Hot Flash Cafe, I Knew Ye Well...Or Not.

I just spent a few minutes looking at the last few entries of “Hot Flash Café.”  Sixty-two essays written over the course of four years, inspired by the trials and errors of my short-but-way-not-short-enough tenure as a restaurant owner.  Pretty damned passable essays, as a matter of fact.  I’m surprised by how decent the writing is.  Given that most of the time during those years my batteries were depleted to about 15% of full power. 

But, the thing is, it’s like reading about someone else’s life.  That five years was such a…time out of time.  It was really like no other part of the rest of my life.  Though I thought that all I had done, career-wise, had led up to it…I was lost, clueless and completely unprepared from Day One.   And once it was over, I wasted no time putting it in the past.   Like a particularly grueling course of study…or a prison sentence.  When you get to the end of something like that, it seems you run as fast as your little legs can carry you to put distance between you and it.  At least I did.

So when I take a few moments to revisit the whole thing, what I feel most is a kind of disbelief that I spent years in that situation…and not that long ago.  I (evidently) went into it with nothing, and brought nothing away from it.  Just…wasted time.  Honestly.  I sometimes wish I could ask for a “do-over.”  As it is, it looks like I’ve decided to just cut those years out of my life and bury them in a hole in the back yard.  And am attempting to solder together the neatly cut ends to form a more-or-less seamless transition between 2006 and 2011.

But the ends don’t…quite…reach…