a love letter to a bookstore coffee shop shelter from the swarm

this must be the place

it doesn’t seem like anything special from the outside, there on sunset blvd next to club pilates and the 826 time travel mart.

on the ‘kooky mad maximalist <—> cultured minimalist museum’ spectrum, it leans hard toward the madness, the ‘read more books’ and ‘drink more coffee’ signs in blue neon and the thin books only smart art heads can understand. so leans everything here in LA. 

but then you walk in and you are lost by which i mean you are found, here in the darker than it would seem interior. maybe it’s because of how cramped everything is, or how little the eight foot woman at the raised register seems to care about you, or the siren call of books upon books upon books that have drawn you now between two shelves, philosophy and the occult on one side, new fiction and non on the other, but your eyes have adjusted and now everything is dark except the books. the books shine, each calling you with their titles and their artwork and their ideas and their acceptance of you, you, and even you.

the clanking of coffee being made beckons you further, into the cafe that’s always full and empty at the same time just like its patrons, mad and sad and alive in the quiet ways that make me want to scream except i come here for the silence. 

it took two solid years of coming here, four, five times a week before the people making the coffee learned my name.

but once i was in, i was in. it was my third place, my demented cheers, a refuge from the loathing and the loathed, the place where i’d go and get high and think about how time couldn’t exist because here, it didn’t.  

i'm here now for the first time in a long time and the woman who is also alex says hi to me like she remembers me like we have history like she knows i am alive and not a dead thing walking. she asks what I want and i say espresso and she says okay and i wait, taking it all in, the people here whose identities all blend in spite of my brain’s best efforts to sort them each into their little boxes but i cannot.  

i can’t ever tell the difference here between who is strange and who is unstable, who is man and who is woman, who is dead and who is alive, because the differences don’t exist not really

mostly we’re dead except when we’re not, those brief moments of life jolting you awake like a can of surge soda when a friend texts or the bell on the door jingles and for some reason you actually hear it and you remember for a second that your feet are on the ground and your body exists within three (!) different dimensions all at once - time and space and - wait what's the third? does space get two? cuz space is length and width? 

some mysteries are not meant to be solved. 

i see a book titled 'this must be the place' and i agree. 

another woman pokes her head around the corner of the kitchen and asks if my dog would like a wishbone. i say "robert? yea, he can have one i don't know if he will."

“Ah, so he’s more of a cheese man” she says and I say “yup.”

"is this THE robert?" alex asks. 

she remembers him. 

he remembers her, too, in his way. but not as much as he remembers the sharp swiss heading straight into his yum yum.

here, he is not some indefinite article — a robert, one of many — but THE robert — one of one — specific, known, definite.

i sit and eat a salad with avocado and two fried eggs and sunflower seeds that they toasted and some little orange slices and THE robert sleeps and then i read a book i haven't bought yet because sometimes i'm just browsing and it’s by leonard cohen or it’s a collection of his, the last of his work, his notes and letters and i read them and they are like bukowski but lighter somehow, less agro and more like music but sourced from the same soil of darkness, the same roots of rot. 

roots of rot who the fuck does this guy think he is?  

cohen and the salad and the espresso and the notebook and the music and the cheese digesting in THE robert's system all combine into a feeling that this must in fact be the eternal timeless 3d place and i never want to leave. 

and yet.  

ur turn

do you have your own version of stories aka a local indie place that is a fuckin vibe and makes you think who am i and what even is time? tell me a story about it.