Dear Pantera Boy,

I noticed you some time ago, but was in denial of your existence. You wear a black t-shirt, board shorts with hoodie tied around your waist and a black back pack with stitched letters 'Pantera' across the back....IN THE dead of WINTER. Dude, what are you thinking? It's 5 degrees outside. I usually bundle up - fuck fashion - during the cold months of the year, fully equipped with down jacket and a couple layers underneath to ensure warmth. Did your mama not tell you to put a jacket on as a child? Drop you in a cold bathtub of water and said 'swim bitch, swim!'

I'm not too familiar with Pantera as a band, though you're always head banging on the subway with it blaring in your ears at 4:30 am (I cant imagine how you can hear at all after the i-pod comes off), so I've taken the liberty to see what this Pantera is all about. I mean, it's not like I haven't heard of them. So this is what I found:

"Pantera was an American heavy metal band from Arlington, Texas, that formed in 1981. Although initially influenced by 1980s glam metal/hard rock bands, thrash metal acts such as Slayer and Metallica as well as traditional metal bands such as Black Sabbath would prove to be influential in the band's significant change in musical direction at the end of the 1980s. Pantera subsequently became a key formulator of the post-thrash subgenre of "groove" metal."

I'm going to take a good once through listen to their biggest album Cowboys From Hell and perhaps then I too will not feel the cold. If they blast Pantera from the top of Mount Everest will the snow melt?! It is March now ... will you be wearing a parka in the summer? Turtle neck on the 4th of July? Leg warmers on Labor Day? So many clothing options for you to 'stick it to the man,' son. Only metal heads will know ...

-Deryck Todd