Liquid Pleasures

Staring at a bunny whose face protrudes through flowers.  The decoration of a coffee mug that my daughter gave me many birthdays ago, my birthday nearly coinciding with Easter that year.  Inside this mug remain a few more swallows of Costco medium roast coffee, a best buy on their K-cups, now that the need for bifocals induced membership renewal.  Once finished, another cup of coffee of a different variety will follow, and perhaps a third later, but that's my ration.  At the end of the day, or perhaps with supper, I will have my choice among several potent potables.  Beer tends to go best with shabbos dinner.  High volume soda no longer goes in my shopping cart except on Pesach or when needed for a colonoscopy prep, rarely purchased from a convenience store either.  Seltzer with a zetz of flavoring has largely replaced this.  I do not miss the excessive sweetness at all, despite the scientific certainty that the amount of sweetness each company places in their 2 liter PET bottles maximizes the hedonic response of my subconscious.  Soda is no longer one of those liquid pleasures.  Coffee has moved to the top of the list.

Other liquids never made the cut either.  Soup is convenient, economical, unrestrained in its varieties, yet never really among my culinary delights.  If socially acceptable I would devour the matzoh ball without the chicken soup but culturally they remain a unit.  Tea and soccer captured other parts of the world, most of the world, in fact, though are second tier for me.

Liquid pleasures take a tactile form too.  There are salt water waves stimulating skin, fresh water or chlorinated pools providing cooling on a hot day and pleasant resistance to muscles, shower streams of multiple adjustable patterns, intensities, and temperature levels at different occasions to relax or invigorate.  Never had a mud bath.  Have been in a hot tub with moderate pressure water targeting my most sore area.  And we have rain of different intensities, sometimes an annoyance to be shielded with an umbrella, sometimes better to get soaked and achieve pleasure in drying off.

There are also visual pleasures.  I like seeing the waves break and watching fish or marine mammals, preferably live but often in captivity.  Casting my own like to be retrieved empty-handed defers liquid pleasure until one day I hook one, to be released for being such a good sport.

Not to neglect olfaction, I know when my coffee is brewing, when I drove past the massive Anheuser-Busch brewery, or when chicken soup is homemade.

And hearing participates too, the waves of the sea, the faucet, the flush.  All liquid.  But for me, it's a gustatory stimulus primarily.