Caffeine and me

This month's National Geographic has a piece about caffeine, entitled Caffeine Addiction Is a Mental Disorder. This is obviously intended as an understatement. Before I get my morning coffee, I wallow in the throes of Intense Misanthropy and Pessimism, otherwise known as the Eeyore Complex . What's worse about coffee dependency, and feels unique to caffeineheads, is the whole coffee snob thing. I really am fussy about what I drink, to where it's almost worse to get my caffeine in the wrong way than to not have any. We have a little Italian Mocha (a screw-together stovetop percolator) and Illy coffee grounds. Then we have a milk fluffer, which looks and sounds like a dentist drill, but makes amazing foam. And basically my wife has given up trying to make the coffee, because I. Like. It. A. Particular. Way.

My wife tells a "you can laugh about it now" story about a day I was stranded without coffee. We were visiting friends in the north of Germany for Fasching (German Mardi Gras). This involved huge parades, costumes, candy, and absolute bedlam. Also, this being Germany, the closure of every store in the entire region. No coffee, no cola even, just a cup of very wimpy black tea. I was dressed like a clown, but in every photograph I look like I'd rather be strung up by my eyebrows. And there are a LOT of pictures.
My wife refers to this as my "sad clown" day, and usually brings it up only in order to get me to behave myself. But, in her wisdom, she always packs the Mocha now.