Too much Dasani

Folks, as I write this, I am in the Internet cafe of the Costa Mediteranea cruise ship, paying fifty cents an hour to use the computer. It's taken me $3.50 just to get to this point. My loyalty to HoboTrashcan knows no bounds. Actually, I just procrastinated up until this point. So let me be brief.

I could easily write about how much I loathe traveling, especially flying. I could write about shitty drivers down here in Florida. I could write about a lot of things, really, but I've decided on an old, familiar enemy.

Dasani.

My searing, loathsome hatred for Dasani is likely irrational but exists nonetheless. It's not Dasani itself that gets my goat per se, it's everything around it. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

While sitting on my couch the other night, shoveling noodles n' beef into my pie hole, I flipped on the idiot box to see what distractions were out there for me. CSI New York was on, and since I caught it in the middle (after the disinterred bowels of whoever died at the beginning of the show had already been shown to 8.23 million viewers, thus ensuring I would only see my dinner once), I decided that the tertiary spin-off of the popular crime drama would make a fine choice for the numbing of my brain this particular evening. Then I saw the lead actor, Gary Sinise, take a pull of a bottle of water, and the angle of the draw revealed that he had chosen Dasani as his bottled aqua of choice.

Of course, it really wasn't Sinise who made the choice. The Coca Cola Company chose it for him. See, the fine folks at Coke manufacture Danasi, and they have lots of money to spend on advertising - so much so, that they can forgo traditional routes of marketing and pay studios to have their actors use their products in hopes that you, the brain-washable consumer, will buy said products in droves and make a few white men fabulously rich.

So why stop at selling sweetened water with artificial coloring and flavoring? Why not take a few steps out of the equation and just sell tap water? And not only that, why not sell it for MORE MONEY THAN SODA!!! Brilliant!!!

Yes folks, that's all Dasani is - tap water. Oh sure, they run it through a filter, or some sort of reverse osmosis system or some other expensive sounding shit like that. But in the end, it's the same water you find in your toilet, and we are paying two bucks a pop for the privilege of drinking it. And that's if you're lucky. If you are at the airport like I was recently, you get to pay three dollars! Want a different kind of water - you know, from (gasp) an actual spring? Nope, sorry. Coca-Cola has an exclusive contract with the airport, and all you get is Dasani. Dasani enemas, up your ass, all day long.

I'm at $11 now, so I can't tell you all the ways this pisses me off - just a few. What the hell does Dasani mean anyway? I'd Google it, but that would cost me another $4 bucks right there. I assume it means "Fake Italian Name for Toilet Water That Makes American Idiots Think They Are Drinking Some Fancy Artesian Spring Water From, Uh, Artesia". At least, that's the conclusion the marketing execs at Coke probably figured. And half the membership at Augusta National Golf Club is populated with Coke big wigs, and the fact that they are playing that awesome golf course with money made from Dasani ... ohhh, that really gets me. But the worst is that probably about two-thirds of the people drinking it don't know that's it's tap water. I don't know what's worse - that Coke is duping them or that they don't bother to check the label of the stuff they glup gown.

So that's all I have time for, but I leave you with a preview of next weeks' article, $17.50 later.

Cruise ships: high tackiness on the high seas.

Evan Redmon is a freelance writer and editor. He has lived in Washington, DC for most of his life, with seven years of college down the drain in Madison, WI and four and a half years of doing nothing in particular in Boulder, CO. He has visited 39 of the 50 states in the Union (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and can be reached at evanredmon@yahoo.com.