You've Gotta Try Sometimes

Am I really living in Europe?  The land where so many of us think things are better than they are in the States? The land of high fashion, fancy cars, expensive perfume, fabulous cheese, exquisite wine, leather that melts in your hands, chocolate that makes you melt, incredible (unbeatable, amazing, fabulous, perfect, wonderful, I've got to have every pair of) shoes? If all of this is true, I have to wonder why it's so hard to find a Diet Coke in a pizzeria. 
I can understand why it wasn't available in Bolivia, Ethiopia and Mali.  I accepted it and drank regular Coke.  But this is Italy.  Wouldn't you think a restaurant in Italy would have Diet Coke?  I thought this might be the 'last straw' and I'd finally quit drinking it, but that hasn't happened yet.
My favorite pizza place, I'm embarrassed to admit, is called Punky Reggae Pub.  I found it one morning while I was running.  My friends had never been there.  It's one of the few pizzerias I've found with any character.  And I suppose it's probably not Italian character, but it's character nonetheless.  Half of the floor is Mexican terracotta tiles. Maybe they're not Mexican (although the owner's favorite city in the world is Mexico City, so who knows?).  The other half of the floor is beat up old wood.  The tables and chairs are perfectly unmatched. For some reason the sparkly plastic snowflakes hanging from the light fixtures don't bother me.  They make me think that I'm really going to like this place in the wintertime. 
One wall is covered with snapshots.  They're unframed and glued to the wall in one giant collage.  Some are in color and some are in black and white. They're pictures of signs and fire hydrants and close-ups of toes and spice jars and coffee cups and bubbles. They're nothing extraordinary, but for some reason I can't stop looking at them and every Friday night I find one that I didn't see the week before.
At first my Friday night trips to the Punky Reggae Pub were an obligation.  Soon after, I realized it was my favorite place.  The obligation was that I had to consume my share of Diet Coke.  It started as a joke.  I told my friends that I'd brought a can of Diet Coke with me in my bag.  I said I was going to order a regular Coke so that I'd still be paying for something, but then I was going to drink my Diet Coke and take the regular Coke home for someone else.  It didn't seem that crazy to me, but they found it quite embarrassing. 
Then I decided to tease them a little more.  I told them I was going to ask the owner if he'd buy Diet Coke for me if I promised I'd come back often enough to drink it all. They didn't think I'd ask, but I did.  And they certainly didn't think the he'd say yes, but he did. 
The next Friday night I ordered a Diet Coke and he brought me a Coke Zero.  In an effort to continue practicing my new found ability to go with the flow (as long as the flow is kind of going in the right (or should I say MY) direction), I decided NOT to ask why it was Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke. It's not 'The Real Thing' anyway, so what's the difference?  I like the can better, too.  Diet Coke cans currently have a caricature of a skinny girl, which only  reminds me of something that I'm not. Coke Zero, instead, is a stylish black can with a red, green and white design. Instead of the Italian flag, all things red, green and white still make me think first of Christmas.  The cans complement the snowflakes.
So, like The Rolling Stones say,"You can't always get what you want." (You're right, I had to check to see if it was really The Rolling Stones.)  And I'm not sure what else they say, but it has always sounded to me like "but if you blah blah blah, you get what you need" and the words I've always sung are, "but if you try sometimes, you get what you need."  If those aren't the lyrics, I think they should be.  We should all try sometimes.  But if at first we don't succeed, maybe we don't ALWAYS have to try, try again.  My failure to get what I asked for opened the door to something new.