Dear Mr. Cola
This year has brought many tragedies — plague, war, heatwaves, the continued existence of celery — but for me personally, chief among them — well, not chief, more like second or third from the bottom, really it was very minor, it barely blipped my radar, actually more of a disappointment, or maybe more of just a letdown, the more I think of it, it was really a nonevent, it didn’t matter one bit and actually my life may have been better for it — was that as far as I knew, Coca-Cola Starlight only existed in diet formulations.
See, I wanted to try Coca-Cola Starlight because it claims to be “Space Flavored,” but I am massively allergic to most artificial sweeteners, and while I wanted to try it, my morbid curiosity did not reach the level where I was willing to go to the emergency room to satisfy it. After all, what might space taste like? I started to write a list:
- quasars
- high speed hydrogen ions
- glycoaldehyde
- the chocolate micrometeorite gravel in a carvel ice cream cake
- bitcoin
- billions and billions of uncleaned grease traps
- hot dark matter
But I would never know, because it was only available in death-dealing diet, so after about ninety seconds of consideration I put it out of my mind for — as far as I knew — forever.
And then, oh what a day yesterday was! Because yesterday my housemate came home with a bottle of Hot Dark Matter Coca-Cola, and there on the label was the magical statement RECYCLE ME! No, excuse me, not that one, I meant the magical statement 240 CALORIES PER BOTTLE. No nutrasweet here, baby! No saccharine badness more important to a Nicholas Sparks movie than a bottle of Ethereum-flavored sugar water! My path was clear: I would have to get a bottle of SpaceDustUltravioletLight Coca-Cola and give it a whirl! I then promptly forgot about it again. But then today — my housemate came home, and that lovely human brought a bottle of RedDwarfBlackHoleEjectionPlume Coca-Cola home with her, and she very kindly gave it to yours truly. With all the flavor of space that it might contain. I was so excited that I immediately opened it with my shaking hands…
And that was a bad idea, cause, well, soda, so all that shaking caused a Big Bang if you know what I mean!
As I cleaned up the vaguely pinkish-purple-reddish spill — or as I like to call it, the Cosmic Background Stickiness — I reflected on the tantalizing hints of aroma that I was so hashtag blessed to experience. What does GasGiantNeutronStarLight Coca-Cola smell like? What does Mr. Cola himself think space tastes like? Apparently, you, sir, with your Jupiter-sized ego, think that space smells… like Coca-Cola. With maybe a hint of powdered sugar and raspberries. After all this time thinking about it — and cleaning up a spill caused by overexcitement and the collapse of a cosmic wave function — was I only to be let down?
The answer? Apparently: yes. You, Mr. Cola, sir, think that space tastes like Coca-Cola with a hint of unspecified fruit, perhaps raspberry, perhaps strawberry, definitely not grape, possibly marionberry. Hmmm. Maybe some cotton candy too. And a hint of iron. All I can chalk this up to is that there was a miscommunication at your company. Perhaps you’ve grown too large, like a star going nova that consumes its planets, that consumes its very children!, in a fiery conflagration; like that star, you’ve grown so large that edicts from your august office have to filter across an ecliptic, through various planetary orbits, and with each jump to a new gravitationally-stable coordinate, some data and intention is lost. Yes, it must be that.
We all know that regular Coca-Cola tastes like sweetened, carbonated battery acid. Since you wanted to export that battery acid taste to Space! and beyond, you must have told your Jupiter’s-moons-like array of subdepartments to make a cola that tastes like space exploration, not space itself, and so they adapted the regular car battery acid flavor to instead taste like a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator — a space battery, not a regular old earth battery. I feel pity for you, Mr. Cola. This was always the problem with the secrecy during the Space Race: by fragmenting design and implementation across so many subcontractors, communication was difficult, and sometimes designs would be released that did not fulfill expected obligations. This has obviously happened here, and to such a wonderful vision of yours — the vision of SpaceFlight flavored Coca-Cola. I can only hope that the departments responsible find that their orbits are decaying, and that like an ancient Kreutz sungazer, they fall into the sun.
Best,
Alex Parise
