The Demon Brew
Recently, I made an awful decision. With the inexorable creep of winter boredom going unalleviated even now in mid-April, I decided in an flighty haste to quit caffeine. Like most urbanites, my morning begins with a ringing alarm, an unceremonious tumble onto the floor, and a desperate crawl to the coffee machine. This sequence has played out thousands of times in succession, the life of a working man, every day starting in this predictable, fated pattern. The rare times I found myself in circumstances that kept me apart from my morning cup, within hours a splitting headache would arrive, along with the familiar, rueful laments of an addict. Never again. Next time will be different.
Coffee is not a demon; it’s barely even a vice. But it is an addiction. I have lately been in the company of a few Buddhists, and have taken a particular liking to the free yourself from attachments thing. While caffeine is far from a drag on my life (in fact, I owe it a great debt), my body still lurches a little too eagerly towards a steaming cup in a way beyond my control. I am not ready or interested to quit my Self or renounce the Ego, but it would be great if I could survive a morning unmedicated. I love coffee, but I don’t want to need coffee. So I set out, mistakenly and in great error, to break the cycle.
My first try at quitting caffeine was cold turkey—a terrible mistake, second only to the decision to quit in the first place. Within hours, the familiar headache appeared, with no intention to leave. For two days I braved these miserable conditions: a lowered mood, a paralytic body, a near-total absence of brain activity. At the same time, work started getting hairy and making me so sullen that I began to allow a strange and baseless paranoia—nearly a dementia—about my job security to creep in. Realizing where this was headed, I gave in to the urge and made myself a double espresso.
The second try was more successful, but ultimately a failure. I tried to switch slowly from coffee to less-potent Earl Grey tea, then to green tea, and finally to herbal tea. The guiding principle of this strategy was gentle separation: reduce the morning pot of coffee to a single cup, and change subsequent mid-morning, late-morning, early-afternoon, and late-afternoon cups from coffee to tea. This was easy enough, but it didn’t work. The morning cup provided a sufficient jolt of caffeine for me to ride a sort of caffeine-wave throughout the day, topping it up every few hours with cups of watery tea. Moving to caffeine-free herbal tea was trivial as long as I kept the morning cup.
(The most important lesson I learned here is that herbal tea sucks. Does it ever taste like anything but slightly tart water? Where’s the flavour? The flavour is in the caffeine, isn’t it???)
Clearly, the evil Morning Cup was the linchpin of my addiction. The link for me had become psychological, reinforced with years of Pavlovian conditioning. Alarm bell go off, drink coffee. I attempted a third strategy: instead of quitting the M.C. outright, I placed a delay between waking up and drinking the coffee. I resolved to drink M.C.s only at the office, never at home. To get my M.C. I had to put on my boots and walk down to the office and then elbow my way past the morning zombies who coagulate near the espresso machine. And on the weekends? I’d buy my coffee at Tim Horton’s.
The trick worked. Within days, the M.C. was a thing of the past. I knew it worked when I shambled into the office one morning and forgot to have coffee. Like never even noticed. It was a busy morning, and I was wrapped up in some menial task and by the time I noticed it was three in the afternoon. With no headache.
Since then, I’ve gone caffeine-free. I still feel sluggish, weary, and braindead, and not seeing the benefits at all. The snow falling outside doesn’t help. But if you’re considering quitting caffeine, please learn from my mistakes. All of us deserve an addiction or two, especially when they taste so good first thing in the morning.
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Return of the Meme
Glorious memes, growing in strength and in number! For what was once five is now ten! Besides, I do whatever Vila tells me to, a month later or not. So without further ado… yet another Five Things About Me:
- I taught myself to read at age three, according to my parents. My mom claims to have been startled by my reading aloud the cover of a magazine at the grocery store checkout. My skills later atrophied, and from the ages of 4 to 19 I probably read fewer than fifteen books. I still have trouble keeping my eyes on the page and if there were pills that allowed me to read a book and remember anything about it a week later, I’d pay good money.
- I like to play games, and the way I play a game is this: I learn the rules of the game and the basic strategy. Then, I immediately set out to find a way to mangle, skew, mix up, undermine, or otherwise debase the way that game is played. I do not so much play games as attempt to find their limits; my style of play tends to rub up against the game’s most obscure rules and special cases. After settling on a pattern of debasement, I try to generalize it into a strategy that works against my opponents, who have since given up and moved on. This is why I play games at home, until the sun comes up, against no one in particular.
- My immune system is made out of galvanized steel, flanked with missile turrets and encircled by a hideous, alligator-filled moat. I have not had the flu in almost ten years, and aside from a few minor sniffles, I never, ever get sick. I chalk it up to a disgusting lifestyle that tests my body’s fortifications regularly.
- Language is probably my chief pleasure in life, as well as my chief pain. It is a rare moment indeed that I do not have some word swirling around my head which is either a) utterly appalling, or b) fantastically hilarious. I grieve over haphazard lingo-gunk like “empowerment” and “skill set”, and giggle over endlessly pliable profanity like “pussification” and “fuckery” (n.). The other day I was proffered a portmanteau for “blog carnival”: blarnival, and I nearly keeled over, but now I can’t stop saying it. Out loud, even. I obsess over the latest linguistic irritatants (current nemesis: “either you’re [adjective], or you’re not” and all variations thereof) and keep such close watch over my usage that I never get anything done. The downside of this obsession is that I am a horrible grammar and spelling snob, and judge everyone accordingly. Call it a coping mechanism.
- Most days I spend more hours on a computer than sleeping. This pattern of living has made me demonstrably dumber. In fact, I’m sure the two variables can be correlated. Computers are the leading cause of gawky, clumsy teenagers, and old habits die hard. We keyboard-jockeys sit still, making only negligible motions with the hand or wrist, conversing almost telepathically with the computer screen. This has been my habitat for many years, and I am of mixed mind about it. Gainful employment is a blessing, and my general state of inactivity has made me physically awkward, and yet more self-knowledgable than anyone could ever be. However, much self-knowledge is without essence; it is merely more information. So I still harbour serious dreams of taking a job filled with nothing but manual labour where my days are spent upright, pulling up quarry stones or pushing trees over, so that I might rediscover movement. Know anyone?
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