A few months ago, I was ingesting too much caffeine. Early morning: three Nespresso pods. At work: a mug of instant coffee, then several green teas. Another instant coffee in the afternoon. A Nespresso after dinner.
This had been the routine for several months, then I started experiencing too many chest flutters, too many worries. Coffee turned against me! So, I chopped it out, or at least down – just one Nespresso in the morning, lots of water for the rest of the day. It’s been about a month now and pretty much everything is better.
It is not without regret. In high school, the nineties, I started drinking black coffee every day, and I’ve missed maybe seven days since. (I exaggerate – it’s more like four.) I’m inclined to bad coffee, McDonald’s or instant, but I don’t discriminate, I do appreciate the good stuff. Better than the coffee, I remember so many coffee dates, coffee shops, people inside them—the diner grease, the luckless lovers, the culture even in a Salt Lake City Starbucks.
Some people say coffee smells better than it tastes, but I wonder if they don’t love coffee sufficiently. For years, coffee didn’t tip me, it balanced me. Until it did not.
Still, craving is living. Wednesday this week, when the rain stopped, I left my desk, walked to a shop on Sunset Boulevard, and paid six dollars for a pour-over. A sign said the beans were from Papua New Guinea. My memory said the music was Teyana Taylor. The barista took his time, made his measurements. A doctor in black scrubs was examining something on her iPad. A man in a puffy jacket drew flowers with colored pencils on a paper pad. Eventually I was served coffee in an attractive china cup. It was so good, I sank into a seat and just stared at a wall—stared so long I became self-conscious about staring, then decided I didn’t care.
I was halfway through my coffee when one of the staff, arriving from another shop to service the espresso machine, asked the barista, “So are you a coffee addict?”
“It’s the only vice I’ve got left,” he said. “Cocaine is kind of a big commitment.”
The woman nodded. “Yeah, you’re either in the life or you’re not.”
True for coffee, too, I think.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters:
New singles and albums that got me through ruts this week
Some brute-force contemporary classical from Ukraine that I absorbed in one sitting in a hotel lobby
A round-up of recent fashion and service journalism, kinda
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.