Green Tea

Aug 18, 2023

I switched from slurping coffee to sipping green tea, and let me tell you, it has been an amazing experience. While I know people usually discard their first infusions because of its strength, I just dose it out for a 5 minute hot water bath. But I also tried out crushing up the leaves with mortar and pestle and gulping down the resulting “snuff”. It was quite mind opening. It also made me realize how a bit sinister plant, coffee is.

It’s true! I’m delusional about the importance of my health at the moment. I’ve just been through a 15-year kerfuffle with various substances that almost feels like plants are hypnotizing us to devour them. In fact, caffeine and other alkaloids were originally designed to combat the insect infection that started 385 million years ago. Since those days, receptors in our bodies shifted positions, and what used to kill ants now gives us all kinds of highs. This gives me the scary thought: what will happen to us once plants start actually defending against us?

However, I don’t want to be high on anything right now or worry about scary things. I need to learn German after 4 years of being a bumbling idiot. But it’s a pretty challenging feat to accomplish, even without the irresistible urges I managed to train myself to have, like smoking and drinking coffee, along with many worse things. But those worse things are over, and I’m gaining a newfound resonance with my body. It tells me things if I stop pretending that “doing this” and “doing that” are important for a moment.

Lacking a direct line to our hearing system, it only lets us know we are doing harm to it in subtle ways, such as making our stomach upset, that is, if we didn’t mute those signals with smoking first thing after getting out of bed. It’s weird and messed up, but this is the system we have to work with for now, and I don’t intend to skip breakfast for long.

In fact, experimenting with various flakes, seeds, and berries to create the perfect crunchy breakfast has been one of the many small steps I’ve taken to battle my smoking addiction. However, I’m well aware that this doesn’t have to be a fight. I’ve already done it once—combined things together and accidentally stopped being an alcoholic. Unlike normal people, I got to skip the usual long and highly unsuccessful battle with booze and jump right into being upset about my old behavior.

Besides cleaning my room of empty flasks, I’ve also cleared up in my head. But the change was very traumatic, happening so fast. After all, I spent 6 years slowly increasing the dosage of my daily poison intake. The result was that I went crazy, not knowing what to do with all this free time I’m now spending thinking clearly and not being passed out. 8 months later, I’m still that way. This is probably why I’m capable of hitting paragraph after paragraph, but I’m okay with letting myself cope with things.

Something in our brain is wired quite strangely, possibly because the engineer was in a hurry to ship the finished product. Which makes you think, upon making blood-barrier contact with the plant, that you should dedicate the rest of your life to the art of smoking it. Some decades pass, and you find yourself very stupid for ignoring every warning label and the horrid pictures of deformed organs that lie on the box when your health becomes subpar.

Well fuck this shit, I say it’s time for our race to become smarter, deciding for the good of everyone, whether stupid or smart, to limit our access to this plant. At the very least, we shouldn’t allow people to profit from it. It’s crazy to think we’ve let this happen for well over a century.

With all these amazing new technologies, there’s no way we can’t find a molecule that lets us turn off these cravings for good, fixing a design flaw in us. Do I really need to go to a university and learn chemistry so I can fix this myself?