ortals fled in terror from the Gulf Coast, fearing the rising wrath of Hurricane Dennis. The dangerous storm had already inflicted severe damage on Cuba, then grew in strength to a category 4 storm, which is apparently a meaner storm than what it had been before. But the real threat may lie in a small garden in New Jersey, where corporeal being Mr. Wilson assured reporters the "menace" was after nothing else but his rose garden.

"He's back," stammered the fearful, doddering old fool. "He's back and he's come to finish off the job he started on my flower bed! And then I'm next!"

Old George Wilson, a Ketcham, New Jersey resident of 60+ years, claims the storm to be the reincarnation of a dead neighbor boy who has carried a talent for mischief into his reincarnated hurricane form. Wilson warned the local media, but when they failed to listen, brought his story to the commune, the world's most gullible news source.

"That Dennis has only one goal in mind," warned Wilson. "He wants to destroy my roses and drive me out of my mind!" When it was pointed out that those were actually two goals, old man Wilson pulled out a chunk of his own hair and screeched.

Indeed the hurricane has destroyed several gardens and virtually everything else it touched in Cuba, and has turned to engage the Gulf Coast of the United States. Though the New Jersey rose garden in question is several hundred miles out of the hurricane's current direction, Wilson assures all it is the hurricane's ultimate target.

Some of Wilson's story was easily verified, including the existence of a young boy named Dennis Mitchell who lived next door to Wilson in the 1950s. Though the boy mysteriously disappeared several years ago and his body was never found, Wilson claims the hurricane now bombarding the United States and terrorizing himself out of a feud the ghost carried into his new existence.

"That little monster says he just wants to play," groaned the old man, "then he makes noise and sets off fireworks and wreaks havoc on everything. He had to go, don't you understand? He had to! I just… I needed peace and quiet. That's all I wanted… a little peace and quiet!"

Though there didn't seem to be any doubt to the possibility of a young troublemaker being reincarnated as a category 4 hurricane, some further explanation seemed necessary: Why trash Cuba as he did? Why not simply come back as a tornado in New Jersey, or a gopher, or any number of creatures cable of destroying a garden quickly and efficiently?

"I'm not sure why he came back as a hurricane," admitted Wilson. "But I can guess why he attacked Cuba. That Mitchell boy always hated the Commies. He planned on growing up to fight them in World War III. He… he always made me be the Reds. He forced me to play soldiers with him," sobbed the old man.

Contacted for further comment, Wilson's wife contradicted the man's version of the story, painting a picture of an old fussbucket and a charming young man who just wanted to be friends.

"Oh, I thought he was a perfect little gentleman," said Mrs. Wilson. "The problem with my George is, he's just grumpy. He's half out of his mind sometimes, you know. And if that hurricane does destroy that rose garden of ours… oh, well. Tropical winds will be tropical winds."

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I can't count the number of times in this life that I've been unfairly accused of being a pessimist. Actually, I probably could, since I'm a capable adult who made it through grade school with little trouble, unlike some people I could mention by name. So perhaps it is more accurate to say I don't care to count the times. If somebody out there is hot to get on my good side, they could run up some figures and leave the result on my desk after working hours today, but otherwise we're just going to have to work from my general estimate of "a whole lot."

Usually the name-calling follows a familiar scenario: Some dewy-eyed dreamer with his or her head up in the clouds will make some unrealistically optimistic statement about his worth as a human being or her newborn baby's chances of surviving its current bout with pneumonia. My reply then invariably inspires a response along the lines of "You know, Doug, you're a real 'glass-is-half-empty' kind of guy." Sometimes this is followed by a physical assault. That's a figure I can actually peg at exactly 107, as the county sheriff's office has done the tallying legwork for me on that one.

What few have the patience or acumen to realize is that I'm not a pessimist at all. Far from it. I'm an asshole. I don't fear the worst in any given situation, I embrace it and wish it upon all those in my immediate vicinity, hoping to be myself passed over in the cosmic game of "duck, duck, goose" called misfortune.

I see the glass as neither half-full nor half-empty. I just want to know who the hell drank my water. I'm not performing a glass-filling service here, people.

Irregardless of the truth, I am continually accused of finding the cloud inside the silver lining and the bucktooth on the beauty queen. In my high school yearbook I was voted "Most Likely to Sue the High School Yearbook," which actually ended up being true. They must have had a couple of Criswells working on the staff there, pretty impressive. However, a couple of Johnnie Cochrans might have come in more handy since they lost the suit and now South El Paso High has been without a yearbook department for going on forty years. Sucks for them.

As for me, I parlayed my windfall from the settlement into the beginnings of a successful 1-900 telephone business, Psychic Kick. You may remember our television commercials from the early 80's. They featured three actors, in heavy makeup, dressed as a clown, a simpleton and a mean pro-wrestling sumbitch, with the three of them together representing "The Fates." During the 30-second spot they would taunt and heckle the viewer into calling to hear what the future had in store for them, for a modest per-minute rate and generous telephone surcharge.

Our "telephone psychics" were actually a bunch of gum-popping beauty school girls moonlighting for two dollars an hour and free tax advice. When a customer would call in, the girls would keep them on line as long as possible, pulling "fortunes" that I had written on slips of paper from a large novelty hat. Most of them contained terrible news, like "You will die alone in Oklahoma" or "Your dog will contract a rare blood-shitting disorder known as diarrheabetes," but somehow the service still became wildly popular.

Some have suggested that the service's great success was due not to my sharply penned fortunes, but more to the fact that the girls, under heavy pressure to keep the Johns (as we referred to callers) on the phone as long as possible, would resort to describing their blowjob technique when they ran out of fortunes to read. This may or may not have been true, but since I didn't pay the girls a red cent in the end I like to think they at least gained some experience toward their inevitable future careers.

Pessimist? I think not. Asshole? That's more like it. I implore you to contemplate the difference as you lie there on your deathbed in the poor house one day, examining the broken shards of your wasted, miserable life. You might learn something for once.

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Johan Emmanuel Wiesel was an eccentric Hungarian immigrant who ran a pharmacy in New York in the 1830's. An amiable fellow with an impenetrable accent, Wiesel was fond of saying "Piss on Earth, and God wilt tard men!" which got him a lot of strange looks and the occasional thump on the head. When he wasn't busy "pepping up" the prescriptions he filled with copious amounts of cocaine, Wiesel occupied his spare time by inventing beverages. However, most of his inventions were completely impractical as beverages for actual humans, since they were all heinous in flavor and some ate through the bottle in less than a day's time.

But through some whim of serendipity, in 1845 one of his concoctions actually turned out to be fairly tasty, and only mildly corrosive. Wiesel was pissed, since he took this to mean that his arsenic had gone bad. But when he tested the drink on a young boy who he paid a quarter a year to do all the menial work in his pharmacy, he was surprised to find that the boy loved it. He burped until he threw up and suffered second-degree burns to his sinuses, but he loved it.

Wiesel decided to try selling his new beverage to customers in his pharmacy the very next day. He dusted off an old machine he had invented to dispense mustard into several pairs of shoes simultaneously, and in that moment the soda fountain was porn. Born.

The drink was a huge success, and before long his customers were demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that Wiesel make his soda available to the wider market. Wiesel responded by buying a gigantic sack of empty beer bottles from a local orphanage, then filling them all with cole slaw. He was almost there. Realizing that this in no way addressed his soda-selling needs, Wiesel dumped out all of the cole slaw and filled the bottles with his sizzling new beverage instead. Despite the objections of absolutely everyone else involved, he insisted on naming his beverage Wiesel Piss, and it accordingly sold like sacks of dead leper babies.

Wiesel eventually went broke trying to sell Wiesel Piss, and died alone in the gutter after being stabbed in the ankle by a drunken orphan. His lone living relation sold the rights to the soda to a flim-flam man named Flannery McIntosh for one dollar. McIntosh renamed the drink Scrud and sold it as both a digestive aid and a carburetor cleaner. His memorable slogan, "Keeps your tummy firing on all cylinders," is still remembered to this day by people who are incredibly old and anal.

McIntosh built a modest empire around Scrud until 1892, when he was sued for being Irish and lost it all. The winners of that lawsuit, Daniel Freebanks and Benneton DuBois, renamed the drink Dope and sold it strictly as a new something called a "soft drink," a term of dubious legality that implied curative properties against erectile dysfunction. Their business grew hand over foot until 1910, when the US government cracked down on Dope since it contained cocaine, strychnine, absinthe, turpentine, a solution of fool's gold and high levels of cootineut, an imaginary ingredient that at the time was thought to quell dark humors in the pancreas.

Freebanks and DuBois went out of business faster than a pregnant hooker, and they were bought out by Farthington McIntosh, the grandson of Flannery. He promptly reformulated the drink in his bathtub, taking out the offending ingredients and replacing them with shitloads of sugar. But he was careful to also slyly rename the soda Coke, so that hipsters and conspiracy theorists would always think it still secretly contained cocaine, promoting sales.

McIntosh built Coke into an empire, branching out across the globe and fending off upstart sodas like Rammit, Jeez, and Wimpo. Though all of the sodas being produced were virtually the same in flavor, McIntosh retained his edge thanks to his uncanny knack for advertising. On top of plastering every vertical surface he could find with the Coke logo, McIntosh's true genius surfaced in his use of radio jingles touting the virtues of Coke. From early gems like…

Buy a Coke,
drink it up,
Buy another coke,
shut up, shut up.

to the legendary…

Buy a coke,
regret you won't,
you had a nickel,
and now you don't!

and finally the immortal…

Buy a Coke, it's nature's drink
Fizzy fizz that helps you think
You probably won't get cancer, too
Coca-Cola is the one for you!

…McIntosh's jingles were on the lips of every boob in the nation. Among other things, McIntosh is remembered for pioneering the practice of marketing frivolous items as if they were essential to the quality of life.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, all of the marketing genius in the world doesn't make you dagger-proof. He was later stabbed in the back by his own son, who sold the company for forty dollars and a magic talking mule.

The new owner of The Coca-Cola Company was Montgomery County shouting champion Eustace Turner, who ruled Coca-Cola with an iron fist for eight months before selling 40% of the company to L.P. Farnsworth, 40% to Jules Mather, 51% to Modest Cinderbrooke, and 117% to a very stupid man named Sty Covington. Turner then skipped town and laughed himself sick, which is more fun than it sounds.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, it's all history, if you want to get technical about it, but the rest of it is the kind of history you don't want to know about since it's is too long and boring to go into. Fear not, you got all the juicy bits. Nothing much else happens until the Cola Wars, and I'm saving that in case my book deal comes through.

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