“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis
It was very cold this morning, but the sun was making it through the clouds a tiny bit, so I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t dress too warmly as I wanted to feel the cold in addition to seeing the sun.
I decided to walk to Starbucks. I haven’t been to Starbucks in a long time – since I upped my coffee game their coffee simply isn’t that good. Especially since I don’t drink fancy sugary milky concoctions – I only order a cup of black brewed coffee (I like coffee, why put other shit in it?). With fresh beans, my grinder, and my Aeropress I can make far, far, better coffee at home for much, much less cost.
However, I have never considered Starbucks to be a place to buy coffee. It’s an office rental place – you simply pay by buying overpriced drink items. I never understand people that drive through Starbucks, or pick up an order… make it yourself!
Viewed as an office or meeting place I realize I have a lot of really fond memories of various Starbucks. There was the one in Mesquite where I would stretch out a coffee for two hours listening to the various Saturday Morning Confessions while I would write and wait for my son Lee’s double art lessons. Some significant and meaningful aspects of my life were born in that Starbucks a long, long time ago. I wrote something about it during the previous century – I’ll have to look through my stuff, find where I put it.
Then there is the Plano Starbucks that I met with my writing group, every Wednesday for over a decade. I could calculate how much coffee I drank there, in hundreds of gallons, but I won’t.
So today, nothing dramatic. I walked there with my library book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Murakami. It’s a popular book so I won’t be able to renew it – that means I only have three weeks to get through its prodigious pages, but thirty pages a day will be more than fast enough. I’m loving the book, so this won’t be hard.
After one large brew and thirty four pages I decided to hike home. Crossing Beltline I went by Gong Cha, one of the many Asian Boba Tea spots in my ‘hood – and considered if this might be another possible future destination. Unfortunately, most of their offerings have way, way too much sugar in them for my health… so I need to stick to American style black coffee.
In an empty parking spot was an abandoned mostly-drank Boba Tea. Its festive bright pink lid and specked black tapioca balls peeking through the clouds of milk tea looked festive on the cold morning, so I snapped a picture of it.
Oh, I found what I wrote… I think it was the first time I had ever been to Starbucks – I actually bought an iced tea with a gift certificate that Candy gave me. I bought the tea because I was intimidated with the coffee menu (this was a long, long time ago).
Here’s what I wrote – it’s silly- but it brings back good memories.
Saturday, August 29, 1998
Coffee foams
….. Coffee foams comes in a foam cup seashells hidden in the foam, spirals like an ear like time time flies Tea cold, iced, cubed the tea of the day is reddish, fruity cold and refreshing. Fresh tea is hot from the pot and steams hissing onto the cubes. The tea is iced, but the day is not the day is hot and sweaty
Round Green Tables
time flies blue eyes “I seldom talk to anyone anymore other than children and rednecks”
South American Beans Roasted, toasted, ground and boiled and percolate the suspension of disbelief
Once, I quit drinking coffee It made my stomach hurt
I feel something, sometimes as a burning worm in my stomach, my gut a monster of strain
Everybody had to get up early and was scurrying around the house making plans for the day – who would go where, what they would do, and what they could skip.
—-Bill Chance, A Boom in the Morning
NASA Photo
I have been feeling in a deep hopeless rut lately, and I’m sure a lot of you have too. After writing another Sunday Snippet I decided to set an ambitious goal for myself. I’ll write a short piece of fiction every day and put it up here. Obviously, quality will vary – you get what you get. Length too – I’ll have to write something short on busy days. They will be raw first drafts and full of errors.
I’m not sure how long I can keep it up… I do write quickly, but coming up with an idea every day will be a difficult challenge. So far so good. Maybe a hundred in a row might be a good, achievable, and tough goal.
Here’s another one for today (#22). What do you think? Any comments, criticism, insults, ideas, prompts, abuse … anything is welcome. Feel free to comment or contact me.
Thanks for reading.
A Boom in the Morning
Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
—-Sir Fred Hoyle
Hank knew it was going to be a busy, crazy day, and very warm for the first of February. His son had three soccer games and two basketball games. His daughter had art lessons and a basketball game. His car was in the shop. A typical insane Saturday in 2003 in a suburb east of Dallas.
Everybody had to get up early and was scurrying around the house making plans – who would go where, what they would do, and what they could skip.
He was looking for his wife’s keys when the house shook – some sort of boom. Even though the ground seemed to shudder for a split second it wasn’t really that loud, not much louder than the usual background rumbling vibrations from the three big freeways that surrounded their neighborhood. He was so preoccupied that he put it immediately out of mind. “What was that?” his wife Sara asked, “Was that a sonic boom?” If she hadn’t said that, he wouldn’t have remembered anything about the sound.
Sara drove him to her mother’s apartment and he borrowed her car (they had tried to figure out a way to get through the day with only one vehicle but couldn’t quite work it out). He drove home, picked up Elizabeth, their daughter, stopped by the bank to get money, left her at her art lesson (she took two one-hour lessons each Saturday, from nine to eleven AM), and drove down to Starbucks for a couple rare hours of relaxation.
Hank hadn’t been sitting very long when his cell phone rang.
“Did you hear about the shuttle,” an unknown voice said on the other end.
“What?”
“Oh, I think I punched the wrong number,” the voice said, and hung up.
A minute later it rang again; it was Sara, calling from the soccer fields.
“Did you hear about the shuttle?” she asked. He hadn’t been near a TV or live radio all day (He and Elizabeth had been listening to her favorite electronic dance station in the car – it’s only a tape playing on the radio, no DJ or news) and had no idea.
“Hang up, I’ll use something new, the Internet news feed on my Nextel cell phone to figure out what was up and call you back,” Hank said.
He punched into CNN from his phone and read on the tiny screen about the explosion and about the debris falling to the east, on Nacogdoches. Then he read about the sound, the explosion that could be heard.
He felt a sudden, terrible shock as he remembered what his wife had said an hour earlier and was sickened when he realized what it meant.
That was the boom… it was the shuttle blowing up over their heads.
He thought about the rest of the day, how busy they were going to be. Should they cancel anything? Was this going to change things? It had happened only a few miles over their heads.
No, no, nothing. For them, nothing would change. Hank continued to sip his coffee. Soon, he was thinking about his daughter’s afternoon basketball game, and if they had a chance of winning… not that he really cared.
“Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.
Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams–like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.”
― David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants: Essays and Prose
Downtown McKinney Texas
Oblique Strategy:Retrace your steps
John Scalzi wrote critically about writing in a coffee shop:
You’re not fooling anyone when you take your laptop to a coffee shop, you know.
I mean, Christ, people. All that tapping and leaning back thoughtfully in your chair with a mug of whatever while you pretend to edit your latest masterpiece. You couldn’t be more obvious if you had a garish, flashing neon sign over your head that said “Looking For Sex.” Go home, why don’t you. Just go.
He’s not wrong, of course. There can be a certain stuckuppishness about going to the coffee shop to write – either with a laptop or with a Moleskine.
With me, however, it’s different. I like to go to coffee shops sometimes, I like to drink coffee that someone else makes for me sometimes… and I write wherever I go.
For years, a long time ago, I took my son Lee to two hours of art lessons every Saturday morning. While I was waiting for him, I’d go to a nearby Starbucks with my laptop and write. I developed the ability to nurse one Venti coffee for two hours. In addition to getting two hours or writing done in an otherwise wasted window of time I perfected the writer’s ability to listen in to stranger’s conversations without looking at them.
This particular Starbucks was always crowded on Saturday mornings and the conversations were usually interesting. It seems that the main topic was to beg forgiveness and seek redemption for what had been done in passionate error on Friday night. There were some interesting stories floating around.
So I view Starbucks not as a coffee seller (which is good because their coffee is awful) but as an office rental space. For the price of an overly expensive cuppa Joe you get an office, internet connection, and conference room (if needed) for a couple hours. Good deal if you ask me.
Tonight I needed to finish a short story but there was too much going on at the house. I needed to be left alone for a few pages, at least. So I packed up and headed out to a coffee shop not far from our house. Of course, in my neighborhood you won’t be able to eavesdrop on conversations, they are in too many different languages.
But at any rate, three hours and one Venti later, my story was done. And I didn’t care who saw me typing and didn’t worry that absolutely nobody noticed me.
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Use Dialogue As A Trigger For Stories
Learn this quirk. Put it in your bag of tricks. Use dialogue as a trigger for stories.
I go back to my old advice first. Listen. Don’t Talk. Listen. If you’ve trained yourself as a conscious listener, almost any line of overheard dialogue can make a starting point.
This reminds me of a time many years ago. My son would take two hours of art lessons every Saturday morning. I’d drop him off and then head to a nearby Starbucks to kill the time.
I’ve never looked at Starbucks as a coffee place – I view it as an office rental firm. For the overprice of a beverage, you get somewhere to sit. Probably the most important thing I learned in the years of spending every Saturday morning in that Starbucks was how to sip a Venti in a way to make it last two hours.
It was a crowded spot at that time of day – but also crowded in a certain sort of way. People weren’t in there alone with their laptops (except for me). They were there in pairs or groups and they all seemed to have some sort of business to attend to. And on a weekend morning, that business was of an emotional nature.
I became very good at sitting there, taking in all the sounds around me, and sorting out a single thread of conversation. It was always interesting and often more than a tad salacious. For some reason that Starbucks seemed to be a popular place for people to come and confess the sins they committed on Friday night.
To this day, I miss those hours spent listening and writing. I haven’t found any other place with dialogue as interesting as that… just floating around in the air.
I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.
—-Montaigne
An economic crisis is nature’s revenge on those who make and those who accept false promises; it is a holocaust of lies when the dross is burned away and only what is real and true remains. Think of cotton candy melting and charring in the flame of a blowtorch; that is what is happening to the secure retirements that “caring” blue politicians and “committed” blue union leaders promised gullible state workers.
Constructing a city for the car alone shackles all to the burdens of car ownership and maintenance costs. In a city with a poverty rate of 23 percent and household transportation costs approaching 25 percent of income, fewer and fewer can afford to participate in the local economy, getting from point A to point B, without a miserable two-hour DART bus commute. Without choice in the transportation network, Sun Belt cities will go the way of the Rust Belt. A monoculture of transportation follows a monoculture of the very industry that produced it into collapse. Nobody thought Detroit would collapse when it was dubbed the Paris of the West. Paris, however, is alive and well. And so is bicycling in that world-class city.
Bill Chance 