Extra Sausage

I didn't realize until he was getting ready to close the door that the guy I just delivered a pizza to wasn't wearing pants.

It was last summer, and I was delivering on the city's west side. This particular deliver was later in the evening--about 10 or so--and I was looking forward to going home. The way I usually deliver a pizza is like this: I walk up to the door, greet the person, then pull their order out of the bag and set it on top of the bag so I don't burn my hand. I remind them of the total, take their cash, then hold the order out and let them lift if off the top of the hot bag. This was exactly what happened here.

He came to the door, I pulled his pizza out of the bag and told him the price. I took the cash and held the pizza out until he took it off the top of the bag. Because of the way I hold the oder out to the customer, I couldn't see him from about mid-chest down until I lowered the bag. That was when I noticed his penis was flapping at me.

But the whole time before that, he had been completely nonchalant about the fact that his pork and beans were in the apartment hallway. Nothing. When he answered the door, there was no looking from my eyes down to his waist and back up; no "lookit what I've got" eyebrow raise; he didn't answer the door with a hearty "How's your evening? Look at my penis!" So the whole time that I'm holding his pizza out to him and he's counting out ones and handing me the cash and taking the pizza, I had absolutely no inkling what was down there. Then I lowered the bag and went to put the cash in my pocket...and there's this guys lil spittin' cobra looking at me with its one good eye. I took a half jump back and think I even squeaked a little.

Even THEN, things didn't turn weird(er). He didn't wink and invite me in. There was no cheap innuendo about offering me a better tip. Nothing. In fact, he was so blasé about it that for a moment, I wondered if I was the weirdo because I was wearing pants. He told me to have a good night, and closed the door.

What. The. Hell.

I've had chicks answer the door in underwear before. I've gone to houses where people were sitting around looking at porn. Corey Taylor of the band Slipknot lives in our delivery area and he's fond of ordering pizzas for parties he throws and having naked ladies answer the door. So it's not like you don't get used to seeing strange stuff when you deliver things to people's homes late at night. But the thing of it is, when people DO shit like that, they usually do it for the effect. Chicks will answer the door in their bras to watch the guys eyes bug out at the gift of free boobies. People do shocking stuff for the shock. At least, people do things they THINK are shocking for the CHANCE to shock people. Most delivery drivers, we see a guy or a chick in their underwear, we just shrug and assume that means we're not getting tipped.

But this guy did absolutely nothing to call attention to it. And once I finally noticed, he STILL didn't do anything out of the ordinary. He didn't even laugh at my--admittedly--funny reaction. That made the experience even more strange.

Whenever someone tries to make the argument that delivery drivers don't deserved to be tipped, I think of that guys penisokyousee, now, that didn't come out right. (that's what she said) Let me try again: Whenever someone says delivery drivers don't deserve our tips, I think of that evening. People say "I tip waitresses because they bring my food, refill my drinks, and do other things that drivers don't do!" And I think "AND THEY NEVER SEE YOUR DICK!"

Zen and the Art of Pizza Delivery

My dad's a cop. He's been with the police force for 19 years or so now, but he got a late start in his police career, not going through the Academy until he was 42. But the thing of it is, my dad was a cop before he was a cop, if you know what I mean. He's always been the authoritarian, good with keeping tabs on things, willing to bust his ass for what he thought was right. So when he actually became a cop, it was like "oh yeah, this fits."

So, for better or worse, it's save to say that I've pretty much always been a pizza delivery guy.

It's easy to see how people could look at that statement and pull a negative connotation from it, or assume that I'm being self deprecating. After all, you think of pizza guys, you think of stoned slackers who want to work as little as possible and spend their free time riding their fixies and listening to Zepplin in their parents basement. I'm not going to say that any of that is false for a lot of drivers.

But I think that--whether they realize it or not--many drivers have a far more zen-like approach to life than the average person. We all do the job for the tips and the ability to have a decent amount of walking around cash in our pockets, but no one ever became a pizza driver under the auspices of becoming rich from it. And most of us are fine with that. Myself, for example: I only deliver three to four days a week, averaging right around 20-25 hours. My paychecks are juuuuuust enough to pay my rent and bills, and the tip money keeps me in food and DVD's. It's not very Rand-ian of me, but it certainly fits the "pursuit of happiness" portion of the American Dream.

Another thing that attracts many of us to the job, is the impermanence of the whole thing. I'm personal friends with the owners of my shop. I first started working for them when I was 18 and they had one store in town. Now I'm 34 and they've expanded to 11 locations in two states. I haven't worked for them the entire time, but rather I've come and gone pretty much as I've pleased. If I decide tomorrow that I've got to get out of dodge for a while, I can say the word and walk away from the job without causing any real disruption for them. And, when I finally arrived at my chosen destination, there's a pretty solid chance that I could get a job the same day delivering pizza somewhere. As I mentioned in my first post, there's not a huge screening process for drivers at most places; there are usually not a lot of questions asked beyond "do you have a car?" "can you find your way around?" and "can you keep your pants on for six consecutive hours?" As a general rule, as long as you can show up when asked, get food from one place to another without it going cold, and don't steal your bank at the end of the day, you can deliver pizzas whenever and wherever you want. It opens up a lot of options for a person who's looking for a more languid approach to life. Which is why it tends to attract stoned slackers. That and the pizza, of course.

I guess what I like most about all of the above, or the thing that most defines the majority of the drivers I know is that we don't tend to define ourselves by our jobs (says the guy with a pizza blog). I happen to deliver pizzas to pay my bills at the moment. I didn't always, and I might choose to stop tomorrow. But in the meantime, the method by which I get my cash isn't a reflection of who I am or what I want out of life; it's a means to end. Granted, not being defined by my job also means I'm not particularly fulfilled by it, either. But I've got other things to do that. My friends. My kittens. A ton of old generation video games. I don't come home at night worrying about the next day or sweating something that happened at work. I come home at night with breadsticks. And for now, that's a pretty sweet way to go.

I broke my taint today

I finally got to ride my new bike today. A fixed gear, for anyone who's interested in such information. I hadn't actually "ridden" a bike in probably 4 years or so, but I bought a new one so that I could add another dimension to the slimmer, more active, "now with more sexy!" me that I've been working on and I've been looking forward to a day that was dry/warm/free enough to give it a spin. Today was that day.

The actual ride number one went pretty well. There will be an adjustment period to get used to actually riding again, but I expected that, and I wound up making the ride from my gym to my apartment--about 45 blocks--in right around 20 minutes. The ride TO the gym will probably be a different story, as it's mostly uphill, but today I felt pretty good. I got home, whipped up a bowl of oatmeal and sat down to watch the first 140 hours or so of Ken Burns' "The Civil War" (oh, General McClellan. You're so gosh darned lovable with your borderline treasonous rhetoric and crippling military ineptitude!). All was well.

Well, that is, until about 4:00, when I got up to get ready to join a friend for a bite to eat. Lying down on my living room floor, surrounded by oatmeal and kittens, everything was sunshine and lolly pops. Standing up and trying to walk around, however, was all screaming pain and flaming taint*. Seriously, I know I was concentrating on not getting hit by cars and everything, but I still figured I would remember having the bicycle seat actually plunge into my ass. Especially if, as it seems to feel like, it had gone up there sideways. I mean, what the fuck?

I've never had this problem before. I don't mean to brag or anything, but there was a time when I was the 10th or 12th best horse rider at the Dubuque, Iowa YMCA Day Camp. And I never remember getting particularly saddle sore. It's true that I haven't ridden a bike in a while, and not regularly since I was in Junior High, but when I think back to those times, I never once remember wanting to rub Icy Hot on the underside of my coin purse.

And while we're on THAT topic, let me just say for anyone who's thinking that possibly sounds like a good idea that it totally is not. Icy Hot is great on shoulders. Arms, chests, thighs and calves are all fine, too. But don't go anywhere NEAR that whole butt/taint/dangles and orbs area. Sweet Jesus, it's like someone hit my dusty runway with a tazer. While kicking me in the sack. With another tazer. Made of Icy Hot.

I've been looking at different seats for my bike. It's something I was probably going to do anyway, since I'd planned on customizing it a bit when I had the cash. But now that I know that my current seat is made of granite and the fiery tongue of Satan himself, I think the seat issue has been upgraded to "necessity". I am, however, happy to say that it hasn't dimmed my love for my new bike. Gritting through the pain (and the residual burning of my pelvis's version of Dresden), I actually managed to mount up again when I got back from dinner and take a dying light spin around the block. I won't have time to ride it tomorrow, but you can bet that I'll be back out there again Saturday. But that's one of the wonderful things about getting involved in a regular workout program; once you get beyond the starting aches and pains, not only do you start looking forward to your regular workouts, but you start looking for other ways to start being a healthier, more fit person. And enjoying them.

So I'm a bike rider now, or at least I will be, once I either toughen up my ass crack or find a seat made out of cotton and baby seal eyes.










*"Flaming Taint" is currently sitting at #5 on my list of "greatest band name ideas", and I've officially called "dibs". So any of you out there who have been reading my blog in search of the perfect name for your punk band: move along. There's nothing to see here, bitches.

Hey ladies, he's single!

OK. Brace yourselves, female readers, because I'm about to drop a world of cute on ya, and I'm not going to be held responsible for any knee-buckling-related injuries that happen as a result. You ready? Then drink it in.

I Flipped a Baby Off Today

The thing you need to understand is, my kitten is a fucking asshole.

Actually, I have two. Frank and Starbuck. Starbuck is so named because Battlestar Galactica is the greatest thing to ever happen to television and Starbuck is the greatest thing to happen to Battlestar Galactica. Frank is named Frank because my ex has the imagination and sense of humor of an empty cardboard box. This is Frank:

Frank is a good kitten; impossibly cute, hilariously timid and, for lack of a better word, a very polite little guy. Look at him, all sittin there. Good kitty. Goooood kitty.

And then...there's Starbuck.



He's the more social of the two and definitely the more vocal. He's also the more evil.



People don't believe me, because he's small. But they don't live with him. They don't see all the things he does to drive me crazy. He's rude. Selfish. Pushy. Demanding. And gets into everything. Evil.



I leave a box of kleenex out, 'Buck is shredding them. I fill their water bowl, 'buck knocks it over. He gets up in the windows and knocks down the blinds. Gets behind the entertainment center and unplugs all the cords. Hops up on the counter and eats my food. EVIL



So. Like I said, one of my kittens is a fucking asshole. Early this morning my alarm went off and I spent a little too much time relaxing in bed afterward, causing me to have to rush through the rest of my routine and get to my workout. I drank my milk, ate my toast and off I went. When I walked out the door, I was in just enough of a hurry that I left my glass on the counter top, rather than putting it in the sink. Frank didn't mind one bit. He manged to go about his kitty life without paying that glass any mind whatsoever. Frank is polite enough that I'm sure he'd have offered to wash it for me, but for his lack of thumbs. Starbuck, on the other hand, needed to know what that thing was all about. He knows he's not supposed to be on the counters. And I KNOW he knows, because when he gets up there and I notice, he hops down and runs away the moment I stand up to go get him. Bastard.

So Starbuck spends the next hour thinking about that glass. But because he's evil, he waits until I get home to do anything about it. I walk in, sit down and take off my shoes. I like to sit quietly for a bit when I get home from my workouts and just kind of feel everything buzzing. It's nice. But my reverie this morning was ruined by The Yellow One. He waited till I was nice and relaxed, then hopped up on the counter, meowed to get my attention, then--looking me right in the eye--he reaches out one little paw and casually knocks the glass off the edge of the counter. Shatter. That was a matched set you little cock hole.

Swearing ensued. Starbuck ran and hid where ever it is that he goes when I'm pissed at him. Frank, bless his little heart, ran to his favorite hiding place for when things get loud: under the kitchen table. I haven't got the heart to tell him that I can totally see him under there and could reach him if I really wanted to. I swept up the remains of the poor glass, dumped them in the trash and went to work before I skinned Starbuck.

My first three deliveries of the day totaled $212 and some odd change. They resulted in exactly $3.00 in tips. And then things got dead. No deliveries, no phone calls, nothing. Great day. So when things die down like that, they send us out "couponing": walking door to door and putting coupons in mailboxes, taped to doors, or handed to employees of businesses in an effort to drum up a little business. I couponed a couple of residential blocks, then went to the mall. I handed coupons out to a few of the stores then went to the food court for a sandwich. The lousiness of the day had me in such a foul mood that I decided to walk around for a bit to try and blow off a little steam. I walked to the upper level and stood, leaning against a railing, looking down into the lower level of the center court. The mall has an easter display set up, with some poor schmoe in an Easter Bunny suit for the kiddies to get their picture taken with. Does that ever go well? I mean, it's always some kid who's too small to know what the hell is going on and has no idea why mom is handing him off to some gigantic monstrosity that looks like HR Geiger and Walt Disney had sex in your nightmares. They can't pay the guy in that suit enough to deal with all the screaming he must endure in the course of a day. Plus, it's the Goddamned Easter Bunny. What does he SAY to kids? It's not like Santa, where you can tell him what you want and he'll lie and say ok. No one gets presents from the Easter Bunny. It would be all:

"What do you want for Easter, little boy?"

"An X-Box!"

"...how about you just color some eggs and I'll stick them under the couch for you?"


Anyway, I'm watching the horror-fest below and up comes this lady with a baby. Thing can't be more than 18 months old, but I didn't get to count its rings or anything, so I'm not certain. She puts baby onto Harvey's lap, and steps back so the kid running the camera can take a picture. I'm surprised when the baby doesn't start crying. He actually seems pretty cool with the whole thing, except that he's not at all interested in looking at the camera. So the camera girl starts doing all the stupid thing that people who photograph kids for a living do to get their gnat-like attention spans to focus. She's making "brrrr" sounds. Squeaking a toy. Snapping fingers. Calling the kids name in ultra-high pitched voices. But baby's not having it; he's just not looking at the camera.

He's looking at me.

I've always thought it was kind of unnerving how babies can stare at something and they never seem to blink enough, until it gets to the point where your eyes start to water on their behalf. And this baby has got his lidless stare focused up right into my face. I've locked eyes with an infant and he won't stop staring. Mom and camera girl are clapping and singing and "yoo hoo"ing and all he does is keep right on staring at me and all I can keep thinking of is how this baby is willfully ignoring the person who cares for it, just like Starbuck and why won't this baby look at its mother and why won't this baby listen and why the HELL won't he just GET OFF THE GODDAMN COUNTER...

And that's when it happened. All that frustration just bubbled right on up and my arms shot out completely of their own accord. Yes, I said arms. Plural. I whipped out both guns and gave the kid a double deuce.

Look, I'm not saying it was my greatest moment as a human being. Part of me felt bad the moment it happened. Appalled, even. So was the lady who had been standing a few feet away from me.

"Did...you just flip off that baby?"

"What? No. I...know the guy in the suit. I was flipping HIM off." Like that's better: I flipped off the Easter Bunny. No worries.

She gave me a look like I had just farted on her grandmother and walked away. I went back to handing out coupons. Eventually things picked up at work and it turned into an ok day that mercifully ended early. I came home, kicked off my shoes and flopped into my chair. Starbuck hopped up into my lap. He looked at me, purring slightly, then dropped his head under my chin and nuzzled my neck. All's well again. For now.

And I'm not going to lie: flipping off that baby helped.

Love

I was in love once, you know. I was 8, and her name was Karissa Jacobsen.

No really, she meant the world to me. She was a cute little redhead with this splash of freckles across her nose. Karissa was the perfect girl; she liked to run, she wore dresses but didn't like pink, and she knew--just knew--that there was no way Bobba Fett could ever beat up Chewbacca.

We were in the same second grade classroom, and we would hold hands when we walked down the hall to music class. She lived about a half a mile from me, and I would always ride past her house with my friends when we rode our bikes. Every time she saw us go by through the big picture window in her living room, she'd run up to it and wave. I would do what 2nd grade boys do when around other 2nd grade boys, and stick my tounge out at her, and her smile never dimmed because she knew this was the highest form of affection a 2nd grade boy could possibly bestow upon a 2nd grade girl.

There was absolutely no reason why Karissa and I shouldn't have lived happily ever after and made absolutely dozens of babies together, as soon as we figured out how babies were actually made and got over our initial revulsion and decided that baby-making might be kind of fun. But over the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade the city of Dubuque re-formed a couple of school disctricts, and as luck would have it I wound up being the only person from my class who was moved to another elementry school.

Being a pre-teen is a curious thing. I could have called Karissa at any point in the ensuing years, but we went to different schools, so it just didn't seem like something to do. I still rode by her house with my friends on a weekly basis, but don't remember ever seeing her through the window again. Dubuque was, at the time, only a city of about 66,000 people but I never ran into her anywhere else. Even now, I sit here and think about that fact and it seems weird to the point of being impossible.

Karissa and I wound up going to the same Junior High School for a year, but by that time I was undersized and kind of geeky and she was a 13 year old girl and kids can be pretty mean most of the time. Those who say absence makes the heart grow fonder have probably never tried spending their formative years away from something they were fond of. Also, I'm not completely sure "fonder" is a word.

2nd grade love is the best kind of love in the world. Mainly because it's completely unencumbered by most of the things we as adults associate with love. She made me smile and I made her smile and we liked playing games together and I didn't even mind holding her hand. She would call me "cute" and I would stick out my tounge, and we both knew that those things somehow meant more than we actually understood. As people get older, those things take a back seat and people feel this need to manifest love in more quantifiable ways. In doing so, the base emotion of the thing tends to get obfuscated and the actual act of loving becomes much more complicated. We can't love like 2nd graders love, and the day we realize that is one of those dissapointing rites of passage that we all go through in becoming adults.

I haven't seen Karissa Jacobsen since the last day of 7th grade. My family moved to Des Moines the next year, and I've gone off and done...whatever it is that I've done since then while Karissa has quite possibly stayed in Dubuque and made babies with someone else by now. Some things don't change: I still think redheads are adorable, I still know that Chewbacca is the best fighter around, and I still have a tendancy to stick my tounge out at times when I probably shouldn't. But some things do change--have to change--in order for us to become responsible people who vote and raise families and accumulate too much credit card debit. One of those things, unfortunately, is leaving the Karissas of our lives behind now and then. Karissa is a fond memory not only because you don't realize how cool 2nd grade was until you're about 25, but because she represents a lot to me. The purity of innocence, the convictions of youth, and the beauty of possibility.

We can't love like 2nd graders. But we could all stand to be just a little more innocent.



Also, I just looked it up and 'fonder' is indeed a word. But it totally sounds fake.

Burger King Owes Me $2133.90

Here's one thing that I've noticed about fast food. Actually, this is one thing that I've noticed about every food establishment I've eaten at, from McDonalds to Les Halles, but--as the title clearly states--I most commonly see it in fast food establishments. This may be because I continue to be an unambitious economic under-performer who has spent more of his independent years subsisting on various dollar menus then he has asking the sommelier to give the '83 Lafite time to breathe, but at this point I'm into full fledged digression, so let's leave that topic for another day.

Back on point, one thing that I've found interesting is that menu prices change as economic factors do; a Big Mac doesn't cost now what it did, say 10 years ago. Or 5. One thing that HAS remained surprisingly consistent, however, is the price of tomatoes. Regardless of what, say, a Whopper has cost me over the past decade, Burger King has, in the same time span, always charged .30 for extra tomatoes. It's like how stuff on TV keeps getting sold at $19.99, no matter what happens with inflation; Whoppers go up, Whoppers come down, tomatoes hang tight at .30.

So here's where my (pun alert!) beef comes in: Suppose you go to Burger King right now and order a Whopper. Prices vary depending on where you live, but at the place down the road from me, you can have one for $3.49. Now suppose you really like tomatoes and want a couple extra on that bad boy. You can, as they say, "have it your way" for an extra .30. Awesome.

Now suppose you're like me, and you think tomatoes are nastier than a Dustin Diamond sex video. Suppose on the list of "things you'd like to eat", tomatoes come in somewhere between "Akebono's thong" and "your own tongue". So you ask for a Whopper with NO tomatoes. How much does your $3.49 Whopper cost THEN?

$3.49. You see where I'm going with this.

Places charge extra for certain things because of the associated cost with getting MORE of that thing. Tomatoes are historically expensive fruit (vegetables?) to procure, so charging extra for an extra helping is only fair. I don't begrudge them that. But I, who have never in my life partaken in a Burger King tomato, have saved the company literally thousands of dollars in associated cost by not having them on my sandwiches. If you charge extra to HAVE extra, shouldn't it stand to reason that you would get charged LESS for HAVING less? This happens to us everywhere we look: my own pizza joint has the usual "specialty" pizzas; supreme, taco, meat, etc. And if you order one with extra of something, there's an additional charge. Order one without something, and the price doesn't move. This, I don't mind saying, is part of the reason why I'm fairly convinced that I'm the only non-bastard on the face of the planet. I understand this slight!

So I've taken the liberty of making a few calculations, based on the (approximate) number of times I ordered Whoppers from Burger King before I stopped frequenting that establishment and extrapolated out the price of all those tomato portions I didn't eat. It comes to roughly $2133.90 and Burger King, I'm asking for a refund.

I realize that I'm the only one tilting at this particular windmill. But think of this: if I WASN'T the only one, this issue would suddenly cease to be so Quixotic. If we ALL complained about being charged for things we didn't buy, they'd stop doing it. So, in effect, I'm only tilting at a windmill because you aren't. I know, right? I just blew your mind all over your face.

Let's see how long this lasts

So this is my blog. Ostensibly, it's a blog about delivering pizzas and related mental flotsam and jetsam, but I very highly doubt it'll all be about pizzas. Because, frankly, making pizza delivery interesting--in any meaningful day-in-day-out kind of way--is difficult.

Pizza guys are in kind of a weird karmic spot. We technically work in the food industry, but we don't have the years of training and artistic sensibilities of trained chefs; we spend the bulk of our days in our vehicles, but there's no exhaustive training process, ala long haul truckers or NASCAR drivers; we're delivery people, but don't even get the hipster romanticism of bike couriers.

No my friends, the person who brings you your pizza rarely has any special qualifications or skills that he brings to the task of not dropping your food. Delivery drivers aren't even that strenuously vetted in most cases: as long as you have access to a semi-reliable vehicle and can prove yourself reasonably willing and able to refrain from masturbating onto a customers front step, you've got a job waiting for you.

Which isn't to say that I'm completely cynical about my job. Just that I'm self aware enough to know where it puts me on the food chain of "things people will reliably want to check out when they should be working instead."* So, from time to time, I'll write about other things that strike me. Maybe I'll review a movie from my DVD collection. Perhaps I'll turn extra-meta and blog about how I'm avoiding doing my dishes by blogging about avoiding doing my dishes. I can't promise you that you'll laugh all the time. Or, at least, I can't promise that the laughter won't be directed at me, rather than with me. Though, I guess as long as YOU'RE laughing, what do you care where it's going?

Anyway, this is entry number one. If you're reading this, you can feel free to tell all of your friends that you were there from the beginning. Though if you're going to do that you might want to do it soon since (with my propensity for following through on things), the end might be three or four days hence. In the mean time, feel free to check back for new posts. I don't promise daily content, though I'll certainly try. If there are things you want to know or would like to read about, drop me a line and I'll take it under advisement. If you wind up liking something, tell your friends; like everyone else on the internet, my sense of self worth is tied almost entirely to hit counts and friend totals.

Mahalo.

*The answer, depending upon how much you can get away with looking at from your workplace server, is somewhere between 8th and 119,990th. I know I place under things like: sports, politics, reddit.com, facebook, twitter, email forwards from your grandmother and LOLcats. Then, for that magic few of you who work for places too stupid or trusting to install a content filter, there's always porn.