I don't know. I love it, you see.
I love heating duck confit, saucisson de canard, confit gizzards,
saucisson de Toulouse, poitrine and duck fat with those wonderful
tarbais beans, spooning it into an earthenware crock and sprinkling it
with breadcrumbs. I love making those little mountains of chive-mashed
potatoes, wild mushrooms, ris de veau, a nice, tall micro-green salad as
garnish, drizzling a perfectly reduced sauce around the plate with my
favorite spoon. I enjoy the look on the face of my boss when I do a pot-
au-feu special-the look of sheer delight as he takes the massive bowl of
braised hooves, shoulders and tails in, the simple boiled turnips, potatoes
and carrots looking just right, just the way it should be. I love that look,
as I loved the look on Pino's face when he gazed upon a perfect bowl of
spaghetti alla chitarra, the same look I get when I approach a Scott Bryan
daube of beef, a plate of perfect oysters. It's a gaze of wonder: the same
look you see on small children's faces when their fathers take them into
deep water at the beach, and it's always a beautiful thing. For a moment,
or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-
cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when
we're confronted with a something as simple as a plate of food. When we
remember what it was that moved us down this road in the first place.
Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning,
I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write
this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and .
. . dishonest, making a buck writing. Writing anything is a treason of
sorts. Even the cold recitation of facts—which is hardly what I've been
up to—is never the thing itself. And the events described are somehow
diminished in the telling. A perfect bowl of bouillabaisse, that first, all-
important oyster, plucked from the Bassin d'Arcachon, both are made
cheaper, less distinct in my memory, once I've written about them.
Whether I missed a few other things, or described them inadaquately,
like the adventures of the Amazing Steven Tempel, or my Day in the
Life, are less important. Our movements through time and space seem