Coffee Culture

I love coffee. I love coffee shops. Especially the ones with the beat up miss matched furniture and the amateur art on the walls. Unfortunately these kinds of places tend to be dens for two activities that drive me nuts.

I can't stand open mic poetry. Drives me batty listening to whiny suburban escapees wax on about the evils of US foreign policies, pastey white kids lecturing on discrimination, and traumatized teens crying about their failures in love. These are all fine topics for discussion with your circle of friends. I just don't want to be bothered by it while I am trying to read or journal or carry on a conversation of my own.

The coffee house music scene falls just short of making me homicidal. I know that people like Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan got started playing cafes. To all you people playing these gigs, those guys were one in a million. Dylan had talent and Guthrie had a famous dad. I've met some real hard working musicians. Sitting around smoking weed and covering folk tunes won't get you very far. Your music only sounds good if the audience is as stoned as you are. Coffee is the opposite of that and I can hear every lazy chord and cracked vocal. It hurts me.

Unfortunately, most decent coffee shops like to support this kind of culture. The places that don't allow this assault to the senses are stripped down and polished shiny affairs full of Third Reich refugees. The weather is relatively nice, so I sit outside and try to ignore the tragedy that is taking place on the other side of the glass. But when some Indigo Girl wanna-be vegetarian peace and love hippy chick starts slaughtering a cover of the Folsom Prison Blues, it's too much for me. I did the exceptionally rude thing of starting my bike, pipes blasting back at the window, and tearing out of there. You shot a man in Reno just to watch him die? You, with your whisper soft voice and gentle strumming, haven't even shot a squirrel. Not even a beer can because then you couldn't bring it back for recycling. When Johnny Cash sang it I could believe it.