Dripp, The Old New Place
A Return to a Beginning
This Was the New Place
There was a time when Dripp Coffee Bar was the new place. We all talked about it. Someone was adding this new coffee shop right next to the old Fox Theater in the garden plaza, and it felt different. It was a specific kind of excitement.
When it finally opened, it truly did feel like something new. You enter through the small walkway and see the enclosed garden on the far end, and the front door to Dripp opens on the left just before you enter the garden. Its first wall is covered in books, opened, facing out or with the cover showing. Their smell of the coffee is simply a different warmth. It fills the room. I don’t know how to describe it without sounding cliche, but I’ve simply never found anything like it.
Here, I met my friends. We talked about school, things we were reading, thinking about, or our life plans. We read together. We wrote together. I remember coffee dates here with my then-girlfriend. Later, it was here that I met up with others after completing my master’s project. I met with one of my author’s here to talk about his book. Many are gone now.
In my last visit to California, I went there to remember.
If I were arriving at this reflexive moment, perhaps even just a couple of years ago, I would be writing about The Night Owl, another formative place in my young adulthood. It's a wonderful little cafe that holds many steps forward in my sense of being an artist.
Dripp, though, might be an origin-place of myself as a thinker. Dripp was the new cafe in the downtown at a time when I was fresh with the desire for bigger things and starting to taste the world for its possibilities. I knew more of the world than ever before at that point, and I was coming into myself by way of understanding how much is out there to learn.
My hunger for something new was maybe what pulled me into loving PNL, a French rap duo that I was absolutely obsessed with at this time. This was also the time of semiotics, Zizek, and a certain lovely for an endless word, “theory.” It goes deep. I’ve seen far.
And Dripp was the place to do it.
Old Thinking
I was full of thoughts, sitting in Dripp. I thought about my city then.
The myth of a coffee shop in a place like this is that it can give the illusion that there is a walkable place just outside. Yet downtown is an island. We all, essentially, flew here and wanted to imagine ourselves like we didn’t, like it was just a simple little walk to a local favorite. My appearance is such that I have done nothing but simply decided to be here and walk outside instead of maneuvering a machine to carry myself this far. It, again, makes me think of how much I loved the idea of walkable cities with accessible spaces.
In this coffee shop, I imagined re-shaping Fullerton to be something it could never be in my lifetime. I traced fun lines of where a light rail could go to connect downtown and Cal State Fullerton, a 5-minute drive from Dripp or a painful 50-minute walk. I would use the commuter rail like a light rail system, setting off to explore from the Fullerton train station. My friends would laugh at me. I loved it.
From Dripp, I would dream of going to places. These would usually be a train ride away to LA or maybe San Juan Capistrano or San Clemente, somewhere where I would pretend to know how to speak Spanish or feel like I was searching for something new. I wanted to invite the feeling of travel in my own backyard. It would give me a rush of energy, visiting something different from myself yet in my own home all the same. It is a different thing to have these victories and than to have it in a vision, and at this time, I only had these images, these desires.
I desired to see myself as a designer of things to be, of ideas, of a city where it was easy to find people and leave as much as it was to arrive. I desired ground-level inspiration on how to live a more content life. I desired a sense of life at my hands, not a steering wheel. I wanted ideas to open up and refresh how beautiful and interesting ordinary life could be.
This was the old way of thinking: desire. It was the only way to get anything done for so long. I wished for bigger, different places to see, easier ways to move around, more people to find, more ideas to learn.
New Thinking
It was around this time that I started keeping company with people who were interested in building a cultural center a few cities over. This Dripp-era saw my translation of the old way of thinking, desiring something, to something informed by simple management ideas, something practical.
When I met with others here, I was meeting people as a powerful dreamer on something, talking about books and ideas. Later, it was knowing the motions to take to make a book or start projects, having knowledge over the subject to invent. I would meet with someone here, talk about the plan, and then we would leave with a sense of how to get moving about it. Again, one of the books I published came from this meeting ground.
That is the new way of thinking: planning. Looking back, this new place was a kind of base for me to transition from the old way of thinking to the new way. Now, I am familiar with wanting things but can see a path forward. I see steps to things that I once only knew how to desire. I’ve seen this with learning languages, publishing books, learning business, or helping friends reach what they want next.
Since launching from this old-favorite, new place, I have learned a lot about myself.
I think of the joy this place summarizes for me. I work well with ideas, with collecting them. I cherish creativity. I want to help people grow. I love learning, and I want autonomy. These were just seeds when this place was new. Now they are a core sense of myself and shape my future, how I desire and plan it.
In my last letter, I told you about reading books in the morning where the craft of place matched the craft of thought. It is this place, Dripp, that connects me to a specific person I used to be and parts of who I still am.
As a new place, it was a beginning. As an old place, it is a re-collection.
Trevor
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