Wheel! Of! FISH!

SUUUURRRRRGE!

2003-08-13 - 6:04 p.m.

Soundtrack: "I'm Afraid of Americans" by David Bowie

Threat for the Day: "I'll feed the Rush, all right. I'll feed your grandmother to the Rush."

It's hard to find a cause these days.

Well, no. Let me rephrase that.

It's disturbingly easy to find a cause these days, but ridiculously difficult to find a cause one can actually do anything for.

Fortunately, I've found the solution.

Preservation. Restoration. Public outcry. Letter-writing campaigns. Guerilla art. Better living through home-brewed chemistry. This movement has it all, baby.

I give you: Save Surge.

Voila! Fear the power of the vox populi, hated barons of cocaine and cola! We will have our concentrated citrus rush back! We will have our unearthly green! The world will tremble before our mad scrambles over broken-down furniture across a dusty landscape as we once more race for a single gleaming drop of that marvelous concoction!

You see, a tragedy occurred in 1999, when Coca-Cola bottlers decided to abandon the Revolution and return to their staid, archaic ways, taking our beloved cyber-hip soda-plus off the shelves and putting up that misspelled dinosaur of the hated 1960s, Mello Yello, in its place.

We here at Save Surge seek to remedy this through ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

We'll sign online petitions until Coke falls TO ITS KNEES!

We'll write messages on forums about how much we like Surge until CEO Douglas Daft PIDDLES ON HIS GUCCIS IN FEAR!

We'll sit at home and mix an appalling variety of citrus-esque concoctions until we finally achieve a lingering HINT of the taste of that veridian nectar!

My personal favorite of the rebellious brews listed here is the recipe involving dnL and Sunny Delight, just for simplicity's sake. But that might be a moot point as the cruel anti-extreme-citrus agenda of the pop barons comes into play again, pulling our beloved 7-UpsideDown from the stores in an act of crassness that has not been matched since the Pullman Riots.

In my opinion, your best recipe would likely involve one of the more dramatically green citrus sodas -- or alternatively a strong concentration of one of the bright green powdered sugar drinks, such as Lemon-Lime Kool-Aid or Hi-C Tangergreen -- boiled down into a thick, clear syrup of the appropriate color, and then added to a clarified orange juice concentrate, which you would also acheive through slow boiling and the addition of corn syrup. You would then take that thick bit of alchemy and put it into a nice soda siphons, like the ones available here, available from Austria for a reasonable price. Presto-fizzo.

Why would I take my stand with these quiveringly caffeinated pop junkies?

I love Surge. It was one of my first real "hip" cultural addictions back in my wild youth. The folks who clustered about The Annex BBS, which was the heir to the Screaming in Digital BBS, in West Palm Beach were all, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the coolest people in existence. I mean, what a roster! Wheel, Suicide Sam E., Tommyknocker, Matt Steinhoff, The Flying Fists of Master Grant, Thessaly, Soulstorm, Mischief, Azagthoth, Death Incarnate, Malkav, Slartibartfast, Necromonitor ... oh, so many others.

Believe you me, we were hip.

And we loved Surge. There was a hidden BBS inside the greater Annex BBS called Surge!. We made Surge muffins and Surge frosting for Surge cake. Bottles and cans of Surge lined the walls and floor of the sysops' house, and Surge cocktails were the order of the day for all the best parties.

And then, one day, after most of us had drifted away from the Annex, and even from West Palm Beach ... it was gone.

Those swine at Coca-Cola have gone too far, this time. They've snatched away a much-beloved part of my acne-riddled adolescence. They'll pay. Don't think they won't pay.

Just wait until I get my Surge frisbee. Man, will the be sorry then.

- \/\/heel never stop revoluting, baby.