irpin ukraine, 2022

Before i started watching Summer House about a month ago, the only reality tv i had ever watched was FuckBoy Island. I chose it, as i chose Summer House, to be stupid. whenever i had enough internet to stream in Ukraine, i would crawl into my hotel bed at night, sometimes with a sleeping bag and sweats over long underwear, and a beanie under a hoodie, thanks to the Russians knocking out the heat. i would dissolve my brain into the beaches and bizarre style choices and pick me bodies and made up faces. i never watched it outside of Ukraine, but on scary frozen nights there it was a perfect xanax substitute without the morning disorientation.

in meditation you catch frequent glimpses of how we don’t really think about things so much as our minds become what we think about. consciousness is a chameleon. an amorphous substrate that moulds to whatever we lay it on. even the physical brain constantly reshapes itself to accommodate what we think and how we think about it.

our voyeurism has a lot to do with trying on the lives and experiences of others and sucking up their lessons without their risks. we taste danger without getting burned. we taste passion without its subsequent fall out. there’s nothing new about gossip, just as last month’s UFC fight was a gladiators re-run.

we learn how to be people by constantly ingesting, embracing, and rejecting the behavior of others. we’re especially fascinated by love and sex and violence. we never really get enough of that stuff. which makes sense when you think about sex and violence in terms of the power to create or kill. who isn’t a little interested in being a god?

i think somehow the neutered, domesticated, relative safety of modern life creates a yearning for animal experiences. we create wildly popular analogues at every opportunity. video games. porn. horror. telenovelas. history, journalism, film, gossip, instagram and bravo. we just want to fucking feel something. there’s something sterile and buffered and child proofed about American life that leaves people starving for contact with any kind of edge.

sometimes my proximity to edges for work makes me a target of that vampire appetite. people don’t even realize quite what they’re saying i think, when someone asks me at a party, sometimes practically salivating, “whats the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” i can’t even hate on it. i am, among other things, a professional vampire. i decided to go looking for the world’s worst things. reality tv’s pantheon of stars have also chosen to feed that hunger, offering up a hologram of their bodies and feelings and intimacies for dissection and digestion to the masses, in exchange for money and fame. in exchange for mattering to others. in exchange for having their lives seen, so that they dont just grow and struggle and rot like the rest of us. grimm’s fairy tales never presented a more ironic deal with the devil. who doesn’t envy and detest and adore the fairy tail princess and the evil stepmother all at the same time.

Kerighan winning Miss Teen Lumbee in NC in 2018

i entered the world of summerhouse intrigued by the ratings-spiking promise of a love triangle scandal spilling over into real life. after a year immersed in imperial invasions, ICE induced tragedies, fascist antics and the earth itself eating one of my favorite places, im trying to surrender to focusing on fashion and skin and sports and hot summer nights and drama. not forever. just for the summer. my heart is tired and my brain is fried.

i inhaled Ciara’s beauty from all angles, puzzled over Amanda and Lindsay’s cosmetic procedures, delighted in Paige’s wardrobe choices and comedic timing. i texted group chats to declare who i loved and who i hated. My stomach lurched at Kyle’s alcoholic and abusive tendencies packaged as entertainment and spackled over by his current shield of victimhood (a favorite accessory for abusive men.) that didn’t stop me from declaring Amanda dead to me for violating the sanctity of girl code. I joined the legions of women shaking their damn heads about how a beefy basic jock like West could capture Ciara’s gentlest and most girlish grin and at no point seem to appreciate the goddess that had inscrutably chosen him, like some kind of mythical bird alighting to nest on the roof of a wal mart. the absurdity of the swag gap and humanity gap and beauty gap converged in a fable for every woman who’s utter disbelief that some tepid fuckboy couldn’t see her somehow dragged her into the hell of trying to prove her own worth to an idiot.

but guys, of course, i’m getting distracted from my point here which is that while yes this is my blog and i write about whatever i want, i assume yall aren’t here for obvious summerhouse thoughts. as i watched, I imagined myself in an unexpected way. i couldn’t stop thinking about the cameraman. especially in emotional scenes where someone runs to a room to cry alone. there we are the audience, a cyclops inside the camera, carried on anonymous legs chasing them through the house. i cringed. i would never pursue someone obviously running for privacy i thought. how sick. i imagined producers in corners ghoulishly delighting in the tears and conflict. i judged them as i lapped up their handiwork. i found myself facing the obvious truth that in a “reality” designed to create a menu of characters for the audience to identify with or despise, i actually have the most in common with the invisible team of puppeteers and vultures creating the show.

as in my work, the biggest lie the series tells is in the absence of the creators. the slight of hand that makes you feel as though the cast is alone in the house, not half of a constant dance with a massive team of people and machines. i use the same tricks. waiting until the person im photographing stops looking at me and their body settles into something evincing relaxation. cropping my writer and his notebook out of the frame. selecting the one photo out of 10 where no one in the picture is staring at me awkwardly. i smooth myself out, as though i’m not participating in every moment, casting an extractive shadow over everything i touch.

in ‘22, as we smoked out the window in Kyiv’s City Hotel in the days immediately following the liberation of Bucha and Irpin, A. and I griped about gross and extractive behavior by our fellow journalists. we’d been photographing streets littered with bodies for days. A. sat back and took a deep breath and changed the tone. She said something like, ‘We have to remember that as much as we try to distance ourselves from other journalists whose behavior we don’t like, fundamentally we’re more like them than not. We’re here photographing the same death and destruction, it feels good to point the finger, but we are essentially people in glass houses throwing stones.’ I was awed by her unflinching clarity. i hear her voice in my head every time i start to try to condemn the “bad journalists” and imply to myself and everyone else that i’m the good ones. Amanda Batula can’t sign up to live on TV and then be surprised when people judge her, i can’t sign up to leech other people’s lives and pretend im not a parasite.

ukrainian soldier’s funeral 2022

Quantum physicists say that the act of measuring a particle changes its state. That a thing (any thing) is not independent, but a collection of potentials that can only be defined by the act of defining, and for the duration of that process. My meditation teacher says that we humans are the same as particles. We’re a “transitory collection” of memories, projections and physical qualities in a constant state of metamorphosis. thoughts defining behavior defining experience defining thoughts defining behavior defining experience in an infinite loop. I think a lot about the distorting power that the act of being measured, being perceived, has on us and all of our bajillions of particles.

when im photographing something terrible mixed with whatever sense of duty or obligation or fascination or shameful excitement, i always feel guilty. not just for my intrusion, for taking when i should be giving, but also for that instinctive feeling that photographing horror makes it more real. brands it in time in some permanent, unnatural way.

the less ugly side of this coin, also true, is our profound fundamental desire to be seen and understood, maybe because we don’t want to be ephemeral and temporary collections of dust.

We all know we’re at our most honest and least accountable when we’re alone. Arguably our truest selves are the ones who eat spoon fulls of peanut butter in our underwear in front of the open fridge, or slip something that doesn’t quite belong to us into a pocket, or pour over words we were never meant to read with racing hearts knowing we should stop, and not stopping. Some of my favorite moments of Summerhouse are the clips recorded by surveillance style camera that catch people talking to themselves or making weird faces in the mirror or doing funny little dances. It mimics that creepy desire so many of us have to be invisible, to hear and see without being seen, to know the unvarnished truth of the world when the world doesn’t know you’re watching.

Except of course these people alone in their rooms are inevitably aware that millions of people are watching. that goofy solo behaviors are profoundly endearing. Every moment is a potential performance, a tik tok clip, a character development opportunity. which of course mirrors the fact that we all know we’re not technically so alone when we’re alone these days either. the phones are listening. every square inch of outside has its cameras. and if we’re not caught by the omnipresent robots a lot of us will send up our own footage of our lives and loves and bodies into the hive mind in a bid for a little attention, the world’s saddest substitute for love.

dnc cameras 2024

Photographing, or filming real life is like wading in water. Its impossible not to make waves. i’ve always found that the quieter the situation, the bigger my impact is. the more peaceful my subject the harder i have to work, to move so slowly, to become a stone in a lake and let it settle around me, until the water can at least pretend to ignore the shockwaves that emanate from my location every time i click the shutter. The more chaotic the situation, paradoxically, the less my intrusion matters. Front lines, parties, crowds, pain, fear, speed, all create such choppy water that my own wake is barely noticed. But im always there. The whole idea of “fly on the wall” in reference to documentary photography has always struck me as a tremendous absurdity. Sure, a 5’7 insect in the room with a giant camera clacking away and staring hard when she’s not hiding behind her little metal contraption. I think its part of the reason i prefer to work in extreme scenarios, where my presence feels less obnoxious. these days i edit out the people staring at me and my camera less and less. i’m tired of that particular lie.

A man turns to face the camera with gray eyes set under a furrowed, sweat streaked forehead. his t shirt shows a faded logo from some faded government initiative, stuck to his body with a paste of perspiration and dust. he gestures behind him with all of his fingers extended, before whipping his arm back around to hold his palms up imploringly in a dance that washes me with familiarity. a body language as unique to Venezuela as the spoken accent. i used to marvel at this choreography as i learned their spanish. eventually i would watch my hands animate in front of my eyes with these same movements, as though somehow some little part of my hands now belonged more to this place than to me.

he says his wife, his mother, and his two daughters are under there. there are hundreds of feet of concrete collapsed into powder, twisted metal rods, a neat stack of airy beach front spaces full of kids footsteps, and sizzling corn flour, and marital spats and hanging laundry, and pre-noche de san juan salsa all crumbled into a mass grave in seconds. his hands dirt crusted and curled into claws from effort. he’s begging for heavy machinery to lift the jaws of this thing that ate everyone he loved so he can try to pull them out. he can hear them crying for help. he can’t get to them.

i scroll to the next post and its a list of needs.

water, shovels, diapers, strong volunteers, aspirin, antibiotics, baby formula, mattresses, tents, masks, helmets, heavy machinery

the next shows an altercation between police and survivors, the officers standing nervously with clean hands folded in the rubble lined streets, as more families coated in the remains of their buildings scream at them with rage and heart break in their voices, “why don’t you help?”

a friend posts an old photo of her dad, decorated with a border of flowers and designs. “rest in peace” in script below. i imagine how she had been holding her breath, praying that he had survived. or hoping desperately that he hadn’t been inside that building, and would appear somewhere and call to say he hadn’t had service but he was fine, until they found his remains.

posts share updates on the site where they’re digging for a beloved young artist who’s friends with a lot of my friends. they beg everyone to hold on to hope, until they find his body and the hope is lost. then its memorials.

i hear lexi’s voice in my head when she told me their other friend was pulled out, lifeless.

the next video shows a huge man gently cradling an injured doodle type dog as he pulls it from a crack between pipes and collapsed walls. his bulging manual labor arms trembling as he tries to hold the dog tight enough to calm him without hurting him.

men pass a swaddled baby to his weeping father, alive.

a teenage boy in rubber work boots slips into a hole inside the carcas of another Gran Mission Vivienda (housing project) and disappears from view worming on his stomach amid after shocks. he’s searching for his siblings. his parents were dead, he said, but they could hear children calling for help. rescuers are not coming. everywhere they’re digging and praying and digging again.

I shove my phone in a sweaty pocket and look up to see 3 blonde girls running down 42nd street from 7th avenue. i raise my camera to my eye and the metal is even hotter than the air. i turn to a grinning woman with her eye encircled in heart shaped blue glitter. i stand close to her to shoot the detail. a parade of black sprinter vans emerges from the white tents lining Madison Square Gardens delivering glamorous cargo. each one has a flyer in the windshield that says “Jade” and then a number. Celebrity secret code. A young boy with sweaty hair climbs up on a police barricade to get a better look at the guests who we can barely see from this angle. his father watches over him as he balances there, protective and happy to give his son a chance to see a modern deity while on vacation in new york city.

A woman approaches in a pink eras tour t shirt with a black umbrella over her to keep the sun off. I can barely understand how to meter for this light. I blast flash on top of everything which somehow makes me feel even hotter just looking at it. I back up and wait for her to pass a giant Hulk Hogan poster and snap her again walking by. a teenage girl relaxes her vigilant watch over the entrance in the distance to lean a reddened face on her mom’s shoulder as the police mop their brows with bandanas and washcloths. a woman walks by and shouts “they shut down 3 avenue’s for this white bitches wedding?”

i push myself to lift my molten sneakers. i try not to think about the budget for this event and what it could do for Venezuela. i know that kind of thinking will drive you insane without doing any good. two of my favorite editors at the Times asked me to do this shoot and somewhere inside all my other feelings i’m desperate to find a way to do a good job here even though there’s not much to shoot and its 110 degree real feel. i feel like im failing. my brain is emanating a low hum of panic, a survival instinct warning that this heat is dangerous, and i need it to shut up so i can think straight. i duck into a cvs for a blast of AC and to buy some worthers originals which always give me a little bit of will to live. i head back out determined to make a decent picture. i shoot a woman sitting on a barricade in a crown of flowers, and a tall cop buying a rainbow icey from a tiny vendor.

one of my editors texts our group chat and asks if anyone can file and i run for a starbucks. i fight with the colors of the heatwave reflecting off concrete in lightroom and send my selects off into the ether before slumping in my chair. i check the internet again.

a friend’s asking for money to help her elderly father who lost his home and everything in it.

reposts of lists of the missing, numbering in the tens of thousands.

in a group chat, a journalist i dont know corrects my estimate of the number of dead (over 10,000 easily.) “i read it’s 2000 in the nytimes” i type and delete a response about how thats the official death toll but thats official so it means nothing when they’ve already ordered 10,000 body bags and created mass graves for the unidentified. i grind my jaw in rage about this kind of exchange with a dude who skimmed an article and has never been there.

i text lexi to check on her, knowing she’s in the same limbo. heart in her mouth. camera in hand photographing arrivals from the other side of the building. knowing she’s close helps. any other day i would be bursting with pride that my former assistant and forever little sister and i are now sharing a ny times assignment. i still am. you can burst with pride while your heart breaks. later ill look at her pictures and see that she shot way better than me and tell her so. for now we meet in a foot locker to catch up in the air conditioning. she looks exhausted but her voice is calm and her head is up. we can barely form words about how surreal it is. we hug and i descend into the hot breath of the subway stairs.

i plunge back into my Venezuelan news algorithm on the train home. my ex is compiling a spread sheet of missing persons and patients in hospitals and lost children in improvised refugee centers. Cassandra is raising money, she shares a video of her impossibly beautiful face and sad eyes looking beyond exhausted asking for support. she posts a quick extra video asking everyone to please not donate to Code Pink which provokes my first giggle in a while. I share, i donate, i write a little message again asking for money. every time my phone pings with a venmo notification i tear up with gratitude and forward to Mariana who’s organizing non stop. Luis sending videos of what he’s bringing to the people on the ground. (Ice, medicine, thermal cameras, baby heart monitors, food, tents, kennels for lost animals.) Marianita checks in and we share a few stunned and heart broken words and then get back to raising money.

I text a guy i’ve been talking to that im not sure i can meet next week because i might be going to Venezuela. “For work or vacation?” he asks. i delete our text thread and his number mostly to stop myself from throwing my phone across the car.

i notice that its the spanish speakers who know how bad the calamity is. somehow its just not penetrated in english. i wonder for the millionth time if the world is more fucked up than it used to be, if there’s more suffering, or if we simply now have access to watching it in real time. i think its the latter.

At dinner with friends they ask and they listen and i try not to ruin the meal with the horror stories, but i also kind of want to do exactly that because im desperate for people to know. I tell them that its not just an earthquake if there’s such a thing as just an earthquake. That its thousands of homes built from shitty shaky materials on fault lines because authorities ignored the warnings from seismologists for years and embezzled the funding for housing projects to be built properly. That there was cardboard or styrofoam or whatever in the cement and corners cut at every juncture and that every time we’ve felt tremors Adri and i joked about que la tierra nos esta perreando because the problems there were so big nobody had much time to worry about the earth attacking from below.

And it wasn’t just that hundreds of buildings collapsed with their residents all inside plus their guests because it was Noche de San Juan and everyone goes to the beach that night to party so all of those buildings were especially full. that the structures crumpled like dozens of 9/11s. but that people are trapped inside right now as we speak and nobody can get to them because there were not enough emergency crews and equipment and mostly it was just civilians improvising alone with whatever they could find.

that they’re dying right now, and nobody is coming to help. that 17 days later families are clustered atop hills of rubble begging for time to dig out their loved ones bodies with or without help, to bury them before the ruins are demolished.

i stay out too late dissociating and dream i’m missing two planes at once and can’t find my way out of my apartment. i check my phone when i wake up for texts about whether or not im getting sent there. no word.

i cant stop hearing adriana’s voice notes in my head, sounding strong and clear as always, but impossibly tired, as she recounts some of the worst shit i’ve heard in my journalism career about the scene at the wreckage.

i spend the week in NYC dragging a heavy heart through a jubilant summer. the nights are thick and full of glowing bodies and wild grins. i roller coaster between appreciation and a vertigo when the grief hits. sometimes the perfect days lift me out of myself and i laugh with Li and Honey til we’re crying. Billy looks across a table at me, worried, and tells me we can’t carry it all all of the time. Venezuela always taught me that we have to at least try.

i know yall come for what i hope is decent writing and i dont really think this is that but i had to put it down so if you got this far thanks for reading.

if you want to donate to my dear friends who are organizing DIRECT (no middle man no skimming no land rover and lobster budget for NGO employees or govt officials someday ill write a whole post on the ridiculous shit i’ve seen in the field) mutual aid to the neediest folks in La Guaira please venmo me directly or click this link to donate to Mariana who’s organizing. or if you want to sign up for a paid subscription here ill be donating all those proceeds this month too.

Its freezing in the white house press room. And way smaller than it looks on tv. The chairs feel cramped and miniature like we’re on a plane. I put my camera on a chair and sit on the blue carpet with white stars on the floor of the stage. Over my head there are dozens of cameras rigged at various angles and fellow journalists take turns posing for selfies at the podium. I stubbornly pick at the boxed lunch provided to us with a sticker that says “All American” on it: A burger, a hot dog, corn on the cob, tater tots.

After a couple hours in the room my fingers are white from the air conditioning and i step outside to face time my mom. “Mom guess who’s walking by its Stephen Miller,” i tell her. The grass is too manicured and the light bouncing off the back of the white house is too clear and nothing feels remotely real. After holding for 6 hours we’re finally spit out into the spectacle. We’re escorted through an all white marble room guarded by soldiers in dress uniform with those hats that cover their eyes and then the real soldiers with massive assault rifles wearing 80 pounds of state of the art kit loitering right out of sight. We’re through the door and down a path and we’re ring side. The air is heavy and blue between the lights and the post rain clouds and women in their stilettos are clinging to shoulders as they take their places over a snake pits of cables coiling and uncoiling behind giant tv cameras and techs in black t shirts.

In the first 5 minutes we’re on the floor all the photographers and tv camera guys end up in a growling tussle in which a few go down on the ground and get a bit trampled just as Trump walks by. i manage to jump out of reach of the melee to avoid getting dragged down too and get off a single mediocre shot of the president before he takes his seat. An old and famous photographer who earlier gave Stephen Miller a big hug basketball picks me aggressively with his body for zero reason while im trying to gently pass behind him without blocking his shot. I take a deep breath and look around the room releasing the nonsense tension of the pit by reminding myself where I’m at, and immediately make eye contact with the audience, who of course today are also the performers. Andrew Huberman looks veiny and drawn with a long beard that reminds me of lord of the rings. Women on the arms of politicians and fighters watch me watching them to see if i think they’re pretty and want to take their picture. (I do, I don’t.) Kash Patel is dwarfed by some very big men with the ears and jaws and diamonds of fighters and im sure they’re very famous and i have no idea who they are.

My assigned position is impossibly bad, not only behind one of the posts of the octagon but with a big light box on it that says UFC pretty much obstructing my entire shot. I ask the miraculously kind and competent UFC press minder in a sharp burgundy suit and pointed toed shoes about it, and he asks my whole bench to slide over to give me a little space. The photographer next to me, who actually stands to benefit from sliding over, reflexively clenches and protests that is my problem not his, protecting his tiny slice of territory even while being offered a better one. I blink at him very slowly and he doubles down. I remind myself not to get to into this because i don’t necessarily need a clear shot to do what i came to do here although it would be nice. He asks if this is my first fight. I blink again slowly and say no. His eyes dart around a little and I can see him start to second guess himself. He offers me a cable that i dont need and i again quietly say no thanks. His gears turn. He begins to slide over and offers to share space. I sigh as the first contestants come out, kneel on the bench and arch my core sideways and up to get an angle where you can see Trump and Melania framed by the fighters feet.

Before i typed this i did a few laps around my head examining the idea for faults but i do think its fundamentally true: there are basically two types of photography. There is “picture of the thing” photography, where you’re objective is to capture something, to freeze a moment, to GET it. Its like hunting. You might be trying to nail something mid air or cleverly juxtapose THIS thing next to THAT thing but either way its a seek and trap mentality. It results in these moments in the field where I see people waiting for whatever thing to happen, coiled to strike, competitive, often blind to anything else that might be going on before or after or right behind you with tunnel vision for a person or an incident or a war crime or a hand shake or a touch down or whatever. And then the moment happens and they check to see if they got it and sometimes they show each other the back of their cameras and say i got it did you get it and its a zero sum game, did you get it, how good did you get it, if you didn’t get it you lost.

Shooting that way is of course its own universe and within it are a ton of geniuses who i admire, who have an eye for a moment worth freeze drying for history that extends way beyond the peak of action or uncritical reproduction of spectacle. I have much respect for the photojournalists who practice in this way in the service of dutifully and diligently creating a public record without any interest in the more selfish internal dialogue of the artist who wants to put their mark all over these moments until they’re more about the see-er than whats seen. (Me. But im also always trying to do both)

Within that field of hunter photographers there’s also a vein that are mostly just collecting without worrying much about what their trophies mean, and there are also a lot that don’t realize some of us aren’t competing in that game. I see no best photo of the day. There is no moment that is inherently decisive, and if you chase it too hard you’ll miss a million moments that are more human, more meaningful, more felt. Or worse, you’ll trample others, literally and figuratively, to get that all-important shot. Every couple of years maybe i come across a moment thats so terrible, so urgent, so transcendent that it might be worth a trample for, but thats almost never happened at a press conference or a sports game or a runway show where i find more ferocity between photographers than in any setting that really matters.

The other side, my side, of course comes with its own ethical mess. You’re constructing your own vision in the frame, to make something that looks and feels like something you have in your head that you want to express. Which is great, in a studio, in a collaborative fine art commercial whatever practice, but gets pretty dubious when you’re trying to do that with other people’s lives. A million books have been written on this subject so i wont go too far with it here, but in that little donut shaped pit around the octagon surrounded by heads of state and billionaires and the utterly bizarre ecosystem of sycophants and semi celebrities and scavengers searching for a route to the top arranged in a larger donut around us I was imagining the tight rope i was trying to walk and fighting desperately to stay on it.

The sport, of shoving for position and just machine gun shuttering through every shiny thing that moves, easily takes over your dopamine circuits and traps you in the hunt if you’re not careful. I have to slow my breathing and drop my camera and look and remind myself im not playing that game. I talk to myself constantly. What are we doing here? What is the point? What do you want to say about this? What is true? What can you see here from this privileged access, that no one will ever see despite the media saturation present, if you don’t show them?

Dystopian fantasia moments like this one make it hardest to think straight but they’re also my favorite because you’re not generating energy but deciphering it. Its sifting rather than conjuring and I like environments so chaotic that the inside of my head feels calm by contrast.

There’s lights and smoke and famous people pulling wild faces everywhere and men getting paid to hurt each other to roaring chants of USA USA from the smallish crowd curated to be in these stands. I’m not trying to be puritan about the paid fighter thing i respect the sport but the context muddies things. In the title fight, like in all the others, the only cheers were nationalist. A date the other night asked me how i defined good nationalism vs bad nationalism and i said its good for underdogs and bad for anyone else. This particular breed of nationalism, chanting USA in a feverish roar broken by megatron montages of drones blowing things up and AI generated eagles in ads for the department of war, as the blood on Ilia Topurias face mixed with the sweat into a bright watercolor wash, was the latter. When he slammed against the wire fence in front of me I heard myself say feebily, come on Ilia, as hundreds all around us screamed for more of his blood. I’m sure he’s beyond used to it, but i wonder how accustomed he was to the skewed strain of patriotism which made him less a sports rival than an other. I doubt he could hear me much anyways over the crowd.

My best friend texted me a picture of me shooting through the cage on tv. My favorite press minder came and warned us there was about to be another war plane fly over which sounded deafening and brought back unpleasant memories but failed somewhat as a show because it was too dark to see them. I watched Zuckerburg seated about 10 feet from me. He seemed to also be painfully aware of his visibility and shifted through a short series of body positions that appeared media trained, contrived to appear relaxed and comfortable which his eyes were not. Eventually some attendant came to pull Zuck from his seat and walk him over to greet Trump. I watched their interaction through the chain links, Trump craning his neck up to peak out from a white hat covering his eyes, Zuck leaning on the back of his chair and smiling broadly. Power measured and exchanged in the negative space of proximity and controlled gestures. A conversation to be seen perhaps more than heard. On his way back to his seat Zuck stopped to chat with Stephen Miller and i dropped to the floor to frame their two heads clean against the eerie blue light. I looked up and RFK who was watching my absurd camera yoga, smiled at me politely. I stared back blank and thought about what ISO would best capture the strange glow of his skin and eyes in the blue monochrome.

As we were escorted towards the white house to exit, we were held by secret service for the entire Trump clan to pass in front of us on their way out. They twisted in their long legged strides with practiced vaseline teeth smiles and waved for our cameras before disappearing into the white house. I took a photo i’ll never use anywhere of a gorgeous old Magnolia, my favorite tree, lit perfectly by the spillover from the event lighting.

nobody wants to be a symbol.

nobody wants to be your martyr. nobody wants to be your totem of revolution. nobody wants to have to ask you to call them a “survivor” instead of a “victim.” nobody wants some journalist to tell them they’re so resilient with eyebrows knitted in drippy, self conscious empathy.

we make others into martyrs for ourselves, not for them. the dead are gone and the suffering are busy surviving. we make it meaningful afterwards so we can live with it. we mourn for ourselves. we make meaning so we don’t go insane, but i’m not convinced that any of this objectively means anything.

the cubans i met weren’t talking about revolution. they were talking about how to feed a family when there’s no gas to get to work, or to the store, or to keep the chicken cold in the freezer if you can get it. an ambassador asked us if i thought the gringos would truly invade. a widow asked us how it would end. a father told me he’d go get his son out of the military barracks himself before he let him die for these people. a widow asked us when delta force was coming. everyone waited about 15 minutes, or until we were alone, or until it appeared nobody was listening, to ask us some version of when and how. a businessman licked his lips. a mother clutched her baby tighter and and said she didn’t really care how any more.

everyone was waiting. that’s something its always hard to translate to my fellow gringo audience. how good at waiting people from anywhere else can be.

i’ve been reading about consciousness and sleeping off the past few months and having sharp, thick dreams with weird cameos. in bed with a mutant version of an ex and the missile hits next door and he can’t hear it. in the field without my PPE. in the past and can’t remember how i got there. i’m back with adri laughing as we get stuck in a mini landslide in the avila and its funny but i’m secretly terrified this time. i dream over and over again that i’m finally forced to really pick a side on something instead of taking pictures. to be a participant instead of an observer and it always ends ugly. i dream i’m talking to the dead.

a soldier from ukraine who i thought was dead writes me very much alive. i ask him how its going on the front line and he says its terrible what would you expect. i hang my head over my phone with a shame he can’t see and try to say the right thing. im sorry. im glad you’re alive. please stay that way. i write a pitch mostly just hoping to get to see him the others.

i ask a friend in Havana what they thought about the aid convoy and they said “lots of noise, lots of instagram, everything stays the same.” i ask a friend who was on the aid convoy and they said it was more moving than expected, and also notes the optics were complicated and made them pretty uncomfortable. i ask a venezuelan friend how it feels in his barrio and he says hopeful. he asks if Trump is gonna help raise the minimum wage. i tell him, gently, to try to manage his hopes. he tells me not to talk like that, says he needs hope now. i say i wish i could lie to him but i don’t think that does any good. i hope so much that im wrong and he’s right.

the winter strips everyone’s faces naked. back in NYC and i keep thinking about a conversation i had with a friend who’s always the life of the party until 4am when the sadness behind all his jokes creeps in. he told me he prefers winter to summer because you can watch everyone’s eyes peeking out from their bundled heads. “everyone’s just surviving.” he said it with this soft wonder in his voice and it always stuck with me because he’s never serious about anything. at the time i didn’t get it because i hate winter and couldn’t imagine getting past the discomfort to the sense of stark, fresh, quiet that its been giving me since i got back to north america, but here we are.

the warmth last saturday felt sudden and came with notifications alternating between sports style coverage of what we’d blown up in Iran, and who we’d killed, and elated texts about the good weather. i walked out of my apartment to go run sprints which is an insane thing to do while your country bombs another but also there’s nothing in particular that isn’t an insane thing to do in these circumstances.

people tilted their faces up to the sun and i thought about being in Ukraine at the start of the war and wondering how the Russians could just go on doing life while their missiles whistled and thudded into Kyiv. and also remembered that i already knew exactly how cause we do it all the time. ukrainians would ask that question and i would think of iraq and afghanistan and feel sick. my mom said on the phone the other day that judgement is just another way of distancing yourself from something you’re uncomfortably close to. i went for my little run and when i got back the headlines were still rolling.

some things shouldn’t be bite size. reporting the play by plays of war is necessary but its normalizing. S. texted me and asked me what i made of it and I said I don’t know shit about the region but obviously bad and she pocket dialed me while i wiped down charlie’s dirty paws with a towel and for a moment we both shook our heads into our earbuds, without much to say.

at an appointment on monday the doctor asked me if we should be worried about retaliation here and i said not so much in terms of direct military strikes but yes in terms of making the world a worse place. in terms of blood all over our hands, yes.

i ran into an Iranian friend in the park and hugged her hard. she said her family and friends are fighting and taking sides and she’s locked at home smoking all day feeling like everyone’s gone crazy.

about a year ago i was at a block party and i was trying really hard and mostly failing to have fun, while avoiding someone who was there. i ran into a friend of his and tried so hard not to be awkward while battling fight or flight. relatively often i have conversations with men who like to explain things to me about Ukraine and Venezuela. they can’t resist the urge to correct my world view, which they know is wrong from reading, or lets be real, listening to podcasts, and flipping some insta slides, although they’ve never set foot in the places they’re explaining to me. They like to tell me, that Ukraine was invaded because of NATO and US foreign policy, and that Putin is misunderstood, and I must not have realized about this thing called the CIA which does this thing called imperialism. like i didnt read chomsky in highschool too my guy.

the acquaintance explained these things to me. i crossed my arms and felt my eyes starting to smolder. i tried to inject some nuance and find some common ground. not kumbaya centrist kind of nuance but real life suffering and so many sources of evil at the same time in any scenario nuance. that invasion from any direction is imperial and wrong. that perhaps, sometimes, what the people want in a place like Ukraine, or Venezuela, organically, due to their own experiences and agency, their own history and their own home grown bad governments, there is some overlap between the US imperial agenda and their own desires, which neither validates the US imperial agenda nor invalidates their wishes for their country and their future.

these uncomfortable facts give Russia no more right to invade Ukraine, than it gave us the right to invade Venezuela, or Israel the right to raze Gaza to the ground. that human rights, sadly, are not about liking the politics of the victim, or hating the politics of the violator. its not about teams or banners. allegiance to an ideology to the point of oppressing people whose views you abhor still turns you into a monster. its sticky and annoyingly complicated and makes it difficult to wear your political identity as a cute accessory, or a badge of intellectual superiority. political binaries of left and right don’t translate well across cultures and continents. they contort in transit. the words mean different things in different contexts. the axis moves and the connotations and semiotics mutate. i wish it was simple but if you try to rubber stamp the view you formed about your own country onto another that you’ve never been to, even with the best of intentions, i promise you it never quite fits.

i bit my tongue. i had a couple of embarrassing, exasperated tears in my eyes, i asked questions like, “have you ever been there? Do you know any Ukrainians? ”

They tell me, how Maduro is a rebel martyr, and the Ukrainians are not fighting a just war to defend their homeland because the US manipulated them into not wanting to be part of Russia, and they’re just victims of psy-ops. my brain plays back the wet furrowed eyes of torture victims and quivering stories of extrajudicial killings and people starving and bombs and missiles and drones and little old ladies with trickles of blood leaving trails in the plaster dust on their cheeks, and friends that didn’t make it, and that one kid who got his chest blown open with my nickname on his lips, and i usually get so overwhelmed i’m not very articulate and i sputter something like, but i know these people and i loved them.

that i wish it was that simple too and i miss the days before i met all these people and saw what happened to them when i thought that you could just hold up a ruler to how hardcore someone’s belief in certain things was and more or less measure their character. but words are just window dressing. i dont care what you say i care what you do. no amount of psychobabble excuses or childhood trauma really change the hurt an individual does to another under duress. no amount of yap about anti imperialism or terrorism or whatever the ideological hat you want to wear erases torture or authoritarianism. i might have more patience and empathy for certain versions sure but harm is harm.

i tried to keep the conversation cool at the block party. i never want to be that girl that gets too intense. i failed as usual. for him its an abstraction. a debate to be won. i extricated myself and hid in a circle of my girlfriends for about an hour before irish exiting.

***

i’m trying to figure out how to be a journalist in these times while saying what i need to say. I tell my students that its impossible to be neutral and human a the same time. less if you’re seeing ICE separate families in person or sharing bomb shelters with children. That the myth of the objective journalist is a lie. I use a cute robot emoji in the slide show when we discuss this. “Are you a robot? No. Then you have feelings. Then you will care about the people you photograph and the issues you cover. That’s not a failure, that’s your fuel.” Our mission as journalists is not to adopt a frigid, sterile distance from suffering, but to be honest about it. even when it forces us to portray people we’ve come to love or admire as flawed, or undercut the veneer of perfection that a movement we generally believe in would like to project.

We do that not because we’re snitches, but because by reporting the inevitably messy reality beyond the headlines of literally anything, we earn trust. Because there’s no such thing good guys or bad guys. If journalism has taught me anything, its that the powerful are mostly either bad guys or slightly less bad bad guys. That your artistic or political hero is often an asshole in private. That the guy who risks his life to save someone might be paying down an ugly karmic debt. That we’re all doing our best and sometimes its pretty bad. the only side i can consistently find myself on is that of the civilians trying to get on with life under fire and mostly politics at that point becomes inconsequential fluff. As soon as you get up into the ranks of power everything starts to stink, even when the politics of the group in power sound nice from a distance.

It cuts the other way. I see more and more in media this myth of the innocent victim. the idea that an oppressed person is inherently saintly. As though they are somehow not deserving of fundamental dignity and safety if they’d ever made a big mistake before. As though by being persecuted or worse they’ve earned moral superiority instead of simple human rights. As though we can’t tell you the truth about the working man who in fact has done a crime or two, who doesn’t deserve to be deported, and is still someone i can share a meal with and feel safe and laugh. Life is like that and we all know it. Have you ever met someone innocent? And yet in our current washing machine of warp speed polarization i feel the walls of dogma pressing in on me from all sides. Of course breaking every rule of war to fly in and kidnap a president and drag him home like a hunting trophy is catastrophically bad illegal and wrong. That doesn’t mean he was a good revolutionary or that he didn’t steal that election. It shouldn’t have to. a tyrant attacking you does not make you a saint. your enemy’s enemy is not, in fact, your friend.

***

often when i raise this stuff, the guy speaking deftly swats my little feelings aside with some talking point he vaguely remembers from a college essay or a reel and subtly implies i have a confused and weak political mind. or worse, people whose worldview i find abhorrent assume i’m supporting theirs.

in these last couple of weeks these conversations, and there have been many, have stuck in my head more than i’d like to admit. a friend who is an excellent journalist tells me these are internet people, that they’re not real, but lately i seem to run into internet thinking everywhere. I spent 5 weeks on the road reporting on the fallout of our foreign policy (if you can call it that) in Latin America. I make the arguments to myself in my head and struggle with how to write them because my goal is to be able to keep doing this work and that means i have to watch my mouth. But I will say the math is easy. No politics supersedes being pro- civilian, and anti- killing them.

If dogma acrobatics somehow land you in favor of violence against civilians, whether its some kind of pragmatic justification of ICE ripping kids away from their mothers or shooting nurses in the back, or in order to keep X country safe and “free” we have to blow all of this one’s women and children to hell, or extrajudicial killing is less bad if the dictator claims to be anti-imperial, go watch them die, in person, not on video, and let me know how the theory holds up.

One told me she watched from the balcony in awe and terror, knowing standing there was stupid and dangerous but unable to look away. One said they were almost giddy. Others crouched in apartments designed to be open to Caracas’s always perfect breezy sunny days, sick with terror at the alien sounds that vibrate your chest and come closer and closer despite your prayers that it will stop.

I’m accustomed to my self protective posture of having seen it all. i like to be in a headspace of ‘it couldn’t be worse than i think it will be.’ but this week as we wait, and wait, and wait, in Bogota, a soothing third location of relative sanity and calm, it feels like gravity itself has tumbled sideways and crumpled in on itself, pulling on the events of our days with a force and logic i don’t want to understand yet. It’s always been coming but coming is different than here. Purgatory is a sensory deprivation chamber and I’m not entirely unrelieved to be in it.

I made coffee and tried to say evenly into the phone “Its best to be in a basement and if you can’t do that use the silly little two wall rule no windows bathtubs are good” which felt useless but it was all i had to offer. I remembered what Erin T had told me as we sat on the plush carpet of the City Hotel in Kyiv when it was surrounded by Russians, and her words have always felt like a grounding in total chaos: “If the windows are shaking the attack is too close and its basement time.” They blew out Marianita’s abuela’s windows so yes i think that qualifies as too close. I took deep quiet breaths on so i could project calm and be helpful until Lexi got ready to go out to shoot.

I choked down the part of me that wanted to scream at her not to go outside, that we had no idea if the drones and missiles would be back yet, and forced encouraging words “You got this baby just trust your gut.” She’s been making the most gentle, powerful work ever since. I tell my girls i love them 16 times a day and cling to the knowledge that they made it through that night and they’re ok. they tell me about death and damage. mothers wringing their hands. the moments that push them to the edge. I imagine hugging them constantly and try not too imagine too hard to ward off disappointment if it doesn’t happen.

I lit two candles on top of mount Montseratte. One for Venezuela. One for the person i hiked to the top with who stood quietly at my side as we said our little prayers in a cave streaked with colored wax and flickering light.

I photographed Colombian President Gustavo Petro and watched, riveted as he sank deep into his office chair, books and papers piled high around him. he never stopped moving during the interview. a world leader who reads and hasn’t locked down his body language into something trained and robotic. he wrapped his hands around the back of his neck, then twisted his cross necklace, he covered his mouth with his fingers, he leaned forward toward JL hugging his elbows to his knees, then back to the hand behind his neck, in a subconscious sequence. i barely heard the interview because i was so fixated on his gestures and how to photograph them and where in the room i could balance my light to make it ricochet into something that felt like the vibe of pending doom. you can Jon Lee Anderson’s resulting piece here. (Working with him was a dream, reading his book on Che when i was 16 made me want to be a journalist when i grew up, and he’s one of the few heroes of mine i’ve met in real life that didn’t disappoint.)

We went to a massive anti-imperial rally in the center of Bogota where the energy was soothing, and then Petro explained that he had just gotten off the phone with Trump. Tentacles everywhere. the press riser was divided into two sides with a 2 foot gap in the platform in the middle and i climbed and worked my way to the perfect spot in the center straddling the two sides uncomfortably but with a good angle only to see that the other person who had that idea, perched right in front of me, was of course B. we laughed and worked side by side como siempre.

I’m starting to grudgingly enjoy the sweet cheesiness of Colombian Arepas while dreaming of the pure simple perfection of the Venezuelan ones. I make up stories about the intimate sound snippets of people’s lives you hear when you’re staying in a hotel. A young woman weeping hysterically (i hesitated outsider her door, as though it would make sense to knock and ask if she was ok, then i realized that was borderline crazy and kept walking down the stairs.) Couples fucking very loud. The giggling of the house keepers. The bad Spanish accent of the journalist next door. The high heels clicking on the floor above at 4am on the dot every day. I work out in my room and meditate and check my phone again. Nothing can remind you that you’re an ant like geopolitics.

el avila, caracas 2019

In Caracas we would hike the avila to descargar. To escape. To breathe. Black birds with long legs called Guacharacas peck through the brush on either side of the path and laugh at you on your sweaty, breathless way up. Their voices are hoarse and scratchy but the gorgeous blue and gold Guacamayas sound even uglier despite being little drops of the divine guarding the city. In Bogota, Caracas’ rainier, much more functional cousin, there is also a mountain that hugs the edge of the city. my new york brain is fascinated by the idea that a metropolis can just abruptly dead end into a steep jungle, instead of dragging out into smaller apartments and warehouses and inevitable sterile suburbs.

I went for a run along the seam where the tumbling foliage collides with luxury condos. Early in the morning privileged children in green uniforms wait with parents in expensive sweaters for the school bus. I run by security guards posted every couple of blocks and give a dumb smile as i weave in and out of gated communities. I got lucky and stumbled onto a well kept entry to the mountain trails guarded by a handsome 20 something named Santi. ran up into the misty forest dotted with purple flowers and and stones the color of the clouds and eery blue steal leaves of bushes growing from the rocks. Here the birds are small. No venezuelan guacharacas or guacayamayas but climbing above the city reminds me how to breath and im a happy tiny ant again watching the city and all its human problems feel distant. up there its quieter than the avila over Caracas which always seems to seethe even when watching it from up in the sky.

Each morning now i come back down with a sense that i’ve breathed hard enough to make it through another day of waiting by the phone. I get a manicure, go to a panel talk about Colombia’s endless war, JL points out people in the room with deep roots in history. Unassuming faces who’ve played pivotal parts in the conflict, in the peace, in the future. I see old friends and we count the years since last time we crossed paths on each others faces. Journalists are weird because we only see each other in some kind of crisis, which we’re all a little too used to it and laugh a little too loud while our movements broil with stress.

B climbs the mountain with me and we fall into step next to each other outside of time and past and future. We talk constantly but the biggest things dont have to be said.

I say yes to coffee with acquaintances and random invitations. My life outside of new york is uncluttered by routine, affiliations and identity. In my apartment in Brooklyn while im typing or staring at the wall im always a little too busy for a last minute lunch but on the road suddenly i’m open to new people and whatever thing they suggest has no connotation for me to use as an excuse not to go. Its lucky to be picked up and dropped in a place where you can only keep your habits by force. The brittle pieces of self soften in a place where you dont belong. which expects nothing at all from you.

***

8 days turns into exactly two weeks. the sun finally came out in bogota. every morning i ran a bit higher up into the mountains until that process starts to happen where i wonder if the real me is the girl who has created a routine here and who cant quite imagine waking up and not heading straight for the mountain, or the girl who is flying to one of 3 different countries tomorrow still tbd, or the girl who left brooklyn and a dog and a mom and friends and habits and classes and projects on Jan 3 which was actually a year ago and its crazy how fast i’m not sure i know her any more. my meditation teacher says a reality is a flickering intersection of consciousness and context. its all dissolving as it happens. its addictive to be free of all the things that remind you of who you’re sposed to be. that root you in the past.

when the message came in that we are leaving for Havana, not Caracas, I cried. the only reaction left to being cut off from loved ones by borders and papers. personal histories tangled with global chaos and neither even remotely in my control. i told friends on facetime this week that i felt calm and accepting of whatever came next, at peace with my lack of power, but when it came down to plane tickets and choices i sat in a crowded cafe with B with helpless tears all over my face. for all the shit i can’t maneuver and the timelines i can’t follow and wishes i can’t make come true. for all the nauseating powerlessness and gravity once again pulling me exactly away from the people i see when i close my eyes. that’s a border. thats the feeling when there’s no more moves left and you just have to weep til you’re sick of it and then start packing.

i know a lot of photographers who are in love with photography. who feel something for a great picture. who struggle and suffer to make them, for whom visual elegance creates a sense of peace. i’m not that. i like pictures. i feel lucky when good ones happen for me. over the years i’ve gotten good at maximizing luck. i’ve practiced staring, predicting, running and ducking, developed a fun relationship with light so we can work well together. its more of a sport i enjoy than a means to create a great work. i get a lot more out of the chase than the images themselves. i’m delighted when the picture evokes some of what i was feeling when i made it. an echo of fascination, horror, limerence, a convergence of the absurd or enchanted. at best good pictures convince me for a second that whatever our human understanding of reality is, it falls short. but essentially i’m a squirrel. i make the photo, stash it somewhere, and scurry back out to sniff around and forget where i put what i just made.

i have little faith in the truth of images because we see what we project. every element in a composition is imbued with the infinite variables of subjective experience. people ask me “did you mean to do x,y,z thing in this frame?” and my answer is usually “kinda” but the more honest answer is i’m mostly just snapping and reacting and figuring out what caught my attention after the fact. pictures are a rorschach test. do you see a butterfly or a monster or an xray or a smiley face? we’re all hallucinating.

i feel the same way about words. i love them. maybe more than pictures. reading a phrase that feels transcendent, or hearing a perfect combination tumble almost by accident out of a friend’s mouth, kinda does fill me with awe. mainlining other people’s thoughts, and realizing inside their experience are sensations and ideas i’d felt but never quite articulated before, feels like a divine wink.

but so often in conversation we refer to what someone said as though that has gravity. as though that means that for them, in that moment, it must have been true. i think of our words more a transient sketch than a conclusive reproduction of whatever’s going on in our heads. its what’s occurring to us now. or what we think people want to hear. or the opposite of what we’re afraid to say. a regurgitation of what we’ve heard recently. words are decorative rather than substantive. window dressing that can distract from the view.

i’ve been in so many rooms where i couldn’t speak the language but the communication all happened anyways. i’ve been in so many conversations where the words were all right but the experience was all wrong. i like to write because its an exercise in actually trying to put down something true, and its always a struggle and maybe inevitably a partial failure.

i’ve been listening to so much news and conversations about politics and policy because i can’t look away. even if it somehow all the talking happens on another planet from what we’re talking about. like the words have been unplugged from the streets and nobody can quite figure out how to reconnect them.

for the millionth time this morning i heard someone talk about polling and voting. i flashed back to covering the last couple of campaigns and how the words i read about the events i shot seemed to be describing totally distinct phenomena. the people i photographed at his rallies had a vindication in their eyes and readiness for action in their postures. they’d found something they’d been looking for. the interviews i read with them captured none of this and im not sure my photos did either but i could feel it. people who do logic and argument for a living poked holes in words curated by skeptical journalists and refuted vibes with facts and every day i’d leave my suffocating marriott with the windows that never open in my rental sedan and listen to the radio talking a lot about god and once again pull up to a high school gym or convention center and see crowds of heads nodding and shoulders pulled up defiantly over hands shoved in jacket pockets and my body recognized what words and pictures fell short of conveying; a sense of homecoming, a sense of tribe, a sense of outrage. a collective relief and energizing around someone who made them feel chosen.

i didn’t quite know how to shoot it then and i dont know how to shoot this now. everyone’s just trying to feel safe and prevent changes they don’t want even the people who make us feel unsafe and are making changes we don’t want. but my algorhithm has the part of me that doesn’t know that nailed, and when i unblock insta and scroll i grind my teeth with rage. they say lockjaw comes from words we can’t say. my neighbor told me you can botox for that. or scream.

when friends are parsing out the thousands of words uttered around break ups and romantic fights you hear the same thing. we take a scalpel to every syllable as though it will reveal why things are happening but nobody really has the words for their why’s, and when we do they’re rooted so deep its often nearly impossible to excavate and expose them to anyone else.

but somehow in democratic systems we think power comes from what people say or even what they do as opposed to how we feel. i mumble furiously to myself like a full blown crazy person when i hear pundits and podcasters talking about polls. polls are a measurement of what the type of people who answer the phone think someone like them should say to the institution doing the polling, not a measure of what they think and feel. in the same way that my presence with a camera creates giant ripples in the energy and behavior of everyone who can see me shooting, its reaction. performance.

when i walk into a group of people with my camera i see people fixing their faces, people pretending not to watch, hoping to be chosen. i often want to tell young women that they’re pretty, but thats not what im here for, cause i can feel their secret hoping. i see people turn their backs, faces immediately flickering with irritation, wanting not to be seen, not to be frozen in time. i get that. some people open towards the camera like plants towards windows. others scatter like startled deer. protest marches intensify as they walk by groups of photographers. people who were strolling and talking to each other raise their fists and start shouting. the answer is changed by the presence of the questioner. CEO’s posing for portraits part their lips like fashion models and i have to politely ask them to close their mouths and breath through their noses. documenting changes the thing.

the feelings that make us choose a side, i’m not sure can be quantified. we form groups for protection. how we align is governed by what tv channels blared in our living rooms growing up and how much we love or hate our parents. its who we want to impress and who we’re afraid of. our logic is retrofitted around intricate scaffoldings of experience and sentiment.

most of documentary photography is about earning the moment, after minutes or years, when someone stops posing for your camera and you can see something that feels a little bit real. its easier in chaos when the waters are choppy the waves i create matter a whole lot less.

Mike Huckabee at the gun range when he was campaigning for president in 2016

Last night i had a dream about an ex, and then about driving a convertible jeep wrangler off a cliff and jumping out just in time to watch it careen into some pit. The ex part was honestly way worse than the cliff part. I wondered when i woke up if my subconscious took my post yesterday about wanting to be in the car while the driver floors it towards oblivion too literally.

I dream a lot about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. People say its boring to talk about your dreams but i think they’re fascinating. (Mine and everyone’s.) Buddhists say that consciousness isn’t just perceiving reality, but creating it, and thus our dreams are basically just as real as our waking lives, and our waking lives just as fake as our dreams. When i used to have violent nightmares all the time i learned to realize when i was asleep in some projected hellscape, and jump into the air fly and away. My meditation teacher says advanced monks can do that in waking life, but don’t even need to, because they’re not experiencing anything as particularly bad or good to begin with.

Lately on the sidewalk or subway I’ve been playing a game. when i see someone i reflexively don’t like, I take a breath and try to reset and challenge my shitty judgemental mind with an empathetic reframing. I realize how quickly i register approval or aversion to someone’s walk or their shoes or the way they cling to their phone, and try to laugh at myself and then remember they’re as lost and desperate and goofy and confused as i am.

New York is amazing because we’re all so crunched together with our bubbles of energy overlapping and our little stories and desperations inevitably tangled up and tripping over each other. Every other body on the train contains a main character. When you start thinking about that it can be deafening, imagining all the anxieties and insecurities hammering away inside all those skulls. I like to watch people smile to themselves while they’re texting. It makes me imagine that they’re in love. Although when i do that its for sure because someone just sent a diabolically fucked up meme to the group chat.

I stared at the woman across from me on the G yesterday on my way home from an assignment and tried to imagine the contents of her purse. Does she also have half a pack of gum, an emotional support lip gloss, some dog treats, a battered sci fi paper back, and some pain killers for sudden headaches? Do those little talismans make her feel prepared for the chaos of life when she sees them at the bottom of her bag while rummaging for her phone? she was wearing a face mask, and kept dozing off and bumping against the guy next to her. i’m tired and want to hide too girl.

On that train ride a Venezuelan friend texted me and said she was finally getting US citizenship but couldn’t locate much joy or elation about it with the way things are going here. How could she, when she escaped that, for this?

I woke up to texts from another close friend who got roofied last night but thankfully made it home safely. She joked about it, said there’s nothing she can really do, which is objectively probably true. I got in a weird and nasty fight with a neighborhood text group about please don’t call the cops on strangers just cause they’re having an argument on the street. I scroll through my phone and there’s that awful video of ICE agents shooting a priest in the head with a pepper ball.

The whole point of my game, of watching strangers and imagining being them, is that we’re all doing our best, no matter how bad it is. After years of therapy to get the cornered dog mentality more or less worked out of my psyche, i really do believe that everyone’s trying to be good even if a lot of us are terrible at it. But also what the fuck ARE we? As humans i mean, like are we just experiencing a moment where we have way too much access to seeing ourselves? Have we always been like this? How many peaceful and kind people, when given access to power, or with enough fragmentation of cultural norms, whether its guns or date rape drugs or money or bombs, would turn around and USE them on us ruthlessly?

This morning a Gaza cease fire deal was announced while bombs continued to drop on civilians. I scrolled through images of celebration but all i could really feel was a weak, whispered prayer that it sticks.

the tricky thing about starting a blog based on writing transparently is that lately the words bubbling up for me are too personal, or too related to the complexities of the polarized terrain i cover, to write down without fear.

also it feels like everyone is screaming. do i really need to come here and say like, “oh fuck guys authoritarianism is really bad, and its actually happening way faster than my jaded know it all projections, and i see very few reactions that will slow it down, and it feels like check mate but thats not an acceptable attitude because we have to prevent harm”? or that i’m oscillating between abject dread and enjoying the most magical lucky life while I can, and frequently settle on worrying about utterly meaningless bullshit despite both of those more important factors? do i need to say that the convergence of the hive mind era and this tidal wave of violence and injustice has my internal monologue like one of those girl’s notes app memes:

to do:

chicago?

speed work at track 8 X 30 seconds sprints

dentist

mani pedi

meditate!

grant ap: how media makes polarization violence worse but maybe this violence definitely won’t stop without more violence but the message is the driver for the action (see videos of attacks on Venezuelan boats on twitter) so its all propaganda so how do we cover it without feeding it? also can we stop saying the media isn’t covering x cause it IS just google it thats actually how you know about it or how the guy you follow on tik tok found out about it, the problem is HOW are we covering it and how its being edited and the words we’re using and what stories we’re prioritizing and those are very very big problems, bigger actually. im not defending. it all makes me crazy too.

consciousness becomes whatever its focused on

laundry

trader joe’s (trader joe for president, cause that man really is the only one who’s figured out affordable groceries and new york prices are truly going insane and talking incessantly about grocery prices reminds me way too much of Venezuela circa 2014)

in my ongoing obsession with time and how it doesn’t exist and how also space is time and every feeling has a speed, real or imagined, we all are feeling our bodies brace against an undeniable acceleration. the best thing i’ve ever learned was to breathe when i feel things revving up, internally or externally. to be vigilant towards my attraction to speed. to pause, to interrogate, to come back down before i decide on stillness or action.

insisting on balance was always a privilege for a girl who got to live a slow life, and jump in and out of uncontrolled velocity on a whim. i guess what im saying is we’re losing control and we all feel it.

last night i went to a work function and it was overwhelming but actually nice. its still warm in new york and it was windy and you could hear leaves rustling when the music at the outdoor bar paused. a very sweet and funny editor asked me what i wanted to do most right now. she asked twice until i felt like she was sorta demanding an honest answer of me. which is the kind of non small talk at a work event i am very here for. “embed with ICE” came out of my mouth and I realized thats true. and this morning i’m sorting out what that means practically and intellectually.

i love that question maybe above all questions. “what do you really want?” i always tell my students they have to figure out what scares them most and do that. not in a cowboy adrenaline way, but in the sense that i think deep down we all know what we want, and often the wanting it makes it terrifying, because to go directly after what you truly want to do risks failing, and failing at the thing you want most is a hell of a form of ego death. then there’s the usual risks that what you want might seem totally outside of your control or low key- high key impossible. (like an ICE embed, i see that as extremely tough access wise but still, possible. any editors wanna go in on this with me?)

but also naming a desire creates its own momentum and possibilities and forces you to see the part of yourself that wants and why. a friend (?) said a few weeks ago when i asked him why his dream is his dream that he “wants to be in the room” when pivotal choices are made. essentially that he wants to know how change happens, and have a shot at influencing it. that one really resonated.

for me it comes up like a fever. a heat that gets so loud in my head i can’t ignore it any more. not a belief that i can change anything necessarily. i had a couple conversations with smart people i love last night and we were all agreeing that in our current image slop world its absurd to think another napalm girl is going to come along and grind things to a halt. Breanna made a very good point last night that the way that sequence of events is framed in history smacks of one of those oversimplifications of narrative that actually maybe wasn’t so much napalm girl photo was the tipping point about public opinion on Vietnam war, as that image was made around the same time as a sea change.

but today if we’re racing towards fascism i cant lie to myself and say that i have any idea how to stop the car. i read a pretty horrifying article the other day about how rare the historical precedents are for stopping the kind of momentum we see in the US today. but i would like to be in the car. i’d like to look at the driver’s face and hear what he’s saying. i’d like to see the weirder than fiction moments that happen at the center of these things with their clumsy absurdity. if i can’t help i’d at least like to look it all in the eye.

so i don’t know y’all. trying to keep these posts less long winded so they’re more possible to keep up with so i’m leaving this here. what are you most afraid of and what do you want the most?

<3

n

i’ve been struggling to write anything that feels meaningful lately because i’ve been having a great time. i’m not sure what silly enduring human bias makes us feel like good words and songs and images are mostly about suffering. ok actually thats a lie, i have a million theories about this and i think some of them are pretty good. ill try to articulate them here eventually. mostly about how i think suffering is innate to the human experience. (i obviously cribbed that from Buddhism) but that we examine our own and each other’s pain compulsively, trying to find the source of something that courses through our lives as naturally as blood in veins. as though we could find it in our personal histories and turn it off, like that wouldn’t be the equivalent of extinguishing a heart.

but August was damn near perfect and rather than dredge my brain for feelings worth writing about here’s a very substacky set of diary scraps things i want to remember and things i loved lately:

I had the best week ever teaching at the II Festival Fotografico de Medellin organized by the big homie Fede Rios Escobar, whose book, Darién, on migrants crossing the Darien Gap should be a mandatory textbook on the level of desperation that drives immigration movements. In his artist talk he told stories from following families across the jungle through snakes and mud and dehydration with children and the elderly and flip flops and hopes stuck in the mud. his description of the conditions was that you’re always boiling hot or freezing, soaked in sweat but thirsty, bone tired and in pain but hurried. every plant and animal seems to work against you. afraid to stop, afraid to keep going. he described an old man named Hamlet who he photographed collapsed in exhaustion after his daughters convinced him to attempt the trek because they heard about it on Tik Tok, and Angél helping little Sarah (below) on the trail after her mother was lost in the jungle behind them. Hamlet. Angél. The names.

I gave a joint artist talk with my best friend and constant inspiration Adriana Loureiro who was also teaching there. Adri and I met in her native Venezuela when i was freshly arrived and giddily lost trying to figure out Caracas. She taught me to keep a pair of cheap leggings and a hair scrunchy in my camera bag in case i needed to suddenly disguise myself a just a girl, in stretch pants and a pony tail, not a journalist, when the streets changed like a rip tide. that advice saved my ass multiple times. We buddy systemed through covering protests and food riots, also salsa parties and ill advised road trips to concerts and early hikes in the Avila mountains before the chaos of each day started. i feel invincible when she’s next to me. She’s been part of everything I’ve made and who i am for the last decade and her work gets better every time she clicks the shutter. The theme of our talk was being an insider and outsider, respectively, and the ethical quandaries and questions that come from either photographing your home crumbling under your feet (hers), or photographing someone else’s nightmare (me). On the power and safety advantages of being a woman in this space. (No, its not a weakness, its a wild card secret weapon and i will die on this hill.)

We spoke about how all art and journalism is made in community. It felt amazing to convert the endless me me me I I I of artist talks into a we. Sitting next to her on stage I was a little choked up, because i’m so fucking proud of her, and felt so genuinely honored to share the space with her. I also had to work not to giggle or forget we were public speaking and tell the fun parts of the stories best kept private. You can see her work in pretty much any NYT coverage of Venezuela. She’s won all the photojournalism awards because she works harder and smarter than anyone. Her color palette somehow aches. It’s the colors of grief under a tropical sun. Her skills and dedication to ethical journalism based in deep research and challenging assumptions are unparalleled.

Sara Wayra Aliaga was as soft spoken and profound as her photos. Its hard to find words for how much i love her work that don’t come out cliche and cheesy so i’m not gonna fight it. Every image is impossibly elegant, steeped in intention, mysterious and gorgeous. She spoke slowly with a power that made me think of thunder. She covers indigenous communities in Bolivia (including her own) and i was riveted by admiration. Its rare and magical when the artist’s words amplify your love for their art instead of ruining it and this festival did that over and over.

Most photo festivals make me itchy. I hate the competitive jockeying to network with editors and curators, the eye scanning for transactional contact, everyone congratulating each other on their important and powerful pictures of other people’s hell (im including myself in this critique obvi, i hate me too) but this one was at Medellin’s Public Library and organized around a 5 month educational program for 45 of Latin America’s best young documentary photographers from across the region and it felt like it meant something. Everyone there seemed to care genuinely about their subject matter and the conversations were rooted in love and dedication more than ambition and adrenaline.

I had almost forgotten the way thinking and talking about work in Spanish feels like a blood transfusion. I think a lot about what language is and i don’t know if anyone is sure. sometimes words just seem to be decorations hanging on whatever the energy exchange of actual communication really is. a dumbo feather that helps us believe we can understand each other, but actually extraneous to the understanding itself. linguists say its not just a set of symbols. its a thought structure. rails to run on. an alternate personality. a podcast i listened to recently alleged that its basically software for programming for cultural values and ive been thinking of phrases and concepts as bits of code for our brains ever since. i’m reluctant to understand the mind in tech terms, but maybe creating machines in our image does offer a certain insight into ourselves.

i felt a lighter, younger, gentler version of myself take over as my reflexive, habitual, sadder and tireder english brain moved into the back seat. adri and i switched to english as our semi-private language for chisme for the week and got to say publicly that we couldn’t have done shit without each other and tell all the girls there that they can do it too.

i remind myself that you have to notice when you’re getting to live your dream.

A few of our students whose work truly blew my mind were:

Santiago Mesa (Colombia)

Gloriana Ximendaz (Costa Rica)

Raphael Alves (Brazil)

i went to DC to speak on a panel about a new documentary, Match in Haystack, with the Pulitzer Center <3 about modern dancers in Ukraine, and the language which i don’t speak but understand scraps of, woke up a third, grieving self. in one scene, a dancer with chiseled ukrainian features evokes violent death in a cramped stairwell with every muscle in her body and i felt my own go deathly still and tight in the darkness. onstage after for the discussion i zoned out blinded by the spotlights imagining an ant under a magnifying glass and when the moderator asked “what can we do to help” i scrambled for appropriate words to camouflage my instinct to laugh cry and scream. please go watch the film its stunning.

I asked a friend in Ukraine the next day about the so called “peace deal” and he said this:

A couple days later the russians hit an apartment building in Kyiv and killed a bunch of kids. Again and again and again.

Since we’re doing substack recommendations and not writing about feelings today. What i’m ranting at everyone in ear shot based on my professional experience with calamity and total absence of economic chops of any kind, is get some of your savings out of dollars and out of the US. Just in case. Please. For those lucky enough to have savings make sure they stay that way. Call me chicken little whatever hopefully its never necessary but if it is the difference between a refugee camp and a refugee rental apartment is access to money that hasnt been obliterated by hyperinflation or locked down by international red tape. Do i know how to do that? Of course not. But i promise almost all of yall are smarter with money than i am so go figure it out and send me tips on how to share.

Anyways here are the books i read/listened to this summer that are making my brain better not worse:

Lights On - on the science of consciousness please listen to this so i have people to talk to about it.

Entangled Life - on fungi, from the how trees talk to each other kind, to the magic kind, but also about non dualism and re evaluating our perception of the world in general. also the writing is breathtaking.

The Emporer - the goat Kapuscinski on the last days of Haile Selassie’s court. the surrealism of the super rich and their orbits and delusions.

Dune books 1-5 i love them they’re perfect you dont need a link right this is obvious?

When Things Fall Apart (i read this all the time and its essential every time. Pema’s my favorite Buddhist author and if you’re having a hard time this book will help you figure it out i promise.)

You Dreamed of Empires - Alvaro Enrigue- this one was wild. Enrigue reimagines Cortes’ encounter with Moctezuma in the most richly historic and satisfying way ever.

The Ft Bragg Cartel- Seth Harp- Mind blowing journalism focused on my home state of North Carolina’s Fayetville, and the home of Delta Force operators whose programming to be ruthless kill squads is spectacularly backfiring in a reality stranger and louder than fiction. This hit so close to home about the ambient violence and sheer volume of drugs everywhere around me growing up that i wrote Seth some fan mail. Very nice smart guy.

Empire of Ai- Karen Hao - Essential reading on arguably the most powerful force shaping our present and future- the creation and inner workings of AI. Spoiler alert its worse than you think. (And no its not about how the technology itself is evil which i frankly think is silly and boring. Its about how the people making it in their image are.)

Awake in the World- current fave Dharma Podcast for balance

Ok my dad says these posts are too long so im gonna stop it there thank you so much to everyone who’s subscribed and supported it means the world to me if you’ve made it far enough to read this. And if you have questions crits things you wanna hear more about send me a note I’d love to hear <3

bungee jumper in kyiv summer 24

In the Handmaid’s tale, one of my favorite depictions how fucked up and nuanced trauma is, there are flashback scenes to something like present day America. They take place in Boston in a way that’s a shorthand for any early 2000’s gentrified city, where the people live half online and half in walkable streets. Cafe’s push designer caffeine, there’s culture on demand, restaurants and bars with lots of plants, 24 hour delivery of whatever. The flashbacks follow a trickling erosion of norms and protections, nestled in the sedative context of places that look just like yesterday. The outrageous becomes both abstract and quotidian. Authoritarianism’s baby steps dampened by our instinctive unwillingness to believe things can change so much so fast.

The sense of mourning in those scenes haunts me. Like watching a funeral for my little life in Brooklyn. Today in past tense. Very different people living in close proximity, air soft with an expectation of safety. They walk slowly. When people are afraid you see it in their stride. Here there’s languid summer strolling. Basic needs are largely met. Values are largely shared. I’m not idealizing here, there’s plenty about this moment and our systems that I’d love to watch burn to the ground. Obviously the “we” here are ultra privileged and our luck is at bought with slave labor and blood spilled out of sight, but in a lot of the US, and certainly in my beloved New York, we’re mostly not looking over our shoulders in reflexive vigilance, (unless you’re undocumented) clean water mostly pours from our taps, and most of us aren’t starving unless we’re on a diet. We’re mostly not afraid of each other. We can usually speak freely, love openly, and trust each other enough to worry about rent and romance not survival and pain.

The cracks are visible and the chess pieces are moving, but on a practical level a lot of us aren’t feeling it yet. Of course enjoying any of that is grotesque, but I know how much we’re gonna miss these dominoes when they fall. And they’re already falling.

christmas party in los valles del tuy during extreme food insecurity venezuela 21

irpin beach shelled building in background 24

We hear about detentions and disappearances and genocide, and we post about it and shake our heads. Then we log into zoom and meet friends for brunch. We’re either waiting for someone else to do something effective, or we don’t know if anything could actually work.

A habit I learned in Ukraine was to hear a whistle and crack of incoming fire in my head when I saw a happy scene that made me smile. Something unwarlike, like kids getting a moment to be oblivious on a playground, or the candy colors of families in their sunday best after church services, creates an automatic “what if” in my head. A habit I learned in Venezuela was to constantly search for scarce food and medicines even if i didn’t need them, which as a girl earning dollars i mostly didn’t, but you still felt it. Scarcity makes you a scavenger and it hard to quit.

When Venezuelans started appearing on NY’s sidewalks and subways en masse last year, I recognized their walks before i heard their accents. There’s a an unmistakeable head swivel and sharpness in the eyes. There’s laughing at anything. Huddling outside the Roosevelt hotel is not ideal, but nobody’s going to extrajudicially shoot you in the back of the head (yet) and the electricity stays on.

party i forget where BK 21

This weekend i met a friend of a friend at a sweaty block party. I liked her immediately because she’s effortlessly beautiful and sarcastic, and we joked about how weed makes us paranoid. She shouted over the house music that she hadn’t understood what an intrusive thought was until THC started rubbing her the wrong way. I laughed with her over the base, slow panning my vision across bobbing heads and blissy half closed eyes around me. The more i love something the more fragile it looks. Like a shimmery bubble about to pop.

I’m not saying i’m sad. Sadness and mourning are not the same. Mourning is a form of love. All summer I’ve been memorializing each day as it unfolds, and grateful for the chance. I can’t shake the sense of spending time with someone with a terminal diagnosis. Things are slow right now but they’re accelerating. Fear is a prerequisite for tenderness. A heightened awareness of the thinness of skin, or petals, or balance. The wish to protect, embittered by the inevitability of change. When we love something its partly because we know the act of finding is the act of losing.

4th of july in NC 2018

beach revival 2020

Yesterday i took a walk on the beach at Riis Park. My mom used to play there when she was a kid in front of the same brick buildings. Her best friend scattered her mother’s ashes there. I kept hearing the roar of planes taking off nearby and shuddering. Billy and Phoebe and I used to go there when it was still sort of a secret. When window air conditioners were a luxury we didn’t have so the beach was the only place you could breath in NY summer and the world seemed suffocatingly stable. I saw ghosts of various social circles seated at the board walk picnic tables eating lobster rolls and drinking white claw.

On the beach bodies are sweet and fragile. There’s something brave about the pale skin and lumps and red patches, the jiggling and dripping and staring. I watched hot young women touch their stomachs self consciously every 45 seconds with empathy. Older men with skinny bow legs and pot bellies keeping their chests proud. Skittering kids eyes wide fingers stretched out at their sides as they ran. Botticelli moms. Shoulders hunched from a phone habit without the phones. An old man in a speedo that could give a fuck if we were annoyed he was staring. Women in hijabi swimwear grinning in shallow waves. Two boys kissing with their toes in the water, pressing tattoos together into a game of exquisite corpse. a family with a whole lunch taco operation under a blue tent, a tiny boy screaming at his auntie to get out of the water because it scared him as she laughed at him in english and Arabic, a lover’s quarrel, the woman with her arms open and hands flattened in irritation, the man with crossed arms and jaw tight, grumbling in low Polish.

Pembroke NC 2018

At home i listened to democracy now in the shower. Hot endless running water and immigration raids. Over 2000 people ripped out of my city this year, half of them for showing up to their court hearings. I burn an artisanal scented candle and listen to university professors quitting because somehow saying that killing children is wrong is being equated with antisemitism. Got an assignment about glitchy AI used by cops.

The streets outside my window are quiet except for the occasional whir of a city bike or a barking doodle. I can’t bring myself to read the play by plays of the dismantling of the government while ICE is built into an army. I keep getting targeted ads asking if I want to join them. 50k signing bonus. I’m cooking lemongrass chicken and Adri texts from an airport floor while covering the Venezuelan CECOT detainee’s return after being tortured. We chat about mercury retrograde exes in zombie sequel mode and the endless stupidity of the “perfect victim” myth in media.

My phone vibrates with another Ukrainian air alert. I switch back and forth between articles on AI drone warfare and AI for transhumanist lifemaxxing between climbs at the gym, mindful to rest for 3 minutes between burns for muscle recovery. I see a future in which semi mortal men with perfect abs at 80 can play with real life soldiers on the battle field through VR goggles. In the singularity death is a video game and years of life are currency.

immigration court 2025

On a first date at a listening bar with perfect lighting we debate when the wave of political tension will crash. He mentions a Harvard scholar’s 3.5 percent rule. The bartender chimes in, “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”

I dissent. Quantifying human behavior makes me itchy. I only believe in what can be felt. I’m not sure any percentage of Americans walking in peaceful circles with clever signs is going to change shit. I hate violence, but i get it in the face of greater violence, but it doesn’t end well, but nonviolence feels impotent. He orders another martini in graceful stemware and i ask for my NA watermelon cocktail not too sweet.

dnc 2024

We dont need sunglasses this week because of the canada wild fire smog. Deb’s voice notes say that astrology is doing angry mars things and that makes sense cause the sun is hanging low and red over the morning dog park. On my morning walks, i always find weird stuff people left in the park the night before. Witchy alters and sunglasses and water bottles, drug bags and kids toys. This morning it was church flyers. One was a printed fake text conversation.

“God loves u.

How do i know thats really true?

He gave his onely son 2 die 4 u”

parachute easter bunny landing on the beach Alabama 2021

my subconscious has this goofy habit of starting each day with a preloaded song stuck in my head. i wake up, and its there, humming in the background until i get halfway through my first coffee and notice it. often an unsubtle announcement that something’s on my mind. today’s is lil wayne, shooter.

i found out there was an active shooter at the Blackstone/NFL building in midtown yesterday from a group chat. a friend asked if he was the new luigi, commented on his fit, updated that he was dead.

i did the usual thing when you find out there’s someone on a killing spree in your city. mentally scanned to see if i knew anyone there. no. repetition breeds acceptance. USA’s overton window starting to look more like a crater. no feelings of fear or sadness. just curiosity. i scrolled twitter to rubberneck as the hive mind vied to sculpt scraps of information into ammunition for dogma within minutes of the first shot fired. shaky videos autoplayed. i googled the difference between blackrock and blackstone.

i sifted through my mental kaleidoscope of associated memories.

i photographed blackrock ceo Larry Fink as protests echoed outside their building a couple years ago. (different building, different guy.) he walked in harried and irritated and my male friend who was assisting that day quickly corrected Fink’s assumption that i was the assistant. i asked him about his support for Ukraine and his energy changed. i clicked the shutter and paused to watch him, deliberately letting him get uncomfortable under my gaze.

photography is among many things a game in which the starer and the stared at weigh out who holds more power. mostly i try to redistribute the authority conferred by my camera. to make people comfortable. but with the wealthy and influential sometimes I intentionally tip the see-saw. one way you can do that is by staring at people and not reacting when they begin to squirm. its a potent kung fu psy-op reversal of gender conditioning for women when we do that. As a result both you and your staree may experience it as approaching violence, but i highly encourage my girls to try it sometime as an exercise. probably not in public or with strangers for your safety. this is America.

i wandered the streets outside Sandy Hook elementary. immediately after the shooting the police set up a wide perimeter, banishing us grotesquely breathless press to a lonely road near the school where the stunned and weeping laid flowers and stuffed animals. lurking there trying to figure out how to make a picture that carried the weight felt disgusting.

an old friend who had recently emerged from prison changed (long story) wrote me when i posted the resulting WSJ article to tell me Sandy Hook was a hoax to create an excuse to “take away the guns.” i stabbed my thumbs at my phone in a parked rental car trying to refute the idea that these were “crisis actors.” dead kids. 5 year olds. “i was THERE.” he is not a bad or stupid man. the lies had hooked his well earned rage at the system and suddenly i was conversing with something 2 dimensional. devoid of empathy and reason i knew he possessed. i would have said it was like talking to an alt right chat bot if either of those terms had existed at the time. disbelief at his words flipped to rage as i saw that i couldn’t say anything true enough to matter.

belief is about identity not facts. when you push back on someone’s world view you push back on who they have decided to be. the resulting defensiveness goes cornered animal. i fell into the same pattern. i wrote something like “do you really think the government is remotely worried about your little fucking guns?” and threw in something very petty about having held down his commissary before blocking him. i still don’t feel good about any of it. i can see how he got there. he’s not wrong about lies, just which ones and why. i’m sure he thinks something similar about me and my work with the main stream media(TM). i have no claim on truth except some little hills i’ll die on.

i thought about Columbine, the original bite of the apple when this whole thing became a thing. my dad asked me if i was sure i wanted to go to school the next day, and i solemnly said yes, letting him think i was being brave. but i wasn’t afraid, i was excited. electric with fear in a way that felt like drugs. i walked into school through metal detectors with a drummy soundtrack in my head. potential for violence made everything feel important. my first taste.

i remembered Ukrainians and Venezuelans asking with varying degrees of salivating intrigue and pity about our quotidian home grown terror phenomenon. as ours as black friday and mcdonalds and diabetes and opioids. i say we’re sick.

i mentally graded tweets on their likelihood to be true. false reports that he screamed free palestine will surely stick in certain circles even though this was about football and traumatic brain injury. people kept saying he was wearing tactical gear but the photo i saw looks like he’s about to go skate. everyone assumed it was about Blackstone until it became clear (ish) that its once again about a man so hurt and desperate it becomes rage.

i zoomed in on the image of him casually carrying an M4 at his side as he approached the building. it looked like it had one of those camo skins on it. bedazzling for death machines. when the police picture of the gun was released as though to assure the public that with this particular automatic weapon in their custody the public was safe, i realized it wasn’t camo, just black and tan refracted through a pixelated image. now red from bloody hand prints. the new york post notes they retail for 500 dollars.

i’ve seen a lot of news break and read descriptions that dont match what i saw (or that do except for parts where they totally don’t). i read hungrily. like i could catch some transient thread of reality in flying words. our sense of fact is inextricably woven with our instinct to construct linear narratives rarely found in the wild. we call it making sense of things, but things don’t make that much sense.

the “truth” escapes you even while you’re standing in it. every minute starts to twist in your mind the moment it becomes past, which is the moment that it happens. i love photographs but can’t completely trust even my own, because for whatever we catch we miss more. i tell myself over and over to be skeptical of words even as i search them. they’re inevitably inadequate and muddled by their creator’s tunnel vision, especially in the beginning.

fog of war is everywhere. immediate reporting is half unvarnished truth and half hallucination. its both the rawest and wrongest, and its almost impossible to wipe the record clean of those first takes. few go back for the journalistic reckonings about what the fuck actually happened weeks later when the dull math of confirmation and investigation has been completed in the settled dust. while reporting we assign meaning to inferences made so fast they feel like facts. we trust the witness mid reconciliation of what they’ve just seen. the chaos of competing overlapping truths gets stuffed into a simple linear timeline. we make choices about what we’ll believe, and take our place with our camp.

(this is, for the record, why fact checkers are my personal heroes. getting on the phone with someone who flatly asks questions like ‘how do you know it was raining that day? ‘cause i was soaked? ‘do you have proof?’ fills me with relief.)

in 2019 on a border bridge between cololmbia and venezuela, i watched a clusterfuck of political theater, uprising, and protest. there were rows of soldiers in riot gear standing on the halfway line, the imaginary boundary between two countries. a furious crowd pressed towards the combustion point at the center until molotov cocktails, the occasional round of live fire, and tear gas and rubber pellets scattered everyone into a rhythm of advance and retreat, turning the bridge to a battle field. the sound of metal on pavement prickled my skin as shirtless boys with t-shirts over their faces created improvised barricades from which to hurl stones. a little round pellet pierced bambu’s hand at the knuckle and traveled up under his skin into his wrist. i gripped his knees as a medic pushed it out the way it came and he tried not to vomit from the pain. then we got back to work.

i was on assignment for Time and a flying rock damaged my camera so all the images from that day have a surreal brightness that kinda fits. a blocked bridge is a trap. the only way out was falling off or trying to push backwards through a frothing crowd. we hadn’t thought it was gonna be tear gas so when the venezuelan soldiers launched the first round across the invisible border line into the crowd, it sparked panicked stampedes. i sent a cabby to a hardware store for construction masks. i calculated how long i had before i needed to send pictures to new york to make deadline. a truck caught on fire on the bridge.

the trucks were supposed to bring food and medical supplies to Venezuelans in need- courtesy of a man named Juan Guaido who had claimed the Venezuelan presidency with a pretty legit constitutional explanation for why, although the whole thing felt more like a publicity stunt than a true attempt to aid the people. the desperation was also legit, Venezuelan children were skin and bones and their mom’s were worse from skipping meals to stretch food for their kids. the public hospitals had no running water and scarce electricity and you had to bring your own medicine, which nobody had. it would take a book to explain the complexities here but the bridge clashes of Venezuelan refugee protesters, eyes full of rage tears with dirt under their nails from lives on the streets exiled in colombia cause their home was bled dry by the corrupt sitting president, trying to push aid and a new president back across the border into their homeland, was political performance delivered from the back of an incredibly real struggle.

the day before, which i had missed because i was stuck in new york editing, there had been a massive outdoor concert nearby organized by Richard Branson featuring Juanes and Maluma.

that thing in the movies where stuff is flying through the air and everyone is screaming and running and suddenly in your head its quiet and slow motion is pretty real. i remember watching the flames cradling the trucks, then devouring them, and feeling very still. there were outraged voices around me and i should have been keeping my head low but i was just staring. then just like my morning songs, the sound came into focus and i could hear what they were saying. the venezuelan national guard had set the aid on fire rather than let the challenger president bring them in to save lives. a savagely spiteful move emblematic of the stubborn, stupid cruelty of Maduro’s regime.

i had a tiny, itchy, half thought that the boys were throwing a lot of molotov cocktails over those trucks at the national guard behind them, and that their aim is not always the best, but i lost it as time resumed fever speed when someone called out “shooter.”

the news the next day was the story of the symbol. the clashes where the Venezuelan military had lit up urgently needed antibiotics and canned goods rather than let the opposition have a win. i read and repeated, assuming that whoever wrote that must have confirmed. 2 weeks later an OSINT team published the frame by frame of videos showing the errant molotov thrown by the protesters that had accidentally torched the trucks. but by then the story had metastasized.

the truth can be a lie and the lie can be true. it’s not that they wouldn’t, its that they didn’t.

48 hours later i was at Harvard Business School shooting pictures for their website. i stood among rows of students under a projected business case study and tried to summon my mind back into my body, to get the bridge to stop ringing in my ears.

sometimes achieving these transitions feels like a trapped animal gnawing a limb off to escape, but in reverse. gnawing off a piece of myself to fit back in. i feel like it shows on my face, the messiness, the residue of violence. except now in schools, and offices, and wal marts and movie theaters, it makes sense to wonder where the exits are, how the sounds would echo, what would stop a bullet.

i remember the last 4 birthdays sharply and then it falls off into the slushy amnesia of pandemic. in 22 i was in Odesa, meeting the home of my great grand parents. the ancient alleys and ornate balconies, hidden courtyards and stray cats fat from fresh fish, the old ladies who looked just like relatives, the wry sense of humor that made everyone feel like my uncle all dazzled me. i was awed, the first time i felt the nearby thud of a missile strike, as i crawled to my window head low peering up at black smoke rising a few blocks away, at how the old men on the street casually stood in doorways to light cigarettes with quiet, defiant rage. how the fruit market patrons and street performers resumed normalcy as soon as the teeth grinding staccato of air defense quieted. we’d come back from the front in mykolaiv carrying crates of fruit gifted us by farmers with fields on fire. the apricots tasted like candied sunlight and every one i’ve had since has been a disappointment.

i was giddy with joy and fear as our all woman team took me to a restaurant with views of the Black Sea. the beaches were closed to swimmers due to floating mines, so the Odesans sunbathed on the boardwalk. I sat with a travel agent turned producer, a veteran war correspondent turned mother, and a filmmaker turned documentary director at a high ceilinged modern seafood place. Russian warships darkened the horizon but the sky and the room were bright. I felt sun drenched and alive and scared shitless that whole trip. Amy left a few days later to get home to her son. i stayed to photograph more burning fields and pissed off farmers, getting closer to the edge every time i went out. after lunch one farmer tried to give me a brindle french bull dog puppy, unsure if their farm would soon be overrun by Russians, but i couldn’t figure out how to get him home so when i got back i got charlie.

3 years ago i was at the City Hotel, the cheaper of the two main journalist hotels in Kyiv which dozens of correspondents had called home early in the war. I always asked for a room on a high floor with a glass balcony. i loved the view suspended over the city even though its stupid to stay on a high floor during a war. i’ve always had a healthy dose of that idiotic it won’t actually happen to me thing. Returning there always feels a bit weird. We imprint on our first impressions of people and places, and when I arrived during the Russian encirclement of the city, the windows were blacked out and rationed meals were served on a darkened ground floor. now the elevator opens to a glass walled penthouse cafe and the sounds of silverware clinking as journalists do logistics, make bad jokes and check in with uncomfortable local producers/babysitters over heaping breakfast buffet plates often left uneaten.

I emerged from my room to find a piece of cake and hand written birthday card thanking me for spending my birthday in Ukraine from the hotel staff on the floor outside. That night Julia Kochetova, the hardest working most dedicated war photographer maybe ever, took me to a bustling restaurant for my birthday and tried to hide the grief in her eyes when she forced a smile. she gave me astonishing blue hydrangeas which i stared at on my night table for the next week. There’s a profound generosity in trying to give someone else happiness when you’re own is depleted beyond recognition.

Last year i was in Martha’s Vineyard with an ex and his family. We were in a giant house with vaulted ceilings and leather couches, one of those circular driveways where you drive up to the doorway as though a butler will come out and announce you, and a pool. it was half a mile from white sand beaches. in town, everyone wore blue and white and loafers as they strolled past ruler straight hedges in well fed and well trained bodies. the wood trimmed buildings and quaint signs were an almost fascist level of uniform and tasteful.

I went for a run on the beach and sat down to meditate and cried on an empty stretch of sand. i stared at the waves negotiating a false composure and jogged back to the house to paste some contentment on my face. my ex dutifully, if absently, drove us in a borrowed yellow wrangler to get oysters and lounge by seaside cliffs. I swam out in the glittery swell with him and when we touched it felt awkward and forced. i lost one of my earrings swimming. i lay back on the surface and the loneliness was so heavy and dark at my core that floating felt absurd. the sunshine dancing around me was a cruel giggle. I had really wanted to be in love. i had cherry picked what worked. unnerving dark blue eyes with stars of white highlights shooting out from the pupils, and the way he talked about music that made me see sound the way i see light. i employed my olympic level dissociation skills to ignore our problems. on my first night back from Ukraine that summer he cut me off when i was talking and said, “can we not talk about war tonight?” and i trailed off flushed with shame.

on the shore he said the water was like a spiritual experience and i hid my face to conceal the words stuck in my throat, then turned back to grin and agree enthusiastically. we ate at “one of the best restaurants on the island” and i felt nauseous and we went to bed back to back.

When we landed back in the city i jumped then ducked at a loud truck noise outside the airport as we walked to the taxi line. he watched me but keep walking without breaking his stride. he always walked ahead of me, and really ahead of everyone, which I remember only realizing was an thing when Deb described it as a sign of disrespect. His little brother instinctively put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. I wondered, as i shook it off, if he was disgusted by my weakness. I wondered if he thought i was faking. ive never seen a pair of receding shoulders look so cold. I asked him in the cab if he had seen my reaction. He said yes and looked out the window.

This sunday, I woke up and drank an iced Americano on my favorite bench by my favorite coffee shop, and rode my bike to meditation class. My teacher’s father had just died, and his substitute said, there’s no real difference between waking life and dreaming life. our experience is determined entirely by what our minds believe and project. I took an uber to the bronx to photograph a woman who’s selling her house and moving her family to Mexico rather than waiting in fear each day to see if her husband gets deported. It was sauna hot and they had sold their air conditioner. we walked Pinto their lazy pit bull through the Bronx chatting with taco vendors in spanish and running through fire hydrants. I soaked up the calm smiling strength of this woman and her daughters. I listened to R, the mother, weave lessons on non-attachment to material things into the process of sifting through toys and notebooks and sephora makeup for her girls.

When they posed for portraits they pressed close together with an unabashed intimacy despite the sweat dripping down our necks. Pinto wriggled into the frame and we all laughed. R offered to buy me an NA Michelada from the vendor out front when she found out it was my birthday. as i left i wondered how many people from this community would end up getting deported by the hoard of ICE agents Trump is sending this week.

I got home and switched dimensions, put on a dress and rode over to an outdoor bar to stare at pretty people and sip bitters and seltzer. We talked about Gaza and dating and art and friendship and i got a brutal migraine but the night air was soft and my friends are beautiful and the pain couldn’t penetrate my sense of calm gratitude to be there. These days we all say i love you when we hug goodbye and i wonder when that started being so normal. i wonder who else feels the sense of waiting for everything to fracture on the quiet streets, and if that waiting makes them love each step a little more.

i woke up yesterday with lock jaw. its been a while. this used to be sort of constant but lately its pretty rare. teeth clenched as though it’s not enough for them to be near each other, like with enough pressure they’ll explode into powder and that might feel better. everyone has read the body keeps the score or at least heard the title enough to get the idea but the way it actually manifests is wild. it took me a long time to start to decode the way my body digests violence, the way our cells recognize damage to others and ourselves and create their own little diary of it. the physical self sets about imprinting and record keeping. maybe a body is a library of experiences, with its own inscrutable filing system where data gets misplaced on high shelves collecting dust. piled corpses in your teeth. daddy issues in your chest and temples. the sound waves from explosions etched in some kind of morse code pattern on the tissues of your lungs from when you took those sharp inhales as the adrenaline burst in your veins.

the brain, on the other hand, or at least my brain, goes about tidying up the memories and accompanying feelings with unnerving efficiency. a housekeeper who slips in silently and organizes chaos of thoughts and feelings into a lying simplicity, where you can’t find your socks and the tears you know you should be crying. i think everything is put away, and then i wake up and try to open my mouth and my jaw clicks with effort.

one time a man dm’ed me: “nice to see you today, albeit while standing on a mass grave.” and asked if we could get a drink. i think about those words when i see the mass graves in my head.

total numbness had already set in inside and out. slow, fat, meandering snowflakes turned to mud. on their way they alighted gently on shell craters and toys in abandoned yards and the charred flesh of burnt corpses and matted fur of dogs gone half feral.

C was wearing a borrowed flak that was way too heavy for her and you could hear the pain it was causing her back in the pitch of her voice. we were all a little sick and ignoring it. i felt the total impotence, then and now writing about it, of picking through the deaths of hundreds, as though there was any possible way i could make sense of it with my camera. at first i was holding my breath for fear of land mines but as the day progressed the waiting to blow up any second feeling slowly leaked out of me and left an emptiness.

its always hard for me to discern, after a couple years when i get around to trying, what is a memory and what is a memory of photograph. there was the hand of a child in a little kids parka sticking out of the red-tan earth. there were flowers laid on a shallow mound in a little public park where someone had surely risked their life for the farewell ritual. there were dogs eating fire blackened limbs. there was an old man’s white hair, still wispy as though frozen in movement, with his face just a little grayer and greener than old age would have done alone. the way the earth shifted under my boots made me feel sick, as i imagined that same earth pressing in on undiscovered bodies. it filled me with self loathing, not knowing where to step that might be clean and respectful to all the death around us.

i remember a clearing in a the pine forest that surrounds Kyiv’s northern suburbs. a forest for family cookouts and peaceful walks for people escaping the city. there was a pile of 6(?) bodies all tangled. there was a smaller one, with a more adult sized person curled around them. the size and gesture evoked mother and child, although gender and age were the stuff of imagination, without forensic skills far beyond our own to decipher the forms in the ashes. people stopped and stood at the edge of the scene and commented quietly.

the quiet around that pile felt so wrong. like it was impossible to be seeing this while hearing nothign but a snow draped forest. whatever energy humans give off, it wasn’t there anymore and i couldnt feel anything in its place. as i stooped to make a picture, the only thing i could think of to do, a picture that i absolutely won’t show here because who on earth needs to see that, a little cat jumped off the cold ground and curled around my neck. she perched on my shoulders as i shot.

C said, maybe that was her family, about the cat. i held her warm body close but didnt want to take her with us. what would she do at the war journalist hotel with its machisimo and too loud laughter? and what if her family was on their way back to look for her right now? now that this place was “liberated.” although liberation felt like an insane word to use about a place where you couldn’t walk through a garden or a cute little market without crunching broken glass and shrapnel under every step while trying not to trip over the remains of someone’s son.

someone else passing by commented on the mother and child they saw in the heap.

then a ukrainian soldier came by and spit on the ground near them, saying they were not ukrainians but russian soldiers, one of them was just small. i don’t know which was right. clothing and features and hair were all gone. there were so many lives snuffed out there tracking the threads for the months of revelations after was hard.

i don’t really ever conjure these scenes, they appear when i do what i did last night and indulge in hours of violent tv. something i generally hate, but somehow im heavy into Gangs of London rn. my teeth grind until my head can feel some echo of the hurt that i know is in there. its not mine, i dont believe that. as an interloper these wounds don’t belong to me. but its a glimpse of the fragility of the social compact which says humans value human life, and the stupid, arbitrary, savage ways we destroy each other. how easily the sacred can become disposable when our context shifts.

i struggle with the pointlessness of the sensations and the words they dredge up. why would anyone want to read this? and what the fuck was the point of having seen it if i don’t try to make some meaning of it? but why would anyone want to watch hours and days of gore on tv in the movies except that in some way human life is inevitably a death cult and maybe thats not even a bad thing entirely maybe its our way to feel the most alive. i know its been mine although i swear im trying these days to feel alive looking at flowers and my dog and my mom and my stupid perfect friends. and to some extent even succeeding.

my phone vibrates on my brooklyn desk and its an air raid alert for ukraine. 3 years later and worse than ever. when i look past the screen out my window there’s a guy walking by in some kind of flak jacket looking thing that i think is actually a weight vest for fitness. the brain is a prediction machine. nothing means anything without context.

a week later my body was done. my hands would no longer lift the camera when i went out. it felt like the signal system between my brain and limbs was severed. i’d vape and chat with people as they swept up glass. Dima adopted a kitten. a different one, from a building so ruptured with rockets and surrounded by ordnance that i was too scared to go inside. he called her victory. i woke up one morning and my hands packed my bag and sent messages to my friends that i was getting the night train out. it was a decision my body made much more so than my brain.

mostly what i feel about these memories is a profound guilt for having seen it and come home to my comfortable life. like i’ve lost the right to write these words. thats the truest thing i can say about it.

but tonight ill go to a concert with friends and try to wrestle the other side of the coin from inside myself- a profound joy and appreciation for every breath built on witnessing how fragile our flesh is.

When I got in Dr Greg’s car at 6am in the Bronx he was blasting Madonna’s Like a Prayer. He leaned over the steering wheel, scanning the sidewalks, driving fast through the empty blocks all silvery from the winter dawn light and muttered to himself “Red where are you?” His energy is something crazy. Being near him is like being plugged into a socket. We sang along as we searched. You get the feeling he never stops. That he can’t. I meet a lot of people that are performing good, who are trying to be good, but the ones who are doing it, who are driven to it, who risk and give more than they take while trying to help others are different.

They’re obsessed with the people they’re helping. They move with their heads slightly down like they’re bending forward into a future they insist on changing. Greg moves like he’s trying to get somewhere ahead in time where the past can’t catch up. Except when he’s with child patients, then time stops around him and he’s completely focused on trying to make their little world better.

I wonder if anyone on earth is truly devoted to helping others like that without it coming from a place of profound pain. If anything worth a shit happens without terrible suffering coming in as a teacher first. Or is that just a story we tell ourselves to try to make a story like Greg’s somehow fit in our heads?

We found Red on his rooftop . There’s this thing, when someone is destroying themself, their whole manner becomes an apology in advance for the fact that they know they’re hurtling towards an end that will hurt the people who love them. Like they’re already gone. Red showed me a blue rose he’d painted the night before in a project stairwell where he lives.

We visited some friends of his and Doctor Greg’s in their apartment and they shot tranq under the dark circled eyes of a mother Mary statue and Trump’s voice blaring from the TV. I thought about everyone I’d ever id ever lost who was sweet and sad and drowning like Red, in rooms full of ash and drugs and always randomly placed jars of peanut butter and weird collections just like this one.

I thought about an assignment a few years ago with paramedics in a town where everyone was dying from overdoses and how the EMS guys i was with did rib popping CPR to a woman in bed with a jar of peanut butter on her bedside table. Her daughter stood there quietly watching and i froze for just a second when i noticed her because i was supposed to shooting this inarguably decisive moment and then i shook off that subhuman thought and offered her my hand and asked her if she’d like to come upstairs with me and she silently nodded. This phenomenon where my assignments take me into alternate endings for my life and those of people i love. That sense of having been an observer in those rooms but not a participant long before i started taking pictures. There’s something about watching without participating that makes you not really there. Without the photos i might wonder if i had been.

It’s so hard not to give up when someone’s chances are next to nothing. My list of people who i did give up on before they died is long and full of guilt. Sometimes I hear AM’s last voicemail to me, asking if i can get her some pills. She said it was for dental pain and i never responded and then a few months later she was gone. Greg clearly is incapable of giving up on anyone. Watching Red and Greg, lean, fair skinned, gentle, I saw two men totally consumed, one driven to help, one driven maybe by a similar force towards oblivion. But in the in between moments more alive than anyone.

Please read Joshua Rothman’s poignant piece on Doctor Greg here:

The Good Doctor

when i listen to certain people speak, especially spiritual practitioners and healers, i get a really weird tingling sensation on my skin, especially in my scalp. its the sort of purring sensation you get when someone brushes your hair, but all over. i’ve felt it around Santeros and storefront Pastors and priests trying to do sisyphean good in communities where every day is impossible. some nurses. a meditation teacher or two. i used to get it every time my Polish typography teacher in college would carefully trace letters on tracing paper with a sharp pencil while speaking in a low voice. i actually wondered for a second if i was attracted to him even though he looked like an elderly frog, but then i found out what ASMR was. that’s not the thing im talking about though. its that feeling but around power. or danger. i’ve also gotten it right before all hell breaks loose.

i have no idea what it means so i assume it has to do with my body knowing much more than my brain. some yet undiscovered radar system that will eventually be absorbed into obvious science. when i get that feeling around someone, i’ve learned to sit back and study them. i trust that somehow its an indicator that this person is the real thing. i was skeptical about a santera in Antimano, a barrio in Caracas, until i met her and she began to show me her rituals and that hair on end feeling sat me right down at her feet to listen and learn.

when i get that feeling in a crowd or a car or somewhere with no obvious source, which has only happened a few times in my life, i try to get somewhere else, somewhere covered, somewhere with a good view. it feels semi-nuts typing these words for a public audience. but its one of the more interesting things my work has taught me and one of the things i least understand. crowds, violence, fear, power, grief, all these situations share intense concentrations of energy and stuff happens in those spaces, all around the periphery of whatever the event is.

at the gym the other day jason said he wanted to send me a podcast about a documentary filmmaker in ukraine, but he hesitated cause he worried it would be triggering. i said i love being triggered and he sent it. i was half kidding. i mean of course i don’t love feeling like im gonna puke and i can’t breath, but i also do know that thats what very alive feels like. also that its a big problem when that becomes your definition of feeling alive. its a work in progress.

when i got home i listened to it in my kitchen while making a salad and my heart beat sped up. i try not to immediately react to that any more. Pema Chodron says to drop the story and stick with the feeling. when i step back and watch my body react its not positive or negative, just energy. gasoline. the more i learn how not to have anxiety every waking minute the more i can appreciate the way it wakes me up. its absence leaves me groggy and bored, which is also a problem.

jason had said it was about how the filmmaker came under shelling in the Donbas and the voice of his dead grandpa helped lead him to safety. i told him about the weirdest version of that type of experience i’ve had. i think when death gets close by the little walls and labels we put around our perception of whats possible get very wobbly.

i was standing around with a bunch of photographers i think in 2015 in Los Palos Grandes, Caracas, where the protesters used to gather. i remember the day as gray and steamy like it had just rained although i have no idea if that’s accurate. the parts of my memories carved by adrenaline are sharp. but the rest are soft edged. gauzy and vague and shaken up with stuff i learned or saw or thought later. this one plays in my head like a silent movie. i know there were sounds, but i can’t hear them now.

i think we were smoking cigarettes or at least we would have been. we were surrounded by national guard (or was it national police?) who had just swarmed the protest on their motorcycles. two per bike as always with sunglasses on and the guy on the back holding a teargas launcher full of rubber pellets. both of these fall under that cute category of non lethal crowd control munitions except when you shoot at point blank range at someone’s eye and destroy their face or blast a tear gas canister directly into some teenage boys heart which they did all the time. and if that didn’t work they’d sometimes send for coletivos to just ride through and shoot a few kids in the head, but in Caracas that was relatively rare most of the time.

we, the press, would bunch up when the soldiers descended. if you ran with the protesters you could get cornered, beaten, robbed, arrested, something i once learned the hard way although i got off relatively easy. my colleagues had told me not to run and that sounded great until they were coming and i was terrified and my body took over and i ran. it was a great lesson on how the body doesn’t necessarily internalize lessons of the mind. i hid behind a fridge in a tear gas filled restaurant and the moment my body learned that running and hiding wasn’t safe was when a soldier reached down where i was cowering and picked me up by the top loop of my backpack like a cat by the scruff of the neck.

they didnt respect freedom of press but they didn’t totally not respect us either (like most cops everywhere). they’ll shoot “non lethal weapons” at one or two journalists and say its an accident, but they wont usually come for the whole press corps. so when they got on the bikes with their riot shields and revved the engines we huddled together and stay put, waiting for the wave to pass, as they roared by us snatching kids by their t-shirts and dragging them away. we’d photograph the process which felt impotent and then we’d stand there waiting to see what was next.

exceptionalism for the press is a double edged sword. it never sat well with me or the journalists i like best, but when you have a card to play to make you safe you’re gonna yell “I’m press”, (im not like them, im a privileged exception), to save your own ass, cause you have to. for some it hardens the distance between us and them, but in Venezuela our own danger and their cause wasn’t too far apart. i struggle with this idea when i see people decrying the murder of journalists in gaza and ukraine and wherever else. i get it, the utility of regarding journalists as out of bounds, but i also hate the hero worship particularly of foreign journalists who come and leave and assume the risks by choice surrounded by local journalists and civilians for whom the war just came to their home one day like a flash flood they’re trying to stay afloat in.

i hate moving in a pack, packs are slow. these packs are mostly full of big men and im always struggling to swerve around their bulk so i can maneuver. i once got trapped in a slow cluster of photographers on a narrow street as furious apartment dwellers rained bricks down on our heads thinking we were police because of our helmets and proximity. i broke free and ran through a cloud of tear gas so thick i could only see white. when i emerged i found bambu carrying an injured girl. i remember she had blood in her nostril. her head was rolled back. he handed her off to a moto and the medics took her away and he thought she was dead. i used to love the way his lips moved against his teeth. i was in love with him down to the structure of his skull and the length of his canines. i remember his jaw grinding slightly side to side from stress as he repeated the word “muerta…. creo que esta muerta hvn.”

she wasn’t. we called around to the medics until we found out she was gonna be ok. it was a lucky day.

this was a quieter day. the soldiers came on their bikes and had ignored our little turtle formation of smoking journalists. nothing much was happening. they had detained the dozens they could catch and the rest had scattered and the energy was low.

carlos and i looked at each other and one of us asked if we should go check out the corner a block away. carlos was the chief photographer for reuters and we used to clown him because he dressed like robocop to cover these protests. knee pads, military style boots, quick dry shirts, super athletic frame, police style helmet and vest required by the company. he was fit and handsome and had a beautiful wife and looked very robocop in the whole kit. he was a friend of a friend and babysat me on my first few days which was very kind because i was very green. he found me a moto driver and let me follow him around until i got my bearings. afterwards we became friends and he never ever hesitated to help me when i was in a jam and his early advice saved my ass repeatedly.

i dont know who asked who but the vibe was that we both had the same thought at the same time. and that everything was tingling. there was nothing happening there, it was just another corner with soldiers still walking off the adrenaline, dragging barricades built from trash cans and scrap metal out of the streets, but we started walking uphill together. what i remember is about half way up the block we started to run, at the same time, again for no reason, just a sense of shared urgency without exchanging a word, and then we heard shots coming from the corner we were running towards.

it seems like everything i read lately is somehow about the idea that time doesn’t exist. in Annika Harris’ audiobook Lights On she gives a great explanation of where physicists are at with this; that essentially time is a data graphic that our little human minds use to make sense of stuff happening in the world, placing it in an order with a chronology so that we can function. But actually its more like everything everywhere all at once. everything happening and unhappening all possibilities existing on top of each other. carlos’ and my reaction came before the stimulus. nothing happened. we ran towards nothing. then the shots. time was out of order. almost like the intensity of the events rippled backwards.

carlos is the most rational guy ever and we’ve talked about it a hundred times. if i hadn’t shared the experience with him i might have second guessed it into oblivion.

i don’t actually remember the sound, just the motion. i know we heard gunfire and now i imagine it coming from the 3rd floor windows of a pretty apartment building covered in ivy, but we found that out later. at the time we didn’t know where they were coming from it all happened too fast. the government prosecuted and convicted some low level opposition politician for the shooting, but i was never clear on whether he did it or he was framed, just like so many other critical events from that period in Venezuela where we never really knew what was theater and what was violence and whats was false flag psy-ops, what was rebellion and what was the state. i think on some level thats the case everywhere, but the more unstable and authoritarian things get, the more Orwell ambiguity you get.

in the moment i remember my field of vision tumbling lower and sideways to the side of the kiosque, and as i type this my chest tightens with the echo of the fear. carlos was up and running again so i scrambled behind and i saw a policeman’s head lolling too far sideways, feet limp, on the back of a bike as it sped off. i shot frantically, and then another police officer who had been hit in the vest, was lifting up his flak jacket to reveal a purple bruise from the impact. he made a roaring victorious animal sound, his face a grimace of adrenaline and rage and relief and the joy of almost dying but not, which is such a drug. i crowded next to carlos and the other photographers now running up to take his picture. i stepped in a puddle of water from the rain and saw it was mixing with the pool of bright red blood. the cop they took away died. i photographed the pool of blood. i threw away the shoes.

Ice agent says I wanna do some cardio

One is wearing gray air forces

One takes a selfie with me in the background

They sound like they’re standing around a keg

They’re holding onto their vests like Bane. I know that feeling it’s comfortable

A lawyer with a wheelie briefcases says thank you for your service to the masked men

ICE agents nervously joke with each other “the camera adds 15 pounds”

I follow a mother and her two sons to the floor where fbi agents try to hide from my camera. Faces concealed, tattoos aren’t. A lot of women

These fbi guys have all the tattoos that are sposed to ID gang members?

A masked agent says to me “ you guys are quicker on your feet than me” I don’t respond.

There are about 10 photographers milling anxiously. FBI agent is drumming his fingers on his vest.

A politician walks up to the masked FBI agents and sort of poses, surrounded by press, facing them. I’m not sure what he asks but it looks more about the appearance of confrontation than anything. I shoot anyways.

I wonder if the agents are more or less motivated to make arrests because of all the media attention.

I sit on the floor again. Security tells me not to again. The journalists are fidgety. I hate waiting for something terrible to happen. (wrong job)

How much does it cost to keep 5 fbi agents standing in this hallway all day?

One of them doesn’t cover his face.

When people walk by from out of the court rooms they look like they’re holding their breath

9/20

I can hear the proceedings inside the courtroom and they’re talking about address changes and jurisdiction. 4 ice agents are waiting right outside faces covered. Volunteers wait to escort people. sometimes they make a little wall of their backs to the agents to protect people walking out. not a very solid wall.

There’s an elevator across from the court room and when it moves a strong wind blows in with a whooshing noise.

I hear one of them say “ready” and my heart starts beating. They’re shifty and I can feel something coming

A woman in a black face mask (covid kind) keeps coming out and asking in Spanish if any Hispano hablantes tienen fecha hoy but it’s just a million photographers and 5 ice agents and some lawyered and volunteers

She comes and calls out 5 Latino male names, nobody responds- I wonder if that’s who they’re waiting for

I’m sitting in a room with no windows. In front of me is a fat man with the voice of a movie villain. Nasal. High, but also booming. Domino, a devoted Dalmatian would have been at his feet. Later i’ll laugh with my then boyfriend about how he uses the armed group’s walkie talkie system to demand mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread. Both items were luxuries during the food shortages. He’d call his sort of personal assistant/body guard, “Guicho! GuichoGuichoGuicho traeme un sandwich” with that digital beep at the end, and then resume our talk, a talk which he’d deemed so sensitive he put my whole camera bag in another room, in case he’d gambled wrong on me and I really was CIA there to record and destroy him. We used to joke about it, both of us hoping that the other found it funny.

Now he’s sitting at a mahogany desk doing politician war lord. Its an act but its real. His little metal star in a case that says he’s a Consejal (Councilman) sits on his desk. His Ed Hardy shirt tight across the heaving belly. Breathes always a little bit wheezing. Once we got into it he told me I was pretty and i told him we need to act like professionals if we’re going to work together and he said ok ok ill be professional and yelled to the men prowling around him to “be professional! The journalist doesn’t like it when we call her pretty.” And proceeded to explain that he might be ugly but women seem to love him so its ok if i dont which was true, he could pull. And he was professional for years after without a glitch.

On that first day i caught a moto taxi to El 23 and walked into their communally run bakery. The smell of fresh bread was rare in Caracas at the time. I had walked into the bakery thinking of it as a front for the colectivo, (i’m not naming it here cause that could still cause me and other people problems) which had gradually mutated over time from a revolutionary community paramilitary led by ER, ( the sandwich lover at the desk) which had once scrubbed criminal gangs from the alleys and plazas of their territory and installed a communal autonomous government. Evenutally they became a somewhat criminal gang themselves of increasingly dubious revolutionary credentials, sponsored by a corrupt socialist government for which they functioned as henchmen in return for scarce resources like flour and sugar and the right to carry and run guns and govern their territory in El 23 as they liked. I don’t think i registered the powdery smell of fresh bread in my nostrils as i tried to casually ask to see the boss. Or realized how important the bread was. Bread was power, and nostalgia, and wealth. Hard eyes of militant bakers under hair nets fixed on me curiously but relaxed into smiles when i mentioned I’d visited their radio station before. Having permission from someone else eases the tension on anyone worried they have to be responsible for you.

They led me around the cement block buildings to the offices and recording studios. As we walked, residents eyed me with carefully controlled expressions. Over the years i’ve tried to learn to read the people i’m walking beside through the eyes of the people watching them. A game of mirrors complicated by my own projections, but in the comuna there was fear and hate. Tight smiles and waves and hunger dulled eyes. The thudding steps of working men carrying small plastic bags with bits of scarce food from the metro to the minibuses up the chaotic hills to their soviet style concrete apartments with windows open to the tropical breeze over the city.

The radio station is on the 2nd floor of a building overlooking the centerpiece of the comuna, a large basketball court with stadium seating, used for children’s games at Carnaval and basketball games and comuna wide meetings where neighbors can bring concerns about schools or maintenance or safety before everyone. They’re sort of democratic although the real power is in ER’s hands and everyone knows it. There’s a style of speaking which requires flowery ritualized thank yous to the revolution and repeated mentions of Comandante Supremo Hugo Chavez and Comrade ER and the Patria and usually god to be woven in with concerns about safety or food supplies in order for those concerns to be received properly. Like prayers. I to remember to smile at the right times during the speeches to not betray my skepticism about the whole process. I’m always keenly aware of the colectivo members lounging at the periphery, guns bulging under their shirts or in their fanny packs, like bored young wolves.

There are a couple of studios equipped with two way glass between them for watching recording sessions, and an outdoor patio for smoking and talking shit built in barrio style incorporating a giant tree into the structure. In the back of the studios is a large room where the young true believers, who were rare but still existed in 2016 before the failure of Chavez’ oil fueled utopian dream got too ugly to bare, happily chattered within the safe conversational parameters of their love for the colectivo, the comuna, socialism, and anti imperialism. Even then everyone was a little too earnest. The heaviness of doubt was in the room and everyone was pretending not to see it.

The radio kids were welcoming and open, and as we talked I clocked the men with shark eyes peek in to watch me suspiciously. They consulted, called others, violence written in their shoulders as they paced in and out and gathered higher ups to decide what to do with me. I grinned and kept yapping about socialism and the differences between the US and Venezuela with my new friends, i believed, in theory, the words i was saying, but i felt guilty about using the conversation as step one in the game for access. I’d learned that usually the safest thing for me to do is to appear not to find dangerous men scary, so i pretended not to notice the buzzing reaction to my presence. I’d thrown myself in, primarily to escape the clawing anxiety of being half in love with a married ambivalent man, and the only way out of here was choosing to trust the strangers around me so that they would trust me back.

Eventually some men walked in brusquely, soldier walking in wind breakers, and told me to go with them. Levity deflated quickly from all of us. I plastered my safe idiot smile over my face and fell in behind them, back down the tree woven stairs, to a door on the first floor to the room with no windows.

ER was at his mahogany desk and surrounded by the whole Colectivo. They were sitting in a semi circle in front of his desk, with an empty chair for me at the center. He gestured to the chair and used one of his 5 or so words of english. “Seet dowwn.” He boomed, and i did. It felt choreographed. I was elated and terrified at finding what i was looking for. They were here which meant they hadn’t immediately told me to fuck off. In retrospect it was a perfect example of ER’s flair for the theatrical. I think bosses and bad man types inevitably learn half of how to be what they are being from the movies.

I sat and felt an intentional hostility concealing the genuine curiosity from the 20ish men who surrounded me. As ER asked me what i wanted, one pale eyed colectivo member cleaned his finger nails with a curved 8 inch knife and stared at me hard, which would have been intimidating if it wasn’t so on the nose i almost giggled. I turned to ER because he was god in that room. I explained, that i was an American journalist who worked for corporate media that they probably hated and that i was profoundly curious about their revolutionary project and history. That i wanted to hang out and take pictures. That i would follow their rules. ER asked some questions, again, dramatically. I smiled and prattled in Spanish that was good enough but still so riddled with errors that it might have made me seem harmless. Eventually he laughed and the men (and boys) followed suit. He shouted another one of his english words “crazy!!” which would become one of his names for me. “Come back tomorrow,” he told me, “you can photograph our food distribution program.”

In el 23 ER allowed me to immerse myself in a dimension of intrigue and violence without ever quite seeing how the pieces all fit together. I could feel it all around me and strained to learn its language. I noted the lines of residents waiting to speak to him about disputes with neighbors, medical bills, or building maintenance. Sometimes when i arrived and checked in with whoever i saw first with a walkie talkie (thats how you know they’re in the colectivo and have some power), i would be motioned past exasperated petitioners, skipping the line. Some he called in to speak with in front of me, no doubt part of his show or people he found reason to attend to quickly whose matter required no camouflage, others would wrestle themselves into a disguise of patience outside his “office” all day as he ate and shot the shit with me or the guys. He often slept til after noon. I refrained from attending the hookah parties at their secret club after a certain hour, concerned that drinking and smoking til late could get me cornered and blur the lines i was always drawing after one night that got a little too close.

With a wave of his hand he could solve his people’s problems, or at least promise to. In his tiny fiefdom i could see the way they had few other options. Denied requests often resulted in panicked, desperate expressions. If he couldn’t fix it people were generally fucked. He had a monopoly on security, on law, on affordable food. The people here lived better than in most of the barrios in the city thanks to the security provided by their guns and extensive network of closed circuit cameras, and the food provided by the government in exchange for loyalty, but all this took the edge off without solving the problem. Outside the commune walls Caracas seethed with a level of mundane brutality that affected people like a harsh stimulant. The city was hypervigilant and hungry. Inside the walls ER and his boys were the only law and comfort and safety in that space was up to their whims. It sort of worked but there was never a time when you werent walking some kind of tight rope. I felt safer there than anywhere else but never safe.

I would drag myself onto the back of a cheap moto and up that hill against a sense of exhaustion that never leaves me when i have to go shoot. I’d get on the bike and slingshot myself into the hood where i was shooting my project knowing once i got myself there i’d have to do what i set out to do. Moments of magic light and and learning sometimes broke through the fog of fear and heavy limbs and made it feel worth it but the day to day was heavy except when there was enough adrenaline to lighten me. Which i lived for. Truthfully the motorcycles always scared me too which is part of the reason i loved them. The fear was electric and straightened my tired spine. I thought constantly of the men begging with an amputated leg and prayed it wouldnt be me. Sometimes when i was too hung over or excited to be scared on the back of a bike i would find myself finally flying, unable to feel afraid. I learned which emotional levers to pull to get there. Numbness feels a lot like freedom for a while.

One day it was raining and i was late for a rare cookout that ER had invited me to because moto taxis mostly wont work in the rain. On the ride up we were nervous because of the slick streets and nervous because you could hear gunshots. When i got there ER was angry at me for coming when they were at war but said i had missed most of the fighting. They’d save me a plate of food. A paper plate on top of it said, “gringa.”

At night i’d come back down jubilant into the city’s sparkly lights. The fear would seep out of me. (kinda.) I’d shower and look for B, heart in my throat hoping he’d appear in the early stages, and eventually coming back to our shared apartment. In some stupid embarrassing ways i did it all for the nights with him. (In other ways it was all for me.) he started out as a friend to have a beer with after the protests and then at some point i realized i was watching for him in the crowd. he’d bring me a sweet tea with lemon on the hottest days and the taste of cold and sugar on my lips while my nostrils stung with from tear gas and the way he smiled when he offered did something. i needed to have something to say to him. To prove i was brave and committed and special. To show him what i’d learned and do something he was curious about. It felt like a sham until i did it so long that in some way it became true. I’d pour myself into the cheap watery beer and salsa and tambores and reggaeton and terrible american rock at that awful bar greenwich and fed off his light insatiably. we’d shoot and run and dance and walk through the streets holding hands as though he didn’t have a wife and kid and an open relationship. One night i passed out drunk at a table in a chinese restaurant (it was open) to the sound of his voice issuing drunken proclamations or fighting about politics to his friends. In my stupor id still thrill to how brilliant he was, to how open and upright his chest was when he walked with constantly springy and curious steps. My spanish sharpened until it could keep up. I mixed myself with his world until I came out different. Everything was turbulent and writhing but we would come back to our apartment with no running water and he’d cook a vegetarian feast and we’d have a picnic on the floor and tell each other our stories and I’d feel safe in his arms at night, the nightmares about kidnappers finally quiet.

The relationship frayed and fractured as the country did. The tension of the days that built us pulled tight until we choked. There was the day we were shooting a protest against food shortages in the barrio and we refused to leave each other behind when the paramilitary came to break it up and there was only one moto left to get someone out. we say the paramilitary arrive and he told the driver to get me out of there as they approached and i refused to leave him and then he refused to leave and the driver peeled off as we argued, so we stayed together and witnessed a pack of grandmas in nightgowns’s shame the armed men into leaving. “i could be your grandmother did she raise you this way?” The day i was snatched by soliders on a moto and eventually talked my way out and they released me onto barren unfamiliar streets in the night. i barely knew him but i called him and told me to tell him what i saw until he recognized a landmark and he came to find me. i could almost hear the fibers creaking under the weight by the day we watched under gunfire on a bridge as a tank attacked an apartment building. as we walked away I choked on a scream as armed boys moved to jump him and he twisted like a football player and sprinted into the street to evade their grasp. i opened my mouth to stave off the bullets i was sure were about to fly and the streetwise woman next to me grabbed my hand and jerked me back into silence knowing i could only make it worse. He escaped and somehow we fought about it that night because we were so raw and scared and in love and pissed off that we could solve nothing. I think i can draw a line between the fights that destroyed us and the day he saw a man burned alive.

I’m not sure why ER decided to trust me except that he was bored and he must have felt instinctively that he could. He used to say “When i die, tell them that we werent all bad. Tell them you knew some armed poets up in El 23.” I know he got push back from fellow colectivo members and other groups’s leaders for letting me hang around, that people thought he was crazy for it, but maybe indulging the whim was a way of expressing his absolute power. He would ask me to tell him stories about my travels. “I listen to you and I fly.”

i grabbed a pen off my desk to make some notes for this and saw it was stamped with little red words: kharkiv palace hotel. one morning polina and looked at each other and shrugged as we heaped our plates with breakfast from silver trays in its second floor dining room to the sound of two sick tinny thuds. missiles striking nearby. we looked around the mostly empty booths and tables with their handful of unbothered journalists and security, and kept serving ourselves. our security advisor, who loves McDonalds and called me tinker bell because of the way i banged my feet together to get snow off my boots before getting the car, buzzed in our group chat that we needed to go the basement. we laughed and sat down with our breakfast. the hotel was a luxurious tower that felt cut off from the world. built around a hollow center looking down on the first floor lobby with a grand piano decorated for christmas. it was late december. the guy at the front desk was named Kiril and he was especially kind. i felt safe there. a couple of months later it was hit by a missile. pierced right through one of those cozy soaring high floor rooms i loved and fell in a pile of dust and debri into that insulated feeling lobby. i never asked if Kiril survived. there have been a lot of those. points on a map in my head marked by questions im afraid to ask.

there’s also mad max. i dont know how much i want to get into that here, but its another one i dont know if he’s dead or doing insane special ops. all i know for sure is i broke off our little love affair, composed of choclate truffles passed to me in a hasty meeting under that famous collapsed Irpin bridge on a day that a celebrity chef put our whole team in insane and unnecessary danger for a photo op, a cup of tea on an azov “base”, Mila giggling at me at buena vista the only bar open during the siege on Kyiv as i tried to hammer down Ukrainian political affiliations, making out in a park with smoke rising in the distance, hallucinogenic Telegram texts, a front line reunion in Mykolaiv, and an irreconcilable difference of opinion aired out to the sound of artillery. its a long short story but he disappeared from the internet completely and i still dont know if he’s dead, in jail, or doing absolutely bananas missions across Russian lines, but i really hope its the latter.

anyway i was picking up my pen to write to you (ether) about power. some brewing thoughts about being in the same room with it all these years. about collaborating in its theatrics by photographing people how they want to be photographed and trying to find some thread of reality in its halls which are constructed to stage their story their way.

im starting this little experiment to see if i can connect some of all these hanging threads in my head. link the little moments i get to see, which really only start to mean something in the web they create.

i was photographing governor Hochul last week and she was a pro. a tiny powerful creature with her makeup just a little more magenta and sparkly than i think was usual at 9am because she was going to pride afterwards. her teeth are very white. she made sure to say hi to the bus driver and a woman at the bus stop who seemed pretty down and out. she looked even smaller when her security detail hulked into view. she broed down with the cops at the diner and gently reminded a table of catholic church goers that she too was catholic but also forgive her because she was going to pride. she worked every single person she passed and she did it well, but of course, when im there with my camera, what does that even mean?

every time i photograph something that falls into the category of Power or History i have to ask how much of a ripple of performance im creating with my presence and what that does to the little record i make that make that becomes part of Power or History. one of the many reasons why my job has made me skeptical of any single autonomous truth existing. all i see is how my camera’s truth is subtly different from my own, and that of the guy next to me, and that of the writer, and that of the subject, and maybe a world away from the person watching from across the street. my meditation teacher says reality doesnt exist anyway except in the convergence of mind and stimulus in a totally fleeting subjective way, and i find that soothing if a little vertigo inducing.

power is a game of chicken. we size each other up based on a series of future projections. who will go how far how fast congeals in our minds in an instant. can i trust you to protect me? can i bet on you hurting me? how much are you willing and able to do either? what are the paremeters of our invisible fences and what are we each going to do if the other steps outside the line. in venezuela article 350 of the constitution says “El pueblo de Venezuela, fiel a su tradición republicana, a su lucha por la independencia, la paz y la libertad, desconocerá cualquier régimen, legislación o autoridad que contraríe los valores, principios y garantías democráticos o menoscabe los derechos humanos”. (The people of Venezuela, faithful to the tradition of their republic, their struggle for independence, peace and liberty, will disregard any regime, legislation or authority which contradicts democratic values, principles and guarantees, or undermines human rights.)

during the uprising there the kids used to graffiti “350” all over in a shorthand for this concept. they’d shout it as a battle cry before launching a molotov cocktail. some of those protesters had incredible aim, some of them not so much, which was a whole thing if you were standing in the front and they were at the back. best friend A. used to put a finger on the air and giggle “estamos en 350, (we’re in 350)” and grin as she floored it going the wrong way on a the highway choked with immobile cars to get us to a protest, or somtimes a party.

2 nights ago on the 4th of july Deb and I walked through williamsburg to the bomb sounds and pretty lights and the drunks with a dog she’s babysitting because a friend is having visa problems and talked about ICE and deportation and rage and love and karma. we got to a friends rooftop and she climbed up a ladder in heels with the dog in her tote just as the fireworks display ended which suited me fine because fireworks fill my body with adrenaline and grief even if my head is fine with them. jason and i chatted about those homemade guns they make in latin america out of pipes as a few smaller rockets popped off around us and i felt safe because i was surrounded by people i love and quiet and sad thinking about a teenage boy who used to call me “la reportera” who’s chest got blown open completely by a teargas cannister when him and his friends were bucking shots with one of those pipe guns.

i think about the US through a venezuelan history lens every day. power is a mutual belief in a hierarchy. it requires participation inspired by trust or fear, regulated by force. my Venezuelan friends are mostly all seeing the writing on the wall here, as are some fellow conflict bros and pessimists. i say all the time that after years of traveling through different calamities: i see myself less as where i am but when. when on the timeline of stability and collapse.

im watching everyone i know try to sort out the new terms of the power pact in the US. who has what, how much, what does it mean? i think that’s how i’d define this moment. maybe i’d call it the denial stage. or the mental wrestling stage. like when you move the furniture around in your house and it takes months before you learn to stop putting your coffee down on tables that arent there any more. the brain is a essentially a survival based prediction machine say my pop science podcasts, making sense of now without paying too much attention to now because its all tangled up in its stories of then.

the thing about the power chicken game is that chicken is about what you have to lose and how likely you think you are to win. the more comfortable you are, the less fucking crazy you are, the more likely your reaction to accelerating oncoming headlights is not going to be betting it all. especially i guess to beat the analogy to death, if the headlights belong to a tank, and you’re driving the luxe model hybrid SUV with a carseat for your kid in the back.