Ham and Cheesy

Here's something I did recently. For a snack, I took a piece of ham, and sprinkled some shredded cheese on it. Not just a little cheese, I really put a wad on there. And then rolled it up. I lifted it to my mouth and just as I was taking a bite of it, I somehow managed to breathe in. This turned the rolled up ham into a miniature cheese cannon which launched a spray of finely shredded cheese particles toward the back of my throat. Not content to stop there, many of the particles, noticing that the path continued in the down direction, proceeded to explore this new avenue at high speed. After mere micro-seconds, they got bored with this new direction..

“Oh, look,” said one cheese particle to another. “Where do you suppose that opening leads to?”

Yes, I know that's a pretty long sentence to speak in mere micro-seconds, but cheese talks really fast.

“I think it's the lungs,” said the second cheese particle. “Let's go in there! I hear it's da bomb!”

Cheese isn't really good at staying current and frequently uses out-dated expressions in an effort to appear hip, but it really just comes across as....well, you know. But we know what it meant.

So anyway, they decided to go into the lungs, which I can only assume made the cheese particles happy, but what it did for me was cause me to cough and hack and gasp for breath for almost ten minutes. On thinking about how I did this to myself, I decided that it had been a pretty stupid thing to do. But it gave me an idea for a new thing you can do when someone you know does something as equally stupid as sucking cheese through a ham tube.

Like maybe he put his MP3 player in his shirt pocket when he went to the restroom. And maybe, after using the restroom, accidentally knocked his headphones off. No, no, they did not fall into the toilet. They were too cheap for that. But when your friend leaned over to pick them up, the MP3 player slid out of his pocket. Toilets are not fussy, yet while they are perfectly content to do their job without comment, they understandably yearn for finer things. Like MP3 players. So the toilet sucks in the hapless player, like cheese from a ham tube. Now we will not speculate on whether or not your friend reaches into the toilet to retrieve the player, nor will we consider whether it could survive such treatment; we will content ourselves to assume that the MP3 player was no longer a part of your friend's life after it hit bottom. Now, this is not to suggest that this actually happened to me, or that I would reach in after the player, and take it apart and try to dry it out, to no avail. I didn't suggest that at all. This is all theoretical, of course. Yes, yes, you understand.

So your friend tells you about this and at first you laugh. But then you stop, and, savoring the moment, you say to him, your voice dripping with mock disdain, “You cheese breather!”