JeffVrabel.com

GateHouse — I am aware that it is the holiday season and a time for rebirth and rededication and optimism and a drive to excise those parts of your personality that other people mock when you’re not around.

But I don’t care, because my coffee maker’s broken, and my mind is basically a hot burbling Black Sabbath record right now. I’m pretty sure that if a troop of Girl Scouts came by to sell me cookies on Sunday morning, there is a reasonable chance that I would pour an oversized oak bucket of rubber cement on them. Unless, of course, they were one of those Girl Scout troops that sells coffee makers door-to-door, in which case I’d be helpful and caring, as long as they made their sales pitch extremely, extremely fast.

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Ella Fitzgerald – Black Coffee

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I know everyone has problems and that the holiday season is not the time to dwell on these problems. But I am TOTALLY DWELLING ON THIS PROBLEM because if I didn’t make it clear in that unbearably long introductory paragraph, my coffee maker is broken, which means there is no coffee in my house in the morning, which means I cannot get coffee until I get out of the house in the morning, which is a LAUGHABLE RIDICULOUS IMPOSSIBILITY, like flying alligators, or whatever Palin is thinking about right now.

And if that does not sound like a very pressing problem to you, then I am super proud of you. It means you are not a junkie, and I urge you to turn the page and go read Cathy or something immediately, because none of what I say will make sense to you, with your “not-fierce addiction to caffeine” or your “ability to function without considerable chemical input” or “the way you can talk to your family without crying before consuming an absolute bare minimum of two mugs in the morning.”

The problem is that the coffee maker is broken because of me, because somehow when I put the carafe deal in the dishwasher I did so in a way that apparently resulted in hundreds of pounds of brute force being applied to it mid-soak cycle, because when I got it out it was cracked, right across from the handle, a beverage-centric fault line that I am not kidding nearly left me in tears, which is a thing, as I don’t think I’ve cried since the end of “Field of Dreams.”

I am not a terribly spiritual guy, but karmically speaking, I figure that to earn this kind of brutal punishment, I probably in a previous life did something like push an iceberg in front of an ocean liner.

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• My New Coffee Maker Is Totally Going To Score Me $100,000

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“But Jeff,” you might be saying right now if you’re still here because you find extremely wordy self-immolation appealing for some reason, “I have an answer: Why don’t you just go buy a new coffee maker?” That’s good thinking, and I would very much love to do that except for one big blinky peppermint reason.

Thanks to stupid Christmas and this absurd need for “everyone” on “my list” to get “their own individual present, possibly even one tailored to his or her own wishes and desires,” I am forced to wait a few days for my check to come so I can BUY said coffee maker.

By “waiting for my check to come” I mean, “I’m probably going to shake down an old lady at the outlet mall.” After I do this I am going to very likely be arrested, hauled into jail and taken to court, whereupon I will enter as my plea the following sentence: “Your honor (or ‘Steve,’ if it’s the judge I saw when I went speeding through that school zone in 2007, but I’m not supposed to talk about that currently), I have remorse for pushing down that old lady or whatever, but my coffee maker was broken, and I needed a new one, because without a new one there was a very real possibility that I might have poured rubber cement on a troop of innocent Girl Scouts, so you see, it’s really only a matter of ethics and numbers here.”

The judge, or Steve, would nod knowingly, having probably once been in such a predicament himself, and I would be set free immediately. I would then find the nearest convenience mart and pour myself a coffee large enough to take a relaxing bath in. Yeah, I said convenience mart. I’m a junkie, not a snob.