This morning's cereal was delicious. Cocoa Pebbles. The bowl sits to my right, the small dab of cocoa-stained skim milk congealing into a thick syrup. Next to it, an empty soft drink cup from Wendy's. It's been sitting there for more days than I remember.

Fred Flintstone is a stupid, stupid man. He's a caveman, so you wouldn't expect him to be giving dissertations on unified field theory or anything like that, but no. Freddy boy's dumb even for a caveman. Even for a big, square-headed galoot who victimizes his best friend once a week, drives his wife to the point of madness at least as often, and gets fired from a job crushing rocks multiple times.

How stupid is Fred Flintstone? Fred Flintstone is so stupid that he can't find his way into an edible chocolate house. There he is, on the back of the box, staring up at me with those baleful black eyes and looking like he just dropped a big one in his pants. Except Fred Flintstone doesn't wear pants, which doesn't say much for his intelligence, either.

Fred lost the key to his chocolate house, and now he needs me to help him find the way back in.

Now me, if I was encountered with an edible fucking house, particularly one made of sweet, succulent chocolate, the food of the gods, and I had no other ready means of entering said house, you know what I'd do? Exactly what you would do. I'd eat my way in. Hell yes. What else do you do with a chocolate goddamned house, Fred? It's going to melt as soon as the sun rises anyway, so it's not like it's going to gain in market value. A house made of chocolate isn't going to yield any higher equity twenty years from now, because by that time it's not going to be a chocolate house anymore. It'll be a penicillin mold house, and those aren't nearly as nice to live in for reasons I'm not going to go into.

No, Fred. There's no need to traverse a confusing maze of lines in order to enter your chocolatey abode. Just eat the goddamned door down. Just eat it. That's what any simple, upstanding caveman would do anyway. You're a caveman. Your mission in life? Fuck things, kill things, eat things. If you can't fuck it, kill it, or eat it, then it's not an essential part of your world. 

It's an edible house, Fred. You figure out where to go from there. Though if I come back in five minutes and find you with your dick in the keyhole, I'm going to seriously fear for the future of mankind. Before you know it, they'll all be living in stilt houses with robot maids and little basketball-sized children of questionable sexual mores, with talking dogs, flying cars, and a bald Yosemite Sam for a boss.

Eat the house, Fred. That's my final word on the subject.

…I didn't come here today to tell you that.  I don't even eat Cocoa Pebbles anymore.

Let's, like, talk about the word "like" for a minute or three.

This word has become a linguistic virus.  As with the majority of the most horrible aspects of modern culture, it was born in Southern California.  And now it's spread all over the world.  From Seattle to Cleveland to Las Vegas to New Zealand, "like" will hound you everywhere you go.

It's one of those things you probably won't even notice until someone else brings it up, like a buzzing fluorescent light, or the squeaking a Toyota's passenger cabin always develops after the first six months or 10,000 miles, whichever comes first.  But if you're like me, once you notice something like this, you can never un-notice it.  And every time it happens, you want to take an ice pick to your ears, or even better, to the other guy's forehead.

"Like" infects language with purposelessness.  Consider the following two sentences:

-- So, I went to the mechanic, and he told me that my alternator was broken and I would have to pay $250 for a new one.

Nothing wrong with that, right?  Except almost nobody talks that way anymore.  It’s more likely to sound like this:

-- So like, I went to like the mechanic?  And like, he told me that my alternator was like, broken?   And I would have to pay like, $250 for a new one?  (What-ever!)

What purpose is the word “like” serving at any point in this second sentence?  Grammatically speaking, it has no purpose at all.  In conversation, it's become a substitute for a pause, or an “um,” but it's done so to the point that it has become egregiously excessive.  Four years ago, I was listening to a student give a speech in a Young Adult Literature class, and he said the word “like” 75 times in 60 seconds during his speech.  I wish I was fucking joking.

Every time I hear someone talking like this, I want to hit them over their head with a chair.  It makes people sound completely brainless, and it makes it more difficult for me to follow the line of conversation.  It's the verbal equivalent of having to click through twenty-five pages on some shit site like Maxim in order to read 250 words of dialogue.  

The worst part is when I hear this Valley Girl bullshit start to creep into my own speech.  That's what I mean when I call it a linguistic virus; as soon as you hear someone talking like this, whether you want to or not, I guarantee you'll find your speech littered with, like, a billion likes.  And when I hear myself doing it, I think about the nightmares I have about driving off of mile-high cliffs, and I start to wonder if dreams really do come true.

So here's my plan.

They say most fiction is rooted in truth.  I agree.  I know most of the things I write are based on things I've observed in real life.  I just put a shellack of horror over experiences other people consider ordinary, and presto, the world you take for granted suddenly seems a shitload less friendly than it did when you were eating your Cocoa Pebbles this morning.

With that in mind, I know that somewhere out there, there's got to be a real-life version of Doctor Emmett Brown from Back to the Future.

I must find this man, and befriend him.  And when he's not looking, I'm going to jack his time machine.  I'm going back to where and when all this horrible "like" bullshit started.  I'm going back to the year 1980, and I'm going to lay waste to the entire San Fernando Valley.

I don't think anyone will miss it.

Fer shur, dude.