No one understands what I want in a pizza, and I'm forced to conclude that I'm the aberration. Others are satisfied with their New York Style, their Chicago Style, which to me are but two faces of the same sin: excess. I do not crave the thin slices of New York City, frail and wan, drooping under the weight of a meager amount of cheese. Nor do I crave the bloated cheesy tide of a deep dish, struggling to engulf it with my merely mortal maw, feeling it settle heavily into my straining bowels and weighing there, heavier than the combined sins of a thousand denizens of Tartarus, cast there for the hubris of making a pizza that challenges Gaia herself for the depth of its gravity well.
I want a thick crust. I want a thick layer of cheese that can still be classified as a single stratum, and not some kind of dairy based sediment. I want enough toppings that each bite has one of whatever blessing with which I choose to adorn my pizza. I do not need an entire layer of pepperoni, turning an already foolhardy deep dish into a twisted mockery of the humble lasagna. I want to bite into a slice of pizza and be rewarded by a filling mix of carbs, fats, proteins, sauce, bliss. I want three slices to constitute a filling meal, perhaps four for an eternally hungering mass of flesh such as myself. I don't want to fight to survive, choking on a molten lahar of cheese and sauce. I don't want to gaze in sorrow upon the surface of my pizza and see so little cheese spread so thinly over the crimson paste that it resembles the surface of Io, equally bereft of life and human comfort.
Does no one understand me? Is there no pizza in this cold world that seeks the wisdom of the Hellenes, and strives for the perfection of moderation, the simple arete of balance?
Do not think me impossible to please, I am willing to compromise on so many things! Stuff the crust if you like. Bake your pizza into a square if it pleases you. I am no dogmatic zealot, to decry a pizza for its shape.
Just give me a pizza, and let me take it and hold it in my hand, tears in my eyes at being finally, finally understood, gazing upon a slice and seeing it is enough, but no more.
