The gold nuggets of
Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a
sound like glass rods being snapped in half. 
Tiny fragments spiral away from their corners and ricochet around on
the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of
fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in
milk, is the mark of the novice. 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. Randy has a set of mental blueprints worked out 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. 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 takes about thirty seconds in the case of Cap'n
Crunch.
He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the
other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden
time when the cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet
begun to pollute each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals
separated by a boundary layer a molecule wide. 
Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon-handle, the polished
stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole
milk, because otherwise why bother with the whole exercise? Anything
less is indistinguishable from water, and besides he thinks that the
fat in the whole milk acts as some kind of a buffer that retards the
dissolution-into-slime process. The giant spoon goes into his mouth
before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek its own
level. 
A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his
freshly washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between
beardedness and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to
grow). Randy sets the milk-pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it
to his chin, and uses a pinching motion to sort
of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather than
smashing and smearing them down into the beard. 
This
happens without thinking about it; all his concentration is fixed on
the interior of his mouth, which naturally he cannot see, but which
he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming through it in a virtual
reality display. Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply
chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars but
then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of
the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their
armour of razor-sharp dextrose crystals
would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal
into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain-mute
for three days.
Randy has over time worked out a really
fiendish Cap'n Crunch-eating strategy that revolves around
using the nugget's most deadly features to his advantage by playing
them against each other. 
The nuggets themselves are
pillow-shaped and vaguely striated in a way that he has always thought
is supposed to echo piratical treasure chests or something. Now, in a
flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work, but the Cap'n
Crunch could never be manufactured in flake form because then it would
be all surface area, and it must been obvious to the cereal engineers
at General
Mills that this would be suicidal madness, that Cap'n Crunch stuff
in that configuration would last about as long,
when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep
fryer. No, they had to find a shape that would minimise surface
area, which ideally would be a sphere (this is why healthy cereals
tend to be flakes and sugary ones tend to be round). As some sort of
compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry
and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the
cereal-aestheticians were probably clamouring for, they came up with
this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. 
The important thing about which, for Randy's purposes, is that the
individual pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation,
shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to use the Cap'n
Crunch against itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center
of the oral cavity, making the cereal chew itself, like stones in a
lapidary tumbler, minimising any contact with gums and palate ---
contacts bound to be bloody, violent and
painful. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations
(or for that matter watching videotapes while sitting on your ass)
only go so far and then your body has to learn how to do this.
