Rao’s is out of Organic Sumatra, and stay away from their special roast of La Minita, but the regular Sumatra is even better then I remember it. White Electric is doing interesting things mixing fair trade coffees with more predictable roasts. And Espresso Royale has their Ethiopian as the COD(coffee of the day) this evening which is my warning flag to get a press pot.

Which is my way of saying, I drink too much coffee.

I was talking with Linda recently, and she was telling me about an Eastern conception of coffee and caffeine that saw it as robbing energy from your permanent stores to get you that rush – it doesn’t come from nowhere, and each cup depletes your balance.

Being a Western boy, this piece of wisdom got translated into water metaphors, water being totemic for those of us who grow up west of the 87 degree line. Images of the verdant California sprung to mind, the desert transformed by the giant insect-like irrigation rigs. But with coffee am I perhaps drawing too much from the deep wells? Is it drilling into a gusher that pours out thousands of gallons a second, water levels that rose slowly each year, trapping the precious winter melt that comes rolling off the Sierras. Is this my equivalent of tapping out the Oglala, the seemingly bottomless aquifer which is threatening to disappear, turning the Midwest into the worlds largest bust bowl. And could I, one day, look like the glittering fields in Pajaro where the water level has dropped so low that the ocean has started to creep in bringing its deadly load of salt with it.

At the very least maybe these sort of ideas wouldn’t thrust themselves with such powerful dream-time logic into my waking thoughts.