Craig Mod
Tokyo & New York & SF & elsewhere
Hi co-founder. Writer. Travel lover. More at: craigmod.com/about

The beerman sleeps

June 23rd, 2015, 3pm in Kamakura-shi, Japan

The Beerman sleeps. He orders a beer and then sits and sleeps in this shaded cafe, one of my favorite cafes of the many cafes here, all within which I have spent considerable time during these last months of living by the mountains and the water. 1

Days like today are rare. A day of warmth in the sunlight and coolness in the shade and no humidity and a breeze that refreshes totally. These days come in packs of a dozen per year, always unexpectedly, and they must be embraced immediately for tomorrow brings something less comfortable.

The cheerful French music plays in this cafe, this cafe run by the cafe man2 with a flowing mane of greying hair. And the doors — the wall, really — are open and all the other customers have been seated in the main restaurant and it is just me and the Beerman, the napping Beerman, and the cafe man with the lion's mane who is very shy but very kind and the French woman singing and the cool dry air, and the wonderful shade provided by the trees in this little hidden gem of a cafe.

Ah! They come, the others. Some other people for the cafe. And so I must publish quickly before this becomes a lie. While it is still only the Beerman (Who still sleeps! Still!) and the Cafe Man and me. And it is so.

  1. Have I been hiding? Of course. Always hiding. To focus I need to hide. I am weak, otherwise. I am such a weak creative person. Incapable of focus without removing the other distractions, the easy distractions. Those distractions that induce the self-delusion that you are building up a great corpus of work, but really you are just drinking a lot of coffee with interesting people. So I hide, temporarily wedged between the mountains and the ocean. It seems to work. We are at about 280 pages. ↩

  2. I have been told he has run many other cafes, and this is not his first, and that this small but beautiful building of wood was built specifically for this one and only cafe man, specifically for him to run this cafe right here just as he likes, bonjour. ↩

It was 20°C with few clouds. The breeze was light.

All the thanks