On many Sunday mornings, usually before I get to writing the weekly column, some friends and I will get together for breakfast. There are two kinds of breakfast you can have in the southwest: Huevos rancheros (or some other egg/chili/bean variation) or bread (pancakes, crapes, waffles). I try to alternate because sometimes I want a meal and sometimes I just want to stuff up on bread.

You always get more pancakes than you can eat. I think it's because pancakes are relatively cheap to make. Today I had the pancake sandwich, which is two 12" plate-sized pancakes about a half-inch thick, a couple pieces of bacon and an egg. It's not that my eyes are too big for my head, rather that the pancakes are actually bigger than my head.

This is essentially the American way. Give them everything they want and more, because they'll never finish it and feel satisfied.

I get around 70 channels on my cable TV. I watch about fifteen of them. Sure, every once in a blue moon I'll flip through each channel (meaning that, for a split second, I am watching all of my TV possibilities), but mostly I watch a couple networks, sports and the music channels. I pay for everything, but only sample a small portion. Do I feel cheated? Not really, every time I want to watch a baseball game in the summer, there's usually one on.

Say you're listening to the radio and the greatest song in the world comes on. It's such a good song that you go out and buy the CD. And after a few spins, you realize that the only good song on the CD is the single. But you bought all fifteen songs, so you have access to the entire album. You get the whole pancake, but you only want a small portion of it. Of course, Napster and its clones changed this a bit, making it really easy to just get a copy of that one song. And I've never been one of those people who puts a CD on one track repeat--but I know some who do. Do they feel cheated? Maybe, but they really love that one song.

It's like going to a movie to see your favorite actor and finding out quickly that this was one of those movies they did for money instead of art.

It's like the super big huge gulp thing at 7-11, which has more liquid than a human stomach can hold at one time. They bill it as "six hours of refreshment," rather than six trips to the toilet in six hours. Marketing.

It's like watching the comeback sitcom tailor-made for an actor who was on a wildly successful show, and finding out no one remembered to write a script.

And, just as a side note, think about this: "Friends" is starting its last year (the actors have said they are not coming back), are we going to have six semi-friend sitcoms coming out in a few years? Let's pray they made enough money that none of them will have to resort to such an ugly fate.

Anyway, the whole point is we always get too much of what we want. And we're used to this. We expect this. We want to be over-satisfied, over-stimulated, over-cooked. We want the liquor that gets us drunk really fast. We want the chronic. We want the girl who never says no.

When I'm sitting on the back porch, staring up at the sky as the sun goes down, sometimes I think, "Wow, I should hit repeat." Of course, the sun and the moon and the earth do the same thing every day, effectively giving a similar, but varied performance every night. But still, there are some nights when a pause or rewind button would enable me to extend that good feeling just a little bit longer.

I would love to pronounce that this will be the downfall of the United States, but really it will be everyone, all of mankind, that will fall down the dark hole of excess. We're teaching everyone to think like us, and they all see how fat, happy and over-worked we are. So they think to themselves, "Maybe it is a good thing. Maybe David Lee Roth was right. Too much is never enough."

I didn't finish my pancakes today. I'd say about two-thirds got down the gullet. One of my friends asked our waiter if anyone ever finished all the pancakes. He said, "Just this morning, this little bitty woman got the same meal. And she just gobbled the entire thing down."

Matt Worley never thinks he's going to finish the pancakes, but he does on occasion.