2003-02-28 3:10 p.m. It's like trying to start your car on a cold morning; maybe if I turn the key just one more time the engine will catch. Maybe if I type just one more entry, I'll write something I actually would want to read myself. This damn writing thing is harder than it looks. For every entry I've ever written that make me think I could do this all the time, I forget the several hundred that are, well, crap. I wonder how professional columnists do it for a living. How does a humor columnist or a human-interest columnist not burn out after a month's worth of columns? In any case, these aren't serious concerns. Really they're just what fills my mind at the end of a week. There's not much room for anything else. Well, anything worthwhile that is. You know what else is occupying my mind right now? The bottle of Diet Pepsi that's sitting on my desk. I have some concerns. Not with the drink itself; God no. Mikey loves him some dPep. Mikey will now close his office door and kick his own ass for referring to it as 'dPep'. No, my late-Friday concern is with the label. "Same Great Taste!" it exclaims. Ok, as what? Regular Pepsi? Well, no. Pepsi Marketing can't honestly try to make that claim can they? I don't think there's a single person alive who wouldn't tell you that Diet Pepsi tastes 'similar' to the regular variety. But it tastes exactly like the original in the same was that the young Michael Jackson looks exactly like the current Michael Jackson. Which is to say: not at all. Same general design elements, but totally different in execution. So, same great taste as what, then? Same great taste as before? What kind of claim is that? I never knew that status quo could be so laudable. Imagine if every time I saw my friends, I excitedly assured them I was "the same great Mike". I'd get my ass handed to me. Even more than usual. And then, as if all that we're enough, we come to the bottom of the label. And I quote, "Light. Crisp. Refreshing." No, no, and no. 'Light' fails both on the physical and metaphorical levels. I don't think anything the color of old motor oil can, in good conscience, be called light. Of course, they're not referring to the color of the drink. They're referring to how it makes you feel. Since that's the case, I didn't know that light's definition had been expanded to include "slightly shaky and vaguely irritable". Of course, all the aspartame could be interfering with my thought process. Next: 'Crisp'? Maaaayyybe, but it's a stretch. I think Sprite makes a good case for crisp. I think red-headed stepchild Sierra Mist comes damn close too. But dPep? I can't so much agree with the crisp seeing how each bottle coats my teeth with a thin layer of sugary mung. Don't know what I mean? Drink a bottle and run your tounge over your teeth. That's mung. And finally: 'Refreshing'? Nope. Sorry. Re-energizing, maybe. But it never lasts and leaves you feeling worse than you did before. Also, any substance that dehydrates you while it's leeching calcium from your bones cannot possibly be called refreshing. And so, I feel lied to. I almost wish I could make a case that I started drinking Diet Pepsi under the "same great taste, so light/crisp/refreshing" pretense so that I could sue and retire on my millions extorted from Big Soda. But, alas, the label is new and any halfway respectable cross examiner would prove that my addiction...err...love goes back years and years. Oh well. Like any great relationship, this one is sometimes dysfunctional. But it can never be doubted. downtown----uptown leave me a note, fool!

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