Jolt Country

This year, I have been away from all of you for two substantial stretches of time:

1) The two-week trip in Edinburgh I took, that had me back in the United States on Saturday.

2) The indefenisbly-long block of time I was away from civilization watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I returned today to a grocery store for the first time. I needed to get a little of everything, so I blocked out an hour and set forth.

There was nothing particularly noteworthy of my trip, except for when I entered the cereal aisle. For years I had avoided consuming breakfast for one silent and unspoken reason: Marid Audran, the protagonist of George Alec Effinger's novel _When Gravity Fails_, never took it unless forced, and said that having breakfast made him feel "like lead."

... That was seriously it - I might have copped to other reasons, because a grown man emulating a fucking cyberpunk character in any way is a goddamn emotional tragedy, but that was it. I didn't have breakfast on workdays, because Audran didn't.

Anyway, I found myself on the losing side of a brief tete-a-tete regarding breakfast, whilst in Scotland. I was about to declare my main defense for not having it, when I gave up. I would have rather listed the names of all known pop punk bands and submitted to THAT embarrassment, than use the words "The Budayeen" in a breakfast convo.

So I decided to have some when I returned to the United States.

This brings us to what I was doing in the cereal isle. I was going to get some Apple Jacks. I grabbed the big green box and casually glanced at the price.

$5.19!

FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS AND NINETEEN CENTS!

FOR APPLE JACKS!

AT A PROPER GROCERY STORE, NOT LIKE A 7-11 OR SOME SHIT!

...

... How fucking long was I in the UK, anyway??

My wife buys cereal for our kids at Big Lots, Crest, and other discount places. As a result, my kids have never known the taste of Lucky Charms, only Happy Snackies. I think she bought a box of Cinnamon Crunch Wafers last time which look suspiciously like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Too bad there's no generic version of Count Chocula because that was always my favorite. Anyway, not too long ago she came home with a box of Apple Round O's or something that were just like Apple Jacks. I think they were about $2 something. The only unfortunate part about generic cereal is that either there's no prize at all, or the prize is so terrible that you wish they had left it out and just put more cereal in the box.

Yeah, I'll never buy cereal in a box again. That bag shit is fine for me. I have to assume that the makers of the box cereals are in charge of the knock-offs, and they simply control and release the bag stuff like how Intel would control the Celeron SKUs in the late 90s: same chip, clocked differently, grab money from the broke-ass students at one price point, and rich pricks at the other.

I can't overclock fake Apple Jacks, so the analogy is not perfect.

My breakfast cereal of choice these days is the generic bagged version of Coco-Pebbles, "KO-O' KRUNCH." Instead of a colorful illustrated maze game on the back to ease my brain into a functioning state in the morning I do a few mental pushups trying to figure out what they were thinking when they came up with that lame ass name for their cereal clone. But it still turns the milk all chocolaty so I can't complain.

Topic: Generic cereal brands

National brand: Count Chocula

Generic brand: Random J. Vampire chock-o's




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