This week I’m away at CPAC, meeting up with old friends and making new ones. While I’m waiting to go to breakfast with a few new friends, I couldn’t help but think about this.

Coffee…ah, coffee. In my late teens and very early 20s it seemed that coffee was falling out of favor with my generation (this was the mid-to-late 80s.) After seeing that Juan Valdez and his donkey were just making the kids laugh, coffee marketers came up with a lame slogan for Gen X: the coffee generation. That fell on its face.

And lo, a star arose in the West: a young man named Howard Shultz determined to bring Italian cafe culture to America. Starbucks eliminated the fears that Gen X and all those after them would stop drinking coffee. I can still hear my dad – “$5 for a cup of coffee? I wish I’d come up with that idea.”

It took me a while to start, though. Diet Coke got me through all the 8 a.m. classes in college. The year I gave up Diet Coke for Lent represented a Pharisaical excess in piety. I greeted the Risen Lord by popping open a 12-oz can on Easter morning, 1988. Tasted better than any Cadbury egg, by far.

Now my morning drug of choice is coffee, with two or three dollops of half-and-half. None of that fat-free stuff for me! And no sugar. I got fancy around the time COVID started: a new French Press and a bean grinder. That French Press makes 32 ounces and a drink every single drop, every morning. My first cup – well, why should I be driven to compose poetry when the Church Curmudgeon on Twitter will do that for me?

If only there were

a hot black drink

that i could imbibe

to help me think

Church Curmudgeon, Twitter, Jan. 31