Introduction (Again)

Updated 09/22/19 - see bottom section.

What a long, strange life it's been. I'm 41 (as of this writing), yet I can think of no more apt description.

I had in mind, when I first started this blog, to use it as an artistic thing, kinda sorta like what Neil Gaiman does. I cribbed the title from Poul Anderson and then decided that I couldn't quite make the nut of what the fuck it was supposed to do. Part of the problem with blogs is content. If I wrote shit I wouldn't want my wife to read, then it's a diary and those are to be private. However, I've always found those to be dreadfully stupid and boring (such as the pages of any famous person unfortunate enough to have theirs published) and so never had the interest in a diary. I also, despite not putting actual names to anyone, don't want someone to be caused pain because of something I wrote, truthful or no.

So, like my LiveJournal, which was dedicated mainly to a time period when I was doing nothing but literally working myself out of being a disgusting fatass, this blog languished. I had a bodybuilding-type blog, when I had time for bodybuilding, elsewhere. I had a music blog, when I was active in that scene, elsewhere. I didn't want to make a "holy shit I'm a new father OMG this kid is shitting everywhere" type blog, so it meandered from "holy shit I'm a new husband OMFG this woman and her son (not my baby) are shitting everywhere" to let's talk about a season of Top Chef to bitching about the dumbshit online reviewers of the Netflix servers.

Waste of space? Hard to argue against it.  There's enough noise on the internet, so I forgot about it...until now. A week and a half ago, I had the distinct displeasure of being hammered in the ass by the bill at Red Robin for very mediocre and substandard foodstuffs, most particularly the pizza I ordered for the baby, which was so noxious I had to spit it into a napkin. I really wanted to go find a construction site, steal a jackhammer, dig up their parking lot and bury that putrid, wretched pile of cheese-covered shit, but my disdain for a pointless jail sentence got the better of me and I elected to not pursue that particular course.

During that dinner, however, I noticed they were offering a sauce based on the Bhut Jolokia pepper, the so-called "ghost pepper," and since I hadn't a chance to try a food with a heat rating that could earn someone a trip on a speeding white truck to the nearest emergency room, I was all for it. Since chain restaurants generally cannot do anything right, this was an abysmal disappointment. The sauce, while tasty, was not particularly hot, but while combining with the anemic Bourbon BBQ sauce they offered and some fried jalapeno coins, I got a burger, after topping it with bacon, that managed to make it all the way to acceptable. The idea of them using the "ghost pepper" got me curious, though, and I scoured the internet.

That led me to the site run by the esteemed Scott Roberts and my interest in firing up the blades of spicy foods was re-ignited. Why the blog, though? That's coming...

To back up a step, years before, shortly after I first moved to Utah, a friend and me started chasing heat. We eventually got the the point of using it correctly, after several novice mistakes of ratcheting the heat up beyond the point of it being pleasant to eat. Once we learned the lesson of flavor first, we made a steak marinade with a variety of ingredients that ruined us both for years and years in terms of going out to eat at steakhouse. We had a lovely chicken marinade also (ok, that one was mostly mine), but it was a constant battle to improve and pair it with home-brewed beer, which we also did.

Time change and people fuck off elsewhere out of your life. Everybody knows. I largely abandoned a lot of the heat-chasing, refining myself to tinkering and exploring fresh ginger, curry, mustards and garlic. I still kept jars of jalapenos on hand and a few bottles of my standby sauces (that list in another post) on hand at all times, but no longer would I go crazy buying (and eating) the newest and latest/greatest chilis or sauces. Once my son was born, though I had the itch again, I still laid off, since babies and hot shit are not generally what is considered a great combination.

Red Robin and Scott did me in, though. I found a whole new world that didn't exist when I moved to other things. The hottest pepper back then was the habanero and/or Scotch bonnet. There was no ghost, no Trinidad Scorpion, no Carolina Reaper. All the extract sauces back then tasted like steaming ass and the only time I ever saw them was at parties during drunken macho "bravery" (stupidity) contests. No one used them for cooking or anything like that because they tasted awful and it took a great deal of work to make the fuckers even remotely palatable. Not the case these days.

Why I decided on this blog was that I did a lot of music reviews (over 1,000) easy for a website years ago and I enjoyed that. The reviews of hot sauce (Scott's not included) are sorely lacking online. When I see stupid shit like someone parroting the tagline of Frank's Hot Sauce, as awful a concoction as is out there, about putting that shit on everything, during the course of the review, I automatically think to myself, "fuck that review and fuck that site for hosting that review." Also, I see people discussing their thoughts on the label font, text and graphic and it gives me pause. Is that what readers care about? Maybe, but not me.

So, this blog, if you haven't deduced by now, will be primarily for a review and discussion of hot sauces. I happen to have an intolerance to onions, so that limits dramatically the sauces available to me. I also don't see a value to cost ratio in any of the other online reviews and when you're chucking out buckets of cash for a sauce, it has to be worth it. I'm an elitist by nature, so I will tend towards the incredibly demanding. That is part my motivation, but also that I recently went on vacation and am not finding the groove to get back into the various writing projects I have. I'm hoping this will stimulate that in some way as well.

As for those other posts...they probably will never go live here, but some of them are moderately interesting and may work their way into a book or story of mine someday. I'm primarily a writer and one never knows what comes out the other end after everything finds its way into the hopper atop the grist mill.

- UPDATED CONTENT  -

In 9 days, on October 01, 2019, after over 7 years, I have decided to take this blog in a direction I didn't necessarily envision and start doing video accompaniment to some of the written reviews, including 100% of all new reviews from that point going forward. It will launch with a video introduction to the series, but in that way, I can expand a bit more into arenas I have interest in doing, such as reviewing all the available sauces from Taco Bell or expanding more on my Standby Sauce list or trying other spicy foods live. Not all sauce reviews will get that treatment (indeed, not all of them have pictures at this point and some of those never will), but I hope you find what is available to be entertaining. If you look at the "Special Announcement" post of September 2019, you will be able to obtain more information about this endeavor.

As always, thanks for joining me.