On top of which, there’s never been so much to stay awake for! The internet! Josh! Facebook is hell of calling my name at 11 o’clock every night. People have statuses: attention must be paid. Some dudes are posting covers of Red House Painters songs to YouTube: I need to be there to offer discouragement. Messrs Kottke and Gruber are posting links, for real, like EVERY DAY. What happens if I don’t click on them? I don’t want to find out, and neither do you. It’s a wonder I get any sleep at all. I should be lauded.

My primary caffeinatory vehicle remains coffee. I find that one cup a day is about all the gut can manage, but that’s enough to get me through most of the morning. Awesome! Great job everyone, let’s go home. But what’s this? There’s more to the day, turns out. Is Google to blame, somehow?

Back in the days I would reach to Red Bull for the assist, but it’s a tongue-stab of a flavor, best left to youthful risk-embracers. Then I think I was on Rock Star for a while? Did I review it? Quick check of the archive says Negatory, so I guess that period of my life can’t truly be said to exist.

So it’s been with great interest that I’ve turned to the more juiced-out energy drinks lately. Don’t the silver foxes at Metamucil recommend mixers for their fine product? Why should my taurine, glucose, guarana, ginseng, niacinamide, l-carnitine, inositol, and glucuronolactone arrive any differently.

I’ve had all the versions of juice-infused Monster recently. I can’t precisely recall which one was which and I’m 90% sure it won’t end up mattering, at least on this plane of existence. One is sort of orange drink-y? I think? One has pineapple, definitely. One is purple. I think I liked that one the least. The other one, I don’t know. I want to say reddish? But more like the idea of red than the flavor. The marketing concept. Anyways.

The point is I’m here, awake. Updating my website. Participating in the online dialogue. Generating content. Offering all of you who are still sitting in front of your monitors at this late hour justification for doing so. I am now free of my obligations for the evening; who knows where the internet will take me next. My bed is cold but my laptop is warm. There’s a Netflix queue to reorganize. There are female celebrities struggling to retain some shred of dignity as they emerge from cars. There is music to steal from bands I wouldn’t want in my house, and high-poly photographs of meals I’m not interested in eating. I’m up, let’s freaking do this.

So this is happening.

It’s interesting that Pepsi is trying to reinvent their look by pushing it in new and different directions, whereas Coke seems to be simplifying and looking backward. What does it all mean, I wonder.

In this way, John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker, is able to recognize Liev Schreiber’s bravura performance in Cymbeline for what it is: nakedly emotional, a phrase that has nothing to do with the fact that Lahr received an “Off-Broadway Obie” from his 19 year-old P.A. in the back row during the third act.

Or, to put it in language a bit closer to your vernacular: when we used to drink Country Kwencher Boone’s Farm every Friday night down in your mom’s basement, the fact that your older brother kept calling me a fag for not agreeing to arm wrestle him in no way colored my ability to cherish the time you and I spent together.

The truly accurate review is the product of a culture of calipers and hairnets: delimit the stimuli and disregard outlier emotions. Equality in pursuit of objectivity. Every new experience approached as though it were a Sanitaco. I believe there is value in the cultivation of this ability, and I’m glad there are people who do it, but I don’t think I need to tell you I have no interest in living my life that way.

Josh, I’ve been really stressed and sad lately. I know you could tell from my last post, and the sob-choked messages I leave on your voicemail every night around 2 AM, which you do not return, but I know that’s just your way of helping me remain strong by teaching me to lower my expectations.

So the other night, after another long day of being stressed about work and the environment and the political and economic situations and the near-constant threat of zombie attack, we decided to skip our family’s normal evening routine, and threw everyone in the car for a trip to Sonic.

It was suddenly fall in the Midwest, and it was one of those evenings where the setting sun was so immense and red that you can’t help but realize that we are hurtling through space. We got to Sonic, pulled in and ordered, and the car hop waitron brought out our drinks. I of course got to do my thing where I taste one sip of whatever everyone else in the car has ordered, despite their objections. This is not hegemony; it is science. As I vowed to you when we first started this site, I am a bevpert first, a decent human being second.

Like I mentioned up above, I ordered the Peanut Butter Fudge shake. You know, as well as anyone, my thing about dairy, but careful application of sugar and dairy can greatly dull the pain of living. Penicillin is made of mold, and sometimes the things that are best for us are the things that are worst for us.

So I sat there in the car with my family at the Sonic in the cornfields, and we all had our drinks, and the sky grew dark and the neon lights blinked on. There were other families there, talking and laughing. We had the windows open, and there was a sense that this would be one of the last warm nights of the season. We watched the stars and planets coming out over the fields, and the trains hurtling past on their way to the cities.

And here is my review: everything about that evening was amazing, and just exactly what I needed from the universe that day. And I wished everyone I loved could experience this, in whatever way would hold the most meaning for them: this overwhelming appreciation for being in a certain place, at a perfect moment, with the people who are most important in your life. I hope this happens for you, if it hasn’t already. It was amazing. I can’t tell you. It was amazing.