Sometimes I drink too much coffee. (My God! I just heard that sentence inside my head in the voice of Andy Rooney! For the love of Christ, have I fallen so far?)

Some people say they drink too much coffee—they are probably exaggerating—I really do. When I left Italy the last time my friends gave me two going away presents. One was a really nice silk shirt that I tore accidentally and had to throw away in Korea. I felt lousy about that. If I’d bought it, it wouldn’t have mattered but it was a gift from great people and I liked it. All Italians are great people. Go to Italy if you doubt this axiom.

The other present was a little coffee pot. It’s Italian style. It makes extremely strong coffee. I don’t know if it should be called espresso, probably not, but maybe it’s what they call café ristretto. Narrow coffee. It is as strong as espresso if you grind the coffee fine. I like to do that.

Italians take coffee as seriously as Seattlites. Maybe moreso because they don’t fuck around with a lot of squirrely sounding names like frappucino. They just have their coffee. My friend Calvin said that the espresso he got in Malpensa airport was better than the best espresso he had in New York. If Italian airport coffee is that good I don’t think I need to prove anything else.

The coffee pot is underscored by its serious construction. It it made of tungsten steel. I dropped it out my tenth floor window. It was an accident. I had just washed it and put it up to dry. It fell and bounced out the window. I ran to the elevator and got down there. It wasn’t broken and it hadn’t killed any nuns or kittens. It has two little scratches now. That’s all.

I like having a badass coffee pot from Italy. It makes the coffee stronger. Coffee voodoo. I have four pots of voodoo on most days. That’s roughly the equivalent of 16 shots of espresso. Espresso has more caffeine than regular coffee but I don’t know how much. It must be at least the equivalent of 20 cups of coffee and maybe even 30 or more, I can’t remember what drinking 30 cups of coffee feels like so I have no experimental controls or basis for comparison.

You can see I wasn’t fucking around that I drink too much coffee. I try not to act like a lonely chihuahua on Prozac afterwards but I can’t really help it.

I’ll tell you how to tell if you’ve had too much coffee. I recommend quitting at the point when your own urine smells so like steaming espresso that you are sorely tempted to taste it. You should desist any activity that makes you want to drink pee.