Psychocafegraphy

Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory

2011-11-01T01:30:00.000-07:00

Did you notice that this post is incredibly late in my completely arbitrary, self-imposed schedule of once a week? Well, to make up for my tardiness I now present you with a pile of bullshit mixed with bulls, because I'm the sort of doggedly determined realist (or self-defeating storyteller, take your pick) who feels compelled to inform you where all the shit comes from. Additionally, I will provide you with some slightly less adulterated bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with the place this post is ostensibly about, because I needed something to tack on to reach my equally arbitrary, self-imposed word count.

What am I doing? The Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is not a cafe. There isn't even anywhere to sit except on a bench outside, where I am. I will soon run out of the tiny thing of espresso I got because they have no coffee of the vile, watery stuff I romance. The shop itself is a big nothing, anyway, so I will resort to the dizzying array of people going by. Dizzying because just as I begin thinking about one person, I am hypnotized by some other wandering group of tourists.

A group of self-congratulatory, smelly teenagers in a Subaru stops for another, similar, though more smelly and less moneyed group at the crosswalk. Perceiving the two group's bond of vague hippiedom, the driver of the Subaru yells out at them "there was a REVOLUTION last night, man!" This is all kinds of confusing. Is there something they heard about in the (indy) media that has them all uppity? Some development of which the fellow revolutionaries need to be appraised While some revolution takes place, crumbling the ground beneath our feet, we wander about buying chocolate, enjoying our Saturday like Rebecca Black enjoys Fridays, oblivious. This is an image that such self-styled revolutionaries both cherish and bemoan. In a circular logic, the public's obliviousness is proof of the existence and importance of the invisible struggle. It's happening because it doesn't appear to most of the population to be happening--only the few (of whom they are of course a part) know. But it is also a frustrating state of affairs. If only the masses could see as I do! If only they knew that things are changing, and were not blinded by hegemony! This is why life is exciting if you're the sort of revolutionary who yells out your window that the revolution is happening and that everyone needs to wake up (like that Rage Against The Machine song at the end of The Matrix, man): the mundane is always undercut with the extraordinary, or the potential for the extraordinary. You walk around seeing, you think, what nobody else can see. Secret knowledge animates everything you perceive, pulling it all into a dramatic overarching plot of international politics and class warfare. The best part is that nothing has to confirm this sense, because its negation confirms it. The more everyone else is oblivious, the more you are convinced by your righteous truth and you feel you are struggling against their ignorance.

I love the two women licking ice cream to my left cackling at just about everything. One is telling the other about this couple she is visiting here. In the evening she suggests playing cards, or doing something together. But Jill, who we will now call the woman of the couple, always says "no, let's have a drink and watch a movie." She parrots Jill's shrill voice and adds "that's all she ever wants to do, watch a movie." The man, who we will now call Joe, apparently has no stake in the matter, and does nothing but baby-talk with Jill. "Hey hamburger," Jill says when he comes home from work. "Hey french-fry," he responds. Between the movies and the baby talk, our bemused heroine flees from the doubtlessly impending "I love you, chicken strip" to the guest room to get some sleep. But she is kept up for at least an hour by the noise of the television. Jill doesn't bother choosing a movie--she just watches whatever is on television.

For some unknown reason there are hordes of highschoolers wandering the streets. I don't think they're from Ashland. I think they're visiting the shakespare festival on a school trip. I think the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ends at the end of the month. So downtown Ashland is their playground during the daytime hours for the weekend. I prefer to imagine it this way--one of those sanctioned adolescent respites from home for which their parents provide money. Having Hollywood antics in their hotel rooms, flirting, wandering around town latte-laden, feeling cool. Wearing the new outfit they bought with their allowance last week.

He licks his thumb, not because he is fliping through pages, but because that is what he always does when he reaches for a piece of paper. There is not much on the paper. It is full of text, yes, and it once meant something important, but now there is nothing there. It stares back at him goadingly. He runs his hands for the hundreth time through his greasy hair, and makes a few scribbles in the notebook beside the papers and the pile of books. It is not working. This is just like his office. He came here to jolt himself into finish the essay he has been tinkering at for the past year. He has not yet tried to submit it to wider academia, because it never quite satisfies him. He always feels that something is missing, some part in his reasoning that seems arbitrary. Even now he finds himself staring out the window doing the P.h.D-holding equivalent of eeny-meeny-miney-mo in his head. Maybe it is not an important contribution to philosophy anyway. Maybe he will have to give up his reputation of being a prolifically published professor of philosophy and an asset to a for the most part unremarkable university. Maybe he cannot finish this paper. He puts his black bowler hat over his slicked-back jaw-length hair. He straightens his back, stretching, jangles his bangles back into place, and flips desperately through one of the books at his side, this time forgetting to wet his thumb.

Zoey's Cafe

2011-10-22T03:54:00.000-07:00

He won't recognize me, but I said hello to him last week. He was looking down at Zoey's Cafe from the 9th floor of the Lithia Springs, and I took his photo in the reflection on the glass. Barely visible overlayed onto Grizzly Peak, you can see his oblivious eyes gazing intrepidly down at the street, determined to believe there was something to see. Those same eyes overlook me in the booth behind him, although sometimes I think he is aware of the possibility that I'm watching him. When he walked in his was visibly agitated that I was occupying the corner booth where he could have the entire room in front of him and nobody behind him. I can see him sweat when he turns his head from side to side, watching the employees and typing in short fits. My eyes follow his eyes. This he does not suspect because he preemptively dismisses his paranoia of being watched as paranoia.

When he came in I watched him stand in mock patience at the counter, waiting for the group of ten to get through their gabbing and ordering of ice cream. They were oblivious in the way that neither of us could be: so caught up in their world of ten that they could not be fucked to care what the rest of us thought. It is as far as I can tell suicidal to be self-conscious in public with a child, much less four. Or homicidal--there is no shortage of parents who take out their embarrassment on their children who, god bless them, care about as much as a dog does that it smells of feces. Eventually the teenager behind the counter gave in to his feigned serenity of eyes staring past the ice cream case, and asked him "are you not with this group?"

Despite the fact that he tries to politely ignore the large group, he positively stares at his physical analogue. Perhaps he thinks he's looking at a possibility of what he might be doing when he's in his thirties as the guy he stares at is.

I'm not entirely sure what the familial ties are in the group of ten, but there appear to be some. The guy he stares at, for instance, has a very similar face to the oldest man in the group, who keeps adjusting his baseball cap and his lips every ten seconds. There are definitely two heterosexual couples, both of whom have children, all boys. Two of the boys, presumably brothers, have been dressed in matching striped green t-shirts. One of the young women in the group seems to be managing all of the children except for a baby that sleeps on one man's back. But only two of the children leave with her when she leaves. They all go their separate directions. One woman goes across the street before all the others, in what appears to be a dejected manner.

He keeps looking up from what he's writing, scratching his head, and glancing from person to person. Now he stretches, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. He seems a little frustrated, and I'm imagining that he can't get whatever he's writing about everyone he's watching to cohere. Maybe he could blame the setting. It's shockingly, maybe comfortingly uninteresting in here. It doesn't lead to anything except outside. I can see why he came here--it is a perfect place to watch people. Half of the circumference of the building is made of glass. On two sides he can look out on the street. Well, the streets--the main drag, Siskiyou, is in front, and to the side is First Street. I notice that he often stares absent-mindedly at the people walking by outside, gets lost. I do too, following his gaze. Watching them is even more enticing because from in here it seems that nobody will look back at him; nobody will see him looking at them. He can't hear them outside the windows, so it feels more that they are a show than people whose capacity to return his gaze would turn them off-puttingly real. It's not just that it has lots of windows. It's also that the interior is so open. Nothing obscures his gaze between where he's sitting and the windows. There are no partitions or curtains. The largest thing is a single succulent plant right next to the window. Otherwise it's one open floor, with booths uniformly set along one wall, tables neatly distributed in the middle, and armchairs near the door. Zoey's cafe is a place to engage in comfortable voyeurism.

At least of the people out the window. He does observe the employees, but much more furtively. He steals glances at them and then, flinching, seems to catch himself staring unabashedly. He turns his head and pretends he's not listening to every word of the banter between them. I listen in. It's a little flirtatious, having the place to themselves as they do. The girl asks the guy to stop being so gross, and this of course just eggs him on. He grins and keeps talking about whatever it is. "No, really," she says, "anything else." They chase each other around with objects with which to strike. They talk about horror movies--he pontificating, she asking questions. Apparently demonic things get to him, ghosts get to her. They laugh and work side be side. They seem to be in some disagreement about "The Thing". She thinks it's a terrible movie for a date. Did they see it on a date together, or do they merely work together? As his fascination becomes my own, I wonder if it might make an opening scene to a movie--watching them banter and flirt, not knowing what their relationship is. That would become, the film maker would hope, the interest of the audience in the scene. What's interesting as a voyeur is interesting on film. Of course, now our listening is becoming even more conspicuous to them because us two are the only customers in here. It's just us four.

The 9th Floor

2011-10-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

The foremost purpose of a writer is to be quotable.
-Unknown

There are at least a few theories of what a cafe is. One of the more popular is that it's how people gather in a cafe, whatever may be served. As one of the louder proponents of this academic fad, B. Ayn Jojo laboriously puts it, "while 'cafe' has its own array of significations in the English-speaking world, we may freely ignore these to develop a precise, unified theory of cafeness, which is a mutating collection of socio-econiomic practices going back to the Renaissance, and which encompasses everything from a shisha bar to Starbucks." However, there is some disagreement even among Jojoians, who for the past ten years have been whittling down their theory of cafeness to a more and more essential meaning, and tracing its origins to prehistoric times. In fact, Madeline Javangle has gone so far as to postulate that cafeness is "at the very core of human ontology," and that "the tendency towards cafeness is one of our earliest and most primal." Of course, Javangle has defined cafeness in such abstract terms that our hypothetical prehistoric ancestor need only have wiggled his toe in the right body-act to create cafeness.

The renowned Marxist Gerald Hunam of course takes issue with a cafe being anything but a historically situated practice driven by material conditions. At least year's CafeCon, in one of his more polemic (and some say inebriated) moments, he said "the idea that a Starbucks is essentially the same as a London coffee house in the 17th century only holds water among you namby-pamby metaphysicians."

Still others insist that a cafe has to do with coffee, and that a cafe may only be called a cafe if it serves coffee. These coffeeists moreover argue that the sociocultural function of a cafe only came about because of coffee. They take a rather broad view of agency. “We like to think of ourselves as being the only force in the world," Martha Wuwuberg writes, "but if this perception of our intentional effect upon the world is merely an effect of our sentience, indeed the perception of our sentience--sentience itself--then it could be equally said that anything and everything works its will on the world. The coffee plant is one of the more breathtaking examples of this."

I have taken the coffeeist position to write this post, not so much because I believe it but because I have run out of lay-defined cafes in Ashland, and the idea that wherever I take my coffee becomes a cafe gives me something to go on.

So I have come to the ninth floor of the Mark Anthony, which may only be thought of as a cafe in the coffeeist way, because there's nobody else sitting around, no employees, and no coffee served. There is only a small table with two wicker chairs, surrounded by tall windows, probably the highest-up windows in the Rogue Valley.

From these windows the buildings downtown look oddly exposed, as if they had been upturned, revealing this undersides to me above them. From the street one only ever seeds the facade, and maybe the very top of a vent or something, but up here I can see the whole mess of wires, rusting air-conditioning units, fans, satellite dishes, skylights, and television antennae. The top of the post office looks like it's designed so that water drains from its almost flat roof into a few holes, but actually it collects in puddles on top. Not that long ago the post office was covered in white and grey stones, but these were removed to reveal the pink bricks beneath. Zoey's Cafe & All Natural Ice Cream, which I'm not sure qualifies as a cafe, even though the nominalists would have it otherwise, has put their logo atop their roof, as if to announce themselves to high-resolution aerial cameras. If the logo is intended for hotel guests (for the Mark Anthony is a hotel called Lithia Springs Hotel), it is unnecessary. Even here at the top floor the sign on their awning is highly visible.

What if we posit the following tautological theory: a cafe is where psychocafegraphy can happen, and psychocafegraphy is writing that occurs in a cafe and whose subject is a cafe. In other words, if I can write a blog post from this 9th floor wicker chair, it is a cafe. This is potentially problematic because this would mean that a cafe does not necessarily involve hot drinks, much less coffee. Moreover, one of the ventricles of psychocafegraphy’s heart is observing and eavesdropping on people. If a cafe is a place where psychocafegraphy can happen, then people must gather there to converse. I am inclined, then, to agree with the Jojoians, if not quite to their recent extremity. Unfortunately, I am close to finishing a psychocafegraphy post about a place where very few come to talk. (When two or three people do come here to talk, if another group comes, they politely avoid sitting near the group who is already there. Just a minute ago a woman came over here, poked her head around to look out the window, apologized, and scurried off, as if I owned the place. I didn’t have time to say I didn’t mind her looking out the window. But perhaps she did.) This post, then, is a (very tiresome) paradox (for which you probably want to hit me for boring you with).

Javastop

2011-10-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

Around this time of year, I become convinced that we are machines. It's a meaningless proposition, but from it an aesthetic logic strings itself together: machines are, you know, soulless. They're determined, and have no free will, and stuff. Or are they?!?! From here we could plunge pointlessly into the well-trod territory of Blade Runner fanboys, but we won't.

Instead we'll go to Javastop for coffee. We'll be guided by one of their staff into the establishment. They want to make sure that we make it from the door to the counter. There are helpful lines and arrows on the floor to this end, but they don't want us to take any chances. If we were to lose our way we would certainly fall into Hades and sink into the river of “not buying anything”. So with a bright face one of them directs us along the treacherous path, beset on both sides by economic folly. He uses their standard hand signals (I suppose they all would), which are to them universally recognizable. I assume the unnatural spinning of his hand indicates that we should continue walking forward, slowly. One of you veers dangerously close to the precipice, and our guide efficiently tells you "just a little to the left sir. No, your left, sir. Yes that's perfect."

When we reach the counter another one of them asks in their customarily brisk way if we are here for coffee. When only some of us answer in the affirmative, he asks each of us individually, politely directing those that are here for something other than coffee to another counter. "Please step over to the counter to your right, sir, ma'am. Stay within the yellow lines. Thank you." He makes a queer barking noise, like you might imagine a drill sergeant to his soldiers. The one at the other counter barks back in a slightly different tone, then yells "thank you!" to which the one at my counter yells back, in the same militaristic tone, "you're welcome!" It's more like "Yoooooouuuure welCOME!" With such lock-stepped discipline, does this all-male brigade have a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy?

He then deals with us one by one. "I will be offering you our baked goods, teas, smoothies, sandwiches, and sodas. We do not work for commission, and I am not trying to push any of these things on you." He lists off each cookie, cake, tea, fruit combination, sandwich, and soda that they offer, asking me if I want each one. Everything he says to us is in an elevated voice that's slightly lowered from the loud, barking voice he uses with the rest of them. I answer "no, thanks" to most everything he offers me. I feel obliged to return the same politeness, no, I don't feel at all, I just can't help but reply with the politeness of "no, thanks" rather than "no." A simple "no," "nope," or "naw" would not come out of my mouth. I feel somewhat guilty for declining so many offerings. He makes me feel as if not buying these things will decrease the quality of my life. When I decline each one, my stinginess sounds like irresponsibility. I won't even spend the money to take good care of myself. Rather than feeding myself now on a scone, muffin, slice of pumpkin pie, or ham on rye, I will wait until I go home to eat. Because it's cheaper. I starve myself. This time, though, I'll be a little nice to myself. I said yes to a Mexican tea cookie, which is half the price of the coffee, the essential thing. "Huy-yuh! TWO Mexican tea cookies one coffee, SIX-teen OUNces!" he barks, still facing me, as if I weren't there. This summons another one from the kitchen, bearing my order at a fast trot, barking back "huy-yah!" When he puts the requested items on the counter, the one at the counter yells "thank YOU!" and the other one "you're welcome!" as he rushes back into the kitchen. Their eyes did not meet.

Plate and coffee cup in hand, I am shown the way to my seat. "Just around the corner to the left, sir. You will meet the rest of your party there. Mind the gap."

I sit down, and I catch your look of exasperated resignation. I share it. I fumble about in my bag for my notebook, and one of them hurries to me, asking if I wouldn't like a clipboard or other surface that might make my writing experience more ergonomic. Helplessly, I consider this. "It's $1.99," he says. Like a formal dinner we are surrounded by servants bustling about, but they name prices for their services. They want to make our lives easier as conveniently as they can, which just happens to have a cost. They toil seemingly without toiling, bringing us refills, tiny tumblers of simple syrup, half and half, pastries (as soon as they see you eying the pastry case, they politely solicit your desire for a pastry), pillows, trays for our laptops, even tops for the coffee cups (when they sell you a cup of coffee they say "we recommend you add a ceramic top for $0.29 to keep your coffee from getting cold"). All of this is done without showing fatigue, even though I'm sure that by now, well into the afternoon, some of their shifts have lasted many hours. Well, there are hints. Sometimes there is a stifled sigh of breathlessness when one hustles to your service. Once in a while one of them forgets to switch from their military voice that they use to communicate with each other (although it, too, is also a massive performance for the customer) to their stilted but quieter voice for customers, accidentally yelling at someone "WOULD-YOU-LIKE-A-PIECE-OF" and then remembering--"chocolate, sir?" They also sometimes slip out of the formal machine-gun voice when they talk to each other. This voice is so ritualized that it seems as if it's actually incredibly bad at communicating any information to each other, because when there's anything out of the ordinary or really necessary to say amongst them, they talk informally, at a normal volume.

We are left to imagine the training program that lathed, greased, and, well, machined their voices and mannerisms. The machinations of Javastop have little chinks of necessary error that we can’t help noticing, just like we can’t help responding to their service industry Marshall arts. We may be machines, but very bad machines.

Crema Sweet Shop & Espresso Cafe (Talent, Oregon)

2011-09-30T21:39:00.001-07:00

The chairs here, they swivel. It's incredibly noisy, for such a quiet place. It's not that there's a crowd of loud voices. It's that I'm sitting in between two air conditioners. The radio, too quiet and too loud, is turned to "Light 102," the most horrific presence of non-presence. So I have moved outside, to the ample tables out here. Ample is an understatement. They are so enormous that sitting across from someone at these tables is a comical proposition. Made of glass and steel, they are as intimate as a high-rise. I would say that they, like the spacious, sunlit offices of a prestigious tower, are places for glamorous, alienated drama, but the tables are dirty. With its subdued colors and straight lines, it's more that it has pretensions of precision, while in fact being chintzy crap that fell out of its home in a catalog photo. They're all set on an incline, so that everything seems just that more wily-nilly. A tag flaps about at the back of one metal chair's drab, green-and-white cushion. It looked good in the catalog photo, I'm sure.

It is in this way, I suppose, that consciousness of planned obsolescence can become simple snobbery. This is the terrible thing about didactic documentaries--they get you on about these things. Planned obsolescence--it's everywhere! This furniture wasn't designed to last. It was designed to look shiny, to be bought, and then to fall apart over the next few years. How common.

Music can obsolesce, too. On my way here I was listening to the Counting Crows album "This Desert Life"--the one with a goldfish in a fishbowl on the cover. It's my dad's second-hand copy that he bought recently for $1.99 (there's a sticker on it). I used to listen to this CD over and over (well, maybe I skipped a few songs) around the time it came out, when I was 17 I think. Back then the songs had depth because I couldn't really understand them. I focused on Adam Duritz's overblown imagery, and found myself in a kind of dreamy nirvana, as I am wont to do. You will observe that this is the basic reaction of a stoner to the world, especially to beloved "trippy" objects: whoa. Perhaps it is because I had this tendency that I have always been and continue to be pinned as a stoner despite having never actually been stoned. In any case, oddly enough I listened to this CD specifically while I played a Quake mod which turned it into a Terminal Velocity type of game of flying around in various aircraft and shooting things. There was also a great deal of avoiding walls and flying through tunnels. "This Desert Life" and flying seemed to go well together. Oddly, this means that listening to the CD on the drive here conjured up images of a badly-textured, low-facet-count A-10 model twisting and turning (the mod was in 3rd person perspective) around the sky.

The album is largely unpalatable to me now. I skipped all but three songs--the peppy ones. Not because I dislike slow, mopey music in the least, but because these songs I found specifically annoying. What's interesting is not so much what changed from when I enjoyed most of this album to now, but that it changed so drastically. Of course, this isn't the best example of this phenomenon, because it's not like "This Desert Life" was even one of my most beloved albums back then, it was just one I liked. More apt might be my fairly lengthy obsession with Sonic Youth, which I now realize requires obsession to enjoy (one which I can no longer muster--there are no longer deep truths hidden in the music that I can't quite reach, but only some occasionally very pretty but demanding songs). The only thing that has stayed the same is that I'm still intrigued by the song "I Wish I Was a Girl." I still don't understand the singer's stated reasons for this sentiment, although now I'm fairly certain it has nothing to do with an earnest transsexual desire so much as a general need for an "out" of whatever fraughtness he has found himself in ("static" that he "can't shake"). The wishing he were a girl is, I'm pretty sure, just a cheap trick to get our attention that is ultimately empty. Back then, though, I would think yes, I want to be a girl, and I would feel vaguely illicit. It wasn't so much that I actually wanted to be a girl, but that I wanted to be a girl and a boy, I wanted to be all sexes or perhaps not sexed. A kind of inverted tomboyism. This desire still rumbles along, but weakly, as my megalomania slowly diminishes. Maybe by the time I am old and dying, if I ever get there, I will have completely given up and forgotten my desire to be more than one sex.

Which brings us to my intended point, that aging is a process of letting go. Or maybe that's not really what I mean. You know how one's taste in music tends to ossify? One stops bothering to look for anything new, I think because what is new stops being relevant. And what you used to listen to stops being relevant, too. You're left floating around, everything vaguely but not really satisfying. Satisfying enough. Hence "Light 102."

Yeah, I know, this has become less a blog about cafes and more a blog about whatever shit I'm thinking about when I happen to come to one. The cafe, however, is indispensable. I would never think about or take the time to write about what I do if I didn't come to a cafe to do so. The ritual requires that I have something to write, so I come up with something, even if it is simply navel-gazing about having something to write like this paragraph. The time in the cafe provides the time, the space, and the habitual coordinates to write. It gives me time alone. It gives me caffeine.

Of course, while going to a cafe provides me with a kind of consistency, there is plenty that is potentially destabilizing about a cafe. There is something, well actually many things, as David McConnell's narrator in The Silver Hearted would put it, out-of-true about this one. The strange, ill-fitting, intimacy-killing furniture outside. The noisy air conditioning. The way chairs spin. The off-putting radio station turned to an off-putting volume. But that's not quite it. It feels like a concession stand. Maybe that's a nice thing--it isn't so self-consciously involved in its own cafeness nor is it obsessed with gourmandaise. There is one kind of coffee, and they do not tell you whence it came nor how it was roasted. You are only told that it is Noble Coffee. There is regular and there is decaf. They give infinite, free refills. Buy one cup of coffee for two dollars and come back for as much more as you like. This, I think, is the best thing about this place. They also have odd smatterings of food. The to-be-expected pastries in plastic cases, but also bento items to pick and choose from, and some assorted breakfast and lunch items. The first time I came here I had some white rice and chicken skewers with peanut sauce. It was quite nice. Not amazing, but satisfying, and inexpensive.

The building, really, is the strangest thing. As long as we're on this buzz-word, the building fights obsolescence. It used to be a railway station. On both sides of the building it says "TALENT, ELEVATION 1,365, TO PORTLAND 336 MI, TO SAN FRANCISCO 436 MI." I don't know whether this was left here, or if it simulates what the building's purpose used to be. Now it's full of all sorts of hippie shit--on one side is Harmonic Design & Imaging, upstairs is Om Sweet Om, a yoga center, and on this side is the cafe.

Yogurt on the Rox

2011-09-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy writing in impossible present tense. It wouldn't be that strange, I guess, if it weren't nonfiction. (Among other pointless things I enjoy: unnecessary double negatives.) But yes, really, it all happens at once. For instance, there's a pain in my second-from-farthest-back molar as I make my way to Yogurt on the Rox. (It's hard for me not to laugh at the end of that sentence, and not because I laugh at my own jokes. No, it's just that saying "yogurt" next to "rox" is an instant joke that whoever named the place appears to have been unaware of. Or maybe I am mistaken about the nature of this establishment, and I am heartlessly making fun of a tween bar.) Maybe the blackberry seeds from the jam I had on my pancakes this morning exacerbated things in my teeth, which, in general, are a little loose these days.

On my way in a boy is slinging free yogurt samples. He hands out the last one just before I walk up, so I think at first I have been spared. But inside the owner offers to give me a sample of anything. So while the Teflon-encrusted boy politely makes my cappuccino (there is no regular coffee, only espresso), I have pomegranate-strawberry sorbet. It's good. I mean, it's something, I guess. They sell frozen yogurt, sorbet, and espresso. Is the nasty green of their logo supposed to signal healthiness?

On an unrelated note, you know what dentists do to fix cavities in your teeth? They drill holes in your teeth and put things in them. They make the holes bigger and put fancy glue inside.

To be honest, I don't remember what used to be in here (Yogurt on the Rox is very new), but gentrification is essentially dentistry: the rot is torn out and shiny plastic is squirted in its place, off-gassing noxious fumes.

Yes, you've guessed it, this aimless drawing of connections to dentistry will continue. The color of their logo is like the branding of the glue they stuck in my teeth: an acid green, with sky blue for the "on the." Perhaps, like the default Windows XP background, it's trying to be verdant, pastoral, and lush, but ends up eye-searing. In this case I don't know what the green is all about. (What does bright green have to do, for instance, with psychedelia? Whoever is putting on the music at the moment is awfully fond of Jimi Hendrix and The White Stripes.) It's bright, all right. Nobody else seems to understand either. Everyone leaves promptly; nobody wants to stay.

There's a little nook in the front with a leather couch and two easy chairs, partitioned off from the rest of the room (which, not requiring any kitchen space, is rather spacious). You may sit in front of the partition or behind it, choose whether to be visible to the street or not. Do you want to see the inside and be seen by the inside, or do you want to watch the outside and be watched by the outside? I seclude myself from the room, wanting to look out the window and be shielded from the counter's gaze. Frankly the vast expanse of empty tables and the staff's strained chattiness scares me. It appears I'm not the only one. As I sit here a large group comes in and gets yogurt to go, a woman comes in and sits in the chairs next to me (as far as she can get from the counter), and leaves as soon as she finishes her yogurt. Only two people sit at the regular tables, two women very self-consciously dressed, one of whom remarks to the other how cool this place is. Still they sit at the table right next to the partition.

I wonder if it speeds up at night. It's open until ten at night, after all. As it is, at one in the afternoon, I'm not even comfortable talking about it as a cafe, even though it obviously would like to be.

The white walls are painted with god knows what. Dripping turquoise and salmon paint cut off into rectangles, an abstract cityscape. It looks like straight barriers were taped over while the rest was painted. On one wall there is a big white tree.

They get their flavors of frozen yogurt from the same company as The Yogurt Hut. Which sort of makes me wonder: What is the point of this place? For a more adult atmosphere, where you can get caffeinated while you eat your fro yo? It seems somehow dishonest. Not that I've ever liked The Yogurt Hut. In fact, this place is pretty much for people like me. It panders to my pride. Frozen yogurt isn't infantile and Tiki, it's super chic. It's going to have to be if this place is going to survive in the shadow of The Yogurt Hut's already established popularity.

I think I know why I'm so cold to this place. You see, I want to be deluded that a business is not a business, and this one is only that. They want to make a profit, nothing more. The way to make a profit is to convince us that you're not. That you don't need it.

Another thing that makes a cafe nice is being surrounded by people, not in an incredibly loud way like a bar at night, but comfortably. One feels like one can blend in. One feeds off of or grumpily contrasts against everyone else's liveliness. Everyone does, or at least those not imbued with the bravado that would allow them to be talkative and lively with only a person or two around. Which means that a cafe has to develop regulars before it can develop regulars. It needs to have enough people for enough people to feel comfortable being there.

But this chicken-and-egg problem doesn't always apply. For instance Adelante! is not precisely a cafe (it's a gallery and a tea house) and works on a whole different principle. I go there because it's quiet. But it's not uncomfortably quiet. The woman who runs it is welcoming, and not in that strained I-hate-you-but-I'm-smiling kind of way. One doesn't feel overly visible. She has things to do. If there aren't customers she's just working on her computer anyway. There's music that doesn't feel like it's being played only for you. It feels like its own little world. The problem with Yogurt on the Rox is that it doesn't. There's no world here, only a sad semblance. Even the lively-painted walls seem forced. I'm trying to picture this place ten years from now, the paint a little faded, people not shocked by it but at home in it, and I can't. It's not that sort of place. In which case, what is it?

Before I leave I am handed a sample of 'cake batter' frozen yogurt. My god it's sweet. Sort of disgustingly so. If I ate it on a regular basis I'm sure it would lead to more fillings, and fillings aren't a done deal. After all, to put them in is a complete mess. Inside a wet mouth full of nooks and crannies the dentist has to drill out the right nook. Then he has to find the right size and shape of plastic gizmo to insert into it, which he has to do with what amount to pliers. When I got mine in there was a great deal of pushing and prodding to get this odd-shaped piece to go into the odd-shaped hole in my tooth. This strange piece is then covered with some sort of goo, which is activated by a heat probe (or an ultraviolet probe, I'm not sure which). Finally whatever blob this has all resulted in has to be filed down to something manageable, vaguely aesthetic, and possible to floss. It's no surprise, then, that my filling came loose immediately. I can feel it when I floss, a sharp pain as it wiggles around in the hole in my tooth. The glues and other substances they use to fill cavities are of course designed to adhere to teeth. But they don't always stick.

The Garden Cafe

2011-09-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

It would be better if I told them what he's not (but I won't). You know who I mean.

It was you who suggested that I could actually post this here. I didn't know where to put what I know about a notorious person in town, because I would have to hide my identity. It never occurred to me that I could hide his. "You don't have to say who it is," you said, a little deviously.

It also didn't occur to me that I might have to hide other things about him. The problem is he's notorious enough that if I say what his profession is, they will know who he is. So much of what I have to say about him has to do with his profession. His personality is related to his profession. What's interesting about his life? His profession. If it weren't for what he does, he would just be yet another baby boomer who finds himself endlessly interesting. So what can I say about him?

I can say those things about him they wouldn't know from his marketing or from his work. You already know these things not just because I've ranted to you about him, but also because you've worked with him, or rather he for you. His working habits are interesting. It seems interest is, ultimately, what both his stories and his working habits are supposed to elicit. His friend says to him "oh that's interesting..." He himself will not gush about his accomplishments; that's up to his audience. One wonders what exactly his profession is. While on the one hand his job is to make his clients into performers, he, in the end, is the performance. Technically his job is technical, but actually he's an analyst, or rather, he would like to be an analyst, and his job allows him to play out his dream of being incisively analytic. He makes an incision, and aims to heal. He creates an intervention, as they say.

Here is what he does--one of his proud moments of what his friend calls 'edginess' (again, it's his friends job to praise): he asks his client, who is getting married, if there have been any major exes, any drama. She says yes, actually, with the brother of her fiancé. So he singles them out somehow, I can't tell them how. I can't tell them how because then they would know what he does (although honestly they have probably already guessed), and then they would know who he is. It's too bad because I have to admit there's a bit of poetry in the way he does it, and it's only his profession that puts him in a position that allows him to do it this way.

His profession gives him a surprising amount of intimacy with his clients. Perhaps this is what drew him to it. He never believed anyone but himself was alright on their own. He always thought they needed to be changed. He believed, in other words, in the power and necessity of what he wanted. But he didn't see it as what he wanted, the pleasure for him was not just incidental, but such a given that he didn't notice it. It wasn't that he had desires. No, they needed his help and he could help them. It was as simple as that. In his profession he finally found a way to do this.

But anyway, these two brothers, he puts them together. They haven't spoken for years--something out of a movie script. The two don't say anything right then. But who knows. "I don't know if their relationship changed. I don't know if they spoke again. But maybe they did, maybe that opened up some kind of dialog, and that's enough for me," he says.

This healer who, as his friend puts it, "diagnoses" his clients even diagnoses why his clients are uncomfortable with his treatment. "It's always the guys," he says. He believes in the goodness of his work; any resistance to it can only be some kind of false consciousness, some kind of irrationality that might be fixed. "I realized it's all about fear," he says, "and that gives me an angle. I understand what that's about, so I can relate to them. I can try to break the ice and make them feel more comfortable. Sometimes I give them a lollipop, and that makes them laugh, that helps." This tendency for men to distrust him (or to be afraid of him) both fascinates and, obviously, irritates him. They don't know what they're missing. If they would only let go. To fuel his fascination (and to attempt to satisfy it) he reads sociology books. He tries to understand why this might be. He is not the kind of old man who ossifies; he's agile in that curious way, however self-satisfied he might be in his questions.

I am still afraid that they'll know who I'm talking about, well, no, not exactly that. It's more that I'm afraid word will somehow get back to him, and that he will read this, or be told about it. I would die. I'm using him. I'm writing about a character that of course is him, but also not. If I were forced into a defensive position I would begin emphasizing the difference between the character that I've written here and the "real" him. It's not really him I've written about, I would say, he was just inspiration. Isn't that flattering? I would ask, smiling sleazily and batting my eyes. You laugh. You think I'm paranoid, don't you?

That's why I'm handwriting this. My handwriting is so illegible that it creates a kind of privacy. Sitting behind me, he couldn't possibly know that I'm writing about him. I look lost in something far from here. If he walked by, and glanced at the page he probably couldn't make out a word. I haven't written his name.

Sound really carries outside on this patio. It's the perfect place to eavesdrop. Some places are crowded, play loud music, and the sound of the espresso machine drowns out half of conversations. All of the seating here is outside, and there are no speakers out here. It's really quite nice, I don't know why we haven't come here before. Oh, right, it's a bit of a walk. All the same, I would say we should go next week, but they may be closed by then. It's relatively pleasant now, sheltered from the wind here. But it won't last long. Soon they will have to close for the winter. Okay, okay, the fall. As far as I'm concerned when you can't sit comfortably outside in a t-shirt during the daytime, it's winter.

It's not just his profession that would give him away. The other problem is that I've told them that I've hidden his identity, and that he's notorious. I could have written this without waving the fact that I'm hiding his identity in their faces. I could've just been writing about some guy, and they would have never wondered.

But no, I had to do it this way.

If they know, I hope they won't tell anyone. Please tell me you won't.

What is psychocafegraphy? That which can't be said. I write what I write here because I can't write what I want to write. It's what's left over.

Noble Coffee (downtown)

2011-09-09T18:21:00.000-07:00

When it was first warming up sometime in early July (summer came late this year), I used to pay $2 for the tiniest but most delicious cup of coffee from Mix, walk along the creek across from Guanajuato way, and sit on a very sunny bench across the street from Sesame. It was there, soaking up as much warmth as possible, that I wrote at least two posts on this blog. I believe one of them had to do with shoes. Today I payed $2.50 at Noble Coffee's tiny booth downtown to do the same thing, but the cup is larger, and the weather is hot enough that I'm seeking shade, not sunshine.

It's not a new habit. When it really began for me was back in Bar Harbor a few years ago. A friend and I were going on a walk in the winter (although it could've been fall--every season but summer is too cold there), and she demanded with characteristic zeal that we get coffee to go on our way. We didn't exactly know where we were going, but every walk in the direction we were going inevitably ended up at the baseball and soccer field next to the YMCA, at which point you realize that you are nowhere and turn back. But that didn't matter; you have to feel wilfully whimsical to enjoy these things. The coffee was not just fuel for our whimsy, but also warmth. We held our cups to keep our hands from freezing, and drank it to warm the rest of us.

In subsequent years there I repeated this ritual (which even the crinkle the plastic top reminds me of today) on my own, sometimes when the weather was just warm enough that a cup of coffee was what I needed to feel that it actually was pleasant out. I would take the same walk to the same place, because I was bored and because it gave me, I thought, time to think. I did it to step back from the stuffy interiors I inhabited and try to think about the future, try to summon up a space in which to be deliberate. The coffee enabled this. Well, briefly. The cup would run low and tepid, the taste would grow unpalatable, the cold would seep back in, and I would go home (such as it was).

In New England coffee is drunk that way: as a heating element. In some ways it hardly matters what it tastes like. Dunkin Donuts coffee is hot, it has caffeine. Why not quaff several pints a day of battery acid?

I'm reminded of Karen Pelletier's big, Polish cop companion, Lieutenant Piotrowski, in Joanne Dobson's academic murder mysteries. Every scene he appears with a 32 oz. cup of coffee, and sometimes with another for Karen. In some books I am agape at the amount of alcohol everyone drinks; in these I am at the quantity of coffee. He must drink two gallons a day, and she one gallon. Their intake of coffee is the only way that they function. Just woke up? Coffee. Questioning a witness? Coffee. Doing research in the library? Coffee. Traumatic event (murder, for instance)? Coffee. What a professor and a police detective have in common is coffee, apparently.

I have only known the excesses of Pelletier and Piotrowski in college, and it was almost always bad coffee. Unfortunately, it was also free and plentiful. Well, the students insisted that it was free while the kitchen staff insisted that it wasn't. The cafeteria had an industrial coffee maker with two drip-brewing outlets, and several insulated urns. At every meal time (breakfast, lunch, dinner), the kitchen staff (including student work studies) would brew more coffee, filling about six of those giant urns. There was a flurry of people squirting coffee into mugs, perhaps half of which bothered paying for it. Often I wouldn't pay because I wasn't getting anything but coffee, and waiting in the long line just to pay $1 for coffee seemed absurd. When the meal ended, and the kitchen closed, there would usually be coffee left in the urns, which would be grabbed up quickly, sometimes in assorted recepticles (bowls, paper cups, plastic cups, travel mugs) other than ceramic mugs because they would all be dirty.

Then, at night, there would be more free coffee. Through means unknown to me, there was almost always a bag or two of ground coffee in the cabinet under the coffee maker in the cafeteria, which at night we would brew up. The grounds left in that cabinet at night were always fairly nasty. One time I think pumpkin-flavored coffee was there, which was nauseating. But I drank it because hell, I was tired, I had things I needed to do. I don't think it ever really helped; after fifteen minutes I would have drank a cup of it and would feel overwhelmingly sleepy again. So I would drink more. Sometimes three or four cups a night. Basically, I was an idiot. Staying up into the wee hours hyped up on caffeine hardly ever helped me get anything done. More often it helped me dink around on the internet or have be shownyoutube videos. But that's what everyone else seemed to be doing, so surely it must've worked.

By contrast, Dobson's excessive coffee culture is romantic. The way she describes the coffee is tantalizing. It sounds like salvation. Caught in up in a murder mystery plot and the stress of academia, they live lives that require salvation, whereas I, poking around Ashland, do not require anything. I only want the coffee to elevate my experience to something that seems worth writing about.

The woman in the cramped booth says "have a good Thursday" when she puts the cup of coffee on the counter. I'm not sure I have ever heard anyone say that. I've heard "have a nice Sunday," certainly, or "have a nice weekend," or maybe even the same thing about Friday. But Thursday? There's nothing special about Thursday.

That oddness attuned me to a more or less unrelated oddness: that the interaction I was having with her was what I was paying $2.50 for, as well as the cup of coffee. I depend on such transactions to write this blog. I pay for coffee, and the way that that payment is received and the coffee given flies off, ricochets around the walls (or trees in the park, in this case), and becomes in a roundabout way a blog post. When she said "have a good Thursday," I was getting what I needed, which, oddly, was being shown that I was getting what I needed.

Maybe this blog isn't about cafes at all. It's about getting a cup of coffee. One cup, one post. (Which is bullshit, of course, most of them involve multiple cups, even multiple days, which, when you think about the crap I write here, is ridiculous.)

What is a cafe without the cafe? The question makes me think of an ad for an ultraportable laptop, "your office, without the office," showing a photo of someone typing away happily below picturesque mountains, beside a lake, or on a beach. Or maybe "the world is your office." Because, yeah, the world is my cafe, for the time being. Or rather the nearby park.

There are, in other words, two ways to think about psychocafegraphy: place, or coffee. These two have in the past been linked (a cafe is a place where one has coffee). Now they must be seperated, or this whole endeavor must be scrapped. Having run out of places, I must move on to coffee.

Coffee tastes better when prospects look good. Writing this is my attempt to make the coffee taste better. Right now it tastes vile (I could swear that the coffee served from their booth downtown is drip-brewed, whereas at the cafe and roasting facility, they serve french-pressed) because I don't know what else to write. I want to stop, to do something else, and to drink better coffee, but then, cup after cup would taste just the same.

What you do ends up being a metaphor for how you think: When I'm walking I'm led down a path, towards what destination I don't exactly know, but it seems as if I'm getting somewhere, and when I sit all I can do is survey, staying in one place, skimming the surface of everything, not a rabbit hole.

The trouble with this kind of wandering is that it is in fact destinationless. When the slats of the imagination fall away, the feeling of going somewhere fall with them, and I find myself lost. Where was I going? Why did I begin writing this, other than to write another blog post?

Downtowne Coffee House (Talent, Oregon)

2011-09-02T11:20:00.001-07:00

For the record, bicycling sucks. The number of loogies I've hocked and the burning, hollow feeling in my chest has me inclined to believe that flavor of paleo dieter who is convinced aerobic exercise is bad for you.

Some people say that bicycling and other forms of intensive exercise are relaxing. The panting from point A to point B does, I admit, give me time to think, but this is only because I have to distract myself from what's really going on. This is why I'm stringing these sentences together while I pedal: otherwise there is only the horror of wind rushing past my ears and the monotonous pain in my legs. Bicycling are running are good times to think not because they make thinking easier but because what's in your mind is the only thing between you and nothing. This is why runners so often have earbuds, so that they don't have to rely upon the labor of their own thoughts to be distracted. It's a matter of psychic survival, not pleasure.

There is a Calvin and Hobbes comic (actually I've mixed up at least two different comics) wherein Calvin's dad stuck gets stuck traffic on his way from work, and when he gets home, going bicycling. To get ready he has to pump his tires, grease the chain, do some adjustments. He gets rained on, and a passing car splashes him with muddy water, which veers him off course into a ditch. He returns home mangled, scraped, and bruised, and says, "the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse."

Which brings us to the question: why did I bike here this morning? I had planned on driving. But when I was going to leave, my father was gone with the car. He was, as he likes to say, gone with the Schwinn. Except, err, with the Subaru. When I was harrying myself to get ready to bike, he came back with the car. I was determined to bicycle anyway, even though it would take way longer (if you don't want to get hit by a car, to bike from Ashland to Talent you have to take the bike path instead of the more direct route along Highway 99) and I couldn't find a hat (if I bike without a hat in this cold, breezy weather we've been having lately, my ears would quickly throb in pain, making me dizzy and nauseous). I had already wasted an astonishing amount of the morning getting ready to leave, but for some reason (or no reason at all) I was attached to the idea of biking. Maybe because I'm so desperate for material that I need to put myself through something I can convince myself is an ordeal.

An ordeal that I have to alienate myself from to survive. One can get carried away with this idea of false consciousness that is the basis of the kind of cognitive therapy that is so informally popular: Yesterday someone I know said that she prefers to think about the snowfall in the horrible winters where she lives as extra water for the depleted lake--which is interesting because it's wilful cognitive dissonance. Let's get carried away: The acquaintance across the street who has devoted himself to an older woman and her spiritual teachings is deluding himself that she holds some deep wisdom to distract himself from the truth that he's at a loss for what to do with his life. One of many problems with this type of thinking, of course, is what one designates the truth. Personally, I go for whatever is most depressing. There. I admitted it.

Speaking of distractions, supposedly this blog is about cafes. Supposedly I'm writing about Downtowne Coffee House in Talent, because I've run out of cafes in Ashland to write about. (My girlfriend says that if I were in a city, this blog could go on forever. There would be so many cafes, and new ones would be popping up, and others closing, often enough that I would probably never run out of cafes to write about.) But this dissonance between my supposed subject matter and what I'm actually writing is less about the survival of my psyche than it is about the survival of the blog. Writing about cafes is a pain. I actually have to, you know, take notice of things, and come up with a way to frame it. It's much easier to just spew whatever comes to mind. And ultimately, I tell myself, it's about where I'm writing, right?

The other thing is, I've grown nostalgic for those highly conceptual posts I used to write (Case, The Roasting Company, Mix). I miss having ideas I was thinking about. (Well, bad ideas.) I don't really anymore, thus the posts have devolved (or evolved) into semijournalism. Boooring. What am I, writing a newspaper column? In an attempt to recreate how I used to write posts, I've grabbed hold of the most basic theoretical idea that found its way to me this morning, and I have run with it.

Meanwhile, Downtowne Coffee House offers its own dissonance from where it is: downtown. Its sign, showing a city skyline on a night-blue background with a yellow moon and a street lamp the likes of which the Woody Allen surrogate in Midnight in Paris would've romanticized, evokes both another place and another time, in its cute way. The cafe is in fact smack in the middle of downtown Talent, but the downtown(e) it would have us imagine is nothing like downtown Talent. This kind of imaginary sumptuousness is at the heart of cafeness: cafes give us different coordinates to imagine the world. As I've said before, in a cafe we're not where we are. Such dissonance makes us feel comfortable.

It's not so necessary that the way a cafe attempts to transport us is coherent. The sign outside and the beautifully designed music posters from the early part of the last century in the bathroom agree, but I sit across from a vaguely Central-American-looking concrete head statue whose cranium is a pot full of succulent plants. The two male employees here today are dressed in black band t-shirts, black hats, shortish black cargo pants, and (yup, you guessed it, black) combat boots unlaced down to the foot. The music has vacillatedfrom not-often-played early Pink Floyd ("The Gnome") to spacy electronica to Bob Dylan to Loreena McKennitt. There's a photo on the wall that looks less old than it is trying to look old (with sepia tones), of this same place but called "The Espresso Shack" (back then?), the front porch filled with middle-aged people looking into the camera. There are all sorts of paintings on the walls, from bland landscapes to childish Paris cityscapes, and lord knows what the incandescent green light in the ceiling fan is all about. It doesn't matter, because it has funk: the great comfort of benign decay.

I did have some justification for venturing five miles away (by bicycle) to Talent. Though I suppose I don't really have to have a justification, because I've already taken this blog as far as Oakland. Talent is becoming a kind of new Ashland. Gentrification has left Ashland nearly impossible to move to, so people are coming here where the housing market is not so absurd, and in the past decade Talent's downtown has been growing, becoming something cool or wanting to be. At least, this is the story that people tell. I have no idea.

Adelante! Gallery & Tea Room

2011-08-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

I'm always looking for a place to write. I go off to cafes because home rarely ever works for me. This is how psychocafegraphy started. It's a very circular thing: I come to cafes to write, about cafes. I've convinced myself that I need the variety of cafes that Ashland has within walking distance of my house, rather than picking one and sticking to it. There are definitely some I go to more than others, but I don't like going back successively to the same one because I'm embarrassed to. I don't want anyone to be privvy to the fact that I go to one every other day or more. They'll start asking questions, or wondering if I don't have something better to do with my life. So I try to rotate the cafes I go to so that I only ever appear at the same place once a week at most. (Not that it matters. I'm still recognized. The staff of one cafe even knows I write this blog.)

So it was with some excitement that I discovered that this gallery has comfortable seats in the back on which to drink the tea advertised at the door. It was both a potential place to write and new material for this blog--something I am always in need of. Though the tea (loose leaf, it read) had tempted me, I had always been afraid to go in because a peek inside revealed that the tea counter was behind a gauntlet of paintings, sculptures, and pottery. My girlfriend and I had been planning on going in here for weeks. She had the same fear that I did: is there somewhere to sit in there, or will they make me stand around looking at art while I drink tea? Steeled by our shared weariness, we finally braved the gauntlet (oh no, landscape paintings!) and made our way to the counter. To our relief, hidden behind the tall counter (with bamboo siding and pebbles-in-cement top, looks like something out of a tropical resort) there were large, comfortable, pink armchairs and loveseats.

Cynthia Wolf, who owns and runs it all, understandably assumed we were tourists.

"What have you been doing today? Just walking around, catching a play?"

We didn't so much tell her we lived here as said something which made it apparent.

"Oh, so how long have you lived here?"

She is quite chatty about her tea, which is stocked in giant forest-green tins. "Do you like tea?" she asks when I come in the second time (there are so few customers that she recognizes me from a couple days before). She says she doesn't drink much black tea, just green, and therefore wonders how I like the assam. It's okay, but the assam that they're running out of, that she kindly gives me a sample of, is much better. It's has flavor I've not had in black tea, and strong, as it should be.

She engages you as if your presence here indicates you're a fellow tea connisseur, or at least would like to think of yourself that way, and asks if you would like to smell this or that. This is not the hurried, professional transaction you might find in almost any coffee shop, nor will she confidently tell you, like Noble Coffee, that such and such variety is really good, isn't it, and has caramel notes and a clean finish. This is a seemingly somewhat bored artist from Oklahoma who runs a gallery in downtown Ashland, and who has devised loose-leaf tea as a way to lure people in, and who seems to like to chat. (I am curious about her story--why she moved from Oklahoma to Ashland, staying with the new branch of her gallery here.) The first time I came in I ordered tulsi with mint and she told me that she loves tulsi, do I know what it is? I didn't. It's a kind of basil. I had no idea, however much I used to join one friend in making fun of another for drinking tulsi instead of tea in the morning.

For all her enthusiasm, the fanfare, and the obviously fine grade tea (we're talking SFTGFOP here--the leaves are completely unbroken), she brews black tea carelessly, or brews it like it's green tea. But even green tea should not be hung in a paper cup of hot water without a top. That would be fine for the teabags sold in most coffee shops, but this is good tea. The water should be the correct temperature (for the assam, hotter), the leaves should have room, the vessel should have a cover which covers completely (to keep heat from escaping), and it should be served with something to time the brewing and an indication of how long to brew it. (Of course, I've been to a tea shop in Portland that despite having all of these things still managed to ruin the tea by using about three times as much tea that should have been done for the amount of water the leaves were brewed in. The resulting brew was nearly undrinkable--more like concentrated Russian zavarka to which hot water is added before drinking.) Strangely, this is that sort of place--they even have "tea flights" for tea's sake--yet it appears to be not about the brewed tea, but the idea of fine tea, the smell of the different varieties, the zen of it all.

Even stranger, she uses a thermometer to monitor the temperature of the water in the electric kettle. Does she deliberately brew the assam in suboptimally hot water? Am I just not used to assam other than CTC, the kind used for chai, which is disgusting unless it has milk? Does she just not bother giving proper teaware to customers (even a paper cup with a tight lid without holes would do, if there were either a removable tea bag or another cup to pour the brewed tea into)? The pathetic part is that I could ask, if I knew how. But instead I act agreeable, saving the commentary for this blog, where I snipe and prod.

Some of the teas come, she says, from someone she knows in Sri Lanka who owns a tea garden. "Tea plantation--no, tea garden," she corrects herself, commenting that one doesn't call them plantations any more. The rest of the tea comes from The Tao of Tea in Portland.

This new-age paradaise was precisely what we needed that day we finally got up the nerve to come in here. The iced tea was nice, the setting quiet and relaxing--not full of the pop-drenched mania of Mix and Noble Coffee. It was the perfect place to talk and to read. Back here I feel removed from the downtown bustle (I know, it's nothing) out the door. Behind me I hear the creek. Out the window all I see are maple leaves, tinged at their edges with the brown of oncoming autumn. It seemed like a good place to write. When I tell her this (because she asks if I'm going or staying here), she says it gets loud in here sometimes, but corrects herself and says yes, it is. Why argue with the praise of a customer?

The Human Bean

2011-08-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

some people drink Pepsi / some people drink Coke / the wacky morning DJ says democracy's a joke
-Cake, "Building a Religion"

Some people drink The Human Bean, some people drink Dutch Bros.. Every coffee-drinking Ashlander has this choice as he or she drives north out of Ashland. The two drive-thrus are all of about two-hundred feet from one another and can inspire strong allegiances. That both have enough business to stay afloat is a testament to how ravenous Ashland is for coffee.

My father is for the most part indiscriminate about which he drives "thru" on the many road trips northward I've accompanied him on. The determining factor for him, he says, is which has a shorter line. He used to say he likes Dutch Bros. because of the Columbian roast they use for their regular coffee (not an espresso fan, his habit is a big cup of brewed coffee with "a big slug" of half-and-half). I think my mother preferred The Human Bean, but I could be making this up. It would make sense though: The Human Bean seems more her style. My girlfriend's father insists upon The Human Bean, I don't exactly know why. Perhaps he likes the girls there better.

In case there's any question in the matter: I am an idiot. My plan was to get coffee from both Dutch Bros. and The Human Bean. But obviously I couldn't allow Dutch Bros. to see the The Human Bean cup in my cupholder when I pulled up to their drive-thru. That would be far to embarrassing. Far better to put the The Human Bean cup on the floor. Cupholders aren't really there for any reason--certainly not holding the cup upright, so that its contents don't spill out. My comparison, largely a stain on the passenger seat floor, was mostly botched. But my small taste of The Human Bean coffee had me wishing I had spilled the other cup. There is something gross about swallows of Dutch Bros. coffee: It tastes strangely syrupy, medicinal, especially when it starts getting cold. Candy coffee. It's a familiar taste for me, though, from several road trips to Portland and back. Even though Dutch Bros. hasn't expanded beyond the West, it's far more ubiquitous than The Human Bean. Grants Pass vs Ashland.

Of course The Human Bean started in Ashland. Just the name is so Ashland, and just look at that white feminine ghost of coffee steam rising out of the cup, holding its palms up in some pose of at-one-with-the-world grooviness. Yet somehow this part of their logo is surrounded by harsh, modern fonts and an equally modern, red cup. The slick slid its way across the country into North Carolina, spreading its wispy, hippy Coffee Elemental.

So--and now my father says he agrees with me--if you're looking for brewed coffee, The Human Bean is the place to go. (I can't believe I just made an endorsement. This blog has never been in the habit of doing anything so helpful as reviewing.) Of course, with just a tiny bit of suggestion, it's easy to become convinced of something's goodness. When Scott told me that the coffee at Dutch Bros. was Columbian, the next time I got Dutch Bros. coffee I was convinced Columbian was a good thing. It would not have mattered what it tasted like; thus named, that taste became what I wanted.

My secret cargo of The Human Bean coffee cleverly hidden from view in the carpet, I noticed that Dutch Bros. this morning was running on two boys (they sell bumper stickers that read "runs on Dutch Bros.," while Dutch Bros. runs on someone), while girls were on both sides of the The Human Bean booth. Which, however tiny my "sample size" is (one), makes me wonder about The Human Bean's hiring practices. It's rumored that they do not hire anyone male. If my uncle's refusal to go to Dutch Bros. because of the "hairy boys" is any indication, this would be a wise, though cynical business decision for The Human Bean: The drive-thru becomes not just a purveyor of coffee, but of opportunities for dirty old men to gawk. Assuming that gawkers of the female form comprise a large part of their cliclientèleThere are also rumors that one guy drove up to The Human Bean booth without pants, and that someone else gave a $100 tip.

The Dutch Bros. website has inspired me, I must say. If we are to believe their website, they inhabit a kind of high school PSA utopia. While The Human Bean markets coffee, Dutch Bros. markets the happy, shiny customer. It could be said that the latter is more sophisticated marketing, but it is also more patronizing.

"Here at Dutch Bros., we're all about being positive and lovin' life." They have "come across" the Optimist's Creed (which they've inexplicably encased in quotation marks), and renamed it The Dutch Creed. Need I really make reference to "the ultimate content of the superego" to explain the sense of mild horror this gives me?

Dutch Bros., as they insist on calling themselves (much like Luigi and Mario are not brothers, but Bros.), even have a "Cyberbowl." Their website does not elucidate for me what exactly a "Cyberbowl" is. All I know is that it's an "online football game" which makes it possible to "WinFREECoffeeforOneYear!" (Yes yes, I know, that isn't really written all as one word, it's just typeset to have virtually no spaces between words.)

The website asks the quequestions a drive-through coffee franchise somehow lacking if it doesn't sell its own branded clothing? What's incredible about the "DutchWear" store is that it can't seem to find decent photos of the clothing. The image that links to the women's section shows a care-free girl in a pink sweater, but blown up from half the image's resolution, so that she's blurry in that special resizing algorithm way. The men's section boasts an image at the correct resolution, but the photoshop work, which places a bland guy in a black t-shirt in front of the obligatory background of purple rays of light, was botched. His whole body is haloed with a thin line of white, presumably from what he was actually photographed in front of. The last two sections ("outer" and "hats") seem to've avoided catastrophe, which just makes the errors of the first two more inexplicable. Is their web designer lazy? Underpaid? The relative or friend of some upper-level management, whose poor work everyone has to put up with? Did the photographer somehow fail to provide a photo of the girl in the pink sweater of more than 218x218 pixels? Did they filch her photo, somehow, from elsewhere on the internet?

I didn't have an allegiance to either of the rival Southern Oregon drive-thru espresso chains, but this post, I admit, has been for the most part an excuse to bash Dutch Bros.. I am after all from Ashland, not Grants Pass. Banners strung across Grants Pass (or Grant's Pants) proclaim that "It's The Climate!" What exactly its climate explains, I don't know. But perhaps it has had some mysterious effect upon Dutch Bros., an effect that has been passed on to us, its customers.

As far as The Human Bean having an Ashlandizing effect upon its increasingly wide customer base, I think I'm so fargone I couldn't possibly perceive it. The name would have us believe that it does not purvey the particular, but the universal. Which is so Ashland. COEXIST.

Water Street Cafe

2011-08-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

You need a guide in the realm of the dead--someone to open it up, to make what is invisible, visible. Without a guide you may not see the dead, and without a guide skilled in the obfuscations of storytelling, the dead would burn out your eyes, destroy you--you would be become dead. Without explanation the realm of the dead is impossibly incoherent; it must be explained away. It must be walled off, yet illuminated. To walk there the path must be opened, but it must be carefully closed off. What is a path, after all, but boundaries on either side? A path is limited openness, largely consisting of that which cannot be walked upon, whence the view from the path, the thing made beautiful because impossible to walk to without deviating from the path.

A cafe is that kind of path--walls here, windows here. A window creates the very condition of a view: it is a solid wall that blocks passage but through which you can see. Water Street Cafe eschews this definition of a cafe as it eschews windows.

Here the only shelter is from the sun, and their sign advertises "open-air dining." It is open-air dining in a rarely intended sense: This isn't dining in the open air of a courtyard or a garden, but open to the busiest street in Ashland. All that's between me, sitting on one of the wooden stools, and the traffic are some hanging potted plants and the thin beams holding up the plastic greenhouse roof.

The whole establishment has no indoor space. Even the food preparation and storage takes place in a tiny shack of wooden slats, metal screen, and a doorway covered with a flap of mosquito net. Like we're in the tropics. The music confirms this beach resort feel, oscillating between worldbeat and new-age, voices from warmer climes sampled into euphoria with a beat. (Which, what can I say, is a bit too appropriate for this psuedospiritual droning on about "realms of the dead.") Perhaps it's the music that forms the "window"--I'm indistinguishable from one of the people outside, except that I'm listening to this ridiculous music--"enlightened nature," runs one of the choruses--that to them is only a low murmur.

Let's be honest, I write these posts in two parts, occasionally more. For this entry what feels like a morning routine has developed that will end after today, its second iteration: after breakfasting on cereal, I leave the house to grab another breakfast of yogurt and fruit from the food co-op, which I eat on the bright blue picnic tables at the Oak Street Center. I then pop over here to get coffee, but their coffee machine is broken so both times it has actually been an americano, which is a perfect name for the most tasteless idea for an espresso drink. I write here for about half an hour, and go home. My life is so hard. (Maybe this nascent routine isn't one that should end with this post. I am shockingly productive here at ten thirty in the morning, at least in sheer volume of masturbatory crap.)

The two employees are in the throws of adolescence, experiencing that quintessential part of high school that I never did: the summer job. About the coffee machine one asks the other "when are we going to get that fixed?"

"Whenever he can figure out how to fix it without calling anyone or spending anything, I guess."

This morning the music has switched to an energetic oldies station: CC'n'R, James Brown, Bob Dylan. It creates the illusion that it fits the sunny street, as if everyone out there (which really isn't distinguished from here--there is no "in here") is moving to the same music, is part of that music. The man across the street with a cane and a knee brace who smokes and spanges has a movie soundtrack of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain Gonna Fall". He's the age who might have grown up listening to Dylan. So obviously it's his song; he's in it. The music, as I said yesterday, is my window that appears to constitute the scene.

Let me be (not terribly) clear about what I mean by the realm of the dead. Without some kind of window, downtown Ashland is all surface: sun and breeze glancing off inscrutable faces, cars on unknown errands, and green leaves swaying overhead impassively, blank blue sky above them all. Without a window a countless fray of presumptions fly wily-nilly through everything, though never still enough to see, or, most of the time, even to notice. A million Subarus and Priuses drive every which way. A thousand Chaco and Teva sandals bending rhythmically against the pavement and the balls of feet.

Sight is by its very nature sight of that which is already dead. This is obviously some of the most daft metaphysical fuckery. The thing in itself is defined as that which cannot be sensed, what lies beyond perception. By the time you see the thing the sight has already been taken from it, little deaths peeled off like automatic gunfire. You need a guide, then, to see beyond the realm of the dead to the realm of the living, that impossible place.

The cripple on the bench is getting more desperate. People are disturbed by his shamelessness: He yells at them from thirty or forty feet away, asking for monetary help. Something in his manner suggest that he finds it ridiculous that people are unwilling to help.

His story is that the VA Hospital in White City (twenty miles away) has kicked him out. He was injured ("got hurt") in '71 in Vietnam ("fighting for our freedom"), and now he's "reduced to begging. But I got no choice. People look at me like I'm some kind of drug addict, some kind of pariah, but it's not true." Thus the indignation foreign to people used to beggars not filled with pride.

I wish I had some personal story to tell about Water Street Cafe. In the summer I had burned my feet on the asphalt while I was waiting for one of my brother's friends to order.

Cafe 116

2011-08-03T22:01:00.001-07:00

Why name a cafe after its street address? Why place pillows along a long bench inside? Why fresh flowers in tiny vases, one on every table? Why blue?

You can heard them asking each other questions behind the counter. On this, the first day Cafe 116 has been open, it's not entirely certain how it all is to be run. Everyone has had their training, but no practice being Cafe 116 rather than Key of C. Although there don't appear to be all that many differences. The counter has been truncated into a straight line along one wall, from the L-shape of before, and now it's all shiny steel and glass. The refrigerated portions house salad and quiche. Today there's tuna fish Niçoise. Tea and coffee are still served in the same mugs. Yet as one of the owners lunches quietly on soup and bread, the employees behind the counter ask each other how to do this and that. Not many certain answers are given, but lots of "oh, well, what I did was..."

There is the oddest hush at the counter. Each transaction is riddled with ponderous silences, as if saying the wrong thing would shatter Cafe 116's pristine (re)opening. I'm given the impression that this is not supposed to be the place for loud small talk (anymore), that anything more than a smile is vulgar. Quiet French jazz holds everything down sumptuously into itself. Purple, white, and blue--colors of calm control and understated fecundity. "You can relax" turns into "you must relax." You will live in this form.

That is what going to a cafe does: gives you form. You become expressed through the dark, sober tables and the yawning white cups. You become the person who sits where you're sitting, listens to what you're listening to, and drinks what you're drinking. I am the person who drinks jasmine tea (which tastes purple, don't you think?) on a pillow, alone. I lift the cup to my lips in a certain languorous way that aspires to the enjoyment expected of such a person.

Watching people in cafes also works this way. Whether you like it or not, you are to anyone watching you the kind of person who does what you're doing, sits the way you're sitting, has what you're having. A cafe is the form--one a sonnet, another a villanelle, one more a sestina--you are the content.

In writing there's the possibility of revision, of perfectionism. You can write a draft, throw it out entirely, and write a new version. You reveal it to be read when you want to. The writing process does not take place in front of an audience. In a cafe, or, indeed, anywhere else public, there is only improvisation. It's always live. You are judged not by what you can privately perfect, but on the hapless perturbations of your body--the immediate you. (Artaud might write an angry letter against this point.)

Which on the other hand, can be comfortable. The greater possibility of perfection in the written word hangs over your head as much as it buffers you. If it can be perfect then shouldn't it be perfect? Of course, by no means is this (megalomaniacal) anxiety limited to writing. It's just as easy, really, to feel this way about the immediate world: If I just did this, remembered this, wore this, held myself this way, said this, I would be saved from being wrong, acting wrong. If only all the wisdom from all the time I have lived could be compressed into each moment so that I might not let it get away from me, so that I might not get away from me. But there you are, yourself, not yourself, drinking the latte that you never drink, feeling naked without the beard you never shave.

In an odd way this brings us to something I've been thinking about ever since last weekend when one of the employees of The Roasting Company told me that she read that post. It didn't occur to me until later that when she handed me a tea cup and called it "ugly" that it was a joke aimed at my description of the mugs there ("ugly").

But I actually rather like their tea cups. So many times I've come in to have a pot of tea with their dainty, shallow cups which prolong the tea pleasurably: three, four, five cups of tea. And there is something about the pouring (and the chastening!). But I have called their cups ugly and said that they seem about to fall apart at any moment.

The fickleness and time-bounded-ness of judgment comes also of the observer. This blog is subject not just to what cafes happen to be when I happen to be there, but also to my whims. Each post is really, when it comes down to it, however I was able to get my kicks at the time. When I wrote about The Roasting Company, I felt like insulting their pottery.

Now I have an opportunity to correct this error (and you're right, I just did). But is it an error? Do I begin apologizing, taking back things I've said? I'm inclined to say no. First of all there's a certain futility in correction. Correct and recorrect all I want; I will not arrive at a crystaline expression of truth. Second, the structure of this blog is such that it should preclude corecting myself, because it's one post per cafe. (But then Key of C goes and gets a new owner, then changes its name, creating three posts on the same place.)

(Of course, now we're missing one of the essential ingredients of psychocafegraphy: memory. But haven't I covered every vaguely interesting memory associated with Key of C in the last two posts on it?)

Cafe Namaste

2011-07-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Café Namasté has been around for a while. Their signs tell potentially disappointed returning customers that they've moved; they're now "located just as few steps away." (Don't worry!) I suppose do remember people relaxing under red umbrellas where the signs are now posted. In fact that's why I came here--to be one of those people at tables shaded from the heat. But I never knew it was called anything. Has it been here for long enough to establish the reputation its relocation notices refer to ("you can enjoy all the same menu choices")? So far as I know it has moved in just this summer, the same as every other eatery that's ever been here. There has almost always been something here, across the street from the park, and every year it's something different, something basically the same, but owned by someone new. Just last summer my father and I were having coffee from some other failing business in this same spot.

If this is at first glance such an ideal location--closer to Lithia Park, where tourists and locals stroll, picnic, and play, than any other cafe, even Percolate, looming over the tall trees of the park--why is every cafe that takes up here doomed? (And why do minor entrepreneurs continue to try to succeed here?) Some possible causes for financial failure can be supposed. For one, this is more or less a dead spot for half the year. The off season is a problem for every restaurant and coffee shop in Ashland, but here the off season really is off, and not just slow, because who visits the park in the winter? Well, ice skaters, when the rink opens in the same place as Café Namasté. This means that anything setup inside the little room which serves cafe customers in the summer can only be temporary, because the rink stores their skates there in the winter. Additionally, as we learned from the woman who ran last summer's stand, the building has no plumbing and can't legally have a kitchen with a stove or an oven. It can only be what amounts of a concession stand. Somehow, each cafe finds a way to heat water for coffee and tea.

It's for all these reasons, I imagine, that Café Namasté has moved next door, inside, to where hot food can actually be prepared (I think). No other business here has been able to do this. What has changed to make their move possible, I don't know, but it seems possible that Café Namasté, unlike its predecessors, is here to stay. (Of course, the outside seating is gone. Something may be here to stay, but it's not the concessions that rotate every year.)

To a grumpy, nostalgic local like me, this is a troubling possibility. It's like when Lithia Springs Hotel moved into and renovated the tallest building in town, the Mark Anthony. Several hotels moved into those nine floors and went bankrupt throughout my childhood, and for a long period of my adolescence the beige tower stood abandoned. Somehow, this seemed right. There it was, rotting away, iconic. My brother and his friends used to hang out on the top floor. Then Lithia Springs Hotel came in, steeled themselves against failure with the renovations that large sums of cash made possible, and put themselves on interstate exit signs.

I know that money flows into Ashland from the outside through the clean, shiny Lithia Springs Hotel, and that I can still use their elevator to sit watching downtown from the 9th floor, but I miss the dead end that it once was. I reveled in how the enormous old building thwarted. Or rather I revel now in how I imagine it once thwarted.

Café Namasté, as I'm sure you've guessed from the name, is full of paintings and statues of Hindu gods and goddesses. It's also full of couches. The interior looks comfortable, soothing. There's even a small wood stove in one corner. I can only say what it looks like through the windows because despite its exuberant relocation notices, it remains closed. I've come back every day for the past three days and it's been closed each time.

There's something about the notices that seems translated, or written by an outsider to English. They've relocated to "the more comfortable restaurant right next store," which, if you say it out loud, sounds right. One of my friends parents has a story of similar verbal confusion: One day when she was small she asked her dad for a "boycheese sandwich." When asked what she meant, she explained that she didn't want a "girlcheese sandwich," which was cooked, but a boycheese sandwich, which wasn't.

The notice goes on to say that "you can enjoy all the same menu choices at right and so many more." "At right" isn't wrong (the restaurant is indeed to the right of the signs), but it sure sounds strange. It's as if the "more comfortable restaurant" is on the opposite page. So it is: Café Namasté hasn't overcome the challenges of running a business in the place they used to be; they have turned the page. (Showers of rotten tomatoes for this last metaphor.) Will the live ruin of the shack on the previous page go on impaling itself on reality? Or will this new restaurant replace any future optimistic readings of what preceded it?

Starbucks (Albertsons)

2011-07-21T04:14:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, if you're still reading this blog, you aren't coming here for truthfulness. Not only do I warp, stretch, and willfully misremember facts to have something to say at all, but I actually make shit up. To continue in the supposed tradition I began last week by pointing it out: psychocafegraphy is reaching to find dramatic, usually somewhat specious things to say about Ashland and its denizens. For instance: Ashland has a North side and South side, and the boundary between them holds sociocultural importance. South Side Tattoos acknowledges this delineation, although it is actually North of the railroad tracks. This, ladies and gentleman, is the wrong side of the tracks.

On this side are the interstate and almost all of the chains in town: Taco Bell, Rite Aid, Bi-Mart, Subway, Goodwill, Albertsons, and there used to be a Pizza Hut. (The former building of which, oddly, now houses Heartsong Chai.) More suburbia than small town, everything over here is what the downtown core repels and yet relies on. You could, for example, get your kitchen gadget from Alyson's (well, could've gotten--it has recently gone out of business) downtown, but you can get it cheaper at Bi-Mart, over the little bump of Ashland Street's railroad overpass. Downtown is an idyll, a touristic semblance of a whole town, full, basically, of everything you don't need, and over here is where its strict aestheticism takes a dump. (Of course, this begs the question: what exactly is a "whole" town? Taken to an extreme, the "__ local" movement would have it that such towns or cities unto themselves exist, or ought to.)

I assume that almost none of this existed before the interstate was put through it. But then, why did this spot in particular get chosen as the intersection of Ashland Street (which here becomes Highway 66) and Interstate 5?

To a dweller of the interior of the North side there is a certain poetry to these outskirts. Their spaciousness and decay were often the subjects of my teenaged camera. The yellow grass, the railroad tracks, the crickets, the contrails of airplanes made visible from lack of trees. Just to the other side of the tracks is a park where I've had picnics both by myself and with a friend who used to work at Shopp'n Cart (where my grandmother used to shop, forget that she already went shopping, and go shopping again, filling her kitchen with a large cruft of duplicates), right next to equal opportunity housing. With wide parking lots and without the crowds of pedestrians, people look at each other differently here. The gaze is more indirect, and incidental voyeurism is mostly lost. All of which, of course, casts this side of town in the same rosy light as a traveler does another country. He forgets the loneliness of travel.

Actually I am not at (one cannot exactly be in) the Starbucks in Albertsons at the moment, and thus to write about it I must imagine that I am there. To be there you must do the reverse: you have to imagine you are elsewhere. There to be "present" or "in the now," like the Zen gurus with which Ashland is elsewhere replete, would be disastrous. In fact, this is why Starbucks is here: You buy your cup of comfort to protect yourself from the cold fluorescent lights. Unlike the haunts of the more generously moneyed, Albertsons does not shove its own fantasies down your throat. Rather its very barrenness is a potential breeding ground for a variety of needfully alienated consciousnesses. Bring your iPod.

There is a beer-bellied giant with a child on a leather leash. Apparently, children have leashes now. The child runs ahead, straining his lead. The giant laughs and ducks his balding head of long white hair under the door frame of the automatic door. Albertsons is the stuff of cheap horror, or at the very least Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Unwitting employees nearly trundle into me with massive carts on my way around the corner of an aisle. Inside the public restroom, the door is violently jerked--stopped loudly by the deadbolt--as if some hungry animal is trying to bash its way in. If this really were a horror film I would be frantically prying the air vent to escape the unseen beast.

In film there's a tradition of ironically setting cheery music to gruesome scenes of innocents being torn limb from limb. I have heard that the music in supermarkets is intended to put you in the mood to shop longer. The music in Albertsons--at the moment a man warbling incomprehensibly at the top of his sappy lungs (think "I will always love you" but somehow more relentless)--seems rather designed to drive customers out. Technically the in-store Starbucks might qualify as a cafe because there are two sad little tables to the side of it, next to the magazines, but I can't bring myself to sit there for more than five minutes because of the music. Not only is it depressing; it's actually difficult to think. So much for my theory of fertile emptiness.

Not everyone can rush in and out of Albertsons as quickly as possible. I wonder how the girl at the Starbucks counter, or for that matter everyone else who works in this store, manages to stand listening to it all day. She does seem awfully bored.
"How's your morning going so far?" she asks.
Is this the kind of perfunctory politeness suggested in employee training, or a question from someone looking for any viable distraction?

Fleeing the music, I sit outside in the sun at a nearby Subway table, filtering through the recent memories of my brief experience in Albertsons, placing myself there. Of course, I'm not actually at the Subway table anymore, but on the Bloomsbury patio. Or I was; now I'm at home. At home imagining myself in a place which one must imagine is another place. I may as well just be in my room, sitting in the dark. The Starbucks here is hardly even a cafe. It's an armory at ground zero. Or at least, I would like to think so. That would be more exciting than the reality.

A Street Cafe

2011-07-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

It is becoming traditional to begin these posts with a broad, somewhat self-deprecating statement of what psychocafegraphy is. Glimmers of these were in the very first two posts--in which Noble Coffee (the new) was interrogated with paranoia and The Beanery (the old) was romanced--but only now have they become explicit. Recently I said psychocafegraphy is hysteria about change. Inevitably, such a failure to accept the present ends in a declension narrative. With every post I in some way announce the oncoming decline of the blog itself, and things, according to a psychocafegraphy post, are getting worse. It’s easy to find confirmation of this here, in what has become of La Baguette and Hardware Cafe unnervingly soon after the owner’s death, where there now is literally less than before.

A Street Cafe would like to think that less is more, of course. People like myself who bemoan gentrification believe that this really is true. Over ten years ago there really was hardly anything on A Street. A few blocks of quiet houses was enough to separate it from downtown. Its businesses hadn’t even begun promoting the concept of A Street as hip extension of downtown that today is at least half reality. All I can remember is that there was the hardware store, and the Grange Co-op, which remain.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but there was no Ashland Food Co-op. Well, there was, but it was a tiny place full of bulk food bins. located downtown where the Outdoor Store is now. Hordes did not self-consciously browse aisles of raw, vegan, organic, gluten-free and natural foods there. There were no homebums and punk kids hanging just outside the doors. The building Ashlanders now know had in fact not even been built yet.

There were not restaurants (or perhaps only Lela’s Cafe) nor were there spas and yoga centers.. There were galleries, but not as many as today. The old steel works was just that--an abandoned industrial building.

Then construction began. Things are always worsening, but I evidently distrust my distrust of the present, because at the same time I can, believe it or not, be excited by the future. I remember the building under construction was an object of fascination, cynicism, and excitement. The girders rose into the damp, dreary winter, and we photographed them, my oldest friend and I, sometimes at night when they were orange and under streetlights and seemed from some other era. The giant clock taking shape at the top seemed then tantalizingly anachronistic. I was excited about what it would all become, yet we would say to each other how lame it was that they were doing anything at all with the building. Of course, we would never have noticed it before construction began. The reconstruction revealed the building as (having been) a ruin at the same time that it transformed it into something new.

When finally what turned out to be an ugly green clock and its surrounding facade was finished, businesses flocked to rent space, as had been intended. It was a bold attempt to turn A Street into a thing. It was, we can say now, too much too soon. Perhaps the idea was not untenable, but not there or then. There was a cascading cast of eateries which came and went over the next five years or so. At the apex of this over-hopeful venturing (this was, after all, before the economic bust) there was a gourmet waffle shop, a Mexican cafe which sold itself on the basis of its “freshness,” a pizzeria, and a bar. The bar served a large, open space in one end of the building where performances sometimes took place. Its dark, shellacked cement floors stunk of deliberation: This was how the building was built to be used, someone’s plan realized.

Now it houses the offices of Plexis Healthcare Systems. The original premise, though, like people talk about spirits of the dead doing, still floated about. Entrepreneurial dreams and spirits wander. If there’s anything left of La Baguette’s owner’s spirit, it’s elsewhere, haunting, waiting to inhabit the will of another entrepreneur. Here in A Street Cafe there is no trace of the residue crusted onto dough mixers, the silt of flour, or the funk of before. Octogenerians do not gather here in the early morning to gab about their peers.

One never lives in any era, or at least, never in the era that afterward will be designated “now.” This cafe is 2004 stretched into the present. The cupcake bakery that just opened a month ago downtown rides a trend from two or three years ago (or more?). But when I say two or three years ago: Where? Whence does the “now” unfold, always pointing outward at all that is not “now” and calling it “then”? The quintessential always emanates from some other imagined time and place.

There is something of what the remodeled steel works once were in the dark, stately minimalism of this interior. But unlike that bar and venue of years ago, these small, square, wooden tables are arranged in orderly rows, not in ornamental disarray. Whereas Bloomsbury, and many other cafes, try to make customers feel at home with clutter and decor--needful distractions to fall into, buffering and lubricating the intimacy between people--here all attention, without anywhere else to go, lands entirely on the people. Conversation is supposed to beautify the place. A lofty goal.

The dishes follow the same aesthetic. Tea comes in simple little white pots and little straight-sided teacups, showing off the amber liquid like the interior design does clientele. Nothing is fun or cute or charming. Even the coffee cups somehow bridge the gulf between the self-consciously simple heavy, slightly hour-glass-shaped mugs that Noble Coffee uses and the hand-painted clay cups of The Roasting Company.

Someone, whoever he or she is, has gotten what they always wanted. Though densely packed, the tables can be rearranged to accommodate music, comedy, a lecture on a diet consisting entirely of air, or a man in a tutu balancing a lime on his nose--whatever it is one attends these days. Deux Chat, a new and highly regarded local bakery down the street, provides all the cafe’s pastries. It’s all rather idyllic, at least for someone. Maybe I’ve gotten what a nostalgic supposedly wants, too: The future (of one person) has, given way to the past (of another). I would like to cast this transaction as cold, uncouth opportunism, as if the new owner was waiting for the old owner to croak, or arranged for it to happen himself. But this is not a black comedy, nor a thriller, and who knows, the old owner, tired, might have just sold the thing if he’d been given the chance.

Twenty-Four Hour Cafe

2011-07-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

In a somewhat Victorian sense, I was not altogether a well child. In middle school I was prone to fainting spells, and in elementary school I “saw stars”--blots of rainbow ink swimming in my visual field. The latter I took as some divine sign of my specialness and therefore I attended them as one might the monthly missives from an estranged lover. I was chosen, by whom I didn't know or think to ask.

When the fainting spells struck I would usually end up in the nurse’s office, per her suggestion laying belly up on the examination table and waiting for the whiteness to pass. I don’t know if white is the way I remember it, or if I just described it with that word--white. The ceiling in the nurse’s office was (probably) white, but it was whiter then. The white threatened to take over and leave me behind. I think at the time there was some irrational connection with my mother’s epilepsy, as though I had somehow inherited another neurological malady. Though I remember it being explained as low blood pressure or hypoglycemia. Though it’s quite possible that I only misremembered “low blood pressure” as “low blood sugar,” hence hypoglycemia. As I write this my girlfriend points out that if it was hypoglycemia, as it very much sounded like, why was I laid on a table and not given food?

Sometimes they would strike away from any medical channel into which to be shunted. I didn't get them often enough to very well understand what was happening, so one time when I was walking to school with my best friend, it was at first with mild confusion that I noticed that I was salivating excessively. As I swallowed gulp after gulp of spit, I knew that something was wrong. I recalled that this had in fact happened before, and ended with my staring at the ceiling in the nurse's office on the brink of vomiting. How did I explain this to my friend? It's difficult to say how one feels sick when there's no outward sign to point to. I'm not sure I did explain. Maybe I just walked the rest of the way to school, and somehow the episode passed. Maybe I said to him suddenly that I had to sit or lie down for a bit.

These spells of nausea, lightheadedness, and what felt like near-death have since stopped, and so remain a mystery. No retrospective investigation can occur, and my memory is more of the sensation than of the medical discourse, if in fact there was much of any. Which makes the spells glare all the more brightly white.

There was only once I can remember that I was taken to the emergency room. In the middle of the night I couldn't breathe, or only just, gasping. Here’s where I struggle to remember: Was I sick with the flu already, and had been having respiratory difficulty of lesser magnitude up until that point? Had my parents been watching for things to escalate? Or had I not been sick at all, suddenly falling prey to an attack of breathlessness at that horribly urgent hour of the morning?

In any case, they took me off to the emergency room. I can’t remember how the hospital staff treated me if at all. They may have simply examined me and found that it would pass--my air passages would only constrict so far and not kill me. Or maybe they gave me drugs. (Those are obviously the only two options.) I think, like the dancing lights, the emergency made me feel special. In this case it wasn't divine attention I got, but the next best thing at that age: attention from my parents. I felt, in my mortal frailty, that I mattered. That I had power.

Confirming this, afterward my parents took me out at some four in the morning to a twenty-four hour coffee shop. At least, that’s how I choose to remember it: that there was such a place at all. It was too early for any other kind of eatery to be open. Wasn’t it? I remember it being warm (I believe it was winter at the time) and cozy with carpeting and comfortable couches and arm chairs. Though there was nobody else there, it felt more like a hippie community center than strictly a coffee shop. There may have been a menu written on a chalk board in effervescent multicolored strokes. There may have been baked goods wrapped in clear plastic. I don’t think I drank coffee then, but I do remember drinking something, more because I recall the sense of recovery that a hot drink brings than I do the actual imbibing of anything.

I've asked both my parents about that night and neither seemed to know anything about it. They remember the trip to the emergency room. "Yes, and then we went to a twenty-four hour cafe, remember?" They don't. It seems that I'm alone in my memory of this place. There's nobody else I can ask to confirm my vague yet sentimentalized memory. What was that place that we went to, if indeed we went at all?

I remember it being somewhere along the north side of Siskiyou, the main street downtown, between Puck's Doughnuts and the post office. Or maybe not. To me it somehow feels both downtown and secluded away. My grasp of its geography is so loose that it seems pointless to ask anyone if they remember it being there. I certainly don't know what it was called. It's the scene of a poignant memory, but it's lost. The town's changed commercial landscape has not just veiled the scene from me, as Mix has The Fudge Factory, or countless other storefronts that have changed over the years, but has annihilated it entirely, so that I'm not even sure what, if anything, has been annihilated.

Key of C (Again)

2011-06-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

Psychocafegraphy, I am realizing, is a kind of hysteria about change. Mix is an embodiment of the absent present because it has white-outed The Fudge Factory before it. The Playwright is untrustworthy because it complicates access to my beloved memory of Lela’s Cafe. For all of the loveliness that has come about in the recent (and ongoing) remodel of Key of C, it leaves me somewhat queasy.

As I said in the first post about it, Key of C was a (small, intimate) music venue in addition to a coffee shop. Years ago my girlfriend sang in the wood-backed corner, her father accompanying her on guitar and our mutual friend drumming them along. Where she once stood singing is now a cream-colored couch. She just called me to ask “are you singing?” No, I said, one does not sing in Key of C.

At first it didn’t occur to me that such drastic changes were taking place. I saw the new furniture, the flowers on the tables, the comfortable couch, the (distinctly not medieval) panforte, the more open space, and thought oh, how nice. In my narcissism it seemed that they were responding to my complaints: The pots of tea now had bags so that it was possible not to over-brew, and the panel that had divided the upstairs counter and the downstairs seating had been removed. It seemed that Key of C wasn’t changing entirely, but perfecting itself.

I didn’t realize that it was that same ugly, obstructing plywood panel that had allowed musicians to perform. It wasn’t until my girlfriend pointed out that the couch we were lounging on reading would make music performances difficult--”where will they play?”--that everything fell into place for me. The white-patterned, indigo walls, the dark-stained tables and chairs, the chic (to someone) baked goods (saffron snickerdoodles?): this is some new vision of cool. Although the accordion is still affixed to the wall, and bagels are still made and sold here, these things have been shifted to the background. They have been replaced by a lubricated, fresh yet generic comfort, and a new regime. Now there’s a notice in the window that they are applying for a liquor license. I prefer to write this now, before the license goes through and alcohol is served, before I know how all this will settle or what this place is to be, exactly. Let us speculate.

Before any of these changes came about I remember seeing at a table there who I now know to be the owner and the managers. Or perhaps it’s a joint venture among the three of them: a perky, curly brown-haired woman with an accent I can’t place, a calm woman who wears a great deal of black, and a tallish man with large, flat lips who wears boat shoes and another accent I can’t place. They were undoubtedly planning their future endeavor, imagining how their cafe would be transposed onto this one.

Later (two days ago), we saw the strange-lipped man flustered at the arrival of a new range from a large delivery truck. He hadn’t been informed that nobody would be provided to help him move the heavy box inside. The perky woman ran out, excited about the delivery, and he said to her yes but how are we to get it into the kitchen? An employee came outside with her cell phone, recruiting the help of her male friends. “Should I offer to help?” I surreptitiously asked my girlfriend. He kept saying he just needed one guy. Of course, between him, the perky woman, the employee, and the owner of the fashion shop next door who stopped to ask him what was going on, they probably could have moved it. If I had pitched in, surely we would’ve been able. But I didn’t offer. He was very apologetic to us about this huge box that had been dropped in the alley next to us, even though we were lingering past closing time. We were customers to be snagged, pampered, and kept coming back.

Today when I came in the perky woman smiled at me, seeming to recognize me from two days before. As I made my way to a spot in the corner opposite her, she beamed at me in an almost disconcerting way. Before my girlfriend came to meet me I moved me and my clutter outside, in part because where once jazz and classical was played inside, which was a nice if often bland reprieve from the hipster pop played in Noble Coffee and Mix, now there is only more pop. Outside, the strange-lipped man’s politeness continues as he closes the doors an hour early. “We’re having a meeting, but feel free to stay,” he urges us. They’re all in there, everyone who works at Key of C in any capacity, around a long table comprised of all the tables put together, discussing who knows what (because obviously it is a conspiracy). At some other time he called it a “training.” I hypothesize it has something to do with the future sale of alcohol. All the employees are filling out forms of some sort. I can’t hear what they’re saying inside. What is Key of C metamorphosing into?

Lela's Cafe

2011-06-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

Summer and Winter are announced by their declining. Yesterday, June 21, was the longest day of the year and the beginning of Summer. For the next six months the days will get shorter, yet for at least two of those months, the days will also get hotter. Summer begins when it begins ending, when the potential for Summer has all run out.

With this in mind, I would like to say that now that I’ve run out of cafes to write about, psychocafegraphy can begin (to end). The trouble is: with what? What can the subject of psychocafegraphy expand to include? (Especially when there are annoying yippy dogs squealing for their owners at cafe doors, making all thought impossible?) What marginalia do I turn to? Do I write about any place that serves coffee? Any place where people meet to talk, to sit on their computers, to read, and to write?

There aren’t many places in the latter category that don’t serve coffee. There are bars, but I can’t think of any that are consistently relaxed like a cafe. The Black Sheep, an “English pub” can be comfortable in the afternoon or early evening, but only because it’s mostly empty. Alex’s, a rather grubby downtown establishment (in the sense of The Establishment, man), is also like this, and there are probably others I don’t know about.

If there really were a pub, and not a loud bar with English pretensions, that would be enough like a cafe for psychocafegraphy. A cafe basically is the American version of a pub--a place one feels comfortable sitting around in for long periods of time without paying for anything more than a drink--without the alcohol. This is why I can’t write about the recently opened Larry’s cupcakes, or Ruby’s restaurant, etc. Supposedly, according to their newly painted signage, there soon will be a pub on A Street. It’s called The Playwright: a public house. (Yes, it’s shamelessly cashing in on what Ashland means to the world at large.) I’m somewhat shocked to discover that it will be taking over Lela’s, which I remember in my adolescence as the very inaccessible height of haute cuisine. (It wasn’t the restaurant of all restaurants, I now realize, but back then because I only went in once, it grew grand and opulent in my mind.)

Inaccessible because expensive. (I will proceed to make up a history of my family that in actuality I remember so hazily that I’m not sure of anything I’m about to say.) We would never have dreamed of spending the sums that Lela’s demanded on dinner. But at least once, outside the disapproving gaze of my father (which is funny to think of now--he is not a frugal spender) we went there for dessert. Dessert because it was cheaper than a meal and because we were not there to feed ourselves but to taste. Of the four of us in my family, only my mother and I could have shared dessert at Lela’s. (This very well could be a lie--my father might have joined us, or even impelled us to go there against our better financial judgment, and my brother also could have been there too, coming with us begrudgingly. We also may have never gone at all, only talked about going a few times on trips to the hardware store from which Lela’s was across the street.) That is, of the four of us, only her and I would’ve cared about fancy desserts. My father doesn’t have aspirations of refinement. He likes what he likes, and he probably would have been equally happy with a banana split from the ice cream shop down the street as any convoluted French sweet from Lela’s. My brother disapproves so thoroughly of the signs and cultural products of wealth that he would not have seen the point in spending ten dollars on a piece of cake. But my mother and I, we wanted to have palettes; we wanted to discern and appreciate. Once, when we were looking at a piece of art, she confided, to my Oedipal glee, that unlike my father I had aesthetic sense. I was so flattered: I could really see? This was what I had strove for.

To put things melodramatically, I grew up in a triangle (rather than an accommodating corner of a square) of morality, kind heartedness, and, well, madness. If I were written by Terrence Malick, I would now cry “Brother! Father! Mother! Always you wrestle inside me!” Cut to an undulating nebula.

Did we go? I do have a dim recollection of the interior of Lela’s, warm and cramped and bustling. I don’t remember sitting down, who was there, or even what we ate, if anything. Did we just come in to look at the desserts? I could of course ask my father about these details, but honestly I have more to write not knowing what exactly that memory contains.

The point I’m trying to make by saying all this is that Lela’s, despite not being a cafe in the ways I have previously defined it (even though it is called Lela’s Cafe), is embedded in my past in such a way that makes it a subject of psychocafegraphy. Well, at least of the kind of psychocafegraphy I used to do. Lately the posts have degenerated into depressive descriptions of cafes, without much of any personal involvement. I pose myself as simply a quirky observer, not an observer with a past and a psyche tangled up with the cafe that is my subject. Lela’s would allow me to return to form, to put the psycho back in psychocafegraphy. But Lela’s is already out of business and gutted, its red sign with white lettering and early 20th century decorative flourishes replaced by stark black and white minimalism. It will become a pub--something which would certainly make for good cafegraphy, but, being entirely new, lacks my entanglement.

But I will come here sometime when it’s finished. I’m curious how a pub could possibly work in the U.S. They say on their website that it will “become a community hub” and “a place where one can find lively banter.“ How will this be achieved? And does “community” include those under twenty one? Will it simply be closed to the under-aged after a certain hour? Will it be split into two sections--alcoholic and non?

It reopens with particular urgency the question posed by any new establishment, one over which owners anxiously fret and hope: can one engineer the way people gather? Cafes try to create cafe culture. The Playwright hopes to create pub culture, to transplant a bit of the British Isles here. And to do so the Lela’s I imagined must be uprooted. As The Playwright’s website lamely puts it, here is “the deconstruction of one idea and the construction of another.” What will the author of such phrases construct?

Puck's Doughnuts

2011-06-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

I have been misled. Maybe it’s only on Sunday that retirees flock here at 6am. Or maybe they come later. Or maybe they never do as they’re rumored to. This morning it’s only who I think is the owner and I. He sits behind me at one of the wooden tables shaped like empty spools of thread, shuffling papers and clearing his nose. I’m disappointed by the absence of any other customers because now I seem to have dragged myself out of precious sleep for nothing. I came here to fix an anthropological gaze on a bunch of old people eating buttermilk doughnuts. I’m miffed like a tourist who, having showed up for the traditional dance of the famous tribe, is told that the tribe is no more and their ways, lost. His airplane ticket wasted, he might well return home to send angry letters to the rainforest timber company that has pushed them out of the tribe’s home. Perhaps there is a nonprofit to which he could donate. Instead, I’m eating a giant glazed old fashioned and drinking cheap, weak coffee.

Puck’s is perhaps more known for its smell than anything else. At night the intoxicating aroma of maple flavoring and hot oil is blown into unexpected corners of downtown Ashland. I almost never come here because by the time it occurs to me that it might be nice to have a doughnut, it’s already past noon and they’re closed. The smell would be great, even devious advertising, except that the smell and the availability of doughnuts never coincide. The olfactory allure depends on people not being impulsive, on people actually planning to come here the next day. I once overheard someone say that Puck’s ought to be open at 2am, when he’s walking home drunk from a bar getting a tantalizing whiff of doughnut. Puck’s, then, comes most startlingly into presence when it is closed.

The other reason I never come here, even just to get a doughnut and leave, is that doughnuts have largely lost their appeal to me. Even when I was a teenager I began to feel sick after half a doughnut, but I would keep coming back, convinced again and again that the doughnut occupied some exalted place in the pantheon of sweets. In part I received this ecstatic notion from my oldest friend, who has an unmatched gusto for eating things. This could be because he sometimes doesn’t eat often enough, so that when he finally does eat he finds an enormous appetite waiting for him. Or maybe it comes of physical exertion. We used to come back into town from a bike ride, and stop here to get a doughnut each. Sometimes it was me who incited us in this direction. Doughnuts were a passion. Now I remember more than I forget the nausea that accompanies so much sugar and fat.

Getting a doughnut from Puck’s requires that a certain intersection of remembering and forgetting come into alignment. One must remember that one wants a doughnut, and one must forget that doughnuts are sickening. One will not sniff an amnesia-inducing reminder on the air at the right moment. How Puck’s has survived all these years, I don’t know.

Puck’s is an island of unambitious pragmatism amid the trendy extravagance of downtown. The walls are a sickly yellow with green trim, with a few potted house plants hanging about in corners. The lights are long fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There is one of those cappuccino machines. In short, there isn’t much of an aesthetic trying to be achieved here, and it lacks the pretensions of a hip new concept venture. One will not find transcendently fluffy, booze-soaked cupcakes or locally roasted, free trade, french-pressed coffee here. They just sell doughnuts. Everything else is just icing. And this is not Voodoo doughnuts. There is no bacon.

It would be a great comfort that I can soon go home and back to sleep, but after having now drank two cups of terrible coffee, I’m not sure I’ll be able to. Now the day, blasting through the east-facing windows and painfully into my eyes, has become something to endure. Alone in Puck's with a cup of coffee at six in the morning is the kind of desperate purgatory more commonly found in airports. Except in airports at least there are people to watch.

The Coffee Mill (Oakland, California)

2011-06-09T00:05:00.000-07:00

This is so California: To the side of a wide, four-lane street saddled on both sides with bright, dingy shops, a freeway overpass would, at a later time of day, cast a shadow onto the cluttered windows of a cafe called Day of the Dead Coffee. But it’s noon; the cheery sun bounces off bleached palm trees swaying in the breeze and throws everything--pavement, potted plants, awnings, tiny people on the plane of the metropolis, trees, red tile roofs--into the dereliction of the open sky. The blankets have been thrown off the city and it lays there exposed to the full, underwhelming force of laxity. Noon is not a time for sunbeams, color, or shadow. The Day and The Dead face each other. But inside Day of the Dead Coffee, the Day is given to the Dead. It’s ours. I can’t think of a better name for a cafe.

But I am not here to tell you about Day of the Dead Coffee. It’s closed. Appropriately, it doesn’t open until two in the afternoon. Because the Dead only begin waking up in the afternoon, and then must retreat from the garish “day” (as some call it) to the dark Day steaming in a mug, ensconced in the equally dark interior of the cafe.

Nor am I here to tell you about California. Really, it is nowhere to be found. As much as I look around for the quintessential, it comes only in misguided postcard flashes. Some places I have no iconography for anyway. While San Francisco can be glimpsed when one nears the crest of a hill and looks to the other side, down into an undulating cityscape and the ocean, I have no idea what Oakland is supposed to look like. So I rely instead of a broader geography of notions, California, where it is supposed to be sunny, where the economy must eternally boom, and where movie stars are governors. All vague enough to situate oneself within just about anywhere, even carrying only the knowledge that I am inside its political boundaries.

I have come to one of the least imaginatively named cafes I can imagine, The Coffee Mill. It is, as its sign claims, the oldest coffee shop in Oakland. I was heartened to come here by four friends who crossed the street with me and came here for lunch. As I often (erroneously, I assume) assume of people I see in cafes, I assume they come here often on their lunch breaks. They seemed at ease in their outside seats, watching people walk by as they ate and chatted. They left promptly, presumably returning to the workplace they came from. The Day of the Living. In their wake, dry, neglected nasturtiums vining their way from pots to trellises shiver and droop almost to the sidewalk. Their pale yellow, anemic flowers reach in every direction but down.

Dutch Bros. Coffee

2011-06-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

A Silent Film with Lecture

(In-house sound effects: rain and idling car engine.)

SHOT LIST

1. Inside car wipers slosh headlights back together and rain splashes them apart.

2. Grey foggy hills, bits of blue sky.

3. Dutch Bros. sign in neon orange in the rain.

4. Tulips painted on flat gray wall.

5. Girl in booth window, smiling.

TITLE: “Hi, how are we doin’ today?”

6. Overhead of Dutch Bros. booth straddled by two opposite cars, steam coming out exhausts.

7. From side girl leans far to hand coffee down to car.

8. Hands move from coffee cup to steering wheel, turning onto interstate.

TITLE: “Nasty weather today.”

9. Interstate at 65mph through windshield, wipers every second.

10. From other side of booth (flip of shot 7) boy leans far to hand coffee down to car.

11. Overhead (same angle as shot 6) car drives away. Booth with no cars: 20 seconds. Door opens; boy runs out.

12. Boy opens “Hair It is!” door.

13. Boy opens bathroom door.

LECTURE

“Now, when you go down 99 just before the freeway you’re gonna want to veer left. The road will kinda pull you to the right.” It was a deadpan joke. He alluded to the two competing drive-thru coffee huts, The Human Bean and Dutch Bros., on the way North out of Ashland. It’s a pull that whenever I’m driving with my dad I pretend is something only he feels, relying on a continuity from before I ever drank coffee. Or I should say pretended, as it will be rather difficult to go on pretending, considering who reads this blog. But yes, every time we drive by that gauntlet of coffee together, he either stops to get coffee and I pretend to order with ambivalence, as if to say “oh, as long as we’re here,” or he makes a joking show of how he’s restraining himself by not going, and I say nothing.

But the truth is I feel the same pull, and I restrain myself every time I go by there. It seems like the perfect way to make the drive more bearable. I might have to drive to Medford, but at least I could have coffee. In times of desperation on longer trips when I’ve been driving forever (read: more than an hour) and I can hardly pay attention to the road, going to a coffee drive-thru is a matter of caffeine, but the initial allure is that of companionship. Just as how one lives to see a pet’s growth, youth, old age, and death, and yet imagines it will always be there, that one can reach out and, well, pet it, with coffee in the cup holder I imagine I can always reach out and take a sip. But coffee of course lives (stays hot) for minutes, not years. The actual time I have with the coffee, warm and comforting, is very short. This doesn’t stop me from wanting it.

I’m similarly drawn to a cafe by an ideal scene that seems like it could last forever. Coffee beside me, my space made somehow more private by everyone around me, words flow effortlessly onto the pages of my notebook. That’s how I imagine it.

I have already made the distinction, but: Is Dutch Bros. a cafe? One comes to it for similar needs--namely, coffee--but above all else a cafe is a place, and one doesn’t come to a drive-thru. One goes to it. But thinking in terms of pedigree, one can’t entirely separate Dutch Bros. from cafe. As cafes might not exist without the popularity of Starbucks, drive-thru coffee would never have come about were it not for the recent American proliferation of cafes. Drive-thrus are their tacky, practical children. Why put baristas in a box? Because we want espresso, not gas station coffee.

While being at the freeway entrance is a perfect hook, somehow the other Ashland location over in the shopping center next to the Cinema draws plenty of people, but not because one is caught unawares by roadside advertising. For the most part one premeditates going here to get coffee, knowing that it’s here.

I have always thought there’s something to the colors and design of Dutch Bros. Maybe it’s because, for some reason or another, I’ve spent a lot of time waiting in the car, staring at the wall of a Dutch Bros. booth. The color scheme is a vision of coffee as a warming fire in a storm. The walls are medium gray, the awning is blue. Even the name, “Dutch Bros.” isn’t in the alarm tones of fast-food, but just white and blue. It’s “Coffee” that burns yellow and red.

What is Dutch? As the Bros. have it: Tulips, windmills, and blue and white. It’s not coffee; they do not espouse there being anything Dutch about coffee, despite the fact that their name is “Dutch Bros. Coffee”. Their numerous window and bumper stickers make a running gag of all things (not) Dutch: Dutch Mafia, Dutch Fro, Dutch Freedom Fighter. Dutch, being a more or less meaningless ethnic signifier around here, makes a perfect tongue-in-cheek brand for a west coast drive-thru coffee chain. It could not have been called Mexican Bros., or Chinese Bros., or even, really, German Bros.. But Dutch? Yes.

The Apple Cellar (Downtown)

2011-05-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

As I’ve said before, I’m always thinking of what to write on my way to the cafe I’m writing about. Though it would be more practical to begin thinking about these things at home, I very rarely do. I can’t, really. I need the forward motion, to humor my restlessness. To move forward is to tear up the present, to make really reflecting impossible, but it’s the only way to reflect. One can never really understand, one can only keep moving past shreds of where one has been scattered along the way. There’s never enough time to think, but if I stop to allow myself time to think, the thinking stops. Sometimes, afraid that when I arrive at the cafe I won’t have anything to write, I dally, walking around the block chewing my lip. This never really helps. One cannot dally on the way to the grave. And the Apple Cellar, down in the cool earth, is certainly the grave.

They started at the other end of town, where everything that’s sold in this downtown location comes from. This little cafe is just a satellite. I haven’t been there to the main bakery in ages, but I used to go with my friend’s family often. It feels like it’s trying to be a modernized throwback to another era. In that frantic state of mourning in which one tries to preserve rather than let go of what’s lost, everything is draped in bleached white. The tablecloths are white. The plates are white. The uniforms are white. The baked goods are set in pristine refrigerated deli cases. Everything is cheaply French. It’s not that the products are entirely bad. I like their almond crescents, even if they taste a bit too refined in the industrial sense. But the repertoire doesn’t feel like the choices of a discerning taste, because taste, like anything alive, is open to change. This is just ossification. It’s an apple cellar in an English estate on some American rebroadcast of a British period drama. As time goes on the Apple Cellar has grown via their little colony over here, but they haven’t changed.

The window display belies its preference for aesthetic perfection over everything else The cupcakes, cakes, and breads on display are lacquered inedibles. Rather than a rotation of perishable fresh goodies, these preserved corpses are used to lure customers. In the window they advertise that another bakery’s (The Village Baker’s) bread is sold here. Their bread has always been dependably okay, nothing special, but they never change the recipe.

The decor is deeply apathetic. The beige walls are completely bare except for some flat glass art for sale. As one college student customer commented to another, even the ambiance is for sale. And unlike other cafes, these pieces of artwork are the only things the ambiance has going for it. And they’re not much. Otherwise, everything is drably regal. Lifeless. Black chairs with Art-Nouveau-via-Home-Depot flourishes on their backs. Beige half-sphere lamps, like one might have in a new suburban home, hang from the ceiling.

As I’m stuck when I stop to think, this place is stuck. To come in is to be buried in a casket. What lies beyond the grave? Not much: pale ghosts, inedible cupcakes, broken-record angels--everything that one doesn’t imagine because one doesn’t need imagination. This is why one should fear death, and try one’s best to sin so badly that one avoids being raptured off the planet whenever the next millennial prediction rolls around. Because this is the afterlife.

Which appears to be a particularly awful place to work. I do not envy angels. The pay is minimal, the shifts are such that one is usually working alone, and the customers, mostly tourists, come here not because they like the place, but because it has coffee and baked things. The girl who’s working here now has a terrifying chirpyness. I cannot tell if she’s just nauseatingly happy or deep in despair. Whether an angel is filled with joy or melancholy we will never know.

An English woman comes in, for the second time I gather from her conversation with the girl. They chat amicably, and the girl asks her, as she asks everyone, how her day is going and the woman says it’s going well. The girl says how refreshing it is to hear that someone is having a good day. “So many people, they go ‘oh... okay.’”

Of course I’m thinking myself what then does she think of me looking seriously out the window?

Not long after this a man comes in who she asks the same question. He says “pretty good so far.”
Again, “it’s so refreshing to hear that someone is having a good day.”
“Oh, really?” Doesn’t everyone say they’re having a good day?
“Oh, you’d be surprised...”

Perhaps she says everyone’s good day, whether or not it’s a good day, is refreshing.

the automat

2011-05-18T22:45:00.001-07:00

The only cafe that’s open at night is Mix, and it closes at nine, just after the night begins. Beyond that there are only bars, and all of them are loud. Where does one go to sit and talk at night? When people complain that there isn’t a quiet place, I remind them that there is the automat. This is met with groans of begrudging acknowledgment. It’s a bit like suggesting that we go to Denny’s, which, rather than inviting one to an of island of comfort where the night expands, tends to remind one all too strongly that it’s too late. The florescent lighting, the empty booths, the drone of the refrigerator, and the unhappy staff all do this. One stares at the menu thinking oh god, I want to go home and to bed.

The automat is similarly sterile, and as one of the few places open all night, has much the same role as Denny’s. But where Denny’s, flung far from downtown on a road dangerous to walk along, is more connected with the interstate than anything else, the automat is just a couple of blocks from downtown. And the automat of course doesn’t have a wait staff to disaffectedly take one’s order. All the employees are hidden away in the kitchen behind the wall of neatly packaged food. And somewhere someone watches the video camera pointed at the wall. It’s just a room run by machines. At least that’s the idea. The illusion that one is alone with the rest of the customers and that one’s comfort is not supported by people but by machines is an anachronistic one. There is a reason that there are only a few automats left in the U.S.. And this one is doubly out of its time, having only been here since 1992. As far back as I can remember it has always been here, somehow staying in business despite not being terrible popular.

Cafes today basically flee in the opposite direction from automats. The early 20th century in a fervor for novel mechanical artifice embraced the automat, and the way it veiled the customer from the labor of food service. Today, through the cafe, we have a new way of dealing with the same conflict. Instead of hiding it, we make a performance of repairing it at an interpersonal level. The cafe is a community of which baristas are a part. Rather than living in blissful ignorance of capitalism, we have dressed it in soft and cuddly fabrics.

The seating here is uncomfortable and ugly, the lighting is garish, and the walls echo, but its the only place open through the night.

Daylight is alien to the place. It sleeps during the day, recovering from the previous night. When I walk past it I sometimes see the window cleaners at work or someone mopping the floor. Technically it’s open during the day, but nobody comes in. It’s in the night that the dreams of the past century come to life and the world of electric lights and machines is a world at all.

At the same time that the automat’s starkness can end the night, it also can make the night seem to go on forever, and that the needs of the body that the automat panders to are immaterial. It’s a demanding dream. One either believes of one doesn’t.

The automat is particularly desolate for me because I have a lot of memories here with people who aren’t here any longer. Back in high school when the night was its most infinite, we used to come here as a giggling horde full of quirk. Or at least, we thought we were full of quirk, thoroughly convinced that each of us was special and destined for Great Things. During these invasions the automat wasn’t filled with modern emptiness, but all of our limitless, though angst-filled egos. Because, obviously, everyone was like me in high school.

Even though I was alienated and aloof with these people, coming here without any of them and without youthfulness, it seems so pointless.

Hardware Cafe

2011-05-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

Crawling out from under the toilet brush cover in the Hardware Cafe bathroom is a silverfish. I don’t know what else to call them. ‘Silverfish’ is a word as familiarly alien to me as the arthropod it names, because I never uttered the word, my elementary school friends did. They would tell me of the silverfish infesting their bathrooms. I never had silverfish in my bathroom. I had earwigs. Silverfish always inhabited some other domestic universe. And the word itself seems lifted from a lexicon undefinably different from my own, like how those who say “wash” and “warsh” and “roof” and “ruf” are different. Silverfish are troubling to me because to name them I have to be someone else. In other words for me they reanimate the trouble with all words, with the way language eviscerates.

What do silverfish do? Their elongated, water-droplet shaped partitioned exoskeletons look threateningly sleek. They seem to move without legs, and bend easily from head to tail. Insects and spiders might make one fear being bitten, stung, or crawled upon. The threat of a silverfish is not annoyance or pain, but rather undetectable violation. It could slip like a liquid into any orifice, even your ear. And once inside, who knows what it is that they want? They’re threatening because purposeless; they would mindlessly wander about inside the brain, the intestine, under the skin, until eventually they completely by accident run across something vital. This is not out of malice or biological need (they do not feed on you like ticks and mosquitos). Their evil is sheer ignorance, of an alien encountering an alien, not just ignorant of any harm, but ignorant even that anyone is there.

To the degree that our dealings with others are determined by forces outside our awareness, we are silverfish. It might be said that when we are most ourselves, we are silverfish. There are those things we can’t help, and then there are those things we don’t even know we do, that only others recognize. This is an especially strange line of thought to follow in a cafe because the knowledge of what another is unaware of might only come with intimacy, and even then it’s unclear. One notices all sorts of things about people, but their consciousnesses are lost to anyone else. And it’s not as if we carry around a catalog of what we’re aware of. One does not check off a little box that acknowledges that one is aware of X, Y, or Z. Awareness is not continuous, but momentary.

The silverfish has moved three inches, and now remains completely motionless on the floor, seeming almost to hide in the shadow the sink casts. I leave it like this and flush the toilet using the end of a PVC pipe labeled “push here.”