Category: Coffee

Don’t bother

bee-halloween

I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now on the corner Bushwick Avenue and Cornelia Street in Brooklyn feeling as undead as the decorations on every second home in the area.

Jet lag is very real. I’ve not slept properly since 5am Friday morning (Perth time), but that’s a more than fair trade-off all things considered. New York is also very real.

Below are my very tired first impressions of Bushwick:

  • There are so many dogs around and pumpkins with faces carved in. All of the dogs and pumpkins are of varying size and style. A big dog walked past before. I’d say the pumpkins are 98 per cent seasonal.
  • I went for a walk down the Brooklyn Broadway thing beneath the J Line of the Subway, and everything here seems as real as it’s portrayed in the media. It’s pretty diverse culturally from what I can tell, which is pretty neat.
  • I made my first friend while I was eating lunch – his name is Strawberry and he’s a New York Knicks fan. He sang the same three songs when he was in church when he was younger, and proceeded to sing all of these in my general direction. Then he sang that Temptations song My Girl over and over until staff at the restaurant joined in. I wish I’d engaged more conversation and taken a photo of this guy but I was a bit sleepy with it at that point.
  • The coffee here is cheaper but not quite as good as in Perth, but I’m basing that on two experiences so far. There’s also a wasp in the coffee shop but no one seems too concerned. Maybe it’s the house wasp? Maybe it’s a Halloween decoration?
  • There’s some great street art happening. I’ll take some pictures to prove it at some point.

That’s probably about as much as I can write right now. I wanted this post to read as incoherent and scattered as my head feels in this moment, so here it at. Will do better in future hopefully thank you for reading anyway.

Roaches and records

roachy-1-diplodopest

Note: A lot of blogs I’ve read open with a cheery welcome post. Through no fault of its own this one doesn’t, but it picks up. 

It was an unbearably warm Saturday evening spent alone in a roach infested two-bedroom flat in Perth’s southern suburbs. The apartment – my apartment – had helped me back on my feet, but a lot had changed during my time there and things felt really stale.

The recent changes – a relationship breakdown, a loss of interest in my only hobby and the cancellation of my plans for the evening – added up to feel heavier than the sum of their parts, and as such, things were pretty flat.

I was moving in a few weeks time and most my stuff was packed, but instead of making new plans that evening I sat among the roaches and the boxes and tried to keep the roaches out of the boxes and honestly felt really sorry for myself. It wasn’t a great night.

Pretty much the only thing I hadn’t packed was my record player, and having spontaneously picked up a copy earlier in the day that was when I first listened to Mac DeMarco’s Another One.

I like DeMarco’s work, but I’m no fanatic by any stretch. That said, there was a moment on Another One which particularly stood out. It wasn’t even a song. At the mini-LP’s conclusion the Canadian crooner, now residing in some weird part of New York, blurted out his address and invited the listener around for a cup of coffee.

Normally an invite to anyone who cared wouldn’t elicit a second thought, but in these circumstances it did. I’d never had any motivation to travel to New York before so I slept on the idea, but within a week I’d booked my flights to JFK – initially in September by accident but eventually in October like I’d intended. And so began a plan to travel several thousand miles from the world’s most isolated city to one of its most populous and drink a cup of coffee with a complete stranger.

I’ve read that people have made the trip before, but I’ve not heard of anyone going from Perth to do so. Provided he’s home I guess I’ll know for sure in a few months’ time.