While my yuppie friends were sucking each other off at New Seasons, I was filling my cart sky high with cut-rate Sugar Bomb cereal at Winco. As I arrived a team of EMTs was shoving a dead shopper into their ambulance. 

If you are one of my yuppie friends and shop at New Seasons, you don’t know about how Winco is like going down in the mine as it were. There’s a lot of slag to be sure. A lot of bologna, in other words. Literally a lot of bologna. But sometimes you hit a thin precious vein and it’s all the more exciting since you’re in the dim, dripping mine, and the lanterns are swaying to and fro from the inexplicable winds that blow underground, and awful, warn faces appear all of a sudden in the light of them.

Anyways, the lanterns were swaying and everything in the frozen meats section and, because I read Soren Kierkegaard in college, I immediately picked out the only perfect and scandinavian object in the room. It was a square of ‘Ski Queen’ Gjetost cheese from Norway. I pronounced “Gjetost” to myself a few different ways. I used it in a few different sentences. “I think you’re acting out a Gjetost tendency and that is why you won’t let me go skiing in the morning,” etc.

As I was saying, the ‘Ski Queen’ cheese appeared to me as a rosy flicker inside a mine, and so far it was perfect in every way. As you can see, it is packaged in a square red package and has perfect font and evokes alpine and european feelings. It looks like a block of kick wax, in other words. They could, alternately, put this cheese in aerosol canisters and call it Ski Queen Klister Cheese and it would sell very well. Likewise the package depicts a stylized cheese shaver that is planing off a shaving of wonderfully brown cheese.

The cheese is indeed a psychological-brown color and shape. If you went to Montessori school you know this color and shape. I was very pleased by this cheese when I saw it out of its package. It looked nude but not embarrassed necessarily. A little bit embarrassed maybe. 

It looked like a Velveta would, if Velveta attended Montessori school. It had some pillow creases on its face and a messed up hairdo and little bit of a sheen. I put the cheese next to some bright green olives and pickled peppers and artichoke hearts.

I sliced into the Norwegian cheese with my pocket knife. It was sweet and mild and pleasant, like Europe. And it fell from the block like clockwork. Everyone tasted the cheese and liked it sort of. We felt we should like it, because it reminded us of Nordic things. We imagined ourselves leaning our skis against a snowed-in Chalet and kicking off our boots and being presented with a board of sweet cheese and fruit. And some powerful wine and beer. And then stammering up a ladder to the sleeping loft, drunk as skunks, and sleeping a weird sleep in the hot pitch of the A-frame.

Night-forest still life with Spaten Optimator doppelbock, olives, pickles, prosciutto, and Ski Queen cheese.

Rating: Five stars.

Price: 4.99.