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Black Saturday

Today is the first day in almost 19 years that I will wake up and go to bed without having had a Diet Mountain Dew.

I've been painstakingly combing my memory for exceptions, and I don't think there is one. I drank it when I had the flu for two weeks. I made sure I had an ample supply with me fishing 40 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico (not too many convenience stores out there). I took it with me to the hospital when our children were born. There it was. There it always was. Almost 7,000 days in a row, more than 5,400 gallons consumed, more than $20,000 spent. I've known for more than two months that the dark day would come, and it's April 22, 2006.

Oh, the grand plan I had! When I wrote about my relatively late decision to hoard the previous formula, I said I wanted to cut my consumption rate by half so that my eight cases would last six weeks. "All it'll take is a little discipline," I said to myself. It's easy to think like that when you've just dropped $60 on eight cases of the good stuff. "That's a lot. I can make that last." Well, they're gone, and the calendar doesn't lie. In the end, I didn't cut my consumption rate at all. Why didn't I buy more? Why didn't I fill my pickup bed with it? Hindsight, 20/20, all that rot.

When I found myself at Costco this week, I thought I'd better check the soft drink aisle just in case. There they stood: three or four dozen cases of Tuned Up Taste, mocking me. "Yeah man, we ran that other stuff out of town at the behest of our corporate overlords." My only other option was Diet Coke, and I don't like Diet Coke nearly enough to buy it by the case, so I left with just the dog food and a turkey sandwich. I did see cases of regular Sun-drop for sale, but no diet. Maybe I'll talk to the manager next time I'm in.

So our crisis just got 100% real for me. Now I'm with those of you who have already been without it for weeks. As we've discussed at length, there is not a wholly acceptable substitute available, but I've reviewed some of the drinks you might skip around with while we're waiting for the previous formula to return. Good luck.

(And strictly speaking I'm really not out of the previous formula. I saved one for my shelf in my study.) What an absurd place in which we're standing—a place in which an ordinary can of diet soda is a curio! What wanton nonsense is this, PepsiCo? Bring back goodness and normalcy! Restore the previous formula!

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