A Cough-Free Man of Tea

Ned here. I've been trying to hold off on this debate until someone else posted something - so I don't come across as an overzealous Neddy - but, seeing how it took me two months to blow my first log, maybe things are kind of balancing out.

Something that makes me blow logs of a different metaphorical nature: coffee.

Coffee: smells great, less filling. That's because it induces vomitting. One time in college, while in the desperate throes of a panicky all-nighter, I'm not proud to say I turned to coffee. I'd heard a lot of buzz around town about the brown bean. I figured now more than ever I needed that buzzing in my brain to carry me through. It was about 4:19 in the morning. I was slogging into one of the hardest hours, typing about one word every ten minutes trying to get a ten page paper off the ground. I felt like the Wright Brothers must have felt for years as Momma Wright cursed their sorry asses up and down the dinner table. "Failure," my Mom's voice rang clear as the swiftly approaching day, while I sheepishly fiddled with the font size and scanned the thesaurus looking for phrases to replace my one syllable words. "Here goes nothing," I said to my sleeping roommate, a false bravado, as I spooned a pot's worth of freeze-dried instant orange-flavored coffee into my mouth. I swallowed. I swallowed for my Mom. I swallowed for all my Luddite ancestors who paved over the Bering Straight with their frozen and dried coagulated blood just to get me to this free world. I swallowed with tears in my eyes.

Then I blacked out. I came to in a parking lot about 10 blocks away - skippin' rope and singing songs of a simpler time. When I got home, I took a good long look in the mirror - eyes recessed into dark sockets, hoarse singing voice, bulging calf muscles, and hair that looked like I tried to fornicate with a light socket in a bath tub. I haven't touched the bean since. Oh, if you got it, I'll sniff it up and down like this is my last day on God's green earth and God took away my other four senses and dropped me off on the outskirts of a Guatemalan farming village with a booming command to "experience nature at its finest young brotha" or my name ain't Nedd Ludd. But I don't smoke that shit any more.

I do, however, still smoke tea leaves. Especially the various herbal mint flavors. Then I compose quatrains and make up new dances to go along with them. This one involves a lower body "running man" while wiggling your fingers as if you're playing the clarinet and sticking out your tongue like a jack-ass: "poetically prophetic/ like a brewed tea leaf in yo' empty mug brutha/ waste not want not is my song/ cutting up a rug as I fire up a bong."

[If you or any of your friends want to submit a video of you or any of your friends attempting this dance while singing the quatrain, it will be posted.]

Coffee Versus Tea

When this topic was posed to me, I thought, how can I choose? Tea, who is there for me at the first sign of a cold and stays with me during those long sick days. Even coming back around on hot summer days, adorned with lemon, sweating seductively into a cardboard coaster. Oh, and there are so many varieties….When I visit my sister I drink black tea with milk and sugar, other times it is green tea I crave. I have never been one to refuse a cup of Sleepytime and yet I think mint is my all time favorite.

All that being said, the smell of coffee wafting in from the kitchen to my bed is akin to a siren’s cry. I get up knowing I will soon be in the sweet embrace of caffeine that will carry me through the day. I have to shake the thought of a tangy cup of lemon zinger and remember it is coffee who sustains me. That black tea with milk and sugar my sister is so fond of making only gets me through to unearthing the old french press she has banished to her garage.

I am a fair-weather friend to tea. I’ll see tea at a party and we can pick-up where we left off, never skipping a beat. We’ll make plans for lunch or to get together at the pub some night after work, but we both know neither of us will call. Tea has grown used to hearing my hoarse voice pleading, beckoning it when I succumb to my seventh cold of the year and it always comes to my rescue.

But, it is coffee I need. Coffee who at 22 made me feel like a haggard old bag lady when I dismissed it one morning. Coffee who when neglected exacts its revenge in the form of fatigue and headaches. Maybe it does taste like a shoe, but I don’t care. It’s my shoe.

Teas and Coffees. And, Rush!

In the world of hot beverages there really are only two contenders. If you think yerba matte is close, you're off. If you love hot cider, great, that's not on normal folks' radar. You got coffee and tea.

I begin the majority of my weekdays with a hot tea. I've never cared for coffee. The taste, simply, reminds me of a shoe. And, I don't always want the caffeine coffee brings to the shoe-like world in which it resides. Sometimes I just want a hotty that will warm me up and leave my taste buds saying, "yes, i know what's going on here. It's a Tuesday. Peppermint, yo!"

I've included photos for you to admire. Either the photography is akin to an orgy or your souther regions ain't a-workin'!

Several weeks ago while drinking my morning peppermint tea I stumbled on a lil' news story about my favorite conservative talk-show host: Rush. I've taken the liberty of attaching the clip below, so you can enjoy Rush's latest. In it Rush concedes his hope for an Obama failure. If Obama fails doesn't that, too, mean this country fails? Maybe it's just Obama's "socialistic" tendencies that he hopes fail. I'll admit that I don't agree with everything Obama does, but I can tell you that had an analyst on any side of the issue said, "I hope he fails" about Bush that individual would have been clearly labeled, by several of the rights more vitriolic talking heads, "un-American" or "anti-American" faster than you or I could say Joe Ray McCarthy.

I won't do that, because I feel the term, in itself, is un-American when applied to dissent. I think Rush has crossed a line, though. This isn't merely dissent, Rush.

Seriously, who takes this guy seriously? I've also taken the liberty of adding some Bill O'Reilly gems below. Enjoy!

Let me know what you think!