Cereals have been evolving since humankind first learned that everything tastes better with milk. From the time when the first bowl was filled with cow juice and had something crunchy and/or spongy dumped into it and shovelled into a mouth we have been evolving the science of cereal. From mammoth gonads to Chocos, we've come a long way. That being said, not all cereals have evolved equally.
Let me start this off by saying: I once loved Cheerios. At one point in time Cheerios and I were buddies.I could inhale the savoury scent of Cheerios and not want to vomit, I could fucking snort Cheerios and be completely fine. All that changed with the Family Value Pack. If you aren't familiar with the Family Value Pack, allow me to shed you of your ignorance. If you ever dreamed of having a cereal box that was big enough to have a mascot of realistically fuckable size, I'm happy to inform you that it exists. If you want to feed all of Africa with a single goddamned box of refuse corn flakes, I'm glad to tell you it's right here and has an expiry date of one year.
And in case you didn't catch the keyword there, it is refuse. And it isn't as though normal Cheerios aren't milked out of a giant bee then freeze dried into those little doughnuts of self-loathing. These are the Cheerios that didn't make it into the boxes sold to normal people. People who don't want to engage in intercourse with a cartoon bee. People who can look at the Family Value Pack and say: "that is too much Cheerios".
The Family Value Pack is a box with the surface area of my torso and the nutritional value of my asshole. I would rather stick my dick into a pickle slicer while singing the song "Jingle Bells Rock" and have my ass hairs tweezed off than eat another single Cheerio. And it's all because of the Family Value Pack. See I was unaware of the Family Value Pack until very recently. By very recently I mean about two months before the expiry date. The thing is we all remember the day the box arrived because it didn't fit in the cereal cupboard and we had a laugh about how stupidly large it was. Well, nobody's laughing now. I found the box lying on its side, mysteriously hidden away in the cupboard where we keep the fancy dessert stuff nobody touches (like Vanilla extract n' shit). I was going to mourn the expired cereal when I discovered that it had two months to go. Instead of losing money (because I'm a cheap motherfucker) I made the conscious decision to devour the entire, full Family Value Pack of Cheerios on my own.
I didn't eat them all in one go for two reasons: one, I don't want to fucking die, two, we didn't have enough milk. So almost every night for around 60 nights I had a bowl of Family Value Pack, bottom of the factory line, half-crushed, unreasonably shitty, refuse Cheerios. Cheerios that aren't actually viable for human consumption, Cheerios that have the texture, flavour and nutritional value of fucking cardboard. And I consumed them for 60 nights. 60 bowls of the flavour equivalent of Nickelback. Almost eight weeks straight of consuming nothing but Cheerios swimming in vaguely honeyish milk that tastes more like liquified sadness than anything else. Added up, around 20 hours of doing nothing except eating starchy circles of misery, that are so shitty I think they may have given me brain damage, floating in a bowl of off-white milk that looks, and tastes, like it was pissed in by a diabetic. But there was light at the bottom of the bowl; after 60 days of Cheerios induced depression.
I
was
free.
I can now die happy in the knowledge that I didn't waste the equivalent of three dollars and 98 cents.
