Hello again. Wright here. The subject of this blog does not follow the normal progression of stories that I have been telling lately, but it is a subject that has been on my mind so I thought I would address it. The subject of today’s post is coffee or more specifically, waking up and smelling the coffee. I don’t know if you have ever heard the expression, “Wake up and smell the coffee.” As an expression, that expression means to get a grip on reality and pay attention to what is going on around you. Somebody might use the expression, “wake up and smell the coffee, people” whenever they want you to take note of or become aware of something important that is going on around you right at that moment in time. That expression seems to be used quite often in the military. But I do not think that the military has an exclusive license to use that expression. Okay, so here is where I go off on a tangent of sorts. I just wanted to throw that in as a starting point or a jumping off point. But what I really want to talk about is the literal expression, “waking up and smelling the coffee.” I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a Folgers commercial on TV. If you have seen that commercial, you may know that the hero or heroine (not to be confused with heroin) wakes up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee while a jingle about Folgers coffee plays in the background. Why am I telling you all of this? That is a good question. Well, to make a short story longer, it’s like this. The other day, and no I don’t remember what day it was, I woke up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee permeating the air in my house. Suddenly, I started to crave coffee. Sad but true. The sad part is that I didn’t even drink coffee until about two or three years after I joined the military. I believe that I started drinking coffee after I got reassigned to Korea for the first time. I started drinking coffee while I waited for the pot bellied stoves to warm up and heat up the Quonset hut buildings that we worked out of in Korea. Those Quonset hut buildings got cold as shit in the winter. But I didn’t really get hooked on coffee until I got stationed in an engineer Battalion and became good friends with the Battalion mess Sergeant. That mess Sergeant had a weird way of brewing coffee. When he made coffee, you only needed to drink one cup and you were wired for the entire day. That right there was some serious caffeine action. Well, within a few years, it got to the point where I was a caffeine junkie. I could not even think about starting the day without at least two cups of coffee. Then I had to have another cup or two to chase those starter cups. You know. Just to keep the action going. I had my own coffee pot, and my own coffee fixings in my office just to brew my own. When I was part of the large staff, I paid the weekly or monthly fee to the coffee fund so that I could drink from the office stash. The only hassle with that was that there was this rule that whoever drank the last cup was supposed to make a new pot. Yeah. Right. That usually didn’t happen. Whomever would take the last cup would usually just quietly walk away and pretend nothing happened. Then they would wait for the next poor sucker to come along and find the coffee pot empty. Cuz usually, that poor sucker was hurtin’ for certain and needed a quick fix. Thus, that poor slob usually (generally always) got stuck making the next pot. Was that fair? Hell no. But that’s the way it was. I really didn’t like those office coffee pools, but what was I going to do? Whenever I could, I would gladly opt to brew my own. Fast-forward to the present time. And I’ve got to have my one or two cups of freshly brewed coffee every morning. When I wake up and smell that aroma in the air, the cravings for caffeine immediately kick in. My cravings are so bad that when this morning there was no coffee brewing, though my wife was grinding fresh coffee beans. You see, we have a certain brand that we’re hooked on. Go figure. So whenever that brand is on sale in Costco, we buy several bags of the coffee beans. Then when we need to grind a fresh batch of beans, my wife will grind 2 to 3 weeks’ worth of coffee beans. Well, this morning I woke up to the smell of coffee beans being ground. That smell wafted through the air all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom. All I could think was, “Coffee, coffee, coffee!” I went out to the kitchen to ask my wife if she had stopped grinding long enough to brew a pot of coffee. Of course she hadn’t because she was just finishing up the grinding. As a result, I had to wait a few minutes. If you have ever seen a drug addict who needs a fix bad, that was me this morning waiting for that pot of coffee to brew. And this is a guy who didn’t even drink coffee until after he had been in the Army a while. So sad. My situation is so pitiful that I have to carry a hot thermos of coffee with me in the morning when I dash out of the house to go to an appointment (or anywhere else for that matter). I don’t usually experience any exercises in futility right when I wake up, other than the fact that I got to have my daily fix of coffee.
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