I was at a rather standard cafe today waiting for my car to be fixed. I had quite a bit of time to kill so I pulled out a book to read and order a coffee and a piece of apple pie. I felt like an early Gen-X’er that was really into Bukowski for a moment, as if I should be writing mediocre poetry into a moleskine. I began to prepare my coffee, one sugar and a plop of cream. The waitress I had was rather nice and projected the kind of character you would only get from a truly good person. I ascertained that she was an immigrant from her accented English and some chit chat she had with one of the other customers about coffee in her country. The unfortunate thing is that this woman was less than attractive. Actually I’m putting that rather nicely but you get the idea. I began to wonder in between bites of my pie if she didn’t get as much in tips as a pretty waitress would. If I had to guess I would say no but this person’s demeanor and attitude were so good that after the initial shock of her appearance she was rather pretty. I took a few sips of coffee and delved into the book I was reading. Chuck Klosterman’s Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. I was reading his justification of pornography as an odd social conscienciousness. In classic postmodern justification he references this as a self justification for watching porn thus almost making it all ok and a little less pretentious. If nothing else his essay on the subject is entertaining. Really the article is about the rapid evolution of the internet and how porn helps the ordinary user understand the internet. It’s a rather interesting read. All the time I was thinking why is it necessary to come up with a discourse around the need for pornography on the internet. Why should it even need to be justified, why can’t it just exist with a simple social understanding that it is available in a split second thanks to the series of tubes.

After reading this and a few other articles I was a little embarrassed, not because I was reading about porn and the internet but because I had been sitting at this relatively empty cafe for about an hour now having only a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. I felt that I was just wasting people’s time, especially the waitress who ironically checked up on me almost instinctively when my coffee was empty. Not when it was half full or when it had been empty for a while but within a few moments of me taking the last sip in the cup. I hate having a refill in the middle of the cup because it throws off the sugar and cream ratio. So after this hour and change I thought I should order something bigger although I wasn’t very hungry. I then thought maybe I’ll get something to go so I could rack up a decent bill in order to give a decent tip to this nice waitress. I felt as if I should pay rent for the table I was at. I used the table for almost two hours when all was said and done. It’s the kind of strange thought that haunts us although no one really cares. A friend of mind when eating alone will dirty his knife a bit so it seems to the waitress that he used it to cut the meal as opposed to the side of his fork. He didn’t want the waitress to think he was some sort of a Neanderthal. Although in reality it’s not about the waitress at all its about the person. It’s more of an internal sense of perception than the external one when it comes to things like this.

The bill came to all of about 4 dollars. So as I looked at the small bill and began to pack up my things, I started to have the internal debate about what to do. Yet what to do is simple: pay the bill and leave a couple bucks for a tip considering I was an easy person to take care of. I’m not a, “Can I have that on the side and no this and no that”, kind of guy. I can take the tomatoes off my own sandwich if I don’t want them. I grabbed my bag and took the bill up to the register, it was one of those kind of places. The waitress was the one ringing me up and I paid with a 20 and she gave me the change. A 10, a 5, a single and some coins. I looked at the combination of bills and folded the 10 in half after looking at the waitress smile and handed it to her. She gave me this look of shock, similar to what was probably my look of shock when I first saw her. She thanked me rather enthusiastically and I nodded in approval and made my way out the door.

Now, did I give her a 10′er because I was paying rent, or because she was truly nice and that was the only thing I could do to show my gratitude. Or was it because I was compensating for her not being pretty so I would not be the kind of guy who would judge on appearance. Does the 10′er make me more evolved? Or does me admitting it make me that much more shallow? Or did I simply do it to have something to write about?

Nevertheless I can always say I had a 13 dollar piece of Pie today and it was good.