Cafe Mind, Mind Cafe

Today I arose at a hefty 10 AM after lying in bed for more than an hour, staring out the window, at the screen, scrolling the tubes, watching the spectacle. After waking, I finished the cherry cider leftover from the night before, a nice, 6 oz. lift to what had all the trappings of a perfect Sunday morning, minus the availability of the Eucharist (my own fault, really). Instead of the liturgy, I repaired to the cafe, my seeming church, its congregants my brothers in faith, these days. There are all manner of folk here and only the old men come in, much like myself, for their soups and coffees alone. There is a boy who resembles the fat kid from Stranger Things on an awkward and seeming first date with a young lady. They make small talk and fumble with their cups. There are families, whole scores of people, with babies and children eating tiny portions of grilled cheeses. Old ladies consort in the corner. People stab plastic straws into disposable cups with a prurient urgency. Lana Del Rey is fucking slaying me and I'm close to sobs. Holy God, send a little help to your scribe down here.

Yesterday I was in the cafe solely for reading. I had been writing a truly insane piece of journalism that will never see publication (but that's okay) but put the juice on hold for the day in order to scratch around through a collection of thoughts from various authors. Continuing my education, as it were, refreshing the knowledge I'd forgotten. I stopped after each section in each book to "rest my eyes" as my mother would implore me if I video gamed too long. The cafe was a bustling oasis of warmth and I had just finished a story by Laura Van Den Berg (Volcano House) where the protagonist's twin sister fell victim to a mass shooting. I began to dwell on the absurdity of this, the logistics, the tactics, the possibilities of a man (white, mid-twenties) prepping in the nearby bathroom to gun us all to hell (the delicate click of rounds into magazines). I arose to investigate, found no shooter. Pro-gun Trump guy was in the cafe and I considered the lack of public violence in my town. How would one go about such an endeavor? Remember basic Marine training. Begin planning. Arrange recon. Make recon. Complete plan. The thing I can't remember unless I google (Its acronym's placeholder being an I). Supervise. What was I doing if not making said reconnaissance? I studied the layout of the cafe, the patrons, the curiosity of mass shootings happening in mostly open venues like supermarkets and malls. Here, we were/are target dense, few exits, choke points for bodies, literal fish in a barrel. Why hadn't the imagined guy from the bathroom come in blasting? Which corner would he take first? What child could I steamroll to escape? The thought of a hand grenade rattling around in the small nook. A possible incendiary device, maybe more. The pop pop pop of 556 rounds into puffy coats and bodies. The baristas flooding out through the kitchen in back. Maybe a surprise? Maybe Pro-gun Trump guy engages the target with a concealed pistol? Maybe an "allahu akbar" prior to a clean and final light? Rest your eyes, Benjamin. 

I go back to work tomorrow. Not excited about that one. I suppose its necessary as I've worn out my welcome at home and everyone needs a break. This "vacation" of mine has been, like all things, a mental odyssey. Another family through the door, vacantly looking around before selecting a table. A child in bib snow pants (mauve?) runs about smiling like everything, the world, life, is okay. The beauty of the young is so grand, in that they are ignorant of all the ways the earth will destroy them. Yesterday (Friday?) I watched a short-eared owl coast above the Matanuska river before plunging, presumably for prey, into the reverse slope of a nearby rise in elevation. Everyone is speaking wordlessly, replaced by the music making a circuit of my ears which in turn is equally as meaningless/ful. Ah, fuck it.

I suspect I should get in this balloon and motor.

Mind Cafe, Cafe Mind

In the dark (brilliant, dazzling) temple of the cafe where there sits a family of seemingly Nordic stock enjoying the hard-earned labors of the man and woman (man sits with his hood raised) among the children dressed as ragged scamps (one, a boy possibly, doffing a red and feathered felt fedora prior to repast). They are curious. Recently I read the story of a prehistoric mass grave unearthed and examined in Europe somewhere (the Baltic states? the Balkans?).  A collection of skeletons unceremoniously dumped in a pile in a shallow grave all of which bore the evidence of disastrous head trauma, aged 2 to old, and only a few of which were related genetically. The scientists speculated as to what had happened, what led these bound victims to their brainings, but if you pay attention to this family over here, you already know. A massive, ugly truth from the deep unrecorded.

A barista delivering a meal passed within arms length. I chuckled about that. Last night A and I finished a movie, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which is, as far as I could ascertain, largely themed around the armature narrative of the unknowable other. (Jesus, will you ever shut up about that?) It was good, infuriatingly so, the way decent works of Art are supposed to elicit outrage. Of course I wanted to argue with A about it but she would have none. There is an ancient man, a gnome by rights, who frequents the cafe in the same way as I. The baristas know him, his usual, and I even saw one of the prettier ones, one who works here no longer, hug him once. He sits and watches and I rarely see him speak. Is he a widower? He is always solo, save for that legendary scene where, over bibles and notebooks, the blonde woman a quarter his seeming age asked for a hug and received one (avuncular, well-meaning, rightly-intentioned, no hint of filth). Fuck I hope she's doing well, wherever she is.

The other day at work, I consoled (one wishes), a young lady from the village about a recent test result that had not gone in the intended direction. She was upset (it seemed) at not having performed on a metric that others had impressed upon her as important. She'd called to see if it were appropriate to visit my office at the oddness of the hour and I said yes, natch. She asked on the test results' seeming import and I explained that, while I understood her concern, to not bother with feeling shame, or bad, or negative as the test was an absolute falsehood. I tried to inform her of testing's inherent bias and of things cultural and societal that had conspired such that she'd never reach the hoped for goal and as such pining about missing the mark was a waste of energy. Can you imagine the roles reversed? Can you imagine yourself hunting seals and being graded on your performance adversely and then feeling poorly because strangers might be disappointed at your failure? Absurd. Insane. Possibly unethical. Definitely wrong. She left after a quick chat and her eyes smiled but I don't know if it was genuine as she was wearing a mask for the duration of our visit. Bizarre. Wonderful. I cried after, about the futility, the hopelessness, the implicit consent with all the things that conspired to make her feel bad that her score decreased. 

White guy in dreads across the cafe, near where the paleolithic massacre victims had sit. I've been flogging the beast of race in these posts lately, mostly thoughts about whiteness. I don't know what I'm saying and I have no agenda. I don't even have a cogent position as you have seen. It's like hearing an idiot's blather. Yet it won't leave my mind unless the trepanning here. Earlier today I learned that Trump was set to launch his own social media platform. Other things I learned from the news recently was that a man killed a six year old girl, shot twice in the chest after spilling some water. Some guy killed a bunch of Atlantan Asian people the other day. The same student I spoke to about her test results had previously taught me the Yup'ik word for caribou. I described my life to Nick and Dan as a "series of potions" and I think that's pretty accurate for us all. When challenged about the grandiosity of a woman's armpit aroma this morning, I maintained that it was definitely top ten in odors. (You're making up that part.) A young blonde woman is eating a pumpkin roll in front of me. I mean, if you can't see the species connections here, I'm not sure I can paint a clearer picture. 

Balance, Balance, Balance

The cafe is a vast and sobering place. Lunch press is upon the baristas caroming behind the counter to espresso, pasta, soup, chatter, receipt tape, orders up, mania broadcast from every cornice. There are folks here, all white, hugging and laughing and, before I juiced into the prog jazz station recommended for me by an A.I., conversing about the economy and recovery and COVID related things. Across from me at the shared long table, is a man whose laptop declaims loudly his a: being a gun owner and b: that he is stolidly pro-Trump. The women, one of them is probably Eowyn Ivey, all wearing the uniform of the white: yoga pants/leggings, puffy Northface coats, children in tow. Earlier, in the library, there was a woman, in the uniform of the day, with four children, only one of which was school age whose youngest daughter supplicated, pulling at mom's coat pocket flap with a keening "unnhhh, unnhh" for a full three minutes before her mother dismissed her with, "One minute, honey." I was in line behind her and imagined all the implications of the scene before me, all 4 billion years of it, the absurd machinery. Who are these people? Why can't they get out of my head? Why can't I get out of my own?

Later, I went to the grocery store and spoke only in memes, aloud, to the patrons attempting to shop alongside me. I spent 80 USD to purchase items to make po'boys. I laughed in the check out line as I relayed this amount to Uly. When he didn't appreciate the hypocrisy, I enjoined him to chuckle, in the vein of Foghorn Leghorn, as "It's a joke son, you're supposed to laugh." I have the feeling that I'm going to be the old man in the home who speaks in crude and unrecognizable snippets of a lifetime of exposure to a culture that refuses right understanding and all cogent analysis. (Can you imagine explaining your daily life to an extra-terrestrial?) I imagine the long suffering CNAs doomed to cater to my needs as eye-rolling goddesses. How can one study a thing without the trappings of its infection? Maybe that's where the writing comes in, a kind of barely-maintaining-sanity-life preserver, a consciousness Mae West inflatable. Maybe the point is to become so cryptic and esoteric that one eschews ciphering, to write oneself into a nice solipsistic dreamscape from which awakening is unable and undesired? 

The older I get, the more I seemingly understand, as much as anyone understands anything, the flow of the jazz tunes that the machines suggested I hear. I've been in the nerve for a while now, long enough feel profoundly revolutionized yet not long enough to begin to question my initial assumptions, a dangerous juncture. I might say any number of asinine things at any second, outing myself as a fraud, a neophyte, an idiot. I wonder if the Trump sticker guy has these thoughts. Maybe I should ask him over a heteronormative and totally not homosex beer that I know, at least for myself, is going to happen later? We could talk shop, discuss the nation, engage my fellow patriot. The fictions we collectively suckle are delightful indeed. Wait, hold up, I just glanced over at my man's next to me (not the Trump dude) screen and found he was reading the story of Jesus's encounter with the famed (infamous?) tax collector sitting in a sycamore. I'm surrounded. I'm terrified. I'm in love. Man, is this track screaming. I need to displace, to reload.

The new pos is engaged with an enemy in the form of a white man, bearded, 30s, wearing a hoodie, who is roundly expounding about the military-industrial complex to a table of similarly raced folks, both apparent men and women. Oh, he's going hard at it, talking, talking, talking, declarative in extremis (What is it, exactly, that I think I'm fucking doing right now?). A woman at the hand-gesturing instructor stretched her back, twisting against the chair in left and right arcs and revealed she had, no doubt during the course of this very morning's shower, shaved her armpits bare. The light fixture over the table's head has one blown fluorescent bulb, the kind that, when introduced a while ago would destroy the incandescent bulb market and was seen, by some, as anathema to lighted structures. The walls of the cafe are decked in new watercolors and ink at obscene prices. I am beset by words, by lies, and the more I see them, the more I hate lies, as Captain Willard would say.

I was recently taken with the fantasy of using Uncle Joe's stimmy money to partake in a Greyhound bus tour of the Michigan wilds. Jesus Christ guys, I just took out my earbuds to go get a birch beer with ice and heard mil-ind complex guy say "For a minute there I thought you said 'game theory' and I was all 'eeeeeee' because it seems complex but it's really based on simple principles." (Legit LOLs here in the cafe as I type.) Anyway, I wanted peruse the highways, in Poe Ballantine fashion, of the upper Midwest, logging country as I understand it according to Papa Hem, and meet a kindly old man named Bert who would teach me to hunt and fish the land in a way my father never did. We would wear mackinaw coats and hunting caps with ear flaps and stroll the wood with our shotguns, looking for pheasants. Bert would be the kind of person who had never heard the construct "cancel culture". He would be solidly anti-hippie, but would, for reasons unknown to himself, take a liking to my long hair and ratty beard. He would have vague libertarian notions of national governance. Evenings, we'd sit by his cabin's glass-doored woodstove and stare into the fire without words, sharing warm whiskies, before a shuffle off to sleep. A completely absurd scene, surreal really, one that lives in my mind, like this cafe, like the baristas, like the Trump guy, like Zaccheus, like the military industrial complex, like this music, like everything else.

Jesus, these are words. 

Magic, Magic, Magic

Earlier today, the barista stopped me before I ordered and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I was watching a documentary about a cult and you look like you belong to it. Hold on, let me show you." Then she proceeded to scroll her phone's images to display a shot of a  group of African men in orange jumpers, much like the thermal garment I wore. We then had a good laugh, mine altered, hers seemingly genuine. It's not the first time these young women have said something about the meat face and aura I project. Previously, I'd been informed that, from among the patronage, the group of early and mid-20s caffeine dealers (all white, many Christian) had decided that I was the one most likely to be/become a serial killer. It's nice to be seen, by anyone, much less a troop of attractive, young and unattainable folk even if it is not in the kindest light.

Speaking of the cafe, I took it on myself to visit for a prolonged stay, the first time since COVID numbers in the valley took a significant leap back in October of last year. The place is every bit as mysterious, as casually strange as it has been with only the sporadic mask sighting, a kind of looking glass back into pre-COVID days when people had the sheer temerity to gather indoors in large numbers of souls not in their circle in order to breathe on each other. A woman passed so close I could smell her perfume, and I had the insight that it was a divine thing, the smelling of people not your own and likely, I imagine at least for myself, to go away for the most part on a large scale just because COVID. Speaking of, numbers are down, statewide, from their obscene peaks around solstice-tide and so I sit in this magical spaceship cabin with my fellow passengers - to be awed by their separateness. If only there were some way to reach them, to communicate an experience, yet not one is reading a book. A bizarre let down from the species.

At work lately, students have been returning in fits and starts - subject to the whims of a fanatical bureaucracy and the order by fiat mentality of all the most oppressing machines. That I'm a tool of institutional racism is a fact that never fails to present itself. The Department of Labor needs civilized, meek, conflict-resolutionized, and anger-managed facile drones for the work force. At work the mechanism seeks to take the Native out of the Native; the sufficiently un-white, un-western must be whitened and westernized, else they will be unable to get and maintain a job "outside of the village". This and sentiments like these ring from the dorm mezzanines and the classroom walls, the institutional hallways and in the communal dining hall. My role in the beast is finely tuned, one for which a body must have the thinnest veneer of empathy to execute, and must be an organism attuned to the jazz sax wailings of a student's potential employment in Q4 lest the company performance rating take a hit, and one where a person must bow to the bottom line of and apparent student success, but who must also must carry around with them the family mysteries of hundreds of individuals, all piping similar melodies of the cruelties that brought them to us. What a world.

The equinox is trending and it shows - water in the streets, slush in the gutter, the scrubby cottonwoods on the walk downtown birthing just beginning to green nodes of leaves, vast labile moods from despair to euphoria. I haven't written anything coherent in months, almost a year. I've tried to corner ideas, snare them, but all of the things I write sound banal, corrupt, greedy, and, worst of all, repetitive. Topics abound that I wish to broach but the words look like idiots on the page, myself the idiot king puppeteer. A sentence appears yet one does not follow. The thought of submitting a story to a magazine sits obscenely gesturing at passersby. The prospect that graduate debt was a waste in both time and energy, at least in terms of creative ability and proliferation, looms.

  Ah, time for the bar and pint rim paredolia after some prolonged absence.