Black Coffee and Sadness

I am training myself to drink black coffee. Because, you know, there wasn't enough bitterness in my life what with the pandemic and all.

Really, this all started a few weeks ago, when my ancient coffeemaker died.  It had served me well, providing far too much caffeine for far too little effort since I bought it for about $8 from a Costco in 2011.  It's been tossed into pantries and abandoned, lived through a classroom full of students abusing it, survived a career change that required SO MUCH MORE coffee than I ever anticipated, even clogged a few times, but it's always survived. Suddenly, ten days into a pandemic, and nope, time for the Little Coffee Maker Than Could to eat it.

I went to Target and bought myself a new one - a better one! - for a whole $20.

This coffee maker and I got along great for a few weeks - fresh, delicious, piping hot coffee that made the world feel a little better when it was cold and dark and awful (and not just in my house).

Then it went bad. Every cup tasted overly bitter, oily, burnt. Something was wrong - something that couldn't just be solved by cleaning the carafe, though that certainly helped.

It took me a few days until I figured it out: the creamer. My normal creamer somehow didn't get along with this new coffee maker -- the coffee turned to bitter, gross sludge. Maybe I'd added powdered vanilla caramel one too many times and the flavor rebelled. Maybe I'd tried to go sugar-free too many times and the coffee itself gave up all hope of tasting even remotely palatable. Whatever it was, every single cup was ruined.

Which brings me to yesterday. 

Yesterday, after my first cup of disgusting coffee was poured down the drain, I realized I still had half a carafe that was hot and, more importantly at 8am, caffeinated.

I poured it in a mug and stared at it for a while.

I've never liked black coffee - it tastes too much like punishing myself first thing in the morning, and if I'm going to do that, I may as well work out instead.  Sure, I've been teased over the fact that really, I'd prefer my caffeine in the form of a candy bar in a cup (aka, a skinny white chocolate mocha, and no, the irony is not lost on me). Sure, I've struggled to find tolerable gas station coffee that I can stomach while on road trips or vacations in order to stave off the headache long enough to make it through the day.  But I've never given up on creamer and so much sugar that it makes other people cringe from across the room.

But yesterday... I knew. I had to make the effort. I was drinking too much coffee every day, and it was so bad, that there was no way black coffee could possibly be worse.

I took one sip and promptly realized how wrong I was.

That said - it was still better than whatever unholy concoction I'd made and thrown out the day before, so I decided to see what I could do.

After scrounging around my nearly-empty (read: only vegetables and fruit left, what a crisis) pantry and fridge, I located a container of half and half and a couple of sugar packets. Hm. Once the sniff-test deemed the half and half acceptable, it was go-time.

About a tablespoon poured into the mug, tendrils of creamer roiling through the hot coffee. I stirred and stared - could I do it?

Nope - needed more empty calories. I added a sugar packet, stirred again, and finally took a sip.

It was pretty good.

A feeling of immense pride swept over me: I was drinking my coffee black. Well, black for me - it wouldn't give me diabetes on impact nor would it cause me to spontaneously throw up, so that qualified as a win in my book.

This morning, I repeated the experiment -- perhaps my results yesterday had been skewed. Perhaps the quarantine was getting to me. It seemed almost reasonable that I'd hallucinated a nearly-plain cup of coffee and had instead driven myself to the only open Starbucks in my city.

So I tried again -- the same tablespoon of cream and a single sugar packet, and I was bopping along, happy as Zipper on Bunny Day on a deserted island while I tried to intelligently interrogate my new coworkers on our clients and their projects.

Even while typing this, I remain proud of myself - this is growth! I've never enjoyed black coffee in my life! Could this be it? Have I made a breakthrough?

Only time, and the continued sadness of being trapped in my house, and quite a bit more mostly-black coffee, will tell.