Just a Taste, Man

I was once a raging coke fiend. Never did a day go by when I didn’t have my fix—I wouldn’t be surprised if I averaged an eight pack of 20 ounce sodas every 36 hours of so. These days I can be better described as a Diet Mountain Dew demi-fiend—not many who know me would voice disagreement when it comes to this. However, I still hold the reputation for consuming untold amounts of Coke and Diet Coke through the years. My extended family in Mexico routinely asks if I’m still drinking a lot of soda; it is claimed that soda consumption has gone down in my parents’ house since I moved out. I admit that it is rare when I don’t have some kind of carbonated drink on me. My coffee and tea consumption varies wildly, but the one constant is soda even if it has diminished with age (caffeine has begun to affect my sleep patterns if nothing else, so I now have a no soda after 7pm rule).

Sodas may seem straightforward—you buy them, pop them open, drink up to your heart’s content. What makes my relationship with sodas funny, though, is having lived in Mexico for a few years. You develop a few precautions before drinking a soda that are hilarious when you think about them, but they are required. Two of these apply to buying sodas that are bottled in glass, not plastic, and are obsolete since all sodas as bottled in plastic nowadays in Mexico:

• You almost always have to have empty bottles to take back in exchange for new drinks; you fill a bucket with the empty bottles, drag them to the store down the street, then buy the same amount of sodas for your bucket. As you may have guessed, there were no such things are packs of sodas; two liters were rare. It’s not essential to buy the same type of soda (say you have a Sprite bottle and want a 7-UP), but sometimes you’ll get a clerk who’s an ass and make you take the same kind of soda. Butthead—my grandmother doesn’t like Sprite as much as 7-UP, even you know that (it’s a small village—they know that).
• Fish around in the cooler for a soda that has just a touch of ice chips in it–soda con hielo, if you will.  It’s like having shaved ice in your drink.
• You can only do a cursory glance while at the store, but be sure to scan your soda in a well-lit area to make sure you don’t have any extra treats in your soda. I have come across cockroaches, phlegm, furry little pieces of different animals, and plastic in my sodas. Disgusting but strangely enough not a deterrent for anyone—you simply exchange the offending drink for an item-free soda. Of course, this doesn’t preclude the chance that the item-free soda you’re now enjoying was in the same batch as the cockroach or phlegm, but you ignore that little possibility.
• You have to be very careful when opening your soda. You’ll of course need a bottle opener; of course, the bottles are very fragile and given to breaking at the lip. The broken glass will invariably fall into your drink and you will not be able to have your soda. Empty the bottle and go to buy another one—they won’t exchange this because the breakage was your fault, fool.
• Once you’ve navigated all these perils, enjoy!

Additionally, there’s more than one way to consume your soda—a gimmick that children fall for hook, line and sinker (you can include me in this). Ready for it? Your pour your soda . . . into a sandwich bag and stick a straw in it. Yep, that’s it. Make sure it’s a bag that folds, not one that zips. You can sometimes tie the bag so that it doesn’t spill (much). Kids will sometimes ditch the straw, tie the bag, and bite a corner out of the bottom of the bag and drink the soda in less than a minute. Fun, eh?

Ah, sodas. Excuse me, I’m off to buy a Diet Mountain Dew.