My friend Coolguy is the coolest guy ever.

Coolguy was telling me about his new passion, coffee.  Big deal, right?  In the post-Maxwell House era, coffee geeks aren’t exactly rare.  But Coolguy’s passions are anything but common.  I’m not sure he actually drinks the coffee.  Mostly he reads about it.  His 45 minute morning bus ride is spent devouring books, trade journals, scientific papers, and God knows what else…as long as it pertains to coffee.  I should point out that Coolguy has a PhD in some sort of scientific jibberjabber, and that he’s a New Testament Greek scholar.  (He and I were pastors together for one crazy year.  Yeah, I said pastor.  How about that?)  Oh, and he’s one of three living masters of some sort of Okinawin musical instrument.  What I’m trying to say, is that he’s not your average dude.

Coolguy’s house sits on the edge of a cliff.  When he first bought his house, Coolguy’s cliff was full of weeds, rubble, and mangy bushes.  At the bottom of the cliff sat a crumbling retaining wall.  Rather than fix the wall, Coolguy elected to cover the wall with vines.  Lacking horticulture experience, Coolguy began to study the world of botany.  And then it was off to the races.  Soon he was Photoshopping elaborate gardens, scheming waterfall-like landscapes of pyrotechnic proportions.  And the soil.  Soil, soil, soil.  “Without the right soil, you have nothing”, he would tell me.  Dude spent six months reading about soil and composting techniques.  His basement was turned into a decomposition laboratory for mail-order worms to do their thing.  After a few months, Coolguy’s wife got tired of the house smelling like shit, and the fruit flies got to be a pain, so the garbage can worm-farms were deported.

These days, Coolguy’s cliff still looks like the side of an Afghan mountain.  But…if you ever want to know anything about plants and soil, ask Coolguy.  You can talk about it over coffee.  These pics are from one of his blogs: (Oh, and here’s his coffee blog)

The wall has seen better days…

The goal.