Serving Size

I can’t believe it’s not better. Where the margarine is marginally different, and rarely does it positively affect the taste of your lesson. It’s a crock, for sure. But why?

I want your recognition. I want your accolades. I want to be acknowledged as being superior at what I do.

Sprinkles on an unearned dessert.

But it’s been pretty damn silent. Flavorless. I got exactly what I asked for a few years ago. Cup filled to the brim with silence. Nothing extra. Just basic, black silence. 

When the phone went silent, I doubled down on my own work. When I doubled down on my own work, I saw improvement. When I saw improvement, I wanted to see immediate recognition. Some shares for how amazing my work is. How witty the words I write are. Some messages in the ol’ DM’s about how good I am at what I do. 

The worst part, I haven’t heard anything like that in quite a while. If I’m being honest with myself, it must be because my work isn’t good. If the meal was good, I’d hear about it right? Or I have, but it’s not from the people I want to hear it from.

I just barely started the process of learning how to cook. How to apply heat appropriately. How important it is to pay attention to the ingredients. To control the uncontrollable by just letting the process happen. Trying to move everything around before it’s ready. To help fuse lessons and flavors together by just turning the burner on higher, thinking that will get me what I need makes me a short-order cook.

Not a chef.

Turns out, I was just putting things in the microwave and calling it a meal and then expecting everyone to partake, call it delicious and tell all their friends.

That’s not a real meal. It’s not real butter. It’s wet. Still cold in the middle. There’s nothing nutritional in that. It’s fake. It’s marginal margarine at best. I can’t sustain myself, my family, my friends and my body of work with fake food, fake heat.

Fake ingredients.

No proper application of heat. Seared on the outside but cold as hell at the core cause I rush.

I need sustenance.

I need to learn to live off the fat I’ve built up these last several years from being lazy and feeding off the assumption that the group of people I hung around with made me better. They didn’t. But I believed they did. Cause that’s how I got my recognition. That’s how I ate. I’m not even sure we were at the same table most times. All the same food, but looking around wondering why the meal on my plate was burnt, sloppy, cold, and wet.

They helped me see the ingredients, nothing more.

Still burning it. Still undercooking. Still adding too much when less would have been more. Still finding ways to fuck it up.

I make the dish.