The existentialism of decaf

You never know what you might find at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

I rediscovered the marvel of decaffeination on my last trip back to the US, and I suddenly felt freed from the inherent constraints of being an inconsistent and somewhat repentant coffee drinker. No matter how much I love the aroma of a coffeeshop, the tingling sensation of a strong espresso on my tongue, or the richness of foamed milk, the caffeine is too much for me.

I broke my coffee addiction a couple years back, and can now drink a marron pequeño from time to time as long as I don’t get back into the habit. But the coffee buzz still goes to my head. It gives me a surge in the morning and then leaves me needing a nap by the early afternoon. In Venezuela I’d come to accept that these were the rules of the game, since asking for decaf is an invitation to a blank, uncomprehending stare.

 It must have been while swirling a small cup of espresso and milk in the Caracas airport, on my way to visit my brother and newborn niece in Pittsburgh, that something clicked for me: I can get this stuff without the accompanying caffeine high.

I’m way too old to worry about the snobbery of coffee connoisseurs haranguing me about how impure a cup of decaf is, or the sneering derision of a hard-core addicts rolling their eyeballs and repeating catch phrases like “Decaf?! What’s the point?”

So I dove in. I’d carry a travel mug to the Starbucks around the corner from Andrew’s house and order my preferred poison – a decaf machiatto (this usually required some explaining afterwards, including No, I don’t want caramel in it, or Yes, I know it’s really small.) I could all of a sudden indulge in those mid-afternoon cups of coffee that I stopped drinking years back because they made my head swim, kept me from concentrating, and, ironically, made me sleepy.

 It’s true that it doesn’t taste quite the same. The way a low-fat muffin or fat-free chips taste somehow a little less brilliant. There’s a physical sensation of caffeine in the mouth that’s missing from the experience. And of course there’s the bright sunny feeling created by the beloved chemical, which as it turns out isn’t actually giving you a buzz per se but rather “covering up” another chemical called adenosine that’s responsible for telling your brain that you’re tired. (After that first sip of espresso your brain can no longer “hear” the adenosine. So your brain turns up the volume to hear it better, such that when you stop drinking coffee your brain gets a flood of it, like a pulse of screeching feedback coursing through your ear drum at a rock concert. That sends blood rushing to your head, which can give you a headache. Yes, I looked all that up.) 

It was an incredible liberation. Decaf shall set ye free, I intoned to myself. Just about any self-respecting café, restaurant or even fru-fru grocery store I pulled into could give me the fabulous morning brew that I usually reserved for special occasions or for days that I was so genuinely dog-tired and sleep deprived that I needed a jolt. I didn’t think about the chemical treatment that went into this unleaded version as I sipped coffee with my older brother on his lunch hour at 21^st St. Coffee, where Eric has been so many times he can practically walk in and order “the usual” and pay for it with his frequent-drinker miles. I sipped coffee at the Starbucks at the entrance to a Target while Isa shopped for T-shirts, vitamin supplements and home electronics to take back to her family. I sipped coffee on the porch of my younger brother Andrew’s house on the days when the Pennsylvania spring was making its best efforts to burst through the Pittsburgh winter.

And then came a strange moment I had barely anticipated.

I found I genuinely didn’t want it anymore. The experience had lost its spontaneity, there was no surprise left. It had turned into a routine.

This particular dilemma – enjoying an experience whose pleasure is dimmed by its repeated occurrence – is one I’ve struggled with over the years. Seeking out something enjoyable can have the unfortunate repercussion that you get bored of it. Confronting this dilemma head-on in my adolescence pushed me to the “absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder” approach that borders on self-abnegation and asceticism which, while not without virtue, are ultimately dead-ends. At sixteen I made of the unfortunate discovery of Jean Paul Sartre, who offered an alternative solution to this particularly quandary. Not a very good one, as anyone who has delved into existentialism knows, because it tends to perpetuate the idea that dissatisfaction is the ultimate solution to not being satisfied. I dreamed of laying my hands on a copy of Being and Nothingness, which captivated me with phrases like I taste life, and it tastes of nothing. Thank God I never found it.

Fortunately I grew up, and left the existentialists stewing in their nihilist brew. It felt like something of a milestone at my friends’ David and Katrina’s wedding last year when I managed to turn the catch phrase “existence precedes essence” into a drunken running joke with a group of friends as we danced under the stars. Seven years of happy marriage to Isa, perhaps my crowning achievement after almost 36 years on God’s green earth, have shown I’ve learned how to enjoy the same person’s company day-in-day-out without getting bored.

But decaffeinating my inner existentialist, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, led me to a new conclusion during my week-long quasi-hibernation at Andrew’s house in Pittsburgh, and this time the coffee mug was finally half-full.

It turns out there’s an upside of getting bored of something – you’ve escaped its grasp. You’re back in the driver’s seat. You’re no longer slave to that indulgence. A bourgeois version of Janet Joplin’s nothing-left-to-lose optimism.

Decaf set me free, and then getting bored of it once again set me free. In a circular way, I think that’s what the existentialists were really after all along.