a coffee shop with good couches and good caffeine cokehead buzzing blood and a big window to the street where the slideshow of flesh and skateboards under bare feet, shirts tucked into jeans like coattails and summer dresses in the hot schizophrenic california fall carousels around and around for my viewing pleasure, and a good coffeecake donut and a Brian Jonestown Massacre soundtrack to the movie I’m watching in my head of the book I'm reading in my lap; this is my Bukowski's Nirvana and I'd live here if I could. I don't care if it's the drugs in my hot bean juice or the sugar my brain is eating or a feng shui ambience placebo or the dream woven by the book feeding me pictures, or the pretty girl on her laptop across from me, who I will never touch, with whom I will never speak. Whatever this is I'll take it. Knowing what things are made of does not change my experience of them, knowing that the coffee is made of beans and the book is made of trees and horses in the spinal glue and ink and that love is an emergent property of oxytocin meant to keep us from eating our own children does not change my experience of coffee, books, love.