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I had stopped shaving. I mostly dressed like “Jonah Hill at the beach” or “Kristen Stewart on laundry day.” I knew all the afternoon shift Whole Foods employees by name. While the rest of the world was hitting the “3 p.m. stretch” at work, I would be starting episodes of "Glee." Entire afternoons were spent mulling trips to the gym or a coffee shop or a museum without ever moving from my couch. This is where I was at by the end of my life as a night blogger.

After two years of working in an office, in a “normal” job with "normal" hours at a Park Avenue consulting firm (totally disgusting, I know), I switched careers. My new “work day” began around 6 or 6:15 p.m. and would last until I was finished with my tenth post, which meant I generally finished up somewhere between 3 to 4 a.m.

As is so often the case, this blogging took place at the desk mere feet from my bed, meaning that as I would blog the night away—fueled primarily by almonds and Diet Coke—the end of the tunnel was always an arm’s length away. The modern isolation of your standard blogging job—the lack of non-virtual people around, the relentless Internet tunneling, the lack of sunshine or regular movement—was multiplied by the lack of even having digitally present coworkers, the darkness outside, the silence.

While the centerpiece of my conversations with friends-of-friends at bars had previously been the latest Lady Gaga music video or “that sketchy guy” standing near the bathroom or an anecdote about the subway/Korean food/Twitter, my night job quickly became the primary thing I talked about with acquaintances and strangers. People were just fascinated by this idea that I started work when everyone else was finishing for the day. What did I do with my days? When did I sleep? People would look at me in this pitying, almost disbelieving, way, as if when I said “I blog at night” I had actually said, "I am not able to digest chocolate."

“Yeah, sometimes I feel like I am turning into the world's most boring vampire,” I would respond, as if I had just thought of that line for the first time, and my roommate’s friend’s coworker or whoever it was would laugh politely. I would spare her riffs on the many other oddities of working at night... and there were, as anyone who has worked a night job before knows, countless others.

Since I couldn't see any of my friends during the week, I started to feel on weekends like I was Katherine Heigl in the classic film 27 Dresses, in which she had to go to like 14 weddings in 14 horrendous outfits in one day or something. Some Saturdays I would schedule a brunch-drinks-dinner-drinks quadruple-header as some sort of completely misguided overcompensation for not interacting with humans during the week. There was also the havoc that working nights performed on my eating schedule (let's just say that most of my eating during the week took place after 6 p.m.).

First dates had to be scheduled on Friday and Saturday nights, a stipulation that eliminated any semblance of “casual” about them. And there was the unrivaled shame of sleeping in until 1:30 p.m. on an odd Monday and then feeling so guilty about it that there was no choice but to just get back under the covers and sleep some more.

There were aspects of working nights that weren’t so bad. I got over my phobia of going to movies by myself. I could schedule doctor's appointments at literally any hour I pleased. I had a built-in excuse for missing all sorts of weeknight social engagements that I previously would have had to begrudgingly attend. More significantly, I increasingly felt like I was part of this rare and special tribe. Working at night by myself when no one was on the Internet made me feel like a solo spaceship pilot, like every post about Sarah Palin or James Franco I churned out was going to ensure we stayed on course. I was careening through quiet forgotten Internet space, a vast calm all around me. And while all my friends were at work during the day—gchatting and fidgeting in their itchy button-downs—I was scarfing hummus and preparing for this noble take-off.

Now that I'm working during the daytime hours again, I feel like I have returned to the land of the living—back in the sea of hyper-stressed, closed-off New Yorkers. While I’m generally happy about this, I have to admit there are certain mornings where I catch myself feeling sort of wistful when the alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., and feeling sort of ordinary on the subway at 8:25 a.m. I miss the Starbucks barista, Kevin, who would hand me my drink at 6 p.m. every night with the resigned look I imagine he reserved for people who order venti iced coffees past sunset.

I do not miss how I would feel on the way out of Starbucks, knowing that the day was over but also just beginning. I don't miss the Chinese food. And I don't miss spending 15 minutes at 2:45 a.m. trying to come up with a joke about Naomi Watts to conclude a blog post, only to settle for something King Kong-related that wouldn’t even really make sense when I re-read it the next morning... by which I mean the next afternoon, but then, anyway, it was nearly time to start blogging again.

Two months later, Josh Duboff is still having trouble falling asleep before 3 a.m.

Photo from Flickr by nicksarebi.

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This is a tiny philosophical problem: when you find the hidden treasure, the off-the-beaten-path-gem, and you are a digital citizen, do you pimp the hidden treasure, or do you keep your trap shut? The cost/benefit analysis is not clear-cut. Publicize the hidden treasure, and you benefit the proprietor of the hidden treasure, but you run the risk of the hidden treasure, through success bought with this publicity, losing some of its hidden-ness and eventually some of its treasurability. Withhold the information, and then you get to have the hidden treasure to yourself, but the proprietor, who surely could benefit from an elevation from hiddenness, does not benefit at all. Plus you pass up the opportunity to claim to have discovered a hidden treasure.

Since we're talking about food and not a band or a comic book, it should be noted that in the past five years a very dedicated subculture has developed, comprised of a couple tens of thousand people who record their meals, the meals they cook or purchase, and share them with everyone, online and obsessively. They have blogs, they have message boards, and they even have entire Web communities that can afford to gainfully employ people by virtue of the size of their audience. And beyond the online aspect of this subculture, there are entire television networks and tens of hours of prime time programming devoted to these people. (In addition to the already extant publishing industry, which has waited for this moment for decades.) They have their totems, like ramps or Himalayan salt, and they have their extraneous hobbies, like calculating energy footprints of potatoes and arguing over proprietary blends of hamburger meat. You may know a member of this subculture, or even be one yourself. If you have ever waited more than ten minutes for a slice of pizza, if you have ever taken a picture of a sandwich, then congratulations-your membership card is in the mail. Foodies, as they are known, or, more derisively, Gastrohipsters.

If you are a member of this subculture, then, this dumpling house? You become its Foursquare mayor and then you blog the holy heck out of it. And if your post is linked somewhere good, your street cred skyrockets. Your neighbors will stop and remark with a wink, and your parents will be proud. You are the king of Chowhound. Foodies are a large, well-defined affinity group, and the respect of an affinity group is currency. And only a fool doesn't like currency, at least until the Singularity brings non-scarce resource allocation, in which case you'll be sitting on some sweet sweet Whuffie. And eventually a TV producer reads your blog or the reblogging of it, and soon the dumpling house feeds Adam Richman many many dumplings and then has a fried dumpling Throwdown with Bobby Flay. And you did that. Victory is sweet.

But on the flip side, that moment after Flay's film crew wraps and drives away, you will never get to eat a fried dumpling again at that dumpling house. With success comes leverage, and with the skyrocketing demand the fried dumplings will now cost an hour's wages, and you will have to make reservations just to wait in line for them. And if you endure all this, will that plate of fried dumplings be the same plate of fried dumplings that you fell in love with originally? Or will they have become fetishized into some commodity that has nothing to do with the Ur-fried dumpling in your head?

It is a dilemma, and a nifty one.

This is not meant to rail against culinary trends. Someone somewhere is deriving pleasure from the designation of the flour in their pizza, and some other person gets out of bed in the morning to argue for chives on lobster rolls. They're just trends; once, people wore Mork suspenders in public. They are not meant to be anything but something to be briefly exploited and then tossed out the car window at a high velocity, or at least to eventually appear on an Applebee's menu. Some trends are more pesky than others, on a subjective level, and the only thing more fun than being annoyed is complaining. So this is not meant to be the beginning of the Gastrohipster Counterinsurgency. (Though if one starts up, call me.) Foodies are not going anywhere and the damage they do is negligible. Tracking down gbegiri and stalking the most authentic taco truck is an awfully lot less time-intensive than starting a band or a zine, two erstwhile leisure pursuits of those of a specific age.

My personal concern is that fetishization begins to replace the actual experience. Were I to opt to fully share my fried dumpling experience with the World of Foodies, then I would take notes on the meal, photograph every element and then spend a good chunk of time composing my initial post detailing the experience and then spend more time ensuring that the post is brought to the attention of the right people. Having done that, what portion of the event is comprised of "eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome"? And if I keep it to myself, or at least just tell friends and family about it with my actual mouth, what then is the portion of the event is "eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome"? See also: people who attend weddings and/or concerts and watch the entire thing through the screen of their mobile phone, which is being used to record, a kneejerk mediation of experience. There is something to be said for Just Experiencing something and letting the sole record of it be your memory. It's worked for centuries.

It's a question of coolhunting. The verb "coolhunt" is of course now an archaic term: "so [x] (where [x] = [some date a few years before now])." But it lives on to this day. At this point, instead of an occupation that's a subject of a Wired feature, it's a game we all play at home, as the Internet shifts the load-bearing structures of cool away from the William Gibson protagonists to anyone with a Wordpress username. We identify objects, in situ, and tag them. It is hunting, but, coming from a family of actual hunters, it is the lamest kind of hunting because the hunters are not eating what they kill. That sneaker, those vintage eyeglass frames, and, yes, those fried dumplings are definitely cool in the context of where you find them, but they will be less so once their heads are mounted in your study. The coolhunter destroys cool just by geotagging it.

And in the same sense that coolhunting negates the cool of the coolhunting target, the codification of organic cultural processes (liking things, sharing said likes) into "coolhunting" negates cool entirely. Or if not negates, at least transmutes it into some new substance entirely that only has anything to do with the shadow that cool casts. Cool was a shabby little beast, powered by archaic means like word-of-mouth and peer pressure. Now, even the personal interactions with cool have been commodified. Cool used to be something that happened to you. Now, even teens are manufacturing competing versions of artificial cool, each iteration more weaponized than the last.

And so here I am worried about the fate of fried dumplings, when what's at stake is cool itself, as the realization creeps in that there is no longer any such thing as cool, or at least that there soon will not be-I personally am largely stuck in a nostalgia loop, so I'm the wrong person to ask. But that notional canary is either dead or wheezing desperately.

Maybe cool is now the Bakelite handset telephone that anyone over a certain age remembers but mostly exists now as an expensive collectable, an artifact to impress visitors with the ironic glorification of the mundane and obsolete. Maybe nostalgia as it exists now feeds primarily on nostalgia for cool itself.

This is the source of my reluctance to publicize fried dumplings, or any other modest discovery involving hitherto unrenowned food that actual people eat. While I'm ecstatic to propel the proprietors of the dumpling house into wealth and acclaim, the way that the "cool" sausage is made now is terrifying in its machine-like ubiquity. It's a game you don't want to play unless you know you can win, and I'm not so interesting in winning anymore.

I'm interested in delicious awesome fried dumplings, the location of which I am happy to share, the next time I see you.

Brent Cox is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY.

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"9.10pm: Is it over? It is not over. For a brief moment back then, I thought it was over."

"8.40pm: It's 56 games all and darkness is falling. This, needless to say, is not a good development, because everybody knows that zombies like the dark."

"8.20pm: Wow, is that really the time? I must go home; can't think what's kept me. Wa-ha-la-ha-la-ha-la!"

Good news though! Liveblogging was finally canceled due to darkness. Bad news: there'll be more tomorrow.

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