New Flavors to the Coffee Shop Novel
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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