How to Avoid Writing in Coffee Shops
by Nick George.

In Austin there were many coffee shops, but I couldn't write in any of them. I tried, but I couldn't. I would go to the Green Muse on the corner of Oltorf and South First and scribble away, but their paintings were too dark and the people in them would stare at me until I couldn't concentrate. It had a nice patio in the back with smooth wooden floors and trees growing up through them, and that was where I heard Speed Levitch read his stories about working in New York as a bus tour guide. They were very good stories, but all we could think as we watched him strike an Aristotelian pose and sweep his hands through the air was that he had been in Waking Life and we wanted him to tell us to "Beware, and beware."
The Spider House was on the north side off Guadalupe, and there some of the genius madmen featured in other scenes of Waking Life still held court, though now they did so in hushed whispers at corner tables because they were becoming celebrities. The Spider House was a garden of hanging lights, oriental rock paths, and woven walls of ferns. I would sit in the garden there with my notebook and try to write, but it was too close and I couldn't help looking around the room like a drooling sycophant, caught in the spells of the pulsing greenery and hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the madmen.
I couldn't write in the Halcyon Cafe because it was not really a coffee shop. It was a place where the stylish, young professional crowd came after work to swap stories and brag too loudly. It was in the warehouse district on Fourth, and I hardly ever went there without a purpose. It was stuffy and too clean there, but they had a tobacco shop in the back corner that had that good, earthy tobacco smell. There was always a pretty girl working behind the counter who would chat with you for awhile and make you feel comfortable smoking in the presence of a lady. The Halcyon also had good paintings from time to time. They weren't always pop culture kinds of paintings; sometimes they had paintings of real things. Grant Whipple used to hang his paintings of spoons, bottles, and screws in the back corner above the leather couch and I would go just to see them because they danced in the light on the canvas. Many people would reach with an outstretched finger to see if the objects were real, and I would laugh when they realized they had been tricked. I couldn't write at the Halcyon Cafe because their paintings were too good, the chairs were too soft, and it was too clean and nice-smelling.
For a short time I could write at the Ruta Maya International Headquarters. It was off South Congress on a hill behind the Expose Gentlemen's Club and I could walk there in ten minutes and set up my computer on the balcony that looked down over the stage and the dance floor. There weren't many pretty girls at the Ruta Maya and they didn't have good paintings. There were always ex-flower-child-turned-soccer-mom types milling around and taking pride that they knew the baristas, but I could sit up on the balcony in the corner and not be distracted by their children or the world beat CDs they played on the stereo. I went there on Sunday afternoons to read the paper and write because there was a lady who taught salsa dancing there every Sunday, and I could work while their Latin rhythms blocked everything else out. I wrote there for a time in the summer because it was cool and dark, but not long into it I met a vegan girl with dreadlocks at a party who told me she worked there. She was very pretty and there could have been something there, but I had to stop going to the Ruta Maya because I didn't want to have to come up with anything clever to say to her.
The Bouldin Creek Cafe was a nice place to sit in the sun and drink a beer on an afternoon, but not a very good place to write either. It was on the corner of First and Mary on the Southside and it was just two blocks from Vulcan Video and the boutiques on the SoCo strip. It was at once hip and unhip, as everyone who went there considered themselves hip but mostly pretended not to be. There were always dogs there, running around off their leashes, sniffing other dogs and introducing themselves to other people. They were attached to pretty, confident girls that had tattoos snaking into hidden places. These girls would play checkers, drink lattes, and talk about honky-tonk music. It was a good local place where many people would walk in off the streets and you would see some you knew. They had a screen porch out back where I could sit and escape the flies, but I couldn't write there because there were too many hip, pretty, confident girls with tattoos, and I couldn't focus.
In Austin there was a coffee shop close enough for anyone to walk to. Some of them had live music, some of them had poetry slams, and some of them were just squat little rooms in buildings that wouldn't rent for anything else much good. But I couldn't write in any of them. There were things to look at, people to greet, and beers to drink. Some were made to be cozy and in some you didn't feel badly about spilling or taking an abandoned newspaper. Some served good, cheap food and some served bad, overpriced food. They all had excellent coffee. But I couldn't write there. There was always too much energy, too much activity, and too much life.