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Over the last week I sufferred from what I will call a "coffee lobotomy". Here is my tale.

I usually drink about two large cups of strong coffee a day, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I like the process of making it, in my Aerobie® Aeropress™ coffee maker. I like the taste of a dark dark roast. And I like the mental energy. I rarely, however, manage to keep it at two cups a day. After a few months of that routine, the coffee stops working. I get irritable. I don't sleep well. My mental energy slumps. As the saying goes, there are no old speed freaks. So I've taken to going on a coffee fast a couple of times a year. I stop coffee, cold turkey, and don't drink it for a month or two, until one day a cup of Joe looks irresistable, and I start again. Coffee withdrawal takes a week. The first two or three days are bad. Emotionally on edge. Irritable. Dull headache in the forehead. Low physical and mental energy. But after seven days, it's over, and my energy returns.

Usually, I notice that it's time for my coffee fast, yell at my wife for a couple of days, and go about my business, albeit a little slower than usual. This time it was different. Last Thursday and Friday, I sat down at my computer to do my software work, and my brain was busted. I stared at the screen all day, read code, attempted to comprehend it, but it wasn't working. I wasn't managing to put things together, and my short-term memory was even shorter than usual. I spent the weekend mostly away from the computer, in the hopes that I would be able to work on Monday, but no such luck. Monday morning, I was still unable to think. It was as if my frontal lobes were no longer connected to the rest of my brain. Habitual activity I could do. Speech and motion were all fine. I just couldn't do any creative thinking. I was emotionally hyper-sensitive, and depressed.

I drank my last cup of coffee on Monday morning. Then I went home and slept the rest of Monday, and most of the day on Tuesday. Took a short walk on Wednesday, and a longer walk on Thursday, but spent most of each day in bed, reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and watching Prison Break on my iMac, which I set up next to the bed. I wondered if maybe I had had a stroke of some kind, so my wife convinced me to go to the doctor on Thursday evening. He didn't think there was any reason to worry about a stroke, but he DID want to treat my depression, which I wouldn't go for until the coffee withdrawal was over.

It was scary. I knew I was in coffee withdrawal, but it was so much worse than before that I thought possibly something more serious, something permanent, was up.

Well, this morning, Friday, I awoke feeling as if I once again have a brain. Still low physical energy, likely from lying in bed for four days, but with a fresh outlook, and the feeling that my coffee lobotomy is healing. I think that this coffee fast will likely be longer than the last one.

Blessed Be!

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