The Take-Out
Eaten alive
By Brandon Watson, Fri., Oct. 9, 2015
There's something wrong when a lighthearted piece about Bloody Marys causes my blood pressure to rise. As Twitter kerfuffles go, the hubbub over our latest AC Food Fight was barely a blip, but it still caused my body to clench. Almost immediately, I hunkered down.
It's not as if I don't do my best to try to ignore negative comments. I know nothing good can come from engaging, and no amount of reasoning will keep someone calling for your head from not cutting the guillotine's cord. Besides, most of the barbs are some variation on "hipster" – perhaps the most meaningless insult of our time. Telling me I have a mustache hardly even qualifies as a read.
I know being bothered by such "slights" is frankly silly, but that awareness often doesn't keep them from lingering in my head. There, circular thoughts build fires in oil cans; the heat builds and builds. Even the most inane aggressions get internalized. Maybe I need to do something different, maybe I'm not as smart as I think? Why do so many people hate me? What have I done?
That impulse is the caked residue of junior high and high school, where the names people called me carried considerably more menace than "hipster." The clench my body mimics now was then simply self-protection from taunts of "faggot" and potshots, the hunkering down was an attempt to shield my naked body from locker room humiliation. All the subsequent years should have softened the blows, but I guess you never really get over it.
Naturally, I would later choose a profession that would expose me to misanthropic instincts, and where pushback is not wholly undeserved. I do have some self-awareness. It's no small irony that I partially make my living on saying mean things. I can try to draw a distinction – commenting on food or service without directly lobbing criticism at people – but I'm not sure there's really a distinction to be made. Words and phrases like "kitchen" and "front-of-house" may seek to depersonalize, but they do not describe machines.
Still, we are talking about food here – something that is temporary even at its most vaulted. Even if I do know why I am a lightning rod, I don't know what about food gets people so undone. That we even have the knowledge to argue about who makes the best Bloody Marys in town, from smartphones no less, speaks of enormous privilege. It's a privilege that anyone would even engage with what I have to say. And maybe that's just the thing, what will convince the scared boy inside me to open up instead of close down. People may not get any nicer, but one day it will be OK not to care.