National Coffee Day

Every other weekend my parents would take the family out to farm. Which was where my mother grew up. It was out in the middle of the poorest county in North Dakota. They had

to go town to get fresh water. If you drank water from the tap, you drank salt water. So it comes as no surprise that I was drinking coffee as soon as I could hold a coffee mug.

I did one year of college where my diet was nothing but M&M's and Mt. Dew. Freshman 15? Bitch please. More like Freshman 45.

When I got into radio I pretty much overdosed on caffeine. I worked an overnight shift, Midnight to 6am, and I would pick up a 6 pack of Pop, normally Coke. I would also make a fresh pot of coffee. By 6am I'd be finishing off my 6th Coke, and would be brewing a new pot of coffee for the morning show.

After a few months of this I started having massive headaches in the morning, or in this case, the afternoon, since I didn't go to bed until after 7am. It got so bad I thought I had a tumor. I went to the doctor, and after I explained my work day, he asked,

"Do you drink a lot of caffeine?"

He almost fell off the stool when I told him. He said...

"You're going to have a ruff couple of days. You are drinking way too much caffeine, and if you don't stop you will die. You're going to have ween your body off the stuff, which means going cold turkey. No caffeine at all."

Worst three days of my life. Caffeine withdrawals are horrible. It took a few tries to do it, but I soon kicked the habit. Now I can't even drink any Pop with caffeine. I instantly get kidney stones. So, between the withdrawals and peeing pellets, you can't pay me to drink the stuff. But, since there's a billions cups of coffee drank each day, I guess I'm in the minority.

Well, have a great National Coffee Day, and don't forget, pure caffeine, in powdered form, like what they use in a dietary supplement, can be lethal in tablespoon-sized amounts.