Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Maybe it's some sort of mental dysmorphia but I live in a constant state of self doubt. I feel like I'm treading on a thin strand of luck and the slightest of circumstances could buffet me off the rope in to the abyss I deserve to live in. This isn't to suggest I believe I've done something cosmically immoral, but it is to say that I'm presently living a life I have a hard time accepting I'm worthy of. I have a job that is actually fun to go to, I have an insistently loving and supportive family, I have enough money to sustain the maintenance of two dogs who I adore and enough extra to manage a date night here and there. My wife is the loyal, sweet, incisive and hilarious breadwinner of my house who puts up with my neurotic bullshit with more patience than I had previously assumed was possible. That doesn't even touch on her beauty, which exists on such a scale that otherwise mature and tactful adults who meet her for the first time feel compelled to tell me they don't understand how I, of all people, ended up with her. The life surrounding this teeth-gritting, fatalistic, catastrophic curmudgeon is by definition a good one; one that could be categorized as enviable for a lot of people

So what's my stupid problem then? Well, I'm so nervous about the fragility of my very nice life that instead of enjoying it I become a hypochondriacal wad of nervous energy. I consider the logic of doomsayers predicting the end of the world, I convince my body it has cancer or some anomalous neurological condition, I remind myself constantly that at any minute someone I love could die in a car accident and joy itself could become rendered an impossibility forevermore. In short, my last name is "Ciaccio" and I am imbued with a genetic condition that makes me, at times, a grumpy and petulant old man who loves life too much to invest in it. Caution begets anxiety which begets self doubt which begets depression which begets me sitting around and playing my PS3 for hours instead of doing anything remotely useful, like cleaning up my house or writing on this here blog. It's lame and inexcusable. That's why I'm sorry.

I'm not sorry to you, my reader, whoever you are. I'm really grateful that you've tolerated my indulgent self-effacement long enough to get to this sentence, but I'm not sorry. I'm also not going to apologize to myself because my inner snob resents my inner sloth too much to let me get away with contrition. I dedicate my lament to the static sense of fulfillment that I've been shutting out the last several months by looking at my laptop and saying, "Why bother?". Knowing that I've exchanged something I personally find enriching for hours and hours of forgettable non-life isn't something I want to apologize to myself for, but it is something I want to regret. Even if life isn't as fragile as my brain would like me to believe, time itself is a non-renewable resource.

So here is this post, in all of it's immodest and maudlin glory, obliging me to keep writing. There may be a lot in this world that I thumb my nose at, but food and writing don't fit in to that vast bracket. Whatever this blog is the product of; be it a talent, a gift, a delusion or whatever else, it is with out a doubt a more logical means to a satisfying end than all of the nothing i've been doing. So, with Wisconsin's pertinacious winter looming, let's get cozy, and I'll fill some of your time with what I think about the great (and not so great) world of gustation.