Hey, look! It's time to quit something again for a while.

I'm writing this just to let you know that even the people who seem generally to have their diet and exercise together may not be as care-free about all this shit as it might seem.

My personal battle du jour is, apparently, coffee.

I love the stuff. Too much, it would seem. My stomach is objecting. In precise medical terms, it burns like a motherfucker too often lately and coffee seems to be the cause. (I also have had a mild hiatal hernia for most of my life and that's involved too, but trust me when I say that coffee really seems to be the most direct agent of doom here).

Funny thing is: I never drank coffee until my forties.
Another funny thing is: I'm really bad at moderation.

When I plunged into the big, bad world of coffee, in 2005 or so, I did not do so in a measured way.  I dove in, off the ten meter high dive, and immersed myself fully. I've been there ever since.

So I'm committed to two things:
--getting an endoscopy to find out if this situation is worse than "usual"
--quitting coffee for an extended period

In fact, if quitting coffee has the immediate effect that I expect it may, I probably can skip the endoscopy, which is scheduled for mid-January at the moment.

I know how to do this quitting thing.

I've done it before. I can quit anything.

But, with coffee, you really can't just cold-turkey the quitting. Not without a lot of pain anyway. That will bring crushing headaches of doom. You have to taper down using black and green tea.

Fuck. I really like coffee.

I'm going to miss it. But I'm at a point in life where I work for myself, when I feel like it. I get up when I want. I rarely have to be TOTALLY FUCKING "ON" in a manner that demands/requires the "zoom" that coffee supplies.

But, oh, I like that zoom.

I also previously lived 40-something years without it, and it's not like black tea is caffeine-free.

Wish me luck. This sort of sucks right now. I have to throw an old friend out on the street, and then see if he was actually the problem.

Onward.