7Up - Huh?

Because of the diet I'm on, I've learned to tolerate diet pop (or soda, depending on where you're from). I never really liked diet pop that much, and once, after drinking a two-liter of it, I had a pretty nasty reaction to the artificial sweetener. At least, I think I did.

But those days are behind me now as I belt down cans of diet Coke and, my favorite (because it doesn't have caffiene), 7Up. Today, while sitting in my office at 6:00 and wondering how in the hell I wound up with so much work to do in one day, my mind started to wander. Specifically, it wandered into that delightful little meadow where you think about really strange things. Some would argue that my mind is there most, if not all, of the time already; I'm sure it is, at least in part, but that's what the old internal censor is for.

Anyway, I started thinking about my Diet 7Up. I thought, "I like this stuff because it has no caffiene in it. I can drink it because it has no sugar in it. And yet, it tastes like something other than carbonated water. I wonder what is in this stuff?" So I turn the can over in my hand until I can see the ingredients list.

It was a little like taking a furtive peek into the pits of hell.

I'm no chemist - I was more worried about hitting on girls than balancing chemistry equations back in the tenth grade - but I recognize that certain prefixes, words, and suffixes, when attached, can sometimes form an evil and nasty whole.

After looking over my Diet 7Up, I'm still no more enlightened as to what exactly I'm drinking, but I can tell you this: these are materials created in a laboratory somewhere. They are not natural. The amount of chemical bullshit floating around in my body as I type... I really don't want to think about it. Because I know just enough from reading that asinine can so that my imagination will take over and go, "hey, fucknut, you don't know what that stuff is, but here's a list of what it could be," and then I'll spend the rest of the night feeling chemical bubbles floating around in my arteries.

I'm sure the fine folks at 7Up mean me no harm so long as I continue to drink their pop, but goddamn, I really have to wonder what some of that stuff is. There's one ingredient that's so long, it doesn't even fit on a single line of text, they have to hyphenate it halfway through. I do remember this much from chemistry: the longer the name, the more complicated it is. Gold = simple. Lysergic Acid Dyathalyde = much more complex. I think I spelled that right; I think I did a report on it in chemistry. It's hard to remember.

Hopefully, the memory of those words on that pop can will fade in time as well.