Dollars and Senseless
I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.
—Kevin Bacon
Sunday morning. I'm getting in from a two-hour walk about town. I was going cabin crazy and needed to get outside and move around before the heat became unbearable—and early enough to beat the lines for coffee. I easily scored an iced coffee with so-called cream1 and figured I'd push my luck by walking uptown to buy a baguette from Metropolitan Bakery. Unfortunately, the line was already spilling out of the door by the time I arrived.
The well-off will stand in line for the most absurd things. A $6 red-eye isn't worth the six dollars, let alone fifteen minutes of queueing for the privilege of being overcharged. And we'll even leave a tip for the hassle! Or how anyone can unironically stand in a breadline to pay $4.50 for a baguette is beyond me. And then there are the crowds broiling on the summer asphalt of a Locust Street parking lot during a heatwave as they wait 40 minutes or longer for the next available cafe table to brunch on scrambled eggs and bacon at $18 a plate or maybe the $20 bagel with lox. People with money are not necessarily wise or even very bright, but they do seem to have lots of spare time.
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Coffee shops typically give you milk when you ask for cream. You might get half-and-half if you're lucky. Neither of those is cream. Trust me, and try real cream in your coffee sometime. It is a delight.2 ↩︎
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Unless you're vegan, of course, in which case it's all so much suffering and death, like pretty much everything, really. ↩︎