Cracker Barrel Cheese and Diet Pepsi

Cracker Barrel actually sells a sack of individually wrapped logs of cheese. Now, I'm not a huge cheese fan, but I am a fan of convenient late night snacking. And, for that, nothing works better than individually wrapped cheese. Is it a good idea to eat anything that can be referred to as a "log" mere seconds before you go to sleep? Probably not, but it's as close as I get to being a daredevil.

I've found that the sharp taste of this particular cheese is offset quite nicely by Diet Pepsi. Maybe the unholy swill of evil chemicals in each item offset each other --sorta like how Chelsea Clinton turned out okay -- or maybe it's just dumb luck, but there's no better post-midnight snack than a log of Cracker Barrel cheese and a swig of Diet Pepsi.

Something occurred to me tonight that made it taste even better: if a person from France were to have seen me eating Cracker Barrel cheese and drinking Diet Pepsi they very well could have exploded.

To most Americans this is just some common sense snacking. Americans don't savor -- we're descended from frontiersmen who spent all day long taming a new land (and, uh, killing its indigenous people) -- our people don't have time to savor!

Europeans, on the other hand, descend from all the people too scared to leave for America. Their ancestors spent their afternoons powdering wigs and polishing snuff-boxes. They might have time to savor things, but so what? Unemployed people have time to do a lot of things.

Of course, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. In a weird way, though, the fact that I've been raised to eat shitty food in the worst circumstances in order to make things more convenient and efficient actually made me a little proud. Eating Cracker Barrel cheese and drinking Diet Pepsi is a good representation of both the best and worst of what it means to be an American.

So let me suggest this the next time Old Europe gets mad at the US of A, instead of declaring things "Freedom Fries" or "Victory Gardens", I'd like for every American to grab a lump of Cracker Barrel cheese and a bottle of Diet Pepsi and have a good ole American wine and cheese party standing up right there in their kitchen.

USA! USA! (Oh, is no one else chanting? Well okay then...)