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Here I am in Starbucks. This is the first day I’ve felt like writing, and the atmosphere is optimal.  Coffee smells, sudo-vintage hipswag jazz, and a clear view of the busy streets. My favourite past time is probably listening to techno music while watching cars go by. I hate to end sentences with prepositions about as much as I hate cliffhangers; probably because they are the same thing. I like to sway my feet with this mixtape, but when I hear that I am actually swaying my feet with the music in Starbucks, I have to change, so it looks like I am listening to something that has no consistency what so ever, which wouldn’t be odd for me. Maybe if they played Norah Jones’s Christmas stuff I would take my iPod out, but apparently Norah Jones is too mainstream for this joint; as if Starbucks isn’t?

Things are changing for me. Good changes. Now nothing changes very fast (for very long, anyways) of course. I’ve found myself to be much more comfortable in public and around people while alone.

UNRELATED: A hideous purple Chevy Equinox just drove by with about 200 people in it, approximately.

Back…At any rate, I am much less socially inept than I used to be. I think, and hope, one day soon my social anxiety will be more than a “-1″ and less than a “1″  on the scale of annoyance and inhibition, as observed by me in the study of my human interaction.

Onto the real reason why we’re all here…a little bit of history of Starbucks in this lowly, and globally irrelevant town of Northern Georgia. This place used to be a second Arby’s. This is a big deal, because the only thing we have more than 1 of around here are gas stations and pawn shops.

INTERMISSION

This lady sitting on the couch in front of me is singing the old-new-vintage jazz hipswag music while reading. IMPOSSIBLE! What is she reading? IDK, my friends. But it is one of those novels which have the author’s name in gigantic font, with the title of the book somewhere obscure and probably spelled backwards; like under the publisher’s name in fine printinside the novel. The author is Pat Connory. I wonder if Pat’s a guy or girl…

AND WE’RE BACK

The 2nd Arby’s decided it would be an excellent business decision to move down an exit from the other one. So then we had this here abandoned and overgrown Arby’s. (Rumour has it, kudzu managed to overtake the kitchen within a month of them moving out; a record not yet matched in the entire county). The land was on the market for years.

INTERMISSION

This “bznz” man (suit, tie, with tiny company laptop) got up to go the bathroom FOREVER ago. I wonder if he took a “bznz” trip to Aruba and wrote a novel (HE COULD BE PAT CONNORY. Though I doubt even he knows the name of his own novel…Do authors wear suits as casual wear? Food for thought) as no human takes that long, unless…

AND WE’RE BACK

After a while of sitting there, the old Arby’s was torn down and turned into a plot filled with none other than: dirt. Finally the land decided to take it upon itself to no longer be “that ugly patch of dirt” and grew some nice grass. Then, awarded for it’s hard work, it won the Academy Award of commercial real estate: a “SOLD” sign. Apparently some mysterious coffee god forked over the big ones to build a Starbucks. Right around the same time, Kroger (right down the street) decided it was time to bring a Starbucks to this one-horse town. A bad decision, really…The Kroger Starbucks was largely a failure; a flop; a menagerie of screw ups. Aside from a year-long service record of messed up orders and poor waiting times (I clocked them fastest at 3 minutes for a simple tall cafe vanilla latte), when the full-Monty Starbucks opened up on what it came to be known as”Ye Olde Arby’s Lot”, the non-grocery shopping, coffee drinking consumer base largely shifted to this real coffee house. With tables and cheap pre-fab hipswag jazz that is so gender neutral you start to question sexuality in general! This brings us to the Starbucks of today: one that, instead of drawing a massive west coast profit, has shifted to the east in terms of cups of coffee sold per capita. While I am not complaining about having an actual coffee shop in this hole-in-the-wall of a town, I wish that trends would start on the east coast some day (WE HAVE NEW YORK CITY, FFS!)

Oh, and the Gingerbread Latte? Do not get it.