I miss Java Jungle

How many people out there have a neighborhood haunt? Someone where everyone knows your name, like the song says? Someplace you can go out to and just be yourself… Unwind, maybe socialize a little… have your mind run it’s gamut and get some social stimulation?

I’m not talking about a bar, where the object tends to be to get smashed or deal with those who are smashed… I’m also not talking about a restaurant where it’s awkward to hang around, watching everyone else eat with nothing going on besides food…

It was a little earlier this week I had been conversing with my friend Bill about his need to get out to a neighborhood place on the norm just for the sake of meeting people… He’s isolated where he’s living now much like I’m isolated in my current situation. Yet I used to have a place to socialize every so often… It might have been a Thursday, Friday or Saturday Night… but it was my chance to go out and enjoy myself by just enjoying my surroundings.

Before Starbucks ever appeared in the greater Tampa Bay metro region, there was a little coffee shop just across the street from my place in Palm Harbor called Java Jungle. It’d been open a few years before I finally got the courage to go inside… I began my love for Espresso there as well. With nightly music and even the rumble of different drink-dispensing machinery against the bar where I normally sat, it was my little place of escape for a few hours a week where I could be me.

I met a bunch of interesting people during that itme, a lot of casual friends at that… I got to know the staff but not as well as I had liked. My hearing was so horrid at the time that being social was a pain in the ass… but it was also a necessity for my sanity.

And I spent many a night there simply scrawling in black-and-white Meade notebooks, writing down ambling verses of rhymes and poems — some of which are on this very website.

The problem is, the Jungle is gone. Long gone. And while I have no qualms about Starbucks (and rather enjoy their coffee), it’s not a neighborhood coffee shop when all of the closest locations are situated for mass appeal on US 19 with drive through windows (to get COFFEE??!?) and next to BBQ restaurants.

And so I get to reminisce about the days of yore and the evenings spent sipping coffee and musing with the guys and girls of the Jungle and what was… and what’s missing from my current day to day: a place of escape.