As a kid, I read the cereal box while I ate breakfast. No, I’m not the only one. My brothers did this too, and on TV, characters on sit-coms and commercials would sometimes be shown reading the box. I think it was a thing. Sugary cereals often had content printed on the box to distract the diner. Mind puzzles, mazes, jokes, crap to buy. After I memorized the back of the box, I moved on to the ingredients list, wondering why we needed dyes and unpronounceable chemicals in my Trix.  Finally, I read the nutritional chart—the reading material becoming less and less interesting as breakfast wound down. Do people still do this? Now, I play Connections or read blogs while I eat breakfast. I exhaust the news while drinking my coffee.  

Old habits die hard. As I brushed my teeth last night, I occupied my mind by reading the back of the Q-Tips box. Q-Tips offered four illustrated uses for their product. Beauty—a photo of a woman removing eyeliner; First Aid and Baby Care—um, I think someone was tickling a baby’s foot with a Q-Tip; Home & Electronics—apparently here, you’re supposed to deconstruct your car stereo speakers and use a Q-Tip to poke at your tweeter; Arts & Crafts—why waste money on paintbrushes when you have a box of five-hundred Q-Tips?

What happened to cleaning ears? I googled: What percent of the population uses Q-Tips to clean their ears? I don’t think many definitive studies have addressed this question, but the number that kept popping up is sixty-eight percent. Sixty-eight percent of the population use Q-Tips to clean their ears even though for decades, doctors, and even the various manufacturers of Q-Tips, have cautioned against inserting a stick into your ear.

Personally, I use Q-Tips daily. If I don’t, the tips of my hearing aids get gunked up with the crap that lines my ear canals after I exercise. Plus, I think I’m addicted. I need my daily fix of ear scraping. In college, my friends and I walked to 7-Eleven one night to buy hot dogs, three for a buck, at the end of a party night. As we dressed our dogs with every single condiment offered, the clerk eyed us while he dug in his ear with the pocket-clip-end of a Bic Round Stick pen cap. Walking home, we trashed him as uncouth and ignorant, but the whole time I thought, that’s brilliant, I can’t wait to give that a try.

Without ear cleaning, Q-Tips would have gone out of business decades ago.

Lying in bed last night, I tried to think of another product that exists solely because people use it incorrectly. I immediately dismissed regulated medications from my list because so many are used off label—the most obvious and current being Ozempic. I settled on inhalants. In my preferred musical genre, punk rock, many songs sing the praises of inhaling chemicals as an intoxicant. Carbona Cleaning Products famously sued the Ramones in the seventies for suggesting that inhaling Carbona produced a superior high than sniffing airplane glue.

As a teen, I delved into this myself. Each bus tub of dough that rose on the prep shelves at the pizza joint where I worked contained a twenty second buzz. When you dug your hands into the center of the dough and made a small opening, the gas that escaped, if inhaled, left you dizzy and giggling. We called these dough-hits. Even though the managers complained that dough-hits ruined the dough, most days, most tubs got hit.

And eighties metalcore pioneers L7 sing a song about “Scrap,” a skinhead who lives to get high on spray paint fumes.

I met a skinhead named Scrap
He lived in my friend’s garage
Every day, he’s shaking that spray paint can
And comes out seeing stars

Grab a paper bag like an oxygen mask
Until your mind starts to gel
‘Cause the ball in the can has a crazy beat
The funky, dying brain cell

On a summer day about five years ago, I asked my kids, aged fourteen and seventeen, to clean and repaint the heavy, steel ‘bouncy-chairs’ that reside on our patio. Midday, they called me at work. “Walmart wouldn’t let us buy spray paint. We’re not old enough.” My immediate thought was a crack down on vandalism, but then I remembered my Scrap lyrics. If teenagers buy spray paint, it’s clearly to get high.

Scrap is a song I’ve returned to repeatedly over the past forty years. The clever lyrics compare the high from huffing paint fumes to the supposedly mindless adherence to charismatic Christianity.

Well, he met some Christians from hell
Who said, “Let’s go to Vegas, man”
So he packed up his leather and his red beret
Into that big, bad Christian van

Use revival meetings like an oxygen tent
‘Til your mind starts to gel
‘Cause the preacher thumps the bible with a crazy beat
The funky, dying brain cell

For me, song lyrics are often unintelligible. I always sang along offering my best approximation of what I thought a band said. As a child, Elton John’s fictional rock star “Benny” had electric boobs and a motor scooter. AC/DC sang about dirty deeds and the dunder chief—whoever TF that was. Deep Purple’s woman was a T.K.O. She makes me sick! When L7 told me that Scrap dug atallic coal baluka John, I had no clue what they were talking about. I didn’t twist the line into a cute phrase, I just mumbled along hoping that no one questioned my rendition.

Almost all lyrics are now on the internet. Ten or fifteen years ago, I checked out the lyrics to Scrap.

Well, he came back to the garage
But the garage, it wasn’t there
And he dug metallic gold more than Luke and John
Now he’s growing his hair

Huh! What’s metallic gold? More internet research. Ah, gold spray paint. The kids on the web think gold gives the best high. So, Q-Tips and metallic gold spray paint. Keep your eyes open. If the person in line in front of you at Walmart has either of those, an intervention might be in order.

Listen to Scrap by L7:

Photo from Pixabay