Electric Underpants

Personally, I can’t drink coffee. It seems like most of the country is fueled on caffeine, but I can’t tolerate the stuff. Sure, I like the taste of coffee, but it’s the side-effects I can’t handle. First, I get shaky. The I have this general feeling of anxiety. Then the hunger sets in. Hunger that I don’t get just going without food for awhile. This is hunger I feel down to my bones. The only cure for it is to eat. Obviously. But even then it takes quite a while to get back to normal.
I know what you’re thinking. “What about decaf?” you say. Well, you see, there’s still plenty of caffeine in decaf coffee. Not as much as the regular stuff, but enough to trip my shake sensors and send me into the kind of hunger known only to post-apocalyptic vampires who have run out of victims in the charred, radioactive remains of civilization.
Okay, that all seems a bit arch for a beverage discussion. Even without coffee I get by. I drink a lot of water. And (decaf) iced tea. It still give me a little twinge. So, mostly water.
Many years ago I had a girlfriend who was a coffee fiend. She was small – maybe 5′ 2″ and 90 pounds or so. But she drank enough coffee on a daily basis to give Mrs. Olsen a caffeine-fueled, anxiety-related breakdown. I would get the shakes just kissing her. Just smelling her breath. She was cute, though. And smart. And we had a lot in common. After all these years I can’t really remember what broke us apart. Maybe it was a coffee intake gap. I should have tried harder. Maybe if I would have forced myself to drink coffee I would have developed a tolerance toward caffeine and we would still be together. Nah, she would have left me anyway. If I drank as much coffee as she did I’d be a violent, anxiety-ridden, 300 pound, quivering mass of insecurity and I would prefer to be the passive, anxiety-ridden, 200 pound, quivering mass of insecurity that I am.