The other day, a particularly hot one I might add, I was driving up my street when I was forced to stop in the name of the greatest marketing scheme I’d ever laid eyes on. Two little girls had decided to suddenly dart out in the middle of the road holding pitchers. The brilliance is numbing really, I suspect all soliciting will soon be done in this manner.. But, back to the anecdote at hand, after slamming on the breaks, narrowly managing to avoid going over my weekly manslaughter quota, the girls walk over to my side window and inquired as to whether I’d be interested in a tasty beverage. Or ice tea as they put it.
Not being a man to pass up a good tea, and hoping to put them in good spirits so that when the next car coming by hit them, they would be able to die happy, I said yes. After having been promised that it was “really sweet,” and being told in a Mafioso manner that if I saw anything in it, it was most assuredly lemons, I was told that this tea would cost me a dollar. And though vending machines have trained me to pay a dollar for 12 oz of chilled beverage, I was expecting something of a mark down remembering the 25 cent lemonade I once peddled myself. Still, I figured, funerals are expensive, they probably need it. So I fork over four quarters and they fork over a rather generously sized plastic cup leading me to discover 1). That my Ice Tea has no ice and 2). The large cup contained approximately two shots of tea.
Around this time I grabbed my tea and drove away, strongly suspecting that this was somehow a perfect metaphor for the whole of existence, yet never quite able to pin down how.