Land of Few Cafes

Here I sit in the essence of what I lacked in Richmond County. It was for the best really. If the RC had coffee shops, I might have been sucked by the chance to spend hours with hot beverages, my thoughts, tasty pastries, a book, a refill, the internet, my thoughts….

I really like coffee shops. I like coffee and things that go with coffee. I like reading among other people. I can internet schmooze with the best of em. More than all that I like the culture that coffee shops create. They're as much about sitting and thinking as they are about purchasing a particular product. I am a ruminator, a probosculator, a dreamer, a wonderer. It's nice that there are places where people gather to do those things.

And in Richmond county there was none of that. I knew of two cafes in my area. They were both closed by 3pm. In fact, I'm not sure I ever saw either of them open. Even if they were, I expect they weren't really what I was looking for. There was a place named "Fatz' Cafe," which sounded promising. I gave them a call, and asked if they had a wireless internet connection, to which I got this reply: "No, but the wife has it at home."

That was one of my first big, "Oh wow, I am in the South" moments. That was a line you simply would not hear in the worlds am I used to. One thing I'm trying to get a handle on, and give others a sense of, with this blog is the South. The South is real, I can tell you that much, and it plays by different rules. There's a different vibe down there, and it manifests a different world. I was very interested in the lack of coffee shops in Richmond, because it seemed to capture something fundamental about the difference between where I come from and where I was. It wasn't just the lack of cafes, it was the absence of the sort of culture that would support a cafe. The environment is less academic, less contemplative, less symbolic, less abstract. Minds are mostly occupied by one's family, friends and job. Concerns were 99% local and tangible. In some ways it's bad- people generally didn't have much mental space for issues that they couldn't see with their own eyes. In some ways it's good- without those concerns, people couldn't use them, to quote the late Elliot Smith, to "fight problems with bigger problems."

At Oberlin, where I went to college, we would sometimes refer to the "Oberlin bubble," the mental outline around the campus that made us go for weeks or months with scarcely a thought to the outside world. The Oberlin bubble was a fascinating place to live. It was a co-creation of some 2800+ vivacious, angsty, arty, emotional, funny, active, stressed, hormonal and busy college students. When the outside world pierced through into your mind, it was usually because it demanded to, not because there was a lack of action within the bubble.

Richmond had a similar thing, but it wasn't a bubble. For most people, the world simply ended somewhere in or around the neighboring counties. People were concerned with the places and people that they had physical contact with. There wasn't much interest in travel. There were exceptions of course, and I was fortunate enough to live with two of them, but many people had been in the area their whole lives, and weren't about to leave.

I was a yankee (I didn't realize people still used that word to mean something other than someone who plays professional baseball in the Bronx) but I was also halfway to an alien. I was from the lands beyond. I don't go to church or eat meat. I like to write and watch absurd internet videos. I'm friendly in my way, but not in their way. "There's sumptin sumptin sumptin sumptin weird about you. Sumptin different." That's from a guy in Billy's Chop Shop. He spoke for many down there. He spoke for the majority who would be just as out of place in this Logan Square coffee shop as I was down there.