Caffinated Social contract

I could wait for the coffee pot to fill up all the way, but it’s faster to try and fight gravity and pour a half cup of lukewarm coffee. This process is why there is a semi-permanent stain one the kitchen counter where the percolator is located. On a good day I’ll find a rag and use it to minimize the mess. On a bad day, coffee will drip down in to the silverware door or the coffee mug slips from my hands and breaks apart on the concrete patio in the back yard where I smoke. My mother is very concerned about the coffee stain under the percolator. She has long loud conversations with the stain. She screams at the stain in the third person. She talks to the stain referring to me and herself in the third person. She talks loud enough so I can hear her outside when I’m smoking. If she is not confident that I can hear her she opens the kitchen window.

I make the coffee in the morning. I am the reason why the coffee stain exists. I am the reason why the stain in the kitchen has sister and brother stains trailing down the basement stairs to my room. When I was in the Navy I made coffee for the officers and enlisted when I was on watch. I’d walk three decks down and if there was a CS (Culinary Specialist) I’d con the guy with Snickers to make the coffee for me. If I couldn’t find a CS I’d go 2 more decks down to the enlisted Mess decks. I’d steal some from the enlisted percolator. Throughout the four years I’d be in this situation I only dropped the coffee jug once. The ship was rocking pretty badly that day. The day before a buddy of mine, twisted his ankle during a fire drill. He said the position the deck was when he lifted his foot off the ground was 45 degrees the opposite direction when he tried to finish his step. I made sure I didn’t spill coffee because I didn’t want to clean it up. Also, I only had a certain amount of time from when I was sent to make coffee to when I was suppose to return with coffee. I didn’t have enough time to lose focus. This coffee was also the coffee that was going to keep me awake during watch. If I started nodding off the BMOW (Boatswains Mate of the Watch) was prone to taking a marline spike and jabbing me in the rib cage or blowing his Boatswains Pipe in my ear.

The easiest way to avoid the coffee stain the kitchen would be to wait until the coffee is finished and clean up the mess as soon as it happens. I start writing papers for my classes as soon as I get my first cup filled. The sooner I finish this paper the sooner I will be playing Rockband. Everyone once in a while when I don’t have a paper to write and it’s not a morning in which I need a pot of coffee to function I think about avoiding creating a caffeinate mark which brings my mother closer to dementia. This stain seems to bother her. This stain bothers me but not enough to converse with it. The kitchen counter is a speckle blue color and does not mesh well with coffee rings. All the kitchen rags now are stained brownish yellow. This stain is a problem. At the moment this paper is more important to my well being then a clean kitchen. Although my mother seems to think I should be able to take care of both situations. I figure if I focus on one thing at a time that one thing will be done better then two things done with half-focus.

I downed a pot of coffee morning during highschool before I got on the bus. I don’t remember if I was as messy with the making, drinking and carrying of coffee then as I am now. I know there isn’t a stain in the kitchen that looks like it’s from 2003 but that might be due to the four years I was in the Navy when there wasn’t a male living in the house. The coffee stain can be extremely useful to distract my mother from something else I might do that could bother her. If she starts raging on me about the cigarette butts in the back yard or toothpaste in the bathroom sink, then I can make a subtle indirect reference to coffee or coffee accessories and that will redirect her tone of voice to a manageable familiar babble.

There are two fix’s I need to purchase to remedy this situation once and for all. A coffee percolator with a valve that stops the coffee from flowing when the pot is lifted off the heater, this would solve the immediate and obvious staining process which is happening to the kitchen counter, and absolve me of the 3^rd person banter coming from my mother. I might even get verbally rewarded by my mother because I made the effort to fix a problem. Also I must purchase a couple coffee cups with lids which would stop the spillage that happens when I pounce down the stairs excited to write my next paper. A snazzy little cup with something witty written on the side of it like, “A cup a day keeps the anger away.”