Well, it’s been a while.  I’m back from Wisconsin, and here in Champaign trying to pull together the last chapter of the dissertation, to defend, I suppose, at the end of the summer.  I’ve been wasting time however fixing up the beginning of the diss, when I should instead be finishing up the last chapter (which isn’t a simple chapter, and which will surely suck up a goodly amount of work).

Anyway, I’m here in the usual coffee shop, wondering what it is about this dimly-lit place that transforms human beings into strange caricatures of the species.  Each person has some distinctive and strange feature, and most of them are here all the time.  The guy who’s always trying to switch chairs with people, the older couple to bring their own light, the dude with huge monitor he likes to bring in and plug into his Mac.  There are an endless stream of ghost-like regulars who seem to populate this space.

Anyhow, this is all preliminary to a complaint about the worst of them all: the strange new dude, who is apparently? from out East somewhere, with short dark hair, big plastic glasses, about 5 pounds worth of rings, bracelets, and watches, and a Long Island accent that I swear to God has to be fake.  He seems to enjoy doing two things in particular: wandering in and sitting down, plugging in his cell phone, plugging in his earpiece, and holding hours-long conversations about basketball and gambling pools of some kind.  Alternately, he sits down next to one, turns on his laptop, and starts playing terrible music on his laptop speakers; which can’t possibly sounds good, even to him.  An endless loop of “Blue Suede Shoes” and other Elvis standbys played on laptop speakers is almost too terrible to contemplate, much less hear.

Anyhow, I just left the coffee shop a bit early last night, rather than tell him to shut the fuck up with his laptop Elvis.  I guess my calculation was that since he’s one of the regulars, I’m probably better off being in the “persons this guy doesn’t speak to,” category rather than risk a conversation and end up in his “talktoable” column.  But one more such encounter with this oddly obnoxious dude, and I’m afraid I’ll have to provide him with a brief but helpful explanation of human manners.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.