I walk into the hip space and everywhere are open laptops, and the sound is soothing yet cool music behind the hissing gurgle of milk being steamed. Everyone is creating amazing graphics, writing inventive short stories, texting inspiring dialogues. The place is so crammed with a symphony of firing neurons that my own muse begins to speak to me in poetry so original I can barely keep up with my own self expression. In fact, there it just went... I thought.... there was something I wanted to say. And although I can sense its ambiance like something I was going to say and then forgot, the moment is empty. It was a contract between my spirit and the caffeine which in the end has no content. What is called in your language an empty promise.
The reason is because if you could really see what was on those laptop screens you would realize it is only emails, and spreadsheets, and amazon.com. The real creators must be at home sitting lonely at their desks sweating out words and phrases, creating imaginary worlds that don't flow like soothing waterfalls from their minds, but are more like pulling nails from old scarred wood and piling up the lumber until there is enough there to build the beginnings of a house. And everyday the writer spends most of his hours looking for cast off lumber and pulling the nails out of it so he can have a few sticks to add to his slowly, painfully forming wood pile.
The cafes are beautiful illusions, lovely promises. Espresso is the aroma of the unattainable, visions of impossible possibilities, aural dreams of unhearable music. And that is why I love them. That is why I keep one eye out for a coffee house while the other is spying cast off lumber.
