Past Future

The sun had already risen by the time I sat down outside the cafe. The apartment building/fastfood place/hotel/gentrification show-piece/tax abatement across Broadway sat high enough to block dawn. My small coffee jiggled in its cup on its porcelain saucer as I bumped the wiry table upon which the caffeine sat. 

I bumped the table shifting myself to reach for my smokes. Cigarettes, a lighter, and a doob tube from the dispensary down the block. I am shifty in general, thus the THC. It is reliable for that if not anything else arguable in court.

The cigarette pack and lighter un-pocketed swiftly but the tube holding my pre-roll was caught up in my change pocket. Bit of a struggle but the tube came free as well. I have dexterity issues, as most other people my age. 

But sitting now on the table; cigs, lighter, doob tube, coffee. Breakfast of survivors. I slurp my first taste of caffeine. Rich, bold leathery-earth. The nose wafts up my nostrils and vacant memories of broken past dawns rush by and fade back into hiding.

Popping the cap on the doob tube, I hear a dog sitting shotgun in their owner’s car bark.  I survey the 180-degree front of the cafe from left to right and light up. The pre-rolls canoe, so you gotta treat them with a bit of care, but they fit the budget and discretion realities of my specific medical use of cannabis, wherever I may roam.

Smoke leaking from my holes. Relief in some unfulfilling and fleeting sense washes across me. I take another swig of coffee. The sun climbs behind gentrification across the street to the east. I know it is up now. I do not wait in prayer for the sun much these days. Progress.

Promenading into the day comes the bar district. A bar owner, possibly, paperwork strapped to his back, walks out of the front of the cafe. A young couple push their baby and its stroller along the walkway between the cafe, myself, and Broadway. Dump trucks circling the block, workers who woke up when the bartenders called last call at 3 am this morning, like myself, though I work for myself alone. I no longer need to be in a bar district, I want to be. Neon disease survivor.

Taking another pull on the j, surveying still, the steam stirring from my coffee. Thinking too much lately. Waking up angry, frustrated, feral…not lost but not feeling found. Out of the crisis but not without crisis. I may look put together roasting one at dawn but, folks, this picture painted is called survival. People drink coffee in the morning so I fit in where I can survive.

The sidewalk is dry but up the block a member of the district’s cleaning crew is pressure-washing last night off of the concrete. The pressurized water blasts clouds about the worker who wears galoshes. Maybe in another life. In another bar district, sure, but I am not there, I am here smoking a j with my morning drip.

And the j is done. I stub it out between my index and thumb fingers and walk the butt to the trash can by the street. Sun is higher. There were clouds moving through, headed east before morning, and it appears the sun now is high enough to brighten things up a bit more. Back to the coffee and, likely now, a cigarette.

People occupying other chairs and tables in front of the cafe offer few insights, but the women who move tables to get away from smoke tend to be from the parts of town which have more money than sense. Like I used to be and really still am. But I am not, nor have I ever been, a suburban sprawler. Funny how unacceptable they are even of the notion of inconvenience.

Lighting my cigarette, feeling the j set in, one of the women who moved tables coughed obviously as I dragged away on my first puff. We live in a free society, right? Or country. It just costs a lot of pride and self-respect. You gotta maintain humility in the face of socially acceptable behavior. You really gotta learn to say “fuck it” early on. I flick my cig and slurp my swill.

My coffee is running low. A bit of cig left, about time to move on with my day. The suburban sprawlers have moved on from the cafe to the bigger and better, or at least less-inconvenient, items of their days. My coffee is now tepid but the sun crests the tax abatement across the street. The day has begun.

Repeating the stubbing out procedure with my cig, strolling again to the trash can along Broadway, and returning to the table to grab my porcelain, I figure up Broadway and back to my place by mid-morning. Strong-arming the door open into the cafe, porcelain secured, approaching the dirty dish bin, the line at the counter is now a half-dozen deep. Morning coffee, a tradition unlike any other. Routine, buddy, you are here for routine.

My routine is simple. I had no time to think of much but what to do next; wake up, shit, shower, shave, be a cog in the wheels. Then life happened. It keeps happening. Turns out it is disabling to me. Probably unemployable. I cannot keep my head screwed on straight. And, so, routine. Hygiene. Serene. The controllables and the un-controllables. The meds.

In prior iterations of daily life, you would have perhaps called me a “go getter”. Set the bar as high as you would like and then give me space to operate. A challenge? Mother fucker, I am Challenger Deep. Pressure makes me. I thought as much for a minute anyway. And I keep trying to prove it to myself at least. But then I lived too much, had too much pressure, cracked once too often, etc. Now I am disabled due to my mental health.

Jumped states this time, my next time in over a dozen attempts to find my own, sustainable, life, in the world I believed full of possibilities. Now I know so much about my reality that I try with real, concentrated effort to not imagine any possibilities. There are both good and bad possibilities in the world, I now know, and my odds were never the best.

Walking up Broadway, satchel across chest, I approach the intersection at Westport Road. Traffic would be light this time of day if not for the delivery trucks, both of food and alcohol. A whole community for degeneration around the intersection which is now designated in a geolocation which was once called the town of Kansas. So, in a way, I am still in Kansas.

Crossing Westport Road, the morning sun radiates off of the faces of the buildings to the north which curve to the east along Broadway’s neighborhood curve, the sidewalks drying and the open signs off or turned to closed. A few vagrants at the corner, homeless or otherwise, myself included. Men and women, people in reality, are not meant to live outdoors. It is ironic in excess the lengths to which our current reality decorates the landscape to prevent even the merest comfort for the house-less person. 

Engineering firms designed to design insufficiencies of comfort specifically for the least-comfortable class. What a world. But, oh boy, do we love donating money to charitable causes. The tax write off is built into the tax bracket! Just take advantage. Those people do not need your literal handout. Be civil!

Of course, around this time of day in downtown San Francisco a couple years back, while out and about for this very same routine of caffeine and cannabis, I watched a portly, bald, white man in a wife-beater and boxers inhale something through a glass pipe as he sat buddha-style on what was clearly his twin mattress off California on one of the many SanFran sidestreets. 

The town formerly known as Kansas could truly be doing worse both for itself and in general. They also have AI-driven cars training for world domination in the Bay Area. God help them if they make their way this far east.

Across a row of bushes lining a dead end, another morning neighborhood employee hoses flower planters down with city water. A nice place at any time. Almost at least with this time being essential for perpetuation of any longevity. Why change a thing? That is a nice way to look at reality and I manage to hold onto that thought until the moment I pass the plants being watered and approach the neighborhood gas station.

A gruff, muffled grunt rumbles my way down the block past the gas pumps. Mocking my potential progress, a man is mumbling to himself loud enough for me to hear him from half-a-block away. Do not engage. Repeat. Do not engage.

I ask myself aloud if I heard anything clearly too. I was looking down and thinking positive when I heard the grunting. Could have come from a car at the pump or in the street. Chill. Repeat. Chill. Another grumble; animalian, urgent, aggressive, and in my direction or, at least, in the direction in which proceeds a white man in a white hat and blue t-shirt. Shuffling at dawn, as many of us may. As I have. I know the origin of the head of the grunt: Insanity.

I momentarily mock my experience and reality and tell myself it would be crazy to think this man would be here now to provoke you alone, to impede you, to inhibit your progress. You of all people. I would have to be a fool to fall into being provoked anywhere anytime anymore, let alone Broadway up from Westport at dawn like some saloon survivor.

But I am a saloon survivor. I am a survivor of much, in fact. But provocation ends poorly in general when acted upon, yet I am walking into provocation. His blue shirt reads “PROUD VETERAN HOMEOWNER”. Could be true. Could just be a bad come down this guy has on his hands. Not me. I am fine. A-ok. Never had the chance to own a home. I am a veteran of nothing. My pride is mine alone. Who am I to be provoked, I mutter.

He is closer. We are walking toward one another. He grunts and now I want to decipher the mumble. I guess I need a reason for my right hand to grip my leather satchel strap and for my left hand to ball into a fist. I realize I am physically preparing to engage. Do NOT engage.

His eyes leak and radiate and my soul yearns as if in a hall of mirrors. So many paths and I would have his sight. He knows it somewhere in there too and shuts his mouth. I nod. He lowers his head and we walk past. His past, perhaps, in me. A past future indeed in him for me. A potential future I hope to never find, and I actively plan to avoid in every moment I may have left.

Planter with Graffiti, KCMO, JHB, 2025.