Heard a good coffee rant lately? Me neither. Let’s have one, shall we?
I’ve actually cut back on my coffee. See, coffee has a rich tradition. The main reason that we drink coffee is that the English were greedy and the Americans were cheap. The English, back when they still screwed things up for us rather than leaving us to screw things up for ourselves, decided to gouge us a little more with an insane tax on tea. It is bad enough that our government taxes gasoline and liquor. Imagine if they taxed coffee. There would be people rioting in the streets. Which is damn near what happened when the English taxed tea. We dumped a lot of it in the bay (blamed the Indians) and then just stopped drinking it.
“Give me something as black as my heart and half as bitter!” they said, and we got coffee. Sweet, sweet coffee. But coffee does things to your body that you would be much better off doing with liquor and cigars. I mean, you only get to die once, so you have to ration out how you kill yourself. I like coffee because it gets me back to the “throw the bastards in the bay, to hell with the king and to hell with his taxes!” mentality that I love. Tea, on the other hand, has its own redeeming qualities. So I have replaced my afternoon coffee with twice as much afternoon tea.
Oh, the millions of indigenous peoples oppressed for tea. Your tears infuse every drop, and they are so, so sweet. Arrogant English Bastards (the purest, most sublime form of arrogant bastard, for which they should rightly be admired) fought the Dutch for centuries for the right to hold oppressive colonies all over the world to fuel a tea obsession. They trained the tea smugglers of the 18th century, who kept the tradition alive long enough to smuggle booze into America during prohibition, fuel the rise of the Mafia, and pass the tradition along to our current drug cartels.
But, as will all things, it is being subverted by hippies. First the Starbucks hippies corrupted coffee, and they are corrupting tea, too. They don’t carry a good brand like Bigelow or Twinnings at the drug store under our building, so I end up buying Tazo from Starbucks. Not only is it shit, but it is covered in hippie propaganda. The only saving grace is that hippies are smart enough to know when to stop and avoid me slaying them. They have all their cutesy names for their bullshit blends, like “Awake” and “Zen” and “Om” and “Horny” and “Calm”. But they don’t fuck with what I’m coming for. Earl Grey. He was a proper Victorian Bastard. He was the Victorian Era, some would say, with the Reform Act. He pissed off lots of chaps with that one, but he had such a nice tea that they didn’t kill him in a duel. And now, I can sit here and drink it and think of what it would have been like had I been born in Victorian England. And an aristocrat. And rich. And that they had proper toilets. Kinda like how Alex looks at the bible in A Clockwork Orange.
What am I saying? My people were Welsh and Irish. We would have gladly killed him for a farthing just for being English. I guess what I am trying to say, is that since I want my beverages to be based on the suffering of others and compatible with my personal general cussedness, tea will do just as well as coffee.