Hah – perfect for me.
Routine Changes
I like patterns. I dislike calling them routines.
They probably are routines, or habits. For writing, I go to the same place at roughly the same time every day, and order the same drink. It might also be a habit. As parcel to this pattern, I walk.
Variations exist. I prefer writing in mid- to late-morning, so I tend to arrive between ten and eleven. A musician friend of mine is usually leaving as I arrive, so we have a private comedy routine we engage in about changing shifts, ha, ha. Sometimes, I don’t arrive until early- to mid-afternoon, driven back by other commitments.
I sit in about the same area, but at different tables. Yes, I do have a favorite and try for it.
This was all deliberate. When I began writing in earnest, I needed a structure to encourage discipline. Now the structure is just comfortable, and convenient. By engaging in this process, I free myself to write without letting small details interfere.
None of this is new. What is new is that potential change is crowding the horizon.
This writing location isn’t my first choice. It’s a decent coffee shop, with decent writing vibrations. Service is wonderful and the owners are pleasant, polite people. Prices remain shocking, but that’s the modern world’s nature, what with supply and demand, wages and energy costs. Overall, it works.
I came to this place when my previous writing location abruptly ceased doing business. That forced me into a hunt. I tried every coffee shop in town to begin in search of my new haunt. After narrowing the list down from seventeen to three, I frequented each several times.
I have a set of requirements for my writing place.
- Space to write
- Good writing energy
- Wi-fi
- Good mocha drink – something chocolately, with three or four shots of espresso
- Reasonable prices
- Decent service
- Convenient location
- Clean enough not to be offending
All of this has come up because a new place is to be opened. After three years of inactivity, a new coffee establishment is opening where my previous preference was in business.
Friends familiar with my routines want to know, “Will you start going to the new place?” Well, if it meets my eight needs listed, probably. Right now, this location falls short on good writing energy and convenient location. A little over two miles from home, I often hop in the car, drive closer, and then walk.
This is a compromise. I’m not fond of it. But I have other things to do and can’t always plan to consume that time to walk down there and back.
That’s excuse number one. Excuse number two is weather. We have many days over one hundred degrees in the summer. Winter walking meant enduring rain, snow, ice and wind. It just wasn’t pleasant, and was countering my desire for a walk to shift into the writing mood.
Mind you, my coffee drink’s flavor is important. I’ve tried multiple drinks before deciding that mochas work best for writing. I think that the coffee, sugar and chocolate combo stimulates my creativity and focus.
The new place is much closer. At just under a mile, it’s a fast walk. Variations can be followed to extend the walking time. I found that walk down was perfect for setting the mood to write. Then I could trudge and tramp around afterward to decompress, think and shift back into the real world.
I will try the new business and see if it works. I’ll do back to back comparisons between the two.
Space to write and writing energy are the most critical components. Everything else pales. So we’ll see.
I’m going to do what works for me.
Coffee Dreams
A mug of hot coffee warms my hands against the April’s winter shadow. I sit with my dreams and myself to think.
My dreams took a different turn last night. It feels like a turn for the better. Although multiple elements seen in past dreams, like being in class to learn and working with technology, were present, the dream most sharply recalled featured spilled coffee.
A thirty year old version of myself, I was at a huge room. I thought of it partly as a classroom but also as a work center. It was enormous, as large as say, an NBA basketball area. It was dark, with low task lights doing most of the illuminating. Rows of consoles with work stations filled it. Each work station feature a personal computer but also a link to a master computer. They also had television monitors, telephones, and CD/DVD players and burners. Most were unoccupied.
I’d never seen them before but now was working at one, or trying to make it work. I was holding a cup of coffee. The cup was plain, low and white with a handle. It seemed to be ceramic, nothing fancy. Coffee kept slopping out when I moved. I became aware of this and mildly frustrated. Most of my frustration was that I didn’t want to spill on the work station. Magically, the cup didn’t seem to actually lose much coffee between drinking and spilling from it.
A man and a woman who I didn’t know came up behind my station. They talked about me like I wasn’t present, yet were watching my work and commenting on it, with the woman, slender and white, with dark hair piled on her head, and dressed in a pale yellow and white gown, was telling the man, a white guy in shirt sleeves, khakis and glasses, that she was thinking of helping me. She noted how I made some of the same mistakes that she’d made. This prompted me to focus harder and think more carefully about what I was doing, which was typing. The keyboard was wrong, with the keys spaced awkwardly, even haphazardly, forcing me to struggle and repeat the typing.
When I spilled coffee for the third time, she commented on it, almost as a joke. I explained that I knew why I was spilling coffee, observing that the handle was too small for my fingers but didn’t extend enough for me to grip with more of my hand, so my grip was precarious and not balanced. The cup had a shallow draft in my opinion, with a wide mouth, and that’s why the coffee easily spilled out as I moved around. She seemed impressed with the explanation.
Walking across the work space, I came to where a teach sat with students. The teacher wasn’t anyone I know, but was young, white with dark hair in a bob. She was talking to the students in a chatty, happy voice. The other students were my age or a little younger. I was dismayed that they all seemed to be on a break. She was using the break as a teaching and bonding opportunity. I heard her say, “We all have work to do but you can work at your own pace.” I was happy working, because I had a problem and I wanted to solve it, so I decided to return to work.
But then I thought that I’d watch a movie. I had a DVD in hand. I don’t know what movie it was. I realized, though, that I could put the movie on at my station and watch it there, while I worked, so I turned to do that. When I did, I spilled coffee a fourth time.
That made me smile.
Awaking this morning and thinking about the dream, I felt empowered, invigorated and optimistic. I can’t say why. Was it the spilled coffee? I put a lot of faith in coffee to help me think, focus and work, but that was usually around preparing and drinking it, and not spilling it.
Coffee is associated with get up and go with me. Drinking coffee is part of my rituals for preparing to do multiple things, from writing, cleaning and yard work to washing the car and traveling. So the coffee in the dream is about entering a new stage of activity. The moments of sitting and taking a few sips of coffee is always the cusp of a new beginning for me, a signal to start. Spilling it was important because it didn’t matter to me or anyone else. The cup was limitless; more coffee was always there.
From all that, I decided, I’m ready to step up my pace of work and activity. I have the coffee, now let’s get to it.
Coffee Snob
Yes, I confess: I’m a coffee snob.
I can’t abide most American mass produced ground coffee, like Folger’s, Maxwell House, and Hill Bros. Worse of the worse is Sanka instant.
No, worse of the worse could be the Folger’s Instant Coffee Crystals. Instant coffees taste off to me, as though the coffee has been recycled.
I have friends who swear by Dunkin’ Donut’s coffee. Not me. Dunkin’ Donut cofffee provides a taste that I imagine comes from a dirty tee shirt being soaked in coffee and then wrung out in a cup. Just below it are the foul offerings provided at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast food establishments. I haven’t had coffee from any of those places in decades. Haven’t eaten at them since around 1992, when I returned to America from Germany.
I became such a snob, as with many things, when I was exposed to offerings in other places. Being stationed in Germany was the changing point for my appreciation of not just beer, but coffee, pastries, asparagus and French fries. German coffee seemed so very strong and clear that I was instantly drawn to it. I started buying different Italian coffees available in Germany, examining flavors the way others do with wines.
The same process was followed with wines, and then beers, along with cigars, ports, whiskeys, fruits, chocolate, cheese, fish, oils, vegetables and meats. I learned that an experienced palate will be drawn toward fresher, clearer flavors. Becoming more mindful among the differences in flavors, I became more mindful as I consumed food and beverages. Fresher and more refined foods offered unique flavors on my tongue.
Of course, it ruined me. Returning from Germany and settling into the Bay area, I drove by a KFC. KFC chicken! I remembered eating it as a child. A sudden nostalgic flame consumed me. I ordered a chicken dinner. The eating experience ruined my memories of KFC and made a skeptic of me about all my American favorites.
So, I’m a coffee snob, but I’m also a beer, wine, chocolate, pie, cheese, fruit, vegetable, meat and pastry snob. I’ll eat things because they’re sustenance, and it’s my nature to accept that food is fuel. But I now know that some foods don’t work nearly as well as fuel.
Something about the eating and drinking experience also affected my reading, news reporting and movie watching. Overall, I became a snob, more watchful, more critical, more mindful. Part of me often wishes that I wasn’t a snob, that I can just turn on the television and be titillated by the latest number one show like so many others, or that I don’t need to research and vet news headlines and reports for the truth and accuracy, or that I can just trot on down to a fast food place for a meal.
With that, time for breakfast, locally sourced and organic, featuring berries and fruit we picked and froze ourselves, and a cup of coffee. It’ll be Major Dickinson today, from Peet’s.
Another Disgusting Thing
I made coffee this morning and poured a cup but headed out without drinking it. That was about eight hours ago. Walking into the kitchen with my wife to begin making dinner, I spotted the cup of French Roast on the counter.
“Ah, coffee,” I said. “I forgot I had this.”
I downed the cup’s contents.
As I did, my wife made gagging and puking noises. I set down the cup and laughed as she expressed her horror. “Coffee is supposed to be consumed at the proper temperature.”
I frowned back. After four decades of drinking coffee, including cold, foul office instant in the field with the military, she was suggested there was a right temperature?
Naw, man. Coffee is coffee, hot or cold, long as there are no foreign objects like bugs, dirt, cigar or cigarette butts and human or animal body fluids and parts in it.
I do have standards, you know.
Catfeinated
The state of having so much caffeine in you that your pupils grow large, and you run around the house like you’re out of control.
A Morning Walk
We headed into town, not too early, to have coffee and take a walk. We meandered the streets and alleys, climbing stairs, examining new businesses and wondering about old ones.
The creek was visited to gage how high and fast that water ran, and low spots were inspected to see what protections are up against flooding. Talk turned to books – talk always turns to books – and we drifted into the book stores. The first one was visited because she likes the energy she gets from book stores. Book stores always help her forget recent history and the ugly hairpin turns of the latest politics.
In that first book store was a Tana French novel. I examined it to see if we’d read it and decreed we had not read ‘The Secret Place’, and nor was it her latest. We’re getting behind on our reading!
Next followed an examination of Lisa Lutz’s newest book. This was not another of the Spellman files. We’d enjoyed the Spellman series. They were light, entertaining reads. We’d read good things about her latest, ‘The Passenger’, but we passed with promises to buy it another day, or perhaps wait until it could be acquired used.
On we went to the other book store, where the air is thick with the enriching scent of fresh books. Along the way, we talked about ‘The Likeness’, and how much our late neighbor, Walt, didn’t like that book, thinking the underlying concept was too far-fetched and not believable in his mind. We sought a used book of ‘The Secret Place’ – we like recycling books and stretching our dollars – but only ‘The Likeness’ was available.
Off we went on our meandering way, like cats sniffing the paths left by other animals. She told me of the book she was reading about Robert Louis Stevenson. She’d not realized, or maybe had forgotten, that he’d written ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. She remarked, “He was all about his writing, from the way his life is told, a lot like you. He was all, ‘Grrr, don’t disturb my writing,’ just like you get.”
I let it pass with a smile. He’s not like me, and I’m not like him. We’re just writers.
Those poor non-writers rarely understand.
Downstreams
Some mental activity racing along my axons today.
- Love that first slurp of my quad shot mocha at the Boulevard. The baristas know my preferences and do a great job of blending everything and then topping my coffee drink with with a skim of dark chocolate powder. I love the contrasts of flavors in that first tasting. Sensational.
- It’s National White Shirt Day! This day recognizes the end of a 1937 UAW strike at GM for better working conditions. I have my white tee shirt on, under my natural wool sweater.
- I don’t recall any dreams from last night. That’s unusual. Wonder why. Sleeping period, six and a half hours, seems about normal.
- I’ve been reading a series of articles on sleep and whether we’re evolving from being biphasic. The latest article was on Van Winkle and provided a brief summary of the last eight thousand years of sleep.
- I realized Part I of my science-fiction novel in progress requires some serious editing and revising. I first realized that about a week ago and tried rejecting it. My writer within was willing to overlook changing it; the resident interior editor was reluctantly accepting of it. However, the reader in residence said, “Oh, no. That needs work.” Trust the reader. After we argued a few days, the writer and editor agreed with the reader’s points. However, the writer came up with some interesting ideas to explore in parallel.
- The editor, though, urged us all not to make any changes until it’s all done. He pointed out that Part I is the way it is because the stories and concepts were still being explored. True; I write to understand myself, to order and structure and expand my thoughts. He pointed out that since I’m still writing the other parts, I can save myself some potential work by fully completing an entire draft before making major revisions. I accept his contention and put it on hold until the first draft is completed.
- The novel in progress is ‘Long Summer’. Science-fiction, it’s not quite a sequel but is collateral to ‘Returnee’, as it stars Brett and Castle Corporation, and continues with many of the same themes of technological alienation and isolation, and socializing with yourself via virtual beings you develop to help people cope with life as they live far longer.
- Talking with the barista today. “Fun plans?” she asked. Because, it’s Saturday; in her working and school world has meaning that has left my writing world. I don’t segregate the days into weeks and weekends any longer. I barely notice the date. “Movies,” I answered her. “We’re going to see ‘Lion’.” She wasn’t familiar with it. I mentioned Dev Patel and a few of his movies. Yes, she remembered ‘Slumdog Millionaires’. It didn’t occur to me until later that she was eight years old when Slumdog was released.
- That conversation pointed me onto new vectors of changes and the differences in my values, perceptions and experiences as a sexagenarian and the same in her as a young adult. It’s the same conversation I had as a young adult with those forty to fifty years older than me. I was twenty in 1976. Those who were sixty in 1976 had been born just after World War I ended. They fought in World War II and remembered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Grandparents had been part of the American Civil War. The Soviet Union was founded during their lifetime and the Cold War dominated world politics.
- It’s interesting to put into perspective. What I think of as ‘normal’ isn’t the same as the previous generation or the next generation. Besides when we were born forming us, so do our education levels. More strongly and interesting, we saw how where we live and our education and economic situations affect national politics during the 2016 presidential election. Now, this article on FiveThirtyEight tells about how where we live affects our deaths. It’s a telling insight to me.
Cheers
The Competition
I always interact with the Boulevard baristas. Intelligent, personable, charming, they seem to enjoy it as well. This isn’t limited to me; they interact with everyone. After all, they do get rewarded with tips. The interactions are about snippets from personal activities and lives but also about the drinks. They get serious about making the drinks, which serves me well, because I’m serious about drinking my coffee, especially my writing mochas.
As part of our daily rituals, I often admire their latte art. They typically fill my drink to the brim, forcing me to slurp some away before walking lest I spill some of it on the way back to the table, so I comment about its taste. They’ve come to wait for those comments, and some of them are competing to see who makes the best-tasting drink, and who has the best art.
I didn’t know how serious this had become until I made a comment to Meghan about three weeks ago. “I think your drink tastes the best,” I said, “but Lexi has the best art.”
Meghan responded, “I make your mocha different. I put the cocoa directly in the steamed milk at the bottom.” Chrissy stopped what she was doing and leaned in to listen. “And I add a lot of cocoa powder because I know how much you like it. I can make better art but I’m being lazy.”
That changed immediately. Her drinks started sporting more serious latte art – flowers, trees, and hearts. Lexi also heightened her efforts, along with Chrissy and Chelsea. Madi is still learning it, something we both acknowledge, and often covers her efforts up with extra cocoa powder (which I mind not at all). Sam, ironically an art student whose wonderful water colors are now on display in the coffee shop, is also still learning latte art. Allison, the owner, doesn’t try.
But Meghan raised her game the other day. After calling my drink out, she waited for me to pick it up. “Look at what I did. Do you see it?”
I looked into the cup and laughed; she’d spelled out my name above a daisy. “Wow,” I said. “You’ve upped your game.”
Eyes bright and smiling big, Meghan nodded. “I have upped my game. You have to tell Lexi that I upped my game. But don’t tell her how. I want her to have to ask me.”
To be continued, I think….
Some Days
Some days –
You leap up, eager to engage. Yeah, you got work, but so what? You’re fucking ready! Give me coffee, tea, whatever, and stand back, ’cause here I come.
Other days –
The movement to remove yourself from that lovely bed is proceeded by a long sigh, a bit of ceiling staring, and an argument. “Is it really worth it today to get out of bed?” you ask yourself. “Can’t I just stay here all day?” Thoughts of responsibilities, deadlines, appointments and engagement roll over you like waves. Damn, you realize, I have to get up.
You throw the covers back and shove yourself free. Look out world, you promise. You hit me, I’m going to hit you back. Hard.
But some days –
Oh, Jesus, you think. Another day. There’s no end to them. I’m in a tunnel but there’s no light. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. “I hate my life,” you whisper.
But, what must be done, must be done. So you get out of bed, a stoic embracing of your duties and trudge through the day, engaging as it must be done but trying not to use much of your energies. Not on days like this.
But other days –
Ha, ha, ha, you think, with a surreptitious glance at the clock and daylight, I don’t have to get up today. I can sleep in as long as I want. I can do whatever I want. And with that, you bound up, because this is your day. You can do whatever the fuck you want.
But some days –
You awake and arise. You don’t feel really rested but you don’t feel tired, either. You don’t know what you feel. There are things to be done but nothing is pressing on more than the immediate need to pee.
You think of the things that you need to do and what you might do. You might go some places. You might not.
Thoughts are accompanied by small mental shrugs of indifference. You’re not really happy. You’re not really sad.
You’re not really anything.
You and the day feel like an onion. Some peeling must be done before anything useful is found. You’re not even sure if you feel like peeling it, though. It’s not a question of energy or attitude. No, you don’t know what it is. To know that would require some peeling, and you don’t feel like peeling. Perhaps you will after having some coffee or tea, or being up a while, or maybe you’ll feel like it after getting cleaned up. Who knows?
That’s how it is.
On some days.
But not others.
Michael Seidel, writer 