Owlspotting

This story is about the randomness of life.

It began Tuesday night, when Martha McPhee’s heart-breaking book “L’America” reminded me of how our choices open us up to unforeseen events, which will—when the lights go off—define our life. Beth and Cesare met because their seemingly inconsequential decisions brought them to the coast of Greece at the same time. Choices about who they wanted and/or had to be eventually kept them apart (Beth was American, Cesare was Italian), but they never forgot. They, like all of us, were “ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything.”

This is that kind of story.

Late Saturday afternoon, panic began creeping in. I was going to be alone that night and that didn’t sit well with me. Especially not after spending Friday night in the company of the Boston hipster establishment, sipping tall-boy PBRs, and using the wrongest pickup conversation topics January has seen.

Eventually, I decided to suck it up, spend Saturday night at home, and crawl into bed with a book. Not a bad idea, since it’s finally warm in my room after I isolated a leaky window using double sided tape and a plastic sheet—crafty and homelessy at the same time. I decided it was time to read Paul Auster’s “The Brooklyn Follies” and four hours later I welcomed midnight by finishing it and nodding in approval at my decision to read it. The book was also about chances, randomness, love (though less personal and more directed to humankind), the stupidity of men, and about never underestimating the power of surprise this thing called life holds. When Nathan Glass, the narrator of this tale, shows up to his surprise 60th birthday party, he wisely proclaims (quoting a Mets manager): “There comes a time in everyone’s life, and I had plenty of them.”

This made roll around in laughter. My good friend Adi sometimes uses the first part of that sentence and I knew I never quite found the perfect ending to it. Now I had it.

But this story, while about randomness, is not about Adi or about parties. It’s about my mouth—sort of.

I turned off the light ready for sleep and that’s when I heard my landlord/roommate return home with her date (both of them in their mid to late 40s). They were laughing and being noisy, which was rare. Was that spanking I heard? And what about the ripping noise? Are they peeling wallpaper? At 1 AM? And what’s with the pounding? Are they hammering? Are they changing the art on the walls? That sounds like too many new nails. Are they hanging a shower curtain across the living room?

Needless to say I fell asleep in a state of utter confusion. It wasn’t enough that Paul Auster made me think of what to do with my life, but now I was also stuck with the mystery of the deep night noises.

I woke up late. 10 AM. Very unlike me. Still, I felt good. My mind was sharp, and the room was still warm. This was going to be a good Sunday. I dragged myself slowly to the kitchen, and then I saw it.

An axe was on the floor, in the middle of the living room. So was half of a big ass log (I live in the city, not in the woods!) and debris all around it. I looked at the fireplace and saw another big ass log was lying there bored as shit, smoking itself out. In the three months I’ve lived here the fireplace has been used for storage, but some kind of “spontaneous things to do” list must have told my landlord to chop wood at 1 AM and get it going. As simple as that I had solved the mystery of the noise, which only made the omelet and toast taste better.

I then rushed off to the gym, where just a few days earlier—the same day I finished “L’America”—I found out I weighed less than I expected and decided I should diversify my diet of cereal, eggs and yoghurt (and the occasional vodka tonics).

After the gym I stopped at the grocery store to buy detergent, but I didn’t have enough money for my trusty Tide. But I did have enough for a medium non-fat latte (which I picked up at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop), and then walked home to the beat of Dr. Alban’s early 1990s hit “It’s my life.” The latter was hot and a pleasure to hold in the friggin’ cold. But it was sunny outside so I didn’t care about the cold. Life was good. In a few hours, the Saints would face the Bears for a place in the Super Bowl and that gave me goose bumps (I’m buying a Drew Brees) jersey if the Saints make it there). The mailbox hid the last issue of Wired, as well as the my first New Yorker in a while (after reading two great essays on literature by Orhan Pamuk and Milan Kundera I had decided it was time to subscribe again). This was a great Sunday.

But this story is about what happened after I climbed the stairs to my second floor apartment and opened the door.

My landlord apologized for the wood chopping and the mess, and I said I hadn’t heard a thing. It was no big deal and I like the occasional mystery. But as I started down the hallway to my room, the toilet flushed and the man walked out of the bathroom. With foam in the corners of his mouth, he was vigorously brushing his teeth using a white toothbrush with blue rubber grip.

MY TOOTHBRUSH!

This is a story about returning home, coffee in hand, smile firmly planted on your face and finding a man in his late 40s, forcefully working the inside and outside of his teeth with your toothbrush. And for all you know, this probably wasn’t the first time he did it.

I am not one to be easily grossed out. I have let women use my toothbrush, and I have used the toothbrushes of others. I ate food of the floor. I ate candy and snacks that I found inside the sofa. I bought and worn second-hand underwear. I sat on dubious toilets. I ate my boogers, grass, paper and drank oil (some of these were done unintentionally). I even spent the better part of an hour sniffing somebody to figure out where a certain funky odor was coming from (to my surprise, it was her belly button).

But seeing this man with my toothbrush in his mouth was too much. I imagined he had used the last time he was here as well. Maybe he’s been using it since Christmas. Or earlier. Maybe we’ve both been doing the same brush for a while, utterly oblivious of its duplicity. This was just too much. Not only do I not know this man, but the thought of brushing my teeth with the same toothbrush he used made me feel I tasted the 1970s and 1980s in rapid succession. I had contemporary American history in my mouth. Decades of it. I brushed my left side with the Reagan years. The left maybe with a failed marriage. Certainly with my landlord. Maybe with one of those dry-mouth hangovers. The memories of some nasty colds in the 1990s. Who the hell knows?

There is only so much history I’m willing to stick and hold inside my mouth. I’m sensitive like that.

I took in a deep breath and quickly said a mental goodbye to the toothbrush. I grabbed my wallet and rushed out to get a new one, along with the detergent I previously had no money for. As I walked out I realized that if I had had enough money for the detergent earlier, the time I would have spent with the cashier would have made me miss the toothbrush episode. It would have negated me the truth about what I put in my mouth.

Life is random my friends. And what you put into your mouth matters. My new toothbrush will now be located in my room.

* Post written to the sounds of The Umbrellas and stellastarr*.

The Romanian newspaper “Cotidianul” published an article today about what it called “Journalism 2.0,” a clever play on the Web 2.0 idea. The premise of the piece is that traditional media and citizen media are about to enter into an all out turf-war. The author, Cosmin Popan, says it’s a conflict between “media with a name and a reputation to defend and alternative media which evolve and grow in vigor and prestige, precisely because they shunned a series of traditional journalism rules.”

The question of what will happen to traditional media in the infomation age is on every journalist’s mind. It’s been a hot topic in the US since the 2004 elections and it’ll continue to be so for a while. I have been to a series of newsrooms (big and small) where this was discussed and there is a lot of fear, but also a lot of hope. So, yes, this subject continues to be news as the world comes to term with the idea that citizens can threaten establishment media.

But when this debate is applied to Romania media, I can’t help but shake my head.

As Bradut well pointed out in his blog, citizen media (if that’s how we wanna call this), is not a revolution but an evolution. In countries with an established media system and established values like the US, traditional press and this next journalism will find a middle ground and will complement each other. Traditional media–newspapers most of all–remain the king of information gathering. But to survive, they’ll need to adapt and reach their audience by using the new forms available to them, as well as by involving the public more and giving up the idea of being gatekeepers (gatekeepers for what when there is no fence anymore?).

But in Romania there is little established professional media to respect. Unfortunately, professional journalism has been developing strongly only in the past few years, and it’s already seeing itself under threat from the new forms of information dissemination. Moreover, even if most mainstream Romanian journalism has dropped its pontification-style, its editorializing and is embracing ideas like “you need three sources to verify an information,” it’s still eons away from being able to connect with the public.

The Romanian public does not know what they should expect from a journalist and they know even less about how the media functions. Not to mention that most of everything I read is dull, stale and disconnected from the life of the citizen. But blogs are not doing any better (although I am happy my prediction proved true and that 2006 was the year when they took off heavily in Romania)

So my problem with hailing Romanian bloggers as the salvation of Romanian journalism (or at least a serious threat to it) is that we’re comparing apples and oranges. Good journalism, great writing and great reporting is what anybody–no matter the medium they operate in–would recognize as valuable. But we have minuscule amounts of all of those in Romania. So who cares about blogs v. newspapers when hardly anyone (compared to the citizenship at large) makes use of any of them?

My point is that we should learn to do it right before we figure it out what platform to deliver it on.

I am currently reading a series of books on nostalgia for what I hope will be a news story. On my way to the news, I’m finding some great nuggets of wisdom in books like Svetlana Boym‘s “Future of Nostalgia.” Here is one on how people from Eastern and Central Europe (who in the days before the Iron Curtain fell dreamt of the West and its openness) learn that their capitalist brothers are just as willing to divide people into various categories.

Boym quotes Dubravka Ugresic talking about her experience of being in Amsterdam with a Croatian passport:

“My problem is of a different nature,” writes Ugresic. “My problem consists in the fact that I am not and do not wish to be different. My difference and my identity are doggedly determined by others. Those at home and there outside.”

Boym continues:

Thus the border crossing to the West reinforces identity politics that one hoped to escape. Recognition of difference results in a nonrecognition of communality, of the other’s aspiration to be treated as an individual, not a member of a blood group or a nation state. (…) The Easterners end up being the most consistent liberals–not only political liberals but also existential and aesthetic ones. While writing about memory, East Central European writers refute the idea that a national community or a nation-state is the sole treasurer of memories.

I know Eastern and Central Europeans are far from this ideal description (we are plenty racist and well schooled in identity politics), but I quote it because it aptly reflects what I often felt in America. Trying to join in on conversations about the American present of politics, sports and entertainment, I was frequently labeled as “the Romanian,” some guy processing reality through his Romanian-self. I know this was done mostly out of courtesy, as if recognizing my origins would flatter me.

It didn’t flatter me, and it occasionally annoyed me (I did rant on similar issues before). I did not want to always be “the other,” I just wanted to be one of many. But this equality rarelly works well in practice, does it?

Books: I stepped out to a cafe in my neighborhood to read Calvin Trillin’s “About Alice.” The book is a tender 78-page remembrance of his wife, who died in 2001. The book was originally a New Yorker essay I had read back in March, but I wanted to own it bound between covers because of its simplicity and sincerity. Calvin loved Alice and he doesn’t use hyperbole to show it.

When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York—a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn’t, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Music: Boston’s Dear Leader. Their record “The Alarmist” is a straight forward rock record, but the coarse groans of their front-man makes it a worthy ride.

Television: The NFL Wild Card weekend. Yes, I am a sucker for American football, and the last quarter of the Dallas – Seattle game only reinforced this guilty pleasure.

Movies: “Notes on a Scandal.” Yes, Judy Dench is always unbelievably good, but who knew Cate Blanchett, who has played an elf queen and a slain journalist in her career, could be so arousing as an upper-middle class tormented school teacher?

An American friend I met recently in Boston told me a story last night about a trip she took to Romania in 2004. Like other trips you might have heard of from foreigners, this one involved stops in Bucharest, Sinaia and Sighisoara. But the best part came when she checked into a Poiana Brasov hotel and decided to get the $8 massage (good deal, she thought).

I don’t want to rob her of the flow of the story, so I’ll just rush through the details. The massage delivery-man was named Romeo. She pronounced it as in “Romeo and Juliet,” which had more cuteness to it than the actual Romanian pronunciation (Ro-Meh-oh), which made me think of a Romeo in my old neighborhood who was the only one we knew growing up that had been in jail. So this Romeo asked her to take her clothes off (no towel was offered as you see in movies) and then insisted she remove her underwear (she refused). So he massages her back (perfect rhythm and pressure) and then asks her to turn around (remember, no towel).

She is not sure she wants to do it but thinks: “Hey, this must be how Romanian massages go.” She commits to the experience and by the time it’s all said and done she had gotten her breasts thoroughly massaged as well. She has been praising this Romanian massage ever since and last night asked me if it’s common practice.

I said it was the first time I ever heard of a “Romanian massage.” I also can’t remember the last time I massaged a stranger’s breasts and said it was a “Romanian massage.” But maybe I should use that more often, as the lesson of this story could be that one’s desire to touch breasts has better chances of coming true if encapsulated into the promise of a greater cultural experience.

I don’t enjoy the idea of ranking books the way I do music because it’d be too much like ranking my reaction to reading them. Which would be odd to say the least. Plus, the books I read in a particular year have not necessarily been released at the same time. In 2006, I made the discovery of a great trinity of writers, which have in common a whole bunch of awesomeness–if not generally roaring reviews

They are, in no particular order, Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated” and “”Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”), Gary Shteyngart (“The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Absurdistan”) and Benjamin Kunkel (“Indecision”). (Follow the links for more info on the authors and their books).

These young writers are hilarious, touching, but most of all, incredible storytellers and character builders. One might argue almost all the characters, including Foer’s 10-year-old Oskar, are on a quest to find themselves and their place in the world. In addition, Shteyngart’s Russian men are two of a kind in their dimwitted capacity to overcome the weirdest and deadliest of Central and Eastern Europe’s problems. And Kunkel’s Dwight, well, it’s hard to decide, dude.

Go here for some of my rants on Foer. Read on for some amazing excerpts from Shteyngart and Kunkel.

From “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”:

* Scene takes place in the early 1990s in a Prague club populated by the hip, family-financed American expats. They had just been insulted by music choice (“How Cleveland,” one said) and are now staring at some regular young American tourists in Ohio State tees, carrying backpacks:

“They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushkas like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus.”

* On picking a movie in early 1990s Prague:

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation’s sensitive people.

* American-Russian hero Vladimir pondering introducing his girlfriend to the Russian mobster he works for.

Vladimir imagined Morgan and the Groundhog breaking break at the weekly biznesmenski lunch, with its customary postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kasino girls going down on the Hog to the tune of ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me,” Gusev drunkenly railing against the Yid-Masonic global conspiracy.

* I reproduced a lovely segment featuring Vladimir and Morgan here.

From “Indecision”:

* Dwight tells Brigid about his desire to not be so indecisive anymore and take action.

“But a convert to what do you mean?”
“I don’t know. To action! I was tired of doing just maintenance work on my life. You know, put on clothes, do laundry. Eat food, brush teeth. Excrete waste. Go to work. Have or seek girlfriend—“

* Dwight on modern life.

In my experience when a person doesn’t know what to do with himself, he will check his email.

* One of Dwight’s friend mocks the hero’s recent conversion to decisiveness.

“So in Ecuador you had a midlife crisis,” Dan said. “Dwight, people don’t do this anymore. You don’t fly to Latin America, take psychedelic drugs, and find sexual liberation with some suntanned goddess of international socialism. Excuse me,” he said to Brigid. Then back to me: “Now is not thirty-five years ago.”

Whenever prompted on what language I like writing in, I set off on a long rant on how torn I am between Romanian and English and how I’m always under the impression that I have to pick one over the other and blah blah blah. Typical self-indulgent stuff meant to get women teary eyed. While I sort all that stuff out (along with the best continuation to the phrase “I was blowing up a hamster with a hand pump when…”.) here is a great explanation for picking English over your native language.

It comes from Eva Hoffman, a Polish immigrant and author, and I found it while reading “Yesterday’s Self,” a wonderful book about nostalgia, its role in building identity, and its manifestation in the lives of immigrants. I will return to the book in future posts–as I have a lot to say about nostalgia, yearning for an elusive “home,” and finding a true self–but let me share these passages by Hoffman, who writes about choosing a language to write her diary in.

In the solitute of this most private act, I write, in my public language, in order to update what might have been my other self. The diary is about me and not about me at all. But on one level, it allows me to make the first jump. I learn English through writing, and, in turn, writing gives me a written self. Refracted through the double distance of English and writing, this self–my English self–becomes oddly objective… However, I discover something odd. It seems that when I write (or for that matter, think) in English, I am unable to use the word “I.” I do not go as far as the schozophrenic “she”–but I am driven, as by compulsion, to the double, the Siamese-twin “you.”

And here’s some more. To a certain degree her views serve as a good explanation of why this blog is written in English and not Romanian.

The though that there are parts of language I’m missing can induce a small panic in me, as if such gaps were missing parts of the world or my mind–as if the totality of the world and mind were coeval with the totality of the language. Or rather, as if language were an enormous, fine net in which reality is contained–and if there are holes in it, then a bit of reality can escape, cease to exist. When I write, I want to use every word in the lexicon, to accumulate a thickness and weight of words so that they can yield the specific gravity of things. I want to re-create, from the discrete particles of words, the wholeness of a childhood language that has no words.

Update (Dec. 27): Read the response from Coca Cola at the bottom of this post.

Coca Cola has not been nice this year. Actually, judging by anecdotal evidence from Coke fans across the country, the soda king has been downright naughty. What has made this small group of people, including myself, mad at Coke is their phase-out of Coca Cola C2 (or Coke C2), the low-carb beverage that hit the street in June 2004 and was already being pushed out a year later.

Today, reports from around the country say it’s hardly available anywhere. When I first posted a year ago about being unable to find C2, there were no responses. Today, there are about 50 or so comments (read them here, here and here) on those three posts, the bulk of those coming in the past three-four months.

Why did the comments come so late? Because C2 was disappearing from their area stores and some couldn’t get it back even after pleading with stores or contacting Coke directly.

One month ago I decided to e-mail some of the people who left comments on the blog and ask them about their history with C2.

They wrote about how in C2 they found the perfect alternative to Diet Coke (which C2 was—not as sweet as regular but better tasting than diet), about hating Coke Zero (which was the product that Coke pushed out to replace C2), about feeling abandoned by Coke, and about their hope to see the beverage back on the shelves. And, here’s one interesting anecdotal fact about C2—it seems it really caught on in Texas.

Read their testimonies below and ponder the following. If so much of the beverage market is a niche world, why can’t Coke provide for us, the people who have fallen for C2 and were then left without it?

First, here is the e-mail I sent to the people who left comments:

I apologize for the unsolicited e-mail, but at one point you made a comment on one of my three C2 related posts.

I continue to be surprised at how many people continue to post comments, even a year later. From those comments, it’s obvious fewer and fewer of us have been able to find the drink–it’s been a year since I had my last one I believe.

The reason I am e-mailing you is because I’d like to pull together your C2 testimonies and post a longer version that I can later e-mail to Coca Cola. I know it’s not going to do much, but it never hurts to show the company.

So if you don’t mind sending me a few paragraphs about:
– how you found C2
– why you liked it
– some adventures is searching for it once it started disappearing
– your thoughts about related products (e.g. Zero).

=======================

Here are the answers (some have been edited for length):

Intrigued at the concept of a drink with calories that allegedly had all the great taste, I gave it a shot and immediately liked it even better than Classic Coke. Truly the best of both worlds.

I excitedly told all my friends and family about how good the drink was, even though it was hard to find. I would tell them about how it was too bad this drink could not have existed for the last ten years, as I would most surely not have the unhealthy few extra pounds I carry, but at least it was better late than never.

Turns out my brother in Houston was buying C2 and loving it just as I was.

My decision I have to live with now is to drink less soda than before. In my present state, I cannot continue to pump down high sugar drinks (i.e. Classic Coke), and their Zero is an abomination. So I just drink less cans per week.

I hope they will consider the idea I heard floating around our Texas bottler that Coke was thinking of re-introducing – for a limited time during the holiday season – some of their old flavors. If they would only do that for C2 once in a while, we devotees could buy large supplies of them to keep us happy.

I have had to pay >$1 a can for a few weeks now, in order to find last-ditch supplies of C2 in odd places. But I know even that option has run its course, and it is terribly disappointing.

Glen, Austin, TX

—-

My discovery of C2 was at a time when I was looking to reduce my caloric intake and find a different beverage to drink.

The no calorie diet sodas all left me wanting because they had that flat Neutrasweet taste. Prior to that I drank regular Coke or seltzer. I knew from my first can that this soda was something I could live with. It still responded to my need for sweetness and bubbles in my mouth.

Unfortunately as soon as I discovered it,…it seemed that it was difficult to find. One Stop and Shop had it. Then the next time they did not. Then one ShopRite had it, then they did not. The Stop and Shop where I originally had found it got it again. Then no more. I waited and waited in Ledgewood, NJ at another ShopRite where I had previously purchased it to see if the Coke truck had some on the truck, but he did not.

This is my sad story. I buy 4 12 packs at a time if I can find it. It was not too long ago that I found it in a ShopRite in Watchung.

It is such a wonderful product, it tastes great and I wish that it would “reappear” in the marketplace again.

C2 fan,

Joelle, NJ

—-

I was a loyal Coke Classic drinker and was looking to reduce my calorie intake without having to give up taste. C2 was it. I tried an individual bottle & was amazed. My local supermarket had rows of 2 litter bottles next to the Classic Coke (pre-Zero days).

The taste was just off Classic Coke, but was half the calories & carbs. I could cut back on my cola consumption, but not really with C2. ( I wasn’t even counting carbs – a bonus!)

Visited several grocery stores when the 2 liter bottles were disappearing and stockpiled. Did the same with the Fridge Packs last weekend. This week I made another round to find most stores had the C2 labels removed. Too bad.

The folks at Coke laid an egg on Zero. Why do they need another Diet Coke? Coke Classic and Diet Coke have had a very long history & picked up loyal customers along the way. C2 wasn’t promoted enough, especially after Pepsi discontinued their low carb version. C2 was aimed at the ginormous Coke Classic audience. Coke Black? If I want a cola, I’ll drink one and if I want coffee, I’ll have a cup. I don’t need them mixed. It’s doomed too.

I looked around at the other soft drinks to find a suitable replacement for C2. There is none!!

The little 100 calorie cans are a joke. Think about it, 12 ozs of C2 -70 calories, 6 ozs of Coke Cassic 100 calories. I might as well live it up and have a 12 oz Coke Classic with 140 calories, twice as much & only 40 more calories. No thanks.

Save C2, and Coca Cola try sticking with a newer product and advertising it. You might be amazed, especially since there no comparison.

Pat, AZ

PS: Once our C2 supply runs out we will be cutting our consumption of Classic Coke in half. No Zero, Diet Coke or Diet Caffeine Free Coke will do.

—-

I, too, am a C2 fan.

I drink it because it has 1/2 the carbs and calories of regular Coke yet tastes the same to me (when it’s cold). When we ran out of C2 here in Fort Worth, I got on the Internet, contacted Coke, etc.

Coke insists they still make the syrup but wouldn’t tell me what bottler is buying it. Finally in desperation, I went to my local Kroger and requested that they special order it. Within a week, they had C2 back on the shelf. I bought 9 twelve packs. They haven’t had any in a few weeks, but I’ll just continue to request it.

The local Coke distributor had no idea where Kroger got the C2 that they sold. The only thing I’ve been able to verify is that it is apparently still being sold in Oregon. Hope this helps.

Coke Zero, which supposedly replaced C2, is terrible in my opinion. If I wanted a Zero calorie Coke, I’d drink Diet Coke. The Coke bottler here sells TAB. I have to believe if there is a small market for TAB, surely there is a small market for C2 as well.

Alan, TX

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Hey, I am still very ticked-off at Coca-Cola for pulling the C2. I t had great taste , unlike Coke Zero which tastes like diet! Also, C2 didn’t have the Aspartame in it which gives myself and several other people I know migraine headaches!

Is Coke trying to make the population obese with all the carbs, or maybe they think everyone can drink aspartame?

Whatever the reason, I speak to so many people who wonder what happened to such a great product. Maybe the sales for C2 weren’t as high as they had hoped because there was always a limited supply of it in all the stores!

I did find it on sodafinder.com! (…) [T]hey want $24.00 for a 12 pack, with a 48 can limit! No, I didn’t order it. I refuse to buy anything from Coke at that price since they don’t have the decency to care about the public’s choice!

Hell, I use to be able to get 4 12 packs on sale for $10.00 at the supermarkets! $24.00 is highway robbery and why should Coke profit from the fact that they aren’t concerned about what we, the public, think!

So, add this to your blog and e-mail me to let me know when you post it! Maybe Coca-Cola will listen, maybe they will try again.

I have told everyone I know NOT to buy Coke Zero, let that flavor be retired!!!

Donna

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1, Saw the ads and the promotions in stores early on but wasn’t immediately interested.

2, Hit a new personal best in the weight dept and tried it to allow some normality during my dieting. Tasted good enough and cut my habit in half-I had always drank too much but for much of my working life it was physical and I could consume as much of what ever I wanted to. Both knees replaced 6 years ago at 40 and life improved from where it had been, stopped working and moved from CT to FL and spent too much time lying out by the pool.

3, Market for C2 had been stellar up to Memorial Day weekend, big promotions, sales, large stocks and I stocked up (good thing). After this it was multiple stores at differing times of day trying to catch some actually on shelves. My local Publix had allotted room for 4 12 packs. My Albertsons maxed out at 8 12 packs. And roughly a third of the time some stock would be there, another third found space depleted and the final third found another product taking up the space.

(…) I once pestered at Publix (…) if there was any out back, they were holding some (special order?) for someone else-a manager called them and the next delivery would suffice for them. This is my best story, I scored, but what a waste of so many peoples time to minimize sales! This to me indicates demand, no?

4, There are no commercial related products, Pepsi had one and dropped it with advanced notice like Coke has provided for Vanilla which for some reason remains on the shelves? The Zero is dreadful, never liked the diet, wouldn’t use the lime for a quick rum and, and there are flavors that I can’t see them doing any better with so I have passed on them.

Larry

—-

I just bought another bottle of Coke Zero just to make sure I felt the same way about it. It is better than I remembered, but I still would not buy it as a substitute for Coke.

Diet drinks are diet drinks. Diet Coke tastes nothing like the real thing. Coke Zero may taste better than Diet Coke but it is not the real thing. My diet drink of choice is Tab. I love the flavor. I also like Fresca. Those drinks came out as stand alone products. They were not supposed to taste like anything else. They have their own flavor profile.

C2 to me is a fantastic substitute for Coke. Granted it has calories….but it also has wonderful flavor. It tastes like the real thing, Coca Cola. Perhaps Coke needs to market the product like a light beer. Beer makers have yet to make a diet beer, with no calories. So perhaps we need three categories of soft drinks: regular, diet and light. Given a chance I think light could be popular across the board. Many people are weary of sugar substitutes.

I loved C2 because, to me, it tasted better than regular Coke. Regular Coke tastes a bit too sweet to me now. I could barely get through one can. With the C2, if I drank two cans I did not feel guilty. To be honest nothing tastes better than a ice cold coke after a long night out. I love the burn. C2 was the perfect answer to a hangover.

I still have five C2s in my fridge. I am holding on to them for a special day, sort of like a fine wine. I know a lot of people who can not stand diet drinks and C2 was their salvation. Now they just get the small 100 calorie Cokes.

From my conversation with the bottler in Texas, there seemed to be more of a market for C2 in Texas than elsewhere. Perhaps Texas could be the place to make it. C2 lovers could make pilgrimages to Texas to get C2. I would pay extra to have C2. I would even order it by mail. I would love a standing order of a case a month. That order would double if I were entertaining.

Virginia, TX

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Below is the answer I received from Coca Cola, to whom I sent this post. It looks like standard PR response, nothing different from what I got from them in the past.

Thank you for contacting The Coca-Cola Company, Mr. Lupsa. We are glad to hear from a fan of Coca-Cola C2 and apologize that you have had difficulty finding it in your area.

We have announced no plans to discontinue Coca-Cola C2. Regarding availability, local bottling companies choose which brands to sell and the size of the packaging that will be available in their territories. These decisions are based on consumer demand and other market factors. We believe they are in the best position to make those decisions.

If you would like to contact the bottling company serving your area, you may wish to contact them at the following telephone number: (800) 222-8088. If necessary, they may refer you to a sales center for assistance.

Your loyalty to Coca-Cola C2 is certainly appreciated. If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to visit our website again.

Vladimir, the confused New York-raised Russian Jew, and Morgan, the Cleveland-born All-American girl, are facing each other on a friggin’ cold Prague night, back when the city hosted hordes of American hipsters in search of greater meaning after the sordid Reagan/Bush years.

I’ll let the author, Gary Shteyngart, pick up from here (passage is from “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook“):

“See, here’s the thing about you, Vladimir,” she said. “I like you because you’re nothing like my boyfriends back home and you’re nothing like Tomas either… You’re worthwhile and interesting, but at the same time you’re… You’re partly American, too. Yeah, that’s it! You’re needy in a kind of foreign way, but you’ve also got these…American qualities. So we have these overlaps. You can’t imagine some of the problems I had with Tomas…He was just…”

Too much of a good thing, Vladimir thought. Well then, here was the scorecard: Vladimir was fifty percent functional American, and fifty percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath. He was the best of the best worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola, blue-light specials, and the prospect of a quick pee during commercial breaks.

“And we can go back to the States when all this is over,” Morgan said, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him back to her panelak with its promise of stale Hungarian salami and a glowing space heater. “We can go home!” she said.

Cut to a theater in Cambridge, Mass. five minutes walk from Harvard Square, the throbbing corner of the East Coast where intelligentsia meets tourism. I am sitting on a bar stool watching Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls drilling mercilessly into her piano, her grin rouge red and her feet encased in stockings. By her side, Brian Viglione buries the sticks into his drums and the waves of sounds wash over the audience, drowning the Onion Cellar, that special place where there is no barrier between your personal fears and the audience. The Dolls are the house band of this dreamy performance club where you pour your heart out, and rejuvenated by this confessional experience, you emerge new (the idea comes from Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum).

I sit there and think of what a perfect metaphor the Onion Cellar is for this age of gentle voyeuristic self-revelation. I think of much I want to shout that out, of how important I believe this story of people’s need to confess and hear the confessions of others to be in the modern context (Ira does, too). I think of how much the Onion Cellar ideas says about who we are, about why we’ll blog about the show (how meta…) and about what answers we’re looking for in the stories (and songs) of others.

For a split second I briefly think of Vladimir’s riotously disjointed self and for another one, fancy myself just as confused about my place and my own story. That’s when a flier lands in my hands. The Dolls are subjecting the audience to the same torment they’re taking the characters through.

Share and be re-born!

I look at my question. Of course, I mumble to myself. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself a lot as I ponder a potential return to what I still call “home.” The question reads: “If you could change your job, what would you do instead?” I grin, I stop for a second and then I reach for a pen. For Vladimir, for Manea, for myself, for whomever cares, I write:

“The same thing–except that I want to do it for MYSELF.”

I hand that to the staff and sigh. Was that enough?

I don’t know. My reply wasn’t a protest or a cry for help. I don’t want Morgan to pull me home. I want to pull myself home, wherever that is. And once there, I want to tell the story of the Onion Cellar, and all the other stories that make up the world we live in today. I want, as Amanda Palmer cries in the closing song of the show to…. “just sing.”

There is thing keeping everyone’s lungs and lips locked
It is called fear and it’s seeing a great renaissance
After the show you can not sing wherever you want
But for now let’s just pretend we’re all gonna get bombed
So sing…

It look our man Romerican more than three months to pick himself up from the brawl of Targu Mures, but he finally managed a recovery. He provides the world with a detailed account of his exploits in Romania’s awesomest city, where a crew of healthy, young locals made sure he felt alive.

Judging from the never-ending post Romerican put up on the Internets earlier today, I’d say his soul was stirred and shaken. Simultaneously.