Coffee Detox Day 2

For the last week or so I have become hyperaware of my heartbeat. It felt like it was beating harder than it should be. Even when I was sitting still and had been sitting still for a good long while at my desk researching Wharton, TX -- hometown to Horton Foote, 91-year old playwright extraordinaire (who liked me according to his agent according Tanya, he having made this assessment during our half-hour interview in which I said about two sentences and was otherwise dumbly starstruck [which has never happened before: not with Sarah Ruhl. Not with Naomi Iizuka. I wonder if it is because I never had a grandfather figure in my life...]) -- it would punch my ribs. Not quickly. My pulse was normal. Just with gusto. It is probably nothing, unless you consider early onset hypochondria to not be nothing, but it has made me reevaluate my little addiction to coffee.

I have, like many of you, been battling this addiction for years. I attempted to give it up last semester. My students playfully mocked me. And with Meshuggah right down the street from my apartment and working at a restaurant with its own special blend -- Khaldi's Blueberry Hill Blend -- which I could drink for free, giving up the sauce was inevitably doomed. For those of you who do not know about Meshuggah's coffee: they brew each cup individually with their espresso machine. It is dark, and rich, and is like liquid electricity speeding through your veins. You can get a free refill, but I don't recommend it unless you want to be wired for four hours and then crash. I, of course, usually opted for the refill, except on days when I felt like my heart couldn't take the pressure...
I had the refill when I was home for Thanksgiving. I had to: you know. I think it is what set off the chest pains. And the longing. The other problem with Meshuggah coffee is that you will NEVER find a cup of coffee as delicious and fulfilling. I tried. I usually get an Americano -- just espresso and water -- at my usual haunts, but you get exactly what you should get: watered down espresso. Which Meshuggah coffee is not. It is not watered down at all. It is the opposite of watered down...

I like coffee. I like it for more than just "what it does" for me. Yesternight, after detox day 1, I was reminded of the physiological dependency as I went to bed at 9:15 with an all-consuming headache that had not gone away when my cats decided to play tag on my face at midnight. I will not exaggerate and say I had the shakes and the sweats all day, but you can certainly tell -- in your soul -- when you go without. But I went into work yesterday with a mission of not drinking coffee: I knew what to expect from the previous semester -- oh, I lasted about a week before I caved and found myself in Meshuggah's upper loft area celebrating my week-long sabbatical with a breaking of the fast -- and I welcomed it. No pain no gain. The throbbing in my head was me beating the crap out of my addicted cells, telling them to fall in line and shape up. My weariness (it should be said that I had woken up early to get Rachel to her crit on time) was the exhaustion of my victorious soul who had fought valiantly on the Trojan fields two-to-two with Mighty Ajax and his Shield all the long day.

But I like coffee because I like coffee shops. They are good places to work. They provide a mock-society that makes one feel like they are not completely closing themselves off from the outside world when they work, even if one does feel little tremors of rage whenever a couple starts talking too loud (or at all). One has to remind oneself that it is not a library and if one had wanted silence one should not have left one's damn apartment...In addition to the frustration of the distraction, this couple reminds the coffeehouse scholar that he in fact isn't participating in the world at all: rather he has brought a 3x4x10 foot cube of solitude with him into the public sphere and he sits sipping Americanos within its woefully un-soundproofed walls.

I don't know what I will order now. I cannot in good conscience buy tea. That's like paying for water. Maybe I will order coffee and not drink it. I'll just look at it. To test my soul.

I think my cat has the hiccups. Either that or he is about to barf all over my keyboard.