Empty and Powerless
May 17
Pretentious Coffeehouse Haiku
Dark, bitter brew dripped
through the filter of my heart,
served black, and not sweet.
I'm currently sitting in Caffe Trio on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Meg is drinking an iced mocha, and I just slurped down an iced vanilla latté. Yum. It's terrible outside-- just dead gray, not even the drama of a real storm. There's some undistinguished blues playing overhead on the speakers. At some point, Caffe Trio stopped being a pretentious coffee shop with black-clad baristas quoting Goethe and became, like, a diner with the coffee shop as an afterthought. They still make really good drinks, though.
We've been bookstoring. I found a Dennis Etchison novel I haven't read before, and it's not even an old one-- it's from 1997, called Double Edge. Otherwise, no really nice surprises-- I bought Full Spectrum 5 because it was cheap and I haven't read it, and I'm in the mood for good, innovative short fiction. I did find a couple of books M'ris has been looking for, and I picked those up for her. Of course, it's possible she found one or both of them when she went bookstoring with David earlier this week. If so, I wouldn't be sad to own either of them for myself-- Delaney's Driftglass and Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. We've been to, oh, three used bookstores today. It's remarkable how hard it is for me to find books I want to buy (fiction, anyway-- there's lots of nonfiction I want, but it's more expensive). Most of the good books I found today I've already read, or already own, or know I can borrow from Timprov and Marissa or Heather. I usually find lots of yummy stuff at Second Foundation in Chapel Hill, but they're closed today due to a power outage-- some transformer blew up. Sigh. I'd wanted to go to the Avid Reader, too, but they've gone out of business-- just an empty storefront, now, with dust in the corners. I never found that much good sf there-- they have much more of a literary bent-- but still, it's always a shame to see a nice used bookstore go out of business. More things changing.
Change seems to be a real theme on this trip.
Going further back in time, I had a nice last day at Mom's house yesterday. We all went to the beach, and I actually got into the water for a while, though it was a bit on the cold side. Still far warmer than the Pacific, though. We had lunch, and then Meg and I left, in the early afternoon. We drove to Goldsboro and visited Helen and Wally, Scott's parents. I love them so much. I know so many cool grown-ups! Helen caught me up on all the hometown gossip. Lots of fun. Then we visited Dad for a couple of hours. He treated us to a dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and biscuits and gravy-- good delicious southern fare of the sort I've been missing. Meg and I overnighted in Raleigh, got up this morning, and have been wandering in literary circles ever since.
In a few hours we're meeting Mike Jasper and his wife Elizabeth for dinner at the Rathskellar. In the meantime… I dunno. Maybe reading (for both Meg and I), maybe writing (for me), maybe more driving around and shopping, maybe a movie if the mood strikes us. We've got no special agenda today, and that's nice. Very relaxing.
