Dog + Pizza

A quick yarn about decision-making.

There was a dog and a pizza and a hitch hiker in my car. Okay, so that is not quite the beginning of this yarn.

We had a beautiful mothers' day where I'd invited my mum and several other mamas to our house. The local pub donated two dozen oysters and a muso turned up to cook an amazing amount of pizza and play guitar. How much more Mothers Day magnificence can you handle?

So we ate, we ate, we listened to his music, we slept in the afternoon, and then we ate some more.
Come the day I was supposed to teach, I piled into the car with the last uncooked seafood pizza. My car wouldn't start. Then the landlord's dog roared into the front yard, grabbed some slippers and a pillow from the rocking chair and fucked off again. (Yes she is a golden retriever.) I still couldn't start said car.

When I finally did, I got fuel at the local servo, drove out of town and, on the outskirts, picked up a Dutch hitch hiker called Frank. Frank is a surfer who is going tree planting on his 'regional areas' visa. He was sympathetic that I needed to get to the uni in less than 90 minutes because he needed to get to the backpackers across the road. The thing was that the pizza was lying on the front seat. I pulled up and said, "You'll have to share with me, the pizza and the dog. I'm probably also gonna have a cigarette on the drive." I put the pizza on the back seat next to Selkie and the poor wretched dog had to look at it for about the whole 150 kilometres.

At the city house, I dropped off the dog, put the pizza in the fridge, and then drove down to uni and dropped off Frank. Profuse goodbyes. Taught my session, went back to city house.
'Oh, you have a pizza? That's a real shame. My oven is fucked,' said Crypt.
So the pizza stayed in the fridge (we had an excellent boil-up that night btw.)

I put the uncooked pizza back in my car the next day while I was packing to make my way back to the Pole. Before I left the city I had lunch with my best friend. She met me in the carpark.
'I have a pizza, a dog and an occy strap,' I said to her. 'I can't leave them together in the car because the dog will eat my pizza. I can put the dog on the back of the ute with an occy strap ... or ...' I then told her a terrible story about a mate's dog who had hung himself recently on one of these things. 'Maybe, I could put the pizza on the back of the ute and keep Selkie in the car.'

I got myself into a really stupid funk thinking about how to do this thing called decisions. I've never had a problem with decisions before. What was going on? I let down the tail gate of my ute, called up the dog, called her off, put the pizza on, took it off ... far out. I was quite aware that this was an example of my whole life right now. Don't cut the red wire, Sarah.

Finally, I attached the occy strap to Selkie's collar, put the pizza back inside my car, and then took the dog to the cafe, tied her up outside. Problem solved.

For the moment. That afternoon I drove 200km home and put the pizza in the oven, thinking 'I'm finally gonna eat this fucking thing.' And you you know? When I hefted it out of the oven, I looked at it and realised it was a seafood pizza that had been left uncooked inside my car for two days. Smoked salmon, mussels, etc. Refrigerated for maybe ten hours. But. Meh.

This morning I took the pizza out into the front yard and fed it to the dog. She ate it like she'd been waiting for it for quite a long time.