Most of us run out of energy before dark these days. There is just more to keep up with than there used to be. Maybe it’s all those emails, tweets, text messages and Facebook things.
I used to get groggy and start dozing off during the Johnny Carson or David Letterman late night shows after the 10 o’clock news. Now I fall asleep watching the 6 o’clock newscasts.
We will probably discover someday that the same people who got us hooked on social media and all the other stuff that drains our time and energy created the proliferation of energy drinks.
The first time I noticed energy drinks was in the 1990s. Some of us were playing in a tennis tournament in Mobile when we were introduced to Red Bull.
There were tubs of the blue and silver cans of energy drinks iced down at the tennis complex. Representatives of the company handed out free samples and told us how it would perk us up.
My partner and I drank a can of it right before an early afternoon match. We won and felt good, so we had a couple more cans before our next two matches that day.
We didn’t read the ingredients. Mainly it was caffeine and sugar. My eyes never closed that night after the matches, and I don’t think my heart rate has dropped back to normal yet.
That was my first and last experience with energy drinks, but there are dozens of different brands now. Their marketing seems to be aimed as much at young tech-savvy folks as it is at those involved in sports and other strenuous activities.
People with laptops, cell phones, iPads and those other devices are taking energy drinks with them to classrooms, coffee shops and libraries. Some of them get double doses of energy with Starbucks coffee and Red Bull.
Coffee was our parents’ energy drink. My folks kept a pot of Standard coffee on the stove day and night. It came in bright yellow packages and was delivered to the house in a yellow truck.
They made the coffee in a little silver-colored pot and kept it hot by putting the pot in a saucepan of simmering water. The longer it sat, the darker and stronger it got.
If my dad was working the graveyard shift and needed something with more kick to keep him alert, he would get the A&P Store to grind him some coffee with more chicory in it.
Most kids in our neighborhood were not allowed to drink coffee, but we had home-brewed tea for lunch and supper. That provided enough caffeine to propel us through bike races and ballgames.
My mother usually had tea left over from meals. She kept it on the cabinet in a blue ceramic pitcher, and we drank it on ice cubes from the trays in our freezer when we got hot.
They have every kind of coffee and tea product imaginable now in cans and bottles at convenience stores. You can get Starbucks vanilla lattes, caffe mochas, caramel macchiatos and a Frappuccino in different flavors.
Store coolers are filled with tea of every description. There is herbal tea, green tea, black tea, white tea, plain old sweet tea, pomegranate tea, organic tea and the list goes on.
All of those caffeine-based energy boosters should be sufficient to keep us pumped up without the huge wave of energy drinks like Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar, Full Throttle and all the others.
I never saw canned or bottled tea and coffee in my younger years. Our energy drink was a six-ounce Coke in a short green bottle, and our parents didn’t let us have many of those.
There was a time when truck drivers, factory workers and others who had to work hard and stay awake were the major consumers of all these energy concoctions.
But all that stuff is gaining popularity now with college students, office workers and others whose energy is being sapped by computers, smart phones and the Internet.
Come to think of it, just typing this column, correcting all the things that were corrected by Spellcheck, selecting the right words from the electronic thesaurus, looking things up on Google and all that wore me out.
The next time I write something, I’m getting some Red Bull and one of those Starbucks bottled espresso drinks with a double shot of dark chocolate to keep my energy level up.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES