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No, I'm some OTHER Anthony Anderson, not the one you might have seen in movies or on Law & Order. In addition to short stories in "Twisted Dreams", "Horrotica", and "The Nubian Chronicles"; I am also the author of "The Vile, Sinister, and Most Utterly Diabolical Account of Latrina Emerson" currently available at Amazon.com or at lulu.com I'm also part of The Gothic Creatives administrated by Andrea Dean von Scoyoc.

Friday, July 2, 2010

ANOTHER REASON CHILDHOOD WAS OFTEN THE PITS

Apparently, you just can't win for losing.  Back when people were just starting to worry about the hole in the ozone layer, there was this big push to wean everybody off chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's.  The stuff was commonly used for coolants and propellants, which probably explains a ritual I sometimes dreaded when I was a kid (you know, back in the day when pointless torture of youth was looked upon as the Universe's way of building character). 
I speak of the ritual of the dreaded deodorant spray, which we applied somewhat faithfully because my peers and I were all just hitting puberty and had enough whiffs of those who skimped a little too much on the Right Guard [1].
However, this was back in the day when pointless torture of youth was looked upon as a legitimate way of building character.  Just what kind of twisted character you were supposed to become as a result of this was something the adults of the time didn't seem interested in being clear on.
The torture I speak of came in the practical application of the product.  I had always wondered why even though we kept the cans at room temperature, it always felt as we had been blasting Freon into our armpits.  It turns out we might have been doing that literally for all we knew at the time.
So when we started hearing all the horror stories about how our spray can were turning the ozone layer to Swiss cheese, I had no problem switching to roll-ons and creams.
Then this morning, I came across this article.
Sometimes, you just can't win for losing, huh?  Oh well, I'm still not going back to spray deodorants, but does this mean I can go back to using cheese spray?

[1] The horrors of Brut constituted a problem from the other end of this olfactory spectrum.  Unlike other manufacture scents that tried to trick you into thinking they were natural, this cloying stuff fooled no one.  The stuff made you smelled like air freshener sprayed inside a chemistry lab.  To be fair, this problem was probably due to its overuse; but in my mind nothing more says to your potential date "not only broke but tacky and delusional about my chances of getting laid" quite like something out of one of those Brut gift packs my peers and I always ended up getting each other for Christmas because the stores were closing up on the 24th and we were all out of ideas again.

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