The Pizza Dog

Canis calidus subsp. suburbiensis

Pizza has an interesting tendency to infect other foods. There's pizza bagels, pizza dogs, pizza burgers, pizza toast, pizza empanadas, pizza dumplings, pizza bao, pizza whatever, pizza everything. When you pizza-ify something, though, it usually ends up trapped in this weird spot between "sick" and "disappointing." I don't want to say "liminal flavor" because that's kind of pretentious, but yeah.

I don't think I've ever fully   enjoyed a pizza-ified food as a sober adult eating alone at a stable point in my life. They hit different when you're a kid, or you're hanging out with friends, or you're going through it, or you're fucked up, or you're experiencing some combination of the above, or whatever. They're just not going to take you all the way to Flavortown if you're sitting in your living room at a reasonable hour with your head screwed on straight.

On the subject of Flavortown, I recently watched an episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" on a hotel TV, and it was actually kind of lame. I had to watch it, though. The only other options were reruns of "Ridiculousness," five flavors of cable news, and the tail end of a 700 Club broadcast. To make matters worse, the 700 Club channel was set to pivot directly into "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" (2009) right after the final prayer with whoever they got to replace Pat Robertson. So, yeah. I thought Guy Fieri was cool and "with-it," but it turns out the memes just altered my perception of him without my knowledge. I feel like they did some Edward-Bernays-type shit to my brain, because Guy Fieri was not at all how I remembered him, which is exactly how pizza-ified foods feel. There's something wrong with them. You have to eat them in the dim, blue light of the screen, because they don't make sense anywhere else.

Pizza dogs, in particular, taste like you've been listening to nu metal all afternoon. They should taste like pizza plus hot dog, but instead they taste like neither. The math just doesn't check out, so a pizza dog tastes like its own pleasantly disappointing thing. It feels like something you eat at your stoner boyfriend's apartment when he's streaming Weezer again and you just know he's not forever. It's lame and it kind of sucks, but it's not bad.