The Coffee Chronicles

I have a directory on my local hard drive where I keep all the unsorted images I've acquired over the years. These tidy piles of digital data run the veritable gamut: personal snapshots, remnants of lost moments, acquaintance-ship propaganda; however, regardless of origin or destiny, the contents of this clearinghouse of nostalgia distracts me from time to time like nothing else I have known - and this night, as it turns out, has proved no different.

Putting aside the subordinate phrase for a moment - but just a moment, now - I could liken the effect to a sudden swerve on the freeway. A well-placed memory, like an errant ray from cosmic space, can strike and transfix; with the convergence of mood, music, and a full stomach, no-one is safe, I suspect, fom these flights of fancy...nihilists all, we must neverthess believe in something.

And so, choosing - perhaps blindly, as we shall see - to believe in the only evidence of myself that I can see; that is, the past, I stand on the fantail of my life, watching the roiling wake of my own passage. Heading myself off, so to speak, at the pass, I will point out that at some time in the past - no pun intended - I had decided resolutely that such perspective was inherently, and unreservedly, foolish; surely, even the Titanic could have avoided her meeting with destiny had someone actually been looking out for it. So should I remember to move stern-to-stem in my own life, planting my shoulder firmly into the wind, instead of spending my days staring into a rearview mirror, searching in vain for clues to my own existence.

But nostalgia is so damn addicting, it's hard to give it up. Opiate of the masses, indeed. Well, screw it, I'm off to bed. Enjoy the arc of your lives while you're still in flight, kids. Remember: those who jump in, even with both feet, can fly; those who watch from the sidelines just get wet. And as the Black Crowes have already put it, and quite aptly,


Enough, then.