Gabe writes:
I like to drink something to pep me up in the afternoon, an espresso, a coffee, or a mate. This might not seem idiosyncratic; many people drink coffee midday to pep them up. I think my practice of mid-day drinking is unusual because barring exceptional circumstances it is the only time I will have coffee.
I begin at eleven or noon usually, when the word COFFEE slips into my mind. Packed into the word is desire, or the desire into the word: the word and desire are concomitant. I don’t think about the taste of coffee, how it will make me feel, or how it smells. I just think the word, COFFEE, and want it. I want the word itself. If it is early I decide not to have it yet, to wait until two or three. I think about it though, and decide if I am going to drink coffee, espresso, or mate. Then, at two or three, I have the drink I decided to have and don’t have any more until the next day, even if I want it before then.
I battle with coffee. I am fascinated with the desire it produces in me, and how that desire relates to my experience of the coffee itself. COFFEE, more than an object, is a process of desire, a feeling of nostalgia, a yearning for that previous desire. As a desiring of desire, coffee becomes a practice of memory. When I have it, I focus and release myself to it, and bring the sensation—the experience and the memory of experience, the desire and the memory of desire—into a dialogue with the rest of my coffee memories, some dwindling and others staying. I like deciding whether the coffee is good or not. The goodness of the coffee then sometimes depends on everything but the coffee itself: the cup it is in, my location, the quality of the day, and my mood all contribute as much as the drink itself. I do however, have a very specific sense of what I want espresso to taste and look like. I know what I want mate to taste like, how it ought to flow and sound in the gourd.
But this is just another way of enhancing the experience, another artificially imposed tension to increase desire, like waiting until two or three o’clock for the coffee. I enjoy and appreciate coffee as the architecture of tensions built around an experience, without which, for me, coffee would lose significance. Part of this construction of tension requires my resisting the coffee for a time. Then, by having the coffee, I briefly bring it out of its reified place in my mind. I think it’s my way of checking in to make sure everything, or at least coffee, is still real.
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