4 out of 5 washed-up doctors recommend booze and smokes.
Lately I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety. My medications is kicking in, thankfully, but until a few weeks back, I’d been depending a little too heavily on the stress foods sector of my diet. And naturally, but stress foods, I mean booze.
Don’t get me wrong: I can suck down an entire package of Jell-O Pudding Cups with the best of ‘em. It’s just that stomachaches and sugar highs don’t do the anxiolytic magic that moderate intoxication does. Yet pudding has a major advantage over bourbon, to wit, you seldom get fired for eating a dozen pudding snacks at the office. So I stick with the old standbys of coffee and nervous inaction when I’m working under supervision.
Much to my liver’s dismay, however, I’ve been working from home on a regular basis. Don Draper’s protestations to the contrary, starting my day with an old-fashioned is not a recipe for future success. I never used to drink much before, and I’m back to moderation now, but I was doing badly for a while, and that scared me enough to get real treatment for my anxiety. Nowadays, I still love my whiskey, whisky, and uisce, but it waits until after 5.
Tobacco is the other thing that helps in an unfortunate way. I can see how so many writers from previous eras ended up as chain smokers. It’s a stimulant, a social drug, tasty, doesn’t leave you lethargic or incoherent like alcohol, and in my case at least, clears the mind. And then there’s the whole cancer-emphysema-heart attack thing–not a minor consideration given my genetics. And let us not forget the fact that public smoking is only slightly more tolerated than public masturbation. (In fact, I could name a few bars at least one continent where it’s tolerated a lot less.) So for a lot of good reasons, I save my pipe and cigars for special occasions or really bad days. But the minute someone invents healthy, antioxidant-rich pipe tobacco, I am *so* getting addicted.
So now that I’ve announced what I want to resort to but don’t, how about I tell you what my typical stress-eating routine looks like?
First, I get a pot of coffee. That may sound obvious and tame, but around this house, a pot of coffee is a pretty serious thing. We use a Bialetti, the stovetop low-pressure brewer that is surely one of the brightest jewels in Italy’s culinary diadem. Our coffee is a dense, cocoa-laden brew from excellent beans no more than a week old, and I can fit the caffeination equivalent of six cups of coffee in a largish mug. Consumption time is usually a morning, but often, I finish one in 10 minutes and move on from there.
Next stop is espresso. Silvia, my tricked-out espresso machine and second wife, is capable of producing dozens of sublime shots per morning, and it’s not entirely unheard of for her to do so.
At this point, if I’m still on a stress eating kick, I get out some baby carrots and some fat-free ranch, and put together a snack tray, which I leave on the kitchen counter as I rush to Panera and demand two of everything, plus cream cheese. It will be a grisly scene. Few, if any, will survive the 3-minute commute back to my home office.
