Someday I will write the Dante’s Inferno of Pizza. How my quest for good pie led me deeper and deeper down the spiral of hell, until I confronted Satan himself in a frozen lake of mozzarella, chewing on the founders of Domino’s, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut. I’m not looking for the perfect pizza, a circular Beatrice I can love unconditionall - just a good hot bubbly pizza with lots of sauce. That’s all. A pizza that does not dole out the sauce as though it is a precious substance gathered by the dram at great expense by men in boats, far from home, following the herds of ocean-going tomatoes as they ply the world of wave and spume. Oh, I found it, once. But my wife’s ceaseless desire for Novelty has led me to wander in the dark wood for weeks now, trying one new place after the other, seeking to recreate that blissful ratio of crust, cheese, meat and blessed sauce. Last week I thought I had found a reasonable compromise: the Pizza Hut (shudder) Chicago-Style Deep Dish. It bore no resemblance to the fabled Chicago pie at Geno’s - but the crust had a happy note of corn, and the sauce was 3/4 of an inch thick, studded with chunks of tomato, and it topped the pie like a slushy lake. Huzzah. On Friday, I went back to try it again.

I’d called the Pizza Hut that delivers to my house on the way back from work. I was on hold for four minutes. The clerk came back on the line, said “Uhhhh,” and hung up. If the window had been open I’d have tossed the phone into traffic. This outlet is doing its damnedest to keep from selling me pizza - two weeks before I’d been on hold for ten minutes, spent nearly as much time placing the order, only to find out that the delivery time was an hour and 40 minutes. The previous week they hadn’t answered the phone at all. Screw ‘em. I called the other local Pizza Hut, the one that does not deliver to my house. I’d tried them last week, and while they’d screwed up the order, the Deep Dish bestowed an impressive bounty of sauce. I placed an order. Twenty minutes, the clerk said.

I showed up ten minutes later, paid, and took a seat. Read the paper. Watched the hectic calamity of a Friday night - the phone never stops, the drivers come in and out, pizzas sit in warming bags for half an hour waiting for people to pick them up. Ten minutes passed; fifteen.

“You are Johnson?” one of the employees asked.

“James.”

“Okay. It’ll be five minutes.”

Five minutes passed. Ten. The printer broke down, which meant no orders could be taken; the phone rang, and rang, and rang while a new role of paper was found and inserted.

“You are . . . Johnson?” the same employee inquired.

“James.”

“I’ll check.” He checked. “It’s coming out now.”

Five minutes passed.

“Joh-”

“James.”

The clerk hauled out two pizzas, apologizing for the delay; I said it was no problem, I could tell they were busy - hey, as long as it’s fresh! He opened the box.

On the Deep Dish pizza: a smear of sauce. A mere daub. A mouse with tuberculosis spits up more red stuff than this. The sauce was 1/4” thick, and covered 5/8ths of the pizza. (If I had to swear to it in court, I’d have to say 5/7ths. But still.)

“That’s not enough sauce,” I said. “Look at the picture here on the flier - the sauce covers the entire pizza.”

“We make the sauce and the pizza separate, and add the sauce,” said the clerk, apparently responding to a query from a parallel dimension.

“That’s not enough,” I said. “I had this last week. It had three times as much sauce.”

“Next time perhaps you order extra sauce,” he said, and he walked away.

Of course, you realize this means war.

I took the pizzas. Crossed the street SCREEEEEECH JESUS! A Pizza Hut delivery car had made a lunge for the driveway I was crossing, and hadn’t seen me until the last moment.

“WHOA!” said a passerby. “MAN!”

I kept walking.

“I THOUGHT THEY’D HAVE TO SCRAPE YOU OFF!” said the passerby. I said something about the pizza being safe, and that was all that mattered.

All the way home I steeled myself for bad pizza. I mean, the sauce is the only thing that redeems this particular item; without the sauce you have only Pizza Hut pizza, and aside from their thin crust - which can be eaten, if you’ve already finished off the rest of the soccer team who crashed with you in the Andes - their pizza is anathema to me. Dull dough and chewy cheese.

Traffic was stop and go. Not just bad pizza awaited: cold bad pizza.

Got home, trailing a black cloud; got to work destroying the evidence of this Crime Against Pizza. I was chatting with wife and child, regaling them with news from the Pizza Front, and it wasn’t until slice three that I realized something else was missing from my pizza.

Ingredients.

They’d forgotten to add pepperoni and sausage.

I was eating CheezeyBred.

Calmly, with great deliberation, I put on my coat, picked up the box, and walked down the tunnel to the car. I was going back. I was going back not just for ingredients, not just for sauce, but for justice. (Also for beer and milk, which I’d forgotten to pick up on the way home.)

A few blocks down the street, though, I just sagged. I gave in. I surrendered. O mediocre corporate pizza, I ask for quarter. I can fight no more. You win. Pizza Friday is over; from now on, Pizza will just be a circular abomination we order out of desperation, when there isn’t time to make anything good. No longer will it be a high-point of my week, the reward for my labors. I realize now that in America, pizza is not just supper. Pizza is punishment.

I got the milk and beer and drove home.

As i was putting the box away, I noticed something - Hello, it’s a customer comment line.

Well.

First I called the store, to see if they’d send by a replacement. They would not, but they offered me a $15 credit for more bad future pizza. I accepted. Then I called the 1-800 line. I expected something like the Domino’s line I called two weeks before, when they’d screwed up the order - an automated system with limited options. But no: Pizza Hut had a real live operator. “How may I help you?” she asked.

I didn’t know where to begin.

I told her that I’d worked for Pizza Hut for a year myself, so I didn’t expect these guys to operate with the skill and precision of a surgical team I recounted the three-week effort to order pizza from the place that delivered, and how it failed. How the previous week I’d gone to another outlet, which had screwed up the order, and how this week the clerk had just walked away in the middle of my insufficient-sauce argument, and how the pizza itself had contained no ingredients whatsoever.

Sympathetic? She made Mother Theresa look like Rosie O’Donnell. This would not do. This would not stand. We spoke for almost ten minutes, and at the end of it all she offered a ten-dollar gift certificate. At this point I was actually in the black for eight bucks on the night - not bad. But the more we talked, and the more I sensed this vast Customer Service Corps ready to snap their spines bending over backwards to satisfy one peeved, pampered, snit-pitching customer whose precious evening had been ruined by the absence of a cup of pureed tomatoes, I had a revelation: They are everything that is right with America, and I am everything that is wrong with America.

Even though I am correct.

My friend the Giant Swede explained the other day that I am, of course, mad. The nation has decided that sauce matters less than cheese and the quantity of salty toppings; I should accept it. But I won’t. It’s not as if I’m asking them to arrange the pepperoni just so, and I send the pizza back if the pepperoni pieces overlap. All I want is extra sauce. Not extra wignlesput, or extra blompgretna, or any other extra noun that does not exist in the narrowly defined world of the pizza prep table. Extra sauce. See that sauce, there? In the pot? Put some on the crust. Now, concentrating hard on the word “extra,” add some more.

HOW HARD CAN THIS BE?

“Obviously,” said the Giant Swede, “pretty hard.”

Next week: I try the neighborhood pizza parlor, the place with 15 tables you never see anyone sitting at, the place that has candles in chianti bottles.

Such a straw-covered bottle, incidentally, is called a “fiasco.” Stay tuned.

(Yes, there's a Matchbook.)

The other morning I got out the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” DVD for Gnat, hoping she’d love it as much as I did. To my particular demographic, this was the best Christmas special ever. Except for Peanuts. It had a plucky hero, a great Santa, a jocular snowman, a suitably fearsome monster, songs that could come from no other season but Christmas, and: it had Yukon Cornelius, the Han Solo of 60s stop-motion animation. (You could even argue that the reformed Bumble was Yukon’s Wookie, and I’m sure there’s six gigabytes of fan fiction on that very point.)

She’s too young to get it, although she grasped emotional arcs - Mommy happy, Rudolph happy, Reindeer mean, Rudolph sad. The Abominable Snowmonster was ver scary, so we avoided him. It seemed to make no impression on her at all, really. She hasn’t asked for it since.

This morning we got in the car. I steeled myself for a request for the songs on her hit parade. Fee Lidl Fishes. Zibede Doodah. Teddy Bear Pignig.

“Holly Jolly?” she said. “Holly Jolly?”

I’d burned a CD of Xmas tunes to play in the car, run through it once on a trip to Target, and gotten the standard toddler thumbs-down on everything. But one tune had apparently lodged its fishhook in her memory.

“Holly Jolly?”

So I went to track 5, for the “Holly Jolly Christmas” song.

“Rudof sad,” she said. “Now Rudof happy.”

The kid should be writing TV Guide program descriptions, if you ask me. I did it for a year and I never approached that level of pith.

And what did I think of the show after all these years? Eh. Ask me some year when I don’t watch it at 7:45 AM after five hours of sleep. Some things you loved as a child deserve adult respect - “The Wizard of Oz” is such a thing, and I say this as one who will run as fast as possible from those Ozophiliacs who regard the movie with the awe and adoration I reserve for true works of art. (Like “Wrath of Khan,” for example.) I’ve met a lot of Oz nuts. I did a story on an Oz parade in Judy Garland’s home town; I got propositioned by a Munchkin, a wrinkly little sprite named Fern. “Oz” is sci-fi for people who hate sci-fi, but so what? It’s still a great movie.

“Rudolph” is not “Oz.” It doesn’t feel “timeless” to me, because unlike Oz, I was present during the time in which its conventions were part of the everyday culture. The voices, the style of the animation, the look of the characters, the arrangement of the music - that was how things were when I was growing up, and part of the subsequent appreciation I had was just reflexive nostalgia. It brought back a time when the entire world seemed to have turned towards Christmas, when December lasted forever and was over too soon. Milk, cookies, jammies, TV viewed from the worshipful position we assumed on the floor. If I felt today the way I felt about it then, there would be something wrong with me.

But is there something wrong with the show itself?

Why, yes. Yes, there is.

1. What’s the problem with the red nose, anyway? These are reindeer who can fly, which isn’t a feature in the original attribute profile. So a guy has a red nose - fine, it’s unusual, but please explain why this must result in ostracization. We need a little more backstory: maybe the last deer with a red nose when mad and gored everyone. “They called it Bloodmas Eve - aye, the older reindeer still talk about it. The red-nosed one stood in the stable door, eyes wide as wagon wheels, gore-flecked foam gushing from his mouth, the entrails of our friends wrapped around his antlers like string in a cat’s cradle. His nose burned like a coal from Satan's furnace, it did; the snow made a horrible hiss as it touched the nose and sizzled into steam. He made a cry they say no reindeer has ever made before, or since - a sound of pain and fury that would chill the blood of the Abominable One himself.

"Then he started in on the elves.

" No, those red-nosed ones are always bad. Good thing Rudolph ran away, or we’d have killed him - why, Santa was out in the shed honing the axe when he heard he’d run off with that gay fellow from the paint department.”

2. If the winged Lion can fly all over the earth rescuing Misfit Toys - which he supposedly does every night - why does he need Santa to deliver them? Hmm? He’s got the stamina, the wings, the motivation. I think he likes having a subject population, frankly; his definition of “misfit” seems rather elastic. There’s nothing wrong with that little girl doll, or the spotted elephant. He’s probably still at it today:

“Greetings, Misfit Toy. I am your liege, the Aerodynamic Crowned Lion. You’re coming with me.”

“Why? I’m happy here!”

“No you’re not. You’re a misfit toy.”

“No I’m not, I’m a perfectly content game cartridge!”

“They might upgrade to a new platform next year. Then you’d be a misfit. Come along. It’s for your own good.”

“Screw you! My owner’s on the last level! He’s at 95% health and shields going in to face the boss, and he has multiple invulnerability!”

“You are speaking nonsense, my misfit friend. Come. You will find new misfit friends, such as the Lionel train engine - “

“Well, define ‘misfit,’ you Aslan wannabe.”

“The train’s manual had a typo.”


There’s more, but this is going to be one of the columns I put in the paper this week. Due to holiday deadlines, I have to write six columns this week instead of three, so get ready for diminished bleatage and/or duplications. But I will say this: on December 23, there will be an interesting announcement that affects quite a few Bleat patrons. One hint:

Cebu.

Meaning? Stay tuned.

As I feared, I had another night of kaleidoscopic brain-hash; this interlude was concerned entirely with school supplies. Four hours of thrashing and sweating and waking and wondering, over and over again, about school supplies. Then huzzah, the fever broke; the old confident brain shouldered aside the capering imps of Feverland, took the director’s chair, and gave me a gripping tale with a coherent narrative. Back to normal! I remember little, but I do remember defending my wife from a small, unshaven oily-skinned stubble-chinned Brit who was threatening to cut her up “an’ spoil tha’ pretty faice a’ yours.” I stabbed him in the heart with a scissors with such force that it pinned him to the wall. Then I called 9-11.

Next scene: my wife and I are in the movie theater, watching Lord of the Rings. “Don’t you think someone should be at the house when the police get there?” she said, and you know, she had a point. I was a little nervous about what might happen, since there was a dead burglar pinned to my wall, but to my great relief the intruder had shrunk to the size of a Christmas tree ornament, and no one seemed to notice.

I know it’s odd to remark that a dream in which you plunge the Fiskars into the chest of an Englishman constitutes “normal,” but that’ll tell you something about the fever dreams. If there’d been a credit roll at the end of the dream, I know who would have played the Brit: a small, oily-skinned stubble-chinned fellow who hung around the bar where I worked in college. Peter. How he ended up in Minnesota, no one ever seemed to know. His manner confounded all the good college students’ preconceptions of the English - his accent was coarse, his manners horrible, he wasn’t clever in the least and he didn’t care at all about music. I saw it again and again - fresh-scrubbed sorority girls would hear his accent, and assume he wanted to talk about John Lennon. I do remember that he called them all wankers, because I had to look that word up; when I didn't find it in dictionary, I knew exactly what it meant.

He wasn't even a heedless drunkard given to fits of colorful profanity - if he'd gone off now and then with a boozy tirade full of bollocks and bluddy and sod off we'd have been so happy: finally! He is British! He is! But when he drank he just got drunk, and his speech was a Trainspotting slur; I swear sometimes when he came to the bar to ask for something my eyes went down to sternum level in the hope there were subtitles.

Peter developed some sort of thyroid condition that made his eyes bug out, so now he was not only unsavory, he looked like a tiny Peter Ustinov with a Marty Feldman attempting to get out. Why my brain picked him out for the role of the burglar, I’ve no idea; haven’t thought of him in years, but apparently his image has been slumbering on a slab in my brain for decades. We forget nothing, apparently; we only forget to remember.

Maybe my brain was looking for a small stubbled Brit to fill this role, and it was moving so fast it slid past the memory of Phil Colllins as a criminal in the Genesis video "Robbery, Assault and Battery" and landed on poor Peter. This would have irritated Peter to now end, since Collins was not only a musician, and hence a wanker, but a drummer, and hence a wankin' fookin wanker. Fook.

Forgot to mention this yesterday: while thrashing around on night #1 of the grippe, I dreamed a brand new Simpson vignette. I envisioned a great wall with a ledge. From a door came Seymour Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers. Skinner was wearing a veil. Chalmers removed the veil. I know the following dialogue is true, because I got out of bed, went to the studio and typed it up at 4 AM, thinking I had struck comedy gold. Just found it on the Mac when I sat down tonight, in fact. Here it is, spellchecked:


SeyMOUR!

Yes, Superintendent Chalmers!

Seymour, WHY are you wearing a Saddam mustache?

Ah - because I wanted you to trust me!

So you’re wearing a SADdam mustache.

Yes.

So I’ll trust you.

(Pause) Yes!

That’s it. You have to admit, it has the tone and character of a classic Skinner-Chalmers routine; it just makes no sense.

Has the tone and character of a classic Saddam-Sean Penn routine too, alas. Or would have until Mr. Penn returned to find that the Baghdad papers had put in his mouth the 47 preposterous lies he hadn’t gotten around to putting there himself.

I try to find a time in the last 60 years when the hand-puppets and marionettes who make up the entertainment profession were so uniformly disposed to parade their mindlessness in the public square. Harold Pinter may rage about the babies born brainless in Iraq because of depleted uranium shells - well, if so,, Iraq this will have a remarkably large talent pool of actors from which to draw in 25 years.

But why do they think their opinion carries weight? Because they know they’ll suffer no consequences. Yoda could give an interview and say “Had the right idea, Hitler did” and we’d still all trot off to Episode 3. Yesterday I rented “Minority Report,” a movie that stars thetan-choked Tom Cruise, who famously announced that he didn’t feel safe raising his children in the Wild-West hell of America; the movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, whose work I admire greatly - but the guy made a hadj to Cuba recently, and spoke of Castro in such glowing terms I expected him to hack up a half-dozen of El Presidente’s pubic hairs. Guys like Mike Ferrell can sign the petitions without fear of the impact on their careers, because they have none to speak of. Ed Asner, the nation’s only communist Horta, can sign these things because it’s his only way of telling the world he’s alive until someone else from the Mary Tyler Moore show dies, and they need a reaction.

And there’s another reason for this activism: when you’re in an industry that depends on the overseas markets, you start thinking of yourself as a Citizen of the World. Whatever you say won’t hurt the domestic grosses, but if you describe yourself as a Proud American without using finger quotes, the Germans might take offense.

And speaking of Germans - well, Austrians - it’s notable that among the few Hollywood non-leftists, the most cheerful, popular and successful of the batch is an Austrian immigrant. Makes you wonder what he knows that we don’t.

The day there is a negative reaction, swift and sure, is the day these people stop signing petitions. But that will never happen. Some fans will labor to separate the character in the movie from their nattering real-world doppelgangers, and enjoy the movie despite the knowledge that they’re giving money to people who think the UN is a collection of disinterested Ghandi-types, and who think the US is a rabid bull whose horns drip gore. (And oil!) Most people won’t care at all, because they’re not paying attention, and they’re not interested in the least what Julia Roberts thinks about international relations.

Now, if she spilled the beans on Brad Pitt, then they’d be interested. Why doesn’t she take out a full-page ad about that?

Took Gnat to Southdale, the Mother of all Malls, to see Santa. She was amazed to see him - the same guy who was on TV, on her puzzle, in the snowdome, on the ornaments, on the cards - here! I didn’t want to make her sit in his lap; from a two-year old’s perspective, it’s like meeting GOD. You want to get your story straight, if nothing else. So we just waved as we walked past, and went ot the computer store. But as I was checking out, buying some DVDs, she asked: go see Santa, daddy? See Santa? So off we went.

And lo, so great was his glory, so blinding his visage, that she turned away and hid her face. Really: I was carrying her as we walked up the ramp, and she buried her face in my neck and clamped her hands over her eyes. But she was smiling, too. In this sense, Santa is like GOD, but a training-wheels version.

When it was her turn she walked up slowly, demonstrating the natural reluctance children have towards unreasonably friendly strangers in costume. He couldn’t get a smile out of her, as much as he tried; she looked dazed with awe. He gave her a candy cane, and said Goodbye, Natalie! Merrrry Christmas!

She held on to the candy cane like it was a fingerbone of a major saint.

Then we shopped for Mommy. Something here from this place, a few items here from her favorite store, even though its merchandise is maddeningly vague when it comes to the difference between Petites and XS. It was great fun - Gnat was happy licking her relic, I was happy to find a few things I know my wife would love, and the speakers were playing all the old songs I love to hear. No snow outside, yet; a busy week ahead, and a busier weekend to come. I was behind in my shopping; hadn’t even gotten the cards made up. Hadn’t made the cookies; hadn’t strung that last line of lights I’ve been meaning to do.

So by all rights I should be in a miserable panic, running from store to store like a Frenchman trying to find a German dictionary before the Nazis arrive. But no.

Why? Haven’t I learned? Don’t I know that Christmas all about GREED, GLUTTONY, INSINCERITY and FEAR?

Sigh . . . . here we go. This was to be Bleat, but its length and tone requires that it be moved over to Screed Country. Enjoy, if that’s the right word.

And remember, next Monday: CEBU!