Time for a Cuppa
I love coffee. There's no way of saying how much. I lurve it. I revere it. Indeed, I venerate it.
I love to drink it while I read. I love to drink it while I write. I love it even dead of night. (Okay, not really.)
But one day in the long holiday weekend, after enjoying two robust cups of Sumatran (mixed with decaf!) I suddenly peaked and went into that zone of palm-sweating, amorphous anxiety that is one of the worst feelings it's possible to have.
There's really nothing worse than anxiety. In a Margaret Drabble novel, a character speaks of "depression as a relief from anxiety." When you're anxious, nothing feels right. A smoky, dismal cloud surrounds everything. The brain seems slowed, despite the racing heart. Death can seem imminent.
A friend supervised my buying of this Sumatran coffee, and she advised getting the espresso grind. She's another person who lurves coffee. I took her advice, but I think those small granules of powerful coffee entered my bloodstream and poisoned it.
Because I wasn't anxious about anything before that. I was watching Wimbledon, the women's quarter final. It was two Russian women, and I didn't care about the outcome. The match wasn't very good -- Maria Sharapova totally dominated a hapless Elena Dementieva -- and I stopped watching it to do some writing. I went out to buy a newspaper and read it in my local bagel shop. I felt a bit weird walking over there and I had juice with my bagel instead of coffee, as planned.
By the time I'd read the paper I realized something was quite off. I felt completely bizarre, frightened, and as if I might burst out crying. I went back to my apartment and lay down, but I couldn't concentrate on my book (Money by Martin Amis) so my anxiety continued to roil. The whole day was shot. The next day too.
Can my trusty friend be letting me down? My life's solace? My drug of choice?
Well, I hope not. You can not convince me a drug-free life is worth a pinch of coon shit, as an old boyfriend used to say.
posted by La Misma at 10:30 AM
5 Comments:
Coffee is the one drug I haven't been able to give up. I have a wonderful espresso maker named "Noam" which makes me an americano each morning. Even though I know from long experience that drinking coffee after 5pm gives me insomnia which can morph over a period of days or weeks into chronic fatigue, I often lack the will-power to resist drinking coffee in the evening. A friend of mine reminded me of a time when we were at a coffee shop in grad school, and just before they kicked us out at 2am, I ordered a "lethal injection," a drink in which 5 espresso shots are added to a normal cup of coffee. Diagnosis: I was insane.
7:40 PM
Wow. That is hardcore. My nervous system would shut down entirely if dosed with 5 espresso shots. But it sounds like you share my sense that overdoing it is part of the joy of coffee. That grinding edge it gives you is pleasurable. The whole thing is a mood enhancer unless it goes too far.
It's interesting you named your coffeemaker "Noam." Oh. I just realized why. At first I thought, how random!
4:18 PM
The espresso grind was your mistake. When you make it, use maybe half the amount you usually do.
I've crossed into the overcaffeinated zone more than once myself. Like taking too much of any drug, it isquite unpleasant.
Ever get sick from nicotine?
10:34 AM
No. I've always been afraid of cigarettes' potential to trigger a heart attack, so I used to smoke relatively sparingly (half a pack a day, and spread out).
Dark chocolate can contribute to the caffeine overdose. Last summer I actually had a worse anxiety attack from coffee plus ice cream with chunks of dark chocolate in. I really did think I was going to have a heart attack. I remember wandering over to sit in a garden in Red Hook, wondering if this was it.
10:50 AM
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10:50 AM
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