From the Plaza Level end zone, I hollered myself hoarse at the Chargers game yesterday, mostly with such observations as, “Aw, come ON! Don’t you get paid to CATCH the ball?

But long about the third quarter, I found my attention diverted. A trio of eight-year-old boys had come down from elsewhere in Qualcomm Stadium to claim squatters’ rights closer to the action. In their high voices, they hollered down grade-school-level insults at the highly paid and mainly inept athletes below.

After awhile, though, I noticed the boys huddling with their heads together. One kid had in his hands one of those cardboard fast-food boats that holds nachos. This boat, however, was empty of chips and instead contained only a gooey pool of leftover cheese — and one very unfortunate cricket.

The poor insect was perfectly alive but his feet were stuck in the cheesy swamp. He must have been a pretty brave cricket, I was thinking, to hop around among the feet of 67,000 plus screaming, stomping, and mostly angry NFL fans. Then, to have taken what must have seemed an ordinary hop, and to have landed, of all places, in a cheese lagoon — well, who could have seen that coming?

So while one of the little boys held the boat, the others ooh’d and aah’d over the cricket’s unusual circumstance. And all the bug could do was waggle his antennae and go nowhere — until his post-game burial at the local landfill.

Perhaps he didn’t give up his little insect life in vain, though. Seeing him stuck in that cheesy mire, unable to carry on his life’s pursuits — to grow old with his cricket wife, or perhaps go on to star in a Pinnochio remake — made me wonder what the nacho cheese is in this season of my life.

In what have my rhetorical feet become mired? Is there anything in any area of my life that is keeping me from moving forward? From making the kind of progress I want to make at the rate I want to make it? What cheesy habits, old or new, if I could unstick myself from them, could free me, as Paul told Timothy to better “fan into flame the gift of God”?

In homage to the cricket’s sacrifice, I am cleaning up two pools of nacho cheese in my life:

1) My snooze alarm. It constantly sucks away my morning prayer time because a snooze alarm to me is as a thimble-full of powder to a crackhead: If I hit it even once, I’ll hit it again and again. And, bam! An hour wasted. Ergo, I am going to Target today to buy an alarm clock with no snooze.

2) My ADD tendencies. Instead of buzzing from task to task like a honeybee targeting flowers of opportunity, I am recommitting myself to living more strictly by my Daytimer again. That always makes me more productive.

Of course, I will have to remain vigilant, because the insidious thing about nacho cheese is that it changes with the seasons of life. Sometimes it might be overwork, and at other times laziness, pride, or some productivity-sapping habit that keeps us from excellence. In some seasons, the cheese is an addiction or some other serious sin. And sometimes the cheese is deceptively uncheeselike — a flirtation with sin that seems harmless, but will likely deepen into a killing quagmire.

At the Chargers game, the eight-year-olds eventually lost interest in the cricket’s predicament, and the kid sitting next to me kicked the cardboard boat up under his stadium seat. Later he kicked it out again, stepped in the cheese, then stepped on my foot, leaving a nasty orange smear on my right Ugg boot.

No problem, I told him, smiling: Nacho cheese is washable.