Hi.
Coffee: Sumatra Medium-Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand
I want to talk about coffee today.
That feels almost blasphemous, doesn’t it? I’ve spent the better part of a year writing this ‘coffee blog’ with the adamant intent to trim, confine and marginalize any talk about the titular subject. Instead, I rant at the world, soliloquy theories, absorb myself to this or that melancholia, and I’m happy about that, but today I want to talk about coffee.
There was this guy I knew. He lived beside my parents and was the uncle to two kids about my age. Those kids were my first friends. They’d stay at his house in the summers when their mother was working so we’d hang out a lot. We got up to all kinds of somethings: mud fights, sword fights, 8-bit videogaming. Our houses were joined by a giant backyard mulberry tree. We’d eat the mulberries and rub them on plastic swords for battle damage. It was great fun.
Very rarely, I’d be invited over for breakfast. Their uncle would be cooking something for himself while we three ate milk and cereal. Here’s a morning I remember:
He’s got his shirt off and the music going. Something low and simple, maybe Elvis. There’s bright exuberances of light trying to get through the kitchen curtains and some of it makes it in. My friends are at the table talking to each other but I’m watching their uncle work the coffee pot. He pulls water from the sink. He fills the old percolator. There’s all this static and steam when the heat coils go crimson-hot, and then the room’s a bit of drip-drip percussion backing Elvis.
When it’s done, their uncle pours a tall, green mug and dips a donut in it. I’m thinking it’s the most outrageous act of gall, ruining a good cake donut like that, so I tell him. He looks at me with a wiry black mustache full of crumbs. He says: “You’ll understand it when you’re older.”
I’m not a big fan of donuts dipped in coffee, even now. Still, I feel like I get what he was talking about.
….shit, this wasn’t really about coffee after all, was it?
Novel Count: 5,709 words
Currently Reading: Autumn, Ali Smith; Cherry, Nico Walker
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“Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.” – Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Livesay Writing 
I’m reading while drinking my morning cup which I brewed too strong and then made too sweet with maple syrup. My cups of coffee never come out the same twice. Measuring might help, but I’d rather surprise myself.
My dad told me the same sort of thing about beer when I was a kid and took a swig of his Labatt blue thinking it was my can of Mountain Dew. “How can you drink that?” I asked him. I hadn’t known how foul beer was. He smiled and shrugged. “You get used to it.” And, of course, I did.
Nice work with the up-word momentum novel count. 🙂
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Maple syrup in coffee is something I keep hearing about! It sounds a certain kind of crazy/lovely and I need to give it a try. Also, surprise is half the fun : )
Funny how growing up gets you used to all sorts of onerous things. In fact, I find myself falling in love with half of them.
P.S. ‘up-word’ momentum is pun-of-the-day material
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EXCELLENT! I always like things that are not about what they seem to be about at all. I’m hopeful that’s what would be written on my tombstone – well damn, I forgot I’m getting cremated. Well, anyway, if I get a hit by a car and get a concussion and wake up as one of those people who doesn’t give two shits about the environment so I want to immortalize myself with a huge mass of stone, then that’s what I’ll get on it. 😉
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I’ll be sure to inform the appropriate parties of your wishes in the chance of those events : p
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In Vermont it’s normal to use maple syrup for everything! As long as you, or someone you know really well, sugars. Otherwise it gets to be a pricey habit!
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