Back on the Wagon
Moderation: the avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in one's behaviour or political opinions.
For the past few months, I’ve been guzzling caffeinated beverages like there was no tomorrow. Namely tea and coffee. I’m not a normal drinker of such things though. When I start drinking coffee, I don’t just have one, I have three, and when I was in someone’s house on cat sitting duties recently, I was informed that there were coffee beans in the press should I wish to help myself. And so, I ground up the beans and had 3 or 4 mugs of the stuff in the space of an hour, like I usually do with instant coffee, and then I actually dozed off on the couch. I don’t know how long I was dozing for but I woke up feeling extremely nauseous, shaky, and funny in the head generally. I thought there was something very seriously wrong with me but then after a couple of glasses of water and such I started to feel a bit better. Later, I realised that the beans I had ground and prepared were for making espresso and you’re not really supposed to drink that much espresso all at once. According to the FDA website, 1200mg of caffeine consumed rapidly can cause seizures in people and I calculated that I had had at least 1300mg, what with the two coffees I had when I got up and the one I got in the petrol station on the way to do my cat sitting duties. Stupid is as stupid does, and I guess I can be pretty stupid sometimes.
Anyway, I felt so positively ill after my coffee overdose that I decided to completely quit the stuff… hopefully forever this time. My name is Richard and I am a caffeine addict. It has been one week since I have last indulged and I have been feeling pretty bloody floaty in the head and spaced out generally. I’ve had extreme fatigue and what might well be close to narcolepsy. Every time I quit coffee, I am always stunned by how strong the withdrawals are. Coffee is such an omnipresent commodity that it seems strange that quitting slurping the stuff could have such strong effects. Every time I quit coffee; I start drinking bucket loads of tea. I think of it as the way a heroin addict might think of methadone, a substandard product to take the edge off withdrawals. However, tea gives me stomach pain for some reason, I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve read on various online forums that people with IBS attribute tea’s tannin content to causing them problems. Some even postulate that tea causes them gastric upset because of its naturally occurring high fluoride content. But who knows. All I know for sure is that coffee makes me super giddy, nervous, causes me cramps and obliterates my running stamina, while tea wrecks my stomach. These things wouldn’t be issues, I’m sure, if I were capable of consuming such things in moderation, but I’ve never been terribly good at that and they say that if you’re a fool at 40 you’re a fool forever and so I don’t anticipate being any good at it at any time in the near future.
And so, today I am one week off of coffee and one day off of tea. I woke up this morning and went to turn on my phone, but the battery was dead. My first impulse was to get up and plug it in on the other side of the room, but then I realised it’s really just another thing that I am addicted to. It’s far too easy to spend countless hours swiping away through things on one’s phone. I’ve sometimes even found myself looking at it when in the cinema at a movie I’ve paid to see. Oftentimes one sees whole rooms full of people tapping and swiping away and I saw a meme recently with the caption “Let’s get married so we can spend the rest of our lives together looking into our phones”, which is funny because it’s true but it’s also a bit sad.
And so, I got up this morning and decided to renounce my phone for one day of the week. The lord’s day. A day of rest from all of the noise of the world. Marching out into the day for my morning constitutional I felt free. And then, walking down towards the beach I thought I might continue with an audiobook I’ve been listening to, but then I realised I had no phone. Approximately ten minutes later I thought I might like to walk out to an island that’s only accessible when the tide is out and while it looked possible to do so, I wasn’t sure if the tide was on its way in or out but I thought I could check on my phone but then I realised – no phone. Approximately 3 minutes after that I thought of something I might like to buy online – but I again realised I had no phone. It’s really quite ridiculous how utterly addictive these things have become. Anyway, I probably thought about my phone a bunch more times on my walk, but I now feel quite determined that I will resist its pulling me into the matrix for at least one day per week. It may ultimately be a losing battle as the things are so embedded in our lives now, but if I can beat caffeine addiction, I can bloody well stay out of the matrix one day a week. By the end of my walk, I wonder what the hell I’m going to do all day with no phone and no coffee, and so I sit down to write this little ramble. Perhaps I’ll go to mass later, or something.