The Coffee Chronicles

I've decided that I'm human, and I have certain needs:

1. Coffee. It's a chemical dependency, on a scale somewhere between NYC pizza and uncut crack cocaine.
2. Books. This is not a desire, but a full-blown addiction. I'm not even talking about simply reading them; no, I'm at the point now where I simply want to own certain books. I'm an honest-to-goodness used-bookstore junkie; I love the smell of old paper, musty bookshelves, and the dusky scent of a well-read copy of The Fountainhead, three separate hardcover editions of which now sit on my shelves. See what I mean?
3. A scroll mouse. Seriously, if I can't scan a webpage with a flick of my index finger, it's just too damn hard. I don't have these calluses for nothing, you know...from guitar playing, of course.
4. Fame. Just a little, you understand - I'll even settle for a slowly growing audience.

Concerning that last item: lately, I've had visions at night, while I toss fitfully in bed for the first times in my life, concerning our future on the Internet. A small concern, but it drives my interest - blogging, publishing, gathering a following, a community - can we get together, write together, join a discussion? Perhaps we can all get together and form a blog webring, who knows? For the time being, these needs-cum-obsessions will drive me, keeping me up at night; but in all, as once advised by a friend, I will just keep writing.

You have, no doubt, heard about this webpage by now. I've received about four chain emails over the last week or so - all from different, internet-hip people, no less - that point me to this page with such excited fervor that it simply must be the latest wonder in the Museum of Idle Internet Browsing. Across the board, these emails say pretty much say the same thing:


Note the double exclamation mark - most exciting, and very grammatically inventive. Anyway, the page seems to be a new gimmickly feature of this site, which seems to be as much about sparking witty political debate - formerly a province of yours truly - as it is about selling coffee mugs and T-shirts. I personally think it's simply an excuse to sell a teddy bear with the words "bomb" and "Donald Rumsfeld" written on it. Nice.

Lately I've been making a habit of browsing my way over to the major internet news outlets, if for no other reason than for simple entertainment. Lately things around the world have seemed to take a macabre turn, what with all the citizen violence going 'round; but, that's another blog. For the most part, news gathered in this way is usually lukewarm, and not very well-documented - especially in the case of this particular site - but that suits the entertainment purpose just fine. And from that quarter, we find a report of quite a strange proposition concerning everyone's favorite ancient ruin, Stonehenge. What makes the paper interesting is that it was presented in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine - probably by anatomists, rather than the archaeologists or anthropologists one might expect. That being said, it shouldn't be a shock to learn of the report's particular findings. In the theory outlined in this paper, it turns out that Stonehenge was not an altar of sacrifice, an astronomical calendar, a solar observatory, or anything researchers had proposed in the past. Actually, to hear them tell it, it's a vagina. A really big, stone vagina. And you thought your first time with a human was awkward; imagine doing it with the whole Earth:


I actually saw Stonehenge during the summer of 1994; the entire experience was like a dream, really*. We took a coach from London's Victoria Station out to Salisbury, and from the moment the stones rose over the edge of the Plain my perspective was clouded in history. I had read so much about he henge that it seemed as though I wasn't - couldn't really have been - there; it was almost as it 5,000 years of heritage were standing in the way of making it real, if you can believe that. Making my way around the outer circle of the site, I approaced the Heel Stone, which aligned itself with ane henge's major axis, its main opening. For a moment, I lowered my ever-present camera and stood, silently staring into the mouth of history.

And come to think of it, I did feel sort of aroused.

In the "More News From the Proletariat Front" department, it seems like I've been spending more and more time trying to decide what actually interests me, either at work or at home. It's no secret that Americans work a lot - perhaps, as some evidence would show, too much - but that doesn't mean that we can't be interested in what we do. Work at two or three jobs, and one of them should at least me mildly engaging - it's just the law of averages, really. Or, keep your options open, and change your world around as often as you please. Lately, I've begun to sell all the useless crap I seem to have accumulated over the years - and as a result dragged from coast to coast - to save space, make some cash, and just simply get more mobile, for chrissake. There's an ideal that I'd like to think we aspire to, that is: to inhabit a space so that it may be packed into boxes as quickly and with as little effort as possible. Sure, it looks like we're totally moved in, but in truth, everything we own in within easy reach of a cardboard box, subtly grouped together by genre, use, or fragility. Voila, the collapsible home.

And so I reach a kind of impasse with myself; that is to say, I find the need to keep myself interested and intellectually charged-up, lest I throw all my stuff - whats left of it, anyway, after an Ebay orgy - in boxes and drive off to find yet another place to live. Not a looming threat, exactly, but there is the sense that there are things to do, and time's a-wastin'...what do you do to keep yourself interested? And, more importantly, what do you do when there are too many things to do? Hmm?