Song of the Day: "Diet Pepsi"

A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.

"Diet Pepsi"

Addison Rae

from Addison

2025

I balk at writing blog posts about specific people and naming them within the blog post, especially if what I'm writing about is negative. But I think I'm going to do that today, because there was an incident with this person that's been bothering me, and I sometimes use the blog to express grievances so that I can, I dunno, figure shit out for myself, put some distance between me and it, something like that.

My Aunt Dee Dee is one of my favorite people, and one of my closest relatives. She's been in my immediate orbit for my entire life. The context that you'd need to know about her in this case—and maybe you already do, she's usually around for parties, especially back in the day, when she was the "babysitter" during house bangers I'd have while my parents were out—is that she has an intellectual disability. I don't think there is or ever was a specific diagnosis, just due to kids born in the 1960s not really receiving such treatment. She's high functioning, but probably not enough to live alone. She's lived with my parents for the past 22 years, and on the same block as my parents for 20 more.

So there's a certain amount of leeway afforded to Dee, due to these circumstances. It's easy to be nice to her if you find it easy to be nice to human beings in general. There are certain scenarios in which I would probably be annoyed or frustrated with someone else, but I'm not annoyed with Dee Dee, because it's Dee Dee, ya know what I mean? I've always found it easy to be patient with her, because I like her a lot, and she's been in my life for as long as I can remember, and that has always been the nature of our relationship.

It was surprising, then, that there's been a pattern emerging in my relationship with Dee that's been getting under my skin lately, annoying me in ways that I really feel the pressure to check myself before I act out and hurt feelings. The annoyance is on me, it's not anything she's doing on purpose. It's my fault. But still, it's been cropping up a lot lately, and I feel like it's time to quickly unpack what's going on here, before I say something that I regret. That's my responsibility as her nephew.

Okay, so the sobriety thing. It's complicated. I've tried to write about that on the blog in certain ways, and I've learned a lot about myself through that part of the process, but it's never going to be completely comfortable, and I'm never going to be able to make everyone in my life understand every single nuanced emotion that I experience. That's not their responsibility. It's not Dee Dee's responsibility to know anything about my sobriety, beyond the fact that I don't drink anymore. That's not just because it's her. I don't expect anyone to know, besides maaaaybe other sober people, but even then.

I don't know if I've written about this before—probably, I just don't have the energy to go back and read through anything—but family parties are a specific trigger for me. I don't feel all that comfortable at family gatherings. It's a complicated issue, and has everything to do with me and nothing to do with anyone else, and I'm dealing with it currently, and haven't "relapsed" or even come close due to this trigger, but still. Still. Let's acknowledge the fact that small family gatherings were typically events in which I would get the drunkest.

So I need a way to deal with that, because I'm not gonna not go to my parents' house anymore or in-laws' house or cancel Christmas dinner with everyone or anything like that. Avoid, Escape, Distract, Endure: I cannot avoid or escape, so it's a matter of distracting and enduring. And the way I have chosen to distract is by drinking a lot of diet colas and seltzers at family parties. It isn't a solution to everything but it gives me a cold can to hold and to drink at rapid clips during family gatherings. It's something. It helps in very small but tangible ways.

Thus, I'm usually sitting in my parents' living room on the couch, holding an Aldi-brand Diet Coke. Dee is usually there too. And lately—like I'm talking in the past year or so, every single time—she says something about the drink. Something like "Yeah, Joey loves his Diet Cokes!" She's not mocking me or anything, just making an observation that she's making. Maybe even an attempt at small talk. And it's fucking getting to me, man.

I think I'm inferring that she's commenting on my ostensible addiction to Diet Coke. I don't know if that's what she actually means, but I'm reading into it. I'm sensitive about addictions, obviously. I'm sensitive about so-called addictions to diet sodas specifically, because the big trend these days is to come down hard on addictions to drinks with aspartame. Pam told me that she saw on Instagram (her addiction of choice) that people refer to Diet Coke as "fridge cigarettes."

Look, I fucking get it. They aren't good for me. There's a lot of stuff I do that isn't good for me. But for now at least, I'm labeling Diet Coke as a bad thing that I need right now. I need to drink a few of them at family gatherings. I need them to distract from and to endure the constant throbbing of emotional pain that I feel in these situations. It's like how we don't judge members of AA for filling up their AA halls with cigarette smoke. The smoke might kill you, and the diet cola might kill me, but we alcoholics are at the point where we are acknowledging that the booze is DEFINITELY going to kill us VERY SOON, and it's really fucking hard to go from that end of the spectrum to living a perfectly clean life free from all things that do harm, and so some people feel it absolutely essential to trade in the addiction that is killing them for a lesser addiction that might kill them way on down the line.

I can't say all this to too many people, and I certainly can't say it to Dee Dee. Especially because she most likely has no fucking clue how weak her words make me feel, physically and spiritually. And it's impossible to explain it. I've tried, short explanations like "well it was either this or kill myself with alcohol," but I don't think the message sinks in when I say that. Maybe I've built up too strong of a reputation as a sarcastic prick at family gatherings, and it's too late to explain that I'm actually not being sarcastic in this case, that I really was literally killing myself. I also can't explain any of this out loud because I'm still too sensitive about it; I'm typing all this at the point of tears, honestly, which is pathetic in its own way, like, c'mon man, it's been 883 days, get over it. But it seems that I need yet still more time.

While I wait, I'm gonna drink some more diet colas, and I'm going to patient with those who cannot understand why I need to drink them. I will live with that, because I want to live.