So I’m sitting in a nearby cafe to the bookstore. Even though this is to be my fifth day, I do not have a key and it does not look likely I will get a key. On nice days I can sit behind the store by the river, but on days like this, humid, sticky, raining days, I am forced into shelter to wait a half hour. And of course this means having to buy something. I just paid $1.68 for a teabag.
I had thought, all right, I’ll bring my laptop with me, get some work done, or some blogging. But I am foiled in my plans. In a place like this, a big cafe with a yoga studio and right downtown Belleville, there is no free wireless. I am not asking for a pin. But I’m pissy about it.
And I happen to have arrived on a morning when three rather loud people, one of them the owner, are having some discussion on something I can’t quite figure out. He’s got a projector and has turned up the volume to extremely loud, which , to me, is extremely rude. In fact, I’m flabbergasted. Hello? You have a fucking customer!! Well, now I know: unfortunately, the cafe only a few doors down from work that promotes calm and inner peace and all that jazz is not the place to take refuge. Who knew.
And I start to rage. This is why downtown Belleville sucks. They have become so used to not having business, they have given up. Because it’s true. This is a cafe, and so far, in half an hour, I am the first and only customer. No people coming in for coffee or tea before they go to work. I assume they all go further down the street to a place that’s in a real estate building and which has even more exorbitant prices than here, or else they don’t support that, either, and go to one in Century Place even farther down the road. I’ve heard enough people say they don’t come down here, they don’t do Front Street, but there’s been so much talk about the need to improve it. It’s just that everyone else wants everyone else to do it. The sleazy City Hotel, blight on the main drag, is haven for all manner of sketchy people, and sometimes I hear someone yelling ignorantly. More likely than not, if these people ever came in it would be to ask, “Hey, man, you got a light?” I don’t know if it’s the weather. Maybe it’s PMS. But I hate this town. I always have.