Tag Archives: coffee

Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

As I sit in my comfy blue recliner, with my laptop open, Donnie Darko plays in the background on my writing room TV.

The sound is low.  So low that it isn’t a part of the pain I’ve had in my skull since… well, this pain started yesterday, with the borrowed dog we’ve been sitting since Sunday, and a particularly piercing bark that I have never in my life of knowing dogs, heard before. 

So, have you ever imagined what it would feel like to have a tiny buzz saw cut a straight line from the bottom left base of your skull, upward, then over your head and down, to just above your left eye socket, then string together dozens of teeny-tiny firecrackers, and set them into your freshly-cut skull-groove, so that all of them can be lit one-by-one and exploded, for six consecutive hours, while at the same time editing a blog post on an otherwise beautiful November day?

Yeah, me either. 

Until yesterday.

Now I sit, in the same comfy blue recliner, with the same laptop open, almost exactly like yesterday, with the pain diminished just enough to appreciate the deadness in my brain, after a yesterday, and yesternight, of over the counter pain meds, followed by an overnight of nonsensical dreams that, to my meat-tenderized frontal lobe, must’ve made, in the moment, made sense. 

It was almost 8 am, when the full-daylight of morning woke me from my final dream, after a shitty 8 hours of sleep.  I sat up, pulled on what was left of the clothes I didn’t fall asleep in the night before, and gently moved myself from the edge of the bed to the bathroom, then from bathroom to the kitchen, and finally, to the coffee maker on the counter next to the fridge.  My morning routine, set in motion twelve hours earlier, like always, so I don’t have to endure the self-shame of spending two extra minutes scooping coffee from a can in the morning. 

As I completed these actions, a thought hits me. 

What if someone unfamiliar with the kind of headache I was still in the afterglow of… say, an extraterrestrial being unfamiliar with the lengths a species such as ours goes to, every day, to feel, you know, like this species we already are, but without caffeine… were to ask me how I was still functioning in the aftermath of said debilitating headache from the day before, even prior to the coffee said human was going to consume hits the chemical receptors in that still hurting human’s brain?

(My apologies for the complex construction of that sentence.  Apparently my red-underscore spellcheck liked it just fine.)

My response to the extraterrestrial in my kitchen, as the coffee slowly dribbles from basket to pot, would’ve been just as complex, and though it would’ve done nothing to help human/extraterrestrial relations, it would’ve explained it perfectly for a species as simplistically complex as ours,

“What about getting hit with a baseball bat makes no sense to you? 

Now I’d like to tell you that this was the moment when I woke up from that last dream that make no sense.  I’d like to tell you that this wasn’t an ill-thought out blog post with a strong beginning, a weak middle, and no ending at all.  I’d even like to tell you that I’m a famous writer and, because of that, I’m going to be a contestant on the next season of Dancing with the Stars.  But what I’m really going to tell you is, before I could finish whatever kind of blog post this was giving us its best attempt to be, THAT was the exact moment that my head stopped hurting. 

So I stopped writing.

Mid-stream-of-consciousness.

Because, after the last 24 hours I’ve had, now that it feels like that borrowed dog headache of mine has finally moved on, I’m going to make me a snack, watch me some General Hospital, and enjoy what’s left of this day that’s almost over.  Maybe something less painful will come to me between now and then, and I’ll share it with you.  But in the meantime…

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Thirteen and the Hi and Bye

Not every day is our best day.

Some days, no matter what we want to do, it is a day for other things.  Today I drank coffee, I journaled, I made breakfast, I did three weeks of laundry… and then, I did this.

By no means was that ALL I did, but those are the things I can tell you, here.  And I will tell you, all those things… the for you to know parts… and the NOT for you to know parts, were all more important than to write another head-scratcher of a blog post about theoretical physics, or baseball.  Which, actually, both occupy the same universe. 

I mean, have you ever seen a slider come out of a pitcher’s hand at 93 miles-per-hour, rotating at 4,790 revolutions per minute, breaking almost 3 whole feet, downward AND right-to-left, spinning more than 170 times in just the 55 feet from release-point to the ball’s terminus, in the pocket of the catcher’s mitt?

Physics, baby!  What the batter calls straight-up witchcraft, the slowest of slo-mo cameras calls… PHYSICS.

Damn, just when you thought you were gonna miss out on two of my favorite subjects in all the world.  And every bit of it only taking up the space of a November hi and bye.

So with that, I’m headed downstairs to do one more load.  Tee shirts, I think.  And for next time?  Well, I still have coffee.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Heisenberg’s Blend

This post is a time traveler.  That’s because I wrote it last night, but now, you’re reading it today. 

Random thought number one… in the late 1980s, Trader Joe’s… if you’ve never been to, or heard of Trader Joe’s, we’ll just call that a YOU problem, not a ME problem… sold a coffee called Heisenberg’s Blend.  The coffee’s name was based on the work of early 20th century German physicist Werner Heisenberg, and not the fictional high school science teacher who made the baby blue meth.  The principle states that we cannot know both the position of an object, and the speed of that same object, at the same time.  It is called “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle”. 

The coffee got its name because Trader Joe’s decided that, if they took all their leftover coffee beans that accidentally lost their labels at the warehouse and couldn’t be sold as whatever the hell they really were, they could just put a new label on it that made the bean’s origin an even bigger mystery, and it would fly off their shelves… especially at the reduced price of $2.99 a can.

It was genius, just like Heisenberg.  And it was the only coffee I drank until the first Starbucks moved into my neighborhood in 1993.

Okay, if I still have your attention, you’re probably wondering, “What did that anecdote have to do with time travel?” 

The answer is, “Absolutely nothing.”

Like most of life as we live it.  An entire day, or night, of seemingly random, essentially disparate occurrences that, because you aren’t seeing them in the same place at the same time, you just file them away in the “Nope, can’t measure THAT” folder inside your head. 

Random thought number two… There is a strong likelihood that, over the course of my life, I received not one, not two, but THREE mild concussions.  I say “mild” because none of the three incidents of head trauma caused any of the, what are now understood to be, concussion protocol red flags.  All three of mine happened within a period of 5 years, between the ages of 15 and 20.  The first was when a car hit me on my bicycle, and threw me ahead, 30 feet into the distance, landing me on my head.  The second was a solo, head-on collision between my car and a parked, family-sized van (don’t ask).  The third, and last, was while playing in a hockey tournament, when I got checked into the boards by a 230 pound defenseman while attempting to retrieve a loose puck.  None of the three resulted in examination, hospitalization, a diagnosis, or… after each… a second thought regarding the possible consequences of any of the above.  All three incidents came with an immediate “graying out” that is known to be a common symptom of a Grade 1 concussion, and in each case, a “getting on with it” after the fact.  From gray to “I’m good” in just one to two minutes, and only the loss of a bike at 15, and the loss of a couple of teeth at 20. 

Are you still with me?

All this backstory to say that, by the time I had entered my mid-twenties, and having not noticed anything like it before, I began experiencing something that has been the underlying theme of this post.  No, not time travel, but the uncovering of seemingly disconnected thoughts that, for reasons previously unexplained, would find their way to the surface from god only knows where in my brain, only to show up spontaneously, into thoughts, conversations, stories, essays, just about anywhere words were being used.  And before that, it never happened, not that I can recall, anyway. 

Now, going on 40 years later, it’s as everyday a thing as yawning before bedtime.  And I have to believe it’s the single most consistent, driving force that sends my fingers over the keys like this.  Especially in the month of November.

And now, as is my plan for every post this month, tell me, is there a something that has happened to you in the course of your life that has seemingly gifted you with something that otherwise might just have slipped through the cracks as random, unrelated, or practically immeasurable?  I can’t wait to find out.

Talk to you tomorrow.