Back in Europe I remember that life was much relaxed. Yes we had plenty of stress and I am in no way stressing that it was fun. But we did at least one thing right. And that thing was morning espresso. One cup of delicious morning elixir with the perfect shot of Italian roasted coffee, a drop of sugar and just a splash of warm foamy milk! Perfect morning starter and it only took minutes to drink, or in my case as long as my cigarette lasted! Mmm perfect start of morning!
Getting back to reality, things weren’t so dreamy as I imagined when I first arrived to the Land of the Free.
I remember like it was yesterday, my first day in this country! I woke up at around 8 am, jet lagged and all and soon enough I found myself sitting in a car on the way to get coffee! What other way to relieve yourself from the stress of traveling, than a good cup of coffee after such a long flight?! Right? Wrong! What I called a morning coffee and what it actually turned out to be are two different situations..pff..I in my naivety I imagined actually going IN a coffee shop, sitting down, having an espresso, preferably with milk and sugar, in my case smoke a cigarette and only after that, go on with the days activity! Boy was I dead wrong! Who knew that Americans have drive thru coffee shops?! So instead of the coffee shop, there was a line of cars in a drive thru …I was soon informed that that's how things work round here and the price for the early bird was to get in line at this drive thru..I reluctantly approved, since the statement was so outspoken. Finally our time came and I was asked what was my coffee preference..espresso I mumbled, what the hell else? Turns out this was a bad, bad choice as well..instead of my morning elixir I got this paper cup with a shot of espresso at the bottom..no milk in sight..and yuk! damn sure no sugar! 
And hell the coffee was dark roast as hell, that is if hell here was dark..nothing till now proved that I actually knew anything about this land. I managed to mumble something about sugar and soon enough I got some packets of the sweet dust and a wooden stick to mix it all up! By the time that I managed to figure out anything we were already long gone from the coffee shop and speeding on the highway. And let me just say this, it is fucking hard to pour sugar out of those little packets and mix it up with a wooden stick, all while speeding down the highway! Damn fucking hard! All I could think of was, what in the bloody hell was burning, that we absolutely needed to rush too?! Only thing I wished for, after my morning expectations were shattered to pieces, was a cigarette. I figured that it might tone down the darkness of the coffee and somehow calm me down. Wrong again. Turns out the Mercedes Benz that I was traveling in was not a smoker friendly one. Well fuck the Germans and their fancy ass cars, is what I thought then and there, being careful not to express my total disregard for this so called rule. So with my paper cup in one hand and my morning routine out the window of the speeding Benz, I was heading who knows where to extinguish an obvious fire somewhere. Needless to say that my initial excitement had burned out, at the same speed it takes a German engineered vehicle to shoot out gas down the exhaust pipe! Hilarious as it may seem now, it felt like I had just been kidnapped and heading to some undisclosed location with the speed of light.
That was my Good Morning America! Land of the Free! Free to run around like a mouse on it’s wheel, to be more exact. 
Since then a number of years have passed and I have learned, the hard way, obviously, the proper way to order a coffee. The trick is to wake up early enough to make your own. Enjoy it at home. While you still have time and take the rest to go, since you are going to need every drop of that elixir!
The story of the little mouse struggling to get ahead of it’s wheel is not a metaphor in this case. We are mere mice in someones wheel, trying to make a living, by pushing as hard as we can to spin that wheel. Nothing seems to get us to stop and look around. There is no time for that. We must get the wheel going! Every day, only stopping to replenish our exhausted bodies with fast, most of the time drive thru meals, just to get our energy up enough to keep the wheel spinning for the rest of the day. And we do it, struggling, with no grand future expectations, a mere routine of living in this cage we call life.
There are mice that have gone rogue and quit the wheel and have, by their mentions, found some sort of Nirvana.
But those are few and I do envy them a lot. Yes, I am not embarrassed to admit my rodent flaws, I feel envy sometimes, but it is short lived, since I have no time to spare and contemplate others success stories. But every now and then, hope comes along and a new master must be chosen. He or she promises to look after us better, to give as a break from the wheel and provide different types of nutrition, so we are more healthy and happy to spin the wheel. We always give them a chance, not because we believe them, but because we don’t have any other choice. By the time the new owner appears, we kinda figure out that the mouse and it’s kind will not get a break. There is no time for complaining.
I have heard of some race of rodents, in other parts of the world, that had enough with those empty promises and went on strike and even full on revolted!
It has never turned out well for them. So we go on spinning and rolling, looking forward for the late evening when we can relax somehow in the few hours that we have, before the wheel needs to be spinned again.
There is no moral to this story. We are what we are. Mere rodents. But I ask you one thing? Who is to stop us from smelling the flowers once in a while? Who is to say we are not allowed to do that? At the end of the day be it not our effort of spinning the wheel, the whole circus would not exist. Not the master, not his assistants, nobody! Who can stop us to actually enjoy that one drop of life once in a while? Be it a coffee or a walk in the park? How many of you, my fellow rodents, have actually stopped and smelled the roses once in a while?
- all images from Duckduckgo.com and fall under the fair use act
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@lidac
