The Dr Pepper Wall
Listening — Linkin Park, More the Victim
Reading — The Letters of Wallace Stevens
Dr Pepper, meme king of the soft drinks. There are things you look back on and can't understand how you were ever in a place to think a certain way; I haven't had soda since 23:59 on December 31st, 2017, so how I ended up saving a hundred Dr Pepper cans in highschool and stacking them into a wall in my bedroom is infathomable and disgusting. But I did it, so let's all take a moment to marvel in its... er, beauty.
When I went off to college, the wall stayed standing. (My mom used to tell stories about accidentally toppling it while vacuuming. Sorry mom!) and sometime before I left again in 2015, I got rid of it. After all, it was a stack of trash. Some things don't need to live on forever.
I found them in my parent's attic a year or two ago and was shocked.
These things didn't get thrown out!? By the time I found the cans, I hadn't had soda in well over half a decade. The idea that I had been hoarding garbage in the attic was repulsive to me, but at this point they were fifteen years old and I couldn't just "throw them away". They had to be destroyed.
Their execution was scheduled two days ago. It was a quiet mountain path in the Pacific Northwest, and they were lined up like good little soldiers who deserted the batallion.
It turns out cans can take a beating, so eventually I got tired of shooting them one by one and put a target on the whole larger box. I took that casket home before opening it for an autopsy, but there were plenty of corpses on the battlefield.
We stayed up there for a few hours and packed up to go home. The next day I unpacked the cans and set them up in a tower for the final time. The Dr Pepper wall would live once more before being erased from the world.
Just think, I cycled all of the content of those cans through my body. I had all of my life's soda intake in a narrow window and I'll probably die at 40 because of it. Oh well.
I let the cans sit one more night of vigil and finally, today, went outside to crush them. It turns out cans that have asymmetric holes blasted through them are pretty hard to crush without sending them flying across the garage! They also leave some nasty, broken glass-like debris everywhere, so emulators beware. But the deed was done, and the wall is no more.
(a word of wisdom: some things do not deserve to be photographed.)
Thus ends the Dr Pepper wall. It was one third plain DP, one third football cans with pictures of undergrads saying they wanted to be doctors, and the final third was clearly Indiana Jones 4 (2008). A single can survived completely intact in the box—Indy himself. That can is the footer to this page, and I have allowed its life to continue for now. The rest is now a thing of the past. Let's not get in the habit of preserving trash sentimentally...
R.I.P. Dr Pepper Wall [2008-2026]
06.06.2026
