Double Flee A

Stories in 25 words or less.
I wish they'd find something else to call them:
Espresso Stories
In Cookeville, Tennessee, armpit of the universe, there once opened a coffeeshop "downtown", across from the "old" courthouse. The "new" courthouse is huge, and it houses the biggest asshole, JUDGE HUDSON YOU C***S****R, and the most corrupt and lucrative business in the county, the judicial business. The coffeeshop is called "poets on the square". Now don't get me wrong, it's the kind of place that will let you use the phone and all, but what an awful name. Even a true coffee lover like myself is revolted by this crime. There's something about poetry that has always put me off. I think part of it is that it consists, to a large extent, of pretense. Anybody can put some words together and make you think, though some poets tend to be better than others. I don't know that I'd ever devote much time to learning about poetry. Is poetry a thing that people talk about to impress other people? Poetry, like advertising, ruins a perfectly good language. If you were really that good at putting words together, that sure of their meanings, I think you'd make a cohesive point with them, not just use about ten of then and leave the reader to work him or herself into a lather over your tortured genius. Poems tend to be the preferred medium of zitty, hyperbolic, self-obsessed teenage girls who think no one else has ever felt like they do, those who wield the language the worst, owing in part to their feeling that they don't suck at writing poetry. Which they do. Young women: please get the hang of menstruating without writing poetry. Thank you.

Have gourmet coffee and poetry become associated in the southern mind? If so, I can guarantee that it is a negative trait they share, the unspeakable "homo" association. It's ok if women go there, but if you blindfolded Gary from the sewage plant and brought him in there he'd probably kick your ass. He'd at least want to, even if, instead, he made some tiresome pantomime of gay people drinking coffee, which I'll bet you he would. You know the one? Pinky finger extended, ridiculous lisp, lips smacking? If you've seen it once you've seen it a thousand times, and you've seen it once. That gay southern man thing is played out. It's probably one of the stupider things that it hasn't become popular to make fun of, maybe because of the paradox that it would present to a comedy audience, and the subsequent unpredictablity of an audience that realized that the other half of the audience was laughing at them. Wouldn't I like to see the contorted faces of those idiots, though, in their moment of clarity, when it became clear that their night of being a fun-loving audience member with what they thought were irreproachably tried and true prejudices had taken a horrible turn for the worse.

Anyway, my friend with the free house is getting plenty of pinball in at the local dive bar, and playing plenty of playstation 2. So don't worry about him. He's not getting a job or anything too taxing. Really. He'll be fine. Gaw.

posted by dale @ 11:27 PM