Gray weather, random thoughts and nostalgia...

Like it's prone to do, the weather in Lubbock took a rapid turn for the worse today. The promise of a sunny weekend broken by one of those late-arriving cold fronts that turns the sky all battleship gray. This put a serious crimp in my plans as I envisioned a day gleefully spent working in the yard, hitting a few golf balls, and generally shaking off the layer of rust accumulated over a winter of inactivity, neglect, and the occasional bout of over-indulgence.

Call it what you want; Spring-Fever, Cabin-Fever, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Winter Madness, but make no mistake, I've got it bad. So, despite having little to do, my restlessness will not abate although some of that may also be attributable to my frenzied, caffeine-fueled state of mind.

My wife and I are both coffee-snobs and hopelessly addicted. We like it strong, flavorful, and served in mammoth sized proportions to rationalize the fact we "only" drink 4-5 cups per day. We purchase whole-bean coffees from Starbucks and remain proud, card-carrying members of Gevalia's Coffee of the Month Club, where for the bargain base price of $40 every three months, we get a sampling of whole-bean coffees from exotic, far away lands. We find ourselves using similar terminology in describing coffee that we used in the halcyon days of our youth while sampling various weed offerings. I'm reasonably certain Starbucks had as it's origin the owner's nostalgia and pining for the social theater of the drug deal. A business built specifically for those of us who over time, lost our connections.

So now we gather in dimly-lit coffee grottos with hipsters of all ages, listen to melodic pop and jazz recordings from artists we've never heard of, and engage in scenes such as the one I experienced at a coffeehouse while living in Atlanta. I placed my order and stepped aside to bide my time by looking at their whole-bean products. One of the java gurus working there, a young, tattooed guy with mini-dreadlocks, comes up and opens one of the canisters sitting on the shelf. He puts it under my nose and with his hand, fans the top of the canister to let me catch a whiff of the earthy, dark-roasted Sumatran.

“Guaranteed to stimulate your central nervous system at a much faster rate than Colombian,” he boasted. “Just wait till those catecholamines are released from the adrenal medulla, you’ll feel like you've ingested crystal meth.”

It sounded promising, so I purchased a ten-pound sack of the pseudo-amphetamine and raced home, eager to do some grinding. Yep, I like coffee and I like big coffee cups. Not the size you get at restaurants or the size included with dinnerware or fine china. I want a big-ass cup of coffee, one that takes two hands to hold; a colossal, man-sized, blood-vessel constricting, catecholamine-releasing ‘sumbitch.

Then another one, if you please.