A year blogging

I started this blog to commit to the collective memory some of the better columns I wrote when I was a college student. Judging by the date of inception, I was also procrastinating, succumbing momentarily to the honest truth that you just don’t give a fuck about those last three papers before your exit interview, parade in cheap black robes, and descent into the rather boring chaos of a normal existence.

This year has been strange. I careened out of college with not much more than a friend or two in the food business and open sores covering most of my brain. Figuratively, folks, but I’d taken the punishment of college head-on, made the most of it, came out in one piece, learned a whole hell of a lot about me, book-learnin’, and somewhere along the way, I started writing about food.

Where exactly I got the idea to start writing the column has been lost, but it came from some combination of my avid consumption of food literature (when I had the time), culinary experimentation I made constantly available to any and all, and my tireless efforts to turn my roommates, girlfriends, friends, friends of friends, enemies, acquaintances and alien love children into better cooks (or at least more adventurous eaters).

I wrote some pretty funny shit for the Quest. I had a rule that whatever I wrote, it’d be created between the beginning of my Friday and deadline, around class time and only as a distraction from real work. That kind of mysteriously bad planning–I really am a planner by nature–led to some columns of questionable quality, questionable content and a few jokes that I honestly wouldn’t have included had I been less caffeinated, less hungover or in any way compensated for my efforts. I always had to read the paper to remember what I’d written. Frankly, if I hadn’t struck gold on the first swing with an analogy comparing Teflon to Prince, I’d have hung up my spurs a long time ago.

That column made me Richard Roundtree circa 1973, a pimptastic player with love for all my peoples. Well, it could have–my anonymity was a poorly kept secret, but no one really cared enough to ‘out’ me. I did gain confidence in my creative writing and got a kick out of making friends and strangers laugh.

In this newer cycle of straight-forward food blogging, far disconnected from the adoring masses who followed the Quest articles so religiously, I have trampled and trundled about unconstrained in the blogosphere, with nary a care in the world or an actual contribution for months at a time. Somewhere around January, something happened. A good friend of mine let it slip in my presence that he reads this tripe. Invigorated by the audience of one, and totally comfortable deluding myself into believing this friend was simply a messenger of an unspoken mass of fans, I began writing again in earnest. So here I am, 12 months and 53 posts into this fantastic experiment I like to call anonymous vanity.

This is too much fun.