December 31, 2008 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City, MO

December 31, 2008 – Kansas City, Missouri - The Broadway Cafe in Westport

Kiss kiss – God you’re still here. I have been sending you text messages all morning.

The line is getting long again but unlike everywhere else the Broadway takes care of those who only want quick service (a filter coffee or tea). And that is so disturbing to those who want their fancy drinks (cappuccino or macchiato) because half the value of what you receive is the inconvenience you cause to others and the other half of the value is in the inconvenience you make for yourself. If the value proposition was in creature comfort everyone would be in the short line and then where would the rest of us be.

So politely stand in the longer line with your hands clasped in front as if you were taking an elevator ride to the top of the Mark. Don’t talk – look straight ahead. A great coffee shop is one with an eclectic clientele. The Broadway is a great coffee shop and oh yes there is the quality of its roast and the expertise of its barristas but they are only secondary. Fresh roasted coffee by the cup or by the pound.

If it were not for people watching you might as well get up and go. If it were not for the people watching what sense would there be to it at all. The short bus does not stop at Starbucks.

What are doing tonight? Going home and going to bed. All the armatures have had their reservations for six months – all you can drink for two fifty a couple (party favors and a bottle of champagne on ice in the middle of the table). Another value proposition to which I do not subscribe. How can you say that – such a stick in the mud. I can easily say that for I do that every night, just not this night. Tonight I celebrate by doing what you do every other night – remaining me of how the other 99% live.

Tall girls in wooden underwear
Young lads in electric spats
Old coots on bicycles two by two
That’s me in the lead

I wish to establish a journal in which the men of genius may fight their battles; upon some terms of equality, with those dunces, the men of talent – Edgar Allan Poe

It is in his nature
To have this power
Of hectoring

And knowing that he
Will get only groveling
In return

And he shall dispise them
For not fighting back
Yet he is intrigued

By their purchases
Of just one more day
At such an horendus cost

He is smug in his own
Self-assuance that he
Would never betry honor

But there comes a time
When we also put on
A suit and tie

December 30, 2008


Kansas City, Missouri - Coffee Break --- School is out (I am sitting here across the street from Rockhurst University and near then campus of the University of Missouri at Kansas City and everyone is gone home for the holidays) and Mark is coming up with ideas for new lines of business - a plasma center (I was thinking of large screen TVs and he was thinking of blood). He had earlier said that there wouldn't be enough business to pay the heating bills and just before Christmas the pipes froze and he only reopened yesterday. Already the economy has taken out my other coffee shop (The Oak Street Cafe) which closed its doors Saturday.
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If I only knew, Mark had said. We would have stayed open just for you, he had said. How's that?, I asked. Said he had seen me at all the bars. Will several people had come up and said they saw me on TV - stuck out like a sore thumb. I had tried to avoid the camera at Hooper's but had evidently failed. Local news was doing an interview with Kelly the owner regarding the lack of a sponsor for the New Year's Eve free taxi services (just another of those post economic panic happenstances - coming faster and faster at you on the wrong side of the street).
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And where else did you see me? I asked. At Kelly's (that would be in Westport). Haven't been there in ages, I said. Will, I saw you crossing the street in front of it. Oh, said I, I was headed to the cinema (MILK - that would have been Friday at about 12:30 - too early even for me to be in a bar). Yeah! he says. And I left it at that. I don't usually go to the movies but during the holidays there is nothing else to do for a single person but get drunk and with these seasonal blues (read SAD) I'm not about to do that and normally I only go over the line maybe once a year just to remind myself what's its like but I do that someplace safe.
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Well two down and One to go and you that are single by lifestyle choice know what that is about.
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With the windows all steamed-up
And streams of rain water running
Down the middle of the street
There’s no imperative to sit in front
Of the big expansive panes of plate glass
It is miserable where ever I sit
And spring is a long long way away


And with the temperature hovering in the sixties
It is only a reminder of far off possibilities
But I did enjoy the all night long winter thunderstorm
And the creeks rising to their springtime limits
But it makes it all that harder to accept the three hard months
Remaining until the green returns again
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If I must suffer from one or the other, I would rather it should be from the paw of a lion than from the hoof of an ass – Joseph Addison