082518 So-called Brewed Cafe really let me down today. the guy at the counter was ugly, absent, disengaged, kinda gnarly. the coffee is weak. it looks like tea in the glass. he didn’t offer to heat up the muffin. the two guys at the next table over, the one between me and the door that says “BEAN STORE” that looks out over Brady Street, are crunching LOUDLY and talking about fucking kubernetes or whatever the fuck it is. Their voices, especially the one nearest me with his back to me, are low drones. passionless rejoinders about features and whether it’s going to work on your laptop and security and this and that. it’s just such a boring conversation. it’s about files, for fuck’s sake. who the what the why the I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THIS. Talk about something interesting, you khaki colored t shirt subdued cotton flannel and jeans wearing GITS. AND STOP CRUNCHING THOSE CHIPS SO FUCKING LOUDLY. Don’t you know you’re not going to be clean and generic and safe and functioning and healthy and well oiled and relatively strong and bright eyed forever? WHY ARE YOU WASTING YOUR TIME HERE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION AROUND MOUTHFULLS OF LOUD AS FUCK CHIPS? STOP! There’s--I’m pretty sure there’s something else we’re supposed to be doing. The lady dinosaur glances over from the right side of the room. The west side of the room. God this is disgusting. That one, the one with bad posture and the army green t shirt (I am 103% positive he’s never been near to even thinking about being in any branch of the military. he looks like a boring version of mike o’neil) i can’t fucking stand listening to him eat those fucking chips. He hunches over the plate and twists into it a little; one ear is closer to the table than the other. KKKKRRRUUUUNNNCHHH!! There goes another one, hapless, into his great crunching judging mildly cynical appraising maw. He has a half formed opinion about whether or not “they” should be allowed legally to make you unlock your phone. He doesn’t get the difference between making you give up your password and making you touch the bio sensor. He doesn’t get it, but a chip and a half later he’s saying “at this point, there’s no excuse” about something, as if there were something obvious that he can see, and presumably the slightly older, slightly less annoying (is he a *lot* less annoying, or is that just good cop bad cop syndrome?) guy across the boring table from him can probably see, especially now that he pointed it out so succinctly, and he gives a little fake dialog example of how this obvious thing would play out; he voice acts both himself and the clueless individual who said something inevitably stupid in the face of the obvious thing, and when he plays the other person’s voice, it’s higher pitched, and has a sort of moronic sing-song to it, indicating the sheer ignorance and depravity and utter lack of moral fibre, and when he voices his own self, it sounds like a farmer. Down to earth. Shrugging with mild irony. Baritone curving upward into the tenor territory of “well what did you expect.” Firm but never needlessly violent. Grounded but enlightened. Knows about machinery. Knows more than the average farmer about subtle machinery, not the rusting hulks they use to plow their sad fields, but the abstract machinery that tells the rusting hulks where to go and when to rust and when to stop altogether. Large, expensive, intelligent dogs are drawn to him. He has a gas grill that has an iphone app. He’s shaved his head about as closely as I used to, but he doesn’t even need to yet. What an idiot. He’s pouring his own virility out of a pint glass into a hole in the sidewalk outside an overpriced but CUTE, VERY CUTE cafe on Brady Street. He probably thinks Brady Street is really Brady Street. He wasn’t probably down here, sitting down here when this was Brewed Awakenings and you could smoke here, and All of Brady Street was just a big old sleepy frenetic freak parade. God bless the freaks. He’s too comfortable to bless anybody. He’s probably doing more good in the world--having a *higher impact* than I am. I’m probably way stupider than I’m acting like he is; honestly, I’m just going off like this because it’s fun. I’m sure he’s fine. The guy across from him, the one with the grey-white beard, just said, “Sometimes you just have to smile and be nice to people for a change.” See? I knew I liked him better. Tacos. Modella. Tequila. ATM. Print here via email (seriously? why? Who prints? Who uses email??). Whatever. Only a couple seconds left. Then they’re going to raze all of this and start over. This movie’s kind of on the boring side, you know? They tried to give it a soundtrack to spruce it up a bit, but the music started to sound all the same. Everybody was using the same instruments, and choosing from the same collection of notes. Can you imagine?