Platt Goes. I Stay.

Adam Platt, the food critic for New York Magazine, is retiring after 22 glorious years.  Some of you may know Adam, and some of you may not.  Some may even know his predecessor, Gael Green, who grasped the job in 1968 (when the magazine was founded), as the readers gasped 40 years later when she was fired.

The latter paragraph may or may not be of immediate interest to cigar magazine readers, but in fact, it has all to do with the current situation at New York Magazine. I’m sure there are among the cigar intelligentsia who have a favorite magazine writer and will hate to see him or her go when they do.  And they will because everything has a beginning and an end.  EVERYTHING.

As Adam mentions in the article he wrote in this June’s issue of New York Magazine, “Some of the greatest critics . . . expired on the job way before their retirement years and even my friends and colleagues who have survived the obvious perils of the occupation (budget cuts, creeping drunkenness, heart failure, choking on a stray chicken bone) do so in a way that is decidedly less glamorous than it was in the glory days, when a friend of mine called it, ‘the last great job of the 20th century.’”

My point is he’s leaving and I’m staying because I believe being an independent cigar broker is “the last great job of the (21st) century.”

My job has the same risks as a food critic.  The difference is the negative fallout was far greater for Adam than it is for me, depending on your point of view as regards exposure.  The story goes that he was adored and despised.  Celebrity chef, Mario Batali, once said, and this is a direct quote, “I believe Platt’s a miserable fuck.” 

Anyway, Adam retires.  I don’t – not yet anyway.  I haven’t been out lately because contracting COVID messed up my body chemistry and aggravated an existing medical condition that has resulted in less travel and a trip to the hospital.

But I worry not.  There is always a cigar that will need me.  Therefore I feel loved, despite any sharp words that are spewed (if any) behind my back.

Adam, I bid you adieu!  I will certainly miss your reviews.  Have a cigar on me.

Consider This.

Being stuck at home with an illness is not my idea of a good time.   It was when I was in grade school, but as an adult, with responsibilities, it’s more of a psychological gut punch than a physical inconvenience.  (Though in my case I have both.)  And, since there have been enough Covid stories written and slathered on the internet wall to last a lifetime, I won’t add to it.  

But I will say this – when given the opportunity to be still – it is incredible what the mind can hear.  In my case, it was the whispers of what I’m doing with this short life I’ve been given and what I’m going to do with what’s left of it. 

No, I can’t predict the future.  But I will say that it gave me the time to consider what’s crucial to living out the balance of my existence and what isn’t.  

Will these embryonic thoughts continue to grow to maturation and release themselves into my reality?  I don’t know.  As I said, I can’t predict the future, but I can sure as hell can guide my life in the direction that is the most magnetic to my imagination.

So as I continue to use this blog as my intellectual Playdough® instead of all the time cigars, cigars, cigars – I welcome you to enjoy my thoughts about the balance of what time I have left, shove back the past, and perhaps play a little with the phrase, “predict the future.”