By Bradford J. Senning
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 12, 1998

Sleep Deprivation, Pt. 2: Coffee for one

Arizona Daily Wildcat Bradford J. Senning

I still haven't slept since part one of this treatise. By now the patterns on my bed-clothes are resembling all sorts of nude inviting women and my thoughts are racing at a Portishead pace. But I've got a half-gallon of coffee brewing in the kitchen. With that much coffee I may even skip my 45-minute nap.

Other creative writing friends of mine say I'm taking the wrong drug. Jack Kerouac used to hang out in coffeehouses, but that's because he was too drunk to care where he was. Voltaire used to drink 50 cups of coffee in a day. I think he could have used my friends' advice in order to save time urinating.

Why am I having coffee? I see Caféeacute; Paraiso and Coffee Plantation wedged into the same block on University, with Starbucks due opening on that self-same block. I figure coffee is the answer - it's popular nowadays.

I like to keep up with the popular trends. After all, I drink Pepsi with the freshness dating on the bottom and I wear sweaters that have a single stripe across the chest with, like, striping down the arms too. I'm hip. So I go to a caféeacute; after class and get tanked on coffee. It's like a cult of sweaters and mocha.

I'd figure that everyone else is suffering from sleep deprivation, but they all look so alert. That's on account of the caffeine, you see.

Coffee has been popular ever since the Arabs discovered it as an alternative to alcohol in the 1200s. Before that it was a wild Ethiopian crop. Goatherds in Ethiopia often had problems with their goats lowing all night after grazing on coffee leaves and berries.

English and French kings also had problems with the noises caused by caffeine.

In 1675, King Charles II of Britain banned coffee houses, saying that they had "produced very evil and dangerous effects." Included in these effects was the defamation of majesty and "disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm."

This decree sounds vaguely like Elizabethan decrees that banned the public performance of plays in London during Shakespeare's day. But most of us are happy that these bans didn't have a lasting effect, if only to be able to see Romeo played by Leonardo DiCaprio and have coffee enough to keep ourselves awake for it.

King Louis XVI of France had problems with a rabble who gathered outside a Parisian cafe in 1789. Loaded on coffee and a little bit of political unrest they decided to take up arms for the French Revolution. Nowadays the closest we come to revolution is when we get to sleep 6 hours in a night. Instead of being agitated on coffee we're barely maintaining an enthusiasm commensurate to eight hours of rest.

Generation X didn't happen because of overwhelming political and social apathy. We were just really tired. Seattle's influence on our lives began with the founding of the Starbucks chain there in 1987. Without Starbucks who knows whether Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam or Kurt Cobain of Nirvana could have been motivated enough to sing on their earth-shaking debut albums in 1991. Without Starbucks who knows if the rest of us could have been receptive enough to listen.

In this day and age our products and our national chains define us more than our literature, but literature chronicles these defining characteristics.

Once again it was a poet who truly captured the vagaries of our sleep-deprived era. In his poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot wrote, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." After finishing my half-gallon of coffee I'd say his is a good enough conclusion.

I even have time for a nap.

Bradford J. Senning is a junior majoring in American literature and creative writing. His column, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," appears every Thursday. He would like to remind his readers that the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.