My coworkers have learned it is best that I am steered away from real coffee. They at first, as most people do, thought my habit of drinking decaf to be a bit silly at best and counter-productive at worst. There was a time when I would have agreed with them. Of course, that was before the worst parts of puberty had really set in for me, and my body chemistry worked quite a bit differently. At that point, coffee relaxed me.

Now if I so much as smell caffeine I get wired like a five-year-old that just ate all of his Halloween candy in one go. I don't notice the effect so much anymore, but the guy I get along best with at work (who, strangely enough, is that homophobic guy I mentioned a couple entries back*) threatened to make me sit in a corner if I went near the coffee pot again.

There is a point to this. I had a red-eye about an hour ago, which for those of you that don't know is a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso mixed in. And that coffee? I made it what my father calls "Mexican style," boiled instead of dripped. I did it for all of those that want to see me write another entry in the anthologies, which I still have only just started. I picked a decent topic, I think, after pondering the feedback Lucy, TheZot, and a few others have given me. But I only have a week to crank it out, so I'll need all the hours in the day I can finagle if I'm to get it done in time.

So when I crash and start drooling over my keyboard, know I am suffering for my art and my audience.

Oh, here's a line from the opening. Not the first line, mind, but nearly.

"I was coming home because my brother Satar had, fulfilling our parent's every expectation of him, managed to knock up his date the senior prom and then asked me to be his best man."

*For the curious, the situation has settled itself in precisely the fashion I thought it might. He brought up golf with me, a game I detest, and asked if I played at all. I told him that only one person has ever managed to get me to play, and I was sleeping with him at the time. He dropped the conversation immediately. Since then, the comments have decreased to a frequency and magnitude I will tolerate.