Listen. This has been going on too long. Look at me. We can’t go on this way. We can’t keep walking past it every day, averting our eyes, trying to pretend it’s not there. It’s too big a problem. It’s too much of a mistake.

Amalfi Oven is awful. OK? There. I said it. Has it been too long since you looked? Dig deep… you know what I’m talking about. It’s the pizza place in the George Sherman Union. Yeah, there we go. I see the emotions bubbling to the surface. You’ve thought about this before. Maybe you were a freshman, just beginning to explore the food options available to you here. You were at the GSU-alone, probably-and you decided you’d try out the pizza place, right?

Oh, no. Tell me your friends weren’t there. They were? Didn’t anyone try to stop you? Yeah, of course they did. You went anyway. You poor thing. No, I understand. You were thinking, “It’s pizza! It can’t be that bad… it’s pizza!”

Yeah, we’ve all been there. What did you wind up eating that day, Panda Express? Me, too.

But that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Everything we know about pizza, everything we’ve learned through our childhood and adolescence, indicates that pizza is good. I can’t remember if I’ve ever had straight-up bad pizza anywhere but at the GSU – pizza so bad that I had to get something else instead.

I mean, that crust, it’s so. . . wrong, its texture is almost hard to fathom. How can it have become so homogeneously. . . not quite chewy, what’s the word? I suppose there isn’t any word to describe it, not in the English language at least.

I hope that by failing to classify it, I will prevent it from being replicated in the future. The closest I’m getting is stale, as though the crust is somehow already stale when they make it, so that your teeth go through at the same maddening, unsatisfying pace the whole way down.

The blandness of the sauce is just sort of pitiful, and it seems that they try to hide this fact by using less of it. It’s not awful, at least, it doesn’t deliver quite the same jolt of terror we experience upon biting through the crust and the. . . the cheese. . . God, the cheese is too much.

The cheese is the straw that manages to make the pizza inedible. By the time it gets to you

it’s. . . it’s de-melted – the worst state of cheesiness, where it has passed through “cheese” and into “hot, gooey and melty” without quite becoming “bubbly and browned.” Then it is slowly cooled into a textural nightmare, devoid of flavor. A kind of edible rubber layer, so far beyond the realm of good food that it’s hard to see how you ever enjoyed eating in the first place.

What? Oh, yes, you’re right, of course. I was in too deep. I was almost lost. Thank you for snapping me out of it. We can’t think about that now, not anymore. It’s too sad. You see what I’m saying, though, right? You understand? Good. OK. At least we know we’re not alone.

But now what? Someone has to do something. I mean, this is a college campus. We are college students. College students love pizza. It’s insane not to have a good pizzeria here. I mean, if they churned out half-way decent stuff in there, we’d be all over it. I know I would. And, maybe if we started buying some, there’d be fresh pies out every once in a while – that alone would improve matters considerably. The point is, we can’t let this injustice go unfixed. It concerns us more than anyone. We have to do something — but what?

I’ll tell you. It’s convenient that we’re having this conversation in a newspaper. We can just call people out. We can issue a letter:

Dear GSU Management – actually, Dear BU Administration in general: You know this Amalfi thing is insane. I challenge you to let me (or at least someone) come in and see what’s going on in there, what’s leading to all these terrible pizzas. It can’t be hard to figure out a way to make them better than this. And I have a few ideas that might really make the place more worthwhile. (Don’t want to give everything away in such a public forum, of course.)

What do you say?