A “destination” coffee shop with various odds and ends, tasteful lighting and wood panels, a relaxed atmosphere, comforting smells. It’s run by Eileen (but with nobody else I know). I say hi to her, tell her I finally saw her in that documentary “Caffeinated”, but it was silly how they only used one clip — she’s already turned away though, either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. Haven’t seen her in a long time, so it might be fair.
I’m here because I spent most of my day postponing putting on my motorcycle riding gear to get to my Russian school, not admitting to myself that I just don’t want to go. Eileen’s shop has rows of merchandise, uncrowded during the pandemic. I find a few items that make me nostalgic for earlier times in San Francisco. One, a cardboard tube with a signature affirming it’s been packed by my old friend Kelly Gallamore. (Perhaps the store is instead run by Noona Nolan?)
Someone I talk with there shares a personal difficulty. In what is a typical response for me, I share a tangential factoid I happen to know… some incident that happened to Queen Elizabeth II (then, viewing a flashback with Prince Philip as a colorful robot, playful geometric designs on all his clothes, colored plates covering his face). Later, I discover my old moto jacket and pants stuffed in a garbage can and fish them out.
The shop has a long row of machines (perhaps for copying or the like). Mine gets a very long piece of paper stuck in it, just as an employee unknowingly points me out to someone as a veteran user/customer who might help them. Down further the row become a trough of water, with a long flat rail down the middle. Several objects I need are floating in it.
Home now. Looking down from our apartment’s back room. To do that, we peer around a large rusty statue of a chicken that our landlord’s had mounted on the corner of the building forever. I think “huh, so odd but I’ve never had that thing remind me of Chicken John.” There are a few massive beasts getting aggressive with each other in the backyard. One looks like a bodybuilding panda with eyeliner, the other a stairway-bumping basilisk. They’ve wandered in, though could choose to fight anywhere. Up closer, I try to consider what to, but there’s not much else except watch.
Spiderwebs encrusting the middle of trees, trees all in a row, as I travel past at high speed. The only way to see them is to line their row and look through several at once. I crack that code, but can’t guess if anyone else has seen this strange metaphor. A metaphor for what though, I can’t say.
I remember: looking up at a dusk-time sky, thinking as if I’m outside my own life, that I was born here and now because I picked this lifetime so I could see humanity’s transition. In this case, the transition to digital.