Coffee: My Benevolent Addiction

Latte art: It tastes as good as it looks. Even better, in fact.

I can’t remember my first cup of coffee. I was too young to recall it. My grandparents used to serve it to me all the time. I’m not sure if my parents were too pleased with their kindergartner drinking caffeine, but I loved it. I used to mix my coffee with chocolate and/or ice cream. (My mom claims I once mixed it with root beer, but I don’t remember that.) This was back in the 1980s, well before there was a Starbucks on every corner. Sometimes I wonder if I could have led the 1990s café craze if only I had been a little older.

I started going to coffee shops in high school. I wasn’t the most socially adept teenager (to put it mildly), so I usually went alone. That was how I discovered the creative aspect of the café. I started doodling and writing and found that the caffeine combined with the crowd really fueled my mind.

While too much of anything can be bad, I think that coffee is for the most part a benevolent addiction. For me, it helps spur creativity and keep me in tip-top mental shape. As an artist and an intellectual, I appreciate the coffee shop as a center of thinking, a mental gymnasium for me and my creative peers.