I don’t know what’s in “Life Water,” but whatever it is it’s also in Imoxicillan, akadoko “the pink stuff.” My first experience with “vitamin enhanced water beverages” was seeing discarded Vitamin Water bottles constantly fallen, defeated, in the parking abyss outside Gateway Community College. Vitamin Water: It’s Baby-Makin’ Fuel.

I wondered what would draw people to an imbibable with such an unsettling name.
“Juice” sounds nutritious and decent tasting, “soda” sounds a bit empty but not disgusting. “Vitamin Water” sounds like how an alcoholic in denial describes the contents of a liquor bottle to a small child.

Why do you drink that?

I need to. It keeps me alive.

Is it vitamin water?

Yeah, kid. Vitamin water.

“Kool” Aid at least admits it’s something not quite natural, possibly made from cigarettes, and Sunny Delight‘s name is adequately Orwellian that sensible people know to keep away. Combined with the appearance, Vitamin Water just makes the stuff seem like there’s something wrong with it, but for some reason only to me! Water is clear, vitamins are clear, why is this goop pink? Something horrible must have happened to make this name obviously no longer applicable, but in the absence of any other identifier you no longer know what it is. And then that white and black big bland font label, it looks like something somebody would drink on an episode of Roseanne. Except on that show it would be peanut butter and bacon water.

But anywaw, this is not vitamin water. This is Life Water, which is even vaguer, creepier and lyingier. This is not water that brings forth life. You cannot revive Benjamin Franklin with it. This is not magic potion. Do not drink this if your red heart-count is low. Sure, it claims to have “100%” Vitamin C if you only drink 8 ounces of the contents, but so does a bowl of Froot Loops. Would you drink a bottle of Froot Loops? If it tasted like medicine? It is worth noting that I wasn’t aware of the “serving” tomfoolery, despite my past scuffles with it, and probably gave myself haemochromatosis by taking in 250% vitamin C within a single day. Yesh, I drank it all. This was just tolerable enough for me to not cry when tasting it so I had to finish it. I know, at least, that humans have the power to process it. I wouldn’t want to dump it out a window and poison some poor stray armadillo.

I should have known just by the awfulness of the associated advertisement –featuring yet another tired, exhausted lamo parodoy to the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, with the sequence being additionally creepy in a way that I guess zombies just couldn’t manage– that the drink would be bad. However, I did not associate the ad with the fluid until I tasted it and realized it was awful and suddenly remembered that the Sobe company typically represents itself with a lizard and there recently was a horrible ad with lizards in it which may or may not have featured a bottled substance instead of car insurance irrelevant to the primary horribleness.

White backgrounds are bad news. Computer generated characters are bad news. People dancing for no reason are bad news. Advertisements are bad news. Advertisements which think they are cleverly spoofing something are worse news. When you put all that bad news together, I wish you hadn’t. I should not forget to mention, this wasn’t but some effortless robotchickeny meme-enabled jerkwork on the internet; this cost many dollars to make and millions more just to debut, I’m told, during some major sporting event or another earlier this year. This is how our masters talk to us now.

If you had asked me in 1993 if I thought allegations of molesty behavior against Michael Jackson would affect his ability to license out his music for awful unfunny over-budgeted ripoffs, I would have asked you what “molest” meant. I was ten years old, I didn’t need that in my life. If you had asked me the same question in 2003, I probably would have pointed out to you that it hadn’t much mattered in the decade leading up to then. You ask dumb questions.