Et Tu... Much Shitty Pizza?

I took Mr. Z to the next door neighbor kid's birthday party at Caeserland, yesterday. Fucking Caesarland... just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. And I swear to fuck, they must've been filming an episode of "Wife Swap" there, 'cuz it was even more white-trashtastic than usual.

There was this moment when I was sitting there at the booger/pizza sauce-encrusted cafeteria table, talking to the birthday boy's dad, as he held his three-year-old daughter on his lap, when these two women passed maybe two feet away from us, stopped and had this exchange:

SATIN JACKET WOMAN: Come back here, BITCH!

[she pushes the woman in front of her]

DISTRESSED DENIM WOMAN: Look, BITCH, do you want me to call the cops?! That's ASSAULT!

SATIN JACKET WOMAN: [confused] SALT?! [pause] You can't call me a BITCH... BITCH!

Finger wave... head wave... and... scene.

I looked at the dad and asked if the floorshow was included in the birthday party price. Then I made a reference to "Wife Swap," and he kinda looked at me like, what the shit? So I had to explain the premise of "Wife Swap," while maintaining that "I think that's the show's conceit... I mean, I've only seen it, like, once." Actually, I love "Wife Swap." I usually just watch the first five minutes and the last five minutes. It instantly makes me feel fantastic about my lot in life. It's like eating a funnel cake that's been dipped in Velveeta, stuck on a Slim Jim, rolled in colored mini-marshmallows and then had a picture of a Camaro airbrushed onto the side of it.

So, yeah, I sat there for two hours, eating shitty pizza, watching really shitty parents do the violently grab their kid's arm/jerk it/and yell in their face from two inches away thing, and making sure all the carnie-looking dudes scattered about the joint kept their distance from Mr. Z, who was busy contracting any number of superviruses from the habitrail tube climging structure that was basically a glorified sputum/poo/lice sewage system.

There was one amazing moment, though. Mr. Z had been collecting a bunch of tickets that he had earned from the shitty video games he was playing, and was eager to go up to the toy counter at the front of the place to redeem said tickets for even more plastic crap with which to fill our already-overflowing-with-plastic-crap existence. He had probably 75 tickets and he walked up to the counter with the birthday boy. When he came back, all he had was a smiley face ring and a superball. I asked him what was up, and he said, "Well, P [the birthday boy] wanted to get this stuffed animal but he was like 65 tickets short, so I gave him mine so he could get it." I pretty much dropped a steaming load in my trousers right there -- Mr. Z has never given away an opportunity to score plastic crap, especially if I'm not there saying, "Mr. Z, why don't you give P your tickets -- you don't need any more plastic crap." I couldn't fucking believe it.

I told him how proud I was of him and he was kind of like, "Ah, ain't nothin' but a thang," but it was really a watershed maturity moment for the boy. The kid never ceases to amaze me. Wild shit.

Well, then we said our goodbyes, passed through the de-lousing station and left. Of course, exiting a Caesarland is akin to walking into the corona of the sun after spending a lifetime in an underground bomb shelter. I felt like a goddamn naked mole rat seeing light for the first time. My fucking retinas shriveled up like fucking raisins the minute we walked outside.

No more Caesarland -- that's IT! I don't care if the spawn never attend another birthday party. I'm never setting foot in that fucking black hole of life-suck again.