Caffeine and Society

This was what I wrote after a local coffee shop went out of business at the beginning of this recession. This is how it happened.

My schedule has been backwards, I sleep in the day and wake in the night or sleep in the night and wake in the day depending on need. So in this haze I came upon the end of something I didn't know existed.

In the hours before dreaming, I say because I've been so ready to cast off down river into sleep, I felt as though I had done nothing with my day. Work never seems of much value and I lacked the energy for anything much more interesting. Coffee seemed the logical choice for the illogical and I slothed my way to my favorite Starbucks. It became my favorite place for caffeine, for the same reason I assumed it did for most, out of apathy. Why trouble yourself to find something better when this was good enough, the staff was kind and it was a good place to waste time?

Today was the last day it would ever close, this location was to become another vacant store window, the last in a row like connect four. To celebrate their departure they held a party with a live band, which amounted to a guitar player (first)/singer (second) and bongo drummer(first)/ backup vocalist (second) with their own amplifiers. I was drawn to the scene while sipping chai and chocolate, by the oddity of hearing all the old songs. The music one expects to float in a haze out of Woodstock or beating through the hands of protestors. Somehow it fit, somehow a melancholy near unrest was exactly the right pitch for this event. Knowing that fact is what hit like a half brick to the skull, why at the icon of all things shallow and corporate was I feeling this tide of emotion? It looked like half the local community turned out, the parking lot was filled with those that spilled out of the tiny performance space. The band wasn't so good that you would expect this but the crowd swayed and mouthed the words to "The Times They Are A Changing" in time, just the same.

Was this a meeting place that ended up more than the sum of it's parts? The organization having no power over what people, human beings, made of it? What once was a shallow mock intimacy actually came to mean something to a large section of people. Individuals, whole families, that came for drinks and obviously something more.

Or does this have something to do with the times? Vague feelings of unease that we really can't put a name to, culminating into becoming attached to any simple thing that reminds us of permanence? Do we need something to pour our hearts into, in order to feel there is any stable place to stand while "The Times They are A Changing"? We are afraid as we head into what could still be the next great depression, and we long to bare it with our neighbors.

Or it could just be, people love free music....


-----Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end-----