Writing

Ever Notice What Goes on in the Café?

Do You Ever Notice What Goes on in the Café?

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You can Listen to this blog post over on Medium.

I do

COFFEE

I just sit there with my earphones on, not listening to any music or YouTube vlogs. I’m blogging or poet-ing or prose writing or all of that.

I hear people laughing in a weird way and now I’m comparing the barista’s laugh to some other guy in a booth across the room from me. They should both go out with each other. They have twin laughs.

A boy next to me tells his high school gf, I’ve got a cute picture of you! and she gets out of her chair to join him on his red cushioned booth seat, so she can cuddle with him while looking at the pictures on his phone.

Listen to “Coffee” by “The Slums of Mediocrity” off his album “Play the Swivel.” Watch him on GoshDarnPodcast!

Machine noises happen at the front of the coffee shop when “the grind” is happening or a the steam milk is airing.

Girls making noises with their mouths make very different noises than men would.

“Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah,” says a man I see at the café a lot. I always laugh under my breath when I hear him saying multiple yeahs with his urban accent. Sometimes he goes on a marathon of yeahyeahyeahs like it’s a Guinness World Record.

The smells are all over the place, but mostly it’s one of staleness. The fans are not turned up much and the door is not open, so there are smells lingering around the café.

Clop, clop, purrress, goes the wooden floor as patrons pass by. Will they spill their coffee or tea? Without a saucer underneath they’re bound to, but I did not know about saucers in cafes until I started getting pots of green tea for my table.

The door squeaks open and a chubby bald man with a beard leaves while his smell passes through my nostrils. The door opens again and he comes back inside while I realize I smelled him coming before the door opened. This is a terrible realization and I’m just glad I’m not sitting near a bathroom.

I can smell something sugary and it reminds of those ginger cookies cafes have behind the glass case with little sugar sprinkles on them.

“Yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah. Rightrightright…”

Lots of conversation sounds spew up into the air and bounce around the wooden board walls and off the wood floor.

There’s even a child’s voice now and it all sounds nothing like a laugh track Very lively now and I’m alone typing what I’m experiencing here.

I’ve been feeling quite alone lately, so much so that I joined Tinder but I would rather talk to people, and smile and look into their eyes because apparently that’s what we are supposed to be doing because otherwise our lives are just meaningless!

I did not come up with the above new age idea on my own. Instead, an old Alan Watts recording uploaded onto a YouTube channel told me.

“Diogenes and Alexander the Great!” says a father to the child I heard earlier.

He’s carrying his son’s plastic sword for him and follows his son to the backdoor admiring this painting above me as he goes out. He’s looking at a painting on the wall and I know the artist who did a rendition of “When Alexander the Great Met Diogenes the Cynic.” He sat with me for a bit and drank his coffee hoping I would by a painting, but I wouldn’t.