Always I teeter on the brink of sanity, but I’ve never yet toppled over the edge. It’s happened to so many others, though, good people lost. The best minds of my generation, as Ginsberg said. Some became Christians, or Republicans, usually both. Some watched television or drank liquor until it swallowed them. Some wore neckties. There are countless paths to normalcy.
When I was young and thought it mattered what I thought (and maybe it did!), I tried to take the road less traveled, with some success and some twisted ankles. Walking alone on a path of my choosing, there weren’t many friends along the way.
Ah, but they were fine friends. None better have any known. We sat in a coffee shop and sipped a shared disdain for ‘the normals’, talking and dreaming how everything should be, and hating how everything was. In the world we were lost, but together at a non-Starbucks we were Don Quixote, or at least Sancho Panza.
That coffee shop was, in retrospect, the place I was happiest. It’s where we swapped ideas and dreams, poems and zines, and between iced lattes and games of chess we solved the world’s problems.
Then we went home, each to his or her own direction. All of us grew old except those who died young, and now all the others have died, and what’s become of me? I’m a limping, coughing, tubby old man. Whatever I do and wherever I go, it’s slowly.
Of all of us, I was always the least, and now I’m the last remaining. Stephanie… Joe… Bruno… Bill & Steve… a few others, but not many. Our time is gone, and my time is near its end.
The solution we’d decided over coffee and chess never came to pass & never will, but it’s the correct solution, I still believe: Help the poor by taxing the rich. If the rich won’t pay the tax, then eat the rich and seize their wealth and share it with we the people. After all, their wealth couldn’t have happened without us.
The catch, of course, is that accomplishing the above would require millions to rise up and stand together, but millions can’t squeeze into even the best coffee shop.
Which is, by the way, Café International, at Haight & Fillmore in San Francisco. Take the #7 or #22 bus, and tell Zahra that Doug & Stephanie said hello.
Stephanie is gone and I’m two states away, but I’m hoping to return for my usual, the Avocado & Cheese sammich and a cup of the Café’s marvelous just plain coffee, with cream, no sugar. If I’m not at a table, smiling and sipping some morning before I die, I’ll be there shortly thereafter.
10/11/2026
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