The Unholy Morning Union of Coffee and a Cigarette

Our atrocious prerequisite for mental operation.

The “European breakfast,” café et une cigarette. Our daily dose of rejuvenation.

It’s a classic anti-kosher morning platter for any average worker, an unholy blessing for the insomnia of modern life, and arguably the least laborious dish to prepare.

But it’s a union threaded in sin, and particularly ironic that for many of us who can’t even muster the energy to prepare a bowl of cereal in the morning, that a coffee and cigarette breakfast is a notably extreme way to kick off your everyday. It sounds like a cocktail you would fix as you’re getting ready to hijack a Rolls Royce. Yet for those of us who depend on it, it’s just enough to get ourselves dressed and make the commute to work.

We’ve evolved as a broken workforce to treat it as a necessity. It’s exactly what we need to start out the day. And I’ll admit, it works remarkably well for productivity. It feels like a reset, it jump starts our neurons. Everything starts working again (reasonably), as long as you don’t change the formula.

But it’s a horrible thing, a foul combination, a diabolical asterisk at the top of the food pyramid. It’s a brutal routine, probably most atrocious thing, mentally and physically, we can do to ourselves at the crack of dawn.

It’s comically repulsive. It’s a textbook example of irony.

But the turbulence of modern life is laced with insomnia and dictated by urgency. Our mornings require an intense methodical rebirth — a near-immediate transition from sentient-vegetable to Apollo-11, right on schedule. Coffee and a cigarette for breakfast, our key to survival , and our ticket out the door. They complete one another, and they complete us. We love and hate them, just as we love and hate ourselves.

My only plea to outsiders is to let us do our unholy-deed free of ridicule. It is one of the rare times it’s better if you just look the other way. Let us do it in peace. Call it what you will— idiotic, foolish, weak — but do it away from us. We all know that it’s self-destructive, but what’s important to understand is that whatever brought us into such an amoral routiene, it’s strictly business.