What your coffee says about you

Whenever I want to get coffee, it's always a tough thing to coordinate with other people. Seems like getting a cup of coffee shouldn't be so hard, but in college I learned just how hard it could be to get a simple stupid cup of coffee.

Of course, Starbucks. You can't go to Starbucks. The pretentiousness isn't the problem. It's the corporate conglomerate nature of Bux, overpowering and outcompeting local small business, and taking money out of communities and draining the small towns. It is nothing short of evil.

Then, there's low brow coffee: Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme, Tim Hortons. You can't drink these. It's simple, unpretentious, without sophistication or class.

There are a slew of smaller national chains: the deer one, the beanery, blah blah blah. You can't drink them, because supporting them would be complicit to the strategy of Starbucks, and the national chain philosophy of the destruction of small town America.

So then, you must find yourself at local small businesses who serve what can be accurately termed as terrible coffee. There are many of these kinds of places, but they tend to go out of business on a fairly routine basis because (1) their coffee is terrible, (2) they try to be pretentious but the hipsters who promote their types of establishments don't spend money, (3) they sell coffee at fair prices instead of coffee drinks at fairly unreasonable prices.

So, whenever I call someone to go grab a cup of coffee, we have to navigate this immense, geopolitical, socio-economic landscape to figure out just what the other person thinks about coffee, before we can even decide where. It's more complicated than trying to figure out who someone will vote for.

So, I called a friend of mine, and we went to get coffee, and we had this kind of a pitiful conversation:

her: So... where do you want to get coffee?
me: Well, anywhere is fine. Someplace close.
her: Well, Starbucks is close, but so is Place A and Place B.
me: Starbucks is fine. Let's do Bux.
her: Okay, Bux it is.
me: I could give a rats ass about where we get coffee, as long as it's warm and has a bathroom.
her: Oh thank God. There's nothing worse than trying to figure out where we can get coffee, and worrying about what your coffee says about you.

And for the record, I don't like Starbucks, not because of the corporate greed or whatever else, but because they burn their beans, and their roasts go far beyond 'bold' and are more like charcoal. If you drink the latte's, then I'm sure you could care less, but if you're a lover of coffee like me, then it becomes a problem. I prefer milder roasts, unflavored. People make the argument that the bolder roasts are more flavorful, but I'm sure these are also the people who order in Starbucks lingo, and think that my cup of Tim Hortons is swill. Well, it's tasty swill.