I voted for the first time when I was eleven. I was an exceptional child. It wasn’t political, it was more serious than that. I voted by mail, but I didn’t have an absentee ballot, I just had the ballot that was in the cereal box.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t personal. I’d gotten attached to the little propeller head over the last couple of years and the threat that he might go away and that his opponent would stay gave me adolescent anxiety and my hands were sweaty all of the time as it was. I should have made copies of the ballot and voted a hundred times like they do in Chicago, but that never dawned on me.

I knew where the post office was but I’d never been inside before. It was a long narrow building. No one was inside, I didn’t know what to do. At the very end of the long building, all the way down, there was a sign of life but I was afraid that, if I walked down there, I’d never come back. Exceptional children are often fraidy cats. When I got to the window I didn’t say anything, just stretched my skinny arm and reached and handed my ballot to this guy. He didn’t say anything either, took the ballot, looked at it, looked at me. “You wanna mail this?” I shook my head. “Eight cents.” That confused me, “Eight cents what?” “If you wanna mail this the postage costs eight cents.” What kinda eleven-year-old walks around with that kinda money? “Sorry,” he says, and off I go, slinking out of the stupid, scary post office with my ballot in my hand and the sad feeling that I’d never see Quisp again.

When I got outside the wind blew my ballot from my hand and I chased after it, stomped on it so it couldn’t escape and when I bent to pick it up, right next to the grimy little ballot with the barely-legible printing was a dime. I sprinted back inside, bought my first stamp, mailed my first mail, cast my first vote and made a two-cent profit.

Lots of people don’t recall voting for the first time, or they have a sketchy recollection of who they voted for. Not me. I voted for Quisp. He ran against Quake, a fat, square-chinned dude who couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to be a miner or a cowboy. His cereal was shaped like the letter “Q” – how lame is that? Quisp was a space alien and his cereal was shaped like a flying saucer and every f’n kid I knew understood that things from outer space were cooler than letters of the alphabet. Quisp tasted better and Quisp was better, but for the last couple of years – on cartoons and commercials and just about everywhere else – every time you see Quisp you gotta see this Quake dude. We all wanted to shake Quake, and now we had our chance. In the 1972 election, it wasn’t Nixon against McGovern, it was Quisp vs. Quake … and the loser gets yanked off of store shelves. Serious shit.

♦

Breakfast cereal has been serious shit ever since. I read somewhere that millennials aren’t into cereal, which is completely understandable because they’re not into employment either, or saying hello to people or, gasp, a little bit of sugar. That’s okay, they can pour okra into their cereal bowls if they wish. Just don’t fuck with what’s in my cereal bowl.

What I’m looking for, me and millions like me, is a bowl full of artificial colors and a pound of sugar and genetically-modified marshmallows and shapes that expand when they’re touched by milk and giant cardboard boxes with prizes that are completely worthless … and invented characters from outer space.

Quisp won that momentous election in 1972, by a landslide. Truth be told, both Quisp and Quake tasted almost exactly like Cap’n Crunch which is comforting. We need more things like the Cap’n, more things with unknown ingredients that taste great, more things that get soggy in milk and more things decided by the vote of an eleven-year-old.

There are still plenty of left to corn and oats