The Energy Drink Hoedown

ubjected myself to a grueling energy-drink marathon last week and am still only at 60% of my usual typing accuracy thanks to my shaking hands and this evidently-not-going-away-anytime-soon throb within the vitreous of my eyes — I mean just look at an excerpt of an entry I wrote while in the midst of the taste-tests: “99999999999999 33333 9999999999 33 99999 393” — then here come the hallucinated insects, the tunnel-vision, the blood trickling from every orifice including ones you might not even think of at first, like pores, and — sorry but I’ll just come right out and say it — pee-holes.

I’m tempted to blame the horrific taste of Red Bull on the fact that it’d been sitting in my refrigerator for almost two years because ’round about Labor Day Weekend ’01 I bought two cans to mix with some aqua vitae since that’s what all the rock stars were doing back then but if memory serves, which I bet it totally can’t in this instance, I made it through maybe half a can — these are petite cans, you know, which is a psychological marketing effect to trick you into thinking that you’re bigger and burlier than usual, i.e., the energy drink is already working its magic before you even crack it open — maybe half a can before saying: Look, I don’t care how energetic and drunk this makes me because drinking this filth is like sucking on dirty sweatsocks that’ve been soaked in hate and dead squirrel.

But following it up with Mountain Dew-branded Amp is what really jumpstarted my own private gotterdammerung with its flavor that at first made me think, distantly, of the Shirley Temples I enjoyed as a lad (a maybe ironic aside is that I was not allowed to have Roy Rogerses, which was the Coca-Cola-laced alternative to the Temple, because it would make me too hyper), said nostalgia being the last fleeting moment of happiness before Amp went to work on my guts and my brain, not energizing at all but enervating the shit out me, sucking my soul dry and spitting out the dry husk of my wracked and thrashed body, making me totally unable to be a team-player and on-message in a spectacularly mediocre meeting at work, my consciousness ghostly and effete until a co-worker handed me some kind of bacon-cheese-egg breakfast thing that made my heart seize up but at least brought me back from the abyss of madness and psycho-social paralysis.

SoBe’s Adrenaline Rush tasted sort of like Orangina and had no discernible effect aside from maybe making me even thirstier than I was before I drank it.