Ode to Diet Mountain Dew
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 11:39AM 
I’m not a coffee drinker. When I turned twelve, I remember sitting at the kitchen table at breakfast time and my dad said to me, “You’re getting to be a young man, you want to try a cup of coffee?”
Up to this point my beverage of choice for the a.m. was grape juice. I didn’t and still never drink milk because when I was around four, my brother Tom told me that milk came from a cow’s stomach and I refused to drink it, despite my parents trying to force that crap down my throat. My mom finally took me to the doctor and the doctor said as long as I ate things like cheese and ice cream I should be fine. I liked cheese, I liked ice cream, so the dreaded white beverage never passed through my lips again.
But anyway, I digress, as I so often do. Getting back to that fateful day, I felt good my dad was acknowledging my maturity and I told him I’d love to try coffee. I just told him not to put any milk in it.
My dad brought me over a cup, told me to let it cool and minutes later I took a sip of this strange, dark-colored elixir that grownups couldn’t get through the morning without. I had it in my mouth about two seconds and ran over to the kitchen sink and spat it out.
“That stuff is gross,” I told my dad while wiping my mouth off.
My dad just laughed and said I’d acquire a taste for it later. But I can be stubborn when it comes to my taste buds and I vowed never to drink that vile fluid again and I never have.
I stuck with grape juice till my freshman year of high school. That’s when I started drinking beer, mainly on the weekends. I’d wake up with cotton mouth and a hangover and started drinking Tab (we always had diet soft drinks in my house) after I discovered the carbonation helped the cotton mouth and the caffeine helped the hangover. In 1982 I switched over to diet Coke and that was my morning drink for years.
I can’t tell you the shit I have taken through the years for not being a coffee drinker. A look of confused amazement always sweeps over someone’s face when I tell them I’ve only had one sip of coffee in my entire life. I always ask them, “Did you like it the first time you tried it?” And the answer is almost always, “Well, no, I acquired a taste for it.” Which I just do not understand at all. Maybe if you drank goat saliva every day for a month that shit would taste fine as wine in the summertime, but I don’t think I’ll be trying it anytime soon.
I’ve also had people counter with, “Well I bet you didn’t like beer the first time you drank it either.” And no, I didn’t. But I did discover that if you drank enough beer, you not only acquired a taste for it, you also got fucked up out of your gourd. You drink too much coffee and you just get jittery and weird, like Floyd the Barber on crack.
So for decades I would greet every morning with a few glasses of diet Coke. Then about three years ago, I woke up, realized I was out of diet Coke and dragged my razzled, frazzled, hungover, Chinese-eyed self to the Duane Reade on 14th Street. I slogged in and headed straight to the soft drink aisle and found the diet Coke. But next to that I gazed upon a lovely vision: A two liter green bottle of diet Mountain Dew. Remember how in the Monkees when Davy would fall in love his eyes would get all twinkly, that’s what happened to me at that moment.
It seemed to be calling out to me: “Take me, Marty, wrap your lips around me and drink me down.” I grabbed the bottle, came home poured it over ice and it was then that I realized I had discovered the nectar of the gods!
I’ve drank diet Mountain Dew almost every morning since. I’m drinking it right now and I thought I would post an ode, to my sweet (albeit sugar free) diet Mountain Dew!
An Ode to Diet Mountain Dew
By Marty Wombacher
Oh diet Mountain Dew,
I love you!
I love you for your caffeine,
I love you because you are green,
I even love Martin Sheen.
Especially in Apocalypse Now!
I also liked him in that one movie
With Sissy Spacek where they
Drive all over, killing anyone in
Their path. I can’t think of the name
Of it, but it was really a fucking good movie!
I never have seen the West Wing though.
I have seen about ten minutes of
His son Charlie’s show, Two and a Half Men,
And that show blows dinosaur chunks!
How does that get better ratings than 30 Rock?
Sheesh!
Anyway, getting back to you,
My sweet (albeit sugar free) diet Mountain Dew,
I love you,
I truly Dew!
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Reader Comments (2)
Amen to that, though I just read that drinking two cups of coffee a day is healthy and can improve brain function and decrease cancer risk so I started drinking coffee just today!
At work this morning before my Executive Committee meeting I went back to the banquet hallway (where our banquet associates prepare the banquet breaks) and I poured myself a very large styrofoam cup of java and I must say it was good and really kept me alert for the meeting. I have found that Diet Dew perks me up but only temporarily.
you should send that to fiona apple and see if she records it!