It happened yesterday. I ran out of coffee, except for around 7 grains.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
I don’t know.<\/p>\n
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<\/em>, when James Garner<\/a> first meets Donald Pleasance<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Ditto, me. With the “coffee.”<\/p>\n Short of anything better to do, I drank it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I was not able to do anything at all. It was dreary, a weight sat on my head and morphed into a headache.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Now I’m OK. Normal. Energized, yet relaxed.<\/p>\n Coffee is a miracle drug<\/a> and don’t you forget it. Use my experience. Please.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading