I'VE GOT THIS IDEA FOR HUMAN CHEESE. Rest assured, this isn’t like the other near-great ideas I’ve had: The heated umbrella. The waffle sandwich. The modern day bed pan—for those insufferable early mornings when you can't seem to muster yourself to the bathroom and can't fully fall back asleep either. (Despite how it sounds, it was all going to be very hygienic, even pleasant: A chemical reaction triggered by the uric acid would conjure the soothing aroma of flowers . . . lilacs maybe. See? Not disgusting at all! Great for mom!)

Granted, these flashes of genius also have their weak spots. How do you put away a self-heating umbrella without hurting anyone? Or, in the case of the Sweet Dream Pee Machine,™ where does the tube go?

But human cheese has none of these shortcomings of technology or logistics. No, human cheese is perfect in its simplicity.

The idea goes like this: Rich people are weird. They like weird things. Take caviar. Fish eggs. The unborn spawn of another living creature. Rich people gobble it up like cheese doodles. In China, monkey brains. An honest-to-goodness delicacy, no kidding. You’re privileged if you get to eat it.

The weirder the better. Because weird means exclusive. Not just the “where am I going to find a monkey to bludgeon on the way back from work” exclusive or the “tasty monkeys are so expensive these days” exclusive. More like the shocking, alienating, snivelling kind of exclusive, i.e., “Of course, you don’t have a hankering for sweet-and-sour grey matter and simian stir-fry. Your palette is totally unrefined.”

Which brings us back to the cheese. Sparing you the tiresome production details (milking, fermenting, etc.), this is guaranteed to be the height of exclusivity. Because not only is it human cheese (way more weird than goat or yak), but it will also be available in a celebrity variety. That’s right: Celebrity Human Cheese. How much would you pay for Julia Roberts-and-crackers? I’m betting quite a lot.

THIS ISN'T THE GOOD PART, or the best part. This is the sentimental part. There are much better, much funnier, much more inventive examples of his writing than this. No, this is the part that made me dog ear the page like a schoolboy who looks for life's answers in a comic book (and who quickly learns to believe more in the solitude and alienation of the alter ego than in the grandeur of the super hero). It's also the part that makes me question why I picked up the book in the first place. It had been on my Amazon wish list for more than year, but just the other day while I was wandering around Union Square, a strange compulsion got me to go into Barnes & Noble and buy it. Then I come across these words, and they seem to perfectly echo some thought I've had just under the skin these last few months. I don't know if I would have even recognized their meaning if I had read them at some other time in my life. Not like I do right now, anyway. Is there some strange coincidence that governs when we read the things we read? It's either very good writing that makes the words seem as if they were written just for you just at that moment. Or it is simply our own weakness for sentimentality, which I willingly display here as evidence of my own:

RUTH: You know, the sad thing . . . The sad thing isn't that love comes to an end. Or that people go out of your life, or die. The really sad thing about the world is that you get over it.

- From "Ancient History" by David Ives

SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAQ have an interesting cultural effect I never considered. Some guy on NPR the other day interviewed a CD shop owner in Iraq who complained about how difficult it is to get all the latest rap and hip-hop music. Apparently, he has to rely on trade through Sudan and Jordan for block-busting beats and slim-shady-ness. I'm sure, however, that Saddam gets all the rap, hip-hop, and techno he wants. Yet another example of how the sanctions only hurt the little people.