This is going to come out sounding like the intro to one of my stories but I’ve been having oatmeal for breakfast nowadays because oats are good for your heart and can reduce cholesterol levels. Actually, oats are a truly wonderful food for human beings, but the problem is they taste like shit. I mean it. They taste fucking awful. It’s the most unfair thing in the world. I often get inspiration for writing from whatever is immediately in my presence, such as rugs, so here I am eating my breakfast and thinking, “I should talk about oatmeal.” Shit is nasty.
Many years ago my internship supervisor agreed and said that applesauce was the only way he could get it down. That works, but for me the trick is maple syrup. You have to doctor up oatmeal into a sugary mess so it doesn’t taste like shit anymore. Here are the ingredients of my oatmeal:
- Oatmeal (sugar-free, and the brand with that one guy everyone wants to fuck on the container)
- Milk (water makes me want to jump off a cliff)
- Maple syrup (essential)
- Salt
- Pumpkin pie spice (which is mostly cinnamon and is FOR pumpkin, not made of pumpkin)
- Raisins
- Chia seeds (for shitting)
- Flaxseed (for more shitting)
- Frozen berries (blueberry/raspberry/blackberry combo is my favorite (one time the grocery delivery people kept bringing us mango and it made me want to jump off a cliff))
Often I forget one of these, and indeed in the course of the first run-through of writing these down for this post, I forgot the raisins. That’s also the real ingredient I forget the most. It’s a lot of work to get this off the ground.
Dietary fiber is good for the cholesterol levels as well. However, knowing all this, and having made all these improvements, I still sometimes find oatmeal inedible. Breakfast… the most vexing meal of the day.