This summer we did nothing. The wind pushed and pulled us uselessly up and down the downtown Kitchener strip; the King St.; the one that is long and straight and makes no curiosity to explore. It is a street without playtime. It is a street with pizza.
On the astral plane Kitchener’s downtown is called Pizzatown. It is called this because there is a lot of dead pizza, slain and cut and displayed proudly on hot-lamp butcher racks. It will be well known to you that the souls of every murdered pizza return to the hands that made them to find love again. There are so many crushed pizzas that a wind of them blows eternal and sweeps the stained oil concrete and bounces off the glass cliffs of the condos, which tower as bleaching grey dead crusts left in the giant pizza box of the city. This is the Pizza Wind of Kitchener’s Pizzatown. You will have smelled the thought of cooked bread and felt the warm finger of toppings on your face if you live here.
Our slouching into the wind begins at The Adventurers Guild. We slink invisibly through the glass and sip at pizza grease on gaming pieces pushed along paper by two people who don’t know each other. A first date. We nibble at the cornmeal dust on the table as they nervously test themselves. They are like two small daisies drinking rainwater. We wish them well. The door opens and the suction washes us out and out onto the street where we surf the Pizza Wind to its breakwater: Ontario and King. The Pizza Wind blows strongest here around the tall grey crusts. It is the sort of constant wind that denies you your hat collection. This is a serious wizard problem.
It is here that City South Pizza sends its heat down Duke St., flows down Ontario, and strikes the opposing stream from Score Pizza and Grand Trunk Saloon. We snort the cheese off student backpacks and from the collared shirts of tipsy cocktail drinkers. This breakwater churns against an eastern blast brought by the struggle between Supreme Pizza and Wings and King Pizza and Wings, who cannot agree on rank. This intersection is a vortex of tomato rage, and we are spun west down the strip.
We huff the Pizza Wind streaming past FRESHSLICE. The marked people in unmarked black hoodies and camo ballcaps huff the wind there too, for it is cheapest in a way that makes one feel rich because it is new. Double Double is cheapest in a way that makes one feel cheap. The Pizza Wind pulls our wretched soul there and there are many hoodies lurching, unzipped and lolling like the tongues of summer dogs. They seem unsure of where to go and what to do with themselves and are closest to the souls of the crushed slices of the wind. We sluice and tumble, following the path of least resistance created by the winds of Bobby O’Brien’s, AOK, Pizza Pizza, La Cucina, The Real Deal, and The Civil, connecting pepperonis until we end our loop at Papa Joe and peer down Victoria St. where the Pizza Wind peters out. There are no crusts to collide with here. There is the final gauntlet of retail and service escaping from Pizzatown in a long line running and running and desperate to escape from thought into a farmer’s field. After many astral years pushed by the slightest pizza particles to move us, we land on a field near Guelph. Maybe wheat will grow here. Maybe the wheat will be pizza.
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