1. Make a cup of coffee, so that you are drinking coffee as you read. Put half and half in it. It should be warm but not too hot.
This is is one of the things that I love most about coffee: The moment when its pleasantly hot but it doesn't burn your mouth. Too hot is dangerous, and too cold disgusts me. It tastes sharp and creamy at once, bitter and fatty, and it lingers like smoke. Stale coffee is worse than no coffee, but ask me when I have no coffee and I will be sure to tell you that any coffee is better than no coffee. Free coffee at the rest stop just dark liquid, you can't be sure its not motor oil. I think coffee coats the inside of my mouth so it must coat the inside of my gut as well. The caffeine enters my bloodstream from my mouth, from my stomach. I could hold it under my tongue like acid, or I can eat it like mushrooms, or I can take one hit of the steam like DMT. But instead, I drink it, letting the heat buzz through me and the wetness touch my lips. The hot liquid or the stimulant makes me shit, satisfying, sudden, and easy. I didn't drink coffee until my senior year of college, but I took speed starting in my senior year of high school. No coffee for me, just amphetamines and nicotine and whatever uppers you have on hand. The first time I got the caffeine buzz I understood what everyone thought was so great. (At the same time, I understood for the first time what people meant when they talked about being in love—my first relationship with a girl soaked me in in-love-ness. I'd loved men before, and it was fine. Now I understood what everyone thought was so great.) After that I worked at a coffeeshop for a year, and learned to brew and grind and pull and pour, worked fifteen feet away from the roasting machine and learned about the cracks and the plural smells coffee made in its stages.
2. Wait til four thirty in the afternoon, then open a beer. IPA recommended.
I have not been to the grocery store for one week and I am not sure what to have for dinner. I will probably spend the next hour and a half thinking about dinner. Curating my grocery list.
3. Stop eating vegetables, for a while, like a year or so. Do this two times a decade.
The first time I made a salad for myself just to make myself happy, I made a fennel and pomegranate seed salad from the cookbook Ottolenghi.
4. Learn that you never learned the basics.
I learned from my therapist that drinks aren't food and its not a meal unless it has at least 3 food groups from the food pyramid represented. So, I asked, a bowl of rice with soy sauce isn't a meal? What if I add butter?
5. Make yourself a neutral snack, like an energy bite.
I am eating a nut ball that I made. I call it a nut ball but maybe it should be called a date ball. It's made of dates, peanut butter, a little bit of pea protein, oatmeal, and dried cherries. I make these so that I have easy snacks that don't make me hate myself. Or, in nonviolent communication I should say when certain snacks go into my tummy I feel guilt and shame afterwards. The snacks don't do it to me, the snacks are just their own self, they are neutral. When I eat my date balls I feel satisfied and satiated. They are sweet fibery protein-y fatty treats.
6. Pour another glass of sparkling water.
Why is sparkling water so satisfying? And am I ruining my teeth? I am not yet thirty, and my gums are receding and I rarely brush my teeth yet my dentists always say my teeth look good. I don't throw up much, so I haven't ruined my body that way, the way so many other people I know have, their teeth like tictacs in red koolaid. I had an assigned roommate once who was bulimic, and I stopped sleeping in our room because she was always in her bottom bunk half asleep and getting skinnier or puking in the bathroom, blaming it on pregnancy scares, and not going to class. It scared me and I am guilty that I didn’t help her, couldn’t help her. We shared a pack of Camel cigarettes and a cinderblock room and a hometown and instability and terrible sexual habits. Now I drink water carbonated by a soda stream and worry that it’s eating away at my enamel; she is somewhere with her children continuing to let each day pass, like me.