I never sit in The Sweet River of Coffee, which has proudly stood resolute behind the historic but abandoned pawnshop on the square since 1999, while waiting for my coffee. I feel I have not earned the right, as I generally take my coffee to go. When I do drop in, it is typically in the afternoons but, because of a change in my son’s school band schedule, I found myself there a few minutes shy of seven in the morning.
I stood and blinked slowly to clear the godawful morning from my eyes. There were several orders in front of mine, notably a table seeking seven or eight lattes of various temperatures and contents for the merrily-clad gauchos who were in the process of opening the Brazilian steakhouse across the square for the day. The five of them sat around a table for four and spoke in small voices, occasionally laughing, occasionally cyring, but always in the gentle sussuration of soto vocce Portuguese.
At another table, a pair sat. I hesistate to say a couple, because they seemed aloof and distant in the modern manner of youths. Their table would comfortably hold two, but had a third chair, which they had commandeered to hold their various shopping bags and packages, variously standing proud and tied with whimsically frayed twine. They sat under the wheeled air conditioning unit that the management had set upon a high shelf in the upper corner of the single-room coffee shop, vented by hand out into the abandoned building next door. I tried to pay them no heed, but my attention was drawn by the phrase, “meth scholar.”
I recount here the conversation much as I heard it, my memory being clouded by the early hour and by subsequent events.
A, the Elder of the two, wrapped in several layers of sweater and various kitschy knit devices: I didn’t want to go see him. That was Merilee. She had the tickets.
B, the Younger, a naïf in translucent thirft tee and cutoff jean shorts: She does that.
A: Anyway, I didn’t know who he was, Dag Gornfson. I looked online and he’s some kind of meth scolar.
I interrupt here to say that this is the moment I began paying attention. I have changed the name of the alleged scholar to protect the innocent. The actual name spoken was “John Andrews.” I return you to the event.
B: Oh, that sounds fun.
A: Anyway, he talked for about an hour. Do you know, he said, methamphetamine’s effect on the brain is actually much differnent that we thought. Scientists can’t explain it, like how a bee fights an airplane wing.
B: Ooh, I know. Or how if the Earth is a flat disc, how it generates enough lift to fly.
A: Girl! I know. Anyway, he says that meth was actually very different until 1999, when they invented Dunning-Kruger and it got much, much cheaper to make. Now, what it does is, it takes the brain’s natural affinity for being skillful
B: So skillful.
Here, B, the Younger, snapped in a quite sassy fashion which I cannot reproduce despite several hours of attempts and so do not reproduce for you today.
A: That what meth actually does is it makes you see your own potential as actualized ability, and act on it, and it allows the brain to create solutions from aether.
B: Ether? I though it was dangerous to take that with meth.
A: No, not ether. Aether. The stuff of creation, sandwiched between molecules. The glue that holds reality together.
B: Quintessence?
A: Quintessence.
B: Like they stockpiled in Atlantis.
A: Exactly. It’s why we don’t have two moons anymore. So, meth now, modern meth, it makes your brain take things you’ve already learned and recombine them into things that look new, but aren’t.
B: Wait. Like AI?
A: Exactly. Exactly. He says new meth, he calls it Y2K meth, just turns your brain into AI. Now, what the AI companies are doing is they take a bunch of programmers from silicon valley, and they give them all meth, and they just extract their pituitary glands.
B: To get their souls.
A: Mmm, hmm. And the leftover juice, that’s what they distill into AI. So, he says, if you can get vintage meth from before 1999, it will actually cure the cancer they put behind the traffic lights now. But the new stuff, it just makes you a target for the drones, out looking for AI juice.
B: My God. It’s just like that movie.
A: Exactly.
I have been unable to divine the name of the film, and I fear that my order was then ready. Because of my inability to relax into The Sweet River of Coffee, I was forced back out onto the sweltering streets to puzzle and moan, as befits my position as a mortal.
| Natosha Gibbs | Voice of B, The Younger |
| Claude Debussy | Composer, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune |
| Ben Gibbs | &c. |