Forced Meditations

In accordance with Christian Filardo's forced prompt, "bottled coke at the brooklyn deli."

The lovely, young, and inspiring Christian’s first forced writing prompt for our new blog, Forced Meditations, was “bottled coke at the brooklyn deli.” Since I currently live in Portland, Oregon, and not Brooklyn, NY, or even Manhattan, New York, NY, I was “forced” to improvise. There is a neighborhood in south Portland called Brooklyn, so I went on Yelp to see if I could find a deli with some bottled coke to write about. The closest thing is a cafe, True Brew Coffeehouse, or more specifically, True Brew: Coffee, Tea & Espresso, Milkshakes, Smoothies, Panini. So, after my bi-monthly therapy appointment, I skipped my group supervision class for my mental health counseling master’s program, and drove the 20 minutes to Brooklyn. It was a grey, drizzly November day, and the weekday traffic was moderate. As Portland’s population slowly explodes, even off-peak driving tends to take a little bit of extra time. I listened to John Maus on my i-Pod, and pondered driving down Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd until it morphed into US-99, out of Portland, and into the scenic wine country, a fantasy I often have, of leaving the small city and my occasionally stressful counseling internship, to be adopted by an old vineyard family, waking up early to work the farm, and taking long rides on a touring bike through majestic, rolling-hilled landscapes, with a Chihuahua in my basket. However, on this day, I just drove to True Brew, a cafe I keep wanting to call “True Blue,” which is the way Gene Hackman’s character describes his ex-wife, played by Anjelica Huston, in The Royal Tenenbaums. He has a lot of respect for her, but not enough to modify his deeply ingrained selfish motivations.

This is a bit how I feel about the True Brew Cafe. First of all, there’s no bottled coke. I order a sausage, egg, and cheese on an everything bagel, which has little to no flavor. Am I fulfilling this assignment? I gaze across the street towards the empty Brooklyn Park, with its muddied baseball field and tattered basketball hoops while pondering my boyhood enthusiasm for sports. A depressed-seeming twenty-something blonde pulls up in a Toyota Tercel and comes into the cafe. She’s cute. Will she sit close to my booth? No. She sits what feels like 30 yards away. The cafe is huge, with scuffed white floors and wooden booths lining the perimeter. It feels like a mix of high-school cafetorium and a thrift furniture store, but with nice light fixtures, bad art, and a large fake Victorian style painting frame with nothing in it. I can’t stay here much longer.

This is Gregory Campanile, reporting from the True Brew Cafe for Forced Meditations. Best regards, and take care!


In accordance with Gregory Campanile's forced prompt, "an unexpected suburban purchase."



One summer day, I found myself clutching a fairly large foot tall Greedo action figure beneath a carport on 14th and College, in Tempe, Arizona, a suburban college town. Greedo is largely known for getting killed. Han killed him in the bar where bulbous headed aliens play what appears to be space clarinets on the planet Tatooine. Either way, my fascination with Greedo began at an early age, and progressed when I started dating my current girlfriend Caroline. Oddly enough, Caroline is also a Greedo fan. For her birthday, I actually commissioned a painting of Greedo to be done for her. So, I ended up buying the doll for a buck and added it to our growing Greedo collection. 

A few years later Caroline and I moved out of Arizona. We ended up in Baltimore, Maryland, which is home to the first ever suburban-community in America. The neighborhood is called Roland Park, and it is sort of an upscale mansion filled zone these days. However, Caroline’s parents live in a suburb of D.C. called Silver Spring, and in the basement of their house is a replica of the exact Greedo doll I purchased for Caroline in Arizona. Pretty weird.


Today I watched this video at work on a blog. In the video, Jar Jar Binks actually dies. He is the pink guy in the newer Star Wars episodes. He says “Misa” a lot. For some reason, I feel like Greedo is the quieter, cooler version of Jar Jar Binks. Greedo is good, and every night before I fall asleep in my new apartment that I share with Caroline, his portrait is illuminated by the streetlights pouring in through our bedroom window.


-Christian Filardo, for Forced Meditations