The DC Jitterbugs

Oh, I've got it bad.

I keep reaching for my missing cocktail - the waxed cup containing that lovely mixture of crushed ice, plastic straw and that sweet, sweet, elixir, Diet Coke.

For me, Diet Coke is Linus's blanket, George Burns' cigar, Doug Heffernan's pound cake. I swoon for its cold, brown fizzy body, the special way it receives its ice like a lonely heart receives a lover. Its low voice hums, each minuscule bubble sparking and popping, a tiny volcano.

Like a wino who gets teary-eyed upon cracking his morning bottle of Thunderbird am I when I see the magic happen at the bagel shop fountain. The first sip is Nirvana, the second is too. Who am I fooling? The whole damn cup is awesome!

I long to refill. I know I should drink water, the stuff that got me through my childhood and early adult thirsts. Then the beast sneaked into my life in the form of a fridge at work stocked with free pop. It could have been anything - Diet Sprite, Diet A & W, diet ginger ale. But it was Diet Coke that tugged at my heartstrings and my life has never been the same. Now, instead of people peering into my party glass of water and asking, "Is that all you're drinking?" they just assume that my animated brown liquid contains a little something. I could go to McDonald's and not confuse the crew because I wanted my extra value meal with a bottled water instead of a fountain drink. Life became easy.

But now it's hard. I know just how terrible Diet Coke is for me. It steals the calcium from your bones, the magnesium from your muscles, the skinny from your fat. It's a chemical soup, a Frankensteinian conglomeration of potassium benzoate, aspartyl-phenylalanine-1-methyl ester, and that legal, well-loved drug that is celebrated on every street corner, caffeine.

Yet still, having said all that, as I sit here on my front porch on a gorgeous spring evening, watching Maddie shoot hoops and listening to the suburban sounds of lawn mowers and sedans, I could really go for an ice cold Diet Coke.