It happened yesterday. I ran out of coffee, except for around 7 grains.
I don’t know why this happened. It was not as if I hadn’t realized I was running out of coffee; I had; and I’d been shopping. So why hadn’t I picked up some coffee?
I don’t know.
So yesterday morning I made a cup out of the very few grains of coffee I had left. When I poured the results into a cup, I looked at the pale brown fluid and immediately thought of the scene in The Great Escape, when James Garner first meets Donald Pleasance in their shared Stalag room. (Real sidebar: until I read through Pleasance’s Wikipedia entry, linked above, I had not known that he himself had been in the RAF during World War II, had been shot down by the Germans in 1944 and had spent time in a German Stalag.)
Pleasance, as Colin Blythe (bird lover and forger), is pouring hot water through a tea strainer into a cup. He offers Garner some, saying apologetically he’s used the tea leaves so many times, it’s barely what he could call tea.
Ditto, me. With the “coffee.”
Short of anything better to do, I drank it.
By noon, I was dealing with a fog of exhausted lassitude. Nevertheless, I forced myself to shop, primarily for coffee. As the day continued, I sank down further, into a sort of subterranean state that felt like an opening scene from a C-class horror film. In slo-mo.
I was not able to do anything at all. It was dreary, a weight sat on my head and morphed into a headache.
While watching the last episode of a bloody Spanish thriller involving Nazi-catchers on NetFlix — instead of a climax, it ended with a weird teaser to what was, I suppose, a third season except NetFlix did not have a third season offered so while I was nodding off, I mentally wrote the next couple of episodes as a way of keeping myself awake until some respectable bedtime.
This morning, I put heapings of the coffee I’d purchased into my French press and was rewarded with the first pour — coffee in my favorite color, black (favorite, except for clothes).
Now I’m OK. Normal. Energized, yet relaxed.
Coffee is a miracle drug and don’t you forget it. Use my experience. Please.
P.S. How do I know I’m OK? I dropped a piece of eggplant on the kitchen floor and said to it, “Oh no! You little renegade.”