There is a grilled cheese sandwich that lives down the street from me in New York City, and he never lets me forget that Grilled Cheese has ruined my life. He takes great pride in reminding me, on a daily basis whenever possible, of my well documented failure at the Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in February 2006.

"Hey, X!" he'll cry out if sees me sneaking down the street, hiding behind trees and lampposts and bushes, trying to avoid his detection. "You can't hide from me. I see you."

He lets me know that he sees me so often that sometimes I wonder if he has anything better to do with his time.

"Get a job!" I'll plead. "Leave me alone!"

It is a pointless request. He'll just laugh and sing back mockingly, "Don't need one. Gotta trust fund. And now I've got a hobby: taunting you."

This grilled cheese, The Grilled Cheese of West 19th St., gives Grilled Cheese in general a bad name. I hate this grilled cheese. No. Correction: I hate all grilled cheese.

Which is why I can't understand what the good folks at the IFOCE are thinking. Someone over there, a grilled cheese lover no doubt, an Eater X hater perhaps, thinks it'll be funny to film me eating grilled cheese sandwiches for high-definition television. It'll be part of their new series of competitive eating TV shows, Eats of Strength, in which eaters attempt to break existing world records and answer questions of consumption and capacity that have long plagued the human mind. My episode, to be filmed on Long Island this weekend, will document my attempt to reclaim from Joey Chestnut the title "Grilled Cheese Eating Champion of the World."

"This is great!" The Whaler shrieked when I told him about the show the other day. I hadn't seen him so excited since he decimated a pod of sperm whales off the coast of Belize back in October. He'd returned to shore feeling so flush that he spent five days in a leisure suit getting drunk at his favorite bar, buying rounds of shots and bar food for his "bestest" 20 friends.

I cocked an eyebrow and stared at him quizzically, wondering why exactly this was so great. "Huh?"

"Because," he said, beaming, blissfully unaware of the potential of this attempt to go sour. "Because now you can get back your record! You loved that record. You did! I know it."

I looked at The Whaler's smile and envied it. I looked at his eyes, wide and white, and envied them too. I sat down on the bottom stair of the stoop outside my apartment and patted a dusty patch of it next to me. "Come here," I said. "Sit down. Listen." I handed him a Werther's Original, and then in painstaking detail I explained to him my feelings.

I told him that when I eat grilled cheeses competitively, I believe the grilled cheese is my partner. "Without its complete cooperation," I said, "breaking Joey's record will be impossible. If they're overcooked, cooked too soon, stored improperly, or prepared with the wrong bread, they're gonna be too slow to eat quickly. The IFOCE knows that. Charles Hardy, my good friend and the IFOCE's Commissioner, told me as much back in February. He said, and he hurt my feelings in the process, 'The only reason you and Joey ate so many [in your qualifiers] was because you had perfect sandwiches.' So my question then, Whaler, is this: If the IFOCE knows that a perfect sandwich is required to break the record, shouldn't they guarantee me sandwiches that allow me at least a chance to succeed? Shouldn't they go out of their way to provide me with the same quality sandwiches that were provided to me and Joey when we set the last two records?"

The Whaler's expression of naive happiness gave way to a look of increasing concern, and I continued.

"There's a 5-second rule, Hardy's rule, right?" I asked rhetorically. "Says you can't dunk anything longer than 5 seconds." The Whaler nodded. "That 5-second rule wasn't in effect when I broke Sonya's record back in August, and it wasn't in effect when Joey broke my record back in October. Same thing for the rule against dunk tanks. It wasn't until the finals in February that the IFOCE began to consistently disallow any cups not provided by the sponsor. So in the interest of giving me the same chance to break Joey's record that Joey was given in breaking mine, shouldn't we play by the old rules, the rules that governed our qualifiers? Shouldn't I be given an equal opportunity to succeed?"

"Yeah, of course," said The Whaler. "You wouldn't run a footrace on a flat track one day and then run it on an incline every day thereafter. Records lose their meaning when the rules under which they're challenged are changed."

"Exactly," I said, chagrined by the cold, hard truth of all that stood in my way. "But I don't know what's gonna happen on Saturday. And I don't know that any one cares besides me. I might be the only one who's taking this seriously."

The Whaler looked angry for a second because he grasped why I was concerned. His eyes, once wide and white and the envy of mine, grew thin and red and mean. His smile, once broad and strong and toothy, shriveled and shrunk into a sour pair of sunburned lips.

"So what are you gonna do?" he asked slowly, teeth clenched, as if to motivate me to fight back.

I paused. "You know it wasn't too long ago that kiting a check was a cutting edge crime," I said. "But now it's a crime for the desperate and dumb." I smiled as if to hint that something big lay beneath the surface of my brow, but The Whaler just looked at me confused, as if what I had said were nonsense.

"Come again?" he asked.

"My point is that when things are primitive, when they're new, there are loopholes, and there are always ways to make a statement. When something evolves, the loopholes tighten. But competitive eating hasn't yet evolved; some rules have yet to be written. A guy like me, just sort of smart--kind of smart maybe?--can still stay a step ahead of the game. You can bet I'll have something planned for that day."

"Like what?" he asked, relishing the prospect and promise of my revenge.

"Just wait," I said. "You'll see."

And The Whaler laughed, and I laughed. And I reached for my Werther's Originals.