TIGHT LINES
DEATH BEFORE DECAF
with Andrew Spencer
I'm not entirely sure who came up with the idea of "theme months," but apparently some brainiac decided that March should be "Caffeine Awareness Month." This one is new to me, but being the dedicated coffee drinker that I am, I'm on board with it.

Is that a cup of Joe, or is our writer simply glad to see us?

According to at least one study, 90 percent of Americans drink caffeine daily, making it the most widely-used drug in the country. And you want to talk about addictive, baby, just try being around my mother before she's had a couple of cups of Java. As we used to say in Texas, "That'll learn ya' to go messin' around with a hornet's nest." Yes, many of us are slaves to that morning cup, and in at least one case, there's someone amongst us who's a slave to that morning eight-to-ten cups. And that morning ritual is not one that I choose to alter, given the migraine-like headache that ensues by noon if I've gone without.

The problem with my coffee habit, though, is that people tend to criticize me for it. There are some out there who suggest I drink too much coffee, and that it might be best for me to make that Godawful move to decaf. That's right. These people think that it would be better for me to drink colored hot water with some coffee flavor in it. Oh, they've got their statistics about caffeine raising your heart rate and blood pressure and all that. They use these little facts to shield themselves from the truth about caffeine, a little nugget of reality that I managed to uncover in my studies of the elixir that is coffee.

It turns out that caffeine helps to relieve muscle aches after extremely strenuous workouts.

Yep, that's the result of a study done on college women in New York. It turns out that caffeine helps relieve the aches and pains associated with posteccentric contraction exercise. And now I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I'm sticking to my guns here and claiming that caffeine is good for

Now, prepare yourself, 'cause I'm heading off on a tangent. I know that's not like me, but just go with it a second here. Remember back in history class when they were talking about John Calvin? He came up with the idea of religious predestination, meaning we were all preordained from birth to be either headed up, so to speak, or down once we were done on Earth. The best way to tell, according to Calvin, if one was headed in the "right" direction was by how one acted. In other words, if you acted like a good person, you were one of those headed up. One of the upshots of that idea was that you had a bunch of people walking around all acting like nice people, if for no other reason than to convince their friends that they were predestined to go to Heaven. And to think they call me cynical in some places.

So now, jump back to this whole caffeine-as-healing-postworkout thing. Yours truly consumes a bunch of coffee. Coffee is shown to relieve muscle aches after strenuous workouts. And I'm guessing you all don't need a road map to see where this is headed, but just in case, let me put it bluntly. The obvious inference here is that I'm a workout machine. And if you really want to know the truth, one of my favorite workout regimens is practicing my fly casting.

Ten o'clock-to-two o'clock…Ten o'clock-to-two o'clock…Ten o'clock-to-two o'clock…Now take a break at three o'clock for coffee and a segue.

Friends and neighbors, it's true. There's nothing any angler in the world likes less than looking like they don't know what they're doing, like when casting a fly. It's sort of in our genetic code. We can't stand the prospect of looking anything other than skilled, so "practice" is kind of a four-letter-word to us. And the main reason is that we fear looking bad at what it is we're practicing. Of course, without practice, we can't be good at it, so therein lies the infamous catch-22.

But Uncle Andrew, as is so often the case, is here to help. March is a great time on Nantucket to practice your fly casting. There's a noticeable lack of tourists and summer folks running around to gawk at you as you do your back-and-forth out there on the beach. And the locals, well hell, it's March, so we all hate each other anyway, so what's a little more humiliation heaped on top?

And as an added bonus, you get that cup of coffee afterwards to warm you up, because if there's anything I know about fly casting, it's that it's an eccentric contraction kind of workout- at least it sounds good, anyway- and nothing relieves that pain like a nice hot cup o' Joe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to drink a big ol' latte. My fingers are absolutely killing me after typing this thing. And besides, Tom Walsh is buying.

Tight lines. I