A Starbucks Reserve

I’m sitting here in a Starbucks Reserve coffee shop, a place where one can watch people roast the very coffee one’ll drink. The ambience is pretty nice—the space being used in many ways—as are the hours.

It reminds me of a place I once stumbled upon in the Bronx. I’d actually been on my way to the Botanical gardens when I saw this cafe sign underneath some scaffolding. The words underneath were more than odd: “they say a still soul is entropic, but my daughter ran and danced thinking her soul free and entropy got her too.”

The Dark Day when I discovered a new, even odd, cafe in the Bronx

I’m not sure what it was that pulled me in — that logo should have had me running away — but in I went and found myself in a factory churning out some diode widgets. Amongst the pleasantly quiet rolling belts and industrial stamps and robotic arms making the diode-widgets was something like a bookstore and coffee shop.

It was the pipes that reminded me of a similar coffee shop in the Bronx

It was love at first sight, this place and I. The design of the belts and other contraptions that seemed to reach deep into a chasm, formed a natural labyrinth for the cafe and random books and seats placed here and there.

There were piles of these diodes, too, almost like they were making too many of them. One employee was a full time artist trying to come up with ways to use them. Some of the piles were just piles, while others were post-modern sculptures of piles.

I stayed long enough to finish my coffee. But when break time came I was certain that the workers, with their jolting movements were robots too. It scared me, this possibility, so I walked out.

A week later I heard that the cafe had been burned down, and I felt bad that I hadn’t returned to see more of it. There were some accusations about how the Feds had burned it down, that someone was seen sneaking about, but soon there were counter accusations that it was a terrorist friendly place anyways; apparently those diodes might have been used against us. Soon the story was buried.

Yet I still think on it. In many ways, the oddity of the place, with its deep chasm, reminded me of Labyrinth of Souls. A secrete underground lair filled with someone moving against the establishment. Always beware when one tries to move against the powers that be.

Nevertheless, I sometimes wish all cafes could use their space like that one did. Glad to find one that was close.