Brewer's Coffee Intervention

To the untrained eye it might seem like my friend (and fellow artist) Mark suffers from some virulent strain of ADHD. The guy fidgets like a kid wearing an itchy sweater in church. And he has this habit of jumping randomly from subject to subject as if he's mentally spinning some tiny conversational carnival wheel in his head. But ADHD is an easy scapegoat.

I think the real issue behind this behavior is the fact that Mark's got a coffee pot next to his drawing table hooked into his arm like an intravenous drip. He eats handfuls of coffee beans like you and I munch on popcorn. He owns stock in Starbucks. And yeah, he never misses a deadline, but that's only because he doesn't go to sleep. I'll see him out at night 'til 2 or later, and the next morning he's waking me with a phone call before 7. I think while the rest of the world is sleeping, Mark is running in some giant hamster wheel in his basement.

Is any of that healthy? Who knows? But in the interest of helping me get more sleep, I'm now recruiting friends to help me with Mark's coffee intervention. Even if you don't want to help Mark, do it for me. -v