The Castillo was smaller than I remembered it. I am larger than I was then. There certainly isn’t any need to empty out such abused tropes. I certainly hadn’t walked five miles to it when I was a child. Although, as a child I would still have turned my nose up at the ridiculously dangerous open-air trolleys that traverse the city. These are acceptable for riding from your car to the gate of The Magic Kingdom but their safety on downtown streets with other (drunk) vehicles is specious at best. We were almost run down by one’s elderly inertia as it jackknifed all yawning into the driveway for the Fountain of Youth. On a bench out of their way and into the way of the stream of loose children by the entrance of the Castillo we shared a banana and a granola bar. A man with curly nicotine-stained hair sat with a Sheltie on his lap. His perch was clearly calculated to halt the skipping gait of as many preteen girls as possible. “Can I pet your dog?” “Of course! His name is Jamie! Is today your birthday? No? It isn’t? It looked like you had some sort of birthday sweatshirt on.” We tacked on “You know Jamie loves birthday girls. Jamie does some really neat tricks, but he only does them in my van, etc.” Considering we only had $7 cash, instead of paying $6 apiece to smell the mossy guts of the fort we reconnoitered its perimeter by way of the seawall. Below in the dry moat Jamie and his master stood and posed for a photo taken from a bastion of the Castillo by Jamie’s master’s wife. He sweated as he stood amongst the children lest his wife espy his sweat.

We endeavor’d inland through the town, first passing White Lion (the restaurant (unfortunately)) and Crucial Coffee, an open shed of a cafe that reminded me of nothing but Thos.’s summer ’99 coffeeshop in the parking lot of the Bay Watch back lot in Marina Del Rey. We of course ‘had’ to go there, but not ’til wearied by everything in the town that hadn’t its bizarre magnetism. We loped through the pedestrian alleys smelling taffy and buffeted by Christmas music still lagging on a warm December 31st. The turrets of Flagler drew us further inland toward my memories of the most peaceful day of 2009 spent in the winter vacation rapture of Emory University. We sat on a bench reading (Sebald again, as I had on that day) in the silence, periodically interrupted by a serpentine tourist trolley passing on Valencia or Sevilla Streets. Hearing voices over muffled loudspeakers from a distance, not making out the words just a vibration, leaves me feeling like I am in a prison camp, and we grew hungry, and an early returning student stood nearby stretching and jogging in place with his earbuds draped over his ears by their wires like two loudspeakers blaring a tinny rendition of some booty-smacking drudgery so we padded back into town for a bite.

Swearing off the vast majority of tourist eateries like The Bubble Room, we poked down a fresh alley where a rainbow flag hung over the patio of Kosmic Bluz Pizza. We were heartened. Avoiding the patio which was filled with a family of fools and children (about 6 folks total) we took a high table inside where there was just one other couple, both staring at their phones silently. We were waited on by the proprietrix who, after several minutes brought us beer in plastic cups and took our food orders. We ordered a pizza identical to their ‘Caney’ pizza which came with fresh tomatoes, portabella mushrooms, red onions, artichoke hearts, black olives (canned, we learned), fresh rosemary and basil, except ordered it a la carte to avoid the cheese sauce. We in fact eschewed the fresh herbs as too extravagant and the fresh tomatoes as we would have a tomato sauce on this variant and ended up with 4 toppings. Now, the Caney pizza costs $18. That is crazy. But the pizza we ended up with, which was inferior to the Caney in scope with two less toppings and a considerably cheaper sauce, ran us close to $22. Not realizing our fleecing until it was too late we tittered through the meal at the proprietrix apologizing to the few other patrons who began to show up for their lack of service because the place was ‘swamped’ and her waitress was out or scolding a family for foolishly attempting to order food before she had collected their drink order. Of course she needed to sauce them up before they saw that they were ordering a lunch for the price of a February’s-worth of pinto beans! It was my intention to forgo the tip but was chided by my companion into leaving the two singles I had in my wallet and we bolted out the door. I tried to convince myself that that was possibly even more of a slight than the €0.01 tip I had left a waiter in Aix-en-Provence after we saw him walking up the street in a leather jacket halfway through our meal, never to return, which I saw as being almost humorous in its theatrics. A $2 tip surely would say something… wouldn’t it? I could speak of nothing else, and after determining that leaving the $2 as a statement and increasing our already bank-breaking donation to Kosmic Bluz by more than I was comfortable with was the wrong decision, I desperately wanted my two singles back. I thought of going back to demand them but my companion reminded me of Crucial Coffee and I perked up. “Let’s reclaim the afternoon from the jaws of defeat!”

Crucial was quiet but for the strains of some distant programmed Casio jam on the salty air. Of the two windows, one to Charlotte Street and the other inside the shop we chose the latter. Once inside a group of teenage girls arrived at the Charlotte window and proceeded to order smoothies. As I browsed all of the menopause related gifts for sale I leaned against a brick pony wall whose heavy coping slid off and landed on the creamer counter knocking all of the stirring sticks about like shocked lumber. As I cleaned up it became our turn and I coaxed my companion into ordering first. She asked for a rhubarb spice tea. “Would you like that in latte form? It is divine in latte form.” “No just black is fine.” As I attempted to lift the coping again to take a picture of my hand sandwiched beneath it I was elbowed and filed my order for a small coffee. “Would you like a latte?” “No just a coffee please.” The tea came out first with the caveat “Let me know if it is too strong. You can really smell the rhubarb.” A man at the other window was jumping in to try to place his order out of turn and was spurned. My coffee came across the counter and I payed, knowing all the while that what I had been served was a 16oz cup of espresso. Now y’all who can put away the caffeine can cast the first stone, but I have had to cut my intake down to almost nil. I plan to gear back up once my days are no longer populated by typing pool levels of keyboard noodling or outdoor voice conference calls by peanut-butter-mouthed wookie impersonators. But at the moment my tolerance is at an all-time low for the drug. I could take no more than a shot’s worth of sips before feeling the rage come back. My companion drank her ridiculously weak rhubarb spice tea.

We sat at a table by the source of the aforementioned Casio airs. A man named Charlie Brown played standards such as “Shining Star” by The Manhattans and “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” presumably the Temptations’ version, not the UB40 version, and some possibly original cuts that we couldn’t place. He had a joie de vivre and innocence that almost completely erased the day’s shortcomings. But it didn’t. It did reveal to me the pearls, by dint of our current presence at a coffeeshop, I could string into a staged tableau using the previous events to pass construct a judgment on the types of sets and motivations in which I would have preferred to act.

First, in the oblivion of my own life, I chose to tip Charlie Brown with the remaining sawbuck I had in my wallet. His foot tapped the stool as I stood in front of him and put the folded bill into his can. He posed for me to take a picture and glowed. “I enjoy entertaining you and your kids.” We can tell! I relished that moment and the decision I had made. If only I could have given him all $7. Then we hoofed back towards A1A. Early-bird revelers in foiled paper top-hats did shots on the patio of a liquor store. “I need to use a bathroom. Why don’t you throw that espresso out?” “I have a plan!” In a plaza near the Saint Augustine Visitor’s Center was a row of portable toilets. “I’m going in here.” “There are some public bathrooms over there.” “I know but I’m going in here!” I had a plan. And by God if the world was not in my spiteful oblivion then it would be now.

We walked the five miles back to our cottage. The beach grew overcast as we walked in the sand to cushion our bruised feet; mine still suffered from my inadequately shod loop around downtown Omaha in August. There was going to be a blue moon that night, New Year’s Eve. I planned to watch it rise over the ocean from the cottage. I planned to watch ‘Persona’ and eat soup, alone.

Play us out, Charlie Brown.

in keeping with the chockablock aggregation of the suburban start-up coffee house this tableaux was composed in five minute spurts over eleven months. i know that the family of this family establishment went through, according to their website, a “creative process to transform a bare room into a cozy atmosphere”, but for me, the bleak exterior, the white hot sky of central florida december with salt seeding the breeze burnt so harshly into my eyes, that readjusting into the dim on the christmas tree and particle board furniture, was never going to settle into a hot beverage like a riding blanket onto the lap of milady in her taffeta lined carriage, clearly it was for some people, and it could be for you too, twernt for me. so with that caveat, trolls be silenced.

this establishment is right up the street from where the husk of the pre-barnes-and-noble barnes-and-noble shop, bookstop, where i worked in 1994 and 1995, which became wild oats, which was bought by whole foods and then abandoned, is located. as with sun shoppe it is hard for me to extricate the sunlit ennui and mini-blind afternoons of my teenage years on the space coast from my contemporary discoveries there. sun shoppe at least has a newly established framework: my parents take a coffee there every saturday morning and have taken myself and the southern oracle there on a couple of occasions, one of which was supposed to be this saturday following christmas which found the sun shoppe closed and me full of curses.

all ajonesed, we continued out past where nahacky’s aquarium store used to be onto 192 toward what others might characterize as suburban, like jimmy carter blvd in atlanta or south sepulveda in los angeles but to me wasnt able to be diverted from anything but 192 in atlanta, where there used to be sawgrass before there was a mall and where the schoolbus probably took the hicks from my highschool out into the swamps at the end of the day. already somewhat sour, into the incandescence of house of joe we fumbled. one poor pregnant girl, in the chin-up stoicism of a girl by herself at the prom, worked alone making endless crossandwiches and specialty coffee beverages for the parade of regular-types. i got a black coffee to streamline her efforts and allow her to help a wheelchair bound old lady into the can.

my family grouped together on a cluster of chairs and a couch which were all just too far apart from each other. the room was large and placing them in intimate proximity would have certainly looked as awkward as a raft adrift in the ocean. the graciousness of the spacing was heightened by the fact that we could not hear each other speak over the pop radio playing through a speaker mounted in the dropped-ceiling directly overhead. it was not even satellite radio, or a disc compacte, or pandora over a laptop, just fucking bj105 your number one hit music station. it played intermittent modern christmas songs (look no further than paul mccartney’s ‘wonderful christmas time’ for incontrovertible evidence that he was the lousiest beatle) and chaka kahn jams for 10 minutes then commercials for car dealerships for another 10. when i was a preteen, in between bouts of playing ‘pro wrestling’ or ‘contra’ on my friend’s nintendo entertainment system in his stale room with the curtains drawn, he and i would call people pretending to be from bj105 and ask them for the ‘phrase that pays’, a common contest in the local area at the time, when they said “bj105 MY number one hit music station” we would die laughing, it must have been incredibly irritating; about as irritating as the noise playing in a coffeeshop.

et cetera:
against the wall leaned a single ratty particle board desk with a computer on it where you could pimp your myspace page while talking to your bro on the celly about your rims..

from website: remember orange julius? House of Joe has recreated the great taste in it’s new orange creamcicle slush… a tasty blend of orange juice and vanilla!

directly in my field of vision a small painting of zelda(?) (not the one from pet sematary) made me remember that i cant find anything about the nexxus coffee and gaming bar in seattle where a someone dressed in exactly that outfit was spotted and whose memory i have had to clutch like judas in my jaws without outlet of tableau.

It gets more and more difficult to construct fantastic worlds around shops as they begin to blend into a continuum of experience that is so stirred, miscible, and in the end, pure. I cannot pluck so easily a place like The Sun Shoppe out of its context and describe it in such a way that will be useful for others. It may be the inherent focus of this project, these coffeeshop texts, that begins to crush the subject into just a catalogue of objects and sensations, unrelated to any sort of real experience, or it may be, in this case, the ennui associated with describing a hometown establishment.

I have not lived in the Melbourne area in 12 years, but the sun, the asphalt, the smell of the air, the whiteness on all surfaces, bleached and battered, touch off in me a disinterestedness that could only be ascribed to adolescence. It is a personal pall over the Space Coast. However, I never went to The Sun Shoppe as a youth, I dont know if it existed. If it did I am glad I did not go there. For although the coffeeshop experience as a whole has become one of laboured inspiration of late, it is still a bastion away from those droll and plain spaces that I recuse myself from focusing on. That is, even though I grow tired of them, the focus of this project allows me to ignite my querulous and inquisitive mind in coffeeshops differently than I do these days just walking up a road or sitting in a park. Also, had I been there in my awkward youth, the associations with it would have been too pathetic to step back even slightly to analyse the place at all. On the flip side of this blessing is the exhaustion of the subject. The Sun Shoppe is a very comfortable place, it does the job it does. Yet I cannot paint a broad-brush description, I cannot capture its essence. I focus on details to pick out, as though they might serve as an outline for a phony concocted tale of my experience. These details are not useful and they do not characterize the charm of the place. Although they are interesting to me they push the project toward irrelevancy, distance from the subject and source, and dull hermeticism. Perhaps in the Flordia sun’s light everything looks dead and objective.

Six years ago I visited The Sun Shoppe in the evening. It was July, as now. In the evening the large storefront windows sweat on the inside. There was a tall partition separating the bar from some seating, and above the seating ran a few fluorescent bulbs. The moisture and fluorescence, and the distance from home, for I lived in Los Angeles at the time, made The Sun Shoppe something else. It was not my home town, or even the whole shop, it was just those details, and it is just those details now. If I could not have painted the picture then there is no way I could do it now. Accessibility and cohesion have never been my talent.