Weak pins holding together the fabric of life.

I have been told that if you eat an apple with some sorts of cheese, it will taste like a caramel apple.

In that cheeky manner which I have become infamous for I ask; why do we not say that it is the caramel apple that tastes like the cottage cheese apple? I'm not even sure what caramel is or where it comes from, and frankly I don't care. Surely there are equal quantities of cottage cheese and caramel in the world, and I need not mention the vast sea of velveeta or cheddar that threatens to wash them away in a thick tsunami of mushy dairy fat.

Yet, imagine what would happen were I to run about county fairs devouring caramel apples proclaiming with glee that they tasted like apples and cottage cheese. I would be labeled eccentric! Worse, I would risk being beaten within an inch of my life by pragmatic local toughs in flannel shirts lacking time or energy for the terrifying world of possibilities I spout off in my madness. And rightly so.

The feeling of a heavy stone within the pit one's stomach. The taste of chicken, lemons, and caramel apples. The smell of burning toast or wood. These are focal points we understand, from which we can relate everything else we experience. God or the blind hand of chance - whomever it was - painted our reality in broad brushstrokes to make things easier for us to comprehend.

And as such, one could imagine those things I mentioned above (and the long list of others I fail to mention) as tiny points of pressure which keep the tent of our universe held aloft. Men in flannel shirts get understandably ornery when you suggest switching out one of these anchors for another. Like a game of Jenga, removing one would not necessarily throw the system into a destabilized state. But if you tamper with too many, you risk bringing the structure billowing down on top of our heads - or worse yet, having it blown away.

So Iguana tastes like chicken and not the other way around, or else you are a flipped-out weirdo that isn't to be listened to. Swallowing heavy rocks does not feel like losing some one you love, it is the other way around. Burnt toast most certainly does not smell like an aneurysm, and you are a demented psychopath if you go around whispering that to people on buses. And caramel apples are the template from which we understand the taste of cheese with apple, you sick boat-rocking maniac.