David Sax once joked that I use my blog as cheap therapy. He was right. I use this space to unload all the angst, worry and pent up emotions from my life in the restaurant. From my personal life too. It feels good. More than once I’d be tossing and turning in bed only to find relief at my keyboard. Not like that. Well, yeah, like that and by blogging too.
Business improved and I could afford to pay someone to listen to me kvetch. I enjoyed that too but the blogging didn’t stop. I have a lot of angst. I am rife with insecurity and baggage. Oh, the baggage. It clouds every relationship that I have and explains why I’m so good at ruining them. Everything I do is coloured by my baggage.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming. In fact, the point I’m trying to make is that I feel like I’ve gotten to the point (brace yourself) where I’m happy. You will never know how long I paused between typing the last 8 words in the previous sentence.
Being happy is something I’m not really comfortable or all that familiar with. I like who I am. I even like this baggage I carry around. It’s me. Mismatched and tattered though it may be. It’s mine. No one has a set quite like it and it suits me. These days, instead of paying someone to listen to my problems I pay someone to work out with me three days a week.
And the blogging has slowed. Although interestingly I was thinking about something I heard Tony Bourdain say. That’s faux familiarity btw. Mr. Bourdain and I are not pals. I did hear him speak at the Drake a couple of years ago. “When I wrote Kitchen Confidential,” I’m paraphrasing now, “I was an angry young man.” He may have said. “Now I have a beautiful wife and daughter and live on the Upper East Side,” still paraphrasing as it could have been the Upper West or Lower East but it was one of those three. Anyway, dude wrote “Medium Raw” from a completely different perspective.
And so I’ve decided to continue blogging as a happy person. It may not be as much fun for you to read although I loved Medium Raw. Actually it will be fun for you and for me too because I’ll spout off on all kinds of subjects that I know nothing about and you may hate me or love me or not care one way or the other but despite your best efforts you’ll come back and read this shit. You just will. You can’t fucking help it.
Here’s my first “Happy Caplansky” blog post:
Dear Anonymous Assholes,
Some of us put our names on our work. We put it out there day after day. Month after month. Year after year. We are human beings. Not perfect. Not even close. But you don’t care, do you? You log into Chowhound or Blogto or whatever other site you care to post your criticism on and do so anonymously. Anonymously. That makes you an asshole.
That also makes you a coward. Is there anything worse than being a coward? How much pain you must feel? How awful for you that you feel the need to hurt others. I briefly dated a girl who wouldn’t tell me her Chowhound handle, I suspect, because I’d search her posts and see what an asshole she is. Note the word “briefly”.
I’m a big boy. Although I can take it I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt even though I don’t know who you are. Maybe you’re a competitor or that girl I dated briefly or my ex-wife. As hard as it is to imagine, I know there are lots of people out there who don’t like me. I mean don’t like me a lot. They think and may very well have good reason to believe I’m a total jerk or worse. But instead of talking to me about it they post personal attacks anonymously.
“Also, the owner is a jerk and I think takes pleasure in this…it’s his schtick.” A guy posted that on some review site under his real name. So I wrote Andrew an email and asked him why he felt I was a jerk. Dude didn’t write back but at least he had the cojones to write it under his real name. And now you know why most cowards use avatars: because they don’t want the object of their attacks to write them emails asking for explanation.
Criticism is ok. You don’t even have to be nice about it. But I put my work out there under my own name and you should too. It’s okay to think I’m a jerk. Just own it, asshole.
You know, I can get used to this Happy stuff.
