A few days ago I changed the ‘About’ post on the menu bar of this blog after something like fifteen years. It was time to admit the original fiction of an actual Omphalos Cafe serving coffee with walls lined with books and a wizened perhaps bearded old fella named ‘Zenon’ presiding over the hushed higher consciousness of the place was just that: fiction. 

  It was high time for an update, I thought. 

  Now I see the Cafe as the twelfth-century hermetic Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers envisioned God: “The Omphalos Cafe is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” 

  Pretty grand, don’t you think? 

  That’s all to say it’s a centredness I carry with me wherever I might be and which I am attempting to share with other like-minded and hearted folk. 

  And so I am free to haul it with me around town to some of my favourite admittedly mundane secular Cafes, one of which is the Saint-Louis. 

  There’s so much outside and inside the Saint-Louis that resonates with me: the paintings and photos on the walls, the subdued music, the artsy clientele. 

  But what most amuses and indeed excites me about the Saint-Louis is the location of the washroom, secreted as it is behind a rotating book shelf! Yesterday while ordering my alongé it gave me an inordinate amount of pleasure to point a fellow who was asking the barista in broken French where the ‘toilette’ was in the right direction. 

  Later, making use of the washroom myself, for I drink a few coffees in the course of an average day, I thought to myself it might be a good idea if they put a little opening in the doorway so a guy could reach out and grab a book if he found himself caught short. 

  Just for the reading material mind you. 

  Thoughts or questions on Life, where we’re at and where we’re going? Let’s have some fun with them at omphaloscafe@ gmail.com.