The Agony of an Old, TGI Friday's Mudslide

While packing up the apartment last night, we stumbled across an unopened bottle of TGI Friday's pre-mixed Mudslide pseudo-booze sitting on top of our refrigerator. It was all the way back in the corner, other junk put in front of it, unnoticed for the last three years. It looked... for lack of a better word, scary. Okay, this is how they're supposed to look all fresh and clean from the liquor store just aching to be drunk by girls at a frat party:

Inviting, no? Now, imagine that bottle covered in a thick film of dust, spiderwebs, grit, filth, and the various leavings of the assorted wildlife that occupy any and all NYC dwellings. Also, the liquid inside was kind of swirly, like a puddle of gasoline, and there may or may not have been chunks floating around just beneath the surface.

Reason dictates, at this point, that one should throw the bottle away. It's old, it's been sitting out through at least three brutally hot Brooklyn summers, it's most likely turned to the Dark Side and drinking it would cause nothing short of an epic Old Faithful of diarrhea and it might even go so far as to kill one dead with a strain of botulism heretofore undiscovered by science.

However, I am not a reasonable man.

"It's got booze in it, so... you know... that's like a preservative... besides, it's probably made with so many chemicals and whatever, I bet you could use it for embalming fluid in a pinch. Let's just put in the fridge and then we'll just see what we can see."

Note that I'm willing to drink extremely ancient novelty drinks, but I'm unwilling to do so if they're at room temperature.

So I popped it in the fridge and, after a few hours, when it had reached a nicely chilly state of being, I prepared myself for a delicious Mudslide-y treat and/or a carnival ride into the depths of Hell that ends with my insides on the outside.

I wiped off the collected scum. Somewhere, I heard alarm bells. I stripped off the plastic protective seal. Dead relatives showed up as floating ghosts trying to warn me about something. I unscrewed the lid. The Earth died, screaming. I took a sip...

You know how when you get a soda from a fast food place and there's something wrong with the syrup lines so it's mostly fizzy water and you take one drink and go, "Ew, this tastes like barf" and you complain to the manager and they fix it and you get a new soda and go about your carefree existence like nothing bad ever happened to anybody in the whole wide world? You're using hyperbole to express your displeasure with your drink of choice. It doesn't ACTUALLY taste like vomit. That would be absurd! Nothing tastes like vomit except for vomit.

And, it turns out, bottles of TGI Friday's Mudslide that have been sitting on top of a fridge for a few years. It literally... and I'm using that word correctly, i.e. without exaggeration... tasted like a mouthful of slightly sweet, very cold vomit. Bilious, rank, like decay and rot and stomach acid and sorrow.

I dumped the rest down the drain, my head hung in inevitable shame, my lesson learned. For now. Because what is life without chances taken? How can one experience the highest highs without risking a dip in the murky waters of the lowest lows? Dare I not dream of a world where pre-mixed, franchise-sponsored beverages remain fresh and delicious across the span of time???

It is better to have lived on the edge than to not have lived at all. But seriously, you guys, it really tasted like barf. Not cool.