Wipe Your Feet

When I was sixteen or so I discovered coffee. I was living in Oxford for the summer studying Shakespeare because all I did was write in my diary about “getting on” various young men and trifle with my parents about whether or not I’d dinged the door of my car on the garage, which I had, but which I was prepared to deny until I was old and we could have a laugh over it. Oxford seemed very far away from the car, the parents, and the young men who had not “gotten on” me and had confirmed that I was an ugly homunculus. When I got there, everything seemed really novel. For starters, we could go to bars, though the program we were on forbade us to drink; however, we could smoke cigarettes, and we could do so right by William Shakespeare’s grave on field trips, which was particularly satisfying. Our days were mostly our own, and because UK cuisine was played and because all I cared about was staring at boys anyway, I spent my first few days in Oxford sitting at an internet cafe, drinking lattes and eating cookies for hours upon hours, ogling English men.

The thing about appearing as a neutral observer is that you must be otherwise occupied. A computer was good for this, though it was like a dollar per minute and I only had so many emails because this was 1999. So when I ran out of money/internet, I would just occupy myself with my coffee. I was on my third giant iced latte when I started to feel something peculiar, which was the feeling that my brain had been lit on fire with ideas and that I had more energy than the planetary universe. I had had coffee before, but this was Critical Mass time: I had never appeared less puffy. My eyes gleamed. I knew I would never be hungry again and be able to wear cut-off shorts every day, I could just go home and cut off the legs to all of my jeans right now and then sew their seams and still have time to jog fifteen miles and tell my parents that I had just discovered how seeding clouds must work. A friend stopped by to check his email and saw me building a pyramid out of sugar cubes while practicing my typing on my thighs. “How’s it goin’” he said, and I told him exactly how. “Jesus Christ, lay off the sauce,” he said before he left. I laughed at him, because he was still a lowly human who would probably only be awake until 1 in the morning and what would he have to show for his day, at the end of it?

Later, of course, I crashed and wondered why coffee was legal at all, but over time I learned to moderate and enjoy the benefits of coffee before I hit Critical Mass. Almost every day I have coffee. At least a cup but sometimes sixteen, depending on my mood. I recently had to chill with the peppy drink for about a week because I was fighting a cold. The change was interesting: at first, on day one, I felt relaxed and great. I was like, man, this is how it feels to live on Key West: you wake up, maybe listen to some tunes, you go outside, notice that it’s nice, and head on inside again. You’re hungry, so you eat something. It sits well. You do your work-at-home thing, but then you lose interest and wonder if you had anything new or worthwhile to say, ever, and decide that no, probably not. Best to leave this for another day. Half-way through Idol you pause it to put on your pajamas and wonder what happened today to make you feel fifty years old. YOU DON’T REMEMBER THAT IT’S THE LACK OF COFFEE. You don’t spend all day missing it. You forget that you went without. But your body remembers, and it both loves and hates you for the lack of caffeine.

A couple of days in, you look around your bedroom. Clothes everywhere. Why? You can’t do laundry without coffee. Coffee was invented to remind you to do your laundry and pay your bills. Even though you recognize that you have become too lazy to wash your belongings, you accept it because your brain is going through a withdrawal like a raft floating down Slowsville Creek. You’re just like, man, is it time for Idol again yet? Do I have sweatpants? How about this pair under the bed? They’re still good. They’re still fine. It’s not like you worked out in them.

Sometime, after you’re feeling better, you get the hankering for a hot beverage and you think, wow, what if I made a pot of coffee? You think about it as if it were black tar heroin. “Should I try it? It might feel good. It might feel lousy.” A cup and a half in you remember why you ever went down this dark road in the first place: while you’re throwing your first load of laundry in, you realize that if the government just got it together to seed all the clouds over the southwest United States, there would be no drought. And if clouds can only be seeded a few times before the government uses up its seeding allotment, then maybe you could get involved and spend some time in the afternoons thinking of a new way to create rain. You feel totally up for it.