The quitter

What I really wanted this post to be about is Shatner. William Shatner. Because he is great. But it's early and I am not sure I can consolidate a lifetime of Shatner musings into two paragraphs and possibly do the man justice, and therefore I will have to talk about coffee.

I've been drinking coffee since I was 14, the reason being that I flunked algebra my Freshman year, and had to go to summer school. Naturally, I whined when my mom tried to wake me up each morning, because I wanted to sleep in until 10:30, eat Golden Grahams, tape "Life in a Northern Town" off the radio, and then spend the rest of the day in the pool. (No modern suburban kid can possibly imagine such an unscheduled life, but this is the way things were in 1986.) "Here," said my mother, sick of my mewling and refusal to get out of bed. "Try this."

For the next 20 years, not a single 24 hour period elapsed in which I did not drink coffee. It became a sort of focal point for my young social life, such as it was, sitting in cafes and psychoanalyzing whichever friend was pissing me off that week, or scribbling about what unimaginative jerks most people were in my diaries and notebooks. I liked coffee so much that it often became the theme of gifts I received at holidays. Whenever I had to go anywhere where coffee might not be readily available, I had a backup plan. I brought instant coffee on a business trip to Japan, unaware that, like everywhere else in the world, there would be a Starbucks 15 feet from the lobby of my hotel.

I never once entertained the thought of not drinking coffee. Quitting, despite being unimaginable, would be flirting with health zealotry, something I have always loathed. Do a search for quitting coffee online and you will discover fire-breathing masses convinced that coffee causes every disease ever identified by medical science. Such people have arranged their entire souls around this crusade, much the way that people speak in tongues about subjects like veganism, attachment parenting, low-carb diets, and other faddishly puritanical notions that doing things a certain way will provide magical protection from pain and suffering. It's all a form of religion, and I remain steadfastly an atheist.

These facts aside, I have quit. Here is how it's done: drink a little less coffee each day. Suddenly, you aren't drinking it anymore. It doesn't hurt. You don't get headaches. You don't feel incredibly better once you have stopped. Nothing changes. Don't believe the holy preachers. It isn't better. It isn't worse. It is a state of complete neutrality aside from saving a few bucks a day.

Health preachers, where is the overwhelming feeling of well-being and absolution I was promised? Ascetic food gurus, where is the drastically improved liver functioning, flawless sleep, and moral unburdening that were my due in the caffeine-free afterlife? Could it be I have discovered in life what religious folk will discover upon death, that actually it's really dark and quiet, and nothing much happens? That there is no braying of trumpets and flowing of robes? That it was all a social club for mortals, and nothing more?

Could be. Could be.