The Cerealverse Effect

In middle school, I knew a guy whose mother worked for one of the big cereal companies. She’d haul home enough test brands to fill an entire aisle at the supermarket, and her son would gleefully showcase these cereal treasures to me. These were the sugary, hyperactive cousins of Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and King Vitamin, but with names and characters that felt like they’d been brainstormed in an alternate dimension. Sick to death of his mother’s never-ending cereal avalanche, the boy would generously offload as many boxes on me as I could carry. The cereals tasted just like the ones you could buy at the store, except they sported names like “Dracula Nuggets” and “Zombie Crunch,” with mascots that looked like they’d escaped from a fever dream. Having these cereals in my home was like living in a bizarro parallel universe where everything seemed the same but was deliciously and disturbingly off-kilter. It was like stepping into a cereal Twilight Zone, where my breakfast routine was governed by creatures that might have been conjured by a deranged cartoonist. That period of my life still feels like a surreal dream, one where I was bestowed with the magical ability to traverse a strange universe of off-brand cereals that was denied to mere mortals. I strutted through my kitchen each morning like a cereal demigod, clutching my spoon as if it were a scepter, lording over my kingdom of oddly named, bizarrely shaped breakfast delights.

I had encountered the Cerealverse Effect – everything feels familiar, but faintly distorted, like a cereal déjà vu.