The Battle For Four Loko

I feel like a lot of this blog will involve me writing about "hot button" topics well after they have stopped being so hot and button-y. With that in mind, let's talk about alcoholic beverages a full two days after New Years, when everyone has ceased to care about champagne and cavalier midnight drunken hookups as part of tradition and whatnot.

A little while back, a big hubbub was made over Four Loko, a trashy, tacky, and mildly disgusting energy drink/malt liquor hybrid. It was the John Waters films of alcohol (For non-film nerds reading this, Waters was this dude who--You know what, never mind, it's not that important). It was recently deemed illegal to sell the iteration of the drink that God intended us to binge on, as the FDA decided that combining high alcohol by volume drinks with taurine and guarana is a bad idea.

If you were keeping score at home, that means the evil alcohol-energy combo duped the FDA for around eight years, seeing how stuff like Sparks and Tilt have been around for a while.

And what a glorious 8 years those were. Some of my favorite memories involve the consumption of Tilt. A preview screening of Superbad at Comic-Con, where a group of fellows sitting next to my friend Grant and I reveled in the glory that was giving very underage kids booze while drunkenly quoting Pootie Tang. A few years later, my friend Spencer and I discovered a liquor store in downtown San Diego that didn't card us. Actually, every once in a while they would, then the owner of the place would quickly dismiss it; he was a blessed man. Anyways, the first drinks we bought from this establishment? Tilt. We walked around downtown San Diego drinking Tilt and having one of those moments we'll remember until our alcoholism has permanently fried our memory cells.

I will admit, however, that Four Loko and I have not had the best rapport. In fact, I'm pretty sure Four Loko is the goddamned devil. If Tilt were the little angel on my shoulder, Four Loko would be too busy to play the devil on the other shoulder because he'd be posting incriminating photos of me on the internet or slashing my tires. I know I should really blame myself for getting woken up on benches without prior knowledge of getting there or a regrettable kiss with a rather annoying girl, but since everyone else is blaming it on the Loko, I might as well too. It also fucked up Tilt for me, and not even for the fact that they took the energy out of it, but rather forced Tilt to change their format to up the alcohol content and change its flavors from "generic energy drink" to "red," "blue," and "green."

What I'm getting at is that I'm not a fan of Four Loko, but does that mean it should be illegal because a buncha people got alcohol poisoning and some douche state assemblyman doesn't know how to handle his shit? We all got that alcohol education as we went to college, we know how to handle our shit responsibly, we just choose not to. If you spend an hour sitting in a doctor's office pounding two and a half Lokos, you're obviously going to start vomiting. That may not even have been alcohol-related, it might just be the taste alone. And I'm pretty sure those kids who got alcohol poisoning could just as easily get way too wasted on some other cheap booze (I recommend Red Cisco and Sprite, a drink I made up called the Shirley Temple Blackout; by my calculations, that's just as disgusting and just as dangerous as Loko).

I don't think I'm a good leader for causes or movements. For example, I started a Facebook group called "If Sarah Palin is elected president, I'm moving to England." It has two members right now, because I just don't care enough to moderate it. Although, maybe in 2012 I'll be a little more gung ho about it, although I'm praying I won't have to. But I'd like to propose a movement to the good four readers of this blog:

You may have noticed Four Loko is still on the shelves, as is Tilt and Sparks. The only problem is they've apparently replaced the energy drink with all-natural colors (yes, really, the can does say that). I pledge that if I ever drink Four Loko again (hopefully I won't, but still), I will buy a can of red bull and mix that shit together. It will taste awful, and I will do something stupid, but at least I'll stand for something. And that something will be the obstinacy of irresponsibility.

Growing up doesn't mean you have to stop being stupid, you just have to find ways to justify it. I recommend using weird words like "obstinacy of irresponsibility" to make horrendous decisions sound kinda noble.