The walls are covered in cheap, oak wood paneling, and the benches in the booths by the eastern wall and north-facing window are upholstered with cracking orange vinyl. The grill cooks all have white aprons, paper hats, and Greek accents. There’s your standard diner counter towards the western wall, behind which is the kitchen. Wiseass, Aqua Net waitresses emerge from behind the counter to heed patrons’ endless demands for cups of mud.

I enter Standee's, drape my shaggy blue coat over a stool at the counter, sit on one of the stools, and order my own bottomless cup.

The diner is populated by the same ratio as always: Thirty percent hipster kids, half of which are lovers lighting each others’ cigarettes and sweetening each others’ coffee while enjoying post-coital pancakes; the other half are seemingly unattached, and nurse their hangovers with caffeine, nicotine, and home fries while they talk about music or recap the previous evening. Another thirty-five percent are middle-aged to elderly men wearing a various assortment of baseball, taxi driver, or wide-brimmed hats. These are men whom the waitresses know by name, but once they step in the diner, they’re all called “hon.”

The remaining thirty percent of us are sundries … a young family cooling the mashed potatoes for their toddler, middle-aged women reading the paper and waiting for their husbands, and people like me, looking for a peaceful place to read where coffee-drinking and smoking can be done simultaneously. Standee’s is a perfect blend of humanity and farce.

Weirdly, Pink Floyd and Bob Marley waft from the juke box, and I wonder who's responsible for choosing something so inappropriate for this setting. A faux-pas of such ambience-shattering proportions would never fly if this was my movie set.

I’m at a point in my book where the author is indulging in a particularly invigorating rant. Though I’m not a habitual underliner, I underline this:

In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared, the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left.

I decide not to sympathize with that right now. I find another couple of sentences which simply read, “Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.”

I drink cup after cup of coffee, and finally check out of Standee's once the glut of caffeine and poetry turns my fingers into lightning bolts.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Arm-in-Arm Down Burgundy - 09.05.05

Motivated! - 08.25.05

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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