Gatorade Rain

I have some young friends. You don’t know this about me, but I’ve got these young friends. Because of how I transcend trends and am basically timeless? So I can relate to any generation? Right? We’ve talked about this. The youths of today just plain feel comfortable hanging around me and don’t care that I listen to Scritti Politti on cassette and fall asleep on the couch at 8:30 while trying to stay up to watch Dinah Shore. Anyway point being that’s why I have a Coheed & Cambria ringtone and ended up giving Gatorade Rain a shot. The kids were all:

“You’re into hydration, right?”

And I go: “What time is it? How did you scalawags get in here? I smell a Sharpie mustache that someone drew on my face.”

And they say try this Gatorade Rain, it’s the “shit.” And I just scoffed because as you well know I do not like drinking s**t or having potty-mouthed teens use my ears as garbage cans! But then they called my commitment to hydration into question and I couldn’t back down — they might lose respect for me and find somebody else to buy them beer!

So I grabbed the too-big, overcomplicated, ghastly plastic bottle — it was the Berry flavor, kind of a sickly pale purple — and took a hearty swig.

Now the kids swore up and down that Rain was a tremendous alternative to regular Gatorade, with a nice clean aftertaste, and I said they better be right because regular Gatorade tastes like something pissed out of a hobo with urethral lesions (if memory serves — I have not taken a sip of that vile concoction since 1986 when I played two games of badminton in a row). And they said: Oh yeah, old timer, Gatorade knows how “ass-nasty” its drinks are so it decided to market this new product as something that doesn’t taste quite so wretched. And I said: Bully to them.

And I will grant you that Rain has a pretty inoffensive aftertaste. Unfortunately they forgot to do something about the foretaste which has that patented Gatorade gym-sock flavor and makes me think of nothing more than their advertisements where they show athletes actually sweating out Gatorade and I’m forced to assume that a key ingredient is, indeed, the perspiration collected from a football player’s moist, stinking, pendulous, postgame jockstrap.