A tribute to an ex blogger named jij.This is one of my favorite writings of his.He is truly missed and we wish that he will soon return to the blogging scene once again.
I love coffee shops. Not the poisonous mushroom kind of coffee shop (that’s Starbucks, by the way), but the small, private-ownership, idiosyncratic coffee shop.
College towns are full of such coffee shops, each with its own atmosphere and its colorful patrons. Here, in Blacksburg, there are four such coffee shops I know of. The nearest to my house is the Easy Chair coffee shop. Every time I feel suffocated from working in my room (which is practically everyday in all honesty), I grab my laptop and my notes, take whatever book I happen to be reading, and go to Easy Chair.
This is basically how I spent last summer. I wake up, I eventually get bored, and so I take a book and go to Easy Chair. The place had some couches and easy chairs (hence the name) lying around. My favorite was a black lazy boy (you know what I mean, the comfy one that comes with something to rest your feet on). I spent hours on that chair. Delightful times. I must have read 20 books on that chair.
Now, two weeks ago, I go to Easy Chair, buy my usual medium black coffee (no sugar, no cream, no milk; they get in the way of the coffee) and go towards the couch area. The lazy boy is gone. All the couches are gone. What the hell happened, I ask the girl behind the counter? Oh, we had to get rid of them, because we needed more space for study tables, she said. What? You need more space? It’s called Easy Chair coffee shop, for god sake. Where are the easy chairs? How could you do this to me? The easy chair is gone, donated to some church.
I’m still aggravated by this incident. Easy Chair is not comfortable any more. I’m like an abandoned orphan. I hate those fucking wooden chairs. They break my back. And the table is too small for my legs. And the lighting system is all off. You either turn on that little light on your table, and it gets to 100 degrees in five minutes, and you start sweating like it’s the desert, or you try to read in utter obscurity, and ruin what remains of your eye-sight in the process. A lose-lose situation.
Maybe I’ll stop going to Easy Chair. Those profit-driven whores. Maybe I’ll start taking the bus to Bollos, or the gay people place, as my homophobic friend puts it. They don’t have couches either, but they never had couches, so I let it slide. The death-of-coffee place (i.e. Starbucks) has a branch just five minutes from where I live, but I refuse to go there. I’m not that desperate. Not yet.
Speaking of coffee shops, I was in Beirut in July, and I decided I wanted to go read a book in a coffee shop, just like I do in Blacksburg. Now, the problem with Beirut coffee shops is that there really aren’t any. There used to be one in Hamra Street, but it closed down a couple of years ago.
There’s the Wimpy, but it’s really a restaurant, not a coffee shop. I wasn’t going to sit there and smell the burgers, no way. I attempted to go to that new happening place, De Prague but it’s just too crowded all day long, even in the morning. There’s a Starbucks, but I there was no way I was going there. There are a few super-traditional, Abou-El- Abed type coffee shops lying around, but they’re not made for reading. In fact, I don’t think books are allowed in those places.
The only remaining possibility was to go to one of those sea-side large coffee shops (Rawda, Shatila, etc). I was afraid that the place would be packed with loud kids playing on their bikes, but I went anyway. It was about 4:00 PM. I chose the seediest, most abandoned-looking coffee shop of the lot. I don’t think it even has a name. It was practically empty. In one corner, there was some kind of middle age poet/writer/intellectual newspapers (the messy long hair gave it away) sitting behind a small hill of. In another corner, a guy and a girl, all smiles, engaging in what appears to be the early stages of courtship (the quiet stages).
In the background, an abandoned restroom. Further back, a guy with a huge moustache sleeping on what looked like a late-nineteenth-century couch. To the right, two waiters (white shirt, black pants) playing cards and cursing each other in the shade. To the left, the Mediterranean. Absolutely amazing stuff, I thought. I wish I brought my camera. I felt like a tourist in my own city.
So I sat down on the most isolated table in the place. I could see the beach from there (The Military Beach, on Manara). Some kids splashing in the pool, an obese fifty year old man not-so-discretely eying a twenty year old girl in a bikini, five teenage boys screaming and gesticulating around a teenage girl, competing for her attention… A few garbage bags floating in the sea, two or three ships further away, and then only blue sky. The monotonous sound of the waves, splashing on the rocks. Life can be so fucking violently beautiful sometimes. I didn’t open the book that afternoon. I had tea, not coffee.
