“Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega is one of my favorite songs. In a bout of writer’s block for an academic article I am supposed to be writing, I decided to instead emulate Vega and her lyrical observations, and write about what was around me and my stream of consciousness while sitting in a Starbucks on an October afternoon.
I have the urge to write something beautiful but do not yet have the words to do so, so I have set a timer for ten minutes and am not allowing myself to do anything but put pen to page (a metaphorical pen, I am on my laptop) in that time.
Something I have been thinking about in this quasi-homework session I’m in is the beauty of a feeling I do not know how to name yet. Cold snowy weather, rosy cheeks, a long trench jacket, downtown streets lit with Christmas lights throughout the night. Jazz in the background. Black and white color palettes in outfits, plain sweaters. A classic novel– a Rory Gilmore novel. Reading that novel in a cozy coffee shop in an outfit that screams feminine sophistication. At night. This feeling is always at night.
I don’t know if I’ve ever successfully recreated this feeling and I don’t know if I’ll ever stop trying. Maybe it’s the people I’ve tried to recreate it with.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I might be having that feeling right now. I am in a Starbucks on a day (not night, so maybe this isn’t the feeling I described) so cold and foggy that I cannot see the mountains that usually tower over the town I live in. I am wearing a white wool sweater over a black dress with black boots and a black headband. It is an outfit classique. I do love colors surrounding me but I believe I could live content with a black and white closet for a very long time. Those two colors encapsulate the feeling I described above. I am writing this while jazz music is playing in the background. It is the kind of jazz music that sounds Christmassy but it’s not Christmas music. Although I suppose it is Christmas music that sounds jazzy. Which came first, the Christmas music or the jazz music?
There is a pair of men in sweaters and trimmed beards playing chess on a coffee table in the coffee shop I am writing in. That is very classy of them.
I used to play chess with my grandpa when I was in elementary school. I was getting good at it. We would pull into his driveway after driving hours through snowy darkness each Thanksgiving or Christmas, and as soon as my grandmother whisked us into their home I would play chess with my grandfather. He got me my own chess set one Christmas. I am not sure why I stopped playing. Maybe the chess team at my high school, riddled with awkward and nerdy boys who I’m sure were very nice but could not interact with a woman properly if a gun was held to their head, had something to do with it.
I think I could fall asleep to the noises of a coffee shop. The clunking of plastic dishes, rather than glass ones I clunk around myself at home, is dull enough to not ring in my ears but just thud. Everyone talks quietly. I cannot hear their conversations, so I am not burdened with their problems or gossip but am instead just comforted by the presence of other humans around me. The sink turning on and off every time the barista with red-dyed hair has to wash a dish is soothing as well. Or maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep last night. Which came first, the sleepiness or the coffee shop ambiance?
A woman next to me is wearing the most glorious boots. They are camel-brown leather, chunky heeled, and come up to mid-calf. I am not the biggest fashion follower but I can appreciate a good boot when I see one. My boots are digging into my heels. They are not broken in yet but I think they are beautiful so I wear them anyway. I wonder if this woman’s camel-brown leather, chunky-heeled boots are digging into her heels. In the time it took to write this paragraph, the woman and her boots have left, and to think: I could have spent this time immortalizing anything I wanted in writing and I chose this woman’s boots. I hope she’d be honored.
I started writing this with the hopes of coming to a point. I haven’t found one yet–no argument to be laid out, no research to be done. Just writing.
I want to go to the library later today to start a book. Do I start a classic or do I choose a book I can read on the couch in one sitting?
I have always wanted to read Penguin Publishing’s “Top 100 Classics to Read.” But then the school year comes and I am encumbered with Foucault and Voltaire and Tolstoy not by choice, but by syllabus, and I no longer want to read classic literature. I think, I’ll read this trashy hockey romance now and start Austen when I don’t have required reading, and then I think, If I die tomorrow having never read any Charlotte Bronte, I would regret it I think. Eventually, no reading, required or otherwise, gets done and I instead sit in a coffee shop uninspired enough that I do nothing but write down what is happening around me, I guess.
Still no point. Still just a train of thought.
The man with the white chess pieces is winning the game. I wonder if these men came to know each other through chess, or if they were friends before their Starbucks chess date. Which came first… They have their laptops open while playing chess. Are they working? Are they Googling chess techniques? You would think someone confident enough to play chess in public wouldn’t need to Google chess techniques. Or maybe that is just manhood. I think if I brought out a chessboard in a public space I would be very worried about a man approaching me and explaining the art of chess to me. Who knows, though. I don’t even own a chessboard anymore.
I am trying to imagine if someone brought Monopoly or Sorry to a coffee shop. That’s odd, right? It would be odd yet I am trying to think of reasons why someone shouldn’t bring a game to a coffee shop. I think that would actually be fun. When did coffee shops become anti-social? I do not remember a time when they weren’t, but I was born in the age of technology and can only assume they were social at one point in time. Or were people always self-obsessed, just with a notebook instead of a laptop on their desk?
Add a pre-handheld technological device coffee shop to a list of places I would go if I had a time machine. Probably ranked before I would like to sit in a tea room in Versailles watching Revolution-era French women gossip. But after seeing a wild west town. Definitely after a Queen concert. And after that one snow day I had when I was 9 and the snowfall was taller than I was (I was tall for my age, too), my sister and brother and I spent all day designing intricate snow chairs and tunnel systems, and then it was night time and my dad came home from work with hamburgers and walked up the driveway and recreated that jazz-snow-always at night-classique feeling once again.
I’m stuck between wanting to keep writing and the voice in my head telling me that nobody is going to read this so I should just stop.
And don’t say oh no, people will read it! I read it! I’m not supposed to care anyway, so your promising your devotion to my rambling train of thought that I just happened to vomit onto paper one day is not necessary. And also I don’t believe you.
Anyway, I should enjoy writing for the sake of writing. But the stream of words is coming out slower and slower, like a train that is running out of coal and the smoke comes out of its little train chimney in desperate and dramatic puffs like the train itself is having an asthma attack like a kid who was not prepared to run the mile in fifth-grade gym class. So that’s probably a sign I should stop.
I wonder if anyone else read that childhood picture book about the construction vehicle, The Excavator, who was so desperate to prove himself useful that he dug a basement for a new building so quickly he forgot to include a ramp to get out of the basement and then he was stuck in there forever. They just left him there at the end of the book.
I can’t find the name of it. There’s a Reddit post asking for the exact book, but they edited it to say “Found the book, thanks!” and then deleted the comment, which was, what I can only assume, the name of the book. Assholes.
I found it– “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.” Written in 1939.
A 21-year-old (like me) woman in 1960 could have written in a coffee shop, one in 1960, one I want to visit in my time machine, and read the same childhood book I did about a steam shovel stuck in a basement. Funny how literature works. I suppose I will pick up a classic novel when I go to the library later.
The men have stopped their chess game. I cannot tell who has check-mated who or if the game is even over yet; a new man has sat down and is blocking my view of the board. Should I ask them who won? Ha! As if I would ever.
In alignment with the stop to their game, I will stop my writing–how bizarre is it that a mundane coffee visit, in a shop I visit multiple times a week, has now become immortalized? Funny how literature works.