I am still here, kinda.

In the few minutes I have before heading out to work this morning, day 10 of a 13-day week that has included 4 16-hour days thus far, I am somehow compelled to blog. I can no longer be satisfied by mere facebook status updates or snarky comments. I must speak and have you listen. Both of you.

Partially, I am a little inspired by bikesnob, my hero of the blogoshpere. His recent work has bee among his best, and today's skewering of single-speed culture was particularly wonderful. As a fellow child of the 80s, the snob has a similar appreciation for counter-culture scenes as I do, having the same reaction in 1991-92 when al of a sudden Metallica and Nirvana became platinum sellers. You can't suffer that kind of disillusionment without it changing you forever. Hell, I listened to nothing but Phish and Miles Davis for at least a year after that. It was a long time before I got back to my punk rock roots, as my friend Rotary Rachel cautioned me to do.

On the plus side, I listened to a lot of Miles Davis.

It's also the start of racing season, but I haven't been on a bicycle since my last day off work. I've been daydreaming of the new steel I intend to reward myself with (that decision is not yet fully arrived at) and looking at pictures on pez, but I have no commuting stories or epic jaunts to share as in posts past.

Even my eating has been curtailed. I have eaten often and sometimes well, but styrofoam boxes and plastic clamshells are not the stuff that blogs are made of.

I did have another (oops, never mentioned the abalone and truffles from the last trip there!) near-religious experience at K-Zo on Saturday. It was a short day: 10-8, so I told BoW that I wanted to have a really good dinner out and asked her to look for a res in Culver City for the evening. Ideally, I would have gone to Fraîche, but that's just because we can never get in.

She got us a reservation at the bar and told them ahead of time that we wanted omakase, and we were seated in the center of the bar in front of the chef who was clearly the stud on duty that night. We ordered some Kikusui draft sake (it's the best drink to come from a can ever!) and did some positive modeling for the younger couple at the bar next to us.

What followed was a truly wonderful dining experience. We had the complete attention of the chef who made only two dishes the entire night not intended for us. Most of his time was spent on an amazing parade of fish and fish accessories: cooked, marinated tuna with a ponzu-like gelée, beautiful snapper, halibut, Santa Barbara prawn two ways, seared halibut fin (!), real bluefin, Spanish mackerel, premium Japanese mackerel with (!), premium golden-eye snapper with seared skin (!), some kind of crazy sweet clam thing (!), fresh raw octopus tentacle, sea trout (it looks like salmon, but it's sooooooo much better), fried octopus suckers, uni, seared black cod with eel sauce, and premium Japanese baby sweet shrimp.

I think that's everything.

One of the best parts of the night was when he brought out the whole prawns and showed them to us. BoW was so sad when he took the heads off. "I want to eat the eyes." Can you blame her? Something distracted her (probably the delicious butterflied tail that was the most delicious shrimp I have every had - why do we cook tis stuff again?) from noticing him carry the heads on a plate back to the kitchen. Imagine her joy when the head returned, split in half and tempura fried. Delicious brains.

I felt a bit self-conscious about photos in this context, but I plan to return and make friends with that chef. My Japanese friend is actually moving to the neighborhood, an K-Zo is where she takes her mother when she visits, so that will boost my cred a bit. After we establish a bit of a rapport, I may give you a visual taste.

By the way, he introduced himself and gave us a fist bump at the end of the meal. His name? K-Zo.