Measuring out my life in coffee spoons

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…

- from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

It’s about 10 AM in the morning on Orthodox Easter Sunday, and I’m seated at the kitchen table and preparing to meet myself again for the first time. I don’t mean spiritually. I’m talking about coffee. Allow me to explain.

Several hours earlier, shortly after midnight, the Paschal liturgy had ended and the congregants filed out of the church and into the banquet hall where the feast awaited. There were traditional food baskets overflowing with vibrant red eggs, fatty sausage, fresh bread and cheese, wine and homemade mead, and tables laid out with meatballs and Asian chicken legs, spinach quiche, tiramisu, all manner of delights that we had mostly abstained from during the past forty-nine or so days of fasting. But the fast was over and the celebration had begun.

Except I didn’t eat much.

I have a dairy allergy. I didn’t relish the idea of accidentally eating cheese or butter and coughing my lungs out at 2 AM in the morning. Besides, I’m not that hungry at an hour when, normally, the only part of me digesting is a slumbering brain as it processes a day’s worth of emotion, turning it into dreams.

My own feast came later that morning, after a foreshortened sleep, when I settled down at my kitchen table before a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast. But the transgressive glories of nitrates and white carbs were not my true desire. It was the dark-roast coffee.

The traditional Lenten fast involves abstinence from meat, fish, dairy, oil, and wine, but I always include coffee. Not that I drink much. Just a cup or two a day. But once that cup has been taken away, I suddenly discover who I really was before coffee—or else I am suddenly deprived of who I really am. I can’t quite tell which.

After forty-nine days without coffee, I change. I’m not talking about the initial headaches, which fade. I mean that the person I become without coffee, while closely resembling the person I am with it, is not exactly the same. They are like two brothers, fraternal twins, the one upbeat, the other cranky and restless, the one light as a butterfly, the other thick-headed, his thoughts like stones and molasses.

I might not have to deal with these dual personalities if we didn’t have coffee, and we might not have coffee if it weren’t for the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans ruled an empire that spread across southeastern Europe and then struck into the heart of the continent, almost breaching the walls of Vienna in 1683. They were routed by an army led by John III Sobieski, and as the Turks fled in disarray, they left behind mysterious bags of dry brown beans.

If the Ottomans had won the battle, they might have taken all of Europe and we would have ended up with a theocracy. Instead, we got Starbucks. No disrespect to the Ottomans, who knew how to make a fine sofa, but I’m happier being ruled by an empire of cafes than an empire of sultans and backless chairs.

The cafe is where modern people with time on their hands go to get mildly high on caffeine. It is where great novels are read and sometimes written, where blue- and white-collar people stand in the same line, where the J. Alfred Prufrocks of the world go to measure out their lives in coffee spoons.

Most of my spoons are measured out in my kitchen, my countertop cafe consisting of an electric kettle, portable grinder, filters of smooth white ceramic and brown bamboo paper, shared with my fellow barista (and wife) Ruth Gaskovski. Here is where I perform my devotions, boiling the water, grinding the beans, pre-heating the mug, this and more, with all the care of a priest preparing the communion chalice behind the royal doors.

Coffee—I mean the caffeine in it—is a psychostimulant, a drug, not nearly as strong or addictive as the illegal stuff, but still a drug. It also enhances processing speed, as well as memory in adults and seniors (but not children). As of 2024, 67% of Americans reported having had a coffee in the past day, and I suspect most people don’t know how much they need it until they miss a cup. But I know. I would be willing to give up polyester, smartphones, AI, toilet paper, plastic (especially plastic), and a lot of other perks of civilization. But I’m not sure I’d be willing to give up the coffee.

Ever since I developed that dairy allergy, I stopped putting milk in my coffee and began to enjoy it like a purist: black as night, hot as hell, bitter as death. If society starts to fall apart, I’m not going to charge into the grocery store and stockpile on two-ply tissue. I’m going for the dark roast.

We depend so much on coffee that I don’t think we realize that we’re all walking around slightly intoxicated. Ever since the end of Great Lent, ever since my brain has been recharged on caffeine, I’ve had more energy than my teenage children, I’m multitasking better than most 20-year-olds, and the energy just doesn’t go away. My sleep is okay. Mostly.

Do I go off coffee every year to convince myself I can survive without it? Maybe. But fasting from coffee is also one of the few times in life when I discover how dependent I am on it. More than that, it’s one of the few times when dependency on a product becomes an existential question. Who is the real me? Is it me + coffee, or just me? Is it the energetic guy who butterflies his way through the day, or the cranky molasses brain who struggles not to fall asleep each interminable afternoon when the noonday demons begin casting their spells of boredom and lassitude?

To brew or not to brew, that is the question. The odd thing is, by the last or second-last week of the yearly fast, I’m often so used to my new self (my old coffee-free self) that I’m no longer sure that he’s inferior to the me + coffee self. Maybe they aren’t as different as I think?

Whatever the truth of it, I know this much. I cannot fully separate myself from the substance of civilization. I can fast from coffee, sure, I’ve done it before and I will do it again, but I can’t fast from dental floss, the laundry machine, or deodorant. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t be pretty. My identity is dependent, in part, on the manufactured stuff of modernity, those products and goods which I wear, drink, eat, sleep on, think through, travel inside of, until I die. And even then, I can’t just go back into the earth, but need to be boxed in a two thousand dollar casket, a final package delivery, arrival guaranteed.

We are frightfully entangled in our little luxuries. Even in death. These countless comforts are packed upon us like mud, like stone, as if we are statues hidden in blocks. Is there a heavenly Michelangelo who will come and chip the stone away, revealing the real me, the real you? For people of faith, the answer is yes. But even for us, in this life, we remain trapped in stone, caught in the darkness, and if we are not careful, we can become so dependent on the addictive stuff of civilization, so clouded and fogged over by its promises and conveniences, that, like Prufrock in T.S. Eliot’s poem, we end up alienated from ourselves, from reality, too unmoored and insecure to make even the smallest decisions.

“Shall I part my hair behind?” he wonders. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Prufrock couldn’t answer the simplest questions. Today he would ask Claude or ChatGPT. The dependencies of our age grow deeper, the fog ever thicker. We are all at risk of turning into Prufrocks. But I’m not convinced the way forward is to strip away all the conveniences of modern life. Humans are not like animals. We are too creative to be without creations.

Still, we can discern. We can simplify. Strive for more grounded lives. To admit this, I hope, is more like humility than weakness. I would rather be grateful for the wholesome comforts of civilization, rather than rejecting the whole of civilization. Even if I could, I will not have escaped that most fatal addiction: the one to myself.

So, what I say to you, I say to myself. Drink that mug of roasted fair-trade arabica if you like. But fast always in your heart, even when you’re not fasting in your belly or in your buying. Resolve to starve yourself of poisonous beliefs. Abstain from willful worrying, anger, and despair. Go hungry of all the dark passions.

When the bitter cup is empty, the other one overflows.

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Five Miscellanies

What have I been doing?

Most of my limited free time has been occupied with completing a novel, a prequel to Exogenesis. It should be out soon, I hope, if I can ever finish editing the 80,000 plus words, one by one, for the twenty-something’d time. Really, kids, don’t try this at home. If you are a book reviewer and interested in receiving an advance copy, you can message me here:

Speaking of novels:

Death and Devices

A sign of a great story is that you end up thinking about its characters, even when you aren’t actually reading it. That was how I felt about Anna Vander Wall’s young adult novel Death and Devices. Cozy, eerie, gripping and at times jarring, this is a shining debut by a writer with enormous raw talent.

Skipping School

Dixie Dillon Lane has just written a book on the history of home education, and no one’s better qualified, as she’s both a historian and homeschool mom. I was honored to walk the Camino pilgrimage in Spain with Dixie (and a wonderful group of people), where we discussed profundities, mundanities, and suffered blistered feet together, so I can vouch for her intelligence, wit, and empathy. You can pre-order Dixie’s book, Skipping School, right here, or even better, join her launch team.

Radical Neighbouring

“What does a human look like who’s not a consumer?” asks Adam Wilson in this short, award-winning documentary about a farmer who explores the gift economy. If you want to see a life lived simply, through wholesome dependency, this is it.

The Prufrock Poem

Here’s a link to T.S. Eliot’s poem. Greyly beautiful and beguiling, you need to read it aloud to fully experience it.