Naked Coffee

In the introduction to his book Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs says, "The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch - a frozen moment where everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

Sometimes the "fork" is a cup of coffee. I was down in Guatemala a decade or so ago. There I learned that average Guatemalans don't ever get to drink their own coffee. It is too expensive. Less than 1% of the population makes more than $500 a year. American importers have paid as high as $2 and as low as $0.30 a pound for the coffee. Even 30 cents is a huge amount for most Guatemalans. That really floored me. I just couldn't believe that they didn't even get to enjoy their most famous product. Then I saw something else. A man heading out to work to spray pesticides on the coffee plants. He had a big vat of poison strapped to his back with a spray hose attached. He was just wearing plain clothes. Just a cloth t-shirt and pants. No protective gear of any sort. No respirator. There's no OSHA in Guatemala. I'm sure he'd never been told that the chemicals he was carrying were harmful to him as well, or been given any instructions on how to avoid getting those chemicals in his community's drinking water...

Naked coffee... that frozen moment where you see exactly what is in your cup. Maxwell House, Folgers, Starbucks... these companies pay the barest minimum they can for their coffee, and they knowingly encourage practices like unsafe pesticide use. Lest you think this is somehow justified, consider that a few years back, growers were getting around $2 a pound for their beans, but due to changes in the market they now make around 30 cents a pound. Are you paying 85% less for your coffee than you were a few years ago? No, because the consumer is getting exploited along with the grower. While corporate coffee gets a huge increase in profits, the consumer gets screwed, and the growers get less than they need to survive. If you buy coffee from these companies you're paying for this to continue.

My new hero is Dean Cycon. Dean makes it really easy to make a moral stand in a cup of coffee. Dean ONLY sells fairly traded, organic, shade grown coffee.

A quick explanation of what that means. Fair Trade sets a minimum price cap on what the grower gets paid (currently $1.41 for organic, as opposed to the 30 cents Starbucks etc. pay). That's just the start of what Fair Trade does, but essentially it means if your coffee has the fair trade designation, you can be reasonably sure that the growers aren't being exploited. Organic means (and here there are many standards and definitions, but generally speaking...) that the coffee was grown without chemical pesticides or fertilizers. It is good to see because you know the grower wasn't poisoning themselves or their community to grow the coffee, and you know you aren't drinking trace amounts of pesticides. Shade grown does organic one better. It means the coffee is grown while disrupting the local flora and fauna as little as possible. It means growing with the environment. Just because something is organic doesn't mean there wasn't a forest clearcut to create a field to plant the coffee in.

As I said before, though, Dean makes it easy to be moral. You should be buying nothing but organic, shade grown, Fair Trade coffees because it is the right thing to do. But sadly, too many people don't really care what's on the end of their fork. As long as something is cheap and convenient it really doesn't matter who suffered to get something into your mouth. And to be honest with you, even though I've seen that suffering first hand, I need that cup of coffee. If Starbucks is the only thing around, I'll get my coffee there because caffiene withdrawals will render me nonfunctional if I don't. And if money is tight, I'll go with the non-organic products to save a buck.

But Dean's Beans don't cost any more than other specialty coffees, at least at the Belfast Coop where I shop. And if one cares nothing about the rest of the world, and only about one's own pleasure, they still win with Dean's Beans. You can compare for yourself. Take any brand of coffee that has organic and shade grown versions and do a taste-test with the non-organic options. Organic coffee tastes better than non-organic. It is noticably richer, fuller. Shade-grown coffee tastes that much better again than ordinary organic.

Dean's Beans make the best coffee I've ever had. Nothing else will do for me now. I had a few pounds of Alta Dena, which is darn good coffee, but I gave that to my sister. I even carry some ground up beans with me when I leave town so I can make my own when I'm away from Belfast (in the base of my Planetary Designs French Press mug, of course!). If you're a friend, relative or student of mine, let me know and I'll be happy to pick some up for you. Otherwise, you can find a Deans Beans reseller near you, or order beans here.

Hurricane Katrina did a number on New Orleans. Although we didn't here about it much in the news in the US, Hurricane Stan has done much, much more damage to Guatemala, El Salvador and other Latin American countries than Katrina did to NOLA. Sadly, I think many of us have overdosed on compassion, and don't have much left over. But just by buying Fair Trade coffees exclusively you are doing something. You are helping. At least it's a start!

My new favorite thing: Planetary Design's Double Shot French Press

I love gadgets and spend an inordinate amount of time and money on them. Very few of these things, however, have altered my life on a day-to-day basis. Planetary Design's Double Shot French Press Mug, however, is one that has.

I'd passed by the Double Shot, sold at the Belfast Co-op where I do my shopping, many times before and never really gave it much attention before. It seemed just a little gimicky to me. But a few weekends ago friends Dustin and Hillary were visiting and Hillary just couldn't stop talking about how cool it was, so I gave it another look. Thanks, Hillary, for making me notice!

The idea is pretty simple. Take an insulated coffee mug and build in a French press, thus making it portable. Not a bad idea, really, since French presses tend to be made of glass, and are easily breakable. Planetary Design's Double Shot French Press Mug is more than this. It is a design masterpiece. Bodum gets the credit for making the best French presses in the world, but after having the Double Shot in my life for a couple weeks, I have to wonder if Bodum's more honest claim is just that they have the best marketing. My Bodum press has been sitting on the counter since I got the Double Shot, even when I'm not taking my coffee on the road.

For starters, look at the heart of any French press, the plunger mechanism. It is a patented design, far superior to any I've seen. It has a plastic flange with a built-in spring to ensure that it is constantly pressed against the side of the mug. Some French presses just use a solid plastic disc. The Bodum uses the slightly better method of coiled spring to press the screen against the side of the carafe. The problem with these methods is that if the plunger tilts you wind up with coffee grounds in your drinking coffee. Planetary Designs provides the best seal I've ever seen, far more effective than Bodum's, and it is also very forgiving. No grounds even if the screen tilts. And yet it is a simpler mechanism. The screen just has one part as opposed to Bodum's three, making it much easier to clean.

The lid is also well thought-out. It actually has a rubber O-ring that completely seals the lid to the mug. There's an additional screen where the coffee comes out. I'm not sure if it is the addition of this second screen, or if both screens use a finer mesh than Bodum and other French presses do, but the end result is that you can actually drink your coffee down to the last drop. Fans of French presses know that you have to avoid that last swallow of coffee in the cup. That's the one drawback to brewing coffee using a screen instead of a filter. You wind up with a certain amount of sediment at the bottom. It is a small price to pay, but even still it catches me off guard when I'm hurriedly quaffing my last bit of coffee before running out the door and wind up with a mouth full of grounds and powder. This isn't an issue with the Double Shot.

The Double-Shot is made with marine-grade stainless steel (whatever that means) and is insulated. Insulated mugs are something I tend to avoid for around-the-house use. They're fine for traveling, but (and of course this could just be my overactive imagination because stainless steel is supposed to be nonreactive, so there's no way this could be true... could there?) I find that even in stainless steel travel mugs the coffee tastes different to me. Not as good as it would taste in a ceramic mug. Maybe it is the "marine grade" stainless steel that makes a difference, but coffee in the Double-Shot tastes just as good as it does if I made it in my glass French press. Even better, since it doesn't have the sediment and the insulated cup keeps the coffee consistently hot, seemingly for hours, giving me time to savor the taste before the coffee goes cold.

I was initially resistant to the directions that came with the cup which said to add the cream to the coffee grounds BEFORE pouring in the hot water. Usually the cream is the thing that cools the coffee off enough to drink so you don't have to wait, so I worried that adding it before brewing would make the water too cool to brew a decent cup. The insulated mug, however, more than compensates for the cooling effect of the cream.

All this is cool enough to justify the price ($28 online from Liquid Planet, $22 at the Belfast Coop if I remember correctly. If you're a friend of mine let me know and I'll pick one up for you...) but the Double Shot still holds one feature that'll make you say, "Oh, that is SO COOL!" Pull off the bottom (sealed with another rubber O-ring) and inside that is an air-tight cannister that will hold enough ground coffee for two more cups (or secret documents or whatever other contraband you need to smuggle). You know, I've always hated those people who, at the coffee shop or restaurant say, "Can I just get a little hot water for this?" and pull out their own tea bag they brought from home. It's always seemed like a totally cheapskate thing to do. But with this massively cool hidden canister thing I may just be losing cool points this year.

So, there you have it. My latest "all-time favorite thing EVER!" I'm sure I'll have another one shortly. I usually do, but I'll be enjoying it with my Double Shot in hand.

yeah, yeah

Obviously, it "didn't take" this time around. I blame the weather. It has just been too beautiful. Turns me into an airhead. I need the cold, gray days of fall/winter/spring to get anything done. You should visit the Castles journal though. I've actually been writing there, and it is way more interesting than 100 Cups of Coffee anyway.

cup 14

cup 13

cup 12

cup 11

cup 10

cup 9

cup 8

cup 7

cup 6: Beach Pea

Where: Beach Pea, Kittery, ME
When: 8 am
Who: Ethel LeClair
What: house French Roast

cup 5: only half a cup?

Where: Curti Residence, Kittery, ME
When: June 29, 8 am
Who: Chip and Ernie
What: Equal Exchange

No chance for a picture this morning. Sorry. I should have known. Mom said she'd pick me up at 8:30 am to go to Brenda's, but of course she showed up 45 minutes early, and I only had time to chug half a cup of coffee before she wanted to leave.

Brenda's was remarkable, as expected. Brenda is the self-proclaimed "Bag Lady of Lee." She is the queen of, well, stuff. She goes to yardsales and picks through trash at the dump to find things of questionable value and then finds ways to give them value. Today she had a case of what appeared to be 8.5" x 11" paper cut into thirds, the long way. She was trying to find a way to make these 7500 2.8" x 11" sheets useful. She'd tried glueing then ends of stacks of them together with a hot glue gun with acceptable results only to realize that just one pad was enough to take down all the phone numbers and create all the shopping lists you'd want to for years to come. So she was looking for other uses. Mom needed a stand for her new apartment so we went through the basement and the shed looking for furniture. So much stuff! Floor to ceiling of years are yardsale finds. There's one room devoted entirely to McDonald's Happy Meal Toys (just McDonald's, other fast food toys are in a different area). Another room is just for Legos. An area of the shed has so many baskets hanging from the rafters that you can't see the ceiling, and there's another area devoted entirely to prints of every sort. The stuff goes on and on.

Brenda has rules when going to yardsales: You can never pay asking price for anything at a yardsale. You can never leave a yardsale empty-handed. The latter rule has led to some interesting collections. Brenda let me in on the secret to never leaving empty handed. You choose something to collect every yardsale season, and make sure it is something that most people would consider so worthless that they wouldn't even put it in the yardsale. One year she choose plastic flowers. At the end of the summer she made a giant mountain of flowers to engulf her mailbox. She left it like that for a while, then sold all the flowers at her own yardsale the following summer. She's more selective about her fake flowers now. She gets very realistic ones, and matches the flowers to whatever is in season outside, leaving them up only while the real flowers are in bloom outside and changing them to match the changing season. She delights in fooling people into thinking the fake flowers are real. It is important to note that she often has the real things growing right outside the door and could go out and cut the same flowers to have inside, but that wouldn't be as fun. Now Brenda is acquiring fake fruit. She doesn't know exactly what she's going to do with it all yet. That is half the point of getting it, though. When she has enough, inspiration will strike her and the fruit will take its place in the grand scheme of things.

Sadly, this trip, coming so soon after my big move, I wasn't so much in the mood to acquire more stuff. I think in a couple months I'll take a trip down again. I did manage to find a candy dot maker in amongst all the stuff. Seemed like a perfect way to use some of those 7500 strips of paper.

On returning to the Curti house, I found the remaining half cup of coffee sitting on the counter where I'd left it. I took a swig. Yeah, it had been sitting on the counter in 90 degree heat all day, but the acid in coffee will keep cream from spoiling (I think) so as long as it doesn't tast bad or have chunks, you're OK. Unfortunately, there was a chunk, and I had a brief moment of "swallow or spit?" thinking it might be just a breadcrumb. I spat it out into the sink and it tried to crawl away. A black and had found its way into my coffee. I was pretty grossed out by now. My addiction must be somewhat subsided now, because I dumped the rest of the coffee out and didn't make any more.

So THAT is why I only had half a cup of coffee today.

cup 4: friendly again

Where: The Friendly Toast, Portsmouth, NH
When: June 28, 8:30 am
Who: Jessica Brakeley
What: house

cup 3: pug ugly

Where: Curti residence, Kittery, ME
When: June 26, 7:30 am
Who: Chip & Ernie
What: Equal Exchange something-or-other

cup 2: The Friendly Toast

Where: The Friendly Toast, Portsmouth, NH
When: June 26, 8:30 am
Who: Jessica Brakeley
What: House blend

Cup 1: Marky

Where: The Bohemian, Brunswick, ME
When: June 25, 10:30 am
Who: Mark Leaman
What: Bohemian Uprising

Yes indeed, the Bohemian still exists. On my previous visit to Brunswick I got the mistaken perception that it was gone, replaced by Little Dog. Actually, it had just moved around the corner. Mark met me at Little Dog, then dragged me over to the Bohemian. It was the only place in town that met Mark's criteria at that moment: WiFi and air conditioning.

I'll probably get letters for saying this, but honestly, I liked the old Bohemian better. I can understand why it moved. The old place was crappy and falling down and had nowhere to sit indoors, but it was, well, bohemian. It felt like a West Coast coffee house, one of those places that existed before the masses discovered you could make money selling good coffee. The new place is about as bohemian as a Starbucks. It is crisp and clean and polished and air conditioned and wi-fied. The coffee is an order of magnatude better than Starbucks. BOHEMIAN : STARBUCKS :: STARBUCKS : FOLGERS, and the people watching is better also. The Bowdoin College crowd is just lovely to look at.

The Bohemian was a stopover on the way to my sister's, where I'd be spending the week looking after their pugs and chickens while the family vacations.... (more later, gotta run...)

home

home
Originally uploaded by matt_leclair.

Where: Home, Belfast, ME
When: 8 am, June 23, 2005
Who: just me
Coffee: Avalon Organic French Roast
Mood: happy

Welcome to my new home! This isn't particularly a good shot of it. I was trying to capture as much as possible of it, and include the coffee resting on my knee. To my right are peonies. There's actually a whole wall of them beside me and I can sit there and drink in the smell. The scent of peonies, I've come to realize, is the Platonic ideal flower smell. Every other flower scent is just a variation on this smell (well, except for carrion flowers...). Peonies throng the front window, too, and when the wind blows just right it is pure wonderfullness. Just above my knee is a lupine. "Pine cone and tassel" is the official state flower. Lame. It should be the lupine. This time of year the lupines are in bloom, and you'll be driving down the road and turn the corner and there'll be a hill or a field turned purple by lupines. The site is so magnificent I've almost gone of the road because of it. The patch of mud on my right is what will be a flower garden. I've planted a mix of short and medium annuals and perrenials. I need to find something tall for the back. These will grow and fill in, hopefully. Behind the hedge of lupines I've started a perrenial herb garden. Peeking out between the house in the middle and the trees is the Atlantic Ocean. That's right. I can see the ocean when I drink my morning coffee!

I'm loving this place!

Meanwhile, I wrapped things up in Pembroke last week, which, except for a few days in July, I'm on "vacation" until September. I'm going through withdrawal at the moment. After months of being on the go from waking in the morning to collapsing at night, I am free to do what I want. I feel like one of those poor saps in the Allegory of the Cave, though. I've been in the cave of constant work for so long that now I am out of it I am just dazzled by the light, paralyzed by freedom. The real world hardly seems real. The responsibility of choosing my own destiny, even if it is just deciding what I'll do this one day, is overwhelming. So I'm taking this week to chill, veg out, think no deep thoughts. Next week I'll start engaging with the real world again.

Meanwhile, here in a new town, I've realized that my relationship to humanity in general is pretty messed up. In a nutshel, I've forgotten how to make friends. It seems like I knew how at one point, but when you've been a workaholic for years you start making sacrifices. Making friends was something I cut out. So here I am in a new town and I don't know anyone but Jessie, who moved here with me, and our landlords, who live upstairs, and I'd like to meet new people and make new friends, but I just have no idea how. No idea.

So, I'm going to start another 100 cups of coffee. Sunday is my tentative starting date, but I've got a lot of driving/hanging out with friends & family that day so it might get pushed back. I hadn't planned to, but I'm feeling the need. The first time around was for artistic/learning purposes. This time around it is for personal growth. My whole life has changed. There's been a whole lot of endings in the past few months, and now, after an interlude, things are beginning. My therapist was always after me to write things down, but I really have a hard time writing without an audience. So please, join me as I live and pay attention and drink coffee and talk about it. Feel free to jump in whenever you want!

Oh, and you're all cordially invited to join me for a cup of coffee if you're in the area. Just drop me a line!

Interlude 2: Serenity

Thursday we woke up to the sunrise over the Atlantic ocean, and then noticed the sunlight reflecting off the ocean onto our ceiling. It was the first sunrise we've seen at our new home. It rained almost constantly for the month of may, so seeing the sun for the first time felt miraculous. Then it hit us: this is our home. We really, honestly have a plce with a bedroom that overlooks the ocean. And that is just one of the little wonders that keep catching us off guard. Things we knew all along, but there's a difference between knowing them as a fact and actually experiencing them. Like walking through the park that overlooks the bay and seeing that incredible view and realizing that this isn't just some place we're visiting, this is our home now. Or walking home from downtown along the ocean. Or discovering a vegetarian restaurant just four blocks away from our apartment. I didn't even realize there were vegetarian restaurants in Maine other than Little Lad's.

Wednesday was the first full day I'd been able to spend in Belfast. It was also our first sunny day in weeks. I spent most of the day outside in the garden, weeding, planting the handful of perennials I rescued from my former home in Orono. It was the first time I really started to feel like I was living in Belfast. The morning before I went to 17 Margin St., Orono, ME 04473 for the very last time, to help my mother finish packing and cleaning the last few things before the new owners took over. The past weeks have been heartbreaking. This has probably been the most difficult time of my life since my dad died. Letting go of Orono and the family home really has been like losing a family member, and losing part of who I am. The new owners had started moving furniture in before we moved out. Big, tacky, expensive leather crap that stunk so badly of cigarettes that I had to close the doors on it because it stank up the house. In the garage they left a HUGE bar, larger than I'd seen at most real bars. So my ancestral home will become a party house for rich kids whose daddy is buying them a house to go to college in. I really hoped for better for it. Tuesday was cold and rainy, a perfectly depressing day, a perfect day for endings. I stood in the cold after everyone left and wondered how I felt. I'd gone numb. "I'll just have to blog about it later, and then read the blog, and find out how I felt," I told myself, and drove away from 17 Margin for the last time.

I talked to my mother on Tuesday night, after she'd made it down to her new home in Kittery. "I'm not going to miss the place," she told me. "Too many bitter memories." She's right. We moved there because after my dad's brain aneurism he couldn't hold a job anywhere, and we needed a place to rent, and Nana LeClair rented us the top half of the house for cheap. But she was an absolute bitch, and dad kept getting sick again and again, the neighborhood went downhill, we had Faye the psycho lawn mowing neighbor...

A week ago I had Faye for the view out the front window. Now I have sunrise over the Atlantic. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Sometimes you can be holding onto something so tight you don't even know what you're holding onto. And then when you let go, there was nothing there at all. You just didn't realize it because you were clutching so tight. Suddenly I find myself in a place of beauty and opportunity where all I saw was loss and heartbreak, and all I had to do was let go.

Interlude

Elsewhere in this blog, I said something about the fact that when I am living a life worth blogging about I have no time/energy to write! The time since my last entry has been no exception. This past month my life has been undergoing some of the biggest changes ever, and I haven't written a word about it. There's the usual hectic work stuff, what with one semester ending at the University and the school year coming to an end in Pembroke with lots of projects needing to get wrapped up, a Mayterm starting, where I teach an entire semester's worth of content in three weeks. On top of this all, I've been prepping an online class. For some reason I thought it would be a really great idea to create new content for it rather than just videotape my live class and put it up online the way most instructors who teach online classes do. That struck me as lame, like charging the full price for something used, it seemed like cheating the students. But now that I've actually engaged in the process of creating all this material, I'm thinking cheating the students wasn't such a bad idea...

There's no way I could have been writing about cups of coffee this past month. Consumption hasn't been measured in cups. I'm back up to the level of coffee consumption I was at when we were writing the books. Two pots a day, or more. A cup of coffee is never far from my hand, and I'm drinking it all day long. I can't remember when the last day I just relaxed was. I think it was my birthday, April 17th, but even then I think I was running around.

This level of business is manageable under ordinary circumstances. I work better with a full plate. But there's more: we're moving. I've moved around a lot. That's nothing new. But this time it's different. Four generations of my family have lived in this house (three of them LeClairs, the fourth my great-grandfather's mother-in-law). The family's been here in three different centuries. My parents moved into this house twenty-five years ago. While I haven't lived here all that time with them, it has still been home. A constant. A place where I know I can go, and where I can keep "that stuff" that I didn't want to move.

It has been hard. I feel like I'm losing my home and my history. Mom has deemed me incapable of ownership because I don't have a house, so everything she owned that isn't going into her new apartment got divided amongst my siblings. The only thing I have of any sentimental or family historical value is a brass lamp my father made. So all the historical artifacts are gone, the physical objects I could point to and say, there, that belonged to so-and-so, and feel that tie to the past and know that I came from somewhere. This house, so many years, so many memories... someone else's now. "That stuff" stored in boxes that I didn't want to move before. Love letters from old girlfriends, stupid little trinkets I'd hung onto for sentimental reasons... but it is all evidence. Time passes, and I repeat the stories of the things I did in the past and after a while I'm not sure if these things really happened, or if they are just stories. But going through these boxes and finding evidence, proof that I really was there after all, and I did those things and knew those people and it was all real. And then it all goes into the trash.

I may sound melancholy about this, but overall I'm feeling very positive about it all. Sure, there are frustrations, and any change is difficult and stressful, even when it is for the better. I am losing my past, but I'm seeing it as pruning off the dead branches. I am losing my home, but the soil here is spent, so my roots here will never grow past where they are right now if I stay here. The neighborhood my house is in has been in a decline for a long time, and doesn't show signs of improving. The old families are almost all gone, and when they move their houses are bought by landlords who rent out to college students. There are houses on this street that have so much peeling paint they look like they are shacks, and other houses where the occupants moved furniture and other big garbage out to the curb to be picked up by spring cleaning last year. Only the town doesn't do spring cleaning anymore, so the crap has just sat outside in front of the house for over a year... I'm not going to miss any of these things! And I'm not going to miss Faye W**dc**k, my insane, obese, ignorant, racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, loudmouthed neighbor and her riding lawnmower fetish. Picture Jello molded into a vaguely human form, clothe it in grey sweat pants and sweat shirt and perch it on a riding lawnmower, and then make it mow the lawn for hours, while chainsmoking. It isn't that the yard is really big enough to warrant mowing it for hours. It is just that she goes over the same spot over and over and over again. I've counted. Five, six, seven, eight times around the same tree, the same spot, like the lawnmower is some demon, possessing her. It is especially surreal when she does it during a drought, and the lawn has basically turned to sand and there was no grass to mow in the first place, and she'll still be out there kicking up clouds of dust for hours on end. Sometimes, if the neighbor's yards aren't up to snuff she'll go and mow theirs, uninvited. It'd be amusing if it wasn't so annoying. She usually does it on a nice sunny weekend day, making it impossible to be outside enjoying the day. Yeah, I'll be really happy not to have her for a neighbor anymore!

Mom's moving to Kittery, and this is a good thing. She'll be closer to the rest of our family, just five minutes away from my sister. Jess & I are moving to Belfast where we have a great apartment overlooking the ocean and there are at least two good places to sit and get a good cup of coffee just a few minutes walk away. I may be losing something of the past, something of my own history, but when it comes right down to it, life in Orono has been OK at best. It is relatively safe, relatively predictable. I feel like nothing super bad is going to happen to me here, but also that nothing super fantastic will happen either. I don't know what the future will bring. In Orono, at least I had that illusion, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. Now anything is possible. That's scary as hell because everything could fall apart from here on. But wonderfulness can happen, too!

"MY heart has spread its sails to the idle winds for the shadowy island of Anywhere," to quote Tagore. Well, not yet, but soon it will be true. Today I am stressed, overworked, overtired, overcommitted, terrified. But soon I'll let go of all this extra baggage and set sail.