Good Coffee, Bad Coffee

There’s something about a pretentious coffeehouse that warms my heart’s cockles. Don’t even mention Starbucks. I’ll come down on you like an irony cop on Alanis Morissette. Starbucks isn’t pretentious, it’s smug. Ok, fine. It’s pretentious too, but not in an enjoyable way. It’s pretentious in a “leader of a team building exercise at the company’s weekend retreat” aka corporate whore kind of way.

I want that pretentiousness unique to the hipstery coffeehouse. The walls are covered interestingly, the staff is Serious and Earnest yet considers themselves to be wittier than thou, and the quality of the beverages is generally excellent.

Granted (Sis, I didn’t “stipulate” there, didja see?) I’m a writer and I don’t drink alcohol for the most part. So a coffeehouse is my natural habitat outside of the gym. But today, when I had a coffee date, did I go to my current fave, the Bourgeois Pig? No. Did I go to Coffee Fix or even Marie et Cie? No and no. Where did I go?

Yep. You guessed it. I went to Starbucks. Because when all’s said and done, when push comes to shove and the clichés hit the wall, it turns out I’m just a parking whore and Starbucks has plenty of it. So what if the coffee sucks. The irony is that I don’t even drink it after breakfast, and bottled water is the same wherever you go.