Was that Chopin or Liszt playing on the stereo? I meant to ask the barista when I came in, but got engrossed in my order and forgot. Now he’s switched to The Carpenters and it’s really bringing me down.

“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down...”

But at least it’s not trendy, sanitized, jazz digitized into vacuum-packed, plastic-wrapped, CDs lined up next to symmetrical stacks of coffee bags.

“Best of luck with your subversive activities,” the barista had said to me as I eyed the half-inch of foam on top of my latte, devising the best strategy for making it last until the last sip. He was referring to the anti-FTAA button that I wore on my jacket and I wondered what made this type of display or issue subversive. The barista was wearing a colorful “Coffee Messiah” t-shirt that splashed with abandon among the brightly painted walls of the coffee shop. Behind him, Pee-Wee Herman hung on the cross, awaiting his resurrection in MTV-paced Hollywood movies like Blow and a sign reminded the devotees that “Corporate Coffee Sucks.”

And I was a devotee. A caffeinated follower reveling in the mismatched chairs, the slouching couch in the corner, the scattered nick-nacks, the Batman playing cards, the glass chessboard, the gumball machine and the chaos of scattered local papers on cluttered shelves. A buzzed disciple who prayed to the dispenser machine on the wall that promised a “Secret...25 cents” and felt no guilt that the local artist displayed on the walls did absolutely nothing for me, except for the nudes reminding me of my New England-bred, prudish side.

A devotee since I heard that, when the Coffee Messiah opened, it had ignited a small but vocal opposition to its Java-inspired blasphemy. A follower since I passed by the tables and chairs plopped in front of the coffee shop and the chalkboard sign that reminded of the ominous presence, up the street, of the Coffee Leviathan, the great white corporate caffeine shark prowling the neighborhood coral reefs and gorging on the diversity of businesses contained in them.

But I shouldn’t have let down my guard. I should have realized that buttons on jackets and correct consumer choices are but a cosmetic, and flimsy, guard against the bottom-line forces clear-cutting the landscape before me. I shouldn’t have been lulled by the woman seated next to me reading a Carlos Castaneda paperback or the guy with a shaved head and nose piercing flipping through a copy of Eat the State.

I should have run out of my sanctuary, the Coffee Messiah temple, after a woman came in and asked the barista, “Did you watch the Oscars last night?” I didn’t look up from the swirls of cocoa brown in my latte foam at that point, or I would have seen the transformation, the transfiguration, the corruption of the resurrection in this haven of clutter and homemade pastries.

But I didn’t look up. And then, through the haze of my preoccupations, the clutter organized itself and the dissonance settled into the creature comforts of American suburbia. Seeking to prolong the denial, I didn’t look up at first as my ears registered the “click, click, click” of fingers on a laptop keyboard and the hollow jingle of a cell phone demanding attention from a leather briefcase. Slowly raising my eyes the situation began to register like a scene from Father Knows Best meets The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

All the chairs and tables matched and were placed in market-tested symmetry. Two racks held neat stacks of acceptable reading material and cloned baristas wore Miss America smiles over branded, green aprons that beckoned you to buy the coffee beans, buy the coffee mugs, buy the seamless jazz CDs. A man with a Ralph Lauren shirt, Rolex watch, Nike Shoes and Abercrombie and Fitch hat sipped his formula-brewed double-tall while perusing the sports page of the Seattle Times. It was June Cleaver’s living room reflected back to me as in a carnival funhouse room of mirrors. A closed loop, like the passing background of a Flintstones cartoon, the same table and chairs and lamp and people named Gap and Tommy Hilfiger seen from this angle and that angle and in the corner and in the opposite corner.

Suddenly it hit me. I was no longer sitting in my favorite coffee shop, but in the newest carbon-copy Starbucks.u

Caught in the tide before I realized it was engulfing me, lulled by the warm sun and soft sand. Spitting out the coffee that suddenly numbed my tongue with bitterness and burned fragments of dreams and sincerity, I shoved the table back and yelled, “I don’t give a damn who won best actor or which actress wore the most outrageous outfit and I’m not a subversive!”

But the baristas continued to smile, Karen Carpenter remained dead, and the afternoon sun still cast squares of light on the expanse of carpet that extended before me to the horizon, flat and featureless, sterile and lifeless.u