I am a philosopher by nature, a coffee server by necessity – an observer of the quirks and routines of life at the front lines where the urban morning begins. It is with some reluctance that I have supplemented my academic career as a purveyor of caffeinated beverages. I’ve done brief and dubious entrepreneurial stints as a fortune teller, a mime and as a magician. I’ve got the business cards to prove it. But coffee is where the real money is – flexible hours, tips, a steady paycheque and an intimate and controlled environment in which to test my thesis in the field – skim milk mocha latte hold the cinnamon, Americano tall, hot chocolate extra whipped cream. There is a certain amount of predictability in the rotation, but every once in a while nature, or whoever is responsible for such things, (Kierkegaard would say God, but my man Hume would argue for chance), throws a spanner in the works, anomalies appear, the tempo shifts, and there’s a new configuration in the cycle. These subtleties, that most people miss, are the gift to those who pay attention. And that is what my thesis is about – subtle relationships between the internal and the external – the inevitability of change.

• • •

Around the time that my fortune-telling prospects were waning, I found myself photocopying my coffee server resumé once again. Rent was due and I had pretty much burnt all the bridges at the independent cafés in the city, so I took this job at one of those franchises where the coffee is bitter, the biscotti tastes like petrified cardboard and you need a prerequisite BA just to get an interview. I was slogging away at my postgraduate thesis, and their washrooms needed cleaning, so they hired me on the spot. If it weren’t for this lucky break, I wouldn’t have flunked out of university, I wouldn’t be where I am today freezing on the streets, and I never would have met my fiancée.

• • •

Sasha, that’s not her real name, was an exotic entertainer. Heaven forbid you use the word stripper – she’d give you a lashing – a vicious verbal assault pointed with Cantonese expletives. "I perform," she would say, "for money. I take my clothes off and put them back on, it’s an ancient art, but the relationship I have is with my body and the paycheque, the rest is all illusion and fantasy, somebody else’s, not mine."

I confess I had occasionally patronized her place of employment. But in all honesty, I was there for the solitude – it was a place to hide out. You see, I was sleeping with my Theology prof at the time. That was back during my Epicurean period and we would have these fights, and well, I knew she would never look for me there. So every once in a while I would slide into a booth at Sully’s and sip a six-dollar beer with my nose in a volume of Hume, intermittently tapping away at the keys of my Underwood portable typewriter. Fuck laptops, I was a Luddite rebel.

The thing is that the girls can’t really see very well from the stage with the bright lights in their eyes, so I just made sure to clap nice and loud at the end of each performance. That’s all it takes to fit in, between the rowdy boys drinking Heinekens at the front who never go for the extras – they exhaust the ex-perience with front row intensity – and the creeps that skulk in the shady corners who are the real customers. That’s where the money is. The guys drinking draft, collars pulled up, businessmen in low profile. But for some reason Sasha turned her mannequin eyes on me.

I admit that I had noticed her too. She wore a blue wig, and I was fascinated with the contradiction of disguising yourself while getting naked. And I happen to have an embarrassingly North American fascination with Asian women. But I was a little uncomfortable when she slid in across from me, her bare legs squeaking against the vinyl seat. "What are you reading?" she asked, tucking a Rothmans between her red, red lips.

"I don’t have a light," I lied, after a pause.

When she saw that I made no move to close the book, she squinted her eyes at me, looked down at the page curling out of the typewriter, "Ah, Philosophy for Idiots," she said.

Okay, she could read upside down, and she was witty, but I felt uncomfortable talking to a stranger who was very close to being naked.

"Aren’t you cold?" I asked sharply, glancing down at her bikini top, my eyes resting on the faded butterfly tattooed on her left breast. She tapped her long nails on the table, and for a second I felt bad. Up close I could see that she looked tired, almost thirty, the papilionidae slightly distorted by the stretching of skin. "Really," I said, "I’m just here for the cheap beverages."

"I liked you better when you didn’t speak," she said, be-fore tossing the cigarette at me. It hit my forehead and landed on pages 136 and 137 of my second-hand volume of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. As she walked away, I could see that the bench left a red mark on her legs between the backs of her knees and the impressive curve of her ass. She turned and gave me the finger. I smiled. I came back the next week and humoured her with some Nietzsche and a half-dozen shots of Jaggermeister.

• • •