by Rick Moody
Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13
Note: Dawn in Springfield, where I am writing these words, dawn, hue of oatmeal, Springfield, city of former industrial glory. Something, some animal, has overturned the large aluminum trash barrel I recently purchased from a national discounter, scattering two insufficiently sealed bags across the backyard, one containing a number of the sexually explicit magazines that have served as my companions in the last several years. How I wish I were making coffee. Maybe I will make coffee; in fact, maybe I will embark herewith upon description of my expensive home brewing station of a Germanic or ersatz-Germanic design; my coffeemaker has a timer and a grinder; I will confess, bibliophile, that frequently I allow the coffeemaker to serve as my alarm, my carpe diem, first a high-pitched screech, no more than a second or two, then the beans that I have scooped into the grinding portion of the technology during the prior night’s rash of scotches, these beans, in a clockwise motion not unlike the movement of planets around the sun, not unlike the sun’s motion around the galaxy, not unlike the galaxies as they helix around the circular nothingness of creation, these beans fall upon knives, roasted and seasoned beans slipping down through the grinding stage of the Germanic home brewing station, and then into the filtering area, where a reusable Mylar filter with thousands of tiny filaments will begin trapping and collecting this elixir of Araby to allow it to achieve maximum viscosity; about this time, where I am lying on a full-size box spring that induces unbearable lumbar pain, I begin to hear the blubbering of the local fluori-nated tap water in the stem section of my German home brewing station. The water is beginning to achieve its electrically induced convection current, in the stem section, the water is beginning to reach its boiling, I can hear it, as the grinding noise has penetrated the scrim of my disappointment and I have reluctantly opened my eyes and concluded, again, that I need to launder the sheets, which duty, by nightfall, I will have abjured; never mind all that, I can hear the buoyant chemistries of the German home brewing station, and now I can smell the beverage, my addiction, my blessing, my nightingale, my helpmeet; it is drifting from the kitchen, across the dining room, across the thick wall-to-wall in the dining room with the Beaujolais stains and the woolen gobs hacked up by my incontinent Abyssinian, down the little corridor, the smell of my coffee, the certain basis for any claim of the Divine, coffee, all the beans, all the varieties, I have lingered in the boutiques of shopping malls devoted to its worship, Eritrean beans flavored with betel juice, perhaps a bit of almond or absinthe, perhaps some Percocet or Vicodin to further amplify my caffeinated comforts, a frame or two of my lost childhood snuck into this taste, ice cream cones past, double scoops, my lost parents and the liqueured desserts, I admit it, even house blends can seduce me, even house blends suggest the high art of roasting and flavoring, even house blends suggest a sunrise when the non-union farm laborer is hunched in the mottled shade of the glorious shrub picking green fruits, a dream fit for a victorious conqueror, even the production of these notes (on books I’m featuring this quarter) were composed in a Javanese ecstasy. I have searched among the possessions of dead people, pinchpennies, those with obsessive-compulsive disorder, those who never read, I have searched in second-hand stores in towns like Rockville and Cincinnati, and I did it all for coffee, oh coffee, of thee I sing, profits, lives, loves, passions, all this for thou, oh muse, oh goddess, oh bean, oh coffee.
