Yesterday Was Rough, Guys

Or, “Curse You, Winco!”

I have coffee now. I also have a new awareness as to the depths of my addiction — so it’s all wins here in Super-Lamesville today, folks.

Yesterday started with the horrifying realization that we had run out of coffee, and ended with The Mother of All Caffeine Deprivation Headaches.

I thought I could hack it — a day without coffee. Writing was out of the question, of course, since I had lost the ability to discern any difference between the literary qualities of say, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the novelization of The Phantom Menace. But laundry, housecleaning, childcare … I could manage those, I thought.

Do you know that feeling where it seems like someone has smothered your brain in cotton balls? You know it’s in there, somewhere, but … the cotton balls. Your brain tries to communicate with your body, but its voice is too muffled and distorted to be heard or understood.

“Thing in the dryer? Obdurately! A food … would be subliminal. We could slice a muffin, but that would stall the wookie. How many machetes go into four? I don’t remember.”

I didn’t get a lot done.

About eleven o’clock, I remembered that there was caffeine in tea. I had three cups. I just wanted to feel human again, but if it made a difference, I couldn’t tell.

By now the headache was starting to come on, presenting as a faint ache in the back of my neck accompanied by an overpowering sense of impending doom.

I needed to go grocery shopping. We needed food, and more importantly, coffee. I despondently thought about how long it would take to go to the grocery store, do all the shopping, come home, and finally make a pot of coffee. All of this would have to be done in my present state. Maybe I cried, maybe I didn’t. Struggling valiantly out of the depths the cotton balls, an intrepid thought made it to the surface of my comprehension: Winco has free coffee samples. I would go to Winco first, and I would head straight for the coffee samples. Everything would be all right. I would be alive again.

NJ was still asleep. I pottered around the house, trying to remember how to fold bath towels and how many machetes went into four. I still felt like The Thing That Died, but I had hope.

When NJ woke up, I managed to use my remaining brain cells to put her diaper on right-side-up, get her buckled into the carseat, and drive her and my mostly-deranged self to Winco. Inside my head, a platoon of orcs were pounding, pounding, pounding the backside of my eye with a battering ram.

I finally found myself standing in front of the free coffee sample counter. It was a filthy mess, strewn coffee grounds, empty creamer cups, and used coffee-stirrers.

The first carafe was empty, its lid askew; someone’s start at refilling it. No.

The next carafe was also empty. No!

The third carafe — the last hope for redeeming me to the land of the living — still had its lid intact, indicating that perhaps there was yet some sweet nectar to be siphoned from its stainless steel bowels.

I reached for a cup.

But there were no cups, you guys.

I just stared at the carafe like a moron for the longest time. I couldn’t believe the betrayal of this moment. Winco had betrayed me. The universe had betrayed me. The universe was laughing at me. For want of a cup. A stupid, lowly, $0.09 Styrofoam cup.

What to do? What can one do, in the face of the universe’s cruel laughter? Find a way to carry on. I did. Somehow, through my crippling dismay and raging headache, I made through the aisles of the perfidious Winco and checked things numbly off my list.

The next stop was Safeway — the Safeway with a Starbucks in it. May heaven forgive me, I paid $2.03 for a tall coffee, even though I was only picking up three things there and then going home, and even though that was literally half what the pound of coffee I bought cost.

But how enormously comforting it was, to feel the warmth radiating through the paper sleeve and into my hungry hands as I picked up a loaf of bread and a bottle of apple juice and quaveringly smiled at the cashier as he asked if I’d found everything.

Oh yes.