Sweet Leaf Cherry Limeade

Diluted with my wife's spittle.

Sweet Leaf Cherry Limeade

Who would ever have thought that Sweet Leaf tea and etc products could prove so vexing? Not I, or else I would never have embarked on such a hopeless venture. At every turn I am faced with insurmountable obstacles, threatened by unfathomable forces, and generally menaced. I find my capers cut short and my spirit leadened by the hopelessness of my Sweet Leaf quest. I shall endeavor to explain:

After a long travail, I finally acquired a bottle of the Sweet Leaf Sweet Tea, only to have it consumed by a vengeful wife fueled by spite. She, no doubt, converted the organic cane sugar in the drink into further evil plots designed to thwart my life's ambitions. A kindly angel from the Sweet Leaf company sent me a packet hoping to rectify the situation. It contained some stickers, some postcards, some coupons, and a business card.

The business card was unusable as it didn't have my name on it, but the coupons proved useful. Very useful. They rode around in my bag until I found stores carrying the Sweet Leaf brand beverages, few and far between I found them, too. I would trade one coupon for one drink, and never had a coupon refused.

Mind you, this is New York City. I've never had a manufacturer's coupon accepted EVER until now. I travelled all over town trying to pass a trash bag coupon and had it universally reviled. Sweet Leaf has pull in this town, and it's a rush of power to be attached to them, even if in such a small way.

Excited through and through by my easy acquisition of the drink, I sampled a Sweet Leaf Black Tea, or maybe it was Earl Grey?, and wrote a review. The review was long, insightful, amusing. No man could have found fault with it, the only woman who could have done so would be my wife. If she had ever had a chance to see it.

Which she did not, for fickle fate flung me far afield from chosen path. That review which I labored over, which I loved, was lost. How? I have no idea. After writing a review I set it aside for a little while, then come back after I've forgotten most of it. I reread it, fix all the spelling errors, remove the accidental curse words, and post it on this blog. This time, however, I couldn't find the review anywhere. Between the initial writing and the second examination it had completely and utterly disappeared. Not even Apple-F could uncover it.

What I now call the Sweet Leaf Curse had struck again. Clearly the puffy cheeked goblinoid on the bottle label was set on my complete and total dissatisfaction.

Still reeling from the hurt of my great loss, I stagger into the living room only to find my semen-thief of a wife glugging her way through one of my cached bottles of sacred Sweet Leaf - a bottle of "Cherry Limeade". Having not been detected due to her haste to deprive me of my sole ambition, I laid her low with a hearty swing of a stout chair. Her skull was so damnably thick I knew the stunning effect of my blow would be short lived, I spirited away the paltry remainder of the Cherry Limeade bottle and concealed it in the refrigerator. Then I hid on the top shelf of our hall closet until after her rage abated and her loss forgotten.

Now, weeks later, I slip to my computer with the precious bottle concealed in the pocket of my cargo shorts. Door closed and braced with a table, I pop open the cap of this nearly lost treasure...

A slightly odd aroma. Something like a public swimming pool full of watermelon juice in use by anthropomorphic lemons from the trailer park side of town. I can't stop smelling it, though, finding in it the forbidden pleasure I might find in sniffing a finger rubbed in nether regions on a hot summer day.

The taste is baffling. The tart aftertaste of lemonade from a cardboard container is all I can remember after the first swig left me totally overwhelmed. I might have blacked out for just a moment. I brace for the second taste, refusing to let it overwhelm my reason - having met it on its own terms and asserted my dominance, I find the taste pleasant. I have its respect now, we can speak together as equals.

Another pull on the bottle reveals myself the victor. Now the Cherry Limeade is working for me, doing what it can to bring me pleasure in the humble manner of bottled beverages. The organic cane sugar is deployed in a manner bereft of the sarcastic grinning so common in other natural drinks, it's an earnest handshake with a friendly smile. The cherry lurks in the background, in the shadows but ready to step forward to help the limeade should it show any sign of difficulty. The "other natural flavors", no doubt, are contributing as well, but most likely as a support role. Maybe caterers.

Inexplicably, when I took that second drink I had a vivid mental image flash through my mind of the place my mother took me to buy my Cub Scout uniform as a child. It was a private home in a run down neighborhood, the garage of the house was densely hung with used Scout uniforms. I can only imagine the pit out back was just as crowded with the naked bodies of the previous owners.

A final toss of the head and the bottle is empty, my day brighter and the world more colorful. I've made a friend this day, and look forward to meeting them again under a more auspicious star. The rest of this enlightening evening will be spent following my treasure map to the concealed sugar maple grove where I buried my bottle of Sweet Tea Original Lemonade. This will be spirited back to the apartment and concealed in a location proof against my wife's crafty fingers and keen nose, and saved for another day.