Monday, October 21, 2002 6:47:28 PM Joe Coluccio

Naked for the world to see if only they knew...

I try to journal every day. On weekends I treat myself to a jaunt to this coffee shop, that. and sit with a exotic flavored bagel and a strange brewed coffee. Some places, it turns, are better constructed for the writing experience.

I immediately scratched any fast food establishment. They all smelled with the lush sins of frying bacon and sausage and played very loud warbling teen divas, while building contractors that didn't want to stand in the way of the early customers at the 7-11 with cups of scolding coffee and squalid talk, jostled and mulled like lost cattle in line. "Hey, Shirley would you put two creams in my coffee this morning. Yesterday you only gave me one! Watch out dick wad you almost made me spill my coffee. So, Shirl, we on for this weekend or what?"

I tried the more trendy $7.00 cup of coffee places (I felt for the price they should at least toss in the china cup), but well dressed good smelling office workers would start queues in entirely irrational sections of the shop and cause such a confusion upon the people serving that it wasn't good for the order that resides in my soul. And the only thing to eat were gooey pastries and dried lumps of trendy sugared bread.

A few true trendy were better than others. I settled. Some urban some suburban. A pattern developed and my adventurous days of disastrous discovery were over. I went I saw I wrote.

At first, I was a timid soul, who would find a booth at the rear of the establishment, open my laptop computer which has a screen the length and breath of a combat aircraft carrier deck, stick my nose behind the heavy lit pixilated active matrix and write delicious forbidden thoughts about the tortured workings of my psyche.

I realized that I might as well be in my basement behind a wall of books (I sit here now) and moved into the morning action. My outlook brightened. People buzzed about me. I described them and made small stories about them. Took note of their garb and realized that people wore different kinds of clothes. A fact, as reflected by stagnant wardrobe, that surprised the pants off me.

As I became a regular, now familiar folks would stop by and greet me. The talk mostly revolved around the laptop. "I was gonna git one like that, you know for stocks and stuff." When I brought my Pocket PC outfitted with a fold away keyboard, I caused quite a stir. "Where do you get something like that? Are you on the internet? I have a camp up north and something small like that would be great. How long do the batteries last?"

Finally one cold Saturday morning, an old guy, less hair than me, took a seat across the table. "You're writing a book aren't you?" His eyes piercing me as if to divine out of my very essence the type of "book" I was writing. I said, "No, just doing some work." Aha! "What kind of business are you in?" "Commercial Refrigeration" I said sensitive, hoping he wouldn't tell me that the refrigerator in his garage wasn't working and what did I think was the problem. I quickly clarified, "You know warehouses and supermarkets, that kind of thing." "Not stocks and bonds?" "Nope!" Just doing some work!

And then I was alone. When the journal works, it is remarkable! It is raw and plain and frank. I know that I am capable of hiding some very unpleasant sides of myself. I also know that I am capable of causing dense doubt with revealed motives true and imagined. It is a slippery thing this working within. And often, after an intense session I will look up and see where I am. I look out over the store, into the parking lot, out on to the road. 'How is it,' I think, 'that I can sit here on display for the whole world to see. No need of xray vision. I have just taken my clothes off and turned my skin inside out. There is nothing unrevealed. And yet, people in cars on foot sitting at tables take no notice?' It is part of the miracle and leaves me somewhat ashamed, certainly humble, but also a little better off.

In Denmark we ran nude into the snow from the sauna.