(piece of shit pizza)

YOU and the world were totally fucked, but it had come on slow and all-of-the-sudden hadn’t happened just yet. One day you went to an Italian restaurant on your way to a friend’s house and had two slices of pizza. It was Sicilian style. Afterward you had a double macchiato. The pizza could have been good, but it wasn’t. The cheese and dough were of good quality and the tomatoes in the sauce were most likely fresh as they were in season. The restaurant was fairly new, and was trying to make an impression: nice kitsch vinyl tablecloths with flower imprints, paper place-mats and a candle at every table (although yours was not lit). Classic Italian music played on the radio and the walls were quaintly decorated with the regalia of Italian peasantry. All of this, and you one of three in the joint, and the pizza came out tepid, under-cooked and late. The cheese was a half inch of pasty mucus overlying still-damp dough, and any flavor the sauce may have had was squeezed out by the ham-fisted helping of lard that this constituted. But you ate it. You ate the whole thing. You even ate the crusts and the last bite that you knew you weren’t hungry for. And then you drank your macchiato (don’t get yourself started on that), paid your bill, tipped and left. As you stepped through the door the first clue to the secret was let loose from the sirens’ throats: this is exactly why it all will end. This complacent lovemaking to mediocrity, this normalization of deluding ourselves into the acceptance of crap, the sheer fucking effort of opening a restaurant, decorating painstakingly and all the foreign children manufacturing the vinyl and paper and candles sent round the world burning fossils all the way – the sheer fucking cost of all of it – the whole world commits together through modern trade, finance and technology to deliver: THIS PIECE OF SHIT PIZZA. The sheer fucking effort of mediocrity. Through vast seas that once made legends of men, on ships larger than islands, burning the concentrated remains of the fantastical creatures of the long ago, by the sons and the daughters of a people that crossed oceans, deserts, mountains and wars comes this worthless porcelain plate with some thrown together starch and lard on it. And you take it. And you eat it. And you pay for it and you say nothing. It’s normal.  You comply.