deep dishin'

pizzzzzza.

There is a deep dish pizza place near where I grew up that resides in an endless cozy fever of nostalgia for me, defying quantification in our screen-filled existences. Yet to the screen I sprinted this evening while thinking of the beloved restaurant.

I spent more than twenty minutes attempting to locate photos of the joint from the 90’s when it was all brutal and beer-stained wood panelling from the 70’s, but I was unsuccessful. It occurs to me that at some point in the internet’s chokehold on my coming of age, being able to find documentation and certainty that things existed became oddly paramount. Most people’s present lives are this way too. Things that happen have words or photos or AI about them. Where else would they reside, word of mouth? The collective consciousness? A forgotten inaccessible Flickr account?

Alas, I could not find what I remembered. That smokey, cheesy, dank pizza place may as well have been figurative. I felt awoken from a dream to not be able to have the recollection corroborated. I could ask my parents and siblings about it, and they would surely remember. They might even have some photos in our physical photo albums of it. I could have asked them to dig around for that.

But I confess I felt at a loss being unable to instantly confirm what I wanted to with the trusty internet. It’s a swift magic power people have become pretty good at taking for granted.

This despite the fact that whatever I’m seeing online is so far removed from context, moment, circumstance that it’s less of a portrait and more of a caricature. Therein I guess lies a lot of the problem of this rhythmic omnipresent cataloguing our daily dance includes.

But then I found some new verve. Aside from eyewitness reporting that incriminate the wrong person, memory can be fucking awesome. More special when it can exist just for the ponderer. The caverns of our visual and emotional minds have strength.

Especially when I am seeking kindness, I can find it in stories and images and audio clips that are chiseled into my head. And when I don’t immediately want classification of whatever I’m ruminating upon to be squeezed through a like/dislike dichotomy, damn what a treat. Just getting space to exist in that mental cavern, doodling and daydreaming are some of my favorite things to do when I’m not otherwise occupied.

The pizza place is now modernized in much the same way as any Chili’s or hotel “bistro”; bland, plain, clean, bright. The eternal Apple Store look. The pizza tastes the same, its lactose and calories just as daunting.

But like my love for movies, music, cartoons, and nostalgic crap in general it is not as much about what life is but how life feels. These fuzzy visions of dart boards and neon signs and adults exhaling cigarette smoke like dragons in some exotic space-like chunk of the mall where my cousins and I played with coloring books, incandescent lighting hypnotizing us to near sleep by the time we braved the winter cold for the minivan. This existed and continues to bake in my mind’s eye, a delicious golden crust of the soul.

I guess this post is just to say that I, like all the other hot girls in your life, like pizza.