This thread has been quiet
This thread has been quiet for too long. In hopes of its resurrection, here is another coffee vignette written around the same time as Carl Buys Coffee. I may dig up some other old stories and poems while I am at it...
The Magic Coffee Bean
© 1993 Michael René Barrick
Far away in a musty, steamy, green place where people know better than to think kindly of llamas, the was a coffee bean named Jesus Paulo Matteo Juan Jose Gonzalez. Even though Jesus knew that the farm he grew on was owned by a member of the Medellin cartel and his only purpose in life was to one day ground up to hide the odour of cocaine from American police dogs (which some other bean once told him were called German shepherds, which to Jesus seemed a very strange name for American police dogs), Jesus hoped that he would one day grow up to be a very important bean indeed. So even though the odds were against him, Jesus prayed to the God of all coffee beans, Juan Valdez, to rescue him from his horrible fate. The other beans would laugh at him for being a dreamer and would taunt him: "Jesus thinks he ees to good to be one of us, he wants to be a cappuccino, but Jesus he ees not a real bean, he ees decaffeinated!"
But Jesus Paulo Matteo Juan Jose Gonzalez was not worried by their silly taunts, he knew he was better than the other beans and that Juan Valdez would come for him.
Then one morning, just as the sun was about to rise, many men in black clothes came running through the fields past Jesus and the other beans. Jesus knew at once that these were strange men sent by Juan Valdez because they had skin the colour of roasted coffee beans. The men were all carrying large guns and were chanting "Hut!Hut!Hut!" as they ran. They all had "D.E.A." written on their backs.
It turned out Jesus was more or less right, because the very next day a little man with a little burro carrying saddle-bags came and picked Jesus. Jesus wondered why the little man was muttering under his breath about "American imperialists", but it did not bother him for long. Soon little Jesus Paulo Matteo Juan Jose Gonzalez was in coffee bean Nirvana: a roasting factory for a trendy chain of coffee bars in Seattle and Vancouver.
Eventually Jesus was made into a Grande Almond Mocha with an extra shot of espresso that helped a young physicist working for the University of British Columbia Kaon Project think of a way to break down nuclear waste into harmless chemicals which made nuclear fission the clean and benign power source the American Energy Commission always claimed it was. So in freeing the world from dependency on fossil fuels little Jesus fulfilled his destiny of doing something great because the war started by disgruntled O.P.E.C. countries was indeed great, for it wiped out the entire world.
* The End *