The last time I dug into horror was back in June. It’s not a genre I overtly crave. I find it stressful, in fact. But nerve-wracking as it may be, horror certainly generates some memorable moments. I fired up the F.E.A.R. series a few days ago, starting with the first episode, which was published back in 2006. While its age shows, graphically, I’ve been savoring its texture.

Like Dead Space, this game reminds me how screen horror is naught but a deft weave of sound, lighting, and timing. I’ve been paying attention especially to that last element–how fear is dispensed, essentially. You’ve got your jump scares, of course, on one end of the spectrum: a corpse lunging at you from a pool of blood, for example–I ain’t making this shit up, incidentally–or a gnarled face flashing across the screen. These scares are brutish, subtle as a hammer, and effective.

When you start moving beyond jump scares, however, that’s when things get interesting. Jump scares are instantaneous. A wider time horizon, on the other hand, affords the game space to prolong the terror. You’re negotiating a narrow ventilation shaft, for instance, with naught but your flashlight illuminating the way, and you see a creepy girl crawling toward you. Or you see a silhouette of a man through an opaque office window, about 200 feet away, only to discover an empty room. But perhaps the cleverest conceit the game employs is when it does nothing. There are stretches when you expect something to drop from the ceiling, or some other classic horror trope to rear its head, but instead you are greeted with silence. I’m hooked–and I’m dreading every moment of it.

Taxes, however, are the last thing I want to discuss tonight. Instead, I’d like to conclude Food Week by bringing bland, boring oatmeal to the table. There’s history here, if you recall. A gambit gone wrong. The official count was 716 packets when we spoke about the matter last August and now, 18 months later, there are precisely 180 bags of–ugh–Maple & Brown Sugar left. It’s a prodigious number, and thinking about it with any appreciable frequency could drive a man insane.

What is arguably the most important meal of the day becomes an ordeal, some mornings. I think a lot about that night at Target, when I made a poor life decision. I have flashbacks. Flashforwards, too, to the day when I finally crack open the last box. Maybe I never left the Island, if you know what I mean. I’ve found some relief in adding cranberries to the stuff, but even as I type this, I’m not entirely sure whom I’m trying to convince. And that’s precisely why I’m grabbing a sausage, egg, and cheese on a bagel tomorrow morning.

I’m not just talking about any cookies. I have a very specific kind in mind: chocolate chip cookies from Chicago, Purple Line, baked right under the Foster L stop. Every year, I make it a point to buy a few dozen from the proprietor, and it’s a tradition driven by nostalgia, then verified by cold, empirical deliciousness. The first time I had these cookies was in college. They were sold in the student union, individually wrapped and stamped with a strange rhino.

But then the cookies disappeared one day, which prompted some sleuthing. Honestly, it was probably the only substantive research I conducted during my undergraduate tenure. And when I finally found the bakery, I may as well have found the Seven Cities of Gold. I loved the ambiance. Entrance secreted away on the side of a building, no real storefront, drawings all over the kitchen walls, and the credit card reader buried under papers on a desk in the back office.

My fondest memory, though, was when the owner made a house call. It was my first Bible study, and I wanted to do it up right by plying everybody with earthly riches in the form of baked goods. I called the bakery and she picked up. Mentioned she was headed home anyway, so swinging by would be a no-brainer. It was a chilly night. I remember dashing down the dorm stairs to the lakeside entrance and there she was, still in bakery attire, with a bag full of cookies. It was a different era, a bygone time when I actually had the wherewithal to lead Bible study. Only worried about the curriculum, with no thought for the vitae part. World economies weren’t constantly on the brink of something, every other week. And cookie flavor, above all else, would be my most pressing decision for the evening.