bad coffee: the b-sides

most good things are useless

eurostar train coffee sounds fancy but what’s important is that it’s still terrible

good evening, subscribers. this is a b-side post, a new feature for paid subscribers that you can read a little more about here (by new feature, do I mean I’ll do it every week, or regularly, or ever again even one time after this? who knows! not me!) Basically, this is a piece (well, in this case, several pieces) of this past week’s mid-week essay that got cut while I was editing, or that I started and decided not to finish. In this case, that means a few more entries for a few more types of bad (good) coffee that I love very dearly. enjoy.

(this post is only for paying subscribers, but here’s a quick reminder that subscriptions are on sale until the end of the month; if you know someone who’d like to subscribe, or if you got here through a forward and would like to read more, or if for any other reason you’re not a paying subscriber yet but think you might like to be, now’s a great time to subscribe or upgrade).

Airport Coffee: At an airport, there are always TVs playing the news and the news is always an emergency. At an airport everything is always an emergency. 

At an airport, it’s always thirty or forty years earlier than it is anywhere else. In an airport it’s always the twentieth century. A man on a TV somewhere is always talking about an emergency in a measured, cardboard voice, and someone is always explaining the weather with a chart that makes a little whooshing sound, and the weather is always an emergency, too. In an airport it’s always the future but it’s the future from a hundred years ago, stuck forever at the miracle of flight and the broadcast news of the 1990s. The same voice announces that it’s raining in Michigan as announces that your flight has been cancelled as announces that the world is ending in fire and flood. In an airport everything is an emergency and in an airport no one particular emergency matters more than any other, which is to say none of them do, which is to say the world is always ending, and the new weather is always about to arrive.