Cheese is weird. Try explaining cheese to someone who has never had it. People don’t really eat cheese in Thailand. So what do you tell them about cheese? “It’s like really hard butter, unless it is soft.” That’s weird. Do you know that they sometimes put like the stomach lining of calves or goats or whatever in cheese? It’s called “renet” and pronounced “ren-ay” but I don’t know how to get one of those little things over the “e”. That little thing over the “e” is weird too, as is renet pronounced ren-ay, and all of them come from France. As does a lot of cheese.
But that’s not what makes cheese weird, because we all know the French are weird but we don’t think about cheese that way. Or neckties for that matter. Coincidentally also French, I do believe. Not so much of the necktie-wearing in Altamont unless it is worn with irony. Less so all over the place, really. But still, that shit’s as weird as pantyhose. Pantyhose are weird, unless you are robbing a bank in which case you will need either pantyhose or a ski mask. Robbing banks must suck in the summertime. If your not hotter than bejesus, then you are probably getting caught in a God-awful thunderstorm which would make it very hard to drive your get-away vehicle.
Or your oil derrick, apparently. Even the smallest, most mobile of derricks seem to have trouble in a storm, such as the one which hit the rig that’s trying to capture all that oil in the Gulf. Did you hear about this? Got struck by lightening and sort of caught on fire. Eerily reminiscent of what happened the first time, no? Got struck by lightening, so “everyone out of the pool” for five hours or so. At which point, were I on the rig, I would start asking “what the hell are we doing out here?” Not just “us” on the boat, but “us” as human beings. It’s not just that the whole oil spill thing is a tragedy, it’s also that the very idea that we are going to get this substance up out of the sea bed and use it to drive around and grow our corn etc, etc, is just weird. Like cheese.