Roasting coffee sounds wonderful. I have a secret for you. It stinks. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee is heaven on earth. Coffee beans going into a dark roast after the second crack — well. You only do that inside the house once.
Everyone who hears I roast my own coffee asks the same question. What’s your favorite? What do you roast? As if there is a simple answer to either question and as if they actually want to hear it.
Here is the thing about roasting your own coffee at 79. I am losing my sense of taste. Too many good bourbons. Too many excellent cigars. If I am being completely honest I might as well buy French Roast from Costco and be done with it.
But then I couldn’t sit in my two thirds enclosed BBQ smoker’s paradise and roast coffee, could I?
And that matters. Not because of the coffee. Because of the sitting. Because of the practice. Because some things retain their value after the practical justification has quietly slipped away and you do them anyway because the doing itself is the point.
Which, it turns out, has everything to do with politics today.
Or rather — it all tastes the same.
Red. Blue. I brew it carefully, I tend it with genuine attention, and what comes out is noise. It’s the evil Democrats, they ruined everything. Blame the Republicans, they tore it all down. The Democrats want this. The Republicans are taking that. For whoever’s sake — insert deity of choice — just stop.
We don’t even know what a Republican or a Democrat is anymore. I asked that question at the beginning of this series and I am no closer to an answer. I suspect you aren’t either.
Maybe that’s the beginning of something.
Because what we have is broken. The two party system that limits our choices to two flavors of the same noise, backed by dark money from both directions that you mostly never hear about. Citizens United didn’t just open the door — it took the door off the hinges. The Federalist Society on one side, the Tides Foundation and Priorities USA on the other, and the rest of us standing in the room where the door used to be wondering why it’s so cold.
Here is a what if. Offered with open hands, no god complex, no manifesto.
What if we dropped the party labels altogether? Not reformed them. Not rebranded them. Just — dropped them. Watch the dark money groups scramble for a target. Watch Citizens United try to decide who to back when the teams dissolve. It would give them fits and I confess that brings me more satisfaction than it probably should.
And while we are at it — what if the Supreme Court had fifteen justices? Twenty one? Enough that no single president could stack the deck in a term or two. Enough that the Constitution might once again be interpreted rather than used as a party tool. Enough that the word justice recovered some of its original meaning.
These are seeds. I know that. Nothing on the next ballot. Nothing in the next cycle. Maybe nothing in my lifetime.
But I still roast the coffee.
Not because my palate is what it was. Not because I can reliably taste the difference between the Nicaraguan and the Sumatran on any given morning. But because I sit in my smoker’s paradise and tend something carefully and the practice itself is worth preserving even when the justification has gotten complicated.
That’s what this series has been. Not solutions. Not a platform. Not a party. Just someone who has been paying attention since 1964 sitting with the question honestly and refusing the checkboxes that don’t fit.
Harry Chapin understood it. His little man said it best.
‘Cause I know I’m goin’ nowhere. And anywhere’s a better place to be.
We may not know what we’re building yet.
But anywhere is a better place to be than where we are standing.
