Burnt by Midnight Oil, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #195 | @MDWorld

September 4, 2012 Arthur Tebbel 1 Comment

Dear Art,
How you like me now?
-Caffeine

Caffeine,
We used to be something special, man.  I loved you.  I could hang out with you up to eight times a day when I was a teenager.  You came in big twenty ounce bottles of diet soda and I had no problem with that at all.  I could pound one of those immediately before bed and sleep all night.  It was a lot of fun.  It’s unfortunate that we seem to have grown apart.

I intended to write about the Democratic National Convention this week; about my extreme political fatigue and how little I wanted to sit through three more days of political speeches.  There were two big problems with that: it’s too easy a problem to fix if you get right down to it (watch something else this week) and I didn’t get any damn sleep last night because I had a diet coke at 9pm.  9pm!  This wasn’t a black coffee or a espresso or anything like that just a diet soda.

The real lesson I got out of this (because the idea that I might be getting old and becoming more sensitive to stimulants is completely out of the question) is that maybe Michael Bloomberg has a point.  My soda was a medium at an AMC Theater up in Burbank.  That medium was certainly bigger than it was when I was a kid and is probably bigger than any soda you can get at the far superior Arclight chain of theaters.  Smalls aren’t really smaller.  I’m not actually advocating for a legal limit on the size of the cups or anything but I would thrilled with a spectrum that encompassed more varieties of size.  Choice is a two way street or something, I don’t know I would be a more persuasive rhetorician if I’d gotten some damn sleep.

We can probably still hang out caffeine.  There are times when I still want you around like when I’m sleepy but need to get work done or to get myself to the gym when I’m feeling sluggish or even to recover in the morning from a night spent awake because of your awful effects.  Maybe we just need to be careful how we go about doing this because you’re practically like pointing a loaded gun at my sleep schedule.  We could use some time apart.  It’s not you it’s me.

But seriously political conventions in back-to-back weeks ought to be against the law.  It’s just such a horrible disruptive thing for the news cycle.  Instead of actual news it’s coverage of overly scripted pageants.  You just end up rooting for someone going nuts like Eastwood and that sure as hell won’t happen the week after.  Give a weekly columnist a break guys.  Ok, that’s enough caffeine is the bad guy here.