Is one of Twitter’s enduring mysteries at its endgame?

A decade ago, not long after the decline of Ashton Kutcher's supremacy on Twitter, in the days when the @horse_ebooks account was making the concept of “Weird Twitter” mainstream, an enigmatic character quietly surfaced.

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But there’s much more to this guy than coffee, and if his most recent activities are any indication, his tragic, ten-year story arc may finally be approaching its climax — or perhaps a new beginning.

The account known as “coffee dad,” with the handle @coffee_dad, is “just a dad who loves his coffee,” according to his bio. Coffee dad almost exclusively posts brief, low-key updates about his present status vis-a-vis his favorite hot drink. The updates tend to be nothing more than sentence fragments about obtaining, making, or consuming coffee. Posts might be “need coffee,” “time for coffee,” or just “coffee.”

Coffee dad might occasionally seem unusually keyed up or overcaffeinated just because he, say, posted “MAKING COFFEE” in all caps, but hey, you can chalk that up to him being a middle-aged dad, and probably not great at using Twitter, not any sort of deeper pathology…right?

Don’t be so sure. Every so often, when his followers least expect it, coffee dad takes a break from sipping coffee to drop hints about his intense struggle with powerful and prolonged grief over the untimely loss of his son. “Please leave me alone today. This is a very difficult day for our family. Thinking of you always my son,” he tweeted in 2013. Over time the rare mentions of coffee dad’s son became more and more elaborate. 

Months may pass with nothing but coffee tweets, and then coffee dad will post something like this:

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Apparently, the son died in some sort of motorcycle-related event, and the dad feels at least partly responsible. These blink-and-you-miss-them outbursts of pain aren’t funny. They’re more cathartic, and they give the “normal” coffee tweets a tragic subtext. The experience of following a grieving dad for years and years makes his followers admire the depth of his love, and it’s hard not to root for him to find a path out of his despair. 

But there have long been indications that this story was not headed toward a happy ending. Tweets like 2017’s “It is time for them to pay for what they have done,” suggest that coffee dad holds some unknown group — bikers? — responsible for his son’s death, and these people have reason to fear coffee dad’s righteous anger.

Many of coffee dad’s non-coffee tweets have suggested that the dad’s quest for retribution has already begun. But one posted on Sunday, July 17 — a date established back in the account’s first year as the son’s birthday — hints at a finality that has never been present in a coffee dad tweet before:

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I’ll let you tease out the meaning of this one, but it’s clear to me that coffee dad’s enemies aren’t the only ones in danger now. I doubt this is the end of coffee dad, but he’s clearly crossing a threshold, and the next time he posts about needing coffee, I’ll wonder if it’s because he’s in a place where there is none to drink.