Grown adult Bill Murray purchased a box of Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop cereal because
How ingestion begets excretion.
he saw it on the clearance rack and figured he shouldn’t pass up a 99 cent box of hot pink processed sugar grains, typically retailing for $7.72. Reading the label, Bill scanned the daily values: 2% Total Fat, 9% Sodium, 12% Total Carbohydrate, 5% Dietary Fiber, 24% Added Sugars. The primary four ingredients: Whole Grain Corn, Corn Meal, Sugar, Corn Syrup. It made sense, truly, why the front of the box described the contents as “Sweetened Corn Puffs with Marshmallows.” Grains and sugar. What more could an adult human desire for sustenance? So Bill deposited the box into his empty cart, and checked out. This, his sole grocery purchase.
At home, grown adult Bill Murray poured himself a heaping bowl of the stuff, and drizzled milk over those ungodly hot pink puffs smattered with marshmallows: light blue hearts, white stars, yellow stars, and hot pink hair bows. He patted his spoon down upon those now-glistening orbs and mallows to ensure proper milk saturation, then scooped a healthy spoonful and gently deposited the mess into his maw. Three chews later, Bill had yet to swallow, but he could already feel his body tingling with proximity to so much unhealth—that chill when the body has yet to digest what’s masticated, but there exists an inkling of what’s coming: the first swirls of sugar needling at the tastebuds, the stomach lining preparing itself to glean wretched nutrients from ill-chosen cuisine, the mind, in concert, steeling itself to find a way forward, to live with consequences.
When grown adult Bill Murray first swallowed the hot pink sugar sludge he’d newly created between jawbones, he felt sick somehow, only one bite in. As he refilled his spoon, Bill locked eyes with Jojo Siwa, gracing the front of that Family Size cereal box, dressed in light blue jeans and a pink glitter sequin bomber jacket, her hips thrown joyfully to one side, her head cocked to the other, mock-singing into a purple microphone beneath her signature blond tresses done up in a high pony, adorned with an oversized pastel, rainbow-glitter-sequin hair bow.
Jojo’s gaze, grown adult Bill Murray found, manifested the same power as the sirens of olde, drawing him deeper spoonful-by-spoonful into the cereal bowl, a fate which Bill wished he could avoid altogether, but into which he found himself inexplicably compulsed. Bite after bite, Bill subjected himself to this cursed mix of grain and mallows, fit only—he thought—for the most depraved of space aliens, or perhaps only for mutant turtles with five and a half legs, having somehow survived exposure to the most toxic of sewages.
The flavor, grown adult Bill Murray could only describe as “potent saccharine.” And it was only with the ingestion of that final hot pink Strawberry Bop puff floating atop the congealed, hot pink sugar milk, that Bill found himself able to break free from Jojo’s eyes, his own gaze rolling across the box’s pastel-rainbow-vomit-smeared background to the cereal’s actual tagline: “NATURALLY FLAVORED WITH OTHER NATURAL FLAVORS.” Bill’s mind, affected by so many bites of sheer cereal poison, could barely wrap his mind around the dense logic ingrained within that phrase. The circularity reminded him of the circularity of human reality: how ingestion begets excretion.
For the sake of decency, which already barely exists in a rumination upon Jojo Siwa’s Strawberry Bop cereal, let’s just say that this cereal bestowed rather severe stomach cramps upon grown adult Bill Murray, and gifted him a blood red toilet bowl, which had Bill worried about stomach ulcers or colitis or both, but which proved, according to his doctors, to be only the result of an excessive helping of red dyes 3 and 40, which, upon more careful consult of Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop’s nutrition facts, had Bill pondering why and how this granular sacrilege had come to exist in the first place.
Laid up on his gigantic bean bag couch, grown adult Bill Murray found himself imagining all sorts of nightmares: sentient hot pink sugar tapeworms emerging from their cereal pellet egg sacs in order to usher in the end times; or the entirety of his insides being expunged from his body in liquid form, Bill’s skeleton and skin remaining, inhabited by the spirit of Strawberry Bop itself, enacting unspeakable terrors upon earth’s inhabitants; or a hot pink tear in the continuum of space time itself, enacting a new universe controlled by Jojo Siwa, ruling alongside the higher ups at General Mills who’d planned this rending in order to destroy Kellogg’s.
For the next month, grown adult Bill Murray avoided contact with the cereal box, which he’d tucked high up on his pantry shelf, Jojo’s face pressed against the wall so as to avoid further punishment unto his body’s fragile equilibrium. But Bill couldn’t help but consider what it all meant for a young celebrity to unleash such a devastating product onto families across a globe. For General Mills to agree to such an abomination. Had Siwa’s reps approached General Mills with their proposed sugar monstrosity? Or perhaps General Mills had designed this nightmare in their cruelest fit of capitalism, knowing full well that Siwa’s youngest fans would pressure their parents into choosing cereal-induced suffering. Or perhaps, Siwa herself was an afterthought as General Mills sought out any young celeb to shill their sugar, the marshmallow hair bows added only after Siwa’s reps had her signed contract in hand, giving General Mills a face to paste upon their most contemptible of concoctions? Any way Bill shook the cereal, he found himself faced with the emptiness of the marketing ploy, the sheer lack of foresight on behalf of all parties involved.
And yet, grown adult Bill Murray thought, could there be a deeper meaning couched within Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop’s cardboard box? For what does such a cereal crime mean for humanity in light of the concept of original sin? Are we born evil, or born good? A big question that perhaps that wise sage Jojo Siwa could help Bill to answer. Perhaps, Bill postulated, Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop is not the emptiest of humanity’s creations, but in actuality one of the more profound? Could the cereal exist as evidence that humans are heinous creatures, capable of enacting untold horrors upon the youngest of our own? Or, in contrast, does the cereal remind us of the core goodness of humans in contrast to such deceptive packaging: a child star in innocuous dressage pasted atop a cardboard shell, housing the most repugnant of surprises within? Bill weighed his philosophical options.
Here, grown adult Bill Murray trotted out Occam’s razor. Which explanation for Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop seemed simpler, more likely valid? Base evil or base good? Stymied, Bill tried other philosophical cereal heuristics, all miserably failing to shed clarity.
That month later, still puzzling Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop’s significance in regard to the innate state of humankind’s morality—and nearly out of philosophical razors by which to consider this metaphysical dilemma, grown adult Bill Murray determined that perhaps a visual assessment could aid his logic. In taking down the box to gaze upon the hot pink sugar puffs once more, Bill discovered that his cereal had grown stale as, when shelving the box, he’d forgotten to clip or twist tie the plastic baggie, leaving the cereal open fully to the air. Holding the plastic bag of stale puffs in one hand, and in the other, the cardboard sheath affixed with Jojo Siwa’s sickening faux-song smile, Bill experienced what he at first thought to be the eureka effect: for isn’t this stale cereal emblematic of how humans themselves develop and grow? Aren’t we, as the youngest of children, mere plastic baggies containing nothing more than the sugars of life that allow our future consciousness? In most original of forms, we: tiny, hot pink balls of flesh. And into the world we too emerge, helpless, dependent on the other to open us, to interact, to form us into paste between jaws. We, the innocent Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop, unmarred, exposed suddenly to the air, corrupted, turned stale. Or—here, Bill reversed course in the fashion typical to his previous month of conundrumming—is it not the other way around? We, ill-conceived Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop: nefarious, iniquitous, spoiled from outset, packed with the preservative guise of uncorrupted infancy? We, miscreants? We, the most degenerate of all cereals?
Grown adult Bill Murray parked his moped at a lakeside trailhead and wandered down the path, toward the still lakewater glinting beneath the sunlight. He pulled his unsealed Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop cereal box from his backpack, which he’d flipped to his front in order to access the largest pocket.
Both possibilities suddenly balanced equally logical, and at the lake’s edge, Bill appreciated this newfound state of mental equilibrium. For, Bill had realized, humanity’s moral origin state doesn’t so much matter in the end, as long as we aim to do what little good we can in the now, to engage with the present and make the world a smidgen better than in the moment previous. And here, grown adult Bill Murray thrust his fingers into the box of Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop cereal, grabbed a handful of stale puffs, and tossed those vile, hot pink diarrhea pellets out onto the face of the deep—a feast for those most inculpable of turtles swimming lazily beneath the surface.
Robbie Maakestad is Senior Editor for The Rumpus and writes from San Diego where he directs an M.A. in Writing program. He’s writing two books: nonfiction, about Jerusalem’s City of David archaeological site, and fiction, about Bill Murray. He’s been published in Gulf Coast, Boulevard, and The San Diego Union-Tribune, among others. Follow him @RobbieMaakestad.
