Crazy for Coffee?

I’m not one to grouse about First World Problems. Yeah, my hand doesn’t fit in the Pringles™ container, it’s hard to find Levis™ that fit and once, they were out of arugula at my Organic Fifty-Mile Food Emporium. However, I seldom complain about such setbacks. It’s all part of the game, as far as I concerned. Actually, I’m usually on the other side of the fence. For my money, our society is full of overfed, over-medicated, bone-lazy malcontents, constantly whining about stuff that doesn’t matter. In a more civilized time, they’d have gone under in the first pillage, and stray dogs would be licking their bones. However, there are a few things in our world that do burn my bacon, and one of them is coffee.

Strictly speaking, coffee is not essential to our well-being. I know several people who never touch the stuff. Nor is it scarce. It grows abundantly all over the world, and you can find it in just about every grocery store. In fact, like oil and cocaine, coffee is one of the most widely traded commodities on the planet. However (and this is what burns me) unlike every other product humans use, abuse or devour, coffee simply refuses to obey the basic rules of economic supply and demand. Let me explain.

Day-to-day, coffee is so cheap that I have no idea what it costs. I don’t keep track. I know that, in any grocery store in all directions, I can haul out five bucks and buy enough regular grind to keep me awake for at least a week — so I don’t worry about it. Sometimes, it’s on sale; sometimes it isn’t, but, like bad Spielberg movies, it’s always going to be there. That’s one side of the coin.

On the other side, if I walk less than 500 metres from the coffee aisle of my favourite food store into the mall, I run into what can only be described as Coffee Bean Buccaneers. These 21^st century pirates are selling coffee by the cup as if it were the Treasure of the Sierra Madres. Kiss your five bucks goodbye because that doesn’t even get you a place in line and, oh yeah, you’re going to stand in line. I have yet to go to a Starbucks, Hortons, Blenz, et al and escape in less than twenty minutes. Why? Because, these days, everybody from Maine to Malibu is on a 24/7 caffeine bender.

People are lining up, three deep, to get their mitts on a couple of hundred mls. of Kona Soft Blonde or Kenyatta Cool Corona or some other such exotic nonsense. But it`s not like coffee`s cheap or even on sale. In the same time period it took cell phones to go from over $800.00 to Here-Take-One-They’re-Free, coffee has gagoopulied in price. What was once a fifty cent all-you-can-drink morning beverage has become a $9.95 that’s-all-you-get experience. And the weird thing is, people are getting it poured into a paper cup and they`re walking away with it – happy as a penguin with a fresh fish. You would think that if you’d just paid a Lindbergh ransom for a beverage that was brewed from handpicked beans, slow roasted over a sustainable rosewood fire and pulverized by union-scale Gregorian monks, you`d want to sit and savour it. Apparently not, because the world is full of people charging around, clinging to their paper cups as if they were carrying the relics of the saints — with two sugars and one cream. They`re everywhere! You can`t turn around without seeing somebody with a cup in their hand. A person might need a coffee on the bus if they got up late that particular morning, but who needs a coffee at the podiatrist – at 2 in the afternoon, for god`s sake?

I don`t mind ponying up the bucks for a specialty item. However, I can assure you that the difference between what some people are calling Medium Roast Jamaican El Negra Java, for example, and Good-To-The-Last-Drop Maxwell House is minimal– especially after the selected serving has been drowned in steamed milk, sprayed with born-in-the-bottle whipped cream and covered in cinnamon-flavoured sprinkles. It’s coffee, folks! There`re only so many things you can do to it.

Our current coffee cult might be just another First World Problem, but I’m telling you the entire industry is living proof that P.T. Barnum was right.

Vulgar Is As Vulgar Does

There are some days when, for whatever reason (too many headlines on an empty stomach, maybe?) it feels as if the barbarians have taken over our little garden spot. It looks as though they’ve tossed their trash everywhere, trampled the flowers and peed in the fountain for good measure. It’s on days like this that I wish I could just hole up somewhere and read novels. Unfortunately, I can’t.

At the risk of giving the Oscars way more ink than they deserve, their antics are still holding our heads in the proverbial sewer – five days after the fact. The Hollywood camp followers, never the brightest lights on the marquee, are keeping the pot boiling, and for some unknown reason we’re all clambering to get a second crack at who did what to whom on Oscar night. I have no idea why. Remember most of these hangers-on are still in apoplectic shock over Seth McFarlane’s song and dance about boobs. At the other end of the freeway, the rest of them are slobbering all over themselves because the seams on Anne Hathaway’s dress suggested she might have a couple of them hidden in there. Somehow, I can’t take people who have the sophistication of a pubescent schoolboy seriously, even though it looks as if just about everybody else around me can. But my gripe is not with these folks – at least not today.

Today, I’m pissed off at The Onion, the risen Messiah of the Chattering Class, and even though they apologized (here) I plan to hold a grudge.

Ever since The Onion deemed it necessary to call a nine-year-old child, Quvenzhane Wallis, a very adults-only nasty name, the prevailing wisdom is the guys and dolls from Chicago went too far. Crap! “Going too far” suggests you were on the right road and just didn’t know when to hit the brakes. If these gangsters merely “went too far,” which epithet should they have used that would have been far enough and no further? Personally, I can’t think of one. However, I can tell you, definitely, that The Onion and their loyal readership have missed the point entirely. While they are rattling on about “appropriate” and “acceptable,” some of us are wondering how (not why) did it all come up in the first place. After all, The Onion is a big organization; it’s not a couple of guys smoking dope and watching the Oscars in the parents’ basement. There must have been a general consensus of some sort. How does a journey that ends in “too far” begin? What are the building blocks that create an attitude that could ever say, “It’s open season on nine-year-olds”? These are the questions we should be asking– not whether the result was “appropriate.”

It’s obvious that — somewhere between Anna Paquin in ’93 and now — our society has become scuzzy. We’ve turned into a bunch of cheap-shot artists who might have a biting wit but lack the wisdom to know where or when to use it. Why? In the last twenty years, we have spent so much time Big Brothering each other’s “appropriate” and “acceptable” language and behaviour that we no longer understand the need to govern ourselves. It’s a matter of supreme indifference to us. Mainly because we no longer care about the substance of our ideas, we’re simply scared skinny of what they might look like. For example, you and I both know there are several “inappropriate” words that The Onion could have used in this situation, but they never came up on the panel. Satire and parody be damned; they were “unacceptable.”

The Onion can be hilarious. However, vulgar isn’t funny: it’s not satire and it’s not parody. It’s just bad taste, tarted up as comedy. Unfortunately, when, as a society, we no longer possess the ability to make that distinction, there’s something dreadfully wrong. Therefore, as of today, The Onion can go hang. They might have 7 million readers, but they’re going to have one fewer. It’s a tiny gesture that those big-ass birds aren’t even going to notice. But I’ll know. The barbarians might already be trampling the flowers, but this is one posy who’s going to surrender slowly.

Bill Hickok and my BFF

As you may have noticed, I spend a lot of time being grouchy in these pages. It’s gotten so bad that a while ago one of my relatives said, “Hey, what’s the deal? You’re not that crabby in real life.” Actually, this is true — I’m not. As Bill Hickok once said to Poker Jenny, “I am a man of comedy.” (It should be noted that neither one of them saw the irony of the Navy Colt pistols stuck in Hickok’s sash.) Unlike Hickok, though, I don’t have a quick temper. Hickok did (which accounts for the pistols.) However, like Wild Bill I enjoy my time. I think the 21^st century is tres cool, especially here in North America. We live in a wonderful world I might carp and bitch about it but that’s only ‘cause I’m worried we’re not going to “know what we got ‘til it’s gone.”

For example, right at this very moment (it’s after midnight) I can wheel on down to the local McDonald’s grab a couple of Happy Meals™ (Hey! Don’t forget my free toy!) come home and watch Dude! Where’s My Car? in HD. Why? Just because I want to. This may sound frivolous because it is. However (and this is the important bit) this is the very same society which will, if I choke on the extra pickles, send a couple of paramedics over to my house at top speed to save my life; with, I might add, enough time left over to watch Ashton Kutcher ride off into the sunset with… Demi Moore? Not bad, considering there are some parts of this world where pickled anything is a luxury, Happy Meals™ are the stuff of legend, and the only time the paramedics show up is when the boys over at the UN finally get off their asses. Life is good in our neighbourhood.

I don’t have enough time to list all the good stuff our society has on offer. Nobody does; there’s far too much. Suffice it to say that the operative word is benevolent. Despite what out of power politicians and professional malcontent activists tell you, our society is not the enemy. In fact, it’s probably our best friend. It allows us the freedom of choice to metaphorically indulge ourselves in Happy Meals™ any time of the day or night, and then, when they try to kill us at two o’clock in the morning, it comes running to the rescue. We can be as fat, dumb and lazy as our minds and bodies will allow, squander our resources on techno-junk and even endlessly dis our social institutions – to their faces. Our society doesn’t care. It doesn’t get all pissed off and send in the jackboots like they do in other parts of the world. It just keeps chugging away, fixing the street lights, repairing the sewers, trying to educate our young people and protecting us from ourselves and others who would do us harm.

I realize it’s a long way from this place to Utopia and our social, economic and political problems are multiplying faster than Norwegian rats in a New York sewer. However, let’s be honest: what other time and place on this planet has what we’ve got? For my money, our biggest problem is we’ve settled on the inconceivable (but very convenient) notion that society itself is the bogeyman. We take all that we’ve built for ourselves for granted — as if it happened by accident. We fail to understand that the institutions we ignore or malign, depending on our mood, are the very things which give us the time and leisure to do so. But there I go being all grumpy again. I suppose, like Hickok, Friend Cody, Texas Jack and the rest, I simply can’t abide a bunch of all-hat cowboys badmouthing my BFF.

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