I’m not talking about a bar, where the object tends to be to get smashed or deal with those who are smashed… I’m also not talking about a restaurant where it’s awkward to hang around, watching everyone else eat with nothing going on besides food…

It was a little earlier this week I had been conversing with my friend Bill about his need to get out to a neighborhood place on the norm just for the sake of meeting people… He’s isolated where he’s living now much like I’m isolated in my current situation. Yet I used to have a place to socialize every so often… It might have been a Thursday, Friday or Saturday Night… but it was my chance to go out and enjoy myself by just enjoying my surroundings.

Before Starbucks ever appeared in the greater Tampa Bay metro region, there was a little coffee shop just across the street from my place in Palm Harbor called Java Jungle. It’d been open a few years before I finally got the courage to go inside… I began my love for Espresso there as well. With nightly music and even the rumble of different drink-dispensing machinery against the bar where I normally sat, it was my little place of escape for a few hours a week where I could be me.

I met a bunch of interesting people during that itme, a lot of casual friends at that… I got to know the staff but not as well as I had liked. My hearing was so horrid at the time that being social was a pain in the ass… but it was also a necessity for my sanity.

And I spent many a night there simply scrawling in black-and-white Meade notebooks, writing down ambling verses of rhymes and poems — some of which are on this very website.

The problem is, the Jungle is gone. Long gone. And while I have no qualms about Starbucks (and rather enjoy their coffee), it’s not a neighborhood coffee shop when all of the closest locations are situated for mass appeal on US 19 with drive through windows (to get COFFEE??!?) and next to BBQ restaurants.

And so I get to reminisce about the days of yore and the evenings spent sipping coffee and musing with the guys and girls of the Jungle and what was… and what’s missing from my current day to day: a place of escape.

That being said, there are still problems there…

Local businesses need to be reviewed and sometimes listings need to be removed. For instance, Jaguar Coffee has been gone from Palm Harbor for years upon years (how I miss Java Jungle — Jaguar Coffee’s predecessor) and yet their listing still exists. Same with the now-closed Palm Harbor Ale House as well as other businesses.

The Yahoo Local listings are very much an online social network of reviews and user driven content… But of course users have to be willing to get active on their own Yahoo Local area in order for the content to be accurate.

The song-poem was Java Jungle which I wrote at Palm Harbor’s “Java Jungle” coffee shop years ago when I was still very much a lyricist and poet. The song is just rambling verse that makes sense to me and probably me alone in some of it’s meanings but has a little niftiness to itself… if you can find the rhyme scheme and what could have been the beat or what the music could have turned into with the song…

At any rate, I’m going to post the lyrics now – then I will tell you more about that “ironic and funny” little meaning I didn’t intend that I just found out about…

Sally-man say:
“Who led the way,
“Across the Great Red Sea?”
Way back,
The long way back,
Back home

© 1997 John P. Fontana

So what’s the big deal? Well, I could break down the meaning of each stanza and verse to you but some of it is boring and some of it – as I already alluded to — should make sense only to me (Mickey and Brand across the great land, for instance, is a reference to friends of mine who used to come down to be with family here in Florida, I would see them every summer).

The lyric that I found funny is one of the closing lines… I talk about Easter Day and St. Jude’s Parade and then make a reference to “Lennon Lad”. This is all talking about Julian Lennon. “Jude” being direct reference to “Hey, Jude” which was written by Paul McCartney for Julian during the time John Lennon was divorcing Cynthia Lennon.

The entire line was actually supposed to be reference to St. Crispian’s Day, I believe I had seen Renaissance Man not very long before I had written this poem and I was very fond of Shakespeare at the time after a year of his works being passed on to me through Ms. Ciccone at East Lake High School.

Well, St. Jude got worked in there and the reference to Julian was made — “The kingdom’s yours to have” and silence abounds… That’s saying that Julian could have easily followed John Lennon’s footsteps and gone to the top of Rock and Roll but failed to do so… Of course, Julian is still involved with music and still battles demons involved with his father and his childhood… That being said, there are reason the kingdom was never entirely inherited by him or by Sean Ono Lennon for that matter.

The ironic – funny twist that I keep making reference to is St. Jude. I didn’t know who St., Jude was nor did I ever think to find out… I just threw the name out there for the rhyme and for the reference (Jude, Jules, Julian) and only recently (reading another Rick Reilly article) found out who St. Jude is:

The Patron Saint of Lost causes.

So, Lennon Lad, the kingdom may be yours to have but from what the Java Jungle tells you, it’s a lost cause trying to inherit it…