Category Archives: Coffee

McCain videos, and much better than the ones I shoot

Mccain_starbucks

We’ve initiated something new for The State‘s editorial board. We’ve been tiptoeing up to it for a year or so, with my relatively unobtrusive gathering of video snippets from our meetings with newsmakers. But on Monday, when the board met with John McCain, Andy Haworth of thestate.com shot the whole thing on a real video camera — he’s got a tripod and everything — which is a far step beyond the low-res, no more than 180-second clips I’m able to grab with my little digital still camera.

I haven’t gotten around to posting anything yet from that meeting — too much to digest during the busy days that have ensued — but Andy’s put up some of his gleanings on thestate.com. You can find links to them here.

While I’ve been running around having lunch with a representative of the Edwards campaign, dropping by a Giuliani town-hall confab, posting video from that, meeting with Sam Brownback and writing a column for tomorrow about that, I have managed to get one key question answered regarding the McCain meeting Monday: Andy was curious about the Starbucks cup that played such a prominent role, looking almost like a Hollywood-style product placement. What sort of drink was it, and why did it have "Buzz" written on the side of it?

I had not noticed the "Buzz," but it was obviously a reference to Buzz Jacobs. So when I couldn’t reachBj_boling
him, I asked B.J. Boling (that’s him at left, listening to the senator’s speech to the Columbia Rotary Club) to find out for me what sort of drink it was. After a reader recently unjustly accused me of being a latte-drinker, seemingly attaching importance to such a choice, I was concerned about what the senator’s choice might reveal that was heretofore unknown. As a longtime McCain admirer, I worried about the "Buzz" — in my experience, they don’t write customers’ names on cups unless they ordered something fancy, if not something downright effete.

I asked him late Monday, and had still not heard back Tuesday morning, which had me doubly worried: What were they hiding? Please, please, tell me it wasn’t a caramel frapuccino!

B.J.’s response:

I left a message for you on your cell phone last night [which I had not yet played]. It was
regular coffee from Starbucks in the Vista.

… and the world resumed its accustomed shape.

This thing’s gone far enough

OK, I should probably admit to you where I was going when I drove by the girl who was talking on the phone while jogging. I mean, if I don’t face up to my problem, how am I ever going to get better?

I was on my way to … well, to this place again. What’s so bad, or noteworthy about that? Well, this was the first time ever that I left work and drove halfway across town and back for no other purpose than to fetch myself a cup of coffee. In the past, it’s always been, "Hey, I think I’ll go book-browsing," or, "I have an errand to run in Five Points," or, "I need to go to a hotspot to do some blogging" — and pretty much always on a weekend.

(Oh, and for those of you keeping score on my time management: Except for that 20 minutes, which substituted for a lunch hour, I was very productive the rest of the day. Especially after that last coffee. So judge not, lest ye also become a blogger.)

This time, I didn’t even pretend there was an excuse. I had been thinking about my next cup of coffee ever since I had my last one, at breakfast (unless you count that half a cup I got at mid-morning, after begging the guy in the downstairs canteen to open back up just for me to get a refill, and then draining what little was left in the insulated carafe thingie). So first chance I got between meetings and such, I put on my coat, muttered something about "an errand or two to run," and drove straight there.

Here I am acting all bemused at the idiosyncracies of youth (my last post) one minute, then the next I’m standing in a long line of them waiting for a caffeine fix. I listen to them rattle off elaborate, absurdly complex orders that sound like litanies chanted in a foreign tongue — with repetitive responses intoned by the help behind the counter — and edge forward, waiting for when I can order my "plain coffee." The lad in front of me actually asks, "What do you have?" The reply is, "Depends on whether you want hot or cold." Everyone — except me — is hugely entertained when he asks for something in-between, and is informed that’s one thing they don’t have.

By the time he removes his inconvenient self and I belly up, I’ve scrapped plans for "just a small one," and order the "grande." The counterman overfills it — no objections from me there — and I ruin a perfectly good dress shirt and pair of gray pants trying to drive back. Ah, but it’s worth it. It tastes lovely. I even find myself tearing away the insulating wrap to savor the inanity of "The Way I See It No. 49." I am utterly lacking in discrimination at this point.

This is madness. I managed to quit Vicodin when I had taken it day and night for weeks after I broke my ribs kickboxing several years back. (And believe me, I felt its pull. No wonder it’s the favorite addiction of TV writers, from "House" to "The Book of Daniel.") So what’s with this? Why does this dark brew charm me to greater foolishness each day?

Well, I’m going to summon what shreds of self-respect I have left. Tomorrow, one coffee with breakfast. A big one. But that’s it. Or maybe another small one, if they’re just going to dump it out anyway. But no more mad, mid-day quests.

Today I hit rock-bottom. There’s only one way to go now.

The Caffeine Also Rises

This is blogging. This is the true blogging, el blogando verdadero, con afición, the kind a man wants if he is a man. The kind that Jake and Lady Brett might have done, if they’d had wi-fi hotspots in the Montparnasse.

What brings this on is that I am writing standing up, Hemingway-style, at the counter in a cafe. But there is nothing romantic about this, which the old man would appreciate. Sort of. This isn’t his kind of cafe. It’s not a cafe he could ever have dreamed of. It’s a Starbucks in the middle of a Barnes and Noble (sorry, Rhett, but I’m out of town today, and there’s no Happy Bookseller here). About the one good and true thing that can be said in favor of being in this place at this time is that there is basically no chance of running into Gertrude Stein here. Or Alice, either.

I’m standing because there are no electrical outlets near the tables, just here at the counter. And trying to sit on one of these high stools and type kills my shoulders. No, it’s not my wound from the Great War, just middle age.

So that puts me in mind of Papa. No, excuse me: I once had lunch with Mary Welsh Hemingway (wife number four) at a hotel down by the river (the Mississippi, not the Seine). It was 1976. She drank a Bloody Mary; I had one of those crisp, cold Dutch beers in the green bottle. It was good, and it did not mount to the head as those things sometimes do. We were standing in line at the buffet when I started to ask her something about "your husband," and I stopped myself to say, "It seems silly to keep saying ‘your husband’ as though he had no name. Is it, uh, is it OK if I just call him ‘Papa‘?"

No, she said. That was just for family.

Good for her.

Anyway, this line of thought got started partly because of the writing-standing-up thing, and partly because I’m standing under that mural they have around the cafe area in Barnes & Nobles, with all the famous writers sitting in a real cafe looking intellectual and bohemian, and Hemingway is up there with Joyce and Faulkner and Neruda and …

Well actually, no, he isn’t. I’ve stepped away and walked around the area three times now, probably drawing stares at such odd, peripatetic behavior, and he’s not up there. But he is on the one on Harbison, isn’t he? I remember it because it bugged me that they showed him smoking a pipe. At least, I think they did. I’m not in a position to check. Anyway, I’ve never seen a photograph of Hemingway smoking a pipe. Not the kind of thing he would do. I’ve got a certain stereotype of pipe smokers in my head, and he doesn’t fit it. Of course, I could be wrong about him.

I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does. I’m going to walk around again to see for sure if he’s up there…

Nope.

You know, the coffee here is a lot stronger than I expected. She warned me that it was really hot and really full (too full for me to stir in my six packets of Sugar in the Raw without spilling), but she didn’t say it was this strong. It’s enough to make a man start babbling about nothing. Nada y nada y pues nada.

We are all a lost generation.

Who said that? Oh, no — she is here…