My drinking life growing up was different from that of many kids I see running around today. In particular, my nieces’ and nephew’s beverages of choice have been essentially inflicted upon them by over dominating regime-loving parents (i.e., my sister and in-laws). That sounds bad, but it’s only because I wanted to be the one to push a beverage choice on them. Naturally, that beverage would be COKETM.
I cannot recall a time in my life when I wasn’t drinking a CokeTM. I remember the frantic buying frenzy I went through when the BAC (Bastards At CokeTM) forced Bill Cosby to push that vile PepsiTM-wannabe piss-drink called “New CokeTM” back in the whatever it was… 70’s? 80’s? I wasn’t old enough to have much of an income, so my supplies weren’t going to last very long.
Since I wasn’t going to drink brown carbonated piss-water, there were NO cola options left for me once my supplies ran out. Fortunately, though, after losing zillions of dollars, and a great deal of face, not to mention the support of Bill Cosby, CokeTM flushed the remainder of its CPW (carbonated piss-water) and brought back the original recipe: Classic CokeTM.
Then I went to grad school and thus began my lethargic trek into obesity. As a compromising strategy to slightly slow the weight-gain, my wife talked me into trying the switch to Diet CokeTM. Frankly, this was only barely better than CPW, but I persisted (perhaps because of the drugs they put into their sodas to create brand loyalty).
Eventually, I became a Diet CokeTM drinker. This ruined me on regular CokeTM because now THAT tastes only two steps up from CPW. (Note: So you can get an idea of the scale I’m using here, PepsiTM would fall six steps below CPW.)
After a while, I realized that I’d need to make an additional transition from the caffeinated beverage to the de-caf version. It took a couple of weeks (withdrawal headaches, crankiness, sneaking into the closet to drink my blues away, etc.), but I finally managed.
Now I’m running into the problem of FINDING restaurants that serve my CokeTM! I don’t really care if it has caffeine or not… I can handle THAT. Now, I’m starting to get hooked on (unsweetened when it arrives) iced tea. My strategy was that by first asking if they serve CokeTM and hearing that they do not, my obvious disdain and snobby reply, “Well then I’ll have Iced Tea instead – NO lemon” would highlight the error of their ways and NEXT time they’d have that beverage problem worked out.
That’s not working too swell. Maybe I should switch to, “Well then, please take my glass and scoop out some water from your cleanest toilet for me because PepsiTM only nauseates.” No, I’d be too worried that they’d just spit in my glass to get me back for having better taste than them.
Those BAC need to get their asses out here and push out the competition. I cannot do it by myself.
