There is a coffee shop near the ballpark called Philz. They serve Turkish coffee and each cup is prepared and pressed to order. The menu lists a variety of roasts, from light to dark, and no matter what you order, it’s always rich and strong and flavorful. Addictive. At $2.75 for a small, it’s not something I would do every day. But it does make for a nice coffee break with Brian, and also gets me extraordinarily high.

I was looking at this book this weekend at Anthropologie (who by the way want $30 for it while Amazon is only charging $19; I knew that place was a rip-off) and suddenly saw the end of my novel. Writing is very weird like that. It will take place in a quiet little garden, in a backyard, and involve someone planting a row of tulip bulbs. Which you do in the fall, right? I once brought tulip bulbs home with me from the Netherlands and tried to get them to grow in a wooden box on my fire escape. It didn’t work out too well.

Another random anecdote: Brian and I met up for coffee together on Monday and as we waited for the train home afterward, I noticed that the woman standing nearby was holding a big framed print of Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. I have always loved that painting. A lot. Could be partially to do with the fact that my parents had a copy hanging on the wall in our house when I was a kid. I always just loved the feelings of longing it evoked.

The woman said that some guy around the corner was selling a bunch of framed prints, but once I saw that she had snagged that one, the one I really would have wanted, I knew there was no point in checking it out.

This coffee is strong, man.