Joe & the cuppa joe

A man and his coffee, his psychic cure-all

Joe drinks coffee every morning. He drinks his cuppa joe. He drinks it to feel calm.

Joe has a deep preoccupation with the effect caffeine has on his neuroses. He believes it quiets the storms in his mind. He believes coffee is like a psychic cure-all or something.

He drinks his coffee fast and usually burns the roof of his mouth. He drinks it fast because he’s in a hurry. He has to get to work. He has to get started on whatever project he has to get started on. To say that Joe is under a lot of stress would be a huge understatement. Joe says this to his colleagues when they are all complaining about work. But the pain from the scalding hot liquid against the roof of his mouth exacerbates his stress. The acidity of the coffee doesn’t help either. Nearly every morning Joe finds himself cursing and asking himself why he keeps drinking the stuff. His daily cuppa joe, that is. He calls it that with affection. But when he spits out the coffee and runs his tongue against the now too-smooth flesh of the roof of his mouth, he calls it fucking shit. From joe to fucking shit.

Sometimes Joe tells himself that’s enough, that’s his last cup of coffee. But he’ll be back again to the cafe off the lobby of his office building the next morning for another cuppa joe. It’s his routine. And he needs his routine, he tells himself. To stay calm.

He knows that he’s addicted to caffeine. But Joe doesn’t view it as a very serious addiction. He thinks it’s worth it. It calms him, he says. It quiets the storms in his mind. He believes that the stimulant properties of caffeine sort of sharpen his mental faculties to a point, and his status quo state of mind is tumultuous and unfocused, which he finds deeply stressful, so he tells himself, Joe, coffee makes you calm.

Joe has been slowly losing his mind, he believes. This is unrelated perhaps to his normally scatterbrained mental activity that he self-medicates with a cuppa joe, but he’s been taking note of what feels like increasingly impulsive decisions some of the time coupled with a complete lack of energy to hardly do anything at all at other times. He feels like he’s crazier than he ever has been in his life. And he needs his cuppa joe in the morning to get through the day. He needs his psychic cure-all.

He tried to quit a handful of times because he was worried that he was spending too much money and the acidic beverage would prime his insides for the development of a stress ulcer and the coffee wasn’t really working the way it was supposed to to keep him from feeling like an aimless, energy-less zombie in the morning and the stains on his teeth would get deeper and deeper and as a stained-smile-sporting tweaked-out over-stressed middle-aged average joe office worker drone he would find it impossible to ever find someone he could really fall in love with. Finding someone to fall in love with being Joe’s #1 priority in life, he tells himself. But quitting coffee was stressful. And the headaches were unbearable. And what if that special someone he had yet to meet was a big coffee-drinker? And even worse what if the person he became when he was not drinking coffee was even worse and more undesirable than the person he was when he was drinking coffee? And so he never lasted very long when he tried to stop. Joe would just affectionately treat himself to a cuppa joe in the morning and then tell himself how much better it would make him feel.

He couldn’t deal with the prospect of the approaching insanity without some coffee to get him through it. And even when he spit out the fucking shit, he would still hurriedly finish the rest, never burning himself again for a second time. He never noticed this, the not burning himself again for a second time, so he was never surprised by it or thought that it could be important at all.

Joe went through his morning routine of waiting in a long line, talking to a coworker if somebody he knew and liked was next to him in line but never if it was a stranger or if there was more than one person between him and the person he knew and liked, in those cases he would be quiet, but then he’d be exchanging pleasantries with the same cashier as always while she asked him if he wanted the usual, a medium cuppa joe, black, to which he would respond yes and make some comment about something he’d read in the morning paper and she’d smile and say oh really?, and then he’d be waiting again this time for the coffee to get made by the barista, who he never talked to more than a word or two, but then waiting for the coffee to be ready sometimes he’d walk up to someone he knew and liked even if he hadn’t talked to them in line or sometimes he would just pretend to check email on his phone, in actuality procrastinating that activity until he got to his desk upstairs, and then he’d be finishing up the routine by taking the coffee from the barista and saying thank you, that’s it, nothing else. He went through this same routine pretty much every day.

Joe had a conversation with the barista once. The barista asked Joe how he was doing, honey? Normally Joe wouldn’t have answered or he would have just smiled and said great, how about you?, but this day, Joe was deep in his own head, the neuroses not yet calmed by the impending daily dose of caffeine. So that day, when asked a typically banal question by the barista who served him every morning, Joe responded with a rather lurid answer.

“I don’t know, to be honest. I guess I think I’m slowly losing my mind. And the worst thing is that it’s not like I’m getting crazier and crazier every day, but it’s that I’ve always been this crazy and I’m only now starting to realize how much. It’s not like in the movies and books where it’s like a descent into madness or something that you watch from the outside. No it’s something else entirely when it’s you. And I feel like I’ve got all these little clues from throughout my life, in my memories and everything, and I feel like a detective trying to piece together the true facts, the story of my life from the little bits of craziness that go back as far as I can remember. I feel like my life is a sort of crime scene if you know what I mean.”

The barista hadn’t realized that she would be getting a response and had moved on to making the next drink after she left his on the counter and let the five words float out from her lips and just dissipate into the air. Joe was kinda staring off into space behind the counter and didn’t notice or didn’t care that his usual barista, whose name he’d forgotten and was too embarrassed to ask again and was honestly a little frustrated that she was the only one who worked there who didn’t wear a name tag, but that she had walked away. Joe just kept talking. And then he looked down at his cardboard cup of piping hot coffee, also forgetting that it would probably burn the roof of his mouth within a few minutes.

My cuppa joe, he muttered to himself. You’re all I need.

And Joe smiled. Joe felt calm.