You know, I’ve been so carried away with chocolate for so long I’ve almost completely forgotten that I was meant to be building up some sort of coffee expertise/addiction. Really I’ve been quite hopeless and what was once coming up to a respectable coffee habit tsunami has completely subsided into a gentle ripple. I guess for most people reducing the habit would be a positive move, but since it would make me so much better at doing coffee in a short time I really think that going down the route of general coffee induced bodily harm would be a step in the right direction. There must be some sort of voluntary organisation that will help me along my way and if there isn’t then there damn well should be!

It seems a little odd to want to cultivate a habit which will almost certainly cause me long term harm and so on with the caffeine and whatnot just for the sake of improving my ability to taste coffee, but isn’t there something fine in a coffee addiction? Maybe it’s just me that thinks it, but sine caffeine has such awesome preparation rituals and snobbish tastery around it, it is just so damn intriguing. The actual – really quite mild – effects of the drug become secondary to the experience of having it. Sure, some people need coffee to get started in the mornings or get the shakes or feel awful when they don’t have caffeine, but the pleasure you get out of having a cup of coffee (or at least the pleasure I get out of having a cup of coffee) is the pleasure you get from having a cup of coffee and not the pleasure you get from sating your need for caffeine. The whole process of having it has become almost separate from the need to get some sort of stimulation into your body and so what you really have isn’t something which has an effect on your body that you get addicted to, but a wonderful experience which just so happens to also pump your body full of delightful toxins. It’s kind of like the whole drug thing is backwards for coffee; most of time you would take drugs and then it happens that you get some sort of hopefully good experience, but with coffee you go and have a good experience and then it just so happens that you’re also getting some sort of drug. It’s unusually elegant. Hmm…. I still don’t think I’ve explained myself very well, but hopefully you got the general gist of that and I didn’t sound like a total retard. I can probably explain it better once I’ve got my esspresso machine all up and running and, instead of feeling distinctly groggy at 2:30, I feel like I’ve got a lighthouse shining from my eyes and some sort of fast paced destruction derby running round my head.

I’ll have a quick go at sorting some of that out tomorrow and get myself drinking some coffeeeee. Got to make sure that when I get all my equipment I’m already a geek. (Not that I’m not a geek of course, but I feel comepletely out of my depth. How can Japanese comics and kicking ass at Starcraft compare to the awesome geekery of playing around with the big boy geeks in the flavour gangs?) I’ve heard good things about a few coffee places around and really there is no time like the present. Just wait a couple weeks and I’ll be able to match coffee to chocolate like the most freakish sommelier you’ve ever met.