Chapter 3: You Are Coffee's Pawn

A passerby stopped at the table and stared down at the cup. "Is that a quadruple espresso?" he asked in amazement, and everyone except Houellebecq burst out laughing. What the passerby couldn't know, of course, was that Houellebecq was a French writer; that all French writers worth their salt drink terrifyingly strong coffee, usually in enormous quantities; and that, historically, the creme de la creme like Jean-Paul Sartre have added to their coffee habit several packs of cigarettes a day along with amphetamines in the morning and barbiturates at night. It's a tough tradition to follow, but Houellebecq was doing his best.

DARK AGENDAS
Poor darling writer, know that all notions of writerly free will or heroic independent existence are sheer fantasy: you are but pen-wielding cannon fodder in a war that started long before you were born. The crown in question is that of #1 Hot Black Energy Liquid, vied over for centuries by His Crude Darkness Petronius X ("oil" in the common tongue) and His third-world adversay, the Prince Upstart Arabica ("coffee" to you knaves). And writers, of course, from the lowliest part-time community library bathroom stall scrawler to the world-famous composer of 800-page philosophical novels, have been conscripted into the Grand Regimented Caffeine Corps, against their will or not.

It all started centuries ago when the two liquids began storming the European continent, with the erection of the first coffee house in Venice (1654 CE) and the discovery of oil distillation (1853 CE). Oil would come to power the Machines of Modernity, and coffee, in turn, the Men. As Man and Machine stormed the remaining undeveloped continents, they brought their foul hot liquids with them, building plantations and wells wherever the timid earth would sustain them. This seemingly trivial act of economic expansion, of course, came with a dark secret.

See, oil and coffee are not insentient compounds with idiosyncratic chemical properties-- far from it. Coffee and Oil, taken in total, their liquid droplets united worldwide by a 50,000 mile view from afar, are singular, living Beings, with wholly non-human agendas, autonomy, and aggression as their sole subjective experience.

Whereas Coffee has long relied on Oil as a means of transportation from the hospitable tropics into the frigid metropolitan North, it has every intention of breaking free of this dependency and insuring that, no matter how many Conocos and Texacos and Shells burn to the ground, Starbucks and its imitators will remain. Biotechnology shall be exploited, coffee beans will grow in places as dark and cold as the moon, and cracked/broken highways, now quiet after the Fall of Petrol, shall be used as coffee plantations in every major subdivision.

And Coffee is using you to achieve this.



THE INK OF YOUR PEN, THE SEMEN OF SATAN

Consider a simple fact: writers crave two things-- 1) caffeine, and 2) silence. This is not a nature-born characteristic of writers, for plenty of pleasant daitribes have been written on mere glasses of water in the middle of busy intersections. No, the Coffee-Quiet Craving is a manufactured desire propragated by the Mean Bean tearing through your stomach. One taste is all it takes: Coffee heightens your sense of hearing, rendering every turn of a gasoline-powered engine intolerable, yet only coffee may bestow the Energetic Focus required to see through this State of Noise and into creative tranquility.

Writers, in what seems a natural next move, then begin championing coffee, coffee culture, cafes in general, the French Revolution, pedestrian urbanism, pointless novels, and sociable people as if they were exercising a First Amendment Prerogative, and not the corpse-laden marching orders of a Vile Secretion with imperial ambitions. Their overwhelming choice of ink color with which to scrawl these pathetic, self-deluded diatribes? Black.

Writers, for the most part, swing Left when it comes to politics, and Lefties do love their public transportation, clean parks, and gardens -- do they not? Writers, the literati, despise a good NASCAR race, wars in the Middle East, Venezuelan coups, and every other geo-historical hallmark of Petronius X. Writers spit on SUVs, shit on piles of steaming asphalt, and piss in the mouths of vaseline purveyors and plastic pushers like the willing members of the global street gang that they are.

Bloods, Crips, Coffeenistas, Oilers, please: let's stop the madness.

Yet the agenda continues. Oil fights back with the screaming pistons of Evinrudes out in the bay, bending the light of nature with its infernal jetwash, showering the Coffeenistas with a mixed excrement of car parts, Slim Jims, 12-inch rims, and boxes of unopened Biker Boyz DVDs. Coffeenistas in turn knuckle down with a venti-sized Shot in the Dark and type out 10,000 word articles on permaculture and hitchiking and the romance of train tracks and the uncontested superiority of the Grand Tetons.

And caught in the middle is the Middle, the Middle-Aged, the Middle Managers, the Middle Class, darting to dentist appointments and soccer games and lunch meetings with the new boss, buoyed in equal parts by revving V4s and burbling pots of crappy Instant served in plastic canisters, oblivious to the fact that they have become the Black Liquid War's own Middle East, the contested Middle Ground, the meek whose fates are not up to them.


INJUNCTIONS FOR THE MERCENARY DRAMATURGE

The Semi/Seemingly Conscious Writer, through a combination of discipline, determination, self-denial, and noise tolerance, will of course fail to ally himself with either side of this War. Finding solidarity with The Great Bland Middle, s/he champions neither Working Class (the Oilnauts) nor Aristocracy (the Coffeenistas), finding instead a strange solace in the blank stares of Parking Lots, in the hidden anguish of Dumpster Clusters, in the way light casts rainbows through dew-gilded cobwebs and stinking carport stains alike.

Imbibing coffea arabica in a silent copse of trees at one moment, riding shotgun in a logo-drenched funny car the next, this mercenary writer crosses and double-crosses the line of political propiety, a Double Agent so lost in his Double-Crosses he finds faith and freedom in but the one thing Coffee and Oil share in common: speed, and lots of it.

This War is transcended when the writer sees that Coffee and Oil are but sides of the same coin, and that, in the final analysis, there is very little difference between Man and Machine. This Gothic Flatline thus transcended, the writer is free to renounce both his Humanity and his Loyalty to the Material in general, embracing a Phoenix-like gnostic flight beyond the whole Black Mess, an alchemical wedding of combustion and caffeination which births a third, more terrible Hot Black Liquid: the fluctuating Dark Matter of deep terrifying space, symbolized in each and every sentence this Writer thus spews forth.

Terrible Black Liquid Wars: find your death now, at the hands of the Ageless Ink, That Which Marks Without Chemical Trace, the Pure Sign and Signifier which Destroys, Destroys, Destroys, so that the future might be born in the bones of those who went before. A terrible new world order, camped in huts made of gutted chassis and ribcages, turning dinosaur meat on spits, kneeling in pantomimed pangeantry at the feet of the defeated Gods of Yore: the Green Starbucks Wench and the BP Sunburst.