IT’S BEEN more than a month into the Enhance Community Quarantine or ECQ courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic and I must say I seem to be handling it quite well.
I just stick to my usual routine. I have been “working at home “ long before it became de rigueur, most writers do anyway and at my age (a card-bearing senior citizen) a nightlife is just a memory of a previous life. Besides, I’m not the kind who tends to socialize. I seem to lean on old, familiar ways.
But if there’s one thing this ageing hippie misses it’s hanging out getting my double espresso Café Americano caffeine fix with jazz and conversation with the regular habituates in Starbucks, not to mention flirting with the pretty baristas.
That sort of longing for my little corner refuge in this troubled land prompts a nostalgic revisit of “Birth of the Cool” in Starbucks.
Back in the ‘90s the epitome of being cool was hanging out in Starbucks with your Café Latte and Pentium-era laptop or an Albert Camus novel. Not so today. The once cool Starbucks has almost lost its mojo, credit that to the trendy, social-climbing millennials who have this perverted notion that to be seen as a Frappuccino-infused hanger-on in Starbucks is a free license to be cool.
Nothing could be more further from the truth. Hanging out in Starbucks while discussing out loud (to attract attention of course) dialectic materialism is not cool; it just confirms you’re an idiot.
Of course, Starbucks is not taking this without a fight. They’re reinventing themselves and they’ve started with a few shops in Salcedo Village, Makati aptly called Starbucks R, but that’s another story.
Back then when we were still living in Manila I was not really a Starbucks regular. I was more of a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Café Mary Grace or Café Breton guy. Then I sort of moved on and started looking at other options. I’ve begun checking out the independents, you know, those progressive, hip and edgy stand-alone coffee shops in Salcedo Village.
There’s one that I really like called “Yardstick”, a hip coffee shop where people living on the edge congregate and plot out their latest bohemian projects or animal rescues. Who knows, maybe lately the next anarchist plot?
But since we’ve moved sort of indefinitely to “I Am Iloilo City”, I left all that “Bohemian Rhapsody” behind and had to find my little corner of the sky in the city where I was born some 65 years ago.
And the next best thing of course was Starbucks. There’s three of them now in “I Am Iloilo City” and that’s where you can find me mostly, or sometimes in a couple of independents that I like to call serendipity.
So what’s cool or not in Starbucks?
Let’s start with “what’s cool.”
Having your coffee as it should be either straight up black or with sugar, preferably coconut sugar, with non-dairy cream or soy milk is cool. Soy milk Latte or Cappuccino paired with bagel and cream cheese or cinnamon buns, along with, maybe reading a book or newspapers is also cool.
Having coffee and conversation with friends, girlfriends, wives, lovers and family is also cool. Of course, having an Espresso shot is always cool in any coffee shop.
So what’s not cool? A lot I should say.
For starters, having those fancy concoctions bordering on an ice cream sundae or halo-halo is not cool; I suggest you better go to the ice cream house or to a gelato shop instead.
A bunch of “cougars” or middle-aged women giggling like school girls or worst, hysterical laughter, calling attention to themselves is definitely not cool!
And obviously, you can spot those first-timers taking “selfies” of themselves and their drinks then posting them on Facebook. Not cool.
Finally, we have those students with arm loads of books camping on the tables pretending to study when all they do is color the pages of their books with colored markers. Seriously, can you really study in Starbucks? And that is definitely not cool.
By the way, “Birth of the Cool” is the title of a Miles Davis CD I bought back in the days when Starbucks also had Jazz CDs besides coffee on offer. Here’s an afterthought life after COVID-19: the new normal is just buying your coffee to go no more enjoying the passage of time in Starbucks. (brotherlouie16@gmail.com/PN)
