I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

I know what you're thinking but you're wrong. The reason I spent a whole day at  the bar was to conduct an anthropology experiment. Yeah. All in the name of science, and all that.

The bar, the pub, the watering hole -- whatever you want to call it -- is the great equalizer. It's where paupers and playwrights rub elbows with princes and plutocrats, because, after all, who doesn't like a drink and a good time?

It's this same reason that makes a pub an excellent place to people-watch. Sit back, get yourself some food and a beer, and see what happens.

 The Academics

It was 10:30 a.m., and I hadn't been at the bar for an hour when a group dressed in medical scrubs strolled in. Stress weighed heavily on their haggard faces. There were three of them, two men and a woman. They eased themselves onto the stools and leaned over the bar, their elbows on the counter and their heads propped up on their hands. They looked exhausted.

Never have you seen more despair than in the eyes of a first-year med student. They acted on their miseries by drowning their worries in alcohol. Where their miseries persisted, they chased the alcohol with several chain-smoked cigarettes. I lost count of the number these three had smoked after the bartender had emptied the ashtray for the fourth time.

It got me into thinking: that's some example these three were setting. Weren't doctors the people who told you not to do what they were doing?

Another group pushed through the pub door. Dressed in sandals and sweatshirts with fraternity letters on them, they looked like college kids except they were too old -- and looked too worn out -- to be seniors. They sat at the bar next to the med school group, lugging their state bar exam cram books with them. Ah, law students.

Things took a surprising turn when the students of both disciplines started fraternizing. It was a friendship that would not survive their entry into their professions. If anybody hated doctors, it was lawyers; and if anybody hated lawyers more than anybody else, it was doctors.

The Musicians

Shortly afterward, a gaggle of early twenty-somethings sauntered in. By the look of them -- tattered jean pants, long hair, calf-high boots, eyeliner -- they were a local rock group. They'd just hit the drinking age and were ready to drink the pub dry. My guess was they had put on a rock concert the night before and had only just rolled out of bed.

"Man, I got the baddest idea!" said the white guy with blond cornrows. "We've got to write a concept album -- you know, where all the songs together tell a larger story." He paused to let the idea sink in. "Except, and here's the crazy part, it's gonna be a book."

The band members gave him high-fives and slaps on the back.

"Oh sweet, man! Nobody's ever done that before!" said the tattooed guy.

I shook my head at this. I didn't want to break their hearts, so I kept it to myself that what they had in mind had been done before, and many times, at that. It's called a novel.

The Rabbis

I thought I'd seen it all by the time these two showed up, but they proved me wrong. Two Hasidic rabbis walked into the bar (this is not the start of a joke, I swear), dressed to the nines in their orthodox garb. These guys were full-on black robes, big hats, big beards, and sideburns that hung practically at their knees. They guy next to me sprang ramrod erect when he saw them come in, his addled mind probably thinking he'd drunk himself into the dark ages and that the rabbis were medieval wizards.

The rabbis were locked in an intense argument that had carried into the bar from the sidewalk. Limbs flailing, aspersions flying, they looked like two angry cats locked in a clothes dryer on spin-cycle.

"I give better eulogies than you!" said the first in a thick Eastern European accent. "Everyone cries at my eulogies!"

"Because you bore them to tears!" said the other with an accent that was decidedly New York. "It's bad enough somebody died, and you put them through torture!"

These two seated themselves in a corner booth, flailing their arms and shouting all the while. The waitress, with understandable trepidation, was slow in taking their order -- you couldn't pay me to jump into that verbal crossfire.

They argued the whole time they were in the bar, even through dinner, somehow finding a way to simultaneously use their mouths for shouting and for putting food in their stomachs. Then, once the meal was through, they left their money on the table and stood up, both at once, in a choreographed rage that blustered out the door again.

Feeling like I'd had enough excitement for one day, I paid my tab and left, but not before giving those last two plenty of lead time so I could make a quiet (and safe) getaway.

WARNING: The beverage we are about to describe is believed to contain an absurd amount of caffeine. It is dangerous, and you should not drink it. It may kill you. If it doesn't kill you, it likely won't make you stronger, despite Friedrich Nietzsche's claims. It may hurt you. Do not concoct, ingest, or serve this beverage to others, or allow anyone to do the same. We take no responsibility for any harm that may befall you or others in connection with this beverage.

The coffee bar guys in the employee cafeteria know their stuff. You want it black, no sugar, no cream? No sooner said than done -- they'll set a steaming mug of fresh roast right on the counter, just for you. Slap down a five-spot and they'll make a cappuccino to order, with the whipped cream and cinnamon to boot. Tea? You bet. And do they know espresso? How silly of you to ask.

Their drink-making prowess goes further than the chalkboard sign above the bar is long, and that's saying a lot. I counted a dozen types of drinks before I gave up counting. Yet for all their knowledge, there's a drink that only a select few know how to make. It's rarely ordered, and justifiably, because it's not on the menu. More so, because it's killed the odd summer intern or two over the years.

Although the exact formulation is not known (nor are we permitted to divulge that information, on our lawyers' orders), the beverage is essentially this: strong black tea brewed in a cup of steaming black coffee, with two shots of fresh espresso stirred in.

We call it "The Nightmare," because after one of those, you sure aren't sleeping.

You know you've heard it. You just don't remember or won't admit to it.

You'll hear it piped through the speakers in any trendy chain coffee shop or other place hipsters have historically gathered. You'll know it by the hesitant guitar notes and presence of "new cool" instruments like the ukulele. The singer usually mutters his verses with extreme trepidation. The singers' vocal styles range between high-pitched, like a candidate for a boy's choir, or brassy, like a reject from Muppets voice acting tryouts. The themes behind the songs are usually so safe to the point of being insipid -- travel, relationships, sometimes something so trivial as "it's raining."
 
Hipster music is unobtrusive; it knows it's not the reason why people go to coffee shops. It never comes to the fore because it's not mainstream, it's not corporate ("You just don't get it, man!"). It hasn't sold out, or at least it claims it hasn't. Its image depends on its audience not knowing it has, in fact, sold out to The Man.

Oftentimes, the volume is turned low so the music provides a barely-audible back beat to the chatter in the café, although sometimes it's annoyingly loud. On that note, when it's turned up too loud, it's really annoying because the genre seems to be about music that doesn't want to be heard. The vocalists mumble. A mumble that sounds like a roar is paradoxical, it's something you don't come across every day and when you do, it seizes your attention and doesn't let go. Like a train wreck. It's an awful thing to see and you don't watch it because you want to, you watch because it's something you don't get to see every day -- whether you want to or not.

All this begs several questions: who listens to this? Does anyone? Were you to go to the music store, would you find a section devoted to coffee shop music? Would you feel embarrassed at the look you'd get from the music store clerk on asking him where that section was?

On that last note, if you'd feel embarrassed at all, it's probably because you know what you're doing is wrong. Take off your scarf, it's a hundred degrees out. And take off your sunglasses too, you're indoors. Spit out that cigarette, it's not even lit.

Friends don't let friends listen to Hipster Muzak.