coffee thoughts

i bought a dvd today in bestbuy: Coffee and Cigarettes. its one of those kind of movies that appeals to me on a certain level, but i'm not sure which level that is. when i first saw it in the theatres i didn't much care for it, but it has stayed with me; this movie hasn't got much, if any, plot. it has 11 scenes of various people in various settings feeling rather uncomfortable with each other drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. my favorite scene, i believe, is a bizarre banter between iggy pop and tom waits. the stronger of the two actors is tom. i just realized tonight that tom waits was in The Fisher King. he plays the bum who panhandles in grandcentral station and has the great line that goes something to the effect of: "you know society's a mess when people start pissin on bookstores." ain't that truth. i'm sitting here, now jonesin for a cup of coffee. and i don't mean a froo-froo starbuck's cup of coffee. i'm talking more along the lines of a good old fashioned cup of joe. you know the kind that has been sitting around just a tad too long on the coffee warmer in a truck stop or, heaven of heavens, an ihop. and it has that kick, not so much a caffine kick, but that "kick" lets you know that its real coffee. the best coffee is from an ihop. perkins has pretty good coffee, too, but for some reason ihop's coffee is just the best there is. i'm not sure why that is, but it is. i'm sure its nothing more then maxwell house, or godforbid, instant. but there's something about ihop coffee that just sits well with my plebian nature. maybe its something to do with the fact that it comes out of the baby blue coffee pot. therein may lay the key. of course there is the whole good memories behind the cup of ihop coffee thing, that might be just as important. a friend of mine and i in college would go to an ihop in austin, right next to the city copshop, for what was ostensiably a "study session" but invariably turned into a "hangout and dig it all session." we would take our books and imagine we were reading and studying, but we in fact just watched the human movie: cops walkin in with their hand cannons strapped to their hips. shiftworkers rollin in before they went work or rollin after leaving. there was something, i don't know, almost dramatic about the whole affair. a play, which we all know hamlet said "was the thing." and it is, isn't it? the play. the human element. there it was played out on the stage of an ihop and no one really knew they were in the play. they just were. and we drank our coffee and if we had the scratch we ate our breakfast food on the big ihop platters commenting on the action. relishing in it. being a part of it. drinking our coffee. my friend and i each had a pot of coffee in front of us. we stayed until we finished them.