Jonesing for a Cup of Joe

I was up late last night. Too late. Way too late. I shouldn't have been, but I was. Sometimes these things happen. Consequently I feel ridiculously tired today. I could go to bed now, sleep for 14 hours, and not feel as though I'd gotten too much sleep (which I believe to be a silly concept, but that's another story).

It's days like today that make me exceptionally glad that coffee is so prevalent in our world today. Some may say that it's too prevalent (I'd argue that it's just too expensive), that too many of us are addicted, and that it's one of the great ills of society.

"Hogwash," I say, "hogwash!" Unquestionably coffee should not be one's sole beverage during the course of a day (what with it dehydrating you and all), but that beautiful black liquid is more precious than oil under the right conditions, and today, for me, is the right conditions.

As I write this I have an oversized mug of the real black gold in front of me, and I'm taking liberal swigs, thinking about not just the fact that it will give me the pep and vim and vigor I need to get through the next seven hours, but that it's utterly delicious, too.

That's one of the things I really don't understand about people's criticisms of the stuff. So many say that coffee tastes terrible, but I disagree with that vehemently. I think that there's little that one can drink that tastes better (and I'm not adding mocha or sugar or any other sweetening agent to it either).

You may think I have a problem, but I don't mind telling you that the first sip in the morning just hits the spot. There's a timer on my coffeemaker and it goes off six minutes prior to my alarm clock. That way, as soon as my alarm goes off I can trudge off to the kitchen, drop a dash of milk into my Mickey's Coffee mug (complete with an old-school Donald Duck image) and pour a cup. A couple of sips as I head to the bathroom and I can make it through my shower. A couple of more sips and I can get through my morning routine. One long swig to finish the mug and I can make it out of the house and head off to work.

Quite honestly, I don't believe that means that I have a problem with coffee. If there's a problem, it's that I simply don't get enough sleep at night, and that's not fixable – save drinking my morning cup of coffee.

Wikipedia informs me that coffee has been around since the ninth century, and if my tiredness is any indication of what is taking place in our society at large, it's not going to go anywhere soon. Thank goodness for that!

Over at UnSpun (where, it is true, I'm also a writer), they have several different coffee lists. Everything from the best chain store for coffee to best coffee orders to best color for a coffee mug (mine is black on top and a pale yellow on the bottom). They also, naturally, have one looking at the best brands of coffee:

I miss going into Dunkin' Donuts, I used to do it a couple of times a week, but now I live thousands of miles from the nearest store. I'll admit that it's not the best coffee, but I've been known to buy it at the supermarket just to help me reminisce about the good old days.