happy birthday, california kid

today is my birthday. on past birthdays, and i'm thinking way back here, something like writing a first entry on a new blog would have been the test run of that new toy, the year's big gift. there was nintendo one year, blasting away at the ducks in duck hunt with the nifty gray and orange gun that came with, bauer roller blades another, the bulky heel brake coming off immediately so as to add the extra cool factor, and so on. but this entry, the blog itself, has been a bitch, a long time coming at the least, and truly only coincides with this year's birthday because i woke up at four in the morning and sleep didn't easily return, and thoughts of writing this entry did.

this blog is about food. but i want it not to be just another food blog—so many of them saturated with clichés and trendy, drawn out fads of chefs and media—but rather a blog that tackles those clichés head on. i will try not to be afraid to dabble in the trends and ask, if need be, just what this new hot thing is for, or why that one died out? i'll explore the histories of food, the familial passing of dishes and how these things evolve, like how the chicken shawarma i ate last night is so different than the one my girlfriend grew up on in lansing, michigan. questions, with my fictionaltendencies of a writing mind, i constantly not only ask myself, but see others asking, direct or indirect, all around. our language of food is present, however indistinguishable it might be, in the subtext of the ongoing dialogue, both mainstream and private alike.

and it starts, for me, with the navel orange tree in my neighbor's backyard from childhood. it starts with the branches that hung over our pink stone wall and the fallen fruit that my brother and i would sometimes toss to one another and whack with a bat, a sticky game that never lasted very long. or the rotten fruits that shriveled, always at least one fly, if not three or four, rubbing its conniving arms together over the orange's white and sickly open wound, the gangrene looking fruit a type of ranky, conjured ugly that i was too afraid to ever even poke with a stick. and never, to the best of my recollection, did i pluck an orange from that tree, nor pick one from the ground, and peel back its skin and plop its segments in my mouth. and yet the tree haunts me still. what the tree embodies—i, like the tree, a product of the san fernando valley—is the epitome of the subtext i aim to explore, and in this case, very much a part of both the private, and mainstream dialogue (see: chinatown). which means that this, for all its worth, is a food blog that starts with a food story in which a food was never eaten.