Friday, January 8, 2010

......there's even a secret hand shake!


It's funny and ironic how things start I think. I reread my 1st couple posts and here I am worried that I will be as wordy and sentimental as Bourdain about food when in this installment, all I want to talk about is the word f*#k. Relax, that's only a half truth. There's a big picture and underlying truths and grand generalisations, but in the beginning there was only F!@#.
I, like all teens, rebelled in all sorts of ways one of which was picking up such a word. Use it here or there for a laugh, whatever. But where along the line did it stop being offensive and further more what does it have to do with food?
There are secret handshakes, secret codes, behaviors, rules, attitudes, language, dress that make us recognize one another. Cooks/restaurant folk as a whole can smell their own kind absolutely. As far as the kitchen goes, it is hopefully one of the last great cynical secret societies left. Feed the masses, make them content. Work when those that rule are off, play when they that rule sleep. It seems that in the slightest of ways, it's only fitting that some of us don't mind social courtesies as well as others. I'm socially awkward. I don't do well around new people, never have. But in a kitchen, everything, every chaos makes sense. It's calming. I'll say ten times an ugly word while using the slightest touch, look like a schizo while doing river dance, because that's what we do. Is it strange that God or some form of him put pirates and artists together and came up with cooks?
We can be rough yet tender. Crude yet incredibly delicate. In a sense, we spend our time learning to manipulate some products like ourselves. Is that cliche or weird?
F@#$ yeah it's weird..........gottcha!!!!!

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