The Diet Coke Chronicles

The Diet Coke Chronicles Goes Comic...(Part 3)

2009-10-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

So it's been awhile since I've updated this blog, and it's been awhile since I updated my ongoing comic essay about the creation of the Diet Coke Chronicles...but I figured now was as good a time as any to upload the next three pages.

Keep in mind that this thing isn't over. But hey, a fella's gotta have a day job, and writing about Diet Coke addiction doesn't pay the bills, knahmean?

Remember: the comic starts a few post ago, so you'll be a bit lost if you start here.

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High School Reunions: Part 3 (of 3)

2009-09-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

Early on Saturday afternoon, while Heather was across town decorating the hotel ballroom for the night's high school reunion dinner/dance, I took Barney to the Ocala dog park. Heather's mother drove us. The day played out in the usual manner: Barney sprinted into the dog park, immediately chased after tennis balls that I launched from one end of the field to the other, probably tallying three miles of total running in just under ten minutes. Quickly, he became a slobbery, muddy wreck of a dog, tongue flopping out, breathing so heavy that the Earth shook under his feet, but still insistent upon chasing that tennis ball wherever it might go. So we doused him with the park's hose, led him into the convenient kiddie pools in the shade, and then he jumped out and rolled in the dirt and grass, and whatever we'd thought we'd accomplished in watering him down was completely undone.

I mention this only because this was the day's first major event. I've long believed that a full day is determined by how it opens, by your attitude, by the way you overcome minor difficulties. If you stub your toe, rip your pants, drop your laptop, and get stuck in a traffic jam, all by 9 AM, you're in for a really shitty day.

And so here I was, cramming in a muddy and wet dog into the back seat of my mother-in-law's car, apologizing, apologizing as Barney walked in circles on the cloth seats, licked windows, shook the kiddie pool water all over the car...his every breath launching puppy saliva all the way onto the windshield. So here I was, positioning the air conditioners to cool off the animal in the back, and still (yes) asking her if she wouldn't mind stopping at a gas station really quick so that I could grab a soda. Heather had my car, after all, so if I didn't stop now, I wouldn't get a Diet Coke all day long...and this was the exact nightmare scenario from the night before.

"Sure," she said, and we stopped at one of Ocala's finest gas stations, a dusty, gravel-smelling Citgo where I found exactly what I'd expected from an Ocala gas station: styrofoam cups (available only in 32 ounces, not even in 44 ounces!), and a soda fountain that featured only Pepsi products. Yes, it seemed as though Ocala knew exactly how to torture me: the only thing worse would have been the absolute absence of a soda fountain, so that I might have relied upon bottles or cans only!

As soon as I was back in the car and we were driving away, of course, I heard the sound of wind and air rushing into the vehicle...I hadn't closed the back door entirely, and there was Barney, still moving and readjusting and panting and slobbering, the door beside him slightly ajar. Just what I needed! A re-enactment of Marley & Me, with Barney escaping the car and making a run for it, back to the dog park! "The door's open, the door's open!" I said, and put the styrofoam cup into the precarious front seat cupholder, where Heather's mother attempted to steady it, and I turned and pulled the door shut. When I turned back, the lid of the cup had popped off, and Diet Pepsi had splashed all across the dashboard, across my mother-in-law, across her white stuffed bear that she kept in the center console.

"Um," I said, and tried to re-fasten the lid, whereupon another healthy splash of Diet Pepsi came surging out. "Sorry about that."

And this was how the day started.

I've talked about expectations ruining even the best experiences? Well. I'd already spent a full night, Diet-Coke-less, watching old high school videos. Now I was destroying my mother-in-law's car, and heading to a second night where I'd have to relive memories that I hadn't lived in the first place. I wasn't sure what to think anymore. Did I have bad expectations, which meant that the night would be good? Or were my bad experiences a sort of foreshadowing of the night ahead, regardless of expectations?

*

Later that evening, dressed to kill, Heather and I headed to the hotel ballroom for the reunion. Apparently, she told me, this hotel was once owned by George Steinbrenner. Hmm, I thought. Must be pretty nice.

We were the first to arrive, and we pulled up to a sort of satellite building behind a run-down hotel on the side of I-75. "Used to be owned by Steinbrenner," Heather said. "Emphasis on the past tense."

"Yes, that feels readily apparent," I said. "So the ballroom is a separate building? Not connected in any way to the hotel itself, or the hotel's bar?"

"No. They'll have a minibar, though."

When we stepped into the ballroom's front doors, already sweating from the relentless Florida humidity through which we'd trudged from parking lot to doors, we were greeted with...the exact same temperature inside as out. And the minibar was not yet set up.

"Not cool," Heather said. "This is not good. My hair needs the AC."

"Yes, AC is good," I said, as she searched through the table full of nametags. Each nametag had been crafted by Heather's friend Suzanne, and each featured Vanguard High School colors, and, of course, the old yearbook photo of the alumnus, so we could juxtapose current face with high school face. Excellent! Now this was something that I remember from Grosse Pointe Blank! Maybe the night ahead would serve up other delicious surprises! Maybe I would indeed watch some old drunk high school jock trying to hit on his old sweetheart, and fail miserably! Maybe I'd see Romy and Michelle walk in and dance with the old nerd-turned-billionaire! Oh, the possibilities for a high school reunion.

But we sat, waiting for the minibar to open, watching the small clusters of alumni arrive. At times, Heather gushed and ran to greet someone, and at other times (such as the very Ocala moments when someone came in wearing jeans and a Nascar hat at an event advertised as "formal"), she simply shifted in her seat. Slowly, the room filled, each of the round tables populating with old friends, then over-populating and spilling over into other tables. There were exuberant "HEEEEYYYY!"s exchanged, and bored head-nods, as if these old peers were picking right up where they'd left off ten years ago. There were scrapbooks passed around, and an old-school "prom photo" booth set up.

Yes, there was excitement, but strangely, there was something missing from the entire affair. I'd noticed it the other night, and I'd noticed it the moment that I decided not to attend my own high school reunion. But, standing in line for a Miller Lite at the very second that the minibar opened (there were no sodas available, by the way, only iced tea, and the only mixers for this bar were orange juice and sweet/sour mix...oh, Ocala!), I wondered what it was. Surely, there was delight on some faces. Heather was chatting up an old friend from years ago, and from a distance, I saw two women who'd last spoken a decade prior and clearly regretted the time spent apart. That was how it was supposed to be, right? Reconnecting. Catching up.

And yet.

And yet, when I listened to conversations from a distance (always, as a spouse, there is an odd distance, un-crossable), there was a sense that the answers to most questions were already known. That the "catching up" chatter was a formality that they'd already seen played out before they'd arrived. Oh, you went into the military? I already knew that. Oh, you moved to San Francisco? I already knew that. Oh, you're gay and you live in New York? I already knew that. In fact, I already knew that you changed your hair color, that you got pregnant, that your old boyfriend is now in prison, that you took a job in DC and that you were recently laid off.

Surprise: that was what was missing at this high school reunion. A sense of surprise.

This entire reunion had been planned online, over facebook, and nearly everyone had spent the last six months (at the very least) trolling through one another's profiles, reading the details of lives lived separately; though the actual communication might have simply consisted of a friend request and a quick "hey, how are you? good to see you on facebook!" message, the learning and re-acquainting process was much deeper. Yes, everyone here had read one another's profiles, but had also scrolled through photo album after photo album, friend lists, personal web site links, had clicked the hyperlink to see her husband, his wife, and so I wasn't even surprised when someone came up to me and told me that I was an English professor. "Yeah," I said, and wasn't sure how else to respond. What did they want to know? Was there anything they didn't know?

But wasn't surprise the very basis for a high school reunion? Yes, I had massive and unrealistic Hollywood-style expectations for my own reunion, but shouldn't I have been motivated to attend so that I could see what Dilan was now doing with his life, what Mike now looked like, where Amanda lived and worked? Weren't these the reasons for a reunion, because--really--if you ten years pass and you rarely speak to old friends, chances are that you're not going to suddenly exchange numbers and start hanging out every Friday and Saturday night, like the old days. You might "reconnect," as I saw Heather doing, but our lives take us in a lot of crazy directions, and formerly close friends sometimes become just passing ships in the night; there's nothing wrong with that, with accepting that the cast members of your life story rotate in and out, some prominent for a lifetime, some prominent for only a season. So really, the high school reunion was supposed to be a sort of freakshow, a night that put together a gigantic group of people whose lives had begun in the same spot, but who were now in a hundred other places. The drama, the comedy, the tragedy...all of it issued from the distance to which everyone had traveled.

Facebook, though...facebook had become the mystery-killing ultrasound for Heather's high school reunion, and when she looked around at the flesh-and-blood people at the minibar, at the buffet line, she saw the same individuals she'd seen on her computer screen a hundred times before. Surprise!

Throughout the evening, I grew less worried about what sort of experience I might have at the Vanguard Class of '99 reunion (okay, it was Ocala, land of meth and racism, but I was actually having a fine time in the humid Steinbrenner hotel...a few Miller Lites could do that), and more sympathetic for the dozens and dozens of VHS classmates, and the hundreds of thousands--the millions--of others in our generation whose expectations of what a high school reunion should be have just been unknowingly dashed by social networking. Perceiving it all a distance, I could watch the anticlimax play out in interaction after interaction, conversations that--at reunions ten years ago--would have begun with, "Oh my God! Is that you?" now simply reduced to, "Hey. Good to see you again."

Later that night at the after-party, and again the next morning on our drive back to Orlando, Heather told me about how she had finally talked to this person, to that person, and that it was refreshing to speak with them again, and how she wouldn't let another ten years pass before she reconnected again. And I don't doubt that the emotions are genuine. But I also suspect that what was "refreshing" might simply have been the face-to-face conversations rather than the online chatting. And while I will never doubt my wife if she says she will do something, I'm certain that--in ten years--there will be many, many old classmates she hasn't spoken with in a decade...but the next reunions, I suspect, will hold a number of surprises. By that point, though my Diet Coke addiction will still be kickin', I have a feeling that facebook will be long gone; by that point, maybe the mystery will return, the expectations will be fulfilled at long last.

High School Reunions (Part 2 of 3)

2009-08-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

Expectations, expectations.

If I was disappointed that my own high school felt and looked nothing like Bayside High (we had no love-able "Screech"-like nerd, we had no local dining hang-out a la "The Max," and none of us--as far as I know--developed the ability to freeze time simply by saying "Time Out"), and if I was disappointed that my own 10-year reunion had not materialized as anything more than a night out at old-people-infested Gulf Coast eateries, what would I think about my wife's Vanguard Class of '99 reunion in Ocala, Florida? Obviously, I already hated Ocala, but I had no idea of what to expect as a spouse at a reunion.

You see, here's the thing for Millennial men: we have inflated expectations for some of our life's milestones (our bachelor parties must feel like "The Hang-Over," for instance), but we seem not to even consider many other milestones until the moment they are upon us. Most men (myself included) do not develop elaborate fantasies for our wedding ceremonies, while women (my wife, by contrast) had dreams about the Big Day from age four or five, when she was in St. Augustine and saw a bride and groom in a horse-drawn carriage. For Heather, everything at our wedding needed to be absolutely perfect so that she could see her dream fulfilled. For Nathan...well, cool, there's an open bar, a bunch of people I love, and a great dinner and a cake! And I get to go to Hawaii afterwards! I was much easier to please.

Perhaps the very fact that I was unable to develop expectations for the weekend would allow me to enjoy myself, rather than focusing on the devastating negatives about the city of Ocala and its Diet Coke deficiencies?

This approach served me well on the Friday that we arrived in Ocala, as the evening's events were to take place in the city's modest downtown square, where famously local establishments (Harry's) intermingled with Ocala's brand of fine dining (The Melting Pot), all around a central park and gazebo.

We headed to the trendiest venue, just off the square, a brick-oven pizza joint called "Pi on Broadway" (as you might imagine, the restaurant used the concept of "pi," 3.14 etc., in their menu and logo design), a place that tried really really hard to be trendy. In fact, there was a sense of desperation about the entire restaurant, from the servers to the bartenders to the decor, that--quite simply--we've got to be the trendiest bar/restaurant in Ocala, damn it! I ordered a beer called "Arrogant Bastard," not because I wanted to be super-clever and tell people all night that I was drinking "Arrogant Bastard!" but because--at $6.00--it was the cheapest IPA on tap. One Rogue microbrew, in fact, topped out at $26 a glass. Yes. In Ocala. Orlando bars don't even try that hard.

While Heather busied herself with her high school comrades, new clusters of 27-30 year-olds filing in through the restaurant's doorway every few minutes, I enjoyed my individual-sized pizza (it, too, was filled with trendy toppings, such as goat cheese or tzatsiki or blackened chicken or whatever...I'm convinced that pizzas are like burritos...just about any ingredient, save for dog shit, works pretty well). Occasionally, I'd hear Heather complaining about the size of the restaurant, how they misrepresented themselves when she made reservations, how our table was stuck under a plant, how we didn't have enough room, how the manager wasn't accommodating enough, how it was raining and so we couldn't go to the rooftop bar, how there were leaks in the ceiling and poor Suzanne was getting soaked, how there was no room for Melissa and Paul to sit at our table, and, yes, the leaks were annoying, and the place was crowded, but I was enjoying my pizza and beer, and this was better than Chili's, right? No expectations! That would be my motto, a fail-safe approach to enjoying the weekend!

Of course, even "no expectations" couldn't prepare me for my first bathroom trip. Apparently, Pi on Broadway not only had severe leaks in the middle of the dining room, but the men's room also felt like it had just survived the Battle of Britain, gigantic bomb-sized holes through which great streams of rainwater were flowing, then collecting on the filthy floor. So...um...I suppose I was unprepared for that.

But the rest of my Friday night in Downtown Ocala was similarly carefree, as we hopped next to a nondescript Irish pub that tried not to be trendy, but simply to be loud. And that's fine. So much better than the Orlando equivalent, which would be filled with novelty Bennigan's-like artifacts and decorations.

And then, after our night on the town, feeling pleasantly surprised by the first night of the reunion, Heather and I headed back to old Vanguard alum Suzanne Bradshaw's house (well, her parent's house), where we re-convened with a large crowd of old VHS '99 cronies. Awesome, I thought. A house party! It had been too long since I'd lived the thrill of a house party, sitting in someone else's living room, parents asleep on the other side of the wall (or out of town), framed family photos on the walls to remind you--as you drank beer or cheap vodka procured for you by someone's 21-year-old brother--that you were doing something ilicit, adventurous, fun. House parties!

Part of me (the devil on my shoulder, or the angel, I'm still not quite sure) whispered as we were driving back to the Bradshaw residence: Shouldn't you stop at a gas station for a Diet Coke? You are the driver, after all, and you might need something to occupy your time. You're no longer at a public bar, you're no longer ordering Arrogant Bastards and goat cheese pizzas...you sure you don't want a tall 44-ouncer to keep you company while the Vanguard alumni reminisce?

But I ignored the voice. House party, I thought. House party!

Ten minutes later, though, as there were maybe a dozen of us spread out in Suzanne's parents' living room, a box of old video tapes on the floor before us, Heather shaking up grape-vodka-and-Sprites, I came to the sudden realization of how wrong my own vision of this "house party" was going to be. On one side of the room, there was Nick making his "Vanguard Grill" face, and on the other side of the room, Suzanne was popping a TV production video tape into the VCR, and then everyone was laughing at old 1998-99 haircuts and clothes, and saying things like "Whatever happened to him?" and "Oh my God, do you remember when...?" and yes, we were watching a full video yearbook of morning announcements and outtakes and it was as if I'd wandered into Patty and Selma's home for a slide show from their latest vacation, and while everyone else laughed and high-fived and knee-slapped and nudge-nudged, I sat with a straight face for fifteen minutes (that's how long these home movies lasted, right?), wondering if Suzanne's parents perhaps had any Diet Coke two-liters in the fridge.

I checked. Nothing. Just some Sprite, some OJ, some milk, and a box of cereal on the counter.

"Suzanne, where are your parents?" I asked. "Do they not have any soda stashed anywhere?"

"Well," she said, likely annoyed that I was rummaging, but also too engrossed in watching old videos to really stop me, "they don't live here anymore, Nathan."

"They don't...live here?"

"They have a new house. This one's up for sale."

And suddenly it made sense. Horrible, horrible sense. When I'd walked to the bathroom earlier, the hallways and bedrooms had all seemed remarkably empty, and it was indeed strange that these people would only have an old-school TV and VCR (no cable, no DVD player), but who am I to judge? It was Ocala, after all. But now the pieces fit: empty for-sale house.

"So they don't keep, like, Diet Coke anywhere? Just in case they come back for an afternoon?" I asked.

"Let it go," Heather said. "Come watch the video."

House party, I thought. Sober. No Diet Coke. And I took my seat again, and the videos kept going, twenty minutes, thirty, certainly no high school video would last longer than half-an-hour?, then forty-five minutes, and by the time we neared the third hour of collected video footage, old pep rallies and Powder Puffs, and Melissa and Heather doing some sort of strange '90s dance together, and Reel Big Fish and Mighty Mighty Bosstones playing as a soundtrack, and Dating Tips for Valentine's Day! and institutionally lit high school hallways, and re-living memories that were not my own, and it was all too much, too much, and by the time we left at 2 AM or 3 AM or whenever, I knew that I could pitch to Dick Cheney a much better and more frightening option than water-boarding.

Expectations, expectations. At the start of the night, they'd kept me going. By the end of the night, they'd grounded me, made a horrorshow of what I was suddenly expecting to be an interesting experience. A spouse at his wife's 10-year reunion: and now I had the dreariest, most depressing expectations for the big night, the Saturday dinner and dance.

High School Reunions (Part 1 of 3)

2009-08-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

Even before I ever started high school, I had an image in my mind of what a high school reunion should be. The image--of a high school gymnasium, packed to both walls with men in crisp tuxedos and women in prom-style dresses, streamers hanging from ceilings, posters tacked to walls, mini-bars in every corner, signs and marquees at every bank all around town "Welcoming back the class of '98!"--was no doubt borne of the depiction of reunions presented in a hundred movies and sitcoms I'd watched up until that point in my life. And, in fact, my vision of high school was similarly shaped by Saved by the Bell, The Breakfast Club, and Encino Man, and was sadly deflated upon my first day at Venice High.

But a 10-year reunion? It should be grand, no expense spared. A milestone for all those in attendance, and a sad regret for any poor fool who decided to stay home and forgo the event. Hell, when I watched Grosse Pointe Blank during my junior year of high school, my expectations only grew. Yes, this movie was about a hitman ensnared in gunfights during his reunion, but suddenly the I thought reunions should be full-weekend adventures, complete with True Love Found, Old High School Douche-Bags Killed, and rich soundtracks filled with the most memorable hits of your high school era. Yes, the reunion was an experience fit for an action-packed and comedic two-hour Hollywood hit. Sign me up!

Imagine my surprise, then, when the details surrounding my own reunion last Fall were so sketchy. Throughout the year, my wife Heather kept telling me to call Venice High School to update my address or put my name on a list or whatever, but I insisted that everything would work itself out naturally...no need to force myself into the VHS '98 Reunion...after all, the hitman Martin Blank (from Grosse Pointe Blank) had shadowed himself in virtual anonymity, and still his high school found him! I'd be fine. But the Spring passed, and then the Summer, and still nothing. Was I the high school douche-bag, passed over purposely? In early Fall, though, thanks to the wonder of facebook, I suddenly found an event invite for my 10-year Reunion, as well as a comment board of explanations (someone was supposed to plan it, didn't, so someone else took over, etc. etc., and now our reunion would be held at Chili's in sleepy Venice, and at the drearily grandparent-filled T.J. Carney's Pub & Grill). How could this compare to my expectations? Chili's? No high school gym? And T.J. Carney's, a place where I walk inside and feel uncomfortable because the dance floor is filled with 70-plussers? Well. I decided to sit this one out, wait for the 20-year.

Of course, there was another reason (aside from the venues) that I didn't attend my own reunion, and I wouldn't quite realize what it was until my wife's Vanguard High School Class of '99 Reunion this past weekend.

As should come as no surprise to anyone who knows her, Heather somehow found herself at the forefront of the planning committee for the event, calling hotels and conference centers and ballrooms and coordinating online guest lists and creating facebook pages and updates, the sort of tasks she claims publically to loathe, but which (we all see) animate her and energize her as if she was once again a sorority president. In other words, then, there was no way I would miss two reunions in two years: with Heather in charge Vanguard's Class of '99 weekend, I'd be tagging along for the ride even if it was held in a backwoods Ocala meth lab, with only five attendees. Yes, I would get my reunion experience, after all, but as a spouse and not as a former student.

But here's the thing about Vanguard High School: it's in Ocala, Florida. And here's the thing about Ocala, Florida: I hate it.

"Hate" is a strong word, so let me back up my perspective with a very strong piece of evidence: Ocala is a typical interior-Florida city, hot and muggy and full of bugs and Spanish moss and Nascar hats and woven belts, large in population but proclaiming itself to be a small-town with small-town values, and very diverse in its population, too, but seemingly ruled by fat white Baptists who always dismiss the region's racist past as if it never happened at all and is not still omnipresent and obvious (because "Hey, I've got a black friend, and I go to that Mexican restaurant every now and then"). Full of meth, too. This is just a quick characterization of the city, by the way, and not necessarily the reason I hate it...after all, this same generic characterization could apply to nearly any city in Florida...pick a spot on a map. I've long disputed the notion that "small-town life" means "better values" or "hard work" (the Sarah Palin premise), instead arguing that this is an outdated notion, that--today--small-town life means myopic thinking and a lack of opportunity, as local businesses can't compete with the chain stores that take root, and so local residents give up the opportunity to start businesses, generally settling for attempts at rising through the ranks at the neighborhood Wal-Mart, or joining the military (nothing inherently wrong with either of these options...but if they're your two best options, how does this make small towns better than big cities?), or leaving town for someplace bigger and better. Remember: this is a characterization, just perceptions and theory.

But my reason for hating the city is much more concrete, much simpler, much more inarguable: every gas station uses styrofoam cups, and many of them carry only Pepsi products.

Not only are there zero (0, literally) 7-Elevens in this town, but even the stores that--everywhere else--I rely upon for plastic cups and quality fountain Diet Coke (RaceTrac, BP) seem to have some colluded agreement that, in Ocala, all will be different. Styrofoam cups everywhere. And Diet Pepsi in the fountain, if I'm lucky. No fountain, if I enter the wrong store. I've detailed my Diet Coke preferences elsewhere on this blog, so no need to repeat myself...what matters is that Ocala gas stations seem to have something against me, so I--as a result--have something against the entire city.

A high school reunion in Ocala, then, would mean two things: (1) An interruption to my finely tuned Diet Coke habits, and (2) A replacement reunion, which I wasn't sure what to think about. Would this be an adventure, still? Would I be subjected to a weekend's worth of old in-jokes and snarky comments about people who had grown fat, bald, ugly, old before their time, but who I'd never seen back in their high school glory years? Would my hatred for Ocala grow and grow, or would this High School Reunion give me a Hollywood ending?

The Diet Coke Chronicles...Goes Comic! (Part 2)

2009-07-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

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The Diet Coke Chronicles...Goes Comic (Part I)

2009-07-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

So, in honor of more than three years of "Diet Coke Chronicles" blogs, we're going to try something a little different. We're going "comic" (and sorry, I'm not a professional cartoonist, so you'll have to give me a break) and--over the next month, in an ongoing series--we're going to go all the way back to the beginning! I'll look not only at how much my own life and Diet Coke habit has changed in 3 1/2 years, but how much the forums and mediums in our lives have changed, and how much the Diet Coke Chronicles has become a symbol of the way that I think and communicate.

Hopefully this works...my apologies again to the blogging purists out there. Just click on each page for a larger image.

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Throw-Down

2009-03-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

In real life, fights never seem to materialize quite the same way as you might imagine.

And I don't think there are very many people out there, either, who don't imagine themselves getting into fights. Our society, after all, is built on conflict and violence. On TV, we see commentators going to head to head over the economy (from The O'Reilly Factor to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and even The Daily Show), pointing fingers, yelling, their faces going so red that we expect steam to blow from their ears. We see commentators going head to head over sports (Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn), over singers (American Idol), over celebrity dancers (Dancing with the Stars). We argue with the television, curse the talking heads for disagreeing with us, wonder what might happen if ever we were to cross their paths...and those are just the reality-based television shows! Think about the movies we watch, from The Last House on the Left to Watchmen, all a series of heated exchanges and fistfights and bombs exploding and (in the case of the former) excessive torture. So it's only natural that we imagine our own arguments enacted in our minds, a series of "I should have said that!" or "I will say that, if the situation arises!" dialogues. We imagine ourselves in the movies and TV shows we watch...we wouldn't possibly be the torture victim, no...we would turn around and use a lead pipe to crush our attacker's skull! Most of us never get into fights, and most of us consistently lose our arguments, but somehow our imaginations have conjured every scenario possible, so that--even if these things never happen--we believe we've already won a thousand confrontations.

But real fights, in real life, never work out so perfectly as they do in our minds. Real arguments come from nowhere, and we stutter and spit out incorrect information. Real altercations occur at moments when we are unprepared, moments when we are with our families for a post-church diner, or walking our dogs, or have been stricken with the flu. Or...moments like this one:

Lately, I've been using the 7-Eleven at Rouse Road and Colonial (U.S. 50) for my Diet Coke needs. This is probably one of the Top Five Dirtiest Intersections in all of Orlando, a place where the debris and trash and exhaust of the entire city seems to collect and linger, but it's location between my gym and my house makes it too convenient to pass up. There are other, better intersections, and much cleaner stores, but here, I don't have to make a U-turn or cross over congested traffic lines or wait thirty minutes at a light. Here, despite the many shoeless patrons, I can just take care of business. Strut inside, hold my breath, fill up my 44-ouncer, pay, and be on my way.

Of course, I don't mind the slippery and muddy floors or the slimy nature of both the clerks and the customers. When I stop into this 7-Eleven, I've usually just come from the gym, and after the gym, I'm a filthy human being myself. Today was no exception. After a three and a half mile run, my entire body seemed to be a sweat factory, every pore that could pump sweat was pumping sweat, and my face was still red, my hair sloppy and falling onto my forehead and eyes. My t-shirt acted the part of towel, but it had soaked all the way through long before.

As I maneuvered my car into a parking spot today, I noticed a group of Hispanic kids lingering out in front of the store, one of whom was holding a stack of orange CD cases and leaning onto the hood of a car in the next parking space over, talking to a girl inside.

High schoolers, I thought. No matter what time I happen to be driving around town, I always get stuck behind school buses, and no matter what time I stop into a store to buy something, I always get stuck behind a group of kids--just out of school for the day--who make obnoxious comments and pay in pennies. He might have been 18; he might have even been 21; he wasn't too young, and he wasn't tiny; but with my luck: he was a high schooler.

But even worse...this kid, dressed in sagging jeans with a belt securely keeping the pants below his genitals (and wearing a wifebeater, just to sort of "dress up" the entire ensemble, and so he could proudly flex his newly formed biceps when he leaned on your car) was selling CDs out in front of the store. Occasionally, I've had to deal with homeless people outside of convenience stores, but they seem to have a sense of etiquette: if you just say, "Naw man, I don't carry cash," they'll still say "Bless you, man" even though they know you're lying. And occasionally, I run into Girl Scouts, who are only slightly more adorable than the bums, and who bring their mothers along when they sell cookies, making the lie a more difficult act to pull off...but for the Girl Scouts, usually you can just say, "Oh, thank you, but I've already bought ten boxes of Thin Mints!" and that's that.

High schoolers, though...with high schoolers, there is no sense of etiquette. There is no lie that you can tell that will convince them that you don't need or can't afford their home-made hip-hop CD. They begged their parents for the computer equipment to record their dopey rap tracks, after all, and they've seen 8 Mile, so they know you have to be persistent. Hell, they even spent their entire month's salary from Quizno's or Target on the blank CDs so they could try to peddle these things to the general public. This is their rap career, right here! They want to move units! And they have absolutely no understanding of adult income or budget! The perfect storm of annoyance!

Somehow, though, I managed to sneak inside the store without the young rapper noticing me, and I proceeded to the fountain, filled up my drink, and took my place in line behind someone who was buying cigarettes and lotto tickets, and I waited.

But coming inside the store...there...was the young wordsmith himself, no longer content to solicit customers outside the store, now entering the store itself, walking up to the counter and leaning there as if he was waiting to speak to the clerks and ask them to buy his CD. Was this really possible? Would I get to see his ultimate rejection?

But the clerks didn't pay him any attention.

And so the high school rapper stood there, speaking to himself about alcohol, and...oh no...looking directly at the line, which by now he was envisioning as a stream of revenue. There were now three people standing behind me, all of us waiting on the lotto tickets to be issued.

"Yo," he said and now he was in front of me.

"Mmm?" I said, trying to make minimal noise, hoping he'd pass me by.

"I just need one thing, yo," the high-schooler said, and he was looking directly at me. "I just need to buy one thing real quick."

He wasn't trying to get in my face to sell CDs, as I'd originally thought. He was trying to cut in line, to cut in front of a guy with a single Diet Coke, to buy "one thing." He'd looked at the line, determined that he didn't have the patience to wait, determined that--furthermore--he should not have to wait. His heroes, of course, the Jay-Zs and the Kanyes and the 50 Cents and the Lil Waynes...would they wait? No, sir! They had balls, these guys, and they'd take what they wanted, no fuckin' wit' dem! This was how legends started, he was thinking. This was how you secured a rep.

Of all the confrontations I could imagine--arguments with my students over grades, arguments with neighbors, fights on street corners, at restaurants and bars, fights late-night with drunken hooligans, and...and...and...well, of all the fights that I had ever imagined, I don't think I could have developed this scenarios in my mind: a high school rapper trying to weasal his way in front of me, trying to assert himself as a Hip-Hop persona. And if I could have imagined this, my mind would have made sure that I didn't imagine myself so sweaty, so exhausted, so generally disgusting, and in so dire need of a Diet Coke. The lotto guy had just paid, was turning to walk away. What was I supposed to do if he cut in front of me, just slid up to the counter? Grab him? Shout at him? Punch him? This wasn't how a fight was supposed to happen!

"Mind if I get in front of you real quick and just grab this one thing?" he asked and made his move toward the counter.

But here's the thing: he asked me. I had my opportunity.

"You can get behind me, actually," I said to him and pointed at the back of the line.

He stopped, stared me up and down. The sweat-soaked shirt, the too-short running shorts. The gigantic soda. What must I have looked like to him? I've always had the opinion that people like to pick fights with me because I'm skinny, and I look beatable. I still remember a tailgate at a UCF football game several years back, when a guy got into a fight with his girlfriend, and when she slapped him, a few of my fraternity brothers laughed. I was on the phone at the time. The guy looked over past all of my friends (they were much larger, much more intimidating), seemed to identify the smallest guy in the group, and probably thought: There's the one. I'll take my frustration out on that guy, even though he's oblivious to what's happening. The only problem, of course, was that this guy yelled at me, told me he was going to kick my ass, came charging at me, and my fraternity brothers slammed him onto the ground before he came within ten feet of me, and had a fun time physically humiliating him. Ever since that time, though, I pay attention during group confrontations to the inevitable moment when someone will target me because all of my friends seem larger, more imposing. Every time, I sigh. Yes, I want to say. I get it. We all know nothing will happen because people don't get into The Outsiders-style gang fights like they used to, but you're clearly thinking: if we do get into a gang fight, I want to take on that guy. Yes, I get it. You have large balls.

But there in the 7-Eleven, the high school rapper stared me down, then backed up and tried to create a new line behind me (the other line stretched in the opposite direction).

I stepped to the counter, watched as the clerk scanned my drink.

"Now days, people are so fucking lame, man," the rapper said.

Now days, I thought? Lame? Was he speaking about the people who wouldn't buy his CDs? Was this the frustration of rejection? Was he speaking about everyone else when he said "people," or was he speaking about me? Was he calling my lame, trying to bait me into a fight there in the 7-Eleven, even as I was buying my Diet Coke?

I turned around. "Are you referring to me?" I asked. "Am I lame?"

He stared at me again; we locked eyes; if he'd insulted me, I at least wanted to know.

"Just...everyone, man," he said and looked away.

I shrugged. Seconds later, I was out of the store, in my car, driving away and drinking my Diet Coke. Fights don't ever seem to happen when you imagine they will, and while this wasn't a fight, it certainly had the makings of a classic throw-down: absolute frustration for one or more member involved, insults exchanged, pride called into question, etc. And as with any confrontation, I wondered as I drove home whether I'd handled myself right. When you imagine a fight, you always imagine yourself to be the one wronged...you are defending yourself against the Barbarian hordes who seek to invade your kingdom. Probably, this rapper thought was the case for himself. I'd denied him the privilege to which he felt entitled. And clearly, I thought that he was entitled no such privilege. But at what point was I obligated to continue pursuing the matter, if he hadn't backed down? At what point did I go from Maintaining My Manhood! to simply Starting A Fight. If he'd cut and I'd grabbed him, would that be the wrong thing for me to do? If it turned out he was 16, would I have been a complete bully? If it turned out he was 24, would I have been a complete wimp to have let him cut?

When we imagine our fights, the matter is clear-cut. We are right, and the other party is wrong. We are both prepared, much like a boxing match, and we will prevail because Right always prevails.

But real life afford us no such luxuries. Right decisions can become wrong decisions in an instant, and manhood can become bully-hood just as quickly. As I drove home, I imagined a thousand different scenarios back at that 7-Eleven; I imagined punches thrown, CDs scattered across the floor, black eyes. I imagined my career over. I imagined scandal ("Professor Pummels 14 Year-Old Phenom Rapper!"). I imagined embarassment ("14 Year-Old Pummels Professor!"). I imagined that every decision I'd made was the right one, and conversely, that every decision was the wrong one.

In the end, though, the Diet Coke tasted the same as always, and perhaps it is reassuring to remember the consistency of life's small pleasures.

The Myth of Busy

2009-03-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

So how does one even begin to explain why he hasn't made a blog post in six months? How does a man--a self-declared Diet Coke addict, who not only boasts of inhuman daily consumption, but also owns (and wears) Diet Coke pajama pants, and who for several years was always able to find the time to write lengthy blogs detailing his Diet Coke rituals and foibles--how does such a man suddenly disappear for six months? Clearly, judging by the number of 1,500-word personal essays I've written on this site, I've got no real social life tying me down. Clearly, judging by my lack of TV appearances (and the fact that I've never made a cameo in a Spoof Movie), I haven't achieved sudden fame with the Diet Coke Chronicles and moved on to bigger and better things.

So where have I been in the last six months?

Three words: I've been busy.

Busy busy busy. A new house and a new car, a guest lecture at a fraternity conference in Naples, four classes in Fall and four classes in Spring, Thanksgiving Dinner hosted at my "crib," a thousand and a half "handyman"/Mr.Fix-It home improvement projects...a dug-up backyard, a patio, a refinished set of kitchen cabinets, an assembled futon, a painted bathroom. And (oh, right) a book. Yes, I finally got a book contract and finished my campus history of the University of Central Florida. Ask me where I've been, and I'll tell you that I've been busy. Ask me what I've been drinking, and I'll tell you that it's been the same potent two-some of Diet Coke (fresh out of the fountain) and Fresca. Ask me which corporation made the acknowledgments page of my book, and...well, I'm sure you can guess.

But here's what I keep wondering: how busy have I really been? On an average workday, I get to my office just before 8 AM, teach and grade and meet with students until around 3:30 or 4:00 PM, then head to the gym, get home after 5:00 sometime, walk the dog, feed my belly, groan when I see my wife watching the same old 90210 reruns again, and--for the last several months--I've shuffled into my office to work on my book for a few hours, before falling asleep while reading. Writing it out makes it seem incredibly taxing, wearying, jam-packed, but during the last six months, I created an entire patio in my backyard. I read Richard Russo's "Bridge of Sighs," Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," and Zadie Smith's "White Teeth." I watched "Heaven's Gate," the world's longest and most godawful attempt at a Western epic, and "American Gangster" and "Days of Glory" and a handful of other three-hour epics, and I even spent evenings watching a documentary about Soviet humor, and a Friday night at the local cineplex in 3-D glasses watching "My Bloody Valentine." Certainly, a busy man wouldn't have found the time to watch "My Bloody Valentine," right? Certainly, a busy man wouldn't have found the time to update his facebook status no fewer than 150 times? If I was to tell that legendary conserver of time, Benjamin Franklin, that I was super-busy for six months...but still managed to rent and watch "Creepshow Part III" and a full season of HBO's "True Blood," what would he tell me? Hell, I remodeled our master bedroom's closet. The closet! I took a day off on Inauguration Tuesday and drank Rising Moon and Sam Adams White Ale and ate 10 pounds of guacamole!

What does "busy" mean, then? When we say that we're busy, do we actually mean that we're busy? Do we actually mean that we're constantly caught in a whirlpool of activity, that we're rushing from one meeting to another, one activity to another, that we are so on the go-go-go that we cannot spare a second...is this what we mean by busy? Or do we tend to use the word "busy" only in past and future tenses, as in "Man, I've been so busy lately" (in order to describe why we forgot to call a friend back, or in order to describe why we forgot to buy our mothers a birthday present), or "I'm going to be really busy this week, sorry" (in order to describe why we can't meet up for lunch, why we can't babysit, why we can't help a friend pack up and move across town, why we can't accompany someone to a Thursday night showing of "A Chorus Line" when she gets extra free tickets)...are these the true meanings of "busy," here in our current cultural moment?

In other words, has "busy" become an American "Get out of jail free card," a mythical concept that we can pull out at will to explain away a lack of discipline in our lives (too busy to go to the gym this week, too busy to respond to your email, too busy to clean the bathroom), or to spare ourselves some unpleasurable experience (too busy to go see that Monster Truck rally next week, too busy to sign that petition that you're waving at me)? Are we ever too busy, really? Or does saying that we're too busy just simplify our lives and our consciences?

One thing is certain, myth or not: when we perceive ourselves as "busy," we find a way to excuse our very worst habits. If we smoke, we wind up smoking twice as much. If we drink coffee, we start chugging Starbucks cups every twenty minutes. We consume candy bars by the box. "I'm busy!" we say in our cubicles, in our offices, chewed bits of Dorito falling from our faces "I'm so busy! I need the sugar to keep going! I need the caffeine! I need the nicotine! No regular human being could do what I'm doing without a massive intake of something unhealthy! So get the hell out of my office while I knock back another glass of straight, warm bourbon, and don't judge me. This is my fuel!" Call it the Mad Men complex, when brisk business and a string of success justifies whatever the hell you do to keep it happening (cigars! whiskey! adultery! etc.).

For my money, it was Diet Coke, obviously. Six months spent toiling over a history book (by the way, did I ever mention that I write fiction, not history? what was I thinking?), and while I was busy busy busy, I was never too busy to stop everything and head to the campus Chick Fil-A and get another refill. I was never too busy to take a drive down Lake Underhill for another 44-ouncer at the BP or the 7-Eleven. Oh no. Never too busy. In fact, I had myself convinced that I could only stay busy if I had a straw six inches from my face. If I realized that I was halfway through the day and I still hadn't made a Diet Coke run...stop everything! I raced from the office, from the house, from wherever, whenever, and ten minutes later...problem solved!

For six months, I treated nearly every day the same way that I--as a child--used to treat Friday and Saturday nights, when I could finally try to stay awake all night and watch horror movies, morning be damned. Yes, I drank my DC like there was no tomorrow (literally), convinced that it was not only important to my authorial well-being, but essential.

But yet I was too busy to write a blog about such abuse. Too busy, too busy.

But was I too busy? Or had I just deluded myself, as so many of us do, confusing "all of the things that we've still go to do (tomorrow)" with an extra four or five hours of free time tonight. Perhaps we can only be certain we're too busy when the guilty pleasures (the bad horror movies, the video games, the snacking, the Diet Coke refills) must also be sacrificed, our lives now suddenly surrendered to complete service of whatever idea or activity that has enlisted us.

The Fresca Foray

2008-09-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

At some point in every man’s life, he faces a crisis, whether it be a crisis of health or conscience or friendship or finance, and in response to this crisis, nearly every man will gain a hardened edge and will stand up straight and will look you dead in the eye and tell you unequivocally how he will conquer and annihilate this crisis. He will change his life, his habits, his very personality…the way he walks, the things he eats, the hour at which he goes to sleep at night…his voicemail message, his myspace profile picture, his wardrobe, his haircut…he’ll do what needs to be done to come out a winner because damn it he’s a man, and a crisis is a painful blow to the most important thing in a man’s life: his pride.

Generally, of course, your average American man will talk with such conviction that few would doubt his words and his resolve, but two weeks later, the true problem remains. The bank account is still depleted, the horrid farting habit has returned, the car is still broken, and the beer gut is larger than ever. Oh, men. Perhaps all we ever really manage to do is tune out the blinking red “ALERT! ALERT!” lights and the screeching noise of the crisis alarm.

Yes, you have a few exceptions. Michael Phelps is doing all right for himself; Ray Lewis has stopped killing people; and Bobby Petrino has stayed with his current employer for the last few months. But mostly, we’re just like the UCF football team: talking trash and then getting whipped by USF one more time. Rarely do we conquer the crisis and actually overcome the problems that hover mosquito-like in our lives.

Such was my thinking, then, when I returned to Orlando from my nearly-two-week vacation in Chicago, my stomach making strange noises, revolting, my head hurting, my weight having increased by at least six pounds, my overall health and well-being corrupted almost beyond repair…my schedule was still in disarray…much of my life was still packed up, and full rooms of my new house had yet to be put together. Crisis, I thought! In order to get through this, I needed to change some aspect of my life; I couldn’t keep going at the same “Live today, die tomorrow of blocked arteries and/or alcohol poisoning and/or caffeine overdose” rate that I’d been going. I was a man, after all. I could get through this, recapture my health.

Of course, there have been many times throughout my life when I’ve said such things. Whether I’ve tried to stop drinking beer so heavily (that has been a goal of mine approximately 40 different times throughout my life), or I’ve tried to go to the gym more, eat pizza less, watch less television, or whether I’ve attempted to stop swearing, I’ve always slowly whittled away at my goal until the finished product no longer even resembled the original goal. For instance, after last year’s football season, I felt so disastrous that I decided I would eat no more hamburgers and drink no more beer until the Fourth of July. Imagine my health if I achieved such a goal! Imagine my abs, finally visible under that layer of fat that has currently settled over my mid-section! But within a week, I’d decided that July was so far away…why not Memorial Day? Then it was Cinco de Mayo. Then it was St. Patty’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and—finally—Saturday night, when we went out to a local restaurant with killer hamburgers and a great beer selection.

Now would be the time, I decided, when I actually enforced some discipline in my life, when I actually corrected some havoc that I’d wreaked upon my digestive system in Chicago.

The “healthy eating” part was easy for me. Chicago had been a deep-fried, cheese-covered city, so anything seemed healthier than what I’d been eating. Hell, if I could just eat French Fries without the chili and the cheese, it was as if I’d found some new diet.

The other part, though…

I decided to purge my system of caffeine. My sleep-wake schedule was erratic, my head was aching, and certain things just didn’t feel right. What would happen, I wondered, if I went a couple weeks without caffeine, without—more specifically—Diet Coke? Would I suddenly sleep better? Maybe even sleep more? Would my eyelids stop twitching? Would I feel more energized at the gym? Would it be easier to breathe? The thought (a formerly unthinkably thought) now occurred to me that, perhaps, Diet Coke was as much to blame for my poor health as all the beer-battered artichokes and deep-dish pizzas and bratwursts I’d eaten. To be honest, I couldn’t remember what life had been like before caffeine and before Diet Coke. When people smoke cigarettes, they generally talk about their lung capacity before they took up the habit, but my life was not so easily divided between Pre-DC and In the Years of DC…my life was intertwined with the drink…for as long as I had any memory.

So I drank water. Water water water. I struggled through that first Monday after the vacation, wondering why I felt so sluggish, why the miles I run at the gym suddenly seemed so much more difficult than usual. In sharp contrast to what I’d imagined, my headache actually grew worse, and I could do little but sit on the couch and pretend to be doing something. I’d put together a shelf or a cabinet, level it on the wall, hang it, all the while thinking that my hands would be steadier if only for some Diet Coke. Any excuse, I thought. But I drank water. Water water water. And I counted the minutes, unsure if I was really serious about this…if I really needed to give up Diet Coke in order to conquer my wreck-of-a-body, if Diet Coke even constituted “poor nutrition.” I mean, seriously, it’s got zero calories. How could something with zero calories be bad for you? Surely it was just the fried chicken and waffles that had destroyed me. Any excuse, any excuse. The rationalizations came unceasingly, all these reasons to stop being a man and just give in to temptation, to the crisis.

And then, strangely, on a trip to Albertsons to find some new and different drink (water just wasn’t doing it for me), I discovered Fresca.

Yes. Fresca.

If you’ve never heard of Fresca (like Tab, it’s not quite mainstream, and can’t be found in any soda fountains or restaurants), here’s the deal: apparently marketed to grandmothers and citrus aficionados, Fresca is a no-caffeine, no-sugar, zero-calorie grapefruit soda. After all other flavors were expended (Dr. Pepper having used most of them in its Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper incarnation), the Coca Cola company was left with grapefruit. The worst of all fruits. Able to be consumed only with massive heaps of sugar.

But somehow, Fresca is great. Sure, you can only buy it in two-liter bottles at grocery stores, and it makes you feel so old you think you should be watching soap operas, but it tastes like a more inventive and innovative version of Sprite or 7-Up…it tastes, in fact, like a slap in the face. Like a cocktail, an alcoholic mixed drink, something whose flavor alone can wake you up and keep your attention. And because it has no caffeine and no sugar, I purchased two-liters of Fresca by the cartload: five, six bottles at once. And I stored them at the bottom of our new pantry so that Heather would have no idea how much of this stuff I was drinking. Fresca: this became my Diet Coke alternative.

And true, it didn’t have the same fine carbonation as fountain soda. True, I had to actually fill my own cup (from my own cupboard) with ice from my own freezer, and drink the Fresca sans straw. True, I could not take my lidless cup on a drive around town, to campus, to the store; I could only drink the soda at my house. True, true, true.

But it was like medicine, this Fresca, a sharp-tasting full body caffeine cleanse, and I went a day without Diet Coke. Then two. Then three. In the heat and humidity of a Florida summer, surrounded everywhere by 79-cent fountain drink deals, I was gulping grapefruit soda out of two-liter bottles to stave off the seductions of my old addiction.

Four days, five days without Diet Coke. And it wasn’t like medicine, no, but instead like a nicotine patch, some replacement item that carried some of the old benefits of your beloved habit (it had carbonation, it was cold, it was sweet) but none of the familiar old “I’m infiltrating your body and killing you slowly” appeal of the original you’ve loved for so long (just as cigarettes fill the lungs, the mouth, the nose with smoke, a sensation nicotine patches can never hope to match, Fresca wasn’t helping my heart to race, wasn’t urging me to drink another cup).

Still…six days. Seven. I was a man. I could do this. And hell, I didn’t even brag. I write a blog about Diet Coke addiction and I didn’t even brag about breaking the habit. I’d go out to convenience stores with my brother Jason, and while he purchased a Super Big Gulp, I lingered about and looked at the nutritional content of Famous Amos cookies. A man!

The thing is, though: in my life (and indeed, in the lives of far too many men), once I’ve proved some sort of point, once I’ve satisfied the cravings of my pride, showing it that I can improve my life if I really want to, I shake hands with my inner demons and call it a day. There is no real change, not in any lasting way. Maybe a few pounds lost, maybe a full purging of all caffeine, but never a binding pact that The Way It Is Now must be The Way It Will Be Forever. The man who agrees with his wife that he will be home from work earlier…the man who promises his children that he will spend more time with them, and less with football games…even the college boy who promises himself at the start of each semester that this will be the one year that he’ll actually read the textbook and study and make straight A’s…he gets only as far as Week Two or Three before exhaling, surveying his accomplishments, and saying, “This was a great challenge. I’m better for it. Now, it’s back to the glorious Old Me.” There might remain some unintentional baggage from the foray, a heavier bench press, a disdain for butter, a slightly better collection of shirts. But men are men. We’re experts at conquering crises, and crises are quick, hectic affairs, not lengthy battles. But we cannot conquer problems.

And so now, if you stop by my house, you will notice that the chaos has ended in my life. Much is unpacked, much has been redecorated and renovated. You will notice that I’ve resumed my old schedules, for the most part, that I look the same as I did back in early Spring. You will notice empty Super Big Gulp containers lining the counter, too, actually, an indication that no habit has truly been broken…but you will also notice, if you know where to look, a recycling bin…and in that recycling bin, a stack of green plastic bottles, the Fresca labels still fresh and peeling from the plastic only slightly, certainly not the remnants of some bygone habit…instead, certainly, they must tell you that someone in this house has not only failed to unshackle himself from caffeine addiction, but has also assumed some new habit, some new slavish devotion—to grapefruit!—in addition to Diet Coke. That recycling bin, and the collecting cups on the counter: they’ll tell you everything you need to know about my summer.

Continuing Chaos in Chicago

2008-08-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

And so, with a house still smelling of packed cardboard boxes, a set of couches still undelivered, photos and sconces still to be hung, and a yard growing wildly out of control, we left for Chicago for ten days.

It was the sort of trip, much like our honeymoon, where we made sure to plan every microsecond, leaving Orlando at 6:25 AM (which, of course, means that we had to leave our house to drive to the airport before 5:00 AM (which, of course, means that Heather had to wake up at 3 or 4:00 AM to do her “get ready” thing)) so that we could get to Chicago’s Midway Airport, hop on the el and rumble into the city (all of our bags taking up an extra seat on the super-tight car, earning us dirty looks from the veteran Chicagoans around us), climb off the el onto a three-story-tall wooden framework boarding/de-boarding gate which might or might not have been under construction, right there in the middle of “The Loop,” the busy financial district of downtown Chicago, where we tried like hell to keep track of our bags, lugging them through turnstiles, around corners, hanging onto them so that they wouldn’t fall onto the el tracks or onto the crowded streets three stories below. We lugged them down a long and twisting flight of stairs, my laptop case, her laptop case, my suitcase, hers, my garment bag, her carry-on, and her purse, all those seasoned city slickers passing around us as we struggled and sweat, shaking their heads at the two “country come to town” tourists who were now standing directly under the giant “Chicago Theatre” sign in the middle of one of the loudest, busiest, fastest paced, and powerful cities not only in the United States but the entire world, and we clutched our luggage as the businessman passed, as the homeless people even looked at us like we were clueless. And where to go from there?

Already we were exhausted, overwhelmed. Already I was in the Central Time Zone, unsure when to begin the Diet Coke binge I had planned for so long, so that I could become reacquainted with an old friend.

We waited under the Chicago Theatre sign for my cousin Diana, who works downtown, and we shared a cab ride across the Chicago River to our hotel, the Inn of Chicago, on the Magnificent Mile, and (bingo!) directly across the street from a 7-Eleven. Whatever confidence the city had stolen from me as it welcomed me, it now returned.

“Can I?” I asked Heather while we checked our bags with the hotel.

“A Diet Coke? Please, Nathan. It’s too early.”

It was still 9:00 AM, I think. Maybe 10.

“Come on!”

“It’ll be there when we get back.”

"You're sure?"

"Am I sure, what?"

"You're sure it's going to be there?"

"We're in a hurry, Nathan."

Okay, so yes, we were. We’d arrived early because we had tickets to the Cubs game with Diana, so I gave up…Wrigley was more important than a Diet Coke, and I’d have one at the game, right? And so it was go, go, go, down Michigan Avenue to catch the bus to take us to the North Side to Wrigley, but first a quick stop in Walgreen’s so I could get some cash back for the bus ride because apparently in big cities, cash is still important for such things, but I had to buy something with my debit card for the cash back, so (bingo! I win!) a bottled Diet Coke (boo! Not a first choice, but I had to take what I could get), then onto the bus, where I tried to hand the driver my money and he sighed and told me to insert it into a machine at the front, and I scratched my head and apologized and complied. And then to an underground subway, and then to Wicker Park, where we met up with Diana’s friend, and then a taxi ride to Wrigley, where (bingo!) there was a 7-Eleven right across the street from the stadium! The bottled Diet Coke taste was still sitting heavy in my mouth…I needed something fountainy. And here was a 7-Eleven. My grandmother, greatest Cubs fan ever, was taking care of me from her place in heaven.

“Not enough time,” Heather said, noticing the gleam in my eye. “We need to get lunch.”

And so we followed Diana to Goose Island, a restaurant and Chicago brewery where—let’s be honest--who drinks soda?, so it was beers all around, and then to Murphy’s Bleachers, where (come on, let’s be honest, etc.) beers all around, and then into the game itself, where I’d pledged to eat a gigantic Ballpark hotdog and drink a Diet Coke, but it was hot in my seat, but not Florida hot, not humid, so I could have sat there all day, and I did, I guess, drinking Old Style and sort of watching the Cubs play one of their worst games of the year, but who cared? There was a singing beerman who brought the beer straight to you, and in order to get a soda, I would have actually had to walk to the concession stand. Oh, well. Five Old Styles. Six. Who knows? And then out of the stadium! Down the road in a massive wave of Cubs fans to…to…oh, hell, who was keeping track, but it was late afternoon and we were already drunk and so there were more beers all around. And then…somehow…a place called Flounder’s with killer tater tots, and more beers. And where was Diet Coke in my life, then? Nowhere, nowhere.

And if I’d hoped to fall back into some sort of schedule while in Chicago, it wasn’t happening. We fell asleep early that night (if it was even night yet), then woke early the next morning (Friday) to begin our Chicago themes of (a) Walking, and (b) Eating Poorly. Day two, and it was go go go. The Chicago Architecture Cruise, Navy Pier, the Ferris Wheel, lunch at Diosa’s on the River where (yes!) I could finally sit alongside the Chicago River and enjoy a Diet Coke…but…it was a tiny operation, this place, more like a street-meat barbecue stand than a complete restaurant, and so I had to settle for a can. A can! (boo) And then wine on the terrace of our hotel, however many stories above ground, where you can hear dozens of distinct sirens all at once blaring from so many different directions, then dinner at Pegasus Restaurant in Greek Town, where (let’s be honest), the martinis and the beer and the flaming cheese and the hummus and the gyros sort of outweigh the desire for Diet Coke. And, oh, there was no schedule, and my stomach was already feeling it, and I’d been randomly patching together Diet Coke experiences as I bounced around town, but this wasn’t the addiction I was used to. It felt like I was grasping to keep it alive.

And then it was Saturday, and Heather needed to shop the Mile, and yeah, I finally got myself a 44-ouncer from the 7-Eleven across the street from our hotel--

--but Super Big Gulps are always a bad idea when you’re shopping because you always have to place them somewhere inappropriate as you pick things up, and then you have to use the bathroom while you’re in someplace classy, like Tiffany’s or the Coach store, and you look like a giant goober because you’re the guy with a 7-Eleven cup asking the meticulously dressed Louis Vuitton salesperson where the pisser is at, and he gives you a look like, “We’re Louis Vuitton. We don’t have ‘pissers.’ In fact, we are all mannequins, and thus, do not ever need to use the bathroom at all.”

Then lunch at Potbelly’s, and cans of soda once again! Cans! Then on to “Wicked” at the Ford Theater for some Broadway in Chicago, and aww heck, why would I buy an over-priced beer when I’m watching a Wizard of Oz musical? So I buy a Diet Coke from the bartender. But, alas, there is a problem! Of course, of course!

“You can’t drink this in the seats,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“You have to drink it out here. In the hallway.”

“Um.”

“However. You can certainly purchase a souvenir cup with lid, and then we allow you to take your drink back to your seat.”

“I see.”

(And this is the story of how I spent five dollars on a 20-ounce Diet Coke, and why I now have a “Wicked” souvenir cup in my pantry back home.)

Then check-out at the hotel, cab ride across town to the intersection of Wrigleyville and Boy’s Town, where we stayed with our old friend (and groomsmen in our wedding) Ira, then dinner at a noisy, noisy North Side Italian joint, margaritas in some sort of Mexican basement that only accepted cash, then a 5K in the wee hours of the next morning, starting near Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, through the Museum Campus, around Soldier Field, and back down Lake Shore Drive to get our less-than-impressive times and places. Then purple Gatorade, but no Diet Coke, and a long walk across Chicago to grab a cab to take us all the way back to Ira’s place, where we showered, dressed, and walked through a sputtering rainstorm and a Gay Pride Parade (which could receive an entirely different blog to itself), where Heather and I clearly stood out as the only straight people in streets filled with every imaginable manifestation of gay pride one can conjure.

Then…finally…finally…a cab ride to Avis Rental cars back in the Loop, where I controlled a mid-size vehicle, and could stop any damn place I liked, any place I knew there to be Diet Coke.

Relegated only to walking and to cab rides and to public transportation, Diet Coke addiction is an enterprise of limited resources, limited availability. When you’ve got a car, you’ve got control. This is why vacations are always so nerve-wracking for me. If, by chance, you visit a city that is populated plentifully with 7-Elevens and other acceptable convenience stores (as Chicago certainly is…hell, 7-Eleven is a major sponsor of the hated White Sox), you are still constrained by where you can walk, and (as I’ve discussed in my blog before, when we visited Memphis) whether or not you can convince others to go with you where you need to go. With a rental car, you have control. With my rental car, there in Chicago, I suddenly had control!

For four days, as we drove out to Lisle in the suburbs, I could stop anywhere I chose! Suddenly, my addiction seemed back on track, my schedule seemed to right itself, life seemed to be reassuming normalcy. We still ate horribly: bratwursts on the grill at my uncle’s house, deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnatti’s and solid scoops of cookie dough in Naperville, ice cream on the Fox River in St. Charles, Trolley Dogs in Kenosha, Wisconsin, beers at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse in Aurora, beers at Emmitt’s Brewhouse in Downer’s Grove, even a daytrip to Milwaukee to enjoy some beers at the Cold Street Brewery and the Miller Brewery. But through it all: a rental car, and absolute control to stop at whatever convenience mart I deemed worthy. Diet Coke out of the fountain. Diet Coke in Milwaukee, Diet Coke on the Riverwalk in Batavia! Yes, life had slowed and I had caught up with it.

But only for those few short days.

Then it was back to downtown Chicago, back to the Loop, back to the rental car return site, and back to walking. Walking, walking, walking, everywhere. Walking from the Avis site, with bags, about a mile to the Congress Hotel on Grant Park, where we’d stay through the 4^th of July and the Taste of Chicago. Walking to the museums, the Shedd Aquarium (where you can only drink your Diet Coke in the food court, perhaps so that nobody feeds it to the sea otters) and the Field Museum (free admission for educators!), walking through the Taste festival and eating the same delicious and horrible-for-us food that Chicago had in great supply: gyros, and chicken and waffles, and pierogies, and potstickers, and catfish sloppy joe, and beer battered artichokes. And, of course, since the sodas again cost as much as the beers, I decided to drink beer at the festival as I walked, waiting for the 7-Elevens that always seemed to be a few blocks out of walking distance.

There were attempts to resume a healthy lifestyle. A job along the lake that lasted for a few minutes. A lot of walking, walking, walking. But too much of it included beer. I even drank at the aquarium.

Then: with Kanye West playing over loudspeakers throughout Grant Park, fireworks over Lake Michigan, a bottle of wine (for which I had to borrow a corkscrew)--

--and—through the windows of our bar at our hotel—a shooting, a mob of police officers tackling young men, and the straight line approach of the SWAT team. Yes! Vintage Chicago! That's the kind of stuff you don't get to see on the tours!

And finally, in order to get more cash for cab rides and el fare and a thousand other big-city incidentals that keep presenting themselves, I found another 7-Eleven, four blocks from our hotel, purchased a Super Big Gulp for probably 50 cents more than it would cost back in Florida, got some cash back, and packed my bags and prepared to lug all of that luggage back up those rickety wooden stairs, through the turnstiles, onto the el, through over a mile of Midway concourses…back into my friend Jay’s trunk at Orlando International…back home to my new place…where hopefully I could resume a normal, healthy schedule once again.

The thing is, though, when you’ve started to experience a bit of chaos in your life, it never leaves of its own accord. My ten-day trip to Chicago had certainly been a new and interesting jolt to my system, a remarkable time, but the food was all still bubbling and turning around in my stomach, and the next weeks would come to feel not only like an extended hang-over, but would also present a new whirlwind of activity—some exciting, some depressing—that would continue to alter my life, and my Diet Coke addiction, irrevocably.

The Diet Coke Chronicles...Plunges into CHAOS!

2008-08-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

My schedule’s been out of whack lately.

My entire life is dependent upon routine, upon not only a disciplined adherence to the things I need to do (wake, shower, work, go to gym, eat dinner, brush teeth) but also the things I enjoy doing (read, watch episode of Mad Men, play with dog), and Diet Coke has been for many years the mile marker by which I time my day. I hit 3:00 on Wednesday, and I know that I’m running out of gas, that it’s time to find the nearest gas station and fuel up. All of life seems to fall into place under such rules, and while some might argue that my life is—like a long stretch of rural highway—predictable because I so rigidly schedule myself, I would argue this: I don’t want to live in an action movie; I don’t want to be the star of Mission Impossible IV or the next Batman film. Bad things happen in exciting action movies. Villains emerge. Loved ones die. Dogs bite you. Buildings blow up and burn your skin. And if you’re an action hero, you get no rest, no time to stop in at 7-Eleven and grab a Super Big Gulp. It seems to be not only an exhausting lifestyle, but a very dry, thirsty one, too.

So…fine. I’m boring and predictable. Every night I go to sleep at about the same time. Every morning, I have a bowl of cereal. And every mid-morning, I crack and have a Diet Coke. I’m boring. I’m boring. But you know what? I’ve got no interest in fighting crime or supervillains or terrorist organizations anyway. Give me a comfortable routine in life, let me get a few things accomplished, scratch off a book from my reading list, a movie from my “must see” list, and let me knock out a few miles at the gym, enjoy my evenings, and call it a day.

Well. Such was my life until the end of May.

And then I had to go and buy a house. Wait, wait. Scratch that. I had to go and buy some old grandma’s house, a fine and well-kept structure (looks great on the outside, and it was a decent deal in the current housing market) whose insides—if left untouched—would quickly shrivel me and turn me into a soap-opera-watcher.

See, here’s the thing. Heather and I had been living in an apartment out in Winter Springs for the past two years, ever since we got married. There was a nice gym at the apartment, a pool, a small play area for our dog Barney, and an excellent proximity to two convenience stores (Hess, operated by the oddest and most frightening assortment of clerks imaginable, and my speak-easy 7-Eleven, operated by the most preppy and middle-class clerks imaginable); everything was fine, except that Barney sheds a pound of fur a day, and it would build and build in the carpet, and I was a sneezing, coughing wreck on a daily basis. Oh, and our upstairs neighbor was a scumbag who might or might not have been running both a drug cartel and a child prostitution ring (jury’s still out). So we figured: let’s get a house.

As soon as that decision was made, of course, I could already imagine my solid routine melting before my eyes. What I couldn’t imagine, though, was the physical toll that my body would suffer under perhaps the most frenzied two months of my life.

At the end of May, as soon as we signed the paperwork and closed on our three-bedroom place near Waterford, we spent a night at Lowe’s buying carts and carts of cleaning supplies and paint and tools to attempt to “de-grandma-fy” our new house. This was no easy task. The former owners had painted the walls a non-offensive crème color, sure, but they’d lived in the place for more than a decade, and not only had the furniture never really been moved (thus the paint was more lively in some areas, faded in others), but the walls were stained in spots from a decade of indoor cigarette smoking. White baseboards and doors had taken on a sickly yellow color. And it wasn’t a tough, masculine smell, either; it was as if Grandma had been smoking Kools (or whatever old people smoke, something that smells like both tobacco and arthritis). So we painted. And painted. We painted doors, we painted bathrooms. We painted the kitchen a bright red, and the living room a contemporary gray, the TV room a dark blue and the guest bedroom and bedroom both a relaxing Bungalow-esque green. We painted the baseboards a fresh coat of white. All Memorial Day weekend, from 8 AM to 2 AM, we painted. And another weekend after that. And another weekend. We ripped out the old smoke-smelling carpet and had dark wood flooring installed. We scrapped the old light switch and outlet covers (the plastic also stained yellow) and fastened on some sleek silver covers. By the end of June, though we were physically drained, the interior of the house had been completely converted.

(before)

(during)

(end of June)

There was only one problem. The hours of the day that I normally looked forward to, that I normally depended upon for my Diet Coke: all was different during May and June. Sometimes I managed to sneak out of the house at the prescribed hour, white paint on my face and in my hair, black paint all over my t-shirt, and drive to the local 7-Eleven for a drink…but more often that not, I drank my Diet Coke at the wrong times. Before bed, and then I couldn’t sleep. After dinner, so late in the day for a first soda that…well…why bother? And the 7-Eleven that I was now using felt different. I’ve chronicled in this blog once before the difficulty in finding a new convenience store to frequent, and this Waterford Lakes 7-Eleven felt so busy, so abused by commuters, that my business didn’t even feel appreciated.

More renovations. Furniture. Putting together a mammoth bookshelf, and additional bathroom cabinets. Forgetting my Diet Coke for a day. Forgetting the gym. Eating a bag of Doritos in a single sitting. Going to sleep with my stomach making strange gurgling noises.

Packing up an entire apartment and moving everything across town in a single day. What day was it now? Saturday? This is how I spend my weekends? Putting together a shelving unit…on a Monday afternoon? Wait. Monday? Or was it now Tuesday? And had I even drank a Diet Coke today?

Back when I was a consultant for my national fraternity, and I measured my long drives by the number of sodas consumed, regular “working hours” stopped holding meaning for me. I’d wake up early, drive all day, and then work until midnight. But even then, when I was in a different city every single day, I still managed to find the local gas stations and convenience stores that catered to my specific needs. I still managed to “excuse myself” from meetings in order to drive five miles away to the 7-Eleven that I’d seen when I exited the highway several hours prior. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing; I was not only regular in my drinking habits, but also gloriously excessive.

Recently, though, my constantly shifting and amorphous schedule led me to an interesting realization: I was missing days. There were stretches of two days, sometimes three, where I’d been so busy that I hadn’t even thought to drive out to the BP Connect to buy a Diet Coke. Other days, of course, I’d down four drinks in an afternoon.

One of the best parts of my sort of addiction is the ability to make it work for me the way I want it to; that’s why crack addicts and heroin addicts aren’t quite so efficient and lovable (there are also other reasons, I suppose, such as track marks and homelessness). And in the span of just a month, my life and my schedule had turned to chaos, and my addiction…well…it obviously hadn’t disappeared…but it, too, felt as if it had turned to chaos, as if it didn’t know what I was expecting of it anymore, as if it was confused about the strange twists and turns my life was suddenly taking.

“Just wait,” my wife and I kept telling one another throughout May and June, as we hung photos or opened boxes or assembled furniture, “in a few more weeks, everything will be back to normal.”

Normal. What an interesting word.

No, things would not go back to “normal.” Not anytime soon.

Because at the end of June, we left for a ten-day trip to Chicago, our first large-scale vacation since our honeymoon, our house still an incomplete disaster area, my head still dizzy, my stomach either growing or shrinking, but making weird noises nonetheless. Still no schedule for me to rely upon, and now I was traveling to a city under a different time zone, where I would have no car, where I was unsure how I would find convenience stores and—sometimes more importantly—public restrooms.

(to be continued)

A Tale of Two Refills Part III: The Warming

2008-07-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

The day after a championship victory (or even just a “big win” in the play-offs) is always one of the most anxious you can have, as a sports fan. For weeks—for months, for an entire season!—you’ve been building toward a single game, waiting, biting your nails, saying your prayers, preparing yourself with a stockpile of pessimism should your team lose the big game…and then suddenly you win. The weight is lifted! All the naysayers, the sports writers, the commentators, the shit-talkers from other cities and other schools who write on your message boards (“You’ll never win! You’re always going to be a second-rate team!”) or post trash on your myspace and facebook pages…they’ve all been silenced. And what an amazing feeling. Victory. The goal that you’ve ached for.

But then there’s the next morning, and all the elation is rendered irrelevant. The victory no longer matters because all the world is already preparing for the next game, or the next series, or the next season. So listen, Fresno State fans, you just won your first College World Series? Clap, clap, clap. Enjoy it. Enjoy the day’s worth of attention. You’re not the favorite to win it next year. Hey New York Giants fans, you beat the Patriots and got yourself a Super Bowl win? Eh. Whatever. ESPN.com has already unveiled its “Top 5 Teams” for next season, and you’re not even close. (The worst sport, of course, is college football…where the new polls seem to be issued prior to the championship game).

And so, far from reveling in your victory over the Lakers, or the Oklahoma Sooners, or the Cardinals, or Penguins, all your energy is consumed on the next season…tension and anxiety build…you’ve got to start praying and fasting all over again…your team must prove everyone wrong two years in a row or you’ll never hear the end of it! Oh, such pressure! Such horrible horrible pressure. And now you curse your team for having won the game at all. Why last year, when you could win it next year and you’d still have the victory to look forward to?

Such was my mindstate after my victory at Burger King, securing my third refill of Diet Coke in a single day, despite stiff opposition from an owner who believed strongly in a two-drink limit.

Sure, I got my third drink that Thursday afternoon…but the summer wasn’t over. All the other UCF eateries were still closed, and clearly the Burger King staff knew my face (and my name, since I wore a nametag during orientations). They would not forget the affront.

So I tread lightly in the days following my victory.

“Diet Coke, please,” I whispered at the Burger King counter.

“Hmm,” the owner said, staring at me through spectacles that seemed to frost when I approached. He obliged with a maximum of crotchetiness.

“Thank you,” I said, and perhaps I even bowed slightly and looked at the floor as I spoke, as if he were not simply a vendor and a clerk, but instead some sort of sensei who I had defeated accidentally in a sparring match, and now feared could deliver a royal ass-kicking should I boast about my win. Perhaps I even feared that he would take the Diet Coke back after I’d paid, or that he would refuse me service and state matter-of-factly, like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, “No Coke for you!”

These were anxious days.

“Diet Coke, please,” I whispered on another afternoon.

“Big orientation today?” the owner asked, venom still in his voice. But he was asking me a question, right? Maybe he was trying to thaw the ice between us, revert back to the good old days when I could swing past Burger King and grab a soda without fear of reproach?

“Well, yeah, there’s a lot of students here today, so—”

“Next in line!” he yelled.

“—and, um,” I said, but he was taking someone else’s order already, wasn’t even paying acknowledging my presence. He’d asked the question only so he could interrupt me.

And I stood around for another moment, Diet Coke in hand, wondering if this was what I had become…some poor dock worker during the Great Depression, groveling for whatever scraps the privileged would allow me, thanking the factory owner for the back-breaking, soul-crushing, pittance-paying labor he might offer. And I was paying him for this abuse, too.

A couple days later, and more of the same:

“Diet Coke, please,” I whispered.

“How’s the weather out there?” the owner asked.

“Oh, you know, it’s a little hot—”

“Next in line!” he yelled.

And again, I stood around for a few moments, disbelieving that my life had been reduced to this. Twenty-seven years old, a man with Diet Coke in my blood, and suddenly I was not simply another member of the masses, but also a target. My three-refills-in-one-day accomplishment had now marked me as “the guy to watch.”

“Sorry,” someone said behind the Burger King counter.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Sorry, but I don’t think he’s listening to you anymore.” It was one of the other clerks, the younger one with the glasses who’d broken down weeks before to give me my third refill. He shrugged and shook his head, motioning with his eyes at his boss, who was already taking someone else’s order.

“Yeah, I guess he’s not,” I said.

“Whatever,” the young guy said. “He’s a little…you know.”

And while he didn’t complete his sentence with any adjectives, only sighed as if the thought didn’t need completion, I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless. In fact, it was the only thing that kept my Diet Coke addiction (and free-fill confidence) going for the next week: otherwise, I felt humiliated. It was as if my Super Bowl-winning team had followed up their championship performance with a 3-win season. Failure is easy to take, I suppose, if you’re accustomed to it…once you taste victory, though, any failure seems suddenly unacceptable, below you, and decimates you emotionally.

Days later, I returned to Burger King for my morning Diet Coke, and to my immense pleasure, the owner did not appear to be working. It was just the young guy.

“One of your co-workers came by this morning,” he said as he filled up my Diet Coke.

“My co-workers?” I asked. “How do you know?”

“Wearing the same shirt as you.”

“Oh,” I said. As Summer Advisors, we always had to wear alternating blue and red shirts to work, perhaps (we joked) so that students and family members might mistake us for Best Buy or Target employees and ask us about the best deals on HDTVs. After you wear a uniform for awhile, you sort of forget that you’re wearing it.

“I told her that there’s this guy who always comes by at the same time everyday. Gets two refills. Always Diet Coke. We had a big conversation about you.”

“That’s…interesting.”

“She ordered a Diet Coke, too,” the young guy said. “She said you drink a lot more, thought. You, like, always talk about it.”

“Well, I mean, there’s a few of us. We’re sort of a Diet Coke cult.”

“She said she had to have a King Size. You told her to come to Burger King, to get King Size.”

“Yeah, you’re the largest plastic cup on campus. I tell everyone.”

“I guess I never really thought about that,” he said, and handed me my Diet Coke.

“It’s a good selling point,” I said.

I had my debit card out, ready to pay, but the young guy waved it off. “No charge today,” he said.

“Really?”

“Nope. Have a great day.”

“Well,” I said, and tipped my drink to him. “Thanks.”

And I’m not exactly certain why he made the choice to give me the drink for free. If he thought that I’d been promoting Burger King to all of my colleagues, sending droves of business his way? Or if he was just embarrassed that his boss kept behaving with such unabashed douche-baggery. Or if he was simply rewarding me—a faithful customer, despite all abuse—with the one thing that would keep my spirits high for another couple months, no matter what. I’m not sure why I got the free drink, but I certainly did not refuse it, and—now having secured another small victory, and having heard definitively that the entire Burger King staff knew my exact refill schedule—I certainly did not hesitate to go back to Burger King twice more that day for my refills. I couldn’t disappoint, after all.

And since that day, I’m now the one who starts conversations with the owner (“Been pretty busy up in here today?”) and then abruptly walks away when he begins to answer. And since that day, also, several new campus eateries have opened up, all of them within line of sight from Burger King…and occasionally, when the owner is working, I make it a point to get my Diet Coke elsewhere, and walk past his cash register sipping and smiling.

Yes, yes. Refills are a dicey business, and the results of testing clerks and soda fountains alike for a brand-new free beverage are not always pretty. Sometimes, they test a man’s resolve. Sometimes, they test a man’s very spirit. But in an age of economic uncertainty when consumers have been exploited and manipulated for so many years, the free refill is like a great equalizer. For that brief, carbonated moment, it provides the same joy as yelling “Scoreboard!” to an opposing fan after a big win. If it is becoming the worst of times for the banks and lenders and big businesses of America, the free refill is the best of times for a consistently cheated American public, one last assertion that we will always drink our soda (By the ton! No stopping us!) no matter the risk, no matter the peril.

A Tale of Two Refills Part II: A Cold Introduction

2008-06-24T05:15:00.000-07:00

I’d thought that my Publix experience—the ease with which I was granted a refill opportunity—signaled some turning point in my life, a “Pax Nathana,” a period of unbelievable good luck. Everywhere I go, I imagined, great things would happen…my life would actually feel like a Coke commercial! Perhaps the “Grand Theft Auto” spoof, where the criminal gets a Coke and then…suddenly…the entire world erupts in happiness. Yes, that sounded nice. So I imagined the clerks at BP and 7-Eleven and Chick-Fil-A welcoming me to their stores, handing me the Diet Coke before I’d even asked for it. All smiles and rainbows and butterflies and sunshine. Oh, the things I imagined.

But at the University of Central Florida, where I pass my days drinking Diet Coke and (hardly) working, the crushing reality of summer set in with frightening quickness.

Summers at the university are a strange time: the familiar hordes of college students are sparse, replaced instead by bright-eyed and terrified freshmen attending orientation, and by waves and waves of elementary and middle-school camp attendees for soccer, baseball, cheerleading, and God knows what else; employees wander about the campus leisurely, as if they—not the students—now own the grounds, and they all wear relieved smiles because they’re actually getting their office work done since there are no students stopping by and interrupting them all the time; and, most important to me, the campus eateries are all out of whack, their operating hours shortened for the summer, their menus in odd transitions, and their employees all at once underworked (so much dead time between customers) and overworked and frazzled (the full staff is sliced in half for the summer months, as most students go home, and then during the camps and orientations, hundreds of kids suddenly descend upon the eateries all at once, forming lines of theme-park length).

The campus seems to change overnight when summer strikes. One day in early May, I work at a traditional university; the next, I work in a ghost town populated in quick gold-rush spurts of youngsters. And so it’s difficult to keep my focus during the summer. I will walk to Chick-Fil-A for my daily Diet Coke, purchase it, stop back an hour later for a refill, and it’s suddenly closed. Closed? On a Wednesday afternoon? It defies logic! It violates my soda schedule! Sbarro’s will be open one day, closed completely the next. Einstein Brothers Bagels has a sign posted that actually states that they not be open until July. Why July, when summer classes are held during June and May, as well? My routine is broken, my opportunities limited. I feel like I’m going to a gym with missing weights and deficient treadmills.

So yes, summers at UCF have wreaked havoc upon my never-ending quest for endless refills. Only Burger King has displayed any kind of consistency. The campus Burger King appears to be open daily, from the morning hours (when I first drop in, they’ve always got the breakfast menu up, still) until the late afternoon (when I grab my final refill, the first early wave of dinner diners are arriving), and because they’ve got the largest cup on campus (the only 44-ounce plastic cup at UCF), it seemed as if I’d found my summer match. In the Falls and Springs, you see, I stop by Chick-Fil-A…it’s a “serve yourself” soda fountain, much closer to my office, so I can pop in and out without any hassle…but, of course, their haphazard and deplorable summer schedule has ruined what was a perfect Fall-Spring relationship.

After a couple days of grabbing morning Diet Cokes at Burger King, then stopping by for a refill or two throughout the afternoon, I began to recognize each of the employees. Not just the clerks, though (although I certainly recognized them…and their exact schedules). I also recognized each of the employees in back: who was on burgers, who was on fry station, who was the manager. And they all looked at me when I came because, well, they had nothing else to do. And so they recognized me, too.

I’m not necessarily a flashy guy, but the school was so empty that I seemed to be the only person around each time I stopped for a soda. I could walk the line without waiting (during the semester, waiting in a Burger King line is one of the worst ways to spend your lunch hour). Because I was the only customer, I could no longer stay anonymous. Of course they recognized me.

In the past, I’ve written about my fascination with clerks “knowing me” (even in places as far away as Hawaii), and so—when I noticed the familiar get-to-know-you phase of the soda-and-refill relationship beginning to take form, I initially thought it to be a good thing. I was living in the Pax Nathana, after all. A period of good will and free, speedy, gracious refills!

But this wasn’t the case.

They recognized me. And they were eying me suspiciously, as if I was stealing something.

But Burger King offered free refills, and didn’t specify that they should be “dine-in”…I was still playing by the rules. Hell, the Burger King cup even agreed with me: in a strange and annoying box on the side of the cup, the following is printed: “A King cup tells others you enjoy the better things in life. A refill may be all well and good, but no thank you, you’ll just take this single, cup of champions, fill it once and sit down and enjoy your meal. And if somehow you still finish and need to refill, well, then you’re that rare breed who needs two giant vessels of refreshment. And that means only one thing. You’re really having it your way.” I was a rare breed, but I was well within my rights. So why the looks?

After a couple days of this behavior, I walked through the empty line at Burger King for a refill one afternoon, and when I got to the counter and said, “Could I get a Diet Coke refill, please?” the clerks didn’t immediately take my cup.

One clerk was older, bald with glasses, wore a dress shirt and tie, and sort of looked like a mean version of Ben Kingsley’s Ghandi (in other words, he looked like Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog). The other clerk was younger, friendlier, but still wrote a tie and seemed to want to please the older man; possibly, they were both managers, and the older man was his superior.

“A refill?” the older man asked, but still made no move to take my cup.

“Um,” I said. “Yeah. Diet Coke?”

“Another refill?”

I looked from man to man. “Yeah?”

The younger man only stared at the cup, now perhaps caught in a “what’s my boss doing right now?” sort of struggle, the type of dilemma I’m sure that many wives across America must sit quietly through when their husbands try to haggle over prices at car dealerships or electronics stores.

“And this is your…?” the older man asked.

“Um?”

“Third refill?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. Did it matter? I was supposed to have it my way. That’s what the cup said! There was no limit on refills, was there? “Third?” I asked, and then tried to joke around. “Fourth refill? Tenth? Hundredth? I don’t know. Sometimes I lose track. I drink a lot of Diet Coke.”

My joke didn’t work to relieve the tension.

“You come here a lot,” the old man said. “A lot of refills.”

“Um,” I said.

The Pax Nathana had obviously ended.

“Third refill?” he asked.

I switched tactics. No more jokes. Now I’d pick apart the fine points of this man’s argument, if he was so foolish as to engage me. “Is there a limit?” I asked. “I’m looking at the cup. I’m looking at the menu up there. I don’t see any limit.”

“There’s a limit,” he said. “One refill.”

“I don’t see—”

“There’s a limit.”

“Oh,” I said. He stood behind the soda fountain. I stood in line. So I was at his mercy. I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter who won an argument of the “fine points” because he could simply deny me the refill. So I again switched tactics: now I’d be honest. “Listen,” I said. “I love Diet Coke. I drink a lot of it, I know. And usually, I go to Chick-Fil-A. The girls at the cash register there love me. Sometimes give me free sodas. And they let me take as many refills as I want. All day long. They love me. And I tell every one of my students about it. I’m like the poster boy for Diet Coke and for Chick-Fil-A…every time I walk by, people get thirsty.”

He regarded me suspiciously. Maybe I’d exaggerated a bit…but not much. Not much, I swear!

“I’ll take the cup,” the younger man said, and…it had worked! I handed it over, and he placed it under the Diet Coke nozzle.

“This time,” the older man said. “Third refill, this time.”

“Yes, this time,” the younger man agreed.

“Fourth refill,” I corrected, and silently cheered.

The young man handed back my cup, which I took eagerly and happily.

But what had happened, I still wasn’t entirely sure. Had the older man—the general manager, or the owner?—been convinced? Or had the younger manager simply grown weary of the stand-off? In any case, I had won the issue, and I had 44 ounces to keep me cold for the rest of the hot, hot Florida summer day. But those 44 ounces would be finished quickly. And, because Burger King seemed to be my only viable option throughout the rest of the summer, I’d have to return tomorrow…I’d have to confront both of these men once again, and certainly there would be no more concessions of “this time.”

And certainly they’d remember me forever.

Turns out: they did.

(to be continued)

A Tale of Two Refills Part I (of III): Criminal!

2008-06-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Walking to a counter to ask for a refill is many times a stressful experience. It’s absolutely unpredictable. The very act of the refill is presumptuous, arrogant: whatever the restaurant or eatery has given you for your drink is simply not enough, and so you are now back demanding more. For some clerks working the counters and soda machines, it comes with the territory, and refilling your soda cup is as natural as taking your money and handing out change. For others, however, there are shades of disdain, there are “how dare you?” looks, there are head shakes and eye rolls and outright refusals.

The all-over-the-place nature of my life finds me buying my Diet Cokes in a number of different places, these days. At the university, I use the campus Burger King (Chick-Fil-A, my usual watering hole during the Fall and Spring semesters, has limited hours during the summer). At my apartment, I’ll stop by the local Hess Mart (if I’m in the mood to feel horrible about humanity) or my speak-easy 7-Eleven (if I want to feel optimistic about the country). When I drive to the gym, I stop by the Mobil “On the Run” on my way home (easily accessible), and when I drive across town to my new house to finish up various remodeling and renovation task, I stop by the BP Connect (recently renamed “AM/PM,” which is going to take some getting used to).

Each store has its own quirks, of course, and the hilarities and heartbreaks resulting from these quirks. But this is the story of two refills, each on opposite ends of the Orlando metropolitan area, each at different times, each serving different agendas, each administered at a vastly different spot on the spectrum of helpfulness and courtesy. Sit back. Relax. And immerse yourself in the attendant difficulties of a man needing constant replenishing of his cup.

A week ago, I made my customary grocery run to Publix.

In the traditional American marriage, grocery shopping—as I understand—falls upon the wife as a responsibility, along with other domestic tasks such as laundry, dishwashing, and vacuuming. The husband, meanwhile, serves the household role as “sweaty guy” by fixing random things with a hammer (usually, badly), mowing the lawn (also, poorly), chainsawing trees and branches, and sitting on the couch and drinking beer. Because my marriage is still confined to an apartment (at least for a few more days), all of those old traditional and sexist responsibilities are a near impossibility for me. I’ve got no lawn to mow. I’ve got nothing to fix. I can drink beer, sure, and I can break things with a hammer, but…well…Heather doesn’t like that too much. So I’ve found myself assuming the 1950s housewifely duties of dishwashing, dusting (infrequently, of course), and grocery shopping.

And grocery shopping, as you can probably intuit if you’ve ever read these blogs (I’ve definitely mentioned Publix before), is an absolute pleasure for me. I fully subscribe to Publix’s “Where Shopping is a Pleasure” slogan, and I fight Heather for the weekly opportunity to go out and fill the shopping cart with foodstuffs and cleaning supplies and toiletries and, of course, Diet Coke. It isn’t so much the purchase of milk or lettuce that is my pleasure, you see, although I consider myself adept at this skill. No, I battle my wife for the grocery run because Publix has a deli and a soda fountain. The pleasure (beginning to see my logic now?) comes from the endless supply of Diet Coke available to me as I shop. Fill it up as I enter the store. Fill it up before I hit the freezers and meats. And fill it up before I leave.

This is pretty dangerous, too. Because I sometimes find myself taking longer and longer at the grocery store, revisiting certain aisles to “make sure I got everything,” just so I can sip a few more sips, then swing back past the soda fountain and refill.

How many extra rolls of toilet paper have I bought since I started shopping this way? How many sale-item cans of green beans that I didn’t notice the first time through the aisle? All for a refill.

Once, in a Publix in Oviedo, I noticed a sign on the soda fountain that said, “NO Refills!!!” and my heart skipped a beat. Weren’t they aware that shopping was only a pleasure because of the Diet Coke refills? If I just wanted a single soda, I could buy it anywhere; I visited Publix because their refill station was my grocery shopping fuel. So I made a mental note to never visit that Publix again…but still I wonder as I grocery shop at my current Winter Springs Publix…is this a nationwide policy for their delis? Someday, will the sandwich artists stop me as I refill for the third or fourth time, and ask me what the hell I think I’m doing? Will I get caught, the same way as some punk skater who tries to do tricks on the smooth concrete of a bank’s parking lot, then is chased away by security guards and police officers?

Such is the unpredictability of “free-filling,” the overall experience making you seem like a criminal, a soda fugitive. And so it is always an activity approached warily, and come away with—if successful—with glee.

So, a week ago, I got cold feet. I’d only come to Publix to pick up a gallon of milk, and although I’d managed to stretch out the shopping experience to include a package of cheese and some crackers, it felt too soon to go back to the soda fountain and get a refill (even though I’d already downed half the Diet Coke). So I proceeded to the checkout.

The clerk, a blonde-haired high school kid who usually chats me up about the weather (“Yeah, we never know if it’s hot or cold out there, if it’s sunny or raining,” he always says, as if the interior of the store were a granite prison without windows), rang up my cheese. He rang up my milk. He rang up my crackers.

He held up the Diet Coke. Scanned it.

“You want a refill?” he asked snidely.

“What are you talking about?” I snapped.

Had this just happened? Finally? Finally? Had this just happened? Had I been caught? You want a refill? What a question to ask! And with such smugness, such sarcasm! Surely, I thought at the time, he must be onto me! He knew the secret to my shopping pleasure, knew that I routinely filled up again and again, sapping the Publix soda fountain of its supply. Surely this kid had seen me at the fountain; his high school friends who worked at the deli had seen me; they’d shared jokes at my expense, and then had plotted for their big ensnarement. How would they catch me in the act? They’d pounce upon me! They’d win the kudos of their manager by stopping The Great Refill Thief of this age. They’d bind me and gag me and toss me out into the parking lot, never to return! They’d tar me, they’d feather me! And the horrible thing was: I’d been caught on reputation alone, completely innocent this time around.

But he recoiled. “Um,” he said.

“Like, um,” I replied, “a refill?”

“Yeah,” he said and swished the cup around. “Looks like you’re running low. You can just go back and grab a refill if you want.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um. Thanks.”

“Just go refill and I’ll hold your stuff”—meaning the cheese—“for you.”

“Well,” I said, but I felt…strange. Betrayed by my own paranoia. Embarrassed by my defensiveness, my lashing out. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime, offered at precisely the moment when I thought myself to be branded a criminal. “Well,” I said. “I’m good. I can never drink more than 44 ounces anyway.”

And I took my cup.

“Okay, cool,” the clerk said. “Take care. Enjoy the weather.”

“Right,” I said, and five minutes later, driving home, finished the soda. Dejected. Disappointed. Replaying back in my mind how I could have given up the offer. But…also…strangely invigorated and emboldened by the encounter. Perhaps free-fills—in light of all the economic problems afflicting the country, the gas crisis, the mortgage crisis—were becoming more acceptable, a way for restaurants and stores to tell consumers, “Don’t worry. The price of gas may rise, but the price of a soda…we’ll keep it nice and cheap for you.” After all, no wars have ever been fought over Diet Coke (yet). There have never been shortages, never been soda tanker wrecks or crashes, no struggle to drill for Diet Coke, no environmental concerns. Yes, maybe—because of economic instability and panic—clerks and managers and waiters were starting to recognize that refills were the only thing in this world that were still free! The privilege of a free-fill was to be guarded against, honored.

Such was my positive thinking last week, despite my blunder at Publix.

But if it was the best of times at Publix, it was also the worst of times at the university. Because for all of my internal rhetoric decrying the “privilege of free-fills,” many in authority positions held a violently oppositional viewpoint. As I was soon to find out.

(to be continued)

Gas Prices

2008-05-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

For the past few months, as I’ve witnessed the nightmarish rise in gas prices across Orlando, my own spending habits haven’t changed in the slightest. If I bought a six-pack of Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat and twelve boxes of Maple Nut Crunch during my grocery runs a few months ago, I’m doing the same thing now.

My anxiety levels, however, surge ever-upwards whenever I pull into a gas station and see the new numbers posted on the billboard. Each new cent feels like a stake through the heart of my checking account…it’s been a gruesome and painful death suffered slowly, penny by penny, from $3.20 to $3.23 to $3.27. No, I haven’t stopped eating out at restaurants, or buying beer, or eating pretzels by the pound. I haven’t canceled my XM or my DVR. I haven’t even tried to drive fewer miles or accelerate at a slower, more reasonable pace. No, no. Those would be the sort of responses one might expect from a disciplined consumer. I, on the other hand, am a gluttonous spender whose response to every economic crisis (be it imposed by the global market, or by my own lifestyle decisions) is to spend as much as possible now, right now, while I still have money in my account, because who knows if I might be broke tomorrow, unable to afford even a sniff of gasoline?

So when I see the $3.27 rise to $3.31 and then $3.33, I gulp and/or whistle dejectedly, think about all the money I’m spending on gas, and then start picturing utter doom, the collapse of the modern world, and the inevitable post-apocalyptic world that will result.

Friends and family alike tell me that I’m being extreme, but I’ve been raised by television and cinema which continually tell us that the world will be plunged into a disaster scenario sooner or later. If it’s not aliens, as it was in Independence Day, then it’s going to be zombies, as in I Am Legend; and because I don’t know Will Smith, I’ve got to figure things out on my own, think and plan and try to figure out escape routes and best spots for fallout shelters, should things get really crazy.

Okay, so maybe I lost you back with “post-apocalyptic world.” The reasoning for my fears (whether ludicrous, or well-thought-out) is thus: gas prices control the entire worldwide economy, as gas-fueled transportation remains the easiest and most widely-used means of delivering goods to a store, and then purchasing said goods from the store. When gas prices rise, the cost of goods also rises. When consumers are forced to pay more and more for everyday necessities, they’ve got to cut some things out of their budgets. And if gas goes higher and higher, consumers will also feel less inclined to make multiple shopping trips throughout the week, or travel longer distances than absolutely necessary. Restaurants will suffer, certainly, as will specialty stores and entertainment venues (theaters, theme parks), and the economic impact felt by these businesses will be devastating…especially in Orlando, a service industry town.

An educated economist would likely take a realistic approach to the above ideas, and might argue that some stores will close, but that those in close proximity to one another (malls, plazas, one-stop shopping areas) will make out like bandits, and mass transit will get built and improved upon in a big hurry, and we’ll be stronger after the first few months of troubling times, etc. But I’m not an educated economist. So I picture Independence Day. I picture I Am Legend. I picture Cloverfield and Jericho and The Day After Tomorrow. I picture a world where people are running, screaming in the streets as if the super-quick Dawn of the Dead zombies are sprinting after them. I picture the entire city of Orlando collapsing on itself, jobs lost by the thousands when restaurants and theme parks close, a Mickey-Ville of homeless Orlandoans (like the old Hoover-ville of the Great Depression) springing up around Lake Eola. I picture looters rampaging through the Mall at Millennia, lugging couches out of IKEA. I picture roller-coasters on fire, Spiderman billboards crashing down into I-4, Snow White and Goofy running amok in the middle of a bullet-riddled Magic Kingdom, the Epcot golf ball rolling into Lake Buena Vista. I picture renegade knights from Medieval Times, galloping on their horses down International Drive with uzis, and prowling for food. I picture Dwight Howard at the head of one citywide mafia, in direct battle with the Tiger Woods mafia for control of the 408.

Orlando: the center of swampy Central Florida. Isolated from the rest of the developed state of Florida, which continues to function weakly, but is so severely weakened by the $50 gas prices that it can send no aid to the trapped, desperate Orlandoans crying for help. Oh, the humanity!

Anyhow, this is the world I keep dreaming for myself, each time I see an increase of mere pennies on the gas station billboards. If the gas-pocalypse were to begin tomorrow, I keep asking, how prepared would I be? The people who survive apocalypse movies are always prepared for the impending doom. They’ve got working bomb shelters, or at the very least, basements or cellars. I’ve got an apartment that might very well blow apart in the next hurricane. Not exactly as solid as Will Smith’s laboratory in I Am Legend, or the underground Ukrainian Cold War bunkers that could survive nuclear holocaust. And how long could I survive without making another grocery trip, if every Publix was stripped to the bone? Well, I’ve got a few cans of corn, some Campbell’s soup, and a lot of Maple Nut Crunch cereal…not good…hell, my dog could survive longer than I could with his gigantic bag of Purina. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a father and son wander the country in an attempt to survive a burnt world, and they stumble upon an underground shelter stocked with canned meat, rows and rows of preserved vegetables, and a generator. Sounds good. But me? I have a single can of tuna. No, no. Wait. I just checked. It’s gone.

The question that comes to mind fairly quickly, then, when I have these gas-price-induced nightmares, is this: would my Diet Coke addiction end?

I’d like to think that it wouldn’t. I’d like to think that, in this horrible apocalyptic world, I’d have the good sense to at least loot a BP Connect’s convenience store (while all the other cretins are siphoning gas outside) and make off with the Diet Coke syrup and some part of the nozzle mechanism, or even the whole soda fountain. Or, worst case scenario, a bunch of Diet Coke two-liters. The problem, I think, wouldn’t be the actual soda, which I can stockpile with relative ease, since so many other people would be concerned with bread and canned vegetables and gas and propane and matches and the other items required for survival. The problem for me would be ice. Diet Coke is not aged in an oak barrel, and is not meant to be sipped warm.

Long ago, I stopped believing that I could ever be an action hero, one of those smart and athletic fictional characters whose every decision is the right one. If I were to find myself in the world of I Am Legend, I would not be Will Smith. Impossible. But I think I could be a supporting character, the shadowy guy in these films who meets you in an alley to sell you a box of bullets, or the last ten pounds of cheddar cheese that has not yet spoiled…the guy who helps the hero in some way, though not without a price. Yes, I could be that guy. I could be the guy who controls the Diet Coke supply throughout all of war-ravaged Central Florida, the bootleg baron of DC for all the former office workers who became addicted during their 9-5 workdays, and now—in a world where the grocery stores have been cleaned out and gutted, where gas-powered transportation no longer functions, where neighborhoods have been forced to band together and grow gardens of strawberries and asparagus and green beans just to have food on the table—I am the man who will get you want you need. I am the man who, for just a few bushels of corn, can locate a Diet Coke two-liter to get you through the day. Need your fix, and need it quick? Hand over that Rolex, sir, and I’ll give you a warm can of shaken-up DC. Yes, that’s a stiff price, but the world’s gone to hell, so take it or leave it.

No, when gas prices inevitably bring about the collapse of all civilization, I might not be the action hero that this world needs. But I’ll be around. And years later, when Hollywood documents the gas-pocalypse, if you get tired of the same old action movies and the same old action heroes and you don’t care how the world was put right again, you can watch the movie that documents my struggles…the little Diet Coke smuggler who, against all odds, risking his life, made a pilgrimage through the bandit-patrolled highways of the Southeast and traveled all the way up to Atlanta, to the Coca-Cola Headquarters, to replenish his supply of Diet Coke and ensure that the people of Orlando would not go thirsty. As long as they were willing to pay the right price.

Standing Up To Tony Soprano

2008-04-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I’ll sink into a television show or series of movies, and I’ll become so immersed that I’ll find myself thinking and speaking like the main characters. Believing (or wishing, or fantasizing), perhaps, that I share the same lifestyle as these characters, that I possess the same expertise in whatever career is depicted on-screen.

After I became addicted to the first season of Nip/Tuck, I found myself constantly cleaning and dusting my furniture, Windexing my glass desktop, polishing my entertainment center and television screen to a sparkling shine, trying to make sure it was all as immaculate as the super-modern sets of the famous plastic surgery show. I ditched my old wardrobe, spent loads of cash on a full closet of bright-colored button-down shirts (definitely not as stylish as Dr. Christian Troy, but I tried my hardest); I even upgraded my old plastic and wire hangers to solid wood hangers in an effort to achieve more uniformity and opulence in my closet. In fact, now that I think about it, Nip/Tuck single-handedly caused me to shed my old “frat boy” skin and adopt the Metrosexual Movement. Thankfully, of course, the show never convinced me to attempt plastic surgery on any of my peers or loved ones.

Far more disturbing was the time during the senior year of my undergraduate career when I got hooked on mob dramas. I borrowed a friend’s Sopranos collection and breezed through a full season in a weekend, then another season a couple days later. Pretty soon, I was calling mozzarella “mozza-rell,” and I was giving pissed-off, squinty-eyed Tony Soprano glares to anyone who so much as sneezed. “Whaddaya, whaddaya?” I’d say, convinced that I was suddenly inducted into the mafia. I admired Tony Soprano’s business skills and diplomacy, wondering far too often how easy it would be to adopt some of these tactics to my own life: threaten someone’s life, break someone else’s kneecaps, pound someone’s face with the butt end of a gun, and you could get anything you wanted! I was president of my fraternity around this time, and I thought perhaps I’d be a better president if I behaved more like Tony Soprano. Collecting dues payments was a lot like collecting…well, whatever random money Tony was always collecting in the show. How efficient I could be. I watched the third season, too, and then bought The Godfather trilogy, watched Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas endlessly. Maybe no one around me noticed it too much, but I spoke like a mobster, always suggested pizza or pasta when the subject of dinner arose.

There was a confidence to these characters—Nip/Tuck and The Sopranos—that I craved in my own life, my own career. I overlooked the dark and sometimes-shameful flaws that the characters had, and thought only of how expert Dr. MacNamara looked when he prepped for surgery, how expert Don Corleone looked when he entered a meeting. These men in these shows knew their trades, and they knew them well, and, as a young man still working my way up, no matter what I do or where I work, it is the expertise that I’ve been simultaneously admiring, envying, and imitating. It is the thought of saying “Scalpel!” with absolute certainty and conviction. Even recently, as I watched two full months of the HBO psychiatry drama InTreatment, I’ve found myself attempting the same mannerisms as Gabriel Byrne’s skilled therapist character…the same calm look of knowing what to do no matter what a patient says, the same slow but crisp way of speaking and asking questions, as if there’s nothing in the world that has eluded him.

Will there be a day, I’ve often wondered, when—in my own life—I share the confidence of my TV role models?

Well.

Just a few weeks ago, I spent an evening in the Thornton Park area of Downtown Orlando, attending a book reading at a strange little shop called Urban Think. I love this area of town not for its brick-laid roads or historic homes or trendy shops and restaurants, but because right in the center of it all, there is a 7-Eleven. How this happened is beyond me. Beside all the classiest condos and homes and restaurants that one could imagine, a 7-Eleven convenience store snuck in. Any time that I’m in the Thornton Park or Lake Eola area, now, I make it a point to stop by the 7-Eleven and grace the store with my patronage. Let them know I appreciate what they’re doing, you know?

I stopped in with my friend Mark (who, as is usually the case with most of the people I drag into convenience stores, had no interest in a soda of his own, and simply sat and waited on the sidelines until I was finished with my purchase), found a Super Big Gulp cup that met with my approval, filled the cup with a frothy 44 ounces of Diet Coke, fastened the lid, popped the top with a straw, and took my first triumphant sip.

And something was wrong with the taste.

“Something is wrong the taste,” I said to Mark.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said and took another sip. I wiggled my nose, looked deep into the brown liquid under the clear plastic lid. These days, I always make it a point to taste-test in the store itself…I never wait until I get out to my car…see, I was burned a few years ago at a Waterford Lakes 7-Eleven…I bought a Diet Coke Super Big Gulp, paid, but because traffic was so awful and I needed both hands for the steering wheel (anyone who’s driven the Waterford area knows its cutthroat nature), I didn’t take a sip until I was a couple miles away, and only then realized that the store had their hoses crossed or nozzles switched or whatever, and so I’d wound up with a regular Coke. Of course, I turned around and wasted a half-hour of my life going back to the store, complaining, getting a Diet Coke from the regular Coca-Cola nozzle, then driving back through the awful, awful traffic to wherever I was headed. But I’ve since vowed to never let another similar experience occur.

“What’s wrong with it?” Mark asked.

“It tastes…like regular Coke,” I said. “But not really. See, regular Coke is richer, obviously. Diet Coke’s taste is more refined, more restrained.” All of this slipped out of my mouth unthinkingly, and my face was locked in the sort of contemplative expression one might expect of a wine connoisseur, swirling a glass of Pinot Grigio and raising it to his nose for an elegant sniff. “Also, this is strange,” I said. “Usually, regular Coca-Cola will leave your mouth with the undeniable aftertaste of sugar. You can still feel it and taste it on your tongue and in between your teeth. Granules of sugar. See, some people say Diet Coke has an aftertaste, and they’ll tell you that they hate it because of the aftertaste, but there’s no sugar in Diet Coke. It’s aspartame, a chemical, and it actually leaves no discernible aftertaste whatsoever. What most people are detecting is an absence of a sugary aftertaste, and the feeling is so unfamiliar that they immediately assume that there’s some sort of lingering aftertaste there.”

“When in fact there’s not,” Mark said. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or creeped out.

“When in fact there’s not,” I agreed.

“So this tastes like regular Coke?”

“It does. But not really. The taste, I mean. But there’s no sugar. I swallow, and I can’t detect any sugar at all. No aftertaste. Something’s wrong, here.”

“Well,” Mark said, and he shrugged. Clearly, he didn’t know what was at stake: what if I were to buy a regular Coca-Cola? I’d be stuck with 44 ounces of something I didn’t want. But yet…but yet…how could I not tell if this was truly Diet Coke? That would be like Tony Soprano suddenly going soft, Dr. Christian Troy suddenly wearing jean shorts and a flannel shirt. The world on end, inside out. How could I not tell? The situation was perplexing.

“Is something wrong?” the clerk asked from afar, noticing that I was stuck in a cycle of sniff, sip, ponder for a couple minutes now.

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know. I think there might be something wrong with the Diet Coke solution. You know, the syrup-to-soda ratio.”

“Uh,” the clerk said.

“I mean,” I said, thinking I’d perhaps offended her, “is it possible that, you know, the hoses are crossed, and I’m getting some regular Coke, or some Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, or whatever?”

“Let me, uh…” the clerk said, then backed toward the back of the store, sort of scared. “Let me check on that,” she said and she disappeared. We waited a few moments, and I went back to sipping, gargling, trying to figure this mystery out. Finally, the clerk returned. “No, there’s nothing wrong with it,” she said, and upon noticing my deflated look, she said, “It’s actually Coke Zero.”

“Coke Zero?”

“We ran out of Diet Coke, and I’ve had that hooked up for awhile now,” she said. “You’re the first person who’s noticed. I can’t really believe it, actually.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said. “You can have that soda for free, too.”

“Really?” I asked again. Anytime I get a soda for free, it makes my week.

“Really,” she said. “Come back anytime and tell me how the sodas taste, and you I’ll give you your Diet Coke for free. I need to know how we’re doing, you know?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Definitely.”

“Um,” Mark said. “Wow.”

And while I can’t necessarily be sure how the rest of the customers were really looking at me (or how Mark was looking at me), I nevertheless felt as if I was larger than life. Remember the scene from Saturday Night Fever, taken from ground level as John Travolta strutted to the hot disco soundtrack? Larger than life. That was me, walking out of the 7-Eleven with my free Coke Zero that I’d earned in the most unimaginable way possible.

It was at that moment, too, holding my plastic Super Big Gulp and walking out into the parking lot, that I realized—maybe—I’d achieved that level of confidence I’ve so envied in all those television shows. Put me on CSI! Put me on Homicide or Law & Order or InTreatment or House Hunters! Who cares if I can’t analyze blood samples or perform any interior decorating miracles? This was my thing. Did you see in my there, I thought. Did you see me in there? I was Kobe Bryant. I was Tom Brady. All those television shows that I’ve watched and that I’ve fallen into…Hey, listen, I know I wasn’t performing psychotherapy or plastic surgery; I wasn’t whacking anybody; I wasn’t throwing touchdown passes; but this might be about as close as it ever gets for me to achieve absolute and undeniable expertise…Tiger Woods expertise…who-you-gonna-call? and I-ain’t-afraid-of-no-ghost expertise. I knew my trade. I knew it so well that I scared people! Here was a moment where I wasn’t imitating anyone else, adopting anyone else’s speech patterns or mannerisms…here was a moment when I was unquestionably myself, a Diet Coke Organoleptic, an untouchable master of a fine art! Let the kids imitate me, I thought.

The Albino Cup

2008-03-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

The plastic cup was halfway filled with ice and Diet Coke before I even realized anything out of the ordinary. I’d been zipping along in my drink pouring routine, finding a nice and comfortable spot at the Mobil “On the Run” soda fountain, pulling a cup from somewhere in the middle of the stack of 44-ounce plastic cups, locating a lid and straw with my left hand while positioning the cup underneath the Diet Coke nozzle with my right. Pressing the button, watching the beautiful, sparkling sodafall from machine to cup. I’ve practiced this art—the perfect pour—so many times that it comes to me as naturally as changing oil must come to a mechanic.

But, at some point during the pour, I gave a minor flinch when I realized that something was very different today: my cup was solid white. Unblemished. White, like a cylinder of porcelain. All the other cups in the gigantic stack of 44-ouncers featured the logo for Mobil “On the Run.” And the 32-ouncers featured the picture of Dale Earnhardt Jr. or some other comparable Nascar racer. But my cup, surprisingly, shockingly, was as plain white as an Arctic iceberg. There was no sign of a misprint, no half-smeared “Mo” without the “bil,” no sign that the printing had washed off at any time, or that some child had scratched off all the paint. This cup, it seemed, had simply been born this way: an albino fountain cup.

I was extra careful as I secured the lid to the top, hoping that the jolt of seeing this plain white cup wouldn’t cause me to behave differently, to accidentally spill or drop it.

What were the odds, I wondered, of such a cup coming into creation? Knowing nothing of the factories that produce these things, I still imagined in my mind a series of scenarios that must occur in order to result in this white cup being overlooked. In a way, it was like the odds for the Big Bang Theory, for Evolution, for the Cubs winning the World Series…so many things had to happen—disaster waiting everywhere, trying to prevent the unthinkable—so that I could hold this albino cup in my hands at this moment. One in a million? No, no. One in billion. That sounded about right.

And so, as I approached the clerk, I started to wonder also: what was the significance of this? I refused to believe the albino cup was some freak accident. I mean, think what would have happened if everyone in Bethlehem had shrugged off the Virgin Birth and said, “Eh…bound to happen sooner or later, right?” When odds are defied to such extremes, there must be significance. Not Messianic significance for a plastic cup, I know, but significance nonetheless. Maybe it meant good luck? Maybe this was like finding a penny, heads up, except much much better. Maybe this thing was my Golden Ticket.

“That’s 95 cents,” the clerk said to me.

I swiped my credit card, again not even thinking. It didn’t occur to me until I got the receipt that the 44-ounce sodas were supposed to cost $1.09 (before tax), meaning that I’d just scored a lucky break. The clerk had rung it up wrong!

Luck! Good luck! The albino cup was already working its magic!

I skipped to the convenience store’s doors, where I saw a woman outside ready to grab the handle and open it. I made my move to open the door first, but she won, and she motioned for me to come out. She’d just held the door for me! Chivalry in reverse! Oh, the albino cup was paying dividends…if only I’d just purchased a lottery ticket while I was paying for my soda.

As I drove home from the Mobil “On the Run,” though I paid particular attention to everything that was happening around me, hoping to translate it into good luck, it became more and more difficult to spot anything significant or positive. I missed a green light on the way home, too; it turned red just before I got there. Was this bad luck, now? Had my good luck already run out? Was the albino cup only worth a lousy 15-cent discount and a polite gesture? No, no. I refused to believe such a thing. The red light, I decided, was not bad luck…it was just timing…and hey, maybe if I’d made the green light, some car would have smashed into me a mile down the road. Maybe the albino cup was saving me from some gruesome death! An accident. A falling airplane. A sniper. A Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Think of all the things that the albino cup was doing for me that I probably didn’t even know about! How dare I question it?

When I got home, I checked my email, hoping for some good news. It was mostly spam. I checked the mailbox. Mostly junk mail, and a bank statement. Maybe the good luck would come later? Maybe I should just keep my eyes open? Oh, this would be so easy if my life was a montage, like in the movies, and I could splice four or five “good luck” occurrences together (to some hip song, perhaps Kanye’s “Touch the Sky”) to convince the audience that the albino cup was doing its thing, doing its thing.

Such is the strange mindset, I guess, of a generation groomed on melodramatic television shows. If there’s an object that is remotely strange and interesting, suddenly it’s got to be a token of good luck or an object cursed. It’s got to be a monkey’s paw or a voodoo doll. It’s got to hold deep and special significance; it’s got to be a metaphor, a representation of something or other. An omen. A sign of things to come. Why couldn’t Zack Morris have ever found an object that turned out to mean nothing at all? A pink sock on his bed that confused the hell out of him, but didn’t signal that his relationship with Kelly was over, or just beginning, that didn’t bring him good fortune for three weeks? And speaking of socks, and feet, why couldn’t the Prince in Cinderella have just tossed away the glass slipper, thinking it weird and foot-smelling?

I know it’s ridiculous to apply such a mindset to real life. Hey, I get it. I’m ridiculous. But I still have the albino cup in my fridge right now (I’m afraid to finish the soda, lest the luck run out), and I will never throw it away. Maybe it won’t change my life at all, maybe it won’t answer any prayers, but—like the image of the Virgin Mary in a peanut butter sandwich—it’s just too good to be true. And sooner or later, something excellent is bound to happen to me: and at that precise moment, I’ll cheer and clap and tell everyone that the albino cup is working out for me after all.

The Art of the Straw: 2/17/08

2008-02-17T15:15:00.000-08:00

As with any major skill or ability—whether it be a physical activity, such as archery, ballet, fencing, hunting, pitching, or quarterbacking, or whether it be a cultural activity such as painting or drawing, or even a medical skill like plastic surgery—there is a developed art and grace to the seemingly everyday preparation of a fountain Diet Coke. One must exercise care not only in cup selection and the drafting (or “pouring,” for the uninitiated) of the soda, but also, most importantly, in the lid tightening and straw penetration that will determine not the quality of the Diet Coke itself (that is beyond our control…that is something we leave to manufacturing plants and distribution centers and convenience store clerks who assemble all the pieces and ensure proper ratios of syrup to carbonated water, etc.), but instead the quality of the drinking experience. Like the technique for a curveball or a slam dunk or a golf swing, it must be practiced and practiced, this fountain Diet Coke preparation, and it must be lovingly embraced as an art form.

And as for anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who would argue that it’s just a soda and you should just drink it as sloppily as you please: they’re unsophisticated, they’re below you, they’re low-class soda trash.

I suppose I didn’t always notice this “developed art and grace” when I would stop by the soda fountain at the local 7-Eleven, or BP Connect, or even the Publix deli. Throughout much of my youth, a soda was just a soda. You got thirsty, you bought a soda, and you drank it. End of thirst, end of story. But as my addiction began to take form and as my palette began to discern between Diet Pepsi and regular Pepsi, Diet Coke and Coke Zero, Diet Coke and Shasta Cola and Diet Bubba Cola and RC Cola, I started to truly take notice of how much my most minor and insignificant actions could influence how I drank.

It took several dirty or cracked 7-Eleven cups before I learned that I should always pull a small stack of plastic cups from the dispenser of the soda machine’s side: usually, the very top cup has been handled in some way, sometimes harmlessly, but sometimes violently, by a pissed-off cop or by a snot-nosed 10 year-old, and sometimes it has even been discarded on the counter-top for a time, after someone pulled it out and started to pour a soda and then decided against a drink and left the cup sitting there, only so that it could be replaced in the machine dispenser by an unknowing convenience store employee. Sometimes you’ll notice “splash back” on the top cup in the stack, orange drink that someone has spilled or accidentally spit out, coating the surface of the cup or (worse) the cup’s rim. Years of experience has taught me that one should always dig deeper in that tall stack of 44-ounce plastic cups, that the first choice is never the best choice…in fact, taking the top cup is a bit like buying display meat, the faded and dry chicken or steak or salmon that has sat under the lights in the butcher’s window, waiting for purchase by someone who doesn’t truly appreciate their meats.

Longer still, however, was my journey toward realization of the proper amount of soda to include in my plastic cup. In years past, I’d always tried to fill my cup to the brim, to maximize the ounce-age that I drank. On the surface, a brilliant proposition, but—the same as filling a coffee cup to the brim, only to realize you have no room for cream, or filling a wine or martini glass to the top, only to realize that you’ve got to carry this precarious, rolling liquid across the room—often a foolhardy proposition. Too many times, I’ve filled the cup too high and then, when screwing the lid into place, a few drops have managed to assert themselves into that circular space between lid and cup’s rim, only to loosen and spill into my lap when I least suspected. There is a proper amount of soda one must “draft” from the soda fountain, and unfortunately, it is always a bit less than I’d like.

When discussing the technique of Diet Coke preparation, there is no more overlooked (and potentially disastrous) skill than unwrapping the straw from its plastic wrapper and sliding it, unhurt and still near-mint, into the perforated opening of the cup’s lid. It’s like a football referee: do a good job, and you’ll never notice…you’ve got yourself a great soda. Do it wrong, however, and you risk cracking your lid and opening too large a crater in the fine plastic (thus subjecting yourself to easy spillage), or, more common, bending the straw and creating a hair-line fracture that allows (at best) a bit of air into the straw, making the soda sucking a little more difficult, or (at worst) allowing in a great deal of air and essentially rendering your straw impotent. A broken straw leaves you gasping as you drink, slowly and inevitably gaining less and less soda with each new sip.

What is uniquely difficult about the art of straw and unwrapping and lid puncturing is the completely different nature of straws and lids, from one store to the next. Some lids are easy to penetrate, featuring that familiar pre-broken “x” dead-center. You can do it with the straw itself, planting the straw into the lid like an old explorer planting the flag of Great Britain or France into some soft coastal soil. Some lids, however, are made of hard plastic or (it seems) rubber or concrete, in which case you’ve actually got to pull open the “x” with your hands and drop the straw inside to keep it from breaking. And the straws themselves! Some appear indestructible (in which case they definitely are not, and they break easier), and some appear weak and pointless. Some are encased in plastic wrapping that seems intended to withstand nuclear fallout, requiring scissors to slice apart.

Here is where the Diet Coke Addict—nay, the Diet Coke Artist—thrives, though. Because the Diet Coke Artist has seen it all, has felt with his fingers every type and style of straw, every thickness of lid. Because the Diet Coke Artist knows when he must rip apart the straw’s packaging with his sharp teeth, and when he can bring the straw down against the convenience store’s metal counter-top until the straw pops out of one side of its plastic packaging perfectly intact. Because the Diet Coke Artist knows when he must help the straw find its way through the lid, and when—like the disciplined Mr. Miyagi and the Karate Kid, as they pounded a nail through a board with just a single well-placed blow of the hammer to the nail’s head—he can line up the straw against that “x,” line it up, focus, focus, and bring the straw down hard, unbroken, listening for the familiar splash of plastic and soda to signal a job expertly done.

This is the work of aficionados, no different than the uncorking of wine or the lighting and enjoyment of cigars. This is technique.

This is what separates us—you and I—from those masses at the soda fountain, those who do not realize the tradition and the responsibility, those who mishandle the cups and crack their straws and gulp greedily and say, “Dude, it’s just soda!” This is what makes us artists, not gluttons.

Changing Plans: 2/01/08

2008-02-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

I measure my days in Diet Cokes, in the number of sodas I drink before 10 AM or before lunch, in how many minutes or hours I must wait until I can get another Super Big Gulp. This is nothing new for me.

But all too often, now, I find myself not just measuring my days in Diet Cokes, but organizing and planning my days around Diet Coke excursions and adventures. Changing lunch plans. Skipping out on chores or obligations. Convincing and conniving friends and family alike into quick road trips supposedly for their benefit…but really only for my own Diet Coke splurges. “Hey, you want to go take a ride and get some fresh air?” I might ask lamely, to which friends shrug, then cave, and a few minutes later, while we’re driving and enjoying the open air, I add casually, “If you turn here, we can stop in at the 7-Eleven and I can get myself a drink.” As if this hadn’t been my plan the entire time.

When discussing lunch or dinner options, I’ll feign disgust or delight depending on the restaurant. “No way, not Panera,” I’ll say when everyone has agreed that Panera is the only neutral and safe option for our party of ten.

“Why not?” Heather will ask.

“I hate sandwiches,” I’ll say.

“You eat a sandwich everyday.”

“I hate their sandwiches,” I’ll lie. “And their chips.”

“And their soda?” (Panera carries only Pepsi products).

“Yeah, that’s bad, too,” I’ll say. “How about Smokey Bones?” (Smokey Bones is a Diet Coke Safe Zone).

To which everyone in our party of ten will groan, having just decided—mere minutes before—that we would not be going to Smokey Bones tonight, not under any circumstances, no, not tonight.

Sometimes, walking across campus with another instructor or colleague or (sometimes) even a student, I’ll subtly alter our course of travel and steer us past Chick-Fil-A or Burger King or Sbarro’s, a quarter-mile out of the way for our destination; sometimes I’m very graceful about this, too, so that my walking partner will genuinely have no idea how they wound up waiting for five minutes—late for wherever they were headed—while I stand in line to buy my soda.

The most recent example of my selfish scheming came a few weeks ago, when I took a trip to Memphis, where my college football team—UCF—was playing in the Liberty Bowl. The town was painted in maroon for the few days we were there, Mississippi State cowbells clanging on every street corner, but still we UCF fans managed to booze it up on Beale Street pretty well, generally outdrinking and outpartying the bountiful 50 and 60 year-old MSU alumni who’d made the trip. This was the first stateside bowl game for the UCF Knights, though, so we had a lot to celebrate. My friends came in a group of 15 or so, and packed ourselves into a tiny hotel called the “Gen X Inn” with violent orange walls and stylized shower heads (that, strangely, only dribbled) and large-screen plasma TVs in each room (each TV rested on top of entertainment centers built for old traditional TVs, so there was a big empty spot in the entertainment center). I’m not kidding. This place actually exists.

And, to make this bowl game an even more special experience, this was also the first time many of us had ever been to Memphis. My friend Alex (who, if you’ve read this blog before, is best noted for dumping cocktail sauce and Tabasco down my straw, once), in fact, didn’t even know that Memphis was on the Mississippi River, or that the state of Tennessee bordered the state of Arkansas. For him, this was an educational experience, as well as a football game and three-day tailgate event.

Of course, UCF lost the game.

We all fell into a deep depression, then drank more.

Then, we all woke up on Sunday (our final day in town) feeling as if we’d spent three days drinking only sharp nails, fish heads, and rotten orange juice.

Alex, I think, couldn’t even move.

But we needed Memphis barbecue before out afternoon flights back to Florida, so we drove back to Beale Street one last time and stopped into Blues City Café and stuffed our faces with piles and piles of ribs and bowls of chili and baked beans and toasts, all the sort of stuff that you’re supposed to eat when (a) You’re in Memphis, and (b) You’re hung over. Pure satisfaction. Torrents of grease and fat suddenly flooding our systems. Perfect, perfect.

About this time on Sunday afternoon, just after lunch, I realized that I had a long trip ahead of me: back to the airport, where I’d sit and wait for God only knew how long, and then onto a flight and then a new airport and then a connection and then finally home, and it all made me dizzy and ache for a gigantic Diet Coke. I needed it now. After all, I was in one of those situations where uncertainty seemed all-pervasive. When would I get my next Diet Coke? At the airport? What if it was a Pepsi-only airport? What if the plane was Pepsi-only, or—worse—I fell asleep in mid-flight, just before the attendants came around for beverage service. For me, travel always evokes paranoia.

So, as our group—Brandon, Heather, Jason, Chalmers, Chad, and myself—walked around Beale Street taking pictures of all the storefronts and statues that we’d never really seen while we’d stumbled through the city in the dark the past couple night, I hatched a plan.

“Anyone ever been to Arkansas?” I asked.

“What’s in Arkansas?” Brandon said.

“Absolutely nothing. But we could just drive over the bridge real quick, and step foot in Arkansas just to say we’ve been.”

“We’re not five,” Brandon said.

“But, see, you could say you’ve been to Arkansas!” I said. Yes, the plan was lame, but I figured that if we took the bridge across the Mississippi and crossed into Arkansas, there was sure to be a “Welcome to Arkansas!” exit with gas stations and restaurants and soda fountains and Diet Coke. Convincing everyone to go to Arkansas was a much easier route than convincing everyone to drive all over Memphis searching for a 7-Eleven.

“I’ll be honest, Nate,” Chalmers said. “I’ve got to use the bathroom.” (He didn't say "use the bathroom," but I guess there's a limit to how graphic I want to go today.).

Chad nodded. “Ribs. The ribs.” He held his stomach.

“We could use the bathroom in Arkansas,” Brandon said. (He didn't say "use the bathroom," either. In fact, Brandon became more graphic. Sickeningly graphic.)

“Ooh,” Chalmers said. “That actually sounds good.”

“Yeah,” I said, seeing the desire suddenly blossoming behind their eyes. “We could drive over the border and let loose in the first McDonald’s (which serves Diet Coke) or, you know, the first gas station we find.”

“This would actually make a good story,” Brandon said. “Driving across state lines just to use the bathroom.”

“And I could get a Diet Coke,” I said softly.

“I wonder how many people do this,” Brandon said. “Eat and drink in Memphis, then let it all out in Arkansas. Is this the one thing that makes their state relevant?”

“Code orange,” Chalmers said. “Into the car. Let’s go, let’s go.” And, like that, we were off. How I’d managed to take a group of friends from fun, party-happy Beale Street in Memphis across a bridge and into the disputably worst state in our Union, Arkansas, just for a Diet Coke, will forever remain a mystery to me. It is only slightly less impressive than my efforts in convincing Heather to marry me, Diet Coke addiction and all other flaws considered.

The story, though, doesn’t end happily.

We drove, six people crammed into a car meant for four, across the Mississippi River and found a McDonald’s within a mile of the marshy river banks. We popped out from the car, each of us shooting out like a champagne cork and running into the restaurant for our own selfish reasons, but before I could even get to the counter to order my Diet Coke, Heather was tugging on my shirt and saying “We’ve got to go.”

“What?” I asked. “I haven’t even ordered my Diet Coke yet.”

“The guys are all back in the car,” she said.

“What? How is that possible? They can’t wait?”

“We didn’t go,” Chalmers said from the McDonald’s doorway, motioning for me. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. We’ll use the hotel bathrooms.”

The counter was mere feet away. I could just place my order…hand over the cash…

“There was...something...all over the floor in there, all right,” Chalmers said. “We gotta go. This is an emergency, Nate. This place isn’t good enough for us.”

And Heather yanked me outside, and before I knew it, I was back in the car, and we were driving back across the bridge to Tennessee, back into Memphis, back to the hotel where all my friends would again rush from carseat to bathroom in record time (this time with better luck). And I would collect my luggage from my room, my throat dry, wondering when and if I could find a new opportunity to connive this particular afternoon.

But such is the fortune for the Diet Coke addict. Just like cigarette smokers, who enter every venue searching for the nearest exit or balcony or outdoor seating area, I’ve developed a sixth sense of my own, thinking and considering always…when can I make my move? Where’s the closest gas station? When do they least suspect that I’d trick them into yet another Diet Coke run?

Water: 1/09/08

2008-01-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve always had a dysfunctional relationship with drinking water.

I need it, right? I need drinking water? Daily? Eight cups a day, or something like that? And it’s pretty accessible, too, but—on again, off again, in a conflict likely born of my primary relationship with Diet Coke—we feud, me and drinking water. Love one moment. Bitter argument, hateful silence the next.

For years and years and years.

Several years ago, when I first began my year-and-a-half career as a traveling fraternity leadership consultant, I packed up my car with the prerequisites for business travel (dress shirts, ties, belts, four different types of footwear in descending order of professionalism, starting with shiny black dress shoe and ending with brown tattered flip-flop; notebooks, notepads; jackets, jeans, a full wardrobe and a full office within the tight confines of my Alero) and the sort of road trip gear I figured would be necessary for constant eight-hour drives: CD carrying case, road atlas, tire gauge, bags of pretzels and other snacks, and, strangely, a Brita water filtration pitcher. I’d be traveling all across the country for a semester at a time, nonstop, and by some misguided notion, I imagined myself proceeding with healthy discipline, drinking only water instead of soda, and saving money by stopping only at rest areas and filling the Brita pitcher, filtering the public drinking fountain water while standing in the parking lot, and pouring it out and refilling (over and over) the same Dasani bottle. This is what I seriously thought I’d do.

That idea lasted about a week.

On my first major drive, from Orlando to Charlotte (an eight-hour trek), as if to prove that the Brita idea was a good one, I stopped at a South Carolina rest area, filtered some water in the pitcher, filled my Dasani bottle…then realized that the pitcher was still full and it’d spill over in my car, so I dumped the rest of the filtered water into the grass. While I was wondering if this was wasteful or frivolous, I considered the looks with which the other travelers at the rest area were regarding me. Even as they ate chocolate wafers and peanut butter crackers purchased from a dirty vending machine, they still gave me the “are you crazy?” looks that I was ordinarily accustomed to giving, rather than receiving.

So, although I tried to picture myself doing this again and again throughout the country—purifying the nasty fountain water into drinkable form, keeping my body pure and healthy with clean, clean water.—I couldn’t do it. It just felt too weird. I don’t know what became of that Brita pitcher, where it even wound up.

Days later, while I was in Charlotte for a few weeks, I was already scoping out convenience stores in North Carolina, comparing prices and cups and syrup-to-carbonation ratios, pumping more Diet Coke into my body than any other substance, liquid or solid, water definitely included.

But still, as always, there was the nagging feeling that I should be drinking water instead, or should be drinking more water: it “flushes” out your system of impurities, all the health nuts will tell you, keeps you hydrated better than any other liquid, keeps you full, keeps you energetic and alert for a full day’s work, for exercise. Water. Pure water, just the way God intended, kept popping into my head every time I’d drink a Diet Coke, shaking its head disappointedly, giving me a dose of what I imagine Catholic guilt to feel like.

I’ve never had a problem with these arguments, with any of the scientific evidence in water’s favor; I wholeheartedly agree, in fact, and therein lay the problem. I know that a greater portion of my daily liquid intake should be dedicated to water, but it’s just so damn boring. And when it’s not boring, it’s weird. Ordering water at a restaurant earns only dissatisfied looks from servers and dining partners alike, as if the drink itself has somehow substituted for your personality. Everyone else orders Coke or Yuengling or Martinis…they’re fun, they’re exciting, they’re ready to party!...and you order…tapwater. And while I’ve many times written about the confusion or outright bewilderment experienced by waitresses when I drink double-digit Diet Cokes, there’s nothing to match the bewilderment showcased by casual observers when they see me refilling a water bottle at a public water fountain, others waiting in line behind me to simply steal a few reasonable sips when I’m done.

After I realized the failure of my Brita water pitcher idea, I bought an indestructible Nalgene water bottle, deciding that I’d drink water regardless of taste…filtered or unfiltered…taste buds and Diet Coke addiction be damned! I would treat my body right! Water water water! Etc.

But while I traveled the country, I too often left the Nalgene bottle empty in the passenger seat of my Alero, opting to buy a new Diet Coke instead of refilling with more toilet-tasting rest-area tapwater. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even finish the last bit of water swishing around at the bottom of the bottle. While I was in Iowa, it froze; while I was in Florida, it heated to coffee temperatures (neither scenario applied to any leftover Diet Coke cup, as I made sure to drink every last drop without complaint).

There’s room enough in my life for only one serious beverage relationship, and sometimes I feel like the clichéd “good girl” who keeps falling for the “bad guy.” (Please ignore the obvious gender complications of this analogy, and just focus on the heart of the situation…thanks). I know water is better for me…I know it’s the world’s most precious resource, and my body is mostly water, and the world is mostly water, and Diet Coke is only possible because the main ingredient—water—allows itself to be transformed…I know all this, but still, I’ll take the dangerous relationship, not the boring one.

And that’s why, when I travel now—as I have so much in the past several weeks of 2007’s holiday season, from Orlando to Inverness to Venice to Memphis to Venice to Orlando to Charlotte to Orlando—the Nalgene bottle and Brita pitchers don’t make the trip. I’ll take my chances finding a soda fountain.

The Future, 12/17/07

2007-12-19T05:26:00.001-08:00

Last Friday night, I spent some time in downtown DeLand, Florida, one of those “Olde Florida” towns too often described as quaint (though there are few adjectives more fitting than “quaint,” to be honest) and populated with plenty of Southern homes situated on big, tree-filled yards. DeLand also has one of those typical downtown strips, a single long street packed with “local flavor” restaurants and knick-knack shops, all built under wooden, turn-of-the-century facades. Of course, DeLand feels rather like it’s trying to be “Olde Florida” than staying true to any authentic heritage, but no matter: I was a tourist for the duration of the night, taking in the smell of pine trees and the sound of a thousand “ya’lls” floating through the Southern air, trying to keep my liberal views to myself in order to avoid provoking bloodlust among locals.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been to DeLand, though. I knew the roads, the shops, the RaceTrac at the edge of town with the 99-cent fountain drinks. I wasn’t intimate with this town, but we’d flirted once before. I’d very nearly come to work in this town.

And while I sat on a velvet couch at a downtown jazz bar, each passing minute bringing me closer to closing time and to the forty-minute drive back to my apartment in Winter Springs, I considered the future I almost had with DeLand. Frequently, I’ll do this: I’ll think about possible futures for myself (or possible futures I might have instead chosen). Not with regret, necessarily, but with fascination. A different job in a different town, a different set of roads, a different daily commute, a different selection of gas stations and restaurants for lunch breaks. Had I worked in this town, would I be fatter or skinnier, depressed and dissatisfied or more excited and sociable? Would I have maintained my Diet Coke addiction, or would this dot-on-Florida’s-map have broken me free?

These are the things I was thinking on Friday night, but perhaps I should explain a bit further.

Seven months ago, just days after I graduated with my MFA, I interviewed for a Guest Lecturer position at Stetson University in DeLand (Florida’s first private college, dating back over a hundred years). I’d been selected for the interview by resume alone, and over the phone, the Department Chair had told me that their selection process had narrowed the number of candidates to just two. Needless to say, my hopes were high: just graduated, and already interviewing for a real job! Of course, the Chair had never met me before, had no idea that I was a spiky-haired 26 year-old, and the interview itself was one of those experiences to which I’ve become sadly accustomed, lately: the Chair, an older man, mid-fifties, did a double-take when he first saw me, and every few minutes thereafter, he seemed to lapse into teacher-speak as we talked, then make a mental note to himself to address me like a professional, not like a student. (Daily, in the hallways outside my office, students will stop and ask me questions when they see my door open, many times referring to me as “man” or “dude,” perhaps thinking that I’m a receptionist or a work-study employee. Professors will regard me with undisguised disdain as I sit in my office and conference with my students, perhaps wondering whose office it is that I’ve commandeered for my little social gathering.).

It could be worse, I suppose. People could think me older than I am, or could be patently disingenuous about pretending that “I look so young,” as we all do to our grandparents. But still…I’ve developed a complex about my youth, one that I’m sure I will someday—old and failing in health—long to regain.

The interview, inevitably, was not a victory for me, simply because I was not offered the job. I have no idea if the Chair and the Writing Center Coordinator (the other man, also older, who stopped in during the interview) had conversations afterwards, laughing about how ridiculous it would be for this little kid to be a professor. Maybe, maybe not…they didn’t seem mean-spirited, but then again, what good is a four-hour interview if you can’t laugh and joke about it later?

But, though Stetson University didn’t invite me into their faculty, the interview wasn’t a disaster, either. I surprised myself by actually talking about pedagogy and composition theory and creative writing instruction methods for four hours (really, no joke), seamlessly, fluidly, and I even survived a mid-interview lunch at a local Korean restaurant in downtown DeLand that only served soda out of cans…and only carried Pepsi products. I seem to recall telling the Department Chair that I had an addiction to Diet Coke, and asking if Stetson was a Coke or Pepsi campus, and if there were any eateries on-campus that allowed free refills.

I don’t know how much I thought about it at the time, or worried about it, but now, looking back, I get anxious about such prospects. Soon, I’ll take a job at a new campus. And many of universities are not so friendly to Diet Coke addicts as the University of Central Florida. Here, now, I have all-day access to a variety of on-campus eateries where the refills are free and easy, and the clerks recognize me instantly. Off-campus, I know the locations of more than a dozen local 7-Elevens and BP Connects where the soda fountains are generally in good working order, and the cups are plastic, and the clerks aren’t unmentionably weird (for the most part). In DeLand, could I have been so certain? Could I have, as I walked from class to class in the afternoons at Stetson University, stopped by the on-campus Chick-Fil-A for a Diet Coke refill? In DeLand, could I have driven off-campus during my lunch break and found a restaurant which had friendly waitresses who understood my horrifying need for twelve Diet Cokes in a single sitting? What would have become of me if I didn’t get what I wanted at Stetson?

What will become of me when I take a job at West Alabama, where there are no 7-Elevens within a 70-mile radius, or at the University of Wyoming, where the gruff, conservative farmboys will laugh and jeer at me for not drinking a “regular” Coke? I’ve seen Brokeback Mountain; I know how they treat men who don’t fit the Marlboro Man image (and trust me: though I find Diet Coke to be rich and masculine, not all of society has truly accepted its goodness yet).

There in DeLand on a Friday night, I could have been picturing a wonderful future for myself, a well-kept office in the English building, with volumes and volumes of books set firmly in a built-in-bookshelf. Students making appointments, stopping by my office to gain but an ounce of my professorial wisdom. I could have pictured Stetson as my dream job, and I could have pictured myself as a millionaire novelist, typing the notes for my bestseller in the coffee shops of the quaint DeLand downtown. So many things I could have imagined, so many positive things.

But instead I envisioned a frightening future that could rival any dystopia portrayed in movies like Soylent Green, I Am Legend, and Logan’s Run. I envisioned a world without easy access to Diet Coke, and that night, suddenly sick with worry, I had trouble sleeping. Finally, I understood how my wife feels when I force her to watch gruesome horror movies throughout the month of October, and she complains and complains about nightmares and a fear of the dark and a lack of sleep. “It’s all right, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I always tell her, but now, yes, faced with the idea that my next job will be in some Diet-Coke-dry town, I can understand how little comfort such words bring.

In the Bathroom: 12/2/2007

2007-12-19T05:24:00.002-08:00

WARNING: GRAPHIC MATERIAL FOLLOWS (finish eating)

I sometimes wonder what other people think when they see me walk into the men's bathroom with a 44-ounce Diet Coke in my hand, sipping it as I open the door, sipping it as I come back out, business finished. It might seem a bit grotesque, I suppose, for the casual observer wandering in the hallways outside the bathrooms, who could deduce that I not only bring this cup into the bathroom with me, but that I also drink while I…you know.

And I don't. I can wait. Trust me. (Usually.).

It's certainly disgusting for the casual observers, mostly because a casual observer's entire conception of someone is formed from a single snapshot or soundbyte. Picture yourself walking down a busy sidewalk on the way to work or class or dinner, occasionally looking around at the foot traffic passing you by on both sides; you see a girl on her cell phone, toting a Louis Vuitton purse and sporting "hata blocka" sunglasses, and all you hear from her lips are the words "totally threw up all over the bed!" Poor girl. Fair or unfair, you have formed an image…nay, an entire collage, a Sistine Chapel mural…of this girl's life, her interests, her upbringing, her friends, her IQ. Now, picture yourself on the same busy sidewalk, and you see a guy holding his gut and slurping a Super Big Gulp, pushing his way into the bathroom. You've seen him for just a split-second, but an opinion is already forming in your mind. Who is this guy? What biography have you written for this odd specimen who has clearly drank enough to cause his bladder substantial pain, but who still cannot stop drinking even as his bladder tells him to stop, and who has (also, very clearly) just purchased a brand-new drink right before his trip to the urinals?

Quite the picture. But here's where it gets worse. For the casual observer, it might be a bit grotesque. But it might seem even more gruesome for those in the bathroom beside and around me. Most men (and I don't presume to speak for everyone, so I could be way off, here) see the bathroom as a pit stop. Get in, get out, get going. No lingering. Do what you've got to do, wash the hands, don't make eye contact or start conversations, don't let your eyes drip downward, don't look at anything but your own reflection in the mirror, don't even look at yourself in the mirror for more than a few seconds. Men's bathrooms sweat and swelter with homophobia, and while some intellectual New York Times social critics may find fault with this, it's worked out all right with society so far; it's created an environment where men—for a few seconds out of their lives—can be super-efficient, and where all atmosphere is relegated to strict functionality (toilets, sinks, towels, doors, trash cans, and that's it).

But I've got special circumstances in the bathroom. I've got a special cup I've got to take care of. And, while conventional wisdom would suggest that I place the cup on the bathroom's countertop, go take care of my business in the aforementioned super-efficient manner, and then pick up my cup on the way out (no hassle, no mess), there's nothing worse than a lingering fear that your cup…sitting on the counter…is suffering from sprayback. There's nothing worse than wondering, as you take your next sip of soda, whether some other man washed his hands too close to the drink (and, by extension, too close to the straw around which I'll place my lips), and something…maybe…splashed off. No need to get specific, here. I'll stay general, and leave all talk of fluids to the imagination. (Also, I worry that someone will steal it, which is illogical, or that some janitor will walk in, assume its trash, and toss it away, which is more probably but still pretty stupid.).

So I carry my Diet Coke with me, hoping that I can keep it clean and fluid-free by clutching it close to my heart where no other man may touch it. I carry it with me to the urinals, where (in case you're not a man, I'll give you some insider info) both hands are required. And what do I do, then? This, you see, is where I'm glad that men's rooms are one of the few locales in all the world where wandering eyes are discouraged. My different Rube-Goldbergian methods of holding onto my Diet Coke cup while relieving myself would—if seen by the casual observer in a men's room—immediately cause observers to believe me warped, sick, no better than a common dog who would drink out of a toilet bowl.

Sometimes I place the cup on top of the urinal, sometimes I balance it precariously on the divider between urinals, and sometimes I clamp down on the cup with my teeth and work out my jaw, holding it steady and trying to keep the Diet Coke from spilling.

I've thought myself disgusting for quite awhile, but I've never really thought of any alternative. What is a man to do if he needs both drink and bathroom relief? Every now and then, I notice someone else walking into a restroom with a drink, and I silently cheer, and further delude myself that everything is all right for me. If they can do it, I can do it. It isn't disgusting; it's universally accepted! You're not so bad, Nathan!

It's encouragement for a gross, gross habit.

And recently, I just got more encouragement. Unfortunately.

The other day, in a mostly empty bathroom in the Classroom Building at UCF, I set my Diet Coke on the metal "book shelf" at one end of the bathroom. (If there's any ledge or shelf, no matter how small or unsteady, I'll try it and pray that my drink doesn't slip or fall over). Usually, I have to push textbooks or folders aside, but this particular afternoon…curiously…I had to push aside a bag of Tostitos. I scratched my head, looked at the bag of chips, looked around the bathroom and saw a pair of shoes under one of the stalls, and thought, "Must be his." I didn't think much more of it until after I'd used the toilet and washed my hands and had returned to the shelf to reclaim my Diet Coke. Then, I noticed that the bag of Tostitos was opened. Food in the bathroom is automatically grosser than drink, but this guy had brought opened food. And left it sitting out while he…while he…God knows what, but he was locked in a stall and the place didn't smell like perfume.

And then I noticed that the Tostitos weren't alone. Beside them on the shelf was jar of salsa. Used up, mostly, but at least the lid was still on. And then, beside that…two metal pans. Uncovered metal pans! No no no. Really? This man had brought in food pans, the deep type normally seen at Subway, in which the sandwich artists store tomato slices or lettuce. I lifted myself up on my toes, peered inside, saw a heap of guacamole, caught myself gagging, couldn't stare any longer and couldn't bring myself to see what was in the other pan, hurried out of the bathroom with my Diet Coke in hand. Oh, this was so much worse than anything I'd ever do! Who was this man, and how dare he mix food and bathroom, profaning both in the process?

I stumbled out, away from the door.

But back outside in the open hallway, casual observers were streaming past, craning their heads in my direction and taking mental snapshots of this remarkably odd, achingly gross scene: a grown man in a starched and ironed button-down and khakis, holding his stomach even as he bolted from the bathroom, a gigantic Diet Coke in hand, a grimace of pure terror upon his face. What did they think of this image, these casual observers? What moment did they imagine had occurred seconds before in the bathroom to inspire such an unimaginable horrorshow? And how many of them were desensitized, having slowly—over the course of the entire semester—seen me enter and leave the bathroom a hundred times, straw in my mouth and Diet Coke moving visibly from cup to mouth?

Well-Stocked: 10/3/2007

2007-12-19T05:24:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, as I stand in line at the convenience store and wait for the clerk to ring up the winding lines of customers before me, I become lost in the varied (and random) goods positioned throughout the store. Some stores are bare bones, featuring only the absolute necessities for the local commuters or out-of-town travelers: soda, potato chips, pretzels, and candy bars. Other stores, though, are weighted down with so much product that I will daydream scenarios by which someone would actually pluck it all from the shelves and buy it. I buy Diet Coke by the barrel (which is a fairly legitimate convenience store purchase), but who buys a three-DVD box set of Asian Extreme Horror at Racetrac? For that matter, who buys The Lion King 2 at Shell, or Saving Private Ryan at BP Connect? Who buys hair curlers? Vienna sausages? Vanilla-flavored Moon Pies? NASA baseball caps? Mittens (in Florida)?

"Next!" the clerk will shout from the front, and I'll take four steps forward in the line, my hand going numb from holding the cold 44-ouncer. And I wait still longer, examining the inventory.

Once, at the front counter of a 7-Eleven, I actually saw a cardboard box filled with "HALF PRICE!" pantyhose. The clerk at that particular store was having a conversation with a female customer (as I waited in line) about what a great deal this was, about how he bought a bunch of pantyhose canisters for his "honey back home," about how the customer "shouldn't be fooled" by the fact that these were 7-Eleven pantyhose. This was quality stuff, he said. The customer, thankfully, declined the opportunity to splurge on this once-in-a-lifetime sale. I almost wished, however, that she had bought a pair…no, no…that she'd bought the whole gigantic box, that she'd hefted it up onto her shoulder and shouted, "What luck! I was coming in here to stock up on pantyhose anyway!" Then, at least, I would have known what sort of person goes to a gas station to buy pantyhose, and I would have understood the store manager's business rationale for keeping this product in-stock.

"Next!" the clerk shouted after this customer had paid, and I took my four mechanical steps forward, waiting with debit card in hand to pay for my Diet Coke.

I suppose I've fallen victim to the "impulse purchase" bug every now and then, also, buying something that no man should ever purchase at a gas station (or, sometimes, anywhere). On long car trips, delirious and still dreading the next few hours of driving, I generally wake myself up not just with another Diet Coke, but also with a generic Slim-Jim-style beef stick, preferably the kind with the cheese attached to the meat. When I was a traveling consultant for a national fraternity, driving from school to school across the Midwest, seven or eight hour drives every few days, I became addicted to Tollhouse cookie candybars: they became both an incentive and a good luck charm. On a particularly long drive from Rolla, Missouri to Columbia, Missouri, back to Rolla, Missouri, and then west to Tulsa, Oklahoma, I stopped at a crumbling Oklahoma gas station in the middle of nowhere for a new drink and some cookie candybars; they only had Pepsi products and Ho-Hos, so I settled for these. Thirty minutes later, going 70 on the highway, my belly burning with the evil flavor of Diet Pepsi, I crashed my car into a deer and nearly killed myself. The lesson: impulse purchases are the devil.

"Next!" the clerk will shout at 7-Eleven, and I'll wait five minutes as the mothers corral their children forward, past the meticulously placed impulse purchase candies, and I always dread the day when I'll have children (years from now, of course), because I'll not only have to convince myself not to buy all this crap, but I'll have to convince a bunch of screaming kids, also.

"Next!" the clerk will shout at 7-Eleven, and I'll take four steps forward and notice a bargain bin in the middle of the main aisle of the store. A bargain bin? This is where the products get truly strange. I'll always look into the bargain bin hesitantly, eyes squinted, ready to jump away quickly, as if I was not looking into a tall cardboard box, but instead into a deep, dark cave in the haunted woods of Appalachia. A bargain bin…full of bags of awful generic pretzels and pork rinds and cheese sticks, the type of food that you never actually see on the store's shelves…where do they get this stuff? Do they buy it wholesale just so they can stock their bargain bins? And occasionally, I'll notice something creepy inside the bin, a pair of fake glasses with mustache attached, or a wig, or wax lips, or a Vanilla Ice CD circa 1991.

"Next!" the clerk shouted yesterday, as I waited in line at the 7-Eleven with my Diet Coke, my head pounding from a caffeine-deprivation headache. I'd just graded the final stack of student essays from my pile of over 100, and my sole motivation for finishing had been (you guessed it) speeding out of my office on-campus and screeching towards the local convenience store for my daily fix of D Coke. Some people are motivated by money, or leisure activities, or alcohol and drugs, or shady and weird fetishes…I suppose that I'm just a bit more predictable and easy to please.

"Next!" the clerk shouted, and there was just one person in front of me in line.

"Say, um," said the guy in front of me, speaking to the clerk. "Say, where do you guys keep the X-Lax?"

"Oh," the clerk said, pointing, "that's over on this aisle here, right by the aspirin and the Q-Tips and the gauze."

I looked around to see if anyone else was hearing this, and I coughed. This guy had come to 7-Eleven to buy a laxative? There was a drug store and a grocery store no more than a block away. And the clerk knew exactly where the laxatives were: right next to…gauze? People came to the gas station to buy gauze and Q-Tips?

"Yeah, I was just over there," the guy said, scratching the back of his neck. "I couldn't find it."

The clerk peered in the direction of the "medical aisle," searching, searching, searching. "Oooh," the clerk said. "Yeah, sorry. I guess we just ran out."

Ran out of laxative? Now, here was a store with a manager who didn't understand the needs of the customer!

The man left, disappointed.

"Next!" the clerk shouted, and I stepped to the counter, slid my Diet Coke onto the glass countertop, directly over the lottery tickets. I looked around one last time as the clerk scanned my drink and my grand total of $1.16 appeared over the register: I surveyed the magazines, the tabloids, the newspapers, the DVDs and CDs and tobacco products and chewing gum and candybars and fake fingernails and Simpsons figurines and novelty lollipops and UCF t-shirts and trucker hats and charm bracelets and Seminole "dreamcatchers," and when the clerk asked if this was it for me, just a Diet Coke, was there anything else I needed for the day, I didn't answer "no." Instead, I said "not today," which—I think—is totally different, and much sadder.

Social Damnation: 8/15/2007

2007-12-19T05:23:00.000-08:00

(originally written as a two-part series)

Until yesterday, I'd never considered that a Diet Coke could be socially damning. I carry Diet Cokes to the office, to class, to student advising sessions, to doctor's offices, to important meetings, never really thinking that others might view it negatively. In fact, it is only when I walk around with styrofoam cups or Racetrac plastic fountain cups (especially those colored with Nascar photos and racing schedules and giant renderings of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s head) that I hurry to finish my drink so that I can toss it.

But in polite company, I realized yesterday, there are things that are acceptable to drink and there are ways that are acceptable to drink them, and to deviate from these manners leaves you feeling uncouth and dirty. I've always known, of course, about good manners and formal dress and social etiquette, about handshakes and smiles and nonoffensive conversation; but I never knew—or, perhaps, didn't want to know—how soda could ruin even the best façade.

Just a few weeks ago, I was officially hired for a one-year appointment as a Visiting Instructor of English at UCF, and—despite the fact that I've been teaching at the university for two years—I had to register for and attend a three-day New Faculty Orientation. As anyone who has ever been to any university orientation could surely remind you, there are few worse things than sitting in gigantic auditoriums for hours at a time listening to workshops and tutorials…unless, perhaps, you've already heard most of them before. And those sessions that I haven't heard before, I pretty much had to figure out a long time ago. There are sessions, for instance, on how to use myUCF, the system that students and faculty alike must use for all personal records. Let me repeat: I've taught for two years at the university. If I didn't know how to access my class schedule or post grades, I'd be in trouble.

The repetitive nature of the orientation aside, I wasn't necessarily dreading the experience. After all, three days of all-day sessions meant three free lunches. Snacks! Peppermints! Cookies! Sodas! Back and forth to the campus Burger King for free refills, all day long! I might not enjoy sitting through a presentation about UCF's Library (I go to the library almost every day, after all, and I'm familiar with the product found therein: books…lots and lots of books), but is there any greater zone-out opportunity than sitting in a classroom, staring at a projection screen, and drinking my twelfth Diet Coke of the day? Maybe I could break a record.

My first day of the orientation, though, made me a bit uneasy. After check-in, I found a seat in the conference ballroom at a round table filled with newly hired Education professors. They eyed me suspiciously, head to toe, as if perhaps I was a student who had wandered into the wrong room. "This isn't freshman Psychology," I kept expecting one of them to say, but I sipped my morning coffee silently, and we all listened politely as a series of campus administrators introduced themselves and welcomed us to the orientation. I practiced my dainty golf clap when the room was prompted for applause.

After the university Provost finished speaking, the woman beside me said, "I know you."

"Hmm?" I asked. She was blonde, in her late thirties or early forties, and carried the same pantsuit professional demeanor as every other woman in the room. She reminded me of the Business Woman caricature who appears in The Simpsons from time to time.

"I sat beside you at the Benefits Orientation last week," she said.

"Oh, right," I said.

She nudged the guy beside her, who was balding and in his late forties and carried the same stuffy patches-on-the-elbows-of-his-blazer demeanor as every other man in the room. They reminded me of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, except not as engaging. "When I met him," she said to the guy, pointing at me, "I asked him, 'Aren't you a little young to be a faculty member?'"

"Hrumph hrumph," the guy said, laughing in exactly the dry-toast manner in which I'd expected.

"I remember," I said. My witty response to her had been, "Yeah, but I got nothing else going on these days," but I didn't remind her of this. I've always tried to fly under the radar at these sorts of events, and the fact that I was the youngest new faculty member in attendance, by far, made me self-conscious. Earlier in the morning, as I was driving to the orientation, I'd found the price tag still attached to my new dress shirt; ever since, I'd been brushing my pants, imagining dog hair and lint to be spreading across each leg like some infection of classlessness. For an average entry-level job, 26 years old doesn't sound young. And perhaps it was simply my imagination, but for a university faculty position, I was clearly a generation removed from my new colleagues. Few of the men wore ties, and some even wore jeans or sneakers, but still I felt as if I were the only one under-dressed, wearing just a dress button-down and black pants.

"Shouldn't you be drinking Diet Coke?" the woman asked, pointing to my coffee cup.

"I'll switch liquids in a second," I said. This wasn't a good sign, that she'd remembered what I'd been drinking the week before.

"Switch liquids?" she said.

"I start off with coffee, but that's just the warm-up. I move quickly to Diet Coke."

At the previous week's Benefits Orientation, where we sat through several hours of health insurance terminology, I went back and forth to that conference room's mini-fridge to grab Diet Coke cans. How many I drank, I'm not certain, but this woman seemed to remember, so it must have been well past my "social limit." The mini-fridge, after all, had held only a few Diet Cokes, possibly fewer than the number of people actually attending the session, and so I suppose I might have deprived her—and many, many others—of the opportunity for a nice cold can. Because I'm so accustomed to 44-ounce fountain drinks, I plow through 12-ounce cans of Diet Coke like a whale through plankton. Yes, yes. I'd surpassed my social limit. For her, I was the equivalent of the asshole at the restaurant who eats all the appetizers before anyone else can even grab one.

"Well, pace yourself today," she said. "It's a long day."

"But you're already drinking Diet Coke?" I asked her. She was holding a small plastic bottle. "They have Diet Cokes here? I only saw coffee."

"Yes," she said, and then hesitantly, "Back there."

"I don't go for the little bottles anyway," I said, shrugging. "Best deal on campus is the King Size Diet Coke at Burger King. Two dollars, but you get free refills all day."

"You've got it figured out, don't you?" she asked.

"Hrumph," the guy beside her said. "We have a fifteen-minute break. We should go get our campus ID cards."

"Oh, I've already got mine," I said. I meant it as a sign of maturity, of faculty experience—look at me, everyone! I'm a grizzled university veteran! I know where the best soda deals are, and I already have an ID card!—but the table full of new Education professors stared at me without blinking, and though they never said anything, just nodded and walked away, I understood what they were thinking: "Of course you have an ID card, kid. And of course you drink Burger King sodas. How utterly juvenile. How utterly classless." Or maybe they were just thinking, "Go back to your freshman Psychology class."

Undeterred, though, I left the morning session and stopped by Burger King for a 44-ouncer. I pictured a fine day ahead of me, all the other new faculty members staring in wonder and jealousy at how I'd procured such a monster of a soda, while they were all stuck with tiny Diet Coke bottles. What happened, however, was a bit more embarrassing than what I'd envisioned.

***

The New Faculty Orientation grinded on, and only my Diet Coke kept me going.

"We-eelll," said the woman beside me in the conference room, "you've got a really bi-iiig Diet Coke, don't you?"

"Yes I do," I said proudly, taking a mighty sip from my "King Size" Burger King cup.

We were both seated in one of the androgynous conference rooms of the Student Union's second floor (carpet and walls so powerfully and potently ugly that they defy both femininity and masculinity, colors neither rich nor soft, all of it accented by muted and weak Powerpoint slides projected onto a flimsy grayish screen at one far end of the room…oh, sitting in these bleak university conference rooms is enough to make you feel as if you've vomited out your soul), waiting for the New Faculty Orientation's second presentation to begin. We'd had a bit of a break beforehand, during which my morning table-mates had scattered to get their Faculty ID cards, and so now I was forced to find a seat and mingle with other 40 year-olds who looked at me and spoke to me as if I was their son.

"Oh, all I have is this little thing," the woman said to me, and she held up her tiny Diet Coke bottle, the same complimentary container that the Education Woman had been drinking and hiding from me just half an hour before.

"That's too bad for you," I said and took another sip.

"Of course," she said, "it's so cold in this Student Union…they keep the air conditioning so low…I don't think I'd want such a big, cold drink."

"Hmm," I said. I looked down at my Burger King cup, the ice inside splashing from side to side, and suddenly my hand felt colder and I shivered. Two seconds before, I'd been bragging about my most prized possession—44 ounces of amazingly Arctic Diet Coke—and now I was finding a place to set it down so that my hand wouldn't go numb. Throughout the presentation, I grabbed the soda only sparingly (only when my body absolutely howled for its caffeine fix) because everyone at the table seemed to shiver also, just looking at it.

An hour later, when the presentation finished, we all had another extended break, during which I hurried from the conference room, chugged the rest of my soda, and shot to Burger King for another refill. Perhaps I was missing something crucial on the orientation's agenda, but –by this point—it seemed as if I had spent nearly as much time on "break" as I had in sessions, and already lunch was next up on the itinerary. The day was half over.

Lunch, of course, was the orientation session that I looked forward to more than any other. Being a bit of a miser (on average, I probably only pay for a third of all the Diet Coke I drink…), nothing seemed more appealing than the prospect of free food. Having worked the university's freshman and transfer orientations many times while I was an undergraduate, I expected one of two things for lunch: (1) boxed lunches with slightly soggy sandwiches, but gigantic cookies and bags of Doritos to compensate (I'm not picky, so I'd not only eat my own soggy sandwich, but also any other new faculty members' untouched soggy sandwiches), or (2) a long line of silver buffet pans, in which I might find barbecue chicken (yes!) or chicken parmesan (yes! yes!) or taco meat (do I even need to type three "yes's"?). Mass-produced meals unsettle some stomachs, but I'm a seasoned veteran with this type of food, and as soon as the word "free" is attached, my stomach knows that it should be prepared to handle anything. Anything.

So I sauntered into the "Grand Ballroom" of the Student Union, the same gigantic room in which we'd had our "Welcome From the Provost!" session earlier in the morning. I expected the same casual decoration, the same seat-yourself organization. But as soon as I walked into the ballroom, King Size Diet Coke in hand (condensation dripping down and splashing onto the floor as I walked), I realized that the university treats new faculty members much better than they treat new students…and I was severely out of my element here. The tables were now arranged and decorated the same way I remember from the old fraternity and sorority formals I used to attend back in college (of course, I was drunk during those, so my memory is a bit hazy): several nice plates and bowls for each person, a collection of silverware arranged around the plates carefully, sparkling glasses of water and iced tea, trays of cute-shaped butter, pouring dishes of salad dressing, origamically folded napkins. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. And here I was—the sniveling kid amongst adults—with a large, dripping Burger King plastic cup (with obnoxious Simpsons Movie advertisements printed across it). Professionals all around me, scholars at the top of their chosen fields of study. Maybe I could turn around and walk right back out and avoid…oh, but now people were looking in my direction! And if I walked out, I would definitely look like a student, and good luck saving face in the next session, or at the next day's free breakfast or lunch.

So I wandered forward, holding the Diet Coke behind me as I progressed, and I realized to my horror that seating was assigned by college. I couldn't even sit at the very back of the room, out of sight and out of mind; instead, I had to slither all the way to the front, between all the other tables, to get to my "College of Arts and Humanities" table.

There, I found an empty seat with nobody beside me; still hiding my Diet Coke, I slowly eased it to the floor so that I wouldn't have to plop it down on the decadent-looking table and completely kill the display.

The middle-aged men around the table looked at me, narrowed their eyes in confusion, then looked at one another and began conversing once more as if I hadn't just sat down. Fine. I wasn't too concerned with conversation. But now I faced a critical test: clearly, I couldn't drink my Diet Coke at this table, but I didn't even know which water was mine. To the left? To the right? And which dinner roll? (A dinner roll, by the way? Really? This was a frickin' lunch! I just wanted Doritos and a cookie!). And suddenly the empty seats on either side of mine were filled, both of their occupants looking down at the enormous Diet Coke on the floor and pulling their chairs out carefully to avoid knocking it over.

"Hello," said the girl to my right. She had an Italian accent. "I'm with Modern Languages and Literatures."

"I'm with English."

"How many languages do you know?" she asked.

"Just, um, English. You know?"

"Ha ha," she said. "You know what they say? If you're from Europe, you must know at least three languages. Yours, French, and English. But if you're from America, you know just one!"

"Right," I said, and looked to my left, feeling insecure already.

"Hello," said the man to my left. "I'm the Dean of the Honors College."

"Ahh," I said. "Great. Great."

The food came just a minute later, and I had hoped that this might be a blessing, that no matter the dish, it would at least spare me from holding conversation with people who were obviously much smarter than I am. Unfortunately, though, this wasn't the case. Still today, weeks later, I'm unsure exactly what was placed before me for my orientation lunch; all I know is that it involved chicken, mixed greens, and something that was diced and laying on a giant leaf of curled-up lettuce. I fidgeted in my seat, reached down for the Diet Coke, had to slap my own wrist and take a sip of water instead. Thankfully, it turned out to be my water. I fumbled with the salad dressing dish, with the butter; I grabbed the Dean's dinner roll by accident, but he shrugged off my stupidity and told me he wouldn't have eaten it anyway. All around me, everyone ate confidently and daintily, seeming to know exactly how each piece of food was supposed to work together to create their meal masterpiece. By contrast, I just cut things apart sloppily, shaking the entire table with my knife work, and made sure I smothered it in salad dressing to obscure the true taste. And, I noticed, everyone else seemed to hold their silverware with such grace, while I…I just used mine to chop and scoop. At home, I usually eat on the living room couch; when do I ever care about proper knife etiquette? The only utensil I really care about is the straw, and these damned water glasses didn't even have straws in them!

"Are you okay?" asked the Dean.

"Fine," I said and sipped my water, pushed my plate aside. Nothing had gone right at this entire orientation. It'd all been an embarrassment for me, the kid who didn't belong. King Size plastic cups of Diet Coke? In a formal ballroom? What had I been thinking? In some settings, these things just gave the wrong appearance, made you look unprofessional and classless and—

"Dessert?" a server behind me asked.

"Sure," I said, and she slid a remarkably rich slice of cheesecake onto the table in front of me. Chocolate shavings! Whipped cream! Graham cracker crust! Perhaps there was something positive in all of this, after all.

"And for you, sir?" she asked the Dean.

"No, no, I couldn't," he said. He patted his stomach. "I'm on a diet."

"Me neither," the woman to my right said. "Diet."

All around the table, one after the next, the new professors—swollen cheeks and swollen stomachs, all—shook their heads and held up their hands and mouthed "no," and gave me jealous and evil looks while I took slow bites of my own cheesecake.

"It's good," I said, savoring it, staring each of them down. These well-educated, well-groomed, well-mannered beacons of research and learning, with their fancy silverware, their twelve forks, their purple lettuce! Ha ha! Finally, finally the joke was on them. And looking at how sad and miserable they all seemed, taking heartbroken sips of their plain tap water or unsweetened iced tea, I suddenly felt fine. I inhaled delicious bite after delicious bite, saying smarmy things like, "You don't know what you're missing." And, of course, I wasn't just talking about the cheesecake; no, the cheesecake was just my classy stand-in for the lonely Diet Coke waiting under my chair. The Diet Coke that, in any other room, at any other lunch, would have been the envy of all the university's faculty.

Secret Ops: 7/31/07

2007-12-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

Lately, Heather has been trying to limit my Diet Coke intake. All of the morning news shows have her convinced that sugar is unhealthy, caffeine is unhealthy, aspartame and saccharine are unhealthy, carbonation is unhealthy, soda (by extension) is unhealthy, and that I'll get some sort of heart-disease/ obesity/ cancer/ foot-fungus hybrid illness from my Diet Coke habit. It doesn't matter that the facts that have convinced her of my imminent demise are constantly mixed and matched (Diet Coke contains no sugar, yet somehow she thinks I'll get fat and clog my arteries; Diet Coke uses the artificial sweetener aspartame, not saccharine, which has long been associated with cancer in laboratory animals, yet she still believes that my fate will be the same as all those long-dead rats), nor does it matter that she hears only thirty seconds of a five-minute news report (the rest of the coverage is obscured by the noise of her blow dryer). All that matters for Heather is that she hears terms associated with Diet Coke, any of them seemingly pulled from a word bank and coupled with "health risk," and suddenly her husband is as good as dead.

This is nothing new, of course. Back in college, she showed me an online report that suggested that my blood would turn to formaldehyde from so much Diet Coke (and which also suggested a gigantic FDA cover-up of the facts!). For a short while, I actually believed it to be true, but instead of curbing my soda consumption, it accelerated it, and I pictured myself living forever in perfect preservation, formaldehyde coursing through my veins. Hell, I'd make an awesome movie monster: ten times better than the Mummy!

So I've just come to accept that Diet Coke addiction will keep Heather on edge for much of our natural lives, and I've tried to devise ways to avoid quitting cold-turkey. For instance, I'll pick a single day of the week and I'll try to go most of the day without even a sip of soda, bragging to her in half-hour intervals about my accomplishment. "Look, Heather! I'm still just drinking Krystal Light!" (Krystal Light, by the way, also contains aspartame, but she doesn't seem to mind…possibly because I can't picture myself drinking Krystal Light by the gallon). Or, sometimes, I'll go on a gigantic Diet Coke binge (four sodas in a day) so that the next day will pale in comparison. Neither of these options forces me to quit drinking soda. Quite the opposite! I simply give the impression that I'm "trying."

I imagine that she does the same to me, except with purse or shoe purchases. These are the things that married couples do, these little charades to distract against the overwhelming truth that there are certain things about ourselves that we never changed when we took our vows, and probably won't change even when we have children or when we turn sixty.

This evening, Heather left the apartment after dinner and drove to the UCF campus to attend a fraternity and sorority advisors' meeting (I, of course, did not attend because my fraternity got booted from campus a few weeks ago). Treated with an evening to myself, my mind immediately started imagining the various scenarios for my free time…and, as usual, all those scenarios began with a Diet Coke. If I drink a 44-ouncer while she's not around, it's almost as if I never drank it at all.

The second she pulled out of the parking lot, I gathered my cell phone, wallet, and keys, and headed to my car. Never mind that I'd just gotten out of the shower and I was wearing only a pair of dirty jeans, a white undershirt with Barney's muddy paw prints dead-center, and a crazy head of towel-dried hair. I needed to make this a quick D. Coke trip in case the advisors' meeting let out early. And besides, I decided to just go to the Hess Mart down the street, a convenience store that seriously ranks among the worst I've ever visited in my life. Aside from the bumper-car-style parking lot (designed in an apparent effort to attract as many fender-benders as possible), the floors of the store are generally sticky and littered with crumpled paper, smushed candy bars, and dead creatures, and the soda station is an abysmal wreck of misplaced cups, spill stains, and slowly melting ice cubes on the counter. In addition, the store clerks seem to have no regard for the clientele; in my first visit to the Hess Mart ever, two clerks spent my entire five-minute stay speaking to one another in imitation slave voices: "Howdy, missah! Soda fo' ya? Don't whup me too hard, missah!" Since then, I've tried to get in an out as quickly as possible, while also preparing myself for the very worst in human behavior.

Tonight, looking like white trash myself (and therefore fitting in nicely at the Hess), I filled my Diet Coke cup to the brim, adjusted the lid, popped my straw through the top in record time. I hurried toward the counter, wallet already in my hand, stopping only to take a sip of the soda and—

—suddenly a geyser of Diet Coke shot out of the lid! Out of the open space around the straw! And it couldn't simply have shot out and splashed against the disgusting tiled floor of the Hess, no, but instead shot out directly onto my white undershirt. A gigantic brown wet spot on my shirt, spreading outward, spreading outward, encompassing nearly my entire stomach now, the shirt matted to my skin underneath.

I turned left, turned right, searching for a napkin. But this was the Hess Mart, remember. The napkin dispensers were (appropriately) empty. Not that it would matter; the Diet Coke stain had settled in, and it wasn't going anywhere.

So reluctantly I joined the line at the counter, smoothing my shirt as I stood, just so everyone else around me would know that I had seen the giant stain on my stomach, that—yes—I knew it was there and there was nothing I could do. I paid, but the clerk took her time handing back my receipt, choosing to first compliment another customer on his sunglasses and then to watch something on the mini-television behind the counter for what seemed an excruciatingly long time. Finally I darted from the Hess Mart, knowing that anyone who saw me would probably imagine the Diet Coke stain to be anything but Diet Coke: only the worst substances are dark brown: chili, tobacco juice, poop.

And, just as I settled in behind the steering wheel, I saw the confused figure of my neighbor walking to his car…staring in my direction...squinting…staring at my shirt as if trying to form an opinion of what that brown wet mark was…"Poop," I'm sure he concluded. "Poop."

I pulled out of the parking lot, narrowly avoiding several other cars as they entered and exited the pumps, and I gassed it the whole way home without regard for the serious injuries—the accidents! the fiery crashes! the amputations and beheadings!—that might result from my reckless driving. One thing on my mind only. Gas it! Get home, quick! Take off this shirt, dispose of the stained evidence in the dirty clothes hamper and hope that Heather doesn't get home before I finish my 44-ouncer, hope that she doesn't notice my cough, my sneezing, my growth on the back of my neck, my steadily deteriorating health.