Quick Post

Ralcorp Holdings, Inc.
P.O. Box 618
St. Louis, MO 63188

Consumer Services, Post Foods:

I need your help.

It all started on that day when my mom took three-year-old me and my baby sister out to McDonald’s for lunch as a treat — and as a trick. You see when we came back we found the house was a father lighter. My mother was used to coming home and seeing my father lit, so I don’t think she was surprised. She was probably in on it, to tell you the truth.

What’s that? Oh you wanted to hear the cancer story from the beginning. Sorry, I’ll get Ed. to ed.it that part out. I’ll try again.

It all started on the night my wife and I pulled into a small town in Texas, fleeing our future on a one-week cross-country drive that ended up the opener of a mistake that lasted two years. Hours after eating a rancid burger from the Shamrock Motel’s diner, I shat out some blood, and not a little either. This was like having a ketchup bottle up my ass and squeezing it with my cheeks — SPLAT! That was the last night for those pajamas, and the last night for me being anything but ill.

Hang on — is this the heart-rending memoir we’re doing or the letter to the cereal company? Oh am I embarrassed! We’ll get the editing team of Ed. and Ed. to gut those paragraphs altogether. Now, onto the flakes.

It all started when our apartment building put out word that they would have to turn the water off for a few hours last Wednesday.* Perfectly routine maintenance on the pipes, they said. But then they found the tumor at the sigmoid junction. And the apartment’s plumbing problem was worse than they thought too. To make a long story short (bit late for that now — Ed.) a few hours turned into a day and a half with no tooth brushing and no tank flushing. Oh yeah. Use your imagination, if you dare.

Fortunately, I wear a colostomy bag (that’d be the cancer we touched on earlier) so I was able to throw out my waste in the trash. My better half, not as fortunate, so around noon on URBAN DRYOUT: DAY TWO we checked in to a local hotel. Oh, that was a glorious shower. Then again for $145 it oughta be, right? But I can’t carp about the hotel bill because it was an Embassy Suites and you know what that means:

Free breakfast! (Dear God, does that mean that the cereal is somewhere on the horizon? I’d given up all hope — Ed.)

Jesus Ed. Lighten up! If this thing is too long it’s your own fault for leaving that early stuff in. What, you woke up late or something? Well then you must’ve missed your breakfast! Ha, ha! Sorry Post, where were we? Oh right, the hotel breakfast, where I enjoyed some raisin bran. I thought mmm, mmm, this is the best raisin bran I’ve had since — well I’d never had raisin bran before! Learn something new every day, yeah? (Like how not to write, for instance — Ed.)

Ed. for God’s sake you’re ruining this for everybody! I don’t know where you went to editing school but it seems to me that whenever I hand something in to the desk, it actually comes back longer than before. You bitch about the pieces being too bloated but there’s never a sign that you’ve taken anything out. The chemo plays tricks with my memory, so for all I know you could be adding material to my drafts and making the problem worse!

(Post, did he get to the part about how he and his wife eventually got back to an apartment with running water? No? I’ll take it from here. It was only last Friday that the drought drama wound down. The following day, our hero and Mrs. Hero went to Target to purchase a mattress pad, so comfortable and persuasive was the hotel bedding. They were also seeking, wait for it, raisin bran. Alas, there’d been a little trouble in paradise earlier in the day, causing mutual peevishness {I wasn’t peeved! — Auth.} that even extended to the selection of, yes, raisin bran. You’ll see — Ed.)

Anyhow, I walk halfway down the cereal aisle and I grab the two scoops of raisins in Kellogg’s raisin bran — boo, hiss, the enemy! I walk back to the cart where my wife is holding up a box of Post Raisin Bran**, as if to say, “It’s right here, dingbat.” So I peevishly (told you so — Ed.) throw the vile satanic rival brand down on the floor, right on its acid-head sunshiny face. I bought the box my better half proffered, and it’s good, but what I really enjoyed was that triumphant throwdown of the bad guy. I just, it just felt like I was finally a man, finally after all these years of questioning my (Aaaaaaaand we’re done – Ed.).

Sincerely,
David Simons

P.S. Please send me free cereal.
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* Jeez, that was almost a week ago now — time flies when you don’t have any.
** Only now does the cereal deserve capital letters. Only now.

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