Black Coffee & Bodega Wisdom

You know, I’m not entirely sure when or why I started drinking black coffee but in my head I blame it on my father, probably because I tend to blame the more bitter aspects of my personality on him. My cynicism, obsession with olives, and inability to not poke holes in the world around me are all imbued with the myth that I have built around the man that made me. When I lived in New York, the guy behind the counter at my local bodega used to mock me when I would say that the only thing I wanted in my coffee was coffee. “Lighten up” he would chuckle, “there’s too much going on out there to take the morning that seriously.” He was, of course, correct because bodega wisdom is among the most real of creeds.

Mornings are important, more important than most of us allow them to be. The average American experiences 27,375 mornings but will spend the majority of them struggling to get their world in order so that they can make it somewhere on time. Rarely do we give ourselves permission to revel in the simple absurdity of being awake, of transforming from an inert bag of meat, capable of endless imagining, into a living machine, capable of unknown and unknowable feats of cognition. You wake up every day, driven by forces that you can barely comprehend despite the fact that you only had a 1 in 400 quadrillion chance of existing in the first place.

That, my dudes, is punk as fuck.

How often do you let your morning be a morning?

How often do you find yourself slowly coming alive inside of a day that you feel doesn’t belong to you?

How often do you reject the gift of stillness because it feels unproductive?

I’ll probably spend my entire life trying and failing to be a morning person but I’m ok with that because somehow I manage to continually wake up and throw my body into a world that won’t stop performing for me. What a privilege it is to share this world with y’all, to have the opportunity to put one foot in front of the other and make a life on this floating rock we call home.

This morning I put some honey in my coffee to remind myself that these days we share are only ever as sweet as we let them be.