Suspended Observations

The soul is what gives us feelings.

“Please be working, please be working.”

You know those waiting room coffee machines that poop out the little plastic cup first, then immediately fill it with black liquid? I’m slightly in awe of them. I’m fascinated by the absurd banality. They make these contorted sounds while they brew. After that, caffeine straight to the main vein. The holiest deliverance.

I bet they’re dying out too.
Just like the birds. I can feel it.

Like old orange fluorescent street lights and casette tapes in cars. That feeling hits you somewhere between dread and nostalgia.

Coffee like that is for moments that aren’t quite moments. Mostly, for a thin slice of time before an occurrence. The long drag before the exhale. Perhaps something has already happened. Places with chairs arranged for nobody in particular. It’s fine, the carpet is designed to survive spills.

You feel this in these spaces because you are not meant to be there.
Only: wait patiently, please, until it’s time to leave.

This is the philosophy. It refutes responsibility and hates the foreground. It hovers at the edge of perception, like a ghost in the corner of a photograph. Drink up while your mind is elsewhere — or even better, absolutely nowhere. Utility is the primary function.

Bad coffee enjoyers know this better than any alleged coffee aficionado ever could.

A familiar artistic doctrine emerges. Not the theological clarity of Raphael. No… More like a theme that is slightly unsettling. Where the colour bleeds into the lighting. Or the subject isn’t fully convinced it exists. Bad coffee is about space. It doesn’t need to describe the room; it reveals space simply by refusing to fill it.

Like Edward Hopper.

I’m thinking about Nighthawks now. That perfect late-night stillness. Present, but not quite arriving. Light pours into the street but it’s not illuminating. That’s this whole moment. The cup is in your hands and you’re technically awake but you aren’t fully claimed by anything.

The momentary aesthetic belongs to suspension.
You are temporally unclaimed.
You are released from the many-faced clamour that insists you relate to your own existence.

No one, not even yourself, is asking who you’re going to be next.

Notice when you get to feel like that. It’s always so tentatively brief, and fragile. You feel neither dissociated, nor much too “present” in the overly tortuous sense that being alive sometimes is.

It is a mistake if you think any of this is describing melancholia, or some kind of meditation.

Just like the coffee, the sensation is mildly bitter — but without any grudging. No crescendo. No dramatic arc. Just smoke obscured downlights, while quiet chat hums from a booth in the corner. Something is beckoning you over.
Sit down, if you like.

Draw breath not in despair, but in indifference.
Existence without commentary is so merciful.

I’m transported to that moment on the square; you’re sat opposite — we’re not speaking, but the look in your eye and the coffee sure is.

Liminality should not be archived. Don’t try to hold onto it, it will curdle like sour milk into a memory.

The modern flat white is the antithesis. Aussies and yanks could never understand the unique subtlety of European liminalism. Espresso culture is acceptable, but quite different, there’s too much Italian flair.

As usual, the French have perfected the dialectic with café au lait — a sublimely romantic distillation.

This is very different from the tea grotesque. Which is absolutely demanding in almost every instance. Particularly in the case of care, and of preference. Certainly of love.

Meanwhile — our esteemed bad coffee is motherless and belongs to systems, not homes. Corridors, not rooms. It’s the proud liquor of institutions and intermediates. It doesn’t warm you in any loving way. It warms you the way an old radiator warms an empty hallway. Just enough to stop things freezing.

It’s brutal reality as antidote to naive idealism.

Do not claim “centred”.
Do not become “enlightened”.

We’re in the asylum now:
I’m hovering in the waiting room, pacing slightly. A little tired, weary even. I’m handing you something warm in a plastic cup, and the universe keeps its distance.