Carolina Calm -or - The Joy of Getting Cheetos in Your Skivvies

Here's the situation:

I'm at work. It is lunchtime, or thereabouts. I have been packing my lunch for awhile now, due to an unforeseen financial situation. I call it 'being broke'. Oh, and to be honest, I have not been packing my own lunch. Mrs. Wiggy has been packing my lunch for me. This is because my inability to cook has extended to become an inability to perform any function in the kitchen whatsoever, with the sole exception of putting dog food in the dog food bowl, and making coffee. These two things I can do in a kitchen - nothing else.

So, we've established that my wife, bless her, packs my lunch for me. And she usually puts a small bag of some sort of snack chips in my lunch box. Today it was Cheetos. You know what Cheetos are, don't you? If you don't, you're probably Osama bin Laden. So here's a link, Osama:

Cheetos Home Page

Now, Cheetos have one attribute that sets them apart from most other lunch treats. They are cheese-colored. Or bright day-glow orange, take yer pick. And the color that they are, whatever you call that, comes off. If you touch them, you wear the cheese color on your fingertips, and then you transfer that color to your face, your shirt, your trousers, and so on. Within minutes, ever buddy will know where you touch yourself - and no one really wants to know that, trust me.

I don't really want the world (or at least my office) to know where I might or might not touch myself. So I do not wish to leave any evidence of my having consumed Cheetos. There are really only two ways to do this.

One is to not consume the Cheetos. Right. Any buddy who knows me, knows that I am going to eat those Cheetos. The Cheeto has not lived who can avoid being eaten by me. I need a sign near my gaping maw that reads:

"Warning: Jet Intake - Keep Arms and Feet Away!".

So we've established that I'm gonna eat the hell out of those Cheetos, right?
The only other way to avoid getting incriminating orange Cheetos stains on your goolies, uh, I mean your shirt and trousers, is to avoid touching them. Can this be done? Well, I write software part-time, I should be able to figure out the logic involved with this, right? How hard can it be?

A brief moment was all that was required to determine that if I opened the bag and then simply tilted it over on one side, the Cheesy Goodness contained within should simply slide right down into my mouth. By controlling the angle of the bag's inclination, I could control the rate of escape, and thus feed my hopper in a most satisfactory way. And this, I proceeded to do.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

The first thing I noticed was that my mouth, although large, was insufficiently deployed to contain all the Cheetos that came leaping out to freedom. The second thing that I noticed was that my shirt pocket was a remarkably efficient container of Cheetos. Unfortunately, I also keep my Rosary Beads in my shirt pocket. You knew I was Catholic, right? Oh well.

"Have some Cheetos, Jesus!"

I lowered the now-empty bag, finished crunching happily through the portion of the Cheesy Goodness that had actually made it into my mouth, and removed the Cheetos that Jesus apparently didn't want from my shirt pocket.

Note to self: wash beads later. That should make an interesting sight at the water cooler.

Ring, ring.
"Hello, HR Department? There's this guy in my department, he's making Holy Water in the hallway. Yeah. In the drinking fountain. Hey, I drink out of that thing! I'm offended, can you fire him and give me a butt load of money for the trauma I've suffered? OK, then!"

Wait, I'm getting off on a tangent here. Never mind that last part.

So, I'm sitting at my desk, I'm all done with lunch, and I have to make a little visit to the restroom. You know the drill when you get older. Drink the soda, run to the can. About 10 minutes is all that separates the two. So I get up to take that little stroll. And I feel something unusual. Yep. Very strange indeed.

It seems that my shirt pocket is not the only place where the liberated Cheetos escaped to. They also seem to have gone down my open shirt collar. This went unnoticed, it appears. Until I stood up. By they they had meandered down overy my saggy chest and my bulging belly. And that's a lot of ground to cover, so they were tired out. They decided to retire to Florida, meaning that they crossed the dreaded beltline and discovered the warmth and humidity that can be found in my Y-fronts. Oh. My. This is Not Good. This is so Not Good.

So, I get up and walking stiff-legged, I crunch my way to the restroom, trailing crumbled tiny Cheeto bits out my pants legs like Tom Sawyer trying to leave a bread-crumb trail out of Injun Joe's Cave, and I am not enjoying the feeling. This is not the highlight of my day, y'know.

I managed to find a quiet spot and clean myself up to some extent. This is a Good Thing.

I then make my way back to my desk. A coworker, a North Carolina Native, has witnessed this exhibition, and has apparently sussed the entire thing.

"Hey, Wiggy."

"Hey, Doug."

"Cheetos down your shorts?"

"Yeah."

"That sucks."

"Yeah."

"Well, I just wanted to say that you might want to practice a bit of self-control in the future. Screaming and clawing at yourself like that as you ran like a guy with no knee-joints to the can is bound to attract attention. Just thought you'd like to know."

"Yeah, I'm sure you're right."

"You need to learn 'Carolina Calm'."

"'Carolina Calm,' what's that?"

"That's when you learn that life is nothing but Cheetos down your shorts from the day you're born until the day you die and you just learn to enjoy that dripping feeling as the orange goo they call 'cheese' reaches melting point as it is exposed to your body temperature and begins to make you want to Rock the Casbah."

"Is that what I did, Doug? Rocked the Casbah?"

"That's what I call that little dance I do when it happens to me. Ever buddy gets a little Cheetos down their pants from time to time. But you over-reacted. You Rocked the Casbah, but you needed to be Carolina Calm, instead."

"Carolina Calm. Gotcha. Thanks."

"No problem. One question, though."

"What's that, Doug?"

"Got any more Cheetos?"

"Not in any condition you'd appreciate, Doug."

"OK, then. Well, enjoy the rest of your lunch hour. I'm off home."

"Bye, Doug."

And that, my droogies, is how I spent my day. And it is only lunchtime!

Keep Crunchin',

Wiggy