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The Most Dangerous Cereal Known to Mankind

A peek inside the box of Chocolate Lucky Charms.

by J.G. | 2005.02.19

A friend told me about the existence of Chocolate Lucky Charms last week.

I was pretty incredulous at first, considering that a small bowl of regular old Lucky Charms, between its frosting and marshmallows, can give a Clydesdale a rush. Surely, tossing away any facade of being part of a well-balanced breakfast by adding chocolate flavoring would be the beginning of the end of General Mills - if not by way of a smear campaign of a Nader-like health advocate, then certainly by the class action lawsuits that would be precipitated by a rash of children being instantly sent into diabetic comas nationwide.

To the friend, I mentioned that if one was a parent in a world where Chocolate Lucky Charms actually existed, it might be easier & less time consuming to just yank your kids' teeth and replace them with gummy bears.

Last night, I remembered that I was out of milk while on the road. I slid into the nearest Safeway (its closing time being 1am, it's the latest open grocery store in the area, and I had about 30 minutes) and trotted down to their dairy section.

If you know anything about grocery stores, you know that their layout is really a map of aisles & product placement displays situated in such a way as to squeeze money from consumers in the most efficient way possible. The foodstuffs considered our dietary basics can be found just by cruising the perimeter of the stores: fresh vegetables, meats & poultry, bread, and dairy. The rest of the store is a mélange of marketing alchemy - groupings of foods & products, promotional stands & product stackings, and distributors fighting for prime shelf real estate (eye level & reachability, the major factors).

Right in front of the refrigerated milk section at this particular Safeway lay a treasure trove of whole grain insanity.

Chocolate Lucky Charms.

They were bundled side-by-side with regular Lucky Charms and were marked as $4.99 (with the Safeway discount card) for the two 14 ounce boxes.

I headed straight to the register, milk and Chocolate Lucky Charms in hand, and, once I paid, got home as fast as I could.

Once home, I headed straight for The Bowl.

I don't even eat cereal as much as I used to, but when I do, I just use regular-sized bowls - the recommended daily intake kind of bowls.

The Bowl used to be used for the pre-game ritual of cereal-eating, prior to what would be 12 to 16 hour stretch of basketball playing.

The Bowl, in post-basketball life, was for the slowly unfolding Saturday or Sunday morning, when minimum effort toward a morning-related meal had to be put forth, while feasting your eyes on mindless entertainment provided by TNBC, Univision, or Hanna-Barbera.

The Bowl hadn't been used in ages.

The Bowl was being called back to duty because I suspected that only the Bowl could handle the chocolatey children-targeting decadence of Chocolate Lucky Charms.

I filled The Bowl with an ungodly number of CLCs and an aquarium-filling amount of milk. With my mighty spoon, I churned the two, making sure that every square millimeter of CLCs was doused in milky moistness. I set The Bowl down for about 3 minutes to allow it to stew and settle.

The moments slid by as leisurely as slowly-gathering sap down a pine tree. I finally mustered the courage to take a heaping-spoonful-sized bite.

It was as if a chocolate unicorn had jizzed in my mouth.

As overwhelming as the first mouthful was, I took a second, then a third.

The sugar gave my molars a shock of shudders like I had bitten into ice cream without warning.

The rush traveled directly from my mouth to my brain, and I could feel neurons firing off, and I could feel the swiftly accelerating blood coursing through the back of my head, and I could fucking *hear* my pupils dilating.

As I continued, I could feel a warm wave of murky euphoria wash over me.

Then, I blacked out.

When I woke up, I was lying in the middle of the room in just boxers, socks, and shoes. The TV was blaring the early morning rerun of last night’s local news broadcast. The Bowl was empty, trace elements of chocolate dust swirling in a tiny puddle of milk. My spoon was nowhere to be found.

Trying to piece things together was difficult since my mind was in a throbbing, cobwebby haze.

Concentrating, I could only faintly recall images of myself, facing down an endless stampede of buffaloes in a torrential downpour on a plateau overlooking a rapidly flooding valley. My only defense was a cloak made of brown bear pelt, head and all, and thunderbolts that I could shoot out from my fingertips at will.

I ran to the bathroom and brushed my teeth furiously.

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