Folgers coffee

I used to work at a cafe. I would spend five- and seven-hour shifts preparing double espressos, triple-vanilla lattes, tall clear glasses of premium Colombian, Ethiopian and Guatemalan coffee for tired office workers on their way back to the suburbs. Untold amounts of refining, shipping, storing and testing went into each cup the cafe sold. Running an espresso machine is, while not rocket science, a fairly intricate process, involving a good sense of timing and proportion.

I started out on the Ethiopian AAA. A straight cup of that was like liquid gold running down my throat. Not in a literal sense, of course. It was a wonderful, sweet, light beverage, and I loved it.

While it was free.

Now, it is the Folgers. It is the Folgers that I look forward to, its non-specifically ground, straight from the huge red corrugated can, cheap cheap cheap taste that greets me in the morning. And it is far better than that AAA ever could be. It just took some time between beverages, and some conscious attitude adjustment.

When you argue with your barista that the pressure on the espresso machine hasn't been adjusted to accommodate the recent dip in humidity, it might make you feel good that you knew something so esoteric. You might feel a sense of pride knowing that your coffee comes from a warehouse where an incredibly uptight little jerk obsesses over each and every batch, where samples are brought in a little rotating pie plate segmented like a Trivial Pursuit piece, each slot filled with a handful of each new shipment's stock.

But where does that get you?

There is something very important to understand in this world. In this country, especially. It's called the diminishing-return curve. Basically, you put the benefit of anything on one axis, and you put the difficulty in obtaining it on the other. When digging for ore, at a certain depth it becomes too expensive for the mining company to continue extracting metal from the ground. Water draining, atmosphere problems and plain distance from the surface all begin to outweigh the profit of obtaining the metal. This is true even in gold mines. The difficulty outweighs the benefit.

This isn't just about the extra cost of a fancy cup of coffee. When you decide you are refined, that you must sensitize your palate to only the highest quality, you give up something. The ability to accept less. Cheap wine will lose its pleasure once you've learned the finer aspects of wine tasting. A harmless romance flick will become revolting to you, once you've immersed yourself in cutting-edge cinema.

It's this same effect for heroin users. After experiencing reality in such an ecstatic form, walking around in a normal world is almost unbearable. What you've gained by extending your horizon, you lose by degrading the normal.

Skip the heroin, enjoy a sunset. Skip the $80 Merlot, enjoy some peach Arbor Mist with your girlfriend. Skip the hazelnut vanilla latte, pick up a sweet gas station cappuccino. And when you wake up and put the water on the stove, skip the Guatemalan-import-individually- hand-selected-bean- AAAA-extra-rich- special-French-press- ground-beans, and enjoy a perfectly normal, lovely smelling cup of Joe. From Folgers.

— Dan Norton)