Cafe #15: The Local

Date: Good Friday, 6 April 2007, 3.10pm
Location: 22/24 Bay Street, Port Melbourne
Wine: $5.50, white - okay
Reading: Of Grammatology

Okay, so this is a pub and not a cafe, I'm drinking wine not coffee, but I've got a view out to the bay, a glass of cold drink and a pencil. It is a beautiful, sunny day after a week of rain and chill. There are idyllic puffy clouds in the sky and enormous puffy bluebottle jellyfish on the shore, often looking like a blown-up latex doctor's glove.

Today I am discovering Port Melbourne. The Port itself is boardwalks and trendy restaurants, but if you walk around it you reach the beach. The beaches are small but more inviting than St Kilda - less rocky and shallow - which is several beaches farther on.

I will be short because I'm writing with a blunt-leaded pencil. The past several days have been good. I've done some good thinking - phenomenology, Derrida, Barthes... The more I read those last two the more I find myself agreeing with them. Oi, such changes. (More difficult to write a paper in agreement...) Maybe I can figure out if Barthes theory of reading works with Derrida's theory of writing.

Oooh, 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' is emanating from the pub! It is a cute and oldish pub, upkept old, not crumbling old. Browny-grey, maroon and beigey-yellow. Richly patterned carpet, a stained glass panel topping the roof of the bar with antique books lined up on top.

Okay, pencil nearly dead.