Have you ever tried smearing yourself with peanut butter and walking into a room full of poodles? No? Just me? Oh, well, then you might not understand that visual.

One of our cute young tax deductions has autism and when she was a tiny tot we started the gluten-free, casein-free diet with her. It works for her, helps her feel better, etc. Starting it as young as she did, she never really missed out on a lot of stuff. I mean, you can get these special ordered donuts and cheese and stuff, but once a block of dairy-free, vegan cheddar alternative has been shipped on a truck, there’s really not a lot of point in eating it. Plus, all that stuff is really expensive because the manufacturers know that you’ll pay for it, damn the expense!

But last night, my husband called and told me he would pick up a pizza on his way home. I can’t tell you the name of the pizza place because they’re really expensive and I don’t want to be ugly by saying, “Your artichoke and feta pizza with the crushed diamonds sprinkled on the hormone-free, free-range Louis Vuitton cheese is a little too pricey.” Interestingly, this pizza place is a national retail chain and they have a very drug-lifestyle motif, which is hilarious because if you’ve smoked enough weed that you need to eat an entire spring-water dough pizza, you can no longer afford this place.

I looked online to figure out which one of their pizzas we could afford without selling a body part on the black market, and noticed that they now have a pizza whose dough is gluten-free and whose cheese is all-natural vegan cheese. Okay then! I purposely did not look at the price of that concoction because I knew I would back out. My kid has literally never eaten pizza in her entire life, and by golly she’s gonna have some pizza! Sadly, I figured out later that this particular pizza was not expensive because of the fancy cheese or the hand-wrought crust.

It was because it’s made of crack.

It has to be. No one in the history of eating, fat people and marijuana smokers included, has ever gone this ape shit for a pizza, especially one with soy cheese on top. We got the kid all excited with this great build up of anticipation (just in case it was really nasty and we wanted her to eat it anyway), only to have her make these really seizure-like faces the whole time that she was eating. Correction: the whole time that she ate THREE slices. It was the peanut-butter-poodle fight all over again as she’s dancing our legs, clutching at the greasy box we were tossing back and forth in a game of keep away, just trying to keep her from eating herself into pukedom.

I woke up this morning to said child holding one of my eyelids open and stage whispering, “K’ai have pizza?” She is downstairs as we speak fighting off the Dachshund for her second slice of the day. THAT is a food-dog visual you do not want to experience.