Now listen. I don’t want to hear any goddamn bullshit about the title. Every 33 year old frazzled soccer mom mourning the effects of gravity and time (while growing in to herself such that she looks like a real woman finally praise be to God, may Conde Nast be cursed forevermore) who’s looking for a little spice in her life has a fucking blog called “The Coffee Chronicles” wherein she lists the days laundry escapades and how she might actually start taking the voice lessons while the kids are off at soccer practice between fantasies of screwing the gardener they can’t afford. All the while clutching her beverage, hair asunder barking that some days she just doesn’t know how she does it. So don’t give me any shit. At least my coffee chronicles is about fucking coffee.
Where was I? Ah. Hadn’t started yet.
I hate coffee.
I’ve always hated coffee.
It’s nasty, bitter and gross. It tastes like water filtered through crushed burnt beans. “No no, you just haven’t had the gourmet..” SHUT UP.
That’s the same shit I hear about beer, which I also hate for remarkably similar reasons. “Oh, but you have to try microbrewed…” NO I DONT. IT’S ASS.
Smells nice though. Coffee, not beer. Beer smells like a frat house on Sunday morning at about 2 in the afternoon, when the previous night’s activities have left the living room caked in dried hoppy beverageness that you have to peel yourself out of, having passed out face down on the floor. If you have to ask how I know that then proceed immediately to the bathroom, stick you head fully in the toilette and inhale deeply.
All that said, I’m a caffeine addict. I love it. I take nodoz. I drink enough diet dew and red bull to kill a very large pack animal. But over the last year or so, those things have really begun to taste like what they are; nuclear waste. I’ve begun looking at ingredient lists, my face painted with defeat as I sink 3-4 liters a day of glowing green go-go juice, my stomach reacting with “really? More? Are you kidding?”
And everybody tells me the same damn thing about coffee (and beer frankly): “Oh, nobody likes it at first.” Which has got to be the most brain dead thing of all time. Then why the fuck…. oh nevermind. Trying to make sense of the indigenous ostensibly intelligent species on your damn planet gives me a migraine. I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna tell central command when my recon tour is over. But whatever it is, you people are going to need to be viable in space when I do ’cause I don’t see a damn thing in my draft report that will convince them not to annihilate this whole fucking place.
So I did the math on the cost per milligram of caffeine, dosage size and ancillary chemical content and realized that I’ve just got to go do it.
Yesterday afternoon I went to our local everything store and bought a “Mr. Coffee” 4 cup coffee maker. Seemed like it was the right size since I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t just drop kick it out my fifth floor window after the first attempt and if I did, I didn’t want anybody killed when it landed on their head. A good reminder of the evils of coffee would suffice.
On my way home with the coffee maker (and crock pot. Long story.) in tow I stopped in the store to buy some of the supplies for this thing. Many text messages and in-store conversations with strangely eager to help women in their mid 50s and I ended up with a “taking it easy to start” bag of starbucks breakfast blend. Apparently the right stuff is dunkin donuts coffee. But you take what you can get.
I got home and unpacked this cute (read tiny) coffee thingie while starting my pot roast (don’t ask.) I glanced at the instruction booklet “Before you start be sure and clean…” garbage. Anything that lives through the coffee process and gets in to my system will likely give me superpowers.
I set the thing up then twitched mightily.
Apparently your “coffee maker” things have disposable filtration devices, none of which are provided with the device.
Now listen. Where I come from this is called logic: If you’re buying a coffee maker there’s a better than even probability that one of the following scenarios is true:
If I were a maker of coffee makers I’d corner the fucking market by providing a starter kit with my device consisting of:
- Filter thingies for the maker itself
- Coffee
- A metal spoon
- a disposable lighter
- a syringe
So off I go to the store to buy taters, coffee filters and onions.
Of course they don’t have the cute little four cup pot filters. Fuck it. Big ones will work. (Protip: They do.)
On my way out I saw an endcap with dunkin donuts coffee, which I thankfully bought.
Well yesterday I was a bit preoccupied with my roast thingie (long story) so I didn’t get to the crackcoffee.
So I took out my coffee mug. My Father bought me a coffee mug as a stocking stuffer or present many many years ago. Probably a score or more. It features a Joan Miro painting I can’t identify. A wonderfully abstract scene that, if you focus (orhavehadtoomuchfuckingcoffee) looks like two women smoking cigarettes out of holders while sitting at a table. For decades this poor coffee mug has been relegated to serving hot chocolate, chicken bullion, the odd cup of soup and milk for cookie dunking. Finally it was destined to fulfill it’s Special Purpose. One of us should be able to.
I held the mug up to the little “4 cup” coffee pot. Apparently a cup is far less than a cup. I bake. I know what a fucking cup is like and there ain’t four of them that fit in that thing. But WHATEVER twitch. I fill up the thing with water. Cold? Does it matter? Fuck it. In it goes.
No indication anywhere on how much of the grounds of cocaine masking substance to use. I remember my childhood “one scoop per cup.” Ok, what’s a scoop. Screw it. Five tablespoons, four “cups.”
So the thing made the noise and that was great. I remember that noise. Once it was done I poured 80% of the pot into my one cup with room left for whatever I was going to put in it. A bit of that white powdery substance. Enough to make it change color. My Father likes his coffee “like Halle Berry.” Now, I like a lot of things like Halle Berry. But there isn’t enough additive in the world of any kind to make that bitterness in the back of my throat go away (reminds me of…oh, never mind.)
Besides, I’m more of a Pam Grier sort of guy anyway.
So two tablespoons of weird “this isn’t dairy” stuff. (which is half a tablespoon too much as it turns out.) I filled up my sugar dispenser and stared at it. I kept looking back and forth between the coffee mug and the sugar. I just couldn’t make it make sense in my head. No sugar.
Swig. Yes. It’s as bitter as I remember, so I try to focus on the other stuff. It’s warm. It has other tastes in there someplace. And once it cools down enough to drink I sink the thing, top it off and sink that. Then I realize two things:
- “Breakfast blend” is bitch coffee for whiny little girlie men.
So I opened a word processor and typed “The Coffee Chronicles.” I thought about it for a second before going back and refilling the thing with Starbucks breakfast blend. I find myself unable to return to the computer and instead stare at the innocent little coffee maker yelling “HURRY you sonofabitch” while considering the relative merits of getting a hose that would lead from the drip portion through some kind of marginal heat dispersion apparatus into my face. (In another note: I now fully understand why Lewis Black talks like that.)
So now here I am, having sank two “4 cup” pots of two different brands of ‘breakfast blend’. This equates to about three coffee cups of coffee.
Starbucks “breakfast blend” is like dunken donuts breakfast blend but burnt. Originally I thought it was “stronger” but while that may or may not be true, it just tastes like it’s been burnt. Interestingly I’ve heard that about their coffee before, so I’m not completely off base here.
In my continuing concessional spirit let me add the following: Drinking diet soda for the caffeine content is like standing in a New York City subway station in August because you like fresh air. It’s amateur hour. I’ve always suspected that might be true (hence the noDoz supplements), but in the last two hours I’ve noticed the ambient temperature in my freezing apartment has climbed to what clearly must be the mid eighties. I’m sweating and my brain is cruising at the speed God intended it to operate.
That horrible bitterness? Yeah, it’s there. Do I love it? No. It’s annoying and nasty.
But it’s a small price to pay.
