"Process"

I now have over twenty subscribers to my Substack, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, because I believe all of my Substack posts combined have less than twenty likes. I suppose it's not like I've written any Pulitzer Prize worthy stuff, but I do wonder why the subscribers are there. What exactly are they subscribing for?

I thought I would talk about my writing process, because I think it's a little unusual, and that may be a big part of why my writing in general isn't better. Sometimes (I don't think it's happened since I joined Substack) I turn out something really extraordinarily good. When I was in college, I took a creative writing course, and the instructor told me my final piece was the only one out of the class that she thought was suitable for publishing. I was surprised, both because I didn't think it was that great, and because there were works by other students that I thought were quite extraordinary.

But this is the thing--well, two things--about that story. It was a story about caffeine addiction, and it was mostly autobiographical, which is to say, I didn't make much of it up. Secondly, my method of writing it was to drink four large cups of coffee and let myself loose on a ream of notepaper. The story just came out of me like I couldn't contain it.

That's not completely atypical of my writing process for most things I write, except for the caffeine. I don't plan it out, write an outline, make a rough draft, edit and revise. When I know what I intend to write about, it just comes out on paper, then I double check for typos. The advantage of this odd, very personal process is that my writing has a certain rawness to it that I like, and it's very cohesive, because it was something that I could hold in my head all at once. The drawback of this process is that I've never developed the discipline for the longer process of rough drafting and revising that would work for writing that could potentially be greater than what I could hold in my head all at once.

Like most writers, I'd love to write a book, but I could certainly never produce a novel, because I don't believe that I have the creativity to craft a plot of a story longer than twenty pages maximum. I could write a collection of essays, but it seems proper that they would be cohesive to a central topic, and really (obvious to anyone who has read much of my writing) my mind tends to be all over the place.

And then there's blogging and Substack. I don't know what, among the many things that I write about, really interests people. I get few likes and even less feedback, even though one of the main reasons I write is the hope that it will spark dialogue. It's not that I'm really writing for a target audience anyway, as I mostly just use it as an outlet to put what's in my head out there to see what others think. A lot of the time, what I'm about is not giving answers to what is going on in the world, but coming up with questions that I think need to be asked.

Is that really sufficiently good writing? Twenty-odd people may think so, or maybe people on Substack freely subscribe the way some people on Facebook make "friends" with 600 people. I don't know, I just keep writing. Give me feedback sometimes, though?

A cup of morning

So, my local grocery store stopped carrying my preferred brand of coffee. I spent a lot of time trying to get a coffee I could feel good about; it's an instant coffee that's organic, fair trade, and good tasting. And then this week it was gone. I looked around at other stores nearby, and none of them carry it.

I of course browsed through the other instant coffees, just to check, but there were no fair trade, organic ones. So I thought to myself, is it time for me to give up coffee? I've come to a point in my life where I'm not caffeine dependent; I could skip coffee in the morning and often do when I'm in a hurry.

But you know what? I like coffee. Sometimes I even drink it black, if it's good enough quality. I like having a moment to myself in the morning when I make myself a cup and just sit and savor it. I feel it makes my morning complete, not because I need it, but just because there's something comforting about having a little morning ritual with things you enjoy.

So, in the end, no big drama; I found a place online that sells my coffee and had some shipped to me. I have to wait longer, and it costs a little more, but I get my coffee. I don't know really why I felt the need to share this moment, but it somehow seemed significant to me.

Do you have anything in your life you don't need, but you don't want to do without it anyway? Sometimes these things are important, aren't they?

Mimi's Last Coffee

I was in the process of putting together something for my other blog, and it occurred to me that one of the issues that I was bound to be addressing was the fluidity and vagueness of language. Really, it's not just about the Bible either, but about the way people nitpick details in literature.

Anyway, many years ago, Scott McCloud had made an improvised comic strip called Mimi's Last Coffee. I say improvised because it was part of McCloud's "Morning Improv" project, in which he was taking suggestions from readers for titles and then making them up as he went along. In the associated discussion forums, some discussion broke out after McCloud published the first panel of the comic:

Somebody wondered where the story could go since this appeared to be Mimi enjoying her last coffee, and since that was the title of the story, what else was there to tell? Well, it's been at the back of my mind time and time again over the years, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in examining the fluidity of language. The fact is, comic strip aside (although McCloud does play with possible meanings of the title in his storytelling) the phrase "Mimi's last coffee" has a near-unlimited range of possible meaning.

Starting at the end of the phrase with the word "coffee", I think a lot of people don't realize that they're dealing with a word that has so many meanings. People probably assume most of the time that "coffee" is referring to the hot brown liquid that many people enjoy with breakfast, but that's just one of a number of meanings. "Coffee" is a word that refers to many aspects of related concepts to that beverage. Coffee is a beverage, yes, but not only can it be prepared in numerous ways (Have you ever tried Turkish coffee? It's a whole different experience!) but the word refers to different parts of the process of making coffee. Starting from the beginning, there is a tree called "coffee", and it produces a fruit called "coffee". The seed of this fruit is known as "coffee", and this seed is commonly dried out and roasted to make a substance known as "coffee". The dried, roasted "coffee" is ground to a variety of different granularities and packaged as "coffee" which people buy and combine with hot water to make the aforementioned beverage. After the grounds are used, they're still "coffee" although nobody consumes them; they either thrown them away or use them for fertilizer (I think).

Being such a big part of our culture, "coffee"" is also used for a number of other concepts related to the food product in one way or another. For instance, "coffee" is a shade of medium-brown. (Mimi could be painting!) "Coffee" can also refer to the food product in a collective sense, referring to types or brands of coffee, as in, "I don't like Folger's coffee or any of the grocery-store coffees; I prefer Starbucks coffee." Actually, if you go to Starbucks or a similar coffee establishment, you'll find that they offer many different coffees. I used to work an opening shift at Starbucks, and before we opened the store, one of the things that had to be done was of course brewing up the coffee; I'd brew a pot of dark roast coffee, then a light roast coffee, and decaf would be my "last coffee". Many years before that, though, I used to have a social gathering at my house in college every week at which I served my friends coffee; such social gatherings are commonly referred to as "coffees". There may be other shades of meaning (including the idiomatic phrase "wake up and smell the coffee"), but that will do for this writing, I think.

So, how about "last"? Once again, devoid of context a person usually thinks of the word "last" as meaning "final" but I think even in that sense of the word there are shades of meaning. Someone who was going to quit drinking coffee and had a hard time keeping their resolve might repeatedly declare "This is my last coffee!" and then have yet still one more, and one more, etc. There are other senses of finality, however. Suppose Mimi were to treat two of her friends to coffees at the local cafe, and having only two hands in which to carry coffee cups, she might carry two cups to the table and then go back to the counter for her last coffee. Also, even if she is drinking her coffee alone, any particular cup of coffee might be her last coffee of the day. If Mimi were working at the coffee shop, even if she intends to come back for a drink after her shift concludes, she could very well call the final cup she serves her last coffee. If she's making coffee for herself at home, and she finds she has only enough supplies for one more cup/pot, she might declare that she has drunk her last coffee, and must go to the store for more.

Furthermore, the word "last" doesn't only carry the concept of finality, but the concept of previousness. Mimi may be enjoying a cup of coffee now, but may have a story about how bad her last coffee tasted. Or if she throws the sort of little coffee parties I mentioned earlier, and you attended one, you might hear about how things went at Mimi's last coffee. There are other senses of the word, too. Suppose that Mimi went to the cafe and found that they were serving a particular coffee blend that was her least favorite; she might declare that that is the last coffee she would ever drink, and have no coffee at all.

Finally, there is, I suppose, the question of who (or what) "Mimi" is. As I already hinted at somewhere above, Mimi need not be the consumer of the coffee, but could be the server, or some sort of host; I also implied the possibility that Mimi could be an artist painting a picture in mainly brown colors. Mimi could be a coffee grower, a coffee roaster, or a professional coffee taster. There's a chain of restaurants called Mimi's Cafe, at which I've never had a coffee, but I assume they offer it, and every day at every location there must be a last coffee served. Mimi could be a company that produces and sells coffee, and "Mimi's last coffee" could be a reference to their most recently introduced product. Mimi could be a family pet that found an unfortunate taste for coffee, unfortunate because coffee was poisonous to her and it caused her demise.

Language is a very fluid thing by necessity, and that has its good points and bad points. Namely, when you read what may appear to be a simple phrase, you can never be 100% sure that you've got a clear grasp on it, so it's best not to leap to conclusions about whether it is stating something right or wrong.