I have measured out my life in Coffee Spoons

For me, this singular line from Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the one line that struck my interest. It makes me realize the power of the reader's personal experiences and just how much that dominates the way we think about a piece. In a literal sense, it makes me think about how genuinely addicted to coffee I am. Within the context of the work it seems to have some emphasis on the monetey of constant productivity. This because in American society coffee has long since been one of the many weapons of the system to keep employees working for longer with more productivity.

Let it be noted that the tabacco industry pulled the same exact thing introducing smoke breaks along with coffee breaks. Throughout the poem the imagery of "yellow smoke" as this sort of beastial thing gnawing and licking the walls also seems to play on this paradigm of productivity. 

Backtracking to the coffee spoons, it reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club (1996) in which the narrator complains about his business trips referring to everything as "Single serving...". (The movie version of this scene is below). This is potentially based off of measuring one's life in coffee spoons and if it is, sometimes the most obscure connections are the most pleasing to make.