about mudguzzler
A bird, a bog and nowhere particular to be.
Mudguzzler is a coffee roastery and small bar in San Diego. The name comes from a poem about a bird that drank itself to death on bog water—and the man who rather admired it.
the source
The Yellow Bittern
In Seamus Heaney's translation of Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, a man finds a bittern dead of thirst on a frozen shore and mourns it as his own reflection: another cheerful drinker who preferred bog water to wine.
It is an elegy, a defence and a joke told without hurrying the punchline. That argument—not Irish ornament—is the useful part for us.
“You that would call me every morning
Seamus Heaney, “The Yellow Bittern”
with your gargler's song
as you guzzled mud.”
the bird
Settled. Patient. Faintly ridiculous.
The bittern carries the old, damp half of the identity. San Diego supplies the light, stucco and coastal ease. He is never stalking anything and appears to have nowhere else to be.
return to the coffee