I wonder how many bowls of breakfast cereal I've consumed in my lifetime. This is a big number. Placed in a row, these bowls would stretch all the way to I don't know where, someplace almost certainly far away. The horizon? How far away is that? Does it "depend"? If so, on what? I have no idea why I like cereal so much. Why does anyone like any kind of food for that matter. You latch onto certain things, they become your things. When there's no cereal in the house I feel the lack, something's not right. When I was a kid we always had a line of cereal boxes on top of our refrigerator, since everyone had their favored brands. A cliched suburban tableau. I wouldn't touch my mother's Special K, nor would I consider reaching for my stepfather's Grape Nuts. Grape Nuts are horrid, no sane person eats Grape Nuts. He'd sit there eating Grape Nuts and drinking Ovaltine, rubbing our noses in his carefully cultivated perversities, a food sadist determined to use the power of disgust to weaken us and bend us to his will. To eat Grape Nuts automatically puts you under suspicion of being in the throes of a psychosis. The Grape Nuts eater, who knows what that person is up to?

Cereal in general, however, the genre of cold breakfast cereal, has a special allure. The bland but comforting familiarity, the cartoony box with its promise of a colorful childhood fantasia filled with demented anthropomorphic characters capering in a terrifying dreamscape, the pleasing but evanescent texture, vigorous palate-shredding crunchiness turning to soggy pathetic limpness well before you reach the feeble anticlimactic end, just like life. I like the bowl, what a pleasing concavity it is. The spoon in the bowl, you don't have to be Freud's housekeeper to figure that one out. I like eating cereal while standing, it's got that kind of puckish adaptability, that let's-take-it-on-the-road sense of fun. You can walk around your whole apartment while eating cereal, take the grand tour, look at your possessions like you've never seen them before in your life, everyone's done that. America's urban centers are full of single people eating cereal while wandering around their apartments like they're browsing in a department store. The big white sale at Solitaries. I like the me eating cereal more than the me eating, say, endive salad, or mulligatawny soup. Those may or may not be foods I enjoy, who the hell can remember, but cereal just seems more me somehow, I've eaten enough bowls by now to confidently consider it part of my identity. I picture myself eating cereal and think, there's a fellow who's doing all right, there's a happy guy. Look at him go, he sure does love that cereal doesn't he. What a loser.