Sneaking Up on the Memories

I spent five hours last night at the Hot Flash Café.  It was by far the longest period of time I have spent in many moons, anywhere near the memories and the issues of that site of my ill-fated struggle to reach the pinnacle of my thirty-year restaurant career. 

I never did reach that pinnacle.  But it reached down and poked me in the ass.  Several times.  Daily.  For five years.  And then some.   

It surprises me—or, maybe it doesn’t—that I had to get more than two years distant from that debacle before I could even look at stories of those days without hyperventilating.

But last night, innocently nosing around in the archives of my six (yes, SIX) blogger journals, I crept up to the door of the Hot Flash Café and sneaked a peek at some of the stories that had, until now, curdled my blood, burned my eyes and sent me high-tailing it in any direction possible, as long as it was away from there.

And what settled upon my shoulders was a dissatisfaction that the collection was so incomplete.  Of the five-plus years I struggled with the daily shit barrage of running that restaurant, only about 18 months were chronicled in its blog.  I was, out of the blue, struck by a (misguided?) sense that all would not be right until I collected ALL the stories in their chronological order, in their rightful place.  So I set about copy-and-pasting any and all cafe entries from various other volumes in my virtual library, and into the blog that bears the name of that epic battlefield.      

Maybe I think that if I do this, I can then sit down and look at the thing as a complete experience, from start to finish: and I can begin to learn the lessons I should have learned from it.  The lessons upon which I have stubbornly turned my back for two years.  Eyes closed, fingers in my ears, and humming really loud.

Maybe I’m entertaining the ghost of an idea that I will turn it into a book.  A memoir. A manual.  A handy “How-NOT-to” for anyone considering a similar saunter across the minefield between herself and her pinnacle.

I’m up to January of 2008. 

What a long, strange trip it was. 

 …IS.