"Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me."
Or Death and December - George Garrett | Pok Pok Som Drinking Vinegar - Ginger
The Poem
Or Death and December - George Garrett
The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey,
wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover.
Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me.
Seven a.m. and time to walk my dog on a leash.
Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters,
and the wind comes down our one-way street
like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi,
huge with a cold load of growls.
There's not only leaf left to bear witness,
with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp,
against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind.
Only my nose running and my face frozen
into a kind of grin which has nothing to do
with the ice and the wind or death and December,
but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy,
for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.
The Beverage
Pok Pok Som Drinking Vinegar - Ginger
I purchased this item yesterday, never having heard of it before. Let me be fully honest: it is syrup masquerading as an artisanal health food item. Delicious, but syrup. I realized this after consuming… all of it in one afternoon.
The instructions call for a 1:4 dilution with water (sparkling or still) and also note it would be great in a cocktail. I had Topo Chico (yessss) and Gerolsteiner (ehhhh) for my sparkling water dilution, and both worked well. I seriously enjoyed this tangy, sweet, gingery drinking vinegar as way to punch up sparkling water.
I didn’t really question the sweetness until I looked at the nutritional facts after getting through most of the bottle mixed into large glasses of sparkling water. It is all sugar. I consumed ~1000 calories of mostly sugar in my sparkling water yesterday. It was a shocking moment for me, the kind of person who almost always looks at nutritional labels. I wouldn’t pour maple syrup into my sparkling water casually over the course of a Saturday afternoon, so I was taken aback when I realized I basically had been doing that all day.
Still, I will probably buy this again for much more sparing use over the course of weeks as a kick-up for a vodka soda, a little evening mocktail, and other kind of treat moments. Not as a substitute for kombucha or Kevita. Saturday afternoon still calls for a MUCH lower-sugar item.