Breakfast: Reading the Coffee Grounds (September 14, 2012)

"THE HAGGARD woman with a hacking cough and a deathless love whispers of white
flowers … in your poem you pour like a cup of coffee, Gabriel" (Carl Sandburg from "Cups of Coffee")

I woke from a weird dream, rehearsing to myself, as I often do, the names of women I have known. I don't know why I do this, perhaps it is because I find comfort in giving voice to a woman's name; or maybe it's a way to remember some of those to whom I once mattered; or maybe, like Boethius languishing in an Italian prison, it’s an attempt to invoke the muse and wrench inspiration from the anxieties and confusion that shutter us from insight and the happiness it could bring.

With only the hazy afterimage of the dream in mind, I stumbled downstairs for coffee. I like my coffee strong, which Jim Harrison once described as having enough density to obscure a dime dropped into it. Months ago the plunger of my French press broke, so now I use a tin measuring cup, which has gathered innumerable dents. The number of uses indicated by these dents reflects the desperation I feel in the morning as I seek to force a few hours of lucidity into my day.

I drank my coffee, and after finishing the cup I noticed that the grounds resembled pictures of the Milky Way: at the bottom was a disk composed of dark spots of various sizes increasing in intensity toward the center. A wisp of chunks rose from the disk to cling to the lip. As we all do in the actual Milky Way, I ride that outer bit, hunkered down in the galactic outskirts, looking both in at the luminosities around which so many gather and out toward the silence that wanders away. As with so many introverts, I am pulled toward the calm of those open stretches, such as that I experienced from the portion of US 2 running through North Dakota. Along the margins of the highway are wild flowers, remnants of the mostly lost tall-grass prairie, and huge, steroid-heavy bulls that rise as high as the stunted and mangled ash trees.

On one trip, I stopped, after hours without seeing a soul, at a rest area, which amounted to a green-stained cinder block building, housing one stall with what struck me as a very lonely toilet. I approached one of the bulls that snorted at the sight of me; its skin rippling against the horse flies that darted from bush to bush. When the bull moved the earth stuttered in protest, and an instinctual panic rose in me. The bull could have turned me into a pool of guts in seconds. In that moment, however, I felt outside of time, maybe lost maybe rooted in the whispers rather than yawps of life. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, I don't suppose that place or time led me to any insight nearer the source; indeed, I'd argue there is no source. Yet at that moment I wasn't in a hurry, and I had no desire to justify my existence in terms relevant to the enormity of those luminosities, those meanings that allows us to place our meager minds in relation to the clock. Maybe that moment drew me nearer freedom where personal failings and vulnerabilities don't paralyze the mind and chill the blood. A location where those you disappoint don't cut and run, but crack a beer or poor a drink and tell you a joke, waiting out your "hard time," as you do theirs. The cynics would no doubt claim that this is utopian crap; the optimists might wonder how such behavior would "pay off"; and those remaining might just ignore the slightly embarrassing, existential drivel.

The shutter across my window shuddered, and I sat the cup down, grabbed a banana and headed out toward Lunch.