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.

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.

Pizza Hut's Cheesy Bites Pizza

There are days where the world seems distant. Where events seem disconnected and discrete. You seem like a passenger in your own life, observing, but never in charge of the course of events. Like a dream when you're in the back seat of a car, careening aimlessly down a crowded highway, and find it impossible to take control. Days where you've watched this one too many times.

In short, there are times where reality seems to fray at the edges. I was in one of these liminal spaces of the mind when I found myself purchasing a pizza from my old acquaintance, Pizza Hut. My friends, it's time again, where I don't know how I arrived, yet here I am.

Pizza Hut's Cheesy Bites Pizza

This pizza is confounding. I honestly don't know what I was looking at. Can any of our observations be objective? Can what goes through a creator's mind prolong itself into a finished project? This pizza is a Rorschach test. Tell me, when you look at this pizza, what do you see?

What is the purpose of this? Was there someone, at any time, who wished there was some way they could share pizza with their friends? What twisted mind combined the two concepts of breadsticks and a stuffed crust pizza?

There is no correct way to eat this. In adverts one is presented with happy young adults, pulling bites jubilantly from the crust, strings of decadent cheese following them, faces alight with adulation. Nowhere does one see someone attempting to eat the barren, crustless slab of pizza left after the bites are depleted. It's a fool's errand. One's hands become so instantly covered in grease that keeping a hold on the neutered slice is all but impossible. The slice itself is so thin that its very existence seems nebulous.

But, you say, the pizza isn't the point. It's the bites, goddammit, get to the bites! Have it your way. The bites, though vibrantly presented in ads, fell tremendously short of expectations. On screen, they seem almost alive, spewing cheese from every orifice, stretching strands off every bite, gooey bits dripping from slavering mouths. In my experience, the bites have long since bitten the dust.

Neither a breadstick nor a true crust, the cheesy bite feels the pain of isolation, trapped between worlds. It has no true home. It doesn't belong on a pizza, and even less so in your stomach. The bites were spongy, rigid, already undergoing caseus rigor mortis. The marinara provides a brief distraction, but upon a flawed foundation.

On reheat the slices fare no better. One has long since discarded the marinara, and any stability the slices may have once had is lost. Your only hope is to grope hopelessly at the flaccid slice and, before your grip slackens, desperately shove the pizza in your mouth, like an animal. It makes you question your humanity. It makes you question who you are.

The Cheesy Bites Pizza is a food for a directionless people. A dinner for those who don't know what they want. A questionable solution to a problem that does not exist. Some flawed person gazed into the void of their mind, and beheld this. What is there left to say? Sometimes a picture can convey more than words ever could. The most apt image inexplicably adorns the pizza box itself, a greasy Spider-Man peering out into the world, silently judging each and every one of us.

We have been found wanting.

Little Caesar's Pretzel Crust Pizza

Once again I have succumbed to the siren song of cheap novelty pizza. I am but a man, and like the Greek heroes before me, I have a tragic flaw. That flaw is the irresistable compulsion to seek out and purchase any terrible pizza I have seen an advertisement for after the hour of 9 PM. That brings us to today's subject. Little Caesar's Pretzel Crust Pizza.

Unlike Pizza Hut, which has little to say about its relative quality, and Domino's, which is constantly attempting to prove that it is, in fact, a legitimate pizzeria, Little Caesar's has a different tactic. Little Caesar's main selling point is that one can obtain said pizza for a measly five dollars without ever leaving the comfort of one's car.

Some would have you believe pizza is meant to be comsumed in a sit-down environment, where your family can discuss the day after waiting 20 minutes for your custom-ordered delicacy to arrive. Little Caesar's, however, does away with any of that pretense. When you drive up to their boxy establishment, you are greeted immediately with a prepacked, premade, and utterly standard pizza. When you pay five dollars for a pizza there, you get exactly five dollars worth of pizza; no more, no less. Little Caesar's is the kind of pizza you are meant to eat alone.

So now we come to the main attraction, the Pretzel Crust Pizza. The main selling point, apart from the titular crust, is the replacement of the tomato sauce with a nacho cheese, similar to what one may find appropriate to dip a large pretzel in. My colleague was relieved to find the toppings kept from swimming in an overabundance of this sauce, while I was quietly disappointed.

All in all, a quiet disappointment is the prevailing sentiment this pizza creates. For all its bluster and pride, it does not seem to differentiate itself from the standard fare. The welcome lukewarm embrace of the unremarkably familiar tomato sauce is usurped by an even more underwhelming cheese. The crust you came to impersonally tolerate is tinted brown and covered in large chunks of salt.

Caesar's strength has become its weakness in this offering. This pizza is a paradox, an attempt to make an interesting pizza from a factory fitted only for the unexceptional. Cheap pizza gimmicks are a younger pizzeria's game. It seems Little Caesar's has forgotten the true purpose of its pizza: To be eaten slowly, grudgingly, lit only by the solitary glow of a computer monitor. This was the platonic ideal. This was PIZZA.

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.