Big Sam was a friend who would drink to face the world while awake, go to sleep when his blood threatened sobriety and then hit the coffee station hard at work in order to be productive enough to earn his booze money.

As a writer I have spent many a day struggling to stay awake at the keyboard. Without checking I cannot tell you what I wrote yesterday, or even how many articles I posted, but can verify that I woke up often while writiing.

My stomach has lost the ability to handle coffee and I now require at least 2.5 hours of sleep to be able to get through a night of stocking yogurt and frozen pancakes without waking up in the case with Tia tapping me on the shoulder, "Mister Jimmy, you okay? You need me ta get Nokia ta swish on by in those clingy polyester pants?"

Once at work I drink one cup of half coffee/half cocoa.

Once at home in the morning I start the brain juice a brewing in an attempt to write as long as possible, with brain juice failure tending to hit between 3 and 10 p.m. As long as I am falling asleep gently and my head is not actually ponding I will keep drinking more brain juice and tapping away. But, after my second or third hard impact on the desk top or keyboard—the glasses look like they've been run over by a car—I turn on the nightmare-inducing Nordic ambient music or the serene Japanese Traditional YouTube feed and go to sleep.

The next morning, the brain juice gets cooking again. But, I need to have a cutoff point to reduce the brain juice in the blood or I have to reverse Big Sam's cure and blast the brain with alcohol [three beers does it] so that I can get to sleep. Today is such a day, so here is the brain juice procedure:

The out-of-work coffee put is used, with 12 cups of water in the upright tank.

In the bottom of the dry pot I place 2 English tea bags, 2 peppermint tea bags and a cinnamon stick.

Hanging from the rim into the nectarious precinct are two green tea bags and a standard tea bag, or, on tough days a gingko/ginseng tea bag.

If me stomach is feeling rough, I drop in a slice of ginger or another peppermint tea bag.

If I do not have to coach in the afternoon I begin adding camomille to the brew, then stop drinking it. If I miscalculate, beer to the rescue at bedtime.

At whichever point I decide to turn the pot off I will bottle some for iced tea, setting the bottled out to seal and later placing them in the beer cooler.

In hot weather I brew a pot and bottle it at dawn and drink the refrigerated tea I brewed the day before.

There you go, juice for the groggy brain.

Yes, and when I have no time to heat something in the nuker, I pour quick oats into a cup and pour the tea on top of that, and eat that for breakfast, which I am doing right...now.