Mental Clutter + Back to the Grind (Coffee)

Cleaning off the desktops: virtual on the computer + snowlike drifts of notes and scraps of doodles that accumulate around the studio) feels good. I’m in a perpetual state of being behind on shit, and when there’s a slackening of pressure from daily work routine, there’s always a corresponding resurgence of busywork to fill in the gap left by the tide of stuff to do. I know I’m a cartoonist by simple virtue of the fact that it spirals into a compulsion: especially it seems when there’s other far more important duties to attend to, I’ll find myself increasingly drawn into the vortex of concepts. In other words, I get the greatest ideas at completely inappropriate times.
Part of the creative juices is the elixir of life itself: coffee. Last summer I set about recording what my intake was for five days of the week (slightly less on weekends) at the height of insanity:

Half a pot at home

4-shot 16oz mocha en route

16oz drip from campus (morning class)

24oz drip (lunch)

two coffee-flavored power drinks (afternoon class)

other half of pot at home

Compared and contrasted with "normal" behavior:

Coffee Cup Consumption Per Day:
Average of 1.6 cups per day.
Among coffee drinkers, the average consumption in the United States is 3.2 cups of coffee per day.
The average coffee cup size is 9 ounces.

"A “moderate amount” of coffee for healthy adults that is correlated with health benefits would max out at 500 milligrams of caffeine per day, which is about five cups of home-brewed regular coffee." (Dr. Axe). Which puts me somewhere waaay up high in the stratosphere as far as estimated milligrams.

I also didn't know that there now is an actual category in the DSM - 5 for withdrawal, which is definitely something I developed familiarity with. According to some statistical charts I ought to be dead, but fortunately the resurrection properties of such a volume can evidently keep a corpse animated long enough to make it through to the weekend. This summer though, the schedule is scaled as far back as possible, and as mentioned earlier, the return of much more healthier, organic inspiration has come welling back to the surface of attention. Cheers!