#scintilla13: writing fuel

Many of our fondest memories are associated with food. Describe a memorable experience that took place while preparing or eating food.

Okay, so it's a drink, but close enough. My previous post about seafood got eaten somehow and I don't feel like rewriting it. :p

So why Mountain Dew, as you can see by the shocking green and red logo? Good question. I latched onto it probably sometime in high school, while all my other male classmates were chugging down the nastiness that is Jolt Cola. If I was going to overdose on caffeinated soda, it was going to be one that was also ridiculously sweet.

There was that evening with my friend Donn (yes, the 'knocking on windows' friend) in which we somehow got a hold of a bottle of mint gin (yeah, I don't know either) and mixed it with the Dew. The funny thing is that it tasted really great...for about a minute, and then the aftertaste. Oh GOD the aftertaste was along the lines of "what were we THINKING??" And of course, when you live in a small town with nothing better to do on a summer night, you decide that maybe it'll taste better the next time out. So you drink some more. Not enough to get drunk, but just enough to question our sanity.

But more to the point, I equate the Dew to writing down in my parents' basement. For a good couple of years I would often have one of those long 12-pack cartons of the cans underneath my desk and drink one or two during my nightly three-hour writing sessions. I still think those were some of the best writing sessions I'd had in my life, and I'm pretty sure a lot of it was due to my caffeinated brain running a million miles an hour and hammering out a good thousand or so words a night. Come to think of it, this was in addition to the early morning coffee, the big half-liter bottle I'd have at work.

I of course don't drink it nearly as much as I used to (and my teeth, stomach and brain thank me kindly), but I will still grab a bottle now and again. My writing fuel lately has been water, but if I happen to have a soda on hand, I'll have that.

But it's the Dew that will always be my go-to Writing Fuel. :)

#scintilla13: these are words that go together well

What is the longest thing you know by heart (for example, a prayer, speech, commercial jingle, etc.)? Why did you learn it?

I know pretty much every officially released songs by the Beatles by heart. I'm still learning how to play a lot of them, something I'm doing while I'm writing my Blogging the Beatles posts, but I've listened to the albums for so long that I know all the lyrics and much of the instrumentation and can hear them clearly in my head if I thought about them (I'm thinking of the guitar and bass saxophone back-and-forth in "Savoy Truffle" as I type this). And yes, I even know "Revolution 9" pretty well.

I can also quote nearly all of Yellow Submarine if given a prompt, since I've watched that movie countless times since I was probably eight or nine.

The best payoff, though, was when A. and I went to see a version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Come Act 4 Scene 6 in which Edgar and Edmund duel to the death, I started quoting the play verbatim under my breath, much to A.'s complete surprise. And why did I know this one bit, when I can only quote small bits and pieces of other Shakespeare plays? Because of the last minute of "I Am the Walrus". ;)