What not to blog, part deux

When we ate at the Thai Orchid the other night, I realized I was there less for the food, which was terrible, and more for the insults I would heap upon its head when I got to blog about it.

Eating out merely to write about it is a waste of time and money. Here I was, sitting with A, enjoying my life, enjoying the time I spend with her, feeling good about the long snarky ride through the 'burbs to get to this place. Instead, The Word Beautiful Bomber was already on the runway with the arrival of the spring rolls; all thoughts of the here and now slipped away and the searchlights switched on; at the first sight of a wilted spring onion (and there were a few) the sirens began: the air-raid was on, the bombs were falling and, with the arrival of the lacklustre pad thai, The Thai Orchid was on fire.

My growing unease with laying waste to a part of my life that I really enjoy found words last night at Jolly Bob's, as I was chatting with Wonder Boy. Living life while savoring every second is difficult enough without having to commit everything to memory. Imagine eating an oyster, that quivering sight, the smells and tastes of a life lived in a mysterious, somewhat scary world, that mix with your own memories of the sea (dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, or a variant thereof), that feel of the rough shell on your fingertips as you tilt that entire universe into your throat and feel your eyeballs rotate in their sockets as the sand and brine hit the roof of your nasopharynx... all this, and then you have to write about the not so good champagne that you drank with it? Doesn't that introduce, as it were, some sand into the oyster, and not one that's going to produce a particularly good pearl, either?

The way I'm thinking about it is, I'm going to try and continue writing something about the food that I eat, but in a more hands-off, unreview-y, way. Wonder Boy was at least empathetic to my predicament (he might even have been sympathetic). Attorney Adorable was more skeptical: "How can you have a food blog without food?" We'll see. Maybe it won't be a food blog; after all, it does say " ...and other things I like doing around Madison, Wisconsin" right under the title, doesn't it?