Taking a bite of the apple

Finally. After years of rambling and fumbling through various countries,states,jobs...men...I am officially becoming official. I got the position I have wanted for the last decade...

Fuck Yeah!

That said, I have had an amazing go at this whole life thing. I haven't played by the rules or lived conventionally-but in the end, the road less travelled has led to the path my heart desires...a life with purpose.

And I believe that things happen for a reason. People, places have come to me, moved through me...and those experiences have been the best education I could ever have.
There is this whole idea about a glass ceiling...I think that has more to do with the limitations we place on ourselves. We draw boundaries based on class or civics...But what happens when step outside of that?
I
am formally educated, good with languages...but I have only flirted with jobs in my field since I left college. I have been a copy editor, done translations, sold leather jackets while in Italy...worked in kitchens,restaurants all over...I worked in a black cosmetics factory, screwing tops on jheri curl juice..I have done what I do in Vegas off and on for years...
Breaking up with the service industry is crazy to me. It has been there with me through it all. For 15 years, I have done everything from cut tomatoes to running a joint. There is a whole dialect that you learn working in restaurants...and a lifestyle that follows.
There are things that most people will just never experience. Restaurant folk have not only experienced it, they have written the book. I have been offered 3,000 in 100 dollar bills to walk out of my job and get into a limo headed for Tunica...I have watched a priest, collar and all, drunk late on a sunday afternoon, with his tongue down a girls throat. All I could muster was "atleast its a chick...and she's legal even" I have seen more cocaine than any human should being funnelled through bars and kitchens in amounts that dwarfed scenes in "Scarface". I have seen rookies sent out for "meatglue" and buckets of steam...I have gotten high in a walk-in cooler in the Haight...In a fit of rage, I booted cooks off the line and jumped in, in the middle of dinner service, with my owner in the building. I have dumped out my tip jar after a busy night behind the bar and found six hundred dollars in tips and about four hundred dollars worth of blow. My lasagna got me backstage for a broadway show...

And there have been life affirming moments. There was a kitchen in Italy that I worked in...The owner was sketchy on a good day and one night there was a buy-out by a group from Cutro. Cutro is a N'drangheta (La Mafia Calabrese) stronghold, and Chef left me in the kitchen alone with the flu and about 15 Bistecce Fiorentine on the grill...and they were to be cooked at different temps, they weren't all "al sangue".I was seeing double at one point. I had this vision of me stroking out right there, with all that heat and meat, my last moments spent covered in sweat and grease with an obscene amount of beef...as I began to float away, I could hear voices in the wine cellar, and the repetitive thud of a body hitting the wall...My boss was delivering some vigilante justice in the cellar...

That doesn't happen in cubicles.

And Vegas has been like war. I am an honest person, almost to a fault...and I haven't been able to be that person here. Also, living with the fear that I will be discovered, and that all of what I have accomplished here will be in vain.

I came to Vegas with secrets, and I will leave with an additional one...

Man. Life is kooky.