Lacuna, Blog 2: Coffee Shop

Maybe not, though. After all, soon it’s a week later and a lot can change in a week.

A lot has changed. For one thing, you’re not in that bookstore anymore. Now you’re back home sitting at your computer staring at a really awful draft of what you have a hunch might turn out to be a pretty good poem if you could just get the self-aggrandizing crap out of it, allow it to be vulnerable and, of course, simple in its vulnerability.

Not simplistic, simple.

And—the important thing—not show-offy.

Whether you achieve this or not, you know it will never get published in one of those swanky magazines, and thinking about what a mess the poem is, and also how beautiful and even crazy it sort of is or might be someday, suddenly you realize that you yourself will never have a career as a poet.

It’ll never happen.

All those things, like being simple and vulnerable and not full of self-aggrandizing crap, well they hardly add up to swanky. Almost the opposite, in fact.

Not that it matters. You’ll keep writing, of course—you enjoy writing—but the career part won’t happen. Thing is, you don’t care. It’s not like you’re sad about it or anything. It’s not like you’re having a midlife crisis and all you want to do is drop everything and go on a long trip to, say, Egypt or Madagascar, on sabbatical maybe, to find out who you really are now that your illusions about yourself have been shattered. In fact, this realization that you won’t ever have a career as a poet doesn’t even surprise you. You’ve always known it. All it does is, it leaves you a little numb—not numb as in astounded by an empty universe and alienated from life, but numb as in: “Hmm, maybe I’ll finish off that sturgeon and cauliflower bisque for lunch.”

The recipe for which you got out of that new cookbook you bought.

Anyway, it’s a week later. And unlike the lacunas in the stories published in those swanky magazines this lacuna, or whatever it is, the lapsed week, happens to be filled with a little story of its own that features a kind of epiphany on your part. Your epiphany, you see, needs to be told about if this supposititious little narrative of sorts, this strange and kind of choc-a-bloc essay, is to have any chance of being read by my generous reader, who is not only reading about you, but, ironically, is you.

Although not really, being a made-up you, and therefore, I must say, a very generous you, whose generosity has consisted primarily in letting me walk you around a bookstore as my protagonist while also keeping you (as my reader) at a distance from your made-up self. I’m sure that before I put you in that bookstore you had plenty of better places to be and plenty of better things to do than wander around fluorescent-lit aisles thinking thoughts that I was making up for you. So to reward you for your gracious compliance with my supposititious storyline, I will do what no self-respecting writer with a career in mind would ever do: I’ll suss out that supposititious and recalcitrant lacuna.

You see, as it turns out, you too actually have an actual career and one day earlier this week between professional protocols you went out for a cup of corporate coffee at one of those places with baristas and all—not in a bookstore, just one with a sidewalk in front of it. Once there, you stood in line patiently, waiting for your turn to order and resisting all the little opportunities they’d stacked up where the line forms to entice you to buy overpriced mugs and bags of “small batch” coffee, or tastefully packaged but also overpriced bags of sea-salt caramel popcorn.

As you stood there you also did a good job of ignoring the nicely and even poetically written things they had on their walls about how much the corporate guys love and respect the noble and happy people who grow their coffee for them and whom anyway they still ruthlessly exploit but they’re pretty nice about it. You didn’t succeed in avoiding all of it, though: above a particularly smarmy bit of agitprop chalked out on a wall board your eye was caught by a photo-poster of a ceramic coffee mug shot from above filling up with café latté shrewdly accented with cocoa powder—sorry, shaved chocolate—which had been sprinkled judiciously onto the foam forming a brown Milky Way-ish vortex rotating counter-clockwise inward on itself, each tiny bubble of which followed its own vector so clearly, so creamily, that for a moment you felt you were almost in that beautiful swirling vortex—or, more accurately, that it was almost in you, tipped right up under your nose being irresistible and all.

That was the effect they wanted the image to have on you, of course. They wanted you to feel, really feel—to the point of salivating, even—that that gorgeous frothy-froth was all but sliding right into your mouth.  And, of course, that you deserved it. Why not anyway? We’re all corporate, we know that, but in another sense we’re all stardust. Golden. Caught in the devil’s bargain. We’ve got to get ourselves, Joni told us, back to the garden. Now, somehow, the garden was swirling right in front of you in the form of a gigantic cup of latté. All you had to do was order it!

Oh, and pay for it—probably about seven or eight bucks.

Then wait for around fifteen minutes while those underpaid, fully-masked kids racing around like lunatics in all that steam frothed it up good and whipped it up right and then called out your name so everybody could hear what your name was and know what you had ordered, which was embarrassing but worth it.

*

What stuck with you, however, was the first impression you had. Remember? That you were about to swirl into it. Not it into you.

That would be a helluva nice way to go, you thought, swirling down into a gigantic mug of latté. A little whirlpool of foam and bubbles and cocoa powder—I mean shaved chocolate—until you were lost and gone. That, you realized, was just what being in this place was like. It was like being eased into a carefully combobulated vortex of corporate imagery, verbal tropes, and formulaic-ly reassuring metaphors engineered by highly professional, sort of brilliant, corporate photographers and graphic designers and kinda-sorta poets. You had to admit it. All that agitprop was evocative and poetical and fully capable of vortexing you down and down-down-a-down-down-down into a creaminess that was, you felt, somehow magically you, your real you, your latté you.

The you they so generously wanted to transform you into.

Just as I’ve done—remember? I’ve made you into the “you” I wanted you to be. I know you resisted it a little, and I don’t blame you. Nobody wants to have their essence co-opted—even in the second person—and then exploited for someone else’s damned essay, or whatever this happens to be.

I’m not very good at it, anyway—that is, at creating a “you” that you’d even want to be, which is the “you” I happened to want you to be. If I were better at making you the you you wanted to be, you wouldn’t have resisted for that nano-second or two before generously acquiescing and all, as I’m sure you did, since you’re still reading, maybe, out of pity, could be, or for the sake of argument.

Anyway, those corporate photographers and poets and all, being pros and really knowing what they were doing, didn’t have any problem getting you to acquiesce to the feeling that in the exact vortex of that swirling corporate Milky Way of firm and at the same time yielding froth sprinkled with shaved whatever was a new and wonderful you—the you they wanted you to be, yes, but also the you you wanted to be. Though you hadn’t known it a second or two before. What made it so nice was that it was sort of a reduced you. No service corridors and all. No janitors. Less complicated—almost one-dimensional, in fact. A diminished you. Diminished down to one and only one urge, which lived only in that moment: the urge in response to the stimulus of a picture to drown in a bubble-swarm of latté—which, well, you couldn’t, of course. Drown and all, that is. In a giant cup of latté. But you sure as hell could buy it.

And that urge, the one to just go ahead and buy it, was all the you they really wanted out of you, although they wanted you in that moment at least to want the same you—which you did since as we agreed their you was less complicated than the one you were stuck with. They didn’t want the you that sat on the crapper three times a day thinking over math problems. They didn’t want the you that still thought there might have been a ghost in the attic of your first house because one night when you still lived there you heard a bump followed by a very low moaning sound that couldn’t possibly have been your dog snoring. Nor did they want the you that swore to anyone who’d listen that you’d once found a jade ring in the belly of a fish you’d happened to order at a fancy fish restaurant in Manhattan.

Those were your yous, the ones you were stuck with, which nobody had quite figured out how to monetize yet. They weren’t common enough to make them worth even trying to monetize. The corporation cared only about its you—the pared down you—the reduced you—the common and centric you. The you that was also everybody else’s you and was basically just an urge, that urge, you know, to buy their product just at that moment in your day when, fingering your credit card, you happened to be approaching their P.O.S contraption.

That reduction, that urge, is in its way the only you that can ever exist at the bottom of the corporate vortex since that’s exactly what a vortex does—it starts out very very wide and ends up very very narrow. That self because it was reduced and centric was a standard—because standardized—you. Just like everybody else in that place, like everybody else in this vast and expanding corporatized world we so happily and creamily inhabit, you consisted of one and only one thing, one dimension as it were, and it was way down at the bottom of a vortex of happy—maybe even creamy—corporate algorithms.

You were a craving, an urge.

A “taste,” maybe.

With money, of course.

In fact, that’s exactly what you were to them.

Money.

*

As you inched along en route to the counter, by way of resisting all these intrusions upon both your prefrontal cortex and your reptile brain and to try to get back some semblance of having your own you, you scrunched your eyes into a determined death-squint and set about pondering a poem by John Donne.

That poem.

You know.

The one where Donne asks God to batter him and blow him off the face of the earth with a whirlwind or something. To imprison him. To ravish the hell out of him. Just so he can finally improve his life—Donne, that is—live the way he should in order to properly love Him.

God, that is.

You see, God loves Donne implicitly and is very sweet and tender to him even though he—Donne, not God—is a recalcitrant and horny-as-hell rebel against all God’s tenderness and sweetness and implicitness. So Donne badgers God to do all these violent and sexual things to him just to get him to wake up and be good. He doesn’t want the kid gloves treatment anymore, old John Donne. He wants the bare-knuckles treatment.

In the course of expressing all this somewhat masochistic stuff Donne also manages to tell the story of a little town engaged in a power struggle within its body politic over whether or not to open its gates to its deposed but rightful monarch. The town is unable to do so because it’s ruled by an usurper—the usurper’s faction, of course, is stronger—and also because the monarch’s (God’s) viceroy—Donne’s reason—is sick or maybe disloyal to his trusting king. There’s also a little story about a woman of some sort—Donne’s soul—who’s been affianced to the adversary of the one she loves—which is God, of course—and prays that the one she loves, being God and all, will please either divorce her from the bastard—who is, of course, really the Devil—or break up their supposed love-knot by, well, some species of brute force.

All this—you shuddered to realize as you death-squinted along in line—all this in a sonnet of fourteen lines of quirkily metered poetry rhyming in extremely surprising ways. Then you realized with startlement that Donne’s sonnet, though addressed to God, for God’s sake, is shot through with all this, well, phallic imagery, such as: “That I might rise and stand, o’erthrow me!"—which brings to mind a sort of really twisted Viagra commercial.

Meanwhile, it sounds exactly right, the sonnet, given its various metaphors and ideas and implications and whatnot. That is, it sounds just like a crazy phallic religious militaristic adulterous love poem to God inviting God—God, mind you—to rape him. 

Donne, I mean.

Is asking God to please rape him.

In a poem.

A sonnet.

*

Anyhoo . . .

As you thought about all this, well, the place sort of throbbed and shuddered. To stop the throbbing and shuddering you started reciting the poem—to yourself, of course—silently—because you wanted to silent-listen a little more intently to that music you were just talking about. As you did so you felt in every fiber of your being the rollicking cantankerous consonants, the little strings of plosives and dentals syncopated with vocalized schwa e’s and any number of anguished wailing vowels, mostly long and diphthong-y, along with very modern-ish line chops—all which made the poem seem to be struggling to enunciate itself during a massive artillery attack or something.

As you can probably imagine, by the time you got up to the barista to make your order—“Hi, Fabio. Yeah, same ol’ same ol’. Tall French Roast, no room!”—you looked like you had just emerged from the sack of Rome or something. Your hands were shaking as if you’d just been gang-raped by all the spheres of the universe. You had, too, an almost uncontrollable urge to catapult yourself across the counter and plaster Fabio’s cheek with a loud smooch. Luckily, you remembered that he hadn’t recited the poem to himself just then and so would probably not appreciate the gesture.

Fabio was nervous as hell anyway about your eyes and your trembling fingers as you pinched a couple of scrawny dollar bills out of your wallet. Knit-browed and bug-eyed, he turned immediately away from you and poured your coffee, first having to ask—again as usual—“No room?”

“Yeah, yeah, no room.”

“Anything else?”

You never wanted anything else, he knew that, but in your discombobulated state you answered anyway. “Nothing else, Fabio. No damned latté. No damned vortex. All I want to be is me, you know? Just me. Little ol’ irreducible me.”

It was kind of a weird and unwarranted thing to say, but he had to ask, didn’t he?

Fabio’s a good guy, though, in spite of all the product in his hair and the mascara, the handle-bar mustache. He knew you happened to like your coffee very dark and very black. This may not actually be true about you, by the way, but for my purposes it is. And, God bless him, Fabio handed you just the thing, just the way you liked it. As he did so he searched your face all bug-eyed while his mustache jiggled a little.

You nodded thanks and moved along out into the rest of the shop. I think you were hoping there might be a magazine lying around somewhere.

A swanky one

*

In a few minutes you were propped on a stool at a long faux-marble-veneered counter along the front window of the shop watching this fat old ignoramus of a guy across the street violently tugging his poor hound dog away from a decorative tree along the curb. He kept tugging at the poor dog as if he were trying to break its neck. He didn’t want it to poop all over the little square of dirt the tree was planted in. Maybe he wasn’t really an ignoramus, you thought, but you felt bad for the dog, even after it gave up trying to squat and went away with him down the street looking okay and even pretty happy and generally quite interested in the things he was sniffing and nuzzling along the sidewalk.

It’s good, you know, when you’re exhausted by some crazy poem, if suddenly there’s a little interlude in which you feel sorry for a dog or something. It gets your mind off the poem a little and soon you don’t feel quite so much as if you’d just emerged from the sack of Rome with your hair singed. It makes it easier to think a little bit about the poem and be reasonable about it.

So as you sipped your extremely dark cup of French Roast you started thinking about the poem again, but not really, not yet. Just up there on the top of your head toward the front—in your prefrontal cortex probably—you started thinking about the fact that you kept spending three bucks a day at this corporate coffee shop in spite of seeing through all its insidious marketing strategies and in spite of knowing that they brutally exploited people of color and women and poor people in general all around the world  so they could sell their very cheap coffee at a very high price and make, well,  mountains of money.

Mountain grown, they tell you.

Damn straight.

And cheap, you know, to roast and all.

Because they didn’t pay much for it. Why pay those people a decent living when they didn’t have to?

All that so you could enjoy your cup of French Roast feeling sorry for some poor dog after reciting a crazy poem to yourself.

Wasn’t it a little hypocritical of you to keep patronizing this place?

Of course it was!

It was completely hypocritical.

Thing was, though, you really liked their coffee. In fact, you kind of craved it. You had for it an ever-present and ever-urgent urge. You’d tried other coffee shops, local ones, and their dark roasts were, well, not dark enough. This place made the best and blackest brew for your taste and you couldn’t give it up, in spite of your highly refined consciousness regarding the human misery subsisting at the other end of every steaming cup.

Let’s face it, you thought. You were a hypocrite. A craven, slobbering, self-righteous, caffeine-addicted, two-faced hypocrite.

You needed to stop coming here, why couldn’t you stop coming here?

Then you made a very odd leap in your thought process. This was probably because you’d just been reciting that poem to yourself and you had God on the brain. If there was a God, you thought, maybe He (or She) could tell you why you couldn’t live your life properly in this one simple and obvious regard.  Forget all the other regards. This was the regard you happened to be thinking about. Namely, as I’ve said, that you kept patronizing this globally exploitive corporate coffee place instead of just going and getting some gas station coffee if you really needed a pick-me-up.

It was an existential mess, really, your coffee habit.

Only God could get you out of it.

Couldn’t He?

She?

Them, maybe?

Certainly, you thought, God, being all-powerful, could help you break this obnoxious daily pattern. It would take grace, though. God’s grace. That’s what John Donne understood in that crazy sonnet of his. God would have to send you the Grace you needed to walk out those doors right then and there once and for all and never come back. Only God could help you do it—but even for God it wouldn’t be easy, because God loved you—unconditionally, of course—and so God actually wanted you to have at least a nice cup of coffee to enjoy at various times during the day.

Then, you thought, no, God could do it. He’d (or She’d—or They’d) waggle Her (or His/Their) beard (or long beautiful hair), clutch Their (or Her/His) trusty old lightning bolt of a scepter, shoot down to the sidewalk just outside this coffee shop—from all the way up in Heaven and all—batter the doors in, grab you by the ear, and, just like that ignoramus tugging his dog away from that little patch of dirt, yank you, wrench you, bend you, blow you, break you and, in short, man- (or woman-) handle you (—or both—) out into the street forever and for good.

God, please come, you thought. Please, God, batter my heart!

You said these things—to yourself, of course—and you weren’t even being post-modern about it, nor ironical. You really meant it.

To yourself.

And, on the mental down low, to God.