(Why is this happening?)

THIS IS WHY (?)

Let’s talk about things that are embarrassing.

I’ll go first.

A question I want to ask people in filmed interviews MIGHT be about their first experience at MOKABE’S.

So…

Okay…um.  Anticlimactic.  The first time I ever went to Mokabe’s was with my friend (the LOVELY and soon-to-be-married) Sarah.  But…I sat outside into the late night.  I didn’t talk to anyone, and I didn’t really know where I was.  (The CITY?  What’s…the city?)

LATER, things changed.  Later, it was 2007 and I was a senior in college and I (listenedtoalotofanidifranco, worebandanas, hadmynosepierced) came with my acting major friend, Sari.  (Not to be confused with Sarah). 

Let’s be real: I was MUCH more interested in this time at the promise of…lesbian sightings. 

(It seemed a guarantee.)

SOON, we were there every day EVERY DAY every day.  We sat upstairs and sipped our multiple beverages and hoped that eventually the people who worked there would talk to us (beourbestfriends).  This was a counterintuitive approach.  We didn’t talk to anyone.  We didn’t even see anyone.  Our studying was not conducive to socializing or meeting lesbians.  When we DID see other people, we usually looked away, down to our textbooks on…whatever it was we studied. 

Let’s skip a huge part of this story so that I can humiliate myself more rapidly.  Things went REALLY slowly but they sort of, in a dysfunctional way, functioned.

ONE DAY I was sitting upstairs on one of those high tables that go up to the window.  I may or may not have been sporting a wrist brace to comfort my carpel tunnel and I also may or may not have been wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt.  Um. 

SOMETHING happened.  I spilled my soy latte!  And it just…whoosh, a tidal sticky raw-sugared mess across that little yellow table, swallowing up the bottom of Sari’s BRAND NEW MACBOOK.

(Disaster disaster disaster disaster).

Good thing she was almost finished with her seventy-page thesis…

(Oh right!  We studied plays!)

uhhhh...

She left to go to the Apple Store.  She was not mad and she didn’t even seem upset.  For some reason THIS REALLY FREAKED ME OUT.  I went DOWNSTAIRS.  I SAT STARING AND SAD AND REALLY SAD SAD SAD at everyone around me.

I MIGHT, might, have cried to the lovely people working behind the counter.

(I OWE MY FRIEND THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS.  I HAVE FORTY-SEVEN DOLLARS.)

Anyway…so…I guess…that was a bonding experience? 

Also…(because, really, who doesn’t like to hear about other people’s discomfort?) I kept running into one of the girl’s who worked there. 

THE PROBLEM would have normally been that I have a lot of trouble with out-loud human language and general social contact.  (I spend a lot of my time thinking about ways to NOT fall down). 

The BIGGER problem was that it happened like…three times within…a week.  

And she was always with friends and/or her girlfriend and I was always alone.  There was Whole Foods and then there was a (not Mokabe’s,) coffee shop and then there was the art museum.   Yes, I was wandering (maybe barefoot?) on art hill, headphones in, and for the THIRD TIME IN A WEEK I HAPPEN TO RUN INTO THIS PERSON.  And she was all like…SO NICE and… “you want to go in with us?”

So I wandered the German expressionism section a little bit behind a group of people I did not know...

Good thing I know her now and that is more funny than it was at the time when I would start sweating profusely and speaking what I meant to be English but what sounded a lot like Russian.

And, also, anyway…those were (some of) my first experiences at MOKABE’S.

So then what?

Time passed.  I moved place to place.  Eventually, (because we’re skipping to only things that humiliate me), I was drunk and living with my wonderfully rambunctiously Alanis Morisette-ly tattooed MOKABE’S barista roommate, trying to make pasta in the early morning hours.  Stovetop?  Oven?  Microwave?  Who knows. 

He came into our (purple) kitchen, and I THREW my phone across the room in excitement to see him (startled simultaneously by the vibration of a text message). 

The phone cracked into several pieces on the linoleum.

Ooops.

(Also, I was REALLY hoping the text message said something like…I love you…and I was pretty positive in the moment that the pasta-drunk-phone-throw would result in MASSIVE damage to my potential new affair). 

Anyway…those were the two things I have to say about breaking things in proximity to MoKaBe’s?

BUT THIS IS NOT A MOVIE ABOUT ME.

THIS IS NOT A MOVIE ABOUT BREAKING THINGS.

I DO NOT HAVE AN EXCITING LIFE. 

I just thought I’d go first.

And so…if you’ve stumbled upon this and you’ll be at the corner of Arsenal and Grand, PLEASE be ready to tell me your first (or overall) experience of MoKaBe’s.

I have had upsets and revelations and moments of real HOME in that place.

Have you?

And if so…that is the “why.”

THANK YOU TELL ME EVERYTHING. 

I WILL BE THERE SOON…