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13 Responses to “The Stupid 365 Project, Day 40: Mr. Coffee” -
Suzanna Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 9:46 am
I know how much you love coffee, Tim, and you’re a great writer so you and Balzac have more in common than you think : )
I’d drink it by the gallon if I could because I love the flavor and the effects of a strong cup of fresh ground coffee. But over and over I have learned that coffee has its downside as well. Wakeful nights, snappy behavior toward my poor husband, and then the way the glorious high from the morning is lost by the afternoon and I sleepwalk through the rest of the day. More coffee doesn’t help, it only reinforces the same miserable cycle.
I’ve downgraded my caffeine fix to one cup of black tea in the morning. I’m still waking up at night sometimes, but no afternoon slump, and fewer snappy remarks.
BUT I MISS COFFEE!
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Bonnie Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Folks, my moniker on Twitter, Chowhound, and a bunch of other, less frequented places is kleine Mocha. That should say it all!
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Beth Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Tim, you have never, nor will you ever, have the experience of being pregnant. During my pregnancies, the consumption of coffee was on the list of forbidden things. I thought it would be difficult but my brain accepted the responsibility and I didn’t have any desire for it.
Immediately after the baby was delivered, I wanted coffee, lots of coffee. My grandaunt started me on coffee when I was about seven years old. College is unending coffee. Now my husband and I go through three pots of percolated coffee a day.
I am not going to count how many months I have been drinking coffee since I was seven, but I do know I was coffee-free for a total of about 21 months in all those years.
Living in New England, we drink vats of iced coffee, too. I didn’t know that iced coffee was a regional thing until my husband ordered it when we were in Florida. The waitress knew we were from New England because people from our section of the world are the only ones who ask for it.
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Laren Bright Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
What I remember about coffee (well, and other stimulants) from my college days (right after the invention of fire) is that the absolutely brilliant papers I wrote in the middle of the night turned to poop when the sun came up. I think it had something to do with the sunlight atoms adulterating the typewriter ribbon ink.
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Larissa Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Mmm…coffee. (c: I am actually rather proud of how reasonable the amounts I ingest now seem in comparison to Balzac…the rest of society not withstanding. (c: A wonderful ode to a wonderful drink. Now, if we can just make it all fairtrade and produce it without all the nasty consequences, we’ll be golden….
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Gary Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
I once went on a professional tour of community forestry in Europe, starting in Dover. A consultant friend of mine was conducting it.
The night before I was tempted by the very nice coffee that came with the very nice dinner at our Dover hotel. And that night, for the first and last time in my life, I spent the entire night utterly sleepless, finally lying there watching the sky get slowly brighter and brighter as day arrived.
So for the whole of the first day of the tour my poor friend Pat had to stand in the bus saying wise things to us all about European forestry, while I slept soundly in front of him. And I was leading a delegation of Pakistani foresters, and supposedly setting a good example.
And the Swiss government was paying for it all!
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
SORRY SORRY SORRY — have been insanely busy all day with changes to CRASHED (thanks, Gary) and trying to push past a point of resistance in the new Simeon book. Sat down at eight this AM, posted the Balzac piece, and worked straight through to now (5:40 pm). Only this minute looking at the blog responses.
Zanna, I admire but can’t emulate you. Somewhere in QUEEN (I think) there’s a scene in which Poke takes his first sip of morning coffee and feels logic and volition (or something) returning to him. I feel that way all day. In fact, I just finished the last cup of the day, about an hour later than usual, so maybe I’ll do a Balzac tonight. And thanks for the “great writer” line. I could use more of that.
Bonnie, Kleine Mocha is is. In Vienna, I gather, they know from coffee.
Beth — you started on coffee at seven? Lucky you — a jacked-up childhood. Three pots a day is a respectable consumption. When I’m writing or revising, I make three a day, although I can’t honestly say I drink it all — some of it gets to the point where the smell changes radically and you know that whatever is in that pot, it’s seething with carcinogens and mutation inducers.
Laren, coffee is nothing compared to, ahem, “other stimulants” when it comes to illusion of brilliance. While I usually write loonnng on coffee, I’m rarely fooled about how good it is or isn’t — just how it maintains its interest value at that length, which is easy to fix later. But “other stimulants” — a friend and I once wrote a screenplay under the influence of the hundred-dollar-bill stimulant and the end — we’d known it from the beginning — was a giant parade that was supposed to bring all the story lines together. By the time we got to it, we had no idea why it was in the script or what we could to to make it any different from any other parade, and parades are, by definition, boring. So we had it go by at about 65 miles per hour. A fast parade. Seemed brilliant until we ran out.
Hey, Riss, do you guys have Trader Joe’s? They’ve got half a dozen fair trade coffees that don’t require consumers to sell their blood to be able to afford them. The Pajaro blend is a great dark coffee, and if coffee isn’t dark, don’t get it anywhere near me.
Gary, how much of the very nice coffee did you drink? Up the whole night? You must have knocked back several quarts, or else you have a finely tuned nervous system. But what an example you set those Afghanis. No wonder they’re afraid to go to war with us.
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philip coggan Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
“for coffee to help you write like Balzac, first you have to be Balzac”. How very true.
Also read something by Somerset Maugham the other day, to the effect that no writer can write about anyone but himself (not convincingly, anyway). The greatest writers simply contain more alternative selves.
And finally, there’s procrastination – I could write heaps about that. Obviously Balzac couldn’t. Nor could Willy Maugham. Disciplined men, both of them.
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Gary Says:
November 10th, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Well, the foresters were Pathans. But thanks to the colonial wisdom of the Durand line, they were technically Pakistanis rather than Afghans.
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Kaye Barley Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 5:23 am
I don’t want anyone to try to get between me and my coffee. Not ever never ever.
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fairyhedgehog Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 6:35 am
I thought that after a while you needed more and more caffeine to get the same effect?
I prefer tea, and I’m on one cup a day at the moment. Reading this I thought that all I needed to do was up my coffee consumption till I saw “for coffee to help you write like Balzac, first you have to be Balzac”.
Never mind.
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Bonnie Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 7:07 am
Not that anybody cares, probably, but the grandpère has an accent grave, not aigu.
Just finished Skin Deep (this is seriously not à propos) and I have to say I’m leaning towards turning Simeon Grist in to the SPCA. I mean, first he has this kitten who no longer exists in the next book, in the 2nd book he inherits a dog, who never is heard from again, and now in the 3rd book (which we learn is really the first), he lets his parakeet be slaughtered. This is not good karma!
Ah, back on topic, my grandmother used to let us kids drink “coffee” out of a water glass that was half full w/milk and severely sugared. No matter how good, of course (I favor the Trader Joe’s Columbian w/the Toucan on the label), coffee is among those things that never tastes as good as it smells.
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Larissa Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:21 am
We have access to Trader Joe’s stuff in some stores. They’re getting pretty good about being eco-friendly though GreenPeace busted them a while back for not exactly following their own rules…I’ll have to try it-it sounds tasty! Right now I’m drinking a Kansas City company’s coffee (Parisi)-they make a pretty good Bolivian blend that is dark and sort of smokey. And it’s fair trade. And I can go visit the roasterie. That’s neat. 
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