I went in to work today a dough-boy. I went home a dough-man.

You would not believe the insane dribble drabble that goes on in the dish room of a "mediocre-at-best" pizza place. Your ears would be ringing if you heard the conversations that go on there. The late Andy Kaufman would be doing somersaults in his grave if he only knew the kind of benign, mindless garbage that was being uttered and echoed all the way to the dry goods storage area.

This of course is misleading. When I'm in the dish room manning the helm of sterility and wielding my faucet hose like an unstable sword - a sword powerful enough to remove caked-on marinara sauce with one trusty "swoop" - when I'm in the dish room, I'm all by my lonesome. I think. And I think about everything. For example:

Regular pizza sauce has no additional steps. It comes in clear plastic bags. "Buffet sauce" is a combination of 2 ounces of sugar per aforementioned clear plastic bag of pizza sauce AND approximately 12 ounces of water all stirred in homogeneously. "School sauce" gets the sugar but not the water.

Mix garlic powder with a big bag of "artificial butter flavoring" to produce garlic butter sauce which can and will be used on everything edible that comes out of the kitchen and placed under artificial heating lamps.

Maybe crystal meth really IS the answer.

People never fail to fail me. Over the years I have grown quite cynical. It is very easy for me to criticize others. This is both good and bad. I think that it means that if I'm being complimentative, then you can rest assured that I am genuine.  There are times when I say to myself, "Chuck - who exactly do you think you are to point fingers at people and say that they are worthless, mindless, bad company, douche bags, assholes, faggots, etc., etc." But I am resilient. I bounce back quickly. Because I am reminded too quickly about how great a judge of character I really am. I can spot a douche bag from several hundred miles away.

Today I learned how to make pizza dough.  List of ingredients include (and are limited to) : 1 ounce of dry yeast, 3 ounces of salt, 6 ounces of sugar, 25 pounds of flour, and then approximately 11 pounds of warm water (you weigh the water on a scale - weird concept - why not just measure the water in volume, I say? "Shut the hell up, and don't ask any questions," They say. - but not really. I just made that up.)

So you take all of those ingredients and give them a meet-and-greet inside of a large commercial mixing bowl. [On my first day of work I was told not to get my arm caught inside this machine. Apparently the results would be less than desirable. Unfortunate, even. Then, again - they have $2 million dollars of liability insurance in a cloud above the business, and I am a bit down on my luck - but I digress.] You mix them all up with a push of a button and time it for 8 minutes. Everything is 8 minutes around there. Pizzas cook in 8 minutes. Dough mixes in 8 minutes. Two people should be able to make a rack of pizzas in 8 minutes. I would expect that if the name of the business were "Godfather's Pizza - and Blowjobs" - then blowjobs would be 8 minutes as well.

Here's the good part. The guy training me. Bless his heart. He's like a lot of people. He gets too caught up in specifics. He can't really improvise. He can't "go with it". All he knows is what was shown to him and anything that strays off the beaten path has got to be viewed as some sort of sin. The perpetrator shall be condemned by stoning. It's THAT serious. Here's what I mean: As I put all of the ingredients into the mixer I did so in this order - yeast, salt, and sugar mixture - then the flour - and THEN I was about to put in the water. "Hold the train!", "Stop the presses!" - apparently you can't do that. (huh?) Yeah. For some reason unbeknownst to me - you can't add the flour before the water. I'm sorry. THIS is the good part. The poor soul of a person training me then proceeded to take the next 10 minutes - or maybe it was 8 minutes - to scoop out all of the flour I had just put into the mixture, so that we could add the water and then the flour. And this whole time I just felt worse and worse with every scoop he took out. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Logic would tell me that whatever the hell you put into this behemoth of a machine in whatever order you choose - it's going to get mixed, and it's going to get mixed up well. I guess that's not the case. And these are the things I'm talking about. These are the things that stew in my mind for days on end. I get real fixated on scenarios like that. And there's just so many. This one was fairly insignificant compared to some of the other "whoppers" I could share.

Now, a last word - if you will.

This is unrelated to all of this, but I must share because I think it's important to find the little nuggets in life that we can all relate to. Here at The World According To Chuck our aim is to make you feel like you are apart of something special and that you aren't weird or out of place - even if you did happen to be a slut in high school or one of the kids who hung out in front of BooksAMillion playing Magic: The Gathering.

This is me "keeping it real".

Today I had a very itchy asshole at work. This was a problem. At work you are confined to VERY light scratching when you turn a corner, or you are reduced to clenching your cheeks periodically to help reduce the itching. At home. At home you have all the freedom in the world. You can really "go to town" on that ass of yours. My personal remedy is to find a nice sturdy chair and do a real nice side-to-side motion. MMmm boy! That's how I spell relief - a nice folding metal chair.

COMING SOON: A GUEST BLOG BY ELAINE HODGES! I bet THAT got your ears all perked up, huh?