 |
No. 125 - Directionless
I told her, "I'm going out for coffee. We're out" and closed the door behind me and drove for six days looking for nothing I could put my finger on.
I started with the best of intentions. There is a corner store just six blocks away from our small little house, too far to walk quickly and too near to drive to. I drove anyway, and after three blocks, a nice song came on the radio, and I wanted to finish it, so I kept driving.
I circled the block a few times, looping the corner store until I was certain that the man behind the counter was on the phone with the police. I couldn't very well go in after the clerk had determined me to be casing the place, so I kept driving.
That's how it started. Through a strange round of coincidences and occurrences, I ended up in Oregon.
I started in Michigan.
Oregon turned out to be really, really nice. The place is stacked with firewood, except all of it is upright and has leaves. Big green and blue mountains, huge thunderheads, vast bays full of salt and the remains of a thousand broken ships. When I got to the coast I thought I should turn around and drive home, but I saw a diner where you could sit and drink coffee and watch the ocean beat against the rocks. The place was deserted. I got a cup of coffee, even though I don't drink it, and sat in the window trying to watch the ocean. Except the ocean had been so violent for so long that the spray it sent across the road had clung to the diner windows and dried, leaving behind crusty salt smears. All I could see was myself trying to see anything but.
A family of seventeen -- I counted -- walked in then, and a few minutes later, a cast of J. Crew catalog models followed. It got muggy inside, so I walked outside in time to see a jet of water screw up out of a fissure in the rocks and spiral into the gray sky, where it was promptly struck by a bolt of lightning that traveled back down the spray of water and into the ocean, where everything suddenly was electrocuted and died.
My cell phone rang on the eleventh day. I was in Jakarta. Even the fish out here were floating belly-up, scorched.
"Hello," I said.
"It's me," my wife answered.
"What's up?" I asked.
"I just wanted to make sure you were okay," she said. "The news just said that the corner store was taken over by terrorists, and they shot everybody, so I wanted to make sure you weren't there."
"I wasn't."
"Good."
The silence that followed was comforting, and then she broke it.
"Where are you, again?"
"Jakarta," I said.
"They don't have coffee in Jakarta," she said.
"Sure they do. I'm going to get the best stuff on Earth."
She paused. "You should go to Colombia, then."
"Columbia? Ohio?"
"Not 'us'. 'Ia'. Colombia. Like that place in Central America, I think."
"I thought they made cocaine."
"Coffee, too."
"Oh."
But a man in a wheelbarrow told me the best coffee was manufactured in Philadelphia. "They grow their own beans in the basement of an old steel mill," he said. "Swear on my mother's grave, best stuff ever made. Got that great metallic tang to it."
I called my wife from Hong Kong. "I'm going to Philadelphia," I said.
"For what?"
"Coffee."
"Oh. Where are you now?"
"Hong Kong."
She didn't seem to know what to say next, so I skipped her turn and went again. "It's supposed to be manana delish," I said.
"Tomorrow delicious?"
"What?"
"What?"
I stopped. Repeating 'what' again would be too much. "I didn't catch that," I said.
Another pause from her end. "I already got coffee," she finally said. "They reopened the corner store yesterday. And my mom came over, so I needed some fast."
"Oh."
"Sorry."
"No, it's...I mean, it's no problem. You gotta do what you gotta do. I guess."
"You're mad."
"I'm not mad."
"You're hurt."
"No. I'm fine. Really, I'm okay."
"When will you be home?"
I told her I would be home soon and hung up the phone. All around me there was noise and big yellow and red signs and the ground was littered with chopsticks the way a ballpark parking lot is littered with cigarette butts.
There was a McDonald's on one corner. Ronald McDonald was wearing traditional Chinese garb in the photo on the window. I got lucky. They had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee. I had to pick the tea leaves out, but it was the best coffee I'd ever had.
...
Okay, so I know this isn't a dialogue. Sue me. But dialogue seems to have aged without me lately; I still pride myself on writing great dialogue (or at least bizarre enough that it seems great) -- I just feel like building things around it now. So what's gonna happen here? Will I keep cranking out one heartless dialogue every couple of days, or once a week? Or will I do something crazy, like tear the site all apart and start at the beginning again?
If you read me often, then you probably know what's coming. Any site that has over 35 design incarnations in less than two years is going to have a problem with consistency.
Anyway. New direction coming right up. Any ideas? Because right now I got nothin.
| |
