On Loko

A few weeks back I started hearing about Four Loko, the malt liquor caffeine drink. All the kids were a twitter about it, so I quickly became obsessed with getting my hands on some before it was pulled off the market.

Yes, people are being hospitalized all over the country after consuming this and I could not wait to get my very own cans of this hell juice.

Luckily, my friend Maxie was just as loco about the loko and volunteered to pick us up some cans. The plan was to hang out at my place Saturday night and see what the hype was all about.

I made us dinner-a pasta bake and salad. Carbs seemed necessary for this endeavor. We popped the first can; it was the lemon-lime flavor. I wouldn’t say it tasted good, but it certainly wasn’t bad. It was kind of like a gatorade on crack. I snapped a photo to commemorate the inaugural sip. I am still having issues uploading photos, but you can see it here.

The first can went down easily enough, but I could feel myself getting kinda cracked out by the end. After drinking 23.5 ounces of fluid, it was necessary to break the seal and that was when all hell broke lose.

Once the seal was broken, we were pretty fucked. We were forcing so much liquid in to our bodies during this experiment; this resulted in about 2695 trips to the bathroom. Plus, the pan of pasta was sitting in the kitchen which was conveniently on the way to the bathroom. We lost all sense of decorum and just tore in that bitch with reckless abandon.

By the time we were halfway through the second can-orange flavor-we were pretty tipsy. This was documented via photo here. The thing is, it isn’t a normal drunk. You are all kinds of messed up, your insides jangly and your body is in confused chaos. We were just sitting on my bed (I live in a tiny studio, so we were keeping it classy), so it was somewhat difficult to tell how messed up we were until we stood up for the bathroom. By the end of the second one, I started yawning but I didn’t feel tired. My body was trying to raise a white flag, but the caffeine was making it hard for the flag to be lifted.

Maxie cracked open a can of watermelon flavor and it was bad, hideously and painfully bad. It was like concentrated off brand Jolly Ranchers and I nearly gagged when I took a swig. I was done for. Maxie did her best to choke it down, but she was only partially successful. That beast watermelon was the straw that broke us.

I slept horribly last night, the caffeine and sugar and malt liquor causing chaos in my body. The hangover ranks in the top 10 worst I have ever had. I found myself wishing I was capable of throwing up from drinking.

This was an experiment I’m glad I tried; this is a bridge everyone seems to be jumping off and dammit, I wanted to jump too. That being said, I will never do this again. I can only imagine what this did to my insides. It didn’t kill me, but I have spent most of today wishing I was dead. I just glanced over and saw the can in my recycling pile and a wave of nausea swept over me. I am grown and grown people shouldn’t be doing this. From now on, my hangovers will come exclusively from red wine, wheaty beer and gimlets.