Useless. Here's me, wanting to write about my feelings on my favourite drug of all time, caffeine, and yet there's no tidy little sociobox to file my report under. Instead, I've had to put this one under Romance and Relationships, since my on/off courtship with coffee and tea is exactly that. A taxing, arduous romance, speckled with little chocolate sprinkles of absolute joy..
Here's what ol' Wikipedia says about caffeine:
"Caffeine is a xanthine alkaloid compound that acts as a psychoactive stimulant in humans. The word comes from the French term for coffee, café..."
Ok so far, but I'm going to skip down the page to the important bit.
"Caffeine intoxication
An acute overdose of caffeine, usually in excess of 400 milligrams (more than 3–4 cups of brewed coffee), can result in a state of central nervous system overstimulation called caffeine intoxication. Some people seeking caffeine intoxication resort to insufflation(snorting) of caffeine powder, usually finely crushed caffeine tablets. This induces a faster and more intense reaction. The symptoms of caffeine intoxication are not unlike overdoses of other stimulants. It may include restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushing of the face, increased urination, gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, a rambling flow of thought and speech, irritability, irregular or rapid heart beat, andpsychomotor agitation In cases of much larger overdoses mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, loss of social inhibition, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis,rhabdomyolysis, and death may occur."Scary stuff right? I mean, how many psychoactive compounds do you know you can buy legally and without prescription? And here's the odd bit. Apart from the last symptom (death) I pretty much experience every single one of those effects every time I have a strong cup of coffee. I don't need to snort the shit like some depraved coffee-ground junkie, just drinking a strong cup of java will do it.
That's right, I'm a caffeine lightweight. (Hangs head in shame)
Coffee and tea absolutely batter me senseless. This is a fact. In much the same way that a massive line of cocaine would completely batter me, the only difference is that with coffee instead of being instantly bored of everything and telling everybody so in a loud and beligerant way, I instead find my mind racing at about 10,000 thoughts a second. This can be useful when I'm in a creative mood, such as when I'm writing something, drawing or playing my guitar or whatever, but if there's anything in any way important to do, forget it. It mentally incapacitates me. In my last office job that I had, my work colleagues quickly became aware of this fact. One time, after a particularly vicious columbian affair (coffee not coke), I sat staring slack-jawed at nothing in particular on my monitor for over twenty minutes, eyes crossed slightly, drooling like a catatonic spastic and muttering to myself incoherantly, before Mandy (or whatever her stupid name was) leant over, tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I needed a tissue. Mathematics genius that I am, I soon learned well the equation Ben + Coffee = Human Squid.
For me, drinking a cup of coffee is a terrible gamble. I risk an almost cataclysmic mental breakdown with every sip, like some ancient hero presented with the chalice of the gods.
"Drink from this cup of the great god Oogah Boogah, oh brave knight, and knowledge eternal shall be yours! But know this! 'Tis a terrible poison which can send a sane man mad!" Or whatever.
The benefits seem obvious though. Feeling awake when you should be shattered is the least of it. I experience an almost unimaginable phrenic acceleration, breakneck and relentless, barrel rolling like an out of control jet fighter piloted badly by some cranked up methhead, teetering on the very brink of sanity, my brain giving birth to ever increasingly ridiculous spurts of twitching, amphetamine-like jibberish. Boiling, ever evolving mental diahorrea, ejected. I watch poetry forming itself spontaneously, repeating in a loop until it shatters and fragments into an echolalic noise, then a piece of music, then if I'm really lucky a picture, or a philosophy, or a universe. You should get the idea here. Total, utter fucking beautiful madness, hot and steamy with a dash of milk. Occasionally I'll be able to record some of this feverish sweaty excretion, usually by shakily writing a few words down, hammering a scatty beat out or by sketching something very weird. Often I'm doing this as much to keep myself rooted in normality, to avoid spiraling into an inescapable vortex of earl grey flavoured headfuck. Amongst all this wreckage, these trains of thought not so much derailed as forcibly shredded into strips of white hot confetti and puked into a bubbling primordial swamp of unintelligable faff, the intact and remembered thoughts I've had whilst high as a kite have ranged from absurd to absolute crackpot mental asylum escapee genius. If only I could hold onto one of them long enough to take it anywhere... I've probably cured cancer twenty times over only to have the revelation completely smothered by the image of an ex-girlfriend bumming herself with her own corkscrew face in a twisted, endless mobius strip of pornagraphic wrongness.GET OUT OF MY HEAD!
The times that I've really damaged myself on this evil brew, I won't talk about. Suffice to say that sitting in a corner rocking backwards and forth waiting for it to end, like you do on a bad trip, is about the easiest it's been. Someone once described me as "twich lord". I fear pro-plus almost as much as I fear beetroot, but not quite. And a cup of coffee as a hangover cure? Are you mentally limited? I have never ever felt so much misery as having drank an entire bottle of vodka the night before and then thinking that drinking a litre of coke to "pep me up" would be a good idea. Cue eight hours of utterly mindtwatting misery convulsively punctuated by long, slow shuddering bursts of projectile vomiting. RESULT!
I'm not the only person who seems to be so sensitive to caffeine either, my mate Ben is even worse than me, he reckons a misplaced cup of coffee can screw his day. What is wrong with us?
At least I don't need to be spending large amounts of money on addictive, heavily cut class-A narcotics when riding the knife edge between heaven and hell can be bought for a couple of quid down the local cornershop.
See you all in outer space.
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