no.8 - my morning chocolate

I recently decided that my breakfast of choice is a snapped off chunk of high quality chocolate. (70% Cocao or more, please.) I love chocolate and hate coffee, so this seems to me a logical compromise. At 40, I now require a small caffeinated push in the morning.

I have not had coffee since the forth grade, when, on my pediatrician's advice, my mother served me a cup, black, every morning for a week. He said it might get my behavior under control. In a bit of bizzaro-world logic usually reserved for comic books, the conventional wisdom was that caffeine had the opposite effect on children who where hyper-active.

As my fourth grade teacher can attest, it did not work.

The experiment was quickly discontinued. I now wonder if the pharmaceutical companies were behind this logic, so that when they introduced Ritalin, they could truthfully say that other courses of treatment were found to be unsuccessful.

This exuberance I once struggled to control (or, at least, was asked to control), has now evaporated and now I crave some kind of caffeinated boost. The trouble is, chocolate is very, very delicious. As such, now, much like the pediatric medical community, I tend to over-medicate.