One of the joys/destitutions of being a starving artist is that you get to pick and choose which modern conveniences/inconveniences you get to try and survive without. In some cases, these are sometimes not that hard to live without. (Why have a car when everything I need is within walking distance, there is low-cost public transportation 10 minutes from my apartment, and there are low cost, convenient bus routes that will deliver me to wherever I need to be in Ohio whenever I need it?). Others are vaguely important to have, and make their presence known as soon as you go without it for any period of time. (God DAMN, but it gets cold in here. Maybe heat should have been included with my rent. Oh wait, I don't know how to turn on this radiator from 1955. Balls)
In the case of Internet, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, I don't feel tethered to popular sites such as Facebook as much as I once used to. On the other, I'm not able to get on Facebook. Withdrawal symptoms have already begun to set in. Quickly.
(Ah, good. No updates yet. But that means I'm becoming unpopular. Time to update my status for the fourth time today.)
(Ah, that's the stuff.)
In the case of blogging, that means that my journalistic efforts here will happen more on a weekly basis than I had originally intended them to. I do apologize, as it has been over one week since you last looked at my blog. (Cocked your head to the side and said you were angry over my clogs? Yeah, that was a forced BNL reference, I apologize. I'll try to do better next time.) While I don't want this to seem as though I'm ignoring my writing, (Quite the contrary, I'm using much of my lacking the Internet to focus on writing things like stories, plays, and poetry in my spare time. You know, the things I moved out to Chicago to pursue) I will be forced to manage these entries to about once a week. Ideally, this would be at a regularly scheduled time (Let's say, Tuesdays for example), but given that my two means of gainful employment are restaurants with irregular scheduling and whatever theatre I do end up doing will be irregularly scheduled as well, I make no promises.
Therefore, let's go ahead and shoot for Tuesdays, as a means of keeping that dull day of the week a little more exciting.
Now, where were we?
The coffee shop as the social gathering place.
Last time I wrote was from a coffee shop. This week, it's from a coffee shop. All because of the wonderful introduction of free wireless internet. (or WiFi as it's being called by young uns these days. And old ones. And in-between ones.) This contribution to the social domain is invaluable to those, such as myself, that lack the means to provide internet in their own homes. It is also valuable to those who are seeking to get work done in a location far from their own home, or for those who somehow have the ability to afford both a small laptop AND a $4.00 cup of specialty coffee, but no home.
(Ya know, stranger things have happened. Yesterday on the Red Line, an elderly gentleman sat down next to me as I read my Eric Larsen, sat still for nearly twenty minutes staring straight ahead, and proceeded to calmly ask the train if anyone had a "War ship" that he could drive. When nobody responded to him, he calmly took out a little black book, opened it, and next to the number 75, recorded what looked to be a combination of Arabic, Sanskrit, and a Richter scale recording the seismic vibrations of the train. Not that I looked over his shoulder as a means of spying on him, no. I was rather looking to see if by the #75, he would be recording "twenty-something male, 210 lbs., brown hair, method of death - bombardment by warship, loaned by red line passenger; on a Monday". One can never be too careful on board the Red Line after all.)
It used to be that when I pictured a coffee shop in my head, I imagined it being as something from the TV show "Friends", where the coffee shop served as a gathering point for the six leads of the series. While enjoying their favorite beverages, they would share whatever was going on in their lives, joke with each other, and somehow always manage to occupy the same couch in the center of the shop. Even though it was busy at all times, and they all had different jobs, schedule demands, availability, etc. In short, "Friends" is impossible, but that is besides the point. The coffee shop was the hang out place. You went there for meetings, to see friends, to go on a first date, to hear musicians play, etc. This is something that I remember from my carefree youth. (aka, the late 90’s/early 00’s, in the days when owning a laptop was something of a rarity, as they were still something of a luxury item. Case in point, my first laptop in 2004 cost something in the vicinity of $900. My, how things have changed.) The few times that I went to a coffee shop, it was always with friends, it was always busy, and people were gathered there with other friends talking and chatting the night away. This included both locally owned shops, mass coffee chains like Starbucks or Caribou, and those little coffee spots that one could find inside of a bookstore. Like Borders.
(I used to have a job at Borders. Before they went the way of the dinosaur. Was in line to be a full timer, even an assistant manager with some kind of power. Then I could have transferred to Chicago, gotten a nicer apartment, not had to worry about feeding myself hand to mouth, etc. But no, someone had to declare bankruptcy because of poor financing choices regarding United Kingdom stores, where bookshops have been operating independently since the 1800’s thank-you-very-much and mass American chains are looked down upon with English scorn and disdain, as well as a lack of e-reading devices, kind of like how Netscape Navigator got caught with its pants down once Internet Explorer was created, or how Altavista was rendered irrelevant by Google, or… (etc.etc.) Anyways, I had an ideal fantasy life centered around having a Borders job, but that went right out the window. Now I serve pie for a living. That’s right: pie.)
Anyways, the introduction of Wifi was initially offered sometime around 2005, but it came with a cost. Something around the nature of $.95 a minute or something, if I remember correctly. (Which is saying a lot) According to that fountain of knowledge Wikipedia, this became a free Wifi option in partner with AT&T in 2008 if you were a Starbucks card carrier, as a form of loyalty reward to customers who were abandoning local coffee shops right and left. At this time, those local stores began offering free Wifi to try and draw some attention away from Starbucks and to retain those customers who weren't ready to sell out (their souls) to the corporate (demon) entity that is (Cthulhu/Satan) Starbucks. Rather than get caught behind the movement, Starbucks changed their offering to entirely free Wifi to all customers in 2009, thus completing the transition of coffee-shop America to the Seattle-based corporate swill that is Starbucks.
(When asked what the greatest contributions to American society come from Seattle in the 1980's, many might say grunge music, but more will probably say Starbucks. Eddie Vedder is crying somewhere (for $50 a pop).)
Anyways, the Wifi is now free at Starbucks, and if it could be metaphorically compared to a substance, it flows like honey from the gilded mouth of that weird topless mermaid-thing on the side of the coffee cups. Which actually doesn't sound that bad until you realize that she's actually a She-Demon, she will feed on your essence for all eternity, and is a Twilight fan. (I made that last part up for effect, but the rest is true. I swear!)
But let us look at what has happened now. As I look around the Starbucks I am sitting at, which is not even a thriving metropolis street corner (Already the differences between Rogers Park and, shall we say, Wrigleyville, have made themselves apparent. I live in the equivalent of BFE to Chicago that Waynesville is to Dayton that Dayton is to Cincinnati. More or less.), there is one thing that stands out.
All but two customers in this Starbucks are sitting at a laptop. The exceptions being a little old lady reading the Tribune and some older gentleman just sitting staring into space. The only conversation is coming from the baristas, who are trying to keep the shop from feeling like such an awkward place to work by filling it with friendly banter that no one pays attention to. Not even the older gentleman staring into space.
(Note: this is not the same elderly gentleman who asked about warships on the Red Line as a means of plotting my demise, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were both members of some mutual association. You know, the "Crazy Old Warship Pilot Club with a Vendetta Against Twenty-something Young Males". Or COWPCWAVATYM as they're calling it on their business cards. Which may or may not be the backs of discarded pizza boxes.)
I don't know what this really says about our society that everyone within a coffee shop has come there solely to sit within their own isolated bubble of wireless networking. Maybe everyone here does have a thriving social life, and the coffee shop has become a place where it is preferred to come to work because it is such a relaxed quiet environment. This transition from a bustling place of noise and social interaction to a quiet den of technological solitude has been somewhat seamless, governed by the quickening pace of the evolving cultural changes, as well as what constitutes the social norm. It has also been affected by how fast technology is evolving. (There are three of these iPad contraptions being utilized as I type this, although I'm still not sure what the advantages to having a giant touch screen that offers all the things one could get on a laptop, but that might be a blog for another time.)
All I know is that within five years, the definition of what it means to go to a coffee shop has changed, without anyone saying or doing anything different. The hegemony of Starbucks has shifted so that noise is frowned upon now, rather than being embraced, and if you choose to meet friends, you are looked at as though you have decided antlers and horned helms are making a comeback in fashion and should be embraced. (That's how you identify the Vikings in crowds nowadays. You know, because Vikings have horns.) On the contrary, if you have a laptop, you are entitled to sit in your own social bubble, working on your own terms, isolated from everyone else in the shop, and anyone who interacts from you is violating your personal bubble, and thus, asking for a beatdown. That's the norm now, and one can only imagine that when "Friends" is discovered twenty years from now by our children, they will wonder why everyone in the coffee shop is talking to each other, when speech has been subconsciously banned from Starbucks so as not to distract people from their internet time, and we will wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.
I can only hope that if I choose to talk at a coffee shop that there are no homeless gentlemen with war ships nearby, for their vengeance will undoubtedly be swift.
(Postscript #1: I realize full well that I am working on my own laptop here, in a corner, isolated from everyone else in the shop, and that I have made no effort to interact with anyone in the shop, except for briefly waiting my turn in line for the bathroom. I include myself in the adaptation of cultural means, rather than proving myself the exception, but I embrace it because of the lack of Internet options in my own apartment. I also acknowledge that I have no friends, but that's something that should just go without saying, right? Right guys?)
(Postscript #2: This originally was intended to be a study of a perceived rivalry between Ronnie Van Zant of Lynard Skynard and Neil Young, as heard within the Neil Young songs "Alabama" and "Southern Man", where Neil Young calls out Southerners for their history of racial discrimination and slavery, and Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama", where Van Zant calls out Young for being Canadian. That blog entry took a swift hit from three subsequent points: 1), when it was discovered that Van Zant and Young were actually friendly, that they collaborated several times, and regarded each other quite professionally; 2), that since Lynard Skynard are from Jacksonville, Florida and NOT Alabama, their moral grounding is questionable at best; 3), that Neil Young's response to Lynard Skynard's lyrics seems to have been to slightly shrug, giving it a hearty "Worse has happened, eh?" before going off to groom his sideburns and enjoy a donut while watching "Hockey Night in Canada". (I may have made that last point up, but I can't find anything that seems to point to Neil Young being upset with Lynard Skynard anywhere, so we'll go with my scenario instead, eh?) As a result, examining the feud between the two sets of musicians reached a journalistic dead end, and I was forced to turn elsewhere for my inspiration. Sorry.)
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