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Feeling Like A Cheese Sandwich
by
Paul Grimsley
I feel like a cheese sandwich, and by that I do not mean that I am peckish, I
mean that I have entered the mind-state of a cheese sandwich. I can hear you
laughing, saying that a cheese sandwich has no mind-state because it has no
mind. You are right in a sense: a cheese sandwich is indeed a non-thinking
object, but it does have a particular essence, a cheese-sandwichness which is
unique to itself. You would not argue, I take it, that a cheese sandwich is
quite different from a ham sandwich? OK, well if you accept that, then why, may
I ask, is it not possible for you to accept that I am essentially a cheese
sandwich in a man's body? Oh, you say it's difficult to digest, how very droll
of you ... do I look like I find your cheap jibes amusing? I don't? Well, that
is because I am unimpressed with your cheap-shots; leave jokes to the comedians.
I am on a plate, I have been left by someone that felt hungry but made too many
sandwiches and couldn't fit me in. The heat has melted the butter in me and the
cheese I contain is slightly softer than it should be -- all this does not bode
well for my future prospects for being eaten. My bread is soggy, it was quite
thick, good wholesome brown bread, made with loving care and attention to
detail: the perfect ingredient for a good sandwich.
Do you remember the time that Tyler said he felt like a cigarette and he was
talking about exactly the same sensation that I am experiencing at the moment?
No? You don't? Do you not listen to your friends observations on life? Do they
not interest you? He said that his head was a red ember and that he could feel
time burning through his body, that he was being smoked by someone, some thing
that he couldn't explain, and do you remember that he actually had smoke coming
out of the top of his head?
I can feel the sun laying its light over me like a blanket and my whole
structure is deteriorating -- I will be inedible if this lasts for much longer.
I pray to The Earl, my creator, father of all those who came before me and those
who shall come after. No toasted frivolity me, no crepe monsieur, I am just a
down-to-earth, common-or-garden variety of cheese sandwich. Can you sense it?
No, for you’re the essence of something entirely anti-cheese-sandwichlike: that
is your truth, a lie. Your truth is a lie.
You are saying that you have never felt your entire essence transmogrified into
something that you thought it impossible to be? That the alchemy of an inanimate
object has not worked a magic on you that leaves you feeling wholly reborn as
something inhuman? Well, even before this, I knew that this whole type of thing
was possible. I used to know how to fly -- only on waking up did I forget how
this feat was accomplished but, nonetheless, I knew how to fly. I had no wings,
I was no angel, I was no bird, I was just a man that knew how to lift himself
off the ground and traverse the skies without the aid of an aircraft.
In a previous life I was a Picasso sketch. The sketch was of his first lover and
was done in charcoal -- it was beautiful and I loved being it, well, I feel now
that I loved being it, at that point I had no feelings on it at all. Anyway,
that life was very fulfilling, if short: people admired me and thought that I
was possibly the greatest thing he had ever done ... up to that point of course.
He fell out with that lover one day though and, in a fit of rage she tore me up
and threw me in the fire. What's hell? Dying and realising how lonely and
pointless your life was. What's heaven? Being born again into ignorance and
living blindly through the daily blessings of existence, not thinking about
dying. I know this -- I have been to both places before.
Actually, hell needn't be death and the realisation of your mortal futility, it
can be looking in the mirror and seeing the evidence of decline -- decline that
you yourself invited into your life, and knowing that you can do nothing to halt
the inevitable downhill slide. God, how depressing. At least when your a cheese
sandwich you don't have to worry about those kind of things. As a cheese
sandwich my only purpose is to be eaten and enjoyed, and if that were not the
case, if the person thought I tasted disgusting, what could I do about it?
Nothing. I would be powerless. Cheese sandwiches do not worry about such things
anyway.
I am coming out of that area now, my mind is travelling on to a different zone
of consciousness: the Homo Sapiens brain is reasserting itself, all the blood
rushing into my breeze-block! dense skull. These phases don't last long but
perhaps, if I'm lucky, I might be able to tune my mind into that frequency
again. You will not believe me when I say that I was there, and you will not
believe me when I say that it was liberating. You think of cheese sandwiches as
being quite a boring and uninspiring food-stuff and maybe, in the hands of
lesser mortals than me, that is true. When I wield a cheese sandwich it is a
culinary delight; something that Gods would come down off Mount Olympus to try,
something they would savour over any amount of ambrosia. I have bedded women on
the strength of my cheese sandwiches. I have orchestrated orgies full of fromage
fetishising fuck-hungry fiends. The cheese mountain would be severely depleted
were I to get my hands on some means of mass-communication and could whisper
sweet cheesy nothings into the ears of the world -- people would fuck on beds
made out of cheddar, get married in Wensleydale wedding dresses. If I could tip
the whole! world off the edge of sanity into a cheese frenzy then I and they
would be ecstatically happy. God, I've made myself hungry.
I feel like a cheese sandwich and, yes, I do mean that I am peckish.
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