Don’t stop ’til you get enough. As well as being a classic Michael Jackson tune, the sentence also serves as a lifestyle. And as is important to whatever you choose to call life – breathing, survival or continuing until the next Wednesday night at the Roxy – eating is the most the crucial aspect of day-to-day activity for most, aside from the anorexics one sees waiting in line for the Roxy.

When eating, it is important not to stop until you have gotten enough. For someone like me, who has never cooked a meal for himself, getting enough is like trying to buy beer at 1:01 a.m. in Columbus – problematic. Stopping is not the problem.

In the seven or eight “hip-to-be” square meals I eat/purchase a week, at least five involve a personal relationship with fries of the French variety.

Sometimes I lay the cardboard box of fries on the living room table, sometimes I eat straight from the bag. But whenever my hand rises from the cold white paper bag bringing forth a hopefully warm thin, white, potato-like structure, I can always count on good eats.

Just like at noon on Jan. 20, 1989, when Ronald Reagan’s presidency ended, all great things sadly must come to an end. The cardboard box of fries becomes empty – much like Al Gore’s glass case for presidential victory trophies.

A year minus 49 weeks from today, many of you will associate with your high school friends in the human, non-instant message manner for the first time since late August. At first, it will undeniably be odd. Like the words Maverick sang to Charlie in “Top Gun,” you will wonder if “you’ve lost that loving feeling” with your high school chums.

By the Saturday night after Thanksgiving all will be kosher. You will remember how great the hometown friends are and rue the next morning when you must return to campus.

In the car ride back to Columbus on Sunday you will contemplate how much you missed your high school friends, and how excited you will be to spend Christmas, oops, sorry communists, “winter” break with your friends.

A year ago today, President Bush pulled the shocker of the century and beat the aforementioned Gore in the 2000 presidential election.

Left for not by your professors, Lantern opinion editor and kids with beards who wear stocking hats in July, Bush came out of nowhere and upset the heavily-favored Gore.

So what do French fries, your high school friends and George W. Bush have in common?

Well, if you went to my high school, Poland Seminary in northeast Ohio, all are white, but the focus of this column is not to purport that fact.

When you were 7 or 8 and did well on a test your parents would take you for a reward in the form of a trip to a fast food restaurant. Happy Meal or not, it was a treat.

In college, things change. Fast food is no longer a treat; it becomes a way of life. But what forever remains a treat is the end of the meal. The moment before you throw away the bag and check to see if any fries remain in the bottom of the bag. If fries remain, a smile comes and you realize that everything is going to be OK.

Your high school friends are essentially the fries at the bottom of the bag – neglected, but always the best tasting. Sure, they made be a little chilly, and a little unloved, but upon sight of them a smile always follows.

George W. Bush is also the French fry at the bottom of the bag. People are prone to forget about him, but when the chips (in the non-British way of calling french fries “chips”) are down, people will and have looked to him for reinforcement.

I hope he doesn’t get eaten.

(i)Dave O’Neil is The Lantern sports editor. In the words of Brotha Lynch Hung, “Label him FedEx because of the words he delivers.” Deliver him words at [email protected].(/i)