Battle Not With Monsters

I love my girl desperately, but sometimes I’m convinced that she is Loki the Trickster, spinning me off on fools’ errands to wind me up, turn to her side, and eventually do her unquestioned bidding. I secretly fear that someday she will show me the Queen of Hearts, and when my head clears I’ll find myself standing over the body of Rachael Ray with a shotgun and a rapidly-wilting erection.

A perfect example of this happened this morning when, as we were staggering toward Dunkin’ Donuts in the pitch dark to get coffee while I had been awake maybe seven minutes, she casually mentioned, “I was checking out one of my food blogs, and there was a big thread asking whether or not people liked to put ranch dressing on their pizza.”

“…What?”

She giggled shortly and said, “Yeah, I guess down south, a lot of people dip their pizza in ranch dressing.”

My mind recoiled in horror, as if after a long night of drinking a sharply-dressed gentleman smelling faintly of sulfur had shown me a cocktail napkin with a short, hand-scrawled formula proving that Pi was actually 11. When I tried to picture it in my head, my throat would close to choke back the dry heaves. The very concept was the Two Girls One Cup of food.

“What do they call this… abomination? The Ron Jeremy Special?” I choked.

My girl giggled again. “Yeah, maybe you can write about this on your Web site.”

Which is precisely what I sat down to do, foregoing breakfast and getting in touch with my inner seventh-grader to write things like, “Do these fucking culinary monsters not understand how it looks to wrap their hands around a long piece to deliver a creamy load to the throat?”

But after a few paragraphs, I realized that something didn’t feel right. I was coming up with nothing more profound than, “You ruin food and are therefore stupid! And I’ll bet you enjoy sex with men! Men with ranch dressing on them! Ha ha!” and something felt strangely out of place… and that’s when I realized it: I was engaging in my first real act of food snobbery.

Even though it was about pizza, which I hold almost as sacred as the Holy Origin Story of Batman, I was still casting aspersions on someone based on their taste in food. And that’s a slippery fucking slope; it starts with defending pizza, but pretty soon you find yourself in the comment section of food blogs, writing in ALL CAPS about how real truffles are better than truffle oil, all while completely ignoring the fact that both of them smell like a three-day dead guy in an Alabama attic.

Suddenly I flashed back to some of my questionable food choices. Like the time I had my second and pretty much last experience with marijuana, which turned out to be laced with something the provider called “The Kicker” but which I like to call “poison,” and I went home and ate an entire box of uncooked ziti dipped in generic store-brand peanut butter. Or the time me and my buddy Ken MacDonald killed a handle of Jack Daniels and ate raw, microwave-thawed bread dough smeared with Jim Beam mustard so we wouldn’t have to spend money on a pizza, or perhaps die.

So who am I to judge? You want to ruin a perfectly good slice with ranch dressing? Fine; you can watch me ruin a plate of Tater Tots with chicken gravy and a side of Marlboro Lights and we’ll call it detente, or at least mutually assured destruction.

Hell, in the interest of bringing the nation together, perhaps sometime in the next few days, I will even take a page from Steve at The Sneeze and try a slice of pizza slathered in creamy ranch dressing, and then report about the experience here on The American Jerk.

But first, I’ll need to teach my girl the lyrics to Stayin’ Alive.

[tags]foodies, pizza, ranch dressing, dark humor, satire[/tags]