About two years ago someone once said something about me that at first made me laugh but then got under my skin. The comment was along the lines that I live a “highly art-directed life”, meaning it’s all pretty and most things I do are glossy and stylish and there’s no room for imperfection. HA! They surely don’t know me well enough, that’s for sure. Just like everyone else I can be messy, my life is filled with imperfect moments and if you’ve seen my junk drawers then you know I’m only human. If anything I’m very good at self-editing, I think this comes from a marketing and design career where stories and ideas and images go through rounds and rounds of edits before being made public. Every now and then I begin blog posts that never quite make it; either they burn out like a firecracker or get killed in my random editing process (read: laziness). Or sometimes they are just too racy. But today I thought it might be fun to share some of the things that weren’t quite ready for prime time. Today I’m sharing The Posts That Never Made It.

Thank god I never posted this. It was a post about my uppity thoughts on ribs and barbecue in general. I’ll still maintain that I know a little sumthin-sumthin about barbecue because I’m from Texas and we alllllll know our barbecue. But then I realized that if I proclaimed that I knew what was best about grilling meats that I’d never be able to say “Oh, you know, I’m not sure, let me try what you’ve got cookin’ up there.” And then I realized that I’d probably never get invited to North or South Carolina.  So I scratched the post completely but don’t think it we meet in person I won’t secretly give you my very biased opinion about it. Cuz I totally will.

I shot these little sweet treats last year for a greeting card company.  I still think they are some of the prettiest little treats I’ve shot but there wasn’t really a story behind it so I pulled it. I was going to tell you at the time that I ate about 16 small cheesecakes that were left in my fridge and how sick I felt afterward thanks to a slight dairy intolerance but that’s not really appetizing, is it?

I created these graphics for a post I wrote about banning anything sexual when writing about figs. And then I realized that in my ranting the post itself became sexual and well, I could lose the millions I make off this blog in corporate sponsorship! But seriously, where do I get off telling writers how to write when I can barely string together a sentence? I’d probably be irritated if a writer told me how to make pictures, ya know? Plus that photo is kind of, well, um, you know. If you saw it at high res you’d scream. Or smile. Enough Matt, stop! Next!

See this Strawberry Trifle? Well, it’s just whipped cream, strawberries, vanilla pudding and spongecake. And it can all be store-bought. And while I’m ok with writing recipe suggestions I couldn’t get a certain semi-homemade someone out of my brain. And then I realized at this point in my career I can’t really poke fun of anyone because a) it’s not nice and b) I should know better and c) inevitably someone knows someone-who-knows-someone-who-knows-you-know-who will read it and all that jazz. It’s just not good form I’ve decided. But I will not let this post go without telling you about the joke I made that involves an image of me on top of this woman. See? My mind is still stuck in 2nd grade dirty humor.

And finally, I toyed with the idea of a Mattbites mailbag from the submitted questions from formspring.me. This was a test I did but felt it was a bit clunky. The audio was muffled, I said “um, ah” way too many times, and the videowork is really amateurish. Plus I said “my twitter account” like someone who doesn’t understand the internet, like “my faceplace page” or “my tweetspace” or something like that.  It’s lived hidden on Vimeo for the past two months but in the spirit of this post I figured “why not?” And maybe, just maybe, I’ll work on my video chops and actually answer more questions.