| Cookies and Creme chocolate bars, in combination with a balanced lifestyle of Jolt Cola and backrubs, are the righteous truths I would fight for in an intergalactic space war. Comprising some 200 cans, each an individual memory, this, then, is Mount Jolt. Given the insatiable appetites for Jolt that I have, one might suspect that it would be vastly larger; and indeed, it would, were it not for the fact that I stopped adding to it long ago for several reasons. The first consideration is that even at this modest size, it's unstable. In my old room, where this photo was taken, a good slam of the door to the garage would send my wall a twitching, and that would always topple ten cans downwards to a noisy stop. And even if I just bounded out of the room at just the right canter, a clinking and clattering cacophony would follow as my labours went tumbling. So it just seemed that the several hundred cans that I've otherwise collected in my lifetime would have either made the can so unstable that to even look at it cross-eyed would pelt me with murderous aluminum, or in the event of a fire, when I was about to leap out of my window with my computer and five or six other things I consider priceless (my genitalia, of course, would still be sitting in a glass beside the bed. We're talking priorities here...), the combined weight of all those cans would be precisely thirty grams more than I could safely carry. |
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| I'm also sufficiently not in love with the new can designs that it's all I can do just to consume them greedily, and then get those abominations out of my sight. I love that Jolt, but the ungodly faded red to black has nothing on the bright garish red of its more immature days -- or solid black, with skulls and kryptonite and warning labels that finished "all over your dead ass!" if they really wanted to make a statement. Each can comes from a different occasion, further fueling my packrat obsession with utter garbage that I accumulate simply because they remind me of things. Three years of my life are spanned in a modest accumulation of bright red tin, which is pathetic on so many levels that if you can name more than eleven, which is my current tally, then obviously I can go to bed knowing that there are people as obsessive and sad as creepy as I am, and that there really is nothing wrong with me. We can smell our own. |