Philz Coffee

This coffee is insanely good. This coffee is so good that I have taken a bus across town for a single cup. This coffee is so good that upon taking the first sip I have to yell repeatedly about how fucking awesome it is. This coffee is so good that I'm willing to pay $2.75 for a cup. Hell, I'd pay twice that. This coffee is a different beverage entirely than Starbucks and Peets or even IntelligentsiA and Cafe Trieste.

Philz Coffee is the wonder of which I speak. There are three locations, all in San Francisco, and I recommend that everyone make it a point to once in their lives have a cup of Philz, even if it means driving two thousand miles across the desert in the summer. (Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic, even for me.)

Upon walking into Philz, the customer is greeted with a list of twenty coffee blends. A loving description is available on the menu, or the bouncy hipsters behind the counter will help you choose the right one. I asked for something like Kona or Jamaican Blue Mountain, and they steered me to the "So Good" blend. It's not necessary to call these kids barristas... "angels" would hit the mark better. The angel takes a single scoop of whole beans from one of several dozen tubs, grinds them, pours them into a puffy paper filter, then pours super-hot water over the beans. She adds cream and sugar to my specifications, then hands me the glorious product of this endeavor. The top layer is a thick froth; the liquid is exquisite. It has all the beautiful rich coffee flavor with none, zero, none of the bitterness. The lack of bitterness is what separates Philz from everything else ever. This is when the yelling starts; I spend a few minutes unable to contain my astonishment and joy at the deliciousness of this coffee.

...all of which explains why, at 11 am on a Sunday with the New York Times delivered to my door, I'm contemplating a trek across town to purchase another heavenly concoction. My god. Go drink this coffee, then tell me I'm wrong.

Philz Coffee, 24th at Folsom, Fourth at Berry, or 18th and Castro, San Francisco. www.PhilzCoffee.com.

Sleeping Dead Man

I found this man sleeping, or dead, on Second Street this afternoon. I just finished reading The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley, who told the story over and over of white people with options and money ignoring poor brown people in trouble. Brinkley’s Deluge was the story of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; looking at this man, I thought of corpses abandoned in the floodwaters of the Lower Ninth Ward, and of Bush and Chertoff, going about their business in air-conditioned comfort while thousands of people awaited rescue in the Superdome. “Suffering of biblical proportions” indeed.

I took the photo, because, well, please, what a shot. Then I was ashamed of myself. Here was a person who was obviously in some sort of trouble. If everything is all right, we do not fall asleep in the middle of the sidewalk at two in the afternoon. If he was (just) homeless, he would have been dirty, and he would have been huddled against the side of the building. He wasn’t dirty, and he had shaved recently, so something other than homelessness had led him to pick this spot for his nap. Or his death; I really did have to look closely to see whether he was breathing. He was probably just nodded out on heroin, and not in much trouble, I told myself. I told myself that checking on him would involve waking him up, and that he would probably be angry. I told myself that he was probably in a delightful heroin haze. I told myself I would be much better off leaving him alone. Still.

I am white, and I am healthy; I have options and I have family and money and an education and a job and an apartment. In this neighborhood, I pay attention to the Web 2.0 companies, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, conventions at Moscone, traffic on the Bay Bridge on-ramps, the organic cafés, and the fine arts bookstores. Things below knee level are literally beneath my notice. Still. I had noticed this man. I wasn’t going to be able to walk away unless I knew that he was okay. I was willing to risk his anger or even violence because I didn’t want him to die.

So I knelt next to him and asked, “Are you all right? Do you need help? Do you want an ambulance?” His eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, unfocused. His lips parted but he wasn’t really there. I was reaching for my phone to call 911 when he came back to himself. “Why you gotta bother me? I’m sleeping, leave me alone. Stop bothering me!” I was relieved; he was alive. I apologized and walked away.

We get a few chances like this, I think. I’m not going to head to Mississippi the next time the river floods, I’m not even going to work in a soup kitchen anytime soon. Maybe I should. But yeah: when it’s this easy, I won’t just walk away.