The Culture of Drink

As a student of human folly, I cannot ignore, without comment, the American obsession with drink. We've been told how necessary it is to hydrate ourselves, particularly in these days of hellish Texas heat, but the obsession goes beyond this.

I kid my wife (incessantly, she would say) about her obsession with walking out of a restaurant with a drink in hand. "Could I have a to-go tea," she will always ask. I realize that there is an inherent need to keep our tissues from dessicating by the occasional infusion of moisture, but we're beyond necessity. We once had a pianist at our church, and I use the term "pianist" in the loosest sense. She would walk in every Sunday, usually late, carrying a huge insulated mug of some carbonated beverage (probaby Diet Coke, given her girth). I've seen other people walking into church, and people walking into funerals, carrying bottles of water or soft drinks. The absurdity I see in these situations is that none of these activities are physically strenuous. None are necessarily thirst-creating. You'll never see a Gatorade commercial that says, "Going to a funeral? Going to church? Don't grieve because of your thirst. Quench your thirst, not the spirit. Gatorade. Is it in you?" Or how about this: "A long day of shopping can take it out of you. The mall is no place to be without PowerAde."

I like drinking, too. I just don't feel the compulsion to be doing it all the time. Right now, I have two half-finished cups of coffee on my desk. I also have a water bottle, which brings me to my next point...

Water. Who would have ever thought that drinking water, by the individual bottle, would be more costly per ounce than gasoline? Gasoline (at a rounded-off price of, let's say, $4/gallon) works out to be 3 1/8 cents per oz.. For a 20 oz. bottle, gasoline would cost roughly $0.62 instead of $1.50, which is about what you would pay for a 20 oz. bottle of water. How stupid is this? And all of this for a bottle of water which is probably tap water that is run through a filter to take out the city water taste. Me? I only drink spring water. I turn on the faucet, and it springs into my cup. One concession I have made at work is that I purchased a Brita filtering pitcher. City water here is atrocious and is in need of some help. At home, our water comes out of the ground, not out of the sewer, and it therefore doesn't taste nearly as bad.

The whole "I have to drink water constantly or I will die" mindset has caused other things, ridiculous things, to happen. I was in a big-box store the other day, the one symbolized with two concentric red circles. There was a water bottle I admired, the kind you fill up yourself from your own reverse osmosis tap so you don't get parched while you take the kids to soccer.  It was a nice aluminum bottle which appeared to have a plastic lining of some sort. Ten bucks. Ten bucks for a bottle that didn't even have any water in it yet. It was about a one liter bottle, so to fill it up with gas would have cost $1.04, still cheaper than a one-liter bottle of Ozarka.

If I'm out and about and find myself in a state where I'm about 99.9% parched, I go for a soft drink. Twenty-ounces of your sugar-infused drink of choice (or sugar-free, if that's your pref) seems to be a better value, no matter how bad it is for you. And it's mostly water anyway, but it's got other good things in there, like flavor and fizz. Sometimes, a sugar-infused, fizzy bev seems a bit heavy, so I go for a non-fizzy bev, like an Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey. You can get a big can of this, about a gallon, for $0.99--a bargain by any standard! And it's sweetened with Sue-Bee Honey--man, you can't get more natural than that! It's also co-sweetened with sugar, but that usually comes from corn, also natural. Aspartame? Not natural. Saccharine? Not natural. Sucralose?  Not natural either.

Then there's our nation's obsession with beer, particularly as it relates to sporting events, live or on television. However, I'm not qualified to discuss this, since I hate sports and I don't drink beer.

Food (or, actually, drink) for thought.

 

On Weblogging

Weblogging (sorry--I refuse to use the term "blog") is quite the phenomenon. Anyone can, absolutely for free, post their opinions and writings on the World Wide Web so that anyone on this old earth (and beyond) with Internet access can read their words. As if the Internet was not bloated with enough garbage before, it's now become sort of a Vanity Press Library of Congress, with countless self-published volumes, few of which would have ever been published were not someone else footing the bill for it. I fit that category. I've never been published in a reputable way, save a "Letter to the Editor" here and there. Those don't count, though, as they can also be allowed in print for the sole purpose of making you look stupid for saying such things. However, I don't do this (weblogging) because I think my opinions are weighty and that others would benefit from sitting at my feet and catching these pearls of wisdom on their tongues. I do it because I enjoy it. Xanga gives me a medium for writing for my benefit, yet at the same time puts the things I write out there in case anyone else can miraculously benefit from it. At the minimum, folks can read my posts and say, "Boy, I thought I was a bad writer!"

Actually, I don't think I'm that bad as a writer. I read over some of the things I've written and I, even if no one else does, enjoy reading what I've written. In my earlier years, I enjoyed writing and thought there could be no better existence than writing and having people pay you for it. In all humility, I've read a lot of other people's writing--people who write for a living--and I wonder to myself why I couldn't do that. It seems obvious that everyone who makes good money writing for a living ain't necessarily good at it. But writing for pay is quite a racket to break into, much like professional music. Many people have the technical skill and can string words/notes together in a way that is, technically, correct. The missing component is creativity. Just because something is original, just because you created it, doesn't necessarily mean it is something that others will enjoy reading or listening to.

On the other hand, those that try and fail are, in my opinion, to be lauded over those that either never try or put themselves in a position to criticize those who do try and yet yield less than desirable results. I'm sure I've quoted this before, but if so, it warrants repeating:

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."   ~  Theodore Roosevelt