Where'd the Cheerios go?

My name is Brian, and I have a problem. I feel I must come to grips with it, meet it straight on, wrestle it to the ground. After years of denial and thousands of dollars, things finally came to a head tonight when I went looking for the Cheerios. They weren't there! They had been moved, hidden away. Yes, Mary had to hide the cereal so I couldn't eat my way straight through the baby's stash.

I seem to have a problem. Cereal. Hot or cold, brown or white sugar, sliced banana or none, muesli or Fruit Loops, rice milk or cow's milk. It just has to be cereal. As kids, my brother and I would eat a huge bowl of cereal at breakfast. After school snack was one or two huge bowls, drowning in milk. Bedtime snack? Yep, again. Mom and Dad were able to buy food cheaply at the Army commissary, which was a fair drive, so we'd make a monthly pilgrimage. We eventually got a spare freezer to hold the 20-odd gallons of milk that were hauled home.

I had a fair bit of stomach pain until I was about 33 years old. Most often it was exercise-induced and running/sprinting was the trigger; cycling was okay. I finally quit the milk. As it turns out, humans domesticated cattle about 10,000 years ago, and in all of human history before then, nobody drank milk beyond their breast-feeding years and consequently only babies could digest lactose. 10,000 years later many of us adults still aren't too good at it. Finally I got onto rice milk, the great enabler: my stomach has been great, but the cereal is still there, haunting me. Pouring a bowl is just like taking candy from a baby.