Pop Pop Fizz Fizz

It has come to my attention that there are 2 versions of flat pop (soda, soda pop, whatever). Traumatically induced flatness and passively acquired flatness.

I got out to the truck this morning and found that I had left my interior lights on all night. Oops. The good news is... I discovered the lights were still on **after** I started the truck.

Back to flatness (which has nothing to do with my chest).

Also in the truck was a can of Diet Pepsi (I will not drink the red-can-who-shall-not-be-named) left over from yesterday. There most always is a dead can sitting in there. Some days it's empty. Some days not.

If I am at my house, where the truck is parked in the open, usually on a slant, I just open the door and dump it out. It disappears into the asphalt and I don't think of it again. If I am at BBs place, I usually don't dump it out. Something about the parking garage and the puddle still being there when I get back that night keeps me from dumping (right there in public for all to see). Somehow the pop-dumping exhibitionism at my place doesn't seem so bad.

Anyway. Dead pop.

Some days I forget it is dead.

And I drink some.

Some days it's not so bad dead.

Some days it is.

And I wondered why.

So I experimented (it's amazing how bored I can get on the 25 minute drive home from work).

The first street I travel on leaving work is very very very rough for about 8 or 10 blocks (the town doesn't have enough $$ to pay the garbage men, let alone repave the street! On the upside, they only just this month had their first murder all year.... that **has** to be a record).

(BB is all of the sudden into stoplights.... why he wants one I will never know).

So, I swilled half a can of pop between work and where the road disintegrates and left the rest to bounce around in the can for the remainder of the drive. Temps in the icky range while the sun was still up, but truck parked in shade once home. Overnight temps in 60-7o's.

In the morning, I tasted it.

YUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! UCCCKY!!!!!!!! ROTTEN BAD BLECH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Truly dead pop.

The next day I left half a can sitting on my desk at work.

Came in the next day. Tasted it.

Drinkable. Not real thrilling, but drinkable without making you make that WHAT-DID-I-JUST-DRINK grimace with your face while you are running down the hall convulsively swallowing while holding your head face down with puffed out cheeks so the pop won't make it into your posteroir pharynx at which point you will be FORCED TO SWALLOW looking for a drinking fountain or sink to spit into where the patients and their families won't see you and wonder why the staff is vomiting into the drinking fountain.......

So... is it the bumpy road and traumatic decarbonation that makes the taste bad or is it the overnight temps in the truck?

Should try the experiment on a day when my secretary is not coming in next day so I can leave the thermostat in the office set at 80 to test that theory.

I know that in the past I have sunk to the level of drinking pop that has overnighted in the truck in the fall and winter with no recollections of yucky-pop-mouth.

More experiments to follow.

If I remember.

Memory sucks now-a-days.

The good news is that both parents passed the alzheimer's test I gave them. No alzheimer's. It may have skipped a generation and gone straight to my brain.

Oops.