Cheesy Superheroes: A Conversation

When traveling, it is important to maintain balance in one’s relationship with traveling companions: a healthy balance between conversation and peaceful silence, and a balance between serious and recreational conversation. The G-Unit and I have plenty of heavy conversations, but we have just as many chats just for shits and giggles. Here is one from a coffee shop with Tiffany and Stephanie:

Tiffany: Have you guys seen Thor yet? 

Stuie and Robbie consult each other with a glance and then shake their heads. 

Tiffany: Because we went to see it last Friday, and it got us thinking about Superpowers. 

Stuie: Okay. 

Tiffany: And we started thinking, what would our Superpowers be? What do you guys think yours would be?

Stuie: Wait a second, are you asking for a power that would correspond to our personality, or for the power that we would want the most?

Stephanie: That’s what I asked, too, because those would be way different, right? 

Stuie: Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t want the superpower that corresponded to my personality. I think I’d like to fly. What did you guys pick? 

Stephanie:  That’s what I said, too. Fly or teleport. I guess it wouldn’t matter. 

Stuie: How would you want to leave the scene if you could teleport? Like, do you want to just vanish with no special effects, like I dream of genie, or do you want a puff of purple smoke to be left in your wake? 

Stephanie: I dream of Genie. The smoke would be annoying, I think, and you couldn’t leave discretely. 

Stuie: Yeah, but it could be useful for purple-smoking people at will. Like, you could be in an elevator jammed full of people,  and just purple smoke the whole group. I would just teleport from the elevator to the next floor stop, so I could see the doors open and watch everybody poor out with the purple smoke. They’d be like, “Why did you even get on the elevator, asshole?”

Tiffany: I said I’d like to be invisible at first, but then realized that I could still get hit if I were invisible, so I’d like to be invisible and intangible. Which could get complicated, I guess. 

Stephanie: Yeah, could you sit in chairs and stuff?

Robbie: Or hit anybody back? 

Stuie: Would you get sucked to the center of the Earth’s gravity, or would you have no mass at all, being intangible, and just sort of float through space, kind of useless? 

Tiffany: I guess it doesn’t make much sense, but none of this does. We are talking about super powers. So Robbie, what would yours be? 

Robbie smiles and leans forward, putting his hands out on either side of the topic he was about to discuss.

Robbie: I’d like to be able to turn things into smoked Gouda cheese Anything. Just look at it and make it Gouda at my will.

The other three sit, perplexed and impressed.

Stuie: That would be awesome. Way more useful than flying. I feel lame. I think I just want to fly because my knee is jacked right now, and I wouldn’t need that to fly. 

Robbie: Yeah, and Gouda is delicious.  So tasty.

Stephanie: Don’t you think you’d get sick of it after a while?

Robbie’s lips purse; his eyebrows raise and his head tilts forward incredulously. 

Robbie: …no. That’s ridiculous.

Stuie: I think if I were going to be a cheese alchemist, I’d like to be able to convert things into a different cheese with each finger, so I had a choice of ten cheeses. 

Tiffany: Oh, that would be better. 

Robbie: That would be cool, for sure, but I don’t know about better. I mean, I just would want Gouda all the time, so I would really only use one finger. 

Stuie: It would be really cool, though, because you would never have to pay for extra cheese at a restaurant. You could just take a napkin, put it on your sandwich or burger, and make it cheese. A big ‘F you” to this McDouble, Double-Cheeseburger scam. 

Robbie: ‘Swat I’m sayin. 

All nod in agreement. 

Later, while touring LA in a Dodge Charger, the conversation came alive again. 

Stuie: Dude, I feel like such a lameass for picking flying as my superpower. The smoked Gouda thing really has a lot of benefits. I wasn’t thinking about the usefulness in a fight against evil until I was thinking about Tiffany saying that intangibility would suck because you can’t hit people, either. But man, if you could turn somebody into Gouda, that would pretty much be the end of the fight. 

Robbie: Yeah. I hadn’t really thought of that either. 

Stuie: The same would be true if you could turn people into money, though. And then you’d be rich.

Robbie: Gouda is expensive, though, so I could sell it for like seven bucks a pound. 

Stuie: OH MAN! Capitalist benefits, too, from the Gouda thing. But you could just buy Gouda with the money you turned people into.

Robbie: Smoked Gouda isn’t always available though, and the world has a pretty finite supply of it. I think if I had unlimited money, there wouldn’t be enough Gouda for me to buy to satisfy my Goudatite. 

Stuie: mmmm. Ok. Ok. And you could really make a lot of money selling the shit out of that. You’d be an artisan cheesest, too, because you could just go into a junkyard and grab an old bike to turn into Gouda, and people would be like, “How did you make a block of Gouda big enough to carve a full-sized bike?” 

Robbie: Oh, that’s money. 

Stuie: Rich people would pay for your Gouda sculptures for their parties. Like the cake boss, but it wouldn’t take you as long, and you would have virtually no overhead. 

Robbie: All good points. I’m sticking with this superpower.

Stuie: It could be dangerous though. Like, if you accidentally turned something important into Gouda, would you be able to un-Gouda-fie it? People would get pissed at you real quick. 

Robbie: That would suck. Especially if it were somebody’s baby or something. 

Stuie: Yeah, they’d be looking at you, all pissed, holding their car-seat full of cheese, and you’d be like, “Oh, man, sorry folks. This is kind of a one way, street.” 

Robbie: I’d need to make friends with a de-goudafier. Your power was stupid. You should change to that.

Stuie: When we got into fights, we would have epic super-hero battle , just turning things into smoked Gouda and changing them back. 

Robbie: Yeah, and if somebody took a bite out of something before you changed it back, I would be winning.

Stuie: Yeah, and if I managed to change originally Gouda cheese into fresh, unprocessed milk, then I’d be winning. 

And later, in the car to San Francisco, after Robbie reviewed the first draft of this blog, the conversation continued.

Stuie:  Dude, Robbie, I didn’t think of this, but you would win multiple Nobel Peace Prizes.  Navy Seals would just drop you into Pakistan, and you would turn their nukes into Gouda.  People in Africa would be hacking at each other with Gouda machetes. Instead of shooting each other with AK-47s, people would be feasting together in AK-Gouda-heaven. 

Robbie:  Yeah, dude.

Stuie:  You’d solve world hunger, except global warming might get worse once that cheese starts to rot.

Brandon:  Kraft would be out of business.

Stuie: Yeah, and shares of Ex-Lax would sky rocket.  Dude, if you ever get this power let me know, so I can invest my life savings in all laxative companies. 

Brandon: ...Wisconsin would be useless to the world.