I Don't Think We Are Four Loko Material

Scandalamitous beverage events:  I had never heard of this Four Loko drink until three days ago and here it has already been banned by an entire state.  Saturday, we went up to the mountain house, and our in-the-know friend Sloan produced a can.  It was tall and purple, and it featured the words, "Contains Alcohol" as a prominent design element.  I was like, "Wah?" and he was all, "We picked this up on the way, it's been banned," and I was like, "Okay, I'll try it."

Banned, baby! Like Lady Chatterley's Lover!

The gist is that it's a caffeinated energy drink that's also 12% alcohol, and it costs $2-$3 for a 24 oz. can.  College campuses are freaking out about this and several teenagers have ended up in the hospital.  I guess the theory is that the caffeine keeps you so alert that you don't realize how screwed up you're getting, so you stay up and drink instead of falling asleep the way nature intended.  And it's cheap, so cheap it's like, loko.

Night fell at the mountain house, and Sloan popped open the huge can, poured a little into four glasses, and carried them to the table.  We picked them up and eyed them like we were at a wine tasting.  I was already thinking that maybe we weren't cut out for Four Loko, with our little bistro glasses.

We took a swig.

Someone started moaning.  Oh my God it started like an injury and then got worse.  Everyone began talking at once.

"It tastes just like Dimetapp from when I was a kid!"
"It's really bad, right?"
"I'm not young enough to drink this."
"I'm not poor enough."

Upon sipping, the initial impression is merely cough syrupy, then in the middle things start to get strident, and then the finish rolls around, and it's like a grape boot stamping on a human face forever.

And oh, the terrible sweetness.  I had to fight several hummingbirds to finish my ounce of liquid.  I think only Sloan and I actually drank our tiny portions of the stuff. Matt poured his out and made a real drink. And Becky (another Becky!) took two sips and got jittery.  I think that could have been the Red  #40, though, even more than the caffeine.

Matt summed up what we were all feeling when he said, "I just have no desire to eat or drink anything ironically anymore."  Yes.  I remembered that there is a name for that phenomenon.  The great Douglas Coupland calls it "nutritional slumming":

[The eating of] food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion. (page 120) 

I had forgotten that there was a Pensacola reference in Generation X. Awesome.

It's possible that our crowd was doing it wrong, because this guy drank a bunch of Four Loko and liked it and had a hilarious evening.  We just played spades and then got in the hot tub and then went to bed.  It seemed like we were having a pretty great time, if not actually Loko in the strict sense.