508 Chapter One: White Rabbit

ACT I, SCENE I: Introduction
Outside. It is cool and not many people are out. A car pulls up in front of the house and a figure steps out and climbs the steps.

ACT I, SCENE II: The Score
Inside. Three or four people are sitting around playing dice when the door swings open. Jason stands there. He steps in and tosses each person a baggy of dope. Close-up of each person’s face in rapid succession.

ACT I, SCENE III: Excessive Drug Use
Series of rapid shots showing pot being taken using: bong, smokeless, pipes, joints, and gravity bong.

ACT I, SCENE IV: The Hot Knife
Scott suggests everyone do a hot knife. Shows each person doing three in rapid succession.

ACT II, SCENE I: WHITE RABBIT
Suddenly, action shifts to Greg’s room. Soundtrack is “White Rabbit”. A series of close-ups shows each smoker in a hypnotic daze. Last to be shown is Scott.

ACT II, SCENE II: Paranoid Vision
In Scott’s paranoid vision, he thinks each person is looking at him, when, in fact, no one is.

ACT II, SCENE III: The Killer Approaches
Camera’s-eye-view of Psycho Killer entering house, getting butcher knife, going upstairs.

ACT II, SCENE IV: Psycho Enters
Psycho Killer bursts into room doing “psycho walk”. Scott screams and jumps out the window. Camera shows each person still in hypnotic state, no psycho there.

ACT III, SCENE I: Parting Shot
Camera focuses on each method used to take pot. Shows Jason’s car, the dead body of Scott, and ends with a focus on the house.

February, 1989
Bellingham, WA

Frankenberry

When I was a kid breakfast was probably much like breakfast at your house. A bowl of cereal and maybe some juice or a glass of milk. What else did a growing kid need? Me? I’d usually go for orange juice if I had a beverage at all. Why bother with a glass of milk? There was milk poured on the cereal. It just didn’t make sense to pour even more milk into a glass. Besides, if you wasted all the milk on drinking there was always that chance that maybe, just maybe, you’d go downstairs one morning, pour yourself a nice big bowl of cereal only to discover that there was no milk. No way. It had to be O.J. or nothing at all.

Usually my parents bought the “healthy” cereals, also known as the cereals that no kid in their right mind would ever consciously CHOOSE to eat. Shredded Wheat, Raisin Bran, and in my house, Cheerios. Being the industrious kid that I was I compensated for Cheerios complete lack of flavor by dumping a cup of sugar in and THEN topping it off by pouring in a nice cold glass of chocolate milk. Mmmmmmm. Them’s good eats!

Every kid knew, though, that if they REALLY wanted something, it was obtainable. Every parent had a breaking point where it was worth the $3 for a box of cereal or candy or toys or Pop Tarts just to get the kid to shut the fuck up. Now that I’m an adult I see how hellish just going to the supermarket is. I can’t imagine dragging three kids along with you like my mom used to. Kids instinctively know this AND how to exploit it for their benefit. As a kid it was jus a matter of picking which battle was worth it. You didn’t want to over play your hand.

It was rare, but on occasion my battleground of choosing would be that rarest of all cereals, Frankenberry. I’d see Frankenberry, the (of course) Frankenstein monster of the Monster Cereals family, smiling up at me with that pink, stitched up, deformed head and know that I MUST HAVE THAT CEREAL.

Monster Cereals, made by the fine folk at General Mills, really had their hey day in the late 1970s/early 1980s with commercials and a seemingly endlessly expanding line of cereals. Count Chocula and Frankenberry were the most popular, followed by Boo Berry and Yummy Mummy. For some reason, Dingleberries never really caught on. Then one dark day I got out of bed and Monster Cereals had practically vanished off the face of the planet. Sure, an occasional box of Count Chocula would pop up, but the crown jewel of the Monster line, Frankenberry, was more or less impossible to find. I remember when I was about 17 driving 40 miles to a gas station in the middle of nowhere just because I’d heard from somebody that they actually carried Frankenberry. Sure, dust had gathered on the boxes and the cereal was older than my mother, but really, really old Franks were better than no Franks at all!

Maybe it’s due to their scarcity but Franks have achieved an almost mythical status amongst my friends and me. If cereal were a religion, Franks would be the body and milk would be the blood in our unholy communion.

Thank God for the internet. Besides being the ONLY place a civilized, cultured man would even THINK about feeding his hardcore porn addiction, it’s also now possible to order Frankenberry DIRECT FROM GENERAL MILLS. Yes, that is not a misprint. You can now have Franks delivered to your door! You don’t ever have to leave your house again! You see, to keep their trademark on the Monster Cereals General Mills has to produced a certain number of boxes every year (or so I theorize). It’s a specialty brand. It’s special.

For my last birthday my friend 8-Ball, also known as The Association’s™ Tea Bag, got me a CARTON of Monster Cereals. Two Count Chocula, one Boo Berry, and, yes, two Frankenberry. The Count and Boo got pushed to the back of the cupboard and I tore through the two boxes of Franks like Rosie O’Donnell ripping through a gross of Twinkies. Between mouthfuls I declared to my empty apartment that “This is the best birthday ever!”

There are a lot of cereals out there. A lot of good cereals. Over the course of this magazine I’ll probably write about a few of them. But Frankenberry is far and away the greatest cereal ever created by mortal man (if, in fact, they were created by man and not some uber-God of cereal). Marshmellows, cereal that’s a shade of pink not found in nature, and good ol’ Frankenberry himself make this one as worth the extra effort now as it was when you were a kid.

 

Barbershop

Immortality

You know what I think? I think we were all born in the wrong time. I mean, now is pretty good. Better than a thousand years ago. Hell, better than 20 years ago. But think about it. Think about where science is heading. We, as a civilization – a species, are on the cusp of so much.

Put aside the wars and corruption and greed and hate and lust and all those other things we’re all supposed to separate ourselves from for just a minute. Sure, the world is becoming more and more dangerous and the ante is raised faster than you can get a bet down, but we’ve survived this long. We’ll survive longer. Even if you consider a global catastrophe occurring, humanity would continue on in some form. The only people in the entire universe that give two dicks about whether or not we blow each other away are us. We’re insignificant on a good day. But let’s put that aside for now.

It’s not completely crazy to imagine a point in the future where people are going to be able to literally live forever. Barring lethal accident or murder, physically speaking people will never die. That’s why I say we were all born in the wrong time. 100 years from now? We’re talking immortality. You pick the age. Do you want to be physically 25 forever? No problem.

The worst might be if they discover this secret to aging when I’m like 80. Fucking great. A whole slew of 20 year olds and good ol’ gramps. Not that I’d be alone. You’d all be old too. With no hope of death. I wonder how we’d handle reproduction if nobody ever died.

It seems life might even be more precious with semi-immortality. Sure, medicine is going to advance and more people are going to live through crap that a lot of people die of now, but there’s still going to be accidents; car wrecks, stupid drinking accidents, and a lot more. If you can live forever, how much more tragic the loss is it if you’re murdered at ten or run over by a bus at thirty? And how much more abhorrent would murder be if you could potentially live thousands of years? I know, heady questions and I’m off on a severe tangent.

So were we all born in the wrong time? Maybe not all of us. Some people seem to belong here. W. That asshole down the street that insists on blocking your driveway with his Hummer. You know, now that I think about it, maybe we were all born at the right time at that. Maybe none of us are ready for the future. At least, that’s what I think.

Chocodiles

About a month ago I wrote the fine people at Hostess, complaining in a strongly worded missive how I couldn’t find Chocodiles anywhere. I gave them a good scolding and anxiously awaited their reply. One week later I opened up my mailbox to find a letter from Interstate Foods, the parent company of Hostess. Inside that letter they thanked me for my interest in their products. Attached was a coupon for one free Hostess item.

I’m no fool, my friends. I wasn’t going to go for just a two-pack of Twinkies or a delightful package of Ho-Hos. Who the hell do you think I am? No, I was going to wait until the Hostess Fruit Cake hit the shelves. And hit the shelves it did, like a four pound turd. And like that imaginary turd, people left it alone. But not me. I gathered that turd in my arms and promised to love it forever.

The Hostess Fruit Cake is good eatin’, pals. And like the cycle of life, I returned the fruit cake to its original form. That of a four pound turd.

But that was only the beginning of my good luck. No sooner had I flushed that fruit cake than I spotted the item that had started my odyssey off in the first place: the elusive Chocodile. I ate and ate and ate. But, not thinking ahead, soon they were gone. I was depressed. Coming down off my processed food stuff high, I was first confused, then angry, and then finally accepting.

But like life itself, the Chocodiles are magic. When one Chocodile is eaten, another is created, and the next week I spotted the Chocodiles at a different convenience store. And the next week at yet another. Folks, this is no joke. I’ve asked the Chocodile to marry me and it has enthusiastically accepted. Wiping away our tears we shared a long, deep kiss. And then I swallowed that Chocodile whole.