Peter J. Crowley

From the General Store to the soda fountain, lunch counter, diner, coffee has been a socializing lubricant. The diner with white cups and stools that spun. Plans and dreams also spun to people you spoke with daily.
Paper cups, corporate coffees answer to cluster bomb advertising litter! Travel mugs and cup holders drive through, tell the clown what you want “scratch $2.05 plessee pull forward to the window” Little chance to smell the beans, let alone linger, converse. Anything more than “How are you? Fine” is wasted billable hours. Thank you? less than half of the time. Hell you are late for your second job so you can keep up the payments on your “I-personality” You got the Vanilla one but, word is that in a month an upgrade to “Ultra Vanilla-smooth personality ” will be available. Maybe you can get some overtime so you can first in line for this one?
Small business doesn’t have associates, isn’t funded by a line item on a senate bill to send more aid to Exxon/Mobil. Small business is funded by you making a decision to keep the American Dream alive. Look forward and look back but don’t forget to see what is right in front of you. The text message is on the wall your humanity is past due. enjoy pjc

Photographic Art

Mocha Joes

Not the first cup mind you but the best cup. After all it’s one hundred and twenty miles north and I’ll need fuel to get me there. Brattlboro First Friday gallery walk. The annual In-Sight Photography Project silent Auction opens tonight. and runs throughout the month and I am honored to contribute to this excellent program. Click here if you are to far to get to this wonderful City and you can support/bid on line. In-Sight Photography Program,
There are 40 something stops on The Art Walk in Brattleboro Vt. One hundred and twenty miles north on the map yet light years away in the creative mind. Another small city another coffee metaphor for small business and the arts. Thanks to the two contributors so far to this discussion. Perhaps people do read my thoughts? Perhaps they will also comment. The dialog isn’t about Norwich Ct per say, I hope to hear opinions on small business, small towns, how they or do they fit in the plan for the big box American dream?
On a recent visit to Brattleboro while waiting to cross the street there was a car radio playing loud. Not uncommon in cities these day yet standing there listening to Judy Garland sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” became a moment where I wished the walk light never came on. Off to fall colors and clean air and Mocha Joe’s enjoy pjc
Smell the Roses or the coffee beans, linger and talk.

Photographic Art

2004 pre car, on weekends I would walk out of Downtown, where the Stripmallonians raced around cell phone in hand mini van idling in the fire lane. “Give me a Mocha Latte extra chocolate and whip cream with four sweet and lows”. The characters here were right out of a Sam Shepard play. Providing me with much to write, I drank too much coffee there and lingered too long but the auditions were compelling and those of us who had a moment to sit to smell the roses enjoyed the show. Intellectual conversation, literature, film theatre and politics. Interrupted by Stripmallonians each one stranger than the next. One of my favorites was the mid 20s guy 7am November maybe Black Friday. In an attempt to impress the cute coffee staff bragged of ripping a Playstation from an old ladies hands, the last one at the Mall store that had opened at 6am to the frenzied celebrators of the Feast of St. Consumer. Well the Chri$mas Decorations are out, been out for a week in Mallonia [the capital of Stripmallonia] me I’m having another cup of Joe and drifting back through those mornings only a reflection now an empty shadow in the History of Stripmallion, waiting to be filled with the next got to have it prosumer shop. Oh and the cute coffee staff was polite but not impressed by the 20 something consumthug. Merry Christmas. enjoy pjc

Coffee in a white diner cup