Coffee, and Desire

I think I am going to Vermont tonight. That’s good.
Let me explain to you about Cupcake and coffee: Cupcake’s a tea-drinking girl. Why is that, you ask? Because Cupcake loooooves coffee. Too much. When Cupcake lived in Italy, she drank at least eight espressos a day. (Technically, the plural is “espressi.”) Coffee can be a costly habit, and Cupcake tends to be thrifty.

It was not, however, the money that made Cupcake abandon coffee. It was the realization that the pleasure of the coffee she was drinking went unnoticed. She was always looking ahead, longingly, for the next cup, and the one after that.

And let me explain to you about Cupcake and dogs: Cupcake likes dogs because they live in the moment. As a girl who climbs up into the treehouse of her thoughts and won’t come down for dinner, Cupcake finds that dogs remind her to Be Here Now. Cupcake finds living with dogs to be a valuable practice. She comes home every day to be met by wagging Zen Masters, who keep her focused on the NOW. (When she can snatch the pebble from Momo’s paw, she knows it will be time to leave.)

When Cupcake realized that drinking coffee kept pushing her out of the present, she gave it up for years. She now drinks it only on special occasions, while muttering a warning to herself to be on the lookout for repercussions of unwarranted desire, which inevitably follow. For Cupcake, coffee is an addiction. She recognizes the defining maxim of addiction: “one is too many, and a thousand isn’t enough.”

As Cupcake says to herself when she is eschewing the siren’s song of coffee: “Anything I want that much has to be bad for me.”

Desire is fine, when it’s a pleasant tug on the sleeve of happy anticipation.

That’s the way Cupcake feels about tea. “Oh, goody! Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we?” That’s the way the thought of tea approaches her.

Coffee slides its hand up her thigh and says, “You know you want me.” She squirms, hoping to get away from its intoxicating scent, its guile, its practiced, expert seduction. She wants it desperately. But knows that if she succumbs she will give up her soul to have it; she will become slave to it. It will overtake her life. Again.

She must be guarded against it, despite her passion for it. It is a passion that will never be satisfied. Cupcake knows that one of the secrets to a happy life is to avoid, as much as humanly possible, desiring things that will lead to disappointment in the end.

There was something I wanted to do this weekend, something that never manifested. The entire weekend was about this thing (which is somewhat complicated, and inexcusably ridiculous, and too revealing for me to name). As I sat in the café staring into space over the newspaper, or listlessly packed another box of my possessions for my imminent move, or stood in the four-person-deep line at Tiffany’s to buy a present, this thing I wanted to do pressed against my head like an external migraine.

This thing offers no polite tug on the sleeve sort of anticipation. This weekend, Cupcake’s desire for this unnamed thing was arm-wrestling her roughly, practically tearing the cartilage in her rotary cuff. And it failed to find fruition, as such rough-tugging desires so often do. Cupcake was forlorn and weary of wanting, til about 3:30 am last night when she felt suddenly elated, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, seeing the humor in the situation and suddenly relaxing.

Her metaphorical arm hurts and bears a number of bruises, but she is otherwise unscathed.

Still. I am going to Vermont. It tends to reset the meter of my mind, and I think I need that. My brain turned over thousands of miles this weekend. I was not in the present, and the place where my mind took me was not a pretty or comfortable place.

Anything I desire that much has to be bad for me.

Oh, and bad for me it is. Time to hit that reset button, and drive.