For lunch today I had soup and bread. Vegetable barley soup, and sliced sourdough baguette with budder.

For some reason this $1.90 lunch reminded me of back when I used to live in Olympia, WA and we would go down to the Smithfield Cafe EVERY day and get a cup of oily strong coffee and bagel with hummus. And then sometimes for lunch I would come back to the Smithfield and get soup and bread. It was like $1.65 or something for a bigass bowl of a cream soup and a bunch of bread on the side. So very good.

And their coffee was unholy in its power and goodness.

But they are long gone, now.

Thinking about those days, I figure it must have been the spring and summer of 1993. I wasn’t going to classes (“independent study”), and didn’t have a job, so what exactly did I do with myself, with all that carefree time?

Well, I walked around with my friends, I think I may have still had a radio show one night a week at like midnight, I went to shows every weekend, I nursed ridiculous and completely unrequited hopeless crushes, I made fanzines, wrote to my many penpals, and listened to music, and walked around, and drove my car.

What a life.

If I imagine that I am again without a job and in no need of one, I hope that I would go back to that same life of leisure, but I’m afraid that it’s a lot easier to pull off when you’re 20 than when you’re (gulp) 32. You have cohorts in the same situation. You don’t need that much money. And so on.

Anyway. Soup and bread. It was a staple.