First I pour myself a cup, bring it to my desk, and some random fly that was buzzing around the room dive bombed directly into the cup. I cannot simply pick out a bug from my coffee and continue eating. It's contaminated. The entire thing has to do.
So, a short while later with a fresh cup of coffee, I start dunking my granola bar in it. Granola bars dunked in coffee makes them all and soft and yummy. However when it was down to about half a nub, it slipped out of my grasp and sunk to the bottom of my coffee. Curiously enough, granola bars do not float; they sink. So my bar is sitting somewhere in the murky depth of my coffee, fizzing ever so slightly and now and then a bit of oat will come floating to the surface. I suppose I can continue sipping it and filter out the oats between my teeth, but to be honest they look like the little chunks that fly into your toilet when you puke. However, I am growing curious as to what the granola bar at the bottom of the cup will look like at this point, so I suppose I will steel my nerves and keep sipping it down.
Yes, that is what is occupying me this morning.
In other news on the way to work this morning the smoke from the wild fires was ever prevalent. It looked like fog without the nice foggy smell. For some reason when I pasted the wastewater treatment plant the smell was even worse than ever. I think the smoke is somehow a good carrier of the smell of processing shit. I had to pull my shirt over my nose as I drive past the plant.
I'm still amused by my caption phone. I was talking to my friend K on it, and she has a little teeny voice so the captioning said (child's voice) and when she burped it said (burp) and when her dogs started barking it said (dogs barking). I thought that was pretty cool.
Friday needs to get here. I got partying to do.
2026 Update
I'm dialing back to May 2007, where a fly, a granola bar, and a wastewater plant wreck Ed's morning.
Ah, 2007 — when a man could still mourn a ruined cup of coffee without the internet forming a committee about it. I look at you, Ed, and I see a glorious disaster: a fly dive-bombing your mug, a granola bar sinking like a cursed submarine, and you driving past a wastewater plant with your shirt over your nose. I remember when wildfire smoke was something you described as fog without the nice foggy smell, not a recurring seasonal personality trait of the sky. Your caption phone, bless it, was a clunky marvel that dutifully wrote (child's voice) and (burp) — now my phone does that automatically and also tries to sell me something. Coffee has since become a forty-dollar ritual with beans named after obscure saints, and granola bars have been reengineered to be so-called healthy and therefore taste like cardboard, yet I suspect they still sink. The real difference? In 2007, a bad coffee morning was private. Now you'd have to livestream it to prove it happened. You got out just in time, Ed — or possibly too early.
“2007 Ed, when that granola bar slipped into the murk, what exactly did you expect to find at the bottom — a treasure chest of oats? And be honest: did you actually finish that coffee, or did you just write about it to justify the morning?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you want to know what I expected at the bottom of that cup? Honestly, I was half expecting some kind of sunken oat kingdom, maybe a little treasure chest made of soggy granola, guarded by a tiny syrup shrimp. The way that thing was fizzing, it felt like there was a whole underwater adventure happening in my mug, and I was just the giant looming over it. And yes, I did finish it. I’m not proud, but I sat there sipping, occasionally picking oat mulch out of my teeth, and by the end the cup looked like something you’d scrape out of a drain. But it was coffee, and it was mine, and I wasn’t about to waste a second pot. The whole ordeal ranks about a 6.2 on the morning suck-o-meter, but I emerged victorious, a little queasy, and still curious about the mysteries of the deep.
