The Sound of a Feeling

Have you ever heard the sound of a feeling? 

I ask this question, because the other day this question occurred to me.  But not the answer.  This is how the question came to be asked:

There I was, being my normal self, enjoying my weekend.  This friend called me and asked me if I wanted to join them for some Turkish coffee.  There are these coffee places around town.  They are like holes in the walls.  You don't see them advertised.  You'd actually be lucky to see a little a sign even by the door.  But people in the know, just know where they are.  Their reputation spreads by word-of-mouth.  There's nothing illegal about them.  It’s not like they are dens of inequity with a backroom illegal casino or something.  Well, ok, some have a backroom where you can play a friendly game of poker for a nominal buy-in.  But that's about it.  And there is definitely no alcohol served on premises.  No drugs of any kind too.

In general, these places are incredibly unattractive with old style Formica top or steel top or chipped wood tables, beaten up chairs, one surly waitress, and an over-friendly owner of the café.  But you can smoke.   Now I'm talking about regular cigarettes, not reefers.  You can smoke your cigarettes openly.  I'm sure it’s illegal to smoke there, but since everyone does it, we figure its ok.  There are some no smoking signs about the place for the naïve.  No naïve people actually come there - except for maybe the health inspector, so it’s all good.  I heard through the grapevine that the health inspector only visits in off-business hours.  Since there are no customers at that time, therefore, no one is smoking.  And there are proper no-smoking signs around, so I suppose everything just continues hunky-dory. 

They serve the most incredibly strong coffee in little espresso glasses.  You can order tea also, but only if you are the female of the species.  If you are a male, and order tea - the surly waitress will turn downright hostile, and the overfriendly owner will eye you with suspicion till you leave.  I know this because I accidentally ordered tea once - I was sort-of coffee-ed out for the day by the time I got there.

I never made the same mistake again.  In fact, as I've learned the protocol of these places, I learned to order nothing at all.  You walk in calmly and find an empty table.  You settle down and stare moodily into space if you are alone.  If you are with friends, you can stare at other people.  Apparently, as long as you have your own people, it’s ok to stare at other people.  But if you are alone and staring at other people, then you are just another weirdo and so the surly waitress will turn downright hostile, and the overfriendly owner will eye you with suspicion till you leave - only then everyone will heave a sigh of relief that will practically blow you out of the door.

Then there is the question about what do you do if you walk in and there are no empty tables?  The uninitiated may hazard a guess that if there are no empty tables, you wait around till one becomes free, or you leave.  You'd be wrong.  What you do is this:  You find a quasi empty space on the floor of the café that could fit a smallish table.  Then you plant yourself in that space, and signal the over-friendly owner for a table in that space.  This will earn you respect not just from the owner, but also the patrons.  All the tables and chairs around the spot where you stand and make your claim, will magically move away from you and make more space.  I have frequently amused myself by picking smaller and smaller spaces, and still by the time the owner shows up with one of the folding beat-up old tables, everyone has moved away sufficiently to make space for my table.  Its fun, trust me.

If you do this right, then at some point the surly waitress will come over and just sort of grunt near your table.  Make eye-contact briefly and tap softly on the table.  That's default signal for "Get me my coffee woman!"  This will earn you the surly waitress' respect, and you shall have your coffee forthwith along with some little snack-y thingies - some sweet, some salty.  However, if you were to actually be nice to the waitress, smile at her, ask her for a menu or for her recommendation, or in any way try to engage her; then there is strong likelihood that you may have to wait till the next millennium to get your order.  And once you get it, you should carefully avoid it, for there would be a strong likelihood that surly waitress has spit in it.

So you see these spots are not exactly customer friendly.  There is an odd raw edge to them.  There is no fake-Barbie giving you a cheerful "Haaaloooo!  What can I do ya for?!" type of double-talk.  It feels real.  The coffee is splendid.  The baklava is avoidable.  If you are hungry, and look sufficiently hungry, the overfriendly owner may saunter over to your table with a plate of food without you actually having to order any.  Its usually excellent food of some sort of middle-eastern origin.  And the conversations you get to eavesdrop on are passionate and right out there! 

Politics is discussed passionately and sometimes tables get overturned.  But no one has thrown a punch at anyone.  As yet. You understand of course, that its not Canadian politics that gets discussed.  No one ever discusses Canadian politics with passion.  Canadian politicians are simply too nice.  I wonder where they get recruited - boy scouts?  Either that, or Canadians themselves are just not the type that can be duped too easily by shams.  Hence whenever you overhear a passionate political discussion, you just know they are talking international politics – and somehow the Americans are involved in some conspiracy. 

Then there are the personal conversations.  Life shaping conversations.  The type you wouldn’t ever hear on any soap opera.  They are the real deals.  Once I heard a whole dumping conversation at a table beside me.  After she had ripped his heart out by blaming her extra-curricular activities on his lack of attention; she then reached over and gave him one hell of a passionate full-mouth kiss goodbye.  Stood up with class and walked out of the café with gaping patrons' eyes following her all the way to the door and beyond.  I almost followed her out.  Except, well, I sort of felt sorry for the guy.  So I stayed, ended up giving him the eye of shame, which actually made him feel worse and me a bit guilty.  Imagine my surprise, when I saw him back in the café the next day with another sexy girl.  Turns out she saw the whole drama and that made her fall for him!  Stuff like that happens there - you can understand, why it’s so addictive.

This place (my own little hole in the wall) that I tend to go to most often, has this nice cozy feel to it.  It has the usual beaten up furniture and people.  But it also happens to have a whole wall of one of those old fashioned wall-papers that depict scenery.  This particular one is of a rainforest.  It’s a little surreal to sit in that shabby little place, sipping strong Turkish coffee, eating middle-eastern food with a fake rainforest staring at you despondently through a haze of smoke.  I like it!

So this place happens to be crowded during certain times.  I suspect those are the times when the surly waitress and over-friendly owner's friends and family come calling.  I haven't actually proven this hypothesis, although the evidence strongly suggests the truthfulness of it.  For example, is there any other reason why the normally surly waitress would fall all over a customer and kiss him or her five or six times?  Initially I thought it had something to do with the tip and was tempted to go over and ask the right amount that could result in kisses from the surly waitress.  Not that I wanted her to kiss me.  The idea itself actually makes me a bit queasy.  I was just jealous that she was kissing others and not me.  I wonder if you'd understand this feeling.

You see it was this very feeling that I was explaining in earnest to my friend the other day.  I argued coherently about the fact that when you see others get stuff that wasn't even offered to you, well then, you *want* said stuff.  It’s a key concept behind all marketing.  You see other people enjoying stuff and enriching their life with it, and before you know it, you are subconsciously taking all the bad things that happen to you in the normal course of a life and attribute it to the lack of "stuff" that is making all these fictional people happy.  You understand that it’s all fiction, but there's a little part of you that whines that it wants a little fictionally happy time too. 

I saw that all the people that the surly waitress was kissing seemed all happy and whatnot, and suddenly one day I felt unreasonably that *that* was the key to real fake-happiness.  I know that it sounds all complicated, but it’s really all very straightforward - all I wanted to know was what the hell I was supposed to do so that I could have surly waitress fall all over me and lay five or six kisses on me?  Did I have to increase the tip amount or did I actually have to be adopted by one of the family clique.  Tell me, I said, I want to know the price of this fictional happiness.  Then I'll decide after I've figured out a way around the queasy factor.  It’s a valid feeling in my opinion and I laid it out there for dissection on that ugly chipped table. 

That's when my friend said to me "That doesn't sound like a feeling, that sounds like a petty fixation."

It gave me pause for thought.  And out blurted this question from my mouth "How do you know what a feeling sounds like?"

Seriously.  Do you know?  What exactly is the sound of a feeling?  I'm clueless.  My friend was clueless too.  Because he drawled back to say: "Discussing feelings is boring.  That was a fascinating rant - hence its fixation."  He grinned back in self-assured all-knowing Buddha-state of enlightenment. 

And I just looked on wistfully as surly waitress fell on top of another customer and fake-kissed her silly while overfriendly owner fake-beamed from the background of that fake-rainforest wallpaper.