I like to think I’m a bit of an expert on breakfast cereals.  It sits on the shortlist of things in this plane of existence that I truly love, and ever since I was young, I have cultivated what I consider to be quite a discerning palate.  Now, I’m not one of these jags who knows the intimate history of when they went from 60′s Trix Rabbit to modern day Trix Rabbit, and other assorted breakfast ephemera, but I did spend many years in a state of mild apoplexy because no one I knew seemed to acknowledge the existence, much less the clear superiority of Boo Berry to the other monster cereals.

Suck my sugar bear, you gay zombie nightmare.

As I get older, my tastes invariably have moved away from the ultra-sugary syrup clusters I preferred in my youth towards more old-mannish fare, but every once in a while, I’ll get a bug up my ass to take it back to ’88 and get something totally devoid of nutrition and heavily glazed.  Here’s the thing:  I work in a hippy-dippy grocery store, where we don’t carry name brand anything, unless you consider Crunchy Jimmy’s Beet Soda to be a brand name.  Since I don’t like to carry a change of clothes in my car to go grocery shopping, 9 times out of 10, I will just pick stuff up as I leave work.  This works out okay for most things, but cereal is not one of them.

One of the most important life lessons you ever learn (usually in college, when you are dirt-ass poor) is that some foods are just fine to buy as a generic brand, and some are just NOT.  Ketchup needs to be made by Heinz, american cheese needs to made by Kraft (or possibly Velveeta), and virtually any cereal outside of shredded wheat needs to be the proper brand name.  Otherwise, shit just ain’t right.  At work, I often don’t even have the option to get something ‘like’ the cereal I want.  It’s logical that Hole ‘n’ Oats will be at least a reasonable facsimile of Cheerios, but if I’m in the mood for Lucky Charms, are Gorilla Dribblers going to satisfy me?  Unlikely.  It is at this nexus of realities that I found myself a couple of weeks ago, longing for Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch and making my best educated guess that Peanut Butter Puffins would do the trick.

Peanut Butter Puffins are decidedly NOT Peanut Butter Crunch.  Not.  Even.  Close.  The first thing I noticed about them:  each individual Puffin is (approximately) the size of a testicle.  These things are huge.  And pointy, which admittedly, is not something you usually hear about testicles.  So the first hurdle to overcome with Puffins is a basic size-to-mass ratio problem.  Once you get them in your mouth, you discover there’s not much peanut butter flavor, and in fact, not much flavor at all.  Puffins are very lightly sweetened, which is not a bad thing at all, and are also wheat-free/corn based, also not bad in and of itself.  But most if not all of us have grown up on super sweet corn and/or rice based cereal, so when you get hold of some shit where you can actually taste the base ingredient, it’s off-putting to say the least.  Finally, and perhaps most damning, no amount of time sitting in milk will ever soften up a Puffin.  These things will remain crispy shrapnel long after your body turns to ash in the mouths of our future cybernetic conquerors.

In all seriousness, the thing that motivates me to get out of bed and begin my routine most days is the anticipation of my morning bowl of cereal. I look forward to it the way some people look forward to their first bump of cocaine of the day.  I ended up throwing out almost half a box of Puffins because I couldn’t face the bottomless hellscape of gnashing through yet another goddamned tureen of these misery nuggets.

Thanks for nothing, retarded penguins.