Make It Stop!

Time for a rant. It's been a while. I'll get back to the more lyrical stuff in a minute, but today I’m gonna get my Grumpy Old Jewish Man on.

First let me identify my target: Food Bloggers.

So Food Bloggers are those clowns that maintain personal sites that cover things like:

• over pictorialised restaurant reviews, complete with contrived metaphors and over anxious emotional descriptors;
• essays that unnecessarily (and failingly) attempt to use the depth of narrative and style required for a first hand account of a Spanish Civil War battle for a recounting of a Wednesday night spent following Grandma's chocolate cake recipe;
• breathless stories of some food-stuff that an old sorority sister found in a tiny store with the tag 'Gourmet' or 'Artisanal' or 'Overpriced Nonsense' plastered across it;
• and other vapid topics and posts that, to be frank, I just couldn't be bothered to Google, check and then describe to you.

Of Paragraphs and Choices

The Fork in the Road.

We've all been there. Several times. Maybe you're not out on The Road as often or much as I, but you've certainly seen a Fork or two. Even if your Google Maps works better than mine and you felt you thought you knew what was coming over the next rise, you still have to take and make decisions on whether to turn right or left. Most often I only realise that I had come up to a Fork after the fact. This is when a route I take perhaps doesn't work out as I expected it to and after mentally retracing my steps, I become aware of the singular, fateful choice that is that one 'wrong-turn'.

But there are times when I know I'm facing a Fork at the very moment I come up to it. It is so clear, that in my mind I see it as a real scene. I am wearing a faded brown suit and an emerald green button-up-vest that are both laced with thick markings of dust that have risen up off the road and clung to the parts of the material that are most moist with sweat. My right shoulder is slumped down due the stiff, red leather suitcase that hangs from my right hand. Across my left forearm and cradled into my stomach, lies a bouquet of wildflowers, wrapped in a light, tracing paper. I don't know exactly how long I’ve been carrying this spirited melange of purples, yellows and whites and neither do I know whom they are meant for, but they seem as fresh and as lively as the ones still growing and attached to the ground around my feet.