(Editorial note: This is an incredibly long, meandering, and silly rant worthy of the “Rex Murphy” [the Andy Rooney of Canada, but with more pretentiousness] award for pointlessness. Ignore at will.)
As some of you already know, I’m a bit of a coffee fanatic. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke anymore, and I don’t do drugs anymore either (technically), so I hold on to the few vices I have left with both hands.
Coffee is, to me, the liquid of the gods. It shares a lot of the qualities that has attracted me to other vices: it helps wake me up when I’m tired, it mellows me out when I’m stressed, it can be done socially as well as in the privacy of my own home, it’s reasonably accessible, and while it can be cheap, I can indulge in outrageously expensive pursuits if I so feel inclined. Oh, and it tastes good.
I’d like to think that even though I’m a coffee fanatic, I am most definitely not a coffee snob. That is, I’ll drink any kind of coffee as long as it tastes good, and it isn’t decaf. Decaf makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, like being a gifted musician but only playing 80’s hairband cover songs (The Darkness, I’m looking in your direction), or drinking Diet-anything when you’re not on a diet. Why would you do that?
So, a realization: Tim Horton’s coffee is utter crap. Yes: the self-manufactured hallmark of everything that is Canadian sucks pants.
For those of you who have no idea who Tim Hortons is, it’s a Canadian coffee and snack chain that has somehow managed to insinuate itself into the collective national consciousness as something “truly Canadian”, like hockey, snow, beavers, mounties, and horrifyingly bad pop idols.
I recently came to this conclusion after Tim Hortons opened a small kiosk at the college. Up until then, we were stuck with the blasphemy that was the college coffee, provided by the evil demons from Cara (the company that does all of Air Canada’s foodstuffs).
College coffee featured beans that had been burnt to a shuddering black crisp, which were then taken out back, rubbed in cow manure and motor oil, and then brewed on a street corner in Detroit in one of those flaming barrels you’ve seen street people warming themselves by in bad Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.
Saying the College coffee sucked would be an insult to sucky things. It truly ranks up there as some of the WORST COFFEE EVER.
Needless to say, Tim Hortons’ arrival was eagerly awaited by student and instructor alike. It had been a very long time since I had last drank from the Tim Horton’s bucket, but I figured anything had to be better than the liquid barf that the college passed off as coffee. Ugh.
After a few weeks of drinking Tim’s every morning, however, some realizations have sunk in:
One. The seemingly ubiquitous “Double Double” (translation for non-Canadians: two sugars, two creams) tastes suspiciously like what chocolate milk is to regular milk (i.e. milk that has gone sour, that has had tons of sugar and chocolate added to mask the bad taste).
Every time I line up for my morning dose, I keep looking for a tank with a large, metal hose attached to the coffee pot with large, corroded lettering on it that spells, “OLD COFFEE WITH LOTS OF SUGAR ADDED. (Wear protective eyewear and clothing when handling)”.
Two. Drinking a large coffee (a bargain at $1.40 including taxes) leaves you with breath that could strip paint from 15 feet away. A good rule of thumb: if drinking coffee gives you bad breath, the coffee is crap. Good coffee shouldn’t give you dragon breath.
This means that by 10am, every single person on campus is busy exhaling evil, foul gases into the atmosphere, and into everyone else’s air.
The college smells funny.
I won’t even get started on those obnoxious Tim Horton’s coffee commercials about Canadians abroad who dream wistfully of the mighty brownian motion that is Tim’s Coffee, or who marvel at the ability of their Tim Horton’s coffee mug in helping them avoid getting the stuffing kicked out of them by natives mistaking them for some other nationality.
Manufactured patriotism, especially that with purely commercial intent, is an act worthy of repeated slaps about the face and head region with a large sack of coffee beans.
Sigh.
