Hi. I have a perplexed question.. what possessed this reality to break its own logic and install a restaurant expecting the average customer to cut their own pizza with a pair of FUCKING CRAFT SCISSORS????
This is a story about how my ideas of reality were further, permanently altered by the existence of a unexplained, yes unexplained, craft scissor pizza restaurant (and why yours should be as well), and the source of how and why this blog exists at all.
This story is the first post in a Tumblr blog series following the absurd bullshit that is our reality and lives, and will have many more to come. It is told from the perspective of The Curator, the creator of this Tumblr blog, who is literally myself, as I’ve been living these actual real life experiences while joking about them, with commentaries from my characters who are experiencing this mess alongside me.
The Curator’s writing-style is tangled with and influenced by many different personalities, ideas, and perspectives, including that of Cohort Collective: the main cast of cartoon characters living in their own realities alongside our own, and who are peering into our reality and learning this story as The Curator does. They shall be properly introduced in upcoming posts.
Until then, you may find lines of thinking influencing The Curator’s storytelling coming from: Reinefe, the main voice in The Curator’s mind who assisted them in writing this story; Faostus, the deep ponderer of novel, horror story concepts; Toowieka, not currently present, but not quite forgotten; and of course, our dear cohort, Bowtie, who can’t control its own physics, at all.
(Pictured: The innocent, unsuspecting The Curator out to dinner in the mood for pizza, hoping for an easy-going night.)
Now, to preface this: Please withhold all knee-jerk ideas on what this story is about, and keep in mind this is not an expected gimmick, nor is it an advertised purpose of the restaurant, hence leaving me bamboozled.
So when I went in to grab myself a bite to eat at a """healthy""" café (everyone loves to mishandle that word) that had pizza on its menu after a rough day of trying to piece together the erratic, senseless behavior of the world before me with Bowtie at a Whole Foods, of all fucking places (more on this in a future post), I was given something even more bullshit, even more senseless, and even more erratic to top it all off.
Aside from noticing that my pizza was oblong-shaped and mimicked the appearance of a similar, flightier species: the common, restaurant flatbread (a lie to camouflage that it’s not a pizza, and so to which, i'll admit, this derailment of expectations was not too chaotic for me at that point), the last thing I anticipated when ordering my dinner was for my waiter to also hand me my flatbr- er, pizza, unsliced and sharing the plate with a pair of GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING SCISSORS.
Before I could even inquire “what in-the-hell-“, my waiter was gone, and I was left with no answer except to observe what the other restaurant patrons around me were finding time to do in an attempt to figure out what to make of this (as any normal person would). And as I did, I thought:
"Am I just expected to cut my own pizza myself with SCISSORS???"
And as it turns out, yes, yes I was.
So why was I expected to cut my own pizza.. with scissors?
Well obviously for the gimmick, right? Wrong. There was nothing in the decor, the menu, the website, the writing, the general lingo of the restaurant, or even the commentary from the waiter that implied this was a part of the dining experience.
In fact, I was frantically searching the website information and rereading the menu highlights (foreshadowing for a sequel post) to make sure I hadn’t overlooked an explanation in the fine print because the server didn’t even address it with me, just rehearsed the usual “enjoy your meal” then walked off before I could even inquire, “whatinthefu-“, because clearly, I had missed something important here.
But no, nothing on that menu or around me was touching this problem with an explanation or answer. Not even a little.
I had to ask Bowtie hanging out on my hat (yes, I assure you, that is a bowtie, plainly. Just like how my pizza is obviously not the common, restaurant flatbread) what the meaning of this was because I was certain dark times were ahead of us when the extra eerie part of this whole ordeal kept setting in and reinforcing itself further: not one human around me seemed to be put in a different headspace about this scissor-cutting, pizza dining experience like I was existing in.
They weren’t speaking around me like it was strange, new and novel, funny and amusing, part of a different culture, out of place, or a deviation from the norm as if they too had just stumbled across a strange gimmick restaurant doing something specific that other restaurants like it weren't interested in even trying as a concept.
Why weren’t they also acting like they had unknowingly just stumbled upon an undecipherable plane of reality that radically altered the human history timeline of how we learned to consume pizza in restaurants? My Mandela effect was frightening.
But no, they were all just scissor-slicing their pizzas and going about their meals, never once lifting their eyebrows about what they were doing. Instead, they were casually chattering away about things like vacations or lengthy, landlord home-owning business strategies with the “advice” of ChatGPT on how to more easily hijack the lives of the lower class, and all as if this was the most normal fucking thing.
These lunatics had the NERVE to behave as if we’ve ALWAYS eaten pizza here in the worthless country I reside in just as is (and trust me, I've traveled through most of the country, eaten many a-pizzas, and no, this doesn't happen).
Not only did the server make no attempt to converse with me about my horrors when I was handed my food in confusion, but he didn’t even look between me and the scissors to discuss proper, scissor-slicing pizza techniques to prepare me for what I was about to have to do in a sink or swim, dire, life and death situation. I was not even granted a brief explanation or a heads up that I’d be cutting my own pizza and that it was with fucking SCISSORS.
Dystopian isn’t even a word to begin explaining this horror show.
So immensely horrified, I was certain that I had stepped into the twilight zone because no one near me even seemed to be under the influence of handling their scissors like they were first-timers trying a new experience in their stagnate lives by engaging in a radically different, pizza consuming exercise.
This was clearly a Mandela effect in real time. This quiet statement from the restaurant patrons around me internally deviated me from my old timeline, with a long-established and unquestioned tradition of being served your pizza pre-sliced where I live..d(?), to a cosmic nightmare beyond human comprehension where I was the only one who saw it.
Horrifying would be an understatement for my poor little head trying to keep the bigger pieces of my understanding of reality in place when this mess didn’t even exist in my well-established, long-lived lifetime of Human Culture and lore.
Now trapped under a large swath of questions running through my head of where I was in reality completely dominating my headspace, I just tried to stay strong with Bowtie and decided to trial cutting my pizza with scissors.
After all, maybe I truly had fallen into a parallel reality that was hotboxed to this little restaurant alone, and should get through the trial by meeting it head-on and getting with, *ahem* their literal spacetime defined by eating pizza with scissors instead of my own spacetime where it comes pre-sliced by a radically different object called a pizza cutter.
Maybe it was better this way, I argued with myself.
I wasn’t ok. But ok, here we go—
Actually, fuck you, that was awful.
It took way too long to cut my pizza, the scissors were stiff and hard to move, it made my fingers hurt, and it took approximately 5x the amount of time to do than if I used a traditional, stupid-looking, pizza cutter, or was simply handed my pizza pre-sliced the way the world around me had forced my expectations of pizza restaurants on to me. Which, for the record, had coerced me into the narrative of what the United States pizza restaurant expectations always were, and thus, was concocting this problem I was having at all.
(P.S. if you are trapped in your own broken, Mandela effected timeline, and horrified at a restaurant providing pre-sliced pizza, this is a pizza cutter, used within the kitchen by the chef in a timeline where slicing pizza yourself is not a customary part of the expected customer restaurant experience.)
Maybe the chefs needed to use scissors to cut the customers' pizza, no god could know why, but did I need to know about it??
Maybe as a gimmick, it’s shortly amusing, but- as a stark reminder, I was not in this pre-established dining experience like when one knowingly goes to Korean BBQ with their friends to show off selfies on social media about how the group got to cook their own slabs of meat at a table. So yes, it was freaking eerie and I did not in any way, shape, or form, consider myself naive about other cultures’ styles of cuisine l, considering I had been obsessed with showing up for trialing international cuisine since I was a littlebaby The Curator.
I also found that after the first few scissor snips to my pizza, the novelty wore off and it quickly became a battle to cut the pizza all the way through. Then, next thing I knew, I was grabbing at the whole pizza with my hands, getting cheese and grease everywhere trying to hold it in place to finish the job. I was not even able to see how one could easily slice it into equally portioned rectangles for the sake of presentation, like one could with a pizza roller, because of how easy it is to accidentally deviate your trajectory while snipping messy pizza with melted cheese going everywhere and getting in the way.
Then to make the battle worse, the scissors got stuck partway in because they weren’t mobile enough to razor through the whole pizza the way an already agreed-upon, more straightforward object we already invented for cutting pizzas should.
This nightmare was only the beginning..
Continue to part two of this story on why I fucking hate this piece-of-shit planet, and maybe we'll solve this together with my cohort, the stunning and incredibly handsome Reinefe ->
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