Still keepin' it real.

Coffee
Originally uploaded by grb3000.

Yeah, I pay three bucks for a cup of java at the ultra-hip, frou-frou coffee clubs like everyone else these days. And yeah, I've developed a taste for the high brow, high priced, highly prized coffee beans found in only one farm in Columbia, grown by only one family in central America, chosen intuitively by only one species of small jungle cat in the rain forest, and available for a limited time at only the most exclusive coffee houses, or only at the most broadly expanding coffee chain. Organic, pea-berry, fair trade, hand pressed, no sugar, hold the cream, just the blessed juice of the bean, please barristta. Yeah, I am one of those guys, just like you.

But...

I haven't forgotten my roots. Sometimes, like this morning for instance, I buy my coffee for 89 cents at the same place I buy my gas. And I pump both myself. I put my hand to the communal coffee pot and fill my styrofoam cup with twenty ounces of the people's elixer of life. This is how my people have done it for generations, in the days when "tall" meant "tall" and "venti" meant "you ain't from around here are you, boy?"

So today I drink my 89 cent gas station coffee from a styrofoam cup. Today I drink with the truck drivers and the contractors, the plumbers and the electricians, the farmers and the men of every profession, fingertips thick with decades of real labor, and ask "who the hell puts a little cardboard skirt on a cup of coffee?" Today I drink with our grandpas, our fathers and our uncles Don and Dwayne, far too savy to fall for the marketing ploys of girly men in green aprons.

Cheap coffee, we are humbled by your unpretentious dignity. We are quickened by your caffinated simplicity. Today we lift our disposable cups to you.