RED 40
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 009 // AUGUST 3, 2024
I woke up this morning in a guest room at my friends’ cottage. It’s a small room, painted all white, with a sloping ceiling, yellow furniture, and an antique silver mirror that is clouded by age. By eight, the sunlight is blinding, and I am sweating into the yellow bed-spread. The window has curtains but in all the years I have slept in this room, I have never tried to close them. I lie there, in the delirium between sleep and consciousness. The mattress is old, probably older than me, and it sags a bit in the middle. Objectively, that’s not a good thing, but it has the comfort of an embrace.
Later, I will sit on the dock in a wet bathing suit, my damp hair slicked back, writing the Stimulant Newsletter. For now though, I will bask in the sun, until caffeine cravings compel me to get up.
I have been coming here my entire life, longer than I can remember. It doesn’t seem like this place has changed at all, though I know that it has. The patio is still painted a rusty brown-red. The rocking chairs are still bright red, yellow, green. When I was maybe seven, I got my wrist caught in one of the doors here. What I was doing is unclear to me now, and I probably couldn’t have given a convincing answer then. Anyway, the latch punctured the delicate skin on the inside of my wrist. I can’t remember if I cried, though I imagine that I did. What I do remember is the blood running hot and crimson over my wrist and dripping onto the white linoleum of the kitchen floor. I still have the scar, a small puckering now, whiter than the skin around it. If this place hasn’t changed, it has changed me.
Do you remember what you wanted to do when you were five years old? I used to tell people that I wanted to be a palaeontologist, then I was going to be a cardio-thoracic surgeon. Neither of those careers panned out. Sometimes I wonder what eleven-year old me would think of the adult that I have become. In the dining room doorway, there are pen etchings of the heights of the various people who have been at this cottage over the years. Looking at it, I can see how much my body has changed since I was the Rowan of 2014. He seems like a complete stranger, yet I couldn’t tell you how exactly we are different. Sure, there is the cigarette burn on the inside of my right forearm that I got in my first week of university, but does a scar mean that I am a different person? I tried to hide it when I went home for Thanksgiving that year, but my parents saw the blister, red and angry; they said they were worried that I was running with the wrong crowd. It hasn’t come up since.
If there is a hard border between childhood and adulthood, what defines it? Is it getting drunk for the first time, sex? To my mind, the transition is more gradual, nebulous, if it can even be fully defined. One day, you revisit the books you loved as a teenager, say the works of J.D. Salinger. This time around, what seemed so profound is painfully embarrassing. So much for the discerning aesthetics of your fifteen-year old self. Or maybe that wasn’t your experience at all. Maybe you decided that you were going to rebrand yourself, shed the childhood abbreviation of your name, new wardrobe, new taste in music. Outwardly abrupt shedding of the old self, sure, but you still love those Tintin books you grew up reading, don’t you? Ultimately, I am not sure there really is such a precise difference between who I was then and who I am now to say that he was a different person.
A lot of people associate moments in time with particular music. Maybe that’s the case for you: an album that you played on repeat after a breakup, a song that you listened to on repeat in the summer after grade eleven. You don’t hear about associations with place nearly as much, nor do you hear people associating things with the other senses, like taste or smell. This cottage tastes like peaches and Twizzlers, Coke Zero and corn. I love synthetic flavours, especially ersatz strawberry and banana. Food with no natural analogue is astronaut food. When I say that, I don’t mean it in the sense of the Astronaut Ice Cream I bought in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum gift shop when I was six. That was like eating Neapolitan chalk. I mean astronauts like the Jetsons, Captain Picard, Blade Runner. It’s high tech food.
I watch a lot of Reels about living on an “ancestral diet.” Artificial flavours are, obviously, antithetical to that. You can’t forage for a bag of Sour Cherry Blasters. I am not sure why eating like the ancients is a good thing, it seems very time consuming. The stuff that those influencers attribute to seed oils sounds a lot like mysticism to me, so I guess that is consistent with the whole pagan thing. From what I can tell, my ancestors developed a gene that requires a steady intake of Red 40 to survive, so I don’t think the foraged diet is going to work for me.
Synthetic flavours are the ultimate day-to-day manifestation of post-war modernity. Only a species that has fully emancipated itself from the natural environment could have thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs formulating new flavours, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. On a micro-scale, have you seen those places that do rainbow food? What about those real or cake videos? We have such a command over what we eat that we can dye our food any colour and make it look however we want. Access to frozen tropical fruit all year round would have been an unimaginable luxury at pretty much any other time in history, but our great grandparents could never have imagined Sugar-Free Red Bull. How incredible is it that we can go to any grocery store and buy food that has been engineered for maximal flavour and habit formation? Purdue Pharma eat your heart out.
If artificial flavours are the food version of modernism, we’re definitely at the tail end of the post-modern era. The classics are readily available, but when was the last time you had Tang? Gatorade is a great example of Po-Mo food. Their flavours don’t reference real-world tastes, they are concepts or abstractions: Red, White, Glacier Freeze, they are colours but when you read them, you can remember how they taste, right? It’s no coincidence that the concept-flavour synthesis kicked off in the eighties. Thanks to the brave scientists of Pepsi-Co, Coca Cola, and many others, we are going boldly into the great flavour beyond.
There is a re-emergence of the modern synthetics, you’ll have noticed it in vape flavours. Like the stuff they advertised in the ad breaks on the original Star Trek, but not quite the same thing. New delivery system and all that. Let’s say that they constitute the post-post-modern flavour movement. I wonder what the Apollo 11 astronauts would think of a lemon-mint Elf Bar. My friend watched the moon landing on a black and white TV in this house, maybe that will give him some insight on the issue.
The cottage is old. Parts of it were built in the 1890s. It has a bell system to call servants, though it is tragically non-functional. Dark brown, the walls are shingle and hewn logs, accounted with green and red window frames. It is everything a cottage should be: beautiful, quiet, rustic without being deprived. None of those Muskoka mansion “cottages” on this lake. Later, when I write this post, pontoon boats will lumber through the bay, their boneless, sunburnt occupants staring at me balefully, as if I am some kind of hateful wretch with the audacity to haunt their view. I know I’m ghostly white but really, there’s no need to stare.
Inside, the walls are all tongue-and-groove pine, some a dark brown, others whitewashed. In the dining room, hundred-year old coronation plates are mounted on the wall, green glassware in the china cabinet. Over the great stone fireplace in the living room, there is a stag’s head mounted. Its glassy eyes have watched me for my entire life. The stairs creak and it is always ten degrees hotter on the second floor. Time slows to a crawl in the kitchen, the second hand of the clock, illuminated by the early morning sunlight, languishes near the nine.
The house is sort of reminiscent of Kragsyde, not the modernist one built in the 1970s or the po-mo building from the 2010s, the original from the 19th century. Similar time period, liberal use of shingle, upright and imposing on their respective stone foundations, commanding (or commanded as the case may be) the hillside. The cottage I know is certainly less grand, though utterly Victorian in its sensibilities. For the curious Montrealers, the original Kragsyde’s landscaping was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also did Mount Royal Park.
Any place that has been in a family for generations will develop its own history. This lake has had an insular community for generations. There is a sort of quasi-incestuous air to the place, a club I know about but will never be able to join. I am just passing through, have been for twenty-six years.
Have you seen The Sixth Sense? I can’t in good conscience recommend M. Night Shyamalan, really his stuff isn’t very good, though if you like a slopfest they have their charms. Old is the only one I can endorse enthusiastically. Anyway, if you spend a lot of time in a place with a long history, you become sort of like the kid in Sixth Sense: all around you, you see vestiges of people that you never really knew.
I want you to imagine that you are me. We’re in our friends’ house. We’ve been here for years, sometimes it seems like we have never really left. We know this place as well as we knew our childhood house. It's where we had our first beer; bitter, the carbonation burned as we choked it down. We are much older now, our tastes have changed and our dad says that we could try being less sarcastic.
Age has given us greater perspective. It is annoying when people say “you’ll understand when you are older,” but there is some truth in it. What nine-year old can understand the politics of a love triangle? Life experience is really more about gaining the tools to understand situations than it is about living out every possible permutation of the human experience. A benefit of growing up in a place rich in history is that it is an opportunity to collect information about the people around us and the people who were here before them. This is especially for gossip devotees.
Ephemera is always a pleasure to read, not just because it gives the opportunity to look inside the life of someone long dead, it is also a great opportunity to exercise the imagination. There’s no way to know why someone wrote what they wrote in the margin of Salo, you just have to imagine what it was that they found so stirring about the passage. It is hardly ephemera, but investigating the drama of past generations is an equally rewarding pursuit. You can do it with letters, but the oral tradition is really well suited to this. I highly encourage you to go hunting for half-century old drama. They say not to speak ill of the dead, but we see no reason why we can’t gossip about them.
One day, I will leave this place and I will never come back. I don’t know when. I expect that I will fade pretty quickly once I am no longer around. Like I said earlier, forever an outsider here. Maybe that would have been different if I had been better at making friends when I was a kid, but I never really got on with other children.
The cottage will always stay with me, marked permanently in the skin of my arm, but also suffused throughout my person. My time in this place has fixed in my vocabulary the idiolects of people who were dead before I was born. How can you ever really leave a place if it is intractably a part of you?
This afternoon, I will dive into the lake. Before I jump, I will imagine hitting the bottom; knocked unconscious, maybe a spinal injury. I would float up like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps I will only scrape my face on the bottom. It doesn’t matter, it is just in my imagination. As the water rushes up to meet me, I’ll picture myself in the third person, feet just visible above the splash, like the subject of a David Hockney painting. A transient moment frozen in oil and canvas. Hockney just did the stage design for a production of Turandot at the L.A. Opera. It is worth looking up: the sort of lurid fantasy you usually only find in nightmares and Argento movies from the early 1970s. It is sort of surprising that Turandot hasn’t been cancelled yet, considering the subject matter. I guess opera fans aren’t really the ones who care to wrestle with that sort of thing.
Miscellany
1. Have you seen the Billie Irish? It’s been making the rounds on Twitter. I guess I haven’t explained yet - it’s an original Monster with Guinness floated on top. Pretty foul-sounding, right? I found a can of the black stuff in my fridge on Thursday, and since I was going to go to a gas station on Friday… I am sure you can see where this is going.
Monster says that their original flavour has the dry taste and texture of “a fine champagne.” I have my doubts, but I am nothing if not game. Chalk this one up to growing up watching Jackass. Ingredients in hand, I am ready to use my body as the canvas for a new kind of art. Surely it won’t be as bad as it looks, right?
Later: Champagne and Monster are both carbonated liquids. That is where the similarities end. Annoyingly, the Billie Irish is actually pretty drinkable. The Monster pretty much overpowers the Guinness, and the texture is much thinner than the beer is normally. It has a sort of sour candy taste that is sort of pleasant, but while you are drinking it, you can tell it is the sort of thing that would make your dentist have a nervous breakdown. I think the best way that I can describe it is that it is to the shandies what the Jäger Bomb is to mixed drinks. Flavour is comparable, the feeling of degeneracy that is experienced afterwards is the same. I won’t be rushing to make more of them, but if I was presented with one, I’d drink it with no hesitation.
If you want to make it at home, you will need a can of Monster, a can of Guinness, a spoon, and a pint glass. Pour a half pint worth of Monster into the glass, then float the Guinness on top. Pour the Guinness over the back of the spoon so that it sits on top of the Monster. Enjoy at your leisure.
2. A few weeks ago, I was at a bar and this extremely drunk stranger told me that I look like Justin Trudeau (I don’t) and then he asked to take a selfie. I wonder what went through his mind the next morning when he found a bunch of blurry photos of him with some guy in his camera roll. Has that ever happened to you?
3. Once again, I am indebted to my friend and editor Penelope, without whom I would be riddled with errors and badly dressed.
RED 40 was edited by “Penelope”.
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