Snoffunkicity

My supreme weakness, and my ultimate joy, is COFFEE. I’m a complete, unabashed, elitist snob coffee junky—a SNOFFUNKY.

According to varying legends, coffee was discovered in the (Arabian Peninsula/Ethiopian Plateau) by Kaldi, an (Arabian/Ethiopian) goatherder in (500 BCE/600 CE), who noticed his goats happily frolicking after eating the red berries (coffee “cherries”) of a wild shrub. Kaldi snacked on a few berries himself and was soon dancing merrily with his flock. Noticing the euphoric goatromping, a local monk snagged a few berries and cooked up a drink for his brothers, whose hyped-up prayers could now extend well into the wee hours. Africans were soon making their own power bars out of coffee and goat fat—yummy—and kicking back with coffee-cherry wine. During the Renaissance, coffee was referred to as a “heathen liquid,” and while I don’t consider myself a heathen, it’s perhaps revealing that I call my stove an altar…

My personal coffee trek began when I was an undergrad and had to pull all-nighters writing scripts or papers for playwriting or English classes. There on the flatlands of coffeeland, I was content with a Mr. Coffee and some dried-up ground Folgers. In the foothills, I discovered the Bunn coffeemaker and fresh ground beans. But I pressed on until finally, I have reached the pinnacle of the coffee mountain—a Chemex drip coffeemaker and Chemex filters, the blackest, oiliest Sumatran or Ethiopian organic free-trade beans I can find (refrigerated, not frozen, and ground only when the water is just below boiling), and cold, filtered water.

The Chemex is partly responsible for my snofunkiness. It’s glass and looks like a lab beaker or, better yet, a woman—busty top, narrow waist, ample bottom. Water is boiled in a teakettle and poured over grounds that rest in a filter in the top half of the pot. The filters are thicker than ordinary coffee filters to slow the drip and capture more of the bitter oils. I make it STRONG.

Call me romantic, but I sometimes see a split in the world between godlessness and its utter faith in science or humans or capitalism, and anthropomorphized god-centricity, with its utter faith in faith, or in religions whose original beauty is buried and lost in layers of humanist rules, dogma, & politics. What happened to seeking after mysteries? Strangely, this rant brings me back to java. It’s the ritual of morning coffee that I love. I revere the process of coffeemaking and the miraculous transmutation from simple bean to elixir. I perform the ritual in a quasi-meditative (or not quite awake yet) state. And the resulting liquid manna isn’t nearly as important as the process, which is hymn, prayer, pilgrimage.

Okay, maybe I’m blowing my own snofunkity a wee bit out of proportion. And if it turns out that coffee can’t put me in touch with the Divine, can’t bring me to the foot of the great spiritual Mystery, can’t initiate me into the Sublime, well, at least I’ll be wide awake and bug-free, because caffeine is also a natural insecticide.

Here’s a little coffee poem, just for fun…

MOCHAJAVA IDYLL

black blood cooled in sunlight
I wake chanting to the dark beast humbled
a chicory garland twisted in my hair
walk the coals to the kitchen
where you sit
cup cradled in your hands so tenderly
time grinds to a snaked unwinding
we lick our lips while we
boil and boil and boil
hungry for that melding moment
we circle the Circle
sink to stove to table
and the linoleum crawls with lichen and fern
our cool bare feet wearing a groove
until we’re ecstatic fertile singing

mochajavakenyasumatra
mochajavakenyasumatra

and we dance the dark dance
and we drink the strong black blood
again and again and again
until we fall redeemed
into moon and moss
the big dipper spilling black
into a saucer of sky