Greetings from the 4 Corners Cafe 2.0

Starting next Wednesday, July 2, 2014, I will be starting a new addtion to this blog. It will be about my life as a writer.

I posted on my Facebook page that I would delete the old entries and start afresh. I now think I won't do that--writers don't like to delete things unless they don't work. When I looked back at those writings, I remembered what great fun I had writing them, and that's what writing is all about.

I am posting below what I wrote on my Facebook page--slightly modified. I hope you will stop by on Wednesday to see how deep I can put my foot into my mouth. I haven't even started yet, but I've already done it.

David Teves

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First entry for my new writing blog that is not a blog as of yet. 

So I’ll start from the beginning then. A writer’s journey. My journey. Call it part biographical, part bullshit. I’m supposed to try to use this to promote my writing. To get you to help me get out of my day job and have a little peace in my life. But going in I gotta tell you that probably won’t happen, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself.

This is the way it will be. I’ll write one post once a week. I could write more, but it would keep me away from the real writing—if that’s what it is. I’ll post it let’s say on Wednesday mornings. Just before I go to my chemotherapy. There I said it. It needed to be said. It would be a lie to myself and to you if I didn’t. But that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject. This is about writing, not cancer.

Next. I will go over the post one time before I publish. If I catch errors, that’s great. If I don’t, well that’s the way it’s gotta be. I obsess too much about the finer things in a sentence than to worry about it here.

Did I mention I’m a bullshitter? Keep that in mind. I’ll tell you something interesting. I didn’t discover I was a writer until I was in my late thirties. That’s a kick isn’t it? I spent a lifetime not quite fitting into things. I thought I was just emotionally flawed, but it turned out I was just—different.

Last. Despite of the heaviness of the last few sentences, I intend to keep things light for the most part. Fictions supposed to be fun, right? But still the same, I am going to try and seduce you into getting me out of the car business. That’s the price of admission.

It will start next Wednesday, July 2, 2014.

 
David

Starbucks

I hate Starbucks. I say this even though I go there about once a week during the winter to order a medium cup of coffee, just a little room for cream please. This hate/like relationship with the place has been going on for several years, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Sad thing to say, isn’t it?

The reason for all the thinking is because I have wondered if my almost phobic dislike for the place has something to do not with Starbucks but with my deep-seated personality flaws in general. I tend to be an anti-social, semi-asshole some might say. For the most part I dislike most people—especially the pompous ones, and let’s face it, Starbucks is crawling with them. Every time you go into one there they are: guys hunched over laptops of iPhones, women with their shoes off, curled up comfortably in an over-stuffed chair having meaningful conversations with their friends.

Starbucks likes to go for the ambience of a hip coffee shop. Smooth jazz lulls you over the lousy overhead speakers. Over-priced CDs are available for those gullible enough to buy them. $17.95 for a CD? Hello, haven’t you people heard of Amazon.com? Expensive coffee makers, To-Go coffee cups that won’t fit in any car cup holder designed to date, all wrapped up in a politically correct, social responsibility, let’s start tweeting package. Now I ask you, who’s kidding who?

In their view, Starbucks is not just selling coffee and coffee accessories, they’re selling a lifestyle. They call it “The Starbucks Experience”. As for me I think any title with the word “Experience” in it should have “The Jimi Hendrix” in front of it. As a still slightly rebellious child of the 60’s, that oh so pretentious lifestyle comes off as obnoxious and fake.

In my opinion a real coffee shop (as opposed to a diner) is a place filled with cigarette smoke, rude waitresses, and guys in berets reading awful poetry while the listeners click their fingers in approval. In my book that is the definition of cool. Smelly, but cool.

When I go into Starbucks I get claustrophobic with the yuppie vibe of the place. I plan the trip carefully. With exact change in hand I will only go in if I don’t have to wait in a line. I place my order quickly a succinctly. No thanks, I don’t want a brownie or a scone. Just give me my damn coffee. Then, paper cup in hand, its one package of Equal, a little half and half and I’m out of there. I don’t want to spend any time wondering as I survey the crowd if I am, in fact, just like them.

I can hear you laughing. Why the hell do you go in there in the first place if you hate it so much? It’s pretty simple. Sometimes on a cold winter night when I have to drive thirty miles to get home, it’s great to get wired up, and believe me; Starbucks is great for getting wired. One properly ordered cup can make you feel like you’re on a South American holiday. At my age a hit of cocaine would probably kill me, so this is the second best thing.

One last thing before I end my rant. I went through a period when I was fixated on not using Starbuck’s names for the sizes on their coffees. I mean, what ever happened to a simple small, medium or large? How can a small cup of coffee be called a tall? What idiot thought that one up? So one evening I ordered a large cup of Joe to go. The “barista” (another word I hate), a blond, doe-eyed young lady with a butterfly tattoo on her neck, looked at me and said. “Sir, at Starbucks we say Venti”. I was so taken aback at the thought of using that word, I was temporarily frozen. Then, after a long few seconds, I turned around and left.

I guess I didn’t need to get wired that badly.

Tee-Shirt Mortality

The other day I figured out that I had enough tee-shirts to last me the rest of my life. This revelation came to me while sitting at the edge of my bed examining my beloved “The Sopranos” shirt with the mysterious hole at its bottom. Do I wear it, or should I contemplate retiring it? God knows I can afford to part with it. I have an entire drawer dedicated to my tees in addition to the dozen or so hiding at the top of my closet.

This was when it hit me. At age 60, tee-shirt wise, I had hit the tipping point. If I never acquired another one, I had more than enough to last until they ship me off to… To where? Ah, that is a good question.

On my days off I dig around for an appropriate tee to wear that day. My current favorite is a black one that says, “Still Pissed At Yoko” in white Beatlesque letters. It gets attention. More than one person has commented on it while standing in the checkout line the Super Wal-Mart.

There are many others, of course—way too many to list here: a Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon” shirt that all true children of the 60’s should own. Then there’s the Beatle’s “Rubber Soul” shirt, my son-in-law, Tom, gave me. It’s a little tight, but it works. A “World’s Greatest Dad” shirt my daughter, Laura, gave me one Father’s Day. A few more honoring local events: the Rio Vista Bass Derby held most Octobers in the town I live, Hayward’s annual Ukulele Festival. A couple more from the now defunct Isleton Crawdad Festival.

Lots of shirts. Lots of shirts to remind me of minor events of my past; enough shirts to remind me of the transient nature of life.

When I was a young man, I never gave the tee-shirt collection slowly growing in my dresser a second thought. The stack of Corona beer shirts building up in my drawer (Are they somehow reproducing in there?) never crossed my mind. You just threw one on after a shower and went about your day: playing with the kids, mowing the lawn, watching television, drinking a beer. Little did I know that the tees were a symbol of my own mortality.

You can’t count white tee-shirts when you noodle on this equation. With no words or images emblazoned on their cotton surfaces, they are meaningless and transitory. But my two Yosemite Mountaineering Society “Go Climb A Rock” shirts are timeless. The shirts are an identical blue; one bought about five years ago, the other circa. 1971. I have used the latter several times as proof to a person younger than myself that “I have tee-shirts older than you.”

Go now to your closet or drawer where your tee-shirts await to let you know that quite a few of them will be around after you are gone. What do they say? What do they mean?

Something to contemplate as I sit in the 4 Corners Café of my mind, drinking a cup of hot Joe.

George of the Rain Forrest

Somewhere along the line the jungle was taken from me. The mysterious, dangerous territory of my youthful imagination, filled snakes, tigers and an infinite number of dangerous creatures and foliage was high-jacked, replaced by a tedious, castrated damp place called the rain forest.

Yawn.

In these boring, politically correct times it’s not polite to call a rain forest a jungle. No, no, no. A jungle is a dark forbidding place. A rain forest, on the other hand, is a place of gentle greenery and cute, precocious endangered animals, a perfect place for your next vegan picnic. When they talk about those bad people trying to carve out a little farmland in the Amazon, they are destroying the rain forest! It doesn’t sound right if they’re destroying the jungle because the term jungle sounds like it deserves to be cut down!

So Tarzan’s parents didn’t crash in a treacherous foreboding jungle filled with dangers at every turn. Their son became “Tarzan, King of the Rain Forest”. Don’t you like the way that rolls of your tongue? Either way he was raised by apes. And what about my good friend George, the monkey of my childhood musings? Can’t you hear the children singing, “George, George, George of the rain forest”?

Speaking of songs, you all remember that classic Creedence Clearwater song. Sing it with me now, “Better run through the rain forest, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. . .”

I don’t care what anyone says; the crew of that PT boat in the movie “Apocalypse Now” wasn’t going up the Mekong River into the depths of a rain forest. That, my friends, was a damn jungle!

I wonder do they still have the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland? If they’ve changed it to the rain forest cruise I might have to slit my wrists.

I find it interesting how our language is being subdued all for the sake of political correctness. Garbage men became sanitation engineers. Housewives are now homemakers. I live on the west coast where it’s often foggy in the mornings and afternoons. I just discovered that it’s no longer called fog; it’s now the marine layer! The next thing you know, car salesmen will be referred as transportation consultants!

They’re making a pussy out of our colorful English language!

Never again can I sing a rousing chorus of the theme from “The Flintstones” at my local bar. The ending, “we’ll have a gay old time” might be misunderstood. Someone might beat the crap out of me and dump my body in a rain forest!

In the summer it’s not hot any more. No way. Its climate change. (Climate change has replaced the term global warming, because apparently the globe hasn’t gotten any hotter in the last ten years.) Instead of just getting some lemonade or a cold beer, and watching a ball game on the tube on a lazy summer afternoon, we’ve got to feel guilty that it’s a hundred degrees outside. We’re responsible! And how can you enjoy the game anyway when there are dead polar bears out there and it’s our fault? And moving them to the rain forest won’t help!

So I say we’ve got to take a stand on this stuff, and I’m here to put forth the proposition that we start with our beloved jungles. I don’t want to go on a safari (oops, I’m sorry, I meant to say “photo Safari”) in a rain forest. I want a jungle. And throw in a little quicksand while you’re at it.

Or is it now called liquid earth?

Rod Serling Changed The World

The 4 Corners Café has a jukebox that only plays Patsy Cline and Led Zeppelin. I asked Betty Jo the waitress about this. She was standing behind the counter appraising me like a bug. She doesn’t know how to take me. I don’t know how to take her. She’s a mystery. I suspect she is younger than me, but a lifetime of Pall Malls and Miller High Life’s have aged her beyond her years. Or at least that's what I think.

Betty Jo shrugged; a subtle upturning of the shoulders that said the question wasn’t worth answering. Then she went out back for a smoke. I gave up on the question. The jukeox like Betty Jo and the café itself remains a mystery to me, and as a result I suspect it will be to you.

At the time I was sitting at the ancient Formica counter eating a slice of cherry pie and drinking a cup of hot joe when it dawned on me that Rod Serling had changed the world. For those of you too young to remember, Rod was the creator of “The Twilight Zone” the early 60’s anthology series that introduced my generation to the possibility that reality as we knew it was not necessary what it seemed.

I swear I remember the night it premiered in October 1959. I was nine years old. My father and I watched it on our humble black-and-white in the little house on Lark Street. The story was about a man who found himself in an unfamiliar town all by himself. There were signs of life everywhere but not a soul to be seen. Panic ensued. In the end it turned out he was slowing going crazy in an isolation booth that was training astronauts to go to Mars.

Dad didn’t say much about it. Then again, dad was not a talkative guy. He just sat in his easy chair considering what he had just seen, rubbing his thumb over smooth surface of his silver Zippo cigarette lighter. I was quiet too, but inside I was trembling with excitement. What had I just seen? It sure as hell wasn’t “I Love Lucy” or “Wagon Train”. No sir, this show rocked!

I was already suspecting that something was up reality-wise. There were those bomb drills we were having every other week or so. “Duck and cover” it was called. Unseen by the students, George, the ancient school janitor, would bring out an old WWII hand-cranked siren. There was a painted metal v-mount for it, screwed into the wooden railing in the open hall between the rows of classrooms. Suddenly, in the middle of a math lesson, the siren would wail the call of impending death. The sound scared the crap out of me.

(Don’t look at the flash! the defense films we watched advised. If you’re out on your bike, throw it to the ground and yank your jacket over your head!)

The teacher would close the curtains and turn off the lights to heighten the paranoia effect while we scrambled under out desks. We were instructed to turn our faces to the floor with our foreheads resting on back of one hand while the other hand protected the back of our necks.

Somewhere around this time, “The Twilight Zone” came to my mind, and I began to suspect that this was all bullshit. Somewhere I had heard that a strategically aimed H-Bomb exploding in the nearby San Francisco Bay would vaporize us all instantly, “duck and cover” be damned. Our fourth grade teacher would have been better off handing out beers than feeding us the illusion we could escape a nuclear attack.

And Rod Serling confirmed it all, infiltrating my mind with the notion that the universe was a dangerous and mysterious place, and the mystery could spill into my life at any moment. There were space aliens who thought we were the ugly ones. There was a fourth dimension in the wall behind my bed that would grab me if I wasn’t careful. Somewhere down a train track there was a town called Willaoughby where life was simple and perfect. Yes, there were other worlds out there, independent from the humdrum reality of my post Eisenhower life. There were things out there that were wonderful, but there were also things out there that might bite me.

As the 60’s progressed, my generation was invaded by the Beatles not the Russians. Fueled by the lessons of “The Twilight Zone” and the naive notion that we could change the world, we went forward to rediscover life on our own. Rod Serling was the father of a revolution of sorts. And though things didn’t go as we planned, he helped open our minds to the endless possibilities of life.

Damn him.

The Religion Gene

Yesterday, a customer asked me what church I attended. I wasn’t amused with the question. He was an ornery old cuss, and he had just revealed that he was a Dodger fan, a state of being that is equal to discovering your wife’s a hooker in my opinion. I looked him square in the eye and said, “I wasn’t born with the religion gene.”

“You an atheist?” he persisted.

“No,” I replied, trying to avoid an argument.

Maybe there was something in the way I said it that made him drop the subject, except for a parting shot about me attending church and something about judgment day. I avoided the skirmish and managed to deliver the car. Whew!

The problem was that I was looking for a fight. You see I enjoy talking about God and religion as any Mormon missionary or door-to-door Seventh Day Adventist can attest. When they come preaching at me they discover a soul who as done a lot of thinking about his place in the universe and has some definite opinions of the subject.

I was born a Roman Catholic. That in itself speaks volumes about why I am religiously challenged. I remember the terror of being seven-years-old going into a darkened confessional to confess my sins to the personal representative of God. I remember making up sins because I couldn’t remember doing anything wrong!

The whole process terrorized me. I envisioned the soul as a cosmic petridish, the sins building up like bacteria. Confession cleaned the dish, but if you had the bad luck of being hit by a truck with a few swear words on there, off to Hell you go!

Being a nice Portuguese boy, I tried to live with the concept that God was just waiting for me to screw up so he could torture me for eternity. But at the age of fourteen it finally dawned on me that it was all a bunch of bullshit.

Over the years the concept of religion has always fascinated me. I developed a theory that God, or whatever controls the wheels of the universe, had very little to do with religion. I decided that the reason religious institutions exist is because of my theory of the religion gene.

In my opinion you are either born with a need for religion or not. It’s in you DNA. Sometimes the gene is buried deeply only to come out when a person decides its time to clean his act up in order to avoid an eternity of fire. People who are extremely religious have a need to have the mysteries of universe placed in a tidy, easy explainable box. They don’t want any mystery in their life, and no surprises at the end. They are not content that the cosmos (both literally and figuratively) is something far beyond human understanding. They want the sucker explained.

Religion by its very definition is the worshiping of concepts that can’t be proven. And since this lack of logic is in itself a dichotomy, they pass off the things that don’t make a lot of sense as faith. Faith is the “inconvenient truth”. It attempts to explain away the unexplainable. It makes the illogical logical. It allows hair-brain theories to take root, wars to occur in the name of God, and general mayhem to ensue.

So let me get this straight. God is a being who along with creating the universe enjoys a little torture on the side. In general he loves you, but if you should screw up he is perfectly okay with barbequing you for eternity.

I don’t think so.

Now let me say that I have nothing against a person needing religion. As Stephen Stills once said, “whatever gets you through the night”. If you need the mysteries of the universe explained to you in human terms in order to make you feel safe, that’s okay by me. Just don’t look at me cross-eyed if I test to your ideas.

I looked out the window of the church called the 4 Corners Cafe wondering why I waste my time thinking about things like this. And as my coffee cooled, I pondered the universe and my place in it.

Bob Dylan Fortune Cookies

Dear Bob,

I’ve been a fan of yours for most of my life. As a young teenager I was a folk music enthusiast, and I discovered you early. My formative years were spent listening to “Blowing In The Wind”, Times Are A-Changing”, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” and dozens of others. I have a button from those times that says. "Relect Bob Dylan God". Love you man!

When you turned electric with “Bringing It All Back Home”, I became electric too. You turned me on to the infinite possibilities of rock and roll. That’s why when a spectacular idea for a business opportunity came up, I thought of you. Think of it Bob: Bob Dylan Fortune Cookies.

Don’t laugh; I’ve thought this through. There are enough quirky lyrics in your songs to last us for decades. Heck you may never have to go on tour again if things work out right. As for me, I can see a time when I’ll talk to my last flake on the used car lot. Won’t that be a great day!

Now let me paint a picture: The young couple has just had their full of Pork Chow Mien and reach for a fortune cookie. Instead of saying, “You will soon have business success”, it says, “The answer is blowing in the wind”. Now wouldn’t that be something?

The great thing about Bob Dylan Fortune Cookies is that as time goes on they will be more and more effective. As we baby boomers die off, less and less people will be aware of your songs and their impact on our generation. So when they open up a cookie and it says, “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, don’t criticize what you can’t understand” it will sound as fresh as it did when you wrote it over forty years ago.

My favorite line of Bob Dylan Fortune Cookies will be called “The Subterranean Line”, after the classic song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” That one song is chuck full of great fortune cookie lines. Here’s a few touching examples.

“Don’t want to be a bum, you better chew gum.”
“Get sick, get well, hang around the ink well.”
“You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”
“The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles.”

The possibilities are endless, I tell you!

The cookies could be used for special occasions. For example, a great “date” ice breaker fortune cookie: “Lay, lady lay, lay across my big brass bed.” For that college fraternity party: “Well I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned”. For political campaigns we can mine the song “Masters of War” for several relevant nuggets

Bob, we’ve got a home run here. I’m so excited I could spit! With you and me partnering up on this project we will make history and a truckload of money. In no time at all we’ll be goin’ down Highway 61 like a rolling stone with the Memphis blues again!

Call me Bob. I’ll be waiting.

David

Sharp As A Tack

Note: I wrote this blog post a couple of years ago for my other blog, Confessions of a Car Man. (I have since deleted all non-car business posts from that blog.) I present it here for your enjoyment.


I’m rapidly approaching the time of my life when people will refer to me as “sharp as a tack”. This label is usually attached to an older person who has a full grasp of what’s going on around him. The term is meant as a compliment, but if you think about it, it’s a sad day when people have to compliment you on your ability to reason.

What brought this to my mind was a conversation with my mechanic friend, Tim Robbins. Tim, who shuns the moniker of technician, is also sharp as a tack, but he’s in his mid-thirties so this is a state of being that is still standard equipment. I find him a great foil for expressing my sometimes way-out-there musings.

On one particular hot August day I was ranting about my most recent health issue as being a preview of coming attractions of old age. The “David Teves Mortality Tour”, I dubbed it. I am currently issuing back stage passes for my fans. “Access All Areas” they say. With this pass you have complete freedom to roam about back stage and hang out with the band so to speak.

Along with heart, hypertension, diabetes, and general state of ennui, life has been sending a yearly health bomb as if to remind me that my days are numbered. A year or so ago I developed a condition called, “Bell’s Palsy”. This delightful disorder causes half your face to become paralyzed, your arm to hurt like hell and a speech impediment also from hell. The whole package screams “Igor” to friends and family and those ups that were forced to face me on the lot.

Luckily, this is not a life-threatening disability. Oh it takes about a year to clear up, but eventually most of it goes away. The only residual effects are one dry eye and a nostril that likes to twitch for no apparent reason. All and all not the most delightful of experiences.

My most recent adventure into reminders of my mortality is a condition known as “Labyrinthitis”. This disorder is a virus that attacks your inner ear. It cannot be treated. Like Bells Palsy it will go away on its own in time. It came on me suddenly the morning after my granddaughter, Brooke, was born. I woke up in a hotel room in Jackson, California with the room spinning to the right like a top. (I wonder if I were in Australia would the room spin to the left?) Suddenly I was four years old spinning myself into a dizzy, a child’s first attempt at getting high.

I spent the next week, ironically a vacation week, barely able to walk. Over the last month, the symptoms have receded sometimes making a return engagement at the end of my workweek. Like the palsy this will pass, but I wonder if it will leave any long-lasting reminders of its visit.

I’m talking about this not to bitch. Well, I guess I am bitching. I won’t go into the depressing details of what goes around in my mind when visited by these maladies, but it does make me wonder what the hell is next.

The scary part is that when in the clutches of dizziness, I am no longer as sharp as a tack. Write a blog entry? Hell, I’m lucky to be able to watch an episode of “Ice Road Truckers”. I forget what I’m saying, names of people I love and have a hard time putting a few words together in a logical sequence.

I suppose you know where I’m going with this: Alzheimer’s disease. I once knew a man, now passed on to that great used car lot in the sky, who liked to say, “Having Alzheimer’s isn’t too bad. You get to meet new friends every day!” I have no idea if that’s in my future. There isn’t shit I can do about it if it is. I suppose writing will help me keep the brain cells circulating for a few more years, but I’ve been clearly given the idea that the end of the demo ride is in sight.

Guess I’d better try to lay away a few people while I still have the time.

Dazed and Confused

Sometimes the 4 Corners Café is not where it’s supposed to be. Sometimes it’s across the highway from its normal location. Sometimes it’s not there at all. Many times I have chased down back roads searching for it, my mind twitching for my country oasis. I’ve never been able to figure out these oddities. Betty Jo the waitress is no help. And as for Mac, the grizzled owner, we’ll, he’s barely around.

I have often wondered if the other patrons have the same problems I have. I’m not talking about the anonymous truck drivers who pull off Highway 5 for a quick coffee and pie. (What’s with the bow ties and caps? I’ve never seen them anywhere else.) I’m talking about the regulars, the farmers and storekeepers from over in Thornton taking a break, eating BLT’s at the counter, or talking quietly in one of the booths. Do they notice that the place is not quite right? But like the café itself, sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not.

Why am I always so desperate to find it? The answer is simple: I do my best thinking there. Sometimes when the world is feeling especially oppressive it is my shelter; my place to let my imagination go. It was there that I wonder why I write at all. No one reads my stuff. If you have stumbled upon this blog you’re in an exclusive club.

One day I put a quarter in the jukebox and pressed D4. “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin came blasting out the speakers like a song on a mission, and I was transported back to 1969. I was 19 and had just purchased “Led Zeppelin”, their first album. It was the greatest rock and roll score of my life. I Iocked myself in my room in the house on Lark Street for two days listening nonstop and “Dazed and Confused” became my anthem.

“Been dazed and confused for so long it's not true,
Wanted a woman, never bargained for you.
Lots of people talk and few of them know,
Soul of a woman was created below. yeah!”

The greatest rock song of all time in my opinion.

It’s winter. My friends Larry Ulrich, Patrick Lynch and I are cruising down Palomares Canyon Road on a cold and drizzly night in Patrick’s ‘66 Datsun. Robert Plant wailing my favorite song on the 8 track. I am in the back seat, and we are playing cardboard. Cardboard works this: you rip off the top half a book of matches, and roll in your hands forming a “crutch”. A crutch was used to hold the diminishing end of a joint in order to make it smokeable to the very last. (No roach clips for us. That was for wusses.) You keep smoking in the dark, passing it back and forth, the roach getting smaller and smaller, until someone finally hits pay dirt and starts coughing. “Cardboard!” you yell between gasps. You just won. Let’s go get something to eat!

“You hurt and abused tellin' all of your lies,
Run around sweet baby, lord how they hypnotize.
Sweet little baby, I don't know where you've been,
Gonna love you baby, here I come again.”

I’m alone in the café. Betty Jo is in the back doing what I don’t know. I look out the window, and it’s dark. Funny, it was daytime when I came in a few minutes ago. The truth is that time doesn’t pass right inside the 4 Corners. The old clock on the wall just doesn’t travel in its orbit around the dial in a normal manner. You come in at eleven in the morning for a quick cup of joe, and when you leave it might still be eleven or maybe ten thirty, a half hour before you got there, or four in the afternoon.

“Every day I work so hard
Bringin' home my hard earned pay
Try to love you baby, but you push me away.
Don't know where you're goin'
Only know just where you've been,
Sweet little baby, I want you again.”

Then there’s that killer guitar solo, a soaring blast of kinetic energy. The one that even after forty plus years gets my pulse racing. How many times have I played air guitar to it? How many times did I embarrass my kids when they were growing up? Pure ecstasy complements of Jimmy Page.

I don’t smoke dope anymore. Those days are long behind me. Today I get high by writing. There’s nothing better than a well turned sentence or a piece that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. But I’ve taken a page of my writing down to the ATM and have never been able to get any cash out. Tragic but true.

“Been dazed and confused for so long, it's not true,
Wanted a woman, never bargained for you.
Take it easy baby, let them say what they will.
Will your tongue wag so much when I send you the bill?”

The song ends, and I’m no longer 19. I’m an old man of 60. Got two grandkids for Christ’s sake! I’m sitting at the counter at a café that I suspect might only exist in my mind. Am I crazy? I just might be. I’ve suspected it for years.

But that’s just life at the 4 Corners Café.