Todd Terwilliger

Brooklyn’s edition of restaurant week begins in a mere eleven days. I am fairly certain that preparations at the participating restaurants are well underway all across the Burrough: colored chalk stockpiled, chalkboards prepped, special menus printed on special menu cards with special menu typefaces. The excitement, if not quite palpable, adds a certain unidentifiable odor to the air. Yet, beneath the surface, there is a black tide sloughing across the gastronomic landscape. There is a war coming. Make no mistake: it will be a war.

Sunday. The last day, the final hurrah, the end. I set the alarm early. We had stayed up too late last night watching The Wire. You simply cannot watch just one episode of The Wire. It gets on top of you too fast. Before you know it, the clock has jumped ahead six hours and you’re laying akimbo on your couch half-naked with a belt tied around your arm, held tight by one end, the end which is clamped between your gritty teeth. You’re looking down at a throbbing vein in your arm and you don’t know why.

I realized that yesterday, I went into very little specifics about what I saw at the con. This is not due to some blindness or memory lapse on my part but rather the nature of my particular interest. For me, the con was less a fact-finding mission to glean secrets profound about anything than it was all about the journey, the experience mentally, physically, and metaphysically, in the con itself.