Imagine what it’s like to not be alive. Pretty hard, right, since you wouldn’t have a brain. But imagine not not being alive, I mean that’s when you have a brain and a body and you live on a planet with other people and millions of species all connected in a biosphere.
Now imagine you were not alive but you had a brain and you were trying to imagine what it’s like to be alive. It would be unimaginable, right? And here we are, we’re both alive and in an unimaginable world with a brain. I mean we have a brain in an unimaginable world.
So that’s the experiment, how you imagine it.
‘Adventure, joy and love’ is what my barista Katie wished me this morning as I rolled off on my bicycle. I took it to heart. I can easily imagine that.
My first stop was Royal Blue. I ordered a caramel mocha cortado and sat down at the table outside facing the street. The collection of books in my bag included ‘The Kabir Book, forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir’, I pulled it out and opened it at random.
Student, do the simple purification.
You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree;
and inside the seed are the blossoms of the tree,
and the chestnuts, and the shade.
So inside the human body there is the seed, and
inside the seed there is the human body again.Fire, air, earth, water and space — if you don’t want
the secret one,
you can’t have these either.
Robert Bly’s translation, Kabir lived in the 15th century and spoke Hindi. Talk to him if you don’t get it. Except he’s dead. Imagine that.
I finished my caramel mocha cortado and sat there for awhile feeling all lit up from Kabir’s poetry and then rode off down Houston Street looking for more adventure, joy and love.
Down a ways and across the street from the Sheraton Gunter Hotel, next to the Majestic Theatre, is the Puro Handsome Barber Shop with their red, white and blue barber’s pole turning in the window. Inside were two old school barber chairs standing side by side in front of a large mirror and a shelf with a sink, scissors, combs and lotions. There were no customers at the time so I stopped to check it out. I had never been inside before.
Ben the barber was in. He’s an excellent guy and convivial as heck, as you might expect of someone running a barber shop in downtown San Antonio. I told him, wow, here you are at the epicenter of the downtown urban experience. We became instant friends.
Our conversation ranged from the petty thieves roaming around in the alley behind his house at night and his attempts to thwart them with lights and sirens to my experiences in downtown San Antonio 45 years ago when I lived in the Gunter Hotel with 150 of my compadres meditating for peace. How we used to go down to the Riverwalk and dance ecstatically in the discos, being young and energetic and full of bliss. Back then the shop next to his sold New York style pizza for a dollar a slice.
Check out Ben’s place if you need a haircut and want to catch the urban energy at the same time.
Further down, at Houston and Alamo is the old post office, a large elegant building done in the Neoclassical style that also features a federal courthouse. I had never been in there either so I stopped, tied up my pony and went inside.
This place was built in the thirties as part of the Federal Public Works program which was designed to put people to work during the Great Depression. The decoration is typical of that period - murals extolling the heroic aspects of American history.
I spoke to the security guard and got some history of the place but didn’t go beyond the metal detector. All the energy seemed to be focused in the lobby anyways. Chandeliers and polished tile floors and decorated arches rising to the ceiling.
Across the tracks on the near east side, also on Houston Street, is Estate Coffee. I dropped a flyer there for the rohn report and got a picture of the barista. Very sweet. I mentioned to her that the American Revolution was fomented in the pubs and cafes of colonial New England where people met to exchange views and news, at least according to the PBS documentary I saw. She said, yeah, cafes used to be called ‘penny colleges’ because that’s where people learned from each other. Brilliant. I love that.
This place features frequent trains passing nearby with their screaming whistle. Pretty exciting ambience. I thought about riding down the tracks to the Hayes Street Bridge which you can see in the distance but soon realized that I would crash out on the coarse gravel banked on either side and that would not be an adventure.
Velocity is part of the urban renewal of the east side, or gentrification, whichever way you wish to look at it. Their vision is to support innovation, entrepreneurism and hopefully good jobs for the community. It’s an old warehouse district, 70 acres of it, and now home to shakers and movers in the biotech and medical IT fields. I got to meet the receptionist who told me all about it and kindly took my picture standing in the lobby. Another place I had never seen before and knew nothing about. Bioscience, wow, big bucks there.
I torqued off down North Cherry (that’s similar to hammer down) and soon found myself at the Hayes Street Bridge, an old wood and metal bridge spanning the tracks. Now it’s a pedestrian walkway and has an amazing panoramic view of downtown.
I have visited this place many times both as a rendezvous point and as a transit point from the east side to the central valley. Yes San Antonio has a valley. It’s called Broadway.
Then it was hammer on down Broadway to Amaretti Coffee.
Dropped a flyer. Talked to the barista. Cool guy! Found my poetry book among their stack of readables. What a kick! I wonder who put that there? Blasted off for home.
Oh yeah, I stopped at the Nowhere Bookshop. I’d been meaning to drop by. It’s a new bookstore! On Broadway! Can you believe that? It survived the pandemic and now it even has a cafe open. Very cool place.
Here’s Paul, manning the front desk. He can take care of your every need. Well as far as books go.
It’s so comfy here, window chairs to sit on and peruse before you buy. Books everywhere on display including the front rack with the Jenny Lawson books. She’s the owner and the author. She’s funny and delightfully zany as far as I could tell in my perusal of a few titles. Didn’t get to meet her but I’ll be back for sure.
Ok. Hammer down and head for home. The last lap. Watch out for cars and buses and cowboys in pickup trucks.
And that was it, the story of my day, or part of it - good adventures, and a fair amount of joy and love. Just like I imagined it would be. A successful experiment.
People are waiting to be discovered and places too. Adventure, joy and love are waiting to be discovered. Heck I’m waiting to be discovered. A lot to learn here.
music :: 00 - 16:32 / thank you Cafe De Anatolia so much for all your great mixes
a thought experiment