𝐂𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞?

Don't you be a "Coffee Asshole". 

What's that you ask? 

That's when you are cultivating a pampered palate and take having a nice hot cup of Joe to the Nth level and make a Tea Ceremony ritual of it, procedurally and with the never ending quest for all the equipment and paraphernalia that's being marketed for you to part with your cash. Let's not even get started on the choices from the world of beans. The best cup of Coffee I ever had was in Jamaica; probably Blue Mountain. At around $100 USD per pound, sorry, just how good do I have to have my Coffee? Price/value dialectic.

Like take, for instance, Coffee grinders. Electric or hand ground? Price point? Seems "entry level" electric is close to $200 USD. There are even $200 plus hand jobs too on the high end of manuals. Not to belabor the pun too far, but after all the time invested in turning a hand crank for your result, it might not be such a happy ending.

Consistency of grind — size [matters] varies depending on brew method — is a big factor. Maybe I'm not that much of a Coffee Asshole ... I'm pretty well satisfied with the grind I get with my $20 blade unit. But, I do watch for how long I press the button, and give it a few shakes in between pulses to get all the particles done to uniform size. 

I would be tempted to buy an electric grinder. But, when you investigate the options, it's very easy to trade yourself up to the next ... and, the next pricier unit. Conical vs. flat burrs. And, what size. "Retention" ... how much grounds does the unit keep for itself. I generally step back at such a point and consider how many actual coffee beans I could buy for that price. I'll stick with my blade gizmo. Besides, I'm not inclined to do the multi-dimensional palate taste report. "Berry-Orange notes forward, with a hint of Chocolate and Caramel with just the right snap of acidity, finishing with a nice slightly bitter note of burnt Sugar." 

Don't give me no jive ... give me a cup of Coffee! 

Starbucks, nota bene: "Vente?" That some jive. When I used to go to Starbucks, since I like a good amount of Milk, I'd order a Grande in a Vente cup. [If you're getting from how I'm focused on price, you might think I'm a cheapskate. And, you'd be right.]

But, when I mention "entry level" at $200, the numbers go up quickly from there. The real bucks are in the units designed for Espresso. Let's not go into that thicket of techniques and equipment. Net net, seems you can easily spend at least $1,000 on a half decent Espresso set up. Half. You better be a heavy user at that price point. Or, some Asshole who likes to impress the company. Or, have money to burn.

Which reminds me to convey to you there's the world most expensive and rare Coffee. Kopi Luwak. They literally get it out a cat's ass. I shit you not. And not just any old pussy, but a rare Coffee cherry-eating feline; one Asian Palm Civet to be exact. Talk about bustin' a Cherry! Seems these cats are fussy too. They are picky about what Coffee cherries to eat. Apparently the beans are fermented in the kitty's digestive tract. Thoroughly cleaned for your drinking enjoyment. Let's hope the guy cleaning the shit off your beans that day didn't have a row with the old lady last night. Or, quite the opposite; in which case he might be too pooped to do the poop. 

Interested? $650.00 USD per kilo. No shit! At this point I simply have to ask once again, just how good does a cup of Coffee have to be? 

The world is full of "the best of" this-or-that's. Like once someone talked about the "best" Burrito. My question was the same, just how good does a Burrito have to be? It's probably a subject worth a doctoral thesis: "The Mindset That Gets You Going down the Rabbit Hole to Perfection." I was once "into" high-end audio. Did you know you can spend $100,000 plus USD on speaker cables?

Okay, we've had our fun. Now back to the topic.

I have to confess I've watched hours of instructionals on how to brew coffee; the various brewing methods, and the equipment requirements whereof. Maybe watching all those videos is a Rabbit hole itself.

When I want a punch, it's Bustelo, in a Moka Pot. Cafe con Leche style with hoted whole Milk and a spoon of Sugar. There are still probably lots of spots in my once hometown NYC to get a good Cafe con Leche at any number of Puerto Rican and Dominican restaurants.

Props to my go-to favorite ...

Alas, no more. Formerly at near the NE corner of 8th Avenue and 14th Street.

Mostly, my morning cup is a pour-over. Fresh ground in a cone shaped funnel, water poured over and collected under into a carafe. Be sure to make a divot in the center so the water gets to the bottom-most grounds. Precisely measured amounts of Coffee beans and water. Beans ground on the spot, with a dash of Bustelo for the win.

I like my "cuppa" hot. If you've ever done a pour-over you know it takes a while. First, a "bloom" with a dash of hot water — better be sure it's the precise right temperature. The "bloom" is to release trapped carbon dioxide for a better brew. Wait a few minutes, then slow pour your hot water. I get a 300ml amount that fills my cup and pour it in three 100ml passes. 

I always wonder with all the various ways people have for doing a pour-over no one mentions the temperature fall off what with waiting so long for to get that brew into your cup. Some, I believe prefer drinking their Coffee at a less than hot-hot level. I'm sure there's a whole specialized discussion on just that one topic alone.

So ... here's what this Coffee Asshole does beside the basic steps what to get a nice hot cup of Coffee.

I set the kettle to heat the water. In a shallow pan I heat water with a carafe with some water in it. The pour over funnel goes over the heated carafe — be sure to toss the hot water out of the carafe before introducing the beverage. I've missed this point a few careless times. Ugh! I like a middle-generous amount of whole Milk in my Coffee. I put hot water in my cup and a small glass inside that to heat the milk. Works like a charm: Hot Coffee in my cup!

Here's a link to a much more lengthy treatment on the subject of "Coffee". If you've read this far into it, you're probably a Coffee Asshole so you'll be sure to want to read more.

𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐔𝐤𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐝? ... 𝐀𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐀𝐦𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧

This is excerpted from the transcript of an interview with former Ambassador Chas Freeman. Edits were strictly grammatical/for reading flow. See the full video below. 

Attention Cold Warriors: If you are of the mind that the nation of Russia is out to conquer the whole world like from the days of the USSR, then skip reading this. Go ahead, continue to polish that turn nugget of Russophobia. Especially if you are convinced that President Putin is the embodiment of everything evil and dastardly. Refusing to even entertain any consideration or communication like Joe Biden did calling him in a litany of darkest shade: "butcher", "mass murderer", "killer", "crazy SOB", "war criminal", "murderous dictator", "pure thug". Some might take that as propagandizing narrative. If you bought it, then be that way. 

... Unless, of course, if you are willing to entertain that Russia has it's own legitimate security concerns. Like the US of A would most certainly have should China, for example, or some other country start training and equipping a military on the soil of Mexico with missiles pointed north.

Psychologically speaking ... We may have opinions on all this. One way or the other. Justified too, one way or the other. Nevertheless, opinions, however well justified, at some point have to have been put on; taken on, decided on ... however you want to put it. What we seem to forget is that it's not the opinion that we're contending with/protecting, it's the justification. So, how about putting opinion aside once in a while and simply look at the facts. If you're brave enough to do the shadow work, then go ahead and reexamine your justifications too. In this, and in anything in the world as well. Carl G. Jung speaks eloquently on this subjects. Dig.

On with the share ...

"Ambassador Charles "Chas" W. Freeman served as US Assistant Secretary of Defense, as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he was Richard Nixon's principal interpreter during his 1972 visit to China which led to the normalization of us China relations." 

Was the Russian invasion unprovoked?

"No, it was not unprovoked. We began to hear as early as 1994 from Boris Yeltson, before Vladimir Putin came to power, that the expansion of NATO and the presence of hostile forces on Russia's borders was unacceptable and would draw a military reaction. That reaction was actually further signaled during the brief war between Georgia and Russia, and there should have been no surprise. [And, BTW, Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly — and disputed — was given assurances in connection of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany that there would be no NATO expansion eastward.] Promises, promises. 

Chas Freeman: 

"The war began actually as a civil war between Ukrainians, Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers in 2014 after the coup d’état in Kiev when the new ultra-nationalist government in Kiev outlawed the use of Russian, Hungarian, Romanian and other minority languages at the local level, so that the Russian speakers who were predominant in eastern Ukraine, in some cases 70 — well 75% in Crimea — but sometimes as much as 90% in the Eastern Oblasts, rebelled and Russia naturally supported them. 

"So they wanted the right to use Russian to educate their children and to communicate with the local administrations. This actually resulted in a negotiation; two agreements at Minsk sponsored by France and Germany, which were agreed to by the Russians, confirming that the Donbas region Oblasts Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Donetsk would remain part of Ukraine but on a basis similar to that of Quebec and Canada; that is, they would be allowed to have their own language as an official language and educate their children in that language. That agreement was then repudiated, was first vigorously endorsed by Zelensky when he ran for president, and then when he came into office it was repudiated at which point Angela Merkel of Germany and François Hollande of France both said well we didn't really mean that agreement it was just a means of gaining time for us to arm and train the Ukrainian armed forces against Russia. So the provocation began with attacks by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians on fellow Ukrainians who happened to be Russian speaking in the East it escalated to a Russian intervention against those ultra-nationalist Ukrainians that went on for eight years.

"15,000 people died from barrages of artillery into the Russian speaking areas and eventually in December 2021 Vladimir Putin demanded negotiations on three topics: [1.] one was the halt to any talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO, or the implication that American and other anti-Russian forces would be stationed on Russia's borders; [2.] the second was to reaffirm the Minsk Accords and the autonomy of Russian speakers in the East and by implication Hungarians and Romanians as well (there are other minorities in Ukraine); [3.] and, finally of course, a broad discussion of European security architecture in with Ukraine as a neutral party to that rather on the model of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 which was reached at the height of the Cold War, which guaranteed Austria's Independence and democracy, and required Austria to treat its minorities Italians and the Slovenians [and] Hungarians in the very manner that the Conference on Security and Cooperation Europe [CSCE] requires. 

"So those were the three items for negotiation. They remain the three items for negotiation, with one major difference which is that Russia now having had to go to war against Ukraine and occupying the four all or part of the four Russian speaking Oblasts in the East now demands to keep them because it does not trust guarantees from Ukraine that in fact anything like the Minsk Accords is now possible to be implemented. 

"So I'll end here and I think that's a very brief history. There are many twists and turns in this, of course."

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐘 𝐖𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍 𝐍𝐄𝐄𝐃𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐌𝐄𝐍 ... 𝐁𝐲 𝐙𝐞𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐦

WHAT EVERY WOMAN NEEDS 

TO KNOW ABOUT MEN

If He Could Say What He Really Felt, 

This Is What He’d Tell You …

By Zen Prem

Most men don’t want to be distant. He’s just never learned how to be close, without feeling like he’s about to emotionally shit the bed

Let’s get that out of the way first.

Most men weren’t raised to be emotionally available.
He was raised to be useful. To keep the wheels turning.
To shut up, get on with it, fix things, pay bills, don’t cry, don’t need, don’t break.

He was taught how to function. He was never taught how to feel.

So when you say: “Just tell me what you’re feeling…” you may as well be asking him to explain the mating patterns of deep-sea octopuses in Sanskrit.

It’s not that he’s unwilling. It’s that he was emotionally house-trained with shame. He grew up swallowing grief like it was chewing gum. He learned that softness equals weakness. That fear equals failure. That vulnerability equals exposure equals humiliation.

And then he meets women who say: “I just want you to open up…”. But here’s what that request sounds like in his heads: “Please hand me the keys to the one room inside you that’s never been safe. And I promise I won’t flinch.”

Except… you might. And you have.

And so has he.

Because when a man does open that door, when he lets himself be scared, raw, uncertain, … too many times, what meets him isn’t reverence. It’s rejection.

He’s suddenly “too much.”

Too messy.

Too emotional.

Not strong enough.

Not grounded enough.

Not man enough.

You want him cracked open, but still stoic. You want his tears, but art-directed. You want his fear, but only if it comes with a plan and a sexy voiceover.

But that’s not real. That’s a curated breakdown.
That’s Instagram-safe vulnerability. And most men don’t have access to that kind of tidy unravelling .

When a man starts to feel, really feel, it’s not beautiful at first. It’s awkward. It’s clumsy. It’s terrifying. It’s rage with no language. It’s grief that’s been fermenting for decades under a lid of “I’m fine.”

Because the male psyche is a warehouse full of unlabelled boxes. He doesn’t know what’s inside until one bursts open at the worst possible moment, usually halfway through a conversation about why he forgot to text back.

He’s not emotionally unavailable. He’s emotionally unsupervised.

He’s been left alone with his shame so long he’s started calling it “independence.” He’s scared shitless you’ll see through the façade and realize half the time he doesn’t know what he’s doing. In life. In love. In bed. In conversation.

But he also wants to show up. He wants to feel safe.

He wants to be that man, the one who can hold space without shutting down. But not if he has to perform our evolution to earn love. Because performing is exactly what broke him.

So if you really want to know the one thing every woman should understand about men… ?

He’s not scared of you. He’s scared of being seen, and left.

He’s scared that the second he let’s you into the soft, unfinished places, you’ll quietly pack your emotional bags and leave him with a look that says, “That’s it?”

And look, maybe men are emotionally constipated idiots sometimes. ( ok, most of the time) … But it’s not because we don’t care. It’s because no one ever taught us how to metabolize pain without violence, shame, or silence.

So here’s what I’ll say to the women reading this: I know it’s hard to love someone who doesn’t yet know how to love themselves. I know your nervous systems are exhausted from holding the emotional scaffolding of every relationship.

But he’s not your project. He’s not your redemption arc. He’s not here to complete your healing story.

We are men, trying. Fumbling. Waking up slower than you wanted us to. But waking up all the same.

And to the men reading this…?

Stop pretending you’re not scared. Stop outsourcing your emotional labor to women and calling it intimacy. Stop confusing stoicism with strength and silence with sovereignty.

Start doing the work. Not to impress her.

But to finally meet yourself.

You don’t heal by performing evolution. You heal by showing up when it’s fucked up and messy.

Because the truth is, every man has a moment where he must choose between safety and soul. Between performing and presence. Between the armor and the love he actually fucking wants.

And if he doesn’t choose presence…

He will never experience, and probably lose everything that ever mattered.

Zen Prem

Coauthor of Beyond Bullshit To Bliss 

with Samantha Spiro

𝐎𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 ...

"Research studies have shown ...". How many times have we heard that phrase narrated like an imprimatur for whatever the F is being stated as verified fact.

There's research, then there's research. Be skeptical. Just because it's "research" don't mean it's true. But, what is true anyway? There's aren't words for that ... anyway.

One type of study is to find out what's what so that we can glean some understanding about how things work. Take atomic energy. [PLEASE!] A prime example of how knowing how things work can be used for good, or ill. These days the conversation is over whether nation states in order to not be fucked over —Muammar Gaddafi is spinning in his grave — need to have an atomic bomb, or two, in the cupboard. What could possibly go wrong? Especially since we're fortunate to not have a single soup-brained nincompoop at any level of governance on the geopolitical world scene. [As if.]

Then there's "pure" research. Just looking into stuff to see what we find; what's there. Open ended. I don't know the percentages between the number of "applied" versus "pure" research studies, but you can be sure there's a lot of latter in the works and looking for funding. 

Researchers, they want to research. Whether any one of them is wise enough to be self-aware enough to research into themselves why they are disposed to wanna look into things anyway ... well, who knows.

So what's with Hippo farts? And the carpenter level? The story goes that this is an offshoot of the classic "pure" research study to determine how many wrinkles in a Bull's ass. The lab joke goes, "Bend over, let me count". Don't laugh. Who knows. It just may be that the number and pattern of wrinkles in a Bull's ass may have significant implications, ramifications, and applications in who knows what and wherefore in so many areas of Human activity. That's "pure" research, you never know.

So what about the flaming Hippo. Well, the study is essentially about how the number and pattern of wrinkles is a large beast's tuchus has effects on the many various aspects of effluent "windage". Why anyone would want to delve into this stinky mess ... well, depends on researcher inclinations and preferences. "Anal retentive"? Who knows. A lot of history is no doubt a result of such conditioned determinants. 

Let's not over state the complications of conducting such a study. The Monkeys? Well, they're the least complicating factor in what would otherwise be the necessity to strap that dumb beast to a contraption which as we know from our understanding of scientific process would be a hugely complicating factor and color the research unduly owing to the layers of input due to the apparatus itself.

From there, the world is your Oyster. The many permutations of measurements: volume, intensity, direction, duration, olfaction, heat — Did you hear the one about the guy who farts in church ... he must sit in own pew. — flame color, environmental impact(s) ... to name just a few.

Then there's the other variables: Animal sex — among the beasts of the world, seems there are only two ... still — age, indigenous locale, diet, health ... and, of course, the number and patterns of those wrinkles. 

As you can see such a study, while seemingly besides any point any reasonable person would want to make, can keep a researcher in lunch money for quite some time. This is not to say that it's all about the money. Like they say at Chase Bank, "Hey, it's just money!". Maybe for some out there. But mostly about, as we've mentioned, just looking into things. 

Even if it's looking into things from the behint of a Hippopotamus.  

𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ...

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐈𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐕𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐁𝐢𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐢 ...

One Summer in our early days together at Rockaway Beach I stood waist deep in the ocean and watched as the rolling waves lifted her up, and too her blue velour terrycloth bikini.

Velour terrycloth is very loosely soft when wet; like tissue paper. It clung close to her body, and with each wave she had to adjust it to keep from being exposed. 

So modest. So sexy.

A moment so vividly remembered after so many years, and so many waves ... upon waves. And, all kinds. As you can imagine. Many gentle and regularly recurring. Others more so. And some, crashing.