Lileks: Why is this column like deep-dish pizza?

For my last column at the Star Tribune, I am going to be as self-indulgent as the medium permits. Consider this the equivalent of a condemned man’s request for a last meal.

Speaking of which, what would you choose for yours?

Sometimes I think I’d go for deep-dish pizza, if only for the argument I could have with the prison official who walked me down the last mile. “That wasn’t pizza,” he’d say. “That’s more of a casserole.”

“No, it has the elements of pizza, just in an exaggerated form.” I’d turn to the priest walking alongside. “Father, back me up here.”

“Pizza may take many forms, my son. We seek its immutable essence. Is a casserole a hot dish? If a hot dish has tater tots, might not a pizza have them, as well?”

Guard, strapping the electrodes to my legs: “You never know, they’re putting pineapple on pizza now. There’s probably a place up north that puts tater tots on pizza. Doesn’t sound bad, actually.”

Warden, bursting into the execution chamber: “I have a message from the governor!” (Opens telegram envelope with trembling hands.) “‘Deep-dish pizza is not a hot dish, but a logical expansion of the basic idea of pizza. It is not, for example, served in a glass bowl.’”

Me: (looking around the room). “See? I’m right. OK, flip the switch, I don’t have all day.”

So, I’m done now. That’s the boring part.

The fun part is how it started in this business: I made a newspaper in fourth grade on a sheet of mimeo paper I begged off the teacher. The lead stories concerned rocket launches and comic books, and an ad for a friend’s baseball cards. It was met with yawning indifference, which destroyed my desire to be a publisher. It wasn’t until the summer break, when I was pouring salt on a leech at the lake, that I realized the trick was to fasten yourself to a larger publication that already existed.

But which one? Why, the Tribune. Of course. In high school, in Fargo, I started reading the Trib. It wasn’t easy to get. I had to go downtown to the library, where it hung on long wooden rods, as if the news was wet and needed to dry. It was full of big-city stories and confident columnists who’d tell you what was what. Oh, I dreamed of Minneapolis. I watched “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and plotted the path to shake off my hick burg.

It took 21 years to get from Fargo to the Trib (by then Strib). From the Minnesota Daily to City Pages to the Pioneer Press to a tour of duty in a Washington, D.C., bureau. In 1997, I got my column, and I think I sang out “You’re going to make it after all!” The future was set and solid.

Even though I Ioved print, I was seduced by the incorporeal miasma that was settling on the world: the internet.

From the start I spent too much time on the web. Like many of you, I’d ping-pong around from one news source to the other, awash in information. Now, we’re like people standing in a lake of news and opinion, toes brushing the bottom, nose barely above the surface, and we still want to wade deeper instead of heading to the solid ground of a printed journal.

Print is archaic, I know. It is often redundant or outdated by the time it bounces off the stoop. The internet is now. It rolls on 24-7, a river that can’t be dammed, because it will just flood the banks and find a new course. The old newspapers were a summation of the world at a particular time, filtered through a particular sensibility, the state of the day in a folded sheaf.

For a while, it was enough. For a while, we were content to open the paper, read the tales of the world and the stories of home, and be done with it for the day. I miss that. I miss not knowing the transitory imperatives of the ever-nattering now.

Before I got into the writing part of newspapers, I delivered them.

The Fargo Forum, thrown off the truck in bundles cinched with gray wire. I had to go door to door to collect money from subscribers, and take the receipts to the downtown HQ. I remember a day when I turned in my dollars and coins, and it coincided with the moment they started the presses. The entire building shuddered to life.

When I started at the Strib, the presses had moved to the North Loop, but I swear the building had some remnant memory of the old days. If you put your hand on the wall at a certain time, you could feel the old rumble deep in the bones.

Or it was a heavy truck passing by outside. Probably a truck.

Anyway. It’s been a good run. But, to be honest, I’m at a loss at how to end my career as a columnist. Famous last words and all that. How about this, the most unimaginative, plainest, dullest sentence I ever penned: Deep-dish pizza is absolutely not casserole. It’s pizza.

That’s the truest thing I ever wrote. Except for this:

Thank you for reading the words I wrote for the Star Tribune. Goodbye.