coffee and cigarettes
(from a creative nonfiction workshop I took in the spring of 2011, inspired by the jazz standard Black Coffee and our tireless coffeemaker, Froust. the next few posts - the ones I’ll make in quick succession - are bits and pieces of the shorter work I did for that class, some of which was included in my chapbook, entitled Variations on Turing. I realized that I haven’t posted in this since the beginning of my senior year, and figured that it’s the one place where I can reliably stick my writing and alternately re-edit and forget about it.)
I’ve read somewhere that coffee and cigarettes are a journalist’s drugs of choice because of the way they alternately dilate and focus the attention, like some kind of mental vortex that breathes in every detail with skitterish, unblinking thoroughness and spins it smaller and smaller till it’s some dense, compact mass from which nothing, not even light, can escape. I drink coffee many times a day to fight off the blurry mental-vision from pulling late nights and forcing early mornings, to jolt open the doors of my mind when I feel them nudging shut; I think of it as the psychological supernova before the black hole. My mother drinks three to four cups a day, and pretends that she’s read somewhere that three to four cups a day is good for the body. After a third cup, my body feels extended, like my fingers are growing outwards past their own skin, trembling with the patter of everything that’s falling into my outstretched hands. That may not technically be a good thing, but I don’t think it’s particularly bad – after years of walking around all widened and spread-out, dilated like a pupil under a night sky, I can’t help but hope I’ve been catching all the bits that would normally fly off into the periphery.
