Revenge of Coffee

So, it appears that I spend a good deal of my time and resources purchasing, making, drinking, enjoying, thinking about, reminiscing upon and sometimes even complaining about coffee. I learned today that coffee does not return the favor. My last post was about coffee, and I declared that I was on a quest to create an American coffee revolution. Today, coffee called my bluff. The war is on!

Before going further, let me allay some of your thoughts of what the revenge of coffee may be. As coffee tends to accelerate the digestion process, and as caffeine is a natural diuretic, you may be thinking that coffee revenge is something like Montezuma's revenge. It is not. This does not mean that coffee doesn't do these things to me. It does, but I see this as a natural price to pay. No, no, no. This is not what started the war.

Background: I have a portable coffee cup. It is vacuum sealed, meaning that the only way to access its warm, delicious, caffeinated contents is to click a certain button. It does not spill unless the button is depressed. I have tested this countless times. I've thrown the cup in the air, dropped it, put it in coat pockets, shaken it over my head, etc. As long as that button is not clicked, it is an impregnable fortress.

Having a lot of faith in this wonderful invention that has (to be fair) greatly improved my life in the past, I began my day today as normal. I got up, had half of the coffee that I made, and put the other half in my 100% leak-proof cup. I threw my cup in my backpack along with my books, notes, and basically everything that I've been working on all quarter.

When I arrived at school on this rainy morning, I noticed my backpack was damp. This was no cause for alarm, given that it was indeed a rainy morning (in case you missed that part about the morning being rainy). I wasn't alarmed until I felt my backpack, and noticed that this wasn't the kind of cold wet that rain makes a backpack. No, no, no. This was warm wet.

Ever noticed that warm wet is never a good feeling? Anything wet that you touch that is still warm is an automatic cause for freaking out. I always think blood or urine and AIDS or cultures of swimming diseases, or something gross like that. There was just a guy down South that peed in a bottle of Mountain Dew, put it back on the shelf of the convenience store where he worked, sold it to a man who gulped most of it, and ended up in the hospital. This man was clearly not suspicious enough of warm wet. So anyway, we've established this: warm wet, and especially warm mysterious wet is scary.

Back to my story. It didn't take long after the initial warm mysterious wet freak-out moment to establish the cause of the wet (which effectively downgraded the status from warm mysterious wet back to just warm wet). It was especially easy to determine the cause since there was a black-ish, heavenly-smelling, brown puddle underneath my bookbag. My leakproof cup had failed me miserably.

It would be a slight exaggeration to say coffee was everywhere. Especially in the wake of two major hurricanes that didn't hit Ohio, so they clearly were not everywhere. Anyway, the coffee was not everywhere in the world, but everything in my bookbag had certainly been touched. Currently, my text books are lying next to my fan. Hopefully they will be dry enough before morning to be useful. All my papers are still legible, but pretty dark and more caffeinated than education notes should be. It was not a total loss, but I do feel like many of my things look like they could have come out of New Orleans residences.

So this is what I get for starting a coffee revolution?!
Coffee called my bluff. I can't win this war. As angry as I am that this happened, tonight, before I go to bed, I will set the coffee maker. Tomorrow, I will drink one cup of coffee, and I will pour the rest into my faithless, whorish green travel spill-proof mug (though I will test to make sure that the button is completely depressed - even though it was depressed this morning, I checked). I will still take it to school, and I will repeat the pattern until I become angry enough to abandon coffee. It will never happen. I'm like Hosea.

Coffee wins round 1 of the Revolution, and I'm not sure there will be a Round 2. It is better to be miserable with coffee than to be miserable without coffee.

More thoughts on coffee

Sometimes the French just do some things better than us.
Though this is not true of politics, cars, capitalism, or hygiene, it certainly is true of many of the finer points of life - fashion, poetry, wine, chocolate, food in general, and as I will point out in the rest of my reminscence, coffee. French coffee is just plain better than American coffee.

When I first came home, I thought I could find a cup o' joe in America that could rival that of France, but I think this was just because of my newfound surge of patriotism. After 6 months of searching and experimenting, I can honestly say that US coffee is crap in comparison. It breaks my heart to have to write that about my own country; nonetheless it must be said. This humbling revelation has of course caused a lot of introspection. Am I still an American? Is there still an America? Is coffee in France really as good as I remember it?

I think C.S. Lewis can help us out on this one. In The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically, The Silver Chair (spoiler alert), he introduces a character named Puddleglum, who ends up lost in the Underworld and encounters the evil green witch who tries to convince him that the Underworld is the only real world. She momentarily has him and his companions convinced that Aslan, lions in general, and sunlight are all just figments of his imagination. He was just really thinking of cats and lamps. After snapping out of her trance, our hero has a beautiful monologue which I will relay here.

"'One word, Ma'am,' he said, coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. 'One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed or made up all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say*.'"

Ah Puddleglum. What a man!

I feel like I can relate with my coffee disappointment. Even if there is no such thing as the coffee that I remember, I'm going to live like there is and spend my life looking for it. Even if it doesn't exist, my imaginary coffee licks American coffee hollow.

Dear reader, please don't think that I am abandoning American coffee altogether. I have not come to condemn American coffee, but to save it. For now, I'll grin and bear the dark waters, and I'll dream of what it could be like. Watch out for the coffee revolution.

*Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair; Harper Collins, 2001; p.633