A cup of Joe

I like coffee. I like coffee with just a little bit of milk. Not cream. Not half-and-half. And not skim milk, either. Milk, the way it comes out of a cow.

I don’t like double decaffeinated latte’s with jimmies, either. I feel stupid drinking them, so you’ll rarely find me in a Starbucks unless a certain buddy of mine pulls me in so the snob can get his ground roast from Kenya or Chile or wherever the heck it is it comes from. I don’t like Starbucks (and a lot of this trendy c**p that seems to come out of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest in general) because frankly I don’t like being made to feel like I’m something on the bottom of somebody’s Cole Haan’s. Nor do I like being forced to order in a foreign language just to appear continental, particularly when they don’t use the foreign language correctly to begin with. If I’m ordering a grande, I want an effing grande, and not a piccolo. Compris?

If I want some fancy coffee drink, and sometimes I do, I’ll go to Dunkin’ Donuts, a nice blue-collar establishment that doesn’t ask you where you went to school.

If I had my druthers, though, I’d prefer some greasy spoon where they serve the coffee in a heavy railroad mug and a waitress named Alice or Gladys or Madge calls me Hon and asks me if I want my coffee "heated up” and knows I like my eggs over-easy with wheat toast.