I typically take my coffee black — that isn’t something I take any sort of weird, shallow pride in. It’s a humble responsibility that I take on bravely knowing others aren’t capable of handling it. Originally, I was introduced to coffee with a lot of cream, but when I ran out of it I quickly adapted to black. I’m just not that picky. 

My relationship with coffee is inherently mechanical and uninspired. Drinking coffee is a vehicle to deliver caffeine to my brain. That’s mostly it. I have, at times, considered making it more of an appreciated ritual. My girlfriend has these pumps with various sugar free flavors for her, my Moms tea drinking seems more about the ritual than the drinks, and so on and so on. To them it’s the 2025 equivalent of drinking the blood of Jesus, it’s a holy rite delivered via Keurig. The only coffee ritual I conduct is watching the look of relief wash over a busy barista’s face when I order a hot black coffee. It’s my heroic act of the day. 

In Twin Peaks, FBI agent Dale Cooper ritualises his recurring cups of black coffee. He asks for it “black as midnight on a moonless night” — a phrase I love and, as of writing this, have just decided to steal. I worry at times that I don’t enjoy things like my morning cup of coffee enough. Like, maybe life is passing me by in some way if I’m just automatically inhaling my 200mg of caffeine. I’m not sure what kind of appreciation I’m even aspiring to. I don’t have a vision for this hypothetical, just that it’s one where I look like Dale Cooper with my woes cast aside as I appreciate the minutiae of life and drink my coffee. The reality is, my rituals are more around not drinking coffee than anything.

Twice a year I’ll slowly taper down my coffee drinking until I’m off of it entirely for 2 weeks. The process takes between 45 and 90 days as I drop from four to zero cups of coffee a day. Every dropped coffee is a flash bang grenade in my head, but I feel motivated to do this because it’s a way to show my control over it. I don’t worry about my ability to handle gambling, poor eating, or alcohol, but caffeine: caffeine is an addictive substance, a physically addictive substance. I’m both genetically vulnerable and morally weak to these kinds of things, so I feel the need to show control over it even if that’s simply not having a coffee. It’s not easy, either. What I feel during this time is true withdrawal – I am an insufferable person during this decline. I have headaches, I’m constantly tired, and I’m foggy as ever. 

Now that I think of it, maybe I’m the one taking the romance out of this. 

“We’re here for you Colin. When you pound Venti black coffees, you’re hurting those around you”

I say all of this because yesterday was my first zero coffee day, which means I’m in the worst of it. Getting up in the morning is herculean. Trying to work is like pressing opposite sides of magnets together, only to see them fly apart. At 4pm I was nearly falling asleep, so I decided to take a walk. Now, I’m in Chicago so it’s 20 degrees out¹. The cold woke me up. Hard not to be awake when you’re being blasted with wind that’s well below freezing. 

The world doesn’t really feel human this time of year. No one else was walking about, only the occasional car. In contrast to the summer, where you can hear many echoes of people enjoying the outdoors, it’s instead deathly quiet. The only sound is the wind and, occasionally, a dog barking at me from behind a closed window. Given the circumstances, I have to imagine I’m the most interesting thing they’ve seen all day. While I miss recent times where I could walk around without my face hurting (and high on my third coffee), I do really like the silence. I like being an exception to the silence rather than being an exception to the noise. When I eventually meandered back I had a bump in natural energy, but now I’m quickly slipping back into that coffee-deprived veil. I have to keep remind myself it’s only a few more days and I’ll be better.  I’m going to rewatch Twin Peaks. 

Colin

RIP David Lynch

1. Okay – cards on the table I wrote this in December, you’ll have to use your imagination