Coffee Klatch: Dark Times

Woo-woo!👻

That's right. It's the spooky season. 

Dark times call for dark entertainment. Many people watch scary movies or shows during October, or at least that's what all the streaming services want us to think! 

My annual nod to the season is a re-reading of Macbeth.

I've already talked about why I started reading a Shakespeare play each month. It just seems fitting to read the play that includes ghosts AND witches in October. (There are plenty of plays to choose from with dark deeds or murder-y scenes, and even others with ghosts.) Maybe next year I'll do a Hamlet re-read - it has a ghost, after all.

Probably not, though. Besides the standard creepy tropes, Macbeth includes the slow descent into insanity of one of the main characters. It just offers so much to click in with the trending cycle of the year! Hamlet has a descent into insanity of one minor character but it's... sadder somehow. Both are tragedies, but Hamlet is a sad tragedy where Macbeth is a sort of manic-depressive, hyperactive romp through the hell of politics and war.

I'm no Shakespeare scholar, by any means, so I am open to any criticism of that assessment. 

This year, I have two versions in my laptop. One is a PDF with a layout that's easier to read. The other one has more easily accessible footnotes and includes a brief summary before each scene. I can quickly pop over to the footnotes for clarification without losing my place in the script. 

Anyway, since my geeking out over the Bard takes place on my laptop, I'm simply drinking plain, black coffee brewed at home. (Ha! Black coffee + dark literature = Dark Times.) 

At home, I use a coffee phin to make my morning cup. That's a Vietnamese drip filter device, sort of like a pour-over, I guess? I buy Vietnamese Weasel coffee at my local shop, add the cinnamon and clove (as I explained here), and let the phin do the work. 

image credit: tamingofthespoon.com

 

I do not use sweetened condensed milk at home, as they do in the shops, but the above picture shows the process of using the phin. If you're curious, you can click the link in the caption to learn how to make traditional Vietnamese coffee.

A lot of us have Big Holiday Traditions for the end of the year, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Solstice... Do you acknowledge Halloween as a season in any way? What books, beverages, or decor fit the season for you?