It’s been twenty hours since I’ve chugged my last
beer. Twenty hours since I have tapered off the ashy blink of an affiliated
tobacco product. Twenty hours since I have ingested anything
with a meat-based product including dairy. Twenty hours since I have routinely sprinkled anything
remotely resembling victual or vittles with gratuitous flecks of sugar.
Twenty hours since I beatifically brewed my last pot of java. Beautiful gushing palate-tingling post-coital java, the lulling purr and syncopated drip of the loyal coffee pot alchemically engendering a grainy bruised liquid that somehow coarsely french kisses the bottom of your lip apres every sacred sip. Coffee that jump starts certain neurological vectors of cognition with Hobbesian clamps of enlightenment. Coffee that has escorted me daily in consecutive tandem slurps for the past 21 years. Coffee that I can’t do anything w/out. Coffee that I just wanted to brew a pot today and lounge at my writers desk and looking out the window and bask in the bulbous sails of the skidding overhead clouds while hammering sentences into the sonogram of the page.
Coffee that I started drinking when I was 11 years
old, attending a wedding for someone I didn’t know in Galesburg Illinois (when
you are a kid you are always attending a wedding for someone you don’t know)
and I couldn’t find the punch bowl so I kept alighting my mug and requesting
the waiter for a refill and the nice fat lady who sat at our table said I
looked very quote, ‘precocious’ drinking coffee and that I seemed like a fine
young man so, of course, I ended up drinking like 20 cups even though I
despised it and got sick.
There was
coffee that was brewed Sunday morning in silver urns that resembled silos; the weak aromatic pinch of thoroughly
watered down economy-priced joe permeating
the Sunday school of my youth, adults brandishing bibles drinking coffee
out of white Styrofoam cups, the coffee I would drink between services later
that tasted like a halibut was using the
percolator as a makeshift fish hatchery during time of liquid conception.
Coffee that I started drinking seriously circa 1992,
Freshman year of high school, my grandmother giving me a coffee pot she
received gratis in the mail via Gevalia. Coffee which I didn’t know how to brew
since my dad always stopped at the crooked neon smile of Mr Donuts on Western
avenue to get his morning fix before driving into wending hills of Hollis townships
to teach rural fourth graders the joy of
the written word. Coffee which, because I had never seen anyone brew coffee
before, I made for the first time without realizing that the machine needed a
filter, flooding the kitchen in a muddy soil of damp dregs not knowing that two years later I would be burning through a coffee pot every six months, arriving home after school, tottering up the back staircase to my room on the corner of Cedar and Sherman in west Peoria, listening to the Writer's Almanac before brewing usually two pots, listening to Morrissey, writing (tepid/sophomoric) poem after poem synchronous with every swig.
Coffee that my grandma always had somehow brewed on-demand in her kitchen, employing a Bunn coffee maker that always had a cache of water stowed inside. The coffee pot was the size of an ewok. Looking back on it know I swear it had beakers and test-tubes and an erlenmeyer flask on the side. You couldn't be in grandma's house less than two seconds w/out being offered a cup of coffee.
When she died a few later, I went into her house the first thing I unplugged was the coffee pot, dandling it in my arms like an orphaned bassinet filled with puppies.
Coffee that I pathetically purloined, skulking into the Teacher's lounge in high school and filching a cup of coffee, retorting to my faculty reprimand that maybe the high school I atteneded would finally meet the minimum state testing requisites if they would stop investing so much money on athletic facilities and invest in a plantation behind the abandon greenhouse. Coffee that I used to drink every morning in high school, always with cream and sugar and sometimes (if I could
surreptitiously wing it) a few shots of Bailey's Irish Cream that my parent's kept stowed in the back of the closet, always cream and sugar until Laurianne De Loue, senior french transfer creature of my dreams inquired if she could have a sip and responded something high-pitch and nasal en francais like, "Sucre bleu. Zat ezz knot Kaff-fey. Kaff-fey ezz blaque." Coffee which we would just lounge around all day inside the taupe vinyl interior of Lums and knock back infinite 99 cent carafes while filling the convenient ashtrays with the banter of both are youth and our dreams.
Coffee that I used to drink at One world before going upstairs and getting stoned and then yipping at Phil that he inadvertently brewed the jamoke with the bongwater once again. Coffee that i one time had a french press blow-up while late for work, pressing the lid down, suffering second degree burns that are still legible in the interior of my arms. Coffee that, in those awkward abeyance filled post-prom ennui-fraught teenage years between 17-21 when alcohol is still off limits, coffee was the social elixir. The query to hopefully getting. Let's get together and meet up for coffee, sometime. Coffee that it seemed like it took just fucking forever for Peoria to get a Starbucks and now I wished they would just go the hell away and hibernate in excessive priced hoity-toityville.
Coffee that my beer-gut emulating dual Honre de Balzac used to drink between 30-50 cups a
day, while writing in massive 20 hour, pissing out 85 novels in 20 years before
dying (of either syphilis or caffeine overdose) at the age of fifty-one.
Coffee that I can't imagine sitting
down for a five hour write-jam without burning through a couple pots. Coffee
that, now that I think about it, is probably responsible for my decade of
wandering and how it took me nine years to receive my undergrad (with honors).
Not many undergrads
I know turn in a 700 page novel as their senior thesis.
Albeit one
that was written under the duress a seasonal flannel-infested caffeine binge
now called the 90's.
There are other cups I remember. The time I was 12
years old and (in an attempt to emulate Hudson hawk) went to Gloria jeans in
the mall and, trying to sound more pedantic than poetic, ordered an espresso
only to look at the diminutive cup like a botched urine sample, certain they
had made a mistake. There is gas station coffee that I always get randomly
while hoping in my car and (usually chain smoking) chasing the whispering
splash of autumnal light. There was the cup of coffee that I drank and then
punched the machine in the nourishment center in Methodist Hospital as my
father bartered his finale of breaths. The coffee I had at Starved Rock Lounge
with my friend Mike Trusky, the psychic, hours before I met the one individual
who truly changed my life.
Coffee which, on an avg, I drink about two pots a day. The scent of which is incessantly wafting in the background in whiffs and sneezes everytime I write.
Coffee which (along with smokes) I practically abused during the forty day composition of the original Succulent Sobriety, probably avg. four pots a day.
It didn't matter if I was going to give up beer for a finite amount of time. In the end, I still had coffee.
Since Novemeber 1992, the longest I have gone without a cup of coffee has been five days when I was hospitalized in May1996.
Since June 1996 the longest I have gone without a cup has been maybe 40 hours.
A few weeks ago I told a friend of mine who is a highly-respected physician that I was planning to revisit Succulent Sobriety and, give up not only alcohol, but also caffeine and sugar and cigarettes and meat.
He looked back at me and told me I was crazy.
"People come to me all the time who are getting divorced and they tell me they want to quit smoking and I tell them to, literally, choose one or the other, because you will feel even more of a failure if it doesn't work out."
And it hasn't. I've had withdrawal mideval-inducing migraines all day. More aptly it has felt like some dyslexic Oompa-Loompa shattered a forty oz. of
Malt liquor on the top of my forehead the same way the nouveau-riche christen
Champagne bottles into the side of a ship on her maiden voyage before slowly rolling
my brain back and forth over triangular splinters of glass, cerebrally kneading
the bulb of my cognition into a vitrified shard of dough.
It feels Like my brain
is being flossed with rusty spires of barbed wired, sawing off flecks of synapses
and neurons with every calculated slice.
Still I'm commited to discerning more about my anatomy via giving up things I love even when my co-worker turned to me and suggested earlier today that I take up Decaf to assauge the initial shock of going caffeine free.
"If you take Decaf you will trick your brain into thinking you just has a cup of coffee and the headaches won't be as intense.
I tell my co-worker that tricking the brain into thinking its had caffeine is like tricking your lover into thinking she’s just had an orgasm.
"Maybe they should call decaffeinated coffee, marriage." I tell him, with a smile.
No comments:
Post a Comment