HOME | DD

Description
Milked, poured, boiled, soured, curdled, salted, molded, pressed, bandaged, ripened, sliced and matured. We lay. Bound together by Kirkland Signatureâ-labeled-plastic wrap from head to toe. Surrounded by similar look-alikes, side by side, perching our bottoms on the firm steel racks that COSTCO employees slipped us on.

And that is the only life we’ve ever known. The life of supposedly inanimate food. The life of Cheese. Milked, cooked and prepared for our final destiny – filling the stomach of a human being. For us that is happiness.

I am cheese. I am cheese. Muenster Cheese to be exact. Muenster Cheese with corduroy-orange edges and yellowish-off-white centers. I was once part of a cow who mooed. But then I was squirted out, liquefied, boiled, and solidified.  I wish I could still moo. But all I know is the typical life of unsold, packaged cheese. And that means smelly.

However, unlike all the other packages of swiss/spongy/chubby/Monterey jack/cheddar/mozzarella cheese, I am wise because I read books, and I hold a story. And you will get your ears stuffed with it along with a nose clogged by my gooey smells.     Hear me now.

Falling asleep to the presence of flickering lights, creaking shelves, and dusted gray COSTCO floors, I assumed this quiet evening would diminish and materialize into another shopping-cart-inflated-grocery-store morning. How very wrong I was. As the remnants of the evening’s dreams dribbled away, I snapped open my dizzy eyes.

It was not the same. It was not the same at all, apart from the fact that my rectangular armpits still had the fragrances of stereotypical soured cheese. I was in a tall, cold room. They call it a refrigerator. Not the metal COSTCO diary shelves I’ve known for such an ear-spankingly long time.  But a refrigerator. And that means food -- many varieties of food -- covering just about every inch of these levels and drawers. Smack-dab in front of my eyes is the unopened door. Eggs in perfect craters were neatly arranged on the top of the five shelves, which held sauces, garlic, ginger, and butter. As I swerved around and peered directly above, I see a single spiny light bulb jutting out of the pure-white-plastic ceiling. Two large, see-through drawers stuffed with root vegetables and those tiny McDonalds sauce packets, cower below me. I am on the top level of the refrigerator, facing the shelf-covered door. Standing solemnly on my right between the Tupperware and denim lunch box, was a carton of SILK Vanilla Soymilk. He was daydreaming, starry-eyed, at the single light bulb that drenched the whole refrigerated coldness with light. The soymilk carton looked at me. With a rather superior-condescending-welcoming grin, I might add. I inched closer, and the soymilk, in all his sophisticated, rectangular glory – gave me a nudge! Maybe this is the beginnings of love…

And then it hit me. I--am—away! Away from the only life I’ve ever known. Away from the peachy loneliness of being one of the thousands of expectant packaged cheeses awaiting for judgment day. The day where a COSTCO customer would finally see the light, and pick me… ME.. MEEEE!… out of every other gooey chunk of cheese -- to buy and take home.
In my sleep, it has happened, all without me knowing! I will be sliced, melted, chewed, swallowed and digested! I have succeeded!

I screamed and jumped for ecstasy, up and down, back a forth, left and right, diagonal, under, and above –- as far as my gooey-orange flatness would take me. This is amazing. This is real. This is wonderful. This is no homework, endless summer days, nonstick frying pans, head-phone music, staying up late, love, and laziness all eggrolled together into a solid form! I am freeeeeee!
But before my scream even had time to wax/wane and vanish, a tanned, short-fingernailed, boyish hand snatched me out of this spanking-new refrigerated home! My plastic wrapper snipped away. Leaving me, all orange and unclothed. The next thing I knew was pain.

Years later, the heart-splintering memory still flickers raw, organic, and fresh in the depths of my mind. It was pain I tell you! Agonizing pain. Pain past endurance. I remember pounding. A human hand pounding, curving and kneading my rectangular, rigid cheesy form -- into a ball. The form that was… me. Myself. My body. But I didn’t want to think that. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted it to stop. This throat-cloggingly cramping pain. I want it to stop. Green light. Yellow Light. Red light. Pain. Pain. Ow. Pain. And then, as quickly and strongly as it began -- it stopped. Everything stopped. I felt numbness. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Except the fact that pain had subsided. And then I rolled. And I didn’t stop rolling. Then there was black. The glow-in-the-dark-watermelon-seeds-and-spilled-ink kind of pitch-black-at-midnight-on-a-forgotten-winter-Saturday. BLACK.

Opening my eyes, to forget-me-not blue skies, I heard voices and realized.
“Let. LET! That was such a let! I told you already, I wasn’t ready! Henry, are you listening?”
“Fiineee. I’ll redo it then. Gosh Andrew.”
“Yeah! It’s was a double fault for you, anyway. Twelfth time you hit the ball over the fence today.”

Those were the first sounds that trickled through my cheesy ears. And then I saw how confined of a state I was in. Suffocating in plastic wrap, clutched in a boy’s hand, enclosed by a fence, on a flat forest-green grounds with white lines. The boy reversed three steps so that his feet lined up with the center mark on the baseline. Through later years of clammy research, I’ve found out that the painful experience I woke up to, that very day,  -- was a Tennis game. I was the heart of it.

“There are no more balls! And I’m too lazy to get the ones I volleyed over the fence.” hollered the boy named Andrew.
“Well, yesterday I rolled up some cheese into a ball, and wrapped it with plastic wrap. I wanted to play tennis with a ball of cheese. I heard that cheese tastes so spanking-rad after being pressurized,” replied Henry.
Andrew snorted. “Yeah. Well I’ll shove it up your crotch if you don’t give me something to hit soon, come-–“
Before Andrew’s impolite words even had the time to stuff my ears, I was tossed into the air by Henry, knowing nothing but the crystalline noise of whistling wind, and when gravity began yanking me down, I was whammed smack-dab in the face with the tough, tight strings of a WILSON tennis racket, plummeting through the air, over the net –- to Andrew’s fingertips. Pain. Exhaustion. Noise. Collision. Scars. And then, as Andrew closed his hands around my dented-sphere of a plastic-wrapped body, his racket collided with me, and he served.

“New game. Love all!.” yelled Andrew, the server, firmly placing his feet on the center mark of the baseline. A pause. A step back. A surge of muscled strength. An overhead stroke. And I was flying, soaring, and in pain. WHOOSH! I was gliding the other direction, clashing with the right service court. FIZZ! I was topspinned and whirling out of bounds, way past the backcourt. CLANG! I faced a painful collision with the wired fence. WHOOSH! I was sliced hard, thumping back and forth and up and down and sideways into the disgustingly green ground. GLAHAHDAGA! I am vomiting invisible vomit. Vomit that neither Andrew nor Henry would ever ever realize no matter how hard they try and fly and cry. But on a brighter side, I can fly! That’s not the kind of thing you’d see a cheese-ball do every day, isn’t it?

“Henry, what’s the damn score, you mad cow?” Andrew called out, after slipping me into his hands.
“Thirty: Fifteen. I got thirty you got fifteen.” Henry replied.
“Oh god, I hope this is not going to be another break service for you. I’m so out of it today…” sighed Andrew.  “Alright. THIRTY: FIFTEEN!” And with those last words, yet once again, I was tossed into the air, and tangling myself in the skies that managed to nosedive me against rackets. Back and forth and back and forth, over and over again. And then, the rally ended, and I lay spread eagled, one inch out of bounds, a baby step from the left alley.
Andrew peeped at me. With a smirking look of triumph, he punched the skies, hand held upwards to signal Henry at the adversary forecourt. Catching Andrew’s hand sign, Henry stuck out his tongue. Andrew’s signal meant that Henry whacked me out of bounds.
“Yeah… This is not going to be a break service game for me. ‘Cause now we’re Deuce! Forty: Forty! I’m gonna beat you up I tell you! Henry, you just wait and see!” howled Andrew.
“Uhh… yeah,” replied Henry, half-heartedly from across the court. “Hey, Andrew, are you smitten with  Michelle?” asked Henry, with a rather furtive glance?
“Huh? What does that have to do with hardcore tennis?” replied Andrew cautiously.
“HAHAHAA! You’re such a bad actor! HAHAHAA!!!!! ” guffawed Henry with a slight smirk.

Quietly I listened to this stretchy conversation. Quietly I hoped that this wispy game would shatter and cease. Quietly I realize how rare it is for any chunk of gooey cheese, like me, to experience such a painful-soaring situation like this. And quietly I realize in it’s full entirety, exactly how voice-snippingly unthoughtful these little humans were. Again I was wriggled into Andrew’s hands, and a second later, hurled into the air, but before I hit the ground, to my surprise the racketing blow did not come -- Andrew swiftly wedged me into his palms again.
“FOOT FAULT! HA! You’re serving off center!” barked Henry.
“That’s why I’m re-serving, you idiot.” replied Andrew, hastily.
And re-serve he did. I was flung into the air again, gazing with wide-open eyes at a chubby magpie teetering above the Tennis court, with a chunky wish in the back of my mind to be in the air like him… and then… WHAM! Spinning, twisting, lunging headfirst, above the net, at the speed of sound, and suddenly, instantaneously, unavoidably, desperately bouncing twice in the left service court like an elastic mushroom, whacked by Henry, and regurgitated backwards to Andrew’s racket again and again and again. As violent and aggressive this heart-clipping experience is, the pain I felt was merely a numbing sore now. The sleeping-foot-kind-of-splintering-gray-sore-numbness. Pulverizing my beefy emotions and wiggling my cheesy butt in odd directions. Numb. Numb. Numb.
And somehow, like the millions of powdery pieces of a shattered Butterfingerâ chocolate bar being taped together again -- it stopped. I collided past the baseline again. Bouncing thrice and rolling to the edges of the fence.
“Dang. Out of bounds again.” shouted Andrew in disgust.
“HAHA! Ad-out in your face!  HA!” retorted Henry.

Once again the pudgy sounds of Andrew’s New Balance â sneakers smacking against the court floor, drummed louder and louder until the distance dividing us apart – disintegrated. Squeezed, and launched into the air, was his serve. The serve that will kick this heart-splittingly physical experience to a clanking end. Soaring through the puffy court, splashing shoulder-deep in mixed emotions. Tangling in the wind like sauerkraut in it’s jar. Deflated bodies. Blurry worlds. Life. Death. Experience. Pain. Elation. Hearts. Souls. And flight. I see them all. I saw them all, as the forecourt whipped closer and closer, crashing into liquefied walls, gulping me down, pinning me to the Styrofoam clouds, until there was nothing left to collide with except for the yellow noise of Andrew’s voice and the word he said that frittered it all away.
“GAME!”
And then it all ended.
And then I lived.

Crinkled, ruffled, natural, bruised, mushy, pulpy, scarred, and alive. I am a ball of Muenster cheese. Nevertheless my life has unraveled out to become the exact opposite of cheesy. I have inflated my honesty, my heart, my calcium life. I know what it feels like to be lingering alone, camouflaged among clones upon clones on a spindly metal rack. I know what it feels like to be squeezed, boiled, sliced, aged, matured, curdled, refrigerated, and in love. And I know what it feels like to scream and scream and scream and scream and scream but remain unheard in the human-world forever. Pain has found me and made me real. Created me. My life. My smells.

May you floss your nostrils with the scaly remnants of my smelly smells.

Description
Milked, poured, boiled, soured, curdled, salted, molded, pressed, bandaged, ripened, sliced and matured. We lay. Bound together by Kirkland Signatureâ-labeled-plastic wrap from head to toe. Surrounded by similar look-alikes, side by side, perching our bottoms on the firm steel racks that COSTCO employees slipped us on.

And that is the only life we’ve ever known. The life of supposedly inanimate food. The life of Cheese. Milked, cooked and prepared for our final destiny – filling the stomach of a human being. For us that is happiness.

I am cheese. I am cheese. Muenster Cheese to be exact. Muenster Cheese with corduroy-orange edges and yellowish-off-white centers. I was once part of a cow who mooed. But then I was squirted out, liquefied, boiled, and solidified.  I wish I could still moo. But all I know is the typical life of unsold, packaged cheese. And that means smelly.

However, unlike all the other packages of swiss/spongy/chubby/Monterey jack/cheddar/mozzarella cheese, I am wise because I read books, and I hold a story. And you will get your ears stuffed with it along with a nose clogged by my gooey smells.     Hear me now.

Falling asleep to the presence of flickering lights, creaking shelves, and dusted gray COSTCO floors, I assumed this quiet evening would diminish and materialize into another shopping-cart-inflated-grocery-store morning. How very wrong I was. As the remnants of the evening’s dreams dribbled away, I snapped open my dizzy eyes.

It was not the same. It was not the same at all, apart from the fact that my rectangular armpits still had the fragrances of stereotypical soured cheese. I was in a tall, cold room. They call it a refrigerator. Not the metal COSTCO diary shelves I’ve known for such an ear-spankingly long time.  But a refrigerator. And that means food -- many varieties of food -- covering just about every inch of these levels and drawers. Smack-dab in front of my eyes is the unopened door. Eggs in perfect craters were neatly arranged on the top of the five shelves, which held sauces, garlic, ginger, and butter. As I swerved around and peered directly above, I see a single spiny light bulb jutting out of the pure-white-plastic ceiling. Two large, see-through drawers stuffed with root vegetables and those tiny McDonalds sauce packets, cower below me. I am on the top level of the refrigerator, facing the shelf-covered door. Standing solemnly on my right between the Tupperware and denim lunch box, was a carton of SILK Vanilla Soymilk. He was daydreaming, starry-eyed, at the single light bulb that drenched the whole refrigerated coldness with light. The soymilk carton looked at me. With a rather superior-condescending-welcoming grin, I might add. I inched closer, and the soymilk, in all his sophisticated, rectangular glory – gave me a nudge! Maybe this is the beginnings of love…

And then it hit me. I--am—away! Away from the only life I’ve ever known. Away from the peachy loneliness of being one of the thousands of expectant packaged cheeses awaiting for judgment day. The day where a COSTCO customer would finally see the light, and pick me… ME.. MEEEE!… out of every other gooey chunk of cheese -- to buy and take home.
In my sleep, it has happened, all without me knowing! I will be sliced, melted, chewed, swallowed and digested! I have succeeded!

I screamed and jumped for ecstasy, up and down, back a forth, left and right, diagonal, under, and above –- as far as my gooey-orange flatness would take me. This is amazing. This is real. This is wonderful. This is no homework, endless summer days, nonstick frying pans, head-phone music, staying up late, love, and laziness all eggrolled together into a solid form! I am freeeeeee!
But before my scream even had time to wax/wane and vanish, a tanned, short-fingernailed, boyish hand snatched me out of this spanking-new refrigerated home! My plastic wrapper snipped away. Leaving me, all orange and unclothed. The next thing I knew was pain.

Years later, the heart-splintering memory still flickers raw, organic, and fresh in the depths of my mind. It was pain I tell you! Agonizing pain. Pain past endurance. I remember pounding. A human hand pounding, curving and kneading my rectangular, rigid cheesy form -- into a ball. The form that was… me. Myself. My body. But I didn’t want to think that. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted it to stop. This throat-cloggingly cramping pain. I want it to stop. Green light. Yellow Light. Red light. Pain. Pain. Ow. Pain. And then, as quickly and strongly as it began -- it stopped. Everything stopped. I felt numbness. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Except the fact that pain had subsided. And then I rolled. And I didn’t stop rolling. Then there was black. The glow-in-the-dark-watermelon-seeds-and-spilled-ink kind of pitch-black-at-midnight-on-a-forgotten-winter-Saturday. BLACK.

Opening my eyes, to forget-me-not blue skies, I heard voices and realized.
“Let. LET! That was such a let! I told you already, I wasn’t ready! Henry, are you listening?”
“Fiineee. I’ll redo it then. Gosh Andrew.”
“Yeah! It’s was a double fault for you, anyway. Twelfth time you hit the ball over the fence today.”

Those were the first sounds that trickled through my cheesy ears. And then I saw how confined of a state I was in. Suffocating in plastic wrap, clutched in a boy’s hand, enclosed by a fence, on a flat forest-green grounds with white lines. The boy reversed three steps so that his feet lined up with the center mark on the baseline. Through later years of clammy research, I’ve found out that the painful experience I woke up to, that very day,  -- was a Tennis game. I was the heart of it.

“There are no more balls! And I’m too lazy to get the ones I volleyed over the fence.” hollered the boy named Andrew.
“Well, yesterday I rolled up some cheese into a ball, and wrapped it with plastic wrap. I wanted to play tennis with a ball of cheese. I heard that cheese tastes so spanking-rad after being pressurized,” replied Henry.
Andrew snorted. “Yeah. Well I’ll shove it up your crotch if you don’t give me something to hit soon, come-–“
Before Andrew’s impolite words even had the time to stuff my ears, I was tossed into the air by Henry, knowing nothing but the crystalline noise of whistling wind, and when gravity began yanking me down, I was whammed smack-dab in the face with the tough, tight strings of a WILSON tennis racket, plummeting through the air, over the net –- to Andrew’s fingertips. Pain. Exhaustion. Noise. Collision. Scars. And then, as Andrew closed his hands around my dented-sphere of a plastic-wrapped body, his racket collided with me, and he served.

“New game. Love all!.” yelled Andrew, the server, firmly placing his feet on the center mark of the baseline. A pause. A step back. A surge of muscled strength. An overhead stroke. And I was flying, soaring, and in pain. WHOOSH! I was gliding the other direction, clashing with the right service court. FIZZ! I was topspinned and whirling out of bounds, way past the backcourt. CLANG! I faced a painful collision with the wired fence. WHOOSH! I was sliced hard, thumping back and forth and up and down and sideways into the disgustingly green ground. GLAHAHDAGA! I am vomiting invisible vomit. Vomit that neither Andrew nor Henry would ever ever realize no matter how hard they try and fly and cry. But on a brighter side, I can fly! That’s not the kind of thing you’d see a cheese-ball do every day, isn’t it?

“Henry, what’s the damn score, you mad cow?” Andrew called out, after slipping me into his hands.
“Thirty: Fifteen. I got thirty you got fifteen.” Henry replied.
“Oh god, I hope this is not going to be another break service for you. I’m so out of it today…” sighed Andrew.  “Alright. THIRTY: FIFTEEN!” And with those last words, yet once again, I was tossed into the air, and tangling myself in the skies that managed to nosedive me against rackets. Back and forth and back and forth, over and over again. And then, the rally ended, and I lay spread eagled, one inch out of bounds, a baby step from the left alley.
Andrew peeped at me. With a smirking look of triumph, he punched the skies, hand held upwards to signal Henry at the adversary forecourt. Catching Andrew’s hand sign, Henry stuck out his tongue. Andrew’s signal meant that Henry whacked me out of bounds.
“Yeah… This is not going to be a break service game for me. ‘Cause now we’re Deuce! Forty: Forty! I’m gonna beat you up I tell you! Henry, you just wait and see!” howled Andrew.
“Uhh… yeah,” replied Henry, half-heartedly from across the court. “Hey, Andrew, are you smitten with  Michelle?” asked Henry, with a rather furtive glance?
“Huh? What does that have to do with hardcore tennis?” replied Andrew cautiously.
“HAHAHAA! You’re such a bad actor! HAHAHAA!!!!! ” guffawed Henry with a slight smirk.

Quietly I listened to this stretchy conversation. Quietly I hoped that this wispy game would shatter and cease. Quietly I realize how rare it is for any chunk of gooey cheese, like me, to experience such a painful-soaring situation like this. And quietly I realize in it’s full entirety, exactly how voice-snippingly unthoughtful these little humans were. Again I was wriggled into Andrew’s hands, and a second later, hurled into the air, but before I hit the ground, to my surprise the racketing blow did not come -- Andrew swiftly wedged me into his palms again.
“FOOT FAULT! HA! You’re serving off center!” barked Henry.
“That’s why I’m re-serving, you idiot.” replied Andrew, hastily.
And re-serve he did. I was flung into the air again, gazing with wide-open eyes at a chubby magpie teetering above the Tennis court, with a chunky wish in the back of my mind to be in the air like him… and then… WHAM! Spinning, twisting, lunging headfirst, above the net, at the speed of sound, and suddenly, instantaneously, unavoidably, desperately bouncing twice in the left service court like an elastic mushroom, whacked by Henry, and regurgitated backwards to Andrew’s racket again and again and again. As violent and aggressive this heart-clipping experience is, the pain I felt was merely a numbing sore now. The sleeping-foot-kind-of-splintering-gray-sore-numbness. Pulverizing my beefy emotions and wiggling my cheesy butt in odd directions. Numb. Numb. Numb.
And somehow, like the millions of powdery pieces of a shattered Butterfingerâ chocolate bar being taped together again -- it stopped. I collided past the baseline again. Bouncing thrice and rolling to the edges of the fence.
“Dang. Out of bounds again.” shouted Andrew in disgust.
“HAHA! Ad-out in your face!  HA!” retorted Henry.

Once again the pudgy sounds of Andrew’s New Balance â sneakers smacking against the court floor, drummed louder and louder until the distance dividing us apart – disintegrated. Squeezed, and launched into the air, was his serve. The serve that will kick this heart-splittingly physical experience to a clanking end. Soaring through the puffy court, splashing shoulder-deep in mixed emotions. Tangling in the wind like sauerkraut in it’s jar. Deflated bodies. Blurry worlds. Life. Death. Experience. Pain. Elation. Hearts. Souls. And flight. I see them all. I saw them all, as the forecourt whipped closer and closer, crashing into liquefied walls, gulping me down, pinning me to the Styrofoam clouds, until there was nothing left to collide with except for the yellow noise of Andrew’s voice and the word he said that frittered it all away.
“GAME!”
And then it all ended.
And then I lived.

Crinkled, ruffled, natural, bruised, mushy, pulpy, scarred, and alive. I am a ball of Muenster cheese. Nevertheless my life has unraveled out to become the exact opposite of cheesy. I have inflated my honesty, my heart, my calcium life. I know what it feels like to be lingering alone, camouflaged among clones upon clones on a spindly metal rack. I know what it feels like to be squeezed, boiled, sliced, aged, matured, curdled, refrigerated, and in love. And I know what it feels like to scream and scream and scream and scream and scream but remain unheard in the human-world forever. Pain has found me and made me real. Created me. My life. My smells.

May you floss your nostrils with the scaly remnants of my smelly smells.