Drinking Coffee Alone
Drinking coffee in a paper-to-go cup is something I prefer to do alone. I sit in my car and crane my neck forward until my lips find the tip of the hot cup held away from my body. I contort my body like Naricssus as imagined by Carvaggio to avoid a coffee spill on my shirt. That first sip of hot coffee is I imagine what an ostrich feels like when it get its head stuck in the sand. On this first sip, I can sense that the hot coffee has melded with the paper cup to produce a concoction that transcends the concept of coffee. I will inevitably spill some coffee on myself when I squeeze the delicate paper cup too hard, and the cap comes loose. The little black cap that the barista had put on with the focus and precision of a veteran playing the carnival claw machine. Most baristas have given up on this practice. Now they place the black caps away from the bar, on an island, along with cream or whatever. Here, you can join all the other customers in playing a game of carnival claw machine with the coffee cup. Few walk out victorious. Most walk away fuming and pondering why they spent $3.25 and tip to be humiliated like this.
I thought paper cups must be part of the liberal George Soros agenda, just like what they did with the straws. So I went to a Christian-run coffee shop. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that there were no liberal neon signs. You know, the ones that hang in the middle of a white wall, usually lit up with the lyrics of a song from the 80s. None of that "This must be the place," "Just like heaven," "Should I stay or should I go" stuff. Instead, I was greeted with a large neon sign that preached the word of god. The coffee shop had no other decor - just the pink neon sign and bare, blank white walls. The lighting gave the impression that I was in urgent care or had died and gone to heaven. Every corner was so well-lit that if there was evil lurking there would be no place for it to hide. May be so well-lit that it gave god a migraine and drove him away. The coffee was still in a paper cup. It tasted like it was made around the time Noah got on his ark. I turned a corner, threw it out, and then asked god for forgiveness.
I recently found a coffee shop that served their coffee in paper cups that held together. I knew it was a great cup when I put on the cap. A satisfying click reassured me that all was well and the contents were intact. They charged me $4.25 for coffee. That's a dollar more than what I usually pay. My coffee shop source tells me that normal paper cups, the ones that eventually end up in your stomach, cost around a buck each. That's at the lower end. For a buck, you can get a cup that eventually ends up in your intestines as thousands of shards of microplastics.
I suppose coffee shops could encourage customers to bring their own flasks or mugs. The neon signs could say, "A dollar off if you bring your own coffee vessel." Instead, all you get are warnings in bold lettering that say, "Contents of cup may be hot," along with perpetual confusion about which trash to throw the cup in—is it recycling, garbage, or a secret third thing?
After my first sip of coffee in my car, I place the paper cup in the cup holder in the middle. I watch the scalding hot contents slosh around as I take turns and apply brakes. There's coffee in the cup holder. There's coffee overflowing the sides of the paper cup. There's coffee in the little crevice between the driver's seat and the cup holder. The annoying crevice into which I've dropped my keys several times. The annoying crevice that probably holds several cigarette lighters, grocery bills, and pens. I twist my arm into unnatural positions to retrieve items lured into this crevice. I do this when no one is looking, just like how I drink coffee.