Little Caesar's Crazy Calzony Pepperoni Pizza

I am hanging from a thread. At the very precipice of sanity, my mind and body on the verge of breakdown. I am numb to the extreme pain I am in. I know, somehow, that one more push will send me careening over the brink. And yet, I crave it. What would it be like, to be freed from the shackles of consciousness? I feel l'appel du vide.

Or is it

L'appel du pizza?

Little Caesar's Crazy Calzony Pepperoni Pizza

Like a gambler who bets their last dollar, I navigate to the Little Caesar's website. There is no future for me now. Only the unraveling agony of the present. This will not make me happy. Far from it. This is a tool of destruction wrought from the minds of the spiritually diseased. But I proceed.

The squat prison-like structure that houses my next mistake looms unassumingly on a dark highway. The sign out front flickers. I feel a deep kinship with it. At its characteristic Pizza Drive-Thru Window, I am handed my square box of regret. I am not mad. I chose this.

I arrive home. It is dark and cold, but the box's warmth is not reassuring. It is the heat of infection. Though I can feel it spread, I hold it close. Inside, I hesitate opening the box. It comes with a cup of marinara. That means something to me now. I could turn back. I imagine a better world, one that does not exist. I look to the bag of breadsticks. It has a message for me.

As you wish, Tiny Czar. I let go and gaze upon the error I have made.

The gossamer thread that ties me to reason loosens. Something has gone horribly wrong. My entire life, for one. I find a perverse satisfaction in the parallel. With an iron grip on my gradually decaying resolve, I reach forward to pry off a slice. I encounter a problem. I cannot tell if this had ever been, or had meant to be, sliced. Madness pulling at the edges of my awareness, I grasp an oozing fold and find no purchase.

I lose it. The weight of the absurd strains me to my limit. I cannot figure out how to eat this ridiculous pizza I bought at 10PM after working for twelve goddamn hours. The latest punchline in the interminable joke my life has become. With animalistic fervor I rip a piece from the profane oblong. I hesitate a moment. The poor, atrophied part of my brain concerned with self-preservation delivers a desperate entreaty. I ignore it and take a bite.

It tastes like nothing. Everything. Very salty. I hate it. I need it. In a frenzy all is devoured, the pizza, the sticks, an unhealthy amount of marinara. I distantly note the fervent protests of my digestive tract. The bread is crazy, the pizza is crazy, and I, too, am waving goodbye to bittersweet sanity.

In the condemned house that is my mind, I feel the last support beam give way. But do not worry.

I am the only one inside.

Madea Goes to Jail and the Transience of Identity

Picture this: It's late on a Saturday night, you are bored and want to watch a movie. But not a good movie, because there is something wrong with your brain. So you head over to [STREAMING SERVICE] and you see a film you've heard of, and one you're pretty certain you have a good hold of despite that. Madea Goes to Jail. What follows is a harrowing experience that can hardly be represented in words. But I guess I'll give it an shot.

Initially, the film presents itself as what one might expect. Madea, played by Tyler Perry, is an ornery old lady who apparently fucked up one too many times, and now is going to jail to meet a wacky cast of characters and learn a lesson or something. But then Madea leaves the courtroom. We stay and watch some completely separate characters. The actual main characters. Candy is a sex worker brought in on prostitution charges, and the prosecutor, Joshua, recuses himself as he knew her at some point in the past. What follows is a crash course in human misery, as every bad thing that could happen to a person happens to Candy. After one night back working on the streets, she is abducted and raped by a pimp, who plans to hold her captive until she escapes and seeks shelter with Joshua. When a local minister sets Candy up for a job interview, the man interviewing her sexually assaults her.

I could go over the laundry list of calamity that befalls Candy, but I think you get the point. What makes this film so bewildering to watch is that each of these scenes of tragedy is interspersed with scenes of Madea and her family being zany. You settle into the tone being dark and emotionally wracking, then Madea shows up for a sassy back-and-forth with Dr. Phil. It is impossible to get your footing with this movie. The listing says "Comedy." The description mentions nothing of tragedy.

What is the deal with this? I must mention I had never seen a Tyler Perry film before. Everyone I spoke to who has seen one of his films sat back like a jaded old schoolmaster and said, "Oh yes, they're all like that." One person's only comment was that it was a "funny movie." How could someone see every heart-wrenching event that takes place and come away with a bunch of yuks? It's simple. It's all in the name.

This film is billed as a comedy, and so that is what people see of it. Once they see Tyler Perry's name, they gloss over the details. Madea is a (supposedly) funny character, and her name is in the title, ergo the movie is a funny film. The content is almost irrelevant when we have nice little titles and genres to tell us what it is.

When does description cross the line into prescription? Is the film a comedy simply because it is labeled as such? Is it a comedy because it has some funny parts? Can it be a comedy even though most of the runtime would be better described as drama? Too often we take things by appearance, by how we think they should be sorted on first glance.

Most of the time with media, that works. If a movie is billed as a comedy and stars a comedic actor, we get what we expect. Sure, one or two sad things might happen in the film, but its primary purpose is to make you laugh. You pick what you want and that's the end of it. Life is rarely that simple.

The worst experience of your life can follow a moment of rare gaity.You can find yourself laughing at a funeral, mere minutes after crying the hardest you have ever cried. People can call you one thing your entire life and one day you realize you never fit in that mold at all. Films are made with intent. Indie or mainstream, somebody wrote a script and a bunch of people took their time to pick what parts they wanted in it until it appeared on your screen. Life has no intent. Things just happen. People just are.

The moral of Madea Goes to Jail arrives late in the film. While Madea and Candy are both incarcerated, Madea tells the group that you cannot be a victim, that you have to take responsibility for the things that happen to you. Shortly afterwards, both Candy and Madea are released from prison when it is revealed that the prosecutor has been padding charges, making all the cases she litigated invalid. Not a single thing about their escape from that situation was in their control. The film expects you to believe this moral it espouses while directly contradicting it with events portrayed in the film itself. It bills itself as a comedy, while bombarding me with more unfortunate events than those billed as dramas.

The labels we use are so inadequate at capturing life. So few things can be boiled down to a couple easily comprehensible terms. But we need them. You can't just think about everything all the time. We have hobbies, jobs, people to meet and things to do. You have to boil things down to handle everything being thrown at you day-to-day.

But there are times when you can't. When the words you used to describe yourself turn into a prison, a list of dos and don'ts. When the things people have said to you don't match up with what you can plainly see. When you've been submerged in an ocean of easily classified Comedies and Dramas, there falls into your lap that which defies these conventions. And though every signpost and label says it's one thing, you know it's not. It is not so easily categorized. The only question is:

Where do we go from there?

Pizza Hut's Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza

I furtively dialed a number with shaky hands. Glancing from side to side, making sure nobody was watching, I resolutely hit the call button.

"Thank you for calling Pizza Hut, how can I help you?" said the disembodied voice. An unwilling accomplice to my heinous premeditation.

"Hi, could I order the, uh, the Cheezit pizza"

"You want the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza?" they asked, blasé in the face of the uncanny.

"Yes, yes goddamn it."

Taken aback by my curtness, they began the next statement with an extra gentle tenor.

"Would you like that with pepperoni?"

I sighed, and a single tear ran down my cheek.

"Just fuck me up."

What is rock bottom? Is it a place? A feeling? Can it be a food?

Is it this food?

Is this food?

After a certain point in life, you assume you know how the world functions. Most of things you deal with day-to-day make sense. But then you start working a night shift and the most deranged minds on the planet gain employment at a pizza company R&D department. Day is night, dinner is breakfast, and everything you came to trust comes crashing down beneath you. As hard as I try, I cannot wrap my head around how this was meant to be a pizza. They couldn't even be bothered to use the one culinary term that gives one carte blanche to do as they wish, "deconstructed."

This idea, and I'm ashamed to admit it, wasn't doomed from the start. Burger King has had, on a few occasions, the illustrious Mac n' Cheetos, another snack melded with comfort food into a brobdingnagian chimera. But it worked. It was essentially just deep friend mac & cheese, a state fair staple, but breaded with Cheeto dust. I've always scrambled to get it before it discontinued again, but little did I know it seeded a virulent idea in some disturbed individual.

There's one thing, and one thing only, I am willing to give Pizza Hut credit for.

It sure looks like a Cheez-it.

When one cooks, it's important to have varying tastes and textures put together that mesh well with one another. You have the crust on a cheesecake, pasta in soups. What you do not do, is take a cheese-flavored cracker, turn it into a crust, and fill it with substandard pizza cheese. But unfortunately for all of us, that is what transpired.

In the interest of pure inquiry, I first took a bite without availing myself of the proffered marinara. I soon saw my mistake. For one instant there's the alluring taste of a beloved Cheez-it, but then it's gone, like a kiss on the wind.

Then there's nothing. It's an undifferentiated mass of grease and something I could, only after rigorous investigation and soul searching, describe as cheese. They could have put anything in there! The supposed lifesaver of this dish is the marinara, a condiment I am quickly associating with culinary failure. With merely a dip, you transform the bland tasteless chunk into a chunk that tastes like marinara. That's it.

The astonishing thing is, if you let it sit for a few hours, intentionally neglect what was once a hot meal prepared for your enjoyment, it almost, not quite, but almost, resembles its namesake. It comes so close to having a crunch. It comes so close to really existing as food.

Why did things have to turn out like this? Just because something seems like a good idea to the guys in marketing doesn't mean you have to put it in production and actually sell it to innocent people. We have to learn from this, as a society. There must be a better way!

There you go I did it.

Let's Watch Barbie Video Game Hero

We all carry with us the weight of our sins. Each of us has the secret knowledge of our regrets and misdeeds, and we all have different ways of serving penance for our mistakes. Some people deny themselves the comforts of life, like the simple extravagances we take for granted. Others subdue their needs in service of a greater cause.

I watch Barbie movies.

It was a cold, dark day when I saw it. Coat slick with freezing rain, hair matted to my forehead, I stumbled unknowingly into my bleak, impassive destiny. From the corner of my eye, burning like the ruins of Gomorrah, lay a neon pink display, housing what I wish I had never seen.

Barbie, Video Game Hero.

Get ready to power up! When Barbie™ magically gets pulled into her favorite video game, she is excited to see she's transformed into a fun roller-skating character. In the game, she meets Cutie, the lovable cloud-shaped friend, and Bella, the roller-skating princess. Together, they soon discover a mischievous emoji is trying to take control of the game. As they travel from level to level, Barbie™ must rely on her amazing gaming skills and out-of-the-box thinking to save her team and beat the game!

My hands, operating beyond my control, brought the DVD case to the counter. Face rigid with shame, I noted the cashier's befuddlement wordlessly. Driving home I felt the film's presence, like a baleful revenant, sitting beside me. Carrying it inside, the case seemed to grow heavier with each step, but I found myself unable to lessen my hold on it. I placed it on my desk, a watchful eye that refused to break its gaze. Now, the time has come, and I can avert my fate no longer. May God help us all.

Let's Watch: Barbie Video Game Hero

Sympathy for Raquelle

I've been watching a show called Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse lately. And you could say I've thought a little about it. In the same way that Newton thought a little about Calculus. It's a show about Barbie, living but also still a doll, with her family and friends, where every incarnation of the Barbie doll is canon.

The closest this show has to an antagonist is Barbie's frenemy, Raquelle. She, like every other character, seems to be fabulously wealthy with supermodel good looks. And yet, she's always trying to steal Barbie's spotlight (or boyfriend). Why? Isn't a life free of labor enough for her?

Let's begin by examining the object of Raquelle's ire, the very doll herself, Barbie. Barbie has had over 126 careers over her lifetime, and not because she gets fired a lot, she just gets bored. Nothing seems beyond the scope of her purview. Supermodel, racecar driver, even astronaut are just things Barbie did before she got tired of them. She has a network of devoted friends, a brand of clothing shops, impeccable judgement, loving sisters, and apparently the best boyfriend ever created. Despite being filthy rich and talented, Barbie retains her gracious nature, always willing to help a friend (or frenemy) in need. Barbie is the Übermensch, surpassing the limits of human development, never even deigning to seek reprisal for wrongs done against her. The next stage of humanity, a paragon of valor, ingenuity, and fashion.

Let me ask you something: How do you compete with the Übermensch? The short answer is: You can't. The rest of Barbie's friends are content being her cronies, ready at her whim to shower her with praise or bask in her glory. All except Raquelle. She's not content with her station in life. She wants more, she needs to surpass everyone's favorite polymath. But that's impossible. Barbie is perfect in every way (except for baking) and Raquelle has few, if any, skills. During Barbie's brief absence due to super fashion heroics, Raquelle was left to fill the void, but failed in every aspect. She can't act, be a runway model, or even advertise perfume.

The only time Raquelle seemed to prevail over Barbie was when Barbie let her. Having a bad hair day, Barbie decided to let Raquelle win for once, but her ever-adoring fandom refused to recognize Raquelle until Barbie faked a compliment. Barbie can't lose, the most Raquelle can hope for is a consolation prize. For poor Raquelle, this isn't close to a fair fight. Barbie's the dealer, and Raquelle knows the house always wins.

If only achievement were enough for Raquelle. When she found her way into an alternate dimension with a dull, self-deprecating Barbie, Raquelle quickly made her way to the top. A profitable boutique, zealous fans, the works. But it wasn't enough. Without the real Barbie to triumph over, it was all for naught. Raquelle doesn't want to be Barbie, she needs to beat Barbie.

So what recourse does she have? Raquelle can't submit herself to the will of Barbie, to her mass of weak-willed sycophants. She's unable to even enjoy simple companionship, Barbie's boyfriend Ken being really the only guy in town apart from Raquelle's brother, Ryan. Thus, bitterness. Scheming. Trying to find the one chink in Barbie's armor, the only specialization the queen has overlooked.

Can you blame her? She has her eyes set on stardom, but is destined for mediocrity. Nothing she tries ever succeeds, so she's stuck, mired in Barbie's gargantuan shadow. She seems full of herself, but it's just a front, a facade to convince herself life is still worth living. She's tired, and angry, and alone. All she wants is someone to acknowledge her existence, to stop looking in a mirror to prove she's real. She can't escape Barbie any more than she can escape her own inadequacy.

We may hate Raquelle. We may scorn and ridicule her. But what she represents is a fundamental part of the human experience. Through her spite and envy, she's the most human character in Malibu. She has foibles, tribulations, and nearly every single one of her enterprises ends in abject failure. Her far-fetched dreams remain unfulfilled, until all that is left is a sneering cynic who only longs for some attention. When we watch Raquelle, who's really looking into a mirror?

Amalgam Comics: Spider-Boy

In 1996, after a couple crossovers, DC and Marvel decided to do something fun together instead of fighting all the time. What they did was something nobody actually likes. It's called Amalgam comics. Sure, people liked it when they combined Batman and Wolverine, but does anyone care about Magneto and his Magnetic Men?! ...Okay, well, in Amalgam, they just combined two of their characters to make one that was either incredibly popular or whom everyone tried to flush from their mind as fast as possible. Try and guess which one this was.

Comic Review: Spider-Boy

In case you couldn't tell, like me, the two characters combined here are Spider-Man and the 90's Superboy, who is the greatest example of 90's Cool I've ever seen.

Well it's got 90's Superboy half in it! Sheesh, why is everyone always talking about Dark Claw, this shit sounds goddamn amazing, it's--

Son of a bitch.

Okay, so I think now we know what we're dealing with. So... ahem, Bizarnage wants to absorb Spider-Boy. Or be Spider-Boy. Or something. After some cunning tricks, Spider-Boy locks Bizarnage in a magical science cage. It's revealed this is in the Cadmus facility, which I would tell you more about, but I have no idea if this is just like the regular DC Cadmus but with the Fantastic 4 working there. Oh, the Fantastic 4 work there. Let's see how Mr. Fantastic is in this thing!

What.

WHAT.

Don't worry, we don't have time to get into that, thank god, because there's more trouble afoot! "King Lizard" (Whom I found out is Marvel's The Lizard and DC's King Shark amalgamated) got out of containment, which is no good. As long as we never have to see Bizarnage again he can fight whoever the hell he wants. Wait, what's the deal on King Lizard?

NEVERMIND LET'S GO BACK TO BIZARNAGE

MALL-CRAWLING WALL-CRAWLER?? WHY WOULD ANYONE SAY THAT?!

Wait, stop. I can do this. I got a handle on it. Spider-Boy makes more references to things that never happened so we can all pretend this isn't the dumbest thing anyone's ever made. Then he goes to some section of the lab where there's... Doc Ock... and, oh no.

WHY DOES HE HAVE A CAR.

IT FLIES?!?

OKAY. SO HE HAS A FLYING CAR. NO BIG DEAL.

Now we got some exposition, which you think might make a tiny bit of sense, but no. It doesn't. So our hero was part of an attempt to create a super soldier serum, so they decided to clone a person with gravity altering powers. Then the lead scientist died in a horrible explosion. Who was that lead scientist? Albert Einstein.

I'm kidding it was PETER PARKER.

So he died without ever showing his face, cool, great. Since the accident somehow released Spider-Boy from his cloning chamber, General "Thunderbolt" Ross becomes his father figure. You know, the guy who tried to kill the Hulk for 50 years. So that's all well and good, but then.

Welp. I guess you can't be anybody's goddamn uncle.

Back to the story, since King Lizard is loose, rather than try to maybe follow his path of destruction and woe, Spider-Boy decides to go to his part time job. He ends up at, where else, the Daily Bugle. Where, for all of 2 pages we get his nebbish alter ego, Pete Ross. Don't worry, that doesn't even matter, because as soon as he walks in the door, a reporter comes in with King Lizard's whereabouts. That was definitely the way that had to happen.

ANYWAY HERE'S KING LIZARD

So there's Lizard punching. The "Special Crimes Unit" which just looks like SHIELD shows up and shoots Lizzy, but predictably it doesn't work. Also, wait. Why is he getting bigger?

So apparently he's growing because he got exposed to Pym particles, which apparently also exist in this world. So Spider-Boy goes back to the lab, grabs a glowy thing, and throws it into King Lizard's mouth. And then he aaaaAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

Well good, now I have the irrational fear of shrinking to an infinitesimally small size. At least that wraps everything up. Villain is left to a horrible fate, and everybody is happy. No loose ends, no weird open conclusions, just a nice, simple ending. Yep, sure am glad there's no final image after a cut off senten--

GOT ME AGAIN, SPIDER-BOY!

Let's Watch The Pirate Fairy

Guys, I'm gonna be honest, I never thought I'd be doing this. I've been working in a store recently, and in that store, there's a display TV that constantly plays whatever new kids movie came out on DVD. During Christmastime, I had to suffer through tiny clips of The Croods whenever I walked by that aisle, and I constantly got distracted by Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, so much so that I eventually watched it. There's something odd about catching random snippets of movies through an 8-hour workday, even moreso if that extends for weeks. Last month, we got some fairy movie, which annoyed me because I thought it would be annoying background noise to stocking shelves or whatnot. As the movie went on, there were a lot of times I had to stop while glancing past the TV, and say something like, "Wait, is that Tinkerbell?" or "Wait, is that Captain Hook?!" So now, I have to watch this movie. You might think I'm crazy, but I need to know what the hell this has to do with Peter Pan Lore. We all know how well my last liveblog went, so let's do that again! This is a great idea! Wait, no it isn--

Let's Watch: The Pirate Fairy

Pizza Hut's 3 Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza

Sometimes I think I might be too susceptible to advertising. I usually only think this when it's some weird time of night and I'm driving to a fast food place I just saw a commercial for. Either I'm gullible or I have a problem with self-control. Point is, last night I found myself at Pizza Hut, which I hope is a situation you never find yourself facing. Anyway, it's time for:

Oh God Why Did I Do This To Myself

My aim that night was the Three Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza from Pizza Hut. If I were a lawyer of any sort, I would have advised them to add a liberal amount of quotation marks to that title. I guess Stuffed could stay. In the kind of hungry furvor you only get after considering the point of your existence, I ordered it with bacon, pepperoni, and mushrooms. I would try to pinpoint which part was a mistake, but if I consider it at all every decision which lead to this was a miscalculation.

You buy a shitty pizza, and you expect grease, I get it. I expected grease. But this was another level. It left a visible sheen on the pizza box.

Look at dat grease.

The bacon, I thought, how could I go wrong? Well, it uh, it did. I don't know if it was the cheap bacon, or something wrong with the pizza itself, but a salty taste permeated every bite. Did it have cheese? My eyes said yes, but every other part said, "Maybe."

As for the unstuffed part of the crust. You know, the part under the cheese. The pizza... bread? You know what I mean. It was unremarkable. Kind of rubbery, but nothing you don't expect from something like a Little Caesar's. The "highlight" of this was the Stuffed "Crust". I was surprised to learn, after eating, that they expected me to believe there were three cheeses in this. I'm honestly not sure if there was even one. What I detected, stuffed unwilling into that poorly rolled crust, was some sort of cheese-esque food goo.

I mean, you could tell it was trying to be cheese. It did its best. They did something to the crust itself that made it taste sweet. Or perhaps after making it through the cheesy part, the sweet taste was my tongue trying to kill itself.

Now, we all know the true test of pizza is not how it is right out of the box, but after a night in the fridge. So, for you, I saved a piece. How was it? I didn't think it could get much worse, but there it was. Whereas previously it was but a container for grease, it became an active receptacle, desperately holding onto every last drop. The plate that held it was free of grease, but my hands were granted the privilege of sharing in this horrible resource. The stuffed portion of the crust became not unlike the floor of a tennis court. Only a marginal improvement over the original.

All in all, I would say this is a poor excuse for a pizza. I can't say I had too fun of a time trying to stuff this in my gaping maw. Luckily, it did put the giant stain on the front of my wifebeater that I was missing. It was salty, greasy, and I think I have trust issues now. Would I buy it again? No. Maybe. Probably.

Yeah, okay, I totally would.