drink if you dare, or if you want to get high

this morning i sat down to a healthy breakfast of super strong coffee and a (small) handful of jelly bellys to read the local paper. now this rag has been duly mocked for its ridiculous headlines, but every once in a while i will spot something that really hits home to me.

today is was this article. i'll spare you from having to read it, the link is there more to prove i'm not making this up. apparently there were almost 20,000 cases of red bull confiscated because they contained cocaine. now it all makes sense.

as my affinity for coffee may lead you to correctly surmise, i got hooked on caffeine early in my youth. recently i was reading over at children of the 90s about surge, but i have to say i never got into that one. jolt was my gateway drug of choice.

i never did (and still don't) enjoy soda in general because i found the syrupy sweetness only made me more thirsty. but i would down a can of jolt in no time just to get the shakes that i craved so much from caffeine overdose.

once i discovered the magical powers that coffee had for my awful hangover that lasted from when i was nineteen to about twenty four, i was fully dependent. i've never gone back to energy drinks and i can't say i miss them. b, on the other hand, will relish the high that nothing else can bring like a red bull and vodka to an empty stomach.

i knew something had to be unnatural about this combo when the sweet, charming man i knew and loved turned into a raging ball of hate after only about eight large drinks. unfortunately for me, the concert we were attempting to see offered only bud, bud light, and red bull and vodkas. being the beer snob that i am, and unable to handle any liquor whatsoever, i was sullenly sober.

the more b drank, the more i counted down the minutes until we were escorted out of the concert. thanks a lot modest mouse, you sounded great from fucking outside. so as we stood in the street in front of the venue, b's apology came to me in the form of him offering up suicide as a way to garner my forgiveness.

'i'll fucking kill myself for you, is that what you want? look, i'll kill myself on this bus!!' he screamed as he attempted to run into the front end of a parked bus. after he was sure that i was thoroughly impressed with his brazen bus-suicide, he allowed me to put him in the car and drive home.

to this day, i will protest loudly if he even looks in the general direction of a stash of red bull. and now, this very morning, i am vindicated. so what the coke was found in china, it still could end up in american red bull somehow, and for that i feel justified in breaking b's habit. i'm not a nagging wife, i'm a champion of heart health and savior of parked buses in the greater ny metro area.

and now that it's nearly 10 am, i need to go make another pot of coffee for my late morning fix.