Hey, all. It’s Charlie from Where the Hell Was I?, filling in for Jenn while she digs herself out of her phlegmy illness.

(Okay, that’s not fair, really. I can’t personally speak for the level of lung goo she’s experiencing right now. It’s just based on my past experience that I think she’s probably ‘projectile expectorating’ at this point. Sickness sucks, and it’s not all that pretty to look at, either.

Hmmm… yeah, none of this is probably making Jenn feel any better. Let’s move on to something less… icky now.)

So, one of the cool things about Jenn is that she’s <style.

(Or to keep them awake until three in the morning, so they can blog about dog snot, or assbags, or their underwear drawer. Hey, nobody asked for definition of ‘highly productive’, now, did they? Who’s writing this guest entry, anyway? Harrumph.)

I’ve got to say, though — and I hope Jenn will still be my friend — that I’m not really a coffee drinker. I tried drinking coffee, along with many other forms of caffeine ingestion — pills, shots, patches, rubbing it on my nipples — but I finally settled on drinking soda (or cola, or Coke (in the generic sense), or fizzies, or pop, or whatever you call it in your part of the world), rather than coffee.

(Although, to be fair, I still do a little nipple-rubbing when I need a perk-up. And really, who doesn’t? Let’s be honest, here.)

I also have to admit that my caffeine intake is down quite a bit from what it used to be. These days, I probably average two or three 20 ounce sodas a day — one with lunch, maybe one in the afternoon, and perhaps another at dinner. That’s a far cry from the old days — I used to be legendary for consuming caffeine.

(Or, if you prefer, ‘putting away the Pepsi’, ‘slugging down sodas’, ‘downing Dr. Pepper’, or ‘squeezing Coke cans into the pie hole’.

Okay, sorry — I got carried away there. One of those is obviously a sexual euphemism, and not a way to say that I drank a lot of sodas. ‘downing Dr. Pepper‘, indeed.)

Moving right along… high school was the height of my madness. I would buy either a twelve-pack of cans of soda or two two-liter bottles every morning, and — more often than not — I’d finish ’em off by the end of the school day. At which point my eyeballs would twitch, and my lungs would beat in rhythm with my heart.

(It was cool — they’d usually do a techno sort of *boom-boom-badoom* thing, over and over, but occasionally I’d get a tango, or calypso. Fun!)

And, if nothing else, it kept me awake throughout the day. Hell, diagramming sentences and dissecting frogs weren’t gonna cut it — I needed a little help. I even switched over to Jolt cola for a while, when that stuff was around.

(Do they even make that stuff any more? I haven’t seen a can of that crap in years. Maybe they got hit with some lawsuits because it made people’s organs explode, or they found that it was actually better used as an industrial solvent. Man, I miss that stuff.)

Of course, it wasn’t a lot of fun around nine o’clock every night, when the caffeine buzz wore off. The world got a little dimmer, and the sitcoms on TV less funny (or more boobered, depending on how you look at it), and suddenly I felt cold and empty inside. Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t the caffeine — I think nine was about the time when I’d finally get around to doing my homework. And that always pissed me off. Whatever.

Anyway, I think it’s clear what the point of all this is — what Jenn needs to get better is a healthy dose of sweet, magical caffeine. It’ll cure what ails you… or at least perk you up, so you can convince yourself you’re cured. (Hell, after ten cans of Pepsi, I used to think I was frigging Batman — surely, it can mask a cold, right?)

So get yourself a hot cuppa joe, Jenn, and feel better. And thanks for letting me ramble here for a while today — frankly, my blog’s been begging for a few hours off for weeks now. (And you can see why, no?)

So I’ll sign off now, and go grab a big fat cup of caffeine — and some lunch — myself. Hope you’re feeling better soon, Jenn! Cheers!

Charlie
Where the Hell Was I?
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