What would I do…
What would I do, were it not for my neighborhood coffee shop?
Here I sit, 11:45pm on a Friday night, whiling away the hours with a $2.00 iced tea, which represents my fledgling -- and as yet unsuccessful -- attempt to wean myself from coffee. I do not imagine myself particularly attached to coffee houses, but I am irresistibly drawn to them, which just goes to show how active my imagination is. There's something about a neighborhood cafe that just calls to me, entirely separate from my undeniable caffeine addiction.
I like goofing around on my laptop in a cafe, because everyone thinks I'm doing serious business stuff on my Thinkpad. Everyone, that is, except the people behind me, who can see me stalking my friends on Facebook, or watching what appear to be English language instructional videos for Japanese sex workers.
Don't ask.
I could try to pass myself off as some kind of avant-garde new media artist, but everyone knows they use Macs, so I'm screwed there. I could start wearing sweater-vests and grow a goatee, but being Asian, I possess neither facial hair nor a sense of ironic fashion to an appropriate degree.
So, I'm stuck. If I were at home, I'd be just another loner nerd, slowly bloating under the light of an LCD. Here, though, at least I have interesting company.
There's a guy here who looks remarkably like Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks. He relishes explaining to me how much he hates "open mic night," because people say things he doesn't agree with. He spends most of his time here, mumbles a lot, and is a nearly pure distillation of the word "crotchety," so he's really a kind of older, whiter, me. I tend to avoid him, because to be honest, I'm kind of an asshole, and an old me is the last thing I want to deal with.
There's another guy wearing a brown turtleneck sweater (66 degrees outside... brrr!) talking to a friend about "Yeah... distributed computing... I think I've heard of that. Never tried it before, though." They both have big thick books which look as if they've never been opened, and are drinking frosted abortions of good sense called "iced macadamia nut mochas." I imagine they have color-coordinated Apple products, and have recently traded in their VW Beetles for a pair of hybrids.
On a sofa, a twitching woman in her forties hunches over a pile of law books. She clutches a mug of espresso and cream in one hand, and the other runs a highlighter over endless tracts of miniscule text.
A pale, rail-thin white guy is tethered to an enormous laptop by his headphones. He's been here for hours, exploring the myriad ways in which a four-foot dwarf wielding a six-foot sword can dismember woodland creatures. He has several in-game companions who -- one might imagine -- are all South Koreans slowly dying from sleep deprivation.
A blue-grey cloud of optimistic loneliness drapes itself listlessly over everything. This is really a temple of sorts, a place of quiet and unconscious worship. Especially at times like this, late on a Friday night, there is a certain reflective thoughtfulness here. People occasionally look up from their glowing screens or ink-stained fingers with a mildly surprised look on their faces. They glance about, bemused, as if they've just realized where they are and are curious about how they got there.
"This isn't my life," I imagine them thinking -- mostly because that's what I'm thinking. "What happened?"
That specific moment is why we come here. It's so we can look around us at the other lost souls. We recognize a kind of kinship, and a gentle warmth rises upwards through us and teases our lips into a small, soft smile. We turn back to our keyboards and papers and think...
"Well, at least I'll never be like those poor bastards."