Flash back a month and a half ago, in order to get in to the proper mind-set.  My life was different then.  I was a young, idealistic youth, happy and full of dreams for the future.  After a long day of hard work and having fun with good friends, I got some much-deserved sleep.  When I woke up the next morning, my idyllic life was shattered forever.  I rolled over and opened my eyes.  There, lying in the bed next to me, was…

 At this point, I know that you’re all thinking that I’m going to spin some lurid tale of how I’ve embraced a dangerous lifestyle that leads me to wake up on a regular basis next to strange women that I’ve never seen before.  This, sadly, is not the case.  Now, where was I? 

 Oh, yeah.  There, lying in the bed next to me, was… a bloody kleenex.  So? Big deal.  We’ve all gotten up in the morning with used facial tissues in and around our beds, so it certainly isn’t anything to be alarmed about.  Well, it is if you’re in the bottom bunk of a college dorm room.  That’s right, I was surrounded by the fallen filth of one of my roommates!  I took the tissue off my bed, presented it to him, and suggested that he make sure that such a disgusting incident would never happen again.  He gave me a stupid grin and explained that it was an isolated incident.  If the story had ended there, it would be mildly disturbing, but certainly not blogworthy.  Brace yourself.  It only gets worse from here.

 The following evening, I warily stepped in to the bedroom and gave my bed a cursory examination.  To my chagrin, a new tissue lay on the foot of the bed.  With an inexplicable sense of calm, I picked up the Kleenex and put it on his desk with a note saying something like “We need to talk”.  A line was drawn in the sand.  Jokingly, I told my other roommates that I was going to go and give my bed a more thorough searching.  Every thing seemed fine, and I sat down in my bed, thinking that with a bit of luck, the reign of tissue terror might be at an end.  Then, my left hand had the grave misfortune of brushing against the point where the wall and my bed meet.  That’s when I felt it, still moist with whatever viscous bodily fluid with which my roommate had deigned to profane it.  My calmness dissipated.  The line in the sand had been irretrievably crossed.  With a cry of rage, I yanked my mattress away from the wall.

 That is when I experienced the Bleakness for the first time in my life.  When a man loses his job, his wife, and everything he owns, and is then robbed of his shirt and pants at gunpoint by Estelle Getty, he experiences the Bleakness.  When you decide to help control the animal population by having your pet spayed or neutered, your beloved Fluffy experiences the Bleakness.  When I saw forty or fifty tissues coated in snot, blood, and other, more unspeakable bodily fluids as they dropped from the wall to the floor in that terrible instant, the Bleakness bitch-slapped me with cold, unrelenting fury.  The rest of the story is predictable.  I ran and showed my roommates what I had found, and we forced the guilty party to clean up his despicable leavings while we watched, and our R.A. stepped in and personally made him aware of the consequences of further malevolent tissue-smitings.  Everything was wrapped up in a neat little package. 

 Everything, that is, except for my faith in humanity.

I walked in to my philosophy class today with a spring in my step and a stupid grin on my face.  After all, the morning had been pretty good up to that point.  Remarkably, I got out of my math class over 15 minutes early, so I went out to UDF and got a liter of Chocolate Milk for my philosophy class. My intent was to save about half for dinner. Yessir, everything was looking up.  

Then, I saw him.  

The annoying kid.  All quarter long, we've been sitting on opposite sides of the room, engaging in a private philosophical war. Today, he decided to play out a final gambit. He was sitting right next to my seat, with a calculating look on his face.

"So, you gonna drink that whole thing in class today?"

Normally, this would just be a simple question.  The spite and bitterness in his voice made it something else.  It was a challenge to my very manhood, nay, my very soul! So be it, I thought. Once more in to the breach. My white-knuckled fingers clenched ever tighter around my frosty cold bottle of brown moo juice.

"Yes. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I was planning to do."

A line had been drawn in the sand, and like a fool, I crossed over it. An entire liter of chocolate milk on an stomach full of cheap donuts? I soon realized that this was going to be a morning that shall live in infamy. I peeled the freshness strip from around the rim. There was no looking back now.  I started off quickly, a rapid 8-chug quaff. I was a quarter of the way there.

He chuckled softly. Somehow he knew the terrible truth well before it occurred to me.

I leaned back in my chair, thinking that I was settling in for the long haul. As my stomach settled in to a new position, I saw the source of my arch-nemesis' mirth. I was already full! The ironically named donuts were evidently a little more doughy today than I had anticipated. I could literally feel them expanding in my already overburdened stomach.

Despair washed over me. The only comfort available to me was the two-hour length of the class.  Perhaps a miracle would occur, and I would get a second wind.

The halfway mark of the class was reached, and I had managed to down an additional quarter of the bottle. I was at my bursting point.  We left to take a brief break, and the rat-bastard psychotic walked off with a final barbed statement.

"Well, it looks like you bit off more than you could chew."

What the hell? Was I not drinking? How could someone introduce a food-based insult in to a purely liquid-based contest of wills? Now, I think you can see exactly why this spineless reprobate raises my ire.

I walked down in to the building's communal kitchen, and saw blessed salvation in all of its glory.  In the center of the main table, there was a nearly empty bag of pretzels with a post-it on the side that said "please eat."  Two pretzels and about a quarter fistful of salt. Just what the doctor ordered. I whipped out my trusty cup and brought the treasure back to class.

I whipped them out, and delivered the perfect Seinfeld quote, right on cue.

"These pretzels...are making me thirsty!"

Victory was mine.

Of course, as my friend pointed out, she could've just been staring at the pizza cheese stuck in my beard.

This afternoon, I decided to sate my inexplicable semi-monthly craving for the Colonel's special blend of herbs and spices. After driving my bike a mile and a half through the rugged streets of Columbus, I expected service with a smile. Unfortunately, I got exactly what I wanted.

"Welcome to KFC, what can I get for you, sugar?"

At that moment, I made the terrible mistake of glancing at the waitress' face.  For the first 7/10ths of a second that I looked upon her cheerful grin, I felt torn between the conflicting instincts of noisily soiling myself and vomiting in terror. It went downhill from there. Like a deer in front of a Mack truck's headlights, I stood there, frozen in a state of animal panic. From this day forward, I shall never in good conscience use the phrase "pearly whites" as a way of referring to teeth in general. What I could see looked more like Tetsuo, right after he got ripe. After a few seconds, my mind started functioning again at some basic level, and I somehow managed to come up with the the theory that I was viewing some grotesque new Halloween costume. Unfortunately, this thin wall that I had just barely managed to erect between me and my own growing madness was about to be cruelly torn down.

"Would you like to try our Colonel's Crispy Strips Value Meal?" 

Her fetid maw widened further, in what I now imagine to be some attempt to appear fetching. what she revealed almost defies calm description, but I shall press on, nonetheless. her lips had stretched up to reveal a veritable Hieronymous Bosch portrait of Hell. Cheap dime-store lipstick was haphazardly shellacked over the rough, pitted surfaces of crude outlines of incisors and canines, presumably to spare the casual onlooker a direct view.

I dumbly nodded, and fumbled for my wallet. I felt like I was staring at a car wreck. No, I take that back. this was a thousand times worse. Handing her a wad of bills, I prayed that my complete disdain for anything resembling social pleasantry would do away with her hideous grin.

God chose not to listen to my feeble prayers. As if I hadn't already seen enough, the young woman handed me back my change and proceeded to give me a wonderful view of how her recent entry into the museum of dental anomalies is connected to the rest of her body. Blackened, withered gums, resembling bacon left on the pan for hours too long, feebly attempted to cling to the decaying remains of things that were (presumably) once were capable of chewing food. They were fighting a losing battle.

Numbly, I shambled over to the pick-up counter. I had somehow gazed in to the heart of darkness and survived.