Think about it. Coffee is not that expensive, and people just lay around their shops most of the day nursing one serving of coffee while they sit at the small table that they make into their command center with a computer, books, cell phone, and often, other weird stuff.

And yet, rents in New York are incredibly high. I honestly just don’t understand how selling coffee can be profitable enough to pay for $20,000 dollar (or who knows how high) rents, and all the other costs of business including wages.

Sure on high density spots, especially near offices, I can see how it works out. But in less dense non-commercial parts of places like (places in) Brooklyn and the East Village?

How do these guys stay afloat?

Are they a racket…what’s the deal?

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”

- Aimé Césaire

I think that it’s a telling commentary on your character. It’s an impossible catch 22. The more willing your are to hold the door, the more likely you will get late in getting to where you are going. However, when we rush in and quickly push the close door button, even as you see somebody coming for the elevator, a little bit of your humanity dies.

At the same time, often people take advantage of your kindness and bring their whole frickin family on right behind them, making your wait sometimes minutes longer.

I can say I’ve been guilty of the elevator enter-quick-button-push-I-don’t-really-see-you coming-but-I-actually-do-but-am-just-ignoring-you move. But, I’ve only done this at work, and when I’m late.

I feel okay about doing it in buildings (like my office) that have a lot of rapid fire elevators going up all the time.

Then again, often it’s you running for the elevator late who just needs that one good soul to hold it for you for you to make it to work on time.

And if you accept that it’s okay to press close door, it means you would close the elevator door on yourself, which is……a bit disconcerting

A week or so ago I was walking back home. I saw a man shoveling out his big pickup truck from the snow bank. It had obviously been there for awhile. As he shoveled out from under a few feet of snow he would then throw the snow into the middle of the street.

He could of easily thrown the the snow onto the large part of the divider cobblestone that nobody really can walk on that separated him from the sidewalk, but he just threw it into the street.

Part of me hopes that he was just doing it so that the cars would more quickly melt it by driving over it, but the other part of me questioned…

“What has happened to the public commons of our great nation?”

We used to be a nation that valued the public commons. We could all till the land together, and collectively reap the benefits. Those cooperative days are gone, besides only communists work together.

But isn’t this man shoveling his own private snow waste into the public street representative of so much else that we do to our public commons and each other?

It’s as if some “invisible hand” will just fix up all that we dump that results from our private excesses, and just fix it up.

Stuff like global warming… and things like that.

Yes, that man may have just been trying to get his truck out of the snow, but in pursuing his own purely private gain, he might have caused an accident when a car driving by skidded on the snow, or the ice, if it stayed over night.

Aka…Cyrus Random Thoughts When He Is Bored and Walking on the Street.