Category: etc.

A girl walks past us in the worst jeans ever. I mean, she needs a serious jeans intervention. We are naturally concerned.

ME (gasp, whisper): What is wrong with that girl’s ass?

HE: Yeah, it looks all flat and uneventful.

***************

After getting a free piece of chocolate from a See’s girl.

ME: So what’s the deal with See’s?

HE: I dunno. They all look like nurses. It’s like you never know if you’re gonna get chocolate or an enema.

***************

ME (singing, annoyingly, I’m sure):

It’s a bushel of flavor/ a smile when you’re down/ a tuba to oom-pah-pah/ a pretty girl to ooh-la-la/ Fanta, Fanta!/ It’s a bottle of fun!

Hey — whatever happened to Fanta? Do they still make Fanta?

HE: Yeah. But it’s like the soccer of soda.

***************

We need to keep each other up on the latest, you know.

ME (putting on makeup): I really need some of that cow teat hand cream.

HE (uhm, responding from the bathroom): My pee smells like tomato basil soup.

See, this is why we have each other. No one else would take us.

MB took my scanner to work?? He took it to work! To touch it. And use it. And mess with it. And and and …..

WAHHH!

And here I was gonna post another Godspell picture. What do I do now? DESCRIBE it to you or something?

Well, that smacks of effort.

It’s a really good shot of my bright green polka-dot bloomers, too.

Hmphh.

All right. A brief outline of how I came to be opening a wee coffeehouse.

And seriously, it’s wee. Truly bite-sized. Here’s how big it is: Open your mouth. Is it open? Okay. It’s smaller than that.

Background:

Back in September, our store — which is part of the #2 coffee company in the US, appaaarently — and 43 other locations from here to Portland were sold down the river to that hated Green Monster, Starbucks. Actually, only the retail portion of the company was sold; the wholesale side does gangbusters. Huge business. And our store does a huge businesss, too. Just a rather sizeable chunk of the stores in Orange County sucked and sucked deeply.

So here we are. Our store closes its doors on Tuesday.

But for the last four months, it’s been the long, hideous goodbye. Customers are losing their home, their hub, the place that grounds them, the place they feel less lonely, the place they’re not rejected. Most of them are gay men. Many of them are sick with HIV or full-blown AIDS. I’ve had men coming in literally crying because their place is closing. They don’t live what most would consider a mainstream life, so they certainly don’t want their beloved coffeehouse becoming a cookie cutter place that serves crap coffee with a snotty attitude. (Sorry, but it’s true. I used to love Starbucks, until I actually had good coffee. Once you discover you don’t have to settle for Starbucks — that there’s better coffee to be had out there — you’ll never go back. Plus, they’ve been real JERKS through this whole transition. Whatever lingering warm nostalgia I may have had towards Starbucks before this has completely died. Ka-poooey. Unfeeling cads.)

So where was I?

Okay. So back in October, a customer with a rich daddy saw and heard all the outrage about the Starbucks invasion and decided to open a new, independent coffeehouse a couple of blocks up the street. Get a wholesale contract with The Beanhouse (not its real name, but you know that, right?), serve the same menu, just call it something else. Can’t use the company name anymore on a retail entity, but you can serve their coffee and espresso drinks.

Then he disappeared to Costa Rica or Venezuela or somewhere for about two months. Didn’t contact anyone. He’s fabulous, but kinda flaky, you know? During his absence, the guy from up the street — the potential landlord for the new venture — decided the deal was off. Then one day, my boss, who’s moving to Denver or she’d do it herself, said to me, “Trace — why don’t YOU do it? I think you should.”

And suddenly, I thought to myself, “Trace — why DON’T you do it? Maybe you should.”

So … I talked to MB. He said yes. Talked to the guy up the street. He was excited.
Started taking email addresses in a guestbook from customers who want to fight the ubiquitous Starbucks machine. I have over 500 names in the book so far.

Oh, and don’t get me wrong. This is all being done on the thinnest, scrappiest of shoestrings. If last year made nothing else clear — we have no money! Hooray!! But, well, we’re getting very creative about it. Last year also made this clear — take a chance, you know? We came so close to losing what other people call “everything,” only to discover that it wasn’t everything. We still have we.

Anyway ….

The space where we’d be operating is part of a huge huge building. One side is a tea-deli, the other a wine lounge that operates only in the evening. In the front of the wine lounge is a small separate space; a kind of foyer, for lack of a better way to say it. That’s where we’d be. To keep start-up costs low, we’re opting for a sleek, probably black L-shaped espresso cart configuration. Nothing needs to be built-in that way, see? We’ll be able to have sidewalk seating out in front and use of the byoootiful private bamboo patio in the back of the lounge.

And suddenly, people from corporate headquarters are bending over backwards to help me. “You’re starting your own place? You’re gonna sell Beanhouse coffee still? Lemme see what I can do for you.” There are so many good people in this company. (Not counting the CEO who sold us down the river — but kept just enough of us so he’d still have a job. Oh, and got a nice bonus for the sale too. Bleah.) I mean, I came home from work the other day to hear some man talking on our answering machine. I heard him say, “Beanhouse” and picked up the phone without even knowing what he wanted: “This is Tracey.”

“Oh. Hi. Uhm, would you be interested in buying the contents of the store for (an insanely low amount of money)?”

I couldn’t even take it in. Really. I mean, initially I told him no, that’s more than I need, blah, blah, I can’t use all that stuff.

THEN … of course after I hung up, it started dawning on me: The espresso machine alone is worth that amount of money. It’s top of the line. The real deal. Not a thingy where you just push a button like some strangely popular places. (But I’m not bitter.) Anything I don’t use, I can resell. Hello, e-bay! And “contents of the store” means — literally — anything that’s not bolted down: tables, chairs, lights, furniture, grinders, brewers, plates, mugs, pastry cases, shelving units, etc.

Insane.

So I called the guy back. This kinda slow-talkin’ old-timey sounding guy. So nice. “If I can get that price lower for you, I will.” LOWER? I couldn’t believe it.

I still can’t believe any of this. I mean, I can’t even make sense anymore. My brain feels like it’s pounding against the walls of my skull. Overwhelming. And every day, at work, men coming up to me, “When? When? When are you opening?” Which is great, but then …. occasionally, there’s just the deadly crushing weight of people’s expectations.

And that I haven’t told my family ANY of this. And I won’t unless it’s successful.

So the head will be spinning for a while, peeps. Sorry.

And yes, I do have a name. I’ll be revealing it …. shortly.

And yes, I’m pretty much scared outta whatever wits I now have left.

You heard me, peeps. Neat-O. For all you library lovers: A blog devoted to the Dewey Decimal System. The contributors also tell you where, in a library, you can find books on the subjects of each post. I like this recent one:

Do you participate in outdoor sports but also like a well-pressed shirt? Then the sport of extreme ironing may be for you! This activity is an extreme sport in which persons take an ironing board to an unusual location and iron a few items of clothing. Recent locations include the top of Mount Everest, on a ski slope while skiing, in the air while sky diving, and even under the ice cover of a lake.

Comprehensive works on extreme sports are classed at 796.046 Extreme sports. A specific extreme sport is classed with the type of sport, e.g., extreme snow skiing is classed with skiing at 796.93 Skiing and snowboarding. We’re waiting for more literary warrant to appear before identifying a category explicitly for extreme ironing. In the meantime, because extreme ironing requires equipment, i.e., the iron, ironing board, clothes, and can use the techniques of various other sports, e.g., skiing, mountaineering, it is classed at 796.2 Activities and games requiring equipment.

And here I thought it was extreme ironing if a shirt was really really wrinkly.

Cool idea to this site. It’s like having your own personal librarian.

My Aussie sister-in-law just sent us some of her photos from Christmas. Here’s a picture memorializing the moment when one of the brothers experienced a bitterly cold convergence of art and nature.

It’s my favorite:

What a baby.

about the Chargers. I am dead serious. We are all in mourning. So, shhhhh!

Seriously. Do. Not. Speak. About. The Chargers.

Today was a day of tromping all over downtown to this government agency and that government agency to do all the paperwork necessary for the coffeehouse. The very very wee coffeehouse.

Agency 1, no problem. Agency 2, piece of cake. And the clerk is a huge Chargers’ fan, so we all blab excitedly — MB, the clerk, and I — about the upcoming game while she types my information into the computer.

Then there was Agency 3, the agency where I need to get my seller’s permit. You know, to sell stuff. I fill out the form and wait for the sad-faced woman in the pink cowl sweater to call my name. Anxiously, I cross and re-cross my legs, wiggle my foot inside my unbusiness-like Converse All-Stars. The pink lady strides by, with her pumps and her papers and her certain gloomy purpose while I huddle with nervous feet in a 1950s overcoat that once belonged to MB’s grandfather. All around us, people fill out paperwork, slouching and sighing irritably in those high school desk-chair combos as if they’re taking some lousy pop quiz. Luckily, we snagged the only real chairs in the room; however bowed and shabby, they’re preferable to the school desks. The whole room glows with that sick, bilious glow of institutional fluorescent lighting, as if the very air were queasy. I sense the Hispanic woman across the room staring at me and sneak a glance her way. She is staring. I look back down and wonder — is it the shoes? the coat? the jaundiced light making my face look jaundiced, too? Thankfully, though, I’m interrupted as the pink lady calls my name and ushers MB and me through the doorway and into the place where things get done, I guess.

We turn a sharp corner into the nearest cubicle.

“Take a seat,” growls a voice from a head that is under a desk. We just stand there, furrow our brows, roll our eyes towards one another. I bite my lip and wonder if we should do something to help the head be where a more business-like head should be. Before I can do anything, though, the head springs back up. It’s a woman with wire glasses and steel-wool hair and a big solid belly. A barrel, really, that bows out past her breasts. As she stands to her full — but short — height, I notice she’s got some kind of cane with pincers on the end. “I can’t get my pen,” she grunts, stabbing the pincers repeatedly at the floor. MB spies a pen on the edge of the desk. “Here’s one,” he offers. She ignores us, grunts and pinces some more, until she finally recovers her wayward pen. It’s the same kind of pen MB had found.

“Sit,” she commands again.

We do. She glares at the paperwork I give her.

“Okay. What kind of business is this? Sole proprietorship, what?”

“Well, sole proprietorship,” MB answers.

She glances down at the papers, up at MB, and barks, “If you are not a signatory, then you DO not answer. If you think you want to talk, go out in the hall.”

Her head is down again. We turn to each other and stare, open-mouthed and silent. She is everyone’s worst grade school teacher.

Ignoring us, she continues to peruse my information. Then, because I answered incompletely on the form regarding what, exactly, I’m going to sell, we suddenly have … a problem.

“So you’re not going to sell pastries, baked goods?”

Oops.

“Uhm, well, I most likely will.”

“Well, it just says ‘espresso, coffee, tea’ here. In that case, you don’t need a seller’s permit. You only need a seller’s permit on taxable items. These are not taxable.”

“Oh, well, what if I end up doing that?”

The bark again. “You’re not listening to me! You don’t need this permit.”

MB is sitting silently. I’m trying to read his mind, ask what he’d want me to ask, but I can’t think straight. She’s old and has pincers and I’m nervous.

“Okaay. What if I just add ‘pastries’ to that information that I put on there?”

“You can’t do that. I have to report what you first put down here.”

“How will anyone know what I first put down there?”

“I’ll know. I can’t do that.”

“Okay. Well, the wholesale coffee bean contract I’m getting requires that I have this permit.”

“No, it doesn’t. You don’t need this. If you’re selling hot pastries, you’d need this.”

“Okay. Define ‘hot pastries.'”

We are now glaring at each other. She openly sighs in my stupid stupid face.

“Okay. If you heat a bagel in a toaster, that’s taxable.”

“And if I don’t, it’s not?”

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t this just a little bit confusing?”

Silence.

“So I can’t just add to my information right now?”

“No.”

“So you won’t give me a permit today?”

“Nope. I can’t. Why are you making your life more difficult?”

Silence.

“So … if I want to serve pastries, I have to change my information, come back another day, and then I can get this permit?”

“That’s right.” She just plays with her rescued pen and stares at me.

MB stands quickly. I jump up. “Fine,” I bark at her, stomping my Converse as I go.

So, I’m wondering, do I need a permit for pincers?

The human comedy doesn’t attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world …. I am from elsewhere. And it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls.

— Eugene Ionesco