Coffee

I love coffee in the morning. I particularly like Melitta coffee, made in a Melitta filter; it forces you to do one or two cups at a time, and - although I would like enough to fill the bathtub on cold mornings - such a method forces you to slow down, think about how much you are drinking, and not get into the habit of making too much and throwing the excess away.
I learned to be thrifty back during the oil embargoes in the 1970s. President Nixon even asked us not to display Christmas lights back then...and we obeyed his request. We even had wage and price controls during the 70s, all you people yelling about socialism: McDonalds had to ask permission to increase the price of a chesseburger by 5 cents. (They got their increase...Ray Kroc had been a major GOP contributor.)
By being thrifty, for example, putting another cup of water into the electric tea kettle after having made a cup of coffee - thereby using the residual heat of the electric element to pre-heat the next cup of water - I calculate that I had saved $1.20 up until the fall of 2008. I stopped keeping record after that.

A morning without coffee is like Saturn without its rings: large, lumbering, bloated gas giant - cold and remote, looking for corners to eclipse in and get that bright thing in the middle of the solar system out of its methane encrusted eyes.
- like Jupiter, another gassy ball with disfiguring red blotches, that has a headache worse than Shoemaker-Levy crashing into the atmosphere, one chunk after another.
- like Pluto, disrespected and relegated to the B-list of planets.

Coffee is creation - convection currents spun by the coffee background radiation (CBR), creating Cartesian vortices, swirling about the teaspoon of Cremora (I don't use it, but I have observed its use.) - a product relatively slow to dissolve, creating a spiral galaxy of foodstuff particles that circles run until it finally winks out, as if swallowed by a black coffee hole at the midst of the galactic cup!
Sugar, being more soluble, goes into it like a shot - no swirling there. It dissolves so fast, that sometimes it dissolves even before coming into contact with the liquid coffee. This particular characteristic has allowed scientists in the European Union to daisy-chain a five kilometer long sequence of coffee cups and balanced sugar teaspoons together, the dissolution of sugar causing the electrolytic nature of the coffee to change, thereby triggering the next sugar teaspoon to be dumped, and so on, all the way through five kilometers. Since the sugar dissolves just before hitting the skin of the java, it essentially steps back a millisecond from the classical physics time of dissolution, thereby essentially moving back in time. After five kilometers, they have been able to move local time back to 2008 (again!), which result has led to the scrapping of the experiment.

When I don't have Melitta, I grind my own to a fineness usually only obtainable by the grindstones of Fate...or Nemesis; a Turkish fineness capable of penetrating even anti-flu masks worn in Singapore. The smell of ground coffee - finely ground, as is this - changes over the course of time, every day being a little different.

I love it.
And, this is the only time I have talked about it - right here. I go to coffee shops, but I am not the type to rhapsodize about this or that coffee, how to make coffee, coffees I have known and loved; I just drink it, hopefully like it, ask for more, please. If it is bad, I do mention it. There's a lot of bad coffee floating around.
It makes you realize what a paradox we inhabit: we will drink tasteless and foul coffee day after day, and the people selling it will continue to make it day after day.............
There is a basic Economics course here: bad coffee drives out good.

Crap seems to rule nowadays. Case in point: Wal-Mart.
I was in Wal-Mart last night; their coffee section was a pig sty: spilled coffee, the displays all disarranged, and they had no #2 filters - hadn't had any for a week.
Wal-Mart is a funny place. As I have said, at the one by us, the greeters seem about as happy to see you walk in the door as they would be to see the plague coming in. Many shelves are empty, and they tend to stay empty for a spell. The store is so close, I can stop in easily more than once a week, and I do; when I do, I check those shelves, and they don't fill them up in a hurry. And there is dirtiness and disorder. Wal-Mart is where I was first introduced to "Dry Roasted Peanuts" of that superior type that incorporates corn syrup solids and paprika and maltodextrin...
All these extra things fall to the bottom of the jar, and form a pile of sawdust. Plain peanuts do not have sawdust.
I shopped in their meat section once.
There are some good things. It also is the home of name brand stuff that didn't quite make the A-list: Smucker's creamy natural peanut butter is decidedly chunky. They have the spring water dispensers the customer is supposed to operate - fine; but do you want to buy spring water from a dispenser in a location that's sort of dirty?

Anyway, I always check out their coffee section, mostly to laugh. I swear, it is an unsightly mess. Some days it looks like demented children have taken down all the packages of coffee, and then threw them back onto the shelves as if they were nerf balls.

Then there's the clothing. I have gotten sub-standard clothing everywhere, not just Wal-Mart, but I swear that the clothing at Wal-Mart has some sort of nasty smell. I bought some t-shirts last year and they were cheap. So, OK, they are going to fall apart, maybe last one summer. OK. But what I hadn't counted on was the smell of whatever stuff they had treated them with. I didn't dare wear them without washing first, depreciating the damn things about 10% right off the bat.

You know, my problem is I got Melitta Coffee dreams, and a Wal-Mart reality.