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A very cold winter dusk in Athens. Downtown, resisting the easy answer of just ducking into Blue Sky, we walk up Lumpkin, past the ‘new’ University buildings with uniform brick stretches and bulbous, orderless stucco columns. The wind whips up Lumpkin all the way from Five Points. Tucked in behind some churchy University outposts a warm light floats out onto the dormitory parking lot. Set amidst a sea of Georgia facilities, Favorite stands alone looking like an ice fishing shack; the wind blows the warm light away from its walls in sinuous trails that dissipate when they blend into the fluorescent gas falling out of the dormitory windows.

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i end up here on sunday mornings. the place does not change in the months between. sometimes i feel that i recognize people whom i do not know. i do not live nearby. the interstate motel has been converted into condos up on the precipice overlooking the highway and the service court of the convention center, a broad blank wall. when i arrived at the motel, late at night, i would rap on the thick glass at the counter to awaken the disoriented old man who i could see asleep on a cot just beneath the desk. he slept atop the blankets. he would pull his watch cap off of his eyes, and proceed to write in ball point pen, a very rigid old man cuneiform upon yellow carbon paper.

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Some things that are commonplace, and often visually associated with banal and infuriatingly mundane errands for those who do their jobs near it, are capable of arousing delight and mystery in others through their covert locations. It is very easy to be covert in Atlanta. Rule number 1: Locate where you are not visible from an automobile. {end rules section}

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Located in the basement of Penn’s library, Mark’s Cafe beckons like a seductive footnote. For years I have sought such a marriage—cafe and library—the way the mythologized, Arthurian knight sought the metaphorical Grail. I have long meditated upon the harmony of these fantasied scenes: sipping a dark, earthy brew while scrolling through a reel of microfilm; or, pausing after the fifteenth photocopied page, in order to request a refill from the carefully coiffed, demure barista, whose nose, as well, is too often buried in a book.

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My partner and I decide to pass an hour before the start of the latest movie by the guy who directed ‘The Fly’ by taking a coffee at this place, ‘Double Shots’, we noticed during the ride to the theater. We spend 10 minutes by placing two (2) u-locks around the frames of our bikes and a ‘no parking’ sign that is embedded in the concrete sidewalk; each of us also threads our own lock through a cable which runs through the front and back wheels, respectively.

We enter Double Shots and approach the counter; as Saul points out the extra fee for soymilk, I look over a shelf of plastic wrapped books.

“Let’s leave,” I say.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I don’t feel the need to support a cafe that displays the Drudge Manifesto as its most important book.”

ideally, i would mysteriously awaken in places whose primary delight to me is the unexpected character of their spaces in relation to the parlance of their type, and especially in relation to what i saw from the outside, awaken there, transported in my sleep, to a contained world that i would seek to formulate a shell for, a history for, like guessing the identity of an object from a magnified fraction of its whole. two places i would like to have been spirited to, on separate occasions, are the inside and outside of the double decker coffee company.

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