P. sat in the cafe, nurturing his Americano, looking out at the passerbys on Abbot Kinney Blvd. He mused that an Americano couldn't have started in America. “The Americans didn’t invent espresso and hot water,” he said to himself in the shrouded, unkempt and muggy old coffee shop that served as the headquarters for the intelligentsia of the area. They perambulated about its nexus like wayward lopsided planets at a hobble, inevitably, like the tug of an irreversible black hole, being pulled closer and closer inward toward its nebulous and decaying center.

    Abbot’s Habit was the last remaining shit show of a once run down Abbot Kinney. Now ‘The Kin’ had all but entirely been buffed and polished for a photo shoot in GQ. Abbot’s remained shitty, and proudly so for a period of time longer than one could have surmised they could maintain business, as they did not offer wi-fi, or air conditioning. Drifting pedantic souls of the ideological elite met in front of the establishment, perched about anachronistic boxes known as news bins, smoking paper wrapped tobacco filled with preservatives. Those news bins now served mostly as armrests, and table tops. But people could still put small little silver pieces of metal in a slot to get thinly sliced trees with propaganda certified by William Randolph Hurst printed upon it (the thinnest of propaganda could be found in grocery store check out aisles, these stories were intensely focused on the translucent, fickle and often staged world of celebrity dating).