om nom coffee.

coffee is a coping mechanism.  I take a drink and I think.  I clear my head and I think about the coffee.  I think about the bean, born in harsh conditions in a drug fueled nation, poor underpaid peasants digging through the dirt, going home every day in clothes that are permanently stained because they most likely have only the one pair, taking their meager existence day by day and living a life of subsistence where the greatest hope is merely to survive.  I think of those beans traveling the miles, carelessly packed and enduring the journey to some unknown processing plant where they are beaten, pummeled, abused in every way science has discovered before they are freeze dried and zipped into useless bags or cans by some unthinking uncaring machine operated by an unthinking uncaring operator whose life is only slightly more tolerable than the bean picker, whose life is defined by commercials set between tv programming for the lowest common denominator, common dreck whose glazed eye perceptions barely make it past blunt, obvious, and mostly brainless content, whose largest concern is the ticking of the clock towards the inevitable punch out time only to regain his dread anew with the knowledge of the impending inevitable next day.  The bags or cans are then shipped, trucked, hauled, forced onto display shelves, sold into slavery as it were, bought, stolen, and inhaled without a thought, without even an intuition of the pain and suffering they had survived.  But I think of it.  I realize all the pain and suffering in each and every cup.  I don't even like the taste.  I pour sugar and creamer until the taste is gone and all that remains is a cup of hot tan sweetness.  And as I gulp it down I think of the coffee as a god might contemplate a moral.  And that is what helps me get through the day.