There’s no denying we are living in a culture of instant gratification. In the workplace, things that used to take days can now be done in minutes. At home, dinners that used to take hours can be done in one-fifth of the time. No aspect of life is immune to this increased speed and efficiency, not even the time-honored tradition of getting wasted.

One such contributor to helping students step outside of their logical minds is the bong. Whether alcohol or another substance, the bong exists to take the time element out of the equation.

Bonging beer, however, can lead to some pretty nasty consequences, so we at the Daily decided to see how much fun we could have with the bong – but without the booze. We decided to fill our purple funnel with other liquids we would never want to binge on, just to see if we could dethrone beer as the bong’s best friend.

Dante

Red Wine Vinegar:

I decided to come out of the gates swinging and down my biggest fear, the red wine vinegar. After an initial sip I took in the office before we officially started, I came to the conclusion that buying the Hy-Vee brand was a terrible idea and that vinegar is good at causing tummy aches. I don’t think I’d ever been as nervous to do something for WTF as I was when I was on my knees staring at the full tube of the sour salad topping – I mean, I was a wreck. The vinegar actually went down smooth, but the burn it left in my gut was there to stay and continued to turn my insides to toxic waste for the rest of the day.

Lemon Juice:

I can’t say much about this one, considering I poured half the bottle in the bong and then watched Alex drink the remnants of the bottle. If he was trying to show me up, I wasn’t going to let him. I polished this thing off with no regard for my intestines, now completely immersed in stomach-churning acid.

Tomato Soup:

They say soup is good for getting over the flu, but guess what it’s not good for. I was certainly getting cocky when I loaded the bong to the brim with this pasty stuff. It was a true case of my ambition telling me to go for it and my belly telling me to get real. I inhaled about half of this hearty meal before I was full and it exploded out of me and into my hair and on my favorite jeans. I’ve never liked tomatoes very much and now I hate the thought of them.

Suicide Bong:

Of all the bad ideas and worse creations to spring from the male mind, this has to be one of them. The suicide bong was the culmination of all my ingredients and Alex’s into one overloaded, vomit-inducing bong. The suicide really turned my stomach from queasy to full blown nauseous in mere seconds. Take my word for it – stick to beer, hell, stick to bonging Everclear, just don’t touch this. It should also be mentioned that my imposed celibacy from last week’s WTF was only further reinforced by my breath, which, three brushes later, still smells like raw sewage.

Alex

Pickle Juice:

Ever hear about getting your hand stuck in a pickle jar? Well, how about getting your head stuck in your butt and coming up with the idea of bonging pickle juice? While sitting in the tube with little pieces of pickle floating around, the juice resembled the embryonic fluid used to pickle the alien display case in “Independence Day” – and it didn’t taste much better, either. Going down, the sodium overload felt like an army of sardines deploying a shock-and-awe campaign on my esophagus. But as far as bonging goes, it still tasted better than Keystone Ice.

Grapefruit juice:

Well, I lucked out. What Dante didn’t know while loading up this bonger is that I am a grapefruit-drinking freak. Surprisingly, however, it actually was harder going down than the pickle juice simply because it was so heavy. Still, while the rest of the crew stared at me with cringing faces (Dante especially, because he has a stomach made of marshmallow) I was still in sour-sweet citrus heaven. Note: Don’t take your thumb off the tube while loading it or you’ll get a ruby red tsunami in your face.

Maple Syrup:

Since I’m from Vermont, the home of the world’s greatest maple syrup, I decided to live up to my “Super Troopers” legacy and try to bong a bottle – it’s harder than it sounds. About 20 minutes after gulping the thing down, I was shaking worse than a naked penguin and trying to keep things focused but eventually fell into a dark insanity and started running through the streets naked. Now that I’ve sobered up and paid the bail, I’m trying to figure out which is worse – the fact that I had to bong maple syrup or the fact that it was fake.

Suicide bong:

That was really stupid.