Question #111:

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  I need lots... LOTS of caffeine to get me through my day, but I'm pretty sure that all that coffee is eating a hole in my stomach. Any thoughts on a cleaner delivery system?
- McTwitchy

Dear McTwitchy,
  If you like your addiction to be warm in your belly, tea is the obvious answer. It's available in many different varieties, it smells lovely when you're brewing it and it's amenable to the same milk and sugar modifications as coffee. As a bonus, steeping each cup individually provides an easy way to regulate the strength of each dose. You can choose a gradual comedown or a drastic crash when you're ready to switch back to your resting heart rate.

  If the thought of drinking tea brings up uncomfortable memories of friendless weekends spent holding tea parties for discarded dolls and broken action figures, consider switching to soda. The upside, if the advertising is to be believed, is that you'll be instantly happier and more popular, and your thirst will be so thoroughly quenched that you'll be able to water plants with your mind. The downside is that soda doesn't pack as much caffeine per dose, and it's loaded either with sugar or foul-tasting artificial sweeteners that coat the tongue, making it impervious to pleasant tastes for decades.

  If you're on the verge of injecting pure caffeine into your eyeballs, you'll want to try one of the approximately 80,000 "energy drinks" that have flooded the market lately. They're like soda in the sense that they're carbonated and best served cold. Unlike soda, they may also contain some amount of a dubious "herbal" stimulant, and they don't even pretend to taste better than llama urine. They're also sold in smaller containers, presumably because the caffeine content of a soda-sized serving would kill a rhinoceros.

  No matter how desperate for a fix you are, resist the urge to drink the new Game Fuel variety of Mountain Dew. It has a decent caffeine content, but it tastes like I imagine antifreeze would after being vomited up by a large dog.