By Gurney Poe

So here’s what nobody tells you about cheese.

Not the eating of it, obviously. Everybody knows about eating cheese. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about the making of it. The actual, physical, catastrophic process by which milk (which is itself a pretty audacious concept, because yuck) becomes a solid. 

A solid, brother. It evolves into something you can hold in your hand and hurl at someone you disagree with.

That moment. Right there. That’s where reality gets absolutely unhinged.

See, from my view here in the fifth dimension, all of time laid out like a Sunday paper, I can tell you that the single most consequential decision in the history of civilization wasn’t fire. Wasn’t the wheel. It wasn’t the sonnet or the printing press or the mRNA vaccine or the season finale of The Wire.

It was some completely unhinged Mesopotamian shepherd, somewhere around ten thousand B.C., who looked at rotten curdled milk and thought: I bet that’s food.

That guy.

That is your pivot point. That is your load-bearing wall.

Because the thing is that shepherd didn’t reason his way to cheese. Nobody reasons their way to cheese. You don’t sit down with a whiteboard and a grant proposal and conclude that fermented animal secretions are going to be delicious. That is an act of pure, deranged faith. 

That is a man who looked at something the universe had clearly given up on and said, “No. I disagree. We’re doing this.”

And now you’ve got Paris. You’ve got Beethoven. You’ve got the concept of the dinner party. You’ve got the entire Mediterranean coast, which is objectively humanity’s greatest achievement per square foot. You’ve got a guy named Marcel Proust weeping into a madeleine about his dead grandmother, which spawned about forty-seven novels and a whole philosophical school around memory and time that I personally find flattering.

All of it. All of it traces back to one stubborn man and some expired dairy product.

This is why I do what I do, pal.

Because every single timeline I’ve ever navigated (and I’ve navigated a lot, I’m very busy, don’t let the hat fool you) every single one of them is lousy with these moments. These tiny, stupid, gloriously accidental pivot points that nobody recognizes because they look like nothing. They look like bad milk. 

You think the universe is elegant? The universe is not elegant. The universe is a distracted shepherd with impulse control issues and unsupportable faith in his bad ideas.

And that’s the good news.

That’s the part that should make you feel great, actually.

Because perception equals reality, and reality is just ten thousand years of happy accidents stacked on top of each other, and the whole gorgeous, wobbling tower is still standing, mostly, which means the chaos is working.

So relax. Eat your cheese.

The universe made it especially for you.