welcome back 1993

I'm in a timewarp. It's mid-August, 2006, but a confluence of circumstances has thrown me back into fall of 1993. It's something about the quality of the light today (hard and bright) and the air (almost crisp) and these hippies from Reed College who have come into my coffeeshop and taken over the table next to me with their silly role playing game and youthful enthusiasm -- it's all throwing me back to my freshman year at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina and my favorite coffeeshop of that era, the beansTalk.

Appalachian, aka: Happy Appy, was a sort of hippie-drug college in a sweet, sleepy mountain town in western North Carolina. Nowadays they're trying to build it up and turn it into a big football school, but back in my day it was still just a small, quiet, liberal arts school with lots of hippies and little ambition. Back in those days, there was only one coffeeshop in town, near campus on King Street. It had a tiny downstairs and a mediumly tiny upstairs and it was such a haven for me and my compatriots, not unlike these fucking nerdy hippies who are sitting here arguing over the "carbon life form" in their game. We'd sit around, read books, debate the finer points of eastern religions or ancient civilizations, drink coffee and smoke clove cigarettes and all the other shit you do when you're 18 and everything is really exciting and new.

It's fun to remember that feeling -- and sitting here with these little nerds next to me, drinking cold coffee and working on a paper, I am more than just remembering that feeling. I'm fully emmersed in reliving it. I'm so disoriented, actually, I don't expect to walk out onto Alberta when I leave, I expect to walk out onto King Street, maybe bump into some familiar folks, walk down to the Boone Baglery for a tempeh reuben, then back to campus to finish working on my paper in my room. This is such a weird feeling. I'm starting not to like it...