People at a coffee shop
The decor of our corner coffee shop screams a healthy disdain for tidiness and convention.
Its owner is either a genius at creating a welcoming underground, counterculture ambiance – the kind of space that retail designers charge ten of thousands to come up with – or he’s simply a bro who doesn’t give a shit.
There’s paint peeling around those enormous windows. Vintage floor tiles are cracked and gaping. There’s no effort to hide exposed conduits in the walls. An invisible film of neglect covers every surface.
Having said all that, the joint runs like a precision time piece. Service is crisp and friendly, lines short. The ugly dispenser of tap water is almost never empty. Customers double park and pick up orders fast enough to avoid parking tickets.
The place is an incubator for remote gig-workers, creatives, small LLC owners and university rats who set up shop and stay for hours. The energy is electric.
A room full of tattoos, piercings, pony tails, hipster knit caps and splashes of florescent hair offer you an opportunity for self-renewal. Osmosis on the cheap. Forget that trek through Nepal. Who needs Burning Man?
All you need do is sit quietly with a cup of coffee, breathe in the vapors and it WILL happen. When you’re in the moment, you’ll connect with a freer, looser, hipper, preservative-free version of your authentic self.
But fear not, wild thing, the minute you step out that door, you’ll return to the person your life choices and your dependents need you to be. 
Christopher Welna
That is where my wife, daughter and I sat and talked and decided to by a condo down the block – in no small part because of that shop! Chris
Pat Shiplett
Chris, I have friends who have had to move to different cities. They all hope to find a “home’ like this joint.
Judith Tobi Eisenberg
Patrick, that is so well written beautiful tribute to our coffee shop. When I bought my condo, I had no idea that I would be able to enter into such a creative welcoming world
Pat Shiplett
It is amazing the range of projects that people are working on here. People of all ages and stripes.
Nick Armbrust
I’m passing along to those that I think will appreciate your style and economy of words to still deliver the story. One is a pro writer for the government that appreciates your balance of those aspects. Her work is so fact based that she’s always lacking the color and flavors of my writing. My context is so important as an ADHD trait, that I overdo it too often and lose the reader.
Pat Shiplett
We’ve all written good sentences and bad ones. I avoid going back and looking at what I wrote. Almost as bad a looking in a mirror.
Susan Lieber
This is wonderful. That coffee shop is lucky to have you
Pat Shiplett
And we regulars are lucky that the owner let’s us sit and work for hours (and provides WIFI to boot).