Coffee with love...


(more coming soon...)

They were performing a scene from "Les Misérables" behind Java Joe's. This was the first day Peter really spent at Java's. (He's the cute one in the purple shirt.) That was the last Good Day Peter and I had for a very long time. We got coffee (mine was the house blend with half-and-half; his was some weird raspberry-butterscotch thing) and we "caught up" on things.

These are Java Kids. This is what being a Java Kid is all about: sitting on the bench outside, taking a smoke break or finishing your coffee; laughing; having arguments about punk bands; tickling each other and pretending you're not sexually frustrated... Or sitting opposite the bench, on a little mound of grass known as The Grassy Knoll of Binghamton, (David and I decided once that Elvis is buried there...) and taking candid pictures of other Java Kids.

More Java Kids. This was taken the day before I left for Santa Fe. The plate Meg had given me was in my backpack. I'd just kissed that boy on the right. They were all playing hacky-sack, and invited me to play, which I did, which caused me to spill ginger-peach tea on myself and bruise myself quite badly. But I think they loved me anyway.

This is Alan. Alan likes coffee. A lot. He helped David and I with the "Java Joe's satellite station" that day for about an hour. Then he just kind of wandered off, chocolate-chip-hazelnut-espresso scone in hand.

Amy took this picture of the Java Joe's Satellite Office, with David centered, of course. I'm the one on the far left (didn't think I was gonna let you see my face, did you?!), getting some lady her coffee, while another lady began bitching David out because she'd found an eggshell in her cookie. The eggshell was Amy's fault. Wouldn't ya know she'd be off trying to snap pictures of cute boys?

Wired to the Coffee Habit
by me, as published in The Press & Sun-Bulletin on Saturday, February 7, 1998...

You know things are bad when the song Yellow Submarine depresses you. Because I have, unfortunately, fallen upon one of those times in my life, and refuse to let myself become self-pitying and whiny, I am offering this article as a tribue to my best friend, the cheer-bringing brown substance known as coffee.

"Coffee is a mood-enhancing drug and there are 20,000 bagel-related accidents a year," said one employee of a local coffeehouse [David] when asked for his input on coffee. (I was not specifically told whether or not any such accidents have occurred there, but, all things considered, one would assume they are fairly common.)

A resurrection
I helped a close friend [Peter] move, and his brother and I set to the task of disinfecting a rodent-infested hunk of plastic we found in the new home, which we positively identified as a coffeemaker. The coffeemaker required much care - it took us at least an hour to clean, polish, and lovingly caress it before it agreed to work for us. When the first (probably highly toxic) drops of brown liquid finally flowed, we did a kind of victory dance around the kitchen to the Queen song We Are The Champions. It was truly a bonding experience.

Language of coffee
I have seen some odd occurences at, in, and around coffeehouses. For example, I overheard a friend [Erich] declare his undying love for the late Errol Flynn in a coffeehouse. That, however, is not the height of java-induced oddness. There was the conversation over coffee about the mating habits of smurfs. There was the day I witnessed five people dancing around, singing songs from Les Misérables outside a coffeehouse for several hours. The fact that the people involved in each of these cases considred themselves sane indicated that some force there - perhaps the concentrated aroma of coffee and soapy-tasting cookies [David's cookies always tasted like soap.] - acts as a biological catalyst, creating a separate reality within coffeehouses.

And there is simply nothing in the world like kissing someone who has been drinking espresso.

One of my favorite things to do is to "collect" coffee experiences. I have a notebook [Diane-the-journal] filled with references to things I've experienced or witnessed in coffeehouses. Separate from that, I have a mental journal filled with images of cups I've had in different situations: the cup in Georgia drunk in the presence of a jolly fat waitress with a Golden Girls accent and an aura as bright and cheery as the sunrise that morning; cups over which I have laughed and cried; numerous cups in the middle of the night at Denny's; and the cup that saw me through an evening of love at first sight.

Coffee, in and of itself, isn't much more than brown liquid that tastes sort of good and can give the consumer a sort of buzz. However, it is an emotional enhancer, a medium that brings lives together for a collage of good times and bad times, a substance whose aroma seems present in all my most precious memories.

Pardon me, but I need to go make myself a cappuccino. Chocolate hazelnut coffee is the drink of the the gods, and to all of you who pollute your mugs with tea, my deepest sympathies.

[That was written for several reasons: to piss Peter off, which didn't work; to glorify Java Joe's, which didn't work because I didn't use its name anywhere in the article; and to make all the Java Kids giggle, which actually happened... Java Kids will giggle at anything as long as they've got enough caffeine in them...]