A Brief and Personal History of the Coffee Bean

"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." --Turkish Proverbs

For someone who claims to be kicking his coffee addiction, I sure do write about it a lot. This morning I penned my 3rd or 4th bean-centered diatribe (to be posted soon), another one of the usual "coffee has occult powers and is using you for non-human ends" screeds. Given that I know very little of the scientific properties of the US's most beloved (un)controlled substance, nor its rich cultural history, I am left with a barbarian "beginner's mind" in my direct confrontation with the potent liquid at inconvenient times. Why this obession? What end might it serve?

When I was little my father's parents lived two hours away and would visit often. I knew the Saturdays when they would hold court in our family's tiny dining room: they were the mornings when I was woken up by the stuttered animation of the percolator brewing up a pot Sanka. With the fevered metallic breathing of a baby Darth Vader, the little pot was a mainstay on days when "Grandpa Coffee Pot" came to visit, and I can only wonder if it was the shake-fuel itself which gave the aging man and his aging wife (my late grandmother) the metabolic focus he needed to entertain four maniacal boys.

In high school breakfast conversations, I soon learned of my father's heartbreaking addition to the nasty sludge, which had given him everything from acid reflux disease to bad gas, and was only partially kept at bay by an ill-fated switch to decaf (hopefully he's trying again). Yet this was nothing I could understand nor empathisize with: my addictions as a peach fuzz mustache-wearing teen remained untapped, and coffee seemed like another silly liquid adults had been duped into selling themselves.

In college I interned at a multimedia company which produced language learning software. My first task? Design a logo for a fictional coffee shop called "Cool Bean", which ended up a beige mug with wavy hair and shades buffetted by green outlines. My superiors thought this an apt homage to their favorite pick-me-up, but again, I failed to understand.

And then came Starbucks.

It began as something of a metropolitan rumor: the corporation whose carpet-bombing campaigns were unlikely to find their way out to the semi-rural communities I commuted through on my way to my first job in a small town in a small-minded county. Kitty-corner coffee shops hawking exotic bean-wares seemed like so many fantastical beasts residing in the massive cityscapes I had yet to visit. Coffee would remain in quiet cans on the back shelves of super markets, and make no more of a fuss than the occasional innuendo-ridden Folgers spot, and then what is it. Starbucks was a fad, and trad at that.

But then something happened to the windows of a certain Seattle storefront in 1999 which changed everything. For Black Bloc anarchists (or their agent provacateur dopplegangers) to risk life and black-clad limb in taking out a few green/white facades hinted at larger issues circling Coffee the Innocent like so many aircraft carriers circumnavigating the Midway Islands. Starbucks, and the super-strong coffee it purveyed, became a lightning rod for 90s-style, Clinton-approved "dumb growth", the unrelenting march of consumer development which would wash past my suburb and a thousand like it, a wave ripping through split-level sand castles at low tide, leaving a thick film of parking lots in its wake.

Soon enough, the inevitable would happen: my hometown would get a Starbucks, pseudo-European cafe-jargon would become the lingua franca of countless mall-grubbing provincials (the very same who would come to pronounce "espresso" as "EXpresso"), and human metabolism would never be the same again.

Think about this: besides soda pop, what access had we tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings to caffiene back in the 1990s? Coffee was a drink for old people, came in fussy pots, and tasted like black death squeezed through the mop-wringer of a midget janitor with syphillis. Yet soon, it became almost commonplace for ten-year-olds to order a grande latte, for 16-year-olds to stop at the local supermarket's coffee stand for a five-dollar frappucino every afternoon, and for whole offices to go up in arms at the prospect of losing their access to the neighborhood pop-n-slop. A whole generation given over to disease-riddled corporate addiction, with which I would have no part.

Until I became a writer.

It started with a Red Eye at an Elmwood Strip hipster hangout, a dark shot of espresso dropped into an even darker mug of house blend. My focus became more accute, my decisions more sure, my kinetics more frenetic. The Laundry Day Poetry Marathon became a common accurance, as I had my T-shirts tumble-drying down the street for two hours as I assaulted a tall pile of yellow legal pads with every memetic lightning bolt I could wrest from the towers of the Caffiene Buzz.

Yet even these sessions were few and far between, until I joined a newspaper founded by a pair of speed freaks. I wouldn't touch meth, but my coffee consumption reached reckless levels as I brought new meaning to the concept of 24-hour Production Day. Yes, like good caff-heads, we waited 'til the last minute to output each issue, trusting in The Bean (and plenty of beer) to open the floodgates of Gonzoid genius with a surging flood of fresh libel for our hungry homegrown readers. 'twas a devious pact indeed.

The evitable collapse of that unsustainable endeavor left me begging Starbucks for a job, and soon enough I too was pulling espresso shots for the hopelessly addicted.
Here the Starbucks Mystery both gained and diminished in power. The suicidal aura of Four Shots to Start the Mornin' became irrestible, yet the sheer banality of preparing once-exotic concoctions for the frivolous middle-class morlocks of Colorado made me question my newfound love for The Bean. If such potent power could be distributed to any and all, why did society continue digging its boring grooves into the plateaus of Dead Time? Where were the manic minions of Sumatra-shivering powerscribes making use of this Pact for the elucidation of hyperbolic pro-Darkness antimatter words cannons? Why did so many seas of coffee bean extract wash ashore of the Mainstream with very little cognitive effect other than a slight increase in Rush Hour agitation and early-morning productivity?


Coffee as Sacrament: A Proposal

The reason caffienated genius fails to materialize is due to the sheer glut of coffee in the first place. When every Tom, Dick, and Harold can purchase a 20-oz throat-burner of Ethiopia-grown arabica excess, the Shaking State becomes something to take for granted, much the way life itself is taken for granted. The cherished augmentation which may have kick-started the Enlightenment has become the average mode of consciousness of modern life, yet it could do with a little of the same temperence which has done wonders for sex, booze, weed, shrooms, and every other Holy Experience which overproduction has rendered beyond the pale of thoughtful consideration, and treated like the Western entheogen it truly is.

Now if it would only let me sleep.

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