Death by Soda

I am so annoyed. My husband is on a business trip in New York City. He wanted me to go with him, since he had a perfectly nice hotel room in mid-town paid for by the client. I could have looked up some old friends and taken in a few of the sights, maybe a museum or two. But I declined, since that ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces was to go into effect today. What a drag--I'd have to keep going back to get more Cokes or Slurpees or Sprites or whatever, and that seemed like a big time waster. Then I read in today's paper that the ban was overturned by a New York state supreme court justice. So I could have had one of those jumbo buckets of sludge after all!

Mayor Bloomberg is totally pissed too. "People are dying every day," he said at a news conference last night. "This is not a joke. This is about real lives." Tell me about it. Now I'm stuck here in boring Maine when I could have been downing large sodas all over the Big Apple. And Bloomberg is wrong, by the way, "people" are not dying--one person died, a lady in New Zealand, and that was back in 2010. The 30-year-old woman suffered a heart attack that was attributed to her habit of drinking more than two gallons of Coke a day, which she did for a really long time. At the time of her death she had already lost most of her teeth, and no doubt all of her sense of humor, so she would not have enjoyed this blog post at all, since I'm just kidding; I actually think soda is gross and disgusting and that Coca-Cola is made by the Devil.

I have never personally consumed a Coke, although I may have swallowed a few sips of it to cure nausea when I was a child; we kept a bottle in the cupboard, flat and warm, for that very reason. All sodas were forbidden in our house when I was growing up. It might have been a kosher thing. Whatever the reason, we drank seltzer only, a 12-bottle case of which was delivered each week by--who else?--the Seltzer Man. He came without fail, just like the Milk Man and the guy who brought the eggs, who at least had a name: it was Artie the Egg Man. I think Artie and my mother were fooling around, but that's another story for another time. In her later years my mother got hooked on Fresca, a carbonated beverage that tasted like windshield wiper fluid with a dash of lime. Or lemon, those two are pretty close. She drank it often, and I'm pretty sure that's how she got Alzheimer's.