Mr. Tea

I drink tea. Coffee makes me feel sick. And: tea is clean. It comes in a little bag. You don't squeeze boiling water through its guts to make juice; you allow heat to coax flavor from its twigs and berries. Also, there's the British angle, which makes things more refined and also uptight. I like caffeine that carries an aftertaste of uptight. Feels honest.

I hate green tea. Green tea tastes like grass, and I'm allergic to grass. Green tea has a musty, rotting smell, like ripe hay. It cannot be tempered with honey or sugar. It carries its pungency the way an old woman carries her purse, in a claw, suspicious, full of hidden crap that's musty and useless. Give me black tea. Give me that tannin feeling in the morning with a sharp tongue-biting tinge of bile. Black tea reminds you that you're alive, and also that you should have had one less drink the night before. Black tea is like coffee, but it hugs you after the abrasive conversation about your failings; so, black tea is the roommate you had sophomore year, not freshman year. Black tea is the roommate you chose, against your better judgement.

My work provides tea. It also provides coffee, per the law of Sunday Comics (an obscure law that enforces the continued romp of lame joke memes through American culture, responsible for such phrases as "I've got a case of the Mondays" and "Hump Day" and "Jersey Shore"), but I'm impressed by the tea selection, which shows either a fine sense of diversity or a quasi-bigoted sense of superiority. I don't know. I work in the financial industry, so either could apply, though the latter is best to assume.

Tea breaks. I remember them fondly from Australia. My first job there was working overnights at the university press, running copies of condensed textbooks for first-year courses then binding them sloppily in hot glue. I arrived a month before the fall semester began, and there was a rush to handle. The giant, belching copy machine that occupied half a warehouse-floored room at the bottom of a hill was working 'round the clock, emitting an odor of toner (black dust, like gunpowder, but softer and with a hint of pantyhose) and overheated circuitry. I filled its drawer-like belly with reams of A4, always making sure to keep the right side up (you must check by ruffling the stack and feeling the fringe of the paper edges beneath your thumb; the soft side should be tactile, not the corrugated side) to avoid jams. When a long job of 500 books was running, my co-hort -- a Jeep-driving, kangaroo-shooting Ocker who listened to Megadeth and once visited Oregon -- and I would take a tea break. This consisted mainly of smoking.

Tobacco is not unlike tea. It's a bunch of carefully selected black leaves shoved into a container and heated until something good but also poisonous leached in an inexplicably pleasurable way that humans cultivated into a fetish. We smoked together, and the sharp black air under the Southern Cross made me feel alive and alone with exhilaration. Finally, I was on another side of the globe. Finally, I had severed myself from any past. Finally, I was free to be an idiot. We talked, and we even drank tea. The fifteen minutes elapsed. The machine fell dormant and muttered in hungry repose. I returned to my task.

Tea, properly, should be served with biscuits. We think of biscuits in America as woven pillows of wheat that have crusted over, not unlike cereal, or soft mounds of dough fresh from the oven. Tea biscuits are sugared crusts of bread, donuts that have gone hard from prison labor. Pepperidge Farms milanos without the chocolate or the mint or the charm or the expense. Just crispy fingers of crusty dough, sprinkled with hard rocks of sugar the size and consistency of kosher sea salt. It pairs well with the acidic pleasures of tea. A biscuit with a cup of tea is like a punishment of bread and water with unexpected, snuck-in treasures. 

Mornings I don't have a cup are mornings to sleep as long as possible. An A.M. without tea is a period of torture, of blood-eyed dullness that cannot be broken with humor or entertainment. I never feel more like a dinosaur than I do in the tea-less morning, stumbling about with dry skin and a bleary brain, swatting away conversation with grunts and dirty looks. I marvel that V ever put up with me after the first relaxed morning we spent together, when I revealed this true side of myself, this tea-dependent monster of selfish resentment. Imagine spending hours with someone lacking a cerebral cortex. Now imagine marrying that person. Shit, this should be my wedding vow: not a promise of love, but a warning to all those who might imagine some tiny joy in finding my love. Worry not, lads and lasses, this angel has taken the bullet, laid on the grenade, dealt with my morning thunder. 

Morning Thunder. Now there's an American tea. I believe it's Celestial Seasonings? At any rate, it's packed with caffeine and caustic as Drano. It does what it says on the box -- your body chemistry gets its wake-o-meter pegged to full upon three sips -- but it leaves your mouth scraped and panting, like a losing boxer who nonetheless celebrates a decent purse just for showing up. I hate Morning Thunder. I usually opt for Constant Comment, which has the decency to bury its caffeinated intentions in a bed of lilac and orange. It's like being slapped in the face by Martha Stewart. (Believe it or not, I'm the kind of masochist to think that's ... a good thing.)

Lately, my 9-to-5 responsibilities have made me question my dependency upon caffeine, upon tea. Am I more tuckered in the afternoons because of its false high, its subtle tweaking of my blood? For sure, there are days when I take three mugs, far more than the recommended daily allowance of any surgeon general. Is tea just a gateway drug to coffee and then 5-Hour Energy and then Clif Bars and then burnt spoonfuls of crack? 

Or is a bag, dipped vigorously in a steaming cup, a harmless stimulant for the mind? I confess -- the Tea Party has a more solid grip upon my imagination than it should, only because I imagine a rational conversation to be had around the smallest of tables, just me and a few patriots and a clutch of childhood teddy bears, all prepared to be civil and witty. To drink tea instead of coffee in America is to subscribe to that other magazine, the one that uses 'u' in some words and puts the day before the month. Tea drinking is effete, unusual, and, in the south, something one does cold with six tablespoons of sugar, not hot with a slice of lemon. So why does the most vehemently and ignorantly American political movement claim tea as its emblem?

Why is the protest of tea such an ingrained part of our culture? It's not bad. It's kind of fun. Imagine something you can brew yourself, every morning, like a fresh quaff of beer without the sleepy aftereffects (or, you know, the drunkenness). It's time to take tea back. It's time to celebrate those little individual pouches for what they are, each one a choice to be individual, to package a global enterprise of exotic goods that were cheaply obtained, to boil the fruits of the world's botany in the service of a mildly flavored morning pick-me-up, to become fuel for corporate enterprise. What's more American than all that? 

Okay, I'll stop. Too much tea; I've become over-steeped and bitter.