![]() The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. ![]() Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic barrier causes the individual nuggets of Cap’n Crunch to resolve, under the halogen light, with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of Randy’s mouth glow and throb in trepidation. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then grips the top of the sac and carefully parts its heat-sealed seam, which purrs as it gives way. The halogen down-light recessed in the ceiling shines through the cloudy material of the sac to reveal gold-everywhere the glint of gold. The lower flap is merely tacked down with a couple of small glue-spots and Randy pulls it back to reveal a translucent, inflated sac. Randy hates it when the box-top gets bent or, worst of all possible worlds, torn. But then the entire flap pops open in an instant as the entire glue-front gives way. ![]() For a few long, tense moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. Using both hands in unison he carefully works his fingertips underneath the flap, trying to achieve equal pressure on each side, paying special attention to places where too much glue was laid down by the gluing-machine. Randy takes the red box and holds it securely between his knees with the handy stay-closed tab pointing away from him. He has to wrap it in a towel because it is so cold it hurts his fingers. Today the milk is almost, but not quite, that cold. He would like the milk to be so cold that when he reaches in and grabs it, he feels the flexible, squishy pod stiffen between his fingers as ice crystals spring into existence, summoned out of nowhere simply by the disturbance of being squished. What Randy would like to see, ideally, is the whole milk-pod enveloped in an even, jacketlike flow to produce better heat exchange through the multilayered plastic-and-foil skin of the milk-pod. The cold air becomes visible as it rushes in and condenses moisture, so it is a simple matter to sit there with the fridge door open and observe its flow characteristics, like an engineer testing an experimental minivan in a River Rouge wind tunnel. Not too close, or else the pods will block the flow of air, and not too far away either. Randy always stores his milk-pods directly in front of those louvers. The fridge in Randy’s apartment has louvers in the back where the cold air is blown in, straight from the freon coils. UHT milk need not, technically, be refrigerated, but it is pivotal, in what is to follow, that the milk be only a few microdegrees above the point of freezing. He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, reaches deep into the back, and finds an unopened box-bag-pod-unit of UHT milk. He obtains a stack of paper napkins, not the brown recycled ones that can’t be moistened even by immersion in water, but the flagrantly environmentally unsound type, brilliant white and cotton-fluffy and desperately hygroscopic. ![]() ![]() He sets up his San Miguel, an empty bowl, an exceptionally large soup spoon-so large that most European cultures would identify it as a serving spoon and most Asian ones as a horticultural implement. Randy walks with a measured, forcibly calm step to the living room where he does most of his dining, usually while facing his thirty-six-inch television. ![]()
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