Caffeine has been part of my life since I tried to drink the foam off of a freshly poured cup of Pepsi when I was three. Pepsi was different then, more magical, certainly more foamy. Maybe it was the real cane sure they used before the spectre of high fructose corn syrup descended upon our beautiful and precious soft drinks. Maybe it was because it was always at my grandmother’s house that I got to let the Pepsi bubbles tickle my nose as I slurped them like the greedy, excitable post toddler I was.

I don’t know that people were so atuned to how caffeine and sugar would spin up a kid back then. They probably were. I like to think that I wasn’t a complete terror, but I probably was.

I started early on the other vitamin c. Pop was always prevelent in our home. My Father would get upset when I consumed all of the mixer for his Black Velvet and Pepsi. I could guzzle pop by the gallon, or more aptly, the Big Gulp.

I never moved on to coffee when I grew up. Maybe I never got in the habbit because in a lot of ways I haven’t grown up. Is coffee a right of passage that holds your childhood down in to the percolator until it’s just a memory? Part of it was the way my parents drank coffee. My Father in particular was a coffee fiend. So was my Grandfather, but Dad could open a can of coffee, when coffee still came in cans, take a whif and get a Groucho Marx face only rivaled by the cat who found a dime bag of catnip.

My folks drank their coffee black, which was not for me. Thank you, no, I’ll start the day with a Coke, eventually with a Diet Coke, and then, when I least expected it, that Ambrosia of the Gods that is Diet Mountain Dew. My uncle has been a Mountain Dew fanatic. Enough to get clucking from my Grandmother. He was always drinking a Mountain Dew. Real men drank coffee in my Grandmother’s estimation. At least he wasn’t always at the beer garden. I’m not sure my grandmother understood the idea of a bar, or hard liquor. Anything alcohol related was always a beer garden for her. Maybe it was just the polite way to say bar. Not too polite mind you, this was still alcohol she was talking about.

My uncle was a kid in her estimation. At the time that wasn’t so far off. My uncle never did seem to grow up. Children take their caffeine cold.

It’s only been in the last year that I’ve really taken to drinking coffee on a regular basis. I discovered these amazing additives that made the dirty water palatable. Cream and Splenda are my coffee companions. They got me to grow up and consume caffeine the way a man of my age should be conuming caffeine. Granted, I’m still not a real man who drinks his coffee black, but it’s progress I suppose. I still drink Diet Mountain Dew when I don’t have time to sit down for coffee, so I suppose I live in a limbo state between the childhood that seems reluctant to leave, and the adulthood that is long overdue.

The odd thing is… I don’t really feel the effects of caffeine. It could be that my long history with the stimulant has given me a resistence. Maybe I just have a natural resistence. I should take one of those DNA tests to tell me.

I can go days without drinking anything caffinated. No ill effects. Not even a headache. I can drink half of a Diet Mountain Dew in the middle of the night when Elwood the Beagle is outside watering the lawn and head right back to sleep. I can even switch to soda from beer when I settle in for an NHL game in the evening and have no lasting effects on my sleep.

I suppose it’s another thing that sets me as different. Real men get a jolt from… Jolt. Not me. It’ll serve me well when Harris Sockel invades my dreams for an espresso drinking contest. We’ll be in some Tibetan Starbucks with rows of espresso cups flipped upside down waiting for Indiana Jones to walk back into our lives. Sorry Harris, but I get to be abducted in a basket in Egypt. Maybe next time.