Readers of this blog know my enjoyment of craft beer, and sitting in a brewery on a Friday or Saturday night talking with my wife or a friend is certainly an appreciated enjoyment. But equally so, the coffee shop. I started my coffee dawdling while a freshman in college and its been a regular habit ever since. Has always made for a time when I can appreciate both the primary and secondary aspects of life. This past Sunday evening (when I read quite a few blogs and scroll through various tumblr accounts) I happened to come across two coffee related posts: 

Go to a coffee shop. Sit by the bar with the glass windows and look out. Look at all the people running to catch a train. All the girls with one too many shopping bags. All the couples too in love to care. Then you’ll see it — a bit of yourself in everyone. And somehow, sitting alone in a coffee shop had never felt so good." 

--unknown (via parkstepp) 

“Why do you like working in a coffee shop?” 

“I like watching a line of about 3,000 people turn their mood around with a cup of coffee. They could be coming to the coffee shop for many reasons, including escaping something. It’s an environment that gets people excited, pumps blood into their minds, makes them more productive, and inspires this kind of energy that people want to use for the rest of their day. 

“I like the flavor of a really vibrant and yet smooth cup of coffee and the ambience of a coffee shop with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong doing their duet in the background. You can look outside the windows and sometimes catch the rays of sunrise. 

“A lot goes into why I love coffee shops and why I chose to work in one. If I had to do a mundane job, it would be at a coffee shop. I’d like to instill the idea that, at least for those parts of my day when I’m drifting out and zoning out from the everyday banalities that go on, I can look at some person who is sitting quietly with their cup of coffee across the café and relate to how they are going through an almost spiritual experience in the way they taste their coffee, their emotions, what fragile state they may be in, and why they are at my coffee shop. 

It’s the beauty and solitude of a person alone.”   

--from Portraits of America