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Some half-caf commentary

By Ed Goldman

According to the Wall Street Journal, we may be getting to the point where someone will admonish us to “Wake up and smell no coffee!”

The newspaper reports that the new A-list brag is telling everyone you’re “off” coffee. And like every recent convert to religion, sobriety and romance, the NUCs (newly un-caffeinated) can’t shut up about it. 

I’d be very concerned about this spreading among the so-called Influencers if I were the owner of Starbuck’s, Peet’s, Seattle’s Finest or even Folger’s Instant Coffee (“Tastes like mud because it was ground this morning” is my suggested motto). 

I was already concerned to find there are people even considered to be Influencers whom I’ve never heard of. Seriously, who the hell are Cristiano Ronaldo, MrBeast and Virat Kohli? They’re in the Top 17 of Social Media Influencers (according to social media). To me, they sound like a flamenco dancer, the host of a horror-movie matinee on a local TV station and a hot-yoga position, respectively. Feel free to culture-cancel me at any time. 

To get back, I really like coffee. Now, I’m not one of those people who claim to be nonfunctional before they intravenously inject their first five cups every morning but I do understand its allure. I brew a pot almost daily—and the fact that I do this that often should give you an idea of how much of it I consume.

And I’ll grant you that when I go to make some and the canister in which I store the beans is empty, to say I “panic” would be an overstatement—as would saying I break land-speed records driving to the coffee shop to refill the canister and yell at the barista who takes more than seven seconds to process my order. Believe me, the words “What are you, half man/half sloth?” have never been uttered by me. Nope. That video you saw of me doing so on YouTube was clearly created by A-I.

“A person’s cafe order can be a kind of personality cypher,” writes Lane Florsheim in the Journal. “Black-coffee devotees are hard-core. A single espresso evokes sophistication. Then there are those who don’t drink coffee at all. Superhuman? Alien? Or maybe they know something we don’t.”

Okay, let’s unpack, as I wish I had the nerve to say to Arizona bar patrons. 

In the first place, why did the Journal hire somebody whose surname implies a connection with shoe manufacturers. Would it be in bad taste for me to barge into the paper’s offices and demand to see if everyone there is shod in Florsheims? Is that how Lane got the job?

Now notice the very careful hyphen placement in the sentence “Black-coffee devotees are hard-core.” No, not the one separating “hard” from “core.” The other one. Without that little dash we’d see attorneys from the ACLU contact the newsroom so fast it’d seem like they’d been up all night, drinking—well, you know.