So Gradual As to Be Mistaken for Natural

  

I went back to Michigan recently and found myself slightly out-of-step with how my friends remember me. Having kids has changed a lot of my tendencies, and even altered my beliefs somewhat since my life has come to revolve around them. My friends remember me as an arch-iconoclast. Someone who was rigidly against a lot of what others took for granted, and constantly on guard against hypocrisy. Which, of course, I’ve had to relax somewhat. Nearly everyone marvels at my possession of a smart phone. “I never thought you’d get one!” they gasp when I take it out to look something up or show pictures of my kids. In truth, neither did I, and I often think of getting rid of it—as I suppose anyone aware of any spiritual aspect of life must, but the material side tends to overwhelm the spiritual obligations with concreteness. I’d love to return to the forest, to communicate by letter from my log cabin, but I don’t think anyone would write back, much less come and see me. I’ve sent a few letters in the past year that I’m still waiting for replies to. 

I don’t really think of the smartphone thing as being excessively hypocritical. You need one of those things to navigate the modern world. As I still wish to belong to the world, I don’t worry about having one; I can always turn it off or leave it at home, though admittedly, I do those things very seldom. 

The way in which I’ve defied my friends’ expectations in the last decade—as well as my own—is that, when I was younger, I avoided buying things from multinational companies as much as humanly possible in the US.

Before having kids, I didn’t feel I needed a car. Getting around places like Chicago, Lansing, San Francisco by bike is not only easy, but fun. And I seldom had to move anything that wouldn’t fit in my backpack. Maybe once a year, I’d rent a car and take a roadtrip. This relative support of big oil, I could live with for the pleasure of seeing friends, and the freedom of movement afforded by a car, but for daily life, I never found it necessary. 

I also used to buy most of what I needed second hand. I could spend an entire day looking for a new pair of jeans in the thrift shops and, if I didn’t find anything, it wasn’t very important. 

Some of these changes have nothing to do with having kids; I just got lazy. When I realized that H&M (for all their horrible labor practices) had cheap and decent-looking clothes that fit me. I just started shopping there. I have to admit, I never liked thrifting, but the west has such a surplus of clothes, it makes the most sense. 

But I don’t think I ever would’ve bought a car if it weren’t for kids. We bought our first car used for a few thousand dollars just before our daughter was born. Then we bought one new car a few years later and, when that grew too small for the family, we bought another. I hate driving around town, I hate buying gas and fueling so much of the bullshit in the world by being another human who requires the stuff to live. I’m aware that before I had a car I supported oil through so many other aspects of my life (like buying anything for one), but at least I didn’t buy the stuff directly from the pumps on a regular basis like I do now. At least I still ride my bike to work. 

But these are all minor transgressions against my past self when compared to my patronage of Starbucks. I think that one still leaves the homies scratching their heads and asking “could this even be the same guy we grew up with? Didn’t he hate Starbucks with a passion?”

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan in the 1980s and 1990s, and I watched a homogenization occur in that time. The downtown which was only local business gradually shutdown, emptied out, and the crowds sought the comfort of the predictable in the ever-growing row of chain fastfood places by the highway, or in the bland predictability of the malls. 

While we may have had McDonald’s, and Gap, we weren’t white collar enough for a Starbucks until the early 2000s. Even then, they put the thing way out where 127 intersects 94. I imagine that at least half of the clientele are people driving between Detroit and Chicago and, espying a convenient coffee break, pull off. 

The lack of Starbucks in my day-to-day didn’t stop me from hating the company when I was younger. I saw Starbucks as the ravager of my most adored of small businesses: the independent café. When I first discovered cafés and coffee as a student in junior high (circa 1995), they were all independent. Theatre Coffee downtown was where I sat on Friday evenings with the all-girl Goth set, drinking cinnamon French sodas and thumbing through the Anne Rice paperbacks that stocked the complementary bookshelf, to Café Royal in East Lansing where I went on my first dates, drinking pint glasses of resinous, obsidian-dark coffee like no one roasts anymore, to Café Gourmand in Chicago’s South Loop where I first discovered my student persona, studying hour after hour and frequently getting up to have my cup refilled. And anyone who knows me has heard me reminisce on the beauty of Theios, which, to be fair, was more of a diner, but I never did anything but drink coffee there. 

These places—as important as they were to my development— are all long gone now. Like so many other great cafés I discovered in these United States. How many of them were plowed under by Starbucks (or other more regional chains, for example in mid-Michigan, ugh, Bigby) is hard to say, Theater Coffee was probably gone before Starbucks even left its roost in Seattle, killed by the crushing economic despair sweeping over the rust belt in the 90s, when downtown was quickly emptying and becoming synonymous with crime. Honestly, I can’t imagine what the people who started Theater Coffee were thinking. It existed at a bad time in a bad place, but it introduced me to a very important concept, and I will always be grateful to those risk-taking owners for that. Café Royal closed and became Espresso Royal and, in its upgrade as it moved out of the parking complex in downtown East Lansing, acquired too many people studying, you couldn’t even get a seat in that place. While the original was drafty, dirty and usually nearly empty, they had the best coffee I’ve ever had, so smoky and oily, it was like a tire fire, and it set the standard for coffee for ever after. 

And now, I never go into a local café and find anything darker than a medium roast. Coffee snobs (who influence everyone else) having declared that anything darker than the subtlest of roasts is “burnt” and should be beneath one as the accident of chain coffee (read: Starbucks) that everyone naively accepted. 

The preponderance of lighter roasts being marketed as though a revolution against corporate coffee tastes. The little guy is taking the bean back to its rightful place of tasting like juniper, citrus, honey and all kinds of other crap. They are freeing our palates from what Starbucks has forced upon us for years. 

This argument has become completely ubiquitous. I see it from Michigan to California. Very few independent roasteries do a true dark roast, like the one Café Royal had in 1997, so afraid are they of seeming to support the Starbucks sacrilege. What is overlooked here is that coal black coffee was the revolution; at least the one I grew up with. In the 1990s, most coffee was a watery broth kind of stuff you got at Denny’s, made to be drunk four or five cups at a time as the waitress came around and refilled. 

It was the midnight, coal roasts that started to crop up at the small artsy places with the dumpy couches, and ashtrays perched all over the place. Dark roast coffee was a challenge to the existing banal order of watery medium roast. It said, “look, this can be done another way where we really tap into the heart of this bean, bring out those beautiful oils and, yes, burn them because they taste good like that!”

I came of age in cafés that served these blackhole roasts. Airpots lined up on the counter with hand-drawn caricatures of people in berets reading “French roast”, pint glasses with carboard coffee sleeves, and the first taste of bitterness. I can’t help it, I’m nostalgic for it, but what happens when I go into a new café and inquire after it? Either I get a “dark” roast that’s on the lighter end of medium, or my taste is scoffed at as too plebian. “Go back to Starbucks” being the implication when the barista smiles and shakes his head. 

What a shame that our beautiful revolution was so co-opted as to eventually become the sole name in coffee and, therefore, be something to rebel against in turn! I took it for granted when I was younger that dark roast coffee would forever be hanging around in an oily haze in every little café. 

But revolutions, if they are successful, eventually establish the standard to be rebelled against, and, as Starbucks, and (to a much lesser extent) Peet’s made dark roasts the inescapable standard, they were also fomenting discontent. The old couches, the pint glasses, these things became anathema to a new generation of café proprietors who, instead, opted for Edison bulbs, air plants, white paint, wood and glass. The lash back took the comfort out of coffee, declared it to be coddling. A little café in the SoMa of the early 2010s looked like a laboratory with people drinking coffee out of beakers while coffee molecules were painted on the walls. 

Again, the intention was freeing the soul of the bean. Only now, the bean was imprisoned by the oils which oozed from it and burned in the erstwhile revolutionary process. The new generation of rosters turned down the temperature. They tried less and less heat for shorter and shorter periods of time, and they had some weird eugenics thing going on, too. Believing in the “purity” of certain types of beans. Never mixing them and putting “single origin” on everything, as if mixing beans had somehow polluted their stock, making them less, rather than more. 

I learned to avoid these coffee laboratories, after all, they were really easy to spot which such thematic décor. I got tired of getting patronized when I asked if there was anything dark. I never believed in tasting the terroir of the bean, reading two paragraphs about it on a notecard while I waited for it to be brewed through a lengthy (and showy) pour-over method. It always tasted like some kind of broth to me, like it was salty somehow. Meanwhile, the proprietor would be leaning over the counter, eager to see if he had convinced you in the perfection of light roasts, but I could never lie. They’d turn away in a huff after I delivered my verdict: “ ahh, it’s ok”.

 At this point in coffee history, these kinds of “light roasty” labs were popping up in cities, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods, but they were not yet the standard. There were still many cafés of the old type that proudly served smoky, black coffee. You could tell which was which quite easily by the smell, and the smell of the dark roast places is such a romantic smell to me, hinting as it does at a warm interlude on a cold afternoon. A place both for physical warmness, but also to warm the heart with the kind of strong coffee that clings to your clothes when you exit to the cold afternoon. The light roast places smell like so much fresh paint and the sourish smell of beans not long roasted. 

It was just a few years ago when I realized what happened. That the fringe of light roast places in North Oakland, Detroit, and Pilsen, established the standard for “independent coffee”. I never walk into a new independent café and find a legitimate, oily, black dark roast on the menu anymore. On the positive side, the politics of roast preference have died, and I also don’t get a lot of flack for this preference, most places are happy to have a “dark roast” only these are generally way too light for my preference. 

So, despite my incredible antipathy for Starbucks as a kid, they preserved something too important to me to be let go. Dark roast coffee isn’t just a flavor to me, its youthful memories preserved in coffee amber. All the places where I sat hunched over a laptop, leaning back with a paperback. All the places, I set my backpack on the floor. The places where I mused, and others around me mused, the places I met like-minded people and conversed with them. The only place I really felt comfortable going on a date. The warm place removed from the cold and the empty place in the summer with the light hitting the floating dust motes. Dark roast is like a perfume to me that stirs memories of someone long-forgotten and, in its absence from local cafés, I am unable to give it up, at least as long as some place is still serving it, even if that place still embodies the corporate greed for expansion which I think makes the world a less interesting, homogenized place. I would much rather buy the coffee I want from a local place, but can’t choke down something I don’t like to stay true to my ideals, so, I guess in the end, it is just taste that wins out, leaving not only my friends, but even myself scratching my head and asking “who the hell is this? Is this the same kid who used to wear the ‘Starbucks, Fuck off Get out of My Neighborhood’ shirt?”

I can only answer, “it is, but I wore that shirt without realizing just how unrecognizable the world would become in middle age, without realizing the importance of memory in or preferences, and without realizing just how much I dislike light roast coffee. However, the ideal is still there, and I look forward to a time when I get act upon it again.” 

Looking Back on the Height I Have Walked down from

The height of my knowing myself occurred probably between the time I came home from the Peace Corps and when I started working in Paraguay. It was in this period that I felt the greatest self-possession, like nothing I did was a misstep, nothing I did was untrue. When I moved in this period, I moved with decision and certainty; I knew myself and I was busily engaged in this knowing, daily testing the parameters of who I was. 

I worked; I wrote; I read; I traveled; I skateboarded; I had a huge appetite; when I went out on Friday or Saturday, I stayed out late. I felt beholden to no one. I was my own person, finding my own way and doing it comfortably. I didn’t have to compromise anything. In Paraguay, I realized, however, that I did, because I lacked a degree of professionality.

I still do things in a somewhat slipshod, less-than-professional way, I guess. But I’m in a position now where my methods work well enough, and I don’t think they are much questioned, balanced, as they are by my obvious passion for what I do. 

Yet, I have never recovered from the blow to my self-possession. Today, I can’t even feign the kind of relaxed attitude I took toward life back then. Some of it was sacrificing parts of my personality to meet a more generic standard, but most of it is that I have kids now and no one responsible for children can be sure of anything, leastwise themselves. There is too much chance involved. 

My kids are well-behaved—at least I think so—most of the time. But at five and seven they have developed their wills and they exert them strongly. Thus, their behavior is very often unpredictable.  

One of them is reading on the couch, the other sits down next to her. 

“Go away” she tells him flatly without looking up from her book. 

“No” he responds, or, more likely, he doesn’t say anything, but makes no move to go. He must show that he doesn’t live by her command.

In in seconds, someone is screaming at the top of their lungs. Perhaps because a fight ensued, and they were hurt, or through being emotionally overdrawn by the situation, just not having the capacity to deal with being bothered any further. 

As the parent—the responsible party-- it is up to me to diffuse such situations, and I am utterly inept at it! The kids are screaming, I try to make myself heard with rational next steps, no one is listening, so I raise my voice to angry-dad level and say curtly “stop!” which only serves to make everyone feel like they’ve violated some rule when all they’ve done is try to work out who is sitting where. Not really that big of a deal, but no dad’s yelling again. 

We’re in the grocery store, and we’ve managed to make it past the toy aisle without any demands, or whining, but then they’re climbing all over the cart, constantly in danger of tipping it or making me crash into another shopper. I can’t resist trying to reason: “Hey guys, try not to climb around so much. We don’t want to run into anyone or fall over.” But though I repeat these words, they aren’t heeded, or can’t be heeded and, once again, we come to the point when all I have to use is “stop!” and everyone is upset again, the tensions are up and, rarely, do things suddenly come down from this level. The next thing to happen will likely catch the attention of everyone around us. The cart will tip, a carton of something will fall and break, or, simply, the screaming again. 

I once made my way comfortably through the world because I knew what I wanted and I had a reasonable idea what would help me achieve it, now, what I want is largely not for me, but for my kids, and I have no idea how to achieve it. I blunder after them as they race toward adolescence, doing little more than picking up what they drop along the way and yelling “stop!” occasionally. 

When I am at home, I feel ineffective and somewhat superfluous, when I am at work, I hope everything is going alright at home. I no longer have the means to be 100% anywhere; part of me is always where my kids are and this makes me less engaged generally. 

If my wife and I have any time to ourselves, I have a hard time really being engaged in conversation unless we’re talking about the kids, but that is not a topic that can be resolved, we only talk about it to try to get a vague sense of understanding, like groping around an unfamiliar object in the dark. 

I suppose some people anticipated having children long enough that they were able to go into the rearing of the children with their self-possession intact, but not me. I wasn’t around children much growing up, and, in my twenties, I never thought about having them. Even after we had kids, babies don’t prepare you for anything. They might not sleep, they may scream on airplanes, but everyone forgives you because it’s a baby. You smile and shrug and they smile back; babies make you feel more connected to the world. Most people like babies so, by extension, they seem to like you, the parent. 

But once your kids are out of toddlerdom, the expectation is that they will follow the social norms they are only still learning. They don’t get the automatic forgiveness afforded to babies. You blunder after them, yelling “stop!” devested of all self-possession, a ragged, fatigued, and largely ineffectual person. Even a bit of a factotum because anyone can see that what you’re doing isn’t working but you keep doing it anyway, hoping, this time, things might be different. You are capable of feeling pity for those in the same situation as yourself, but, at the same time, relief that it is them and not you with the tantruming child at the farmer’s market. 

Until one day you realize you’re not entirely sure who you are anymore. You’ve spent so much time correcting behavior, trying to minimize the temptation for other types of behavior, and foster burgeoning interests that, alone, you’re uncertain what to do with yourself. When you have time, if you don’t sleep, you wander around, but without the interest you once had because the sense of discovery, without kids to share it with, feels limited.

 Life is a great bell curve. As a teenager, you struggle to understand who you are and feel in control of your life under your parents’ care and subject to their limitations. You gradually endeavor to make the right mistakes which you learn from, and you rise in estimation of your peers, and you find things that are fulfilling and aid in establishing something of a character. 

In early adulthood, you float through life, comfortable with even the unexpected. It is just you and, without enough understanding, it’s not hard to navigate one person through the Sturm und Drang of life. You have a hard time conceiving how it could even be difficult for anyone. 

With kids, you become like the model of the atom, a proton, surrounded by chaotic, spinning electrons. The proton is the only part you have learned to control. You go out into the world, the electrons spinning wildly around you, occasionally reaching out to steady them, to keep them from crashing into each other, or into someone else. You take up a lot more space as such, and even the sympathetic can’t help but to be somewhat annoyed when your electrons call someone a “poopybutt” because they are “on one” and trying to outdo each other in silliness. 

Before our third child was born, my wife and I were sitting outside the supermarket, alone, chatting. We saw a struggling mother making her way to the door with three children in tow. One of them was having to be carried for some reason, the other, in the cart, was rocking it precariously, while the third, walking, suddenly demanded to have her shoes which were in the car. The mother, being rational, assessed her control of the situation which was dramatically decreasing as they neared the supermarket doors and made a decision. She turned around, went back to the van, and drove away. Nope. No groceries today. 

In the moment, I though “shit, that doesn’t bode well for us.” I couldn’t imagine going all the way to the store, getting everyone in and out of the carseats, etc. only to turn around without accomplishing the errand. But there was a lesson there, one that I’m still struggling to learn. I don’t always get my way—even if my way is something as mundane as getting the groceries—sometimes, you need to turn around and go home, or do something else. It might be possible to recover a little of that self-possession if I stop trying so hard to exert it. Perhaps rather than make the proton overwhelm the electrons, the proton need only move in another direction, after all, the electrons will follow.

It is very difficult to imagine ever having the self-possession I enjoyed in my mid-twenties return, but I guess the point of life has never been to get to a comfortable position and stay there; you have to take on new challenges to grow and, adding a bunch of electrons to my proton is a pretty obvious way to grow. Still, it’s hard not to look back to the solitary “me” I once was and feel some amazement that, so far in the past, I had such a better idea of what I was doing. Surely there’s a scientific explanation for that, too. Maybe entropy, maybe nostalgia.