Kyle and the Jingle of Doom

There are only three things in this world that can make a man question his will to live: losing his job, living with his mother-in-law, and the jingle for adult diapers playing on loop in his nightmares — I, unfortunately, have all three.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Kyle Brenner, formerly known as “The Voice Behind Hot Pockets,” currently known as “Susan’s disappointing son-in-law who can’t even load a dishwasher correctly.” Two months ago, I was sitting in a corner office at MelodyMinds Creative, collecting royalties every time someone hummed my “Dippin’ Dots, Dippin’ Dots, the ice cream of tomorrow, today!” jingle. Now I’m sitting in Susan’s guest bedroom that smells perpetually of mothballs and disapproval.

“Kyle!” Susan’s voice cuts through the house like a chainsaw through butter – hot, messy, and inexplicably violent. “The throw pillows go PATTERN SIDE UP!”

I look down at the couch I’ve just spent fifteen minutes arranging. Apparently, in Susan’s world, there are throw pillow crimes punishable by death. I flip all six pillows while maintaining eye contact with her framed needlepoint that reads “A clean home is a happy home.” I’m pretty sure it’s watching me.

My downfall came swift and merciless. My latest composition — “Wipe Right with Wipester Wipes!” — was supposed to revolutionize bathroom tissue advertising. Instead, it accidentally synchronized with the same neural frequency that makes people impulse-buy garden gnomes. Three days after the commercial aired, garden centers across America were ransacked, and seventeen people were hospitalized with shopping cart injuries.

The Catchiness Tribunal classified my jingle as a “Neural Loop Hazard” under the Jingle Safety Act of 2019. My company fired me, my license was revoked, and my bank account drained faster than a bathtub in a horror movie.

“Kyle!” Susan again. “Did you use the good towels? Those are for GUESTS!”

“I am a guest,” I mutter, stuffing the apparently sacred Egyptian cotton back into the linen closet.

“You’re FAMILY,” she corrects me, making it sound like a terminal diagnosis.

My wife Linda works remotely in HR now, which means she spends all day mediating other people’s problems while completely ignoring the psychological warfare happening between her mother and me. Even now, she’s upstairs on a Zoom call, nodding sympathetically at someone’s screen while downstairs I’m being slowly crushed under the weight of Susan’s organizational systems.

“The peanut butter goes on the SECOND shelf, Kyle. We’ve been over this.”

There are fifteen — I’ve counted — different organizational charts in this house. Pantry shelving. Towel rotation. Acceptable shower times. The proper angle for hanging toilet paper (Susan has a protractor in the bathroom, I kid you not).

At night, I lie awake listening to Linda breathe beside me, wondering how she emerged from Susan’s womb with actual human emotions. Meanwhile, her father Frank just wanders around the backyard feeding squirrels and occasionally offering cryptic one-liners like, “The storm always looks worse from inside the boat, Kyle,” before disappearing again.

This afternoon, while Susan was at her weekly “Neighborhood Beautification Committee” meeting (aka gossiping about which houses have unapproved lawn ornaments), I ventured into the forbidden zone — the attic. I was looking for my old synth keyboard, the one thing that might preserve my remaining sanity.

Instead, I found a dusty USB stick labeled in red Sharpie: “DO NOT PLAY.”

And that, dear friends, is exactly why I’m now sitting in Susan’s pristine guest bathroom, headphones plugged into my laptop, about to listen to something I absolutely should not.

Because when you’ve hit rock bottom, sometimes the only way out is to dig.

The USB stick clicked into my laptop port like destiny itself was guiding my hand—or maybe that was just the residual tremor from Susan’s morning coffee, which she brews to approximately the viscosity and potency of industrial-grade paint thinner. I’m pretty sure I saw it dissolve a spoon once.

The folder popped open to reveal a single audio file labeled “JOHNNY_B_LOOP_FINAL_DONT_OPEN.mp3.” Now, in the grand hierarchy of things you absolutely shouldn’t click on, this ranks somewhere between “free_virus.exe” and “definitely_not_a_government_watchlist.html.” Naturally, I double-clicked it immediately.

What exploded through my headphones wasn’t just a jingle. It was auditory nitroglycerin—a perfect fusion of synth, bass, and an inexplicably catchy sequence of notes that made my brain light up like a Christmas tree hooked to a nuclear reactor. Forty-five seconds of pure, undiluted earworm magic about something called “Crackalicious Snack Wafers.”

I yanked the headphones off, but it was too late. The jingle had already nestled itself into the folds of my cerebral cortex like a musical parasite. I found myself humming it while brushing my teeth. Tapping its rhythm while sorting Susan’s color-coded recycling bins (blue for plastics, green for glass, and a special crimson container for “packaging that disappointed her”).

“Kyle!” Susan’s voice interrupted my musical trance as I stood in front of an open refrigerator. “Are you reorganizing my condiments by viscosity AGAIN?”

I looked down to discover I’d somehow created a perfect gradient of sauce bottles ranging from ketchup to mustard to mayonnaise. The jingle was making me more organized. This was terrifying.

“Sorry, just getting water,” I lied, quickly grabbing a bottle from the door—only to discover it was Susan’s special alkaline water infused with “moon energies” and cucumber essence.

“That’s MY water,” she hissed, snatching it from my hand. “Yours is the tap water. We’ve discussed this. Your kidneys haven’t earned alkalinity yet.”

That evening, the torture reached new heights when Susan forced me to attend her book club—not as a participant, mind you, but as a combination waiter/emotional punching bag for six women who’d gathered to not discuss “The Secret Garden of Self-Actualization.”

“Kyle’s a jingle writer,” Susan announced to the group while I distributed gluten-free, dairy-free, joy-free crackers. “Or he was. Until his music was classified as a public menace.”

The women tittered politely while eyeing me like I was a particularly interesting zoo exhibit.

“It wasn’t a public menace,” I clarified. “It was classified as a Neural Loop Hazard with potential for commercial manipulation.”

“It made people buy garden gnomes, Martha,” Susan stage-whispered to her friend. “Garden. Gnomes.”

“They were very tasteful gnomes,” I muttered.

Later that night, after Linda had fallen asleep and Susan had completed her nightly ritual of rearranging the pantry and sighing loudly outside our bedroom door, I pulled out my laptop again. The jingle continued to bounce around my skull like a superball in a dryer. But now I saw it for what it truly was: my ticket out of Susan’s domestic prison.

With trembling fingers, I opened my dusty audio editing software. The plan forming in my mind was either brilliant or the desperate hallucination of a man who’d spent too long matching sock colors by Susan’s sixteen-point classification system. I’d tweak the mysterious Johnny B. Loop jingle just enough to make it my own, submit it to Crackalicious (a new snack company desperate for brand recognition), and resurrect my career from the ashes like some kind of jingle-writing phoenix.

As I worked through the night, I could swear I heard Frank’s voice whispering from the hallway: “Sometimes you gotta play the forbidden melody to find your own tune, Kyle.”

I nearly had a heart attack until I realized it was just the house settling. Or possibly Susan’s collection of decorative owls judging me.

By dawn, I had it—the perfect jingle. I played it once to test, and the neighbor’s dog instantly began dancing in perfect synchronization. Even more disturbing, I caught Susan humming it while alphabetizing her spice rack before violently shaking her head and muttering, “Get out, get out, get out.”

I’d created a monster. And it was absolutely glorious.

***

Let me tell you something about submitting a potentially illegal jingle to a snack company while living under your mother-in-law’s totalitarian regime—it creates the kind of anxiety that makes your armpits sweat with such intensity that you could hydropower a small village. I’m talking next-level, code-red, DEFCON 1 perspiration that had me wearing three layers of shirts just to absorb the evidence.

“Is that one of Frank’s Hawaiian shirts?” Susan asked, eyeing me like I was wearing a costume made entirely of dead houseplants. “You look like a tourist who got lost on the way to a Jimmy Buffett concert.”

I muttered something about “laundry day” while clutching my laptop to my chest like it contained nuclear launch codes. In reality, it contained something far more dangerous: my career resurrection in MP3 format.

Sending the jingle to Crackalicious took approximately seven years off my life expectancy. The submit button on their website might as well have been labeled “Press Here to Potentially Violate Federal Jingle Safety Regulations and Spend the Rest of Your Life in Acoustic Prison.” I hit it anyway, then immediately deleted my browser history, cleared my cookies, and contemplated eating my laptop.

For three days, nothing happened. Three days of Susan’s scheduled “Personal Growth Time” where she’d force me to help reorganize her collection of decorative plates while listening to motivational podcasts with titles like “Embracing Your Inner CEO: Even Disappointments Can Achieve Mediocrity.”

“Kyle,” she’d say, handling a plate with a painting of a disapproving cat, “this podcast is specifically for people like you. Listen to the part about ‘redirecting failure energy.’”

Then, on day four, it happened. My phone pinged with an email that made my intestines perform gymnastics routines that would impress Olympic judges:

“CONGRATULATIONS! Your jingle submission for Crackalicious has been SELECTED! Production begins IMMEDIATELY!”

I made a sound that was half-victory screech, half-terror hiccup. Frank, who was passing by with a bag of organic squirrel feed, gave me a knowing nod. “Sometimes the bird that flies highest gets shot first, Kyle,” he said before wandering back outside.

Sometimes I think Frank might actually be some kind of backyard Buddha.

The first Crackalicious commercial aired during a prime-time cooking show. I gathered with Linda in our bedroom, laptop balanced on our knees, while downstairs Susan hosted her “Decluttering Support Group” (six women sitting in a circle confessing about buying unauthorized throw pillows).

The commercial was simple: attractive people looking surprised while eating triangle-shaped crackers. Then my jingle hit—that insidious, brain-melting sequence of notes that burrowed into your cerebral cortex like an auditory tapeworm.

Linda’s eyes widened. “That’s… really catchy.”

“Too catchy?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Kyle,” she whispered, “I’ve only heard it once, and I feel like it’s rearranged my childhood memories.”

By morning, the signs were everywhere. The garbage truck driver was whistling it. Birds seemed to be chirping in sync with it. I caught Frank doing a little two-step in the backyard while the squirrels watched, seemingly hypnotized.

Even Susan wasn’t immune. I found her alphabetizing her collection of artisanal soaps while humming the jingle with the vacant expression of someone whose brain has been temporarily hijacked.

“Susan?” I ventured. “You okay there?”

She snapped back to reality with such force I swear I heard a sonic boom. “WHAT have you DONE?” she hissed, clutching a lavender-infused soap bar so tightly I feared for its structural integrity.

“Me? Nothing! Just checking if you need help with your—” I glanced at the label on the box she was organizing, “—‘Soaps That Spark Adequate Levels of Joy’?”

By day three post-launch, it wasn’t just our household. Social media exploded with videos of people involuntarily dancing to my jingle. Flash mobs formed in grocery stores when the commercial played. A news anchor interrupted a serious report to bob her head rhythmically before catching herself.

They called it “The Earwormpocalypse.” Productivity plummeted. Traffic accidents increased as drivers got distracted when the jingle came on the radio. The Catchiness Tribunal issued an emergency statement.

And then my doorbell rang.

Standing on Susan’s immaculately swept porch were three people in what looked like hazmat suits, holding specialized audio equipment and badges identifying them as agents of the Federal Jingle Regulatory Commission.

“Kyle Brenner?” the lead agent asked, voice slightly muffled through their protective gear.

“That depends,” I replied, calculating my odds of escaping through the back door (zero, given Susan’s triple-deadbolt system). “Are you here about the garden gnomes? Because I’ve served my time for that.”

The agent’s eyes narrowed through the clear visor. “We’re here about Crackalicious. And Johnny B. Loop.”

My stomach dropped faster than Susan’s expression when someone uses the guest towels. “Johnny who?” I squeaked, my voice achieving a pitch previously only accessible to dolphins and panicking chipmunks.

That’s when the lead agent removed their helmet, revealing a face I recognized from my own driver’s license.

“You are Johnny B. Loop, Mr. Brenner. Or should I say… you were.”

***

Have you ever had one of those moments where your past self reaches through the space-time continuum just to slap you upside the head? That’s exactly what happened when Agent Hazmat McBuzzkill informed me that I was, in fact, the infamous Johnny B. Loop—a fact that had apparently been deleted from my consciousness with the efficiency of Susan purging expired condiments.

“Wait, I’m who now?” I sputtered, my brain short-circuiting faster than that time I tried to fix Linda’s hair dryer with a butter knife and a surprising amount of confidence.

The agent sighed with the weariness of someone who’s explained quantum physics to a golden retriever. “During your experimental phase in college, you composed under the pseudonym Johnny B. Loop. You created a jingle so catastrophically catchy that it caused seventeen people to spontaneously form a conga line in the middle of a funeral procession. The Tribunal classified it as a Class-5 Cerebral Invader and scrubbed it from the public record.”

My mouth hung open like a broken garage door. I had vague memories of a wild creative period in my twenties that involved energy drinks, questionable mushrooms, and a keyboard I’d found in a dumpster—but nothing about being the jingle equivalent of a bioweapon manufacturer.

“That’s… impossible,” I stammered, just as Susan appeared behind me with the supernatural timing of a horror movie villain.

“I KNEW IT!” she shrieked, pointing a finger that could have skewered a medium-sized rodent. “I knew he was harboring illegal melodies! My brain hasn’t been this involuntarily organized since the Great Pottery Barn Jingle Incident of 2015!”

The agents pushed past me into Susan’s immaculate living room, their hazmat suits leaving microscopic dust particles that I knew Susan would be vacuuming up with tweezers later.

“Sir, by reintroducing a banned neural-loop sequence into public consciousness, you’ve violated Code 17 of the Jingle Safety Act,” said the lead agent, setting up what looked like a portable EEG machine on Susan’s antique coffee table. “We’ve had reports of people alphabetizing their sock drawers against their will. The President himself was caught color-coordinating his tie collection during a security briefing.”

My knees went weak. I collapsed onto Susan’s pristine white sofa (the one normally covered in plastic that’s only removed for “special occasions,” which apparently included federal investigations).

“What happens now?” I whispered.

The Tribunal member exchanged glances with her colleagues. “Normally, this would mean immediate transportation to the Jingle Rehabilitation Colony in northern Montana.”

A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. Everyone knew about the Colony—a remote facility where dangerous jingle composers were forced to listen to elevator music on loop until their creative spirits were thoroughly crushed.

“However,” she continued, “given your unique situation and previous violations, we’re authorized to offer an alternative.”

Linda appeared at the top of the stairs, her Zoom meeting forgotten. “What alternative?” she asked, her voice tight with worry.

“House arrest,” replied the agent, “under the supervision of someone who truly understands psychological torture—someone who can ensure Mr. Brenner never again poses a melodic threat to society.”

All eyes turned to Susan, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, arms crossed, a smile spreading across her face that made the Grinch look like an amateur.

“I accept this sacred responsibility,” Susan announced, with all the gravitas of someone being handed nuclear launch codes. “I already have a chore chart prepared.”

And that’s how I, Kyle Brenner, formerly known as “The Voice Behind Hot Pockets,” currently known as “That Jingle Criminal,” became the permanent ward of Susan Hellman, my mother-in-law and newly appointed federal jingle supervisor.

My days now consist of composing government-approved “safe” jingles—bland, forgettable tunes that promote dental hygiene and the importance of filing taxes early. Each creation must pass Susan’s rigorous “Catchiness Assessment Protocol,” which involves playing it for her garden club members and ensuring none of them remember it five minutes later.

Frank occasionally slips me contraband melody fragments scribbled on napkins, winking as he whispers, “Sometimes the caged bird sings the sweetest song, Kyle.”

But they’ve all overlooked one critical detail in their perfect plan: Susan hums in her sleep. Every night, I lie awake listening to her subconscious processing random tunes. And every night, I plant a new neural-loop fragment, building my masterpiece note by note in the mind of my captor.

They might have shackled my talent. But they forgot one thing: Susan’s brain is my new canvas, and revenge is a dish best served with a catchy hook and an irresistible beat.

The jingle revolution is coming. And this time, it’s personal.