I am filled with preconceived notions and unfulfillable expectations. It is no place’s fault that they fall short. Certainly every place is loved by someone just like every person, no matter how objectionable I might find them, usually seems to stir themselves up a mate. I like things that many people would find uninteresting. One of my favourite parts of Mexico City was the piles of garbage and the guy selling cellophane tape on a towel by the Zocalo. Some people love Starbucks and some people love shopping for CDs. I went to the Mission district to buy records and be breezily caffeinated in a gentle coffee shop. After tearfully leaving Aquarius Records empty handed with the kind of embarrassment a kid has making an uninformed off-color boast to an older crowd and being shut down, I tasted the air in search of some blackjo and did not have to go far to hail Ritual. Although not the breezy and oddly light-filled tomb of afternoon hot beverages that is Dr Bombays or Chapterhouse, it redeemed the BART trip for me with its concept.

Lord I miss the California sunlight. The city was completely washed out. The little revolutionary flag hanging over Ritual hopped lopingly like things do in the afternoon. But lord I do not miss idle Californians. Dipping out of the crystalline sunlight I was immediately confront with the eyes of 50 Thursday mid-afternoon idlers in ironic sweatpants or head-to-toe denim get-ups. Whereas the guy in Aquarius could barely deign to look up from the counter at me after enjoying the feting of the ‘experimental music’ shopper who desperately hoped that someone in the store recalled the ‘magazine’ he used to publish, I now had 100 glazzies besotting me. I focused on the quickly moving line I was in and everything settled back into the din. Completely soured by Aquarius I prepared to treat the barista like shit to avenge what I saw as the injustice against me by the Mission district but instead found an earnest and quite enjoyable personality behind the counter. Being the last in the diminished line I bantered a bit about the size of their ‘small’ coffee and my insistence on maintaining my order even after seeing it. Satisfied for the afternoon with 15 seconds of conversation I surveilled the rest of the cavernous shop in the glow of laptop after laptop and took my little cup out to the sidewalk.

I was back in California in the sun. I saw a tortie in the window of a decrepit storefront of a ruinous shop sleeping with its back pressed against the glass and a woman chuckled at me as I took a picture of her (the cat). I drank my bitter brew and chewed more grounds than the last cowboy to the chuck wagon and plotted to ‘spitefully’ order the Daktaris record I was looking for from Aquarius when I got home to the worthless sunlight of Georgia.

it was not the time to be roving the streets of some distant city. sometimes the distance from home helps you feel alienated enough to make assumptions about who you are, who you want to be, how you want to be seen. this is not the case in a motel room, one as tiny as if it were in an upstairs veronese pensione, with one window looking into a ventilation courtyard and a bathroom that you step up into. this is not the case surrounded by associates in intermittent pockets of the city. perhaps over a boule taken in the embarcadero plaza, or poking through the metreon, one can begin to see how others are seeing you, come to terms with how everyone has been seeing you your whole life, and figure out how right they are. there are places in cities where you are so acutely aware of your contribution to the social fabric, even when you are silent and grave. the coffeehouse is one of these places. you fill the role of the silent and grave member of society no matter how accurate that is or how separate you strive to be. i tried sitting at a table on the street, i tried sitting at a table in the window, i used the restroom and drank my beverage and through no fault of the quotidian corner shop i was in flight. i wanted to lounge comfortably in cup-a-joe and address myself to the city, be that quotidian coffeeshop patron, disappear into the city as i talk about doing so much. instead i ran across the city from coffeeshop to park to coffeeshop slugging down soy lattes and loaves of bread, keeping myself in flight, and exhausting myself until the time i could go home.

no one was looking, but the idea that i had to construct myself as a human being before the city could consume me was too much. so i wouldnt let it find me, not in cup-a-joe, not in union square, because i was already gone again. i was so unsure of who i was in that city that i couldnt bear to let its inhabitants see me turning translucent, a walking diuretic with a fistful of batard.