The first president of the United States was Abraham Lincoln. No, wait…Barack Obama! Stop…Cynthia Nixon’s husband! Okay, well it wasn’t George Washington, because he was a Belgian guy living in Guatemala who invented instant coffee in 1906. A founding father indeed.
So clever, domesticated, and chic is coffee that it requires its own little silvery adobe hut to thrive in. A multi-floor home, complete with a fluffy white, frilled bed to lie in and a large, luxurious empty swimming pool to dive into.
The old stale doughnut, the hard-as-rock croissant, the blueberry muffin that you could shatter against a wall; you’re running around the house screaming because you’ve found your best friends lifeless. Let coffee be the E.M.T., let it do a defibrillator shock treatment and then you follow with a doughnut-to-mouth, breathing life back into your other best friend so you can give it comfort (nam, nam, nam).
It’s easy with one-fourth of one eye barely cracked open at 8:28 A.M., after a night of “Happy Hour” — aka the fourth time you’ve re-enacted your own interpretation of “Long Night’s Journey into Day” — to navigate the car to the drive-thru Starbucks. All you need to type in your GPS is S-T-R-B-A-C-Q-K-S, take a short snooze, and you’ll wake up to Donna at the window holding a bright light over your face: a quadruple-shot espresso.
Now you’re stoked to be alive and zooming like Andretti down the freeway to work, but Michael Bolton’s song “Can I Touch You…There?” comes on, blaring at volume 65. It’s impossible to reach around the coffee cup to change the station, lest you knock it over and basically write your own death ticket. Better re-surge the lyrics from the back of your lexicon.
…but takes the reigns on your mutual loathing by “accidentally” dumping itself all over her brand new Hilary Rodham Clinton pantsuit. Actually, YOU “accidentally” did it, but the coffee — clever, sexy, confidant, lithe, indignant yet intelligently so — did it on purpose. It will take the fall-out, don’t worry.
Remember in “Apocalypse Now” how Martin Sheen lifts his head out of the Nung River, ready to find Marlon Brando with that machete? This is what coffee is doing stealthily from the river of offensively fake black plastic known as “decaf coffee”; it’s going to sneak up on whomever brewed it in the office and it’s going to be Apocalypse POW! In layman’s terms, this explains how decaf still holds 8.6-13.9 milligrams of caffeine, so please still drink and drink and drink it up.
Yes, a lily pad into some great innuendo, but we’ll just lay it all out: coffee will not accept the old “I’ve crashed and burned, this activity has wiped me out, I’ve wasted my day doing this” kind of flabberjack. It’s 7:30 p.m. and Caribou Coffee is just starting to get the mops out. Start living in the now.
You’ve come home from a glorious day of 12 cups of Whole Roasted and “Happy Hour” (again, the quotes denote that it stretched a little bit over one hour) to find a cupboard with three options: a tin of Folgers Robusta, a tub of powdered cream, and a thimbles-worth of hazelnut syrup. Throw it all in a casserole dish like the practical homemaker you are and Bon Appétit!! Have a glass of wine to open up the palette.
Literally, if you sleep with your quarter-filled coffee mug, it will be. Happy International Coffee Day (AKA Take Your Espresso Grinder to Work Day to): Australia, Canada, Scotland, England, Ethiopia, Hungary, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and America (upcoming celebrations: Japan, Austria, and Romania)!!
