The comfort of a mug of steaming tea is something that cannot be described.
I challenge all of the loud beer drinkers of the world, all of the jittery coffee addicts, all of the smug latté-drinkers, all of the proponents of soft-drink superiority to come huddle around the girl's window as we sit with our mugs of tea.
They will be sad, for they will realize just how little they have been getting from their respective drinks.
The beer drinker, though still a bit drunk, will be sobered and will consider how all of the answers can't be had by simply tossing back can after can of his unappealing nonsense. Though it gave him ideas, and these ideas were quite interesting and humorous to him, they seemed very dull to the tea drinker, who hoped that the beer drinker would drop the matter.
The coffee addict will look in the window and at first will grin a bit when he sees one of his own engaging in "the trade," but as he narrows his eyes and looks closer, he will be sad also because he will not see any shaking hands-the nervous kind, not the kind that seal deals, of which there are many to be seen--or any caffeine-fuelled anger. No, he will realize the futility of his rush towards "progress," towards an unthinking acceleration to nowhere which eats at his insides and drives him mad. He will weep because the coffee has made him a slave to a false idol, and the tea drinkers will look out and see a shell of a man, and think it a ghost.
The latté-drinker will be resistant at first, as the coffee-drinker was. He will think of all the care and expertise that went into crafting his complex beverage, and will frown upon a mere plain mug (perhaps with a whimsical design on it), filled with some straight liquid that has no foam, no stirring-stick, no mixed-in syrups, no ad campaign. And yet, he will take the last sweet sip from his mug, his alleged superior concoction, and a great pain will strike his chest, and he will wail to the skies. His drink was too sweet and too unnatural, and it hurt him in the end, though a part of him pretends that the pain is part of life.
Time will wise him up, as he puts his hands on the glass and breathes so close that a certain fogging-up can be seen. He will ponder things and suddenly he will see that all of his fancy trimmings were covering up a decidedly mediocre drink. He will look to the ground, to his shattered mug, and will think: What did I get from this? A pain underneath my ribs? Some processed sweetness? What has all of this got me? The advertising posters in the window of my coffeeshop franchise of choice had might as well be mirrors, for there they were and there I was… and he will be sad in a manner that will be deep, but also deep with thought.
The soft-drink aficionado will have watched the latté-drinker and yet learned none of his lessons. He will clutch his plastic bottle to him as his very own little plastic baby, and in a reversal of roles will put his mouth to the surrogate nipple of the bottle, and then again will cling to it and hug it. But he will feel nervousness too, as did the coffee drinker, and guilt at his ignorance, as did the beer drinker, and he will avert his eyes from the mirror that the latté-drinker saw in the window. Surely no hot drink could refresh the unending athlete's thirst of the soft-drink lover.
But then he will feel remorse, for he let fall his soccer posse, and traded it in for a soccer video game and some chips, and he will realize that in fact his entire last summer was spent in his bedroom with those questionable companions, and he will look at the two tea-drinkers who sit in wise silence, and he will be humbled as the others were.
The very secrets to everything emerge with the rising steam from our tea. There is no question too great to be tackled by us two with our teas on a couch and a, pardon the expression, coffee table.
We share a kinship with the desert traveler whose few possessions include a tea kettle, and with the urban intellectual and his overpriced peppermint tea, and the woman or man lazing about drinking green tea against walls all over the world. Surely this is the tie that binds us, not some tooth-rotting imperial culture imposed by businessmen with contracts in one hand and guns in the other.