Off the wagon (original) (raw)

Yesterday I did something bloody stupid. I drank a cup of coffee. 108 days of abstinence down the drain.

Actually that wasn't the beginning of the bloody stupid. As I get more attuned to my physiology, I've started noticing the effects of nominally milder stuff, like chocolate. Chocolate messes me around too; not as fiercely as coffee, but still plenty. It's pretty obvious that my metabolism just doesn't do stimulants, not at all, no no, and I'll do damn well to cut them out altogether in the interests of a happy life.

But that was before the previous night, when I mis-timed my meals, ended up getting seriously ravenous, raided a supermarket, glutted down by the riverside on bread and strawberries and a whole hot roast chicken, and then went home via Zurich main station which has a little chocolate shop whose atmosphere is richly redolent with the scent of heaven. They do sell wrapped chocolate, and trays of truffles and pralinés and such, not to mention the inevitable Toblerones. Their main stock-in-trade, though, is piles of great raw slabs of Läderach chocolate, freshly made, sold by weight in broken-off chunks, whose intricate and mellifluous savour makes all packeted chocolate seem inadequate forever more.

I bought a lump weighing a hundred grams or so, and brought it home, and ate it all, slowly. The stuff's far richer than everyday chocolate and by the second half I was struggling, but it was too good to resist.

Then I got buzzed, stayed up until after three in the morning, woke up feeling weird and strange, zombied to work, realised that what I was feeling was very similar to caffeine poisoning, decided that I was kinda screwed anyway, and got myself a Milchkaffee. It seemed logical at the time.

Then I got all the symptoms: a few moments of hyperventilation, a half-hour rush of delicious positive energy, needle-pains in heart and teeth and testicles, a slowly gathering sense of dazed and faintly-stoned confusion, a long evening of rather obsessive activity at work, inability to sleep, nervous awakening, and here I am facing two days of steadily intensifying exhaustion.

This, I think, is the lapse that serves to remind me why stimulants are bad mmkay.

Fortunately I have an excellent excuse to break the addictive cycle immediately. I'm getting married in eight days, and no withdrawal symptom could possibly be worse than what akeela will do to me if I turn up at the wedding shambling and dark-eyed and miserable.

So. No more stimulants. Seriously; no coffee, no tea, no chocolate. After 108 days, I've found that I can actually live perfectly happily without coffee or tea or even decaf.

But I'm going to miss that Läderach chocolate.