There are actually big, sad, tragic events happening concurrently in hospitals inches from my breath, if air moves, and in zip codes I’ve never known except on the faith of my own imagination and the possibility that the cartographers didn’t lie. Russia is real. I’ll never go, probably. But I’ll believe every day of my life that it is there.
When I step into my favorite coffee shop, the echoey Sip Coffee and Beer EST 2015 painted in thick black and white strokes against the converted car garage wall next to the sunshine. I am instantly aware of things I forgot about like my hips, and the way my soft yoga pants hug them, and I halfway pretend that those things aren’t real because I am a product of the sexual sterilization of the Christian church. I’d rather pretend I don’t want attention because it feels holier, and I don’t even believe in holiness.
The women around me seem busy, organized, one notch down from stressed (some of them), and the men look important (especially the unimportant ones! The less hungry men look, the more status they probably have. I cannot say the same for women unless they’ve truly arrived). Men can just jeans-and-t-shirt their way into status.
The music fills the garage from the speaker cresting the corner. I know the Spotify station by the barista on shift. This barista is the smiley guy with the funky mustache who likes The Arctic Monkeys. I will tell you that I much prefer this station over the goth artist who quit her teaching job to work full time at the bar whose name starts with an M I think. She never smiles, like actually ever, but I don’t think she’s angry. She picks Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think. Food service at this bar looks to be just as much work, but much calmer mentally, than work in a classroom. I like this skinny mustache barista, and I must admit I hope he thinks I’m cute. Why are my favorite baristas the ones who make me think they’re flirting with me, but only a little? Is that a part of their job description: flirt a little, but only a little?
So, this is how I like my coffee shops: cute, comfortable, with lots of natural light. I like the indoor/outdoor option though I almost always select the indoor. Having two bathrooms is crucial because coffee makes you poop, dude, and no one likes to admit that while standing in the line avoiding eye contact with other caffeinated strangers.
And I like a variety of seating options. You want the metal chairs outside, the taller metal chairs inside, the bar stools with backs, the cushioned outdoor chairs, the sofas, the wooden regular tables, the booth seats. You want the seating options to be a mountain range. It makes your butt feel important to know it can have its choice of latitudes.
But what compels me about working here instead of home, really? Is it the random pauses I take to steal glances at strangers like my favorite book character Leopold Gursky in The History of Love who leaves instructions in his wallet in case he dies and someone finds him? ‘“I have no family.” And to the person who finds him and follows the instructions, “Thank you for your consideration.”’ The music changes in the coffee shop and we, the passive consumers, feigning all-the-way productivity that is really 75% productivity, 25% seeing to be seen, weather another beginning, without moving, without even looking up, which is the new song.
I left the house with the purpose of writing. But what? I am not sure. The goal is not to keep prepping lessons for Monday instead of enjoying my own mind and the writing that I can squeeze from it like the otherwise wasted toothpaste at the end of the tube.
I am here thinking: Mary Karr’s book on Memoir haunts me. It is witchcraft I am convinced. I am on the chapter in which she rips apart her inchoate poetry by calling out all of her self-protective tropes that may have weakened her writing at the genesis of her career. Reading The Art of Memoir is like getting hit in the head with a brick, when all along you thought all of the books you read before were books. They weren’t. They were stories to comfort you at night, to keep you off the apps for a few minutes before you collapsed on your pillow, face-down, and hoped for sleep to come easy and swinging. Those other books were worthy of the space on their pages, but Mary Karr, however, has made knives of even simple words with the way she lines them up. Imagine how she would write a recipe, or an instructional manual on furniture assembly. Her Papermates must fear her because she makes them sweat; her computer keys must dread her fingers.
“Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.”
“Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.”
“..everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little… Writing fiction, however taxing, usually left him some buoyancy at day’s end; his memoir about his father drained him.”
\“The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.”
The woman has obviously done her research, but also, she is frank and crass at the same time: “Unless you’re like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.”
And I hold myself up to Mary Karr like a wrinkled shirt from the previous workout to sniff out if it’s too smelly for another go on the StairClimber. Mary Karr says “no” and deposits me in the basket. Side note: do you say laundry hamper or basket? I prefer basket. Hamper sounds too much like scamper, and all-encompassing and maternal. A basket can be a picnic, or a gift, or a happy outing. A basket is an invitation, a hamper is a problem.
The gym is the other place I go. And I go to 5. Well, really, 7 places: Home, work, grocery, gym, coffee, church, with a tie for movie and airport at the end. I guess we should include gas station and library. Wow, I go a lot of places!
The thing is, similar to dating (I got a text message from someone who I cleanly ended it with two months ago), I am having a hard time making friends outside of work:
“Trying to understand you as a person is pretty nuanced. Thinking about you is fun. You are unique.” (I don’t respond).
In the morning: “But a shadow of grief follows you.”
“And I love to see the light beyond it.”
Now these messages are A: out of the blue, B: have been previously ignored, and C: BRO why? Like, all the whys. I’m not used to being pined over. I’m usually the piner. And it’s kind of terrible. It’s almost embarrassing for both of us.
And so, dating and friendship, those things are coming together like gluten free cookie batter.
This is what my social options are after I gave up drinking: the gym, church, and coffee. But apparently, it is rude to break the bubble at the gym after the invention of bluetooth headphones. Unless you go with a friend to the gym (and I can’t tell you how much I dislike those people). They are always dudes, circling the free weights like hawks over a carcass, while they talk about life like it is so damn important as they wait. And I never know what they are waiting for. I would never go to the gym to wait. But then, I think most of them don’t want to go home. And they got permission from their wives to leave them at home because they are going to the gym, and not the bar. Yes, I am painting a very heteronormative picture of dudes, because they hand me the brush. I try to ignore them and scramble across the treadmill dabbing the sweat off my face. I leave with less friends than when I came.
Church is a place to go, but I don’t know why I go really. I get so bored during the sermon that I immediately furnish a pen and make lists in my tiny notebook, lists about lessons I want to write, or instructions I want to give, or an idea I want to write, during the sermon. But the church is literally the can of mixed nuts that they gift to every new member. “We’re a can of mixed nuts!” they say and laugh. I smile, to be polite. I don’t think it’s that funny, really. I’ve tried to be more mindful of looking down to write notes while the preacher is preaching, because I realized that I hate when my students do that to me. I forgot that she was all the way human, is what it was. But the worst part is that students don’t really have a choice to come to school, but I make the choice to go to church. At least, I thought I did! The funny thing is, as a rule I don’t like church. But I like to go because it’s the only consistent place where people know my name in this city, outside of work. Even then they call me “Profe” at work, not by my name, which I prefer.
But I really could take or leave the sermons. I think they are beautiful and old school and I really like that the preacher memorizes them! So much work involved! I say hello to her every week, and she says hello to me, but I am intimidated to bother her. I have seen her sit alone and eat meals at an otherwise empty table in the reception hall, which I would think was the exact opposite of pastorship. I think she might be a loner. And that, of course, as a person making a list of all the places I go in my daily life while existing to exist in a coffee shop, is a feeling I can understand.
Bars? Not since I gave up drinking and being young. Shouting in bars is so obnoxious. I have to use my voice for 5 hours and 10 minutes, 5 days a week. That’s ostensibly 26 hours of talking, and then I want to project my voice across a table to a person 1.5 feet from me for fun? My coworkers always respond “well, I don’t drink a lot” when I explain that I do not drink, so therefore I do not go to bars. I think they feel accused. And I am not accusing them. I think I am simply trying to explain that I feel out of place at bars. Then they offer “You can order food and just get a water.” Yes, yes I can do that. Of course I can order food. You know what’s really delicious and fruitful for my pre-diabetic 37 year-old talked-out body with a teacher-brain-on-fire? Bar food. I love to pay too much money for potatoes chopped and embroiled in fat. So, I swipe left.
So, here’s the coffee shop. More strangers actually speak to me here than at the gym, or bars. I’ve had a few guys ask for my number, and one who almost did except I slipped my headphones in. And I have to admit, even if I am not interested in that person, it rounds out my weekend knowing that I was noticed by someone who expressed interest in me. It balances out the energy when I look across the faintly mildewy reception hall to watch the pastor eat entirely alone with her microphone pack to the side.
Is it healthy to spend two hours at a coffee shop so you can feel aware of your hips in public? No, yes, I am annoyed that I don’t have a person to snuggle with (but only when I want) and that I have to go out and find one. But that’s why I ask how that could possibly matter when I consider that all of my problems (I am pretty sure, yes, all of them) are just uncomfortable things. They aren’t actually problems at all.