For I Have Known Them All Already

I've just read and responded to Anne Gellar's blog entry (at Friends of the Writing Center Journal) about how we always think we are going to have more time available down the road. It made me think of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," so I'll copy part of the poem here:

For I have known them all already, known them all: ---
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

It's a strongly visual line --- "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." I see myself in the kitchen with a can of Folger's and a teaspoon, scooping up one spoonful at a time and tossing it in a cup that has no bottom and thus cannot be filled, or tossing it up in the air, so that it is wasted, like so many minutes of mine. My life grows stale, too, like old coffee, and after all it's only "instant" coffee --- not the real deal, from the bean, ready to be ground kind. I hardly ever drink coffee, in fact, so the can stays on the shelf until company comes. I guess in between I measure out my life with allergy pills. :>)