corporate coffee

Corporate Coffee Musings

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An army works for the coffee shop after the election. The Republic survived, barely. Now we’ll see if the Constitution truly works, well at least the Articles. The Bill of Rights is dead and I would know.

An utter frenzy in here., but also a rank and file vibe.

A man with a beaten-up face orders a chocolate croissant.

Tanzania coffee is all the rage.

Christmas is here!

Who are these people spending $15 for coffee drinks and a baked good? Someone has money.

People look whipped. Mainstream America feels whipped to me, although I don’t think they realize it.

One wonders how Facebook undermined democracy on election day. To think that progressive organizations are using the service to coordinate and promote progressive causes is mind-boggling to me.

The coffee here sucks.

A special coffee purchase supports a military unit stationed somewhere in the Middle East or Asia participating in the longest wars in American history with no end in sight.

Lines are seven deep.

One of the baristas is singing the orders as customers place them. It will be a viral video soon, with the appearance of human spontaneity, but really, the result of a directive from corporate headquarters.

I think I’ll read the Lawrence Durrell novel I found on the road. I dived in last night and it was barely readable. No one writes with that rococo style anymore. It’s just too grim out there for ornamentation.

So are the Democrats drafting articles of impeachment yet?

Does anyone ever work anymore?

I’ve been sitting for 30 minutes and I still can’t sip the coffee. Too hot.

I see they have a new special holiday drink with the word “bliss” in the title. Well, at least corporate is introducing a new vocabulary word for most of the customers. How about a drink with the word “ephemeral” or “opaque” in it?

Bodies are listing in here. The ship of state, too.

Additional Notes for the Coffee Shop Novel

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Frenzy grips a corporate coffee stronghold in a suburban mall. The baristas wear a device about their chests that acts as a timer. I’ve never seen such a device before. Is it measuring employee performance or various brewing temperatures? Maybe both at the same time for top notch efficiency,

Corporate coffee is hiring.

An elderly man watches videos on his Facebook feed.

Gleaming vehicles roll through the drive-thru.

An elderly man walks in wearing a military grade utility belt. I dig it. His cap proclaims him a Vietnam vet.

I think about my coffee novel and see that it is essentially plotless, which exactly mirrors my life at the moment. It is a strange thing for a person not to have a plot in one’s life after having one forever. Maybe the plotlessness is the plot. The French existential writers milked that technique for decades and it worked out pretty well for them. Perhaps there is more power in observation than plot. Perhaps plot begins to emerge in the mind of readers when they read observations. They invent the plot as the observations accrue.

There is a spill behind the counter and a barista mops it up with excellent technique, most likely derived from a stint in the Navy.

A weathered man on a bicycle pulling a cart filled with returnable cans and bottles pedals through drive-thru.

A cop walks inside, fiddling on her phone. It occurs to me that cops don’t carry nightsticks anymore. Is that because of tasers? The nightstick was once such a symbol of wanton police brutality. I think they were also called truncheons.

Short story idea: the last truncheon-carrying cop in America…a real throwback who has never fired his weapon in the line of duty. He’s a laughingstock on the force and…I must ponder this idea some more.

A line is forming at the register. It’s going to be a profitable day.

New Flavors to the Coffee Shop Novel

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Corporate coffee has a new coffee, Veranda, and it sports a hummingbird logo. I though about ordering a cup but I’d recently seen a hummingbird fly through fire and a corporate hummingbird wasn’t going to cut it.

A man reads the Bible on a Kindle near me. How do I know? Look, I was a preacher’s kid. I know these things. He’s reading about Jonah. I won’t spoil it for him. Why spoil the greatest tale in literature? My favorite part was when the ship’s crew threw him overboard. No, I prefer when the whale vomits him on shore.

I’m not trying to be a Jonah in this new life I am living. I think about that metaphor daily. There is a lot of the Jonah Syndrome going around these days.

A massive truck gets stuck in the drive-thru. They’re looking up in the policy manual what to do. They may have to call a mobile welder.

I was writing about Bob Dylan ten minutes ago. I was a drinking cold brew Yuban (left overnight in the car) and watching a green river while I recalled my relationship with Dylan. It’s long and involves some very special people to me, but that’s all over now baby blue.

The cold brew here goes for $4.75.

The staff appears frantic. Someone forgot to set a timer. The boss is giving one employee the devil stare.

The sound of sameness is deafening.

A fly lands on my threadbare corduroys. It nestles in the wail.

A man from corporate shows up carrying a huge white binder. New policies no doubt, to fight growing income inequality.

Bob, I am so happy you won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It pissed so many authors off.

I’m wearing green Pumas from the Walt Frazier era. I’ve had them for 25 years.

A tow truck just rolled up. A burly man got out. He’ll have to winch the truck out of the drive-thru. Metal will undoubtedly be sheared away.

Newspapers for sale. No one’s bought one in months. They stopped switching them out. It’s all the same news anyway.

They used to sell Bob Dylan CDs here. They no longer sell CDs.

I’ve often wished I had a job writing liner notes for albums and CDs. That unique American literary genre is dead and never coming back. I hope someone writes my biography in the liner-note format. No one will write my biography although someone did tell me they wanted to. She is a big Dylan fan.

Scraping metal sounds. They belong in a Neil Young Crazy Horse guitar solo.

The truck was just extricated from the drive-thru. The drive-thru didn’t survive.

My coffee shop novel just passed 15k words. It’s an experimental, Yuban cold brew novel. I’ll publish it as a zine and give it away for free in non-corporate coffee shops. Someone might read it there.

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Notes From Corporate Coffee

NSP Meditations

Soft rockless rock plays. Hello, who are you, let me know your name? The Doors aren’t playing.

Always something new being advertised: the newest thing in coffee (that will change your life). I’ve been drinking Cold Brew for years. Stagnant, three-day Yuban leftover in the pot. Sometimes I even ice it up.

The to and fro of a weekday morning in America is underway. They are strange movements to me.

A mother drops $22 on herself and two toddlers.

I await another client. She’s writing her incredible story of educational service in a remote American wilderness. I feel like I am gaining new energy from working with all these aspiring writers, one not even alive. I get to lose myself in their stories and somehow it enhances my storytelling.

My coffee cup is all white, even the embossed corporate logo. I remember when tennis players wore nothing but white in the Grand Slam tournaments. The balls were all white, too. The players however, were not all white. The white apparel was all so classy and probably the last thing in American history where all white was classy. I am dying to start playing tennis again. I can feel it’s going to be a major part of the new life I am forging. Is forging the right metaphor for what is happening? Constructing? Fashioning? Winging? Coaxing? Conjuring? Kneading? Jury rigging?

Planning for the new life is over. It will simply unfold. I have no expectations anymore. But people continue to reach out and begin rapprochement.

Customers stream in. The ubiquity of phones. There are more laptops in use than human beings. That’s a first in my observations and portends something I don’t want to contemplate at the moment.

I have many meeting with friends today. We are gaining strength together in our meetings and moving along with purposeful, strong and good work, mostly done in stealth. Join me.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)