TOXIC COFFEE

At the convenience store I poured a twelve-ounce Styrofoam cup half full of coffee. Then I put it under the cappuccino– chemical flavor dispenser, and dribbled in French magnesium vanilla, hot cobalt chocolate, and hazelnut ammonium hydroxide. Then I took two each of the pasteurized artificially flavored synthetic Irish creme, amaretto chloride, and mentholated mint in their peel-, spill-, and drip-thimble cups and tried to splash their contents in the ever-filling twelve-ounce cup.

All the while I was preparing my cauldron concoction, my taste buds were leaping in a bud frenzy, doing gumdrop cart-wheels and encouraging my salivary glands to wet their pants. Toxic coffee. An exquisite potion. With my admitted weakness for such an unnatural beverage, you would think that I would have some understanding of my children’s love for Pop Tarts, with filling like gritty tar on hot pavement and a hard dough reminiscent of unleavened bread. Usually eaten unheated, it is a cardboard and jelly sandwich.

Or how about dried cereal bits formed into the shape of clover leaves, letters, hatchets, pinto beans, bat eyes, or squirrel testicles, dyed algae green or hemoglobin orange and rolled in powdered cinnamon, baby talc, or graphite?

Food preservatives have been essential to man’s civilization. Salted, vinegared, dried, smoked, frozen, or lyed, they have allowed us to live between hunts and harvests. But when I see packaged pastry pizza or trail mix with the shelf life of petrified wood, I get queasy.

Not to mention genetic manipulation, which has given us bright red tennis ball tomatoes that would not break on the bat of Sammy Sosa, with a taste closer to carpet fiber than tomatoes.

Mexican mutant strawberries as flavorless as poi. It’s what we’ve done to chicken, so we can roll it in carbo dust, deep-fry it, and addict our kids, but I digress. . . .

The ultimate toxic invention . . . a fruit roll-up. A flattened sticky hanky-sized sheet of goo. It reminds me of a frog’s tongue on the roof of an octopus’s mouth. But kids love it! So be it.

Right now I’m sipping coffee made from fresh ground Costa Rican beans in a china cup with real cream . . . and I’m wishing it had a big squirt of pecan caramel caustic cappuccino with a pH of 2. Probably not a good idea though, might take the enamel right off the cup.