Coffee

I love coffee.

Its strong flavor and fragrant aroma usually manage to cheer me up, if only for the few minutes it takes to sip the inky stuff.

It isn't the coffee itself, it's the whole experience. Setting up the coffee pot to brew - putting water on the stove to warm, grinding the beans and finding that one cup that seems to work best with the coffee - these are all a part of the ceremony. One cannot perform sacred actions without preparation, and Coffee Making is definately sacred. Waiting for the water to heat up to almost a boil (coffee is best released from the beans if the water is just off the boil) creates a good time pocket in which to wake up. Pouring water into the French press with ground up beans floating loosely in the container and watching the grounds turn the water from clear to a transparent brown to a dark liquid that promises only good things. This alone can help set the tone of the day. Once the coffee is ready, there is a certain speed for pushing the plunger down and herding all the grounds, or most of them anyway, to the bottom of the press. Finding that speed is essential in learning to make coffee. Some say it that speed adds to the flavor while others argue it doesn't. I say it's just one of the many rituals that is important in Serious Coffee Making.

Coffee is a serious experience and must be approached with reverence.

Then comes the first whiff.

After getting that first whiff it's usually a good idea to put the coffee pot down, or at least level it off, so you don't spill it. Go ahead. Take a few seconds to smell it.

Purr.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee is the ideal, early morning experience. It can create a day or destroy it, depending on the circumstances surrounding it. If you're in too much of a hurry to enjoy that first whiff, you may never get rid of the crankiness that was born from forcing yourself out of bed at 4am in the #@%&*(^$#@ morning (yes, I really do get up that early). With enough time to let the heavenly fumes creep into your nasal passages and work its way into your psyche, the challenges that face you at your despised job can turn merely unimportant.

Skipping that first whiff is like going straight to communion without having been confirmed a Catholic. Sinful at best.

But the critical part of the Early Morning Coffee Routine is the sitting in favorite spot and sipping it. Me, I choose the lower right hand corner of my bed. I sit "Indian style" on it, my elbows resting on my knees, my cup of coffee floating between both hands. It's the perfect position for me because it allows the aroma of coffee an uninterrupted path to my nose and mouth.

It usually takes me about 15 minutes to enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning. It's private time. A time for me to create a truce with the fact that I had to drag myself out of a warm cozy bed when I may or may not have been sleeping and face a world where numbers are the only thing that matters. The minor jolt of caffeine also helps kick start systems that have been in idle for the last few hours and get things going with a minimal amount of trauma. The extra time also helps me define my priorities for the day.

Weekends are different. Specifically, Saturday mornings are different. You're not confined to having ONE cup of coffee squeezed into a mere FIFTEEN minutes of time. You can enjoy TWO cups of coffee over the New York Times, a bagel or two and absolute silence to sustain you. For this reason, Saturdays (or their equivelent) become the High Holy Days of a Coffee Addict. This is the time for serious enjoyment of one of the simpler pleasures of life to be experienced and thought about.

I've never had much luck understanding human kind, for all that I'm considered by most to be a human. I've never really had much luck understanding the male of the species. Curtis managed to show me what romance and deep love can taste like, but even he turned out to be substandard in the end. The corporate word? FAGEDDABAHT it!

But I'll always have coffee.