GateHouse — One night, while working late in Chicago many years ago, I ordered a venti Starbucks coffee at about 11 p.m., finished my shift at midnight, got into the car and drove through Canada. It was the easiest drive I ever made. I was totally awake for the whole trip, first through Michigan (which back then still had money for highway asphalt, which was nice), and then Canada, which was clean, uninterrupted landscape broken only by the occasional rest stop and impromptu all-moose Gordon Lightfoot cover-band concert.
The venti totally kept me up through the night, through the rhythm and monotony of the dark, deserted highway, although to be fair it helped that I needed to find a bathroom every 9 minutes. And once safely back in New York, I stopped for breakfast, switched places with my wife, and stone-cold passed out in the passenger seat for approximately the next three days.
I bring this up because until recently the Starbucks venti, which singlehandedly propelled me through an evening of treacherous international travel, was among the largest coffee-delivery vessels you could purchase in America without applying for a federal exemption (thank you very much Obamacare). But the venti is a wee candypants Dixie cup joke next to a gut-blurchingly Starbucks cup called the Trenta, which means “thirty” in Italian and “If you don’t tell me where the bathroom is now, I am not going to be responsible to what’s about to happen to this couch” in pretty much every other language.
.
Yeah, GORDON LIGHTFOOT HAS A SONG ABOUT COFFEE. #thingsIdidn’tknowuntilIwrotethis
.
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's 
