Neither of us grew up around the culture we ended up inhabiting in comics, we didn’t get all the references, we didn’t really have an understanding of a lot of the behaviors. People talked to each other in ways that seemed like they were meant to drive downhill into a brawl, but it was almost always just a kind of unfamiliar joking amongst peers. Men called each other “bitch”, and nobody got popped in the teeth. It was a brave new world.

One of the things that surprised me pretty early on is that almost nobody I’d met had been in a fight. I grew up with 3 brothers and a LOT of wandering roughnecks, I was incredibly shy and impatient in a way that wasn’t conducive at all to engaging with someone who liked a fight. I am by no means a tough guy, but as a kid I was pretty used to being knocked around and if somebody swung on me, no matter how big they were, I’d just sorta lose my sense and I’d swing back. Sometimes I’d get clobbered, much rarer I’d hold my own, but more often than not, if someone was bigger than me they’d at least be impressed that I hadn’t backed off, and they’d take it easy on me. And after that we’d never get in each other’s sights again.

I only got jumped twice as an adult, the more important of the 2 was when I lived in the Lower East Side at the beginning of the 21st century, before it became whatever it is now. I broke 3 of my teeth, one for each of my attackers, but not from being hit but being angry and stupid. I ground my jaw down so hard I felt the teeth snap in my mouth.

That was probably 25 years ago, and the very next night a bartender at my local got a gun pulled on him in pretty much the same patch of sidewalk and in my head I imagined the 3 shitheads from the night before coming back armed in frustration from having to deal with my poor disposition. So I made an inner vow not to argue if anyone tried to rob me again. There’s not enough money in the world to be worth it, and even if there was, I was hissing at strangers like a cat over pocket change, enough to get snacks for one mildly stoned person at the bodega. Lucky for me since then I haven’t encountered that problem again, anyway what would I do, venmo them? My friends: crime does not pay.

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I was thinking recently about a fight I witnessed on the west coast where 2 guys I knew, for reasons in dispute, ended up entangled in a messy disagreement that involved very little of what people picture when they picture 2 people fighting. Suffice to say, one of the two tried to dissuade the other by gripping a blunt object, and I guess the other guy’s motivation was unwavering because he popped him anyway. The blunt object was swung, and to everyone’s surprise It didn’t do much, nor did the 3 guys who tried to hold the newly bludgeoned guy back from stomping the other. Despite the pitfalls, the stomping was unfortunately a success, and then someone called the cops and everyone scattered. In the aftermath a mutual friend said the blunt object was overkill, and I had to apologize for laughing at him.

I think when people who haven’t fought imagine fighting they imagine a contest of strength where 2 people agree to unwritten but honorable terms that govern what’s acceptable behavior and then they swing their powerful fists at each other and the stronger guy wins, or the more skilled, or whatever other thing you see in the movies. The reality as I’ve experienced it is that once you swing on someone you don’t have any idea at all what happens next. They might swing back, they might set your house on fire. Street violence is not some kind of balletic art. There is a lot of wheezing, and never as much gas in the tank as you imagine, you land a couple, maybe, somewhere in the ballpark of where you meant to. Or maybe you get stabbed. The goal in a fist fight is to end the fistfight. If you attack someone unknown to you, you are rolling some especially radioactive dice. That person might be armed, they might be trained, but most dangerous of all they might be scared. And in the heat of that kind of moment, if some feral creature comes at you with unknown risk, or skills, or purpose, there are no rules of combat to govern the reaction. There is a flashing red light of danger, and you don’t stick around to measure it. Whatever the fastest path to shutting it down is the likeliest path arguably the safest. Be it a chair or a cartoon piano falling from the sky.

You can sorta tell by their behavior when someone’s never been punched in the face. It seems backwards, but it’s not a toughness they’re missing, but a humility that comes from being aware that your behavior isn’t universally safe from consequence. That your words and actions are important. Newton posited that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The theory of fucking around vs finding out produces a less predictable result. There are certain actions that produce reactions outside of our ability to measure. In these situations, it is perhaps more advisable to skip the lesson and just be nice.

Plus Criterion design lead Eric Skillman whose fealty I won by saving his life from a clan of assassins.

Anyway, I am very very proud of this book and very very bad at promotion but here it is

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ivanbrandon/who-is-lily-stein

Talking today to a person whose name I have changed to protect their privacy

(PS: it’s Argimiro.)

(PPS: No, imagine? That’s was my great grandfather’s name. Actually, technically a nickname to an even weirder name. But only very slightly.

(PPPS Anyway it wasn’t him I was talking to.)

Anyway, I have been talking here and everywhere about how social relationships have become at best computer-mediated and at worst parasocial relationships, and it occurred to me that when I was younger I’d spend every literal day with friends, well into my 20s, without any plan or pre-approval, just showing up on whoever’s doorstep, or they mine, not to figure out if they were free, because I was sure they were, or if they weren’t, sure we’d absorb each other’s timelines into one and just adapt.

Sometimes we’d just pointedly listen to music like it was a movie. Staring at unmoving speakers as if to see what might happen. Sometimes to share some dimebag of horrible shwag we got at a Bodega in Fort Greene from some voice we couldn’t see behind opaque bullet proof glass. Watching a screen required planning and foresight. You could turn the TV on at random but had no control over what was on. Also, depending on whose house or the time maybe you weren’t allowed because A: parents were watching something else or B: they believed television was poisonous unless heavily moderated. My mom had a lockbox she bought for the TV plug. Unfortunately, she also was too busy to lock it herself so she never noticed my brothers had broken the box so we could watch whenever she was working and just feign excitement when our screentime arrived.

The point is, if you had a TV, and you had access, you still had to have the good luck to be flipping past something cool, or you’d have to know in advance by checking TV Guide. So that time in my house was budgeted for specific events whereas the times with my friends were amorphous and eternal. (until they weren’t)

But now that’s all flipped upside down. If you want to call someone, there are people who won’t answer no matter what, who have become purely text beings who communicate mostly in funny imagery or local sandwich happenings. It is widely expected now that someone will check with you first to see if calling is ok, or that that time will be scheduled like a meeting. Knocking on someone’s door now unannounced is unfathomable.

But as to your screens, well, you have your own now that you carry probably in your pants, on top of a larger one you probably are supposed to be using for work and then the actual TV, like a hearth warming your couch. So the time you used to spend with loved ones is now floating between all those strings of random perpetual data flowing in. A conversation is for another time, but send me a thousand funny videos, or something outside your life you’re angry about, or a vision of something physically daunting that none of us even tried but were for some reason there for anyway. MY TIME IS PRECIOUS but also please make sure I don’t sit here quietly ever because then I might have thoughts about all the people I don’t have time to talk to.

A bunch of years ago Cliff Chiang and I talked about starting a studio, partially to force social interaction and to get us outside and used to walking around in clothes we might never have worn for dint of avoiding any modern context where one might spend time on one’s appearance. For a lot of people the pandemic killed the last piece of whatever interaction they were forced into . Offices closed, people stayed home and were gleeful about sweatpants. Some of them never went back.

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There is no element of surprise allowed to breach our space now, our interactions are curated and at a minimum. Most of our conversations are about other conversations being had, most of them online by people we don’t know.

When I was a kid I made a lot of questionable decisions and we were latchkeys so sometimes we’d disappear for days and it seemed like nobody would notice. One night a close friend and I went on a bender with drugs we’d bought from a weirdo we had to contact via a beeper who’d have us meet him in random spaces, literally hiding behind objects. It was an introspective night and my friend had graduated the year before whereas I was a senior, so at the end of it I brushed my teeth and he walked me to school and went home. We had smoked probably a thousand cigarettes. You can get away with a lot when you’re young, but whatever the upper limits are, we had definitely breached them and were looking like what we were, dehydrated shmucks who hadn’t slept. We felt we were probably wiser than we’d started, and we had a bond from sharing something ill-advised and inexplicable. When he was leaving he saluted me and said “friends are forever”.

The right moment, even with a stranger, will carry me for years. Your attention rapt, no idea where the moment’s headed, doing your best not to break the momentum and have whoever it is see the dummy you see in your mirror. Those moments are rare these days, and some of it’s definitely on me. We’ve moved so far away from that kind of life that it’s a little terrifying anymore to put yourself out there. We never had any money so we used to go do nothing.

One of the best things that happened to me in recent past is my friend Andy used to come by after I got out of the hospital and he’d walk with me wherever. He had some errands to run, so he’d take me with him, maybe I’d add my own, maybe we’d literally go to the supermarket. It’s funny how powerful stupid little things are when you’ve made it so hard for them to happen anymore. So now I’m recruiting. If I’m near you maybe we go for a drive to nowhere. If you’re near me, we’re going to walk somewhere you’ve never been. My friend Ron says “no plans is plans” and I only recently really understood it.

I’m gonna do nothing this weekend. I might even leave my phone in a drawer. Where I am in Brooklyn is cookout central, people blast music every night and make BBQ on their stoops. I have neighbors I’ve never spoken to, this whole city’s a galaxy of little worlds I haven’t met yet. You’re welcome to come along. If it gets hot people crack the hydrant down the street all summer.

In my late teens I moved to Miami and spent as much time with her as I could manage. We were hopeless goofballs both and I loved to make her laugh. She was stoic about Cuba but she answered all my questions and when I went there the first time she gave me the information I needed to go seek out the places my family had come from. She didn’t cry often around me, but the one time that hit me hardest, both good and bad, was hearing her reaction to some photos I’d taken of an apartment building in La Habana Vieja where she’d lived as a kid. She never expected to see it again, was sure it was gone. She told stories about being a mischievous little demon child throwing stuff at the mail man from the cover of the upstairs balcony.

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I offered to help go through the house last week knowing it would hurt but that it would hurt more if I never got to walk through her front door again. In hindsight I don’t know that there was anything I could do to avoid how sad this whole summer has felt for me.

Without Abuela at its heart, the home that had grown out of her interests seemed almost to have fallen over on its back like some ancient fossil in the sand, all of these tiny bits of her sitting unbroken but without purpose like the shells of light bulbs that no longer fit. She had a wall full of souvenir plates from everywhere she’d been and refused to accept any from places she hadn’t. She had religious icons inconspicuously placed in every room and extras not readily visible, tiny crucifixes stored like pencils waiting in drawers. Above all there were silly things that made her smile, the faces of her family cut into tiny picture frames like lockets, a shrine to Miss Piggy like a royal figure, hundreds of images of cows, spotted figurines and blankets and pillows and sassy placards. You wouldn’t know how sad a cow in sunglasses can make you until it’s all that’s left.

I focused mostly on photos, some dating back over 100 years, sorting them into piles by timeline and household and then scanning them and adjusting the files where they’d faded and warped so that their moments would outlive the amber they were cast in. I hired myself as an amateur family historian and dug through memories of my own life observed, small moments I’d lost, hiding with others from before I existed, fanned out over decades in a series of drawers in her home office. I’m still working on cataloging it all and their power is immeasurable and sometimes devastating. Random vacations printed on paper too small to interpret, holy communion dresses passed down over years, a child’s face time-traveling across generations. My tiny grandma as a little girl, the span of her whole life somehow already in her eyes. Born in a different world, carrying it with her into these rooms.

My grandmother had a mango tree and it’s not the sermonizing of a funeral pulpit that brings me to say it gave the best mangos I’ve ever had. She passed just before their season and when it followed, the neighborhood stole them by the hefty bag knowing she was gone. The prices of airfare this summer were unusually ridiculous so by the time I managed to land in Miami last week the season had passed and I was trying not to let it get to me that I’d missed my last chance to add those sensations to my last visit.

When I got to the house its silence knocked the wind out of me. I’m not embarrassed by tears, but to avoid dragging my family into a sadness they were already swimming in daily without my help, I unlocked the back door out to the lake and stepped out to stare out at the water and let it out. Long after the mangos were all gone, impossibly, sitting there perfectly centered on the ground under the tree as if placed there somehow, there was a single mango like a power-up from an old Atari game. One of those hallmark moments you’d roll your eyes at in a movie. I went over expecting it to be rotted through, the bright colors atop hiding a carcass eaten by the menagerie of weird animals that you’d always find out there eating them. But it was perfect. Bigger than my hand and not so much as a blemish visible.

I drove back from Miami, a drive I’ve done 100 times and swore I’d never do again.

As a kid we’d ride 7 deep in a red VW punchbuggy, me in the cubby behind the back seat, reading a book for 1300 miles. My siblings fighting between me and the front seats focused on the highway. We’d buy fireworks in the Carolinas where they were legal and make one overnight stop at South of the Border, a “Mexican”-motif motel and theme park on Route 95 where we’d set them off and watch them burn the sky. We’d pull into Abuela’s house Christmas eve or Christmas morning and open presents on the floor by her tree. Presents she’d hand out on her birthday. I got my first comic book there, and though I had bought a plane ticket to go home this time, I chose instead to load a rental car up with cow coffee mugs and a Miss Piggy bank and Christmas ornaments, some of them older than me, and make the pilgrimage home this one last time, driving 3 days north, the last 4 hours swimming upstream in flash floods up the northeast, dodging the waterfalls of tractor trailers weaving through monsoon rains like they were Honda Civics on a manic joyride. The rain cleared up just as I hit NY, me and the car running on fumes just after midnight. Unpacking the car at the hydrant outside and carrying the boxes upstairs in waves like an ant without friends. I ate the last mango of the season at my kitchen sink, lost inside a childhood memory still happening, my face streaked like a 3 year old eating spaghetti, the dripping juice filling the bowl like soup, still trying to make my grandmother laugh.

It’s a pretty complicated system; I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna be able to sleep, because mostly I don’t, so I don’t really bother trying. I have a flight tomorrow at 7am. This means I’m probably leaving here at 5am. Which means I need to be ready before that (it’s 1am now, am I mostly there? Probably. Will I realize I forgot something the minute I get there? Also yeah. But I’m not flying to the moon, they’ll have a CVS. I have to remember my passport now, because I don’t have one of those fancy new licenses, and I have a pretty ridiculous setup right now for writing, with an obnoxious and noisy keyboard that I bought on purpose and am in a probably toxic kind of love with.

When I first started writing for a living I had one of the very first Macbook Pros, the plastic ones that looked like a Batmobile, and they ran on ethernet so if I wanted to ignore everyone I just left my house because coffee shops didn’t have wifi yet (nor did my house or anywhere else) and so my computer became a typewriter for however long I stayed there, and it was pretty amazing. The Lower East Side folks would wander in and sit near me as I zoned out writing some kind of uninspired script about characters I’d been hired to write but didn’t have much familiarity with. One time the guy at the table next to me got scolded for shooting heroin at a booth and the girl at the register got fired on the spot. It didn’t really affect my flow per se but I felt bad for the girl, although it was hard to argue with her letting a guy shoot up during the lunch hour.

My friend Matt does a lot of his writing on paper and I’m envious of that. I have a notebook I carry in my pocket and I’m trying to make time to get used to the motions they taught me when I was 6. Out of the many things the tiny confused version of me wondered was, did I miss some kind of family penmanship program? My mother and her sisters have similar handwriting, my grandmother had similar handwriting, even my older brother’s is reminiscent of a certain family style. I spent a lot of time alone when I was young, so often I’d see things that seemed innate to everyone around me but that I had no idea how to do, and I was embarrassed to ask how to do things that seemed so fundamental. So I taught myself a kind of handwritten aesthetic, came up with a number of ridiculously ornate signatures. You’d be surprised how little you come across people whose names start with i for inspiration.

I think I was probably a tween when I got my first guitar, a Spanish classical my mom bought from a local shop, I don’t know how formally she chose the age of endowment, but we all eventually got one. I had no idea how to play, but I didn’t let that stop me. Chords are made out of notes and I’ve always had a solid memory for sound, so I would just feel my way around the strings until I found the one note, then poke around nearby for the 2nd, etc. None of us are especially good, but you’d be surprised how far you get with 4-5 chords. Anyway I lost that guitar when a girl took off with it after a fight when I was 19. She’s on TV now, but I dunno if the guitar is on there with her. My older brother gave me his first one after that, and that’s the one still. I play like a teenager anyway, no real reason for me to upgrade.

I’m reading Caesar’s accounts of the Gallic War, which I wrote about in the Roman Stars, although I added space ships. Caesar describes all of his actions and reasoning in the third person, as if he’s a bystander observing. There is surprisingly little polish, he explains what he did, why he did it, how sometimes he’d have to stop and reassess, sometimes the war would take a break for a couple weeks. You might be surprised at how often the main military tactic against the Roman Republic was hiding the food. This really resonates with me because it’s 2am and all I want is a 7-11 Slurpee (cherry, of course) but i have to leave here in a couple hours and that seems not to be a great choice of fuel for what’s left of the night or the journey tomorrow.

To whom it may concern, If we ever fall in love, remember I am easily manipulated at almost any hour by well cooked eggs.

Talk to you soon.

-i.

Our sleeping rail employee bunkmate gets up and smokes out the window between the train cars and then walks over to the far end of the train up to an invisible door that appears in the fake wooden paneling to reveal two train employees reconciling their bodies to waking life. The taller one holds up a finger as if to tell me to wait and in about a minute hands me the kind of tiny plastic cup they hand you at the dentist’s office to rinse, but full of coffee. It’s not clear if I’m supposed to pay so I raise it up and smile and drink my brain slightly into sentience. We roll into Brasov early in the morning and find a boisterous landlady renting out pieces of her family home with a depth of interaction I am too tired for but Maz embraces until I want to murder them both.

We climb seemingly endless stairs through a space that seems to expand into its own wooden pocket abyss papered with photos and paintings of her children playing piano and huddled in unsettling familial warmth, the upstairs adorned with enough furniture to start a warehouse for dated ski-lodge family seating. We have like 3 wooden decks to choose from and it’s cold but we sit out there and take in the Transylvanian rooftops layered backwards towards the hilltop through the fog of our breathing.

The lady recommends a trip up the mountain, labeled in white block letters like Transylvanian Hollywood. She cautions against climbing the steps and disturbing the bear that congregates there. So we ride the cable car up and eat a great meal of salmon and duck overlooking Romania. It is a sleepy day wandering around mostly into random spaces, gasping and pointing at some of the most beautiful architecture either of us has ever seen.

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Romania is genuinely overwhelming to look at. Every structure straight out of some ornate gothic fairytale. It’s hard to imagine people built these places to live and not just to congregate in front of. Every place feels at least partially related to a church or castle. The town’s center at paces cosplaying a red light district, a bar for vampires, endless businesses themed as American, giant food, strip clubs. I don’t know how many bottles of wine we drink across the timeline of the journey but it seems appropriate to the gothic vibes of Transylvania to keep supplies on hand. The next day I drive us to Bran castle, an 11th century fortress famous for being associated for almost no logical reason with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The entrance is chaos, as if they’d started to hand out snacks somewhere at the front of the crowd and a hundred people had run up to see what the hell the other hundred people were shoving each other to get to. It is touch and go and I don’t fall to my death on the harsh incline of stairs like jagged teeth up the rock face.. Several frustrated Italians push past to heighten my accomplishment. The inside is basically a collection of furniture and art collected by a dowager Romanian queen from Kent. It’s a slow walk through the building not because of any depth to the display but because it isn’t built for this many people. The staircases are narrow and precarious, the slow walking equivalent of a rickety wooden roller coaster.

On the 3rd day we make it to Bucharest and are surprised to find this storybook country’s capital is a gruff unfinished metropolis of thick buildings that seem to compress perspective along massive roadways through this fixer upper eternally in progress. The city is a beautiful amalgam of ornament and decay. It feels like a modern vista on a post war 1940s film lit like a soviet era documentary. I am of course immediately smitten by this beautiful princess missing a great many of her teeth.

NEXT: Two weeks in Africa

I guess where I ended up is somewhere in the middle, realizing I’m not always the one driving and that as a result sometimes I end up somewhere unintentionally that changes my understanding of the moment or the direction, or if I’m really lucky, it pushes me out of the flow of planning and movement altogether. I can be still and just listen without thinking about what it’s for or how long it should last. The irony is I learned this through physical pain, I had a car accident in my teens that left me pretty badly incapacitated for a few months, so that I couldn’t really work, couldn’t sit still but also couldn’t really walk. The result was I wasn’t really cut out for much except alone time, and there’s only so far you can go with alone time before either it ruins you or you lean into it. Or maybe it’s always a little of both. But you can’t really hide behind much when you’re alone that long. Carl Jung said “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” All this before the internet, before social media. I could read or I could listen to music, and after a while I skipped both so I could face how absolutely terrified I was of my own silence.

The other day I heard Colman Domingo say life is poetry, and you have to give yourself over to it. Kierkegaard thought to attempt to eliminate risk is itself a form of despair.

Meaningful things are by their nature uncertain.

When I was 18 I experienced a very real and very stupid heartbreak. I was earlyish into an obsession with basketball that like most things that age I’d borrowed from my older brother. One of those moments where you’re not in control of the remote so you begrudgingly indulge somebody else’s interests. After a while I was yelling at the screen and realized I had a problem.

Basketball was a lot about skill but then often someone who wasn’t much on paper just refused to lose and managed through belief to overcome all of these obstacles that in writing were insurmountable. The NY Knicks were that guy multiplied, they weren’t the best team but they were scrappy and relentless, they believed even when they had absolutely no reason and just ran headfirst through what would usually outclass them. That year they made it all the way to the finals, and in the last seconds had the winning ball in hand and made a bad call that collapsed everything else they’d done like a black hole. They lost the title through a mistake. Worse, it was the mythic hero of the team that made it. I saw them as a bit of a haunted house for so many years after. I was embarrassed by how it shook me. I made it a point not to risk feeling that again.

Jump-cut 32 years and a very different Knicks team has a very different year and are suddenly competing in the playoffs as no one’s favorite. It’s a wild post-season of crazy upsets, storied rises, all of these teams that are to everyone’s surprise about to shock everyone and make it to the finish line. The Knicks are a downed piece on the road of everyone’s predictions. Maybe they’ll squeak through the first round and get embarrassed in the second? Anyway nobody believes except the fanbase, who believe all the other years too, so they’re not really discerning when it comes to NY’s chances. My heart is hard now, so it’s all the same to me. Buddhism teaches not to demand permanence of impermanent things.

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People are impressed when instead of eking through, they end up with arguably the best playoff run in history, and are on a 12 game streak when they’re the first team to make the finals. Even then, having now broken any number of records, when The San Antonio Spurs upset the odds and win against the then-current champions, they are immediately favored to win it all. They lose their first game to the Knicks on their home court. The next game they’re favored again. They lose that one worse.

In the last few days you could get drunk breathing the air in NYC, a story that captured everyone’s attention, this 6’2 front-man defeating his 7’6 opponent who people all year explain is on track to be the greatest player ever. The bars all spilled out into the street with people watching who had never watched before. The city’s adorned in bootleg merchandise bought at surprisingly high cost from a folding table outside a KFC somewhere. The train stations are painted over in orange and blue, the home game seats are the most expensive seats in basketball history. Not a single one is empty. Thousands of people crowd outside to watch through windows or projected onto walls. With each win you can hear the entire city through your open window. The world’s grumpiest city shouting cacophonous joy into the skyline. A horrendous opera spanning days. If you’re a visitor you’re submerged in a moment that pulls you into a kind of Knicks fan ROTC. Cheering in infinite languages.

I am of course watching just anthropologically. Unencumbered by a capacity to love, I am cautiously engaged, standing in my 90s jersey, trying to feign detachment while standing 10 inches from the screen. The charade is discarded before halftime; it fools no one, not even me. Here I am, a middle aged man, locked in worse than I was in my teens. To this story, to how they rewrite the definition of what’s impossible. Worse, when they’re down 29 pts, I take off my button down so that John Starks’ name is visible on the back and it’s that moment where they start to win. So I’m stuck wearing this now forever.

When they actually win the title, the announcers screaming, weeping, the arena visibly shaking the cameras as people lose their minds in motion through the stands and across the court, my friend Krys looks to congratulate me and doesn’t immediately notice my body is in shock. People are jumping and screaming all around, champagne drenching my local bar like from a sprinkler system. I can’t talk, can’t really move my face. The cheers of all the other bars in Brooklyn roll past like fighter jets in the background. I struggle to right myself, looking back and forth between the people dancing on the tables, the players celebrating onscreen. It’s like I’m stuck in a somatic wormhole where the pain of my teens is battling the snake venom antidote of the present. Joy mixed with disbelief mixed with the echoes of a 32 year old heartbreak. People hand me drinks I barely taste. After staring at nothing for too long I realize I don’t know how to celebrate.

I close my tab, apologetically, and walk a while, the only sensation I can feel is I’m suddenly starving. Unlike Kierkegaard I’m a bit of a dummy, so the only philosophy I can manifest is to think about what I would have eaten all those years ago. I order a McDonalds’ number 2 meal, 2 cheeseburgers, fries and a coke. I couldn’t afford the meal back then, but I risk angering the timestream with a minor cheat.

Outside, strangers shout congratulations across the street like we’ve all done something miraculous. The phone booths light up with the news, every passing car blasts Sinatra, Jay-Z, Ja Rule and their hymns to NY so loud the speakers gargle as they shake. The chaos of New York City has a meditative effect. The Greeks thought a life fully lived requires a window for loss. That the alternative wasn’t safety, it was a smaller life.

As I turn the corner I realize I’m finally smiling.

Prologue: I should probably have noticed my friends were no longer in the room.

I had been traveling a while when I got home to find my plants were still alive, albeit dry along the windowsill. I had an odd and wonderful trip, the weird thing I found was that the further I got from anything familiar, the deeper into unfamiliar conversations I would get. Maybe the kind of odd duck I am goes over better across the Atlantic. Or maybe I found myself inspired. Deciphering accents, decoding a language different from the one you were decoding the day before (I’m still catching myself saying “merci” when anyone hands me anything), asking exceedingly confusing followups, learning something new with every meeting.

I had gotten so used to hearing the same ideas repeated to me back home that I got tipsy off a couple sentences when I didn’t know the lyrics with someone new at lunch. Not having to nod my head at a setup to a revelation you’ve been told 30 or 40 times before. Perspectives that had nothing to do with the US, perspectives that had nothing to do with the US’s perspectives on the US. Learning about the recent history of a given place, the connections between seemingly unconnected things, Roman History, Berber, Egyptian.

When I got home all of that was missing. There wasn’t even really anyone to tell about it. I found myself a bit morose, I don’t know if it was loneliness or finally realizing that most of the pieces I’d built of my life had shifted. I was talking to someone new about cooking for dates or even cooking for friends, and realized none of the friends I was talking about were around anymore. Relationships that ended, people move elsewhere, they fall in love, they have their hands full balancing their own new lives on a tray. I was feeling things I’d never felt and had no one to bounce those new things off of.

I have wrestled for years with the idea that maybe I’ve allowed New York City to be a kind of beautiful expensive cage for me, if being sure I couldn’t find anything better was keeping me from finding something new.

Realizing the other day that I was considering starting over, building a new circle around myself, I realized maybe this isn’t the place to do it anymore.

One of my favorite people just recently gave birth, and while the child and resulting family are beautiful, the process was harrowing and she almost didn’t make it to tell the story. Talking about that experience with her she said she still wonders how you balance being an individual with the new identity of a family. “It takes a village”, we both said. And it really takes a village to do anything, and I no longer have a village. I have a lot of people doing their own things that I occasionally cross into. I don’t know exactly what their lives look like when I’m not around, if they still have moments where they feel like they’re alone. But I know the overlap of all those conversations has faded. And suddenly a group that in my head was slowly shrinking had disappeared completely.

So this week I started thinking very honestly about where I might go if I needed to rebuild somewhere else, to find a new village that I trust, whose trust I earn, whose help I borrow from and give myself into. There are people I see sometimes where no matter how much time has passed since we spoke we always dive into the deep end. So I’m figuring out how to maybe dig my way out of this sorta ghost-life I’ve built for myself. All of the eras I can remember jammed into a closet I can’t get open anymore.

I shut down my instagram this week, at least for now. I have a new book to announce soon, and I’ll probably need it for that. But for now the link leads nowhere, the app is in the trash. Most of the time my phone is in the other room unless I need it. I’m writing a lot of things in an unreasonably chaotic way, but there are pieces I love and hopefully later I can string it all together. Like editing film, the glue painstaking and invisible.

I’m trying to put in the work to figure out some of my next steps. I’ve put out feelers for where I might be welcome, researching the terrain appropriate to what I’m thinking of. I’m starting to make my peace with the loss of all these fixtures I imagined were around me. Like losing your things in a fire, knowing they’re not coming back, treasuring the warped and inaccurate flicker of it you’ve lost in a pile of all the rest of your experiences. But on some level feeling the relief of no longer having to steel yourself against losing it all because you can’t lose it all twice.

The flight’s just long enough to wallow in that understanding and when I land in Budapest my eyes feel like they’re full of mud. I can’t even see well enough to figure out where the luggage has ended up, I feel completely unprepared to get myself online to buy my SIM and then figure out how to get where I’m supposed to be.

It only really occurs to me there in the airport that there’s not a word of English in the repertoires of any of the places I’ve chosen to fly over my next month. Of the 5 countries I will almost certainly get lost in, only one of them speaks a language native to me and even then, Barcelona is on the whole violently opposed to speaking it.

So I get ready not to be able to communicate without my hands. It’s not entirely unfamiliar but it makes it hard to crack a joke.

I make a maybe stupid mistake I’m too sleep deprived to properly regret, a Hungarian bar crawl through a number of bars abandoned in the cold war, bomb shelters, garrisons. Horrible medicinal shots provided at each but there is a social element that feels essential to the flow of this month mostly alone.

So I learn about Budapest’s Tuesday Night drunk scene, dragged through what constitutes a map of emergency spaces, ancient courtyard fortifications not made for this purpose and thus ideal for it.

Everyone signed up speaks English at least. A brief stay of verbal execution. The guide is an Iranian artist who transplanted herself into Eastern Europe and listed a familiarity on her CV of bars she’d never been to having just arrived. She ends up great for and at the job. What do any of the drunken foreigners know, anyway to call her on? Mostly we’re here for the terrible shots. As with most places there are funhouse reflections of American things in almost every space. An idea of how we’re seen or maybe just a shared laugh at the absurdity that dominates the global airwaves. Either way it seems to suit its purpose.

Whatever night scene I expected in Hungary is not equal to the task of its description. It is a Tuesday outside of any tourist season and still each of the bars is overflowing. Something about this place feels weirdly familiar to my bloodshot 80s cold war eyes. Street lights a shade of yellow since extinct. Cigarette smoke in every passage. When I leave the group at 2am I am the first to go. I have exhausted my exhaustion and blacking out after zero sleep at the starting line seems not to be advised. So I head to bed.

The city is stunning. A kind of grit and obscene beauty that will follow consistently through every city until the last stop. Places of a different infrastructural DNA that externalizes the inner life of buildings. I drink coffee somewhere new every day and try not to telegraph how ignorant I am of any part of how this city spends its morning. There are cheeseburgers everywhere themed to different US states. Some of the names are funny but horrifying. A New York City Pulled Pork sandwich mixes its metaphors. I don’t ever get a chance to try and see if they’re accurate to whatever they’re aiming for. I’m eating haphazardly, some kind of morning protein sets up a day full of forgetting what time it is and ignoring my body’s cues until I realize it’s past dinnertime and I haven’t really eaten since.

On the 3rd day I meet Maz at the train station portaling us to Transylvania and we’re so ahead of schedule that we get cocky and decide to toast the journey across the street. Pulling into the bar, the cobblestone outside devours one of the wheels on my suitcase, a portent for the journey or at least for the lifespan of this suitcase. Inside, the hobbled suitcase tips over and in reaching out for it the wine in my glass takes that moment to escape to the freedom of every fiber of cotton in my slacks. I wonder if they’ll even let me on the train smelling like I’ve slept in a bar storage room. Outside the bar, taking our time to savor the head start, we decide we still have plenty of time to spare and at the end of a long line at a suspect convenience store we buy the first salvo in a number of snacks we mostly will not eat. We’ve paid for old timey eastern european sleeper beds and it’s obvious to me that I’m going to throw most of this popcorn across the sleeper car at Maz’s bed. This turns out to be too hopeful an ambition.

When we finally cross to the station (it is important to note for the next part that we have literally been across the street), we realize we’ve gotten the timing wrong and are instead of coasting delicately in our sock feet into home plate actually one minute late. We run with my 3 legged suitcase towards the hopefully waiting train, which a guy in an official shirt tells us is on the first track, something like 20 tracks from where we are. It is about then that we realize the station is easily 3x bigger than we had taken it for. The front entrance opens inexplicably on the last lane, so we’re as far from our destination as is possible while still being in the building. At the very end of the string of visible tracks we’re at is a 2nd cluster we can’t see until we finish the level we’re currently trying to pass. Turning the corner we notice the new level is an entire train length deeper, the station curving backwards like a twist in inception, the different sections descending away from our perspective like a very upsetting ladder. When we get to the end of that one there’s another, and way at the end track 1. It feels like we run a mile and when we get there it’s probably 12 minutes of running later and whatever train we paid for is gone.

We interview a string of correctly shirted representatives, none of which have any reason to speak English, all of whom do their best to reach across that chasm and give us advice that proves without exception inaccurate. We finally figure out a train that’ll get us to Brasov but our tickets are no good as it’s a Hungarian line whereas I’d booked a Romanian line originally for the snacks it promised. Pity is taken on us, to a degree, and we pay a little more again but not the whole thing twice, and finally in humiliation board a different train more or less in the same timeframe but with no beds free.

It’ll have to do.

We sit in uncomfortable seats and settle in for an overnight train ride we won’t be able to sleep through. My 2nd of the last 4 days. But adventure is its own reward.

A few hours later Maz wanders off in what seems like the wrong direction and is gone a while. After a while a giddy voice whispers “wanna sleep in a bed?” It turns out Maz has greased the proper Hungarian (possibly Romanian?) hands with Euros and we’ve gotten 2nd hand access to a car occupied only thus far by a sleeping conductor in his underpants. He gets up and throws all our stuff onto the top bunk and we climb up onto our cot-width old timey Eastern European sleeper beds. The car is hot like a sauna and there’s an old man with a mustache in there with us we can’t understand and he likewise us. I opt not to throw the popcorn out of respect for what I assume is his position and the fact it’s now 3am. It’s not easy to sleep in there, but I get a couple hours and when the train pulls in to the mountains of Transylvania I have technically experienced an ill-advised cross country sleeper train.

TO BE CONTINUED.

At the “nothing to declare” line at the Airport, the customs cop waves me over to scan my bags and the guy at the scanner offers me a knowing glance and whispers he can get me hash. The outside of the airport is like someone spilled humanity out of a bucket. Footsteps out to the horizon, cars and trucks ignoring any lines on the street.

When Samah picks me up at the hotel the next morning he has to wait longer than I’d intended, the hotel’s rooftop breakfast took a while to get to me and when it did it was spread out in 7 plates between me and the even more austere spread of the Giza pyramids visible at the back . I didn’t catch what everything was but there was a plate of soft cheese sorta presented like hummus, 3 different kinds of bread, a dish of honey with what I think was probably tahini drizzled in? 2 eggs boiled too soft for me to eat and an adorable teacup saucer full of tuna salad. I don’t know why the fruit is so much better everywhere else, but the house made mango juice he brings me is hard to savor because I want to gulp it down and order another. But I’m already sleepy and I don’t need a sugar crash.

We get to the Giza Necropolis and pull up to the tourist police and I point my phone at the pyramid behind them and they say no pictures, and I apologize. Samah says “inside, pictures.” And the tourist cop laughs, pointing to himself and says, yes, you can take pictures of the pyramids, but not of this guy.

The pyramids are not oversold. You’ve seen a billion shots and video but there’s something almost crippling about trying to fathom them in front of you. Like you’re stuck in an emotional tractor beam. There’s a tiny museum at the entrance which calmly explains how they were made in a way that does literally nothing to explain how they were made. They are the biggest things you could possibly ever see. One would be more than a lot, and yet here we are with a whole family.

The necropolis is staged almost like a tease. There is a road in their direction, but it is a vague road, winding and stopping frequently for coffee, despite the fact that you start out at most a medium walk from the pyramids themselves. You pile into buses, then out again, then more coffee, or just stand with your hands on your hips and a distant stare, getting ready to go closer. The tiny strip malls on the way are new, made entirely of marble. The shops are classy, the coffee is good. And you can’t really argue with the plan, it doesn’t feel wrong to inch your way closer and then reckon with that new relationship. What does it feel like to be 100 yards closer to these leviathan shapes? Howbout 50 yards? And anyway, I drink a lot of coffee.

When we’re finally at the first pyramid, it is surrounded by camels. From the moment you land, infinite people, young and old, welcome you to Egypt in a way that implies the welcome isn’t free. Outside the 2nd pyramid a man asks where I’m from and I answer New York, and he shouts HI HO SILVER, USA FOREVER!

He introduces me to his camel, named Michael Jordan, and once they see I’m paying attention, another 2 guys seem to materialize from the air. They inch their way closer, smelling a mark, but I’ve been around this kinda thing before. So like the lazy road, I let them do their routine while at intervals politely clarifying there won’t be a jackpot at the end. But they’ve been around my kind of thing before too. They move subtly and quick, like the fairy godmothers in Cinderella. They want me to pose by Michael Jordan. No, maybe against him? Let’s try on top, don’t worry, just put your feet into the stirrups! I look over and suddenly one of the guys is wearing my hat and there’s a keffiyeh wrapped around my head. Michael Jordan is about to stand and lift me into the air before Samah intervenes. You have to ask his permission, he says. So they ask if I want to ride the camel, and I say: not really, not today. It’s not you, Michael Jordan, it’s me. I’m just here for the Pharaohs. Or whatever ghosts might be left after this long. They argue amongst themselves and they plead with Samah and then with me and then he tells me they told him to convince me to give them 2000 Egyptian rupees, about $40 US. I give them a few bucks for their craft and we continue vaguely towards the next stop.

Everything you could possibly imagine is on offer for a dollar. You want a scarf? A coke zero? A statue of Nefertiti? The vendors haggle against themselves half heartedly before following behind, asking for just a buck, as if defeated by the fierce negotiations of tourists who definitely aren’t paying attention. I will admit my eye is drawn to a scarab in amber, but I don’t let anyone see because I really don’t want to carry it through the tunnels of a pyramid, even for a dollar. Sitting waiting for another bus, Samah shows me that my ticket is 1500 Egyptian rupees while his is only 60. “Because I am Egyptian.”

Samah takes pictures and video of me like a soccer mom, smiling as if impressed that I can stand and look at things. I take at least 10,000 pictures of the Sphinx and behind me he says to give my face and I turn around and try not to scowl at my inclusion in this landscape. Every time I travel people want me to pose in front of things, and every time I travel I scurry away before I’m captured. But he seems happier to do it than I am sad that it’s being done, so I relent. And it’s too hot to argue.

I try not to make a big deal about touching the 2nd pyramid, but it’s one of those moments in your life where despite your cynicism you’re suddenly 10 years old and need to prove you and the object are both real in the same moment. You want it to be this alien thing, made of a texture you’ll never feel again, but it feels smooth and familiar, almost like melted plastic. Looking out over the city I see a cloud of black smoke and ask Samah if it’s a fire and he says no, it’s Egypt.

At the last pyramid he drops me in front like he’s taking me to school and says it is not easy and to have fun. Even climbing the pyramid’s face seems precarious, tourists passing alongside. Inside is hot enough to cook a pizza. You climb hunched through a tunnel on a wooden board with slats every few inches. I’m in a full squat climbing about 150 feet to the tomb. I hit my head more than once. Not even halfway one guy starts screaming “help” while his girlfriend laughs and then a German tourist barrels down saying he’s too claustrophobic. Above me a man in an Eastern European accent I can’t place says “China!” and makes weird noises at every asian person that goes past, like some kind of racist from a time machine trying to make his schoolyard friends laugh, but they aren’t there so nobody does. Eventually the couple ahead of me just says “we aren’t even Chinese” and he gives them a big smile and tells them to take their time, make sure to breathe on the platform.

At the very top the attendant tells me to put my camera away before offering to take iphone photos of everyone else in the tiny ancient hot-box. There are air purifiers which don’t help that it smells like centuries-old baby vomit. The king’s “tomb” is an empty stone box and one by one everyone poses in front of it.

I hit my head even more on the way back down. Maybe that’s why Samah said it would be hard. When I step back outside he’s got his phone out and pointed my way, smiling. I’m so covered in sweat I feel certain I look like I fell out of a boat. He asks me how it was and I say hot, and he says he didn’t go with me because he’s Egyptian and I don’t have anything to say to that.

You always say your first language was Spanish, but that isn’t entirely true. Your first language is absurdity. The world looks loosely knit together out of a box of the spare parts of all its incompatible purposes. You marvel at how it seems to crumple but never collapse. When you’re older you’ll read somewhere that it’s miraculous and unlikely that humans manage to successfully take a single step, the balance of hundreds of muscles and bones on a tiny piston navigating an uneven road you mostly cannot see. To you the world seems similar, a glass menagerie never quite safely on the shelf.

You are a weird kid and you don’t know it yet but you’re not growing out of that one either. You steel up and press against your fear, you jump where you shouldn’t just to see what’s at the end. When you’re still 3 -but not for long- your stepfather walks you onto a plane and buckles you into a seat, all of the stewardesses watching you in fascination like a baby panda wobbling around. Your stepfather says he’s going to get you snacks and when the pilot announces the plane is leaving you shout out to wait for him. You take that first plane ride alone, the center of its attention, everyone consoling you for a mishap you won’t know for years was by design.

When you get where you’re going, after what seems like a year to a brain that’s only known three of them so far, not yet enough to measure time, your grandmother greets you at the entrance. Every single time you fly this route to Florida in your life will be to see her. To you, Abuela is its north star, her house its center. Her driveway curves past the front door and pulling in always feels like docking at a space station.

Tomorrow is your birthday, an enormous shift from 3 to 4. A full 25% older: an unreasonable leap too big for your tiny feet. You are now somehow double the age of your younger brother. This feels like a great responsibility.

Miami is very different from your world, behind Abuela’s house there is a lake, and below the tree in her yard a pile of coconuts. You aren’t allowed yet alone in the water, which is full of ducks, and those 2 truths in that order are calamitous. You still watch them, tiptoeing closer, trying to make their sounds without convincing them to join you.

In this house are things you’ve never seen. There are the couches where your family sit and then another room off-limits, the seats covered in plastic. There are cookies here and sweets which are not allowed in your mother’s kitchen. They’re too high to reach but your aunt and uncle are still taller than you and bridge the gap.

Your grandparents sit in matching chairs on the far wall like on the set of All In the Family. The room will morph through the years but the artwork and placement will stay mostly the same. An abstract painting of a bicycle, the first time you see an intentionally distorted shape in art. There is a cuckoo clock that must be wound every day… maybe more than once? You’re not yet big enough to know. The room is lit mostly from the sliding doors out to the water, at night the windows are shuttered like a bomb shelter. They have a swimming pool, to a NY kid impossible, like owning a rainbow. You don’t know how to swim and a few years later your teenaged uncle will try to teach you by pushing you in. Mostly the pool to you is like a portal in the center of the floor. A portal you watch from a distance.

You spend your birthday there, away from your mother and your siblings, eating tiny boxes of raisins, walking into and through these lives already in progress. Your immigrant family 20 years into their new life displaced 90 miles from where they were all born. The house is thick with culture, there are always stories being told, but it’s like you’re not tall enough to hear them. Your grandmother is the funniest person you’ve ever met, with a devotion to a gag that inspires you even then. She speaks mostly Spanish to you, but when you hear her speak English with her accent you notice she leans into it for laughs. You get spoiled early eating black beans that are slightly sweet, and you’ll never enjoy them at any restaurant as long as you live. But you order them anyway, because the plate looks wrong without them, like a bed without a pillow.

Years later you will drag your first heartache through those rooms.
You will sit with your grandmother and ask her about Cuba. She is relatively stoic, speaking matter of factly, but even feigning emotional distance your family teaches you to miss a place you’ve never been. Anyway, it’s unconvincing. The barest whisper of a bongo drum is like a hand on a cat’s butt lifting your family out of their seats, kicking off their shoes and doing a copa across the kitchen. The house is perfumed with the forever boil of cuban coffee on the stove. This new city rising as both the offspring and the ghost of a Havana left behind.

Through your life you move from city to suburb and back again, sharing bedrooms in various configurations with the army of children your mother has filled the house with. You arrange yourself in all these new worlds, always alongside the parallel life your cuban family mourn implicitly every day. The only constant is that house on the lake, the furniture shifting, the family in photos multiplying. At its heart your tiny Abuela like a lighthouse you can always find.

In her last days she will lie breathing slowly in a bed too big for her, her family pulled in from across the world trying to keep their heads above the water rising between you and this beautiful creature that brought every one of you into existence. You sit in your memories, the things you are to her and to each other, this little matriarch of three generations, her own reflection filtered through time into dozens of tiny faces all stumbling past her blue chair at the back of the living room. One of the last times she opens her eyes, after the doctors have given the bad news that nothing can be done, it is to stick out her tongue at the nurse and make her granddaughter laugh.

A last one for the road.

In very loving and very silly memory of Marta Silvia Hernandez, 1928-2026

So, to reiterate, I am single. I am taking applications though, especially if you can cook Cuban food. (Maduros non-negotiable). To be clear, I cook too, I just am disarmed completely by the love in a plate of food.

Anyway, I don’t spend much time on “the apps”, for the same reason I don’t spend much time on social media, I think they’re curated (and cursed) abstractions of what people are, I am skeptical of how anyone presents themselves digitally, much less perceives themselves, and I think 10 minutes in person are more valuable than reading a year of broadcast data points. The main thing I take from who you are online is how good you are at being online, and that isn’t a skill I’m looking for in a partner, so it is disqualified.

It is my job to believe that humans are unreliable narrators. Before you call me a cynic: I don’t consider it a flaw, necessarily, just an indelible truth of the kinds of peculiar creatures we are, walking on 2 legs, like kittens sent out of the house in cute little outfits.

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I think we mean well, and maybe because of that we over-analyze our wants while ironically under-analyzing our realities. We’re looking at the composition of who we are in the mirror, for makeup smeared, misaligned buttons, less so what shade of dread we’re wearing.

Recently(ish) I had a talk with a friend who had taken a lonnnnng break after the end of a foundational relationship. This friend was intentionally not dating, was not fooling around, was just sorta keeping to themselves. I was impressed with the restraint, pretty rare in my encounters, But eventually this person flipped over the CLOSED sign and started engaging with potential partners, and it was exciting to watch them rise like a teenaged phoenix, rediscovering crushes. It took a long while before a toe was dipped into the waters of affection and consistent contact, launching an internal exploration committee to weigh the pros and cons of a campaign to trust a stranger long enough to risk feelings.

I don’t say that ironically, feelings are risky things, and It got scary quick. A person of interest appeared, the after-effects visible in my friend’s glowing eyes, which only dimmed when it was explained to me that this new person had incompatible stated goals in life, and despite a massive shared affection, it was determined that eventually their diverging visions would collapse whatever joy they seemed to have found, and this friend lamented having to move on and avoid that eventual sad end.

Well, reader, I should explain here without pride that I am a meddler. I had watched this friend alone for years, and I knew the depth of their engagement with other people. My friend goes DEEP. Will talk to you about expanse of time and space, stand firm with you against the onslaught of a Brooklyn metal band, share art and experience, and outside of those occasions dive into a walk down the street with wonder like it’s an undiscovered galaxy. This friend is curious in ways most people are not, a powerful listener (this rarer than unicorns), who gets as much as gives, thoughtful and smart without needing applause for it. A rare element, a person good at being people.

So here this friend was, eyes big as fedex trucks, lamenting a future he wouldn’t have for fear of a future he didn’t want. The logic was structurally sound: why go down a road you know won’t end well? But DO you know?

Here’s where I am become a meddling chaos demon.

I’ve had a weird life, like anyone, and if I’ve learned anything about interpersonal dynamics, and I probably haven’t, it’s that on a long enough timeline no relationship is accurately forecasted. In the modern world we categorize types by taste, by action, but the changes anyone experiences knock us off the tracks of what we think we are or want to be, and sometimes head on into someone else. I’ve seen mortal enemies end up roommates, I’ve seen the worst guy become the crisis MVP. People think and want a lot of things over a lifetime, and not always in sync. So what I said to this friend, at the time, is that we weigh a lot of different things in every decision, and that a fear of risk is valuable, but that a human that can break through your skin is like discovering a comet. If that luck goes your way at all, and for some people it never does, it is rarely when and where or how you want it to. So I wondered aloud if in sheltering oneself from one possible timeline out of infinite options, avoiding a future we can’t possibly know, you might be destroying your chance at what Sonny in a Bronx Tale calls one of the great loves of your life. Maybe it isn’t a lifetime, or maybe it is. Maybe it’s only a week. But maybe it’s the best week of your life, that you’re closing the door on to hold out for a billion weeks with someone you haven’t met yet and might not exist. Voting against the present to bet on a future you might not even like if you luck into it. A future with the right stated parameters but the wrong connections. Reader, for me that is a bad bet.

People always talk about the regrets at the end of life, what you got wrong, what could have been. I don’t think anyone regrets falling in love too many times or experiencing love that didn’t last forever. But you might regret the things you were afraid to try.

I have had good days and bad and every shade of regular in between. But I’m at the age where I know the bad days will always come, no matter how much you try to insulate yourself against them. It is the arc of nature. The bad precedes the good precedes the bad, over and over, before us and after, whether we do everything, whether we do nothing. I had a relationship once, I was barely out of high school. She was older, we had nothing at all in common, all she talked about was money, all I talked about were books. Some quirk of fate brought us together in a meeting so comically bad I literally turned my back and walked away in the middle of it. But like a prank from above we kept circling each other and when we gave in it was like we were chemically bonded, like there was a gravity trying to mush us together into this ridiculous beautiful idiot who couldn’t speak and didn’t need to. It didn’t last long, we were both in extremely bad places for ourselves and for each other. But those days are worth more to me still than most of the years of my life. Because after a childhood fraught with horror they taught me that someone could love me anyway, could make me more than what I had aspired to be, that all my ideas of who we both were had almost no relevance at all to our potential. Every relationship since then has been a process of trying to unlock what kind of new person I can become when combined with the kindness of someone new. What it feels like to see your own ambition magnified by someone else who sees you without all the baggage you bring to your own reflection. It’s not being lovesick or horny that keeps me coming back to trying to find love. It’s just a shot at being more.

(And if they weren’t, any consensus anyone sells you online is manufactured, some people hate the government, some people love it, some people like it kinda and hate it kinda, etc. There tend to be 2 different major schools of rhetoric: “It’s the embargo, stupid!” VS “It’s the communism, stupid!” and I think both arguments are pretty thin, and am generally suspicious of the motivations of anyone trying to frame human suffering in such simplistic ways. Which is to say: very few of these arguments seem to me to be for the actual people going hungry, and are instead in defense of some broader idea, because people will gladly build a mountain of the dead to give them the highest pedestal to decry their dying.

Anyway.

It’s probably worth stating that more cubans have left the island in this decade than at any point in history, and most of them have come here.

Ok, that’s covered.

So, the major areas of contention visavis life in Cuba from abroad tend to center on the music, the cars, the health care and the change in literacy between the last violent unelected overthrow of power and the previous. If that line sounds like a cheap shot, Cubans have not voted in free elections since 1948, when they elected Carlos Socarras, who was overthrown in a revolution lead by Fulgencio Batista, who had been part of another violent overthrow of the government in 1933, that he was not the head of, but that he’d been essential to because he had a car and no one else did.

His group established a new Cuban Constitution and he was eventually elected President in 1940. He remains the only non-white Cuban to ever hold the office, and he served 4 years and paved the way for his successor, Carlos Zayas, who lost anyway. In 1952 Batista attempted to run for President again, and when the polls had him losing in 3rd place, he overthrew his own new government a 2nd time, and was in power until 1959 when Fidel Castro toppled the previously toppled government. (Deep breath)

I won’t catch you up on every year between now and then. All of that is just to clarify that the Cuban people have had no say in their own governance in just under 80 years. So you can see why it’s a sore topic. Castro drummed up support under a promise to return the power to Cuba’s citizens in 1960, but I can only assume he forgot, because he remained in power, in a number of self-elected roles, until he passed control to his brother Raul in 2011. Castro died in 2016. The next 10 years for the purposes of our story are pretty boring, the party is still considered Castro’s party, and its current President his appointee.

So: addressing the talking points you hear a lot, it is important to note that the only source of news on the Island is the government. Cuba has no free press, it doesn’t have dueling news organizations vying for ratings. What it has, basically, is a PR arm for the communist party, and most of the data points you hear come at least indirectly from their Capitol. Their access to outside news is also completely restricted, so their understanding of the world outside the island, the cultural norms, how people see them, is passed hand to hand like contraband in portable memory sticks. There are ways to get word out and in, but they’re indirect, and usually delayed. When the 11J protests (July 11th) happened in 2021, thousands of people took to the street in every city in Cuba for the first time in decades, because of a currency shift that locked the populace out of the ability to buy food on the open market, paired with the end of rations (the reason they aren’t paid for work is that the state provides their food, and then one day stopped) and because of a rising death toll of covid patients and the state’s refusal to accept any foreign aid at all to treat them. Cubans tend not to protest en masse because the consequences are dire and often permanent, but I suppose their fear of dying outweighed their fear of repercussions and they went out there to be heard. The response was violent and swift and not unlike the ICE raids you see online. One of the first actions of the regime was to shut down internet access to kill communication off of the island.

Back to the points, in no particular order:

If you come to the island as its guest, which is to say, on an educational visa, you will be guided through a very specific PR maze meant to debunk the perceptions of Cuba in the outside world. One of the main points you’ll hear a few times on your journey is the story that Castro took the population from less than 10% literacy to over 90%. There is a museum of literacy, and I will admit the first time I visited I chose to snorkel instead, to the consternation of our state-appointed guide. There is a delicate balance in the things they are supposed to show you and them not wanting visitors to feel controlled, so on occasion there were gentle attempts to encourage us to stay aboard the ride, so to speak. But having seen both now I feel confident stating that Cuban beaches have some of the clearest waters in the world, and a museum about people reading is a little niche. I should clarify that the very first time I visited Cuba there were limited routes to get there, and the easiest way to book a flight was to buy a seat on a JetBlue plane chartered by an educational tour group. You stay in state-run hotels and eat state-made almost indigestible food, unrecognizable as Cuban. Unseasoned Chicken breast, that kind of thing. In the 90s when the government finally opened the very limited parameters of “paladares” (extremely limited private restaurants served out of your home) part of the justification was that tourists would complain at the quality of eating when the government ran the country’s only restaurants. So, I ate a lot of truly awful government food, but I snuck off fairly often, paying out of pocket (the bad food was all inclusive) to eat at holes in the wall in La Habana Vieja. I’m glad I did that state-run tour once, so that I’d understand what it means, because I get asked about its “facts” a lot. I only stayed at those hotels that time, though, because the most guilty I’ve ever felt in Cuba (and that’s not a low bar) is at a continental breakfast, where, if you’ve ever breakfasted with American Tourists, you know they tend to take a little bit of everything and put it on their plate so they can try it, and then leave like 80% of it uneaten, and I realized that the Cuban staff, who aren’t allowed to eat or save what’s left, or be punished for either, have to throw out piles of food, in denominations unavailable to locals who aren’t allowed in the hotel anyway (and couldn’t afford it if they were, a night at the Nacional costs several months of Cuban wages) and who after dumping all that food have to feed their kids rations that consist primarily of rice and vegetable oil.

But there was a big push for literacy, yes, and it’s supposed to have lasted 8 months, and affected a million people between the teaching and the taught, and in general more people can read than could before, but if you look at the books they use to teach kids how to read, you might be forgiven for assuming there was ulterior motivation in teaching the Cuban populace to read them

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Item 2: The Amazing Cuban Doctors: this is something I’ve written about here before, and the one that bristles me personally the most. It is definitely true that Cuba’s education system is high-rated for Medicine, and that people go there for treatment and that their doctors help people all over the world.

The asterisk is that Cubans are not allowed to pick their avenue of study. And are not allowed to refuse to travel. And, regardless of where they work in the island’s economy, are paid low enough as to be considered indentured. So: you have people forced into a role and education who aren’t paid for it and sent away from their families without a choice. But the kicker on that one, the one that grates me the most is that those Doctors don’t work in Cuban hospitals. The medical system FOR Cubans is an arcane purgatory of flickering lights and empty cupboards, Cubans are malnourished, missing teeth, they don’t fit the storybook of Cuban medical exceptionalism because it isn’t for them. Those Doctors are a glorified militia, drafted against their will and sent out on orders to conduct treatment in trade, and never of their actual countrymen.

Musicians themselves are a kind of natural resource. They are a protected class in Cuba, because they obviously add to the mythology. Cuba is by far the most musical place I’ve ever been, live music is everywhere. Where every other part of Cuba is held together by bubble gum and duct tape, you’ll notice the bands all have better gear than you’d find in a NYC night club, and you’ll even see music videos that look like they were shot by Michael Bay. This is because their craft is subsidized, a part of the facade of a vibrant culture you’ll find in the few blocks in the center of Havana that are designated for display. On that early trip an especially irritating member of the tour, between trying to take us off course and berating our guide, told us he’d filled his suitcase with guitar strings, to which his government guide said: that is literally the only thing you could have brought that no one here will ever lack.

So, yes the music is great, and we can debate the reasons, but a lot of the cuban culture I grew up on has evaporated from the country for lack of resources to maintain it, so I’m glad the music has survived.

The last thing are the cars, and if and when Cuba ever sees its freedom, every Cuban mechanic should go to NASA to teach them how to build eternal machines without any auto parts stores. Put this guy in charge, he’s their Oppenjaime

There aren’t really any cars now on the road. Since January Cuba is being actively blockaded from access to oil, and the cars have stopped, and then the lights, and our government insists theirs is going to crack, and their government insists they will never back down from anything. There are a lot of mixed feelings on what that means, and the reality is no one knows. Cuba has no resources to speak of, and we have no great history of empathic violence against anyone’s oppression. So none of us can say definitively what this is for, or where it leads, but as usual what I abhor on any side of the conversation is that the suffering of the Cubans on the Island is always incidental to some greater ideal. Everyone knows what they need, and what the country should be, and nobody really cares what they think or what it costs them. If you’re only rooting for them to survive people’s ideals, all you can do is hope whatever future gets chosen for them is as painless as possible. Because I don’t know that they have much suffering left in them.

I am supposed to be writing (yes I know this is writing) but have found it very hard to write scripts while dealing with book fulfillment, but luckily that’s all over in a couple days, so I’ll have to come up with a new excuse. I have frequently wondered at what age the drama stops, not in the sense that I rise above it, but in the hope that it gets tired of me. It never seems to, though, and keeping my head down only seems to save me from getting hit directly in the face. Maybe next year is when it all happens.

I am ironing out the last pieces of a pretty giant research trip that I have for no logical reason been reluctant to share here, so let’s do that (also for no reason).

In about 5 weeks I’m going to Budapest for a couple days and then riding an old timey Romanian sleeper train that has to be lifted into the air in the dead of night with its passengers sleeping inside (this happens very late) so that it can change its wheels to fit the different-sized Romanian train tracks and cross the border into Transylvania. I’ve never slept on a train and maybe I won’t again even with a bed, but I figure it’s probably my one chance to experience an old timey eastern european night train. (if they could read, 3 of my high school friends would just have giggled) I’ll be in Transylvania a few days, I rented a car that cost $12 total to port me through the vampire hills and got a hotel across the street from Dracula’s childhood home (unclear if he’s in town in April, I assume at his age *he’s in Florida mostly <he’s pushing 600 now> ). While Vampires aren’t the area of my research’s focus I’d be lying if I said I won’t like any red blooded child of the 80s be paying lots of attention. There aren’t a lot of regions synonymous with monsters and I’ve already been to Washington. The travel site had a “secret” rental covered top to bottom in purple velvet like a porn parody to Coppolla’s Dracula and I was pretty tempted by the particular joys that ridiculous interior design choices can bring, but in the end I went slightly more demure.

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It’s my first time in a new country since Mexico in 2023, and my first time in 4 new countries in a row in more than a decade. I’m leap-frogging my way back west from there, to Cairo first, depending on how on fire the region is in April, and then from there to Carthage in Tunisia. I’m not sure how long I’ll spend in Africa exactly, but hopefully it’s long enough to finish a lot of writing, or to fall in love with whoever is willing to pay off my credit cards. At the very least I love Egyptian food. From Tunisia I’m going north to Barcelona to do some more secret research before heading back home after a month away in time to regret it.

I have neurological issues that murder my focus these days, and I like to write somewhere unfamiliar. It sounds more distracting but I’m monstrously shy so instead the exploration is fairly controlled and depending on where I am I’ll usually work 2 normal full-day writing shifts with, for example, taco and coffee breaks. If I can get my brain to cooperate I can usually finish a whole book or a film or a whatever long but contained thing I’ve got on deck. The locale feeds me the right kind of stimulus, like the visual equivalent of one of those frequencies that anchor your brain to a moment. And when I get home and read it hopefully I still like some of what I did. At the very least I love Egyptian food.

I had dinner and drinks with another writer friend a few weeks back and was embarrassed leaving the house with a book I was proud of, mentally workshopping ways to explain that I just happened to have it in my bag, but go ahead and keep it! When I got there he handed me his own books and I realized how good it felt just to actually want to share work without trying to get anything for it. Not wanting a plug or a quote or a job but just sharing the results of a perilous journey through our respective skulls. It reminded me that reading is the whole point, that we were uniquely qualified to understand how fraught the road to publication is and to share the specifics of how we’d handled our journeys, like war stories where the only army trying to kill us is internal.

I’m trying to be kinder about the work I do. To trust people to find something in it even if I don’t always myself. Or even to let them have it without needing a response. Just as a moment to bridge that weird abyss we all feel between writing and having it read.

I’ve noticed recently no matter what you type into google it gives you a certain type of answer (not the right one, mostly). I looked it up and it turns out with the advent of AI it has abandoned using specific phrasing as markers for your request, and has moved to trying to interpret what you need and guess the answer. It is a system that assumes you can’t be trusted with what you’re looking for, that has corrected for typos to where you literally can’t just tell it explicitly what you want, because it assumes it knows better than whatever you type into the bar. It does the same with image search, where it used to compare the actual code of images to find a match, now it squints and guesses what it’s looking at. Not only has new technology exclusively become things no one asked for, but the old tech doesn’t do the only things they used to. It makes me want to buy a typewriter.

It’s getting warmer here, theoretically, but also colder, so don’t come visit.

Yours Truly,

Iván,

Previously on: me. I was born in NYC long enough ago that I’m still getting over the loss of subway tokens as the metro card is laid to rest. I’m the 2nd person in my family to be born in this country, crafted emotionally of a table full of loud Cuban exiles, and consequently I grew up in a weird pocket reality, less apple pie and more arroz con pollo. There were a lot of Cubans, but also Chileans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Dominicans… I think I was literally 6 the first time I met Argentinians, my friend’s mom handing me an alien blob with an antenna, a pre-columian gourd full of mate, the tinny bombilla like a diving board down to the less than appetizing oatmeal texture of the green mush below it. I think I thought it was a pipe, and that I was being invited into something illicit, and was instead surprised to find a mushy, vaguely sugary sort of tea come through the metal straw, which won me over because we weren’t allowed much sugar in my house. It was a very unCuban practice, both in its composition and in its communion. Cubans drink tiny cups of rocket fuel, aggresssively potent coffee at all hours to power their primary communal act: the endless deafening argument. But this was instead a family sitting close and quietly sharing this gourd full of verdant goo, like a british tea-time if the british liked eachother and only had the one teacup.

I lived in Argentina a while, and while the people outside any home are actively willing eachother dead and their cars doing so proactively, behind closed doors there is no more social people. They aren’t a bar culture, unlike my NY life, they don’t need the courage whiskey brings, they drink malbec with ice as if it has electrolytes and eat steak and ice cream at every meal like they’re on death row, and I guess given the outdoors I mentioned, maybe they sort of are. But over that steak whoever you’re with will lock eyes with you and listen with an earnest and unforced intensity I was completely unprepared for when I first encountered it . If the country of Argentina could collectively sign up for Love Island, their eye contact would make them undefeatable.

Anyway, that wasn’t the lay of the land at my house, but the differences in community helped me to be curious, to learn 5 languages, all of them poorly, and in part maybe why I’m so often boarding planes is that I crave the unknown in other people. And I mostly haven’t lacked for it. But it occurs to me that in my adult life all of my family have moved away and most of my adult friends aren’t the kind of feral diasporic children I grew up with, and I feel at odds and inundated with a profound…”American-ness” that challenges me.

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What I hear often in Spanish about Americans elsewhere is that we’re somewhat culturally narcissistic, that our worldview and culture is self-centered, that we lack curiosity about our surroundings, and consider our problems the world’s. I used to be defensive about that, in the way one might be protective of one’s workplace with strangers: I can talk shit about it, but I don’t want to hear it from you. But my argument has waned as my aging body makes me more frayed and less indulgent. Even our conversations about diversity tend to center entirely on a binary, a perfectionist critique framed exclusively on “Americans” as cultural absolutes, the high standard for any budding populace mostly curious about itself.

Latin-Americans have a lot of words for the people of the US. Gringo, Yanqui, Yuma. In a place where identity is the most popular modern currency these kind of nicknames might seem insulting, but mostly to me they just describe what someone isn’t, and there is a universe of what each of us isn’t. To a certain Pan-American mindset a lot of what’s seen here is hard to reconcile. Conversations about money, a fixation on work. Or to the degree that we explore the outside world (exclusively in reading tragic histories) we often build from them a kind of cultural cosplay that fetishizes historic suffering as an ideal to walk safely towards, as walking in circles there’s no risk we’ll ever see it. People’s causes seem to be serviced mostly in conversation, between their podcasts. Fine tuning a perfect worldview like the tracklist of a record store clerk whose eyes roll at your unsophisticated political tastes. We are by any metric the most talkative we’ve ever been about our government, but also paradoxically take the least action of any era. We romanticize fierce intellectual discourse but bunker ourselves from anyone who isn’t mostly on the same page. We have a booming confidence in what we know is right, (why would we get all those likes if it wasn’t?) and fiercely insulate ourselves from any chance of having to kick the tires of our superiority. We declare ourselves radical iconoclasts like we’re choosing a photo filter for our identity. As if the act of choosing a font for revolution is itself a salvo.

It gets harder to rationalize that worldview as my spine crystallizes like sugar candy. Not because I think I know better but because I know I don’t. I lack the confidence in my ideals to be able to buy into your confidence in yours. So more and more I crave a place where I know no one and I don’t have to listen to the same cultural slop as if it’s new, to not feel embarrassed at people’s pride in borrowed rhetorical posture they’ve memorized like a school play. Because as the world hides its violence less, as reality physically disdains the communities I grew up in, I start to feel like the people I encounter are more interested in modeling the drip of their worldview than in the world. That the urgent broadcasts for radical mobilization are like that radio signal in the zombie movie, just an old 8-track banger in an empty room playing on a loop. I left the country last year for a month and next month I’m doing it again. And if I can finish the work I’m going to Africa to do, maybe I’ll leave that trip planning another. Not away from a place but towards perspectives with a purpose bigger than their own production value. Going away from this place I love so that I don’t want to wring its neck.

I made a new book recently, and I’ve been sending it out, which this time around is an often demoralizing fight against package carriers and gravity, but the embarrassment of riches I’ve received in the support of the people who’ve paid these fragile paper missiles to exist has been a balm on a brutal winter. I get emails from strangers every day offering to help in different ways, or to tell me how the book itself affected them. It is incredibly challenging work to get through, but it is genuinely galvanizing to think of its destinations as human rather than geographic and meet so many people taking the time to let me know it landed. The process of writing can be so isolating but sending the finished work out and feeling the wave of its effects roll back to me is its own form of sunlight. I feel like I’m growing in its warmth in a way I’ve never felt all these years. It’s a boost in the arm that has brought in new stories at a quicker pace than I’ve ever been able to think of them before. I went for a walk the other day, I saw an address on an outgoing label that was nearby my offices and offered to bring it to a doorman on my way home. I dressed the book like a toddler for winter, in a nice bag, a nice label. I tried to think about what I’d want to see coming home from work, if someone brought their book to me. It was a nice kind of puzzle, one with no obvious gain but 2 seconds of helping a stranger decompress from whatever their day was. I caught myself smiling when I was done. Like I’d done something sneaky. Made quiet communion out of a book exchange. When people hear I’m a writer, they often assume a joy to my existence that is rarely present. “Do what you love…”, etc. I find writing very stressful, I reject shortcuts any reasonable person would embrace, I paint myself in corners. I make everything as hard as possible, not just on the page, but on the cover, on the spine, in the placement of the copyright. There is no stone unturned, however large or however stupid. But the surprising result of this excessive, stressful process is for the first time ever I genuinely love doing the thing I do.

It is one of the wilder seasons of its kind, for sure the wildest in my memory. Yesterday the sky dropped 2 feet of snow on an unsuspecting NYC populace (we actually kinda suspected it) and I booked passage for my new book to like 9 different countries armed with nothing but bodega coffee and hard boiled eggs. There is no apocalypse that can stop a NYC bodega.

Yesterday I routed books to both Slovakia and Slovenia. I think the first time I understood that I was able to connect what was in my head across not just land but sea was when a long-time reader (short-time at that point, 20+ years ago) showed me a tattoo he’d gotten of our lead troublemaker in a book I worked on called NYC Mech. This was a book we’d made on the sly at our day-jobs, fully for free because we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. It’s always a little funny to me now when younger creatives ask me about money because when I started I genuinely could not fathom ever making any. There is a part of me that always assumes that is the nascent state I will eventually return to. Scribbling nonsense because I lack the sense to get up and get a real job.

Anyway, the new book went out to 32 countries. A couple by boat, mostly by plane or owl, whatever DHL uses. Several are countries I’ve never seen and while I can be loud, it is still hard to fathom my voice preceding me in this way.

The truth is I’ve probably been read more places than that, but the nature of work for hire is often that nobody tells you where you’ve been until one day someone hands some giant beast of a hardcover to you behind a table out of town somewhere. I don’t do many conventions anymore, but every time I do there’s a pretty good chance someone will hand me a Marvel Omnibus I’m definitely never getting sent a copy of. If I’m honest I don’t know what I’d do with them anyway. So I count the 32, because I sent them there myself, and however those people found me is a detail lost in the edit.

It is peculiar that outside the mechanisms of the existing distribution system is where I’ve found the widest support. Maybe it shouldn’t be. The distance isn’t intentional, I spent a decent part of this week weighing options for how to expand into stores. The math is hard to reconcile, in that I’m not really wired for carrying a lot of stock and shops aren’t really wired to prepay for a bunch of books they usually order 1 or 2 of at a time. But I like a puzzle so I’m working on it.

But in the meantime it’s hard not to look at the last 2 years and see a much more intimate connection with an audience that seems genuinely invested in my success. Who promote the books and who applaud and cheer me on. I was stunned the first time I realized that there were a number of backers who send money without asking for a book, or who just added extra money on top of even the most extravagant tier just as a hat tip to what we’ve been doing. Now it happens almost every other day. I can’t say I’m used to it, but even a stubborn self effacing guy like me starts to feel warmth in that much sunlight.

I think a certain type of person is willing to expand their reach for work that doesn’t pass by on a conveyor belt. If there’s a single goal I’ve been focused on lately, it’s that I want to make things that would very clearly not exist otherwise. To that end my conversations mostly are about how malleable forms are. Is there a chance someone would like this one weird thing, despite there being no firm evidence to call on. I think it was 2002 the first time I went to France, and I remember coming home with a full-sized suitcase full of tiny hardcovers I couldn’t read. I probably spent more time on those books without knowing what the words meant than I would have if I spoke the language better. Barring the framing of language, all there was to go by was the world itself. It pushed me earlyish to really think about the idea of sound in comics, and the illusion of time, and how much information there sometimes was when there was only art to go by. How to get out of that information’s way.

One of the worst thing comics ever did was seek “maturity”. I don’t mean it like some kind of purist, “comics are for kids”, I mean that the timeframe spawned a legion of writers who use endless pseudo-Miller riffs to have their characters narrate how out of breath they are hoofing it up the stairs, learning exactly the wrong things from a guy whose most powerful images were arguably these stark open moments that froze time and let you sit in the aftermath of something momentous. Miller’s splash pages were almost never a money shot in comic terms. They weren’t the tough guy with the big gun, they were the ears ringing after the bomb goes off, after the blood had all drained from a crescendo big enough to raise a family in.

I upgraded my main camera recently, well, moreso I tried at first. I got scammed buying a “lightly used” camera right around christmas and when I realized what had happened, I pitted myself against this new rival like a blood feud. I had the NYPD in my house, talked to 3 different departments at the post office. It took a couple weeks to deconstruct what he’d done and how he’d done it, and it was CLEVER. If you’d seen the glee on my face when I finally realized I’d cut him off from any moves you’d probably grimace with embarrassment. (This is why I never smile, to save you this pain). He had a very good grift though, and it made me very happy when I figured out how it worked and how to extricate myself.

I grew up around really lunkheaded street crime and I read literally hundreds of books about sad detectives digging up the rotten roots of some rich old lady’s family tree. I’m not a crime-fighter by any stretch, some of that lunkheaded misbehavior I witnessed was my own. But after being rolled a few too many times mid-stride in an act of kindness recently, it was a relief to know I finally dodged a punch. I’ve got my camera now, not from the grifter, but more or less what he was promising, and I’m going to use the hell out of it on 4 different continents this year. I’m gonna head out on a long research trip whose specifics probably give away what I’m putting together so I’ll only say it’s meant to start in Africa and move eastward. Let’s see if I can find anyone willing to let me point this new contraption at them, now that I found one that exists.

I keep getting asked about the book and where people can get it now that it’s reached our Brooklyn shores, and the answer basically is if you wait til Friday I will have put up the very pretty new website at hellodeathray.com and it has a very grown up and sophisticated store you’re going to want to try on several outfits in. Except we don’t sell outfits. And the store is on the internet.

I wrote a big essay that hopefully I’ll get to show you soon. It’s not for here, but it is for you.

Ponte un swetter, carajo,

-ib

From Coldest New York City, February 2026

Last week the sky took home a new single day trophy for the highest recorded snowfall, measuring over a foot in New York City. This preceded a record cold front with temperatures between 3 degrees F and a high in the 20s, all well below freezing, which as it turns out is the comfort zone of a record snowfall. The snow isn’t that pretty a week and a half later. The plows stack it so that a foot becomes 6 feet of impenetrable wall around your apartment building. Without the sun’s help the walls gain the colors of a NY that is usually hidden against the backdrop of ashphalt. Moments of sunlight melt these frozen monstosities just enough to form sheets of ice under your feet, garbage is stacked up, the subway station floors are slippery as if greased. In very limited special circumstance, the city burns the snow with fire where needed or uses cranes to clear the streets for foot traffic. But mostly that doesn’t happen on my block.

I went to MoMA despite all of this and trudged instead through the archives of the life of Wifredo Lam.

Lam was Cuban-born from a Chinese father and a complicated ancestry on his mother’s side that seemed to gain depth as it passed through generations like an agglomerate mass of every form of human that had stepped on the island. Mixed parents, mixed grandparents, Congolese, Spaniard, Native, Colonial, Criollo. As humans go, he was a special order, but In Cuba, he was very Cuban. With all those different rhythms in his head it probably isn’t a surprise he started painting. He studied at Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, but he left left the island for Spain as a colonial subject hoping to master its art traditions.

Where his new mentor in Madrid pushed a rigid Spanish realism, Lam excelled, a master drafstman, but found the conservative practice suffocating.

He ignored the High Renaissance masters at the Museo del Prado and fed his brain instead on Bosch’s surrealism and grotesquery, Bruegel ‘s crowded compositions and the elongated distortion of El Greco. He began also to frequent Madrid’s museum of Anthropology, where he was introduced to African and Oceanic art.

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He found love and married in Spain, his new wife Eva gave him a son, Wilfredo, but the family lasted just over a year before he lost both to tuberculosis.

You can see this tragedy darken his work at the outset of the 1930s. He begins to reject the lucent, academic portraits that had paid his bills.

Lam flees his family’s home in Madrid and moves to a jagged, Northern mountain town in deep isolation, and there discovers Matisse and Picasso through fakes and reproductions. As a poor kid who often encountered his interests through knockoffs in Chinatown, that part of the story really lit up my internal circuitboard. That inspiration’s path is amorphous and oblivious to proper channels, separate from the artist that made them and the eye of the scene that responds. That sometimes the idea of a thing is so powerful it can spread even through trickery. In those mountains, Lam is stuck with low-res training. He can’t learn from the brushstrokes of Matisse, so he learns the logic of the shapes. This keeps him separated from these influences even later as he starts to cross their paths. But encountering their work, even in pictures, giveshim a pass to stop painting like a 17th century Spaniard.

As the Spanish Monarchy falls, Lam’s social interests begin to radicalize. He moves from Academic circles towards a more romantic and increasingly anti-fascist corner, a Spain of poetry and ideas. In the mid 30s, when a coup splits the country nearly down the middle, rather than flee he digs in and fights fascists in the Spanish Civil War before falling ill to chemical poisoning from handling munitions.

In a sanatorium outside Barcelona, he’s forced by that illness to give up war and go back to painting. This new Lam is somber and intense. His most famous work of the period, La Guerra Civil (the Civil War) is commissioned by the Rebublican Government. It represents a transition, his academic practice shattering under the trauma of his reality. It depicts a wall of suffering, the depth of his old work flattened, his subjects stacked like towers made of cursed bodies and geometric spikes that split through the painting. It hangs at the Paris World’s Fair the next year with Picasso’s Guernica.

As Barcelona’s instability grows and its edges wither under Nationalist fire, Lam’s sculptor friend Manolo writes a letter of introduction to Picasso in fear Lam’s talent will disappear under the bombs.

Lam arrives in Paris, scarred from his losses, weak from one war and about to meet another. Upon their encounter, Picasso immediately adopts him, insisting they share blood in their veins. Through Picasso, Lam meets the sacred high council of modernism, Miró, Léger, Braque and expands Lam’s exposure to African masks and totems.

Lam follows André Breton into surrealism and starts illustrating his poems before they flee Paris to Marseille to escape the Nazis. Trapped in Marseille with Breton and a safe-house full to absurdity of other artists and intellectuals, Lam chips even further away at his formalist roots with collective drawing games, the group stacking their styles to build a Frankenstein none of them can control.

Lam and Breton are forced to flee again, leaving Marseille and WWII on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, a ship later legendary for its unusual manifest of famous artistic figures. Detained by the Vichy French in Martinique, Lam is interned at Trois-Îlets with the poet Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s Negritude moment forms the last piece of the framework for Lam to embrace his Black identity as a revolutionary force.

18 years gone, Lam abandons the growing dangers of Europe and returns to pre-Castro Havana, now run by American mob interests, to find its afro-Cuban roots and rituals on display as a tourist attraction.

The scalding Cuba of the Summer of 1941 is the pressure cooker that leads to Lam’s most famous painting: La Jungla (The Jungle). It features an industrial sugar cane field presented as wild and teeming with Femmes-cheval, hybrid of woman and horse with stylized crescent masks reminiscent of the African and Oceanic faces he’d been studying.

Lam starts to talk about taking the sophisticated language of European modernism and using it as a Trojan Horse to smuggle black truths into the art world.

He is hyper-prolific in this goal, producing a stream of paintings, thinning his oil to where it’s translucent like a watercolor, layering ghost figures over and above each other. Lam begins mixing humanity and beast, embedding ancient ritual in his paintings. It also helps him to use oil on thinner paper when his access to canvas is limited.

Humbled at home without money or proper tools, Lam somehow finds international fame.

There are a lot of reasons Lam’s story pushes my buttons. If you know Cuba, even now, it is built of resilient Macgyvers who make Lemonade without even the lemons. One of the first things anyone mentions about Cuba is its ancient cars, but having spent a lot of time there it’s important to note: Cuba doesn’t have a Pep Boys. Cuba’s highways are traveled almost exclusively by classic antique cars rigged together with string cheese and applesauce, not pampered Sunday cars you find under a tarp, but eternal full-time workhorses that have run non-stop every day for 70+ years. Hundreds of thousands of miles if the odometers could even go that high. They aren’t maintained out of pride, but out of necessity. Without these cars, most Cubans can’t work. And no one in Cuba can afford not to work.

It is also a story about a guy who uses his art almost exclusively to exorcise demons. Be those demons the government, corruption or his own battered soul. At his lowest point, having abandoned the prestige and respect of the art set, without access to any of the materials he learned to use there, Lam doesn’t slow down. When making art is hardest, Lam paints the most he’ll ever paint in his career. He abandons the easy money, eschews the relative ease of using the muscles he trained in school to invent his own means of expression, even when it’s likely to land him in a ditch. Wifredo Lam was a successful artist, but that’s not his fault. He wasn’t painting for those people. Maybe that’s why he appealed to them.

The best and worst part of the year was finding a depth of creativity I had searched for my whole life, arriving unsolicited just as I reached what I thought was the finish to the task at hand. Here I am with more ideas than I can carry, more tumbling into a narrowing path, trying to move forward with whole universes jammed in my pockets. This, in the last year of my forties, the year I finally got far enough under the hood of the comics business to see how little light there is for anything to grow. How much of the road behind me was spent risking the one life I have on a dangerous journey toward the wrong kind of safety, an imagined city always further in the distance.

I went to Japan alone for the first time and tried to focus on the people and all the things they make by hand and how much pride goes into things that will never make anyone rich. The ramen shops that can never expand because the same person fills every bowl. An ambition to feed people. The choice of slow systems to make better rather than more. That craft is a closed circuit that is only complete when it connects you to someone else.

It took me decades to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and it’s both less and more depending on who’s looking.

Nochevieja means “old night”, the oldest night of the year, about to disappear into the harsh light of the oncoming train of the future. In English we focus on the new but in Spanish we memorialize the present moment ending. It’s a made up discontinuity, but on it we place the whole potential of existence. We agree collectively to choose an imaginary point in the distance and place all of our ambition on the other side and then cross it together. One of the few places left where we all see hope.

A portal that doesn’t exist but nonetheless leads everywhere.

Happy Nochevieja.

At my age (and single) there’s a little too much time for introspection and if you’re lucky you use (or in my case overuse) that time. I think a lot of your 20s is about making mistakes while scrutinizing everyone else’s, a lot of the time after that is looking backward at those mistakes but not necessarily seeing them objectively, conflicts that seem like bad moments you encountered rather than in my case often caused. In my early 20s I was in a car accident, rear ended in Miami in the rain by a news van that caused damage which would probably have been impermanent if I’d tended to it properly. As it is my back still seizes up a few times a week and my threshold for pain makes it difficult for me to listen correctly to the normal signals the human body politely offers when you’re in trouble.

Something I learned kicking and screaming at the time, this was before the internet, really, and before cell phones definitely, and if like me you were feeling the kind of pain that hurt when you walked and then hurt when you stopped you kinda had no choice but to spend a lot of time with the person I’d traveled across the country to get away from. (Me)

6 months locked in a room alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to but the wall is the equivalent of parent-trapping yourself, you don’t have a lot of choice but to come to some accord and work together. To find some common ground.

I wasn’t really writing then, to speak of, just little aimless snippets of rage or romance. I spent most of my time with a record player on a couch that in a fit of pretension my roommate and I had decided to set up in front of the stereo rather than the TV. (Irony being in such high demand these days It should come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that after avoiding our TV for most of the 90s I work now sometimes as a screenwriter and he as a director.)

Anyway, I spent a lot of time trying to be honest with and about myself (warts and all), and as most of us towards the end of any year pledge to abandon all our lifelong foolishness and charge head-first towards benevolence and abs, I’m back in that headspace. Under the lights of a makeshift xmas tree I revisit the worst of me to figure out how to improve or forgive and with any luck regret slightly (or substantially!) less when the calendar flips over again. I can’t say I ever feel fulfilled in that regard, but I think I’m inching towards something.

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Usually the last month of the year (except the last one when I couldn’t walk), I try to get ahead of whatever weird-science version I’m trying to build of myself. Ramp myself up, get as healthy as possible, figure out what parts of my life don’t fit, what things feel like friction on the waterslide. First up: when I broke my right leg I was rehabbing the left from a different surgery and had to abandon that process because the other couldn’t so much as wiggle its toes and I had run out of legs. So now that I’ve got them both back it’s time for a training montage to strengthen both these old pistons so that they balance the granite-thick skull they carry and so that my feet and hips are strong enough to keep on going without eventually collapsing from misuse.

This was a weird year for me socially, I took a giant step back from arguing with anyone about the state of the world, and moved towards tangible things within my potential grasp. It’s a mixed bag and my forcefield is made of cellophane easily pierced. We’ve made a culture of being perpetually disappointed in most of the world, and it occurs to me that it’s only fairly recently I knew any of the things about anyone that might disappoint me. That often knowing those things to be upset about them required deliberate research whose purpose seemed to be annoying myself. So now I don’t really ask anymore. If there’s a conversation that comes up I will talk things out and be honest about my feelings, but I don’t seek out venues to grandstand and I don’t actively avoid anyone that might not go to my particular emotional high school. The truth is, there’s a lot more to talk about in a life than politicians, so I mostly don’t. And when I do it’s more likely to be someone on my side of the argument who’ll show their teeth.

I have so little patience for anyone being snide anymore, any kind of aggression or condescension is usually a sign that I need to be focused somewhere else. I learned so much from so many people this year, and it was mostly positive one to one but was occasionally foul in a way that I feel so seldom now it takes me a while even to recognize. As a kid I was great at a takedown, at butting heads and dismantling any point. I wasn’t conflict averse, I’d jump very quickly from one step in an argument to another and it wouldn’t take long before the other person was out of breath. After a while they stop arguing with you and I can’t blame them.

In my old age it’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings, but mostly because my hangups are different. I don’t need to be right anymore. I don’t need to impress anyone with my ideas. I do neurologically need to chew on things out loud to work them out, and through trial and lots of error I’ve learned not everyone’s built for poking holes in things. I find myself testing most of my beliefs these days, most of all ideas that didn’t originate with me, because at least my shitty ideas I know how I got to. There’s such a binary consensus around every modern argument and the rhetoric feels dense and rote and shared. I find myself talking to people who seem to find warmth in where they stand and feel protective of what they’ve locked down and frustrated with anyone still sorta intellectually testing the baseboards to see if they’ll hold my weight.

Politics is such a popular sport and people wear theirs literally as merch or craft familiar expressions as artful 3:4 scale dogma with elegant hand made letterforms.

A revolution of small talk. Expressions of violent overthrow presented like a sparkly sticker set. Marxist agitprop disseminated in $500 shoes.

The conversations in a loop, broadcasting truth to the power of one’s personal algorithm who likely already agree, using the largest server farm in the world to broadcast devastating snaps about the ecological cost of server farms. Placing #NoAIever underneath your name on an increasingly AI platform.

A few years ago I went into critical surgery pretty sure I wasn’t gonna come back out, and when to my surprise I did I found my appetite for digital connection had basically evaporated. It’s hard to feel self-impressed when you’re in a county hospital Donald Ducking it in a heatwave in a plastic bed wearing a mumu with apple juice stains down the front.

But I had friends line up (this was a pandemic hospital and they only allowed one visitor at a time) just to bring me water and snacks and sit next to me while I dozed off and drooled on myself and even without talking those moments propped up my actual being more than hearing anyone’s best take on the trouble with anything outside that room.

So in my 10 day sprint towards a future me, I think I’d like to spend whatever moments are left exclusively with the people who are there for whatever happens in a room with or without jello with the people I’ve chosen to listen and/or sit in silence with. I’m gonna spend more time away from NY, listening to new people to give them a good faith chance before I dismiss them or just move on with my day. Focusing on an enormous backlog of writing I’ve promised to do this year. Working to fix these 30 year old pains or at least strengthen myself enough that I can compensate.

I want to pull away from selling glimpses of my day on the internet and keep focusing on making the kind of work that transcends that sad and counter-creative infamy. Speak through my art more than my public opinions although I’ll still be here for anyone who wants to hear me turn ideas over until they shatter like a figurine in a glass menagerie.

I put a christmas tree up, because one of the only things I remember fondly from being a kid is staring at winking lights until I fell asleep. I’m not wired for religion, but I like sitting in an incandescent glow.

I had a couple beverages so you’ll forgive me if my typing slurrs. Is that how you spell that? Are there more Rs?

I guess I’m trying to work through a thought I had recently, wedged like a splinter in my skull.

It’s about how we engage with pretty much everything. I’ve touched on some of this before, about how most of the arts/entertainment we as a public found our way to before streaming was curated by any number of someones, and if you didn’t like what they had to offer, you could change the channel and try again. If you wanted to watch a show you had to be on your couch when it was on. You had to invest yourself, like sitting down for a concert.

Maybe you had a walkman, and one tape you’d play relentlessly until you knew every note and needed a break. You had to flip it, too, to get to the end. If you wanted to hear the same song twice, you had to wait til it rewound.

Media now is delivered via a tiny hadron collider in your pocket, extracting from the infinite every song and movie ever made. We’ve gone from sitting down out of a desire to engage with a specific work to a place where our every moment needs to be filled with something. They make speakers for your shower now, so you never have to spend one moment with your thoughts. If you’re on the couch, it’s less to watch your show and more to search to figure out what you should watch. Like boarding a plane just to find out where it might go.

A lot has been said about our communal attention spans and how they’ve been stretched to breaking until we can’t spend more than a minute focused on any one thing. TV writers are told now to make their dialogue simpler so people can follow shows without looking at the screen. Having forever 5G access to everyone and everything has maybe damaged our real interest in any of it. Movies and podcasts can be paused. Conversations are just another alert that you can try to fit in between all of that and some video office meeting where nobody’s listening and their cameras are off. A Kafka nightmare, a dark screen droning corporate jargon. Let’s table that for later. Let’s circle back.

All of our interactions are fleeting at best, we cancel our plans with friends the same day because why is friendship the only thing that can’t be paused til later? We’ll get around to it when we have more time.

I keep thinking about making a magazine. Something obnoxiously temporary, something you can only get when it comes out and is meant to be read and tossed in the corner or handed off to someone else. Something that isn’t more stuff to populate your house with. Whose only purpose is the time you spend with it. I dislike how much of the publishing market is about an investment in valuable paper. I want to be made happy or angry or sad by something that can only come from whoever made it. Not another option on your screen. Something you half remember and can’t really articulate why it kinda broke your heart.

In the meantime here are more pictures of Japan.