CHAPTER 8

The Pizza Place

What we’ve spent our time collecting might not be worth it.

There’s a pizza place near our house. I love this place—kind of. They

make noise there. Lots of it. I’m certain it’s where all the noise in the
universe is manufactured. I suspect they have machines in the back rooms
filled with vats of the stuff. I bet it gets dropped off in the middle of the
night after junior high school basketball games where noise is collected
by the barrel. NASA probably sends its astronauts to this place to prepare
them for the deafening noise of rocket launches. My best guess is that the
noise they don’t pipe into their pizza parlors they sell to heavy metal
bands for the guys to lip-sync to. The rest is released into the atmosphere.
It’s actually what is melting all of our ice caps.
Each of the stores in the pizza chain runs on pure sugar, but they also
serve pizza. Lots of pizza. Some people think it tastes like dog food, but I
like it. One thing I don’t get—their mascot is an animal we used to set
traps for around the house. What marketing guy thinks up this stuff? To
me, this looks like one big class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.
There are also lots of games. Some of these games give the players
tickets when they play them. I think it’s why everyone puts up with all
the noise and pizza they don’t like. They’ve figured out people will do
just about anything for a handful of tickets. One game was always a
favorite for our kids. It’s called Skee-Ball. It’s like a miniature bowling
alley got together with a skateboard ramp. There are holes at the far end
that always appear to be just smaller than the balls you roll at them. If
one of the balls does get in a hole, which happens infrequently, lights