Life's Great Rewards 5-31-94

An old page from Dork. About stuff.

I still enjoy or admire most of these things, some thirty years on, at least in theory. I don't have a whiffle ball or a Dapper Dan magnetic drawing set anymore, or a drinking bird. But they're nifty bits of ephemera. I think I still have a Devo energy dome in a box somewhere. Most of my bowling shirts went the way of most clothes, but I have one or two left in the closet, not including the SLG Milk & Cheese bowling shirt. And we still have little kid's drawings among other mementos of times past.

I don't drink mudslides -- or much of anything these days, but I still like them. In theory, at least. No idea what a few might do to my near-60 year old stomach. Now I want a mudslide.

I stopped drinking Coca-Cola at least ten years ago. For some reason Coke started tasting crappy to us, I don't know what the cause of that was -- a slightly altered formula or a slightly altered taste. But it started tasting medicinal and nasty, and we switched over to Pepsi. A few months ago I stopped drinking my precious soda on the regular, which might come as a surprise to those of you who are aware of my longtime soda dependency. I miss it but I don't miss feeling bloated and gross on the stuff, my interior mechanisms stopped processing sugar and carbonation as well as it used to. I rarely buy a 2-liter for the house, I occasionally buy a Dr. Pepper or an orange sodey pop with a sandwich after therapy for the drive home (although I'm off the sandwiches for a while owing to the recent Boar's Head deli meat nightmare. Self-regulating corporations, I mean, can you believe that could ever lead to disaster?).

I mostly drink water these days.

Now I want a soda.

The Outer Limits series is streaming on Pluto. I stumbled across it recently, but haven't dipped in yet. It's been decades since I watched any of these, there's a lot of episodes I've still never seen. The show was never as ubiquitous in local NYC syndication as The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond or Alfred Hitchcock Presents back when I was a kid. Possibly because it was strictly an hour-long series and harder to slot, whatever the reason, it would only run weekly, and it never seemed to run steadily. I remember catching a bunch of episodes when I visited my grandparents in Hallandale, Florida, and that seemed like a rare treat for little nerd me. I was probably one of very few kids who liked going to Florida because you could watch The Outer Limits and Sgt. Bilko. It sure as hell wasn't for the goddamned sunshine and retirement apartments.

Anyway, here's a link to season one of The Outer Limits, if anybody's interested:

https://pluto.tv/us/on-demand/series/6076588ef96a44001a1d47db/season/1

Hope everyone has a solid Labor Day Weekend. I'm supposed to go to a birthday dinner on Sunday. otherwise, like a lot of folks, I'll be working. I'm just happy to leave August behind, summer is my least-favorite season, fall is my favorite, and the General Mills Monster Cereals have started shipping (Sarah found them at Target and I have a box of all three sitting in a place of pride in the kitchen).

Halloween!

I still want a soda.