Breakfast Cereal and Why It’s Not Worth My Fucken Time

It’s snowing this morning. Not that fake-ass Portland “snow” where, in between marathon gonorrheal drizzle sessions, a few flakes fall from the sky and everyone is elated and starts preaching with religious fervor about how we should all make a pilgrimage to the nearest window and pay homage to mother nature in all her majesty. No, it’s actually snowing and I don’t want to go to work. I consider calling in, telling them that the conditions are too dangerous and it is just too much of a risk, but the fact is, the student loans won’t pay themselves, bills will pile up, and rent will still be due at the first of the month so I have to go. It’s 5:15 AM, I’m late, and I’m hungry. I’ll eat something quick, go to the meeting, come back home, and give them the icy roads excuse later in the day so that I can apply for other jobs. That’s how I’ll assert myself. That’s how I’ll take pride in my self worth damn it.

Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day. It can provide you with energy and the mental stamina to power you through your workload depending on what you eat. However, many people often skip the meal in favor of sleeping in and it takes its toll on their creative energy and work performance. Personally, I grew up in a family that stuffed their faces daily with any variety of over-salted pork sausages, greasy strips of applewood smoked peppercorn bacon, Jimmy Dean ground this or that, fried eggs, pancakes, waffles, diced fruit and of course, breakfast cereals. Amongst this endless cornucopia of culinary combinations, I am often relegated to the last and least efficient hunger satisfier in the whole bunch due to my time constraints. Cereal is not worth my fucken time. I know that within a few minutes of consumption, I’ll be hungering for something more. Nevertheless, in my haste, I grab for the box of Kashi off the top shelf of the pantry and fill a heaping bowl of hippie grains that are easily three times the suggested serving. Taking out my frustration for showing up to a 6AM meeting for a job I don’t particularly care for, I sloppily douse the entire pile with a gallon of milk which splashes like a tsunami over the sides of the bowl. I slam a spoon into the mulch as though to shatter the entire vessel and maroon a few ill-fated pieces of puffed rice on the kitchen counter. I refer to this childlike physical display of emotion as “establishing the tone” of my day. I feverishly shovel crunchy, heaping spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth with the hopes and prayers that it will not only satisfy my hunger but hit it like an atom bomb launched from a remote location with surgical precision. Satisfy my hunger? I want to nuke the motherfucker right out of my beergut bunker. I want to annihilate any and all memory of its existence so that when someone asks “Hey man, are you hungry?” I’ll be like, “I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re even talking about dude,” and go back to sticking pins in my thigh in the hopes of once again feeling human emotion while screaming out the names of past lovers. It doesn’t work. Shoving the last spoonful of hippie scrap down my maw, I run out the front door so fast you’d think my house was a Walgreen’s and I’m shamefully trying to prevent anyone from seeing me purchase tampons for my girlfriend.

I’m driving to work thinking of all the reasons that I don’t want to go. Upper-level management is incompetent. I no longer feel as though we adhere to our core values. I am over-educated and underpaid. The outlet for creativity is becoming increasingly narrow, and we have monthly meetings such as the one I’m rushing to attend where we accomplish nothing. You’d think I worked at some 9-5 office job pushing pencils, misplacing corporate memos, and surfing Craigslist as a source of therapy. I don’t. I work at a grocery store.

Since the snow has only just begun, I make my way to the store with relative ease and pull into the parking lot unscathed. I punch my identification number into the clock. 2-5-1-0-8-7-4, the only name my boss will know me as because he is completely oblivious. My stomach is beginning to churn like a cement truck as I brace for the mind-numbing impact of the following two hours. Or maybe it’s the overwhelming amount of fiber I have just ingested minutes prior. Either way, my stomach and my “career” are heading for the shitter. We sit down to the first meeting and within a few minutes I’m already daydreaming about what I’ll do when I get home and holding debates on whether or not to take advantage of the free coffee to wake up or forgo it in order to return to bed after the meeting. Looking out the window, I realize that it is snowing so heavily that it will take me at least an hour and a half to navigate the icy roads back to my house and decide to surrender my lethargic bloodstream to the effects of caffeine. I can already hear my wheels spinning in vein attempts to make traction with the slick surfaces beneath them as I plummet into the ditch. Yesterday my sister called and told me her fortune teller saw me in a horrible car accident. We go over a holiday sales recap, praise our achievements, and discuss where we could have made improvements. I think about suggesting how we could utilize internal movement reports to press margin making products through creative marketing and merchandizing and thereby increase sales through fostering a holiday environment tailored to our specific demographic but stop short of opening my mouth when I come to the realization that if we’re not already doing it and I thought of it, some salaried guy above me is getting paid to take credit for ideas from wage earners like myself. Furthermore, I don’t care enough to draw the breath to verbalize half of what I’m thinking and instead think about how I could have hummed “Billie Jean” better than my friend when we were at his house playing Cranium last week. The trick is to nail the bass line first and then interweave the synthesizer. It takes a little practice, but you’ve got nothing but time and wasted mental resources when you work at a grocery store. Besides, you’ll sound like a fool if you just start humming the chorus without a good falsetto. Trust me.

An hour later the snow is coming down at a hefty rate and we emerge from the “winter of our discontent” that is meeting number one. We conclude the meeting by voting for the employee of the month and I write down the name of the person who sucked the least in the last 24 hours. He is also the person whom I have agreed to vote for if he, in turn, votes for me. Part of me wants to go all Brutus on his ass and vote for myself but I’m a just creature and like I said, he doesn’t suck as much as the rest of my coworkers so, in a sense, I owe him some kind of thanks. I try to be thankful for something everyday.

We make our way to our next meeting as I consider the ironic fact that no snow storm will ever keep me from driving home from work but an hour ago the mere threat of a major snow storm was almost reason enough to justify calling in and telling them I wasn’t going to be able to make it. My stomach grumbles from its lack of satisfaction and I realize that despite getting my allotment of fiber for the next two months in one meal, there is still a void identifiable as hunger. I hunger for something more. I look around at my job. I’m in a grocery store full of food and I can’t find anything that looks good enough to eat.

I suffer through the next meeting just as the last. All of the creative energy I possess that could be going towards a body of work that is self-fulfilling is wasted on identifying innovative solutions to a business that is resistant to accept them. Over the course of an hour I listen to our boss as he rambles on about what could have easily been communicated on the back of Post-It Note in the space below the adhesive. Halfway through the explanation of how to fill out the raffle tickets that will be distributed at the company party, I wonder why you would ever want people working for you who needed this explained to them. They proceed to announce promotions of people into meaningless positions for little or no wage increase and conclude the meeting with “appreciations.” I think how much I’ll appreciate a new job as I make my way to the clock as the meeting drags on.

In my mind I am halfway home and thinking of all the delicious food I would have eaten before coming to work if I had the time, all the other avenues I could have taken in life instead of I5 South to the Barbur Road exit. When I walk out to my car, when I finish the slippery, icy commute through countless accidents and immobilized vehicles abandoned in the snow, when I get home and tell them in triumphant assertion that I am not coming back in for my PM closing shift only to be both frustrated and appeased when they tell me they’re “closing the store due to dangerous conditions anyway,” my wheels will still be spinning in place. My student loans will still need to be paid. I will still be hungry for something more. And tomorrow morning when the snow melts and I have to head back into work, the cereal I eat to satiate my hunger still won’t be worth my fucken time.