Apes aren’t picky eaters. Your average chimpanzee, for instance spends his day working his way through the undergrowth eating leaves, bark, nuts, grubs, lizards, rodents and even other, less fortunate apes and monkeys. I’m reminded of this as I stand in front of the refrigerator at 5 am, grunting, scratching myself and trying to remember where I put the bananas.
I rummage around in the cupboard for a box of cereal and pull the milk out of the fridge. I can’t find any brown sugar, which is what I like on my cereal, so I decide to settle for regular white sugar. Unfortunately, this concession is moot because there is no white sugar either. I sigh and try to remember where I’ve left the pancake syrup.
I rescue a bowl from the teetering pile of dishes in the sink and carefully rinse it out. I actually find a clean spoon and start to be optimistic about my day. That feeling is short-lived, unfortunately; the cereal box is empty. As it turns out, that’s just as well, because a quick, morbidly curious sniff at the milk reveals that is very old and only useful if I was making cheese.
Something about the idea of cheese rings a bell in the back of my mind. I go back into the refrigerator and scrounge around until I find what I’m looking for – a very old, very dry lump of cheese, loosely wrapped in brown paper. It is drier than I’d anticipated and I try to remember the when I last saw it.
Oh yes – Christmas.
I quickly do some calculations in my head and remind myself that the cheese-making process eliminates most of the dangerous germs. I decide to risk it. The problem is, this cheese really is very hard and scary, so I do what I always do in such situations – I put it in the microwave. It ends up taking a minute or so more at high power than I had anticipated to soften up, but it eventually changes from a brick-like mass to a consistency more like a giant pencil eraser.
I try unsuccessfully to eat the cheese nugget on a plate with a knife and fork, but it is far too rubbery for that. I briefly consider looking for a steak knife, but another look at the pile of dishes in the sink makes me realize that I’ve pushed my luck enough this morning, so I pick it up and eat it with my hands. My ape-like attitude grows as I sit in the corner, gnawing my giant chunk of cheese and grunting.
The cheese is actually very good, if a bit oily and rubbery. Eventually, the taste is a bit too… cheesy and I look around for something else to break up the taste. There is an orange on the table, but my hands are too oily to get enough of a grip on the rind to peel it. I end up biting a chunk out of the peel – which is even more apelike.
The combination of tastes is not exactly what I had in mind and I abandon the meal about halfway through, largely because of the smell on my hands. The combination of cheese oil and orange juice combine to smell something like a dead muskrat, which I’m definitely not in the mood for. Besides, I’m late. Wow! A second look at the clock reveals that I’m very, very late.
I jump up from the table, wipe my hands on a paper towel and run out of the house. A moment later, I run back into the house and get dressed, then run out again.
An hour or so later, I shake hands with someone at work. She starts to sneeze and lifts her hand to her nose, but stops, shocked out of sneezing by the smell that has been transferred to her hand by shaking mine. She narrows her eyes and starts to speak, then thinks better of it. I can tell that she wants to ask me about the smell, but can’t quite work up the nerve.
That is one of the advantages of being a silver-back.
