How to know when you're drinking too much coffee

The first way to tell is that, after lunch, you will be overcome by sleepiness immediately following your dessert coffee. If you can take a nap right after drinking coffee, you might be drinking too much.

However, the best way is the second way, which is somehow to go ahead and cut back to the point that you don't drink coffee at all after 3 p.m., and the first night of the first day of that regimen you have a dream, which you realize you have not had in some time, but this is not only a dream, it is a prophecy on the order of the Biblical ones in which you go looking for the room where God teaches singing lessons.

It is inside a large brick building that could be a church or a university hall, and you are told -- by a trustworthy entity whose face is a kaleidoscope that keeps changing to the face of one or another of an old neighbor or friend -- that it is in one of the rooms off the band room, which is at the top of the steps, just like at Northside Jr. High, so you go up a stairway to the top, but the band room isn't up there (anymore?) so you go down a corridor and find a door that opens onto another stairway that looks like it is underneath the basement where you cowered once upon a time when you were dropped off at kindergarten on a holiday by your mother who didn't know the kindergarten was closed that day, except now the stairway looks onto a glassed-in, well-appointed mezzanine lounge well-stocked with butterfly-sling leather chairs, which looks so much like a lifeless MOMA design exhibit that something tells you no one uses these steps, ever, and no one ever has done, so it is just you going up past the glassed-in butterfly chairs, taking steps that have never been taken before in the lifetime of the universe, but there at the top of the steps is a door labeled "BAND," which you open to a room in which a couple of people are distributing red and gold pieces of blank paper that does not look like music, but you have no time to investigate because along the side of the room -- which goes on longways as will, like a country dance -- are alcoves with large, solid, wooden doors that look like they enclose chambers of power and influence, but which repeatedly, when you open them, reveal a small nook in which there is invariably some old man puttering away at an enthusiasm, one of whose is model trains and another of whose is feeling miscellaneous swatches of fabric, but on you go until you stand in front of the door to God and the singing lessons, though not with any great confidence because one of the paper-bearing band people has in the meantime commented with a knowing nod-and-a-wink that God often comes to the door "immodestly attired, if you know what I mean," which is where you wake up.

And that really is the best way to know you've been drinking too much coffee.