“So, yesterday I wake up, and I’m barely awake, you know? So I head to the bistro and order a coffee before work. The coffee is HOT, so naturally my clumsy ass

“So, yesterday I wake up, and I’m barely awake, you know? So I head to the bistro and order a coffee before work. The coffee is HOT, so naturally my clumsy ass spills the entire thing in my lap as soon as I sit down.” Ordinary people in natural conversation will use the present tense to tell stories set in the past. So, “the coffee is hot” can sometimes mean that the coffee WAS hot. It’s not something that we ordinarily notice or talk about, it just happens in ordinary conversation. So if we want to understand what “present tense” means, we have to take care to avoid being confused by the name, “present tense”. “Present tense” is just the name of a tense, but there are several different ways that it is used.