Me and my brother were talking to each other
'Bout what makes a man a man
Was it brain or brawn, or the month you were born
We just couldn't understand

"Tattoo", © Pete Townshend - The Who

Does drinking coffee make you a grown up?

If that's true, I realized this morning, I'm wizened well beyond my calendar-years. I remember filling an old tin-lunchbox thermos with a coffee-milk-sugar mixture (hey, give me a break - I was still a youngster!) and stowing it in my locker and gulping from it at class breaks. This served the dual purpose of giving me a necessary pickup during the stultifying hours of education-by-rote and pissing off the teachers serving as hall monitors who would see me tipping the thermos up and immediately home in on me, exulting that they had caught this nerdish trouble maker sneaking quick nips of hooch on school grounds.

When I arrived at college, I arrived with a small coffee pot and a bean grinder (gifts) which I put immediately to a herculean production output. Since then, almost every place I've ever lived in has had a well-used coffee-maker (the exceptions were the two summers I lived in cheap boarding houses - there may have been shared coffee-makers in the kitchen, but I was loathe to interact in any way with my housemates - I instead relied on the office coffee-makers of countless temporary jobs).

I must say, for my years of caffeine addiction, I think I've suffered few or no health problems as a result, though there was a spell when I was drinking three or four 20 ounce trucker's mugs a day thatI noticed odd, sporadic flutters in my chest. On doctor's advice I cut back a little. If anything, I maintain that my coffee habit ironically kept me from smoking because I never felt competent enough to maintain three vices simultaneously (beer being the other).

So here's to you, coffee - I'm a man now, thanks to you!

Welcome to my life, tattoo
I'm a man now, thanks to you
I expect I'll regret you
But the skin graft man won't get you
You'l be there when I die
Tattoo

"Tattoo", © Pete Townshend - The Who