ThinkingSkull.com

I drink a lot of Diet Pepsi and Diet Dr. Pepper. Pepper is my favorite, but I drink it too quickly before reaching for another; Diet Pepsi slows me down. Why diet? Because when you imbibe as much caffeine as I do, zero calories works out a lot better than 180 sugar calories for a 12 oz. can.

But I digress. I like food, all kinds of food. I like flavors and textures and salty and sweet. I prefer bold flavors but not “loud” ones. Anyone can take hot sauce and pour it over wings and call them hot wings, but Frank’s Cayenne Pepper Red•Hot Sauce has a flavor which is distinct and you’re not gonna find in just any place.

Same goes for Snyder’s of Berlin BBQ Potato Chips, the one in the foil bag that looks like a red brick fireplace. I don’t care if Lay’s bets you can’t eat just one; I will put down a family-sized bag of Snyder’s when I get my hands on one (which usually only happens once a year, thank goodness).

Now, Doritos are available pretty much everywhere and at one time were my favorite snack when it was time for snacking. No, not “crispy orange nacho triangles” or whatever the Save-O-Bunch market generic brand was, but actual Nacho Cheese Doritos. As of late, however, I’ve noticed my Doritos no longer seem as bold or flavorful. In fact, it’s almost as if someone has secretly replaced my crispy golden cheesy snack for (gasp!) nasty orange triangles (for the record, yes, I noticed).

Fortunately, I have discovered a new obsession: Black Pepperjack Doritos. Like the first time I tried the nacho cheese, there’s something just a little spicier than normal without overdoing it. I find myself craving these things when I’m just a little peckish (”Breakfast time. Lessee… eggs, oatmeal, poppy tarts, Peanut Butter Crunch cereal… oooh Black Pepperjack Doritos!”) and it’s becoming an obsession. Am I alone?

I can’t be the only one eating these things because each time I quest for the $0.99 gun-metal gray Dorito bag, there’s only one left and I take it. Yet EVERY time I go up to the counter, someone invariably asks me if they’re any good and that they have been thinking about trying them. Heck, yeah, try ‘em, but not the ones in THIS bag. These are MINE. Get your own bag.

by Cherie Carter-Scott (found by Neener!)

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.

It has recently come to my attention that I have often been cast in or even sought the role of The Villain for much of my life. Never mind my love of movies, cinematic role-playing, and a really good story rife with plot twists, I’m talking about actually being cast as The Villain because, to the “happy bunny” people (to paraphrase One Crazy Summer), if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

Let’s start with the third (or was it fourth?) grade. When schools were still allowed to talk about the birth of Jesus as the subject of holiday theater play, *I* was cast as none other than King Herod. Now, to my credit at the time, I really didn’t understand who he was then, but I can remember seeing my folks in the audience waving at me and unable to “make myself look mean” because I couldn’t keep from smiling. Fortunately, the make-up moms in charge had done their job for me, and the play went on (”I am your KING, that’s why!”)

In junior high I became saddled with glasses, which my mom had convinced me to be proud of until my first day of school. No matter; I’d been picked on occasionally from time to time, but in the eighth grade I ran afoul of a fellow student that the school faculty termed as “trash.” The young man in question (I would later learn) came from a sorted background and, essentially, the school had given up on him… but not me, because I scored really high on some math test in the sixth grade. The double standard: if I fight back, I get punished because I care, whereas my attacker doesn’t BECAUSE he doesn’t care. I spent most of that year at odds with my vice-principal, the man cast as a villain himself to take the heat off the school principal. When I threw a chair at my tormentor in the library, my mom was called in, but I let the vice-principal know in no uncertain terms that I would defend myself if attacked and would use whatever school property was at hand to do so since he was otherwise ineffective in preventing the attack at his school. I had one more encounter with my attacker afterward but then never saw him again.

Becoming a villain is empowering, but it’s also a choice. I enjoyed my new-found power as I always had an evil smile every time I passed the vice-principal for the rest of that year. In high school, I was neither allowed out too late nor had a car or license, so dating was pretty much out and I had to sign up for pretty much everything to get out of the house (ROTC, band, etc). Not being at all the non-school event parties made me “weird,” so I could hate it or embrace it. I even teamed up with another fellow villain, a kid who was both quieter and, more importantly, bigger than I was; we’re still friends to this day.

My villainy served me well again in speech class; when asked to construct a demonstration speech, I gave what would quite possibly be the last of its kind: a foolproof method for getting a date. With the prettiest girl in the class as my victim (ain’t peer pressure amazing?), I explained the tools of the trade: a fast vehicle with a large trunk, rope, and a small caliber weapon. Although I had intentionally misassociated the word “getting” for “kidnapping,” I had followed the outline for the speech perfectly (the instructor still docked me a letter grade for “male chauvinism”… really really). It was my proudest B+ in high school, and it took “the pretty girl” a month to live it down.

In collage, I was selected to share a room with a freshman football pick. On my way to the school, I had picked up a box of video standee ads of three Nightmare on Elm Street movies. These are the six-foot tall, five foot wide ads from VHS rental store. I was so tired my first night there (a week before school started) I only set up the standees, got some food, and went to bed. At 2:00 am, the entire first string of the football team was standing over my bunk; the entire FLOOR was jock housing. The chanting was heard four floors down; I was “Freddy” for the next two years. Two months later, my roommate mysteriously disappeared from school in the middle of the night (turns out he called his dad a 2:00 am with an infected appendix), so I had a private room; students not in on the “Freddy” joke occasionally asked me if I had anything to do with it.

Nowadays, when “The Crystal Lich” or “Grim D. Reaper” isn’t haunting the web, I like to wear a limited-edition t-shirt that has a perfect replication of the MySpace logo with the word “stalker” emblazoned beneath and walk around the local mall. Most guys that notice the shirt secretly smile at the tacky-yet-rebellious image, while most of women of child-bearing age wrinkle their nose at me or look astonished. One actually stopped once and asked why I would wear such a thing. I asked her if she had children who surfed the Internet, and when she answered yes, I asked her if she watched everything they did online. As she seriously started to think before she answered, I smiled and added, “You’re starting to think about it more seriously now, aren’t you?” My job was done.