Welcome to the West Side

This is what "coffee shop" means on the west side of Cincinnati and why it'll never catch on. I came in to work on an espresso and a book and just be for thirty minutes or forty-five until it's time to meet Justin and Michael. I just want to sit and read and that's just what these places are for, right? Well not here. Not on the West Side.

On the West Side, apparently, a coffee shop is a place where two men in their fifties sit and watch a too-loud television news broadcast (itself an unfortunate choice) and use the topics raised by the anchor as springboards to even louder rants about steroids in baseball and the lack of courtesy on the interstate and crumple zones and tsunami relief and retail buyers and blah, blah, blah...

It's a subtle book that I've started today and it demands and deserves to be read apart from such distraction and I find myself reading each sentence, each phrase, over and over in an effort to focus. These men are too loud and, even more unfortunately, too convinced that they know everything for this place to ever really work the way I wish it could, which is a shame because the coffee is truly wonderful.

"They're all spoiled!" one of my tormentors says, and laughs obnoxiously; he's pleased with whatever sterling observation he's just favored his friend with. And it is time for me to go.