Counterpoint: Oh God, I Think I'm Going To Be Sick

Here, as best I can approximate it in text, is the sound I made when I saw the above photo for the first time: Whuuhhuuhuhhhhhhuulckk. It was the sound of the sudden fear that I might puke. If the internet contains a more distressing photograph than that one, I will just have to take your word for it.

Listen. Listen! I do not doubt that Trish’s “Pepperoni Pizza Football Cheese Ball” is well-intentioned, and possibly even not completely awful-tasting. On the other hand, it looks like the ass end of an armadillo filled with vomit, and contains both cream cheese and mozzarella, at the same time, plus bacon bits, and I think if I tried to bring a cracker laden with its contents toward my mouth, my head would wrench itself off my neck and roll itself into the river.

My friend and colleague Barry Petchesky says he would eat the Pepperoni Pizza Football Cheese Ball. I did not know that Barry was an actual garbage disposal, but then again, that is not the sort of thing I typically ask people about themselves. I am glad he hasn’t eaten a Pepperoni Pizza Football Cheese Ball, yet, because he is a young man yet and our website could not exist without his work and he won’t be able to do it once he is dead.

I would not eat the Pepperoni Pizza Football Cheese Ball. Not out of some principled objection to fatty, cheesy, meaty stuff—c’mon, of course not—but because I don’t think I could. I can scarcely look at the photo without shuddering hard enough to throw my spine out of alignment. I could sooner eat burning charcoal.

Look at that thing! It is a horror. Please don’t eat it, Barry. Please don’t anybody eat it. Trish. Stop.