Cold water after black coffee is like tempering steel

I've come to a calm in the midst of my mid-morning coffee—my first and only coffee of the day. The fog in my head burns off. The wool-legged spiders who cobweb my attic disperse.

Caffeine doesn't bring euphoria—more like an elasticity to your limbs and a humming in your head, from the amplified sound of your blood. And a feeling like being wrapped in warm, clean towels.

But it's only good for the first few sips. Just as you start to enjoy the high, you've already peaked. By the time you finish, you're past the plateau and down in the valley after.

Nowadays I'm only happy for 15 minutes at a time, followed by a headache. And with it comes boredom. Not a boredom like watching paint dry, but watching paint that had recently dried. The grass growing in the lawn has stalled out, and I'm languishing in a terminal middle-class lifestyle.

Taking Dexedrine at 2am in NYC to hold you through till 5am when Grand Central re-opens and you can get a train back to Connecticut

I'd say, if caffeine was a taxi conducting your body through the human traffic, that Dexedrine is a black sedan speeding through a tunnel at night.

Junkie

I can tell when my mom has been drinking coffee. She is jubilant. She is effervescent. She bubbles. I tell her, "Don't talk to me, junkie."

She started drinking coffee because she was narcoleptic and would fall asleep while driving. I only started drinking coffee after I started taking caffeine pills. Which I only took with alcohol, to make drinking less miserable.

I read an insightful observation somewhere, maybe in a Gawker comment, that Lindsay Lohan wasn't a cokehead, just an alcoholic who took cocaine to be able to drink more.

Coffee as ideology

1. You're in the city and there's coffee to buy. Either with brunch or after when you walk around the shops. Later there's beer. Someone's in town for a few days or it's a going away party. You drink and talk and make plans to meet at the new brunch place in the morning. They have the best espresso.
2. The pass code for the bathroom at the Union Square Starbucks on July 4, 2014, was 8282. And I gave it away to the first person I saw: a Russian tourist standing in line. In turn, she gave it to the people behind her. In this way, she was my first apostle.
3. I prefer the discretion of pill poppers and day drunks to the perverts who go to cafes after dark.

Hairy Man

In the March 2014 issue of The Red Bulletin, an interview with Nicolas Cage (“Being Nicolas Cage”) opens with “Do you think about death?” (He does.)

At the grocery store by the energy drinks, there is a sign that says "This area is monitored by Closed Circuit Television." In the aisle by the safety razors, the same sign, plus a sliding plastic shield across the shelf—presumably to slow you down when scooping them into your trash bag.

The implication is that there exists a cohort of congenitally hairy men (or one Hairy Man) who both fiends for caffeine and is willing to do anything to alleviate his condition.