Boss' new Drive Shot canned coffee isn't brown or yellow but somewhere in-between, the color of what you'd get if a Hershey bar could take a piss. As I pop the lid I notice it smells about the same, watered down, sweet, a hint of milk, the memory of coffee beans. I imagine some old man down at the local rotary club sucking it down like a babe at the teat out of a paper cup with the fold-out handles, and start to gag, even as I pour the thin swig down my gullet, dampening my cavernous gorge. The outer walls of the narrow metal can are ribbed. I drag my thumb over them as I dump the slosh in. I think of winter, and the people who have touched me.

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There are several brands and dozens of varieties of canned coffee in Japan. But the best one is Boss, because of Tommy Lee Jones' bizarre Japanese commercials as the namesake "Boss" himself. If anyone ever tells me another kind is better, I kill that person and then play the commercials on my phone into their eyes that I hold open because they are dead and can't open them of their own will. I used to drink cans upon cans of Boss in the first few days of my life here, consistently unable to obtain restful sleep and waking at strange hours in the impossibly hot summer, craving the caffeine, Needing it! I started buying canned coffee by the case from the grocery store and developed a heartburn-agitating pseudo-addiction to it that eventually convinced me by force that I should probably switch from coffee to tea. But every now and then my hand is pulled towards the Boss section on the shelf, especially when things are like yesterday, and there is a new kind of caffeine-enhanced coffee called Drive Shot with FUCKING MARIO KART TOYS ON THEM look at these goddamned toys holy shit look at them. The toys

There are actually two varieties of toy we're dealing with here. The basic line of toys is the Mario Kart 7 Pull Back Car, which is attached to single cans (retail price about 110 yen), and the premium toy is the Mario Kart 7 Big Figure Collection, a double-sized toy which spans two cans (220 yen, they do not believe in discounts in Japan, or Jesus). There are eight total Pull Back Cars, and eleven Big Figures, which means that if you were insane enough to get a complete set of all the toys, you'd be dropping 3300 yen, enough money to buy a few half-naked capsule machine figures, two used Bandai Wonderswans, this week's copy of Jump, and ten pieces of tuna nigirizushi at Kura, and play Pac-Man Smash air hockey with a friend two times. You would also have to drink thirty cans of Boss Coffee. Good thing all that awesome stuff I just mentioned totally sucks cause otherwise I would have bought it instead of these toys with coffee attached.

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I think the quality of these things is pretty high. The characters don't look like cheap garbage. The big ones even come partially disassembled and you put them together, like real toys. I got a Mario of the Big Figure and a Luigi of the Pull Back Car, because I kind of could not decide, and I was standing there with the goddamned cooler door open, spinning the cans around to see who was inside, and I started to break into a sort of flop sweat, an indecision sweat, they are looking at me, they are watching me, everyone is watching me.

Just looking at the pictures that show the other characters, it is easy to see that the dumbest one of each toy is goddamned Metal Mario, the worst character ever invented. His paint job even looks shitty and bad, solid grey. Who would pay money for this? If you play as Metal Mario in Mario Kart 7, I'm just gonna say it, you are a really bad person. Good god. Hey, but you know what, it's cool man, we all have to get by. Nah, I am just kidding, it is not cool.

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Unlike Mario Kart 7, these toys just came out yesterday. It kind of raises the question "hey Nintendo, what the hell?" But then I started thinking about what kind of people drink this coffee. Maybe the people who want DRIVE SHOT are people who really need that extra zip in the morning, those hard workers to whom thirty extra milligrams of caffeine will make the difference between their successfully injection-molding hundreds of ornate plastic dildos for The Company and accidentally injection-molding their body with hot polycarbonate cause they fell asleep on the line. Maybe those people don't know what a Marioed Car is and now through this promotion they will understand the Nintendo and buy some of it. Maybe that is what is going on.

The little Luigi car is really fast, he is my favorite. When nobody is looking we share memories with each other. I pull him back and ask him where he wants to go. He tells me, "anywhere is fine, as long as it is with you." I close my eyes tight and can almost remember the way his fingers felt against my earlobes. Then I let go.

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