Confusing Introduction

para mi esposa Believe in anything that you cannot control

I don’t know where I am going with this. I don’t know why you ought to read this. I don’t have any idea if this has been written by others countless of times before and all this turns to merely repetition then. Regardless it is in my head, it dictates itself to me, I have to endure it and channel it into this world; you don’t have to bother with it.

It all started when I stopped drinking coffee, that was the moment of revelation. I wasn’t near a burning tree or next to a sacred rock nor near the heavens, my moment of divination, my moment as a prophet came to me when I ceased being a coffee consumer. I guess the world has changed a lot since Zeus, since Thor and Poseidon were running around making life uncomfortable for a few people. Which is why today, I don’t have to stumble into the Sphinx and embarrass myself because I don’t know the answer to the question, nor do I have to fear finite retaliation for my ignorance. Today, to not know is forgivable and worst correctible and redeemable. An eighty year old lady is cheered for graduating from college, a young man is respected for spending the best years of his life studying to be a doctor or a lawyer. There are no quick victories here, there are studious goals and professions that take life times to fully develop. In such a world you can stop drinking coffee and it changes everything. In such a world your day is not spoiled by a dragon with dirty finger nails but rather by the absence of enough cream cheese for your bagel or calorie free whip cream for your mocha. I stopped drinking coffee the world begun to collapse.

Something just tickled inside of me, my coffee started to smell funny, now I am a Colombian presumably inclined to coffee drinking by culture and habitat, and when I drank coffee I was a fanatic about it, I drank it in every format that it was manufactured in; the darkest roast being my favorite, Italian Roast, French Roast, but also I liked Vienna roast and while I mostly drank it straight with no milk or sugar, occasionally I liked a little cream on it to seduce the flavor out of it more gently. The aroma of coffee drifting from the coffee pot was seductive, I wrote poems under its influence and drank it with the joy that only a woman brings to a man.

But let me be more real about this, I was not a genetic coffee drinker, I was not prone to coffee drinking, I discovered coffee because I was writing and when your writing you sort of acquire an oral fixation, you have to have something in your hand and whatever that is you have to put it to your mouth. A cigarette, a glass of wine, coffee. Coffee, back in the old days when I started drinking coffee was cheap, coffee shops were rare then, really rare. A coffee shop where all you did was have a pastry and drink coffee was practically non existent as late as the early eighties in the US of A. Back then if you were a starving writer with no future and you needed a place to hang out you would hang out at a diner, a place where they served full meals only you would be there during the not so busy periods. And there I used to order my coffee for less than a dollar, as little as 45 cents, with unlimited refills. Of course the coffee was really bad, watered down instant drip stuff, Folgers coffee; Folgers was the coffee company that advertise having a relationship with a compatriot of mine, Juan Valdez, he gets up very early in the morning to pick the coffee beans before the sunshine picks them, don’t ask me where the coffee was the day before, but Juan and Folgers were high mountain people where the best coffee is grown. And there you have it, I drank a lot of Folgers and I tell you my fellow Juan sure did not know a damn thing about coffee. I don’t know where in the Andes they were picking those coffee beans but they stunk badly.

Anyway there was, I was telling you, the occasional coffee shop that did not buy their beans from Juan Valdez, they bought them from somebody else and carefully brewed the beast within, and you got this hot delicious aroma that just caught your attention and made you mellow on the flavor while propping you up from bed and alerting your mind to your resonating thoughts where you had either to go race your bike in the Italian Alps or write down immense thoughts so as to tired yourself out of the caffeine high.

The coffee shops that served this brew were rare in the seventies and eighties but they became high fashion in the nineties so much so that finding a dark roast was as easy as walking across the street and saying “I want a grande French Roast no cream.” For those of us that used to hunt for the perfect coffee shop the game was up. When you can reach across the street for your desires your desires quell.

But your desires do not grow tired of the same great thing, what happens is that the same great cup of coffee is not the same great cup of coffee. You see when I started going to coffee shops they were operated by local people that did not have a global sense of business. So the atmosphere was not uniform in any manner or form, the appearance was haphazardly put together by the regular customers and the matron that maintained the place and made sure the coffee was served. But there was no high mindedness to the task, everyone that went there went there because they liked coffee and they wanted to have a conversation with a stranger or more truly to sit in a public establishment for two or three hours without feeling like they had to tip or that they were interfering with the flow of business.

Occasionally a musically incline local would play the piano, if there was one to play, or the guitar or the violin, many of these musicians knew very little about music but when a poorly played violin breaks through the air in a coffee shop, something other than the music sounds good about it; and that something causes the people in it to look at one another, and to smile, and that makes the player much better than he really is; but then maybe we just don’t know what he is really playing, we are feeling it.

But maybe it was in the late eighties early nineties, that some one figured out that you could make huge amounts of money selling coffee, so they standardized the look and feel of a coffee shop, somewhat to look like a Parisian café, thought only a Parisian café with socially inclined Parisians can really feel like a Parisian café, but in America the land of the instant Margarita, the instant cultural bath, where a taco can be Mexican only in the marketing and still pass for Mexican food, in America there was no impediment to the instant café look and feel. And so it came to pass that cafes franchised throughout the land and they had all the look and feel of a real café only their employees all looked the same and wore uniform aprons and hats and smiles, and had lines professionally kept to maximize output and more relevant returns.

To add to sanguinary consumerism the coffee was placed in colorful bags and put in everything from chocolate to cookies, while next to the coffee a magical land of pastries unfolded and next to that were plenty fancy coffee cups that you could buy so that you could feel a part of the reveling coffee culture.

There was then good cause for me to stop going to cafés, they were too cute, pretty and had aroma weeds all over themselves; fastidiously perfumed with their idea of the glory of coffee. But I did not halt being a coffee shop rat. I warmed up a lot of coffee shops, occasionally listening to much of the gutter poetry that comes out of the places. Some of my best friends came out of coffee shops, it was just like a bar only the poison was coffee, and again for me it was a place to write for ours undisturbed by the passage of time. And so it was in the coffee shops that I became a prophet and by circumstance a writer.

RC