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.

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.

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.

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.