{"id":254571,"date":"2023-02-19T13:50:47","date_gmt":"2023-02-19T18:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=254571"},"modified":"2023-02-19T13:50:47","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T18:50:47","slug":"the-only-good-coffee-is-bad-coffee-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/02\/19\/the-only-good-coffee-is-bad-coffee-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The only good coffee is bad coffee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a recent version of her excellent newsletter Griefbacon (which is the literal translation of a German term for eating because you’re sad), Helena Fitzgerald writes about her favourite kinds of terrible coffee<\/a>, including: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Gas Station Coffee: You\u2019re driving somewhere you\u2019ve never been before. The country is so much larger than anything should be. No matter how many times you think how is there this much of it, how is there still so much of it, there is always more, a room further inside the house, opening into other rooms. Highways spool out like the surface of an unknown planet. It\u2019s lonely but most things are lonely; that\u2019s why it matters so much when anything doesn\u2019t feel lonely, even for five minutes. It\u2019s lonely, but a lot of us like being lonely a lot more than we think we do.

You\u2019re going to meet someone\u2019s parents. You\u2019re going somewhere for Thanksgiving; you have homemade food in the back of the car in big dishes covered over with foil. You\u2019re going to see the friend who moved out of the city. It\u2019s not all that far away but it\u2019s more fun to pretend that it is. You\u2019re going to someone\u2019s wedding; a dry cleaning bag is hanging off that uncertain hook in the backseat like a ghostly passenger. You\u2019re holding a cup of gas station coffee. It\u2019s maybe the worst coffee you\u2019ve ever had. It\u2019s maybe the worst coffee anyone\u2019s ever had.

You stopped at a gas station because you needed gas or because you needed to pee. You got out of the car and the air smelled just slightly wild, in that way the air near a gas station always does. You went inside and bought a coffee and the coffee came in one of the those horrible hyper-insulated styrofoam cups with the treacherous little flip-top tab. You took it back to the car and took a sip and burned your tongue and then you drove away. Or, really, someone else drove away. Gas station coffee is the glory of the passenger seat, the dissociative blur of houses and highway, the crackle of untrustworthy radio stations, every conversation interrupted at its crisis point or punchline by the google maps lady\u2019s polite warnings.”<\/p>\n

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In a recent version of her excellent newsletter Griefbacon (which is the literal translation of a German term for eating because you’re sad), Helena Fitzgerald writes about her favourite kinds of terrible coffee, including: “Gas Station Coffee: You\u2019re driving somewhere you\u2019ve never been before. The country is so much larger than anything should be. No … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The only good coffee is bad coffee”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}