Okay, it's true. I had another slice tonight. Even went and sought this one out. If I'm going to be getting all truthful on your asses then I should probably just come out and admit that I had a slice last night. At Ray's down on Prince. Christ, another Ray's. I had a couple of slices there at some point much earlier and after I'd begun making entries here, but I didn't get around to putting it up. I didn't put up the entry about that lousy place over on 9th Ave. either, the one I ducked into partially cos I had a sneaking suspicion that this guy was eyeing me after he'd seen me using the ATM in a nearby deli. That pizza was lousy though, and not really worth mentioning.

But tonight I was at Sal's on Court St. not far from Union St [305 Court St]. I went there specifically because I was hungry and I'd taken a long bike ride. Ironically I was taking the bike ride because I've got some fears that in my late years I'm starting to put on a little weight. I'd grown so used to being able to eat anything and never gain a pound, and then when I started running regularly (which I haven't done since last July) I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted and never gain an ounce. While I was training for the 2000 NYC Marathon I even had to return home one day after I'd started out for the subway because my pants were just falling off my hips. I still have those pants, I just don't have that problem much anymore. Biking is a good deal less dangerous for your knees, which was my problem when I stopped running in July, and I can work it in with other things, like traveling to distant pizzerias.

Rambling again. Dear reader, get used to it. I shouldn't try to hide the fact that I'm a rambler from you if I've managed to do so at all up to this point. I can rarely stay on one path for long, and when I do it's usually forced or restrained and so my writing suffers for it.

Pizza. I was talking about Sal's pizzeria. To be clear, this is not the same Sal's as the one mentioned in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing ("I'm planning a boycott of Sal's Famous. They got no pictures of brothers on the wall.") as Carroll Gardens is a far cry from Bed-Stuy. It must be late, I'm off track already.

I wanted to make a specific effort to make special note of the qualities of the pizza because I was feeling as though I'd sort of been slacking in this department up to this point. But the fact is that I even as I was thinking about trying to take note of some of the special qualities of the pizza that I could record here I was already close to finishing the slice. To be honest, it wasn't the best slice of pizza I've had from Sal's. I think that the pizza there actually seemed to change in consistent quality a couple of years ago. Tonight, although the slices looked good on the platter there before they tossed mine in the oven for me, although they had two special fountain sodas reflecting the colors of the Italian flag, red and green, I saw something that was for me a sure sign of their decline: they had roasted chickens for sale. I won't tell you that I was crestfallen, because I was only disappointed, my emotions having been somewhat buffeted by the knowledge that something had changed about the pizza there.

The pizza was a good slice, a good solid slice. Having said that though, I should mention those things which kept it from being a truly great slice, or a slice that would have made me think that those earlier disappointing experiences were merely my wild imagination at work or flukes of some sort, an employee with a grudge or something. Alas, I fear that this was not the case. The cheese was a little two stretchy, as opposed to chewy. Chewy can be bitten off, and there may even be threads going from the pizza to the mouth, but not thicker strands, unless the pizza is really hot, in which case the cheese is liable to do just about anything. Further, although the sauce and the cheese had a pleasant blend, and there was even a garlicky flavor that was of a good strength—not hidden away, but not overpowering either—the flavors really weren't coming alive in the way that they could have been. No strong tomato flavor, nor any other spices were remarkable.

The crust was the biggest disappointment. I did tell the guy behind the counter (actually, because of the wonderful weather this evening they had the big to-go window open) that I didn't want the slice too hot, but still, I felt as though the crust was somewhat undercooked. Which was a drag. It just kind of made the whole slice uniformly unremarkable. Perhaps a slightly burnt or crispy crust would have set the other flavors off somewhat more. Who can say.

I have a theory about Sal's and the possible decline thereupon. I noticed (and I don't think that this is visible in the photos that I took) that to the right of the neon sign that read "Sal's Pizzeria" it said "Brick Oven Pizza." Seeing this, I had to have a closer look inside the place, cos I always thought that they had your standard pizza ovens, and in fact they do. But off to the left of the ovens there's an older contraption, looks very much like an oven, which appears not to be in use at present. So I'm wondering if that is in fact a retired brick oven. There weren't any bricks on the outside of it, but maybe like a kiln the bricks are all on the inside? (This is starting to sound a little hokey to me.) It could also be that there's a brick oven some place else in the restaurant and that they only use it for special orders or something. But I'm wondering if perhaps the pizza that I enjoyed so much a couple of years back was from a brick oven, that they were one of these rare joints that you'll encounter that are selling brick oven pizza by the slice (the only other one I knew, up on 59th & Park, closed down about nine months ago) and that now they've switched over to the ordinary ovens things are going downhill.

Now let's keep in mind that I'm judging all of these places against some sort of ideal standard I've got in my mind and not against the comparative standards of what is available out there in the world at large. So the pizza at Sal's is good, as I said earlier, but my knees didn't buckle, which is good, because I still had to bike home from there, but not so good because I'd really love to have my knees buckling these days, instead of feeling more or less as though I'm getting by day to day which is how I'm more or less feeling right now.

Which leads to another possibility. It might also be the fact that I've not been in the best of moods of late that has led me to not caring so much for the pizza that I've been eating. I noticed after I finished a slice at Ray's on Prince St., [I look in the Yellow Pages and can only find Pomodoro Pizza, 51 Spring St.—could this be the same place?] a pizzeria that I happen to like very much, that I couldn't even really remember much about how it tasted, that I hadn't even really tasted it at all. So it might be that I've been doing you a disservice, fine reader, pretending to be discerning as to the quality of various pizzas when in fact all my wits have been dulled by the onset of melancholy.

There is one other theory, but I think that it's a pretty poor one. In his poem, "Adam's Curse," Yeats writes of a discussion with two women in which he says

'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'

and then one of the women replies

'To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.'

So maybe that's it. Maybe the subtleties employed by those who are crafting these pizzas are slipping past me because they are so outstanding. Were they not so smoothly put across then I might take greater notice of them, perhaps knowing these fine pizzerias in advance and having visited them previously I am already expecting the beautiful slices and so don't take any great notice of them when they arrive just as I've expected. Although this does seem like something of a misreading of Yeats or at least a misapplication of the line of thought being advanced in "Adam's Curse" now that I think on it more. Not that either Yeats or I are definitely wrongheaded about what we're thinking, just that the two lines are running more perpendicularly than parallel.

Pizza theory. I love it.

I saw this great car on the way from the East River (the furthest point of my bike ride) to Sal's. It only has three wheels, which might be made clear by these photos. When I first approached it from the back I thought that it was odd that someone had chosen to strip the car of only its front two tires after having gone through all the labor of putting it up on cinder blocks but then I realized that it only has three wheels. I'm almost surprised that you can get a license plate for such a car. Does anyone know anything more about these cars? How fast they can go? Are they stable or do they roll over all the time? Have you ever delivered a pizza in one? How was the pizza?