Make Gibbons Laugh #15
Behold! My favorite sign in the state of Massachusetts (other than “ENTERING ATHOL. POPULATION 11, 573.”):
FREE SOCKS. (Or rather, FREE Pizza Days SOCKS.). This is not a new sign. This is not a new marketing tactic from everyone’s favorite mediocre pizza place with a sun in its logo and a sketchy website punctuated with a “Dot Us” URL. I’ve now walked by Pizza Days—one of 5 greasy pizza places within a 3-block radius near Tufts referred to as Pizza Row—roughly twice a week for the last 45 weeks. And each and every one of those 90 walks past Pizza Days, this sign, the 8th Wonder of The World, has made me glow, laugh, beam, smile, giggle, guffaw, stand in frozen dumbfoundment, mouth open, confused, giddy, horrified, intrigued, appalled, but mostly giddy.
Because, if I know two things in this world, they are: 1. I love socks (usually bright, always mismatched), and 2. I love pizza. Those two passions haven’t, understandably ever converged (aside from the time, at Andrew S’s birthday party in fifth grade, when a frisky, loose ‘roni found its way from my hand into my shoe, unbeknownst to me. And when I took off my shoe, after two hours of sweaty batting cages and sweaty arcade games, there was the dank, mini-hubcap glued to the outside of my sock.
And, bear with me, if I know a third thing about myself, it’s that I enjoy free things. So, let’s recap here:
Socks? They’re on the menu, provided you order pizza, provided you order pizza online. Do we know anything about these socks? We do not. They could be wool knee-highs. They could be bland, white ankle-cuts. They could be some BANANAS design like a pizza over the “I” in the word “Pizza,” to suggest the dot in the “I” is a pepperoni (or possibly a nipple), and a sun over the “Y” in “Days” because nothing says underwhelming, LATE-NIGHT pizza for drunk college students like the thing in the sky that you can’t see at 1am (and nothing screams “legitimate business!” quite like bold Comic Sans with the wavy font feature kids use on their 4th-grade PowerPoints.)
Pizza? It holds the key to the socks. But have you tried it before, Will? Is the pizza any good? I’ll answer those questions with a few more questions: have you EVER seen a food establishment dip into the 2s on YELP (which Pizza Days DID while I was writing this and has since skyrocketed to an even 3.0)?! Have you ever seen so many 1-star, “wish I could give 0-star” reviews for anything?! Have you ever seen an owner respond to disappointed customers with thoughtful customer service like this?!
For about 10 minutes, I actually considered it. I genuinely thought about getting a shitty pizza in order to get the mysterious socks. After my 89th time walking by Pizza Days but before I discovered their YELP presence, I actually considered it. If nothing else, I could order a pizza, give away slices to strangers, give away the socks to a friend as a gag gift. It all felt like a very 21-Year-Old Drunk Will Fever Dream. That, or a more tame, lower-stakes episode of Nathan For You.
When I actually was 21-year-old Drunk Will, during most drunk outings, in fact, I would tell anyone around of my foolproof Shark Tank business plan: a sock company, called Mister & Mismatched Socks, where we would only supply mismatching pairs. This was an actual thing I was intent on starting. And for the most part, these were Drunk Words from Sober Thoughts (or often Drunk Words from Drunk Thoughts) as opposed to Sober Words from Drunk Thoughts.
I remember the whole, general plan, the idealistic-but-moronic idea: a love for socks without even knowing which arrow was Supply and which was Demand or how I would outsource the whole operation, a joy for mismatching but then remembering, when less affected by daddy sodas, that people could, you know, mix and match on their own without needing someone else to do that, how a freedom and agency in mismatching is the root of mismatching joy—not someone else mismatching for you.
I was reminded of Mister & Mismatched Socks when I was came *this* close to getting a (matching, I assume) pair of socks from Pizza Days.
I was reminded of Drunk Words, Sober Thoughts (and all those permutations) when I came across one of my all-time favorite TikToks:
And I was reminded that, yes, most things, after 12am—suspect pizza, suspect sock start-up ideas, lyric-truthers for classic John Denver songs — are really “only for desperation”: