I had to go down to the Franklin Delanor Roosevelt branch of the post office today so I could drop off a package. My company decided to stop using Jaz disks a while back so I've been slowly selling off all the drives and disks that were thrown away on ebay. I haven't been making a ton of money at it, and the return I'm getting on my time probably hasn't amounted to as much as I'd make just getting in another hour at the job itself, but I'm enjoying doing it nonetheless. Since money's a bit tight of late I decided that I would put all the money I made towards buying a new television. The one I've got is about ten years old and it wasn't new when I bought it. Plus the screen is smaller than I'd like since I'm a big movie fan. If I'm not going to be able to watch something in a theater I'd like to be able to see it on a screen of some size instead. I'm not talking about a $3000+ flat plasma screen, I would just like to be able to pick up a decent 36" model.

The post office is on 3rd Avenue and about 55th St., I think. Regardless, I made the trip on my lunch hour and on the way back wanted to pick something up to eat. Choices were limited on my way back, at least partially because of the hour. By 2:30 on a Friday a lot of places have already sold out their more choice items. There's a good Japanese place, but they'd be out of most everything. The salad spot would probably only have their blandest salad left and I stopped eating at Blimpie about two years ago. There's a pizza place on 57th St. near Lexington Ave., and I'd been there before and was going to go right past it.

Christ, I don't know how many years ago that I first went to Belmora. I was working then for an ad agency just east and north of there, and Jordan Trachtenberg, still working at Tomato records. He claimed that they had the best pizza in New York (how many times have I had people tell me this?) and Jordie's not a small man (wasn't then, isn't now) so I thought that he might have some idea. It was pretty good at the time, I'll give him that, but I wasn't ripping off my clothes and dancing on the tables in my underwear or anything. It was good pizza, and that was about the extent of it.

I went back to Belmora a few more times and was just as pleased. Later I returned to working over here on 59th & Madison and eventually had gone through all the eateries in the vicinity and so I began to expand the circle. I remembered that this pizzeria was there and returned, but was sorely disappointed. The pizza wasn't as good, the staff wasn't too eager to serve anyone in a hurry, and they'd started making all those strange pizzas that started turning up in mid-town pizzerias about twelve years ago. They hadn't taken the full nose dive they were heading for, but when a pizzeria begins offering ziti-pizza, that is, pizza with baked ziti on top of it, they might as well hire an old man in rags with a deranged look in his eye to stomp around the place with a sign proclaiming "The End Is Nigh!"

But I'd hoped that there'd been some kind of turnaround, or my brain had frozen in the sub-zero temperatures that are chilling NYC at present and I'd forgotten about the ziti-pizza, or maybe I was in denial, living on false hopes. When I went past there was a new awning out front. It read "Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner." The sign above the place still proclaimed it to be a pizzeria, but the sign in the window reading "Breakfast Served" was only too telling. I don't know what I was thinking, that perhaps they'd achieved the impossible and that once the breakfast hour had past they'd spin the entire kitchen around on a giant lazy susan and bring forth their trusty pizza ovens. But when I stepped closer to the window to look inside, I saw the words "buffalo wings" painted in red cursive on the glass and was finally able to see clearly what I should have known from the beginning. Belmora was only a shell of the pizzeria it once was.

Ah humanity!