usually a place provokes a narrative of memories, a chain of things that had happened before the tether that place to a mess of things from the past. stringing those together in a text is best left to those with more time and those named proust. koffee is the first shop under my oeuvre of tableaux that was recommended to me by someone other than google, a former new havenianiter i suppose, im not quite sure. there was no description or reminiscence in the recommendation, just the name, which i had to follow up on google. so in a way it was still my find. rather than string all of the bits together i will just throw the coins on the table and see what they add up to. you will find the place yourself no doubt, or already have, and i would hate to ruin it for you; its a treat.

i have some mugs at home that are special to me, ‘old mauve’, ‘old blue’, ‘grandmas hugs are the best,’ what have you. they are special i suppose because i have used them for so long now, im worn into them. the slime that i have on my lips in the morning is caked permanently onto them. the insides look like an unwashed toilet bowl. memories of mugs in coffeeshops, if you are lucky enough to get one these days, are typically sparse for me. i know that thos. enjoys the black mugs at green line, and has probably started bringing his own empty tofu tubs to satellite to drink out of, but my mugs at home have never found a counterpart out in the world. as not getting a real mug has become the norm at most shops, getting handed a sturdy speckled clay mug full of coffee is a treat. the mug had the name of the shop on it, which was cute, and i appreciated the proud touch. it wasnt until my father sat down with his cup, and i noticed that his logo was spelled differently (correctly), did i realize just how personal the mug was, this fucked up one was certainly my mug away from home.

i like secret places. sometimes secret places arent secret, they are just uninteresting. sometimes they are both. the cavernous guts of the wholesale ‘marts’ in downtown atlanta are not secret, they are private, and they are incredibly banal, but sneaking into them on a weekday afternoon, when all 20 floors of the full city block are empty and dim, is like being one the last of two people on the earth and staying silent about all of your memories and desires from the old outside world. of course that is hyperbole when describing the storage crawlspace behind the trompe l’oeil door in the basement restroom of koffee, but its creepiness, its moist limy odor, and the fact that i think it might have connected to the other bathroom, made it a memorable find in what is certainly a competitive field of odd coffeeshop waterclosets.

the milky light from the skylight ran down a brick pillar next to my chair. on the pillar was taped a poster featuring an adult with down syndrome. he looked out under a banner text that read something to the effect of ‘do you see me, i see you.’ it appeared to be for a mentoring program or a social advocacy group for the treatment of mentally handicapped folks. his eyes were full and sad. i see it when i see folks with down syndrome in the street or out and about somewhere, a longing kind of look. it didnt make me feel sad, sitting next to the poster, i actually thought about looking up the group. i saw a poster on the train back home in atlanta and thought about it again. i just remember the milky light and the sad eyes. i dont think about it too much.

I have roots in New England but they are that: roots (buried and distant). I sense an affinity for the region or at least some historical connection that is either received or misapplied. One thing I have never felt about the region is ownership. It takes me very little time to feel like I have my feelers into a place, a geographic confidence, and some sort of observational baseline from which to string out analogies and sort memories. New England has always been a place that others have given to me but I still have never reined in. So on my second visit ever to Connecticut my aimless experiences were stolen by the obligations of a family wedding and the first words spoken to me on the trip: “We haven’t seen you since you got sick with the flu in our attic room (the other time I had been in Connecticut).”

Luckily, traveling in the company of my father always provides at least the occasion of support for my coffee endeavours. That could be one small fragment of a region to clip out and scrap in my memory. As has become my habit I researched in advance some joints in Norwalk and New Haven, the two towns we would be hitting. And, as has become a curse of mine, the two shops I had highlighted in Norwalk were both closed. At least one of them was. The other address led me to a house with a sign that read ‘private property’ and lacked nothing save a shotgun wielding rocking chair bound hillbilly to dissuade entrance. With my parents in tow and options for a morning beverage leaning back to the autodrip machine in the motel room, I stepped out of myself and asked a dog walking betighted woman on the corner of Washington Street where there was a good cup of coffee to be had. She pointed almost directly over her head to a carved sign reading ‘Caffeine’ and spoke the word “Caffeine” before smiling and trotting off with her pup. I told myself to start calling ahead to coffeeshops I found on Google and we parked the car right in front of Caffeine.

In new coffeeshops I feel like I see almost purely in analogy. I can’t blame my tired methods of observation on New England and my resentment of received experiences and memories. I have been to Quincy, MA a number of times, but my experiences are funneled through memorial tours of where my father used to buy cigarettes as a teenager or where the train tracks were that separated my mother’s blue collar neighborhood from my father’s white collar neighborhood. I have been to Boston scores of times, but never alone or without a detailed T itinerary from my uncle who drove a trolley on the green line. So if one were to read through other entries under my name on this site to find ‘this coffeeshop is like this’ or ‘this coffeeshop is as this as this’ then please blame me for them and not these observations because I have relinquished control over my reception of New England. Everything is something of somebody else’s.

Maybe that sort of provincialism is rampant for all things in New England. I will never know, but Caffeine was ‘like’ all sorts of things. In an effort to relieve myself of writing all the sentences that would cradle the analogies in repetitive and potentially uselessly purple language, I will just make a catalogue. Chandlery, wine cellar, boudoir, Veronese bistro, Medievalworld, stately pleasuredome, seraglio, nighttown, pillowfort, hash den, high-end kitchen good store, crypt, lighting showroom. Sure the peeling plaster and exposed brick seemed staged and awkwardly frozen in process, but the place was frozen as something other than a coffeeshop, which in the run together stretch of thrift store couches and bad encaustic art that seem to make a place a coffeeshop, this furious attention to atmosphere places Caffeine in a niche alone.

When I look at the pictures again, I smell cypress, Spanish moss, plaster. I am warmed by candle decked chandeliers, and I lay back onto a pillow to drink murky Turkish coffee out of a metal cup. It was all mine for a moment, cubbied away in Caffeine. We stepped back out into the blinding south coastal sun and the warmth and evocative palette of Caffeine burned away back into the tired traditions of someone else’s city and someone else’s dry documentary placenames. Although most of my entries seem to be about how I could turn a public place into a place of my own, the twist of happening upon this place in the mnemonic blackhole that is New England was quite special. But shit, I guess I have to give it up to the lady with the dog. You just can’t win.