Fargo. Or the day after I stopped drinking coffee.

it snuck up on me, my coffee optimism.

funny how we can forget

abject misery

given enough time & distractions.

i've been through caffeine detox before -

after finishing grad school,

when i changed my days

& no longer had the long commute.

twenty-four hours of ugliness

that sent me to bed

wishing for pitch-black night.

so, i knew better.  i had made a habit of only drinking coffee on weekend mornings & abstaining all week long.  no other caffeinated drinks seem to trigger this dependence for me - just morning coffee.  i make our coffee really dark - the better to add cream & sugar to, my dear.  in fact, my coffee cup is usually only about two-thirds full of actual coffee.  the rest is add-ins.  & my coffee cup is small.  no big mugs of brew for me.  & i usually don't even finish the first cup.  it's mostly just a warm mug of sweetness to accompany a lazy weekend morning.  all these excuses aside, i am still careful.  or i was careful.

until our trip, when coffee started appearing with great predictability in the breakfast nook, in our room, in cute little do-it-yourself individual coffee filters.  i guess my weekend coffee rule morphed, oh too smoothly, into vacation coffee free-for-all.  until the one morning when, for reasons i do not recall, i did not drink coffee.

and we ended up in Fargo.

we did not, i should clarify, end up in Fargo because i neglected to drink my morning coffee.  we were always going to be in Fargo on July 4th.  so, it just happened that Fargo bore the brunt of my detox mood - reflected, quite nicely, in the blue tint to all of the photographs i took (having, in my caffeine-less haze, forgotten to switch the light setting back to 'outdoors').

photo by Mike, who did not forget to change his light settings.

it was, also, another gray & cloudy day - and, certainly, the barometric pressure was not working in my favor.

 

downtown Fargo was, essentially, deserted on the afternoon of July 4th.  & we had returned to the land of hot-n-muggy after sweeping across the plains.  given that we were still pretty far north, local fireworks weren't set to go off until about 10:30 that night.  but the boys ended up enjoying the hotel pool (with waterslide!) until about 11 o'clock instead (so i'm told; i took to bed to try and fix my head) & we never did see any.

in hopes that this is not beginning to sound like a medical tell-all, i did not awaken refreshed.  the caffeine detox continued during our drive towards Minneapolis - until i knew the only recourse was, forgive me, a stop at McDonald's for a coca-cola & fries.  which might seem counter-productive in more ways than one but was my cure.

& i had ZERO more cups of coffee for the remainder of the trip.

for sure, i'll remember next time.