1990's Cereal Crisis

I’m standing in line at the health food store, and already I’m questioning the sanity of every decision that led me here—my basket filled with overpriced, artisanal virtue signaling: cage-free this, organic that, vegan whatever. The total cost of all this is guaranteed to make me wince, but the deeper issue, or at least the one I can’t stop obsessing over, is the absurdity of the whole scene—the slow-moving line, the fluorescent lights vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear, and the incessant beep of the scanner. Somewhere between the bulk bins and the cash register, I slip into a fog—a kind of mental cul-de-sac where boredom meets nostalgia and they start doing donuts.

Suddenly, I’m back in the 1990s, a decade that now feels suspiciously airbrushed in hindsight, though at the time it seemed solid enough. Back then, parents weren’t omnipresent security drones orbiting their kids’ every move, and children hadn’t yet figured out how to manifest their grievances in AR-15s. It was simpler. Or, if not simpler, at least less cluttered with the kind of existential dread that comes from being perpetually online.

My modern copy, signed by the god of ass-jabbers himself.

In this memory, I’m in the cereal aisle, all wide-eyed desperation, begging my mom to buy me Cap’n Crunch. Not for the cereal—I’m pretty sure even back then I knew it wasn’t food—but for the two baseball cards inside the box. That was the real treasure. My mom, blissfully unconcerned with buzzwords like “organic” or “non-GMO,” isn’t convinced. To her, a healthy snack is either a granola bar so sticky it could pull out fillings or those weird fruit cups filled with a syrup that looked more like embalming fluid than juice.

And then, the horror. She spots the generic alternative: Crispy Crunch. Same cartoonish box, half the price, zero baseball cards. The math was obvious to her, but to me, it was catastrophic. There was no way I’d pull a fucking Jose Canseco or Mark McGwire card out of a generic box. At age 10, that felt like the end of the world. What was I supposed to do? Beg harder? Stage a protest right there in the cereal aisle? Or, worse yet, accept that my existence would be forever marred by the absence of those glossy, steroid-soaked cardboard tributes to my oversized heroes?

The checker jolts me back to the present with the faintest undertone of disdain in her voice—probably the result of having repeated, “Do you need a bag?” three times while I stared, slack-jawed, at the floor. She’s wearing a Nirvana shirt that might actually be older than her, dreadlocks spilling over her shoulders, and she’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have. I’d been standing there, frozen, reliving a time when my biggest worry was how to con my mom into buying a box of sugared fiberglass just to get a couple of cards featuring guys who turned themselves into Greek gods by jabbing a needle in their ass.

That was the dream, or at least the illusion of it—a vision of muscle and power, sending baseballs into some distant realm, making us believe in something grander than life itself, something beyond the reach of the mundane rules that govern our daily existence. But then, perhaps, that is the point. That the whole thing—the cereal boxes, the cards, the pull of nostalgia, even the mindless shuffle through the grocery store—is, in the end, absurd. A series of fragmented moments that add up to nothing, and yet everything at once. The question is not whether we understand this absurdity, but whether we can still be moved by it. Whether we can still be dazzled by the strange, ephemeral spectacle of a modern life that makes no sense at all, before the weight of it all becomes too much to bear and we let go.