Coffee a Go-Go
At the meeting of Java-holics Anonymous:
"Hi, my name's Bud, and I'm a coffee addict."
"Hi, Bud!"
"I've been clean for nearly two hours."
"Gasp!"
If there's a twelve-step program for coffee addicts, I could be their poster boy.
The first time I tasted any form of coffee other than the garden-variety, fresh-from-the-can, "Good To The Last Drop" stuff was at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle twenty-two years ago. I stood there, steaming grande latte in hand, staring at Elliot Bay, and as I savored the sweet warmth, the world changed. There was celestial music, the overcast sky turned a brilliant Cerulean blue, and my hair started to tingle. I liked it. This wasn't my father's coffee, it was the coffee that launched expeditions, made the American colonists give up beer for breakfast and that would start me on the road to a genuine addiction to the evil bean.
I had lived with coffee before, but it was a tenuous and unfulfilling relationship. My first taste of coffee came from my dad's electric percolator, the stuff of jingly 60s commercials - a jet-age inspired electric chrome table rocket with a little glass bubble on top, gurgling away happily at the break of day. My grandma Patton did it entirely differently, with a mystical, glass-globed vacuum contraption that was part evil-scientist lab apparatus, part amusement park ride. It all tasted the same to me - hot, bitter and boring. Sure, it had some kick to it, but the adrenaline jangle wasn't worth the ordeal and the oral discomfort that hot coffee represented to me. (Letting it cool some before gulping it down didn't occur to me until a number of years later.) Grandma Simpson didn't deal with coffee at all, she may have known of its evils and steered clear. I should have noticed that grandma was able to doze off at the drop of a hat. Definitely not a coffee drinker.
My ongoing love/hate relationship with coffee was fueled in part by an old friend from high school who opened a coffee house. I used his place as a work-avoidance venue - the coffee was a bonus. He used me as a one-man focus group and espresso guinea pig. He studied beans and roasts and armed with new and dangerous blends, he strapped me to a comfy chair and forced me to drink coffee. I was a willing victim of The Espresso Machine of Dr. Moreau. I was hooked. He fed me cappuccinos, lattes, Americanos, cafe au lait, Turkish coffee and a weird variation, "Kopi Luak" the beans for which were once sliding through the gut of a living polecat. Quite good, if you don't spend any time pondering the actual process of harvesting the beans. Weasel scatology and coffee really shouldn't go together. Sadly, the coffee house didn't survive, but my addiction rages on.
Just as cigarettes are a mere delivery vehicle for nicotine, coffee is the medium for the transportation of caffeine. Caffeine in its pure form is a bitter-tasting, white crystalline substance, and is just as addictive as some other white crystalline products I've heard tell of. Caffeine, Trimethylxanthine, to be exact, is described chemically as C8 H10 N4 O2, is classified as an alkaloid, and stimulates the very same neural centers as other common alkaloids - cocaine, nicotine and heroin. A good slug of coffee bumps up the heart rate and blood pressure and also increases the production of adrenaline, the "fight or flight" hormone. A side effect is the constriction of blood vessels and the tensing of muscles. This sounds like a recipe for road rage and all sorts of twitchy over-reactions to life, the universe and everything, if you ask me. I know that when I'm fully caffeinated, I maintain the calm demeanor of a Yorkshire Terrier gnawing on a live extension cord. I also crash horribly if my fix isn't delivered on time. It's gets pretty ugly, and I'm not all that pretty to begin with.
Why this stuff isn't illegal is still a mystery to me.
The addictive quality of coffee has built empires and sends many into the street every morning looking for a quick, if not inexpensive score. You want numbers? If you go to your local inked-up barista for a foamy morning fix, say at $4.00 a pop, and you do this every workday, you'll spend about a thousand dollars in a year. Through the magic of compound interest, at this rate, assuming an annual investment yield rate of 5% (if you're lucky) at the end of ten years, your coffee habit converted to savings would net you a cool $13,000 plus. Another ten years of stashing your mud money in a bank, turns your four dollar-a-day habit into $35,000 of pocket change. I could go on and on, but I can see the bottom of my cup, and panic is starting to set in.
As drugs go, caffeine seems pretty a pretty innocuous master, but master all the same. Every time I think that we might all be better off without our daily jolt, I imagine a world without coffee, where everyone is lounging happily in the afternoon sun, maybe taking the occasional catnap or strolling through the park, and absolutely nothing is getting done.
Never mind. Room for cream, two sugars, please. I have work to do.
"Hi, my name's Bud, and I'm a coffee addict."
"Hi, Bud!"
"I've been clean for nearly two hours."
"Gasp!"
If there's a twelve-step program for coffee addicts, I could be their poster boy.
The first time I tasted any form of coffee other than the garden-variety, fresh-from-the-can, "Good To The Last Drop" stuff was at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle twenty-two years ago. I stood there, steaming grande latte in hand, staring at Elliot Bay, and as I savored the sweet warmth, the world changed. There was celestial music, the overcast sky turned a brilliant Cerulean blue, and my hair started to tingle. I liked it. This wasn't my father's coffee, it was the coffee that launched expeditions, made the American colonists give up beer for breakfast and that would start me on the road to a genuine addiction to the evil bean.
I had lived with coffee before, but it was a tenuous and unfulfilling relationship. My first taste of coffee came from my dad's electric percolator, the stuff of jingly 60s commercials - a jet-age inspired electric chrome table rocket with a little glass bubble on top, gurgling away happily at the break of day. My grandma Patton did it entirely differently, with a mystical, glass-globed vacuum contraption that was part evil-scientist lab apparatus, part amusement park ride. It all tasted the same to me - hot, bitter and boring. Sure, it had some kick to it, but the adrenaline jangle wasn't worth the ordeal and the oral discomfort that hot coffee represented to me. (Letting it cool some before gulping it down didn't occur to me until a number of years later.) Grandma Simpson didn't deal with coffee at all, she may have known of its evils and steered clear. I should have noticed that grandma was able to doze off at the drop of a hat. Definitely not a coffee drinker.
My ongoing love/hate relationship with coffee was fueled in part by an old friend from high school who opened a coffee house. I used his place as a work-avoidance venue - the coffee was a bonus. He used me as a one-man focus group and espresso guinea pig. He studied beans and roasts and armed with new and dangerous blends, he strapped me to a comfy chair and forced me to drink coffee. I was a willing victim of The Espresso Machine of Dr. Moreau. I was hooked. He fed me cappuccinos, lattes, Americanos, cafe au lait, Turkish coffee and a weird variation, "Kopi Luak" the beans for which were once sliding through the gut of a living polecat. Quite good, if you don't spend any time pondering the actual process of harvesting the beans. Weasel scatology and coffee really shouldn't go together. Sadly, the coffee house didn't survive, but my addiction rages on.
Just as cigarettes are a mere delivery vehicle for nicotine, coffee is the medium for the transportation of caffeine. Caffeine in its pure form is a bitter-tasting, white crystalline substance, and is just as addictive as some other white crystalline products I've heard tell of. Caffeine, Trimethylxanthine, to be exact, is described chemically as C8 H10 N4 O2, is classified as an alkaloid, and stimulates the very same neural centers as other common alkaloids - cocaine, nicotine and heroin. A good slug of coffee bumps up the heart rate and blood pressure and also increases the production of adrenaline, the "fight or flight" hormone. A side effect is the constriction of blood vessels and the tensing of muscles. This sounds like a recipe for road rage and all sorts of twitchy over-reactions to life, the universe and everything, if you ask me. I know that when I'm fully caffeinated, I maintain the calm demeanor of a Yorkshire Terrier gnawing on a live extension cord. I also crash horribly if my fix isn't delivered on time. It's gets pretty ugly, and I'm not all that pretty to begin with.
Why this stuff isn't illegal is still a mystery to me.
The addictive quality of coffee has built empires and sends many into the street every morning looking for a quick, if not inexpensive score. You want numbers? If you go to your local inked-up barista for a foamy morning fix, say at $4.00 a pop, and you do this every workday, you'll spend about a thousand dollars in a year. Through the magic of compound interest, at this rate, assuming an annual investment yield rate of 5% (if you're lucky) at the end of ten years, your coffee habit converted to savings would net you a cool $13,000 plus. Another ten years of stashing your mud money in a bank, turns your four dollar-a-day habit into $35,000 of pocket change. I could go on and on, but I can see the bottom of my cup, and panic is starting to set in.
As drugs go, caffeine seems pretty a pretty innocuous master, but master all the same. Every time I think that we might all be better off without our daily jolt, I imagine a world without coffee, where everyone is lounging happily in the afternoon sun, maybe taking the occasional catnap or strolling through the park, and absolutely nothing is getting done.
Never mind. Room for cream, two sugars, please. I have work to do.
