Let's Have Fun With Pizza!

“Are we paying for the pizza with the credit card?”

It sounds so ‘adult’ when you say things like that.

“Well, I don’t think we have any cash on us,” she replied.

I check my wallet just in case. I pull out: one almond. “That’s in there as a good-fortune charm to make sure I never go penniless; in other words, to ensure that the last thing I’d ever pull out of my wallet is an almond,” I exclaim. “I must need a new wallet.”

So, we used the credit card. Shantoozy had given the last of our cash to the dentist because Shantoozy went to the dentist today. She is a grown woman and she knew she had to go, so no-one needed to force her there, wailing and resisting. When I have to go to the dentist I know it, too, and go there even though it will hurt a bit and be boring.

I am thirty-three years old now, and for most of my life my favourite food has been pizza.

Only after I’d noticed she was finding eating her pizza quite painful on the ol’ muncher, did I latterly find out that she had actually undergone a root canal while in the dentist’s chair.

If it were me instead, she would have heard every facet of my dental ordeal in explicit detail:

“…But the eighth time Doctor Renson put the dental saw’s unforgiving interrogator to my second premolar I hearkened a slight octave shift, thus realising that the blades now carving out a higher pitch of air were rotating ever so slightly faster than previously they had. This was due, obviously, to the fact that this particular layer of the tooth was showing the beginnings of tartar-induced decay and that’s strength had been subsequently compromised. Then the sawing desisted. The dentist retracted the saw, sighing through his quavering hygienic face mask, as I…”

Well, she has the male brain in our relationship and I have the female brain, or so ‘Blog Things’ informed us when we sat their little quiz. Then again, they also told my friend, who is in an established pop-punk rock band, that he was ‘emo’ and he swears that ain’t the facts.

We kept eating the pizza. Shantoozy was down to her last slice and became concerned that I was about to commit theft when I asked her to shut her eyes, reaching as I was for her exposed vegetarian triangle.

I beseeched her not to worry, that I would not eat her final slice and, because we have constructed a strong, reliable bridge of trust between us, she relaxed and closed her eyes. I held the pizza slice above her head and told her to open her eyes as the pizza slice hove slowly into her field of vision just like the triangular Star Destroyer at the start of the original ‘Star Wars’ film, guided by my hand, and accompanied by laser-beam blasts emitted from my mouth. Half an olive was Princess Leia’s spaceship and it got sucked up to the bottom of the slice, just like in the movie, which was something else I loved as a kid, and as a kid, boy, was 'Star Wars' something else! People born later than the Nineteen-Seventies really don't know just how impressive a cultural event the original 'Star Wars' trilogy was.

Of course, at my current age one does ‘adult’ things like devote yourself to your art, and fuck regularly and soberly, and partake of the occasional metre-and-an-half long party-line of coke, and you keep your toys packeted ’cause they’re worth more that way.

Yet, I don’t really like that last one. I prefer it when toys come in a box that you can open and close, and remove from and put back into, without damaging its novel aesthetics, unlike blister-packs where you have to rip the plastic bubble off of a piece of backing-card to get at the trinket inside.

I still have the action figure collection that I built up in my childhood, and even though I now appreciate the injustice of their manufacture by kids in a sweatshop in Hong Kong, I also still have my inner child, whom I hope shall always be there despite the evil that human beings perpetuate like Darth Vader or, from Mel Brooks' 'Spaceballs', Pizza the Hutt.