Yesterday evening, I was restless and alert after watching a Colombian film called “Un Poeta” that strongly reminded me of him. It was past 11pm but I wasn’t tired in the least. C had a migraine, so I dimmed the lights and put her to bed and went to the kitchen to clean up after dinner. Still worried with energy, I mopped the linoleum floor and then the tiled bathroom floor.

The apartment is overflowing with stuff at the moment. Mostly books and clothes, which have seeped out of our bedroom and cluttered all the rest. I gathered a few errant books that I reclaimed from the street and galleys sent by publishers and shelved them in the hallway closet. From the closet, I took one book with me — Decreation by Anne Carson, a book of poems and essays that C gifted me for Christmas last year. It only took a few pages for inspiration to fill my lungs and wing me up to the third floor to eulogize my minor revelations. I took the book with me into bed hoping for something similar.

The night had finally cooled after the heavy rains in the evening, which cooled the hot blood of the city, darkening its streets and emptying its sidewalks.

The movie made me want to reread my father’s poetry, especially the last scene where we finally hear a poem from the protagonist, Oscar, who everyone views as a failure.

Here I am, a man

An old-fashioned dinosaur

Bearer of grievances

Deserving of condemnation

Fragile dreamer

But don’t lose your faith

In this sad poet

Who’s trying to write

A happy poem

Long ago, Oscar won a prestigious poetry prize and shortly after left his university teaching post to dedicate himself entirely to poetry. For Oscar, poetry was the only thing that mattered, but it left him a penniless alcoholic, divorced from his wife, and estranged from his daughter. To his sister, he was a nuisance. To his mother, he was her forever child constantly asking for money.

After years of steady decline, Oscar’s life begins to turn up when he reluctantly accepts a job teaching again, this time at a grade school, and takes a deep interest in the poetry of a young girl. Her poems are simple but beautiful. They breathe new life into him. When he asks to borrow her notebook, I worry he is going to steal her words and publish them as his own. But he doesn’t. He champions her poetry at the local literary foundation and insists they consider her for a youth prize. But foolish decisions that result in Oscar’s immediate dismissal from the school and a near-lawsuit bring his budding relationship with the young poet and his rekindled relationship with his daughter to a screeching halt. At the end of the movie, he sits down to write a poem. But rather than expressing the usual anguish that won him a prize so long ago, he seeks to inject a little bit of joy. That insistent optimism in spite of his life unraveling, and in spite of a life so afar derailed, was what reminded me of my father.

And as I lay awake in bed reading through my dad’s poems, I suddenly remembered that he suffered from insomnia and that he too would lay awake at night and read until sleep embraced him. He wrote a poem about it, in which he describes himself as a restless ocean, tossing and turning.

I try to sleep.

I toss. I turn.

Still it does not come,

That for which I yearn.

Sleep is not here,

but never fear.

I grab a book.

Knowledge is right around the corner.

After skimming through all the poems, I picked up Anne Carson and read her poems about caring for her dying mother, or at least that’s what I think they’re about. The first poem is called “Sleepchains.”

Who can sleep when she—

hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath

fan her restless decks

Cicatrice by cicatrice

all the links

rattle once.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.

Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Here we go. So begins a voyage. But what voyage is possible when shipless? When she —? The part unsaid in the first line is key. What is it exactly that keeps our voyager awake at night, that gags our narrator in her first breath? Later poems suggest a terminal illness, but for now all we have is “Cicatrice by cicatrice.” I underlined this upon first reading, not knowing its meaning but admiring its sound and its twinness. It means: Scar by scar.

The plane’s descent into Mexico City coincided with the sun’s. Our controlled declines made us level, but not equals. The sun burned crimson and endowed the clouds with an air of nobility, trimmed in gold as they were, and bathed in a hushed purple and a honeyed orange.

Pam and Alex were eager to see us upon landing. “Where are you guys?” Alex texted as we waited for our checked luggage. “We are going to get dinner in a sec and then an industrial goth club with some homies. Come!”

“Come meet us!” Pam chimed in, sending a Google Maps pin. “We’re a little drunk jajaja.”

We met them outside a punk bar. A plate of half-eaten nachos, pecked over ceviche, and an empty bottle of beer occupied the tiny round table. Alex was wearing a PAAL shirt he printed himself and Pam, along with most of the bar’s clientele, was wearing a leather jacket.

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We pulled up two chairs and they told us about the pop up they hosted earlier that day at a friend’s concept store. This was the first I heard of a “concept store,” but they were everywhere in Mexico City. They trafficked in fashion rather than ideas, but they both circulated by word of mouth and straddled the edge of the avant-garde.

We exchanged travel woes—us nearly getting booted from our flight out of JFK because I forgot to check in, them getting flagged by Mexican authorities and taxed on all the clothing they brought to sell at the Hardcore Art Book Fair.

The fair was the entire impetus for this trip. Though only in its second edition, the fair was impressively organized and brought together exhibitors from all over the world—Paris, Seoul, Los Angeles, London.

We arranged to meet them later at the goth club and walked around the corner to a Chinese restaurant. They brought us upstairs where they seated us immediately. The ceiling bubbled with red Chinese lanterns; emo pop punk piped through the speakers. “Inglés o español,” asked the waiter holding four menus.

We ordered bok choy, spring rolls, pork won tons, mushroom ear noodles, cucumber salad, and a pot of jasmine tea that came with ribbed shot glasses. The hot tea felt good on my agitated throat, and I poured another glass as we waited for our first real meal of the day.

The scene struck me as something out of a Wong Kar Wai movie. The moody, atmospheric lighting. A foreigner at a foreign eatery in a foreign land seated across from a beautiful woman drinking a thimble of tea from glasses no bigger than the film canisters we smuggled onboard.

The bill came with two fortune cookies. I had completely forgotten fortune cookies were even a thing because nowhere we ate in New York carried them. Eager with nostalgia, I cracked open my cookie only to find it had no fortune. It was completely empty. No slip of paper, no nothing.

“That’s extremely ominous,” I said, popping one half of the unfortunate cookie into my mouth. “Mine didn’t come with a fortune.”

“What?!” C said, mouth agape. “I don’t like that at all.”

“Me neither. What does yours say?”

“‘You will achieve a better work-life balance.’ I wish you opened this one,” she said.

I ignored this, confident that the fortune withheld from me was far more profound than “work-life balance,” a casualty I’d long forsaken knowing that a writer had no choice but to fully commit to the craft. Anything less than complete submission was unthinkable.

Moreover, I was convinced that a deeper meaning lay in the absence of a straightforward text. As a trained literary critic, I’m predisposed to close readings and capable of extracting great fathoms of meaning from a single sentence, resulting in reams and reams of analysis. A textless text, however, was far more intriguing! Indeed, the unfortunate cookie in my possession was exceedingly post-modern. This fortuneless fortune cookie was in open rebellion against its very subjecthood, neutering language entirely and freeing up untold number of ontological possibilities.

While my head was dizzy with possibilities, C’s was succumbing to our newfound elevation. What started out as a bout of nausea had crawled north and bloomed into a headache with a touch of vertigo—all telltale signs of altitude sickness. We agreed to call it a night and scope out the goth club on our walk home.

But first I needed another fortune. In broken Spanish, I explained la galleta no viene con una fortuna. He brought me another. Through the slit between the fold of the cookie, I could see a slip of paper. Promising. Cracked it open like a wishbone and read it aloud to Celina, “Love will find you unexpectedly.”

“That’s even worse!” she said.

It was nearing midnight by now. The kitchen was closed and all the tables had been cleared and evacuated. Only we remained. The waiter was in a corner, polishing a glass. I flagged him over once more, tried to explain that this second fortune just wouldn’t do, that I was on a honeymoon with my newly betrothed wife and the both of us were deeply disturbed by the idea of being ambushed by love. But my pleas had no effect. It was late and his patience had worn thin. We drank the last of our tea, paid and left.

Outside the night air had chilled and we realized how poorly we had packed. 50 degrees doesn’t really register as 50 degrees when you’re coming from back-to-back heat waves in late July.

We heard the music thumping from the club before we saw it. The Smiths wailed through, followed by Michael Jackson’s percussive moon walk. C stopped to rest at a bus stop where I rolled a cigarette. “Are you really not feeling anything?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s because I’m a flatlander born of the Plains.”

“Hmmph. Well that doesn’t even make sense.”

I passed her the lit cigarette.

“Why don’t you sit?” she asked.

“We’ve been sitting all day. I’m good standing.” Just then I saw Pam walk out of the club and waved. She bounded over.

“You guys. It’s incredible. They’re playing Joy Division and everyone is geeking out. Alex is drunk; he had to scrape a cockroach off the bottom of his beer.”

“How did he kill the cockroach?” I asked, laughing.

“He didn’t. The bartender did as he was serving it to Alex. Brought it down like a judge’s mallet and wham. Oh, and the drinks are only two dollars and they’re all this big,” she said as she stretched her hands like an accordion.

“Damn, sounds incredible. We’ll have to go again.”

I explained C’s unfortunate altitude sickness, and asked what they had planned for tomorrow.

“We’re going to this antique market in the morning, you should come.”

And so began an unusually social vacation with exceptional shopping. We made out like bandits, and not just from the favorable exchange rate, though that helped rationalize our growing expenditures.

Detailed below are some of the best shops, designers, and finds from the trip. Worth visiting CDMX just to explore the wares.

• Tianguis Cultural del Chopo — an insane flea market on Saturday mornings that bills itself as punk but was actually more heavy metal. Metalheads peddled bootleg band merch, heavy denim, rock and roll CDs imported from Japan, and lots of leather. The flea is right outside Biblioteca Vasconcelos, the most beautiful modern library I’ve ever seen. We were both astounded it had never been featured in an action movie. The suspension walkways and cells of shelves were perfect for a Jason Bourne fight/chase scene. We bought three vegan tacos wildly varying in temperature. They weren’t very good, but they were a quarter. More importantly, I bought a piece of armor that straps across my chest and scales down my shoulder. Dyed red and handcut, it was impossible to refuse for just $25. The Halloween potential was high. Scorpion King. Mortal Kombat Fighter. Prince Zuko.

• Distante — I encountered a sick hoodie that said “Todos Hablan, Nada Saben” by this young designer after a string of overpriced concept stores that had cratered my hopes of buying anything. The oversized hood swallows my entire head, casting a dark shadow over my face that compels me to sit in the corner of some tavern where I can stare into my barely touched drink only to glance up when the hero walks in the door. I was thoroughly convinced but the hefty price tag made me hesitate. Fortunately, I was able to find the designer online and buy it directly from him for less than half the retail price. He hand-delivered the hoodie on his motorcycle on a rainy night and invited me to come to his art show the next day.

• Soft Debris — bought an embroidered hat with a great colorway, and turns out the designer is homies with Pam and Alex.

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No relief. Today of all days C confronts me about my usage. This after an ultramarathon at work during which I largely abstained, and all because I entrusted her to read something I wrote on the topic. So even though I am finally free of work, I feel as if I’m back at it — making a fresh pot of coffee to refocus, washing dishes as it brews, returning to my desk. As unfair as it feels, I feel more pathetic than anything — fussing over drink when I’ve already had two beers, the effects of which I am definitely feeling, which is probably why I’m so sensitive and irritable to begin with.

The bitter taste of Colombian coffee dries out the cool European lager; the zip of caffeine evaporates out the haze of alcohol.

July 3

This heat. The atmosphere has molted, melted, given up. We’re closer to the sun, can feel the awesome power of its endless fusion energy beating down on us. Or at least that’s how it felt biking around Prospect Park at 10am. I woke at 5:30 am and wrote down three vignettes from a dream.

In the first, I impulsively dye my hair blonde without C’s help and it looks terrible. She asks why I didn’t wait for her, and I shrug in response. When I look in the mirror, I see that my hair has grown. It’s longer now, curlier too, and very brassy.

In the second, I’m witness to a spectacular golden temple near the crest of a mountain. Just as I crouched to take a photo, a group of locals sporting white robes and gold-dome hats mirroring the magnificent cloud-strewn buildings appear in front of me. Then, in the middle distance, I see my mom fall — once, twice, three times. It’s like she’s wearing roller skates in a field of banana peels. She laughs it off, tries to, but I see she’s hurting and I hurt too.

In the third, I walk into a bookstore and think: should I work here?

After jotting these down, I considered biking for a moment — the streets would be all mine at this early hour — but was content to sleep in for the first time in a while. Woke with yet another dream lingering like dew on my lips. Drank deeply from a glass of water and the dream disappeared with it back inside me.

The heat proved too much, even for the wildlife. I saw a collapsed bird fallen on the pavement and, further down, the pelt of a brown squirrel. Biked until I hit the 20 mile mark. Even though my cutoff shirt and over the shoulder bib were damp with effort, my arms were completely dry. That’s how intense the sun was — it now had sweat-wicking powers. But after so many long days sequestered in the office and rooted to my phone, I didn’t care. I was just happy to be out and about.

A few years ago, at my first artist’s residency in Nebraska City, I ran in even worse heat. My routine at the residency was simple and everyday was the same. I got up at 6:30, made coffee and read for an hour to awaken my faculties. Poured another cup of coffee and sat down at my desk where I wrote until 11am or noon, at which point I laced up for a run before lunch. I was training for my first marathon, a trail race in Moab, Utah.

Trees are not native to Nebraska; they had to be imported. So shade, even today, is scarce in the Great Plains, where you can see for miles and miles. The vast country carries a calm plentitude and humbling solitude. As if to say: There is enough here for everyone. And: No need to hurry, you won’t get far. I ran through this great expanse, neatly organized into uniform rows of corn and long country roads where the occasional truck kicks up a tail of dust and dirt.

The sky was cloudless. The roads were shadeless. The only shadow was my own, and I cannot hide there. Vyvanse coursed through my blood, endowing me with undue confidence and great urgency. I decided to go 12 miles instead of 8 and set off at a breakneck piece. It was the middle of the day, when the heat was at its worst. I couldn’t remember if I drank much water that morning because I started to feel faint.

Long story short, I ended up having to ask a stranger to borrow their phone and got l the residency manager to come pick me up. I could’ve made it back into town…eventually…but the day would’ve been lost by that point, and I had more writing to do, so I swallowed my pride and called it in.

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July 4

I have not yet brushed my teeth, but I have kissed my wife and biked 23 miles and showered without shampooing knowing I will shower again after the beach, which is where we’re headed next. But first I must brush my teeth.

July 6

The week-long heat wave has finally snapped. The sky opened and released torrents of rain that gullied through streets powdered with TNT. Before the rain, came a powerful gale of wind that threatened to topple the tree outside our window and successfully uprooted a giant tree in Prospect Park, bringing with it cement, roots, and untold fathoms of worms.

July 8

For the past several days, I’ve been battling a phantom illness. Today it’s a headache and nausea. My eyes may be sunburned from this morning’s ride — 10 laps in Prospect Park, the most I’ve ever done. And with great pace too, averaging over 19 m.p.h. It amounted to 33 miles and 1100 feet of elevation. I wanted to hit 40 but my legs were giving out and the work day had begun. Good I turned in when I did because I was strapped to my chair from 9:30am to 5pm.

Legs are shot. Walked 4 or 5 miles yesterday while catching up with Nata over the phone. They always ask who I’m hanging out with, a question no one else asks me but that I find amusing/charming. I struggled to answer this time, as I’ve been a bit of a homebody. I mentioned a therapist specializing in addiction. I mentioned a painter and her husband, for whom I wrote the press release announcing her first solo show in Paris. They mentioned an astrophysicist and a kinky edgelord from the Pacific Northwest.

July 10

Decided to pick up flowers for C, along with a special beverage: salted lemonade and a kombucha. When I walked in she excitedly hollered, “Don’t look in the kitchen!” I hollered back, “Don’t look at me!” Moments later, completely forgetting about this arrangement, I walked into the kitchen still holding flowers. It was the eve of our three-month anniversary.

July 12

Last night we saw a quartet play Beethoven in the Greenwood catacombs. We fought the whole bike ride there. I was angry that my morning and afternoon had been stolen away from me. A mild hangover kept me in bed until 9am. Then I helped her fold zines after reading aloud to her from the new story I was working on. Not long after I taxied over to the Weeksville Heritage Center where she was leading a sewing workshop for a community quilting project she pitched. When I arrived, it was just her and a high schooler interested in fashion. One was enough.

I also contributed a square — a noir urban scene with birds resting on telephone wires like a simple song and, in the backdrop, the silhouette of a city cut from houndstooth. Floating somewhere in the middle was a polka dot strawberry outlined in green plaid — a stand-in for Celina.

From there, I hurried home to ready the house for Tom and Cat to come watch the England game. Washing dishes, putting away clothes, making pico de gallo. C tapped in to do the rest — cleaning the litter, vacuuming, preparing a cheeseboard, tidying up the living room, grocery shopping.

My foul mood began around then, when I realized I would have no time to write this weekend since C wanted to go to New Jersey the next morning to see her sister and go to Maplewoodstock. I grew quiet and cold, like a distant planet. Sat at my desk packing in a word or two while C plated everything.

And though we quarreled on the way to the cemetery and even more on the grounds, we managed to find a slow, simple resolution while watching the sun set over the East River in order to take mushrooms. The cemetery at that hour was beautiful — the sunset veiled the grounds in a misty light, giving it a liminal fragility, as if swiping your hand through it would make the scene unfurl in wisps of smoke. The trees seemed to grow with the night, which never turned quite dark but remained a husky blue. The lush fields were left to grow wild and bouquets of thick grasses and wild flowers surrounded the most imperial tombs — pyramids and obelisks and temples — many bearing names I recognized from history and maps of the city.

We walked by the hillock where we got married. She grabbed my hand and I pulled her closer. Felt foolish for everything before.

July 13

Of course I fell asleep with the lamp on and my notebook on my chest — an adolescent habit. My back was damp and Chicken was tucked between my legs. What time was it? 4am. Far later than I thought. Got up to pee, turned on the AC and shut the windows, cocooning myself in white noise.

July 17

A rare white pigeon with radish-colored legs walks by foraging for second lunch. It’s my first lunch despite the late hour (3pm) and I’m eating one of these terrible hot bar medleys where you panic and get a gross combination of things (potato samosa, mac and cheese, sesame broccoli). I would’ve gone for my tenth straight Sweetgreen but there’s a parasite lurking in lettuce, raspberries, herbs. Naturally all those products are on sale.

The city looks otherworldly. The wildfire smoke from Canada has given it a yellow, chemical complexion. It was even worse yesterday. It smelled like campfire everywhere when we stepped out to go to the Gotham FC game. To think this is what my brother inhaled half the year, every year for five years. Except he was on the frontlines, not hundreds of miles away.

July 18

Lightning strikes all around. I’m staring down into the well of my phone, reading Geoff Mak’s adderall detox diary, so it only registers as a peripheral flash. With every flash I hold my breath in anticipation of the thunderclap that follows.

The road climbs to the Manhattan Bridge. The tires eat the steel-toothed stitches that weld together this bridge. The same rivets vibrate under my taint when I bike to work everyday on the narrow concrete path to my right. To my left, the Brooklyn Bridge is barely visible, obscured behind a thick veil of rain and soot from the Canadian wildfires. For days, the smoke has cast a haze over the city, bending the light toward the end of time, as if a mass extinction was slowly unfolding.

We turn up Bowery and drive through the lights district. Chandeliers and lamp shades glow softly in the gloom, their electrons bleeding out onto the damp sidewalk in watery blades of light. It’s charming, but only from the dry interior of the Tesla. Only from here can I admire these light-filled shadows reflecting through tungsten and glass, concrete and soot.

July 20

Perfect out, finally. So much fun this weekend. Charlie came to visit and we went to Nowadays with a deep crew — Nicky and Eva, Kevin and Olivia, Ellen and Wolfi and their friend Chrissi. AB came later.

At one point, I thought I saw a body bag being wheeled off the dance floor. Everyone else thought the same and laughed in collective relief when they unzipped the bag to reveal sound equipment. They were setting up for a live performance in the middle of the dance floor, something I had never seen before. My feet ached and my calves groaned, but I stayed put since I was right in front, with nothing between me and the DJs. They were a new screamo duo called cry and their set rocked Nowadays into a moshpit as one howled in alien tongues while the other mixed heavy metals.

In the end it was just me, C, Charlie, Ellen and Wolfi. They went to a diner. We stayed for one more cigarette and ordered a car home. It was 6am, our latest in a while.

In the course of rereading the essay I relived my manic desperation in that moment. My dad had passed away only three months prior and everyone had stopped asking me about him or checking in before I had even begun to really think about what his loss meant. My insides ached, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t speak it. And try as I might to outpace it through long runs and bike rides, that didn’t work either. Writing was the only way through the pain.

My pain was palpable reading through this first essay, but so too was my euphoria. The revelatory power of writing and the sonic pleasure of a handsome phrase had revealed itself to me once again. Writing offered a way to transform my pain into something beautiful.

Beauty was all I sought in those early months of grieving because beauty was the only thing that made sense. It was easy to find, too. My dad’s sudden death followed by Celina’s mom’s late-stage cancer were by far the most remarkable things to ever happen to me. In other words, life had never been more meaningful. Amanda Petrusich observes this in her powerful new essay about the science of grief and becoming a young widow / a new mother almost simultaneously.

The drama of death enhanced everything about life. My observational powers became telescopic; my emotional acuity as sharp and agile as a butterfly knife. Sometimes, while staring death in the face, I felt invincible. Don’t confuse this for strength. It was not strength I felt, but rather a perverse confidence that no further harm could be done to me. I had already been across the river Styx and back.

Truth came later. Pretty as my words were, I worried they had begun to ring hollow; that they would not hold up under serious scrutiny. I worried I had fallen prey to Joan Didion’s famous warning, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Perhaps I wasn’t a writer after all. Perhaps I was a storyteller who trafficked in happy endings, using them as cheap medicine for the many wounds the world inflicts when what I wanted to do was use those wounds as portals to bone-cutting truths lodged deep in the human heart and psyche. Bloodied but gleaming, I would share these truths from high on the mountaintop, like Prometheus shielding his stolen flame.

As my grip on the narrative loosened, so too did my understanding. It became clear I was entering a new stage of grieving.

My writing has also entered a new stage. For the first time in years, I am writing fiction again. And after enrolling in Geoff Mak’s cultural criticism seminar (highly recommend), I am kicking around a couple of ideas for literary criticism.

I am also venturing into new, uncharted territory, writing about things I’ve never spoken about to anyone in detail—not my wife, not my therapist, not my brother, not my closest friends.

I did precisely this in my most recent piece, which I published on a Saturday afternoon. That evening, I met friends for dinner. On the way to the restaurant, my Mom texted me that the piece was difficult for her to read. We were late to dinner, for which I apologized, but my friend brushed it off and said it gave him time to read my latest Substack. He said he was surprised by my use of “abusive,” but that it was completely accurate. I thanked him and quickly ordered a beer. After dinner, we walked a mile deeper into Bed-Stuy to a bar I’d never been to for a friends’ birthday party where another friend told me how much he liked the piece. The things I wrote rarely had such a verbose reception. Already on edge, I put these comments out of my mind and ordered another beer.

The next morning, I lay in bed unable to sleep, still high from the club. My heart was racing, not from the substances still coursing through my bloodstream, but because I was full on panicking about the exposing words I posted online just hours before.

I tried to regain control by taking several deep breaths. I turned on music to lull myself to sleep. I looked out the window at the beautiful morning full of regret for all that I’d done and all that I’d said. It was the first reasonable day after a week-long heat wave made more insidious by wildfire smoke that smothered the city in a cyberhaze. Turned over to Celina and gently touched her shoulder and said her name. “I’m sorry, love, but I’m freaking out.”

She blinked back to life. “About what?” she said, her voice floating over the sound of birdsong. It was already 7am.

“The piece. I think I should delete it.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It’s your story. Everyone was saying how much they liked it.”

“Yeah, but I’m worried, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“What are you worried about?”

“That it was too exposing. That people might look at me differently. That the wrong person will read it. I saw it was viewed via Instagram and I didn’t share it on Instagram.”

“Would it make you feel better to delete it?”

“It would help ease my mind, I think, but I’d feel like a coward.”

Coward or not, I pulled aside the sheets and went to retrieve my laptop. Realized I could make the post subscriber-view only, so that’s what I did, and that’s why I’m writing this right now.

I’m afraid I’ve buried the lede again, but I’m writing to announce that, beginning this month, I will enable paid subscriptions for the first time ever. To be clear, most of what I write will remain free to read. But if you want to be inside the panic room with me, and if you want to read my most revealing stories, essays, diary dispatches, etc., then I invite you to pony up.

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Many of you have already generously committed your support, for which I thank you, but I wanted to give you a courtesy notice before you see an unexpected charge in your account and show up outside my home armed with pitchforks. (Happy to refund you if your situation has changed or if you’re no longer interested, just message me.)

Early on, I rejected the idea of paid subscriptions because I wasn’t sure how much I’d actually be writing on Substack, and I didn’t want to take it all that seriously. But in the last two years, I’ve published 58 pieces (2.5 per month on average) and every post receives the same level of care and exactitude that I brought to all of my professional criticism and reporting. If anything, I hold myself to a higher standard now because I don’t have editorial support beyond Celina, my devoted editor-in-chief, and because these essays, etc. are so personal.

This has been a labor of love, and will continue to be so. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing, please consider showing your support by sharing this newsletter with your friends or upgrading to paid. (Except for you, Mom—I can’t have you reading some of this stuff and risk both of us losing sleep). The rest of you, buckle up for year three.

During one of his fits of rage my dad exploded at my brother Ethan for not doing as he was told. Ethan ran out of our shared bedroom and retreated to the downstairs bathroom. This was a sacred space we often both visited under the guise of “needing to poop” with ulterior agendas. For my brother, pooping was a way to get out of work, whether it was cleaning, as was the case in this moment, or gardening, as was the case in summertime.

Summertime for us meant tending our mother’s garden — Sisyphean task of weeding, digging, planting, mulching, watering, mowing, and harvesting. The yard went through many iterations throughout my childhood and was the pride of my mother, who let things inside the house go fallow. Sometimes the yard looked nice, but it was a perennial work in progress. For years, a few beams at the edge of the yard stood evenly spaced with no metal fence between them because the man they contracted to do the work took their money and then refused to finish the job. The yard was bisected by a concrete sidewalk that led to a gravel parking space off a rocky alleyway large enough to accommodate two cars: a station wagon and a bronze van, both with six-figure mileage. On either side of the gravel lot, were two raised beds where Mom grew a medley of vegetables that kept us well-fed through the summer and sustained us in the winter following marathon canning sessions. At ankle level was a bramble of yellow squash and zucchini with leaves the size of baby elephant ears and hairy stalks that itched when they grazed your skin. We grew the essential herbs: basil, dill, parsley. Our collection of cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, and yellow tomatoes were by far our best producers. In a method lifted from Grandma Nelda, the seeds were planted inside a giant hollowed out aluminum can, for what purpose I was never sure, and around that was a cylindrical iron cage onto which the vine would grip and pull itself sunward. Beginning in July, keeping pace with the tomato production was a challenge and my mom gave them away by the bushel to friends and neighbors.

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Mom began working the yard around 7am before the prairie sun climbed too high and the heat became too unbearable. After we poured ourselves a bowl of cereal and milk or toasted eggo waffles, she came inside to recruit us to help. Pushing aside mail, laundry, and empty glasses, she made a tiny clearing on the overrun dining room table and sat down to write a list of the day’s tasks. The back of her neck was already damp with sweat and her short cropped hair gathered in small wet blades, like a big-toothed comb. To give us the illusion of agency, she let us choose which tasks we wanted, though we knew full well this was nothing short of indentured servitude and that we would have to pay our dues until the day we moved out. Whoever won rock, paper, scissors got to pick the first task. We both favored the more muscular work — digging, mowing, sawing down volunteer trees — and hated weeding most of all. No matter how many weeds we pulled, roots and all, they always grew back with a cancerous vengeance.

After fifteen minutes of work it wasn’t uncommon for Ethan to announce he had to “poop” and then disappear inside for up to an hour. It’s unclear if he ever really ended up in the bathroom because we often found him upstairs playing video games at the end of these bowel odysseys.

I also used this bathroom, not to hide from something but to secretly eat ice cream sandwiches. In one corner of the linoleum tiled room were two topless, unkempt litter boxes. The washer-dryer next door always had a mound of unfolded clothes wrinkled above it. On the opposite side of the room was a bathtub with the curtain drawn. No one ever used this tub because inside of it lay a heap of things that evidently didn’t belong anywhere else but there. Next to the unused shower, was a second freezer, standard in the Midwest where grocery stores were bigger than cathedrals and maintaining a freezer fit to feed a small army was normal. The door to the freezer didn’t shut properly, so it was pulled fast by a bungee cord, which was attached to the knob of a door to the living room that was rendered unusable by the freezer’s presence. From its frosty innards, which were bursting with meat bought on sale and food mom produced en masse during marathon cooking sessions — meatballs, pesto, soups, cookies — I would loot the box of ice cream sandwiches, devouring one, two, sometimes three in a single-sitting. I was always careful to hide the evidence too, ensuring the wrappers were out of view in the trash and licking my fingertips clean of any chocolate flour mix.

It was into this bathroom that Ethan fled as dad stormed after him. I ran after them both and managed to slip between my dad and my brother, forming my body into an X that blocked passage through the doorway. My dad’s face flashed a sign of amusement at my attempt to defend my brother but his voice remained firm. “Out of the way!” I was overly obedient as a child, even compared to other first-borns, but I stood my ground here. Something about this felt right.

I do not like to raise my voice, something about it feels deeply discomfiting to the point that I’m unsure what I’d do if I came face to face with a grizzly: scream for help or allow myself to be silently mauled. But standing on the moral high ground I fashioned for myself as a semi-conscientious objector, I somehow felt assured enough to bark back, “No!”

Any trace of amusement was now gone from my father’s face, which had turned beet red verging on purple as it did when he worked himself into a rage. He stamped his foot, pointed at me in the face and then off to the side, raising his voice further still, “Connor! Move now!”

I do not know what possessed me, but I too succumbed to a blind rage. Trundling down from my moral mole hill, I got up in his purpled face and screamed right back, “I never want to live my life like yours!”

I couldn’t have been older than twelve at the time, but the words proved prophetic, pulled from some dark undercurrent I had not yet identified but that charted the course of my life. The words were bruising, and left my dad dumbstruck. He got quiet, and then, without another word, walked away.

This marked the first time I can recall hurting my father with honesty. What was more cruel than your own son rejecting you and your life choices? Seeing how I could wound someone so deeply with the truth of my feelings, I decided to never again be honest when being honest risked hurting those I loved. I would rather swallow my words and keep the hurt to myself. But I am a small container for such things, and over time, shielding others from the potential harm my truths might incur became confused with not standing up for myself.

This is the very same dynamic that my agreeable dad suffered from. He was kind to a fault, let the world walk all over him. If he expected more from his own son, I showed him otherwise when I rejected him and his way of life. But in a Freudian twist, the recoil I felt following my violent rejection of his passivity put me on a similar path as him, vowing to take… and take… and take all the indignities of life without saying anything back for fear of upsetting someone and at the expense of becoming embittered myself.

My parents were not yet divorced, but even at that tender age, I could detect my dad’s ineptitudes. His inability to swim and general aversion to the outdoors. His uncertainty behind the driver’s wheel. The fact that mom was the one to wield the hammer and the screwdriver. His habit of starting a new book before ever finishing one, which left as many as a dozen partially read books throughout the house bookmarked with unopened utility bills and opened credit card offers.

Though largely rooted in athletics, the measures by which I judged my father’s competency were stereotypical markers of masculinity. Whereas my brother and I were athletically gifted and spent most of our childhood playing sports outdoors, my dad, with his coke bottle thick glasses and easily burned skin, was as coordinated as a newborn giraffe. He played baseball growing up in Oklahoma and some softball in college, but he gave that up after a fly ball hit square him in the face, permanently damaging his left eye which remained half-closed in a squint for the rest of his life. A Popeye with no pipe and no super spinach.

Sports meant the world to me growing up and largely governed my life. The calendar year was organized around team sports, with soccer in the spring, baseball in the summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter. Most sports came naturally to me, but I performed especially well when it came to endurance activities. I looked forward to the pacer test, an annual physical exam in gym class meant to measure aerobic capacity that involves running the length of a basketball court at the sound of a beep. After every lap, the beeps come faster and faster. From kindergarten until the exam ceased in 9th grade, I always came out on top. When so many of my peers would rush out of the gate sprinting to the other side, I loomed in the back of the pack to conserve my energy for later. I kept pace with the beeps, gradually picking up speed until I was in constant motion, accelerating and then decelerating. By the end, I was full-on sprinting, legs blurring beneath me and hands balled into fists as I tapped my deepest reservoirs of energy. It didn’t matter that everyone had already dropped out. Running is just as much about mental tenacity as it is physical fitness and I wanted to see how far I could go, how much I could take.

Despite his physical ineptitude, it was through my dad that I learned to love sports. He was a sports maniac and indiscriminate in his fandom, capable of carrying a conversation on golf, college football, the Kentucky Derby, you name it. My brother and I became unwitting disciples of his devotion, watching ESPN every morning and listening to the sports talk show Mike and Mike on the drive to school. My dad fanned the flames of our budding fandom, getting us into baseball cards, fantasy leagues, filling out March Madness brackets with us and taking us to games whenever he could. Any family trip with dad included tickets to some sporting event. The Kansas City Royals where I nearly got Barry Bonds’ autograph and then received one from Buck O’Neil instead. The Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Stadium where, to my dad’s great frustration, I was more interested in the bucket drummers on the street than in the game. March Madness in St. Louis, where I recall eating at an upscale riverside restaurant, which was highly unusual for us.

We kept up this tradition on his only visit to see me in New York when we went to watch the Milwaukee Bucks take on the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden. Beforehand, we stopped at Old Town Bar on 18th Street for a drink. I ordered a beer for my dad and a bourbon for myself. Some guy at the bar asked if we were from Boston because I was wearing a vintage Celtics jacket and dad was wearing the Harvard hoodie I wore for good luck while taking the ACT. With the bourbon warming my gut, I took the opportunity to tell my father a little bit about breaking up with my college girlfriend following a years-long abusive relationship that decimated all my dignity and completely warped my sense of self and reality.

I broke up with H on April Fool’s Day after she openly mocked me in front of her friend who elbowed her and told her to stop. Her friend said what I hadn’t been able to for years. We were at a bowling alley upstate and I was taking the game seriously, in part because I was in a bowling league, but also because I’m naturally competitive and wanted to show off. H’s laugh wasn’t always undercutting. I used to try to make her laugh, and I suppose I never stopped, even though she always took care to remind me: “You know I’m the funny one, right? Not you.” That one made her laugh.

Early into our relationship my chief objective became not upsetting H. This was a full time job that required extreme vigilance and humility because the smallest offense could trigger her. Whenever I ate, I excused myself and left the room because she couldn’t stand the sound of chewing. The times I didn’t, I chewed my food so slowly and so quietly, suddenly excruciatingly cognizant of a motor function I had never given any thought to. As my molars slowly masticated fiber and protein with every measured chew, all flavor and all pleasure vanished. I flinched when I swallowed; looked over to see if she heard me. Lost my appetite altogether.

Her mercurial moods ruled my life. I always knew exactly how she was feeling, but she never had any idea how I felt. Hell, I barely knew what I was feeling. I was too preoccupied with studying her every mood, analyzing their subtle shifts, and responding accordingly. Even if I had the attention to spare, I had long since smothered my hurt and resentment, drowning them in beer and suffocating them in smoke and burying them as deep as I could. But even with all that distance and all that numbing, I still consciously gave my feelings a wide berth, never wanting to think too hard about my own situation. Such thinking was dangerous. I knew the feelings were still accessible, despite all my efforts to strangle them, and I was afraid of what might happen if I allowed myself to actually feel anything. Such honesty would unravel me entirely.

Worse still I knew how deeply it would upset H. The thought alone terrified me, and I doubted I could weather the fallout. Trembling, I hid them from her even more desperately than from myself. I hid them from family and friends. I did this for all four years of college.

I didn’t bother making any plans after graduation because I knew I’d do whatever H wanted to do. She wanted to move back home to New York. I didn’t have any friends there, but that was nothing new at this point. I packed all my books and notebooks, and then I packed all of her stuff too, arranged for a U-Haul, and drove us from Chicago to Brooklyn.

I loathed what I had become in college — a meek, pathetic boy with no self-respect, who let himself be treated like dogshit and said nothing about it, not even in the privacy of his own diary for fear it might be read and because it was too painful to acknowledge. But no one knew me in New York. I could be whatever I wanted to be, and I was determined to change. I didn’t want to reinvent myself, as so many new arrivals do in the mythos of this city, but rather recover some semblance of my true self. It took years. Only now, a decade later, can I begin to think about any of this long enough to write about it.

When my dad visited me that spring, three years after I moved to New York, I was unable to share any details surrounding the toxic relationship with H. He respected my limitations and didn’t ask me too many questions while we sat at the bar before the Knicks game.

I had bought the cheapest tickets I could find which still weren’t cheap at $140 each. We typically sat in the nosebleeds but never this high before. We were so far away from the court that there was a bank of TVs mounted above us streaming the game. If we sat one row further back, we would’ve been able to actually watch the TVs, which would’ve been preferable because my dad couldn’t see a damn thing. Nosebleeds worked much better in baseball, where the emerald green field stretched far and action announced itself with the crack of a bat making contact or a fastball walloping into a catcher’s mitt. Basketball was too fast-paced and the players, enormous as they were, looked like beetles shuttling back and forth across the hardwood court.

As I showed my dad around my adopted city, I acted blasé, picking up the dinner check and walking down the avenue under a towering canopy of steel and concrete, industry and culture, with my eyes fixed on the next traffic light instead of gawking at the skyline above. Though I eschewed my gaze, keeping it fixed on the next traffic light instead of gawking at the skyline above like my dad, I secretly hoped that he would see in the grandeur of the city’s many skyscrapers the life I was trying to build for myself, and the heights I was determined to scale.

When I screamed at my dad that I never wanted to be like him, I was saying I wanted to be more than a spectator and that I wasn’t content to sit on the sidelines as he was. I hungered to test myself in the arena of action, to swim in the tides of history. I wanted to author books, not just read them.

That was part of why I moved to New York, and why I didn’t return to the modest city in the heart of the country where the tallest building was the capitol. Here, I walked through the throng with an agitated pace, eager to move on.

When I slowed down for my dad, I missed the light. Looked over at him and followed his squinty eye marveling at the sliver of sky in between the glorified office buildings. Catching my glance, he met my eyes and smiled, completely unaware I was in competition with him. He was just enjoying the game.

I have made the remarkable decision to stay in tonight even though I am home alone without Celina and it’s the beginning of a three-day weekend and it’s 88 degrees outside and in. Instead, I ready for the morrow: pump my tires, filter water, and fill the empty ice trays. Succumb to a nap while reading a cleverly constructed John McPhee essay about the game Monopoly and Atlantic City. “Go to Jail. Do not collect $200.”

I act as if I’ve overcome fate by staying in, but perhaps this was my fate all along. At 5:01pm, I texted a colleague and friend to see if they wanted to get a drink. At 5:23, as I rounded the bend onto the Manhattan Bridge and began the ascent over the East River, I pulled out my phone to message her back when I felt something wet and warm splash onto my head and hand. I actually saw it first—a small, discolored splatter on the concrete in between freshly painted traffic lines. Typically I’d swerve around the mysterious little puddle, which abound in the streets of New York along with pot holes and a million shards of glass waiting to bite, but in that moment I was caught one-handed and biked straight through it. This was the moment of impact and instantly I understood what it was I had seen and felt: a bucket of bird shit had just bombarded me from above, splattering my hand and the phone it held along with my helmet, handlebar tape, messenger bag, and, most glaring of all, my white corduroy shorts. I did not see my perpetrator, but I know him to be well fed and a good shot. I don’t know that he could’ve managed any more damage unless I happened to look up at the very moment and opened my mouth to say what’s that?

I pedaled home faster than I have in a long while, hoping no one saw the dark slick stain on my shorts and hedging my wishful thinking with enough speed to blur whatever sighting might’ve been had. I avoided all eye contact and only breathed a sigh of relief once I was in the building elevator alone.

I make an 8pm coffee following my nap. Consider putting on The Wolf of Wall Street as a stand-in for the night I’ve denied myself, but that seems ill-advised and so instead I rotate from the couch to my desk to write. Writing, after all, is what I’ve been wanting to do. It’s what I’ve been yearning for and complaining about, and what I planned on doing this weekend.

In the lamplight before my door-sized mirror, 20 lb dumbbells swish by my side, and I suddenly recall the days of COVID lockdown when all my nights were spent sequestered in my Flatbush apartment bedroom, oscillating between a book and notebook, the words of others and my own. And in between those, I’d put on music to lift and do push ups and sit ups. I had not lifted in years at that point, but I took up self-sculpting on those lonely nights, usually with a beer or a smoke.

I look very different now. My head is buzzed and I’m in army fatigues. Back then, my hair was an unruly mop and I almost exclusively wore marine blue soccer shorts or tangerine Kappa joggers. The world is also different. We’re at war now. Not quietly, as we were with Afghanistan, but loudly with all cap threats from the Oval Office.

June 19

I ended up putting on The Wolf of Wall Street and somehow stayed awake for the entire movie, a rarity that kept me up until 2:30am and effectively dashed my plans for a sunrise ride. Perhaps for the best, I sigh, as I settle into my desk with a hot coffee and open my notebook to reread last night’s scribbles.

Yesterday morning, my wife left me for a puppet theater. They call themselves Bread and Puppet and it was started by a German baker who immigrated to New York in the sixties with aspirations to become a dancer and choreographer. The warm scent of freshly baked bread lured starving artists to his Lower East Side performances where they patiently sat awaiting a slice and a pad of butter. Though it was bread they came for, puppets were the reason they stayed. They sat captivated by the baker’s creations made from whatever scrap the city provided: discarded pallets, yesterday’s newspaper, tube socks, saw dust, car batteries, and a sprinkling of flour and yeast.

In 1970, Bread and Puppet relocated from a $60/month Lower East Side venue to an old dairy farm in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where today it flirts with anarchocommunism, the Canadian border, and one another. I thought about this as I packed her the three-person tent we used on a road trip to Glacier a few years back.

Camped by a river outside Glacier National Park, we took mushrooms and skipped stones all afternoon and discussed in intricate detail the three-day festival we would host. Big Thief would headline and breakfast burritos would resuscitate us in the morning. While still hungover, you would be given the choice of mud wrestling or log rolling. The final event in the friendly Olympics would be rock skipping, which would be measured quantitatively and stylistically. (To clinch the win, I would unveil a new technique—skipping two rocks simultaneously. Everyone would look on in awe as they skipped in and out of each other like a double helix DNA strand.)

The night before I read aloud to her from Loorie Moore’s short story “The Jewish Hunter.” We both snorted in laughter and cooked everything in the wrong order, which delayed dinner but happily prolonged the story.

The morning she left I made her coffee and toast. Toast has taken on a new, profound importance since meeting Celina and her family. Her decadent constructions based on a carbohydrate foundation taught me that toast can be so much more than a quick and easy bite to tide one over between meals.

Take this morning: sourdough smeared with pesto, topped with ricotta and sliced heirloom tomato along with fresh basil. A bit of salt and pepper at every layer like a lasagna with olive oil drizzled on top. Or what about toast with ricotta, grilled peaches, and honey? These dishes were royalty in our home and summer was standing in the linoleum kitchen barefoot with the windows open talking in between crunchy bites of decadent toast with ricotta and olive oil sluicing onto the salt-speckled plate.

The soundtrack of Celina’s childhood home, I soon surmised, was the sound of scraping butter onto incredibly crisped toast and the crunch of enthusiastic chewing. For a family of five, the consumption of toasted bread with every meal was a necessity. Indeed, the ding of the toaster doubled as the dinner bell.

In our own home, we repeatedly surprised ourselves with our superhuman ability to carboload. A boule of sourdough was often halved by the end of its first day, and next to none survived more than three days. And if it did, it was made into a creamy bog of bread pudding.

The button to the toaster oven didn’t work well. Had a mind of its own, really. Despite my patient study, it was immune to hacks and left you standing there like a primate before a vending machine or a pre-pubescent mutant button mashing Super Smash Bros. If you weren’t quick enough, or perhaps if you were too quick, you risked stopping the toaster as soon as you got it started.

That morning, I woefully undercooked the toast. It was just warm and still had give. C prefers toast that shatters. First bites are explosions with crumb-shrapnel flying in every direction. Sometimes she twice toasted bread, and I liked to imagine her flipping over a welding mask and picking up the white hot toast with a long pair of tongs and thrusting it back into the oven, the flames of which reflected against the smooth curve of her face mask. In this instance such remediation was impossible because I had already dressed the toast with all the fixings.

What do I do in her absence? Hide at home, browbeat myself into reading/writing, vacuum and clean the kitchen while neglecting the plants she asked me to water.

Ran today. A measly 3.5 miles but that was the right amount. My legs even felt a little tired. And if my run from earlier in the week is any indicator, I’ll be sore as hell come Sunday.

There’s a royal parade in the sky. Clouds tuniced in a purple sash and rimmed in gold. Planes from Cincinnati, San Diego, Miami, glide over Kings County and into Queens. A beautiful day I’ve managed to avoid much of by watching soccer and reading/writing.

A woman nearby is juggling a soccer ball. Earlier I noticed she relies heavily on her right foot / knee. Now I see her practicing with her left. So rare to see adults practice anything in their later age. Something beautiful and life-affirming about this, as if the field of possibilities hadn’t narrowed to a chute we’re tumbling down hoping to land on our feet.

June 20

How is it only Saturday? I woke up worried the entire weekend had already evaporated, but it’s only just begun.

Joined Nicky on a bar crawl birthday last night that ended with closing out Bembe dancing to a terrible DJ. Biked home as fast as I could (19 mph) and watched morning slowly seize the sky as I listened to Mac Miller. Considered going for a ride to tire myself out but eventually fell asleep and woke at 11 a.m.

June 21

Whereas yesterday I felt a delightful abundance of time, today I feel the usual scarcity. Slept in later than I would’ve liked but my body hadn’t fully recovered from Friday’s shenanigans despite staying in all of Saturday pissing the day away.

Speed read through book four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series in frantic search of inspiration. That’s why I ordered it, along with book three in Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetraology, instead of waiting to poach it from a used bookstore. I need a writing boost and those two have delivered in the past.

This Knausgaard, however, isn’t clicking. He’s freshly graduated from high school, working a s teacher in northern Norway where he is only two years older than his pupils in some instances. But he’s not really there to teach; he’s there to write. Beyond becoming a writer, his only other interest is getting laid, typical for a virgin his age.

I read on the couch, still in a daze from the night before. But I was chameleon-eyed, following the story with one eye while the other gazed out the window where the leaves chimed in the wind and the sky appeared bluer than usual amid storybook-esque clouds. The day beckoned, as it had in the early morning when I was too wired to sleep and tempted by the empty streets of Brooklyn.

I went to the park, which was abuzz with activity—tents covering tables bearing pamphlets, organizers in matching t shirts carrying clipboards, a flock of children gathered round an inflated beach ball taller than all of them that required constant vigilance lest the wind sweep it away, which it nearly did a few times.

Found a shady spot where I don’t usually sit and read/wrote. A dreaded man in long shorts before me patiently worked through a detailed stretching regiment—all while seated. Where he sat there was usually a different man who knits obsessively. He brings a serious set up meant to sustain long outdoor knitting sessions—a gaming chair that looks like a throne, a portable fan, a speaker for music, peanuts for himself and squirrels. Though he must enjoy being outside, I never see him looking around. His gaze is always arrested on his hands, which are never not in motion as they expertly loop and stitch.

This is where C finds community, I thought to myself, remembering that Field Meridians, the local food forest/gardening group she joined was staging a block party outside Rodeo Bar and that C had organized a community quilting session, producing materials and sugaring neat squares for people to customize.

Outside the the bar last night, I told Nicky I hadn’t met this many new people in a while. Nearly all of them worked in media, a professional class I find increasingly intolerable, in part because half of them work for the Times, which is not only the paper of record but a bomb shelter for an imploding industry. Reporters, I’ve found, are shockingly poor conversationalists. For a people whose livelihood depends on asking questions, they sure do like to hold court when off the clock, effectively filibustering any back and forth until I loudly slurp the end of my drink, excuse myself for another, and find someone else to talk to.

Even though I wasn’t so taken with Knausgaard’s fourth installment, or at least wasn’t ready to unearth the anxieties and lost values of my teenage self that lay buried under reams of homework and lingering anxieties and lost values of freedom and nonconformity and bourgeois abandon.

Young Karl Ove finds work reviewing music albums for a local paper. My first published work was also reviews—books, not music—and for The Rumpus, a digital outlet. His pay came in the form of records, and mine in the form of review copies of books. While not currency I could exchange for a meal, I still felt rich and as if I had uncovered a great secret. In a way, I had. By simply emailing a publisher’s publicity team and stating my intentions to review a book, they’d send me a copy completely free of charge. I made quick and wide use of this. My emails were genuine then. I really did review every book I requested and checked the mail box with even greater anticipation than before because receiving mail has always been an exciting experience for me. The pleasure of seeing your name scrawled in another hand, the mystery of what lay inside, the flattery of words written expressly for me and confiding in me that which may never be spoken.

I emailed all my favorite indie presses — Graywolf and Coffee House in Minneapolis; New Directions and New York Tyrant in New York; Deep Vellum in Dallas and Dalkey Archive in Champaign. I reviewed with such frequency that soon they started mailing me copies without my needing to ask. The tables had turned! Now I was the one sought after. For the exposure my voice and my opinion conferred to them. It helped that I was a kind reviewer. While I enjoy a takedown as much as the next person, and that’s the best means to making it as a critic, I was more interested in sharing my excitement for a remarkable book and in championing small presses as tastemakers and literature in translation.

Aside from the Talking Heads, my musical taste didn’t overlap much with Knaussgaard’s teenage self. Subconsciously however, I found my way back to my own high school soundtrack, beginning with Bon Iver’s “For Emma Forever Ago,” a howling album of heartache. My friend Charlie turned me onto this album after I told him my parents were getting divorced, a declaration that took me six months to make because I was too worried about ruining the vibe. When I finally did must the courage to tell my new friends, it was hardly a blip. They went home to their families, I went home to mine, and we never spoke of it again. I didn’t need to, not with them at least. All I needed was for them to know, for the world to know.

It didn’t take long to realize Celina was the person I wanted to marry. I knew it while writing the story you’re about to read. And now, I’m delighted to announce we are married.

Two months ago, Celina and I got married in our favorite place in the city: Greenwood Cemetery. After days and days of rain, we were blessed with what felt like the first day of spring. At the end you’ll find more magazine-worthy photos of the elopement shot by our talented friend Wolfi.

The Lake Was Small But Biblical

There would be algae blooms and tropical storms, bear poop and two dead fish. But for now there was just a mild lake, a clearing to sleep, and a tent to set up before dark.

We arrived only by chance. I had made reservations for us at a campground called Devil’s Tombstone, but it should’ve been named the Devil’s Ass Crack. Our site was basically a gravel parking lot sandwiched between a highway and an outhouse. Even though the campsite had nearly zero utilities, the outhouse was equipped with a motion-activated industrial fan that blasted wretched toilet fumes right in our direction.

We left without flushing and she called a friend whose family owned a Christmas tree farm nearby. We asked to sleep there, but they quietly demurred, explaining they would be at the county fair all night and instead told us about a lake just an hour’s drive from where we were. We could stop by the fair along the way, they said.

There was no fair. But there was a biker gang gathered at a pancake house, awful margaritas, and a parade of fire engines in a tiny, impossible town. And there was a lake too.

At the end of a long dirt road were the ruins of a rich man’s lodge and the lake he built for himself and his family. Built with railroad money, the three-story lodge fell into disrepair until the state stepped in. Eventually they razed everything but the stone foundation, which was now overgrown with weeds. Columns of brick, graced with graffiti here and there, were the first sight upon arrival. At the center was a thick column with a cavity once used as a fireplace and now home to trash.

The lake itself was small but biblical. We toured the entire perimeter scouting for a spot to rest our heads. We romped through knee-high ferns, past signs that warned of bears and a large family feasting and speaking a language we could not identify. Their set up was expansive and decadent - folding chairs, floaties, overhead tents, a spread of oversized trays full of meats and salads. More than half their party was elderly and I had no idea how they managed to schlep everything to the other side of the lake.

We set up camp near the ruins and built a fire by the lake. It felt wrong - as if the brick columns marked with graffiti were lightning rods for something ineffable.

I drank all the beers and shed the ill feeling. Though it was night we had an abundance of light: the fire, the Fourth, my headlamp, the lake reflecting the moon reflecting the lake.

We had an army of ten paper tanks at our disposal. A child’s firework display. I cleared an arena for battle, positioned the tanks to face off and we wagered on who would win. The tanks whistled and hurled their mightiest flames, accelerated and tipped over helpless as cows. Once expired, we threw them in the campfire.

In this miniaturized war, the real enemy was bears. Our greatest weakness was scent. Death by Beyond Meat. Death by Goldfish. Death by Oreo.

We shielded ourselves with explosions. The biggest of our puny explosions was uncontrolled. Bright blue streaks shot out from the campfire turned tank graveyard. Most fizzled out in the air or in the dewy grass, but one flaming tank cannonballed into the dark lake.

*****

Overnight, algae bloomed like fireworks and two dead fish shored up in front of our tent. The lake, once barely blue, was now spectacularly green. It was an intense green, made strange by the algae’s shapelessness, which dispersed and floated like the emptied guts of an animal.

Our winter bodies - pale and doughy - waded into the flurry of green. Though I was initially disturbed by the algae, I abandoned all caution as I dove in. The lake was warmer than I expected. I wanted to swim across and have something to feel good about. It was far but not too far. A modest challenge. The algae thickened the farther I swam. My worries resurfaced: Was the algae toxic? Was it caused by the tank we sank the night before? Was it yet another symptom of the accelerating climate crisis or was it simply a seismic glitch?

I hesitated for too long and now everything was heavy - my breathing, my arms, my return to the city. I swam the cruel distance back, alternating between breaststroke and backstroke.

Drying myself on shore I saw a fleet of canoes paddling across the lake. It was the family from the other side making their way across with all their belongings strapped aboard. Pros, I thought.

I left the lake feeling unsettled. Even though I was fried by the weekend bender, I could go on drinking and swimming and napping. I was not ready to be alone. I wanted to read on the train home, but I watched the muddy Hudson roll by instead. This was July.

*****

We returned in August. By now this “we” had changed shape. We were slowly merging, shedding friendship for something fuller. We were figuring it out and this would be our first time alone.

The drive was long and pastoral. In place of a dirt road, was a freshly paved county road that ran parallel to a modest creek that fed into the lake. We drove by a trout fishery, fields of crops, and wildflowers in full bloom. Grey skies threatened rain. We saw the abundance before the harvest.

Though it was only our second visit, I felt like we knew the lake. I wanted to believe we had formed a relationship the same way locals feel territorial over a particular footpath, whose turns and topographical oddities are rubbed into memory with every pace. I wanted to believe this, but memory is an ice palace - it soon melts into a puddle. How many memories were pooled in this man-made lake?

Rain was imminent. We didn’t waste time setting up the tent. We changed into our swimsuits, walked waist-deep and dived in. After several hours of driving the water renewed us. It was colder than I remembered. I had to keep moving to stay warm and suggested, once again, that we swim across. But we had nothing in our stomachs, so we tread somewhere in the middle until we felt the first drops of rain. We crawled back ashore and threw everything in the tent and zippered ourselves inside.

The rain continued as night approached. Without the light, it was impossible to forecast. We simply had to wait it out. Our bodies were more than okay with this. And, long after the rain stopped, we lay there still.

The next morning, we went into town for coffee and learned there was a hurricane on the loose. Neither of us had bothered to check the weather before driving up - we had other reasons to look over our shoulder, reasons we were only just beginning to talk about. But we were not alone in our obliviousness to the storm. It seemed to have taken all of New York by surprise. Overnight, it upgraded from a tropical storm into a full-blown hurricane. It was expected to hit the city later that night.

Blue skies suggested otherwise. We waffled all day, unsure what to do. So far inland, shielded by a mountain range, I was confident rain would be the worst of it. Like idiots, we drove back to New York, straight into the heart of the storm.

****

As we drove over the George Washington Bridge, the first major spasms of torrential rain poured overhead and the Hudson gushed below. Under the darkening sky and over the brooding Hudson, the city looked like a titan ill-prepared for the battle to come.

She was terrified of driving in the rain and so I made a distraction of myself, which was something I excelled at with regards to her. Unserious, but steady. Buoyant, but nourishing. We took shelter in each other, or so I thought. I played dance club music, snaked my hand over her thigh and read to her all possible food delivery options. We made our way through the Bronx, into Queens and over a bridge made of whale bone where traffic slowed to a miserable but safe pace.

Our saga was nearly over, but the storm was just beginning. The water had nowhere to go - too much concrete - and the city became a filthy bathtub for rats and residents alike.

We managed to make it back to my apartment before the city flooded. My apartment became an island, but we could not escape the weather entirely. My ceiling swelled and sagged as water pooled on the roof above - a perennial problem the landlord painted over - and I spread out dish towels near my window to catch the slow drip of bad news.

That’s when I noticed the hulking bird perched on the mottled fire escape outside my window. It stood stoic and endured the worst of the hurricane seemingly unbothered by the violent rain. And for the first time I wondered if birds couldn’t fly through a hurricane. If true, was it because their internal compass was confused or because the heavy rain was too punishing for its wings?

I periodically checked on the bird and each time he seemed to get a little bit bigger, as if it were absorbing the might of the storm. The bird did not budge all night nor did the rain let up. It was a battle of attrition.

After two nights of rain, the sun finally overpowered the clouds. I woke up and went to the window to check on my wet angel, but the bird was gone. She left not long after, following her own migratory patterns, which I had long mapped and knew by heart.

I made myself a hot bath. As I soaked in the too-small tub, my body softened and a truth crystallized: distance is cruelty and only love can undo distance.

We would not stop at any clubs, we learned, as we merged onto the highway. Instead, we would stop only to buy more booze and to use the bathroom. The music—a mix of Connecticut trap, Colombian reggaeton, Bad Bunny, and the occasional girlypop hit—piped through bluetooth speakers as we climbed out of the city center on a highway that ribboned through the mountainside.

At the second stop, on a hilltop with a view of the city, we poured out of the bus, our bellies swimming with lager, liquor, and agua con gas, and in desperate need of bladder relief. Empanaderos, with their steaming fried offerings, lined the space between the many parked scooters and the local couples and families who were sprawled out along a concrete bench, drinking in the night view of the city, which perforated the dark with a million warm lights. Behind a grill serving chicharones y chorizo, and near a bridge, there was a slope with partial cover where everyone who had to pee naturally gravitated toward like moths to a flame.

As we milled about in search of firm footing and a bit of privacy, I felt the acute embarrassment that our presence here was an insult and recalled with sudden clarity Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, a study of mob mentalities as seen through the prism of English soccer fans in the 80s who, like us in this very moment, laid siege on foreign cities, storming in by plane and bus wearing an armor of sunscreen and weaponizing an advantageous exchange rate.

In Buford’s sociological study of mob psyche, he breaks down mob violence into three stages. By the time we reached the hilltop, we had already accomplished the first stage: with our bodies penned into the bus together and with liquor lubricating our minds, we had effectively congealed into a single organism, drunk on our own potential power. And when we reached this hilltop, we sought to exercise this collective power, entering the second stage of mob violence, which also marked the first real transgression: the destruction of property.

My brother and I were among the first to enter the battlefield. We skidded down the closely cropped grass to the edge of a bamboo grove and there relieved ourselves with the city below us and the bus behind us. Walking back up the steep incline was a bit challenging because the grass was slicked over. What I thought was dew on account of the high elevation and/or that afternoon’s rain, was actually slick with human urine.

My brother and I made the ascent without incident, but other members of our company were less fortunate. One lad who stood peeing for an abnormally long time, returned holding both of his hands up in the air, as if in surrender, revealing two muddy palms—a consequence of slipping and falling on Pee Hill. C, who did not share the same luxury as us, searched in vain for somewhere to squat but was quickly deterred by the pungent scent wafting from one promising looking area.

Least fortunate among us was a blonde girl who dared seize this most coveted piece of land. Completely flat and shielded from view by a raised concrete bed, this spot was clearly favored and heavily trafficked judging by the strong odor it emitted and the dark puddles surrounding it. Into this putrid bog she went, blind to her fate. She pulled down her bright white slacks, exposing her bare buttocks and began to pee when, to her horror and ours, her right foot began to sink into the urine-made bog. She lifted her foot in an attempt to escape, but the bog had already swallowed her woven sandal whole and, in the struggle to free it, made a terrible puckering sound as she loosened the sodden chancla from the earth’s wet jowls. Her eyes popped like a chameleon’s and her mouth opened in a silent scream as the mud squeezed between her toes and it was at this moment—still mid-stream—when she turned around and locked eyes with me. Of course it is impossible for me to say, but I can only imagine my face mirrored hers as we stood agape in horror.

Momentarily speechless, C and I bade a hasty retreat, rejoining my brother looking over the expansive city view and laughingly relayed the catastrophe we watched unfold. “Now that’s restorative justice,” he said.

Before takeoff, I showed C some of my writing from the beginning of the month detailing my usage. As revealing as it was, I thought it was good writing and was tempted to share it on Substack and I wanted to talk about it strictly in literary terms. I wanted her edits and her praise, but instead I got held-back tears. I had no interest in relitigating the topic while seated at our gate waiting to board a connecting flight to Miami and then to Medellín. It was a terribly timed vacation that I sorely needed and I only wanted to relax and write, not therapize.

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For the past month, I’d been working like a dog. C fared even worse. She was navigating the one-year anniversary of her mom’s passing and an injured back that necessitated a career change, and all the pain and anguish that came with those hardships. She needed support. I needed support.

For the first three weeks, I coped with my usual methods. In my mind, the first beer, the first bump, provides instant relief. But what it actually does is ignite my appetite, triggering a night-long crusade I never want to end and that I often chase into oblivion only to find myself in bed the next morning full of self-loathing.

That was the first three weeks of May, which resulted in a highly irritable husk of a person who was alternatingly surprised and dismayed at his capacity to recover in the AM and by his ever-returning desire to do it all over again in the PM.

This last week, however, has been quite different. We agreed I wouldn’t drink until Colombia and that’s what I did. The first three days were challenging, especially at Nowadays. We showed up to the club at 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday for Cat’s birthday and by 2 p.m. I was ready for a beer, or a bump, but I refrained, even when offered. Instead, I ripped cigarettes, which left my throat torched the following morning, and ordered some fries. While standing in line for food, I recognized the guy ahead of me from a Nonstop the month prior with Wolfi and Ellen and my brother. He was wearing the exact same thing—a white headband and a yellow tank with the sleeves cut deep revealing his ribcage. I noticed he was checking his step count, examining it hour by hour. It was only 3 p.m. but he’d already racked up 15,000 steps. Admirable, I thought, to go to Nowadays in lieu of the gym. Ever since then, I too have been checking my steps daily. 10k or bust.

The rest of the week was breezy. I drank seltzer with blackberry juice in the evenings. And whenever I craved a lick, I settled for a phony negroni instead, which scratched the itch exquisitely. My quality of life and disposition vastly improved. I worked late into the evenings. Biked more. Bickered less. Rose early to go to the gym. Read in the park. Started pooping regularly for the first time in years. I almost wished it didn’t feel so good.

…

On the flight to Medellín, I’m seated next to a guy who is having a complete bug out. With his phone on full brightness in the dark of the tarmac, he manically sends follow up messages to unanswered texts in which he is asking for money (Brother, puedes enviarlo mañana? Es urgente.) and to his wife that he changed his flight to come home earlier. He’s breathing heavy, elbow-hogging the armrest, clenching his jaw. He must have railed a small mountain of coke before boarding the plane because never have I seen someone work so meticulously through their phone settings, going through it line by line and changing everything, only to then reset his entire phone to the original factory settings. He renames his phone “Javi’s Secret” and sets up a winking avatar “JaJaviii!!!” which I find oddly charming in its hemispherical symmetry both longitudinally and latitudinally.

With his born-again phone, he shares his location with someone named “ICE Mom” whose location shows Richmond, Virginia. His last text to ICE Mom was sharing a contact for someone named Diego Shippo.

4,944 steps

MEDELLÍN—We arrived late last night. 1 a.m. local time, 2 a.m. New York time. I managed to catch an hour of sleep on both flights in and out of Miami so I was pretty awake when we arrived at the hotel. Aside from a slight miscommunication with the taxi driver that was easily papered over, I was happy to have made it there without incident.

The thirty minute drive into the city began with a straight shot through a gutted mountain. “So much bigger than the Holland Tunnel,” C observed. Indeed, this tunnel was cavernous in comparison, and not just because we were one of its few passengers at this midnight hour. Its ceilings were high and its shoulders wide and SOS phones were wired in every 100 meters, as if made with evacuations top of mind.

When we emerged from the dark depths of the mountain’s core, it was to a glowing mountainside as dozens, then hundreds, then tens of thousands of homes lit up the valley we snaked through as we approached the city center. The terrain, the uncontained growth of both plant and human life alike reminded me of L.A., but to a greater degree. Like a super L.A.

We’re at Pergamino Cafe now, enjoying cold brew, awaiting a waffle and a skillet of pinche huevos, the highlight of which was a corn biscuit and stretchy cheese that roped back to the warm plate, like a mother clinging to her son on the first day of school. The vermillion backyard is canopied for shade and rain, populated with people and plants, many of which we recognize because we care for them potted in our Brooklyn apartment. The clientele appears 70% local, 30% foreign. One cajera speaks fluent English and humors my Spanish, though I breakdown and just say “cold brew” and “avocado on the side,” not willing to risk an allergic reaction for C. She nods and says back aguacate aparte, which we both commit to memory and use for the remainder of the trip.

…

Ego bruised, feet tired, I write this at the very same Eater-recommended café where I left off. On our first outing, we made just about every mistake in the book. After breakfast, we walked 3 miles to el museo de Antioquia, an art museum home to a bounty of works by Fernando Botero, the Medellín-born Colombian artist who found fame in his rotund vision of the world.

In Botero’s work, the human form balloons into a comical and exaggerated fullness. But despite the gigantism endemic to his artistic vision, there remains an undeniable daintiness to his figures, all of whom are carefully, softly posed and finely dressed. But after seeing his work in person, I realized that his emphasis on volume was not infinite. In fact, it tapers quite severely at the extremities of the human body – fingertips and noses, eyes and toes, pinched mouths and wandering pupils – all of which are rendered life-size, or even lesser than. The result is unnerving. Once you get past the abundance of flesh and peer into their eyes, you see the desperate, trapped look of a prisoner. “The eyes are like, Please save me from my own hell,” said C.

To see Botero’s obese works in the age of Ozempic, as skinny is mounting a whispery comeback, brought new relevancy to his abundant vision of the world. Perhaps because of this backdrop, I wondered for the first time ever what the artist actually looked like. He was flaco, skinny. But his rounded face was oddly reminiscent of the egg-like bodies he painted—at once pale and well-rounded, and within its fragile container, harboring the yolk of new life.

I was least familiar with his still-lifes, and quite enjoyed these perfect globes of fruit crowning massive bowls, a ceramic hemisphere meeting a fibrous one. In some, the fruit is sliced suggestively, revealing a pink inner flesh. Elsewhere, a plucked chicken is gutted of its colorful entrails, which lie limp next to the noosed bird, hung for reasons unknown but evidently attracts flies.

The flies, no doubt a commentary on the waste that excess inevitably produces, were seen throughout and as ubiquitous as Botero’s blunt social and political commentary. He satirized colonial legacies, infantilizing monarchs in jumbo body suits with pursed lips and fish eyes that wandered this way and that but never aligned. And while he painted both the upper and lower echelons of society, he saved his brutal stroke for those at the top, endowing them with chameleon-like eyes that protruded and wandered left and right.

But that’s not where we started. Our walk to the museo from the hotel routed us along a major highway, which we managed to sidestep for a spell until we had to cross the river that divides the city. Suddenly we were fording two streams of four-lane traffic facing a strong headwind that kicked up dust, trash, and who knows what else. We lowered our caps and trudged onward. When we finally made it over the bridge and exited off the highway, we found ourselves in an auto-body corridor where motorcycles and cars in various states of disrepair outnumbered people five to one. The men who were there, for it was almost exclusively men, leaned against towers of tires, squatted over gas-slicked puddles, and held cigarette in hands gloved with grease. We stepped over a small fire in the middle of the sidewalk inside which a man placed a license plate for reasons unknown. Everything was so tightly packed I feared my all-white fit wouldn’t make it through the Star Wars-like bazaar unscathed, but somehow it did.

We entered an even busier stretch of market stalls peddling countless soccer jerseys, trinkets, and a buffet of fried goods. It was like Canal Street on steroids. We stopped amid the madness to watch the Champions League final, loitering outside a small tienda behind a group of men with cervezas seated on stools and alongside a row of parked motorcyclists doing the same.

But this was nothing compared to the human misery we encountered closer to the museo. Here, the many indignities of city living were on stark display. Sleeping forms in makeshift beds foraged from waste bins lined the curbs. Addicts stumbled in circles babbling to themselves. Parks and sidewalks were fully commandeered by these unfortunate souls. It was nothing we hadn’t seen before living in New York, but the concentration of depravity and indignity, coupled with the matter of fact indifference as the city flowed in and around it, was difficult to stomach. Deeply unsettled and a bit uneasy, we quickly aborted a loose plan to check out a food market a few blocks from the museo, opting to take a car back to the hotel instead. Feeling both a little silly/ashamed and a lot of relief, we rounded the corner in our cab and saw that one of the young men who was stumbling in place was now knocked out cold on the ground with two people arguing over his lifeless body.

That night, we ordered Indian takeout and watched Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals between the Spurs and the Thunder. The food was underwhelming and we uncharacteristically under-ordered, but the Spurs clinched the series away from home, advancing to the NBA Finals where they’ll face off against the Knicks, who have not appeared in the Finals since 1999 when they made a Cinderella run as an eight seed before ultimately losing to the Spurs in five.

14,120 steps

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JANUARY, 2025—I’m approaching physical therapy with renewed vigor in recent weeks. After months of languishing, I feel a sudden urgency to get back into top form. I’m not talking about running—that is still many weeks away. I’m not talking about biking either—getting back on the bike was surprisingly easy. Easier than walking to the subway and descending/ascending multiple flights of stairs. Easier than hearing the train arrive as you start down the stairs and watching it go as you reach the bottom and seeing the next one won’t come for another twenty minutes.

I need to get back into top form because I’m bowling again. I’ve been on a bowling team at The Gutter for nearly ten years now and it has become a pillar of my life (Robert Putnam was right). It was the social fix I needed when I was new to New York and I’ve met good people and made close friends through it. I had to sit out last season on account of my first knee surgery (meniscus repair / bone graft). I had my second surgery (ACL repair) in early December but I was walking around just fine after two weeks and felt confident enough to bowl in the winter league that started in January.

Getting into bowling shape may sound laughable. It is not an especially athletic sport, but it does require working legs and right now I look like the Tin Man learning to bowl when they used to call me ‘Silky.’ I won’t be so flat-footed once my left knee is able to support my weight. For the time being, I’ll keep waddling up the lane and chucking the ball with a prayer.

Bowling is muscle memory at this point, but I’m unable to slip back into my usual wind up. Returning to the fundamentals and recalling my Dad’s famous advice to “shake the hand” has helped. Just last week I managed to roll a 166. Regardless of my performance, it’s been great to get back to my regularly scheduled programming of evening bike rides and Monday night league at The Gutter. Apropos of that:

Here’s a story I wrote about bowling, my underworld quest to master the art of the curve, and how New York City lost its soul to developers.

The Gutter

Our motto was Nothing Matters and we were comfortable losing. We tanked every season, usually finishing last or second-to-last. But then, in our tenth season, we started winning. No one knew why, but we could all feel something was afoot.

Our bowling team consisted of an adjunct communist, an elite raver who ran on ketamine, and a cowboy we all bummed cigarettes from. Every Monday, we congregated at The Gutter, a punk bar in the yuppiest part of Brooklyn, to roll with a league of degenerates, half of whom wished to extend the weekend, while the other half sought redemption.

Some teams were organized around industry. We started out as a media team and gradually morphed into a design team. We were friendly with a team of DJs, one of whom parked a bus on an empty lot and made it into a famous open-air club. The all-girl team stood out in a league that heavily skewed toward boys and beer bellies. So did the competitive old heads who found each other in a softball league and was the only team to actually practice on the weekends. And then there was the team with mob ties who dressed well, wore pinky rings, and always arrived together in two black SUVs.

Everyone in the league had their own windup. The ponytailed communist, who shared my love for Italian literature and film, settled into his sightlines like a sumo wrestler—wide stance, bent knees—while the raver stomped like a penned-up bull, ready to run wild in the streets of Brooklyn and gore every landlord in sight. The cowboy squinted down the lane and threw a mean reverse curve that landed like a shotgun to the chest.

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I privately theorized we were on a winning streak because we had finally surrendered to the team motto: Nothing Matters. And why not surrender? The economy was in freefall. The country was run by plutocrats and our so-called progressive city voted an ex-cop into the Mayor’s office just two summers after enraged citizens threw molotov cocktails at police cars. Later, the Mayor would become the subject of a federal investigation for accepting Turkey dollars and other perks in exchange for what exactly I’m not sure. Didn’t matter in the end because the DOJ ordered the case to be dropped. There was no mystery about what was exchanged here.

Trust was a lake drying up—we were all parched and bodies were beginning to surface. So I wasn’t surprised in the least when I overheard someone between games say we stood to be the first generation worse off than our parents.

With no future, it only made sense to take shelter in The Gutter, a run-down relic of an older, cuttier New York. For this reason, The Gutter was special. It was also the kind of special that earns a “now, now” pat on the head, or the way a bleacher parent describes someone else’s kid when they’re not around.

What I mean to say is The Gutter didn’t always work right. The cobbled lanes were full of dings and nicks and they were seldom oiled. Lane five had a slight lip that behaved like a guard rail and lane six was famous for splits and a helpful lip on the left side that sometimes acted like the hand of God. Everyone knew lane seven was cursed and that lane 8 had the best seats. Lanes one through four were reserved for pedestrians who often had no etiquette, which was another reason lane five sucked.

Instead of overhead TVs playing cartoons whenever you rolled a strike, there was a bank of monitors boosted from IBM in the early 90s. They served a singular purpose, which was to confound the user. They kept score, too, but not always honestly. You had to cross your strikes and check your spares.

The pinsetters were a constant headache. Sometimes the pin cycle would gum up and jam, or freshly laid pins teetered over. Other times the lane gobbled up all the balls and held them, like a dozen grapes in a stretched mouth, before spitting them back: phoom, phoom, phoom.

When the lanes gave us trouble, we notified a stone-faced attendant who disappeared around back without a word. The lane went dark as he tinkered around. What lay under the hood of The Gutter was unknown, but sometimes we saw his converse-clad feet suspended mid-air as he jiggered the pinsetter into alignment or shepherded a ball run astray. Then the lights would return and the balls whistled back and the wheel of life kept turning.

[pin setter photo]

Most people at The Gutter were friendly, but the attendant guy unsettled me. His pierced face and ice blue eyes were always half-hidden by a black hoodie, even in the summertime, and he seemed to dye his hair a new color every week—platinum blonde, slime green, hibiscus pink. But it was the silence that really got me. He rarely spoke a word and every week refused to hand over bowling shoes until I told him I was in the league, even though there was no way he didn’t recognize me after ten seasons.

Whatever. We were winning and I wouldn’t let anyone dampen my mood. Emboldened by our nihilism, we climbed through the standings, tallying win after win, until we clinched our first-ever playoff spot.

When you’re up, everything changes. You become clammy and self-serious. You watch bowling clips on YouTube before bed and dream about throwing the perfect curve. You even start thinking about getting your own ball.

I asked the league commissioner, a long-haired greasy fellow rumored to work for NASA, where he bought his ball and he told me about this guy in Queens named Dino. I penciled myself in for the next available appointment, which happened to be a week shy of the playoffs.

Dino’s shop was housed in a bowling alley right near the bridge to Rikers Island. He personally greeted me on arrival, extending a portly hand for a shake. His grip was strong and it felt like he was testing me the way men used to do. He was compact in stature with curly hair knit close to his head, mostly intact but somewhat receding leaving him with a distinguished widow’s peak. His shoes—handmade, leather, Italian—clapped against the wood floor as I followed him into his back office.

“So, what are we working with?” said Dino.

“I need a 13, and I want it to look like this,” I said and pulled up a screenshot of the first-ever photographed black hole—a hazy, angry-looking red ring against the blackest black. It could’ve been a doomed aura reading from Canal Street or the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings. It was menacing and supernatural, a destroyer of galaxies. It would make for a season-winning ball.

Dino couldn’t care less. “That’ll cost you extra.” He pulled a tape measure from his desk drawer and took my measurements—finger girth, hand spread—and then led me to lane eight in the corner.

“Let’s see how you throw,” he huffed, reaching for a handsome cane, which he used to rise from his swivel chair. I followed him to an empty lane in the far corner and picked up a thirteen-pounder. I slid my right foot into position, toes pointing north by northwest, and moved my left foot alongside it. My right heel lifted, then left, then right, like a puma zeroed in on its prey and ready to pounce. I took a deep breath and let it fly. I was always making small adjustments to my throw here and there. Lately I was bringing the ball back higher to gain more momentum before my release. Gravity gave me an extra boost without sacrificing accuracy, but I was still bowling more spares than strikes and had a frustrating affinity for splits, which is what I rolled in front of Dino.

He clapped his cane against the lacquered wood and barked, “Again.” I picked up one pin in the second frame. “You’ve got a decent arm,” he said. “Have you ever tried curving it?”

I had, many times. I knew how to do it, but I had no control. Sometimes the ball didn’t even make it halfway down the lane before guttering. When I did manage to bend the ball back, it didn’t have enough speed to carry it into the head pin and ended up on the other side of the gutter. The curve was risky for these reasons, but it was dynamite when it landed. It was precisely this kind of pin action that my game was missing.

I relayed all this to Dino who listened patiently. He pointed his cane at a ball rack and said, “Try a twelve, and throw it harder.” I picked up the twelve. Lined my feet up on the other side of the lane, the far left side. I did not wiggle my tushy like usual. I just took a deep breath, stepped forward and released. The ball made a wide arc, kissing the right lip of the lane before arcing back and colliding with the head pin. Strike.

I smiled. “Again,” said Dino, expressionless.

Another strike.

“Again.”

Gutter right.

“Again.”

Gutter left.

“It needs work, but I think you’re ready.”

I shrugged it off as beginner’s luck. “I mean it,” he pressed on. “But you have to decide now. A ball made for curving has two holes, not three, and can be weighted differently.” I barely knew the man, but I trusted his instinct. I wanted to believe him and, at a deeper level, believe in myself. The playoffs were only a couple weeks away and I knew it was reckless to change up my throw so late in the season. But I also knew the curve would take my game to the next level and, maybe, just maybe, get us over the hump.

He drilled two holes.

My new ball was the black pearl of The Gutter, where it earned plenty of oohs and ahhs on its debut.

My performance, less so.

Before I adopted the curve, the ball usually bent to my will. What I lacked in power, I made up for in accuracy. I didn’t roll a lot of strikes, but I almost always picked up the spare earning me the title Spare King. The curve, however, loosened the ball out of my control. Now it bucked and swerved, as if possessed by a mind of its own. I watched the red ring turn and turn, and whatever sense I had was lost to this turning gyre and its strange gravity.

There was another problem too. The lanes kept swallowing my ball. Every other roll, my ball simply wouldn’t return, throwing off any flow I might have achieved.

Worse still, it was testing the patience of the pale attendant I’d come to think of as a living gargoyle. When the ball-swallowing continued the following week, he was fed up. He tapped a cigarette loose and threw a set of keys on the counter. “Your ball, your problem,” was all he said before stepping out for a smoke. His orange hair had blonde tips and looked like a flaming halo.

I grabbed the keys and slipped behind the counter when no one was looking and slowly made my way down a dark hall with an unusual number of twists and turns.

I unlocked a door where the sounds of the alley were amplified: balls carving down resin lanes, pins exploding like fireworks. I found the light switch and a lonely bulb illuminated a beautiful mechanical ballet. The pinsetters worked in perfect concert, opening their jaws to lift the leftover pins and then restore them into tidy pyramids.

And then I noticed a tiny man bustling from lane to lane, chasing each incoming ball and pushing them on to the correct return track. I had never seen him working at The Gutter before. Maybe he lived back here, like an old movie projectionist, invisibly pulling pleasure levers to anesthetize the public.

But this job appeared nonstop. It was hard to stop staring at the tectonic muscles shifting under his oiled skin. The sound of his leather sandals scraping against the floor was barely audible over the cacophony of balls and pins colliding. I kept quiet as I watched him, unwilling to interrupt his laborious flow. I thought he would never rest, but eventually he paused to wipe his sweaty brow and only then did he notice me. He cocked his head, seeming just as confused as I was.

And then a thundersome voice bellowed out, “Back to work or I’ll have your head!” The tiny man held my gaze for another second. By now there was a pileup of balls in lane six and he returned to his task.

I turned around and there was Hades himself, seated behind a large oak accounting desk. His eyes tunneled through me and my bones went cold. He licked a feathered quill with a black-stained tongue and dipped it in a pot of ink. “What is it?” he growled. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Before him was a long ledger of names, presumably dead souls in need of processing.

“I’m… here for my ball,” I said like an idiot, anxiously glancing in the direction of the tiny man who was sweating furiously. “You haven’t seen my ball, have you?” I said to the tiny man, “It’s black with a red ring around it. Looks like a black hole.” But he just kept on trucking from lane to lane, ferrying each ball back to its rightful owner.

“You mean this ball?” Hades said, pulling open his desk drawer. And sure enough, there it was: my black pearl. The red ring pulsed in his palm and he tossed it to me underhand, as if it were as light as a baseball. I caught it with more chest than I intended and felt all air escape me.

“Thanks,” I wheezed, wondering how many of my ribs snapped. “This is it. I should probably get going.”

Hades laughed. “No one comes here just for a ball. Tell me, what it is you really want.”

I covered my mouth and coughed. My chest squeezed in pain and blood spotted my palm. Seeing the blood made me worry that toss might have punctured a lung. I slowly backpedaled. “I really should get going. I think I’m up.” But as I turned to leave, the ring around my ball flared bright red and scalded my hands. I dropped it and looked down at my raw hands which sizzled with fresh blisters.

“Don’t be a fool,” Hades hissed. “I know you came here to cut a deal.” he said leaning over his desk.

The blisters on my hand burst and blood dripped down my fingertips. “I just came for the ball. Really.”

Hades snapped his teeth. “By accepting the ball, you’ve already agreed to my terms.”

“So you get my soul in exchange for a ball? No, no thanks,” I sputtered.

“Your soul? Ha! I have a million souls just like yours. I have no need for another.” he shouted, hammering his fist over his desk as bright columns of fire spit up all around me. A pot of ink spilled from his desk onto the ground before me. I felt sweat swim to the surface of my forehead and back.

“What if,” Hades began more calmly, “I gave you complete mastery over the curve?”

My eyes widened, but I didn’t say anything and averted my gaze. I looked down into the black liquid pooling around my feet and hardly recognized myself.

Sensing an opening, he pressed further. “Rest assured your soul would be safe. What I want is the soul of the city.” He unfurled a scroll of paper, placed his palm over it, and the fine print of a contract bloomed into being. “All you need to do is sign here, here, and here,” he said, marking each spot with a red X, “to make it official.” His shit-eating grin bore pointed teeth.

The terms of the deal were shrewd: I was to collect the soul of New York City.

Thankfully, Hades had thought everything through and told me exactly what I needed to do. The soul was not locked away under Gracie’s manor or tucked inside Lady Liberty’s torch. It was not buried in Central Park or at the bottom of the Hudson. Reading through the contract, I learned the soul of the city was quietly converted into equity in the 1980s as part of the mayor’s revitalization effort. New zoning laws and state-sanctioned violence weren’t enough to eradicate crime from the streets of New York. They needed money too, and lots of it. The public coffers were nearly dry, so city planners turned to private developers. But convincing them to pony up millions of dollars for a mismanaged city overrun with crooks and artists was no small feat. That’s when the mayor offered the city’s soul as collateral.

In exchange for seed money, the soul of New York City was split evenly five ways and doled out to the biggest real estate developers in each borough. Their ranks included a number of private equity firms, most notably Blackstone. All of them were now minted billionaires. And it was now my job to recover these fragments and return them to Hades.

He handed me his quill, but I hesitated before signing. “What do you plan to do with the soul of New York?” I asked.

“A little late to be wondering that, isn’t it?” Hades chided. “I simply want to accelerate what is already happening. The American project has failed. It is time for new leadership and a great reset,” he said, lowering his voice to a purr as he ran his fingers over the oak desk. “Once I have the city’s soul, I will merge our worlds into one giant necropolis. I’ve hired a top firm, the very best in mergers and acquisitions, to manage the onboarding process.”

I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but I feared I may have unintentionally sacrificed the planet for the curve.

Hades was on fire now and kept blowing steam. “Everyone talks about the cloud and blockchain and micro chips as if technology will save you,” he railed. “But they forget this world is made of dirt and iron and that history is forged from fire and blood. They fancy themselves machines forgetting they are made of meat. They forget that I, Hades, lord of the underworld, have trillions of souls at my disposal.”

He paused to catch his breath. “I know what you’re thinking,”—honestly I was thinking about bowling a perfect game with that sweet, sweet curve—“but there’s no sense in trying to stop me. Between all your mass shootings and the forever wars obscured from view, your people have long flirted with necropolitics. I’m simply unafraid to openly embrace what everyone is quietly doing.”

At this I shrugged, picked up the pen and signed the document. Hades snapped his fingers and sparked a flame over his thumb. He lifted an emerald candle from his desk and held it above the fire. Wax dripped down over the folded contract. He pressed down on it with his ring, sealing it with the crest of a skull haloed in flame.

“There’s a shareholder meeting tomorrow afternoon at the Four Seasons. You’ll find who you need there.” he said with a wave of his hand. I wanted to ask more, but I could sense his growing impatience. There was, after all, an endless procession of souls to process, pins to set, balls to oil and circulate. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go forth! Make me a king and I will grant you the curve.”

I stole a last glance before leaving at the little man hustling. Like a true New Yorker, he worked long, unforgiving hours on contract without benefits or job security.

I retraced my steps and found my way back to the bar where I ordered a beer and shot. The bar had thinned out and I wandered over to the alley. It was my turn, but no one seemed impatient. I lined up my feet, breathed deep, released. The ball swung wide, rotating fast in the opposite direction, the red ring sang against the resin lane. Strike. It went like that all night. I couldn’t tell if it was me, or if Hades was giving me a taste of what lay ahead. Doubt was creeping into my mind.

I biked home, wondering what the hell I was going to do when I showed up at the Four Seasons. I failed to read all the terms and conditions and it just occurred to me that I had no idea what the penalty was if I failed to uphold my end of the deal. Surely there was one, and surely it was eternal.

I was too anxious to sleep. When the sun finally rose, it was a relief. I got up from bed and realized I had sweated through the sheets. I made coffee, tried to read, looked out the window. Everything seemed normal. Traffic bellowed below, as trucks delivered their goods and busses wheezed by pulling up to every other corner. Commuters scurried underground, some tired, some self-important. The oldheads played chess and the teens blasted reggaeton. I closed the curtains in distress. They had no idea. My coffee had gone cold but I decided to let it be and try to nap instead.

When I woke up, everything was dark. I checked the time: half past six. Fuck. I was massively late, but if I took a cab I could maybe catch them on their way out. I got dressed as fast as I could and ran out the door. A piece of paper was pinned to the door. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket. I ordered a car as I waited for the elevator. Once inside the elevator, I unfolded the crumpled paper. It was an eviction notice, which made no sense because I never missed a payment. I was ready to dismiss it as a scam, but then I remembered the notice was pinned on the inside of the door, not the outside. I read it again more carefully. This time I read that I was being evicted not from my apartment, but from the world entirely. Signed, Hades. I had reached the first floor by then but the elevator didn’t stop. It didn’t stop at the basement either. It just kept going, plunging deeper and deeper and deeper.

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If you’d asked me what the best piece of artwork based on a school shooting was, I probably would’ve said Lynne Ramsay’s chilling adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which stars a hollowed, wild Tilda Swinton as the mother of a malevolent Ezra Miller, who is actually violently unhinged in real life.

Today, however, I can answer both of these questions with a single response: Innocence, which just premiered at The Met Opera. I almost forgot I bought tickets for the contemporary opera months earlier on Kaitlin Phillips’ recommendation, and when the day finally came I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go because it was pissing rain, but I’m so glad I did. It was an elevated art experience, and not just because we were seated five stories high.

The way Innocence was set up, both in terms of the story and how it appeared on stage, laid the groundwork for mounting tension, explosive revelations, and a density of emotion befitting a trauma-soaked performance. Though the school shooting premise was no secret, there were also several gasp-worthy twists, including a real-world intrusion.

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The opera opens with a shotgun wedding with only the groom’s parents and the local priest in attendance for the happy couple. The parents are in a merry state of disbelief, stunned that their son was able to find a bride on a trip abroad, but unable to fully give over to the festivities, fearing it was too good to be true. Gradually, through a slow drip of information that is artfully concealed and revealed, leaving the stage increasingly bloodied as the show goes on, we come to understand the parents’ trepidation and the secret reason no one was invited to the wedding.

This was my first-ever opera and I have nothing of note to say about the singing. I’m sure it added an atmospheric quality, in particular the haunting voice of Finnish folk pop singer Vilma Jää. But at times the singing, especially when in English, was almost a distraction from the incredible story that unfolded and the magnificent set design which allowed for its novelistic telling.

Of all art forms, novels are best equipped to represent consciousness in all its vast and rich complexity. Whereas a character in a movie most often communicates her thoughts/feelings physically and through speech, a novel can embed you directly inside a character’s mind. There, in the nebulous grey matter of the human mind, is where the true drama unfolds.

Innocence leverages a novelist’s ability to endow a single moment with a lifetime of baggage, and it does this by giving audiences a limited omniscience as we look down into a semi-porous, two-storied, cubic building. Designed to accommodate both the wedding venue and the international high school where the shooting took place, the set effectively gives audiences sightlines into multiple characters and timelines all at once. This is what I mean when I say limited omniscience. As the wedding attendees reckon with the fallout of the shooting ten years later, the reconstructed memories of that tragedy, which play out in real time just a floor above them as they croon, help give their emotions a real depth, edge, and lived-in weight.

Somewhere between a creepy doll house and a forensic diorama reconstructing a crime, the many-roomed structure was simultaneously open and compartmentalized—not unlike the troubled psyches of the trauma-stricken characters on stage, still roiling from the life-changing tragedy that ruptured their families. This cube of open architecture slowly rotated in place, allowing the opera to seamlessly progress from scene to scene and move between timelines. The slow creep at which it turned also created a surprising degree of tension. We were all anxiously peering around the corner, waiting to glimpse whatever terrible thing was coming next.

No one could have seen what was coming when the curtain closed and the lights turned back on. As I was sitting on the edge of my seat watching a hooded shooter step through blood-splattered school hallways and over fallen classmates, a real-world shooting was unfolding in that very moment. The entire audience experienced this final, unscripted twist collectively as we fished out our phones at the closing of the performance and read the same Times push notification about a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“I can’t believe how nonplussed you are,” C said as we were leaving the opera house. Everyone around us was discussing the breaking news, our broken society. But I was still in awe of the performance we had just witnessed and wasn’t ready to relent the latest spate of terror.

Two days prior, for $20 less than I paid for our nose bleed opera seats, I found myself cross-legged in a metal folding chair in a small, third-floor theater near Union Square where Franzia was being sold for $5. A friend had been cast to play himself in Matthew Gasda’s new play, The Last Days of Downtown, a sequel to his contentious breakout, Dimes Square. It wasn’t that good, and sadly my friend didn’t perform that evening, but it did spur a somewhat interesting conversation between C and I afterward as we were stuck in the dark underground somewhere beneath the East River on a Brooklyn-bound 4 train.

C: I had a moment in college where I realized that the best artwork is something that says something of consequence and does so in a way that’s easily understood by everyone. Up until that moment, I tended to dismiss things that weren’t difficult because I thought the harder it was to understand the more revelatory the meaning. But then I realized that some people hide in obfuscation because they have nothing important to say. So to make it up for it they make it sound grandiose, when in actuality it’s just a hollow statement.

C: I think there is validity in making difficult work, especially when you’re trying to tackle a beautiful subject or a complex concept that requires all these intricacies. But then it does become the viewer or the reader’s responsibility to put in some work, and the pay off has to be worth it. I don’t feel like I’m seeing enough work like that being made right now. [The Last Days of Downtown] was so self-referential, so scene-y—I wonder if any of it will even mean anything to anyone in fifty years?

It made me think of something I heard recently—about the best work in science being something that pushes the scientific community and contributes to its growth. Rather than just proving or disproving the work of others. And it made me think about the art world and whether work like that is happening, and maybe I’m just not seeing it. Certainly not in the New York scene.

C: I’ve been meaning to send you this piece about New York real estate and the ruin of American art that basically argues how the cost of living in the city precludes the production of any challenging or groundbreaking art because no one can afford to take any risks right now. Not the artists. Not the galleries. It’s not a revelatory argument, but the way he laid it out was extremely persuasive.

C: That’s what I’m saying. The burden of trying something new is too great. That was something in the Galliano documentary I watched yesterday. They were saying that for the first few collections he put out, he was completely broke even though he was the darling of the fashion world. He literally stopped making clothes and didn’t come back until a famous fashion critic said he was the next big thing and the fact that he had no money was absurd. He said, you need to stop trying to make him sellable and just support what he’s doing. And its true. For all his failings, Galliano really did change the way people were thinking about clothes because he was doing such ambitious things.

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• Over the weekend, Jasper Diamond Nathaniel published a story about a school shooting in the occupied West Bank that barely registered as a blip in the media. The IDF reservist who shot and killed a 14-year-old in the back of the head and a 32-year-old in the chest while injuring four others, walks free because no one is even looking for him.

• As reported in The Trace, Gun Violence Archive recorded 94 mass shootings in the United States in Q1 of 2026. That’s an average of one mass shooting every day.

• The Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting for its coverage of a shooting at a Catholic school that left two children dead and 17 wounded.

• Somewhat related, but cool as hell that Pablo Torres won a Pulitzer in audio reporting for his innovative video podcast series Pablo Torres Finds Out. Out there doing serious magazine-style reporting while also having fun with it. For those who don’t know, Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sucks. Torres’ reporting revealed how Ballmer and the Clippers avoided the NBA’s salary cap by funneling money to superstar Kawhi Leonard through an environmental startup.

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This was one of the nuggets of wisdom Ethan said to me as we talked about our parents, living and dead. We were camped out along San Simeon Creek, a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, and it was day two of a five-day trip up the California coast. The next day, we would drive north to our final destination: Big Sur.

The fire purred between us and the ocean breeze cruised through the surrounding bushes and trees, like fingers through freshly cut hair. We had been talking all day driving up Highway 1, which was perfumed with light and colored citrus. Mustard flowers ran wild up the hillsides. Construction workers wearing lime-green vests walked between cara cara-orange cones as they shored up faults in the cliff-side highway and cleared the last bit of rubble from last year’s landslide.

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We had been talking all day during the previous two days as well. Ethan had an abundance of things to say when we were outdoors. On a walk through one of San Diego’s many gullies, he pointed out various flora, explaining their uses, how they can be identified, whether they were edible or invasive.

“These are stinging nettles, which you can eat and make tea with,” he said, kneeling down toward a serrated nest of leaves, some of which had small cream- and butter-colored buds. “This was one of the first things I foraged in Nebraska.”

“Smell this,” he said, cracking a narrow, dust-blue leaf, unleashing a fragrance I knew but couldn’t place. “Eucalyptus. It’s invasive and poisonous to nearly all species. Koalas are an exception.” What deal, I wondered, did koalas strike with the devil to eat poison and sleep twenty hours a day?

Earlier that day, on a roundabout walk to the beach, Ethan came to a sudden stop. “See how these oily leaves shine?” he said, pointing at a collection of reddish-green leaves the size of my thumb nail. “That’s poison oak. Avoid getting it on your clothes, your skin, your shoes — everything. It can live on a surface for months. A guy I worked fire with once got some in his sleeping bag and I guess he never bothered to wash it out because on the first roll of the following season he broke out in a terrible rash.”

Watching the smoldering fire, I wasn’t sure I had anything left to say. But then, without really thinking, I asked how the conversation with Mom went, the one we’d both been working up to for months.

When approached with certain topics, Mom clammed up, became defensive. Before the topic was broached, conversation flowed easy as we exchanged questions and responses until we had exhausted all that was new to say. But when either of us gently introduced the topic, her responses became short, terse, monosyllabic. They were said with a sigh of reluctance. Sometimes I pressed further, though I never made much headway. More often, I made a hasty retreat to, “What are you doing this weekend?” and there the conversation ended.

We both wanted to push deeper into conversation with Mom but didn’t know how. I hid in preparation, devising a schematic of scenarios with focus group-tested responses backed by research and supplemented with resources.

Ethan favored a different, more inquisitive tact. Instead of trying to engineer a particular result, he posed open-ended questions. If any change was going to transpire, he argued, it would have to be self-determined. After dragging my feet overthinking and drawing up discursive battle plans, Ethan just went ahead and called Mom.

I took another swig of tequila followed by cucumber lime gatorade and asked how it went. From there, we went back and forth, exchanging thoughts, feelings, and psychoanalysis of our odd but intact family.

I told him about a new essay I was working on that interrogated the story I’ve been writing and rewriting about dad ever since he passed nearly two years ago. “I worry it’s all fantasy,” I said. “That what I’m writing isn’t actually true to life, but manipulated into a dramatic narrative. I worry the story I’m telling myself has supplanted who dad really was; that my attempts to preserve his memory risk corrupting them.”

It was all quite heady and tiresome, and I felt a tinge of embarrassment saying it aloud for the umpteenth time. I was not all that vexed after all, because, ultimately, these self-made problems served as fodder for yet more writing. And so on, and so on.

But Ethan’s response—that’s just how you see the world—cut through all my hand-wringing. It was a simple observation that carried with it a radical idea: self-acceptance.

I took that weighty kernel of an idea to bed with me and dreamt of a friend of a friend who had died last year. In the dream I was walking through a dusty town like Lonesome Dove where downtown was just a lonely saloon called the Dry Bean. But this town was bustling with a crowd so thick you could lose yourself in the stampede. When I managed to slip out of it, I saw this dead friend jog past me wearing a striped shirt and loose pants. I turned to the person next to me, “Isn’t he supposed to be dead?”

“Not anymore. They used the new revival technologies on him.”

He looked the same as I remember, younger even, and his famous dimples were deeper than ever. But something about him seemed muted compared to his old, manic self.

The next morning I woke up to dew-licked grass and cows baying in the hills. We took our time packing and set out for Big Sur where century-old redwoods slaked the sunlight. There’s no cell service, Ethan had warned, so I sent Celina a few messages, buckled up, and wondered how the world might change by the time we returned to civilization. It was only three nights, but anything could happen.

The last time we camped together, the world actually came to a standstill. In March 2020, we drove into Death Valley — the driest place on Earth — under a cloud of rain. In the rubble of this vast wasteland, we biked around old mining facilities and slept under a waning moon, unaware of the global upheaval happening all around us as hospitals filled beyond capacity, supply chains snapped, and everyone was ordered to shelter in place.

When we resurfaced days later and got cell service for the first time, Covid-19 had completely upended the world. (I wrote about this experience in greater detail for The Seattle Times, which also published photos Ethan took). New York City, where I had flown in from days earlier, was under lockdown as the contagion ravaged the close-quarter city. I was due to fly there the next day, but decided against it at the last minute. Better to rent a car and drive home to Nebraska and wait it out there.

On the long drive up I-70, I caught up on the slow drip of news. There were more questions than answers and the far-reaching consequences of what was unfolding had only just begun to make themselves felt. On the edge of the Rockies, it became clear that the week-long visit I anticipated would actually be much longer. But even then I had no idea it would become a months-long stay as the nation self-quarantined and as we all tried to figure out what the fuck was happening.

Now, in 2026, the world order was once again unraveling with the United States declaring war on Iran, a development that occurred during my cross-country flight to San Diego. This illegal proclamation of war came after Trump’s pet militia ICE had laid siege on Minneapolis on a phony mission to investigate fraud tied to pandemic relief and after he directed the military to kidnap the Venezuelan president to be tried on American soil. Though made with a shrug, Trump’s throwaway threats to annex Iceland, which harbored precious metals valuable to war hawks, and to overthrow Cuba, a phantom nation consumed by its own government’s utter dysfunction, took on new seriousness. In his second term, Trump had fully adopted Nixon’s madman theory and taken it to a whole new level, acting with unfettered self-interest, drunk on his own power and dreaming of empire. Bets were being made that the U.S. would have troops on the ground within two months. Anything seemed possible.

There was also the immovable fact that the last time my brother and I camped together, the world really did change.

And though I mulled this over half-joking, the world really did change when we left Big Sur three days later. Those changes, however, weren’t telegraphed through push notifications on my phone because the changes didn’t result from a demented White House policy or from a lab leak. The changes resulted from long, challenging conversations with my brother who himself had undergone a radical transformation over the last two years, a transformation equal parts political and personal and one spurred by yet more long, challenging conversations, with his partner, himself, and his therapist.

I try to visit my brother at least once a year. We have great fun together — biking, climbing, camping, hiking, cooking, eating — but what I value most about our time together is how rejuvenated I feel afterwards. This is selfish, of course, but it’s true.

Although we are not that dissimilar in personality, the lives we lead are vastly different. Shadowing Ethan’s life out West — one built around a closeness to nature, quality time alone and with others, and a full night’s rest — was a great and necessary reset from New York, where life moved at a blistering pace, bred feelings of want and inadequacy like rats, and where everyone sought release in the weekend stampede to crowded dive bars and humming dance clubs with lines reminding you of your place and supercharging you til dawn. Sleep was a nuisance; contentment was the enemy. If you paused to catch your breath, you risked falling even more behind than you already were. This was what I thought, at least, when I knifed my way through Manhattan traffic on bike, loving my life.

Though I barely took any notes on my visit to California (a rare relief to not feel pressure to write!), I wrote down early on that Ethan was a “pathfinder.”

From a young age, he has made his own way. He decided to forego college to work in Yellowstone National Park, where his reverence for the outdoors first took hold. From there, he set out on an epic bike trip down the Pacific coast, from the Olympic peninsula all the way to San Diego. (This inspired me to embark on my own, albeit much more modest, bike trip from New York to Canada.) The following summer, Ethan joined the Western Colorado Conservation Corps (something I thought had died along with FDR) which largely focused on trailwork — literally creating and maintaining paths — as was removing potential fire fuel, which exposed him to his next line of work: wildland firefighting.

When I described Ethan’s work, I liked to say he wasn’t just fighting fire, but history itself. Every season brought record-setting blazes and my brother always seemed to be on the front lines battling the next Big Fire.

He was in Estes Park when Colorado simultaneously had its two largest fires in state history — Cameron Peak and East Troublesome. His second fire season ended with his crew digging a line against the Dixie Fire, which remains California’s most destructive fire to date. His third season picked up where it left off when he was sent to help put down New Mexico’s largest blaze ever, The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire.

The first time we ever went camping together was in New Mexico. During spring break of my senior year in college, I flew down to Albuquerque to meet Ethan for a week-long excursion hiking through canyons and visiting ancient pueblo dwellings still carved into limestone cliffsides. This was my first time backcountry camping/hiking and it wasn’t until we checked in with the park ranger that I realized how woefully unprepared we were.

“Do you know how to protect your food from bears?” Vaguely.

“Do you know what to do if you’re bit by a rattlesnake or a tarantula?” Suck and spit?

“Do you know where to check for scorpions in the morning?” No.

“We recommend carrying at least eight gallons of water for the hike.” I didn’t even consider water.

I was too busy thinking about mountain lions, bears, and tarantulas to hear the last part of what she said.

“A fire came through here three years ago, destroying most of the trail markers and making the path difficult to discern. Pay extra close attention to where you’re going and make a mental note of where you’ve been.”

That night, I discovered I had accidentally flown with an eighth of weed. So began a series of paranoid nights as I made sure not to waste any precious bud at the expense of my peace of mind. All kinds of Hollywood horrors unfolded in my clouded brain — a bear’s hot breath snorting in my sleeping ear, a pissed-off rattlesnake repeatedly striking my face, a scorpion waiting erect in my boot, a murderous couple slashing our car tires leaving us with no possible escape.

Somehow, we survived our first night. We had a long day ahead of us — a 16-mile hike out and back. To move fast and travel light, we decided to leave most of our gear at camp and only bring the necessary water and calories to sustain us for the day. We also brought our headlamps to explore the painted caves that marked our destination.

We hiked through hard-scrabble territory. Only the toughest of trees remained and only the most eager bushes and grasses had returned. All in all, it made for an empty, colorless canyon with few standout features. We descended and ascended so many switchbacks I had lost count by the time we reached the painted caves.

We climbed up a boulder to afford us a view of the valley and there we ate our well-earned pb&j sandwiches. We were completely alone and well out of cell service. I hadn’t felt anything so expansive in a long time, and I reveled in the rough quietude. Though we had made good time, we still had eight miles to hike back.

I stood up and went off to pee when I heard Ethan cry out behind me. He had rolled his ankle, heard the tendons stretch and rip, and now he could barely put any weight on it. At first, I downplayed it, thinking he could walk it off. We started walking back, but Ethan was limping pretty bad. To lessen his load, we emptied his backpack and put everything in mine, which wasn’t much: a gallon of water, a bag of nuts, couple protein bars, and a hoodie.

We were at least 13 miles from help, and no one was going to come looking for us for at least another 48 hours. We had no choice but to hike back. As the reality of the situation set in, I became increasingly anxious. Doomed survivalist scenarios began playing through my head as I imagined us sleeping inside the painted cave, rationing our meager almonds, taking only one sip of water in the morning and at night until help arrived. Without realizing it, my pace quickened as my nerves motored my feet forward until I was 100 yards ahead of Ethan. When I finally looked up, I did not recognize any part of my surroundings. Now my anxiety turned into a stampede of buffalo thundering off a cliffside to meet their own senseless deaths.

In a full-on panic, I turned back to Ethan, shouting “Do you recognize this?!” He wasn’t sure. I couldn’t be sure either. We decided to keep going until we were sure.

The sun slung low in the sky. We only had two, maybe three hours of daylight left, and it had taken us most of the day to hike into the painted caves. We were moving more slowly now, and I couldn’t think of how much precious time we might’ve wasted getting lost. If we couldn’t find our way in daylight, how the hell were we going to find our way in the dark?

“I’m going to run ahead to see if I can recognize anything,” I said to Ethan and ran off before he had a chance to respond. I wasn’t just running, I was sprinting as fast as I could. Every 200 yards or so I stopped to look around, chest rising fast and shallow, eyes flitting this way and that, like a scared squirrel. I was too panicked to think straight, too wound up to be still. After running for at least a mile, maybe two, I saw some fallen trees that I definitely had never seen before. Finally, a sign. But whatever relief I felt upon seeing this fallen tree quickly vanished because it confirmed that we were, indeed, lost.

I turned around and sprinted back to Ethan, who was so far back I couldn’t see him and the awful thought crept into my head that maybe I was not only miserably lost but now terribly alone and separated from my brother. I pushed faster, knowing very well and not caring that I risked rolling my own ankle in the rough terrain. I had no choice but to move as fast as humanly possible. Atoms were splicing inside me, unleashing wave after wave of nuclear power that turbocharged my dormant cross country legs. I thought speed could save us. We were, after all, in a race against the sun. I flew through the valley and found Ethan limping. “Turn around!” I shouted. “We missed it.” I didn’t think it was possible to be even more panicked but my nerves ratcheted up to a new level as the air thinned around me.

I was struggling to catch my breath when Ethan said, “I have an idea.” He pulled out his phone and indicated for me to do the same. “Look through your photos for landmarks and time stamps.” Using the time stamps, we roughly calculated that we had overshot our turn off by approximately two miles. We also now had a visual reference to look for. With a renewed sense of hope, I sprinted ahead and then slowed to a Manhattan walking pace, eyes scanning the bluff for any sign of a trail. I scanned and scanned, but didn’t find anything. Then I heard Ethan, the pathfinder, call out, “Found it!” I ran back to join him and saw a trail marker just barely creeping out of the brush. The real work still lay ahead of us. We hiked in silence, retracing the steps we made so carelessly earlier in the day.

Exhausted, we made it back to camp after nightfall. “Let’s keep going,” Ethan said to my surprise. We had already hiked 18 miles, more than half of that on a rolled ankle. “My ankle isn’t going to get any better overnight.” So we gathered a few belongings, leaving behind the tent and cooler of food, and hiked another four miles to the car. It was well past midnight by now. I drove out of Bandelier National Monument and looked up the nearest 24-hour pharmacy, which was a Walmart an hour away. The pharmacist on duty had never seen an ankle as swollen as Ethan’s, which was the size of an angry grapefruit.

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Believe it or not, we managed to get lost a second time on that same trip. While I brought a bag of paranoia, Ethan brought the root of the universe, i.e. mushrooms. I had never done them before, so I was relying on Ethan to be my spiritual guide. We split the stems and caps between ourselves, downed them with a peanut butter sandwich, and went for a hike in the woods.

The New Mexico terrain varied wildly. From the low red deserts dusted green with sage brush, one could drive an hour north, climbing a mountain road into an alpine forest where banks of snow hid in the shadow and a blanket of fiery orange pine needles blanketed the forest floor.

After our earlier debacle, I made sure to take note of every turn we took. At one crossroads, with the mushrooms beginning to take hold, I gathered three sticks and lined them up on top of the pine needles pointing in the direction of the trailhead. Not long after, we approached a river that cajoled uncontrollable laughter from me. That’s when I knew the mushrooms had fully laid siege on my mind, turning my brain into laffy taffy and melting my body like butter. We slowly backed away from the laughing river and retreated to a handsome looking boulder beneath an open pocket of sky. When a pair of hikers walked by, Ethan said, “Hello, fellow travelers,” which was about the highest thing you could possibly say.

Our backs flat on the mountain’s knobby shoulder, we stared into the blue heavens for a long time, searching for images in the clouds and the words to describe them. Meanwhile, a warm cloud unfurled inside my chest as my mind galloped in child-like wonder. Slowly, and then all at once, I felt my many worries molt away as reality winked in and out of focus. I started to say something only to abandon the sentence half-way through, not remembering where I intended to arrive nor, come to think of it, where I began.

The light was dimming and the cold was creeping in as the sun edged toward the other side of the planet. It was time to go. We stood up to leave, our vision still swimming, and started making our way back to the car. But the way back looked different now, in the evening light and under the shimmer of a dosage I’d never dare take these days. It didn’t help that the ground was literally moving. The fallen pine needles from before were now a river of fire coursing underfoot, moving this way and that, bleeding the path seamlessly into the forest floor. The terrible feelings from just days before surged back into focus, along with a burning disbelief. We couldn’t possibly be lost again, could we? But we were. Our dimmed faculties didn’t help, nor did the low light and the shift in perspective nor the fact that the many hikers from earlier in the day were nowhere in sight.

And Ethan, who I relied upon to be shaman, was suddenly useless. To my every question — “Do you recognize this?” “Did we pass this?” “Do you remember this turn” — he responded, “Uhhhh, I dunno.” Evidently it was my turn to captain us out of this mess.

With great trepidation, we walked through the darkening forest. Where I once felt an ecstatic riot of abandonment, I now felt the creep of doom as my fate of being a hiker who lost his way reaffirmed itself. Whenever we stopped, unsure where to go next, my vision swam further and I truly became disoriented, sometimes even sure of the direction from which I had just arrived. It was at one such juncture, where I was on the verge of giving up when I saw something fixed that stood out in the swimming fire-needles. Three sticks! The same three sticks I had laid down as a joke to help us wayfind were now doing precisely that. I jumped for joy and fell on the ground laughing. We both did, in complete disbelief that my stupid antic actually proved helpful.

When we finally made it back to Mom’s car, it felt like we had returned to the safety of her womb. We drove an hour down the mountain, picked up a six pack and smores, and had ourselves one last fire.

Our trip to Big Sur was our tamest yet. We’ve biked thousands of miles across continents, hiked through fire-ravaged forests, cowboy camped near bears, snakes, and gunfire. But on this trip our days were built around enjoying delicious food and admiring beautiful sunsets.

On my first full day in San Diego, Ethan, his partner Ro, and I went to a beach where a man wielding a katana and wearing a floor-length kimono paced through the shallows of the ocean’s tide. The water tinged the bottom of his robe a darker shade and, when he unsheathed his blade, the steel fused with the light of the sun. In swift, exacting movements, he cut through invisible enemies with a controlled rage. As the sun edged closer and closer to the horizon, his moves and footwork became increasingly complex as he strung together devastating combinations while accelerating and decelerating according to some imperceptible rhythm. In the final minutes before sunset, when the wet shallow sands mirrored the sun’s brilliance in an oily glimmer, the katana man evolved into his final form. Here he was, serious as stone, wielding a blade of lightning, walking barefoot over a calm lake ablaze with golden flames.

It was that day that Ethan’s partner Ro told me about the green flash — a rare phenomena unique to San Diego where a brilliant green light winks in and out of existence at the exact moment the sun crashes into the ocean. The sky must be clear and cloudless; the edge of the horizon distant and low. Only then, will the prism of light shimmer green for a half second. The rest of my California sunsets were committed to witnessing the green flash.

The closest we came to a mind-bending experience was eating Ethan’s homemade chile colorado — a smoky flavor bomb of richly colored slow-cooked pork. That or the increasingly vivid dreams I experienced sleeping amid the redwoods, as if these 300-foot beings were dreamworld conductors supercharging my subconscious.

For most of the trip, all I wrote down were my dreams, which had grown from impressionistic images to populated scenes to mini scripts. When I did finally sit down to write on my last day in San Diego, it was to record two ripe realizations I had come around to through my conversations with Ethan and from observing his life and how he chooses to live it.

As I stated earlier, anytime I visit my brother (and it’s important that I go to him, be it Tucson, Grand Junction, San Diego) I walk away with a shifted perspective. Top priorities are unmoored, as I reconsider my values and how I choose to spend my time. Not only with what I’m doing, but with what I’m thinking, what I’m concerned about.

Historically, finding quiet and slowing down have provided a keyhole view into another way of living. Because of where we are, moments of absolute silence are easy to come by. This is something that I cherish deeply, but am seldom able to access in New York City. When I do, it’s often biking home from the club or the bars in the wee hours of the morning or at the foot of the Atlantic ocean on the outer edge of the city.

Along with New York’s noise, it moves at a velocity unmatched by anywhere I’ve ever visited. It’s easy to get lost in, to become seduced by the city’s self-mythologizing. Ten years in, I know it’s illusory, but it’s too late. It’s already in my bloodstream. Only full extraction helps me see New York for what it is.

I was immediately reminded of the different pace we move at on our first morning. While I tapped my foot anxious for my first lick of caffeine, Ethan paused to explain the chemistry of coffee beans as he was making me my first americano of the day using an intricate method that involved weighing beans with a scale, tamping the grounds three times, flushing the machine, warming the mug, and then using a stopwatch and scale to align 30 seconds of brewing to 36 grams of weight.

I’ve spent much of the last two years fixated on my own transformations and evolutions, largely through grieving. It quickly became obvious, as it should have been all along, that my brother has also undergone significant changes. In fact, his transformation was even more dramatic than my own, and certainly more radical, because it carried with it a political dimension.

In recent months, Ethan has gone to ICE trainings held by local grassroots orgs and signed onto join patrols that follow and observe ICE agents. In his free time, he listens to podcasts hosted by activists and abolitionists (I recommend this one with writer/activist Vicky Osterweil that he recently shared with me). And while my brother has always valued “being present,” his scope of what that means has expanded to encompass politics, at a global and local level. It’s no longer a matter of paying attention to your immediate moment. It’s reckoning with what it means to show up in this dire political moment? What is owed?

What he said that got through to me most of all was that you don’t need to have everything figured out for yourself. There’s a bunch of really smart people who have been doing the work already, for years, decades even. What’s needed at this moment of reckoning is a willingness to show up, bear witness, and take action.

There are few things I’m more precious with than my time. If I’m not reading or writing or exercising or cleaning or doing errands, it feels like time wasted. But I can afford to volunteer my time, to devote some of my reading to revolutionary histories rather than Lost Lambs or whatever is being talked about on Substack. I can afford to think as carefully about our collective future as my private one, and it’s actually imperative to do so if there is to be any worthwhile future at all.

(The second realization was that Celina and I absolutely should fuck around and go on a months-long road trip. If/when this happens, I regret to inform you I will likely enable the paid subscription options. You’ve been warned!)

On my last full day in San Diego, we went to a local beach spot where we copped the best seat in the house. California, chill as it is, is just as competitive as New York when it comes to real estate. On a baby cliff, I read the final pages of Lonesome Dove, which is as good as everyone says. Ro practiced yoga. Ethan read Parable of the Talents off his tablet and rolled a cigarette we shared as we schemed where to go for dinner.

After deciding on fish tacos, we gave up our prized position and left a scene that was an ultra microcosm of Southern California: tattooed bikers on their Harleys; boogie boarders riding the day’s last waves; bikini girls tanning alongside their logical terminus: leathery old white men; a girl in rollerblades juggling five pins and vibing to whatever song was pumping through her headphones, many couples picnicking, the young smoking weed and eating Cheez Its, and the not-so-young smoking weed and eating cottage cheese.

On the flight home the next day, I kept the window open and studied the topography of the West and its magnificent mountain creases, its green rivers bending mischievously into one giant horseshoe after another, and, strangest of all, humankind’s geometric interventions. Cubist quilts of plowed lands, planned grids organizing urban sprawl, and perfect green circles with no known purpose.

Already, I felt my old habits impose themselves. I should start my new Substack piece about Big Sur. I should start my new book Blood and Thunder: The Epic of the American West. I should… I should… But I didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to let my thoughts meander, as indirectly as the rivers below, until they spilled out into the ocean and evaporated in a great, green flash over the darkening horizon.

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I’d heard the term “death rattle” before and sitting at my Dad’s bedside across from my brother I came to know the terrible noise that inspired it. The heavy guttural scraping would haunt me for months afterward and made it impossible to think in the moment. I tried to say something, anything, but the death rattle easily overpowered me.

And then, somewhere in the wee hours of the night as Easter Sunday gave way to April Fool’s Day, the hospital room turned quiet. As the night progressed, the gaps between each breath stretched longer and longer. In between each, I held my own breath as I anticipated my father’s last. I was doing just that, holding my breath, as I leaned in, looking for any sign of life because, awful as it was, the death rattle had been the only indicator of life for my stroke-stricken father.

30 seconds passed. 60 seconds. My own breath escaped me in a wail of loss I’d never known. I leaned into hug my departed father when all of a sudden his body convulsed as his lungs raked in one more desperate, dying breath that could’ve been sampled in any zombie horror. I jumped back and screamed, “Jesus Christ!”

What I thought was his ultimate breath, was actually his penultimate, and it scared both me and my brother shitless. As we caught our breath, it hiccuped into chuckles before erupting into full-bellied laughter. Even in that dark hour, our father managed to give us something to laugh about. A celestial joke was afoot, and my Dad was somewhere between heaven and earth pulling one last prank on his boys in a poor imitation of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

There are things I wish I did differently that day. I wish I wet his lips, which looked so painfully dry, with a damp cloth. I wish I wrapped him in a quilt sewn by Mom to preserve his bodily warmth even after he drew his last breath. I wish I told him over and over how proud I was to be his son.

But I don’t regret laughing, and never will. As I wrote in my eulogy days later, one of the many important lessons my Dad taught me was that laughing and crying are powerful medicines. In my Dad’s final moments on Earth, he gifted both to his boys.

Today is the two-year anniversary of my Dad’s passing and, to mark the moment, I wanted to share the eulogy I wrote and read at the Zoo Bar, which is copied in full below, along with links to several essays I’ve written over the past two years inspired by him and our complicated relationship.

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My Father’s Eulogy

I’ve tried to write about my Dad a thousand times. But I was never able to finish any of those stories. Both of us had trouble seeing things through to completion. I thought that perhaps I could finally finish one of these essays about him whenever he passed, because they weren’t necessarily flattering, but they were honest. They were about our messy relationship, which only grew more complicated with age. I have a lot to say about that, and maybe I’ll finally write those essays, but it’ll suffice to say I felt ashamed of my Dad more than I’d like, and felt terribly guilty for feeling shameful, and that lovely pairing eventually hardened into feelings of resentment, often blinding me from his best aspects.

Of course I loved him too. How could I not? He was my Dad and, as with his comedy, even though he wasn’t the best, he never stopped trying.

And I knew how much he loved me. He loved me so much. I don’t know anyone with a bigger heart. Me and Ethan were his pride and joy and he made sure we knew it every chance he could. He was an amazing father in that way.

Our relationship grew more complicated with age, but it became really simple last May when he had a life-changing stroke and then again this Sunday when he had a life-ending stroke. At the end of the day, he was my Dad and I was his son, and there was nothing but love between us. Nothing to do but hold his hand and stroke his head and update him on the latest March Madness games and betting odds. I tried to say something profound to him on his deathbed, but all I really wanted to do was talk about the shit we usually talked about: the NBA, my bowling league, what we’ve been reading, his latest book idea for me or himself.

That simplicity didn’t last long, because he’s gone now and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week. A lot of rethinking actually, and I’ve started to see how much I underestimated my Dad. I worried about my Dad constantly for most of my adult life. I worried for his happiness, but have you ever met a firmer optimist? My Dad had a lot of tough breaks, but he never felt sorry for himself, never became bitter with the world.

I worried about his loneliness, but just look at all of you here today - what a warm crowd. And I want to give a special thanks to Lisa, RJ, Mike, Anita and Joe. You guys showed up for my Dad when me and my brother couldn’t, and you kept showing up when he probably would’ve driven the two of us crazy.

I worried about his health and, well, I was right to worry about his health. The man was crumbling before our eyes and could hardly see with his own. The first time he met Celina we had barely sat down for lunch when, much to my horror, he told us the doctor said they might have to carve out his eye and he wanted to know how we thought he’d look in an eye patch.

I worried for his quality of life. I could never square his unwavering good nature with his life circumstances. It’s become increasingly clear my Dad didn’t measure life the same way I do, but I’m beginning to see his wisdom. It’s a wisdom rooted in the heart, and that wisdom says: friends and family come first, and that includes dogs. It says never presume and live with humility - you never know what the person next to you has gone through and laughing at yourself brightens any moment. It says laughing and crying are powerful medicines.

But I never once worried that my Dad didn’t believe in me. He believed in me with all his heart, no matter the task. He believed I could write for The New Yorker. He believed I could qualify for the Boston Marathon. And I took that for granted, and I wish I thanked him more.

I think we all fear becoming like our parents. I know I did and I tried, consciously or not, to be different or better than my Dad. But I can see now how the qualities he gifted me are fundamental to my being. There’s my love of reading of course. We both slept with books in bed. My ambitions to write. My aversion to driving. My affinity for sports and, a parting gift, my budding obsession with sports gambling.

Moving forward I want to lean into his wisdom, confident that my life will be enriched because of it.

I couldn’t find these words Sunday night, but I hope they find you now, Dad. I want you to know how proud I am to be your son and how proud I am of you. Thank you for teaching me, in your gentle way, what matters most in life: friends, family, laughter, books and dogs.

Reframing My Father

Using family photos and letters of correspondence, I found supporting evidence for a dark truth I’d long suspected about my Dad and his upbringing, and how it impacted his entire life.

How to Read Poetry

Poetry was where I made my clumsy first attempts at writing and where my father made his final expressions. In this piece, I close read William Butler Yeats and my Dad’s own poetry.

The Only Story That Matters

I thought I had a handle on grieving, in part because I had worked so hard to hone and polish the story of my father’s passing. But now, two years following his death, my grip on that story has loosened and I find myself looking for something else to hold onto.

My Father’s Kingdom

This is probably my rawest essay. Written over the course of five days, it explains our shared love of literature and how I found myself throwing away my Dad’s life’s work: his book collection.

In the timbre of her voice, I recognized a deep need to be heard, and I remembered in a flash the devastating chronologies I too once guarded with a fierce and proud exactitude. I understood that every detail was a measure of her care and devotion, and that the reason this monologue sounded rehearsed is because it probably was—ahead of each new appointment, while catching up over the phone, laying awake at night. I understood that every telling was both a shedding of the loneliness that loss inflicts and a spreading of the spirit we worked so hard to preserve.

So I stood there in her driveway, wearing nothing but a light sweater in sub-freezing temperatures, and I listened intently because this—the story of her husband Mike’s long, sharp decline—was the only story that mattered.

It was a story of cascading medical misfortunes where one diagnosis begat another, and another, until her husband was facing a footlong blood clot pulled from his throat, a rare blood disease compounded by an infection, and heart valves that stopped working, leaving him unable to breathe without a machine’s help. Carey made a fire every morning, even in the sweltering Nebraska summers when temperatures regularly reached 100 degrees, because Mike always felt cold, even when he was double-wrapped in blankets. With their backs to the wall and no other choice, they agreed to a risky open heart surgery. But that merely delayed the inevitable and marked the beginning of a grueling five month hospital stay. When he was finally discharged, Mike vowed never to return to a hospital again.

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I heard that vow once before. It came from Celina’s mother, Dana. And it came at a point when Dana was spending more time in hospitals than at home. I’m not sure anyone fully understood what this pact would require, but everyone agreed: no more hospitals. I figured there would be time to come to terms with this solemn promise, but time was not a luxury we were afforded throughout any of Dana’s cancer diagnosis. Less than 48 hours after promising no more hospitals, I found myself dialing 911.

Carey’s voice faltered as she relived the pain of every turn in the year-long saga and as the facts reasserted their cruel reality. By the end, she was in tears and so was I. We hugged and I thanked her—for sharing her story, for holding onto my Dad’s belongings, for being a good friend to him. We dried our tears with talk of tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and Friday’s snowstorm and Saturday’s Husker volleyball game.

I lifted three tubs of my Dad’s stuff into the trunk of my Mom’s car. Weeks earlier, Carey had texted me out of the blue saying her husband Mike had two boxes that belonged to my Dad. She wasn’t sure what was inside them, but told me she’d hold onto them until I could pick them up. I told her I’d be home the following month for Thanksgiving and we made arrangements for me to come by. I said goodbye to Carey, drove out of view, and immediately pulled over. There, I idled in a memory as a neighboring man hammered Christmas decorations into the hardening ground.

For weeks, if not months, I had felt increasingly alienated from the world, friends, work. I chalked it up to a creeping depression, but I couldn’t pinpoint the cause of it. On the surface, all seemed well: I liked my job well enough, I was running again, things were good with Celina. Despite all this, it was a battle to feel joy.

Upon hearing Carey’s story, however, I started to grasp the reason for my growing sadness. On that cold afternoon way out near Old Cheney Road, Carey’s story was the only story that mattered. But for over a year, the only story that mattered was one I carried. It was the story of my Dad and his sudden death following a third and final stroke. And it was the story of Celina’s mom Dana, who died of medical malpractice following a risky surgery to excise a cancerous tumor and the chemo treatment that ravaged her immune system and disappeared her appetite.

At a time when so much was taken away so rapidly, I preserved everything I could and arranged it as beautifully as I could in the form of a story. I recorded it on yellow legal pads in fine ink. I tinkered with every word until it glowed warm with blood. I immortalized it in a cloud. I rehearsed it over and over until it became a song I knew by heart, a song I hummed quietly to myself, unbothered by the fact that its melody harmonized with so little else in my immediate surroundings.

I was incredibly proud of this story, even though it was full of sorrow. So proud I carried it around like a badge of honor and told it to anyone kind or brave enough to listen. Those who listened, I noticed, often had a story of their own, one that made my sad song understandable.

Soon, however, my story became old news for much of the world. It is staggering how seldom my father came up in conversation, even among my closest friends, as if this weren’t a seismic, life-changing loss.

Undeterred, I kept writing and rewriting my sorrowful story—expanding it here, tightening it there. Despite my efforts, the story gradually dimmed, even for me, as the events and raw emotions grew more and more distant.

Today, I no longer know every word by heart. I confuse dates, conflate events, forget entire episodes. I confess there are days where I think every lapse deserves a lashing. But facts, at least, can be found and recovered. One can reasonably reconstruct events from journal entries, texts, photos, medical files, and other records. The emotional texture behind those life-changing events, however, is harder to recover. That emotional core, I fear, has disappeared down a deep well that rests on a hill. When I work up the energy to climb this hill and lift myself over the well’s stone edge to look into it, all I see is glassy darkness. When I call out for it, my own voice answers back, only weaker and lonely sounding. I often worry it might be altogether irrecoverable.

I held the story of my Dad and Dana cupped in my hands, precious as water. And although it was made of pain and death, this story-water was life-giving. In the months since their passing, I ceremoniously raised my palms to my lips, bowing my head to drink from this nourishing spring. Its glacial waters soothed my aching tongue, helped me speak truth from memory.

But now, nearly two years after my Dad’s passing, these waters have all but dried up, and I am left holding nothing—no memory spring, no soothing story, no Dad, no Dana. With nothing to hold, I once more feel unmoored from the world. And although the story I attached myself to was made of hurt and grief, it was better than feeling adrift and alone. I don’t know how to replenish the spring that sustained me, and I don’t know what else to latch onto. But I know I need something.

So when Carey texted me out of the blue that she had two boxes of my Dad’s belongings, I responded immediately, excited by the prospect that this unboxing could somehow strengthen the increasingly tenuous connection between me and my late-father. And though it was not lost on me that my material gain was her personal loss, I was delighted when it turned out there was an extra, third box.

I drove home down unfamiliar roads, my eyes wet with tears as I welcomed back the familiar ache of grief. Relieved I could still access these feelings, I turned the radio off to better focus on this inner frequency, which felt like an old friend. In a way, the ache was a companion, a stand-in for my Dad. Even though it was a land of hurt, it was precisely there that I felt closest to him—amid the pain and longing.

This was my first trip back to Lincoln since my Dad passed away 19 months prior and, in the weeks leading up to it, this return journey felt increasingly high stakes. I had high hopes for what it could mean and grand designs to write about it all. I wanted to make headway on a new essay about my Dad’s truncated archive and what this unexpected addition of three new boxes meant. I also wanted to rekindle a closeness with my Dad and thought that visiting our old haunts—Barnes & Noble, Pho Factory—might unlock new memories, insights, feelings, anything really.

So with great anticipation, I hauled the three tubs inside as if they were treasure chests full of rare jewels, gold coins, and, most precious of all, inspiration. I carried in the first two and pushed the third and heaviest down the wooden hallway and onto the carpeted living room where my Mom, brother, and his partner all sat in a cushioned semi-circle half-watching TV. The dogs, Lucy and Poppy, were perched on either side of my brother on the jumbo couch, finally settled in after spending the morning battling over a disemboweled duck.

Kneeling like a child on Christmas Day, I opened the lid of each tub. Ethan joined me on the floor and together we began sorting through their contents. There were dozens and dozens of college athletic programs published by universities in the 80s and 90s; thick sci-fi paperbacks with unbent spines; hardcovers on U.S. military history and contemporary politics; anthologies of sportswriting and magazine writing; copies of The New Yorker and MAD Magazine from the 90s; 25 cent DC comics including one where Supergirl, tears in her eyes, is kneeling down to care for a man, saying “Geoff! Who did this horrible thing to you?”

It didn’t take long for the wick of my hope to expire. I had hoped to discover something new inside these boxes, but they only contained more of what I already knew. I found myself at the outer limit of something, when what I had been pining for was a new frontier I could roam in a state of awe and discovery.

What I was coming up against was the sad reality that there would never again be anything “new” about my Dad that wasn’t generated within myself. He had ceased to exist, and with it the possibility of outward change. Whatever dynamism that was still possible existed strictly in the psychological realm. This notion alone made me feel tired and weary. The idea that my relationship with my dad would only be sustained through me, that it would only grow through my willingness to put in the work. Gone were the days of quietly reading in a cafe together, guiding him to his seat in the dark of the Grand cinema, or slurping down broth and noodles over lunch.

I wasn’t at all motivated to do any of the things I told myself I’d do on this return journey. I avoided the basement where all of Dad’s boxed possessions lived, lacking the willpower to pull them out, dust them off, and sort through their loosely organized contents.

My obligations to the living—to my mom and grandma, to my brother and his partner Ro, to my friends Max and Catherine and Graham, to sweet Lucy—felt more pressing, and certainly easier to fulfill, than my obligations to the dead. So that’s what I did. I tagteamed Thanksgiving dinner with Ethan and Ro, played cards and dominoes afterward with Mom and Grandma, third-wheeled as Ethan showed Ro around town, took Lucy for walks around the developing neighborhood.

Outside, a dusting of snow sat atop the cold-packed prairie, skittering easily across the year-old sidewalk. The pockets of undeveloped land in this suburban enclave took on a tundra quality. I walked to where the sidewalk ended and kept going. Houses that were once foundations of concrete are furnished and fleshed with people lining their doughy stomachs with hearty holiday foods.

I felt closest to my Dad in the moments where I found myself sitting with Lucy, petting her velvet ears and staring into her big starlet eyes. The calming comfort and loving affection she once gave to my Dad, was now being redirected toward me. I felt a surge of love and gratitude for this sweet dog who, though she belonged to my Mom, was a loving companion to my Dad when he otherwise battled loneliness and isolation. In those surging feelings and in the warm calm that spread through my chest, I felt a closeness to my Dad that, until that point, had only been approximated by the burning ache of grief.

In his unfinished archive are notes for a book. My Dad had many book ideas over the years, and most of them remained just that: ideas. But there was one concept that he actually did pursue, the notes for which I found in yellow legal pads feathered about his room.

At first I thought this book idea was like all the rest, but he kept at it with a persistence that surprised even him, setting up interviews with experts, doing field research, and thinking through structure and marketability. It quickly became a fixture in our weekly phone conversations, during which he’d update me on the progress he’s made and sometimes voice doubts about the enterprise.

After a couple months of this, I started to think: he might actually pull this off. By then he had conducted several interviews, enlisted a friend who worked as a professional photographer to help shoot portraits for it, and I could easily envision it as a stylish coffee table book that was part memoir, part reportage, and furnished with high-quality color photography. And though I thought its premise was incredibly corny, I knew it would be hugely successful, perhaps even a bestseller.

It was a book about dogs and the companionship they offered humans, and it would read like a personal, lightly scientific exploration of dogs as man’s best friend. Corny as it might’ve seemed to me, I felt the strength of its cliched truth as I pulled Lucy closer. Stroking her fur and rubbing her spotted belly, I felt tugged by the same kite of inspiration that spurred my Dad to dust off his reporter’s hat and chase the lede. This story mattered too.

After my Dad died, everything swelled with meaning. And I mean everything. Feelings soared to new heights, minor details took on great depth, random instances seemed purposeful. The matrix of death imbued everything with significance as I sought to fill the sudden absence left by my father. I opened myself to it and raced to record it all.

Under a feverish spell, I filled page after page of my notebook in a foolish attempt to bottle this explosion of meaning. My Dad’s death unlocked something dormant inside me, something I had long wanted to say but couldn’t. Now that the floodgates were finally open, waves of ink stormed my notebook with epiphanies, taboo feelings, unspoken secrets.

Today, the floods have receded and I am left in a muddy field below a gray sky. I can see now how arrogant I was to think I had a grip on the story, that I had somehow figured out grief and grieving. Remember: this was a flood. All I did was build a crude raft made of language and honesty and heartache and weathered the storm. This flood, this explosion of meaning, is what buoyed me over the last two years. To think I could neatly hold it in the palm of hands and drink from it as I please was wishful thinking. I was awash in it all, learning to float. The floods and the stories I drew from it are what held me, not the other way around.

The storm has passed now. The gales that left me short of breath have quieted. The lightning that ignited new ideas and realizations has disappeared. And in the calm stillness that has followed, I find myself missing it—the drama, the inspiration, the sense of purpose—which is another way of saying I miss them.

They’re still here of course. They’re just not as easy to reach. The waters have seeped deep into the ground, enriching the earth below. From this clay, I will build anew. And if I dig deep enough, I know I will find a hidden aquifer.

Woke up to a very vivid dream, but it evaporated instantly leaving me only with a small puddle of a memory about childproofing a home.

Outside, car wheels screamed like jaguars as they searched the icy snow for traction.

Got out of bed to feed Chicken, boiled water and ground coffee beans. As I waited for the espresso to percolate, I washed dishes from last night’s dinner and then poured bulgur wheat into a pot, filled it with water to rinse and swirled the wheat with my knuckles before draining it. Did this twice and set it to boil. The wheat would accompany a Mediterranean salad of sorts I made the night prior—kalamata olives, chickpeas, very out of season vine tomatoes, red onion, and a narrow English cucumber over which I poured a marinade of red wine vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt, and pepper. I sliced a thick pad of butter and put it on the wheat, along with salt. The butter was freshly purchased after we gave a neighbor the last of ours. This neighbor and I got to know each other during my double knee surgery because he also had a bad knee. His, however, was permanently damaged by a botched surgery that he never fully recovered from. Now, marooned in his wheelchair, he hung out in and around the building. He was in the lobby when he waved me down to ask if we had any butter he could use. It was around 1am, and we had just come in from dancing at a new club in East Williamsburg. It was a peculiar thing to request so late in the night, but it seemed urgent so I said sure, of course. Then he held up his hand to gesture how much, stretching his thumb and pointer as wide as he could. He needed an entire stick, perhaps more. I checked the fridge and the freezer. All we had was a small knob, but I took it down anyway because he was expecting me. He laughed at how little it was, and I fumbled the clever response I had prepared on the elevator down. With a quick “good luck,” I bounded back up the four flights of stairs where C and I started a new show that opens with a navy ship being struck by a missile, which sets off a global diplomatic crisis that the protagonist is dispatched to resolve as a test for higher office. Miraculously, the ship didn’t sink.

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I wrote through the morning until it was time for couples therapy. We talked about the crises unfolding across the country and said things we’d never said to one another. C told me she was disappointed she didn’t see her anger and alarm over ICE and Gaza reflected in me. I told her I sometimes didn’t trust my own political views because they were so flimsy compared to hers. She had a strong moral compass and only had to look inward to know what was right. I was deeply unsure and easily persuadable, wary of anything that sounded too absolute or alarmist, which left me in the herd of public opinion, perpetually late to arrive at what history would later deem obvious.

The sun was now high overhead and at 18 degrees it was as warm as it was going to get. I grabbed the brand-new shovel and walked to the end of the block where our car was pinned in by an embankment of thigh-high snow whose topmost layer was dirtied by the street and hardened with ice. I put on a podcast about Tucker Carlson’s rise in media and got to work, stabbing through the hard outer layer until it gave way to a soft and powdery inner layer. Eventually I figured out that I could cleave away large chunks by stabbing from above and below until a big block broke loose, bringing to mind the massive walls of blue ice a warming Antarctica shedded into the rising ocean. Using my gloved hands, I picked up the mini iceberg and waddled it over to a large pile of snow across the street, feeling simultaneously like a penguin late to the party and an amateur contestant on World’s Strongest Man. Using this method, I cleaved several small bergs loose at a time and, bending down, chucked the smallest blocks over my shoulder and bear-hugged the largest to add them to the pile. This manner of working, alternating between tool and hand with a fevered desperation, made me feel like a miner on a rescue team in a collapsed cave working furiously to free any survivors.

When my arms began to whimper, I stopped to catch my breath. Someone walking by called out, “I wish I could help.” I’m not done, I thought to myself, and went back to work.

With the front and the side of the car cleared, I turned my attention to the rear. We needed a few feet of clearance to accelerate over a stubborn ridge of compact ice. I had my method and worked quickly, hurling chunks of snow over my shoulder and onto the sidewalk behind me until I saw the dark road beneath me. With about 95% of the work done, I called it good and walked home.

Inside, I drank a full glass of water in one go and then laid down flat on the floor. I was waiting for pain to knit through my lower back, but it wouldn’t arrive until the following morning. I stared at the ceiling while C created protest signs using cardboard she found in the basement of the building. She modified a poster intended for me to say: Call your representatives. Admittedly, this felt quaint and old-fashioned, but I still believed it could actually be effective, in part because it was a page out of the far-right playbook. Showing up at town halls, calling the DC and field offices—these local, targeted actions seemed to have a real impact when deployed by right-wing activists. Leftists meanwhile took to the streets or social media to bemoan Trump’s latest actions, diffusing their energy into vacuous public squares rather than channeling their outrage toward levers of power.

With temperatures approaching the single digits, we wore two of everything knowing we’d be in the streets for hours protesting: double socks, long underwear plus thick pants, long sleeves under warm sweaters. En route to the subway and enlivened by what was to come, C walked fast, weaving through embankments of snow and overtaking slower walkers by skipping ahead a few steps before the path once again narrowed. I followed a half step behind, carrying our signs under one arm, observing whoever noticed the signs and read their reaction. I had no idea what these strangers were thinking, but I tended to imagine they felt a pang of guilt for going about their business as usual and not getting off at City Hall and that this inward guilt was outwardly manifested in looks of derision, as in: how dare you remind us of the many ills and injustices of the world on a Friday.

We exited in a sea of people who trudged up the salted stairs for air. Stately white columns greeted us and we followed the swell of people toward Foley Square where the crowd was at least four times the size of the previous protest we went to. I turned my phone onto airplane mode and C called Cat and then Becky, and coordinated for us all to meet under a street sign away from the growing crowd.

Cat emerged wearing a mask and red puffer with Mike behind her, and Becky joined a few minutes after. Together we slipped into the crowd to get closer to the action. We found ourselves at the mouth of a subway entrance that no one exited from but several entered having wormed their way through the crowd. We strained to listen to the speakers, but the cold swallowed up all speech and only a few key phrases were telegraphed back in a call and response. The speech portion soon concluded, perhaps due to the freezing temperatures, but it was another 30 minutes before the ranks thinned out enough for us to begin our march through snowbanked streets.

Spirits seemed high, especially among a young group of high schoolers near us carrying a banner and leading chants. Perhaps it was because they skipped school in solidarity, or because they screamed Fuck ICE and the crowd answered back in kind. Perhaps they liked the edge of dissent, and the allure of command. Their eagerness found an acceleration in the chants, pressing the words closer and closer until they became a hurried mash. There was no song in their smiling mouths, no rhythm in their young hearts. I slowed my pace, let them walk past me.

But the chants didn’t change in this new part of the crowd. For the entirety of the march, there were only two thrown back and forth: “Fuck ICE” and “No KKK, No Fascist USA, No ICE.” I preferred other chants, but I couldn’t remember any of them. One person tried to start a Palestine chant but no one followed suit. He kept at it anyway, his voice growing louder with each cry, until he stopped altogether after a respectable six rounds of soloing.

We walked up Lafayette, turned west down Canal. At the end of Canal, lies the Hudson River which has been jigsawed into plates of ice that don’t fit perfectly but nevertheless belong together. Over this tectonic puzzle, the horizon was ablaze in a warm flash of orange embers. It was late January, when the wick of the day grew minute by minute until nighttime was scarce once again.

We turned up Sixth Avenue. The buildings looming overhead become shadows of steel and concrete. Inside some are squares of light with darkened figures looking down at us. “It’s weird there’s no cops out,” said Becky. I hadn’t noticed until then, but it was true. There were no police whatsoever, not even barricades. The streets were all but empty and the only faces we saw were those from the lighted windows peering down.

The protest concluded in Washington Square Park, as it had the previously three times we marched. As the crowd began to disband, C looked around in dismay. “This isn’t enough,” she said. “I’m sick of ending up in the park. None of this is actually disrupting anything, it’s too convenient - for us, for the cops, for observers. We need direct action, we need a sustained general strike to force any actual change. That obviously requires a lot more preparation, but that’s what we should be called to do here, not just put a neat little bow on the end of a protest. It might be uncomfortable, and would take real commitment, but I think the discomfort of living under fascism outweighs the effort required to overthrow it.”

She was right, of course. Cops didn’t need to be in the streets monitoring the protest because there was nothing unruly about it and nothing that couldn’t be easily contained. The route we marched was planned with and approved by the city. There had been dozens and dozens of protests in recent weeks and all went according to plan, except for one.

At the end of the last protest C and I went to, a group of people shouted, “Fuck Washington Square Park! And fuck ICE!” before doubling back to the federal building that ICE was allegedly operating out of. Their leaders skipped ahead in all-black, lifting their signs high and proud. It was only a small group of a dozen protestors initially, but it still triggered panic among the police, who scrambled to maintain control of the situation.

The offshoot’s declaration was met with mixed reactions from the other protesters. Some responded with a “Fuck, yeah,” and joined their swelling contingent as they snaked southwest back toward 6th Avenue. Others seemed to flinch at this call to further action, either from fear of what a true confrontation might entail or from offense at the suggestion that the protest they had just participated in wasn’t enough.

At C’s insistence, we followed the offshoot of protestors as they exited the park, amused by the cops collecting easy overtime who suddenly had to exert themselves. They shuffled ahead in a half-jog while holding their belts up to get eyes on the developing situation. The offshoot protestors marched against the flow of traffic, which was genuinely disrupted now that the cops had removed the barricades. It was the cops who disrupted traffic most though, as they took up an entire car lane. The protestors, suddenly more fluid than the sleepy herd of before, weaved in and out of moving traffic and parked cars, switching between sidewalk, bike lane, and car lane. The chants picked up again, the loudest voices beginning to sound hoarse but more animated than before.

Several protestors were arrested that night. I wasn’t there to witness it because I convinced C we should stop for dinner.

In hindsight, and following long conversations with my brother and with Celina, this type of dissent is what is needed at this moment, along with all the rest. If that sounds overwhelming, that’s because it is. It is an all hands on deck operation and I realize now I’ve had my hands clasped behind my back whistling to myself as I go about my life as if nothing has changed. And in truth, not much has changed for me, which only speaks to how shielded I am from the devastating White House policies and Supreme Court rulings. Meanwhile, the lives of countless people living in the United States have been completely upended. Whether disappeared into an ICE facility or deported to somewhere they’ve never set foot, their individuality has been obliterated in a statistic, blurred by headlines. It’s embarrassing now to consider the discomfort I sometimes felt while at protests or during political conversations. It is infinitesimally small compared to the harm actually inflicted on those I’m purporting to protest on behalf of. It is embarrassing the extent to which I have agonized over these internal feelings when that energy would be better spent contributing toward a cause. Instead of being ready to critique an activist’s plan for change, I should think critically about what tactics or strategies might be more effective. Instead of quietly muttering a chant I don’t care for, I should learn a new one and share it. Instead of fretting over what to say or not to say in a political conversation, I should acknowledge I don’t have all the answers, and don’t need to. There are plenty of people who have thought long and hard about these issues, and been fighting all kinds of injustices for centuries that have crucial lessons to share. All I have to do is show up, and keep showing up, even when it’s uncomfortable.

For some reason, I was inordinately excited to go to the grocery store. We needed ordinary provisions—eggs, oat milk, butter—as well as ingredients for the dinners I had mapped out—cheeseburgers, cauliflower shawarma, cacio e pepe.

I go to the market multiple times a week for this or that, but this particular trip swelled with literary potential, which is no doubt due to the fact that I am reading Knausgaard again. I’m on book three now and it took 139 pages for me to even consider picking up my pen to underline something of particular interest: “Speed and anger went hand in hand.”

What inspires me about Knausgaard isn’t the writing itself—his sentences are largely unremarkable—but rather his relentless documentation of everyday life—cooking dinner, getting ready for work/school, etc. This way of being infused my powers of observation with a new vigor, and elevated observation itself into a kind of meditative state.

What’s more, his manner of writing soothed me, which is something I sorely needed after my bear attack book in which the author’s body becomes a Cold War battleground for French surgeons who distrust their Russian counterparts. My experience of reading Knausgaard was like literary ASMR—soothing, quiet, private, with a premium placed on minute attention to detail.

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I was also excited to go to the grocery store because I decided to get myself a treat. I have been so regimented lately, devoting every moment to reading or writing or lifting weights, or at least aspiring to. Whenever I started to nod off while reading late at night, I’d get up off the couch or out of bed and do twenty push ups to wake myself up. The exertion, however, often only served to further fatigue me, sandbagging my body closer to sleep.

Despite all my focus, I haven’t managed to finish a single book or write a single essay. I have read more than a thousand pages—plowing 275 pages deep into medieval history, 297 pages into a biography of Edgar J. Hoover, 249 pages into Knausgaard, 323 pages into Lonesome Dove, 240 pages into Loorie Moore’s collected short stories. I have filled a quarter of my notebook with thoughts, events, laments, and I have written lengthy introductions to three potential essays. But all of this remained pointedly unfinished. At the end of the day I felt I had little to show for my monastic discipline and was beginning to wonder what the point was.

Anyway, the prospect of a treat, and the feeling that I deserved one, put a new wind in my sails. A can of La Colombe double espresso seemed in order. Perhaps some spicy sausages as well so I could attempt again to recreate Frankie’s heaven-heavy cavatelli dish. I missed those hot, oily coins burnt to a gristle.

Cooking meat, which I seldom do, has always struck me as a form of alchemy. How is it that fire alone can transform something that could sicken you into a delectable morsel? After taking off the last few months of 2025, I was back in the kitchen cooking many of our meals, in part to free C up to focus on her own projects, and in part because it’s what’s fair. It may also be because I’ve been spending so much time alone consumed with worry about nearly everything: the car with its many mysterious noises, unpaid tickets, and mountain of snow pinning it in; old patterns with old friends; travel arrangements for my cousin’s wedding in Colombia. And those were just my selfish concerns. Minneapolis. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland. The world was unraveling, and the United States was responsible. The global order we built, oversaw, and benefited from was now the target of one man’s crusade to “strike a deal” not realizing how good we already had it. Grasping the full magnitude of what was unfolding was hard to do. What felt like a slow creep of fascism was likely never slow at all, I just wasn’t looking closely. It was easier to look away than to bear witness. The news was frightening, and often left me feeling utterly powerless when resilience was what was needed, and speechless when language was my homeland. All I could manage were names of places under siege and people executed, and the federal agencies responsible for the terror and death. I called my senators, went to protests, followed the news, but it wasn’t enough.

It was well after dark by the time I set out for the grocery store, but it was necessary that I went today because tomorrow was a general strike and C and I had pledged to abstain from shopping, call out of work, and go to a protest. There were only a handful of shoppers so I lingered longer than I would’ve normally: took my time selecting produce, compared expiration dates on dairy products, surmised whether pecorino and romano were interchangeable. I also paused in the NA section, where my eyes flitted between two phony negronis; a white one and a classic-looking one that had “mezcal” in the title for some reason. They were bottled in a handsome cone-shaped glass that looked like a party hat and was heavy like a grenade. I added the white negroni to my basket already heavy with oat milk, potatoes, eggs, and went to look for sausages.

I’d never gone to the meat section of this store before. I scanned the pre-packaged goods, taking care to avoid eye contact with the butcher behind the glass in his signature white smock. Ordering meat from the counter made me nervous. I didn’t know what to say—what cut, how much—or how to say it. There was a method to ordering and you either knew it or you didn’t. You could tell whether someone has really lived in New York based on how they order at the deli, and you can tell what part of the city they came from if they said ketchup, salt, pepper or salt, pepper, ketchup. (While editing this, C paused here to fact-check me: “No one says ketchup, salt, pepper.” I do, I protested. “And that’s how I know you’re not from the city.”)

I didn’t see any spicy sausages in the case but I did see bratwurst from a local German shop I once visited on the Upper East Side after going to a reading of Devin Kelly’s for his debut novel. I’d arrived alone with Elena Ferrante in my hand five minutes late, but still in time to grab a seat. Bud Smith was on stage giving a laid back introduction to Devin. I knew Bud from a fiction workshop he organized a few years back and, afterwards, I went up to say hello to him and Mike, who I met through Bud’s workshop and now represented Devin among other writers in the city, several of whom had a penchant for self-mythologizing. These writers wrote about each other, commissioned each other, smoked and drank with each other.

Showing up that day I had hoped to kindle something with these writers. Often when I attended a reading of someone I admired it amounted to excessive lingering and nervously peeling the label off my second beer then immediately turning for the door after my last gulp. This time it worked, sort of, and I left feeling accomplished and hungry. To celebrate, I went to a German food shop Robert Sietsema (NYC’s best food critic) had recommended and ordered a bratwurst from a small counter adjacent to the store. I almost ordered a Bitburger as well, but decided against it. It was a long ride home on the subway, after all. As I waited with Ferrante open before me, another man showed up and sat next to me. He too ordered a bratwurst. Then he shrugged and said, You know what, I’ll take a beer as well. The girl poured the wheat-colored beer into a plastic cup and handed it to the man who already had his phone out and was queuing up a video. The young girl handed me a boiled sausage whose gray pallor looked entirely unappealing but still tasted good with mustard and sauerkraut. I was done eating within two minutes, gathered my things and went into the shop next door. Everything was imported—the chocolates, cookies, relishes, pickles. I took a lap, stealing a glance at the splendor in the deli glass when I could, before returning to the bank of pre-packaged meats where I selected a cheddar-stuffed bratwurst for myself and Irish bangers to give to Declan next time I saw him.

I once more reached for these cheese-stuffed bratwurst back in our neighborhood grocery, not in celebration this time but in consolation for my missing spicy sausages. Then I made my way toward checkout, resisting Quadratini since we still had some at home along with a diabolical bread pudding that Celina made.

By then, my podcast about Bari Weiss’ takeover of CBS had finished and I listened to the cashier’s gossip about their coworker’s dating life in a flirting way. I walked home in silence. Scarcely a soul was out. I didn’t feel cold for the first time in a while despite the freezing temperatures.

Upon entering the hardware store, I felt a surge of power completely foreign to me. I had a purpose here. Even better: I knew where my purpose was located and didn’t need to ask for assistance. I strode up to the shovels and picked up two -- a shorter one with a pointed spade and a taller one with a squared edge. How much, I asked, and bought the squared one which was cheaper. It was the best shape for the immediate task at hand, but I wondered about its greater use and longevity. A pointed spade, in my experience, was superior in dirt. Such uses were years away, but still. It was entirely likely that this shovel would be used once and never again for many years.

Walking down 40th Street with the shovel in hand I ran into Julian and he looked quizzically at my new companion. I explained the emerging Cold War with my Polish super and the shortage of shovels in my own neighborhood. The day went like this, with the shovel serving as a conversation piece and me brandishing it as a weapon in my private feud. On the subway ride home, I felt like the farmer in Grant Wood’s famous painting. Except my long-handled tool was a spade, not a pitchfork, and I held it from the rubber red nub of the handle rather than the neck of the steel end.

I abstained from reading my new book after it nearly made me sick on my morning commute. Racing around the dark bend between Chambers and Canal, my skin suddenly prickled with hot needles and a wave of nausea welled up my throat. I was only a few pages into In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, but I couldn’t go any further. The bear attack, the thin hospital bed and cruel nurses, the long rough tubes for breathing and feeding — it was all too much. But what was truly unbearable was the powerlessness, and that the only path forward was surrender. So the author, a French anthropologist, surrendered to the cold touch of a Soviet medical system that styled their wards after gulags and to the humiliations that witnesses inflict on miracles and those who survive them.

When I got home, C greeted me at the door and said, “I want to fight back.” I could tell she’d been on social media again watching citizen footage and first-person testimony from Minneapolis and Palestine.

I took off my coat and muttered, “I want to write.” She followed me into the bedroom where I sat at my desk and looked back at her without saying anything. She left, and I heard the window to the fire escape open.

What does it say that I’ve been back in New York for two weeks without once writing here?

I came close to power today, in a meeting with Zohran’s transition team. Across from me was a waify senior advisor with White House experience and fingers slender as icicles. She ran the meeting comfortably, clearly accustomed to a roomful of strangers eager to make things happen. I wondered what her mornings were like. I was reading a profile of her Friday evening that told me what her mornings were like and now here she was sitting across from me on a Monday morning.

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December 21

Perversely, some part of me misses the drama that losing Dana and my Dad infused into life. If nothing else, I had a clear purpose then. Now, life feels dull, not least because the two of them are absent from it. Life no longer feels surreal either, just taxing. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been sleeping in more. On weekends, I part the curtains so that I get a face full of sun at 9am. But even then, I lie there tanning my eyelids until 9:30am.

I had a great desire to read but watched three movies instead: Ghost Trail, Festen, Moon. Festen was like nothing else I’d ever seen and a perfect precursor to any big family gathering.

December 22

I started reading Loorie Moore again. Hard to think of any writer more original in their use of metaphors. Think to myself: a Substack post excerpting the best lines from her short stories would do good numbers.

December 25

Sitting criss crossed on the couch with a new book in my lap in pale imitation of my father and feeling newly tender toward my mother on account of Anne Carson’s poetry, which is wintry, Midwestern, and lyrically hints at caring for a dying mother.

I quickly scaled three flights of stairs for privacy and quiet only to be smacked with the powerful tang of catshit. I clean the litter, make myself another coffee, and return to the high desk with my notebook.

My own family is far-flung. Brother in Memphis. Mother in Lincoln. Father in mother’s basement in a box of cinders that’s heavier than you’d think. Outside, it’s one of those days that pulls the blinds over the sun, leaving only an ashy glow.

Yesterday, we made an attempt at the seven fishes. A fish pie did the lion’s share of the work, massacring four of the seven in one fatal pastry. I admit I was wary, but it was good in the end. I was more concerned with the river fish on my cans of beer, which I drily dispatched one after another.

December 27

I woke up to Chicken’s hunger, as usual. After I fed her, I got back in bed to try and summon the memory of my dream, allowing my mind to wander its own shadows. In those shadows, I found a new kind of dreaming -- one I hadn’t engaged with since I was a young student. I simply observed my own thinking, taking notes as it hopscotched from my brother to airplanes to the price of this or that to the opening sentence of today’s diary entry.

When I finally got out of bed 40 minutes later to make coffee, I looked out the third floor window and was struck by the sudden beauty of a red stop sign in a field of white snow. It was perfectly ordinary, but something about it felt precious and innocent, perhaps even civically righteous. The fire engine red stop sign stood tall and officious amid the overnight snow, which was still undisturbed and serene-looking. And though bundled children would soon emerge with sleds to race down the school hill and plows would soon come to clear and salt the roads, they had not yet done so. For now, the snow quilted street, sidewalk, and grass under one cold banner. And the shallow creek appeared dark and syrupy against the clotted creamy snow atop every rock in its thin wake.

The scene reminded me of William Carlos William’s famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow. The famed physician-poet lived only a half hour’s drive from where I’m writing this. I reread the 16-word poem and immediately likened it to the Art Basel banana -- another primary-colored stunt.

Later, driving into the city to see a Talking Heads tribute band, I told C and her dad about my third floor vision and read them Williams’ poem aloud. After I read it a second time, Celina defended the poem’s logic. She saw the important mandate that Williams saw. So much depends on one’s ability to see beauty in what is small and ordinary.

January 1

Dozing off to the strange violent beauty of bullfighting. Not barbaric, but definitely medieval insofar as it makes a sport out of blood and entertainment out of death.

January 4

Went bowling at Whitestone Lanes with Pam/Alex and Ellen/Wolfi last night and got hot pot after in a Flushing mall complex. Rolled a 125 and 162. They gave us two lanes, and the girls took one and guys the other. I had a hunch the boys would make a business of bowling while the girls talked. Sure enough. The boys tried to slow down and gab, but the magnetism of the lane had a strong pull that we had to clench our teeth to resist which made conversation difficult.

Alex and Wolfi are friendly Austrians who grew up in the same small village and lived on the same Berlin block for several years, but never knew each other until they met in New York.

January 12

I spent the morning reading the news. I started on the international desk where human rights groups were reporting that a massacre could be unfolding in Iran which was experiencing its largest protest in decades. As in the past, those in power responded forcefully and, under the cover of an internet blackout, executed hundreds of protestors.

I then read Jasper Nathaniel’s Substack on Israel’s plan to settle the West Bank, and how those plans are plainly telegraphed via spokespeople and local media.

On to the national desk, where ICE has been under severe scrutiny following the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The SUVs, the masks, the sense of impunity these law enforcement officials carry with no respect for the letter of the law or regard for human dignity. Good was killed just blocks from where George Floyd gasped his last breath, launching a nationwide protest not seen since Ferguson.

Finally, local news. Hochul is considering a bill demanding ICE officers not wear masks. Mamdani is being criticized for not commenting on protesters chanting pro-Hamas slogans in a Jewish neighborhood. His move into Gracie mansion. His efforts to bridge the social-first poetry of campaigning into the tougher mandate of governing.

January 18

Outside glows blue like cold lightning. Inside glows orange from flames and bulbs from the prior century. We made it north today. We were supposed to come up yesterday, but as we were packing and watching the snow come down harder and harder, the cottage owner called to warn us the roads were bad and we all agreed to delay our trip by a day. Thank god because I was horribly hungover, the likes of which hadn’t happened since the time I went to New Orleans for my ex’s 21st birthday and tried to match an alcoholic twice my size shot for shot because he was my ex’s ex and I didn’t want to be outdone.

But we’re here now in what looks like the Hundred Acres Wood. It is truly a storybook scene: perfectly still and snowcapped. Yesterday’s snow sits inches high on the thinnest of branches and in the slightest grooves on the bark of a tree trunk, as if an illustrator reverse-shadowed the scene to illuminate the heaven-facing earthly matter rather than that which is cast in shadow.

C & I are happy to be students of the quiet. On snowy walks through the wood, we like to stop and listen. We did so on a rail trail by the Rondout creek. It was silent at first, but then the world slowly revealed itself. First came the beating of wings as geese flew overhead in what I thought was the wrong direction. Hungry mallards invisibly paddled. Two woodpeckers traded messages in morse code. The low surf of distant traffic asserted the shadow of civilization. The creek gently lapped the frozen, pebble shores. When we finally move, the heavy snow packed underfoot carries the sound of bubblewrap wrung out but not popped.

I listen now to the fire, which crinkles hot like highly carbonated soda. And to the staccato drip of the faucet made to leak so the pipes won’t freeze. And to the hushed rise and fall of C’s chest.

Last night, I dreamt of an immovable knob of stone in a bed of grass. I kept returning to it, or it kept returning to me as I lay waiting for the sun to rise and then Celina. This stubborn stone stank of the bar.

The fire purrs and I miss Chicken.

January 19

We went for a walk in Minnewaska State Park to Awosting Falls. The trees are different up here, even though we’re only a ten minute drive up the modest mountainside. Reminds me of New Mexico, where dry low deserts and snowy peaks neighbor one another.

Icicles fang over the mouth of a dark cave. We try to name the color of the ice: mucus, urine, citron, baby’s breath, iron, umber.

I would like to return tomorrow, and the next day. I would like to know the many seasons of this place: the freeze that arrests the edges of the river in its icy clutch; the first thaw and how it refreezes overnight; the melt that finally licks away the last of the ice packed hard underfoot.

After wolfing down some kung pao tofu, C and I went to a New Year’s Day screening of The Testament of Ann Lee at Village East, which houses a cathedral-like theater where operas or vaudeville acts must have once taken place. All I knew about Ann Lee was that it was about the Shakers, and all I knew about the Shakers was that design carried spiritual meaning and I only knew that because our friend Sav lived near New Lebanon, which was once headquarters for the utopian Christian offshoot whose following topped out around 6,000.

I was keen to learn more about the Shakers, but about a quarter of the way through the movie, amid a minutes-long close-up on a singing Amanda Seyfried that had me wondering: how did I get here? I leaned over to C and whispered, “This might be terrible.” This realization hit me as Ann Lee was having her own epiphanies. After being jailed for disrupting a mainstream sermon, Ann Lee has a vision that would come to define the Shaker belief system and elevate her from impassioned believer to the group’s most influential leader and, in the eyes of her most devoted, the second coming of Christ.

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In Ann’s vision, which was accompanied by a song that repeated “I hunger and thirst” ad nauseam (did I mention this was a musical?), an oily snake glides across the screen, flicking its tongue like a lit cigarette. The juice of a bitten apple courses from lip to chin. A naked man and a naked woman coil around one another. What Ann sees is original sin. What we see is more sex. Up until this moment in the movie, the prevailing tone has been erotic—the sun lancing through a white night gown to reveal a morning buttocks, that same buttocks being slapped with a bristly hand brush and met with rousing moans as her husband Abraham reads scripture aloud. But after four unsuccessful births, a despondent, incarcerated Ann becomes convinced that the reason for her maternal misfortune and all human misery lies in sex. Fornication, she tells her fellow Shakers, is the cause for wo/man’s estrangement from God. Only through celibacy does one stand a chance of growing closer to Him. Some, like Abraham, furrow their brow at this revelation, but most adopt it immediately and without complaint like her brother John.

But the erotics did not stop there. It was merely transmuted into the Shaker form of prayer, which took on an intensely physical quality and placed new importance on breathwork. Shaker praying was modern-day raving. Everyone danced madly, alone but tapping into something communal and deeply felt: a common cause, a dissolution of self, an absolvement of wrongdoing.

I took many issues with this movie, but the choreography was not one. The director Mona Fastvold’s ham-fistedness tarnished most of the movie, but when redirected at the body this fist produced a seductive, somatic cadence that had everyone tapping their feet, keeping time with flesh and heartbeat.

The Testament of Ann Lee suffered most from the lack of any compelling storyline. Instead what we were given was a 2h 10m music video laced with epic shots, a few decent songs, excellent choreography, and absolutely zero narrative thrust. The script was so badly butchered that the only thing that moved the plot forward was a much-abused voiceover. I kid not, 40% of the movie was voiceover, another 40% was song, 10% was breathing and the remainder was acting. Unless you’re making a documentary, that amount of voiceover is inexcusable. It made for a herky jerky viewing experience wherein acting did little to advance the narrative, song interrupted what little progression was being made, and then voiceover leapfrogged us forward.

The conspicuous absence of a plot made for a wristwatch-checking movie experience. Conflict sometimes knifed through, but usually we were only allowed to see its tidied up aftermath. Indeed, I could count on one hand the number of times any character’s face had the look of something other than adoring adulation. Our principal character, Ann, had no development arc. Saintly and strong-headed from her earliest days, she remained so for the rest of her days. Whatever hiccups might appear on the road, were easily papered over, usually by a convenient voiceover.

For a movie that catered to so many modern sensibilities, I’m shocked they didn’t leverage the Shaker’s renowned craftsmanship. They were artisans and woodworkers of the highest order who believed that form should follow function. The result was simple furniture made elegant through complex joinery that masked any visible use of nails. Ladder-backed chairs and twin bed frames were enjoined using dovetails, mortise-and-tenons, and pegs. Pegs, in particular, were a Shaker signature. Most rooms came lined with a long, chest-high peg rail where any item not in use was meant to be hung. Chairs were a bestseller and were eventually trademarked by their Mount Lebanon factory, which had become an epicenter for Shaker artisans and industry.

Shaker furniture and its influence on American design is arguably where the Shaker legacy lies. Devotion to God was exercised in work ethic. The relentless pursuit of perfection was a means of measuring proximity to God. In short, work, like dance, was a form of prayer.

But instead of giving any airtime to craftsmanship, Fastvold chose to focus on the Shaker’s doomed evangelizing efforts. The spread of Shakerism was never in question. Their vow to celibacy precluded any meaningful proliferation. As of 2024, there were only two Shakers living in a small village in Maine 30 minutes north of Portland. This is their Adam and Eve.

But despite their paper-thin ranks, Shakers are having a moment. A museum devoted to Shaker history and culture is set to open in Chatham, New York. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will be opening an exhibition later this month about Shaker craftsmanship, using items on loan from the museum. And last year, the number of Shakers jumped from two to three.

We went to Knockdown again, dressed as a rat czar and a bloodied boxer. C went off with my costume, making a nose-heavy rat mask that gave me an overly friendly appearance, a thick fleshy tail, and a fur-lined coat bedazzled with tassels, a gold chain, and cat buttons.

It was our first late night in a while. We almost left after the costume contest, but we stayed on and I’m glad for it. Even though I had sobered up by then and it was 2am, I didn’t feel tired and neither did C so we kept dancing and I got another beer. We wandered out back for a change of scenery and to burn a grit and met a lost soul K-holing. I invited him to sit with us when another guy came over to bum a cigarette. The lost soul asked if we were all friends, and the guy said, “Oh yeah, we all went to different high schools together.” He delivered it without missing a beat, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

The day after was a lazy one. First, a big pot of coffee and an ep of Stranger Things. Then a bike ride in search of a pastry that ended at Frankie’s where we splurged on a $100 lunch because we hadn’t spent that money on cabs the night before. The cavatelli with sausage was excellent. Chewy, handmade pasta with oily coins of sausage burnt crispy, all crusted in salty parm. Tiramisu and coffee for dessert. Then a stop at Caputo’s for more handmade pasta, castellano olives, and to re-up on calabrian chili oil.

Back home we watched House of Dynamite, a bureaucratic procedural built around a nuclear attack on the U.S. You get three different perspectives — situation room, military, president — but no sightlines into the outcome, which made for a very disappointing ending.

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November 2

Today is the NYC marathon, daylight savings, Sunday. That extra hour of sleep was put to good use by all runners and Halloween partiers. We biked up to Peter Pan’s without course interference until Greenpoint, where we saw the first contenders: a line out the door for the best donuts in Brooklyn. We ordered half a dozen thinking we’d link up with C’s family but that never happened so now we have a half-eaten old fashioned crueller, half a blueberry, and an apple cinnamon sugar donut.

We set up camp to wait for C’s cousin Julian, cheering all the while and shouting the name of anyone whose shirt bore it. The sun inched farther and farther until we were cloaked in shade. Three hours in and we finally got word that Julian was near. By then, the crowd had swelled into a nonstop sweaty, smiley procession as the glut of the middle pack labored its way up Driggs and Manhattan Ave. The only way to take in the tsunami of faces rushing forth was by not focusing on any one point. I opened my eyes wide and didn’t blink in my best CCTV impersonation, but eventually my vision was corrupted by too much data and I blinked. Around that time we also received some intel — we were told he was wearing a lime-green hat. Finally, a piece of information to fixate on. We trained our eyes on lime green headwear. A minute passed. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Unless Julian was gravely injured, surely he would’ve appeared by now. A photo of our marathoner was shared in the family group chat revealing that we had been given faulty info — Julian was wearing a lime green shirt, not a hat.

Inspired, I ran 7.5 miles, my farthest since the double knee surgery. Knee didn’t feel great and my right calf threatened to cramp but I made it home in an hour perfectly intact and found C sitting on the fire escape smoking. The dappled light coming in was so beautiful. The tree outside our window has finally turned and its leaves blaze red against the buttermilk sky.

Ice my knee, heat up soup, fry an egg, settle in for Stranger Things and Scrabble. We make coffee, eat more donut, have sex, rewind, keep watching.

November 4

Today is election day. The turnout has already been historic for Mamdani v Cuomo v Sliwa and the results, I suspect, will be close but decisive. This morning, Mamdani revealed he would vote yes on all three contentious housing proposals, which sought to fast-track the approval process, stripping Councilmembers of their veto power, which they say strengthens guardrails and gives them leverage to push for more affordability. I voted yes on one, no on two others, fearing it would concentrate too much power in the Mayor. I tried to take the long view. Mamdani, it would appear, bet on himself.

Out for lunch in Bryant Park, a punk in tight jeans clad in all-black hopped up on the ledge next to me with a transistor radio blaring and cracked a beer. Like something out of the 80’s. The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” came on as I was wondering the same, which made me chuckle and think of my Dad. His birthday is close. Idk what I’ll do. Maybe see a movie with C.

Feel the need to get back to the basics, to relish in the duldrum of life, find a new rhythm to release my current one. That means going into the office, running, writing not for Substack, but for me or a future book or editing the manuscript I need to dust off and punch up.

November 5

A historic day, not just for New York, but for American political history. NYC elected Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist with a high wattage smile and limitless charisma and a clear affordability agenda to be Mayor. On the same day, Dick Cheney, arguably the most influential Vice President ever and a chief architect of the post-9/11 world order, died.

I went to see Bugonia the night before at Village East, walked there from Midtown to kill time and for something new. I remember how I used to speed walk through the Financial District’s curved, medieval layout, footing the curb and stepping onto the street to overtake globs of tourists and bluetooth yakkers. How I’d swim through the crowd, twisting my torso and drooping my shoulder, avoiding any and all collisions.

I needed this hour of wandering. I have felt aimless, alone, disconnected. I can think of possible reasons why but I can’t pinpoint it and am reluctant to articulate any of it. Fear of dredging up old hurt. Fear of new anxieties surfacing. Better to look straight ahead. But yesterday I chose to look around. Being on foot encourages this. My bike, though I love its velocity, shackles me to the same avenues, the same green lanes blackened with soot. It restricts my observational powers, trains it on movement, thus obliterating all buildings. Stillness, great heights, sky — these all go unnoticed when I’m biking through Manhattan.

November 7

I don’t even want to write about this but I must in order to stop thinking about it: my nemesis is back.

November 11

I have been running again. 7.5 miles today, 6 yesterday, 10 the day before. I feel surprisingly capable for having barely run the past two years. And in this moment, where I feel adrift, running has grounded me. More than that. It has represented a return to my fundamental self.

I finished an essay today that I’ll publish in two days on what would’ve been my Dad’s 70th birthday. It’s about poetry, and my attempt to better understand the form I’ve never had patience for and that has never opened its wonders to me — until now.

An overnight cold snap has brought Arctic gales to the city. Coldest day of winter, no work, and yet C is away in CT for a job. Had she been here, we would’ve gone to the baths or made soup or gone to a movie. Instead, I edited, ran, read, had leftover salmon and made chicken for dinner.

On Saturday, we drove up to Rhinebeck to visit Dana / plant ferns and bulbs for spring. I took furious notes along the way. It was the first time I’d been back since I proposed to C on July 4.

November 12

I’ve also been drinking again.

November 13

Today would’ve been Dad’s 70th birthday. I scheduled my essay on How To Read Poetry to publish at 6:30am. Woke at 7:10 to feed Chicken. Left the apt at 7:20 to get oat milk for C. I don’t even want coffee at this point, I want to write before I have to go to work.

There was a big fire down the block last night. You could see and smell the smoke from our building. Five fire trucks responded and they brought it under control by the time C returned from Hartford. This morning I could see the damage under the gray sky which amounted to blown out windows with curtains somehow still white billowing like wind-full sails. There was a single fireman idling in a van outside and a sign on the front door that said vacate.

The streets were quiet at this hour. Only delis and breakfast joins were open, and only school children and their adult chaperones were on the street. I considered starting my days with runs again.

Compelled to document this day and its strange little moments. On the subway, a full cup of coffee spilled right next to me. A healthy dose of cream by the looks of it. As the subway accelerated toward Manhattan, the spilled coffee rivered across the floor. Less like tributaries and more like a subway map of its own, not mapping the transit system but the transit of this individual car through the dark underground.

I made coffee in the office, made a note to buy milk for here too. En route to the bathroom, my favorite sweater caught the corner of a stanchion which tugged a thread loose, unspooling the cable knit Oscra de la Renta sweater C gifted me. The urinal smelled oddly sweet, like bubblegum fluoride from the dentist’s office.

Already dark out. I don’t remember walking through darkness this time last year, when I tried for a beer and pho and cried myself home, feeling sad, confused, treasonous. This year I tried instead for a beer and a burger and a movie at Nitehawk with C.

Two old guys seated next to me at the Double Windsor. One will be 73 next week. The other said he’s physically well but mentally unwell — he knows the end is near. “I wanna ride my bike, play pickleball.” “You play pickleball?” They ordered scotch to toast his birthday and quoted Rocky 2: “No shame in getting old.” Long, unworried pauses broke up their intermittent conversation.

November 17

Woke up fog-headed. Watched Twin Peaks with coffee and apple pie to stabilize myself and then went for a long walk in Prospect with C. It was all sun and wind. The explosion of autumn leaves overwhelmed my toxic, depleted brain. I didn’t know where to look. Felt slow and weird biking to Prospect and was glad to dismount as I felt like a danger to myself. Prospect was as beautiful as ever. We walked the circumference of the lake and felt the full chilly force of the 40 mph gusts exposed in the shadow of the bluff. We looked for the swans and found them in a feeding frenzy. Felt early in love with C, like she was all I needed, that we could depend on each other and would never disappoint the other. Draped my arms around her to eliminate any space between us so we had to walk in lockstep.

We stopped at Unnameable on the way home and I bought the second Ferrante and good thing I did because the first, which I finished later that evening, ended on such a cliff hanger. But before I finished Ferrante with coffee, we watched The Girl With a Needle — a black and white Danish film so expertly shot that all the miseries depicted — a horribly disfigured vet, an ether-addicted baby killer — looked silvery and beautiful. A startling contrast to the warm explosion of color that overwhelmed me in the winds of Prospect.

November 21

I said something good to my therapist today. I said I worried my obsession with writing, my desire to live my life like a novel, sometimes eclipsed or occluded real feeling. In other words, sometimes I’m unsure whether the things I do, say, or feel are genuine, or whether there’s an odor of artifice fudged for the sake of drama/narrative. The precise word I used was “corrupt.” I liked that phrasing. As in: do my writerly compulsions “corrupt” my life experience?

She pushed me to consider what it was I really wanted or felt, separate from writing. I laughed, told her it was impossible to unwed them. Writing was desire; language was feeling.

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November 24

From November onward, sunlight is reserved for weekends only. Or at least that is how I spend my weekday: toiling at my desk, vacuuming, washing dishes, putting dishes away, wiping the counter free of bread crumbs and coffee grounds. That or reading in bed with C asleep next to me like a human furnace under the comforter. The days escape me and I do not know what I am prisoner to — my apartment? work? literature? — but I nevertheless feel ensnared by something. This cell is by no means coarse or rough. It is buttery, warm, safe. It is movies, dessert, tea. It is absolutely enough, but there is an unhappiness stalking the edges. Sometimes I pace with it, try to coax it to reveal its terms and desires, to see whether we can strike a deal. But it guards its silence fiercely.

I’m flying home to Nebraska. I read Ferrante until the words passed by without ever leaving the page, without projecting the fragrance of the sea nor the heart quickening tension of clandestine love. Now, as never happens, I am above the moon, which creeps by my window with pace, as never happens.

Tonight’s moon, seen somewhere over the frostbit prairie, was the same alien glow of New York — a candle soft orange, coloring the night sky with oil from a century ago. But whereas the moon is brilliantly alone, New York is a network of lights — some still, some moving, all dull on their own, but spectacular together — collectively needling the dark descent of night.

I read wondering if I might die in a plane crash after enduring several minutes-long bouts of turbulence. Last time I was scared of dying on a plane was on a return flight from Buffalo where the cabin shook so violently it spurred all passengers to buckle up, pull out their ear buds and look around. But no announcement ever came, which was most alarming of all. Instead we were left to measure our fear in each other, quietly calculating whether our heart rate was warranted based on our neighbor’s dewy face, the seconds between each blink, and the berth of their night pupils. In this near-death moment, I pulled out a muffin I purchased in the airport the hour prior and devoured it in three panicked bites. In between furious chews, I laughed spewing crumbs, laughed at my very undignified response to mortality and meeting it with muffin mouth.

November 28

First snow. The pockets of undeveloped land in this distant suburban enclave feel like tundra. The hard crystals of snow sit atop the cold-packed prairie, skittering easily across the year-old sidewalk. Two summers ago I ran to where the sidewalk ends and kept going. But now the houses that were once foundations of concrete are furnished and fleshed with people lining their doughy stomachs with hearty holiday foods. I feel something chrysalising within, a winter moth waiting for its wings.