I'm a Blogger, Dammit - Now, Who the Hell Am I?

Legend has it that Hemingway would do much of his writing while standing up (that’s Ernest, by the way, not Mariel…what she does standing up is none of my concern). Interestingly, I have discovered that I tend to to do the same, albeit often unconsciously. What’s more, nothing puts an old-school kibosh on a freestyle random thought process faster than sitting my taut, muscular backside down in a comfy chair for a spell of focused writing. If true art is born not of misery, at least I can see how it is nurtured along by discomfort.

And so it was this morning as I lost myself in a brief catatonic stasis (yes, another one… no, I do not need to “see someone” about it), standing mid-kitchen, somewhere between an unprepared bowl of oatmeal and the siren song of the coffee pot. I was conscious of my surroundings, yes. I had surveilled the countertop to ensure the ritualistic elements of my morning breakfast routine were at the ready. And yet, I was not “whole.” Oddly, and without warning, my thoughts had retreated inward, yet I recall passively watching my subconscious frolic somewhere out in the middle distance.

Yes, I am pretty sure I was giving myself the thousand-yard-stare. And, as my gaze unlocked with…myself…it’s complicated…after what felt an uneasy eternity, a tiny ember of truth expanded forth with the blinding MichioKakuan force of an over-eager singularity, bursting at its adolescent seams with testosterone and galactic energy…

An epiphanic event so epic, it was totally narrated by this guy…for free.

…I was not a chef with recipes to share… I was not a wordsmith, channeling his craft through a generalized gustatory muse… And I was not the long-awaited, perfected, culmination of 65 million years of lovably snarky evolution in dire need of a written outlet…

Well, ok, technically, that part might still be true…

…I had become… A BLOGGER.

For approximately 1.7 seconds, this awakening made the most beautifully flawless sense you can possibly imagine. Law was brought to a chaotic system – flown in on the wings of an angel and kissed, gently, with the warm authority of cosmic balance…

For approximately 1.7 seconds, Handel’s “Messiah” hung in the air before clashing to the ground as the first three bars of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” theme…

For approximately 1.7 seconds…

And then it began to dawn on me: the evolutionary convergence of my inner writer and my outer chef into one cohesive identity is not the ultimate discovery of a long-sought voice. To the contrary, the realization has only provided me a pick axe, compass and hand grenade with which to try and FIND myself a voice. In the process of weaving personal passions into verbal conveyances that inherently carry fragments of my soul, one obvious question surfaces repeatedly… Who am I???

Oh God, it’s high school all over again!!

The more I thought about it, though, the more I began to hope that this tumultuous voyage is exactly what sets this blog apart from the countless others out there… This is not a standard recipe collection and it is certainly not a primer on cooking like grandma. I want your visit to be an EVENT: front-row seats to a bare-knuckle brawl between the mad chef, the irrepressible poet and the socially irritable satirist that hopefully keeps you, the inspiration behind it all, coming back for more.

Put another way, my passion for food mirrors my obsession for life on a larger scale… And I have always sucked at keeping my passions limited in number. But perhaps this is exactly the harmless schizophrenia that I should be culturing and nurturing for the benefit of society as a whole – or, far more likely, for the brief-yet-genuine amusement of a discrete and insular minority within that society…an awesome minority that embraces the belief that it is not always recipes, but rather personality, that makes food fun. Perhaps my voice is not hiding entirely within a realm of ingredients and process, but rather flitting the boundaries of some inter-dimensional space where there can never be too many cooks in the kitchen – as long as they all reside within the same over-crowded head…

But where can a bewildered, conflicted and fragmented soul find a utopian world in which to commit such multi-faceted textual alchemy without fear of reprisal…?

…oh that’s right… I’m a blogger.

…the journey continues…

About these ads