danielpasquinucci

[danielpasquinucci]

[danielpasquinucci]

Impressionable by sudden gusts of strong wind, a fickle seed flew up and away from its mother and found a new home implanted on the highest branch of a 10 foot diameter tree. In the canopy of the forest, the erupting air currents were constant and the seed’s new home was a whirlwind of soil and skyjacked insects. If it wanted to blossom, it’s roots must be unwaveringly wide and labyrinthine. In the soft blades of a spore-ascended patch it plopped and exploded from the moisture sprouting stubborn roots through the moss—the outer bark too hard to pierce, its roots grow like the shadow of a building: thinly shallow, but vastly encompassing. The seedling grows. An epiphyte, leafy and scrambling shrubby stems through the moss busy branches, awakened millions of years ago. Beautiful, but bulky; the epiphyte modifies its leaves like a sailboat in a typhoon. Leaves rolled up into spines, the plant is much more aerodynamic in the wind and the tiny spears repel the neighboring nest of robins. The ants, however, enjoy frequent passing through the channeling spines like street lights and have acquired the taste for its nutrient rich elaiosome: the shell of the pseudo-flower’s seed which contain ample lipids and amino acids. The seed is an attractive bounty for foraging worker ants to carry back to the colony. Therefore, by myrmecochory, the elaiosome is consumed underground and torn apart by the ants mandibles. Buried naked in the anthill, a new seedling sprouts and awakens far from the tree.

Under the brush, light was yielding as the Sun dropped soft rays through the forest canopy—just enough to be caught by chlorophyll. However, on the plains, the seedling lay exposed to unrelenting radiance. Through transpiration, pores open and close allowing carbon dioxide to enter; but at the cost of its water. Too much water is lost under the sun, therefore, the vagabond plant learns to breathe at night and it’s spines grow longer and dense to shadow the plant. It becomes nocturnal and stores the carbon dioxide for daytime photosynthesis. A shift of tectonic plates crash and mountains divide the ecosystem; the forest fruits to the windward, and the dry plains on the leeward. As the wind blows high into the mountain’s windward peak, the atmosphere cools the air and forces its travelling moisture to precipitate; the forest grows dense with ceaseless rain. Contrary, the vagabond plant, prickly and nocturnal, now finds itself on the leeward side of the mountain receiving hardly any rain at all. Wilted and shrunk, the sun’s heat folds the plant over its flimsy stem. It’s been many a days since one lonely cloud made it out of the rainforest—the desert is arid and devastatingly hot, but suddenly black clouds make it over the mountain and pour rain down the leeward. A river flows down the mountain side and washes over the plant. During this brief baptism, the plant awakens in a surplus of hydration. It sucks up all the water it can and then more! Its stem grows FAT and fleshy with water hoarding for inevitable scarce times to come. Cacti is born.

A bandito with a gold tooth finds the cacti sprouted all along the red canyons. Its spines are perfectly pink, and the bandito finds them in huge clusters. He finds cacti growing in the cracks of rocks. Cacti a meter high, clusters 10 feet wide. He finds tiny, tiny, tiny, cacti just a few centimeters tall. The bandito steps on a cacti and gets a spine in his foot. The bandito pisses on a cacti and also piddles a bit on his boot.

[danielpasquinucci]

It was captivating, this newsstand, and it radiated glossy colors with ideal faces that invited me with smiles. It was a myriad of local gazettes, biweekly booklets, monthly magazines, and digests regurgitating information into boiled down conciliatory compilations of summaries that are easy to understand. Paper boys announcing the twofold extra and imploring me to read all about everything. Extra Extra. There are still bundled never to be unbundled twine wound newspaper stacks used as a stage to support a broom that sweeps the concrete; of course they’re a top sealed cardboard boxes of presumingly more bundled newspapers never to be unsealed to never unbundle. There are plastic wrapped bushels of the same magazine never to be unwrapped, protected by a polyethylene shell. Reliable, the artificial guard accumulates the LA dirt and New York grime, but discourages a translucent preview of the content inside. I know, from recognizing similar color patterns through the mask of dust and comparing to an above shelf, it’s a New Beauty magazine. Paulina Porzikova, 53, is on the cover smiling with rosy lips and a laughing face displaying great teeth; she says “It sucks. When your entire life has consisted of looking good, aging publicly, in a word, sucks. This is not for the faint-hearted.” I don’t know Paulina, but the 56 pocket revolving stand old aged arrangement of sudoku, crosswords, and brain buzzlers all yellowed out without the plastic cloak would agree—I give the swivel a spin and a whiff of sweet heavy library smells swirls into my nose because puzzles don’t need to have plastic protectors. The glossy magazines on the shelf are beautiful enough to just take home, and I must; but there is a surplus of the same magazine. Pull a magazine off the shelf, and there’s a dozen more behind it. Clear a shelf of a magazine, and there’s a perfect pile of another 3 dozen plastic wrapped magazines waiting. There’s some plural cardboard boxes concealing dozens more of the same magazine never to have the spine flexuously bowed…. 
It all happens very fast, but you and I, the readers, get it all because the audience is known: people that work during the day and simply want to know what’s deemed important happening in the world week by week— the words are small, concise, and there are pictures. Golfers are swinging clubs with clenched smiles and workout people are issuing weight loss advice with washboard abs. “Ryan Gosling has got the right stuff” GQ assures us—he has the look on his face and pockets hold his cool hand gestures, but enough wrist lay bare so he maintains the time and the glare of his tungsten watch. It is evident in his look he does—he knows what time it is—Ryan Gosling does have the right stuff. He’s fashionable. Everything he’s wearing is textural: staticky blue fibrous trench coat augmented with three large darker matte blue buttons, a tight buff [sRGBb (224, 171, 118)] long sleeve collared shirt of soft cotton which is tucked into brown wool slacks; a charged jolt waiting to zap you with his electric blue eyes. His hair shouts up like a snow covered peak waiting to avalanche as it tapers to a faded side and blends fluently into his brussly bearded strong chin. You might fall victim, like I did to running your own hands through your own hair with sad realizations of disappointment and calamity of dispossessed locks so we bring the magazine home to see what else it takes to have the right stuff. That’s what I need: right hair, right shirt, right shoes, right etc. Ryan Gosling is a vindicated gentleman because he has the right stuff: expensive cloth, designer haircut, and designer jewelry. I, you, we need. We are promised, in this quarterly issue, in order to be gentlemen we too must acquire the right stuff, but that’s nothing new. 
There’s countless magazines on this newsstand, but this one stands out. The Last Magazine calls for all goggling eyes—it looks cool. It’s very large, unreadably so that it requires effort and you better plan for it. Express care when you grasp it in your clumsy paws because it’s a flimsy glue-bond oblong tunnel enveloping stuffed pages. A piñata of literature and images waiting to be cracked open and spew out sweet pages. You desperately want to crack it open with a bat, break the seal like an SAT section, however, let’s not untangle it at the newsstand; rather than make a public mess, bring it home and spread all the pages on the floor diving headfirst. Wait to unjamble that mess of a magazine till you’re in privacy to undress—in all glory, settle on the hardwood floor naked in solidarity with the broken sealed Last Magazine. Consume and binge. Center your hands on the pages and order them however you’d like. Circumscribe yourself in a perimeter of paperback images and words until you gorge—raw, unadulterated human consumption. When you unravel the mystery content of The Last Magazine and find yourself playing Twister with the inner loose pages of modeling faces and stunning figures, move left hand to starving beauty and self esteem out the window as you pinch right hand to chunky belly. In the eye of the storm of glossy paper, you cannot see yourself in any of these pages or in any of these model humans—make yourself feel better and skip a meal, buy into a fad diet to purge the feelings of negative body image, a green smoothie, repent. Forgiveness. 
There is an endless array of magazines. Fabian Curt Millet, a 712 review, 1,089 photos, 27 ratings, and 21,797 point certified local guide assures us in his 5 star review that this newsstand is “breathtaking”. Fabian Curt Millet has been to the scenic spot of Le Sentier des Ocres de Roussillon, France and the “ochre color of the earth” was “unforgettable”, but he snapped two pictures just in case it wasn’t. 5 stars. Fabian Curt Millet has been to Ole & Steen in Marylebone, London where he enjoyed “great foccacia” and “great avocado toast”. The WiFi was only just “good” unfortunately. 5 stars. Fabian Curt Millet looks like a cuckold who’d give his wife’s adulterer 5 stars, but his reviews are of the caliper and quantity exemplary of a great yelping local guide. Contrary to Fabian Curt Millet, the newsstand isn’t awesome or taking my breath away, but it is perfectly sensationally overwhelming. You get your dose of anything. There’s at least 14 different car magazines that I can count with the assistance of my hands and 4 toes, and there might be more; German cars, classic cars, Corvette and Porsche specific magazines, Jaguars, concept cars, red and blue and green cars, I pause to breathe….Oh alright, F.C.M. Each one suggests an enhanced life if you purchase this metallic protruding intake, or any of the items on the front page column of gizmos and lubricants to make it go faster. There are encyclopediac magazines heavy with mechanical stuff about cars and there are more in the back with articles of the power a driver feels behind the wheel. Road Track, with two Goliath sport cars racing on the cover, dwarfs the used car manual to it’s left. All the magazines are vertical and oriented in a legible manner except for the horizontal used car manual. The used car manual has absolutely no chance—it’s hanging on so that a thrifty bargainer might barter for the manual, but immediately left, Jeff Bezos has a discerning arm folded objection to it on the cover of Wired which on page 54 of the magazine has an inside look to Blue Origin’s Mission where Jeff Bezos “wants us to leave Earth for good” and the used car manual as well. Nobody ever bothers to fix the manual’s position anyway. 
I’ve been standing before this newsstand Above The Fold Larchmont long enough to be obviously sweating on my 9.5” x 6” three subject notebook; the pages’ ink smears with saturation and it’s the second time I’ve made eye contact with the shopkeeper. He’s probably wondering why I’m standing here and what ever I could be doing, what I could be writing. I must be auditing his performance—a bureaucrat sent by bigger bureaucrats to audit his working conduct. He lowers the radio because he must keep the decibels below 9 to comply to company regulations—man, corporate would audit him at such a time with record low sales like last month’s performance. Low returns to the company so he’s sweating. I’m sweating. We’re all sweating—this is Los Angeles and we are all too shallow to wear shorts. Everyone in magazines wears jeans, which suffocates the genitals and impedes bending, but cover the ugly shortcomings between your knee and ankle. 5 stars. 
VOGUE.
VOGUE.
VOGUE.
VOGUE. 
I’ll open up ONE Vogue: £3.99 square in the top corner. This cover features a woman in a dress with a supine hand perched under her chin in an obsolete red telephone booth—the nostalgia of a phone booth adds quirky pizazz to her vintage look. Her diamond ring protrudes off her long fingers, but her dress is slick that, in accordance to physical laws, it must be wet the way it shines and clings to her body. Upon further advancement, the first and second page are dedicated to Louis Vuitton purses. Handbags for your car keys, wallet, phone, and lipstick. The seventy-seventh page is thicker than the rest; employing gravity it uses its weight to attract consuming readers. The seventy-seventh page is a Gucci Bloom cologne scratch and sniff page with promotional hashtags #inBloom. I sniff my own musk in vast conflict with my senses—a new cologne is something I buy the following month. Different Vogues are lined up in a row with different covers—an endless supply of fashion accessories, makeup and beauty, perfume and cologne, and sharp facial expressions interpreted by and further translated through photoshop. You’re seeing this and making love to girls in magazines—it is not surprising. Here’s one entirely in French which I cannot understand, but I appreciate the cover girl’s bushy eyebrows at least. 
“Do you have PAW PATROL?” The shopkeeper goes to help the woman and her child (presumably her child). He’s under the microscope now as I audit his interaction. Big Brothers watching—lets see some fucking customer service….There’s Christmas themed Scooby-Doo coloring books which feels creepy in the fall, but she picks that up anyway and her husband (presumably her husband) buys a pack of cigarettes. 
A bombardment of requests from another lady draped in blonde hair “Do you guys have the November issue of C Magazine?” The newsstand only has the other one, October. She reveals to me “I’m picking it up for my job; it’s a women’s magazine” and I joke asking if the men’s one is named D—nobody laughs. C Magazine is more like a woman’s manual—are you eating the wrong thing, are you wearing the wrong thing, is your couch the wrong fabric, are you eating the wrong thing while dressed in the wrong thing on your wrong couch? Oh no. It’s almost a cosmo mag, but instead of how to please your man it’s more like how to please aesthetically to the world as a female—it might be written by misogynistic Marthas. The shopkeeper does his best to query inventory, but it doesn’t look like the November issue has arrived yet. “C Magazine is always a little slow I know—I used to receive it home, but I don’t anymore.” She’ll check back next week. 
The amount of bike magazines that are on this newsstand is alarming. Mountain biking, maintaining your bike, street bikes, bike trails, a collage of bike photos through Europe, triathletes, electric bikes, Vero News, etc. There’s plenty of spandex and dickheads on the covers of these bike magazines. Get decked out in a $200 carbon fiber aerodynamic helmet. Get these grip saving fingertip exposing gloves. Get these lightweight aluminum frames. Get these spandex (it’s gross). Get this. Get that. Get all these things so you can bike better and you don’t get fat. Hobbies must be expensive according to magazines. What it all boils down to is magazines are nothing more than paperback commercials. Even when they’re not trying to sell you something in an advertisement they’re just trying to sell you something in product placement. They’re just trying to push a product and keep its relevance and keep people talking about stuff. This newsstand is nothing more than a street level tiny billboard mosaic. You feel like an individual when you conceive this because you can consciously make the choice to be the super cyclist with a $9,000 dollar ultra lightweight ride, water canteen, bells and whistles, spandex, Oakley’s, and dirty looks—or you can just ride your bike.

[danielpasquinucci]

[danielpasquinucci]

A Forgotten Revolution (a preview)

What’s left after the furry has fated are desperate food shortages and looting, areas of the island cut off from a free flow of supplies, but normal patterns of life began to re-emerge on the spice island, Grenada. Distribution of goods is spearheaded by local businessmen rather than the invaders, and key exports too, like bananas, have begun to flow—Bananas for Britain. Britains eat 2.5 million pounds of Grenada’s bananas every week and with bananas roughly tipping the scale at ⅕ a pound there’s 12.5 million weekly bananas being eaten in Britain in 1983. 84 pence per kg of bananas in 1983’s Britain October supermarkets which is a fair price really to color your whole grain traditional British breakfast cereal and deliver your body a fast and nutritious burst of energy with no added sodium or fat or cholesterol. Britains enjoyed the slicing and spreading of a ripe banana over their weetamix breakfast cereal and didn’t mind shedding that 84 pence per kg of banana. In fact, Britains loved their bananas so much, the price of bananas rose to 123 pence per kg in 1991 till weetamix, that same year, was proud to announce a super smooth and creamy porridge without the lumps and left bananas to brown on the shelves of Britain’s supermarkets—bananas felt a steady decline to 68 pence per kg in 1995. In the new millennium, bananas in Britain are priced in the mid-80 pences to low-90 pences per kg which if you factor in inflation is fair maybe—weetamix has since released a chocolate rendition of their popular cereal further destabilizing the traditional banana breakfast addition by promoting chaos and skepticism whether bananas should even be added or not. Young British purests believed bananas belonged nowhere near traditional breakfast cereal with their chocolate privilege. Elder British breakfast indulgers who patiently overcame the dull whole grain pinecone pool and thereby knew the splendid pleasures of a soft sweet banana juxtaposition in their Sun rising bowls. Weetamix really overthrew the young purists, however, with the release of banana flavored weetamix, not as a product itself, but as an idea it represented that bananas should be added—bananas used to be added. Just like the Romans built the mighty impressive aqueducts that influenced our plumbing infrastructure, demonstrated the people’s voice in democratic government, ancient peoples of the 1980s implemented archaic banana augmenting methods to increase the pleasure reciprocating effects of cereal. However, now we’re left with a flatlined banana rating percentage index. We are left with a cheap banana flavored cereal—an impression of an original.

In the weekend following that Tuesday of 1983’s October 25, bananas began loading again on a vessel in St. George’s Harbor. The event was marked by a reception onboard attended by Grenada’s Governor General Sir Paul Scoon. Governor General Sir Paul Scoon spoke with a mustache above his lips which was rectangular and immediately fenced vertically by the vermillion red part of his lips growing flush to his nostrils, and blocked crossing any further laterally by the oral commissures where upper and lower lips meet and host crumbs. His mustache personifies his macron accented Ō as he addresses the party in it’s intentions to promote business confidence in Grenada “and of course bananas.” Only a few days after being liberated by American troops, the vessel loaded with bananas is heading to the UK. “We promise you sir, we are going to plant more and more bananas. And I hope with the help of friendly governments...urm...we should get more fertilizers and...other things to help the banana industry so that we provide of our friends in the UK with more and better bananas.” Over a collective applause in the group Governor General Sir Paul Scoon shouts “Long live Great Britain and God save the Queen.” He exits the vessel down a carpet draped staircase and enters the backseat of a polished Mercedes Benz as the Governor General Sir Paul Scoon is driven into a sun that never seems to set.  

1979’s March’s near-Ides

In 1979’s March, the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) with members of the New Jewel Movement (NJM) political party staged a coup to capture governing power and dethrone the turning dictator Premier Eric Matthew Gairy, instituting a People’s Revolutionary Government all while Britain was paying a mere 51 pence per kg of bananas. This strategic capture was a decision made with, arguably, all best intentions for the people of Grenada. Hours before the sun could rise, the revolutionary army disarmed the sleeping hands of Gairy’s army.

Pendulating at the mercy of an oxidized suspension, the radio antenna still remained attached to the box in the short bed truck. The soldiers of the People's Revolutionary Government, proliferates bearing arms, hiccuped in pickup trucks driving to seize power for the people of Grenada—their greenness seen in queasy faces and unsteady rifles inundated with sweat. With Premier Eric Gairy absent for an irrelevant backseat presence at the United Nations council in America, the PRG stormed the central government HQ: Butler House a repurposed private hotel. Broadcasting a fuzzy accuracy of sounds and words was an announcement issued by Maurice Bishop interrupting static noises. His charismatic voice inspired

“LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE OF GRENADA! LONG LIVE FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY! LET US TOGETHER BUILD A JUST GRENADA!"

[danielpasquinucci]

Dirty Junior High Mop

A tangled messy disheveled look had become burdensome and janitors replace their mops when the gelatinous drippings of vomit become intertwined in the mass bundle of course string. Picking out paint chips, you’re sure the mop is just spreading and diluting filth across a greater area not fooling bacteria or the hepatitis E swimming around the cuss pool. You ran your hand through the noodles and pulled up at the top like a puppeteer—your hair wasn’t any longer than it has ever been, but you felt a strange sense of boredom with it, almost a sadness that from the past couple weeks, or past couple months, accumulated and polluted your mind inextricably. It wasn’t without warning, because over the past few months you thought about shaving your head. You saw skeletons peek their skulls out of your closet one by one, circle and surround you. Knowing not today, but maybe in a few weeks you would do the deed.

Waking up with your hair behind you, it’s heavy, and claustrophobic as you struggle unsinking yourself—it weighs on your mind. The barber is far away and your agoraphobia strands you home for fear of being strangled by his black cape with no exit. You’re left with a mirror as you stare at your head that gel, coconut oil, a shower, comb, or brush can’t help.

It was the official first day of summer, the sun was burning bright in your backyard blessed with the warbling of birds, and you’ve just about had it. Regretfully, you should’ve purchased those blackout curtains because now the sun is spitting in your face slumped on your pillow so you jump to your feet. 21 June was the day you do the deed. You looked in the mirror and hung your head over the sink. Every bump in your head was revealed, naked, and the place where you brush your teeth is a furry flood as if there were a hairy sewage back up. Hands patted around for missed blotches—none, it was a work of art. Perfect. You could feel your scalp move under pressure.

Looking into the mirror, you’re filled with dread. Perfection is for the unhappy. Now, all at once you can see yourself. Those bushy caterpillars over your eyes are ugly and disgusting. How you even open your eyelids with those creepy crawlers up there is a defiance against gravity. Everything you hate about yourself is exposed—your nose is bigger than ever without hair to tame it. You’re pale without shadow, and face so round and portly. How did you live so long without knowing how ugly you were? You now realize those skeletons you let out of your closet have been giving a floor to dance on your head—can’t dance on carpet. Maybe that bright sun will burn them off and tan your golf ball face...bad idea. After a couple hours outside at 3.P.M. your head is now a hellish igneous prehistoric Earth. Oozing. Fiery puss volcanoes, rivers of mucus magnum rage out of your skin and you were positive you now had cancer.

People saw you. Your head cracking and erupting, cratered nose, meaty cheeks, and seashell ears—all piled carelessly above your neck. People pondered you. Look at this lunatic, shaved head, bursting out of his own skin clawing like a drug addict with an infinite itch. You’re not deceiving anyone—you’re caught bare headed, mid swan dive not off, but into the deep end.

[danielpasquinucci]

Ashtray Life

Knotted together under bunker-like awnings idling together in a downpour, we congregate habitually on the hour. Crying clouds, gale force winds, and stampy dorsal hands from exiting and re-entering won’t stop our parliamentary parish. A healthy diet of onion rings and red star green Dutch beer is not adequate as we also prefer kindling friendship embers at the short end of a cancer stick. Humble beginnings of routine to change atmosphere and faces quickly transcend into an ugly eye bulging pulling panic of a gimme gimme frantic addiction. Smokey coughing choruses huddling and regurgitating phlegm. Cross-eyed and punched lips suck in and exhale choking conversation. Lung to heart exchanges fortify special bonds and repetitive relationships of strangers and friends alike.

Cigarettes burn down to the now ominous chemically black filters. At night, a line of glowing embers dimmers and die one by one like luftwaffe bombers peeling off formation. The postgrad sorority sweetheart outside the bar lighting up—she’s back inside with the computer engineer whom she just met because he smoked 27s. The two blatantly heterosexual bros return to the bar arm in arm like conjoined amoebas after discovering mutual interests in rambunctious hooliganism. Old friends small talk discussing big dreams before rejoining their larger group of dear friends.

Alone, they provide private company and assurance in your head. A tingly stimulating aura engulfs your body. You’re present. You’re relaxed. Do you remember your first cigarette?—a nauseating head trip you felt down to your fingers. The ashtray in front of you, a spinning graveyard of crushed manilla butts. Alone, cigarettes provide a masquerade of smoke and mirrors—you see the smoker, but you can’t see into the smoker; you only see the smoke cloud lingering in a cool ambiance synonymous with Fonzy in sunglasses.

We’re talking cigarettes, buddy; and as a side-note, I’m a diet cigarette smoker, I don’t smoke habitually only because I refuse to let corporations make a killing of and off me. I will kill myself, but while profiting nobody not listed as a primary recipient on my rolling credits, thank you very much. So, I’ll frequent to “can I get a drag, man?”, trade a beer for boge, 25 cent Lucy at Krauszers, or the pittiful “lemme bum one”. Never to discriminate against camel crushers,  cowboy killers, menthols, Newport’s, or anything free, but always surprising a new chorus of circled coughers by declining a light because I carry my own dwindling matchbooks as a glass to break in-case of death mooching.

[danielpasquinucci]

[danielpasquinucci]

KOFFEE GOOD, KEURIG BAD!

Viscous syrup clinging to the edge of pancakes like snow veneering the frostbitten faces of sheltering mountains warmly welcome the goose-fleshed skiers—nothing malicious comes out of Vermont or Les Verts Monts as the French called it. Dead head ice cream entrepreneurs and dedicated premium coffee roasters supply the smalltown state’s cravings for pints and 3rd wave caffeine. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra all paid homage to the sycamore trees flinging boomerang seeds and meadowlark warblings therefore contentions are vindicated absolutely: nothing malicious comes out of Vermont.

Convenience culture and a coca-cola company takeover managed to eat up a small Vermont coffee roastery with swindling promises and contractual clauses, and crap out a heaping plastic pile of pod injecting refuse. So, when you wake up at that chick from the bar’s one bedroom apartment and she makes you a Keurig coffee you might think “Gee, this girls got her life together”, but what lifelessness spills out of her ikea mug are the prophecies of apocalyptic relationships Nostradamus predicted (probably)—don’t dare stay for breakfast. Grounds + water = coffee so flavor is derived from the quality of the two; who in their right mind decides to use a reservoir, a bacteria breeding ground, to stale your water for a sad cup o’joe? Utter psychos,  horror movie victims too manifested with nonsense to turn around before their impending stabby death, that’s who. Oblivious to the pending doom of the organic compounds in the pods as coffee deteriorates; freshness, therefore flavor, fleets. Foolish Keurig loyalists might say “Well it's given a foil hat and a spritz of nitrogen to impede oxidation.”—that’s fine they can keep drinking pinky out while revolutionaries irreverently toss Keurigs overboard Mohawks out.

If you engage in the practice of adulterating java with non consensual coffee mate flavored cream read no further. Ok great, now that we got rid of the faithless unicorn vomit aficionados let’s talk about flavor. If grounds + water = coffee, then flavor “f” is a positive function of time(x), mass(y), and temperature(z): f(x,y,z). The universal solvent, water, extracts acids, fats, and sugars from the grounds. Effortlessly, the acids in coffee are dissolved first to create a sour taste, but with more time (x) sweeter flavors and more complex notes can be distinguished as the water absorbs additional compounds to create an ideal cup of coffee. Finer grounds increase yield as water moves slower through the less permeable mass and there is a longer duration of time to pull out flavor. More grounds (y) further emboldens flavor with a combination jab of adding surface area for water to dance across and increasing time (x) as the two commingle longer through a greater height of coffee mass (y). Nominal extraction temperature (z) is mutually agreed by experts to be 96 degrees Celsius. So what the fuck is Keurig thinking operating at a temperature of 89 degrees? Employ the flavor function: with time (x) = 3 minutes to brew 12 oz, and mass (y) = 7 grams of grounds in a pod, and temperature (z) being the aforementioned 89 degrees of disappointment, flavor at best is barely distinguishable from hot water. This article isn’t about how to make the perfect pour over, but I call for 21 grams of coffee for a 2 song length pour at just under boiling temperature (100 degrees Celsius) and find my morning brew to be a perfect kick in the teeth.

Now, you realize the Keurig sitting atop many kitchen counters and workplace watering holes pumps out mistreated mediocrity to the nine to five rat with half the required caffeine dosage to create an addictive habitual ritual (or a ritualistic habit depending on how you perceive a coffee-drinker-body’s chemical dependency on caffeine). Those poor rat bastards don’t even realize what they’re missing; they’re so acquaint to vacuum cleaner dust, filth, grime, and smut that is Folgers Coffee that they think “This Keurig is some gourmet shit, man.” We know this not to be the case. The Keurig is nothing close to resembling love, art, or a cup of coffee for that matter—how could it? Bureaucrats don’t know love, art, or coffee; they only know policy, profits, and procedures. That means the customer pays—pays what? A hundred bucks for a hunk of plastic, and nearly one dollar per pod. When all is said and done that’s paying a heartbreaking fifty dollars per pound. For fifty dollars a pound, that coffee better be eaten by an Asian Palm civet, fermented in its intestines, and defecated directly into a 22-karat gold leaf package. It’s not though—Keurig shoves their abominations into plastic bucket shotgun shells and 9+ billion cups per year wind up in landfills and plugging the blowholes of dumb dolphins and whales. So load up another cartridge and shoot another marine animal, bird, or fish. Or do this: grab a bat, hammer, flamethrower, etc and cause ultimate destruction. Sweep up the plastic shards and glue the pieces together to create a tasteful mosaic coffee table. Welcome to the not-any-less convenient pour over, moka pot, French press, or napoletana life. You may continue the crusade of cleansing the earth of Keurig infidelity or just be content you discovered delicious coffee and easily reuse your leftover grounds as a nutrient rich toss over for your grass or in a homemade dermabrasive soap so you can smell like your new favorite morning cup of magic. Between sips, rest your mug on your new coffee table as you enjoy a pause in time, morning bliss a top your enemies’ grave.