Garfield once said, “I hate Mondays.”
(above: image search result for “public domain orange cartoon cat”)
In His honor, I’d like to introduce “‘I Hate’ Mondays,” a feature that runs on Mondays in which I rant about things I hate:
I HATE COLD COFFEE (and I hate people who like it for helping to make it a default)
I like a good cup of coffee. You hold this hot thing, which you know is gonna wake you up because heat is energy, and then you smell the aroma (a fancy word for “smell”) of it and that already gets your mind reeling, and then you drink it and pour the heat down the gullet, and now you’re damn near all the way awake, and then the drug hits and you’re good. Then later you feel like shit because it overstimulated your central nervous system and made you anxious, but at least you enjoyed the ride.
Cold coffee skips all this good shit and makes you feel like you’re supposed to be going to sleep until the drug hits later but you can’t even appreciate it because your body told you things were going in another direction. Cold things waking you up makes just as much sense as a downer named “reds” - I never took reds and don’t know what they are exactly, but red is the alarm color, not the chill out color, and everybody knows it.
Even the purveyors of cold coffee know they can’t sell it as “cold coffee,” so they use euphemisms like “iced coffee” or “cold brew.” The last is worse than the first: any time someone’s big selling point is that they cooked something without heating it up, the product is gonna be crap. Look at “frost-brewed Coors Light.” The reason they emphasize coldness is because if it gets even near normal serving temperature people will taste how bad it is. Nobody’s explained to me why not boiling things that you brew is supposed to be beneficial, and I refuse to learn it because I’m disgusted by the whole endeavor. “Wake up and smell the coffee!” “Oh, no, I can’t smell it, it’s in a little cold bottle in the fridge.” Disgusting.
There’s just no life in cold coffee, and that’s why our artists have always used hot coffee as a touchstone. Go look up some panels of Garfield, the original Monday-hater, and notice the difference between when he has the cup of coffee with a little line of steam rising from it, when he’s got one that’s inert. You can tell which one’s appealing and which isn’t. Or go watch Twin Peaks, either the original or the new one. I know people have a lot of opinions on David Lynch, but I don’t think his ability to depict coffee enjoyment is in question. That whole show would be terrible if the coffee were cold. It would make no sense, and not in a bizarre Lynchian way but just in a sad, confusing way, a world without any light to contrast with the darkness.
Bottom line is that coffee is a whole experience and drinking it cold fails to bring out its best elements. It’s like a cold soup, and not like borscht that’s meant to be cold, but like cold pho. Incidentally, a cup of Vietnamese iced coffee after a bowl of pho is one of the few times cold coffee makes sense, because you just had a whole bowl of hot water to prime you anyway and the cooldown makes sense while you wait for the drug to kick in. Speaking of hating coffee…
I HATE WHOEVER DID THIS
I occasionally use this comedy-writing app called Pitch, and I logged in this weekend to find the proposed “take” above, and even though I agree with the sentiment of it the timing was very bad for me. I’ve been hating cold coffee for years, and it was the first thing I had in mind when I thought of the idea for this column last Friday, and at the last minute this person pre-empts my take. I just did it anyway, though. Speaking of timing…
I HATE THE IRREVERSIBILITY OF TIME (especially with regards to mistakes)
In physics they teach you that time is a dimension, but that doesn’t really do us much good because even though we can walk all around the two flat dimensions and even go up and down a little, we really move only one direction when it comes to time. If you make a mistake and embarrass yourself or destroy something good or squander a bunch of time or whatever, you can’t go back and repair it or retry in a different direction. You just have to live in a shittier world of your making. In the game Zelda: Majora’s Mask, I think you keep going through the same time period again and again, but changing things each way through, or something. I loved the game Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and I never played it as a kid but I did play it during my second childhood in college and the mask game was the next one. So maybe that system of reality would be better, but on the other hand…
I HATE THE PROSPECT OF REVERSING TIME
It would be a headache and you could never move on with anything. I still think it would generally be better though, as long as everyone could do it in a way that we weren’t stepping on each other’s feet, but I hate it because it introduces a bunch of new problems. The guy in Groundhog Day hated it too. Anyway, no segue, but a Segway is a vehicle, and speaking of vehicles with dumb names…
I HATE “UBERS” (the company is bad, but I mean I hate calling them that)
I’ve seen “Ubers” and they’re just cars. They’re not hovercraft or any kind of different vehicle. They’re just cars where the person driving them got paid like 70% of what you paid their company to tell them to drive the car for you. And nobody is “your Uber driver” either, it’s just someone who’s driving the car at the time. It’s all just cars. Or SUVs or whatever, which really are just cars.
That said, I wouldn’t get in an “Uber” if it were some other thing, because it sounds like some Nazi shit to me. Speaking of which…
I HATE NAZIS
They’re bad. I think nobody should be them. It’s a thing you can not do if you don’t want to.
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