I first started using the term “coffee philosopher” back in high school. I even created a little Platonic-Marxist (I was a confused young man) constitution for a government by the three most qualified groups – the coffee philosophers, proletariat poets, and the philosopher kind.
My friends and I were consumed with various fantasies of intellectual mandarins from times past – Allen Ginsberg drinking coffee in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse; Hemingway writing his “one true sentence” with a pencil in a Montparnasse cafe; Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at Cafe Deux Magots in Paris; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung playing chess at the Cafe Central in Vienna; even Samuel Pepys visiting London coffeehouses for the latest political news.
Of course, in suburban Florida, we had no such place.
Typically, we congregated at Denny’s, drinking cup after cup of coffee; Matt, Damian, Scott and my other friends also smoked Camel cigarettes.
Later on, our we found places like CAMS (Consortium for Art and Media Studies) in Pinellas Park and Clearwater. Mother’s Milk, inside an old house on the edges of the then decrepit downtown Clearwater. Later, there was Insomnia (tag line: “Because there’s nothing else to do in Palm Harbor.
Sometimes, an older person would be there (older is a relative term – by the standards of my teenage self, I would be older, too). In the sometimes unsubtle but also unrecognized (at the time) sexism of our culture, we would be especially drawn to these people if he were a man. For at least an evening, his greater wisdom and deep thoughts would be admired, as if he were Sartre and we his willing disciples.
I have never found that place that would truly recreate those images from past periods. In the past, I looked for this place in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, Dublin, Madrid – even in Paris.
Now, in truth, I most often buy my coffee from a place down the street called Peregrine Espresso. They serve the best coffee in DC (for me – this is a fact a not even in question – the coffee is indisputably delicious). But they are not a good place for would-be mandarins or would-be disciples to hold court.
As an adolescent, sitting in Denny’s, I used to pose the question to my friends – what if this is what it was like in Paris in the 1920s? Sitting around a dirty coffee shop, complaining about how people were petty and there was nothing to do? Fifty years down the road, will there by graduate theses about the “scene” in Dunedin back in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Are these moments recognizable, palpable as they are being experienced?
the coffee philosopher 