Reliving My Coke Addiction and How Science is Just Killin’ Me
Catch Her in the Wry wrote about her addiction to Coke and longed for the good old days when Coke came from a coffin.
where you pulled out the bottle, dripping with condensation, popped the cap on the built-in opener, and took a swig on a hot summer day. There was nothing better than the burn of that first sip.
Yup. Me too. Except for the addition part. I have cut way back on Coke and tea because they stain my teeth so bad. I’ve gone to the white drinks: Sierra Mist and 7up or the yellow drinks: Mello-yello and Mountain Dew.
All diet drinks of course (more on that later.)
My dad had a Coke machine at the mill and it was my job to keep it filled.
It looked like this, but I’m pretty sure it was 5 cents back in the ’50s. It dispensed those little green bottles of addiction via a giant wheel. Pushing the lever rotates the wheel and the bottle appears behind the little door-in-the-door. The design was pretty ingenious because the holes were offset enough that the second bottle was insight but not within grasp.
I always kept a dozen or so bottles in the very bottom so that when I refilled it, a hot Coke would never be sold. Coke – only Coke – was in the machine.
I stacked crates of empties somewhere else for The Coke Guy to pickup. Sometimes I pee’d in the bottle just to be ornery.
Coke also was part of my after school routine. The school bus stopped in front of Shenefield’s Standard gas station. Very similar to Wally’s in Mayberry. There even was a pit in the back of the station where a car could drive over so the mechanic could climb down a ladder to do service.
Lloyd’s dad sold 16 ounce bottles of Coke. He would open them and hand them across the display case of cigarettes, cigarette papers, chewing tobacco, cigarette lighters, cigars, Sen-sens, and other traveler essentials.
We would chug about half the bottle and then burp our way out the door.
He put in a coffin type cooler and we could shove in our coins and help ourselves to the smaller and more expensive Coke.
When the neighborhood gang could stay out later, we would ride our bikes down to the truck repair place that had a vertical pop machine that was outdoors.
With a glass and bottle opener in hand, we would pop the tops and release the bounty within to flow into our glasses. The only disadvantage was there would only be two rows of Cokes. That meant in our gang of four, the first two to arrive in the dark of night would get the Coke. The other two would get Royal Crown.
Of course, we drained and drank all the bottles – even the Hires Root Beer and Faygo Orange.
Damn, we were a devious bunch of punks.
Diet Drinks
I learned today that half my health problems may be because I did the “right thing” and switched to diet Coke and diet gum and diet tea…
- Headaches,
- Hearing Loss, (check)
- Anxiety attacks,
- Loss of taste, (check)
- Joint Pain, (check)
- Vertigo,
- Tinnitus, (check)
- Irritability, (check)
- Dizziness,
- Muscle spasms,
- Rashes,
- Depression,
- Fatigue,
- Seizures,
- Dizziness,
- Tachycardia,
- Insomnia,
- Breathing difficulties
K8 has a scary post about the horrible side-effects of artificial sweetener.
Crisps, diet (‘zero’) drinks, chewing gum, diet yoghurts, artificial sweeteners, breakfast cereals, aspartame, aspartame, aspartame. It’s in sugar-free children’s medications, in a bid to prevent tooth-rot. It’s in 1200 of the products you consume, and it’s very slowly mucking up our genetics and making us say things like… ‘isn’t it funny how people are dropping like flies with cancer these days?’
Ignorance is bliss.
Thank you for reading.
Now forget about it and have a Coke and a smile.
Buy the way did we ever play football in your yard across from Louie’s?
I just felt like I saw a ghost, goose bumps all over.
I can’t tell you how many times I spent at Louie”s Standard Station, and Hortense fixed breakfast for Lloyd and me. I was about 3yrs old when I first remember being there
You see Lioyd’s mom was my dads sister, this is bizarre.
By the way they also had Pepsi, but coke was always my favorite. Please respond and let me know who this is I have an idea but not sure
@Ross: That’s what is killing me: sugar means calories means more weight = killed. Aspartame means less calories but brain fried = dead.
@K8: (for some reason I have the damnest time typing K8, so you may be k* or K* or k8 from now on) Yeah, I googled it and followed the link because I know you can be cackaloo sometimes. Freaked me out.
The symptoms I listed on me blog are only roughly a third of the entire list I found on teh interwebs.
If you take the reliability of the internet with a BIG pinch of salt, you still end up with a heck of a list!
I miss chewing gum 🙁 Back to Hubba Bubba it is, in its sugary goodness.
I did the switch to the diet drinks some years ago and thought I was doing the right thing. I put up with the taste for the good of my health I thought. My brother though was a Coke addict, like about 2 x 2 litre bottles per day, so he switched to the diet versions as well. He gave up smoking also and looked forward to better health, as his doctor had been urging him for years. He was in his early 50’s when he did this.
When around 55 he got very ill and was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and sadly passed away a few months before his 57th birthday.
He was the sort of person to look into what was caused things and loved to research. As the MND progressed he was confined to home and a wheelchair as got right into researching what was happening to him.
Along the way, he looked at the effects of aspartame on the body and shared it with me. I did my own research and was shocked at the range of issues aspartame was being blamed for.
Just Google things like “aspartame” and “nutrasweet” and see some of the things that come up with – all the stuff the mainstream press is too scared to print because of the advertising dollars they stand to loose as the Nutrasweet brand is in so many main stream products.
I made up my mind it was better to have an indulgence in a full sugar Coke once or twice a week as the sugar was probably less harmful to me than whatever chemicals are in the diet drinks.
How is it that I am the only one to comment on this?
I mean, god, just the age hit opps alone!
Dude, what are you like, 150 years old?
We have a coke machine like that, but no turn-y thingy.
And seriously — you really lived in a town that had a little store like that? Was it 1867? Are you a vampire? Werewolf? Some other type of immortal?
I don’t drink any diet drinks. The only artificial sweetener I use is sweet and low in my coffee. I do deign to drink dark colas though, but you won’t find me drinking a Pepsi. I would rather die of thirst first.
🙂
@Absurdist: Dunno… not yet…yes…the car had been invented… Dorian Grey!