Carpaccio: Vol. 2, No. 1: (In your best Rakim voice) 🎶It’s been a long time...🎶

So, HB, where you been? 

How does a person lose themselves so completely? Writing this, I feel like Don Corleone, sitting at the table with the Five Families, asking the question, "How did things get so far?" I am, of course, talking about Carpaccio, and the last entry being nearly four years ago, Aug. 3, 2014. How could four whole years pass without a single entry to this frivolity I enjoy so much? 

The first answer is unsatisfactory but kinda true: There are only so many words. On book project, I tend to marshal the words I do have in me into the manuscript I'm working on. It is not an infinite reservoir of words and one must be judicious, focusing on the project instead of some bullshit appraisal of the octopus at Landmarc (above average, by the way). 

This justification for not writing isn't just unsatisfactory, but I'm mistaken: it's patently untrue. Plenty of words have been spilled that never made it between two covers. A quick look at my Twitter profile says I tweeted 77.1k times since 2009, cutting that roughly in half would mean maybe 40,000 tweets at 160 characters is a lot of words that could have been allocated to Carpaccio but instead were spent sparring back and forth online. This is inexcusable. 

The second answer is more pure: I lost interest in this little hobby. The last entry was Aug. 3, 2014, a few days before police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson. Ferguson is a true demarcating line in America, and an intensely personal one for me, where black folk especially, regardless of our historical layers of protected covering were reminded in ways maybe we wanted to forget not to feel as though equality had been achieved, that the state is now colorblind, or your ability to be served at Morton's means Morton's wants to serve you, or its customers want you in the dining room or both don't still believe it's their dining room and they're graciously allowing you to enjoy sitting in it. It has always been better to assume nobody cares if you're in there or not, but that would be foolish. 

Ferguson was followed by "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!" and Jordan Davis and Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice and Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and suddenly my feelings about the Sunrise Roll at Roy's not only felt unimportant but offensive. Who the fuck cares about your fancy dinner? 

Four years later, the second answer still applies, what with Stephon Clark being shot in the back by Sacramento police and Houston Texans owner Bob McNair essentially saying "Sorry not sorry" for apologizing to players for calling them "inmates" a few months ago. The issues haven't gone anywhere. 

Still, writers write and you use the times around you to write differently, feel differently. The desire to resume Carpaccio has returned, to chronicle the often bizarre and humorous life of covering sports, the food encounters that come with it – and the people at my tables. Humor is important and so is an outlet, so let's not take any of this too seriously. 

As I told a friend earlier this evening, if this blog ever amounts to nothing more than the uninteresting exercise of me snapping pictures of my dinner and assessing the consistency of my parsnips, feel free to slap the shit out of me. It's a standing offer. - HB