Confessions of a Pop Bottle Top Popper

So you wanna talk about pop, huh? Well you've come to the original soda pop bottle top popper kid himself :P It's practically 1 in the blessed a.m. and I can't sleep yet because our Atomic Ranch Lady got me started, so now I hafta go finish it.

Over here, in the center of the country where we lived in peace and harmony we called it pop, not soda. I try to correct Junior on this constantly because his Mother, who hails from Florida calls it soda, which is just all wrong when you're living here in the peacefully harmonious Midwest, dadgummit (if you'll please pardon my French, merci beau coup).

Now for all you POP aficionados out there who used to drink it straight down from the glass pop bottle (either clear or green-tinted) like I did (which incidentally is much more refreshing than a metallic tasting aluminum can) there's still opportunities for you to reclaim one of the original pleasures of your hopefully misspent youth.

For instance, in my local grocery stores here they sell real bottled pop (besides the "designer soda" or whatever it is that they call it to sell to people more sophisticated than I ever hope to be!). There's several flavors of Frostie available (yum!), and Sioux City Cream Soda, and in the ethnic isle there's the Mex version of Coke and Taqueria... it's very sweet! Another bonus of the Mex pops is that they are sold in the larger 12 oz. size bottle, just like the ones we drank from as kids.

I've got my ever diminishing collection of vintage pop bottles recovered from my Grandma's crawlspace basement. Why they were down there, I don't know. Except I did happen to find a few empty beer bottles of my Grampa's down there too (as well as up in the attic!) so I assume that my Grampa was umm, storing the evidence from Grandma ;D Anyhoos, I used to keep the better pop bottles in the fridge filled w/ appropriately colored water. That is until one night when the fridge got too cold and froze the bottles, which in turn made them busted bottles... Live and Learn *sigh*

Now remember, it's pronounced p-o-p, not s-o-d-a unless you happen to live in a different part of the country. But if youre gonna speak the same American language as I do then you have to use the term "pop" sans the "soda." Pop's also easier and faster to say than "that other multisyllable word" anyway, which means it'll give your mouth increased time to say more profound, thought-provoking stuff, just like I do.

So what was my favorite pop when I was a kid, you ask? My fave pop as a kid was Tru Treat, which was a lot like Squirt w/ some Mt. Dew influence. But I wasn't against experiencing the wonders of all the flavors that our super market had to offer: Dr. Pepper, Apple Beer, 7 Up, Nesbitt's, Shasta, any Root Beer, SunKist, Teem, Bubble Up, never too crazy about RC or Pepsi... But through it all, my family were diehard Coka Cola people... And I collected every pop bottle cap I laid my hands on.... And my Mom, who never really understood why kids see the real true value of such things, simply threw my pop bottle cap horde away!... And to this day I still feel the brutal pangs of a treasured horde's untimely loss.... and... I'm running off with my happy little fingers again, aren't I???

The end :D

ps. Pop bottles are the only proper launching method to use with your pop bottle rockets this Fourth of July... accept no substitutes!