Stuffed Crust Pizza

What ever happened to stuffed crusted pizza, that perfect conflagration of overindulgence, the paragon of dinner decadence? It's existence opened up to me a panoply of culinary possibilities the wattage of my considerations were before too naive to consider. Perhaps, we were all too naive to consider. Never had I understood before how food could not just be prepared, but engineered. That its catacombs were capable of the legerdemain that would so delightfully conceal excess where there had only before been a point of respite for palate and compunction alike.

In the sadomasochism of our most savory pie, "crust" was our safe word.

"Cheese in the crust?" We asked, our incredulity struggling against the giddy percolations of what could be. "But it's already on the pizza. Are we allowed to do that?"

Where did this guilt come from? The stuffed crust pizza was no mid 80s perm, no early 90s flannel shirt, no late 00s blog. It was a flowering of the possibilities of the original conception of pizza. A miraculous step in the evolution of the form made all the more so for the simplicty of its design. So why do we struggle now to accept that this actually happened? Why is this a joke, something we laugh at like a youthful indiscretion, glad to have matured out of and survived?

Why is the stuffed crust not celebrated alongside the funnel cake, the cheddar dog, the chaco taco? This is America, is it not? What makes this country great, what has always made us so is our ability to determine with surgical precision how much of too much is just enough. And if history has taught us anything, it is that giving up is a sign of weakness. And that weakness is to be reviled, maligned, and hardened out of ourselves immediately upon discovery.

We have given up. We have grown lazy and soft. We have turned away from the dream that Pizza Hut realized, and why? Because of calories? Because of health consciousness? These are merely social constraints, fads pigeonholing the small minded to live life the way they think they should instead of the way they want.

Don't turn away, America. This is not just cheese we are dealing with here. This is cheese in places we never thought it could be. From here, if we take this up, adopt stuffed crust as the new norm so that then the only phrase becomes "unstuffed crust," there is no telling what me might achieve. The end of hunger. The end of peckishness. And gas prices so low that pizza delivery will becomes so affordable that the only thing keeping us from revelling in our new-found freedoms are the chains of social oppression from which we have already been freed.

Bundling

Today is the first cold day since it stopped being cold a while ago. If I had human sensation to do over again, I'd make warmth like being full so I could sate myself and go without it for a few hours until the effects of my last fill-up were ebbing.

As it is, cold pretty much sucks it out of me. I live about a 25 minute walk from where I spend my weekdays, and I decked myself out in a sweater, top coat and scarf only to still feel underdressed. The sting of a light headwind snatched from my eyes tears like a confession and I wiped them away before they could freeze against the piqued expanses of my dimed-out face.

And what did I see, my vision then clear of its liquid haze? A young woman, an old girl, a fool in gym shorts and flips flops, carrying a backpack and an easy gate, daring the early morning, as I, mourning my lack of daring, suffered the reverberations of our oldest schoolyard chants that even a girl can do it.

I never did make it to the top of the jungle gym.

Further Retrograde

On Wednesday of last week, I was walking out of Ellis Hall with a friend of mine on our way to the free lunch provided by the Episcopalian church down the street. My companion had with him several sheets of photocopy and told me that he had to learn this material in under three hours in order to present on it.

Having delivered a presentation the previous day and with the psychological and physical effects still fresh with me, I asked with equal sincerity and hyperbole, "Are you nervous!?"

But before I could hear his reply, my attention was stolen by one of the few young men who had just walked in the opposite direction and his mocking quip, "Are you nervous?!" I immediately wanted to confront this interloper, but general timidity and the ingrained strategy of pacifism as a means of self-preservation took over. Instead I complained to my friend what a jerk he was.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Listening to another friend of mine while waiting for lunch, I realized I hadn't heard 80 percent of what he'd said. Instead, I was stewing about my missed opportunity to dole out justice four knuckles at a time.

I wanted to tell him that this isn't high school anymore. That people don't do things like this even if they want to and that there's shame in acting with such a lack of civility and, really too, originality.

This isn't high school anymore. Save your complaints for you blog, buddy.

But mostly I wanted to tell myself these things, that the world is different, that people are different once they're not 17 anymore. They're better and nicer and more considerate. I wanted to tell myself this because there I was, after the fact, wishing I would have been the kind of guy who I've been training myself to become, the kind of guy who sticks up for himself, who can't stand rude behavior on principle and calls people on it, but instead only thinking until rage dissipated into torpor, consoling myself that some guys are just jerks and I'll have something ready to say for next time--just like I did in high school.

Thermo Biology

Walking out of the first hockey game I had attended in seven years, my friend and I noted that it was colder outside than before we had gone into the arena. A simple observation granted portent by its accuracy. My friend then said that his heart hurt from having to work so hard to maintain the steady temperature of his body.

As though provided by fortuity herself in all her vouchsafed garrulousness, one of the two young women in front of us returned that it wasn't your heart that provided this service, but your blood. I caviled that your heart pumps the blood that would otherwise et cetera, et cetera, thinking to myself how strange to be arguing with a stranger after a hockey game about something I had no scientific expertise to discuss. And how strange to be winning that argument so handily.

She must have clued into my lack of experience and asked my major, asserting moments later that as a one studying chemistry with a pre-med focus, she was more qualified in her ability to make the assertions I was seemingly full to the brim with.

I haven't had a major in three years.

It was dark, the hood on my jacket was pulled up,. The lines on my face were then as ripples on the waters illuminated by a cloud-covered quarter moon. The sorrows stamped across my brow from mounting worries delivered from the inexorability of time's tenebrous unveiling were lost to the recalcitrance of my protestations and the fact she was walking in front of me.

But here I was. An undergraduate again. And I had been asked the ultimate question. No query of religion, party affiliation, sports fandom slips as easily off the tongue as any 20-year-old asking any other how they have decided to sum up their life so far and aspirations thereafter. And then we would talk about what dorms we lived in. What dining halls we ate at. What classes we've taken. And not really be interested in any of the answers, and isn't it better, I thought, to start talking to someone this way, to jump right into the vicissitudes of discourse and treat trivialities as if they were truly important because, why else talk about them?

I told her "English," I'll never see her again, nor would I recognize who she was if I did.

Solipsisms

It is not without some irony that I venture into blog writing, having complained about those who complain and finding when left to my own devices, complaining is what often comes out of me.

But artful complaints, acute in their observations, and sincere in their (titular...?) incredulousnesses. When I get worked up over something, it's worth my time to be angry.

My time. And now, here it is for you (the reader) to observe, balance on the palate of your considerations, roll around on the tongue of your judgments, and swallow or spit out at your discretion. Your time.

It seems inherently solipsistic to write about my life as if it is important enough to merit the idea that others might find value in it as well.

And even more so to be cheeky enough to point this out in the very first thing anyone (the reader) knows about the idea man thinking up all the stuff on this page. The only truth comes through the self. Self is formed through interactions with the world. To interact with the world is to suffer. To suffer is to have reason to complain.

"I had some friends over last night and we all stayed up talking till really late. By the time we were too tired to keep it up and they had all gone home, I felt cared for and satisfied in a way that only happens with the deepest and truest personal connections. I slept like a baby. So, I don't think I agree with you at all. Actually, I'm not sure you are even using the word 'solipsism' correctly."

Yeah, well, I think you should work out the kinks of any definitions that are giving you problems. I wouldn't want burden your mind with any narcoleptic inconsistencies.

Some people should just keep it to themselves until they get home and can put it all down in their blog.