Cup of No

The longer I live in this city, the longer I'm amazed by people's addiction to coffee. Every morning, people rely on coffee to jumpstart their day. Otherwise-impatient people wait in long lines at Starbucks, and others make sure they get their caffeine fix as soon as they get to the office. But I just don't understand why so many people are slaves to the java bean.

What's funny is that I actually like the concept of coffee—just not its taste. Because on the surface, the appeal is understandable; what a better way to start your day than with a steaming beverage that awakens your senses and invigorates your body?

But in its darkest, purest form (black), I find the taste overly strong and insipid. Of course, I forgot to add cream and sugar, you say. Yes, that makes it better, but that doesn't say a lot about coffee itself, does it? Think about when you were young, and the only way to make Grape Nuts tolerable was to overload it with sugar. That didn't mean Grape Nuts was a naturally good-tasting cereal, because it's not. It just said more about what it was missing.

But as coffee and its trendy spinoff drinks like frappuccinos become more flavorful with a plethora of additives, at what point is coffee still coffee? Coffee is essentially becoming un-coffee-like when it starts to resemble hot chocolate, a Frosty, or another dessert-type drink in both taste and appearance.

So my question then becomes: Why not just cut to the chase go straight to the hot chocolate? Or is it all about the caffeine?

Man, people and their addiction to drugs...

Something else I find amusing is my parents continually asking if I've started drinking coffee yet, as if they're looking forward to the day that I inevitably get hooked on it, just like they are. (It's not unlike cult members pushing the Kool-Aid on their initiates.) And now that I think about it, maybe that explains my associative aversion to coffee—I view it as an adult drink. And I don't really like to think of myself as an "adult," at least not yet.

So, short of a major palate reversal or grim survival situation, this is one man who will always say no to the Joe—for life.