Not Fit To Serve

Fit: A sharp, brief display of feeling.

Several years ago my sister bought me a pizza pan so that I could cook a pizza pie in the comfort and cheapness of my own home. It's not a complicated piece of machinery. It includes the metal pizza pan itself, round, full of holes to allow all of the grease percolating off of the partially hydrogenated cheese and meat-like pepperoni to drip down into the catch tray. This tray, round also and slightly larger than the pan, is made of plastic. The theory, clear to anyone with the most basic common sense and intelligence, it to remove the scorching hot pizza pan from a 400 degree oven and set it on the plastic tray. This will protect your counter top from the hot pan while simultaneously providing a receptacle for the crap discharging from the surface of the pizza.


Newly sober I took the pan out of the box, placed the pizza on the pan, and set the pan on the catch tray, which I inserted into the oven. I was dismayed for a minute that it didn't quite fit, and I allowed this dismay to explode into a fit of justified anger. "Why the hell would they make a pizza pan that wouldn't fit into an oven?" I fumed. When I'm angry I can just flush any of the little bits of wisdom that I possess right down the spit sink.

I took a pair of pliers out of the small kitchen drawer holding my pot holders while simultaneously serving as my shop, workbench, and basement woodworking facility, and tried to "bend" the corners of the plastic tray so that it would fit into the oven. I was not discouraged by the fact that pieces of the "metal" tray began snapping off with loud cracks. I don't know what I did with these shards. Probably flung them at SuperK, who sensibly clears out of the immediate area when I get angry. Something about collateral damage.

At some point, probably when I was taking a short break to try to catch my breath and stop hyperventilating, I lifted the metal pan out of the "metal" tray, and tried to put this into the oven, where it fit with plenty of clearance.

"Hey, SuperK, I figured it out!" I shouted into the other room. I pretend like nothing out of the ordinary has happened when I make an ass of myself. I'm like a cat. I turn my back and start to clean my head by licking my hands and rubbing them over my hair.

Every time I tried to save a few dollars by making my own pizza I contemplate my handiwork. In the Horseface household, we call this phenomenon "getting bent." SuperK will pick up something that I have destroyed or damaged in a fit of irrational rage, and ask me:"What happened here? Did this get bent?

I'm cleaning my head right now.