The Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast at the Wednesday Housefly household is often a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of dogsandwich. (You’ll have to ask juvenal to define “dogsandwich.”) It’s more fast break than break fast. We are a late-sleeping bunch – at least, those of us who can actually reach the doors of the cereal cabinet are – and this means that the most important meal of the day is often either skipped entirely or is composed of a cup of coffee and Crest Plaque Removing Tartar Control Hyperwhitening Cadavers-Have-Fresher-Breath-Than-This-Dope Fresh Mint Gel. (The blue kind; the green kind is for masochists and/or Anabaptists. Note to any Anabaptists offended by this portrayal: What the heck are you doing using a computer? Hasten thee back to the farm – Harrison Ford doth plow with thy heifer; yea, verily, he danceth with thy women!)

But on those odd occasions – like blizzards, for instance, or perhaps random power outages, post-operative recovery, morning sickness, or your basic total solar eclipse – when we find time for an honest-to-gosh sit-down breakfast, I typically go healthy. A whole-wheat bagel with all-natural peanut butter. (Crunchy, not creamy… what are you, Amish? Live a little!) An apple, an orange, a low-fat granola bar. Or, if I’ve really got time to make breakfast special, I go for the gusto.

Basic Four cereal.

As it says right on the box (which means it must be true), Basic Four is a “DELICIOUS BLEND OF SWEET AND TANGY FRUITS, CRUNCHY NUTS, AND A WHOLESOME VARIETY OF GRAINS.” I know, I know. You’re thinking that’s a pretty general description. After all, who would buy a cereal described as “a strikingly bland combination of rubbery dried fruits, bitter nuts, and some puffed rice the rats in the warehouse wouldn’t touch.” But in this case, the marketing pagans are telling the truth. Basic Four is good stuff.

I was thinking that very same thing the other day as I scarfed down a bowl – behold, even two bowls – of General Mills’ finest. I felt the inner warmth that comes with the knowledge that I was eating healthy (it might’ve been the coffee working its black magic on the ol’ bowels, but that’s a tale of sound and fury), and frankly, I began to feel downright superior. I was better than those who defile themselves with the harlotry of Little Debbie, more upright than the unwashed throng of Twinkies consumers.

The words on the back of the box confirmed my status. I was eating a low-cholesterol, high-in-fiber meal, and the smiling, sultry women on the back of the box cheered me on. I was getting extra calcium to fight bone loss and osteoporosis, baby. I was taking the edge off the effects of menopause. I was…

Menopause? What the…?

It hit me like a ton of shredded wheat. Chick cereal. I was eating chick cereal.

Those self-same marketing gurus who’d sold me on the merits of my cereal o’ choice had just stabbed me in the back. Their dirty tricks – which, silly rabbit, apparently aren’t just for kids – threatened to rob me of not only my cereo-social status, but also my manhood! I realized those women on the back of the cereal box weren’t smiling at me – they were laughing!

In a panic, I reviewed my options. I could throw the cereal away. I could gag myself and upchuck the load of Estrogen Puffs in my gullet. I could write a letter of protest to the Sugar Frosted Council*. I could rush out and get one of those macho cereals, the kind where the box probably tastes better than the cereal itself.

Or I could do what any other 21st century kind of guy would do.

Poured myself another bowl.

* -- Sugar Frosted Council: Cap’n Crunch, Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger, Dig ‘Em, Count Chocula, and, in the name of diversity, Snap, Crackle, & Pop.