(as told by the Dark Lord)
It so happened that there existed certain people who pour so much sugar and cream into their tea that they’re effectively simply giving themselves permission to drink great steaming mugs of syrupy milk, which they feel they have earned by dint of having gone to the trouble of boiling some herbal stimulants and inserting them, sometimes in essentially homeopathic quantities, into their drinking implements. Not in my Realm, of course; around here, we feed such people to the Orcs. But it’s said to happen in other, less-enlightened places.
Now, there are many legends concerning the origin of tea, my favorite of which is that a being of supreme illumination once meditated for an incredibly unreasonable amount of time—seven years—and, at the end, he realized he had fallen asleep. Rather than rejoicing at the fact that he’d apparently gone seven years without eating or drinking or performing several other critical bodily functions, he is said to have cut off his eyelids in a fury, which makes perfect sense to, I don’t know, insane people, I suppose. These eyelids were so shamed at having permitted slumber that they burrowed into the ground and became tea leaves.
(Kindly cease looking at me as though I’m making this up. Because I’m not, and once you do enough research to confirm what I’m saying, you’ll recall the faces you made in my direction, and feel extremely foolish.)
I was, however, making up the part about the Orcs. I try not to kill taxpayers for trivial reasons; while it appeals to my sense of whimsy, unpredictable punishments tend to lead to unpredictable actions. That is to say, someone who rightfully feels they might die based on arbitrary things, such as choosing to wear the wrong color of shirt, might (reasonably) assume they have little to lose in taking rash actions, such as attempting to poison my moat monsters, or starting some kind of underground resistance.
(I would like to say that I learned this through an extensive study of human patterns of thought, but to be perfectly honest, I learned it through an extensive study of human patterns of thought…and accidentally fomenting a rebellion, back in my younger days. In all fairness to me, it was an excessively tacky shirt.)
To be perfectly honest (as if one could ever be perfectly honest), I take my tea that way. It’s a big frothy cup of froth. The part that matters, in my own mind, is that I admit it. I don’t claim to like tea. Tea is bitter. I like the mild stimulant effect, more efficacious than many potions which involve, on average, significantly more time, energy, magical infusion, and complicated ingredients. I don’t like the taste. So I don’t lie to myself and claim I enjoy the tea; I enjoy the things it does for me, and I enjoy mutating the experience into something that I find pleasing. But the cream multiplies the calories and fat by an order of magnitude; the sugar, over time, reduces and essentially counteracts the original stimulant; and, one might argue, I have changed a difficult, bitter, healthy thing into an easy, pleasant, unhealthy one.
And this is why, though I command the resources of a fairly large domain, I drink only one cup of tea a day. Because I recognize that I use a simple, easy process to change the fundamental nature and effect of my experience, and it’s no longer the same thing.
Likewise, every time one of you nitwits comes here with some oversimplified, saccharine, unexamined idea that you’ll serve some nebulous “Good” by increasing my daily intake of sharp pointy metal to fatal limits, I slaughter you as expeditiously as possible.
Because I do not have time to waste on someone who doesn’t know the difference between “bitter potion of wakefulness”, and “big hot bowl of liquid candy”.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!
