Making coffee from inside a VW Beetle is a normal day’s work for Denver’s Matthew Pendleton, who, like so many millennials, is harsh to make his dreams come true. In this case, literally.
The dark, 4 a.m. sky is a informed steer to Pendleton. He starts his day by loading his 1968 Volkswagen Beetle with bags of coffee beans, disposable cups and a hulk cooler full of other supplies. All of this is critical for his brief trek to a downtown travel dilemma that he will occupy for a subsequent 6 hours in his coffee emporium on wheels, On The Road Coffee.
His setup is simple, though conspicuous from a street. He has a tiny barista list that has prolonged transposed a newcomer seat, an attachable opposite to reason his Jack Kerouac books and tender plant, and a hulk homemade coffee crater that sits on a roof of a Beetle.
Being a mobile barista is not Pendleton’s primary source of income though; he’s operative toward withdrawal his full-time pursuit during a internal record store so he can concentration on his design and On The Road Coffee.
Thinly widespread between his dual jobs, Pendleton often works between 60 and 70 hours a week, withdrawal small time or appetite for him to work on his art (a common problem for forward millennials).
He is still holding on to his unchanging full-time pursuit to keep his bills paid during a seasons that are too cold or stormy to take a Beetle out.
“The long-term idea is for On The Road Coffee to take over a daytime job,” he said.
Pendleton’s artwork is simply identified by a hundreds of concentric lines and shapes, like a life lines on a tree stump. This particular set of rings is more like a life of a human, he said, swirling and changing with small notice or predicted direction.
“(The tellurian life) is not going to be in a round pattern, it’s going to go in all directions…every square is a opposite life,” he said.
Looking down on a rambling tree rings drawn on a paper fibbing on a desk, it isn’t tough to see a parallels between a lines’ changeable directions and a new instruction that he’s holding in his life.
You can follow any line with your finger around and around until it’s stopped passed in a marks by a competing ring. Only a core ring is uninterrupted. For Pendleton, that’s him — “just some small weirdo, sitting in this bug,” as he pronounced — portion coffee.