I was driving home tonight and passed one of my old favorite pizza places, The Pizza Runner.  It’s something of an Ogden institution and up until the last few years I’d have happily put it up against any other pizza place.  I have memories going back as far as I can remember being conscious of making my own food choices.  My parents liked Piccolo Bro’s, which was also excellent, but my true love was the Runner.

Back in the day it was a cool place, covered in local concert posters from what seemed like the dawn of time.  All the employees played in crazy punk and hardcore bands and seemed out-of-this-world hip to a nerdy kid who didn’t yet know his place in the world.  Aside: I guess I still don’t and I’m still pretty nerdy too.  I remember putting up my first flyer for a show my band was playing and feeling like I’d hit a milestone.  I remember years of the Runner being a standby when, broke but trying to live a vegan lifestyle, I would order their starving student special (which they still honor, btw).  Vegan sticks, pesto pizza, and two sodas for like $5.  You couldn’t beat it.  And damn was it good.  I remember the TV toss annual, where people would stockpile old televisions and put them on the roof.  The voodoo organist would play, and crazy psychobilly bands.  There were strippers mud-wrestling in sub-freezing temperatures, a car that got rolled by a mob foaming at the mouth.  In essence-destruction and insanity, boiled into a positive event.  A release for the people…sponsored by your local pizza house.

Years later friends of mine worked there and even though I was working what I snobbishly thought of as a real job and starting to make decent money, I not-so-secretly envied them a bit.  They were those cool guys now, driving around at night, serving the good people of my hometown, and sticking it to the man by doing it better, and cheaper, than anyone else.

Tonight all of those things ran through my head immediately followed by this.

I will never again order a whole, normal pizza.  I will never be able to eat a whole, or even the majority of even a stripped-down, healthy pizza.

Never.  For as long as the rest of my life may be.

So there’s me, driving my sad-but-awesome car, in my awesome but so-far-away town, being really thankful for the darkness and the beard that obscure this damnable quivering chin.