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Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand
At about 10:30 I was reading Killing Commendatore in our dining room with the sun going high behind me. I had black coffee. Kids were shooting each other with water guns on the playground. The first bright day in who knows? But I just couldn’t sit still.
I don’t get what makes me restless sometimes. There are days that look exactly how you want them, and there are days where everything’s up in smoke, and it’s a 50/50 which of those will keep me calm. I had a therapist tell me I might have ADD. Shortly after, she told me I seemed pretty put together. So I’m not here to claim I have ADD or that I’m very put together, but focus and calm have always been elusive to me.
So anyway, I decided to get lunch. There’s this new place in Raleigh, the Morgan Street Food Hall, that a lot of people I know have been talking about. Like so many other places in Southern cities, it’s an old warehouse that’s been repurposed for leisurely afternoons. I like old buildings and complicated spaces. I drove twenty minutes on the highway and parked a block away.
But after five minutes inside the crowded food court, I was done. I got as far as the line for a curry stand where three tall women with tossed curls and beige sweaters talked loudly while swinging around their iphones. It was a place like that: affluent. The bars were buttoned up and the food was made behind a barrier – no sense that the people cooking it could come here and feel comfortable in their off time. It broke my heart. Beautiful old building built on sweat and labor only to become a place for people to spend easy cash. Needless to say, this whole experience didn’t help my restlessness.
Maybe it’s just something about being Southern – the under-your-skin tick telling you to go out looking, searching, longing for a perfect place to sit down and smell the wildgrass, or the braised greens, or cooked corn.
Novel Count: 11,743
Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
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My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Livesay Writing 