Some people write in cafés. I don’t know how anyone could write more than a blog in a public place, but that’s me. Whether I’m working on my own work, or ghostwriting, I have to write without music or distractions. Boring, I know! But I blog, as you may have noticed, and for this purpose I use cafés on a daily basis. When you spend all day communing with a computer, it’s important to have some kind of public interaction as part of your routine, which is why I started blogging. Its not the writing of blogs that’s so important, it’s the fact that I go to a café to do it, which not only warms me up for the day, but reminds me there is a world out there.
In this town, we have a lot of cafés to choose from. Where I live is basically on the rim of what one could logically call Santa Fe’s westside cafe circle. In the morning, I usually go to The Betterday Cafe, because it’s closest to my house. It’s a little hole in the wall type place, where the tables are tiny and close together, and they don’t mind if I bring my dog. (No, I don’t pretend he’s a service dog. Tacky!) The clientelle and workers there are mostly young, hip-looking people, for some reason. It’s a good environment for checking email and writing blogs and stuff like that, but I can’t get any serious writing done there, because they play good music, pretty loud, and the seats are rudimentary benches, and the tiny tables wobble, and the people are pretty friendly, which means sometimes strangers talk to me. Everyone loves my dog, so that makes even more people talk to me, so Betterday is strictly a place for blogging and hanging out.
There’s only one cafe in town where I might attempt to actually write creatively, which is The Iconik, because it’s all done up like a postmodern casbah. The atmosphere is both extremely creative and relaxed and the furniture’s more comfy and the people are, well, less outgoing. Currently, I’m at Counter Culture, which has the advantage of being really spacious, with an industrial feel. It’s more of a family place, with kids running around all over the place, and a large patio which is great for people watching, but during the day the patio is crawling with both kids and flies, which makes me crazy. It’s a place for meeting with friends and having loud conversations, basically. Not a place for loners. Counter Culture, though, is ideal in the evening, when it’s never crowded and I can take over a big table all to myself.
So, in case you’re in Santa Fe, or planning a trip here, and in case you’re a writer, like me, or a coffee lover, or a person who loves to hang out, there you have it. I could go on. About three other cafés come to mind, but this is a blog, not a dissertation, so I’ll leave it at that for now.