The Domino's in Boulder seems to be operating in a post-closure state
Another excuse to not write about anything substantive, but including updates and lazy promises
I (or one of my proxies) have written before about my dubious relationship with, among other cultural and commercial institutions, the local Domino’s Pizza. I described lapsing into a pattern of fairly frequent ordering this awful-on-a-good-day, overpriced muck simply because somewhere between half and two-thirds of my orders were arriving late, entitling me to a free medium pizza that, when redeemed, would usually arrive late, entitling me to…
Even if I wasn’t bothered at all by eating cold, hour-old pizza—and given that I routinely shove Domino’s slices of various ages and temperatures down my craw, I’m clearly not—and thought this pre-hacked route to a permanent 50- to 67-percent discount would remain open in perpetuity, the economics would still be unfavorable to me, the consumer; the $5.99 delivery charge alone enforces that reality. And I always tip the driver at the point of online purchase, even though I know this is equivalent to handing a barkeep an extra ten right after sitting down and saying, “Go ahead and water down half my drinks, and occasionally don’t bring what I order at all. It’s cool.”
Last night, after seeing that every Domino’s pie ordered online was half price, with no limits on quantity, I decided to preload my Thursday and Friday with a pair of pizza-like discs from this storied establishment that, when ingested, could be broken down into glucose, triglycerides, and amino acids in the same basic manner actual food is. (If you don’t think your body is a marvel, stroll through the candy aisles of a Dollar Tree—typically there are three—repeatedly muttering to yourself, “I can derive metabolically useful energy from the neon-colored, stale chum in those plastic bags.”)
Once I had the price cut in hand as a primary justification, I augmented my private case first by recalling that a friend has recently overpaying me to do some very basic and agreeable tasks, and second by recalling that I had recently covered a lot of ground on foot, about two-thirds of it countable as running. (That I wasn’t especially hungry as a result pf these labors didn’t enter the analysis.)
(It’s also possible, though speculative, that several great green billowing clouds of frighteningly acrid marijuana smoke exerted nontrivial effects on my pre-weekend meal planning—shimmering, globular phantasms either making their way into my house from the ne’er-do-well-riddled street or somehow forming in my room and flowing outward for the quacking and yapping neighbors to confront with arm-flapping bemusement.)
The order arrived on time, but with serious quality as well as quantity issues—not new ones in context, but somehow more poignant on this warm and windless eve.
This is what the large thin-crust with red peppers and beef looked like. Although Substack has been slow to introduce scratch-and-sniff option for embedded photos, you can probably tell that this poor motherfucker was obviously standing too close to the flamethrower used to fuse its frittered layer of fromunda cheese to the razor-thin undergirding of unmilled flour beneath.
Since I couldn’t eat any of this without hurting myself—too many sharp corners are fine when it’s rock candy, especially when LSD-enriched, but I wasn’t nearly high enough on imagined cannabinoids to even nibble at the arguably organic components in play here—I decided to see how much actual mass this pizza contained. Well, no, I didn’t, because if I had, I’d be reporting a number. Instead, I stacked up all the “slices” and took a photo of the result next to one of my (admittedly enormous) mitts.
Remember, this is a large.
The next item for consideration was a Brooklyn-style extra-large chicken and ham. It wasn’t burnt, probably because the lone one-site flamethrower gave out as soon as the thin-crust item had been “cooked.”
I believe that someone threw this baby into an autoclave for a minute, rinsed it carefully under lukewarm pond water, and sent it merrily toward Park East in a 1995 Tercel with no traces of a muffler or suspension system but at least eighteen decals. Domino’s drivers here don’t need to text you to let you know when they’re two minutes from your place, provided you keep a window cracked to hear the distinctive ruckus of incipient engine failure.
As before, I decided to see how much physical space this behemoth—which, in theory, contained a slathering of barbecue sauce in lieu of tomato paste, as did its charred companion—would consume in a less-merchant-friendly conformation.
Together, these two pizza-like constructs fit neatly into a three-quart container with zero compression and room to spare.
Perhaps owing to some rogue application of the Law of Conservation of Mass, the two boxes this stuff arrived in—sadly, very much on time—could have held about eighteen robust calzones between them, properly distributed. Or perhaps…it’s merely a marketing ploy. Imagine your lack of surprise when, say, a Magnum XL condom turns out to have a somewhat rigid peanut floating around inside it.
When I’ve ordered Domino’s in other parts of the Rockies, I have had the same kind of experience I remember having when I occasionally ordered Domino’s years ago from anywhere in the country, mostly liquor-bottle-strewn hotel rooms: Certainly not flavorful or even tasteful, but substantial and true to what I requested. I know the local franchise has had an impossible time keeping drivers and probably kitchen staff, too. But everyone involved seems utterly checked out, and I wonder if the enriched half-price offer isn’t part of an unannounced “All Dough Must Go!” store-closing process.
That’s probably too optimistic.
That story was intended mainly to beef up a placeholder post, as I have a number of other yarns in process that I’ve been slow to move owing to sundry late-springtime distractions, chief among them sleeping through life with insomnia. These include:
A review of last Saturday’s New Hampshire Meet of Champions and a preview of Saturday’s New England Championships (I guess I can’t sit on that one much longer)
A comprehensive summary of Outside, Inc.’s recent, violently telegraphed personnel purge and the equally obvious and rude lessons that most of those affected almost certainly won’t learn from the move
Chatter about my trip last month to North Carolina to visit my folks
Another throaty indictment of the ghastly and worsening social retardation of my fellow Boulderians
A likely upcoming podcast (see previous bullet point)
Personal running content, basted generously in scorn sauce and stir-fried to cynical perfection
Why the U.S. should redirect its military efforts toward reckonings with Israel and the Holy See
Hot take: The limitations of Ex-Lax in anime porn and why it matters, explained and fact-checked
You people have all been great lately. Too bad we all can’t meet in person. That would fucking be something, especially if someone else oversaw the catering.