The Electron Pencil

I suppose I should have taken a picture but I’m not one of these people who click every damned thing they see. As George Carlin famously advised before he died, I actually use my memory.

Typical Slice of Cheese.

Anyway, I was getting out of the hot rod yesterday morning. I’d parked in the first spot on the east side of Walnut Street, just below Kirkwood. I put my foot down on the pavement and there it was: an almost perfect slice of some kind of yellow-orange cheese, probably American but quite possibly cheddar. Point is, it either dropped out of some knucklehead’s sandwich or some knucklehead had simply tossed it on the asphalt, for god knows whatever reason.

But get this: the slice of cheese had been run over by a car. There were tire marks on the thing, distorting it a little bit and discoloring it in the pattern of the tread. Yet the slice still retained much of its identifiable overall hue and regular quadrilateral symmetry.

So, let’s recap: a piece of cheese somehow made its way to the pavement and was squished by a metal and plastic machine weighing anywhere from 1800 pounds to two tons. Despite this, an old crank getting out of his car at an hour when he hadn’t had his normal dosage of coffee and was still bleary-eyed could readily peg it as the comestible it once was.

Typical Block of Velveeta™.

Because of that, I’m tempted to say the slice was actually Velveeta™ but, as far as I know, V. doesn’t come in slices. I really wouldn’t know because when it comes to food I only consider edible things as such, and Velveeta™ is decidedly not edible.

I’d like to think the slice came from some McDonald’s or Wendy’s burger, although my experience with those things tells me once the slice of cheese is laid therein, it becomes an inseparable part of the entire unholy mélange. I really have no idea where the slice of cheese came from, only that it had been squished by a car and somehow retained it’s essence.

That slice of cheese, it can be said, was the Rasputin of its oeuvre. Either that or all such slices are able to withstand extraordinary crushing pressure. All I know is it’ll be a long while before a jam a square slice of yellow-orange cheese into my trap again.

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