Cool. That's cool. Be cool. Stay cool. We all use the word, but what does it mean?

The editor turned to me because I'm as far from cool as you can get without falling off the edge of the square earth.

In high school we learned that cool is another way of saying "not warm." Cool kids knocked the books out of your hand, teepeed your house, and drove so fast that you finally paid them ten dollars to stop and let you out. Was that out loud?

After graduation, cool morphs into something different. I took to the street to find out "what it is."

From all accounts, tattoos are still in. And they are getting bigger and badder. Anyone can ink their rear end, but facial tattoos require the kind of commitment you only find in state penitentiaries.

I spoke to Steve, a local tattoo artist. He said that body art is so trendy, he fears that it will go away.

"I mean, at some point it has to become cool to not have a tattoo, right?"

Ah, yes. Like Dr. Seuss's Sneetches, who got so many stars on their bellies that Sylvester McMonkey McBean had to bring in his Star-Off Machine.

Kids agree that music is cool, so long as it's loud and obnoxious.

I met with Wretch, a band that specializes in loud and obnoxious. Lead singer Angelo Miles is the one your mother warned you about, all the way down to the porcelain rings that were implanted, by scalpel, into his ear lobes.

Angelo said, "Cool is not caring about what the masses think of you."

"Then why all the tattoos?" I asked. "Isn't that a type of caring?"

Angelo chuckled, and I moved to the next question. Quickly.

Wretch gave me their CD, which is growing on me. Like a cyst. It's the kind of music that is loud even when you don't turn it up. My wife caught me listening the other day and made a face.

"If anger could masturbate," she said.

Inside The Wild Planet clothing store I found a girl who "doesn't talk to reporters." Her blue hair suggested that she is not, in fact, from this planet, so perhaps she was guarding her identity. A customer, Kyle, did talk. Kyle was recently released from prison -- er, high school -- and had this to say:

"Uncool is when people talk bad about you. That's jacked up."

Consulting my Dictionary for Hopeless Geeks, I saw that "jacked up" describes something that is "not quite right."

When I was growing up, the Fonz represented cool. I asked Kyle if that was still true, and he said, "The Fronds?" So it goes.

The blue-haired girl was too cool for me, yet Angelo was happy to talk and could easily outscream her. I was so confused.

I turned to a famous philosopher, Homer. Homer Simpson.

"I used to be with it," said Homer, "but then they changed what 'it' was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary."

Michael is a bouncer at a local bar. His job is to maintain order and occasionally get shot. No kidding. He showed me the wounds. Michael has been shot, stabbed, bitten, spat on, and trampled. He only keeps bouncing because "it's a cool job."

"Nobody knows what cool is," said Michael. "You just try not to be the guy who is trying too hard."

A man wearing a cow's worth of leather strutted by, shot us a look, and hopped onto his Harley, which began flashing and sounding till he finally found the keys and revved the engine so loud that you could almost hear his soul cry.

You try not to be that guy.

I brought our dilemma to an uptown club, where cool is the same as anywhere else, only with more zeroes at the end. There I found Dann Alari, AKA Dann the Mann. According to Dann, cool is best defined by The Tao of Steve, a movie whose central point is this: If you ever doubt what is cool, ask yourself, "What would Steve McQueen do in this situation?"

The Jose Cuervo girl passed by and Dann paid scholarly attention to her step. Once she was out of smelling distance, he regained consciousness.

"So, yeah," he said. "Be like Steve McQueen and don't give your power away. Also, clean your room."

We seem to be getting somewhere. I fear it may be the beginning.

I approached Kelly Bear, because she looked the most like Barbie. Surely she could shed some light.

"I have no idea," she said. "I don't want to be cool."

Kelly consulted her friend, Christina, and they made a lot of festive, high-pitched noises. I thought they were on to something.

Christina said, "Cool isn't even a good word for cool. Tight is better."

Christina seemed to understand my confusion. Others had climbed the mountain to ask her these same questions.

"Everybody cares what people think," she said. "It's a matter of degree."

I scribbled in my notes.

"Are you going to print that?" she asked.

"Why?" I said. "Do you care?"

Cool is harder to come by as you age. Anyone who has ever been called "mister" is instantly disqualified. Cool fades subtly over time until, after not paying attention for a while, you wake up one morning and poof, you're wearing tube socks with Bermuda shorts.

A kid at my health club thinks it's cool to burp when he enters the room. It proves that he is free from societal understandings regarding bodily gas.

Steve the tattoo dude said that people compete to appear crazy. Some go so far as to scar themselves with glass-tipped soldering irons. They'll show you the wounds.

By these guidelines, though, wouldn't Charlie Manson be the coolest of them all? He is clinically insane, he plays a guitar, and he's got a tattoo in the middle of his forehead.

So confused.

Dr. Barton, a psychotherapist, said, "There is a dark side of cool that prevents you from admitting your emotions, and that's not healthy."

Only a small percentage of people are certifiably, Johnny Depp cool. They share what Dr. Barton called the It Factor, a grace to which others are attracted. The cool don't think much about it.

In other words, if you think you're all that, you're probably not even a bag of chips.

"The ones who were cool in high school," said Barton, "don't really cut it in the real world."

You can test his theory yourself. The next time you drive by those orange-vested trash collectors on the side of the freeway, look more closely: It's all the cool kids from high school.

From what I gather, cool cannot -- must not -- be defined. It is a power so awesome that words turn back frightened as they approach its ultimate reality. Science can only wonder at the promise of harnessing cool. We might use it to propel ourselves to distant galaxies, where it's cool to have four eyes but where creatures with glasses are referred to as eight-eyed freaks.

"What is cool?" may even be a question that has no answer, like, "Why is Anna Nicole Smith on TV?"

When people say "be cool," I guess they are reminding us about the road back to ourselves. They are telling us to keep it real.

That's the best I can figure it, and if you disagree with me, you can sit on it.

It used to be that I judged a food by two criteria: the picture on the label and how happy it made my mouth. I didn't gain weight because I didn't know better.

Then, one dark day, the FDA passed a law about Nutrition Facts, and foods were either "good" or "bad." In case you forget which is which, there's a formula: If it tastes good, it's bad, and if it tastes bad, it's good. The perfect meal consists of cardboard and water -- but not too much!

In my opinion, foods aren't inherently bad; they are just a product of their environment. So instead of dieting, I took other measures. I ate junk food extra-fast to sneak it past my brain; I ordered unsliced pizza so that it was, officially, one piece; I neutralized my cheeseburgers with Diet Coke.

On account of my new "waste line," today I pay attention, a fate worse than fat. Every week they add a new name to the Black List, foods thou shalt not eat without going to confession. It started with candy bars and French fries but has, like a witch hunt, come to include foods that grow right out of the dirt. I can't order a sandwich anymore without someone suggesting that I remove the bread!

Next week they'll report that the air itself is fattening.

It is with a grain of salt, then, that I read Nutrition Facts. Wait. Sodium is bad for me. I read them with a flake of Mrs. Dash non-salt substitute.

Recently I purchased cookies from a health food store, or as my observant niece calls it, the "hell food store." The Nutrition Facts said the cookies were Good, so I cleared the shelf into my cart (you never know when you'll encounter Good cookies again).

Delighting in my darlings at home, I reread the label just for fun. It was then I stumbled on the fine print...

Servings per container: five.

Five servings per two cookies?! Could that be right? Five doesn't even go into two. For me, the word serving has always suggested completion. One meal equals one serving. If I go for seconds, I'm having two servings, and that's my prerogative as an adult who buys these damn groceries and has had a tough day, all right?

My biggest fear is that someday, when I'm not paying attention, I will eat a cookie with 16 billion servings and have to be carried away in a stretcher.

In a rare departure from my normal fluff, I phoned the FDA. I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth (or in this case, the horse's other opening). After waiting on hold long enough to raise children, I was told that serving sizes are based on "standard amounts derived from surveys conducted by the U.S. government."

Who were they surveying, two-year-olds? As part of my "research," I bought a bag of Doritos, the stale kind you find at the gas station. Three servings per bag and most of it air. How long before they advertise, No fat. No calories. No anything at all. Bag o' Air!

Perhaps it is time for the Food and Drug Administration to narrow its field of interest. I'm starting to think they are on drugs as they administer food.

The FDA rep said that small businesses, the kind that supply hell food stores, are exempt from label laws. Why, then, did the cookie folks bother to -- Aaaaah. It hit me like a ton of lard. They create Nutrition Facts but skip the guidelines, serving size be damned.

Could they do that?

"Yes, sir, technically they could, so long as the product doesn't claim weight-loss."

Welcome to the loophole, a popular hangout for attorneys. It smacked of the time we lobbied to lower the volume of commercials, the greatest television victory since they canceled "Irkel." No sooner had the stations complied than some wicked man thought, What if we just lowered the volume of regular programming... And arbitration began anew. So it goes.

I called the cookie people, but they wouldn't comment. In fact, they wouldn't even be polite.

As I did the serving size math, I remembered a truth of the universe: There is no such thing as health cookies. There is either eating sweets or not eating sweets. Since I am not good at the latter, I collected the packages and, with a sigh ... tossed my cookies.

I have since designed for the FDA a proposal that will require label makers to live by their own serving sizes. The cookie people, for instance, will receive two-fifths of a cookie for lunch and then back to work, the whole thing on surveillance. If the label maker dies of hunger, we leave his body where it falls as a reminder to the next guy.

Barring that, I think we should include a second label called Nutrition Fiction, for those of us who would really rather not know.