Mike Says

by Mike Seader

I’ve never written anything in a coffee shop, however like everyone else I know, I have “business meetings” at coffee shops because I don’t have a business office. At these meetings certainly I write things down, but I don’t write things, like this column for instance. The exception was a day like today--no, I don’t mean I was writing at the coffee shop, I mean I wasn’t having my business meeting there because I was meeting with someone who actually has an office. So I stopped at the coffee shop to bring a coffee to the meeting and I was feeling pretty good about myself in an arrogant way, floating a little above the coffee shop crowd because everyone else there was already at their imaginary meeting of one, while I was on my way to my real business meeting with a real client in a real office. I walked a little too slowly to the cream/sugar/napkin service area, making sure that everyone saw I wasn’t staying, that I had somewhere I had to go, reveling in my simple triumph over the coffee shop culture, when mid-revel I glanced over the shoulder of a woman sitting at a table and realized in the second I looked and the second I lingered that she’s doing something with her hand and a pen and paper that was absolutely astonishing: She was writing. Dumbstruck I stood peeking over her shoulder, furtively eyeing her as she wrote in what looked like a journal. When I say she was “writing” I mean it literally, as in she was guiding a pen across paper leaving markings that formed letters that formed words that formed sentences. She seemed to be capturing her stream of consciousness, writing without spaces or paragraphs in perfectly straight rows despite the absence of any guidelines and all in the lost art of brilliant, emotive penmanship. Clearly something in her world had gone horribly wrong and it took all the nerve I could muster to not interrupt her thought stream and ask her what had happened to her Mac. Had it been stolen? Dead batteries? Did she have a court order preventing her from computing? Could it be I was in the presence of the last person on earth who didn’t know that no one writes in the coffee shop, they type? Didn’t she know that you’re supposed to sit at the coffee shop writing your screenplay on a two-thousand dollar computer like the rest of the world? I guess I wasn’t as invisible as I’d imagined because she became aware of the creep peeping over her shoulder and she gave me a brief glance that said Get lost. I concluded that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be having coffee without a computer companion, she was just showing off, rubbing our collective coffee shop noses in her individualism. She was intentionally insulting the conformist sensibilities of millions like me who take up precious space at the coffee shop, exercising our right to sit all day at a window seat, sucking wi-fi bandwith in exchange for nursing a cup of coffee. How charmingly offensive was her hand-written journal, what with it’s poetry or eulogy or apology letter to the Court. I turned away in disgust and came face to face with the shop’s hard-working manager and I joked with him that he was the only person in the place with a job. He cleverly replied that high unemployment was the best thing that ever happened to him. Was he worried, I asked, about that one girl using pen and paper, because she might be on the edge and pose a danger to us normals, because madness is what happens when your batteries die and your dreams die with them? Did that worry him? “Nah, nothing like that ” he said, “she’s just applying for a job here the old fashioned way and she’s on the Tell me a little bit about yourself part of the app.”

Mike Says: The coffee is mightier than the pen.

Mike Seader