The battery acid spaghetti smoothie

this is liquid power

Hello clowns!

Sorry for the slight radio silence. I had one of the busiest weeks of my life, and part of it involved multiple doctors office visits trying to figure out how to tackle my bum eye.

Looks like Grandpa Dannis will be getting cataract surgery at the end of the summer. That’s okay. It sounds scary but it’s a whopping 20 minute procedure and I get to go home right away. Expect some garbled anesthesia selfies from me while wearing nothing but an eye patch. Until then I get to enjoy a few more monthly eye injections (good times) while cursing my lame eyeball.

During the time I spent in and out of those doctors offices, multiple people alerted me to a dumb Tumblr meme from 2021 that’s been recirculating across social media.

In it, Tumblr user @milfkanan threatens to peel a bunch of rainbow gummy strips apart and soak them into a cheap energy drink to create a new beverage called “battery acid spaghetti.”

In the original thread (of which you can check out screenshots of on Reddit), a bunch of other Tumblr users caution @milfkanan not to do this. I’m assuming these kind souls were just worried about @milfkanan’s potential consumption of disturbing amounts of sugar and caffeine, but compared to my entire newsletter, this shit sounded like child’s play.

Since my friends were hellbent on me trying this, I figured I could at least try it and fiddle around with a few variations of my own.

I went to a few stores in search of the perfect ingredients.

The original battery acid spaghetti post doesn’t specify which cheap energy drink to use, so I gave myself the luxury of choice. And as you all know from nearly four years of Food is Stupid, I’m somewhat obsessed with the entire concept of Monster energy drinks.

So I picked up a trio: Ultra Watermelon, Ultra Peach, and a curious new product called Monster Reserve, which was an orange dreamsicle flavor. Reserve. Wow. It’s like we tapped into the the secret stash of rare oak-casked shit that’s been buried in some dead estate-owner’s private cellar for decades, except that estate owner was a gamer and really into NASCAR.

These Airheads Xtremes rainbow ribbons were harder to find than I thought they’d be.

The grocery store didn’t seem to carry them, but Walgreens did. There’s some comfort in knowing that if I triggered type 2 diabetes from these shenanigans, I could just walk over to the next aisle and ask for some Metformin.

Splitting the rainbow ribbons up manually was a tedious task and I found myself getting irrationally angry while doing it, but I figured my rage would contribute to the final flavor somehow.

I put the rainbow candy noodles into a glass and poured the dreamsicle-flavored Monster Reserve over them, as the process described.

The sugar from the rainbow candy floated to the top of the glass and made it look like the top of leftover soup that I accidentally forgot in the back of the fridge for six months.

I took a sip. It was as obnoxiously sweet as you’d imagine, but still tasted like creamy orange dreamsicle as the Monster Reserve can advertised. Any sourness from the candy wasn’t present in the granulated coating, so basically this shit just made my teeth ache and my gums burn from straight sugar overload.

For all the fuss around battery acid spaghetti, I wasn’t particularly impressed at the result, though I did admire the fact that the Monster Reserve had the color of pee from someone who was severely dehydrated.

Then I asked Davida to choose which candy to pair with one of the remaining flavors of Monster energy drink.

As you can tell by the photo, she put a lot of thought into her decision.

She handed me the Trolli sour gummy worms, which were filled with a gushing liquid, and said, “I associate peaches with worms,” while pointing at the peach-flavored Monster. I respect this logic. These are dots I would have connected as a child and therefore they made complete sense to me.

I combined the peach-flavored Monster with the weird stubby liquid-filled Trolli gummy worms, and similarly wasn’t particularly impressed with the result.

The sugar pretty much floated off and created a mild layer of scum on top of the beverage, just like with the original battery acid spaghetti drink, but didn’t contribute much to the flavor. I basically just got a mouthful of extra-sweet artificial peach, even after I stirred up the worms a bunch. Battery acid wormies were a bust.

For the third version of the drink, I just said fuck it and dumped some sour punch straws (which looked like ziti) in a glass along with an entire three-serving pack of Fun Dip, including those weird sticks.

After I poured the Ultra Watermelon-flavored Monster into the glass, I was delighted to see that it was forming a really intense skin on top from all the loose Fun Dip sugar.

It was like the bubbling La Brea Tar Pits, if they were filled with a deadly amount of sucrose. But for all the funky moldy vibes, I really didn’t get much from the flavor other than sweetness. I guess if you mix a bunch of artificial flavors together your body really doesn’t know how to recognize a single one of them. I think that’s a survival instinct.

So out of sheer disappointment at all three of these dumb drinks, I decided to take the original glass of battery acid spaghetti and run it through my Nutribullet.

You know, in order to unlock all of its nutrients.

The result, a sort of battery acid spaghetti smoothie, if you will, looked deceivingly like something you’d get at a health supplement store.

It had a deep green color reminiscent of spirulina powder, and a slight foamy head to the top. Frankly, it looked fucking horrible. I took a reluctant sip from the cup and suddenly my face lit up into an involuntary, chemical-induced grin.

“This is awesome!” I shouted to Davida. “You need to try it!”

She reached for the glass reluctantly and took a sip. An incredulous look crept across her face.

“I…think I love this,” she said.

I hastily took the glass back from her and tried a bigger sip. It tasted like an orange dreamsicle with a rainbow blitzed into it, and suddenly I felt true unfettered energy coursing through my veins. It hit on nearly every pleasure receptor, it was silky, frothy, unmercifully sweet, and had enough caffeine in it to power me through next year. I had done it. I had discovered liquid power. The world was officially fucked.

“If I drink this entire thing I think I’m going to the emergency room,” I told Davida.

“You could run there!” she said, emphatically, feeling the effects of the drink. I could feel our pupils dilating. We could do anything we wanted after a glass of this shit. We were now gods.

So the battery acid spaghetti itself might have been a bust, but basically what I accidentally discovered was the architecture for a new designer drug. My plan is to start a new smoothie chain; it’ll be like Jamba Juice, but way more irresponsible. I think I’ll get started on that some other day, because man, I’m starting to get a horrible headache and suddenly I feel really crabby all of a sudden.

Thanks for nothing, @milfkanan.

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A Monster Reserve and rainbow gummy ribbon smoothie, who knew? If you guys liked today’s edition of the newsletter, don’t forget to share it on social media, via that secret work Slack channel, read it over the phone to your parole officer—anything helps.

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I’m currently recovering from the results of yet another eye injection, so once that settles, I’ll be back on schedule again (screen time’s a bit uncomfortable). So as always, I love you all so very much, and yes, I’ll pop into your inboxes again soon.