...Yes, yes, of course I'll pay in sweat and blood; I'll take the ulcer and the Hard-Way lessons. I'll take the whole sleep-negating lot, only 'cause I'm impatient and goatheaded and saddled with unbridled curiosity like that. Just, y'know, couldja bitch-slap the living hell outta me until I can stand in front of my own ego and look it in the eye? That'd be great. I've spent months working on my Ten-Mile Stare.
Jesus tits, it feels like I've learned a lot recently. Or maybe I haven't; maybe I'm just now noticing what 7 years in Seattle has taught me, how those years molded and affected me. Either way, I am still having a difficult time not loathing most people, but I am suddenly more comfortable with shoving them around and taking their money.
...No, wait...
I guess that's kinda true, but its opposite is also true. I still can't stand the willfully ignorant (which is, what, 97% of the human population?), but I am at least not so interested in trying to save them from their own fear. I've become a lot more comfortable with saving myself, and...it's nowhere near as cold and savage as I thought it'd be. In fact, sometimes it's just fuckin great. Sometimes it feels like I fit into my own skin like no one else could, and sometimes I even remember who I was when my mama found me under that giant mushroom: a ceruleal star with a great, wide hunger and a moon-chewing grin.
Tonight, I am blowing off my culinary obligations for a couple hours just so I can write. I haven't made that choice in weeks. Hell, looking back at these posts, I suddenly remembered that, Hey, wait a minute...I can write! Oh yeah! I, like, totally forgot and stuff! If I hate working the professional kitchen so much, what the hell am I still doing there? I mean, the dining car on this particular Opportunity Train is providing more hard and fast lessons than any I've been on in quite some time, and that is precisely what I want (always, always, always), but, y'know...I already know how much people bore and annoy and disappoint me. I already know that the -Ridiculously Long Weeks Stressing the Fuck Out Over Something That Should Be Joyful and Creative and Communal and Is Instead Competitive and Heartless- thing is not for me. Y'know? I figured that one out pretty early. But I love the food...the goddamned fooood! And so I keep coming back 'cause they keep asking me back, and I keep killing my writing opportunities with sleeplessness and stress and, currently, a return to unabashed alcoholism. Though I am aware how appalled I will be, next time I see this post, at how scattered and inelegantly worded and ranty and simpering this little tirade is, I am high as hell, riding on great blue Joy in my veins...not "joy" like heroin or something, but Joy like the kind that bumps my skin when I sit down to write. It feels so goddamned good to selfishly spend a few hours doing what I'd really love to do for a living instead of bowing before the Gods of Sustenance I choose to worship. Feels like playing hooky from church and feeling finally free to live Life instead of acting it out, a minor character in someone else's seen-it-before play.
I have other ideas for interacting with food, ideas about which I am terribly excited and may actually pursue. But the writing has to be there. And the reading. And the not giving a fuck about whether or not anyone else agrees, or cares, or whatever. I just write 'cause it gives me joy. And if I'm happy, so is absolutely everything else I come into contact with. Who could help it?
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