Do The World A Huge Favor

When I was a kid, there was this store out at the mall that sold cheese from all over the world. The place reeked. They must have had hundreds of different kinds of cheese. I like cheese as much as the next guy, but you wouldn’t think there would be any real need for so many different types of the stuff. I wouldn’t, anyway. I mean, why would anyone spend so much time dicking around with cheese? It seemed to me that there couldn’t have been much difference between some of the varieties, and a lot of them looked pretty much the same.

I never understood the place, to be honest with you, never understood how the hell it managed to stay open year after year. I guess maybe lots of people bought cheese for Christmas presents, although that doesn’t exactly make sense to me either.

Pretty much the only thing they sold was cheese. Well, pickles. They sold pickles as well, those great big pickles in giant jars, but I think those were mostly a point-of-sale novelty item to break up the monotony of all that fucking cheese. I don’t have any idea why anybody would go to a mall to buy a humongous pickle, unless, of course, they’re just completely bored out of their minds, which lots of people clearly are.

We used to drive around and get stoned and then go out to the mall to play Ski-Ball. We’d always walk down to the cheese shop because every day they gave away free samples of different kinds of cheese. They had a display out front with little cubes of cheese with toothpicks stuck in them, and they were never really dicks about it if you took more than you should or kept coming back.

The guy who ran the place always wore one of those big cheese hats made out of foam.

I once asked this guy if he could tell the difference between all the different kinds of cheese.

“Of course,” he said.

“Let’s see you prove it,” I said.

“Do the world a huge favor and don’t be such a smartass,” he said.

That pretty much became our favorite catch phrase all the way through high school, and in the right situation I still find it comes in handy now and again.