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.