The Trident

I’ve joined a new culture… the internet café culture. I’ve been doing it for a while now, visiting the cafes around town. Today I am sitting with my computer in, my favorite, the Trident, a old Boulder coffee shop. The Trident still attracts hippies, traveling gypsies, professors, and local intellectuals. It’s a place where outcasts can feel cozy and students write papers. It’s a little piece of old Boulder that stays the same over time while all around it high end shops and restaurants have opened.

In a table just adjacent to me are two unshaved guys looking close to geezerhood. They are conversing loudly from everything to Gandhi, existentialism and classes at CU in the sixties, to real estate deals gone bad (otherwise they’d both be millionaires by now, maybe). It’s a wandering conversation induced, I suspect, by a hit of Boulder smoke. In the space of ten minutes they’ve gone through every psych class and professor they had at CU, Greeley, Ft. Collins, Alamosa, and the University of Oregon. Then they flipped from that to “The Dancing Wuli Masters” to The Art of Motor Cycle Racing.” Actually I can’t keep up with them. Now they’re on about their grandmothers and the traumas experienced by their mothers. One of the mothers married rich men twice, each time burying a husband who left buckets of money. (Somebody’s mother a Black Widow here?) Both of their grandmothers smoked like chimneys and drank themselves to death with Scotch. Humm.

Sitting here I almost think I am in a tired café in Paris on the Left Bank. Too bad the Trident doesn’t have a liquor license, a glass of red wine would be perfect.

Jesse