I have two topics to cover tonight but not enough patience to cover them both adequately, I suspect. First, I'm giddy with excitement, as if I'm in the first weeks of a new romance, but my lover is one of Rochester's oldest coffee houses, Java Joe's. It's not as if I haven't been to Java Joe's before. I have, a handful of times. Yet I guess it never caught the sparkle in my eye, or something, because until recently I never really wanted to make it one of my regular hangouts. Perhaps it was all of that live music, or what seemed, in my advancing age, to be hordes and hordes of young kids apparently overtaking it. Or was it that its location seemed out of reach, just beyond the limits of where I wanted to travel. Maybe it was because it seemed unwelcoming of outsiders, or too self-consciously hip. Whatever it was, I've overcome it. And now I love the place. There's no doubt that it's a little heavy on the ambience and a little light on product and service, but it's perfect for me, or at least for some moods and needs.

It has a greater mix of people than I originally thought. Of course it has its share of hipsters slouched against windows reading in a fog of oblivion, the tittering high school boys and girls contributing mostly to the noise levels, the earnest but unemployed pseudo intellectuals yaking on and on about deconstructionism in the modern age, the old timers, the regulars, the faithful and the drifters all gathered around the usual table wondering what happened to that record shop around the corner, and the leather-clad bikers wondering if, hope against hope, the cute blond boy approaching from across the street is not straight, even though the thin, lovely girl in attendence at his side suggests otherwise. There are all of these, to be sure, but much more. There are still the fine and proper elderly couples ducking in for coffee after the symphony, the blind daters, the nondescript graduate students studying medical texts, but Java Joe's has real diversity, or at least a greater number of those types that I do not see at other shops. Most notably, it draws the less affluent, although not the less intellectually equipped. It seems to have its own little community, but neither welcoming nor exclusionary. It's a rougher crowd, but worth the extra effort. I'll be going there a lot, I think.

I'll save the other topic for next time. I'm too restless to sit any longer.