Cafe Lament
My social life centered around cafes, but now it’s in video games.
Years ago, I lived in a low-income housing unit that was eight or so blocks east of Powell’s City of Books, where I worked as a bookseller. Every morning I would light a cigarette as I walked out the door, and by the sixth block the cigarette was out and I had arrived at my favorite coffee shop of all time, Courier Coffee. Courier had roughly four small tables, a wooden bar, and no power outlets. I usually spent two hours before my shift drinking coffee, writing, and shooting the shit with other regulars.
Portland, known for its coffee scene, had walking tours for visitors. Guides would take groups of folks to Stumptown, Heart, Courier and beyond to give them a basic overview of the area’s coffee culture. I remember typing furiously on my Chromebook, hunched over a cold coffee, when a tourist group walked in and the guide told them “Courier is where all the artists hang out.”
I’ve been social distancing for six months now. 2020 marked the end of my cafe haunts for the foreseeable future, so now I spend most of my time scrolling through Twitter and Tik Tok. I was okay with this for the first couple of months, but recently the grief has set in. I miss reading, writing, and socializing over chance meetings in my favorite cafes. Depressed, I did my best to chat with friends over FaceTime to scratch the social itch, but it was awkward, painful, and boring.
Seattle coffee culture was very different than Portland. Coffee culture here felt like it was shaped by Starbucks, which cafes either tried to emulate or reject. When I moved here, I noticed that more people were in a hurry. People in line were more likely to snap at you if you got in their way. The coffee came quickly, and the people were tremendously busy. I liked it, though. The pace reminded me of New York, and I was never out of new cafe options to investigate. Ambitious, I bought the domain “everycafeinseattle.com” and hoped to keep track of all of my new spots. This project quickly fizzled out, and I think my ownership of the domain expired. But in private, I marked a Google Map with all of the cafes I wanted to visit, and slowly made some headway.
I developed a weekly routine for visiting cafes, which I called my “orbit”. Usually I drink coffee twice a day, once at 8am, and once at 3pm, which made scheduling meetings easy. I went to Capitol Coffee Works on Sunday at 3pm. On weekdays, I had my 8am espresso at either Convoy Coffee or Elm Coffee Roasters. There rules were no stricter than “drink coffee twice a day at roughly these times” and “try to visit as many different cafes as possible.” Soon, I began to recognize familiar faces in my haunts, and they began to recognize me too. We’d exchange names and promptly forget them, but a kind of unspoken familiarity developed (which I call ambient proximity).
This ambient proximity is what I miss the most. I felt very cozy and at ease being surrounded by people, and now being surrounded by people is out of the question (unless it is for a protest). On an average day, I interacted with 100 people at my job. Now, the only person I see daily is my partner, Cheyenne. My unused social energy has morphed into neuroses, and Cheyenne has noticed I’ve become more irritable and strange. Needing an outlet, I turned to video games.
I’ve never really played video games before. My parents forbade them in the house growing up, though my sister and I did our best to work around this. But, in the year of our lord 2020, Cheyenne bought me a Nintendo Switch Lite. Then I built a budget gaming PC. Now I spend roughly ten hours a week playing Sea of Thieves online with my friends.
I jokingly tell my friends that video games are my “social lifeline”, but it’s kind of true. Video games provide the closest thing to ambient proximity that I can get. In Sea of Thieves, you roam the open ocean in a boat of up to four people. I recruited some friends from college, some friends in Seattle, and a handful of others to go sailing. It is incredibly refreshing to spend time with others doing something, as opposed to having to stare at each other for the duration of a Zoom call.
Cafes in Seattle have opened, mostly for to-go orders. Some of them have tables set up six feet apart, but I personally am uncomfortable with the idea of being in a building with others, especially when my country has no real control over the spread of COVID-19. I’ve visited my favorite spots for a quick drink, but mainly I brew garbage coffee at home.
The thing that surprises me the most is how I spend my time reminiscing about my cafe life. Cheyenne and I will sit on the couch and talk about the things we miss from the “before times”, and it feels both good and bad. It’s a kind of grief, and from what I know about grief, you go through phases to process it. Stories help. Talking about it helps. And finding new holy spaces helps, even if it happens to be on a virtual ocean with friends you can’t see.
