Autoscopy #1: It's the Coffee Talking

I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker. Not that I have any particular problems with the drink, other than it sometimes giving me a mild case of sour stomach (or what I understand to be sour stomach) and diarrhea. And it’s not an issue with taste either, because I’ve always liked coffee flavored sucking candies and coffee ice cream. Sometimes I think that I may even like coffee more than those people that drink it regularly. I know plenty of people that discuss different roasts, the advantages of cone filters over flat filters, and the best places to grab a cup of coffee in just about every major city in the USA, but I’m always surprised by just how much sugar they dump into their cups. That’s right: I may be only a casual coffee drinker, if that, but I take it with no sugar and just a splash of milk.

The point is that coffee is just fine, but I’ve never depended on it to get me—or keep me—moving. In the morning, to wake up, I take a shower. Or I don’t. Either way I get up. And while it’s not the fear of becoming a caffeine junky that has kept me from a regular coffee routine, there are a number of things that I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with: (a) I can only assume that on Yom Kippur when all those Jews in synagogue are fasting and haven’t had their morning fix, the resulting trembling and shaking makes them a little nervous about their pending atonement; (b) when I’m in a bad mood, I can blame other people, rather than blaming myself for forgetting to set my alarm and running out of the house without time for a coffee; (c) I don’t feel compelled to talk about coffee all the time; (d) similarly, I don’t assume other people want to hear me talk about coffee all the time (but hopefully enough to read this essay).

Even in college, I didn’t really rely on coffee to get through those long nights in the library. And that usually made me the odd man out, considering everyone else was either on caffeine, taurine, adderall, or some combination thereof. When I would start to lose focus, I’d stretch my legs under the table to get my blood going. If that didn’t work I would take a walk to the water fountain. If that didn’t work I would go to the other water fountain, the one that was plugged in and dispensed cold water, cold water being all the more effective. And if that didn’t work, I would skip a couple pages and try again. After all, if David Hume had anything important to say in those fifty pages, he probably would have said it already.



While I would categorize my relationship to coffee as one of admiration at a distance, energy drinks like Red Bull, Amp, Rockstar, Sparks, Crunkjuice, etc. are a whole other story. I think they are scary. They not only have a whole lot of caffeine, but all kinds of other chemicals. While taurine, one of the active ingredients, may not actually be a synthetic version of bull testosterone as some rumors indicate, the notion is just a little too juicy to ignore completely. And the thought of needing a dose of testosterone just to be able to read my Foucault always seemed to say something strange about my masculinity: man up, don’t be a pussy, concentrate on those fucking power structures, bitch-ass.

Not to say that I haven’t ever had an energy drink. I have. In college I played on my school’s competitive ultimate Frisbee club team. Besides daily practice sessions, we would play in weekend-long tournaments throughout the northeast. For reasons that I never understood, even in the Spring when daylight hours were long, tournament organizers always insisted on starting these games at what seemed to be the crack of dawn, which meant we had to wake up before dawn to make the sometimes two-hour commute.

Tournament days were without exception exhausting, even when I didn’t get much game time. It was certainly exhausting when I did get a lot of game time and had to run around chasing a plastic disc and people for four games each lasting around an hour and a half. And if you made it to the tournament finals, you got to play in a fifth game (great).

So it shouldn’t be surprising that most players rely on energy drinks to give them just what the drinks advertise: energy. It also shouldn’t be surprising that at some point, the upperclassmen looked at me nearly passed out on the side line and took pity on me by passing me one of their cans. It wasn’t peer pressure or anything like that, and it’s not like in Major League Baseball where teammates make you take steroids for the good of the team. To me, this seemed like some sage advice from my captains. So, without much thought I opened the can and downed the thing.

It didn’t take very long to kick in. I’ve described the feeling as suddenly having this deep urge to dance, bumping and grinding with some female, while simultaneously punching some dude in the face, repeatedly. And that’s how they sent me onto the field. That was game mentality.

We were playing Brandeis University. They were an okay team, nothing particularly special. We had played them before and I even knew some of the kids on their team from summer camp.

Within the first few possessions, I jumped over a Brandeis player to knock down a deep pass. On my way up I had made a little contact with the Brandeis player, just enough for him to know I was there. When he called a foul, I started yelling at him:
—You should be ashamed of that call. Really ashamed.
The Brandeis player, short, pimpled, and wearing athletic goggles, tried to explain how I fouled him. I replied very simply:
—That was some pussy shit!
When he told me to calm down, I didn’t:
—Go fuck yourself!
He asked me not to curse. The conversation ended with me saying the following:
—At least I’m better looking than you!
That’s sort of the way the remainder of the game went. When I caught a goal, I took a little extra time to stand over the Brandeis player guarding me. When I guarded someone, I would whisper to them that they had no chance. I tried to stare down their entire sideline. I barked. I stuck my chest out. And I laughed at them. When they dropped a disc. When they threw a bad pass. When their cleats didn’t hold in the mud. When they spoke or looked at me. I just started laughing.

A few hours after the game, after I could once again feel the exhaustion in my body and all the muscles I had pulled over the course of the day finally made themselves known to me, I thought back on what had happened during the game. That was weird, I thought. While everything that happened during the game seemed appropriate at the time, I couldn’t help but think about how out of character it actually was for me. Normally, I’m much more the kind of guy that rolls my eyes or (silently) sneers at the guy talking, talking not whispering, on his cell phone in the library. The guy who would rather stew in my seat and wait it out, rather than confront the inconsiderate guy. But the outright aggression I showed in that game: that wasn’t me. That’s not how I see myself, and that’s not who I want to be or ever wanted to be for that matter. I remember the kids like that. I couldn’t stand them.

So who was it?


Red bulls may not be laced with testosterone, but it certainly made me act in this hyper-masculine way. But what does that say about my actual masculinity? I suppose no more than the fact that I’m writing this on a beach in San Francisco no less than 15 yards from many naked men. And no less than the fact that when that girl in the bikini walked past me, the best I could do was muster a sort-of smile.

Maybe if I were raised on caffeine, I’d be a totally different person. If I were a routine coffee drinker, I would have more interest in working out. Maybe there’s a whole would-be me out there in an alternate universe, with a cup of coffee in one hand and some one-night fling in the other. Maybe I would have played varsity basketball. If only I grew up with a little more caffeine in my system, slipped into my diet a little more steadily, I would have had a more pronounced jaw line.


For my 7th grade science fair project, I did one of those experiments your teacher recommends to you from a book. My partner and I took a bunch of mealworms and split them up into four groups. Keeping one as our control, we gave the other groups increasing amounts of “no doze” pills in their food. The group that received the most caffeine literally bounced off of the walls of their container. Not jumping. Bouncing. They were all dead within a day or so.

Come to think of it, I guess I should take that experiment as reassuring. Those mealworms didn’t become anymore masculine. They were just in a mosh pit for no reason. I should really rethink the whole thing. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity. How could caffeine do that anyway? Maybe over caffeination doesn’t make me “hyper-masculine” it just makes me a “hyper-asshole.”

~josh