Thoughts Over Coffee – The Cereal Taxonomy Crisis
The diner was your everyday small town greasy spoon kind of place. Trucks, station wagons, and the occasional tractor were parked haphazardly along the crumbled curbing. The food was palatable, but it always looked kind of off due to the lighting that made you question both your life choices and your complexion. Booths were faded vinyl with more cracks than the asphalt parking lot outside. It was mid-morning, that strange hour of the day when breakfast people and lunch people overlap. The ones with pancakes staring at the ones with burgers, neither group entirely sure they made the right choice. The coffee was strong enough to count as a personality trait, and the tired wooden chairs made noise every time someone shifted their weight. It was a running bet between the regulars on which one would collapse first.
Old Eddie was already seated at the counter when I arrived, hunched over a bowl of cornflakes as though it had personally offended him. His spoon hovered a few inches over the wet flakes, however the cereal remained untouched. Now Eddie had some interesting personality traits, like how he would stand and sing along, anytime the Nation Anthem was played, even if it was on television, or how he talked about the weather like it was one of his children. But sitting there watching his breakfast rather than eating it, well that just wasn’t Eddie. Not Eddie at all.
I sat beside him at the counter and accepted the coffee he pushed toward me without even bothering to look up. “You’re late,” he said in a deep raspy drawl.
“You’re early,” I replied, laughing a bit before taking a sip. As usual, the coffee had the flavor of burnt determination, but at least it smelled good.
On the cusp of deep thought, he nodded toward his bowl before speaking. “Is cereal soup?”
With no idea where this was about to go, I considered leaving while I still had the chance.
“Good morning to you too,” I said.
“I’m serious,” he continued. “Think about it. The math works out. You’ve got your bowl of liquid with some stuff floating around in it. A spoon delivery system, and it comes in about a hundred different varieties. Now if someone served this here bowl, hot and called it breakfast chowder, you wouldn’t blink, you’d just accept it and go on with your life, right?”
“I absolutely would blink,” I said. “Repeatedly. Maybe until I passed out.”
He ignored me. “Soup is a bunch of ingredients in a liquid base. Milk is a liquid base. Therefore—”
“Stop right there,” I said. “Soup has a broth base. Milk is not broth.”
“What is broth but milk with ambition? And now that I think of it, there’s cream soups; cream of mushroom, cream of chicken, cream of celery.” Eddie countered.
That’s how it began. Eddie thought he had me. Not with a crisis of faith or an existential spiral, but with dairy.
As I shook my head, I took a long look at Eddie. He had that look in his eyes—the one that appears when he has wandered too far down an internet thread and returned with a bucket full of wild thoughts. His expression carried the fragile excitement of someone who had discovered a loophole in the thread of time and was unsure whether to exploit it or apologize for it.
I took another sip of coffee and decided to indulge him, not too much though. “Soup,” I said carefully, “requires intent. Soup is constructed, developed from a mixture of time, love, and ingredients. Cereal is poured.”
“Assembly is construction,” he said. “You don’t dismiss one of those old-fashioned model cars just because it came in pieces.”
“That’s not the point,” I said, somehow knowing that Eddie had more to say on the subject. Much more.
He gestured at his bowl with an open hand, almost as if he was a magician revealing a surprise. The corn flakes had begun their slow surrender to saturation and were slowly sinking below the milk line. “There is a transitional phase,” he said gravely. “You can see it happening right before your eyes. When cereal loses crunch, it crosses a boundary.”
“You’re not describing taxonomy,” I said. “You’re describing tragedy. Death of a Corn Flake, a tragedy in three parts,” I chuckled, trying to lighten the mood and maybe steer Eddie off this subject.
At this point Margo, the owner of the diner, moved toward us, a look of suspicion on her face as usual. She held the stained coffee pot in one hand, the hot liquid splashing around but never spilling. She looked at Eddie and then at me, the skin on her forehead wrinkling as she pursed her lips tighter.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked me.
“He’s reclassifying breakfast,” I answered.
Margo glanced at the bowl. “It’s cereal.”
“Well, today he thinks it’s soup.”
She topped off both of our cups without breaking eye contact. “If that’s soup, then ketchup’s a smoothie.”
Eddie opened his mouth, maybe to object, maybe to agree. No one will ever know as she cut him off with a look that has many a grown man mid-sentence.
“Eat it before it turns into philosophy,” she said, rolled her eyes, then turned and walked away.
Eddie watched her go, then leaned in closer to me, whispering, “it gets worse.”
I should have known, now really regretting not leaving earlier.
“Is a hot dog a sandwich?” he asked me, his expression stoic and without the slightest sense of humor in his words.
Now I’ve known Eddie for more years than either of us can count. We spent countless hours in duck blinds, tree stands, and riverbanks, over the years. We’ve had conversations that would put a hungry bear to sleep and others that would wake one. There are moments in friendship when you realize you have made choices. Sitting there, staring at him while the coffee steamed between us, I understood that I had chosen to remain in proximity to a man who wakes up and chooses chaos, just because he can.
“No,” I said firmly. “A hot dog is a hot dog.”
“That’s avoidance,” he replied, one hand rising up with his palm turned over. “There’s bread, meat, condiments. That’s what I call a structural similarity.”
Eddie was breaking out the big words, trying to sound scientific, so I countered. “It’s longitudinal,” I said. “Sandwiches have lateral integrity.”
He blinked, I knew I had him. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you can’t rotate a hot dog ninety degrees and pretend it’s normal.”
“A sub has a hinge,” he argued. “A hot dog bun has a hinge. That’s what I’d call bread continuity.”
“Tacos have continuity,” I said. “Are tacos sandwiches?”
He hesitated. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re… culturally distinct, and anyway they don’t have no hinge, just a space to shove stuff into.
“Ah,” I said. “So now we’re factoring sociology into bread geometry.”
Eddie frowned thoughtfully, which is always what he does right before the problem escalates. “What if we define sandwiches as two separate planes of starch containing filling?”
“Then you’ve eliminated open-faced sandwiches,” I said.
“Maybe they’ve always been misclassified. We call them sandwiches, but aren’t they really just bread with confidence issues,” he replied.
He paused. I paused. His Eddie-logic, as usual, was collapsing in on itself like a tent in a downpour.
He continued. “Fine. Forget hot dogs then. There’s still lasagna.”
I felt a slight pain in my temple; a warning sign that a headache was riding the cusp of my brain, waiting on Eddie. It could go either way at this point.
“Isn’t lasagna,” he said slowly, “just Italian cake?”
The phrase landed with a soft, destructive elegance. My brain shifted into protective mode for fear the crazy he was spewing, might be contagious.
“Absolutely not,” I said, more firm this time.
“There’s layers,” he began.
“No.”
“Filling between the layers.”
“No.”
“Sliced into portions.”
“Eddie.”
“Celebratory occasions,” he pressed. “Weddings. Birthdays. Communions.”
“That’s because Italians are correct,” I said. “Not because lasagna is cake.”
He was relentless. “Cake is layered. Cake has structure. Lasagna qualifies as cake.”
“Cake begins as batter, and only when the batter is baked, does it become a cake” I said. “Lasagna is delicious compilation of sauce, cheese, meat, noodles, and a bunch of spices.”
“That’s poetic, but not scientific.”
“Neither is this conversation.”
Eddie was already one step ahead of me. He tapped the table lightly with a fingernail. “How about ravioli, then.”
I exhaled. “Please. Don’t.”
“Are ravioli just wet Pop-Tarts?”
The pain in my head was back again. The diner noise around us growing as mid-morning became closer to noon and the actual lunchtime crowd filled the room. Eddie wasn’t ready to give up on this idea, no matter what.
“Pop-Tarts are pastries, toaster pastries,” I said.
“Ravioli are made of dough.”
“Pop-Tarts are baked.”
“You could boil one.”
“You could boil your fishing vest,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it gumbo.”
He grinned despite himself. “You’re dodging.”
“No,” I said. “I’m protecting civilization from whatever this is.”
For more time than I wanted to waste, we continued. Eddie both building and dismantling entire food hierarchies. Calzones became folded pizzas. Quesadillas drifted toward molten envelopes. Burgers were confirmed as sandwiches but only under strict bun separation guidelines that only Eddie seemed to know about. Eddie finally proposed that cereal becomes soup precisely at the moment the flakes surrender their crunch, and I reluctantly admitted that there might be a kind of twilight zone between breakfast and broth.
Eventually, though, the humor thinned, and something quieter emerged beneath it.
Eddie stared into his coffee for a long minute before responding and said, almost casually, “I visited my dad in the nursing home last week. He asked me what I’m doing with my life, how I’m handling retirement”
There it was, I thought to myself. The real soup.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I said I’m trying.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“He said trying is what you say when you don’t want to admit you’re stuck.”
I knew his father. Good man, successful, always came out of every situation a winner. Eddie never reached the same level of success, never once outdid the old man. It seemed to weigh heavy on him for his whole life. The cereal in his bowl had turned to mush. It looked like oatmeal with cream on it.
“He also asked if I’m happy,” Eddie continued. “And I didn’t know what he meant by that. He never asked me anything like that before. Does happy mean sitting in a diner drinking coffee till noon? Puttering around in the garage because I don’t have a job? Is it some sort of label you give people once they are done being a productive part of society?”
Watching and listening to Eddie made me realize that the taxonomy crisis suddenly made sense. He wasn’t trying to define cereal. He was trying to define himself.
“Maybe,” I said, “you’re looking for the wrong category.”
He gave a small laugh. “That’s exactly what my dad said. He said maybe I’ve been calling things by the wrong name all my life.”
Eddie and I have had heart to heart conversations in the past, but rarely this deep. I glanced out the window, the sky hung gray and undecided. It was fitting I thought, uncomfortable, but fitting. While inside, the diner hummed with the comfortable indifference of people who had ordered something and were willing to wait for it.
“I think,” Eddie said slowly, “I want something that feels like the right category. Like I fit somewhere now. Somewhere that matters.”
“You do fit somewhere,” I said.
“Yeah, where?” He replied, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
I gestured vaguely at the worn-out booth, the diner coffee, and the absurd debate we had just conducted with doctoral seriousness. “Here, apparently.”
He smiled at that; it was a small smile, but completely real.
The truth is that retirement rarely announces itself. There’s a ceremony, but it’s nothing more than a bunch of people saying goodbye. Your seat will be filled before the last slice of cake is served. There’s no certificate declaring you a fully classified human because you worked your forty or fifty years in a job you didn’t like, for a boss who drove you like a rented mule. You made hard choices, missed out on the easy life, always too broke, too tired, or feeling lost. Everything you’ve done is like ingredients dumped in a bowl, and after all those years, you hope they cohere into something edible.
“Maybe categories aren’t fixed,” I said. “Maybe they’re provisional. Cereal is cereal until it isn’t. Hot dogs are hot dogs unless you’re trying to win an argument. Lasagna is lasagna unless you’re hungry for semantics.”
“And ravioli?” he asked.
“Ravioli,” I said, “are not wet Pop-Tarts. But if someone needs them to be, I suppose they can be.”
He looked at his bowl one last time and finally put his spoon into the soggy remains. “So, what’s the final ruling?” he asked.
“There isn’t one,” I said. “That’s the point.”
He leaned back. “That feels unsatisfying.”
“So does growing up, getting old, and sitting here while the rest of life passes us by,” I replied.
He laughed again, and this time it didn’t sound forced. It sounded like someone who had briefly stopped trying to force reality into tidy containers and was content to just let it sit, messy, undefined, and present.
Margo returned with two plates of hot toast and honey. She set the plates down a little easier than usual. “On the house,” she said, an understanding smile on her face. “For emotional damages.”
Eddie picked up a slice, turned it over, examining it carefully. “Is toast a cracker?” he began.
I pointed a butter knife at him. “Don’t.”
He grinned. “Okay. Fine. I’ll stop.”
We sat in a companionable quiet for a few minutes eating our toast, the kind of quiet that only lifelong friends or married people would understand. The coffee levels dropped. The world outside remained stubbornly unresolved. The sky above was still gray.
As we got up to leave, Eddie said, “You know, I still think cereal might technically qualify as soup.”
I opened the front door, letting in a rush of cool air, before stepping outside. “That’s fine,” I said. “Just don’t let it turn into one.”
He paused. “You mean don’t overthink it?”
“I mean eat it while it’s still crunchy.”
We walked together into the gray morning, the debate unresolved but no longer urgent. Some questions don’t require answers. They require company, coffee, and a willingness to let language wobble without collapsing. What tomorrow brings can wait until tomorrow.
And for what it’s worth, I still refuse to call lasagna cake.
Even if the layers are suspicious.
Additional Reading
R.J. (Ralph) Schwartz is an American poet, author, website owner, and online publisher. His writing spans several poetry collections—ranging from spiritual and romantic to fear-driven explorations—and even extends into science fiction. Notable works include:
- Hope – Inspirational and Spiritual Poetry
- Normal Was The First Casualty – A Collection of Dystopian Poetry
- Things That Go Bump in the Night – Poetry of Fear and Fright
- The Lover’s Thread – Poetry for Couples
- Poetry of the Human Condition – The Ups and Downs of Modern Living
- The Secrets of the Moon(a sci-fi novel co-authored with his son Sebastian J. Schwartz)
Schwartz’s work is described as purposefully wordy, richly descriptive, and thematically grounded in nature, romance, antiquity, and forgotten histories. He writes regularly on platforms he manages, including The Creative Exiles, a collaborative venue for writers, and The Gypsy Thread, which delves into offbeat histories, pagan lore, and poetry.
- The Republic of Perpetual Outrage - March 7, 2026
- Thoughts Over Coffee – The Cereal Taxonomy Crisis - February 25, 2026
- Normal Was The First Casualty - February 23, 2026
