RENÉE writes:

I just started reading a book, The Long Dark T-Time of the Soul, by one of my favorite science fiction authors: Douglas Adams. It was written in 1988. In it is the most perfect account of a young woman’s relationship with pizza. I normally would only have laughed at it. However, because I am under the tutelage of The Thinking Housewife, I know this is a sign of the times.  I think you will appreciate the description:

“She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table starring at red paper napkins for wasn’t real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.

London was the place she like living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in from of the TV?  What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English  that they couldn’t grasp this simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could describe –a pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially– then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.

‘To what?’

‘Deliver. Let me give you the address–‘

‘I don’t understand. Aren’t you going to come and pick it up?’

‘No. Aren’t you going to deliver? My address–‘

‘Er, we don’t do that, miss’.

‘ Don’t do what?’

‘Er, deliver.’

‘You don’t deliver? Am I hearing you correctly?'”

Laura writes:

Wow, Adams was really onto something, wasn’t he?

The “only thing she really missed” was pizza. All of civilization is reduced to this.

Aldous Huxley wrote of soma, the drug featured in The Brave New World, that it had, “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” Industrial-grade pizza is not quite that powerful, but it seems to have some magical ability to deaden higher expectations.

                                 — Comments —

Joe A. writes:

Mmmm, pizza. Loads of naturally occurring, non-artificial MSG and I&G are great. Mmmm, pizza.

 Laura writes:

When I write about this subject, I sometimes get e-mails from readers who are clearly in a state of pizza ecstasy. I wish I could help them, but they are too far gone and more serious intervention is warranted.

Daniel S. writes:

After reading your various posts on pizza it becomes harder and harder for me to enjoy pizza anymore. I used to be a pizza fiend, but now I cannot help but think of pizza as not only having the texture of cardboard or fiberglass, but as being the embodiment of the ugly, suffocating banality of modernity. I now no longer can view pizza with the lust and desire I once had in times past, but now have only a sense of dread when I am compelled to consume it.

Laura writes:

Someday all the pizza resisters —- that small remnant of sanity — will congregate in a forest somewhere and begin a new civilization. Or rather, carry on the old.

Laura adds:

Pizza delivery has its ugly side, as we see in this woman’s murder, discussed by Lawrence Auster at VFR. She was working as a pizza delivery woman when she was stabbed 50 times.

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