To be entirely honest, writing this entry is probably among the last things that I want to do right now. It's also not really the thing I should be doing now. I usually try to reserve Tuesday afternoons for writing poetry, or for sitting and trying to write poetry, but I'm going to allow myself the excuse of being overwhelmed by the heat to keep me from trying to tackle poetry today. Frankly I rather dread the prospect of trying to write any poetry right now, heat notwithstanding as I'm in the midst of a long strain of writer's block which I'm really only furthering by not writing. Is writing the cure for writer's block? Not writing couldn't be the cure. Feed a fever, starve a cold?

But I've heard once again from several people who'd like to know why I've not made any new entries in this blog and I don't really have anything that approaches a good excuse. I continue to eat pizza and even photograph pizzarias from time to time, but I just don't find myself drawn to the keyboard to report on it. I've been eating the same old pizza at the same old places, not venturing uptown or deeper into Brooklyn as I'd once hoped I'd find myself doing. Since the most recent complaint came from my friend Betsy who's living in pizza-deprived Oxford, England, I thought I should try to write something or other. Try to make some sort of entry.

I thought that perhaps I might even try putting restrictions on my life, on my pizza-eating habits since such strictures are often what I require to go through with a project. I can be obsessive this way, refusing to veer from a set course for no reason other than that it's the course I've charted. I think that if I didn't possess such a quality I never would have managed to run the marathon or to do much of the other running that I've done. After a while my agenda may tend to deteriorate, as is evidenced by the fact that I'm not sitting trying to write poetry this Tuesday afternoon, or that the hot water faucet—which is on my list of things to do—has been leaking profusely for some time now. My thought was that for a given period of time, let's say three months starting today, I won't allow myself to eat pizza unless I've made some sort of entry in this blog. Not a slice, not a bite, unless I sit and write. I'm counting on my ability to keep this up for three months. The only condition under which I will allow myself any leeway here will be if I am eating pizza more than once in the same day (Heaven forbid!)

Actually, that last "Heaven forbid!" parenthetical or not is something I might perhaps take a little more seriously. It wasn't long ago that I had a check-up at my doctor's and learned that my cholesterol is a bit on the high side. It was 160, as I recall, though it was a measure of a particular type of cholesterol, LBJs or some such. In any event, it wasn't good. I'm not taking Lipitor now or anything, but I'm trying to run again and I'm eating sorbet instead of ice cream. Or at least the pint in the freezer right now is sorbet and not ice cream. It's not as though I've been slapping my own wrist whenever I've found my index finger slowly moving down the list of deserts on a restaurant menu. I have to go back to see the same doctor next week and I'm going to ask him to do a workup on my cholesterol again so I can find out if I need to start eating nothing but broccoli and brussel sprouts.

The poor bastard suggested to me when asking about my diet that I switch to taking skim milk in my coffee instead of whole. I almost laughed in his face. Why not just take it black?! Skim milk. Skim milk is for suckers.

—Which is an attitude not entirely out of place coming from a man who likes a good slice of pizza. I don't know that I've ever been to a pizzaria where low-fat mozzerella was even on the menu. God knows there might be one in Park Slope now, and I'd bet money that the fine people over at Pino's have heard the voice of some concerned mother on the phone asking if they can deliver a pie with low-fat mozzerella. I wonder if there's a special designation for the mafia hit-man who tracks down these parents and puts them on a special diet. No possibilities spring to mind right away, but I'd welcome any suggestions or inside information.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with my having eaten pizza lately. And I think that this is something I was trying to get across at the beginning of all this: I haven't written in so long because nothing has happened. Did you really want to know about how I fell from grace several weeks ago at a restaurant upstatewhere there was a fake fisherman's skeleton in a small boat on the roof, eating a pineapple & ham pizza (hawaiian pizza) in their backyard garden while this brat through small rocks at Holly, myself and his parents? Hmm. Actually now that I write it out like that it sounds as though it might have made a decent story. But God's honest is that the summary of the thing is about as good as it gets. Nobody really wants to read about how I had to make several trips to the bar because I kept forgetting to bring back my friends' drinks. Or how the bartender kept calling me "sweet cheeks." See, I had to make that part up just to keep this explanation part interesting!

But I began this entry because I had pizza today. I had it at Antonio's and I didn't take a photo of the place. I've probably got a photo of it somewhere in my files though since it's right there on Flatbush next to the now defunct Plaza Twin Cinema and the Seventh Avenue subway station where I'll catch the subway three times out of five. For the most part I try to avoid the place because I've never really liked the atmosphere and the place usually seems kind of dingy. I think that pizzaria's situated on major thoroughfares like that one, especially ones so close to subway stations should generally be approached with caution and viewed as being somewhat suspect. If you consider that most of the "restaurants" in the immediate vicinity are just grab-joints it may occur to you that there's a reason why there aren't any more stable restaurants: no community. Since many of the people stopping to eat at such an establishment are on their way elsewhere (there's also a bus stop right out in front of the pizzaria) there's less need to seek out return customers. Places like this one are thriving more on the convenience of their location than on the quality of the food they're offering.

As I've mentioned, I usually try to write on Tuesday afternoons. My schedule usually works as follows: I work until about one o'clock ($ work, not poetry work) and then go see my shrink in Manhattan. From 2 to 3 I'm at the shrink and then I'm headed some place to write, working lunch in along the way. Since I know from previous experience that the Rose Reading Room at the main branch of the NYPL, where I've often gone to write and which I adore, is hotter than balls in the Summer, I do what I can to stay away. So I got on the 5 to the Q, heading home. When I got out of the subway at Seventh Ave. I was presented with the issue of how it was I was going to eat anything in this heat without hurling, and I considered pizza. The Cuban place across the street had their door open which meant no A/C, which was straight out. I said to myself "If the door on the Pizzeria is closed then it's on." Sure enough, the door was closed.

The atmosphere in the place spoke to me of transience. There was no one else there except for me and the guy behind the counter and whoever was working in the back. Even though "Antonio's" emblazoned on the surface of every booth's counter top it still managed to remind me of a pizzeria in Penn Station or in a small bus station somewhere outside of New York City (I'm actually thinking of the Amtrak station in Albany, where I had to wait to be picked up for about three hours early in the day on New Year's Eve some years ago). I ordered one sicilian, one slice and a bottle of Pepsi. To tell you the truth I don't have that much to say about the pizza. It was edible. I got slapped on the chin with hot cheese at one point when it didn't hold to the slice but I'm alright. The sicilian was a little on the oily side but I dabbed it with a couple of napkins and it was taken care of.

As I sat there eating I noticed that the program playing on the television mounted above the entryway was General Hospital. Who was watching General Hospital (with closed captioning)? The counter man? Someone who'd come in while waiting for a bus and realized they weren't going to make it home in time to find out if Rex really was going to have Jessica's baby?

At some point a man came in and walked straight into the bathroom even though there was a sign on the door made out of a paper plate that clearly read "OUT OF ORDER." I was only half way through my sicilian at the time and hadn't even touched my slice. By the time I left he still hadn't come back out of there.

[Ed.'s Note: It would probably be in my best interest to mention that the aforementioned brat is not a brat at all times. To the contrary, he is capable at times of being quite sweet. Of course these times would not include when he's beating up on his 13-month old brother or peeing on his parent's television. But then we all pee'd on our parents televisions when we were three, didn't we? Well?]