7 Habits

Clean and Sober After Going to the Brink with Mike and Ike

Mattimus sought to alleviate the stress and strain of the chaos swirling around him in 2003 through the sweet comfort of Berry Blast Mike & Ikes. What started innocently enough soon spiraled into a costly addiction.

Having gone public with his ordeal, Mattimus said, “At one point, I pulled into a Baltimore gas station and picked up a couple boxes of Berry Blast Mike & Ikes and nothing else. The clerk asked if I wanted any gas with that. When I replied ‘no,’ it occurred to me I was on a collision course with self-destruction.”

“They don’t sell Berry Blast in the economy-size bags, so burning through those small, 2.12 ounce single-serving boxes can really suck you dry financially.”

The cure was in Listerine mint strips, although Mattimus was uncharacteristically perplexed to hear the strips are to be consumed in the mouth, not the armpit. “Heck, the burning sensation of that mint strip in the armpit was enough to cure me of my Mike & Ikes addiction, so let the results speak for themselves.”

It's not surprising Mattimus turned to such addictive artificial stimulants. Troubles found Mattimus easily in the late ‘90s right on through the turn of the millennium.

Things heated up with threats of a lawsuit from the questionable president of a shady dental practice after he exposed their attempts to perform unnecessary dental work. Turbulence was also strong while earning his Master's degree, during which time one nutty professor threatened to kick the challenging student out of grad school after the prof was confronted about his sadly out-of-date 30-year-old curriculum. And, of course, there was the assassination choreographed by the Three Stooges, which was followed by other corporate terrorists, such as Dumb and Dumber and "Pat" and "its" boy, the air-headed Artificial Intelligence.

Allegations of being a simple, glorified hooligan were only buttressed when Mattimus had his camouflage CD case confiscated at a Feyenoord soccer game in Rotterdam. That was a simple misunderstanding, Mattimus would later claim. "You don't throw U2 CDs onto a soccer field; you also don't break them in half to use as weapons," he said.

TC