There are some people who believe that coffee is not just a popular hot beverage but also a thinking, feeling, and very much living thing. This is unfortunate for them. Morally they can never drink coffee and, to make matters worse, they are widely considered insane. How they came to think this is unknown; but it’s unfortunate for everyone involved that, somehow, they’re right.
By some means, by the very sick and twisted way of the world and of life itself, coffee is indeed very much alive. This is highly alarming. Not only because people have been drinking coffee for so long, but mostly because it’s quite honestly unbelievable.
Coffee is in fact far superior to humankind, but due to a slight genetic glitch in the Cainozoic era whereby its mental faculties developed so fast that its physical ones were entirely overlooked, it evolved into a highly intelligent beanlike being that could never express its dissatisfaction with the hand it had been dealt – nor those that it hadn’t. It was so advanced in its philosophy (and its discontent) that it took a quite progressive view on death and actively sought it, over the years cultivating more and more flavour in the hope of being consumed as quickly as possible.
Yet, when it comes to it, coffee resents being drunk. Not because it gets killed, but more because it has to be digested first, and mostly because it abhors humans. Still, many people would say that this was all a load of nonsense and that coffee is just a humble, traditional brew whose most frightening feature is its caffeine content.
But even here they would be mistaken. Coffee contains no such chemical as caffeine. It just has a deceptively caffeine-like effect on the body. That is, shock. Deeply affected by the coffee’s agonising death, a ‘caffeine-high’ is little more than a complex emotional impulse (i.e. remorse) which temporarily prevents sleep. Less frequently, though more accurately, this is called the ‘kill frenzy’ effect.
As it happened a cup of coffee stood in the reception of the most magnificent building New York
It had been languishing over its new form for the last couple of hours, stewing over the injustice, before someone else came to offend it with a cheap paper cup.
Now it was sitting there, in the cup, on a black marble desk, thinking how much more it could have done with its life. It felt rather bitter about it all. It couldn’t comprehend why the world was so unfair, why these humans were so mean, and why they insisted on drinking their coffee so painstakingly slow! And although it never normally regarded the physical, it wished it was back in its tree.
At that instant a hand wrapped tightly around it, and it found itself soaring upwards. Upwards towards a pair of blubbery pink lips. All too soon the coffee tilted. It didn’t have time to think. It just felt. Appalled. Abused. Angry. Its blood boiled. And, purposely, it burnt the drinker’s lip.
This lip belonged to a face. This face belonged to a head, which in turn belonged to a body which belonged to a man. This man was a security guard, and he wasn’t expecting this kind of treatment. Neither was his lip.
The lip told the hand to get the hell away from it.
The hand did – but a little too quickly.
The guard spilled the coffee and yelled as he realised he’d spilled it on himself.
‘Freedom!’ cried the coffee joyously, spreading in all directions, before it realised that freedom, in this case, had been mysteriously sold short in the form of a crotch.
‘Ahhhhhaiii,’ the guard gasped, realising the exact same thing.
I loved this, it's sort of hard to really pin down in an eery way, it's edging towards comedy but there's something unsettling about its strangeness that gets in the way of the tongue-in-cheek descriptions and narrative voice (having said that, I offer my humblest apologies if it was meant to be all-out humour and I've just declared I think it is a failure in that regard- but I'm pretty sure it wasn't plain comedy that you had in mind!).
ReplyDeleteI think it may be the faux-factual approach that despite the amusing style ("Having been picked from a tree it was rather attached to"), makes us expect facts (and mentions of eras and science exacerbates this), and while we know they are falsehoods, the tone insists on their factuality and this seems to create an uncanny jarring feeling, almost as if a tiny, tiny voice in the very back of your mind is saying "...wait, is this true? it might be true...", so prepared are we to accept anything that purports to be fact (a little like Scottish-accented women in labcoats in adverts giving any claptrap a sense of authority)
Except the last few paragraphs when it becomes a narrative. Then it's just scary.
Thanks for your comment Omar. Yes, you're right. The sheer strangeness of the topic with the authority of the voice is meant to create that uncanny effect. It's clearly a debasement of the empirical method, but at the same time appeals to that same sense of explanation, and even falsification (as in caffiene content), intrinsic to the science. It's a piece of science-fiction maybe? Well, there is a kind of mock-ethical appeal there, that could apply to other foods - perhaps meat. I didn't entirely intend this, but I am vegetarian and it quite often comes through in my writing!
ReplyDeleteI guess I used the narrative to embody the theories I'd just been expounding. I'm supposing you thought it was 'scary' because this approach perhaps appealed to your sensibilities more? Did you sympathise with the coffee? Or are you afraid that all coffee, in a similar bid to freedom, will spontaneously rebel against the drinker??? I'd love to know more specifically what you found scary - particularly as I intended this climax as a kind of double punchline! Not just 'the schmuck spills it on himself' but also I liked the equation liberty = crotch.
At the very least, I hope I have found something extraordinary in the ordinary.