Brio Cafe, Arcata

The Plaza - 9:34 am
Today is the Oyster Festival on the small town plaza with food and beer booths circling the grassy square with a small stage for rock and reggae bands starting up. This is the largest gathering of people in Humboldt County each year. The weekly farmers market booths are on the sides streets just off of the square.

There are several people drinking coffee here and at the other cafe I saw, both with lines out the door as the fair is still half started and half set up.

This cafe has a great bakery, and has a small breakfast menu. I ordered the two poached eggs on bakery fresh sourdough bread over bacon. Patrick recommended this place and I am not disappointed. The macchiato, served to spec Blue Bottle Roastery standards was exceptional. The cafe decor was very clean, almost a French cafe motif. The sourdough bread was amazing, I have to come here for a croissant, which may have the real flakiness of a French one.

The chained off area sidewalk seats seem like prime real estate for watching the fair. I watched through the window until an outside table opened up, and grabbed the table on the other side of the glass that I was watching.

Brio Cafe, Arcata

It seems that it will warm up to the mid seventies today. I'll get rid of my shoulder bag and my vest and just carry my camera and my sunglasses once I start to walk around. I am glad I came here early enough, able to get free street parking two blocks away.  When I get to my car, I will buy some sunscreen at the drug store.

When I travel, I always have this thing about looking like a regular joe for the area I am planning to visit. There are plenty of people here in button down shirts with jeans as well as guys with middle aged bellies  hanging over there tight belted pants. I don't think I will have any trouble fitting right in. Maybe there is no problem with how I dress wherever I go, whether it is Paris or Arcata. If I look like a teacher, then others dress similarly that are not teachers. All of the clothes are made in the same 5 countries anywhere and sold in the same 5 stores that we all shop at. The only thing I could do to look different than I do now is lose some weight - an age old problem that I have typically worried about, but as I get older, I do feel it in my knees and lower back. Time to think about that - at least so I have more energy, which is the most important factor to worry about as I get older.

It seems that Arcata and its visitors has as many older folks as mid-aged and youngsters. There is also an aspiring midding class in contrast to the youth image marijuana culture projected to the outside world.
The social stratification is no different from Santa Cruz, California, judging at least from a busy Saturday crowd, with its transplanted student population looking for some idea in Redwoods and a good party to change their consciousness to aspire to more authentic and/or hippie inspired spiritual pursuits. This aura, may be an unofficial marketing strategy of both the university and the chamber of commerce to sell the college experience as a foot in the door to eventual settlement by graduates. This in turn offers a direct line to the middle class suburban created bank accounts of the parents, who fully support their child's need for self-discovery and personal fulfillment.

In this way, I am no different, ultimately settling in the Haight Ashbury in the belief, however quickly shed, that my neighborhood was some idealistic communal experience now sold off as souvenirs to tourists, as the place where being a hippy began. To that end, love does not fall out of the sky nor does it line the streets, but instead must be earned and nurtured by the individual in a modern paradigm that often reduces one to an electronic identity, and consumer, far removed from all six senses required to make real human contact.

In other words, if Arcata is a vortex for love and a communal sense of community, when it is incumbent upon me is to open all channels to people and reciprocate kindness and accept all for who they are. If that feeling is in my mind and heart, then at least I can be the reality I wish to see, realizing that nothing is simple, nor without an effort, and nothing is free. At least, maybe, I am surrounded in my neighborhood by people who thought initially as I did, only to realize we must all aspire to the reality we wish to be in, by first expanding our own internal reality to the possibility.