It’s always bothered me that the title CONSUME. could just as easily refer to food or entertainment. When I was originally structuring the different sub-publications of Pen, Ultimate!, CONSUME. went back and forth between the two genres, and only eventually settled on entertainment because the theme’s riff on subliminal messaging (it is, like Shepard Fairey’s OBEY Giant—and just as iconic—a direct rip on designs from John Carpenter’s iconic aliens-among-us thriller They Live!) felt more distinctly sci-fi than culinary.

All this time it’s still bugged me. So I’ve finally merged the two blogs. So long Munch Collins. I’ll find somewhere for the turtle to live.

CONSUME. is now a monthly newsletter covering each month’s adventures and recommendations in everything Consumption; mostly food and entertainment, with occasional sneaky otherage. Mysterious as that sounds.

Let’s get to it.

This July in CONSUME.:

• Appropo for this inaugural issue, I revisited a hit list of my favorite foods (or as Eric from might say, “All Home Runs”).

• I watched a few truly great, exciting films (The Odyssey, The Invite, more) and one fascinating new show (Furious).

• ????

I ate a lot in July. It was great. Food is my comfort vice, so all the below is the rebound off a wildly busy and occasionally fun June. What a rebound, though.

3.Iconic.Sandwiches

The roasted pork banh mi from Banh Mi Hoa Phat (Monterey Park); the beef tongue sandwich from A La Beirut (Eagle Rock); the turkey sub from Mario’s Deli (Glendale). In order of iconic-ness, respectively. Respectfully.

Banh Mi Hoa Phat is currently my favorite banh mi spot in LA. I don’t see it being dethroned any time soon.

I’m not a fan of the “clean” food trend making its rounds through social—“cleanest pizza in Glendale,” “cleanest burger,” “cleanest steak,” whatever—it reeks of MAHA and seed oil garbage, and means nothing. I say that so I can now feel fine about saying this banh mi is pretty clean…for a sandwich absolutely bursting with delicious, delicious pork fat. It could be oily and gross. It’s not. Instead the roasted pork at Banh Mi Hoa has all the hallmarks of great banh mi: the light, crackly (but not jagged) bread, the fresh veggies, the generous pate, mayo, and house fish(ish) sauce. The pork itself is incredible, perfectly cooked and well-seasoned, flavorful and textured, crispy, crackly, and tender. The pork meatball banh mi here is also great, if a little messy; and the house Vietnamese coffee is as sweet and as strong as any.

I’m a big, big fan of Eagle Rock’s Lebanese strip mall hub A La Beirut. Admittedly I’ve sampled little of the menu. The problem is that the Chicken Shish Tawouk wrap (juicy chicken kebab, garlic sauce, pickles, cabbage, fries, and ketchup) is a perfect dish, and it’s awfully hard to deviate from perfection. But I finally nudged myself to try the beef tongue sandwich and there were no regrets. It’s beefy, herby, garlicky and pickly, on their light, crisp house bread. I’ll be happy to mix up my beloved Chicken Shish Tawouk with this now and then (but next time I’m getting the Tawouk).

Mario’s in Glendale is a bonafide classic. I’ve been going since time immemorial and my parents have been going since time pre-immemorial (their days at Glendale High). That’s probably why, though I’ve tried their more traditional Italian-American sandwiches—your ‘dellas, ‘sciuttos, meatballs and all—I nearly always just get a turkey sub. Maybe a turkey-avocado if I’m feeling spicy. Turkey sandwiches were my favorite as a kid; but Mario’s was probably my first Adult turkey sandwich. Not only was it huge (and still is), it had stuff on it. Enemies! Lettuce, tomato, onion, and mustard. Horrifying, to the plain hot dog, plain burger, plain fries plain nuggets plain sandwich-eating child. But delicious. It was one of the early culinary gateways that led me to wonder what other enemies might not be enemies; what other flavors were out there. You could, in a way, in the labyrinthian convoluted way the internet is especially fond of, say the Mario’s turkey sub is responsible for this very newsletter. Still a great sandwich (and if you’ve never been, I highly recommend a stop by the fridge or freezer for a box of pasta to take home).

3.Neat.Sweet.Treats

The pie from How’s It Going To End? (Montrose). Louisiana Banana Ice Cream from Perla’s (Montrose). The apricot-pistachio danish from Colussus (San Pedro).

They say cafes are the modern “third place,” and that’s a whole thing because it’s sometimes true and sometimes not depending on all kinds of socioeconomic factors, but what is inarguable is that How’s It Going To End? is literally the place I spend most of my time outside of home and the restaurant. And I’m happy to, because not only is it an exceptionally pretty cafe with kind people and good coffee that’s close to work—it’s also home to some of my favorite baked goods in the city. Baker-in-chief Molly does miraculous work with all things out of an oven, from shortbread cookies to biscuits to yellow cake to, in this feature, the seasonal pie. These bakes are delicately balanced, never too anything, and often include a dash of the unexpected, whether that’s an ingredient—a sharp zest in a frosting to cut through the intense sweetness—or a concept—like the peanut butter cheddar crackers that harken to the Keebler and Ritz snacks of after-school afternoons.

The pie itself is pretty much everything you’re hoping for in a slice of pie, with a brittle, lightly sweet crust filled with melty sweet-sour seasonal fruit, decadent and fullsome but not overrich. It makes pie for breakfast make sense. Enjoyed best with a cup of coffee.

Perla’s is the best, man. Excitingly it is yet another hometown upstart opened just this summer, in Montrose a couple blocks down Verdugo next to Berolina Bakery and Schreiner’s Deli. They’re whipping up Filipino-American flavors like Calamansi Creamsicle (orange creamsicle+), Milo Crunch (a chocolate rice crispy treat turned ice cream), and Turon (banana, jackfruit, caramel), as well as unique, not-specifically-Filipino flavors like White Coffee (Malaysian ipoh coffee with Biscoff cookies), Black Sesame (wildly addicting nuttiness), and Lousisiana Banana—which I’ve been anabashedly telling everyone is my “flavor of the summer.” Vanilla, chunks of banana, and “tanduay rum sauce.” I mean…right? What are you doing? Get over there. Every flavor is available in a pint; and flavors update frequently!

Colossus has been a long-time favorite of mine, and is a top stop among my weekend morning getaways (considering the restaurant, more like my “unspecified day off” getaways). It’s one of those bakeries where everything’s special and you should always order what looks good in the case that day. I’ve never gone wrong with the seasonal danish, which on this visit was a pistachio apricot, nutty and creamy and sweet and just a little sour in that buttery brittle shell. Ultimate treat stuff. Enjoy nearby at White Point Beach or at some scenic cliff spot up the coast in PV.

2.SGV.FAVs

The Chonqing cold noodles from Chong Qing Special Noodles (San Gabriel); and everything so far from Ipoh Kopitiam (Alhambra).

Every once in a while I crave a slap in the face. Flavor-wise. (Though, it has been since college that I was last literally slapped in the face. I’m not asking for it, but it feels like I’m due.) The Chonqing cold noodles at Chong Qing Special Noodles are a firm slap in the mouth. They are spicy—the restaurant is Szechuan—and have that numbing quality that foodie masochists love so much. They don’t have to be destructively spicy, however. The server will ask, then clarify, and then confirm that you understand you are ordering something spicy. It would be condescending if it wasn’t so obvious that people do somehow end up here not knowing that the bright, screaming-red oil flooding every dish is HOT. You can also choose your spice level—for first timers you might as well say, “mild,” and adjust the taste yourself with the handy jar of chili oil on the table. But these noodles are absurd. They genuinely bewildered me on first bite. The cold temperature leaves the noodles with a more subtle, building heat (the soups are more immediately intense), and brings the savory, floral nuttiness of the peppercorns to the front. There are also sour and bitter notes that I still can’t quite identify, but I’m relishing in the mystery. The noodles themselves are definitely Special, thin and straight and chewy and soaked full of that addictive sauce. It’s a potent experience, pleasurably masochistic in a way everyone enjoys. Everyone!

Everything’s good at Malaysian cafe Ipoh Kopitiam—the roti canai, the white coffee, the kaya toast—but I’ll give a special shout to the char kway teow and the laksa. Both are dishes I’ve struggled to find great versions of in LA, and they are very good here. The char kway teow comes hot and smoky from its brief, bright turn in the wok, with pops of fatty sweetness from the Chinese sausage and plenty of bite to the flat noodles. The laksa, a rich blend of coconut milk and curry with thick, soaked cubes of tofu, fish cake, dense rice noodles and three head-on prawns is a feast in a bowl, one of the iconic flavors of Malaysia done well.

Everything.Else

My dad makes a killer burger that you unfortunately cannot eat, but is worth appreciating. Just get good at burgers, I guess. (It is quite similar to the Town Smash Burger, if you’re looking for an analogue. Or the Maui Burger at Islands, an old favorite.)

I made an easy, tasty summery pasta. Can of crushed tomatoes, sweet onion, sweet italian sausage, a heap of garlic, rigatoni. Just slice the onions and cook them down to color and sear that sausage to both bring out/keep in the sausagey flavor. It probably sounds like a lot of sweet ingredients, but it comes out a more subtle sweetness balanced against the other saltiness in the pasta from the sausage and cheese (and salt, for the onion). Highly satisfying (I did a little dance), and going in the more regular rotation.

Town specials have been on fire recently. This loaded queso was spectacular. Check us out Fridays and Saturdays for specials and a deceptively difficult free dessert quiz (that I’ll be personally concocting the next couple weekends).

(Hey! Find all my food recommendations on my maps list here!)

Big month for summer. Big summer for screen. Big screen for movie. The Odyssey. The Invite. Furious. Creed? Star Trek?

The.Odyssey

A man laments the world of toxic masculinity, and the poison in himself, in Ancient Greece.

A movie I really, really liked. Matt Damon has always excelled at being “A Guy,” and making Odysseus “A Guy” instead of “The Guy” is a pretty inspired choice (Agamemnon is arguably “The Guy” of The Odyssey). Despite its well-noted alterations and cuts to the original tale (I cannot begin to care), the film remains one of the ultimate journeys, mythical and fantastic, grounded only enough to make the people feel human in a magical world. It’s a film about what men will do (take/seize/burn/kill/sacrifice/war/lie/cheat/blame) to feel like Men, to be Right, to not be denied what they feel they are entitled to. As such it’s not directly a film about women, and the women of The Odyssey are largely reflections of the terror and failures of men—scenes with Helen, Clytemnestra, Athena, and Circe harshly punctuate the living danger of this hypermasculine world. Tellingly, this world is on the brink of collapse.

All that and, as a movie, it’s pretty fun! It’s spectacular in all the ways you hope, intimate in ways that are meaningful, and powerful in its biggest moments. A true blockbuster and a reason to go to the movies.

The Odyssey also features the single most terrifying sound I’ve ever heard in a movie theater. Good heavens. In theaters.

The.Invite

A millennial couple is exceptionally weird about making friends.

A movie I loved, for the simple reason that it’s the hardest I’ve laughed in a theater in a long time. It’s cartoonish and real, silly and incisive, clippy and cringey and unexpected. Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz are all dynamite—but Seth Rogen, with not a little nostalgia behind him, is hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in scene after scene. It’s worth seeing at a screening (with a crowd) if there are any remaining; if not, invite your own aging millennial (or decrepit Gen X) friends over, pour the wine and prep the charcuterie. In theaters.

Furious

A serial killer methodically murders participants in an Epstein-like conspiracy; an FBI agent tracks her; men, and the systems men built, get in the way.

Furious is one of the most interesting killer-thrillers I’ve watched in some time, a fresh take on one of my favorite genres. Emmy Rossum and Lola Petticrew are powerhouses, gripping and magnetic and layered in contentious lead roles. Love to see Scoot McNairy, somewhat pigeonholed as a burnout, but just so adorable when he’s sad. And Jake Lacy, also somewhat pigeonholed as one the most hateable faces on TV, living up to his face. The conspiracy is insidious and deep, the revenge delicious and disturbing. I’m tuning in weekly. On Hulu.

Oldie.Goodies

I watched Creed and Star Trek (‘09) again recently, two blockbuster films with near-perfect individual scenes that bring me to tears every time. In Creed, it’s Stallone’s big locker room revelation, perhaps the best single minute of his acting career. In Star Trek, it’s the entire first five minutes, with a standout performance from the Hemsworth who would be Thor. Both films are still a blast outside those moments: Creed is 1000x better than a Rocky sequel/spinoff ever needed to be, an early Coogler flex that’s as much a modern Philly movie as the original was to its time; Star Trek has so much style, energy, and fearlessness for a franchise reboot. It’s always nice to confirm a past hit still hits. On Netflix.

(Hey! Follow me on Letterboxd!)

VJdL279GLfcsemRFoYRTHNHZcgF8udSmQ8x1s+W4UX+Ad/3emF9S5YOd7zasPZlCNP4BT59xubkhMzkhSemjgVMuM/shMTAhGPyl+SnVITAhee6f858b5J5ZjIhqjiExMyGC

HAGS,

-Mitch

“I walked through the most dramatic landscapes, I saw the most beautiful sights, and I ate at so many warm, family-run cafes. I had a lot of soups of the day with cheese scones. Every night I had a shot of whiskey, threw a coat on and walked the grassy path along the coastline, past the ponies and the sheep, to a set of stairs down to the shore. I sat on the steps and smoked two cigarettes, and watched the sun set. Then I’d head back, make dinner, pour another whiskey, watch a movie, and go to bed.”

Some people press. “But what did you do for two weeks?”

And I tell them, “That.”

Google Maps does Birsay little justice.

User photos show a round, grassy tidal island, with a lighthouse and some flattened ruins. Sheep. Pretty much it.

As a frequent hiker, I was underwhelmed by what basically appeared to be a loop around a big, flat circle of grass. This was the top result for hikes on Orkney? I hike up hills and mountains, down valleys, across streams and over boulders in areas practically teeming with lions and snakes and tarantulas (*oh my) (**mostly snakes)!

Birsay did look, you know…nice. Worth a quick visit at least. But I was more excited about the cozy tearoom in the little village nearby. I thought, instead of being the main destination of one of my precious days in Orkney, that Birsay would be more of a pit stop. Park and snap a few pics of the pretty geography. Then go get a coffee and a slice of cake.

I first visited Birsay on my second day in Orkney—the eighth day of my vacation. That morning the skies were dark and wind rushed through the farm where I was staying. The isles were fresh off the back of the first storm of the season. I’d weathered the brunt of it over an unexpected day in Heathrow, then Glasgow, then caught the first flight out. I figured Birsay, the big, flat, pretty circle of grass about a half-hour’s drive from my cottage, to be a fairly relaxed destination for that inaugural outing.

The drive raised my expectations.

Orkney is rolling hills of bright green pastured farmland and purple-brown heather, smattered with ponds and interspersed with small villages of old wood-and-stone and new, plain, durable construction. Narrow roads, mostly paved, snake between endless wire fences penning fuzzy cows and fluffy sheep. It’s beautiful, rural, in every way different—everything I had been greatly anticipating. The light was a real surprise.

It’s often cloudy in Orkney; regular news in the far north of Scotland, in early fall. But thanks to the wind, the cloud cover there is no static grey blanket. It is shifting, roiling, showering, always moving. And brilliantly, breaking.

Crest a ridge and behold heavenly rays illuminating a placid scene: a flock of bright white sheep dotting a green hillside sloping down to a small, rippling pond, overseen by a two-story, grey, stone farmhouse. Round the bend into the full force of a squall, dim light and intense rain, a low, cobbled stone wall all that separates you from a sheer hundred-foot cliff and thrashing sea of white-capped waves smashing into thunderous spray. Turn the next corner, blue skies! The little stormlet has passed. Pull over to let the cows by, shepherded by a Honda Civic.

The especially wondrous thing is, from certain places in Orkney, you can watch these scenes transpire from miles away. To the east, heavy showers; to the south, heavenly rays; to the west, open sky. In five minutes it’ll be different. Nothing is still. The wind never ceases. The island is a living oilwork.

Birsay is north of Rendall, where my farm-stay is. I took the longer road along the coast, past Tingwall where the ferry lands, through Evie where the bakery is, around the top of the Mainland (the main island), down a long slope to the very northwest tip.

I passed the ruined Earl’s Palace, turned down the coastal road, and parked in the lot at the end of the point. The Brough of Birsay was there: a big circle of grass, yes, and yet the grass was amazing to behold, separated from me not by an LED screen, not by thousands of miles, not even by a narrow strait but only by jagged wet rock, the tide pushed out, the land bridge exposed. I’d timed my visit well. The concrete path that crossed the rock was itself broken in many places, but traversable. I could go to the island, right now. A perfect first adventure. I got out of the car and the wind plucked my hat clean off my head, sending it flying into the air.

I chased it around the parking lot for a minute. Bent over, shuffling and juking, back and forth. I lunged; the hat flew away. I lunged; it skittered under a car. I went around the car; it came back out the side it went under. A man in a work truck eating his lunch watched me. He saw me finally catch the hat, straighten up, and put it back on. He saw it blow right back off. Thirty seconds later I put it on again. Backwards.

There would be no crossing to the Brough that day. It would have only been windier on the island, and I hadn’t brought the right jacket. I had no idea when the tide was supposed to come back in. And that guy would be watching if I slipped on the walkway or got stuck out there. The thought of that, more than anything, was unbearable.

There was, luckily, another trail, leading back eastward along the coast, marked by a wooden sign that read: “Skiba Geo.” Whatever that was. Some ancient thing, probably. I was determined that that first excrusion would not be fruitless. I’d have my adventure. It was still windy, and I’d probably be frozen and hanging onto my hat for dear life, but whatever Skiba Geo turned out to be, there was at least no chance of me getting trapped on a shelterless island with a bunch of sheep.

One hand in my jacket pocket, the other on top of my hat, head hunched, I set off.

The otherworldliness of the Orkadian coast is difficult to describe. I come from another coast, but an arid one. I come from warm, crowded beaches ten-plus months a year. The cliffy, temperamental Central and Northern California coastline is closer to Orkney, but I’ve only seen it a couple of times. In Southern California we do have the occasional spat of rough weather (believe it or not); but for the most part, famously, on any given day, you can drive right into the sunshine dream that still draws millions and millions.

As I started down toward Skiba Geo, the first word that sprang to mind was one I’d never ascribed to my beaches: “ferocious.” That’s mainly from the wind. Its intensity ranges from “a series of playful shoves” to “trying to eat you alive.” It also, as I mentioned, does not stop. “Relentless.”

As for the landscape itself: “dramatic.”

It is like something out of hundreds of fantasy novels. Every inch of coastline looks like it should host a castle, or the ruins of one. It would make for a wonderful painting. Or a sketch, in the center of the book. But instead of castles there are cows. Lumpy stone walls. Barbed wire. Nothing else. After walking for five minutes, I understand why: to build anything here would see it punished as the rock itself. Scathing wind and crashing tide. Perhaps there were once castles, long since rubble, or tumbled into the sea.

I already knew, in the 20 hours or so I’d been on Orkney, that my selection of destination based on one viewing of a film recommended by some podcast or article I couldn’t remember (The Outrun) had, somewhat miraculously, paid off. The island was everything I’d been hoping for: it was pretty, it was foreign, and it was remote. But in that first five minutes at Birsay, a deeper certainty clarified, too. I have, over and over again, forgotten where I can go until I am there. Orkney was one of the places to remind me.

Turned out Skiba Geo is a hut.

Kind of a shack, really. A storage shed. A squat building, bunch of stones, grass roof, a little wooden door sporting an awfully temptatious sign reading: “KEEP OUT.” On later research, the hut also usually featured an old whalebone-charm-thing mounted on a post outside—that is, until some tourist the summer before…you know. Sigh. The whalebone is now put away for “restoration.” More like safekeeping, from the untrustworthy public. I don’t blame them.

Skiba Geo, the hut, was built only a couple hundred years back or so—practically yesterday, for these islands. Ho hum. But the rocky beach it overlooks has launched fishing boats for thousands of years, so long that the boat perches dug from the soil have become permanent landscape (see above). As though one ancient day great fingers reached from the ocean and with deific ease scooped out deep, even grooves in the clifftop, and pointed: “Hey. Keep your boats here.” Then retreated into the sea. The early fishermen looked at each other and shrugged. And they did, ever since.

I wandered past the hut and down the next bend in the cliff. A woman sat on a bench with her retriever, watching the water. We waved silently to each other. A sweet, if also kind of stupid person in my brain said, “Wow! People sit on benches with their dogs and wave to each other here, too!” He tends to be vocal when traveling. We still marvel at how people are exactly the same, everywhere. Despite the fact that it is possibly the single most obvious truth in the world.

I stood as long as I could, just looking at the hut, the grooves, the waves. The wind never slowed. My poor red ears throbbed. Next time: beanie.

I returned to the car and went on with my first day.

Four days later I tried again.

That morning it drizzled outside, at the farm. That didn’t really mean anything in terms of whether it’d be a nice day. Showers pass in minutes on Orkney. The forecast for the islands (near useless, but provided at least a direction of the weather) was 50 degrees, partly cloudy. I thought, well, if the wind was blowing west-to-east, it might be more sunny at Birsay, since it’s on the northwest coast. Plus, it was Friday, and the cheerful-looking Birsay Bay Tearoom would be open for the weekend. Logic established, I decided to give Birsay another shot.

Mhm.

I’d been in high wind before. Boston gets pretty windy, especially downtown, channeled through the narrow corporate corridors. I’ve been in Chicago on windy days off Lake Michigan. I’ve been to Livingston, Montana, one of the windiest places in the country. I grew up in LA foothills thrashed by the notorious Santa Anas a few times a year. Only a few days earlier I’d been in a plane that had to land sideways due to the gale-force gusts hurtling across Scotland, and then practically taxied sideways to the gate (and then stood in horizontal rain with a hundred other stranded passengers, half of them shorts-wearing Glasweges, waiting for a cab). Still, I’d never been knocked off my feet by wind. At Birsay, once I forced the door open and myself outside, the wind picked me up and pancaked me against the side of the car. I slunk down and struggled to put one foot in front of the other, lunging fully forward into the gale. Jacket flapping and rippling like a sail. This was the Atlantic I’d only read about. This was the fury. There was a genuine, almost worrying sense of danger. But…the sea! I had never seen something like that.

It was white. Froth and chaos, crashing peaks, spray caught on the wind and slung stinging into my face. The cacophany extended far out into the bay. But the shallow strait to the island, where the land bridge would have been, was hell. Dante’s orchestra, all cymbals. I couldn’t look away. With transparent hands on my shoulders shaking me side to side, forward and back, tugging and pulling at my jacket, it was everything I could do to keep both feet on the ground. The closest sensation to it is an earthquake. When the ground beneath you moves, all by itself, the reality resting on it, that you’re living in, abruptly pauses. Regular life, gone. For however many moments, there is just helplessness. The one unshakeable thing in the world is moving. All we can do is exist until it’s over. Ride it out. Be at the whim. Then it’s done. You say, “Whew, crazy,” and resume. Standing on the point of an island in a storm is something like that.

I laughed. It was amazing. Truly, rarely amazing.

Over on the brough, the sheep continued to graze. I suddenly thought it was a perfect day for soup.

Just back down the road, bent awkwardly around the ruins of an Earl’s palace, over a small bridge with a solitary, forbidding public restroom, was Birsay Bay Tearoom.

The lonely cafe was all warmth and coze. Little wooden tables, white and black chairs. Long windows looking out over the thrashing bay. Behind a short counter and a three-tiered display case decorated with handwritten notes, the operating family hustled and bustled and called in distinctly Scottish sounds. The high, vaulted ceiling echoed everything. It felt busy, despite being not. That morning it was only me and an older couple who gave me the up-down with shameless suspicion. I ordered potato-and-leek soup and a warmed cheese scone (the Redwall child in me smiled).

Orkadians are connoisseurs of at least three categories of cuisine: seafood, soup, and bakes. For islanders in the cold North Atlantic, I think this makes sense. Things that warm a body and soul, that fortify against the relentless, ferocious elements. Birsay Bay Tearoom is a prime example of the latter two cuisines.

Take, for example, the bake case, which that day hosted: frosted coffee cake, tea loaf (“served with butter”), a double-decked carrot cake, chocolate cake, Victoria sponge, lemon drizzle, ginger cake, caramel cake, brownie, tiffin, Biscoff rocky road, millionaire’s shortbread, billionaire’s tiffin, and three types of scones. It was the off-season.

The soup and scone arrived, steaming and aromatic, sharp cheddar and savory potato…ness. I believe all the Tearoom’s soups are vegan (so they always have something to offer); but lose none of the rich fullness that many soups achieve through dairy. There were hearty lumps of potato and creamy dissolved potato in every spoonful, thin green flecks of leek and longer, firmer strands. At a guess, I’d say they blended or low-and-slowed potato and leek to that fine disintegrated texture; then added more potato and leek later in the process for those chunky spoonfuls. Seasoned handsomely. I expected the soup to be more a vehicle for the scone; a dip, if you will. Then I ate about a third of it before I remembered there was a scone on my plate.

The scone: buttery, soft and warm on the inside, crisp on the outside, delicious without butter; but oh, decadent with. A bite of scone dunked in the potato and leek soup?

I made some primordial sound. A guttural “OHM.” The old folks glanced at me with concern.

Outside the windows, the bay continued to rage. Inside, I was content as a person can be. I ate and looked and looked. Ordered a coffee. More folks came, mostly locals by the sound of them, filling the vaulted room with conversation. As I left, helplessly, I ordered a couple slices of cake.

Goldilocks blessed my third and final visit to Birsay.

It was cloudy, not stormy. Breezy, not windy. And the parking lot busy; but not packed. Kids ran across the concrete path that days before was fury and froth. It was my time.

Having failed to make the crossing twice, it felt momentous to finally accomplish it. The conclusion to a 10-day personal saga. The path, slippery in places, bisected smooth, jagged rock and calm pools of water fluttering with hundreds of tiny ripples in the soft breeze. I was struck by the turnaround from my last visit. It felt fragile; as though any second the sea could rush back in and crush us all.

I hurried up a little.

The brough, the enormous grassy uprising, grew even larger on approach. Warm wind blew across the bay. The sky was still dark, but the mood at Birsay, with a collection of people I suspected had also been biding their time for just the right day, was festive. Families taking pictures, couples taking selfie-videos, kids hopping rock to rock and being futilely chastised not to run.

Up the stairs, onto the grass.

The old village ruins are low foundations of smoothed white stone. There first lived the Picts (the most ancient and stubbornly mysterious of Britain’s early people), then, a couple thousand years later, the Norsemen, doing all the same things. Mainly raising sheep. As though the Picts, one day, handed over the keys: “Take good care of it.” Having some familiarity with the Norse, it probably didn’t go quite that cleanly.

The centerpiece of the village, an original, solitary standing stone faintly engraved with the image of a deity, continued its long watch as kids yelled, climbed, and leapt through the ruins. The activity was encouraged, as it should have been. Kids laughing and playing—it’s a far closer thing to living history than so many curated experiences, virtual recreations, and restored architecture. If there’s one human activity we could guarantee they were doing then that we are doing now, the exact same way on the exact same spot, it’s whatever kids are doing in grass under the sun.

And the sun did come out. Quite overdramatically, blazing its way through the cloud cover with a few intense rays, poking holes throughout the grim ceiling that stretched across the island. One ray shone right down on the village, and the old stone gleamed.

I set out from the ruins to do a full lap around the brough. And in only one step, discovered what the sheep had been doing on this island for thousands of years: pooping.

The Brough of Birsay is one gigantic field of poop.

Immediately I gave up trying to avoid the poop, and settled for the lesser disgust of stepping only in drier-looking poop. It was everywhere. Everywhere. Millions and millions, perhaps billions of little dark pellets, scattered like marbles and stacked in fresh piles. It didn’t smell. That was nice. But it was still poop.

I tried not to think about it, which was pretty much impossible. Then I thought about it clinically. Centuries and centuries of poop. I wondered how much of the brough was composed of it now. Where did the poop end and the rock begin? Towards the top of the island the grass was long enough that I could sort of bend it down on top of the poop so that I wasn’t stepping directly on it. As much. I felt better about that.

At the highest point, which was not so high, there was a lighthouse. Past that, sheer, weatherbeaten cliffs, and the sea. There’s a sense of vertigo I get sometimes, looking out onto open ocean. Throwing my mind at it to see how much I can comprehend. Never takes too long to feel deeply overwhelmed. I can’t help it, though. I can’t help but see what there is to see. It could be anything. It’s probably ocean all the way to the horizon; but it could be anything. In the unknown, there’s comfort as well as the infamous fear. There’s possibility; and quiet; and a peaceful lack. No people to figure out, no obligations to worry, no responsibility. I could be anything.

But, I do as we must always do lest we end up the subject of some tragic novel, and turn back away from the sea. We live in a world, we have to. It’s as simple as that. Despite what the sea whispers. On the way down the hill, still getting over the vertigo, I looked up, and God had painted me a painting.

There’s still plenty of comfort in the known.

Curiously there was less poop down the main path in the middle of the island than there was on the small path around the edge. Maybe someone cleaned it every day. Seemed unlikely. I tried to scuff my shoes to get rid of some of the buildup before I got back to the car.

As I got in, a small burst of adrenaline: it was time again…for soup!

The Tearoom was busier that day, but the same table I sat at the last time was open again (it was one of the few not along the windows). I did briefly hesitate to order the same. The soup of the day was “Lemon Basil Lentil,” which sounded…fine…and I’d already learned to trust the Orkadians on all things edible with a spoon, but lentils? Lentils have never inspired a greater feeling than pure ambivalence. I like dal, Indian-style lentils, and that’s about as culinarily interesting as lentils get. Lentil soup on the other hand is, classically, something you eat to feel healthy and satisfied, a solid under-the-weather meal. Nothing more. I had, however, picked up on the near omnipresence of lentils since landing on Orkney, in every store and on many cafe menus. Its mere ubiquity pushed me through the hesitation, and I’m glad it did. It was probably the best cup of soup I’ve ever eaten.

It was so…rich. It was lentils, lemon, and basil, and seasoning, salt and perhaps a bit of pepper. It was, again, vegan, so no butter or cream. Yet the soup was velvety creamy, thick and unctuous and smooth, savory, herby, and bright. In every spoonful, so much. All, it must have been, thanks to the slow, long, careful cooking down of those boring old lentils, that oldest culinary concept of rendering the everyday, at-hand ingredient into the enjoyable, in that case the luxurious. Again I ate half before I remembered the scone. Again the scone and the soup, combined, became greater than the sum. My previous visit, I was well pleased by my meal at Birsay Bay Tearoom. That time, I was enraptured.

In the half hour or so I’d been there being enraptured, the Tearoom had filled up. More tourists this time, like back at the brough. It was loud and buoyant. The small team hustled and called back and forth behind the counter. Clink and clatter and laughter.

I bought another two pieces of cake and left. It was my last full day in Orkney. There was more to see, and to eat, one more time.

Note:

I don’t know who I wouldn’t recommend Orkney to. People without patience, or who go to viral TikTok restaurants.

But if you just like supremely beautiful, serene places out on the fringe: I couldn’t recommend it more. Particularly in the early fall.

More Orkadian adventures still to come.

You can technically find lists here in old Pen, Ultimate! articles, but individual addresses and links on a long blog page aren’t exactly the most helpful format. My friend eventually figured it out, but the question bothered me. If I recommend a place, be it restaurant or scenic parking lot (several included), I want people to go so they can validate my taste. That’s like, the whole point.

So here’s a bunch of maps all in one place. Every pin is somewhere I’ve been and personally recommend (in the past I’ve also recommended based on research). There’s a little blurb included about each.

I thought about doing one big map, and maybe I will sometime, but for now I’ve narrowed these down by what I hope are useful categories. I use Google Maps because I’m Green (Android), and beyond that as a family business co-operator I nurse an evergreen (eh?) vendetta against Apple Maps. (The amount of business we’ve lost to Apple Maps telling people we’re closed because any random user can tell Apple Maps we’re closed, at any time, would be funny if it were funny.)

Anyway, here’s where I go to eat and relax and escape and have fun. You can save these maps and plug them right in and hit the road, right away. Please do! Let me know how you like it when you go; and if you have a place for me to try, send it my way!

(If it’s red, click it.)

Curated Maps

Favorites

My favorite places? That’s it.

Weekend Adventures

A collection of little, food-related escapes near LA. Almost entirely along the coast. Get your food at (A), go eat it at (B), go for a little walk/hike at (C) and a coffee at (D)—and that’s a good day. That kinda thing.

San Diego Road Trip

Pit stops on the road to San Diego. Fewer places actually in San Diego, tbh.

Santa Barbara Road Trip

Pit stops on the road to and in Santa Barbara. More places actually in Santa Barbara, tbh.

Joshua Tree

High Desert favorites. A lot of these feel like must-stops—but there are now too many to stop at on my typical 2-night trips. A few recommended JT National Park spots thrown in for good measure.

By Food

Breakfast (soon)

Breakfast Burritos

Burgers (soon)

Burritos (soon)

Coffee & Cafes

Family Style (soon)

Plate Lunch (soon)

Poke (soon)

Ramen (soon)

Sandwiches

Tacos (soon)

Treats (Sweets, Creams, Bobas, & Baked Goods)

✌ 🛹s

REVIEW.2025.CONSUMPTION.

MOVIES.TV.GAMES.MUSIC.

CONSUME.STAT.

MOVIES

These are the best films I watched in 2025, in order of strength of recommendation. Movies from prior years qualify if I saw them for the first time last year.

Microhabitat (2017)

I know, I know. “My most-recommended film from 2025 is actually this little Korean indie drama from 2017. It’s called Microhabitat? Have you heard of it?” This, from the guy who just wrote a movie list featuring A Knight’s Tale and Sahara (and not the good Sahara (1943))?

Yes, indeed. It’s true. I am…that guy.

[Moment of silence.]

But, listen. I don’t recommend this kind of movie lightly. I know it’s a hard sell. Just do me a favor and keep an open mind while I pitch. Yeah?

Microhabitat—as perfectly summed in the excellent Australian podcast The Last Video Store—is a movie about your 30s. Possibly the movie about your 30s. As a 32 year old, color me biased. Color me vividly biased.

In Microhabitat, Mi-so, a young woman, lives a barebones and, at first glance, depressing life. She cleans homes during the day, pays her bills with her meager wages, and spends the remainder on her two great, perhaps only joys: whiskey and cigarettes. When her landlord suddenly raises the rent, she is faced with what seems like a rhetorical ultimatum: give up whiskey and cigarettes to keep her apartment. Instead, Mi-so packs up her rolling suitcase, heads out into the Korean winter and embarks on a couchsurfing trip down memory lane, rooming night by night, one by one with her old college friends and former bandmates, all of whom have taken disparate, altogether more traditional trajectories through life into their 30s. It is a tour of roads not taken, each well-intentioned friend questioning Mi-so’s decisions while she intently examines their own, asking herself: “Is this really any better?”

The gut-wrenching quality of Microhabitat is its total lack of judgment, which is left entirely to us. At first we (probably) think oh, how irresponsible for Mi-so to choose whiskey and cigarettes, these self-destructive vices, over shelter and security. Then, as we go on to meet her friends, the glamour of responsible maturity—the presumption that there is a “right” way to move through life and that there are correct, “adult” choices we “should” make along the way—vanishes entirely. Everyone has their own struggles, deep, personal, and burdensome, that they have to live with, day-to-day. Mi-so’s relatively simple life, with a simple problem and simple pleasures, actually begins to look quite attractive in comparison to her friends’ more complicated situations: nasty in-laws, absent husbands, helicopter parents, recent divorce. But Microhabitat does not do the easy thing—because it doesn’t explicitly say Mi-so’s way is right, either. It becomes clear that we find comfort with Mi-so not because her circumstances are simple; but because she recognizes and accepts the outcome of the choices she makes, as irrational as those choices may seem to her friends; and to us. Because she understands herself, and what she wants, and questions that as is only natural—but ultimately does not waver.

Microhabitat fully captures the weighty crossroads of adulthood, of the ever-weightier, ever-present questions: “What do I do with my life?” What are the few essential things, between the compounding necessities of work and hygiene and life maintenance, between all the have-tos, that I really care about? What do I want to chase?

Microhabitat’s answers to those questions are, for an existential and contemplative film, reassuring. Not in a schadenfreude sense, in seeing the shared misery of the human condition regardless of wealth or position; one thing it’s definitely not saying is, “We’re all fucked no matter what choices we make.” But it distills the complicated-feeling crossroads of adulthood to choices and consequences. Paths and destinations. It’s only natural to question the decisions that you’ve made, and will make throughout life, particularly in your 30s, where it seems the promise of your youth should, by now, be realized, right? When you seem to be surrounded by people who appear to have fulfilled their promise, who took the “right” paths to safety, security, happiness, wealth, etc. But if Microhabitat is saying any path is “right,” it’s the path that’s right for you, right now. It’s saying that “right” only really means that you understand what you’ll have to give up to get to the destination of your path; and choose that path anyway. More hopefully, it says that every destination is itself, also another crossroads.

I should clarify, Microhabitat is not some grave trodge through existential philosophy—it is often a very funny, borderline slapstick movie smattered with powerful, earnest scenes and honest conversations. There are two entire subplots with a boyfriend and an employer that I haven’t mentioned, both also hilarious and heartfelt. It is at turns sweet, devastating, and uplifting. I (clearly) haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

You can watch Microhabitat with English subtitles here (legally!) on YouTube.

28 Years Later (2025)

Not scary enough for horror aficionados, too scary for scaredy-cats, at turns soul-crushing and knee-slapping and gross, and also bizarrely filmed entirely on iPhone (heavily modified iPhones, but), 28 Years Later defies categorization and description. It is a zombie movie…about family, love, and loss…and recognizing humanity…and coming-of-age…and the identity of the British people. It is the only film I saw last year to bring me fully to tears.

28 Years Later takes place [redundant] years after the Rage virus contaminated the mainland of the UK, as seen in previous films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (The two prequels, good on their own merits but not necessary viewing prior to 28 Years, have their shortcomings: 28 Weeks is fairly color-by-numbers zombie stuff, and 28 Days, as aptly described by the Blank Check podcast, now looks like it was the first movie ever filmed on potato). The British and Irish isles have been quarantined to contain the virus, sealing away an unfortunate pocket of humanity from the rest of the modern world. Civilization there has not only stalled but reverted to nearly medieval standards. The “zombies” have evolved in grotesque and terrifying ways. Through this world we follow one little family. A father shows his son the ropes of manhood. A son takes his myseriously ill mother on a dangerous journey to a doctor in the wilderness. The doctor lives in a self-constructed Bone Temple.

To adequately explain the unexpected soulfulness of 28 Years Later would be to spoil its extraordinary effect. Suffice to say it is a moving story of determination, love, and acceptance, with plenty of bloody zombie fights and kooky side characters to keep us entertained along the way. Scenes crackle with style and technical choices that not only grip and electrify the viewer, but shout its themes of identity and immortality with a bullhorn. It is more full of an energy and purpose in storytelling than I’ve seen in a long time (granted, since then I’ve also seen Sinners and One Battle After Another). It is the most surprising film I saw last year.

Sinners (2025)

Rules.

RULES.

There is a right way to see Sinners: it’s on IMAX or Dolby. The biggest possible screen with the biggest possible sound (and heads up, it’s returning to those screens this Oscar season!). It deserves an overwhelming experience without the minutest distraction. Everything about Sinners is big: its stars, its performances, its effects, its narrative, its genre, its message; every swing is for the fences. Some of those swings, on first watch, miss. Later, on recall, on further viewings, even those misses are reframed into hits—or at least such great efforts you just have to admire the attempt. Sinners contains one of the single greatest scenes in cinema, and is, by a hair, the most movie I saw last year.

Black Bag (2025)

Oh, it’s good to have Soderbergh suspense back on the big screen.

Black Bag is a slick, discomfiting film. In it, cyberintelligence operative Michael Fassbender is tasked with rooting out a mole in his division. He is given a list of suspects: among them is his wife. He invites everyone over to dinner. A series of subtle, sensual, lethal games ensue.

Black Bag discomforts through taut atmosphere and impenetrable language. Characters purposely speak in a dense technical spy jargon that, initially, makes it difficult and even frustrating to parse precisely what’s happening. But what the film does ingeniously is make us, minute by minute, feel ingenious. Plot and language untangle simultaneously, and as we finally begin to understand what the heck these intense and very well-dressed people (Blanchett in particular is somehow walking a runway in every scene) are talking about, we also begin to comprehend the full scope, and stakes, of Fassbender’s hunt. Earlier scenes are rapidly recontextualized as events accelerate into a glorious crescendo of “Aha!” moments.

That is, if you’re paying attention. It is easily the least accessible movie to phone-checkers of the year.

And I should mention Black Bag has quite possibly, in tight running with Sinners and 28 Years Later, the best score of the year; jazzy interludes like a dark Ocean’s Eleven (by the same composer). Plays great on a rainy day in a foreign city, I’ll tell you.

The Outrun (2024)

The Outrun’s effect is such that it singlehandedly took me across the world to witness for myself the harsh, beautiful setting depicted in its unflinching recovery tale. Of course, I didn’t see any other Outrun tourists or tours while I was there, in Orkney (“…and this beach here’s where Saoirse stood and smoked a cigarette while staring at the sea…eh, one of the ones when she’d finally begun pulling it together but not quite got it together, in the middle, aye.”), but I doubt I was the first or will be the last to be lured by its remote, rugged grandeur. There’s no better place to get what my cousin Rory would call a “head shower.”

In The Outrun, Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman trapped in a vice of violent alcoholism and depression, who returns home from London to her relatively quaint islands of Orkney, off in the cold, blustery Atlantic north of Scotland. There she embarks on the long road of pulling the frayed mess of her life together, and discovering what she’ll make from its tattered ends.

As a film The Outrun is a hard start leading to a brilliant finish. It doesn’t shy from the painful consequences of addiction and alcoholism, and holds steady through multiple gut-twisting scenes of brutal outbursts and emotional fallout. But well beyond the suffering it is dedicated throughout to the journey of recovery, as nonlinear for every person as the narrative itself, told across multiple time periods and flashbacks. There are as many moments of love and kindness as of frustration and fury, of gentle understanding as of harsh rebuke, of breathtaking beauty as of despair. It is gorgeously filmed and thunderously scored, appropriately capturing the quiet, harsh Orkneys, rocky dichotomies of quaint farmland and crashing storms as they are. Watch it, and try not to be drawn to that far corner of the world, and not have that deep well of empathy restored for all broken travelers of long roads.

You can read more about my trip to Orkney in the “Gist of Orkney” series.

One Battle After Another (2025)

I’m not much of a PTA (Paul Thomas Anderson) fan. It’s not that I don’t like the movies I’ve seen (rather, the movie I’ve seen, only There Will Be Blood…once), but over the years as I’ve watched a trailer or read a synopsis for one of his films, they just don’t interest me at all. That’s a little strange, because the math should add up to Me+PTA=<3. I’m generally a fan of oddball drama-comedies, and I like directors that utilize hyperspecific settings, as Anderson does with LA’s sprawling Valley. Instead, so far the math has always summed up to Me+PTA=¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

That said, One Battle After Another is undeniable. Breathtakingly propulsive, it launches from the gate and, every once in a while, takes its leaden foot just a hair off the gas to scatter a handful of jokes and heartfelt moments into the air, then, while, you’re distracted, it grabs the front of your shirt and launches again into the next intense setpiece. It is present and prescient, fun and funny, affecting in its performances (everyone is tremendous, but Benicio del Toro is magical), and such an obvious masterclass in filmmaking that even I can appreciate the choices made, moment to moment, to make this ride as spectacular and as potent as possible.

I won’t delve into the plot because it’s unnecessary. It is, by a hair, the second-most movie I saw last year.

Far From the Madding Crowd (2015)

I went on a run of British nobility romances in the fall, refreshing my Austens (Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Emma) and exploring new favorites like Far From the Madding Crowd and Northanger Abbey. This is the most self-serious of them, but also the most scintillating, a barely-restrained tale of Goldilocks and the Three Suitors that pits a magnetic Carey Mulligan against a selection of broody potential husbands-to-be. There’s plenty of too-close talking, dashing through the rain, prolonged gazing; and though there’s clearly a “juuust right” bowl of porridge for our heroine, it is by no means clear if circumstances will ever let her taste it.

It made me quietly gasp more than any other film last year.

Warfare (2025)

Listen. I try hard to resist the stereotypical masculine urge to watch gritty war movies. I do! Alas, The Hurt Locker gets an annual viewing, sometimes two, and Band of Brothers returns to my screen every winter, and every few years I check back in on Zero Dark Thirty, which somehow always has more nuanced thoughts to communicate than I remember. Though Warfare won’t make the annual list, it might make the every-few-years list. Intense, well-performed, and human; it’s an honest, unsensationalized depiction of modern warfare that we are rarely allowed to see.

Northanger Abbey (2007)

A late-Austen romance featuring a self-aware heroine and a haunted mansion? Starring Rogue One’s Felicity Jones and Far From the Madding Crowd’s Carey Mulligan alongside a who’s who of British character actors character acting up a veritable character storm? I’m positively sat!

If you enjoy a good Victorian romance, Northanger Abbey is a refreshing delight. It breezes through the standard genre plot developments and twists the formula in giddy ways—even hinting at elements of the dark and supernatural. It also serves as something of a gentle rebuke to Austen fans; to not expect love to play exactly as it does in the books.

The Old Man and The Gun (2018)

The Old Man and The Gun is a fitting epilogue to the cinematic career of Robert Redford. Loosely based on a true story about a crew of elderly bank robbers, Redford leads a group of fellow gritty old fellas (Tom Waits, Danny Glover) through a series of “last jobs” that confound Casey Affleck’s exasperated detective in both their flawless execution and charming gentility. Of course, Redford falls for Sissy Spacek along the way, and begins to revisit the many choices that led him to this late, fraught point in life. It’s a film intrigued by the messy inner grey area where the aspects of our nature we can’t change and the aspects of our nature we refuse to change confusingly intermix. It is humble, moving, and transcendent; and boasts the best use of Redford’s trademark glinting gaze since All the President’s Men.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Avatar: Fire and Ash, Avatar: Ecstasy and Frustration (nice!). I continue to have an extreme mixed relationship with the Avatar franchise. There are performances that still astound me (Zoe Saldana’s Netiri, Stephen Lange’s Quaritch), performances that are new and exciting (Oona Chaplin’s Varang, David Thewlis’s too-brief Peylak), and performances that bewilder me to the point of exasperation (Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, Jack Champion’s Spider). The action sequences are the most spectacular cinema rendered in CG since the last Avatar; Cameron has a craftsman’s awareness of digital rendering that actually realizes the technology’s potential rather than turning everything into a sludgy splashy slugfest. Then again, overfamiliar family drama beats feel tedious and rote, becoming borderline torturous in a three-plus-hour film. There’s also about 500% too much use of the word “bro” and 200% too much “babygirl”—not a note I expected to have, but when I found myself actively groaning in the theater, it was going in the review. All in all, though, I was more than happy to see another of these epic adventures in theaters, and hope to see several more.

Predator Badlands (2025)

Surprisingly family-friendly times at the movies with the Predator! The other stuff I like about this movie is spoilerific. Good movie!

Superman (2025)

Superman is back from a not so long break from theaters, and this time he’s fighting cynicism, remembering his sense of humor, and getting his kisses! According to Marvel, superheroes don’t kiss except for Whatsisname and Whatsername in The Eternals, so a new kissing cape was exciting. I just…never got the chills. And that’s just the slightest bit disappointing for a Superman movie.

TV

The Pitt (2025)

I’ve already watched The Pitt twice.

The Pitt—which follows the day shift of an emergency trauma center hour-by-hour, 24 style—is an exercise in hope. It’s a depiction of what we pray emergency medical care is like, especially who we hope to be treated by, if we ever find ourselves in need. That said, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. This trauma center is called The Pit(t) for a reason.

The Pitt’s foundation of hope is established in the many fantastic performances across 15 episodes (of Season 1). The core cast are rich personalities we immediately want to know as much about as possible, and as we’re drip-fed backstory we are in the meantime charmed by them, their expertise and their antics, from the fresh-faced med students to the confident residents to the grizzled attendings to the capable, snarky nurses that are the obvious backbone of the operation (heh!). They handle everything that comes through their doors, regardless how messy or strange or dangerous, with dedicated if flawed humanity (and a healthy dose of blunt crassness). There are A, B, C, D and sometimes E plots per episode, some lasting just that single hour and others carrying several episodes, and still others crossing the entire season. There’s so much happening! Just like in a busy emergency room! It’s almost like…everyone’s a story (🤯)? And, while occasionally these plot developments get a little silly, or dark or dramatic, they feel grounded in at least what we imagine an emergency room could deal with on a daily basis: all the menagerie of wounded humanity funneled into one place.

I’m a sucker for shows about competent people doing things competently. On TV that usually translates to some kind of detective mystery; but I’ll be following The Pitt’s ensemble teamwork drama as long as they make episodes. And when they’re done, I’ll watch them all over again.

K Foodie Meets J Foodie (2025)

This is maybe the most on-brand recommendation I have for 2025. If you know me at all, you know I love food and travel (I should really start a blog!). K Foodie Meets J Foodie is the ultimate way to travel and eat vicariously through your TV. It is the only reality show I watch—and that does make me better than you!

The premise is simple: famous Korean foodie and pop star Si-Kyung and famous Japanese foodie and actor Yutaka Matsushige take each other to their favorite eateries in their home countries, exploring both nostalgic favorites and dishes that exemplify the best of each nation’s regional cuisine. Episodes usually feature only one meal at a time, so we can savor each restaurant and dish (each bite) along with our hosts, learning a little about them and a lot about Japanese and Korean food culture along the way. It’s an extremely cozy watch. No show has ever made me hungrier.

GAMES

Silksong

I didn’t play many games last year—but I made an exception for Hollow Knight: Silksong.

The original Hollow Knight (2017) was a cult hit that developed a near-mythical reputation years after its release (not unearned). It is a difficult exploration and adventure game that follows a little bug guy as he journeys through a mysterious underground world full of secrets and great big bug guys that want to kill/squash/eat/otherwise destroy him. It satisfies in both the combat—simple and tactile, with enemies that constantly challenge in refreshing ways—and exploration, with rewards earned with every victory and treasures discovered in hidden crevices and breakable walls. When the sequel, Silksong, long-awaited and delayed, surprise-released in September, the gaming world went rabid.

I didn’t go rabid though, because I didn’t understand the Hollow Knight games until later. On my recent trip to Scotland, when I was cooking or waiting for weather to pass, I’d put on a playthrough of Silksong by a streamer I follow; the game just looked incredible, especially in the hands of someone who clearly knew what they were doing. So when I got home I finally gave the original a try, and was immediately hooked.

Silksong heightens and enhances the Hollow Knight formula in every way: in storytelling, in combat, in its characters and more than anything in the size and richness of its world. It constantly feels like there are endless places to explore, exciting treasures to find, and fascinating characters to meet. It is also enhanced in difficulty; this is not a game the average person can bulldoze their way through, unfortunately for me. I had to finish short of the game’s “true” ending (there are multiple); it takes nothing away from the result. It is a game that, once you’ve developed the skills to hang with it, makes you feel every inch the hero (bug) you’re playing.

MUSIC

The Beths

A few months ago the Spotify algorithm threw Kiwi indie-rockers The Beths into my Billie Eilish/Chappell Roan-clouded feed, and it was a sound that immediately caught me. “Little Death,” the first track I heard, is an absolutely ripper piece of music (that’s Aussie slang but whatever) about falling hard in love. Since then I’ve had that first album, Future Me Hates Me, on loop between all my podcasts. It featured heavily in my Orkney road playlist for triumphant dramatic drives, and at home is always popped on the second I can see the ocean. Although I’m still developing my affection for their other albums (that’s not a euphemism for not liking them, it’s just difficult for me in this honeymoon period to move beyond Future Me Hates Me), which are all fairly distinct, I appreciate that they are a band that plays the music of their lives, wherever they’re at at the time of making. I can see myself following them for a long time coming.

END.RECOMMENDATIONS.2025.

DIRECTIVE.2026.

CONSUME.

Woah! You can now listen to me(!) reading(!) Pen, Ultimate! instead of, or in addition to, reading it yourself!

This is the inaugural episode of the Pen, Ultimate! Audio Edition. It’s admittedly a little rough around the edges, I’m still getting my audio legs back.

Just got ‘em out of their podcasts.

Ahem.

There’s a way you can actually subscribe to this thing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and once I figure it out, you’ll be the second to know. I’ll put it in the notes for the next episode.

Til then, by way of my new apparent audio signoff—

Peace!

Written, produced, and edited by Mitch Collins.

Attributions (freesound.org):

Intro/Outro: “ride alone 120” by leaving.february

Farm Ambience: “AMBRurl_Autumn.Swampy Wild Field.Dist Birds.Grass,Shrubs And Trees In The Wind.Gusts 2_EM” by newlocknew

Sheep: “2 Minutes of Bleats Sound From Lambs Grazing in the Field” by tonnex

Orkney is here.

“The Gist of Orkney” could be an extraordinary geological feature. Something like a long, deep, narrow hole plunging down into the earth of a coastal clifftop, through which ocean spray rises and erupts in a spectacular geyser at high tide. There’d always be a traffic jam of busses and vans of day-trippers down the bumpy farm road leading to the Gist, and all around it adults would marvel at the images on their phones at a safe but less than picturesque distance while kids jostle with stick-wielding, Gumby-faced influencers for the wettest possible position in the splash zone. There’d be a handful of other “Peedie Gists” dotting the edges of the islands, too, complete with honesty boxes for enterprising locals to lightly tax the “Hidden Orkney,” off-the-beaten-track completionists. Orkadians might well not blink twice at a Gist joining their tourist trail alongside the ancient Gloups, Broughs, Dovecots, and Mounds, all the humbly breathtaking sites and sights that draw gawping crowds throughout the islands. During the warm months, at least.

But in this case, the Gist of Orkney is just what it sounds like.

The nights are quiet in this part of Orkney. The cottage overlooks the Bay of Puldrite, a little crescent of archipelagan sea, shallow ocean waters largely protected from the fiercest elements of the North Atlantic by the islands surrounding. That protective, if broken shell renders these waters calmer than the ocean outside, though often, as today, they can only be laughably described as “calm.” Inside the cottage, I wake up in a silent, warm, dark room at the absurd hour of 9 a.m. With no responsibilities besides enjoying myself to the utmost, I’ve been staying up long past my adult bedtime, and sleeping to such egregious hours beyond my usual morning alarm.

About 10 minutes after the first glimmers of rational thought, on pile the layers: long socks, then thick high-ankle socks over the top because in the last couple days, to my dismay and discomfort, I’ve discovered the pathetic limits of the “water resistant” rating of my trail shoes; a shirt under a long-sleeve; sturdy green pants. I have a pair of jackets, both also merely water resistant, but quite a bit more resistant than the shoes, and more importantly wind resistant. They are draped over chairs in the combination muck/dining room across the house.

It’s really not all that cold in Orkney, yet. The temperature hovers between 50-55F (10-12C); but it’s whatever the air and sky are doing—downpour, drizzle, sun, clouds, mist, gentle breeze, blustery gusts—that determines the necessary layers, moment to moment. In minutes, balmy, sunny walks turn to huddled trudges, and I frantically transition from a carefree single long-sleeve shirt to hunkered so deep in my jacket there’s no head visible between upturned collar and rainbow beanie. Every day is a looping exercise of donning and doffing. But for me the exercise is nostalgic, something no one who lives permanently in this weather particularly understands, not that they should. I harken back to miserable Boston days trekking between classes and around the North End and down through the Common and Back Bay, as rain falls onto snow to mix the frigid wet slush that is winter’s seepage, that not even the most enthusiastic snowbird can defend—but even at that time I enjoyed an extra metaphysical layer of warmth, the knowledge that home was LA, and I’d be back in the land of eternal sunshine sooner or later. Inclement weather was and is, to me, a novelty. As opposed to previous trips, however, in Orkney I’ve decided to embrace that novelty rather than hide behind some kind of half-apologetic facade. I have already been caught by both tourist and local cackling at the wind and rain, cackling harder the more ferocious it is. Here, my cold (sic) truth is at last revealed: I love weather! Anything but dry, bland sunshine is a vacation! I do, of course, wish all the people of the world all the sunshine they think they want; but I wish them it without the corrosion that I know comes with living in endless sunshine, especially in grand estates with all wants catered and “needs” a lost vocabulary. The irony of heaven; these are the most fundamentally unhappy and unpleasant people I’ve ever met. I don’t wish that on anyone. In fact, actually I wish rain, too, on the eternally sunned and mortally privileged, all the rain they think they don’t want, the rain they think they’ve escaped, if only for the reminder that there are elements, feral, priceless and uncontrolled, above even them. Oh Genie, oh djinn oh God, please give us rain for the sunned, and sun for the wet! This is my nightly prayer. Call me a progressive.

About 20 minutes later, the waking reverie concluded and assorted morning rituals achingly accomplished, I pad cautiously into the kitchen, keeping a peripheral eye out for Mouse.

Mouse and I became acquainted the other morning when I opened the door from the living room to the kitchen and a grey-brown blur (another, less-warm but I suppose more-fuzzy nostalgia of my college days) darted between my legs and across the kitchen floor before cartoonishly squeezing its body (fwoop) into the sliver of shadow beneath the washing machine. After cleaning up the spilled coffee, I stuffed a towel under the living room door so I wouldn’t have to worry about my nightly movies or sleep (in order of priority) being disturbed. Since then I’ve glimpsed Mouse a couple times, and to be fair, Mouse is neither particularly quick nor stealthy, and while it can get itself onto the countertop, there’s no food up there, and it tends to hide extremely obviously under the empty dish rack by the sink before eventually running back beneath the washing machine. For a pest, Mouse is a relatively friendly one, and as long as there’s only one Mouse and I keep the kitchen clean, I don’t mind its company. The giant, bulbous black spiders that infiltrated the living room through the window I cracked on the first night I did mind—they disturbed my movie—but those I thoroughly thrashed with my handy dandy spider-killing towel-whip, which now never leaves my side. And as long as I don’t look too closely at the outside of the cottage, I don’t notice the dozens of spiders nesting there, either.

This morning, however, Mouse stays tucked away, and I prepare a cup of Nescafe instant coffee and an overflowing bowl of Quaker Golden Syrup-flavored porridge in peace.

On Quaker Golden Syrup-flavored porridge: This humble-looking bowl of white gruel is better than any instant oatmeal I’ve ever had, and probably better than any you’ve ever had, either. In this series I’m going to be saying this kind of thing a lot (“best ____ I’ve ever had”), and there’s surely a healthy dash of vacation optimism responsible for these glowing opinions of common comforts; but in this case, and in nearly every future case I will go on to enthuse, with the benefit of retrospect, I’ve concluded that it’s more truth than optimism. Porridge is better than oatmeal, unquestionably; and Quaker Golden Syrup, the Goldilocks of porridge—not bland, not maple brown sugar saccharine-sweet, especially made with real, local, full-fat Orkadian milk, emerging creamy and overabundant from the microwave—is confidently the best of instant porridges.

After breakfast, I pour another half cup of coffee and head out for my morning walk around the farm.

Riff Farm is a pretty typical Orkadian livestock farm. About eight pastures of various size are cycled between sheep and cattle throughout the year, with two pastures reserved for the family’s horses and Shetland ponies(!), and another small pasture for two little goats. A pair of skittish but curious cats also roam freely, one tabby, one black. The farmhouse, sizable, is partitioned in half, part for the family that owns the farm and the remainder reserved for larger groups to rent. Additionally there are three rentable cottages: two set behind the farmhouse closer to the road, and one, Riff Cottage (my cottage), down a short hill between the farmhouse and the water. Riff Cottage abuts the workhouse and garage, where industrious farmer Greig operates a surprising array of veteran yet functional machinery, all impeccably maintained (to the layman’s eye). Between the gravel workyard and the water there’s a broad grass field with a cute picnic table that I imagine families greatly enjoy in the summer. Meandering throughout the farm, between the pastures, and down the coastline is a grass walking path, and on it I set out, most mornings, to greet all my creature neighbors.

On the morning stroll I catch up on events and correspondence from yesterday in LA. Real life is allowed exactly as long as this walk to intrude on vacation life. There’s been something different about this trip, or something different about life lately, or both, that has left me, frankly, happier than I’ve ever been on vacation to leave everything behind. I miss no one and nothing, not at all; though there are occasional moments that I wish specific people were around to share. It’s been a massive relief. Despite that basically being the point of a vacation—to get a clean break from the routines of life—it feels a harsh thing to write aloud. We’re supposed to miss some people, some things, right? We’re meant to be homesick by the end of our adventure, aren’t we? What does it say about me, about life, if I don’t, and I’m not, not one bit?

While these questions are concerning, for the time being I am inarguably, effervescently happy. So I figure I’ll embrace that for now and leave the pending existential assessment for home.

To my left the sea is wind-churned, grey and frothy-white. In the pastures surrounding, the long grass whips in the wind, the animals are unbothered. Outside the cottage, the spiders have thankfully retreated. 10-30 second cloud breaks briefly reveal a world of vibrant color, a living painting of Green grass and Blue sky and White sheep, before all dulls again under the next blanket. Bitter hot coffee and bracing crisp wind go as well together as anything. Make the combo a deluxe with the occasional patting of soft, warm fur.

I walk and text, scritch behind a pair of velveteen sheep ears, walk, chat to the goats and keep my sleeves out of their reach. I continue, unsuccessfully reassure the more skittish sheep, and ponder a more complicated response to a work question. I greet the horses (who are clever enough to know that I won’t have food for them and are as such largely uninterested in me), put the phone away, and finally wish Greig a good morning.

Greig is, in every possible aspect, the quintessential Orkadian farmer. He marches around the property in great rubber boots, tending to the animals, making endless repairs, rearranging his many varied vehicles, herding groups of creatures into trailers to haul them to their creature appointments and back. He speaks in a mouthful of a Scottish accent, but not unintelligible—I’ll credit at least some of my comprehension to the unexpected day and a half I spent amongst the truly astounding voices of Glasgow. The Orkadian accent is similar to the Glaswegian, but with a hefty lilt not unlike the deeper Irish. If you’ve seen Derry Girls, Greig actually sounds quite a lot like Orla. Just, an older, Scottish, practical, male Orla.

Greig and I briefly catch up on my Orkney activities and exchange recommendations for seafood, before he runs off to his farm activities and I run off into one day more full, end-to-end, of the most beautiful sights I’ll have ever seen.

That’s the gist of an Orkney morning.

Part 1 of ~5 of The Gist of Orkney. Stay tuned for the remainder!

-Mitch

My family has always been a movie family. Not a “film” family; we neither worked in “the industry” nor had any patience for independent, low-budget, old, or “artsy” cinema. In fact, though we watched the Oscars every year, every year we also lamented the fact that some grim, dramatic, “boring” movie “nobody’s ever heard of” would almost certainly win Best Picture. We liked adventures, mainly. I was raised on The Princess Bride, The Mask of Zorro, and Star Wars (IV-VI), as well as many of the titles on this list. Back in schoolyear summers, they would be practically on loop for three months straight.

Our taste hasn’t changed much. The newest movie on this list is Mad Max: Fury Road, already a decade old—and most of the others are at least a decade older than that. In that way, our summer films are a time capsule of the early-to-mid 2000s, of hot days in the freezing local UA (United Artists) theater, of warm, breezy nights upstairs in our rented beach house, as tired and cozy as only sun and saltwater and bellies full of dad’s cooking could make us. These are (largely) the movies we watched then, and remain the movies we watch now. They are summer on screen…for us.

For you, I hope the following resurrects memories of posters by the box office, and that you find at least one old, silly, fun adventure to revisit in these, your well-tanned years.

Save this list on Letterboxd!

A Knight’s Tale

I think we can all agree that “He will rock you” is one of the all-time taglines. If you can’t agree to that, God help you with the rest of this list.

A Knight’s Tale is the quintessential summer movie of the Collins household. In fact, for at least the last 15 years, I don’t think one summer has passed without watching Heath Ledger change his stars.

This is a loose adaptation of the first tale of Chaucer’s medieval anthology opus, The Canterbury Tales—one of the more famous examples of a book everyone’s heard of but no one’s ever read. A Knight’s Tale follows Ledger’s William Thatcher on an epic journey from squire to knighthood via the trials and travails of tournament jousting(!). Obviously pulled directly from Chaucer is the soundtrack of classic rock hits, from Queen’s We Will Rock You to Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back in Town to ACDC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, often performed in-character by crowds of stomping, clapping, electric-trumpet-playing extras. The movie is light and irreverent, funny and fun. The jousting is, if I may, pretty sick.

If there is any haze in your memory as to Heath Ledger’s stardom, let A Knight’s Tale banish it. One can lay so many of A Knight’s Tale’s successes at the feet of its wildly talented and enthusiastic cast: the magnetic Ledger, the bighearted Mark Addy, the unhinged Alan Tudyk, the showstopping Paul Bettany (in a meta turn as frequently nude author Geoffrey Chaucer), the ironclad Laura Fraser, the despicable Rufus Sewell, the punk Shannon Sossamon, and many more delightful bit parts.

A Knight’s Tale is pure entertainment, with more than enough heart behind its romantic adventure veneer to have you earnestly cheering with the peasants in the nosebleeds at the finale.

Ocean’s 11 and 13

Because this is the Collins household summer film list and not my personal summer film list—a distinct difference—this entry specifically contains only Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 13; Ocean’s 12, alas, does not make the cut.

While I myself enjoy the inarguably weird left turn of Ocean’s 12, partly for more time with the gang and partly because of its bullheaded resistance to conventional sequelism—the movie is mostly a Euro comedy that occasionally remembers it’s a heist—I don’t blame anyone for shrugging it off. It’s weird. Really weird. So, in the time-honored tradition of our household, we skip Ocean’s 12 as we skip all the weird ones (a recurring theme on this list).

To the movies at hand: I don’t know that I know anyone who dislikes Ocean’s 11. I’ve known people who haven’t seen it—a character flaw easily remedied. It is one of the most undeniably likable films ever made. George Clooney as Danny Ocean assembles a team of crack(ed) thieves to take down three Las Vegas casinos and their devious owner (a deliciously sucky Andy Garcia). It’s sharp, dazzling, and slick, from the cinematography to the jazzy score to Soderbergh’s notorious moving-square montages, with twists and turns clever enough to believe they were imagined by the world’s smoothest thieves. One cannot have a bad time watching Ocean’s 11. If one does, something is terribly, perhaps irreparably wrong with one. I feel deeply sorry for one.

Ocean’s 13 is Ocean’s 11 plus Al Pacino. Of course it doesn’t hit the same high as 11; but nearly so. It remains a blast, and above all else is simply more fun high stakes burglary time with the gang.

We revisit these 2/3 of the series at least every summer, occasionally twice a year—and uniquely among our movie picks, there is rarely ever an argument about it.

Independence Day

If there is a film that is more quotable, or that is more quoted by our household, I don’t know it…well, actually it’s The Princess Bride. Obviously. But that’s the only one higher on the quote list.

Independence Day rocks. Aliens invade Earth in a big ol’ way and humanity fights back and wins by being human. That’s it. It fricking rules. Will Smith has endless swagger as a fighter pilot. Jeff Goldblum is actually hotter in this movie than he is in Jurassic Park, and he also gets to say the same line as in Jurassic Park (“Must go faster” three times fast) so that’s cool. Randy Quaid is nuts and will make you cry. Bill Pullman’s performance as President Good Man (not really, but basically) gets sadder by the year, because imagine if we had a president who was a good man (woah). The aliens are pretty awesome.

If you don’t like this movie I hope you get a laughing skull computer virus delivered via nuclear missile into the void of your heart!

Sahara

Sahara is a light adaptation of one Clive Cussler’s more popular Dirk Pitt pulp adventure novels. It is an extremely silly movie—”Legend says a Civil War Confederate battleship full of treasure sailed to Africa at the end of the war, let’s go find it, oh hey there’s a plague, too”—but an extremely fun one nonetheless. Beyond mayor of Charm City Matthew McConaughey as suave diver/salvager/treasure hunter Dirk Pitt, the cast is stacked with comedic talent: Steve Zahn as Dirk’s extraordinarily capable gun-toting sidekick (the beating heart of the movie); Rainn Wilson as their fish-perpetually-out-of-water Tech Guy; William H. Macy as their exhausted, put-upon boss. Penelope Cruz is unfortunately mostly relegated to the damsel role, but she does her best with it, and (I may be over-forgiving here) Sahara feels like it’s at least trying to give her more to do.

Sahara is quick, it’s funny, the setpieces are big and pretty neat, with (gasp!) largely practical effects. A classic summer pulp adventure come to screen. Whaddaya want.

Mad Max: Fury Road

The best thing and only thing I can say about Mad Max: Fury Road is: it is a movie that should not by any rational measure exist. Every single time I watch it, I’m so happy it does. My family agrees. The wasteland makes it summer.

Open Range

Open Range may just be the perfect Western. It is the beneficiary of the century of genre that came before it—without, like Unforgiven, being an epilogue. It’s not even particularly an homage. Open Range is just exceptionally good at telling its relatively simple Western tale. It is my dad’s favorite movie; and unlike my mom’s favorite movie (Legends of the Fall, for reasons both obvious and unfathomable), thank god it’s an easy watch.

In Open Range, Kevin Coster and Robert Duvall (as Charley Waite and Boss Spearman, a pair of all-time names) are a pair of cattle drivers whose only goal in life is to escort their cattle across the West in peace. They unfortunately run into Michael Gambon (of later Dumbledore fame), a wealthy Irish landowner whose only goal is for them to die. Conflict naturally ensues, and later than you think, erupts into one of the greatest gunfights in Westerns; if not the greatest. But Open Range is much more concerned with untangling the feelings of its two world-weary cowboys than with exchanges of bullets. The rugged pair are dogged by tragic and violent history they reluctantly unfurl as events leave them no choice but to confess or explode. They are men of steel and grit—but by the time we meet Charley Waite and Boss Spearman, they are men who do not particularly want to be men of steel and grit anymore. It comes across, for a through-and-through Western, surprisingly tender.

Duvall and Costner are at their best here, between the former’s endless wry wit and dry cackling, and the latter’s earnest monologues and searching horizon-ward gaze. There are many other notable performances: the tremendous Annette Benning, the sleazeball James Russo, the heartbreaking Michael Jeter, a baby-faced Diego Luna. Michael Gambon is hardly a complex villain, and seems to have been sculpted out of spit, sweat, and four-leaf clovers, but he makes a hell of a guy to root against.

Being a Western, Open Range also features sweeping vistas, a grand score, some tragedy. Summer is the season of the west, and this is an upstanding celebration of that.

Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade

The second of our family’s several split trilogies, Indiana Jones’ Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade are actually a lot like Ocean’s 11 and 13; in that as with Ocean’s 12, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is an attempt to do something different with the franchise (something messier in every way), and subsequently like Ocean’s 13, The Last Crusade is an unequivocal pendulum swing back to the cozy narrative roots of the original. In the case of The Last Crusade, that means “Indy races the Nazis for a world-altering religious artifact—this time, with his dad. Uh oh!”

But honestly, what else do you want from Indy? He’s Indiana Jones, grouchy punchy whippy archaeologist! Globe-trotting adventure! Surprising Spielbergian currents of humanity and humor! Dank ruins full of supernatural treasure! Raiders and The Last Crusade are perfect popcorn movies, and we will hear no detractors.*

*Someone on a movie podcast I used to like said Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn’t hold up and the co-host agreed and I unsubscribed from that podcast.

The Three Musketeers (1993)

We find ourselves crossing into “swashbuckler!” territory.

With the crossing comes, in intent at least, the first “hot take” of this list: that Disney’s The Three Musketeers (1993) is the ultimate cinematic depiction of Alexandre Dumas’s epic romantic adventure. It surpasses the cinephilic snoozefest The Three Musketeers (1973), the forgotten steampunky Orlando Bloom vehicle The Three Musketeers (2011), and even the recent to-the-letter French adaptation The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers: Milady (*fedora tip*), both of which are great examples of why liberal adaptations to source material are so often so necessary in the transfer to screen. These other attempts have their charms, but none come close to the throne.

The Three Musketeers ‘93 is the ultimate depiction mainly in that it is the most watchable; and it is highly watchable. Starring Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt(!), and a reality-questioningly calm Charlie Sheen as Athos, Porthos, and Aramos, respectively—as well as a mid-dreamboat run Chris O’Donnell as D’Artagnan, the gravelous Michael Wincott as evil anti-Musketeer Rochefort, and most of all (and I mean most of all) Tim Curry as the dastardly Cardinal Richelieu—The Three Musketeers (1993) is a jamon beurre of a movie, doing away with all unnecessary frills and plots—eliminating probably 75-80% of the source material—and focusing on what matters in a two-hour adventure: epic sword fights, nasty dungeons, funny little quips, and every venomous word spat from Tim Curry’s nutcracker maw.

You don’t have to like the best Three Musketeers, that’s completely fine. My brother and I like it plenty for everyone. For, in the immortal words of Tim Curry’s Cardinal Richelieu: “All for one…and more for me.”

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Don’t look up Jim Caviezel, just don’t bother, don’t do it, don’t let the irreconcilable reality of the man tilt you against what is an earnest and genuinely moving performance in the ultimate revenge story. Hey—stop it. I said don’t! HEY!

The Count of Monte Cristo, the original novel, has everything: swordfights, a prison escape, twisted Machiavellan plots, betrayals, disguises, pirates(!), treasure (literally giant chests full of gold coins), Napoleon, kisses…it is a brilliant and thoroughly engrossing tale still. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) has all that and more: specifically the talents of the aforementioned Caviezel, a sniveling Guy Pearce, a twinkling Richard Harris, another delightfully wicked appearance from Michael Wincott, a heart-melting turn from Dagmara Dominczyk, a baby-cheeked Henry Cavill, and a film-stealing performance from knife-fighting-pirate Luis Guzman. Like The Three Musketeers (the good one), this Count of Monte Cristo keeps things moving at a brisk, exciting pace, without trimming any of the sweet catharsis of revenge.

This is one of my mom’s favorite (watchable) films, and has been in the summer rotation for at least a decade—mainly due to my brother and me using it as a decoy to distract her from other, less-watchable favorites, such as It’s Complicated (a movie no child should ever be forced to watch with their parents) and Little Miss Sunshine (a pretty good movie that is frankly also kind of a drag).

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

The first Pirates of the Caribbean was my favorite movie for a long time. Dropped into a childhood endlessly looping the likes of The Princess Bride, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl felt like the first action-adventure to be mine, of my generation, rather than my parents.’

We’ve all seen Pirates: Captain Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa…Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan…the funny pirate guys…the funny soldier guys…monkey…cursed treasure…”Why is rum gone.” It’s a perfect combination of all the classic adventure elements; so perfect that it earned one of the only compliments I ever heard my grandmother give a movie (the vast majority of which she considered “silly”): walking out of a screening, she turned to me and said, “That was a real swashbuckler!” And so it is.

In addition to the the obvious draws for me at age 10—the swords, the guns, the cannons, the buckle-y outfits, the freedom of the sea, the YARRRGHs—this was the first film that I voluntarily watched knowing it contained a remotely scary element. For a kid who demanded we skip the scene in Independence Day where the alien wakes up, and the scene in Raiders where Marian gets mobbed my mummies, and even, most egregiously, the scene where the Muppet face pops out of Scrooge’s doorknocker in A Muppet Christmas Carol (it was a freaky transformation!), watching pirates turn into slimy skeletons with eyeballs was a major leap of courage, but one that gave me my first addicting taste of the thrill of being horrified.

We don’t always watch all three—and only three—Pirates films when we watch Curse of the Black Pearl. But if we watch more than one, it’s likely that we will indeed jump straight to At World’s End, skipping the staircase of a sequel Dead Man’s Chest. At World’s End is also weird, and has a downright abysmal beginning (we skip the crab-afterlife sequence, as everyone should), but also features certified cool shit Shipwreck Cove and the best last 45 minutes of a movie ever filmed, i.e. The Maelstrom Battle.

I feel I should also note here that I recently made the mistake of telling my family I was writing this list, and they are currently holding hostage our annual viewings of Pirates and Independence Day until I agree to add the likes of I, Robot (a movie we watch maybe once every five years), Secretariat (a movie about how the biggest fastest horse…uh, wins? There’s no twist?) and Tombstone (a movie we do watch a lot, but not exclusively in the summer) to the list. This is why we don’t tell people about things.

The Bourne Identity

So, right, here we have what appears to be yet another trilogy conspicuously missing its siblings. And it’s true: I don’t consider The Bourne Supremacy or The Bourne Ultimatum to be official Collins Household Summer Films. Unlike the other series mentioned in this list, however, when we watch one Bourne, we tend to watch all three…eventually, over the course of about three to six months. Identity is just the one we tend to watch over the summer.

A moment to admire the elegant setup of The Bourne Identity: a CIA assassin forgets who he is, but his body remembers. *Mwah.* That’s all we need, and we’re in. From young Damon’s naive confusion to Chris Cooper’s ever-loosening tie to the smash-paced action sequences that nearly ruined action for a decade (a style often aped, rarely successfully), Identity still works on every level. Supremacy remains my favorite Bourne; but it also remains more of a fall film, and so will get its due on some other list.

The Italian Job (2003)

“Get in. Get out. Get even.” Now that’s a tag.

Olds will tell you that the original Italian Job is actually the better…*honk shoo* I’m already asleep. Yeah yeah, young Michael Caine, takes place in Italy, yap yap yap wah wah wah.

2003’s less-old and improved Italian Job, starring, get ready—Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Seth Green, Edward Norton, and Donald Sutherland, boom—is an electric, silly, squarely-2000s heister that has aged, more or less, pretty well (barring some unfortunately creepy sexism from Green & Statham’s characters, played for laughs)! Like the afore-listed Sahara, there is almost no depth to The Italian Job: a heist goes awry and a revenge heist is orchestrated. But I’d argue there’s no depth necessary. Everyone’s great, it moves fast, it has this extremely cybergeist electronic soundtrack, a lot of 3D digital blueprints, convoluted plans, at least two twists, and most of all the famous Mini Cooper chase. Watch this with the windows open and the warm summer breeze blowing through the room. Have another glass of wine. That’s how we do it.

Hidalgo

“Unbridled. Unbroken. Unbeaten” is not a good tagline, but it is a very funny tagline.

Of all the films on this list, this may be the truly guilty pleasure. Based on an absolutely untrue story woven by a real-life Wild West grifter, Hidalgo is nonetheless fun; even if it is, ultimately, kind of a movie about the triumph of the American spirit over those strange, backward foreign cultures (sic sic sic)!

In Hidalgo, Viggo Mortensen is Frank Hopkins, real-life grifter neatly painted as a cinematic hero. Frank (the movie character) is a long-distance horserace champion along with his eponymous horse, Hidalgo, and notably, he is also a half-Lakota cowboy constantly wrestling with the guilt of his heritage after witnessing the massacre at Wounded Knee. The duo becomes so notorious that they are summoned across the sea to the Greatest Endurance Horserace in the World, “The Ocean…of Fire!”(!!!!) There he and down-home American mustang Hidalgo will compete against the finest thoroughbred horses in the world in a treacherous journey across the Arabian desert, filled with snakes, bandits, locusts, and countless opportunities for silly, potentially-fatal cultural blunders!

Hidalgo works (generous) mainly on the backs of Mortensen and the legendary Omar Sharif, who, despite playing a Sheik, does get a lot more to do in this film than most Hollywood roles he was unfortunately relegated to. Mortensen naturally fits right into this gruff, honest, traumatized man (as if Aragorn was plopped into the West), and his bond with Hidalgo is sweet. Sharif is a powerhouse, an important figurehead restrained by tradition who escapes through an endearing fascination with the Wild West. There are love interests and bad guys and greedy imperialist Brits and other kooky side characters. It’s all good, light pulp adventure stuff. The end may even bring, I daresay, a big horsey tear to your eye.

On a personal note, this is probably my second favorite horse movie after Seabiscuit, a great horse movie about an actual underdog (underhorse) overcoming all kinds of adversity, especially the fact that his jockey is very big and he is very small—specifically not a movie about a big fast horse beating all the smaller slower horses (Secretariat). Listen—it’s cool that Secretariat was the fastest horse who ever lived. Great for him. I just will not have him contrived by Hollywood as some kind of underdog when Seabiscuit is right there! I will not have it! Diane Lane should not spend two cinematic hours worrying about the financial health of her farm because, hm, I think you’ll be just fine considering you own the biggest fastest horse ever born. Don’t waste my freakin’ time, Diane!

Anyways, yeah, great horse movie.

The Sandlot

As a former Little-Leaguer, The Sandlot was a favorite of mine growing up, even if it taught me less about baseball than it did about being afraid of big dogs and how to construct elaborate PG-rated insults. I wanted nothing more than to be like Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, despite being afraid of the ball (or really, being afraid of the high-strung, giant children with notoriously volatile tempers hurling the ball at me). I swore that one day I would own a pair of black, hi-top PF Flyers—and I do, right now (and they do make me run faster and jump higher, thank you).

Watching The Sandlot now, it’s a sweet, funny little movie, not so much a coming-of-age as a childhood memoir. It’s about a kid who moves to a new neighborhood and finds a new passion and community at the local baseball field, but interestingly, he doesn’t necessarily “grow up.” Instead The Sandlot is about embracing childhood, about being silly and stupid and playing games, where the highest conceivable stakes are disappointing your step-dad and “getting in trouble.” And maybe being eaten by a giant monster dog. It’s an endlessly quotable romp that rightfully remains a classic—and the most explicitly “summer” film on this list.

The pool scene where Squints kisses the lifeguard is no good, but worse is the epilogue where it’s explained that Squints and Wendy Peffercorn end up getting married and having 9 kids. Like it’s okay that this kid tricked a girl into kissing him because later they’d get hitched? C’mon, Sandlot.

Summerable Mention: Miami Vice

This is a personal plug of mine and specifically not a Collins Household Summer Film. In fact I doubt anyone else in my family has seen this movie.

But hey, a big Michael Mann crime epic in the grittiest possible version of Miami starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx at their hottest and sweatiest? The scenes of Farrell blasting across the Caribbean on his “go-fast boat,” long blonde locks aflow, gazing lovingly at Gong Li on their way to mojitos in Havana; that’s a permanent pin for this film in all summer movie lists as far as I’m concerned.

Why?

How did they arrive at this number? Why the 30 cents?

How does any customer arrive at any number?

We speculate:

The percentage a customer tips can tell you a lot about them. Of course everyone has their individualities, their on days and off days, hale and thin financial seasons, that affect the tip on a given day, but generally speaking, the following is what we know of tippers by the percentage and what they are telling us with their tip:

(Often,) Customers calculate their tip based on standard or accepted percentages, whether the percentages provided by the restaurant (at Town we present 20%, 22%, and 25% tip calculations at the bottom of each receipt, indicating that these are the expected amounts at our restaurant, though they are frequently and boldly ignored) or percentages gleaned from culture and upbringing, from the social circles that surround them. Some people’s circles are generous; others, more frugal, but within acceptable sympathetic margins; still others, the memorable ones, mostly the wealthiest ones, are the stingiest penny-pinchers, ironically given that many of them haven’t touched a penny in decades, if ever in the bubbled comfort of their coddled lifetimes.

The accepted cultural tip percentage at a sit-down dinner restaurant in Los Angeles1 falls somewhere between 15 and 22%. Even the duddiest of fuddies rarely goes below 15; if they do, it is a clear indicator that they felt something was superbly wrong with the meal. Sub-15 could also be a teen who hasn’t yet learned how to tip—a lesson our more experienced servers are always salivating to teach them. Or they’re European.

15% itself says, “I am old, or was raised in old circles, and have never left them regardless of my current age or financial stability.” It implies a life privileged with fermentation in its own juices, of having interacted with the public at large so little as to have missed the cultural inflation of the tip percentage to a modern acceptable minimum of 18%; or, such a prodigious lack of empathy or such a ballooned ego that they are absolutely confident that this, 15%, the number they consider to be the appropriate number, must be the appropriate number simply because they think it is. The world cannot possibly have changed without them first approving it. What the 15% tipper was taught to be correct at the country club dining room table at age three must always be correct, until they (or their father) decree otherwise.

Now, 18%. 18% is acceptable…if a little disappointing. It’s slightly cheap, but usually in a less entitled, more financially unstable way, and therefore understandable. Even relatable. Good servers receiving an 18% tip search themselves, play back the interactions at a table to pinpoint a missed opportunity or accidental goof, and there may well not be one. But it’s always considered. Still, 18% says, “We had a good/fine/perfectly acceptable meal, and [while studiously ignoring the tip percentages on the receipt] we think you did a good/fine/perfectly acceptable job here today. We’ll see you again, and we will almost certainly tip you precisely 18% again.”

20% is the true standard modern tip percentage. At 20%, all is well, and one has only to give the faintest smile and nod as a ritual of acknowledgment before entering it into the POS system at the close of a shift. 20% says merely, satisfyingly, “Thank you. I get it.”

22%...well well well. Look at this flirty little tipper, hm? Delicately placing a cherry on top of the sundae? Trying to get our attention, are you? Well, you got it. You, 22% tipper, clearly had a really nice time tonight, and we look forward to seeing you again. ;)

A 25% tipper is what we at Town like to call a “Big Baller.” Not that the tipper necessarily possesses testicles of unusual size, or TOUSs (or T’s OUS); it means, you know, someone’s balling out. 25% is either an act of true generosity or of public self-flagellation, usually more the latter than the former; either way, it’s more money than we thought it would be, and it spends just fine.

At 30%, we reach another turning point. Something is wrong—and it’s the customer’s fault. 30% says in no uncertain terms, “I fucked up and I know it.” Maybe your spouse screamed at, swore at, or otherwise belittled the server and you feel bad (but not divorce bad, or even “let’s talk about this” bad, just “I’ll tip an extra 10% for the rest of my life, and that’s the cost of being married to a complete sociopath whom I otherwise love or at least have a kid with” bad). Maybe your lumpy little 15-month-old projectile vomited in a high arc over the table onto the front rug of the restaurant. Maybe your boss made a wildly offensive remark and tried to pass it off as a lacking of your server’s sense of humor. In any of these cases, 30% and a half-hearted attempt to clean up or apologize is the best you can do. At a minimum, it’ll probably keep the entire staff from loathing every molecule of you the next time you come in.

35%? We get it, you’ve got money. Yacht-loads of money. An “I-own-a-house” amount of money. Not that we don’t appreciate it. You could even yell at us a little for 35%. A little. And you can’t be too mean. But we’d take your veiny belligerence, and then the tip, with a smile, genuine or forced. If you did yell at us, we’d say, “Fuck that guy…but he tips 35%,” and everyone would nod understandingly.

Any tip higher than 35% is either a mistake, a generous billionaire (hah), or someone paying with a thick rubber-banded stack of cash that wants no change and no questions, conditions we are all too happy to meet.

That covers broadly why people tip what they tip; it does not particularly help us with our titular problem of the $3.30 tip on a $21.56 total. I had some stuff to get off my chest.

But why, again, the 30 cents? Typically if a customer puts anything but 00 after the decimal it’s because they’re under the mistaken impression that leaving a round total is, in some way, helpful (say, if the customer had left $3.44 on $21.56, the total would’ve come out to $25.00). To be clear, a round total isn’t helpful. At all. If you want to be helpful, leave a round tip (a round tip at or above 20%).

As a percentage, $3.30 on $21.56 is about 15%—but our standard customer psychoanalysis goes out the window when we include the critical context that this is a to-go order. There are no widely accepted rules, standards, or expectations for tipping to-go orders (beyond that you should, and many would debate even that); which is why we apply a gratuity to them. Occasionally a customer is angry that they have to leave anything at all on a to-go order, but the gratuity is 15%, which is less than the dine-in standard and covers the service we provide in making and packing the order, as well as fulfilling whatever truly mind-boggling modification has been left in the “Special Requests” box. But on this particular order I actually forgot to apply the gratuity, which is why our bewildering customer was able to leave this most bewildering tip.

There is, truthfully, no existing reason or rationale to explain our example. The conclusion we are left with, that we must come to when presented with $3.30 on $21.56 or any other tip that defies all accepted, fringe, and even heretical tip logic, is this:

That the customer wrote a number down, thought to themselves, “That looks about right,” and left.

That another person would be affected by that number, would judge it, consider it, or think about it at all (much less write about it), that the number represents real dollars that will be individually tracked all the way into a pocket, and then (sometimes but not always) the bank, that collectively this $3.30 joins an ever-fluctuating pool that feeds or starves a person’s tenuous livelihood, never once crossed the customer’s mind.

Not that you need consider the full existential weight of every tip. But the next time you think about leaving cents on the dollar, do the entire restaurant ecosystem (and me personally) a favor and round up.

Is there anything as exhilarating as waking up on the morning of a trip?

Consciousness in a trickle, then a flood. A flare of routine anxiety as the brain rushes to tally the necessities of the day—halted, suddenly, by happy realization. Ah ah ah, the mind sings, not today. Today, we go, thank god, Somewhere Else!

Getting ready for a trip, despite being hardly different from the day-to-day, is injected with a breathless energy. Contacts in, brush those teeth, skip the shower—today there will be sweat, dirt, and probably some blood—throw comfy clothes briskly on, toss tatty sweatshirt over-the-shoulder into the bag packed late last night, shoes on, electrics off, out the door, forgot my hat, out the door, bags in the trunk, key in the- forgot sunscreen, one last check, grab my sunglasses, throw out the trash, lock the doo- actually, new trash bag, wash that glass, last check, out the door! Back in the door, where’d I leave the keys, where’d I leave my phone…five minutes later, lock the door, start the car, we’re off!

But not going far.

It’s about a five minute drive to Tacos Villa Corona in Atwater Village; delicious, hot, barebones breakfast burritos of a gratefully reasonable size. Soft, near-mashed griddled potatoes, crispy bacon, onions, cilantro, and cheese (melted if you can wait a few minutes before digging in, a tall order), wrapped in foil and served in about two minutes flat if it’s slow, as it is at 7:30am on a Wednesday. The milky, cinnamon-spiced horchata latte from Black Elephant two doors down soothes the eye-watering heat of the Villa Corona house salsa—soothes it to tolerability, at least. I pop the trunk and take my time, because, for the first morning in a couple or a few months, or more, I’ve lost track; I can. A bite of burrito, a sip of latte, check my phone, another bite, take a picture (I could fill a gallery with vertical burrito cross-sections), finish the burrito, plenty of latte left for the drive, post the picture to Stories so everyone knows I am Away (there’s nothing to steal from my apartment anyway), hit the road, and now, for real, we’re off!

As I have written previously, I love to drive, and on a road trip, no matter how brief, not even the loathsome presence of all other drivers can dampen the mood of God’s Perfect Driver. Neither can the expected logjams of morning traffic on the 210 from Pasadena to San Bernardino, where as the wind ominously rises (it is one week after the windstorm that started the Eaton and Palisades infernos, and both are still burning) and bullies my poor Kia, the highway finally begins to clear, cars peeling off onto exits forgotten as soon as they are past, a mere few of the countless flyover neighborhoods of great Los Angeles.

Somewhere near Redlands I pass the house. It camps on a tiny, yet prominent hill maybe a couple hundred feet from the highway, empty windows, tall weeds, curiously lacking graffiti. One story, not particularly broad. Brick chimney. Just a house on a hill, surrounded by acres of empty, renaturalized land, bordered by the rattling grey snake that likely killed it. Here, at the sputtering fringe of the contiguous city, the day’s score calms from the rousing bombast of adventure outset into something more contemplative, more atmospheric, as the desert is wont to inspire.

Now, there’s the Morongo casino, the welcoming monument to the desert valley, a shining pillar and voluntary toll-booth to the dry lands and their oases, so often, as today, wrapped in gusting winds blowing westward fast clouds of dust.

Now, there’s the usual rest stop, as my latte comes home to roost—and shit, it’s closed. I can probably make it to the park, only another 30-40 minutes. Probably. Deep breaths, and no more water. One more sip.

Now, there’s the exit to the 62, the High Desert Highway, the lazy patroller’s ideal hunting ground with its long straight stretch of empty, tempting pavement, bushy median trees obscuring predatory Challengers. Twist through and up rocky hills into Morongo Valley, a dust-beaten little place that in only five years has gone from tumbleweed town to gentrification target, clean new crystal shop-cafe hybrids and restaurants, real restaurants, occupying the shells of crusty dives. Dives, I should admit, I never went to, and never wanted to, but liked to look at. Then a long rise over a tall hill and I’m in Yucca Valley, and the High Desert.

The windows roll down and I can finally breathe away the last desperate grip of the city, and life, and work, and regardless of the time of year, whether it’s an oppressive 95 or a repressive 50 outside, chills fall from head to toe.

From here, normally I’d take the more scenic and direct Alta Loma—which runs across the southern incline of the valley and provides views of the entire breadth, from Yucca Valley and the hills toward Pioneertown in the west all the way to 29 Palms in the east, and the Army base at the feet of more stony hills in the northern distance—straight to the park; but thanks to the closed rest stop, today I gotta go. So instead the 62 takes me past Walmart and every fast food chain known to California, into kitschy, popular, yet still somehow quaint Joshua Tree, and the park Visitor Center. Rapturous relief in a Port-a-Potty. I stop by the fridge at Roadrunner Cafe, the far-better-than-necessary kitchen conveniently attached to the Visitor Center, grab a friendly-looking veggie sandwich, and for the third time today: we’re off!

Finally, to the park.

More Airbnbs than the last time I drove up Quail Springs Road, sprawling homesteads and tiny houses with charm-chic painted names on faux-scrapwood signs staked at just the right awkward angle along the roadside: Hot Rocks Ridge, Desert Springs Oasis, Lazy Lizard Lodge. But that’s to be expected after two years. Who am I to lament—I’m staying in one, just a little ways back down the hill. I like the privacy, the solitude, for the most part. It’s why I’m in the desert; it’s why I love the desert. Plus I’d rather not have to listen to a sinewy and enthusiastic pair of climbers climb all over each other through the horrifyingly thin walls of any of the motels around here.

Joshua Tree. The park.

There’s definitely a spot, a moment, on the road into the park, just over the first hill, past the busy Maze Loop trailhead, past the first informational sign explaining to paste-faced tourists what a boulder is, where the park opens in front of you; and perhaps it’s a Californian thing, even an Angeleno thing, if not a City thing, to feel such overwhelming relief at such vast emptiness. The eponymous fuzzy trees dot hard-packed ground as far as you can see, patterned as if hand-scattered, broken up by piles of boulders of sizes, individually and as collective hills, ranging from “woah” to Gasp!. But it’s the distance, the sheer amount of land between you and anything, even as your car curves down the intruding black stripe that slashes through the center of it, the space that lets the sky bend, that is breathtaking. As many times as I’ve been here, it is always breathtaking.

An impatient Subaru honks at me for driving in awe in a National Park. I let them pass (and confirm, yes, that they indeed look like Subaru drivers), and try to decide where I’m going to stop for today’s exercise in masochistic thrill-seeking. Probably, as per usual, the increasingly appropriately-named “Hemingway” formation. I find my usual turnout past the main lot, and park.

Getting out of your car in Joshua Tree, the first thing you notice is the quiet. Beyond the Doppler of the occasional car going by, the only sound is wind; rustling the bristly Joshuas, battering your ears. There are birds, but they rarely chirp. There’s the occasional skitter of a lizard or fuzzy desert mouse through the underbrush as they play deadly hide-and-seek with circling hawks. You might, if you’re lucky, hear one soft thump as a jackrabbit—always bigger than you think they are—bounds away. Of course, this is only true if you, like me, prefer to keep your distance from people in nature, if you find an out-of-the-way spot to explore. If you instead park at the massive lot at Hidden Valley, for example, the sound of wind retreats behind echoing shouts and laughter, and the critters largely avoid the constant stampede of dust-kicking feet.

But here it’s quiet, and I’m happy. It’s funny; when I’m packing for a day in Joshua Tree, I double and triple-check to make sure I have my headphones. I’m convinced that I couldn’t possibly last several hours with no music, no podcasts, no soundtrack to living, mainly because I can’t last ten minutes without that in my everyday life. But every time I’m here, and I’m standing on the dirt, Camelpak on, sunscreen applied, hat, sunglasses, and sturdy trailrunners, I can’t imagine putting music on. In fact I am viscerally revolted by the thought. Partly because I’m justifiably worried about rattlesnakes; you do not want to miss that rattle, not even for the mind-massaging first chords of Soccer Mommy’s circle the drain. But mainly because it feels so grossly, intrusively human, so arrogant, so unforgivably boneheaded to presume, “You know what would make this astounding natural beauty even better? Some fuckin’ Party Rock, baby!” Often at this point in a rant I’d qualify, shrink, I’d say that this is just me and my little preference, to each their own, enjoy nature how you will…no. No, no no. This time I’m calling you out, you ignorant music players, especially you music players that use speakers Christ Almighty, I am calling you gross, intrusive, arrogant, an unforgivable bonehead, turn that LMFAO off and listen to the freakin’ wind and learn to be where you are.

Composing ourselves.

I’m in Joshua Tree to wander around, climb rocks, and have epiphanies.

The term “rock-climbing” is more-or-less used to describe high ascents using ropes, pitons, pulleys, et cetera clanky safety gear. In the same climbing parlance, what I do in Joshua tree is a combination of “bouldering” and “scrambling,” smaller scale climbing (of rocks) with a lesser, but nonzero, degree of danger. Fall when rock-climbing: very bad. Death bad. Fall when bouldering: ouch. A sprain, maybe even a break or dislocation. Fall when scrambling: depends. Scrape, cut, sprain, ow, but the biggest danger, in my experience, is potentially falling into a place you can’t scramble out of, 127 Hours-style (my parents are going to love reading this). I have so far carefully avoided every such pitfall, but I come across them all the time. Your prerogative as a climber is to responsibly choose the situations you put yourself into, understanding the consequences; so as long as I don’t put myself into a situation that could disastrously result in 127 hours of pain, suffering, and amputation, I’ll be fine. Mostly, I don’t do that. Mostly. It would be easier if the potential-127 hours-routes weren’t so exciting.

“Hemingway” is the best spot in the park for scrambling and bouldering. There are at first sight seemingly endless piles of boulders, and then you climb those piles and achieve an excellent view of endlessly more piles beyond, and not just piles but heaps, stacks, and hills, different, increasingly and varyingly towering and formidable, beckoning and challenging: “Can you find a way up?” And while I tend to distance myself from people in my immediate vicinity, the other perk of Hemingway is that there are often people within shouting distance, other hikers, climbers, and wanderers. It’s a layer of peace of mind that, frankly, lets me take a few more risks, knowing, again, that I probably won’t end up in my own personal 127 hours. Probably.

I’m not going to further describe rocks to you, but basically, scrambling goes something like this:

1. Stand before a huge pile of massive boulders that could crush me instantly if they decide Today is The Day in Geologic History that they’re going to Move.

2. Wonder if I should be doing this. At all. Especially alone.

3. Decide I’m already here, so why not.

4. Analyze the rocks, evaluating routes. Cue 90s beep-boop-bop cybervision, techno-target reticule and rapidly populating electro-charts, calculations whizzing upward in an endless scroll: That route looks safe, that one looks fun, that one looks really fun but if I fall, yikes…

5. *Bing!* Route selected. The fun route. Not the safe route, not the yikes route. The Goldilocks Rule of Scrambling. If you only pick safe routes you’ll never come back because it’s no fun. If you only pick dangerous routes you’ll never come back because you’ll never leave.

6. Ascend. Grip, lift, perch, push, scrape (ow), clamber, little hop, hup, hup, hup, squeeze between these two, hope there’s not a spider in there, lift gently, there it is, got it, up, done!

7. Repeat until tired or no more up.

In the midst of that process, getting my sturdy but increasingly vincible body up and over these boulders, there’s the ever-present, ever-welcome distraction of the desert. Just behind huffing, puffing, and grunting, there’s the aforementioned wind, the skittering in the brush, the faint unintelligible echoes of other climbers calling out to each other as they dangle, tiny, against the face of a sheer rock wall. Every time I pause for a quick breath I glance behind me at a landscape of contrast, unfiltered sunlight beating down relentlessly except for deep lakes and ponds of shadow thrown by the tallest boulder piles, a still-life but for the deceptively slow drifting of predators silhouetted in the bright sky. Then back to the climb.

Behind the imposing first wall of Hemingway there’s a long, long-dried streambed before the next craggy tower. I’m on the other side of that streambed, and I can feel, as I pick my way up the final few rocks, that this is the turnaround point. At the top—not the top top, but the top of this particular ascent—I wiggle myself through a cranny out onto a nice, flat, shadowed ledge, rock still warm from its daily sunbath. I read a few pages from my book, then get chilly in the shade as a breeze moves through, whistling in the higher reaches above. I throw on the jacket I sweated off on the way in, pull up the fuzz-lined hood, and doze for 10, 20 minutes.

Down and back is always harder than up and in. Harder still when you’ve just slept and allowed loose muscles to relax and congeal. There’s a symphony of cracking, snapping, and popping with a chorus of groaning as I stand and stretch. Wincing, I look out at my route back—the rocks seem somehow so much rockier than on the way in—and whisper an apology, a prayer, to my joints. A lot of hard landings between me and the car.

But I make it fine. The stretch of walk to the road after dismounting the final boulder is a place of unbelievable satisfaction. I’ve remembered why I like doing this, and proved to myself that I can still do it, without hurting myself, and can look forward to doing even more of it tomorrow. The winter sky is already growing dark, the desert cold. I watch for pesky fallen cacti that love nothing more than to stick through the side of a shoe into a vulnerable foot. I chuck my bag into the passenger seat and bask briefly in the car’s warm, shielded interior, catching myself just shy of another nap, before heading out.

Trepidation, on my way to the Airbnb. I’m good at booking Airbnbs—in fact, I’m better than most people I know at booking Airbnbs (or VRBOs, or whatever). If I know you, it’s true. I’m better. I’m really good. For instance, I actually check to make sure the place has air-conditioning (or heat, per the season) and wi-fi. I look at the neighborhood the place is in on Google Maps to make sure it’s not full of burned out buildings and empty lots and haunted people who stare unblinking at your car all the way into the driveway. Streetview. Yeah. I know the tricks that all you plebians seem to fall for every time I let you do the booking. And every time we’re walking through the place and you’re shaking your head in amazement that there’s no electricity or something I say, “Crazy that they didn’t mention there’s no electricity here,” while I think, “They absolutely mentioned there’s no electricity, you just didn’t read it dummy.” At this point, especially in Joshua Tree, I’m practically a pro.

That said, even I get duped sometimes.

Because you never know with 100% certainty how an Airbnb (VRBO, etc) is going to turn out until you’re in the door. Gorgeous photos tell you nothing. Comprehensive photos, multiple angles of every room and the exterior, are much better. If any rooms, amenities, or outside photos are omitted, red flag. What don’t they want me to see? Barren, scrap-strewn backyard? Buzzsaw-wielding, metalworking neighbors? A wood furnace requiring wood I have to provide myself, like I’m Paul freakin’ Bunyon?

Even if the photos are comprehensive and all the other details line up, though, there are things you can’t know. Furniture quality, for example. It’s extremely easy, and extremely common, to disguise shitty furniture in photography. The same for fixtures and building materials. Many times I’ve walked into an Airbnb only to discover the place feels…hollow. The wood floor creaks, too new and cheap. Walls echo loudly. Light switches don’t work. Wall art still has stickers. The bed is as hard as the rocks I’ve been climbing all day. There’s an odd…smell…from somewhere, like a small critter snuck into a wall and died during construction. All unfortunate signs that you’ve walked into a trap of an Airbnb, one of some greedy jerkoff Angeleno’s many income siphons.

Luckily, the trepidation is unwarranted as this one turns out to be none of those things, and is in fact among the best I’ve ever booked.

Everything works. Like, everything. Lights, shower, water, even the automatic shades that lower from the ceiling to obscure the wall-to-wall front windows (that look out onto a fantastic view of the desert valley), which I worried briefly didn’t work until I realized I was just hitting the wrong button. Not only is the place functional, but it has real, genuine taste. It wasn’t furnished from the Pinterest sale bin, and neither is it someone’s recently-deceased grandparent’s recently-uncluttered home. It’s minimal, but roomy, organized, and thoughtful. And did I mention that everything works?

Though it’s a side house next door to a house-house on a larger property, the view is unobstructed and there’s plenty of distance between this place and the next. Space to breathe, to relax, space for privacy. Space, perhaps, to fill in with imaginary spooks once it gets dark—but I can live with that. I’ve been living with imaginary spooks, light or dark, all my life. Not to get…you know.

After confirming that the place is lovely and everything works—and playing with the automatic window shades for somewhere between two and 20 minutes—I throw myself down on the couch, which is comfortably firm and crucially not a rock, pull out my laptop, and begin hunting for food. In the two years it’s been since my last visit, unfortunately both of my go-to local pizza joints have closed down. Fortunately, two new ones have opened up. I pick the one that has wings on the menu. Never fully trust a local pizza joint that doesn’t have wings; they either take themselves too seriously or are a health-food restaurant in disguise. I find a not-too-sketchy (dangerous), but not-too-clean (expensive) liquor store between me and the pizza shop. Then I spend about 15 minutes willing myself back off the couch.

Bashfully, I think what I find tremendously beautiful about sunsets is how uniquely stunning they are depending on where you’re seeing them (as well as, obviously, the weather). From my apartment window it’s a cascade of gradients across the sky that disappears behind the house across the street. From Venice Beach it’s a burning orange ball that drifts down, down just off Point Dume, casting afterimages of surfers, soccer players, and packing families as they savor the last moments of quintessential California joy. From a backyard in Belgrade, Montana it’s a purple ink stain blossoming behind cloud cover and far mountain peaks, a cue for an evening walk around the sparse neighborhood. From the coast of any island in Hawaii it’s an existential witness, as close as an individual comes through their own inadequate sight to beginning to comprehend the Sun and Earth as bodies in an incomprehensible space, before the bodies vanish in a supernatural green flash that throws all colors of perception across the horizon.

In the desert the sunset fuzzes the harsh terrain and wipes a rough brush across dirt, rock, and scrub to render a breathtaking painted landscape, a few moments of fullness and rich beauty before the night plunges all into cold, empty, dark unknown. Driving in the brushed light feels cinematic, not of old westerns but dismal thrillers with grey endings, so many of which have a scene of lonesome driving through jaw-dropping beauty, the driver either too preoccupied with untangling life-threatening quibbles to notice or all too aware of the conclusive symbolism of fading light. Right on time, I pull up to the liquor store.

I walk out with a tall bottle of Eagle Rare, a good bourbon. I pick up the pizza, one of the first of the night out of the hot brick oven. The place is too bright, smoky, and empty, not the kind of place you want to sit in, but the pizza smells good and I hope the business lasts.

I have to reverse to find the house’s unmarked dirt driveway. Once inside I toss the pizza and wings in the oven to warm, lower the window shades, gulp down a quick burning shot, and head for the shower.

And stop.

Why, why why why, why, why—why—do they make showers so goddamn different and so goddamn complicated?

I stand, naked, on tile, staring at an arcane set of unmarked golden spokes mounted on the wall opposite the shower head. There are two long spokes and one short, and the short spoke when turned turns the long spokes with it, while each long spoke turns only itself. On the wall directly under the shower head is another set of unlabeled golden spoke-handles, but only one short and one long. Again, the short turns the long, the long turns itself. Next to that, mounted on the wall is a washing hose.

Get it?

Clearly this is supposed to be intuitive, or else they would have labeled it, I think. So, sending my mind into a state of intuition, I intuit: One set of handles must handle (hah) the temperature, and the other set must control the pressure. The three-spoked handle may correspond to hot, cold, and…something, while the two-spoked handle controls the pressure and direction to the shower head or the washy-hose thing. I chuckle to myself, shaking my head. Easy!

I turn one of the long handles on the three-spoke set: nothing. I turn the other: nothing. Ahah! The temperature! I was right! I reset both and turn the short spoke, which turns all three. Water sprays from the shower head. This really was intuitive. Now to set the temperature. I look at the two long spokes. Hot is usually on the left, I guess. But do I turn it clockwise or counter-clockwise? I try clockwise, and wait a minute: the water remains cold. I try counter-clockwise and wait a minute: the water remains cold. Hm. Maybe that’s the cold control. I try the other long spoke: same results. I say, out loud, “Shit.”

I run out to the kitchen to make sure the hot water works. It does, instantly. I run back and stare at both sets of gold handles for another two minutes. The water remains running, and remains cold.

I know how to turn the water on at least, I don’t quite reassure myself. Maybe the two-spoked handle controls the temperature…for some reason. With the water on I carefully approach the two-spoked handle under the showerhead, gasping when I can’t fully avoid the frigid water (it is 40F outside and falling). I turn the long spoke. Nothing seems to change. I try the short spoke—and yelp, “AIP!” as the water pressure changes destinations and freezing spray immediately blasts my face from the washing hose, pointed helpfully outward at precisely face-level. I duck out of the way and flip the short spoke back—and yell, “NO!” as the same freezing water drenches me from the showerhead I’d stepped under. “YAH!” I jump like a wet cat, out of the way.

I am drenched. I am cold. I am mad.

“WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A SHOWER WITH NO LABELS!?” I yell at the shower. I dry off and go check the house manual to see if there are instructions. There aren’t.

When I come back the water is steaming.

“WHAT.”

I am dumbfounded. I touch the water—and recoil. Extremely hot. It must just need time to heat, I think, but which handle activated the hot water? I return to the three-spoked handle and turn one of the long spokes a bit clockwise. When that doesn’t appear to do anything after a minute, I turn it more. Does that look like less steam? I touch the water: definitely cooler. The water eventually settles to a barely-tolerable heat. I don’t know if that spoke turned down the hot water or turned up the cold water, but the pressure stayed the same and at this point I can’t be bothered to find out. As long as I keep it on this setting, then I can turn it off and back on again without changing anything.

It is admittedly, when finally working, a pretty terrific shower. Heat and high water pressure are a magical combination after a long day in the sun, whether in a ridiculous shower or a hot tub’s coveted jet seat. There are few more comforting feelings, matched only by the moments after, scrubbed to a new layer of skin and in a loose, soft shirt and sweatpants.

I plop down on the couch and nearly fall asleep (it is 6pm) before I smell the warming pizza and remember I have food waiting.

The pizza’s good. The wings are good. The bourbon is also good, and about 15 minutes into The Hurt Locker it hits me like a sledgehammer and sends me into something like a waking coma. Sensation becomes slippery. Ralph Fiennes appears briefly, memorably, and dies. I finish the remaining pizza and wings that I was going to leave for tomorrow, way back when I was mostly sober and full. I manage to avoid drinking more bourbon. I do something for another two hours, maybe read, check hopelessly to see if she texted back, and then I finally let myself collapse into bed.

Some people struggle to sleep in foreign beds. I do not. I’ve always found them, with rare exception, more comfortable than my own bed. Whatever that means.

I wake, curiously un-hungover. Sore, definitely, from yesterday’s scrambling, just about everywhere, and the small nicks and wounds are starting to itch. But not dry, not spinning. Feeling pretty good, overall. Suspiciously…good. I drink a full glass of water anyway, just in case.

Light floods the room as I raise the window shades, revealing a brilliant blue cloudless morning, all the signs of a brutal and uncompromising cold waiting in ambush behind inches of glass.

I head down the hill for breakfast. The desert is as slow as anywhere on weekend mornings, and it’s a pleasurable crawl to Big Dez for a big, soul-warming coffee and a couple hefty pastries. As anticipated the cold is dry, sharp, bracing, and I need the coffee more for heat than waking.

I enjoy the pastries over a bit of Stop Making Sense to amp up for today’s excursion, stretching, hopping around, constantly staring out the windows at the minute movements of the twitching desert town. Then we’re off again.

I manage to mostly beat the weekend line at the park entrance, which can stretch a mile or more down the two-lane road in peak season, and even now in the off-season, at the wrong time, can grow long enough to wait an hour to enter. Once through, it’s back to Hemingway. There’s an old favorite spot a short ways down a dirt road with treading that feels designed to rattle my poor Soul until all the screws fall out and the intrepid little car disintegrates and plops me in my seat directly on the sand. But it, somehow, holds together.

An enormous hill of jumbled car-sized boulders looms. I’ve climbed it before, several times, but each time I’ve doubted I would make it. I can see many routes up, it’s obviously possible; it just feels unlikely. A big task for small me. Then, as I plant my foot on the first rock, my body remembers: up is easy. Up is only push, lift, pull. Find the next path. Step, pull, lift. Next path. Step, step, jump, push, lift. Next. It takes me about 40 minutes to reach the top.

I pause and take a long drag from the Camelpak. My heart is pumping but not racing. I have probably a dozen new little red marks: scratches, dings, nicks, and what I reluctantly have to call a gash near my left elbow from catching myself on a slip. I have a little gauze and some athletic tape, and I clumsily but securely wrap my arm. Then I move on.

At the top of the boulder hill is a dirt slope that ramps to a crack in the massive block of stone that tops this formation. I scrabble up and discover something I hadn’t noticed before: the crack is actually a tunnel that leads through the stone to its back. Creeping through, I hop onto a small ledge, a pocket of rocks and dirt with a sheer drop—about 60 feet—on one side and a sheer cliff wall on the other, and a gap under a large boulder that I could probably crawl through. Here, on this precarious, lonely perch, I pause. There could be spiders in there. After five minutes of hemming, hawing, stomping, kicking, and verbally warning the imaginary(?) spiders of my impending approach (nearby climbers hear faint echoes of: “If there are any spiders in there, tarantulas or otherwise, I’m coming and I mean no harm! Just passing through! Here I go!”), I shove my backpack through and army crawl under the boulder.

Standing up on the other side, my stomach drops. Mental alarms ring. This is what we don’t do.

I’m on another, smaller ledge, unprotected. The wind blows strongly, and that’s important because one random powerful gust could potentially throw me off balance at a critical moment. And the only way off this ledge, besides back, is right through a highly critical moment.

All I have to do is climb up onto this one, thick, round-ish rock, and then it’s two steps and a short leap onto a huge, flat rock that’ll be safe. However, the round rock is…round. Which means that although it looks grippy, one false move, one misjudgment of weight or balance, one surprise gust of wind, could put me off the rock. There are no holds, nothing to catch myself on. Off the rock and 50 feet to the ground. There’s also a slight gap between my ledge and the round rock with about a 20-foot drop underneath, making it even trickier. It’s still not a difficult move to get up there. It’s just a bit of momentum and balance. I can do it with about 95% confidence. It’s just that there can be absolutely no mistakes. It’s a scary 5%.

My first and loudest thought is correct:

THIS IS WHAT WE DON’T DO.

Then, a second, insidious, churlish, childish, brick wall of a thought:

But I don’t wanna go back.

The past few months have been a lot: of work, of emotion, of stress. Especially the last month. In the past four weeks through the holidays I’ve worked the most shifts, and some of the most exhausting shifts, I’ve ever worked at the restaurant. Many of those nights and days were rewarding, not only in customers served and made happy but in feeling like a driving mechanism of a supportive team. Still, fulfillment doesn’t always top up the tank, and the more you work the less it does. Rest, and life outside of work, has to take care of the remainder, and there has not been much of either lately. In fact there has been very little life outside of work for some time now. Arguably years. So when I got a little money for Christmas, I booked myself this short getaway practically as soon as it hit my bank account.

But it seemed like as soon as the holiday rush died, LA caught fire. Thousands displaced overnight, my parents fortunately but unnervingly in the Yellow Light zone (“Be ready to go.”), Wednesday sunrise smothered by two monstrous roiling plumes of pitch-black smoke encircling the entire city. Trees fallen everywhere, onto parked cars, through buildings, blocking sidewalks and highway entrances, in many, many cases bringing power lines and poles down with them. That first morning I drove from my place in Los Feliz up to Montrose (in the hills where the wind has always careened) through Glendale, staying on side streets. On Los Feliz Boulevard, an artery connecting the 5 to Hollywood and Silver Lake, two massive pine trees tangled in power lines dammed the entire road, and I knew even before I caught up with the news that it was bad, really bad, because though this was not only a fire and safety hazard and a major power failure but also an enormous traffic fiasco waiting to happen, there was not even one emergency vehicle in sight. Just cars beginning to line up, a few drivers and locals standing and pointing, people self-organizing the early chaos. Some helpful utility worker had at least thrown strips of reflective high-visibility fabric over the dam so that no one would drive into it in the dark.

Days of chaos, checking in, wondering where, why, how to help. Opening the restaurant, and a shocking, welcome, flood of regulars and displaced. Help, work, an overwhelmed sense of not doing enough, of not being able to do enough. A worthless guilt over leaving on a two day trip on the first day the wind died, two weeks into the fires.

Least importantly, but nevertheless affecting: a crush. The first I’d felt—allowed myself to feel—in a long time, almost unwillingly. You know how they go. Highs and lows, an exhilarating and terrifying lack of control, revealing your worst self in overwrought attempts to be your best, and your best in the few moments you manage to forget the self-imposed stakes. This one was on a downslope when I left for Joshua Tree. But there was hope in it being felt at all.

And so all that pent-up exhaustion, depression, and frustration inspires the third, winning thought, streaking like a rocket through my mind as I stare at this potentially deadly rock:

FUCK THIS ROCK.

Decided, shutting off my mind, I take a sip of water, tighten the straps on my bag, and make the first move.

Instantly things go wrong.

The gap is wider than I thought. Or my legs are shorter than I thought. Either way as my toe lands on the round rock across the short gap I’m caught in a ¾ split, with no strength or momentum to propel myself up to the top. Also, I’m tilting backwards, towards open air. 50 feet of open air.

Using the explosive burst of adrenaline from sudden, mortal fear, I throw both arms forward over my head to reset my balance, or at least fall in a less deadly direction. I achieve the latter. Before I can fall 20 feet to certain injury, I shoot my right arm out and slap the top of the rock, grinding my palm into the gritty stone. Shooting pain as my right shoulder slightly hyperextends, but the move catches me. I think quickly, unsure how long I can hold this position, nearly all my weight thrown against the rock, one toe extended to the relative safety of the ledge. I could try to shove myself off the rock and pendulum back to the ledge; but I’m not feeling particularly strong from this position and I’d likely just fall back on the rock. I’ll have to climb up.

Truly, deeply, FUCK THIS ROCK.

I twist my torso over my front leg so I’m facing the rock directly, then slap my other arm over the top and dig every inch of skin into the stone to get as much grip as possible. Then I reluctantly release the toe on the ledge.

I dangle briefly, splat against the side of the rock like a child’s lint-covered sticky-palm toy, toes scraping to find some hint of purchase beyond prayer.

One toe finds it. Just a hint.

I pull hard on my arms, scraping my chest up across the stone until I can plant it over the rounded top. Then I slowly move one arm, then the other, a little further across the top face of the rock, grip, and pull again, hoisting my belly over the edge. Finally, carefully, one leg, and then the other.

I stay flat on my stomach, not trusting my balance while still on the rounded boulder. A strong gust of wind blows through, whipping my shirt. Yeah, flat is good. Flat is great.

I squirm my way to the edge, just a short hop away to the huge flat rock and safety. I listen for telltale moaning of wind rushing through nooks and crevices in the higher rocks nearby, and when there is none I quickly stand and jump across.

Safe.

Panting, I sit, take off my pack, and take stock.

My right shoulder is sore, but there are no sharp pains. My knees have a couple dings from bouncing off the rock. My forearms are embedded with gravel but most of it brushes off, revealing a couple light scrapes. My hands are in the worst shape, my right hand especially, scratched up and a few tiny rocks planted too deep to squeeze out with my fingers. They don’t hurt now but they’ll infect if I don’t take care of them tonight.

All in all, not too shabby.

I squeeze some water over the scrapes and onto my hands. Then I throw the pack back on and continue.

There’s a little green dead-end canyon up here between the massive peakstones of the formation. It’s not the little green canyon I was looking for—and now I’m confused about where exactly that particular canyon is—but it’s where I’ve end up. There’s a tall pillar of stones in the middle and more jumbled boulders around it. At the far end there’s a rock wall with a break in it that looks surmountable but I know from experience isn’t, at least for me. Ironically, that was my last near miss, that inspired The Rules and an impeccable run of safe choices up to today. On the right is a sheer rock wall and on the left is a sloped rise topped with individual, house-sized boulders. In the gaps between I know there’s some decent flat rock and shade, and a view off the front of the Hemingway formation. A nice place to stop for lunch.

I’m there in the shade unpacking when a voice right next to me shouts: “RIGHT!”

I nearly hurl my lunch off the top of the rocks.

I look around, see no one, and then again: “RIGHT!” Then, “YEAH, THAT’S IT!”

Then I hear the clinking of carabiners and faint grunts of exertion. Climbers nearby. Maybe right on the other side of the boulder, or on the face of the formation in front of me. I quietly gather my things. They wouldn’t expect me to be here, and surprises are dangerous for them, too.

I find another spot a couple boulders away and enjoy my chicken curry wrap in peace.

The top of a pile of rocks in the middle of the desert is a peerless place to think.

Especially for someone like me, who will chase every possible mental distraction with urgency. Here, in nowhere with no cell service, the distractions are mostly gentle: Ooh, look at those hawks. Oh, that’s a nice breeze. People still drive Hummers?

In the past I brought notebooks with me to capture wild ideations on my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, short stories, life and career goals. None particularly useful. And why should my thoughts be useful here, where there’s no place for utility as a concept? Today I decide to leave productivity out of nature entirely, and the thinking is all the more pleasant.

Breeze, alternating warm and cool. Faint, unintelligible calls of the climbers nearby, echoing oddly off the rocks. Fainter drag of tires on pavement as the occasional car passes a few hundred feet away. Once in a long while, a chirp, a screech. My own deep, increasingly satisfied sighs.

I could do more of this.

Can I afford it?

Mm, good point. Maybe more than once a year, at least.

Maybe.

…

Should I get into rock climbing?

Can I afford it?

Mm, right, right, good point.

How about running again?

Sigh…I guess. But my knees.

I’m already playing volleyball.

Yeah. Maybe only if I really really want to.

Lol.

What? I could want to run again.

Lol.

…

Dinner?

Hungry?

Yeh.

Chinese?

If there is one. Maybe that Thai place.

Sure. Ooh, some crab rangoon…

Hello.

Some noodles…

Uh huh.

That chocolate cake in the fridge.

Oh hohoho I forgot about that.

Oh yeah.

Helllll yeah.

…

Think I’ll ever figure it out?

I hope so.

Seems like the more I try,

The less I figure.

Let’s just focus on being a good person.

And cleaning the apartment.

Jesus, yeah.

What’s that thing Masa said on Parts Unknown?

Big ol’ bites.

That’s what he did. What he said was,

Once in a lifetime, never again.

Time to go.

Down is methodical.

At least from here at the top of Hemingway, it’s only down. It’s not down, then up, then over, then forget which way I was going—there’s basically just the one way. But the boulders are big and deceptively far apart, and not everything that looks like a safe route is. It’s slow pickings. Sit on the edge, dangle a leg, tap a toe, scoot off, lower down, twist, find the second foothold, release the toe, move one arm, then the other, drop. Next rock down. The only trick is to not get impatient and let the drops get too big; my knees will scream.

About halfway down, scooting off another rock, my jeans rip; dead center saddle. Super. Really good. Definitely weren’t my good jeans or anything. My only good jeans, or anything.

It takes about 45 minutes to reach the bottom, another five to trek through the brush back to my car, keeping a careful eye for dozing snakes. I inspect my pants tear in the reflection of the door; doesn’t look super visible. I could probably grab a quick coffee with none the wiser.

I get the coffee, and none are the wiser. Back to the place for a thankfully easy shower. Two lazy horizontal hours, reading a nice, pulpy fantasy novel. Warm sunlight through the wide windows. Soft music. No traffic, no passing pedestrian conversations, no distant sirens or honking. I coze.

When the sun begins to set, I stand at the windows and watch the entire parade of oranges and purples march down the northern hills, until only the dusting of individual tiny houselights is left in their wake.

Later, I get the Thai, noodles and rangoons. There’s more bourbon, then chocolate cake. Juror #2, a surprisingly thoughtful Clint Eastwood flick.

Out, hard.

Nine beautiful hours. Still had the dreams, vivid and visceral, but at least they evaporate upon waking.

One final, glorious shower to relax the all-encompassing soreness and ease the itching of dozens of healing breakages.

Then, we’re off.

I stop at a Vietnamese restaurant that sells bagels in the morning, mostly because I want a Vietnamese coffee, and it is, unfortunately if not surprisingly, a sad sight. Someone spent way too much money on the place and clearly dinner revenue isn’t cutting it, so they’re trying to make up for the shortfall by opening other dayparts. It’s not going to work. Alas, not all adventure ends in treasure. The coffee is delicious, though.

Two hours home.

My mind tends to drift (more) on the 10. Luckily this isn’t an oops-I’m-falling-asleep morning, which has happened a couple times before. I feel lean, baked, happily wrung-out and hung up to dry by the desert. As usual the minute I pass Morongo going the other way my thoughts leap, like Superman, in a single great bound back to responsibilities left behind, tallying, sorting, prioritizing. Dinner service tonight. Events to plan and promote. Staffing and coverage. Inter-team peeves and bickerings to soothe before they chafe and draw blood. Once the mental list is satisfactory I move on to grander questions, such as: What am I DOING? I wince. I am less sure than I’ve ever been; yet, more stable than I’ve been in a long time. I’ve become deeply skeptical of dreams, but without them I feel aimless, and not in the wandering around some deep neighborhood of Tokyo, charming, lackadaisical, “I’ll find my way,” kind of way. There’s a sudden intense urgency to it. I don’t feel guilty for the days off, they were necessary, but now that I’m back, or on the way, I better figure things out before time runs out and time can run out anytime. What do I want to do? Who do I want to be? Where do I, ugh, see myself in five years, ten? Does my life ride on some undone Great Work? What will it be? When will it begin?

The waterfall cascades across all 12 lanes and I plunge into it, back into it, back home.

🌵✌🌵

That said: enjoy! Because I recommend all these restaurants with good reason. I’ve never had a bad time at any of them, and I’ve never heard from anyone I’ve sent that they’ve had a bad time, either. They are all in their own ways some kind of representative of LA. I recommend them to visitors because I want them to like this impenetrable city that can be understandably hard to like. I recommend them to my fellow Angelenos because the hunt for good food can be overwhelming in the sprawl; and a good word from someone you know, or in many cases the son of someone you know (thanks for sharing, Mom), goes a long, long way. Lastly, I recommend them because I want all these restaurants to continue to succeed at doing the wonderful, delicious things they all do.

You can see this list in map form (and save it to your Google Maps profile) here.

Corner Market

I’ve had almost every sandwich at Corner Market, and none of them were mediocre. The little corner store that still sells meat, fish, craft beers, Armenian pastries, and an unbelievable variety of chips is now a deli first and foremost, turning out hundreds of subs a day for locals on lunch breaks and nearby offices in need of enormous platters of email fuel. Sure, you can get a turkey sandwich your way, plain with just mayo and cheese; sad, boring, why-even-bother-going-outside. But you should really lean on proprietor Ray’s near-fanatic sandwich composing expertise. Every item is a carefully crafted medley of meat-veg-dressing, built to feature each ingredient and blend them harmoniously between hinged halves of a perfect, crispy, chewy roll. The Spicy Capiccola and Mortadella are great, somewhat simpler and highlighting the excellent quality of the cold cuts, the flaky cap and nutty mort. The Pastrami Rayz Way tops a generous heap of smoky, tender (Wagyu when available) pastrami with a potent horseradish aioli. But for me it’s hard to beat the Spicy Italian and Italian King, Ray’s two takes on classic Italian subs that stack several cuts under crispy veg and slather them with bright cherry pepper aioli, the Spicy version completed with pepperoncini and the King with a thick slab of soft mozzarella.

For your first visit, go in person and take a picture of the menu. For every visit after, call ahead; they’re busy. There are a few tables inside and out, but you’re not going to get one if you come between 12 and 1pm. And get an extra side of dressing, whatever’s on your sandwich or just sounds interesting; they’re all worth having more of.

The Chori-Man & Colossus Bread

2309 S Alma St, San Pedro, CA 90731

I have written and posted about Chori-Man and Colossus Bread with every opportunity, to the point that I worry I’ve overhyped these two suburban San Pedro storefronts. But then, every time I drive down there, pick up my burrito and pastries and coffee, and take them over to White Point Beach, I’m over-hyped all over again.

Chori-Man—maker and distributor of some of the city’s best and most unique chorizos—serves one of the flat-out best breakfast burritos in LA, with choice of chorizo (mine is the green pork-poblano chorizo), runny egg, crispy potatoes, and a pair of abundantly flavorful salsas, one spicy, one mild. Next door, Colossus Bread dishes flaky, decadent danishes and croissants, along with the necessary coffee for the morning (Chori-Man does not serve coffee). Making the 45 minute drive down to San Pedro for these two siblings is easily one of my favorite ways to start a weekend.

Smorgasburg LA

777 S Alameda St, Los Angeles, CA 90021

There is no better single place to experience the breadth of LA cuisine than Smorgasburg. Is it totally representative of LA’s dining culture? No, but that’s an impossible standard, and there is still plenty of variety to Smorgasburg’s lineup: Japanese onigiri from stalwart Mama Musubi, McSatan cheeseburger tacos from Evil Tacos, one of the city’s great breakfast burritos from Macheen, a serious contender for LA’s best lobster roll (Broad Street Oyster Co), crispy tteokbokki and a decadent box of bulgogi and banchan (Royal Box), a truly worthy smashburger (Softies). Parking is easy, and free for two hours; more than enough time. And if you can’t find a table to sit (likely), there’s more than enough curb space throughout Row DTLA’s industrial hub-turned-mall to find a temporary spot to snarf. Smorgasburg is best enjoyed with a crew, small or large (though that doesn’t stop me from going solo now and again). The fair opens at 10, closes at 4, and gets busy starting at about 11:30am. It is only on Sundays. Popular vendors occasionally sell out. Plan accordingly.

The Prince

3198 1, 2 W 7th St, Los Angeles, CA 90005

Every perfect night in Koreatown ends at The Prince. The Prince is one of those surreal places that sounds totally, completely ludicrous when you try to describe it to anyone in the daylight, but makes total, complete sense when you descend its carpeted steps and enter its dim, pleather-and-velvet dining room with a party of four to ten at 11:30pm or later on a Friday night. Every surface in The Prince is red, and what is not red is either a suit of armor or an enormous painting of some sickly European royal. Deep booths, not all shaped like you think a booth should be shaped, line the walls, and in the center of the room is a large horseshoe bar (the one of New Girl fame). Your party crowds together and orders a couple pitchers of beer and a bunch of food to share, especially the kimchi pancake, kimchi fried rice, tteokbokki, fried chicken, and wings. The order is accomplished by pressing a big red button on the top of the booth seats, which summons the server once they’re available (emphasis on once they’re available). You enjoy yourselves immensely, especially after the food arrives. You go home, and sleep a princely sleep, dreaming spicy, red dreams.

Ali’i Fish Company, El Segundo

409 E Grand Ave, El Segundo, CA 90245

Ali’i Fish Company is one of the most pleasant lunch experiences in my repertoire. The main location is in semi-sleepy El Segundo, the beach town next to LAX that most visitors only see on touchdown or takeoff, and most locals drive past on their way to (the admittedly more exciting) Manhattan Beach. Parking at Ali’i is easy, and on entering, you immediately realize that this isn’t the fast casual type of build-your-own poke exported across the nation; this is real Hawaiian-style poke. Bowls are not customized from start to finish; instead, you pick from their selection of pre-mixed, marinated fish—from the classic tuna with soy and onions to salmon with ponzu— then choose between a base of rice or salad, and one of a small selection of add-ons (edamame, avocado, seaweed salad). The simplicity of the bowl lets the fish and its few complementary dressings shine, and reminds you why poke works as a dish in the first place; and not only as the quick, semi-healthy yet dismal lunch option you’ll find at chains. The menu extends far beyond poke, too, into fish burgers, loco moco bowls, fish and chips, and Hawaiian mix plate staples like huli huli chicken and garlic fried chicken. I haven’t had the chance to try them — whenever I go, I am there for the poke — but I trust them to be good if not great, too. There’s a clear passion here for bringing all the comfort of Hawaiian food to the mainland, without watering it down too much for more health-conscious Angelenos. Ali’i has some outside seating, or you can take your meal down to the beach just a couple minutes away.

Old Place

29983 Mulholland Hwy, Agoura Hills, CA 91301

I like Old Place in spite of a few major obstacles, only one of which is remotely within Old Place’s control. For the first, it’s far, far away—in Cornell, practically the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains, 45 minutes from my apartment with no traffic. For another, there are naturally a lot of Malibu regulars; they’re nice, but might as well be from Mars. For a third, the coffee situation is, shall we say, ridiculously rustic. Or rustically ridiculous. Old Place’s “coffee shack,” which is admittedly adorable, is a small building located behind the main restaurant, and regardless of what time you arrive, there are no fewer than four families of four and their assorted guesthouse-guest friends standing in line, all waiting to order highly customized lattes from the lone, beleaguered, yet improbably friendly barista. I’ve waited over 40 minutes for coffee before, which was ultimately my choice. This is just how coffee works here, take it or leave it; but when I recommend Old Place to people, I always include this heads up. If you’re planning on taking your food to go, you might as well grab coffee from Starbucks or one of the cafes just off the 101 nearby, before you arrive. If you plan on eating onsite, which is also recommended, just divide and conquer; start in the coffee line, and when you feel like you’re about 10-15 minutes away from holding coffee in your hand, send someone to the kitchen window to order your food.

But those so-called “obstacles” are also exemplary of why I like Old Place. I like that it’s way outside my neighborhood, among the mountains and pine trees and twisty dangerous roads, without being hours away. Though as a self-respecting front-of-house employee I expect the worst of all people all the time, especially people with money, the families who pull up here and pop down their tailgate and fold-out chairs and order their kids a massive cinnamon roll and chat with their neighbors (who infuriatingly yet charmingly join them in line for coffee) are far more sweet than they are annoying, even for curmudgeonly-single morning me. I like the quirkiness of the coffee shack, the unrelenting cheer of the barista, the huge backyard property where you pick a table, bench, or stone wall (if not your own tailgate or hood) to sit and enjoy your food. I like the slow, communal pace that the entire operation feels like it’s gently guiding you along. And of course, of course, I like the food. For breakfast, Old Place serves breakfast burritos with bacon, steak, or mushrooms (you want steak), and enormous, buttery cinnamon rolls. Come with friends, get it all. If you take your food off-premises, there’s a spot I recommend over on Latigo Canyon that you can read about in my “A Little Brekkie, A Little Walkie” post that I hopefully remembered to link here.

Cafe Tropical

2900 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026

I’m a big cafe guy. I look like a big cafe guy. On sight, with my Carhartt backpack and beat up “Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters” hat you’d probably and rightly guess that I spend a lot of time in places that serve coffee, tapping away at some ill-advised, half-considered new passion project at a little table in the corner. For the moment, I’ll use that cafe guy status to sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Cafe Tropical is a Cuban cafe and local legend. It’s been holding court on the corner of Parkman and Sunset for decades, most of those years in the hands of two Cuban families, now in the hands of standup local cafe operators Milk Cult. There is still excellent coffee—I get a colada (an espresso with raw sugar) on colder days and a cafe helado (coffee with condensed milk) on warmer days—best enjoyed with pastries: pillowy conchas, guava & cheese pastelitos, seasonal crullers, cream-filled donuts, and more. There’s also a dynamite breakfast sandwich on a coco roll, chilaquiles breakfast burrito, and Cubanos and other sandwiches during lunch hours. It is always warm, buzzy, and sunny inside, with an aroma of fresh bread and butter in the morning and sizzling pork-and-onions in the afternoon. It’s nearly always busy, and more a scene now than it was, but not at all unapproachable. It remains one of the easiest places to like in LA; and in my expert opinion, a top-tier choice for all cafe-related activities.

Mini Kabob

313 1/2 Vine St, Glendale, CA 91204

I’m happy, both for Mini Kabob and for me, every time I go to Mini Kabob. I’m happy they exist. I’m happy I chose to eat there. I’m happy I ordered whatever I ordered (the chicken cutlet or beef lule, often). I’m very happy I got extra garlic sauce. I’m happy to see all three members of the family who own and operate the place working inside. They seem happy to see me, which makes me happier. I’m happy to drool all the way back home as the chicken cutlet perfumes my little car. I’m perhaps happiest in my first bite, a delicately self-assembled pinch of lavash containing grilled pepper, tomato, and onion, of course the cutlet, slathered in hummus and garlic sauce. I’m happy when I exclaim “GDDMN” with my mouth full, alone in my apartment, and thrilled to assemble another bite to take a picture to let everyone on Instagram know how happy Mini Kabob makes me. Mini Kabob just makes me happy, and that’s why I recommend it, even though everyone already knows what it is.

Zhengyalov Hatz

318 E Broadway, Glendale, CA 91205

Zhengyalov Hatz is one of the ultimate feel-good restaurants. They serve (surprise!) “zhengyalov hatz:” a flatbread & herb wrap from the operating family’s home region of Artsakh, Armenia. They are served hot, right off the griddle, dressed only with salt, pepper, and olive oil, fresh, bright, green, addicting. They also serve paxlava, a regional variation on baklava. The rest of the menu is beverages with which to complement your zhengyalov and/or paxlava; I recommend a hot tea. This particular Holy Trinity — of zhengyalov, paxlava, and tea — promises to bless you with at the very least a few hours of both emotional and gastrointestinal peace. (As of the most recent edit, Zhengyalov Hatz offers shawarma, which I have yet to try but looks pretty delicious.)

The best way to enjoy Zhengyalov Hatz is to go to Glendale on a warm, sunny day, just a bit after the 12-1 lunch rush, get your zhengyalov and your tea, and sit, inside or out. Read, bring your chillest friend for a chat, work on something fun and unimportant, or simply listen, and appreciate this one of many local culinary sanctuaries of the Armenian diaspora.

Tacos Villa Corona

3185 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039

Tacos Villa Corona serves the fundamental breakfast burrito. There’s nothing about it that’s too much; everything about it that’s just right. You have options: get it with chorizo, bacon, or nopales, and potatoes, beans, or chilaquiles, with or without cheese (I like “papas with bacon”). The burrito is blessedly small, in contrast to the many baby-sized breakfast burritos around town that people seem to love but never eat even half of. It comes out fast—I think five minutes is my longest wait time after ordering. And it goes perfectly with a nice horchata latte from Black Elephant Coffee just a couple doors down.

Bodega Park

2852 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026

Bodega Park makes my favorite breakfast, and that is the BEC, a nostalgia-laden version of the classic New York bodega sandwich. Theirs is probably the best in LA, a note-perfect combination of squishy roll, gooey egg, runny butter, and porky, fatty bacon, no extras or surprises. There’s also a luxurious chopped cheese and a selection of other sandwiches, none of them whiffs (their version of an Italian sub, the Mantua, is my go-to hangover comfort). Their vanilla and mocha lattes are precisely the rich, sweet counter-flavors you want two bites into the salty, savory BEC. It can be a bit of a scene around the midday hours when all the local artists wake up, and a little earlier with the leash-and-stroller crowd on weekends, but even then, Bodega Park is simply, at its core, a good place to eat.

Bub & Grandma’s

3507 Eagle Rock Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90065

Bub & Grandma’s is one of those close things to a diner that’s not really a diner but feels like a diner that LA is full of. Order at the front, then wait for a booth or grab a stool on the long lunch counter that overlooks the hot line, where congenial cooks conduct an aromatic orchestra of fire and clatter. Lunch sandwiches are very good and breakfast sandwiches are spectacular. The Chorizo is served on a fluffiest house kaiser roll (as are all breakfast sandwiches), little flavor-bombs of cubed chorizo mixed into folded egg, with cheddar and a spread of mayo. Coffee is served in thick, off-white diner mugs. The pastry case is an all-star roster of rich snacks; my personal starters are the bostock (croissant dough loafed, sliced, and crisped with a spread of black sesame) and any one of their current donut rotation. Bub & Grandma’s is renowned for their bread (they’re a commercial bakery), which you should get a loaf of before leaving if they aren’t sold out. They are busy at lunch hours weekdays and at all hours on the weekends.

Sogo Roll Bar

I’ve been getting Sogo’s four-roll sets delivered for about five years. Salmon, snapper, spicy yellowtail, spicy tuna. Good, fiery wasabi and flavorful but not perfumey ginger. The quality is excellent and the price isn’t ridiculous. It’s one of my ultimate feel-good orders (that becomes truly Ultimate if I add a luxurious bluefin tuna roll on top of the set). I’m sure it’s nice to visit, too, and if you do, the handrolls and crispy rice are the way to go.

Iki Ramen

740 S Western Ave #115, Los Angeles, CA 90005

I love recommending Iki Ramen to people, because as long as you like ramen, and really Japanese cuisine in general, you’re going to have a great time. It feels like a place you’d read about from Jonathan Gold (that as far as I can tell, he never wrote about); an unassuming strip mall joint in K-Town, on Western between 7th and 8th, with a quiet, sparse interior, small staff, and a menu that never quits. The ramen is everything you want in a bowl—I usually go big with their Burnt Garlic Tonkotsu, a hammer of flavor, but a hammer wielded by an expert craftsman. Friends have enjoyed the shio, shoyu, and regular tonkotsu varieties, and there are plenty more that I’d trust to be rendered just as well. My experience with Iki Ramen’s sushi is more limited, but what I’ve had has been high-quality and just as expertly crafted—I know there are people who go exclusively for sushi.

I tend to visit during the week and sit at the bar with my book, or notebook, taking my time with a little hand roll starter before the burnt garlic fireworks kick off, accompanied always by an Asahi. I also like sitting at a table with friends, of course—but at most ramen joints, the bar feels like the essential place to be, and Iki is no exception.

Sonoratown

208 E 8th St, Los Angeles, CA 90014

I am shocked and embarrassed to admit I don’t have any photos of the marvelous cuisine of Sonoratown.

Sonoratown is not just on my list of general LA recommendations; it’s on nearly everyone’s top Mexican food lists as one of the city’s top Sonoran culinary representatives. Mexican is indisputably the most important cuisine in LA; and so I think it follows that there’s a solid argument for Sonoratown being one of the most important restaurants in LA.

I recommend Sonoratown to people based only partly on its Importance, though; rather, my recommendation is based mostly on its ridiculously delicious asada, tripas, and tortillas, assembled into even more ridiculously good tacos, burritos, and house special chivichangas. There are mild and hot salsas (verde y roja), and both are terrific. I also admire that the chain of three (Downtown, West Adams, Long Beach) is family owned, with certain ingredients imported from Sonora because they believe that’s the only way to render the food the way they want it. Take yourself for lunch at any location, or better yet, procure a few trays of chivis and tacos for your next big get-together: Sonoratown is always a hit at parties.

Spoke Bicycle Cafe

3050 N Coolidge Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90039

A breakfast, or dare I say, brunch get-together at Spoke is, unbelievably, a delightful thing. Their eclectic, colorful, haphazard patio feels (is) designed to encourage chill chats and laid-back hangouts followed by long walks on the LA “River.” The menu is LA-flexible; there is something for everyone, of all dietary stripes. I usually get their breakfast burrito — one of my favorite, featuring crispy potatoes and a kind of ridiculous chipotle crema / roasted tomato salsa combo — or their breakfast bun (sandwich) with caramelized onions and buttery, fluffy, slightly runny eggs. Spoke opens at 9am and gets pretty busy within the first hour, even on sleepy Sundays; but you can always order online to go or to stay, and avoid the standing line that builds up quickly.

Proof Bakery

3156 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039

I am not the kind of person that laments the lowly, lowly croissants we have in LA compared to those in Paris. I’ve never been to Paris myself, but you know the type; the kind of person would say the same for tacos in Mexico, sushi in Japan, pizza in New York. Obviously certain foods are better in their cuisinal homelands—with the exception of pizza in New York, which at this point has as good and as bad pizza options as most other US cities—but c’mon, it’s hugely annoying to say that you “can’t enjoy croissants anymore” after you spent one entire week honeymooning in the City of Lights five years ago.

The thing is, I’ve heard several of that kind of person say that Proof is the only croissant they’ll eat in LA. Though I don’t personally have that benchmark to compare, I and the 50+ people in line at 9am on Saturday mornings would probably agree that Proof’s croissants, and all their pastries, are up to Parisian snuff. They are buttery but not greasy, flaky as snow, with delicate, stretchy interior layers rather than the tougher, bready results you frequently see when you crack open a commercially baked croissant. They're a thing of beauty, whether in plain form, almond, pain au chocolate, or other variety. I always get one, as well as a perfectly fluffy almond financier, and anything else that beckons from the display case on the sleepy Sunday morning that it probably is. I maintain that a black coffee or unsweetened tea is the best accompaniment for pastries, and Proof’s coffee does the job with aplomb. Usually I eat at least part of the morning’s haul from my rear bumper, watching Atwater Village slowly come to its senses. Go on a weekday or early on a Sunday; or be prepared to wait on a Saturday. There are a few tables but not much seating; your rear bumper is an excellent option, though.

Demi-Lune

Demi-Lune, in Montrose(!), makes some of the best pastries I’ve ever had. The peach-almond croissant, the apple-almond croissant, even the butter croissant—just *mwah* *Italian fingers.* Rich, rich, rich, and buttery, and decadent, and all those other words I’ve already used 20 times each in this list. Owned and operated by veterans of Porto’s, everything is great, including their coffee, especially their cakes, which cost a very shiny penny but are the exact cakes you want to make a special occasion feel truly special.

Moo’s Barbecue

2118 N Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90031

Moo’s Barbecue is the only place on this list that, at the time of writing, I still haven’t been to; and yet I recommend it a lot. It’s one of the city’s fairly few barbecue restaurants, now in the conversation with Bludso’s as LA’s defining ‘cue after starting out as a backyard passion project. It is consistently line-out-the-door busy—but everyone I’ve sent there has said the brisket is worth the wait. The brisket…and everything else. Moo’s offers Texas-style barbecue with plenty of their own original contributions, including a smoked burger, Korean glazed burnt ends, and multiple pepper & cheese sausages. There’s beer on draft. It’s so barbecue, and so LA, and you can’t ask anymore than that. (You can order online for to-go, and only to-go. They have a problem with people ordering to-go but unpacking food to stay as a way to jump the line—don’t be one of those people!)

Thanks for digesting this long inaugural list. Have a place you recommend to everyone you know in LA? Let me, and them, know in the comments.

He stands outside a garage in the middle of the woods high in the steep peaks of the Sierras. His old jersey dampens slowly under the soft drizzle. In his hand is a red plastic cup filled with Jack Daniels, cream soda, and, increasingly, rainwater. One frivolous toe taps along to Bowie’s “Golden Years” as dazzling rainbow lights from the dance party inside whirl across his face for bright instants before they are swallowed into the deep shadow of the forest behind. He should not, if life had any rational substance, be here. He knows he will never be here again. It is this knowledge that sparks him to wakefulness from miasma; for a few minutes on the hour, at least.

If the mind is a cottage in the woods, its windows are curtained and smoke rises from the stone chimney, and underneath the ominous brushing of wind through tall trees is the creak of an old chair and the gasping crackle of a low-burning flame, and lower, the quiet burble of a simmering pot. On the roof, a wobbling metal pole awaits chance catalyst.

If memory is witch’s brew, its ingredients are luck, oddity, and profundity.

In the space between dancing lights there is a boiling and a crash and all the portals of the cottage are suddenly thrown wide. The brushing invades, armed with the scent of pine, and a head turns to the open door.

Up The Mountain

5, 99, 198. Lunch, then switchbacks, switchbacks, switchbacks. They pass on the roadside hollow relics of the not-too-distant past when there was plentiful water; the shells of buildings and businesses that emptied when the river dried and decided to mostly stay dry. He wonders vaguely at the primordial power of drought. In 2000 BC, if there was no water, the people left. Still, if there is no water, the people leave.

Switchbacks, switchbacks.

Hm.

Switchbacks.

The trees outpace the mountain. They grow and grow, and stop only as the road levels. They are monstrous. Occasionally nature demands reverence. It throws out all evolutionary nuance and cultivates something so breathtaking that even the greedy minds of men cannot help but reach for preservation, all happy thoughts of pillage and destruction aflight to the dim recesses where compassion typically dwells.

Podcasts drone. He worries, as he does. His mind latches onto nothing so firmly as concern, the uncuttable thread that winds throughout the great unraveled tapestry. At times it is all he has, this thread, all that lashes him to the mast as wave upon wave crashes down from all compass points-

The crunch of rubber over gravel and wood chips, and they arrive. As he opens the door, the mountain opens one of its own.

Another Forest Memory

I prayed to be in the car with all my friends, not the car with…everyone else. We always stopped at the A&W on the highway at the foot of the mountains, and never in all those visits did I understand the appeal of root beer floats, the despoilment of good ice cream with horrible soda. From there, an interminable drive up into the pines, and turn by turn I would recognize more and more familiar landmarks and my heart drove with excitement. I rumbled a giant duffel bag across the dirt parking lot to a canvas tent on a wooden platform with eight bunk beds and the same sea-green industrial twin mattress I’d later reacquaint with in my first college dorm. At night we played Mafia, or snuck out to prepare overcomplicated pranks for our fellow campers. The cafeteria served all of my favorite foods, worse than I had them at home. Teen leaders were the apex of cool. We followed their steps closely—and facilitated, as giggling errand-runners, their flirtations and romances. At the Lake I failed the swim test twice for fear of the water, which was fine because of my other fear of The Blob, but which was embarrassing nonetheless. I could swim, just not in front of people.

Great war games of Capture the Flag, sneaking, hiding, dashing quick through the trees, scrapes and cuts a tally of time well spent.

Honest conversations and confessions, not all to do with Jesus.

We sang in worship around a dying bonfire and let the last notes drift with the ember-smoke into the soft chorus of the forest and stared up at all the vast expanse of unobstructed starry sky and felt so calm, so satisfied, so full, so loved, so belonged, and I prayed only that it would stay like this.

These memories are vague recreations. What details there are are reasoned or conjured. But the feelings are enough, for as long as they last.

The cottage was there already.

Table Setting

The theme of the party is “Decades:” specific enough to be a theme, broad enough that the cash-strapped park employees can piece together workable costumes from limited wardrobes and local thrift stores.

The rec hall is the rec hall-est of rec halls, not a single scrap of it purpose-built for recreation. A thirty-foot roof and twenty-foot rolling metal doors mark the structure as a former garage, or enormous storage unit. Now its concrete floors host an eclectic’s hodgepodge of thrifted, donated, scavenged and found furniture, the centerpiece an ornate polished mahogany bar relocated from the Irish pub in town when there was a town, before it was closed and the pub and nearly every other building was razed in a rare official act of aggressive conservation. Elsewise occupying the open space are a handful of rugs of varying degrees of threadbare, a smattering of sofas and chairs in varying states of decay, and all the standards of modern recreation, of varying decades of use: an incomplete weight rack and machine, a basketball hoop at more or less the correct height, a pristine ping pong table, a long-stained pool table. Added to the collection tonight are a real, if miniature, mirror ball—acquired from who knows where—hoisted on a string over a high beam, and an electric spinning rainbow light-throwing disco ball anyone can find for $20 on Amazon. Coolers are rolled in and filled with cases and cases of beer and seltzer. There is not a shard of glass on or behind the historic bar. Instead, tall stacks of red Solo cups line the counter and a bright orange barrel of water rests on the end, to be tapped increasingly as the night goes on in futile belated attempts to prevent disaster.

Finished setting up, the rangers mingle. He is enthusiastically introduced and shyly welcomed.

Suddenly the towering garage doors are hauled up in a ragged clatter and a jukey playlist bursts to life. Cool mountain air washes through the hall as a marvelous Sequoia vista is casually unveiled, sun’s last rays diminishing over tufted peaks as clouds plunge down the valley walls and charge past the feet of behemoth trees, filling this great high basin until it becomes a great gray lake. In a breath he just begins to realize where he is, distant thunder echoing in another forest, another log added to the fire.

Rangers & Blonde Rangers

According to the rangers, a “Blonde Ranger” is whiskey—any kind, or another liquor as preferred—and cream soda.

Like any who grapple with the Public for a living, the rangers (and other forest service members who may or may not be “rangers,” though he never discovered where the lines were drawn, if they existed at all) need to party. If they don’t party, they’ll only drink or smoke in smaller and smaller groups or otherwise alone. People erode as any stone, each other more roughly than any element.

Rangers from across the park arrive in groups via distinct methods of transportation: bike, scooter, motorcycle, skateboard, electric skateboard, cars, vans, trucks. Costumes range by effort as by decade; no fewer than twelve fascinating people joke that their decade is “2020s.” Lukewarm beers are pulled from the just-filled coolers and cups are unstacked from their towers and splashed with the two requisite ingredients—or one or the other. As the partygoers loosen, the week’s stories emerge through the gaps. There’s the usual relationship drama, management complaints, the latest coworker beef. Here there’s also wildlife drama, tales of heroism, and shocking yet unsurprising debauchery.

One ranger regales: A visitor searching for their car asked for directions to “the parking lot.” There are at least five parking lots spread across that part of the park, and a visitor could be bussed between any of them. When the ranger asked the visitor to point out the name of their specific parking lot on the map, the visitor took the map and consulted with their group for a few minutes. They returned, proudly showing their work, having circled the words “Sequoia National Park.”

A guide rolls their eyes: She was asked where the General Sherman tree was, while the asker was standing next to the General Sherman tree. The General Sherman tree is not only the biggest tree in the park but also boasts the biggest sign in the park.

Another laughs: A fresh new search-and-rescue ranger panicked and called in a helicopter evacuation on their first call. The emergency? A little burn.

The whole crowd groans: A car held up traffic for over a mile down the mountain when they stopped in the middle of the road to, at first, take selfies with a bear, and then “help” the bear “find its home.”

His friend explains “tag”: When bored, some rangers patrolling in vehicles will begin to follow each other on the mountain’s main, narrow road, the goal being to lose their “tail” amongst the small parking lots, turnouts, and chaotic visitor traffic. It is extremely embarrassing to lose this game. Having seen the road himself, he thinks he’d rather be embarrassed than in a heap of twisted metal at the bottom of a cliff.

After a time he becomes distracted by a life that might have been. There is something familiar in the temperament of these rangers, and he sees himself on their side of the conversation. If he had gotten that summer internship in the Great Plains, maybe, just after college. He would have missed the city, but then, over time even deep longings become dull wonderings that drift through thought like faces on a passing train. Instants of powerful if, then fled and gone, chased by the immediate demands of reality. Now that life flees, too, chased by Jack and cream and rainbow lights, to join the countless others whispering in the wind among the pines.

Disco

As per parties, especially parties with dancing, things begin to slide about the third drink, the third Blonde Ranger in. The swirling lights grow longer tails, noise loses edge and distinction, and at the first slurring or stumble a soft soundless voice in the back says, Uh-oh. The voice means he is wandering out of bounds, into risky territory, outside ordinary, chains slipping. Into a place of happening. He throws himself forth.

He bounces between groups, saying little and hearing less, smiling. He whirls into and out of the dance floor, he retreats when the music slows. He drinks, and relishes the further quieting of the Chorus. He would be nothing more than a body in motion, a being of action liberated from cognition. In the cottage the crackle of fire becomes a rolling applause, a roaring flame, and a figure leans forward out of a deep armchair dangerously into that calling heat. He does not hear the brushing of the trees, he would burn away the scent of the pines, he refuses utterly the terrible forest and all its endless dangers, anything for warmth, security, and silence, and who could blame him.

But he has long since held his own leash—concern, that uncuttable thread—and the autonomous hand remembers its grip. Whatever enticing unknowns beckon in oblivion, what oblivion holds in certainty is a forest fire that only anyone else can extinguish, and as fearsome as is the forest more fearsome is to be a burden.

He pulls himself away from the crowd and steps outside into cool mist, tiny droplets speckling his face and shoulders a cold blanket and awareness reawakens in pin-pricks: the crunch of gravel underfoot, the drip-drop of water collecting in the gutter, muted chirps and the rustling of dead plants in the undergrowth behind shadow and fog. Suffocated breath spills from deep within. He braces himself briefly against a car. In hazy stupors past he would cast his sight into the sky to find himself from a star’s gaze, a perspective oddly calming, but with the cloud cover tonight that isn’t possible. So instead he turns back toward the open garage door to witness an uncanny burst of human light and revelry reaching wanton into the great wild night, wide curving ribbons of rainbow diffusing in the dark, shouts and music swallowed by fog, all yet reaching nonetheless and with utter abandon, a spark in the depths of the crushing black sea, and as soon as he becomes a witness to it the moment extends, the brew boils, the lightning crashes, and the brushing invades armed with the scent of pine as a head turns to the open door and the thing inside the head finally remembers that a tree is more than brushing, and a forest is more than whispers, and that the cottage is only as safe as its occupant.

How did I get here? he wonders, seriously.

Lauren and Sarah invited me to visit. On my way up they told me there would be a costume party. I was excited. My stomach’s been shit lately—hey, I hope it can handle all this alcohol. Maybe I should eat something.

He shifts his weight and tilts the cup high to take a sip. Inside “Party in the USA” starts and the crowd roars.

Hoo, woah this is cool. Goddamn this is cool. Holy shit this is so, so cool.

He looks all around, trying to absorb everything. He looks up and gets rain in his eyes, and he laughs.

Mountains! Rangers! Dancing on mountaintops with giant trees! Who is this guy that’s here? Who am I to be here?

Suddenly he feels his breath hitch and his eyes begin to water. Why am I here?

He hyperventilates a little then chokes it down. He finishes his cup. It’s a little cold, now. Inside looks fun.

I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will. No, I never will. I will never know.

It ends.

But I am.

Much later, I meet a dog named Abby and fall into bed.

Down The Mountain

Water, coffee, a cocktail of painkillers, and about a hundred Abby-kisses tamp down what should have been a ferocious hangover. Sarah’s friend, thankfully hosting me in a real house and not one of the flimsy shacks the National Park Service euphemistically calls “staff lodging,” whips up a heap of turkey bacon, toast, and eggs. We drape ourselves misshapen over furniture in the living room, hashing out the night before in fits and spurts between groans and ominous stomach rumbles. There is a single crystal clear image locked in my mind, and I can’t stop looking at it.

The rangers have to work today. Sarah gives me an exclusive guided tour of the Giant Forest, where the Sherman Tree and its slightly less girthy brethren make me feel comfortably small. We say our brief goodbyes (we’ll be back in a couple days for some hiking) and Lauren and I head down the mountain.

I’ll return to life in a few days and my stomach will be better. I’ll return to Visalia in a few months to celebrate New Year’s Eve with Sarah and Lauren and their friends.

By then the cottage will be shut again. Its curtains will be drawn and a fire rekindled in the hearth. The figure will sit close in the chair, turned again away from the door, a blanket draped over his legs, inching still closer to the heat with every faint brush of wind through the tall trees. The picture will be precisely as it was, except: except that the figure in the chair will twirl, absentmindedly, a single pine needle in his hands.

And he will wonder where it came from.

Thanks to Sarah and Lauren, obviously and of course, for being the reason I was there to receive this existential lightning bolt. You are true good friends, and I miss you!

Thanks to the members of the National Park Service, who already are paid far too little and far too insecurely for what they do (and what they put up with), and many of whose jobs are now threatened if they are not already gone. You throw a hell of a party.

Thanks to Abby for being a dog.

Lastly, as I sometimes feel like I need to disclaim at the end of Keoki Doky posts: I’m okay!

Thanks for reading.

CONSUME THESE FILMS

This Film About Pavement

If my favorite film of the year is the one still stuck in my head, then my favorite film of 2024 is Rebel Ridge.

In my daily musings on Rebel Ridge, it is Aaron Pierre’s stare that haunts me: piercing, worn, determined, dangerous, above all tense. The man is the movie, a wire stretched past taut between a sneering Don Johnson and his sniveling henchmen, men believed beyond reach who forget that they are not beyond consequence, who utterly fail to realize that when the wire snaps it can only come for them, and come fast.

But Rebel Ridge is more than beat-em-up revenge pulp. It’s a film about the grinding of the great wheels of towering systems upon individuals. It’s about the remorseless machine of authority we call Justice. It’s a film about walking the line, and the line being moved, and walking the line, and the line being moved, and walking the line, and walking, and walking, until the day the walking stops, and yet stops not with righteous fury but with exhausted resignation. It’s about a man who fundamentally understands the film he is in, the sinister plot of the story he is progressing, and just as fundamentally does not want to be in that film. Aaron Pierre doesn’t want to upend a small town and teach Don Johnson a lesson. All he wants is to pay his brother’s bail. Why is that so hard? Netflix.

This “Film About Doors”

It was John Hodgman who dubbed “Conclave,” “a film about doors,” and inspired this year’s list.

If my favorite film of the year is the one with the most Stanley Tucci, then my favorite film of 2024 is Conclave.

Tucci, Fiennes, Lithgow, Rosselini, Msamati; in Conclave names trade barbs in the Vatican like Kong and…Kong 2 trade thundering hammer-blows in that Kong movie this year. It is a film of actors in wheelhouses, a home run derby of a Catholic thriller in which what is said is less interesting than who is saying it and how spectacularly. Though, the what shouldn’t be wholly discounted; the insidious machinations of cardinals dizzy, misdirecting poor, honest Ralph Fiennes and us, keeping all guessing through the final slate of reveals. Doors punctuate scenes like thunder-claps, ending dangerous conversations, obscuring ancient, moth-eaten crimes. Sleek cinematography whips us neatly through them nonetheless, through theology and politic and cunning, nearly too fast to formulate theories on the many red-robed players’ shifting stratagems and outcomes, the visual flair lending the film a prestige its genre might otherwise belie. It is a thriller in its most pristine, streamlined, if verbose, form, only unenjoyable to those who do not like words in their movies or conspiracy in their Church. Peacock.

This Film About Family

If my favorite film of the year is the one I saw the most times in theaters (in fact, more times than any film I’ve seen in theaters besides Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I saw seven times), then my favorite film of 2024 is Dune: Part Two.

Dune: Part Two is, appropriately to the source material, a film of nearly perfectly equal give and take. When it gives pleasure, it is chased with agony. When it gives catharsis, it is marbled with guilt. When it enacts vengeance, the blade cuts both ways. There is a hero’s tale told here, but in the hero’s wake, a destruction vast and universal; a destruction chosen by the hero. Paul Atreides declares that the path he trods in Dune: Part Two is, unemotionally and objectively, the only path forward for Arrakis and for civilization, that it is the least bad option for all in existence. He has seen it, the one amongst all possible futures, in the pure spice blood. The Fremen believe him. The universe will believe him, after it burns. But we, like Chani, do not have to. Because it may well be that it is the only possible future in which he gets his vengeance and his loved ones do not die. Would he sacrifice all else there is in existence, billions and billions of lives, for them? The magic of the film lies in the temptation not to care, because the momentum of Paul Atreides is too great, and his foe too sinister. Before the close of Dune; Part Two, we are convinced the Harkonnens and the Emperor must fall at any cost, so despicable are their actions. At the close of Dune: Part Two, we are left with only the glorious cost. The cost we knew at its beginning. The cost that, accompanied by a grand swelling evolution of Paul & Chani’s romance theme, we are nakedly confronted with. The very last feeling imparted by Dune: Part Two is sheer existential horror. Herbert would be proud. Max.

This Film About Gardening

If my favorite film of the year is the one with a massive flying squid-kite death machine, then my favorite film of the year is Furiosa.

Furiosa, on first viewing, feels a purpose-built anticlimax, coming off of the sustained high of Mad Max: Fury Road. It is as though director George Miller lurks in every projection room, beholding his bemused audiences, chuckling to himself, “Of course this isn’t that. What did you expect?” But thinking about the two films in that order, while not wrong, is a path only to ruin. Because in basic narrative structure, Furiosa is, essentially, all of the rising action to Fury Road’s 2-hour climax. It is epic, sprawling, and measured, with sequestered moments of breathtaking pitched action breaking up extended feudal squabbles of cartoonish, immature, if nonetheless brutal men. Like Fury Road, however, it remains a film that feels for every minute as though a studio executive will suddenly appear to rip it off the screen and wipe it from the mind. It is a film that, for its style and intensity and unwavering commitment to itself, should not exist as a product of Hollywood but for the increasingly rare auteur exception the industry extends, for a handful of years at a time, to George Miller. It is not a joy to watch regardless of context; but in the right context, especially having resigned yourself that it is not Fury Road, it is one of the unique joys of the year. Max.

This Film About Sisters

If my favorite film of the year is the one about a nun’s not-so-immaculate pregnancy, then my favorite film of the year is…actually, it could be either The First Omen or Immaculate. Hm. If my favorite film of the year is the one of those that is a better overall film, then it’s probably The First Omen (though Immaculate, at just under 90 minutes, is a quick, taut vehicle for stylish Catholic terror).

I have no personal experience with the Omen franchise. Perhaps appropriately, after watching The First Omen, that may change. It’s a surprisingly beautiful, unsurprisingly moody film injected with as many moments of dark serenity as bursts of graphic horror, that drapes Roman monuments to the glory of God in grim shadow and spills innocent blood over holy ground. It is a film of light and dark and each masquerading as the other as twisted faith and primal force guide the inevitably tragic path of a heroine hopelessly lost in a spiralling maze of religious conspiracy. All that, and as a horror film it remains plenty fun, with nonstop creeps, shocks, and scares. For a series that originally spiralled into genre insanity, it’s a far better-than-necessary time at the scary movies. Hulu.

This Film About Feeling What A Salad Must Feel

If my favorite film of the year is the one that tossed me around and sprayed me with water, then Twisters 4DX is my film of the year.

Twisters, on its own, is a perfectly fine disaster-action-adventure flick, another modern slicked-up amp-crank of a yesteryear classic that in some ways sticks eye-rollingly close to the original and in other ways accomplishes, through new technology and the benefit of retrospect, what the classic could not. But Twisters is not in conversation for the film of the year. Twisters 4DX is.

There is not, and has never been, a more fitting vehicle than Twisters for all of 4DX’s absurdly over-immersive gimmicks. Where many films have a 4DX experience grafted onto them, Twisters feels constructed specifically for the experience. Characters jostle and bounce in hefty pick-up trucks rumbling down dirt backroads and over endless fields of corn; and the seats jostle, bounce, and rumble right with them, heaving and ho-ing so much they constantly threaten to dump their occupants onto the floor to join their long-spilt popcorn. A hot scientist will say, “We’re getting close,” and cue water jets to launch from behind each headrest to drizzle the audience just as the first raindrops pepper the windshield on screen. Wind shakes the barley corn stalks behind a tense romantic moment, and ambient fans (audibly) kick up a warm, stirring breeze; more fans, less ambient, fire into high gear as tornadoes approach, whipping air (and hair) around the theater in a wild artificial cyclone. The only element that failed to work—and possibly it was only my theater, or only me—was the Smellovision, the synthetic odor/aroma producer. What was probably supposed to be the scent of lively grassy windblown wild wheat smelled instead of heavy chemical cleaner with a little gasoline; appropriate to the rumbling diesel-guzzlers, at least. Regardless of events onscreen, the results are nonstop cackling, squealing, and gasping, the most literal roller-coaster film experience ever made.

This Film About Jada Pinkett Smith

If my favorite film of the year is the one that’s not from this year, then Magic Mike XXL [screenings at Vidiots theater in Eagle Rock] is my favorite film [experience] of the year.

I’m on record about the ecstatic joy I find in every watch of Magic Mike XXL, in its genuine and earnest showcase of clunky male friendship, in its flawless construction as a “one last ride” road trip adventure, in its focus on a profession and professionals grimaced upon by civilized society, in its jaw-dropping dance-strip-stripdance setpieces, in Jada Pinkett Smith’s mesmerizing turn as an elusive legend of mid-Floridian entertainment. However, regardless of how effusive my recommendation, or how academic, or how desperate, most people don’t believe me, or think I’m being ironic; you, in fact, may well not believe me. You may still think I’m being ironic. I’m not. Definitively, positively not. Not not not. But such is the glamour of Magic Mike XXL, that the eyes and minds of the public slide right over the surface of it, slip across the racks of oiled abs and throbbing muscles and veined necks, unable to find purchase to penetrate into its depths and appreciate the mechanics that make it roar.

So I have turned from evangelism, and joined the choir. The choir that gathers, several times a year, at Vidiots in Eagle Rock, to worship together raucous and unabashed, to fling our tithes into the air with every tear of shirt or thrust of pelvis, to greet each other in the concrete knowledge of our own righteousness as July 4th fireworks explode over Orlando and Pony (Remix) rips into the credits. You may now be thinking that I’m overexaggerating for effect, that I’m being so so funny. I am, again, not. There is no further adequate elucidation of the rapturous ecstasy of a sold-out crowd of XXL fiends, beyond this:

It is why we watch movies at theaters. Vidiots, or another lucky theater near you.

CONSUME THESE SHOWS

This Show About Shock and Awe

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee is one of the rare pieces of entertainment with a fully determinative title; that is, if you think the name of the show is kind of funny, you’ll think the show is funny. If you don’t think the name of the show is funny, that’s fine, you can go back to pre-filing your taxes.

In this cheese-box-string trap of a game show, wily Kiwi comedian Guy Montgomery lures in Australia and New Zealand’s best and brightest entertainers (“brightest” thrown immediately into question) with the promise of a little silly spelling—only to set them up for utter humiliation. Episodes begin with, at least, a semblance of sanity with a little “spelling round” (if that sounds redundant for a show called Spelling Bee, it is) and introductions; then rapidly devolve into madness.

To delve into the specific absurdities of Spelling Bee would be to spoil. Instead what you should know going in is that the comic appetite of the show is insatiable; bonkers jokes and cutting quips are hurled about at an unbelievable rate, ridiculous prompts are composed with seemingly no limits to silliness or stupidity, nor any consideration to fairness or justice to competitors who wonder, aloud, what the hell kind of programming they’ve walked into (who, to be clear, while often furiously confused, are having an absolute ball of a time). Cohosts Aaron Chen (Australia edition) and Sanjay Patel (New Zealand edition) step in now and again as the bone-dry lieutenants to Guy’s gleeful authoritarian antagonist, guiding contestants through devious themed minigames with incoherent connections to spelling. At minimum, it is must-see-must-hear viewing to witness the widespread destruction wrought by each and every one of Aaron Chen’s devastating riddles. You can find both Australia and New Zealand editions of Guy Mont Spelling Bee, uh, online. There are easily accessible bootleg compilations on Youtube that I certainly would never recommend. Much better to set up a VPN and pay for ABC iView or something. For a taste of the the show’s…energy…you may watch a collection of clips from the NZ edition here.

This Show About What We’ll Do

Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a thoroughly unsettling piece of entertainment. The lighthearted, frivolous tone of the 2005 Jolie/Pitt action-comedy is absent entirely, its void filled with nothing but uncertainty. It is a show nominally about mercenary espionage agents posing as husband-and-wife; it is a show deeply concerned with human resistance and capitulation, about what we’ll do to survive, and what we’ll do to live, and how far apart those things are, and how far we’ll go to discover the true length of that distance. While consistently dark, it is not a show without humor—leads Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are both angst-ridden comic performers that seamlessly teeter-totter from gritty professionalism to painfully awkward to hopelessly heartstruck to hilariously perturbed by the increasingly ridiculous requirements of the impossible life they’ve chosen. Despite its complexities, it’s a fairly easy watch, each episode focused on one adventure at a time, the season arc mostly having to do with their trajectories as characters and their employer’s escalating lethality. It is best savored, rather than binged. Prime.

These Shows About, Uh, Being Good and Entertaining

I don’t have much to say about the following shows besides that they do what they do very well. If you like shows like them, you’ll probably like them, too.

Black Doves: Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw against type as a deep-cover private-enterprise spy and morose hit man, respectively, make an engrossing watch as they unravel an international conspiracy before Christmas. Six quick episodes of false identities, sinister implications, opaque motivations, switching alliances, and explosive Bourne-esque (but really, genuinely Bourne-esque) action setpieces compose a fun holiday spy thriller. Netflix.

Shogun: Everyone you know has recommended this show to you, and now so have I. Basically: everybody wants to be the Shogun. Impenetrable political machinations and the occasional bloody battle ensue. A seriously bewildered, furious Englishman wanders through the middle of it. It’s nuanced, powerful, epic, jaw-droppingly brilliant. Hulu.

Fallout: The best video game adaptation since Castlevania, Fallout is worth watching for Walton Goggins-as-undead-gunslinger alone. Luckily, everything else is a blast, too. Fallout’s post-apocalypse is riddled with blunt cheeky satire on the unstoppable capitalist motivation to monetize Doomsday down to the person, though also weighted with real, unflinching consequences for its cast of scrappy survivalists. It’s a hilarious and heart-wrenching adventure in equal measure, and the most unqualifiedly entertaining watch on this list. Prime.

Silo (S2): A heavier, dimmer, more grounded take on the apocalypse, Silo season two opens with a full episode of protagonist Juliet (Rebecca Ferguson) literally engineering herself out of imminent doom. From there she steps immediately into a gritty journey of attempts to engineer an entire civilization out of imploding on themselves and self-destructing what may be the last bastion of humanity. Performances are stellar, twists are sudden and visceral, mysteries enticing. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Apple TV+.

Slow Horses (S4): Still more so than Fallout, Slow Horses would be worth watching merely to bask in its central performance: Gary Oldman, as the gnarliest, rudest, crustiest old bin-bottom biscuit of a spy MI5 has ever seen, who seems in his long-curdled age to delight only in verbally eviscerating anyone who crosses his path as he’s pushed, yet again, into handling yet another potentially catastrophic embarrassment for the Queen’s intelligence service. But, we don’t have to lean too hard on an Oldman, as by season four we’ve come to know many of the hilariously unfortunate, tattered birds who’ve come to roost at Slough House, and cheer and jeer for them in all their unique and messy ways. This season we also have the pleasure of Hugo Weaving’s tremendous presence as a ruthless ex-spy turned mercenary, finally providing us a ringmaster Oldman’s equal to root against. Apple TV+.

Arcane (S2): The two seasons of Arcane, based on (and heavily fleshing out) narrative elements from the game League of Legends, are an animated tour-de-force on the level of Sony’s two animated Spider-Man films. Following a diverse cast of morally greyest “?”-tagonists (“pro” and “an” swapping, per character, every episode), the show tackles the violent consequences of systemic classism against a gritty punk-fantasy backdrop, with dazzling climactic action setpieces that are in themselves showcases for what animation alone can achieve. Netflix.

Taskmaster (S18): The most recent season of the UK’s Taskmaster (now in a way Taskmaster “Prime,” with spinoff series rolling around the globe) is as good an entrypoint as any to the endlessly funny comic competition show. Each series, five of the UK’s greatest entertainers are charged with performing inane and bizarre tasks assigned by the magnanimous Taskmaster (Greg Davies) and administered by his assistant (Alex Horne), tasks designed to render maximum silliness out of a potent combination of each comedian’s individual talents and each comedian’s unfortunate human ineptitude. Points for performance are awarded extremely subjectively by the Taskmaster upon review, broken up across 10 episodes. It is a pure good-hearted joy, this season as much as any other; if you’ve had it collecting dust on your watch list, likely recommended by die-hard fans, this holiday season is a perfect time to become one yourself. Youtube.

CONSUME THESE TOO WHILE YOU’RE AT IT

99% Invisible Presents: The Power Broker

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) is a *checks bent, battered, and benoted physical copy* 1,162 page behemoth, a powerhouse of investigative biography that exposes the quintessential tale of an American idealist corrupted, and his subsequent corruption of America’s greatest city. 99% Invisible Presents: The Power Broker is a 12-ish episode podcast that, in comprehensive yet surprisingly entertaining fashion, powers through the great tome 100 pages at a time to bring this story to a modern audience, and celebrate its continued achievement 50 years on. If you’ve ever wondered why there is no river access in Manhatten, an island, why bumper-to-bumper traffic extends from FiDi to Connecticut without relief, why there aren’t trains everywhere there should absolutely be trains—really, why the city is the way that it is today, and why it’s nearly impossible to change—The Power Broker is a must-read, and now the Power Broker podcast a must-listen. If you find it at all possible, I highly recommend engaging with both versions of the story in tandem, as a kind of asymmetric book club.

Rise of the Golden Idol

In Rise of the Golden Idol, you play investigator to a chronologically-distorted series of events as mad scientists and power-hungry politicians attempt to weaponize the mind and matter-controlling powers of a mysterious golden statue. As in The Case of the Golden Idol, Rise excels at putting players through the paces of genius. The game presents scenes, dramatic and frequently deadly dioramas through which you point and click to gather sparse information about the sequence of events leading up to the image you’re looking at. In that gathering phase you collect words, sorted into a bank of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and once you’ve collected all the words in a scene you are presented with a kind of Mad Lib of a historical document riddled with blanks to fill that will ultimately illuminate the current mystery. But you’re not finished there, as each mystery is part of a set of mysteries from a certain year in the timeline of the game, and in each individual scenario you also collect not only words but concepts and knowledge about the various factions vying for the idol as well as about the Idol itself, that you will apply later in solving the grander mysteries of each year, as well as a grandest mystery that encompasses the entire game. It could all easily be overwhelming, if the puzzles weren’t so well-organized, and if the opaque narrative weren’t so enticing to reveal. You want to know what the symbols on the Idol mean, you want to know why the dancer won the talent show, you want to know which tenant killed the landlord, and above all you want to know how each of these strange and disparate events connect, and when they do, who will win. Rise of the Golden Idol is a game of cascading fractal revelations and one of the most thoroughly satisfying entertainment experiences of the year. PC, Mobile.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

A game that is the fully realized dream of a younger me, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the first essential Indiana Jones adventure since The Last Crusade. Great Circle features all the highlights of a great Indy tale—Nazi-punching (complete with original sound effects), whip-swinging, disguise-donning, puzzle-solving, secret-unearthing, treasure-finding—couched cozily in a map-dotting adventure with delectable sneering villains, cheeky yet helpful comrades, and epic supernatural stakes. The adventure is anchored by a set of endearing performances, including Alessandra Mastronardi as one-step-ahead war reporter Gina and Marios Gavrilis as the obsessed rival archaeologist Emmerich Voss (with some of the chewiest arch line-readings of any Jones villain); though most notably, and perhaps most surprisingly, Troy Baker-as-Harrison Ford-as-Indiana Jones, who finds not only the voice of a younger, less-whiskied Ford, but the wry wit of the beleaguered archaeologist far more naturally than Ford himself in the recent film. Nearly as important as what the game is is what it is not, but could easily have been: another quasi-murdery shoot-em-up action setpiece train in the vein of Uncharted. Instead Great Circle is, for the completionist at least, slower-paced, with an emphasis on solving mysteries and discovering the long-lost treasures of the Vatican (Italy), Gizeh (Egypt), Sukhothai (Indonesia), and beyond—all to be delivered to their local history-preserving museums, of course. But one could also speed through the core story as you would a movie, and have just as rompous a time. It is a wholly delightful adventure to be rewound and replayed at least as many times as my lost VHS of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Xbox.

MORE IN 2025.

The restaurant was small and insignificant. It sat on a busy stretch of road in a populous sub-city of Greater Los Angeles, one more tenant of another small business plaza, and in that plaza, on that stretch of road, it was practically invisible. The name of the restaurant was displayed in typical box letters mounted on the street-facing facade, then weathered and faded by what was to be its final year, a name that was the solitary hint to its Japanese offerings. The restaurant did not post a menu or hours, and aside from the mandatory Health rating (A), it issued no further clues as to what its nondescript exteriors contained. Unlike every other restaurant on the street, every other restaurant in that populous sub-city, every other restaurant in Greater Los Angeles, there was not one single element attracting customers to enter the restaurant.

Yet the restaurant was there, and had been there for over a decade. It had endured that long through the stubborn, dedicated will of its enigmatic owner-chef, who ran it alone for years before hiring its sole other employee to handle the front-of-house. His craftsmanship would almost certainly have landed the restaurant on any respectable list of izakaya cuisine in LA, and likely high on those lists, too. But the restaurant, in its lifetime, wouldn’t be found on a single list. In large part because it did not want to be found at all.

To have landed yourself in the restaurant’s dining room you must have been absurdly lucky, to either have known someone who was already a regular, who felt confident enough to invite you, or to have wandered in, randomly, on a day so slow that the kind but reluctant host had no choice but to seat you. And even then, you must have been irresistably charming.

The restaurant was in fact very much like the Isla de Muerta of Pirates of the Caribbean: “An island that cannot be found, unless ye already know where ‘tis.” You could (and I did) pass it hundreds of times and never really see it. It was not a speakeasy.* The restaurant was a true secret: a careful, unbreakable bond of trust between friends. You could not find the restaurant without help, and if you found it, you could (probably) not get in without express invitation or permitted accompaniment.

*A speakeasy is like a stage-whispered secret, a secret wildly insecure in its secrecy: “Did you hear about Secret Place? It’s a secret place where you have to know the secret to get in! It’s crazy on weekends.”

This was the essence of the restaurant’s impossibility: that a quiet, utterly anonymous restaurant could survive in Los Angeles’s increasingly cutthroat restaurant market, at all, and then for so long. There’s simply too much competition, too many other restaurants—many, many too many—vying for the limited attention of millions of distracted eyes to attract a limited share of a portion of the wallet in the least livable city in the country for a restaurant to be doing anything less than shouting itself hoarse both physically and digitally. To do less, to act in any sense short of desperation, is tantamount to drawing up a Going Out Of Business sign. A Los Angeles restaurant must demand to be seen, must promise a singular and thrilling experience, even a prestige, to its discerning, zeit-driven customers, must constantly invite, bark, and post so as not to be missed, so as not be forgotten as eyes turn to the next brightest thing, as ears tune to the next loudest voice. A Los Angeles restaurant must do all that, be all that…or else. Those are the rules. And even when the rules are followed, there’s a tragic, better-than-good chance that “else” may befall anyway. The impossible restaurant did none of it. It either did not know the rules, or was indifferent to them. If it had a voice, it was one that had never known a shout—a kind, soft murmur that spoke only to people it already knew—and still, the restaurant led a long and apparently satisfied life.

In fact, the restaurant went beyond merely not-attracting customers: it actively turned them away. This was the strangest, most mind-boggling aspect of it, perhaps its most impossible quirk. Here’s a situation that would occur not-infrequently: a passerby on the busy sidewalk would glance in the window, stop mid-step, and curiously inspect the customers dining inside. They would lean back, look up at the sign as if reading it for the first time, and walk around to the door to further investigate—and here, things inevitably went awry for the innocent stranger. For the host would intercept them with some piece of terribly unfortunate news: there would be a “three hour wait;” or, in profuse apologies, the food was “very, very traditional Japanese” and “not for everyone;” or, alas, the tables were “all reserved.” She would do nearly everything but put on white gloves and shove them out the door like a Tokyo subway pusher. Certainly, there was sometimes a wait; but not three hours. The menu was distinctly Japanese and unadapted to American tastes; but hardly unapproachable. There were no reservations. The restaurant simply did not like to take chances on the unfamiliar, unless they were vouched for by a regular.

It was not (only) for shyness or paranoia that the restaurant evaded the public. It seemed, at least partly, in order to cultivate a consistently pleasant dining experience. The cozy dining room was never noticeably loud, even when full, and though there was music, it was played at a barely perceptible volume. “Full” also meant 16 occupied seats; hardly a crowd. Parties larger than three were rare exceptions. A soft buzz of conversation was the peak of loudness, and though there was beer and soju there was never drunkenness. The remaining background noise of the room was filled with a persistent chorus of “yummy sounds:” slurps, “ooh!”s, and “mmm…”s. It was an environment of ease and enjoyment, of a tranquility that is at best affected at restaurants, often achieved over an underlying current of tense, behind-the-scenes labor. Here the ease was real, and extended to the back of house as well as the front.

But beyond shyness, and still beyond cultivated ambiance, the principle reason for the restaurant’s reticence seemed to be that the restaurant did not want to be busy. Or rather, the restaurant did not want to be overwhelmed; barely even whelmed. They didn’t want a line out the door, or to worry about a waitlist or managing reservations or turning tables. Guests were sat first come-first serve, and if you arrived and the house was full you would either try again another day or wander back in half an hour or an hour and hope your timing was better then. Once sat, the table was yours as long as you continued to order, and guests largely understood the courtesy of leaving once finished. There were busier days and slower days like anyplace; but the distance between busy and slow felt much closer than in most restaurants. So, if business was to be added, if a new customer was to join the small, exclusive pool, they had first to meet an unspecified standard: that the restaurant would be genuinely pleased to have them back. They had to display the most common discernible trait of the clientele: an impassioned appreciation of the food.  And, finally, swear to an unwritten pledge: to not spoil the carefully assembled tranquility by posting the restaurant’s name or location, tipping off a foodie influencer or publication, or bringing another guest that might do so.* It was a code of utmost discretion; and the reward for following it was, merely, a dining experience of immense quality and disarming informality.

*In other words, they had to “be cool.”

One, naturally, might be tempted to consider a simpler explanation for the lack of crowds and media attention; for the fact that the restaurant was rarely, if ever, busy; for its complete absence from mention in any notable publication: couldn’t it be that the restaurant was just not quite good enough to warrant the bustle of the masses, or the critical notice of the discerning food media? Couldn’t it be true that this was only a fine, sleepy, otherwise unremarkable neighborhood restaurant enjoyed by a few dedicated local patrons, but unworthy of the destination dining label that literally drives notoriety in the city’s food scene? Wouldn’t that be more realistic than an invisible restaurant with a conspiracy of loyal secret-keepers?

The answer is yes, it would certainly be more realistic for that to be the case; for the restaurant to have been merely, unnoticeably mediocre.

But it was not.

The restaurant boasted two staff: the aforementioned shy yet gracious host and the mysterious chef-owner, who rarely made an appearance but was the driving force behind the entire operation. Together they kept the modest dining room moving apace.

That pace was unique, too. You learned to be prepared to order, as the host would only make rounds about every…so often. Emerging from behind the kitchen curtain, she would stop at each table, taking orders with brief, friendly chat, then vanish back into the kitchen for stretches at a time. You could flag her down, or call for her, if you felt you really needed something; but doing so felt wrong, impatient, like a thing you did at other, busier, more typical restaurants; not here. Here you ate at their rhythm, deliberate, relaxed, appreciating the void of rush. Like taking a walk in the park in the middle of a busy day. You tried as much as possible to order all at once, and dishes arrived as they were ready, and if you wanted another order of sashimi or cold glass of Asahi you waited patiently for the host’s next appearance.

The dinner menu boasted 20 to 25 items and often changed without warning, based on product availability and the current motivation of the chef. A briefer menu featuring katsu curry and other mixed plates was served for lunch. An excellent shoyu ramen was served only on Saturdays.

We don’t know for what reason, or reasons, exactly, the restaurant closed—the chef and the host maintained their friendly secrecy, even from regulars, to the end. It seemed most likely that the lease had come up, and the new rent would have become, finally, untenable; the same sad story of so many restaurants and small businesses throughout the city. The irony in dying in so common a fashion, a restaurant that had existed, for so long, so singularly.

But it was also true that the chef and the host were tired. They served lunch and dinner six days a week. The chef was not young, and for a significant chunk of the restaurant’s lifetime he had run the place alone. In the months before closing they had stopped serving lunch to give themselves a break. Breaks are welcomely addicting, more so the longer you’ve worked beforehand. When asked about closing, the host was touched by the feelings of her regulars and experiencing that tidal shift of emotions during a Great Change; but she was also clearly relieved, with a concrete uncertainty as to whether we’d see them again.

“Will you reopen somewhere else?”

She hardly considered. “Oh…I don’t know.” A small shake of the head. “Maybe, somewhere. Torrance, or somewhere. Maybe out of state. I don’t know.” She was almost apologetic, but not quite. It made the closing slightly easier, though, to see that she was ready for it. And if she was, it was likely he was, too.

When I began to plan this piece shortly after the closure, I was torn. It felt against the spirit of the restaurant to talk about it, ever, at all, except with those who knew. (Much like, you know, the obvious movie I tried very hard not to reference for this whole story.) But I also wanted to acknowledge its existence. I thought it deserved some written record that it was there, that at least this one place, for at least a decade, had triumphed in its individuality over the great, ironbound laws of Business and Restaurant in LA, had defined and achieved its own success, and had done so with a tremendous humility, to an extraordinary effect. Some mysteries must remain; but the restaurant was real, and made many people—maybe not as many as it could have, but many—very happy.

I have two remaining hopes, though the restaurant is gone. One, thinnest, is that it reopens, somewhere—though if it does I may still never hear about it—and finds a new, appreciative community.

The other, a hair likelier, is this: that if Los Angeles is any one thing it is vast, so vast that it could easily contain a dozen (no more) of these tiny, impossible restaurants, that I’d never discover unless luck improbably struck me once more. But still, they’d be there, serving in their innocent defiance of the norm, embodying a strange and delicate hospitality, enjoyed by a fortunate few. And if they are out there, which I can’t help but believe—for the alternative is arrogant—then luck has a chance to strike, any one of us, again.

Thanks to my friends, the regulars, for sharing the restaurant with me.

“Yo!”

“Yo.”

“Is the board right? Are we 86 ribeye?”

“Mmmmmmmno, shouldn’t be.”

“Okay, good. I’ll fix it.”

“...just beat the Moon Lady-”

“Oh you’re already in the DLC?”

“What?”

“You beat the Moon Knight in the DLC?”

“There’s a Moon Knight in the DLC?”

“Oh, shit.”

“Spoilers, man!”

“Woops.”

“Here, try this.”

“What is it?”

“Try it.”

“Okay…mm!”

“Hey, can I get a- oh, what’s this?”

“I don’t know, but it’s good.”

“Tom! What is this?”

“Try it.”

“But what is it?”

“Try it.”

“You can’t do that to me…I have a thing.”

“It’s good, whatever it is.”

“Fine, I’ll try it.”

“And?”

“Dang!”

“Told you.”

“So what is it?”

“I dunno, something I tried.”

“Wait, did you want something?” 

“Oh crap, I need an edamame on the fly.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry Tom!”

“It’s fine.”

“Is this for…”

“23.”

“23?”

“23!”

“23, heard, thanks.”

“Are these fries…?”

“Bonus.”

“Hell yeah.”

“HELL yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Heads up, looks like 6:30 is our rush. Might get busy.”

“Cool, no worries. Unless we’re sitting a hundred, we’re not really busy.”

“Sure.”

“For real.”

“Uh huh.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Medium rare, medium, medium well.”

“Uh-”

“Medium rare. Medium. Medium well.”

“Got it—ah, wait.”

“What.”

“Medium well needs side mixed green, the medium is sweet potato fries.”

“Hand ‘em over.”

“Thanks.”

“Here.”

“Cool.”

“Oi, bruv, ees moi raoestid chickin riddy yit?”

“Aw yee mate, eet’s been riddy f’loike, ter whole minnits.”

“Will thin whoi dintchu tell me you rusty bugga?”

“I troid to mate but yew were all fucked off chattin’ oop Danny oop froont there.”

“Ah, ah wasnae-”

“IS SOMEONE GOING TO RUN THIS CHICKEN?”

“Yeah, we got it, we got it. Need hands?”

“Nope, I’m good, thanks!”

“Hey guys, this Bayou was supposed to be no chicken.”

“Shit. Was that on the ticket?”

“Yeah.”

“Tsk.”

“Can I get one on the fly?”

“I’ll have one in a minute. I NEED FOUR MINUTES ON 42!”

“You said a minute?”

“Yeah just take 42’s, I haven’t dropped the chicken yet.”

“All right, thanks.”

“No problem.”

“Is this cup water?”

“WHAT?”

“WATER?”

“YEAH!”

“Chris? Water?”

“GOOD.”

“Eric! WATER?”

“YES PLEASE!”

“Building 33?”

“WHAT?”

“BUILDING THIRTY-THREE?”

“YEAH.”

“CAN I GO?”

“UH…GIMME…ONE MINUTE ON THE FILET.”

“OKAY.”

“Is this 33?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I go?”

“Not yet, he needs-”

“I NEED ONE MINUTE ON THE FILET.”

“Just a sec.”

“Um…”

“What’s up?”

“Uh…I’m gonna need a Shrimp Lemon Linguine sub chicken on the fly.”

“Shoot, did we miss that?”

“No…”

“So…”

“I forgot it.”

“Great.”

“How long’s that gonna take?”

“SIX MINUTES.”

“We don’t have anything already-”

“SIX MINUTES.”

“Shoot.”

“Well.”

“Yeah.”

“WALK 33.”

“HEARD. Got hands?”

“Yeah, sure. Where?”

“33.”

“Hey can I get a time on pizzas for 12?”

“TIME ON PIZZAS? …JUST WENT IN.”

“Okay.”

“SORRY.”

“It’s fine, they’re regulars. And chill.”

“UH, I COULD-”

“Don’t worry about it, we’re all good. Is that water?”

“YES PLEASE.”

“Guys? Waters?”

“YEAH.”

“YES.” 

“PLEASE.”

“So…”

“WHAT’S THIS?”

“The Chimi from 17. She said she wants ‘unburned asparagus’...?”

“OKAY.”

“Sorry.”

“WHATEVER. GIVE ME THREE MINUTES.”

“Kay. Thanks! Sorry!”

“I’m just waiting on a brussels and then I can run.”

“YOU’RE WAITING ON A BRUSSELS?”

“Yeah, for 32?”

“THAT SOLD.”

“It did?”

“YES.”

“I’m looking at the table now and it’s not there.”

“COOL.”

“Dylan, did you take my brussels?”

“No, I took my brussels.”

“For 21?”

“Yeah.”

“That was for 32.”

“Oh…woops.”

“Time on-”

“THREE MINUTES.”

“Thanks! No thanks to you, Dylan.”

“Woops.”

“Whew. That got spicy for a minute.”

“Was it? That was easy.”

“Uh huh.”

“Nah, it was.”

“I don’t know man, you were sweating.”

“It’s hot.”

“Seemed like you were working pretty hard.”

“Ah it gets loud, but it’s not, like, hard.”

“Right.”

“Like I said, unless there’s a hundred tickets up…”

“Sure.”

“Hey!”

“Yeah?”

“Can you guys get your food in?”

“It’s not time yet, it’s only-oh, damn.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah I’ll let ‘em know.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I have that thing Tom made earlier for dinner?”

“Uhhhhhyeah, Tom says yes.”

“Cool.”

“As long as you get him a beer.”

“Cool.”

“And me one, too.”

“Hm.”

“Hey!”

“Yeah?”

“Can you tell Steve to get his food in?”

“Oh…yeah.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t like to be asked again.”

“But we need his food in.”

“I’m sure he’s getting to it. Just, on Steve time.”

“Well if he wants food…”

“It’s coming, it’s coming. I’ll tell him.”

“Umm…”

“What’s up?”

“I’m leaving the fryer in your hands.”

“What does that mean?”

“Once we turn the fryer off, it’s off.”

“Right.”

“So, you have to make the call.”

“Me? Why me?”

“So I don’t get in trouble when we turn it off and someone orders fries.”

“What the hell!”

“Better you than me.”

“Fine, I’ll make sure there’s no more fryer food.”

“Gracias.”

“Hey!”

“Yeah! …What, what’s that? What are you doing?”

“We thirsty.”

“You what?”

“We thirsty.”

“Oh.”

“For-”

“I know. I got it.”

“Thankee.”

“Psychos.”

My favorite thing about the restaurant is how utterly, freely weird we all are. Customers included. No passage is more representative of what is said on a regular night than the one that begins, “Oi, bruv.”

In the vast majority of cases, these aren’t places I’ve been already. I just do the digging: comparing multiple Big Food Pub lists, hunting for the rare genuinely good food local food blog, plunging down individual roads in Google Maps; even, yes, venturing as far as godforsaken Facebook, the inexplicably popular website substitute for so many restaurants abroad. Then I match up what I find to what I think my actual travelers will enjoy, based on what I know of them—while jotting down the best for my own future experiences, sometime miles down the road.

With all that, here are a few highlights from my vicarious digital travels, compiled into the first list in an occasional series. If you’re passing anywhere in the vicinity of these locations this summer (or ever), let me know how they are. Please. And if you’re stuck at home like me, then I wish you, too, savory, far-flung dreams.

Note: should you one day commission a travel recommendation list from me, do not expect it to be written like this.

La Cabane de l'Aiguillon 

54 Bd Pierre Loti, 33120 La Teste-de-Buch, France

Little more than the whine of small engines pierces the thickening blanket of warming air under unobstructed sun in le Ville d’Automne, Arcachon’s “autumn city,” more popularly, “The Autumn Quarter.” Notably absent are the muted thunder of marching feet and anxious, marveling cacophony of the gawking crowd. It has never been a large town, and the distance is not so great, but the contrast is stark between these quiet streets and le Ville d'été, the Summer Quarter, where march the tourists endlessly from hotel to beach to cafe from May to August. On this eastern spike, l’Aiguillon (“the sting”), there are more homes and less sand, few cafes and fewer shops, and so, but for the completionist traveler, and a handful of self-described “foodies,” the area is inessential.

However, one minute, nameless strip of beach beckons. Itself, it is nothing. The sliver of remarkability it possesses is its status as a working beach, one of the last in the city, where oysters and clams, once an industry (once the industry), are now all but a distinguishing culinary feature. Nearly every restaurant in Arcachon boasts an oyster section on the menu. Many are named “La Cabane du…” translated, “The [insert cuisine here] Shack,” for the oyster sheds that in earlier centuries dotted the sand between the sleepy fishing village and the bay. On the nameless spit at the farthest reach of le Ville d’Automne, there are several remaining shacks, though they are not for the crowds. They are still working sheds, denoted by the shallow-drafted dinghies that rest in the waning tide, fishing boats anchored in the deeper water a hundred feet into the bay, that proud work of prolonging tradition accomplished in the cool, dark hours before the sun and tourists rise. Despite their significance, all but one of the oyster shacks are unremarkable, too.

The exception, on the opposite side of the nameless beach from the rest of las cabanes, has a sign, a fence, three parking spots, and tables to sit several dozen. La Cabane de l’Aiguillon is for all visitors’ intents and purposes the solitary reason to be here. It is one of those mythically simple places that feel out of place in a bustling, modern world; even the bustling modern district of The Summer Quarter, a few short kilometers away.

At La Cabane de l’Aiguillon a guest selects their product from among ice buckets of daily local catch, and their selection is immediately shucked and plated over ice. There are raw oysters, clams, and sea snails, and boiled prawns. The raw are served only with lemon, the prawns with an additional spoonful of mayonnaise. Sliced baguette and butter are available, with jarred terrine (fois gras) for the spoiled. Wines largely from nearby Bordeaux, and a few from beyond, rotate through, and are served in bags stuffed with more ice in the boiling months. The tables outside, arranged on cultivated sand raised slightly from the beach, are dappled beneath trees and trellis, and but for the occasional doldrum a constant, cool breeze drifts through from across the bay. It is the quintessence of the enjoyment of oysters.

Muro do Bacalhau

Cais da Estiva 122, 4050-080 Porto, Portugal

It is not difficult to find good food along the Douro, even in the tourist-flooded streets of central Porto. Neither is it difficult in Porto to find cozy cafes with brief menus and a haphazard selection of wines indicative only of the owners personal taste, with two or three tables and a counter, where time is measured by vessel and one could happily spend one glass or several bottles, raucous bilingual stories echoing off rough stone walls throughout the narrow roads.

Near the iconic steel river span Ponte Luis I, however, the steep, sculpted walls of the Ribeiro are dominated by fine hotels and fine restaurants featuring broad showcase windows and rows of outdoor tables lined up to the stone safety barriers. But here, there is an exception. The exception is Muro do Bacalhau.

Muro do Bacalhau is something between the little wine-and-snack caves scattered through the streets of Porto and the grand dining operations overlooking the Douro. It’s a fine restaurant in itself, with smooth wood features and soft lighting to contrast the crude, pale stone walls that support the precarious apartments along the riverfront. It is bigger than the holes-in-walls—despite quite literally being a hole punched in the support wall itself—with a pair of dining rooms and a handful of outdoor tables running right up to the stone’s edge above the water.

On approach you’d be hard-pressed to find it, with one entrance on a narrow path off the busy waterfront that seems surely to lead only to apartments, and the other a level below on a dock ramp for tour boats. But there’s a restaurant nestled there, a cozy two-story affair that defies its potentially kitschy location with thoughtful, creative plates and friendly service. It is the rarer intimate space along the water, and here meals are shared not amidst a sea of gawking heads and unceasing clink-clatter but with the loud creak of rubber fenders between hull and pier, the soft Doppler of a hundred passing conversations drifting from the streets nearby, the persistent slap of water on stone.

Quimet & Quimet

Carrer del Poeta Cabanyes, 25, Sants-Montjuïc, 08004 Barcelona, Spain

The streets above broad Avenida del Paral·lel, the thoroughfare that cuts a neat line through the heart of southern Barcelona, form a pleasing grid of square apartment blocks, each five to eight stories high, surrounding private gardens, tennis and basketball courts, or courtyards, and the occasional snuck away park. Below Paral·lel are more apartments, but these are, aptly for this entry, packed like anchovies in a tin, sandwiched between the broadway and the sweeping hillside of Montjuïc, equally stuffed with theaters, recreation centers, gardens, and more parks, and capped with an ancient castle. The anchovy neighborhood, Sants-Montjuïc, with streets so narrow that some have been restricted from auto traffic altogether, appropriately features some of the best tapas dining in the city.

Of them, one of the best is one of the smallest, squeezed into a box-sized storefront under tiers of apartment balconies fluttering with laundry: Quimet & Quimet.

This Barcelona nesting doll of fish tin metaphor continues inside the cramped store, its walls obscured behind packed shelves of product: mostly bottles, of every shape and size, and mostly wine, of every Spanish varietal. The thin strip of wall remaining between shelf and ceiling is filled with novelty product signs from around the globe. On ground level, a small staff hustles behind a short counter in a constant flurry of assembly to satisfy the unending stream of customers pouring in from the sidewalk, who stand shoulder to shoulder around three small tables and pressed against the counter. One table, one customer, is hardly out when the next is in.

This tin, that is Quimet & Quimet, paradoxically, cannot be emptied until it is closed.

The compact wine shop has earned its notoriety by sheer quality, a quality that hasn’t changed through five generations of ownership or after a tide-altering televised visit from Anthony Bourdain in 2008. By so many accounts, the tapas remain extraordinary enough to, briefly, become a sardine to enjoy them.

The secret is no secret; Quimet & Quimet simply combines immaculate marinated vegetables with immaculate marinated seafood in ways that render a tongue speechless. There are tender artichokes over thick slices of creamy cheese seasoned with dollops of pureed pepper and caviar; anchovies on sweet jarred peaches; prawns, red pepper, caviar; salmon with yogurt and truffled honey, some served alone and others over slices of crisp bread. Each is only a bite, a short sharp spark of individual joy before the next and the next. It is the ideal of tapas, rendered in an uncompromising humble form.

Juveniles

47 Rue de Richelieu, 75001 Paris, France 

On a road named for France’s most infamous literary villain (and, perhaps, historical), a block from the Royal Palace and stone’s throw from the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, and Jardin des Tuileries, is one of the few decent bistros in the heart of Paris. While in the streets nearby one can find truly notable ramen, izakaya, Edo-style sushi, and (not Japanese, but) boba, of French food there are largely tricks, traps, and snares for vulnerable tourists meandering between itinerary items. Much like New Yorkers’ proximity to Times Square, in Paris, the rule is that the closer one is to the 1st—the eye of the city’s spiral of arrondissements—the farther one is from Parisians, and therefore, from their food.

But, you know: rules; exceptions. Such is Juveniles, all the more so for how close it resides to the true center of the city, within Paris’s district of icons (and Japanese cuisine).

Juveniles may be judged by its cover. Forest-green facade and golden engraved letters make little impression amongst loud neighbors on busy Richelieu, fine as they look. Unlike so many of its ilk, there are no sidewalk tables here; there is no space for them. Through the windows one can glimpse seating and the light of the kitchen, but only between stacks of cardboard wine boxes piled a half dozen or more high. The overall impression is nice, well-kept; but ultimately plain. The plainness speaks volumes. If most businesses in the 1st frantically wave, scream, and shout to catch the bewildered, gullible eye of the tourist, Juveniles gives a silent, wry smile. It is merely there, and trusts Those Who Know to find it without undue guidance.

Inside is the bistro of the imagination. Hardly grandiose, at least compared to its looming neighbors; instead of gilded marble and cherubic statues there are maroon wooden bucket chairs at metal-framed vinyl tables, walls hung with a hodgepodge of artwork and children’s drawings and a chalk dust-smeared daily menu board, tall shelves stacked with various pyramids of bottles. Juveniles is proud of their wine—not just from France but frequently from softer-sung regions of Europe—as well as their food, often bistro classics, not elevated or reimagined but rendered with the rare care required to understand why they are classic, as well as plates with dashes of daring creativity, all the better to keep the regulars, and operating family, on their toes. It is a place family-run with clear intent; the intent being hospitality, rather than to strictly feed or to awe or to take advantage of tired feet and open wallets.

In the heart of Paris, where there is little heart and less Parisian, there is a bistro filled with heart that yet serves Parisians—and others who stumble into this vestige of the Paris of the imagination.

Roulote Hot Dogs Cascais 

Av. Rei Humberto II de Itália 1407, 2750-374 Cascais, Portugal

On the farthest westward reach of the Continent, on the side of a stretch of scenic Portuguese highway overlooking the rumbling Atlantic from atop steep rocky bluffs, is a little yellow truck.

Near it, the sharp ocean brine swirls with the succulent char of grilled meat. And not just any meat, but one of the universal dishes; a thing enjoyed in its local variation by nearly every meat-eating culture on Earth. As the most famous traveler of our day called it: “Meat, in Tube Form.”

The nearly 40-year-old hot dog truck/stand offers just a handful of takes on the staple: Simples, Completo, Vegetariano, Vegi Dog, and Chili. The last is exactly what it sounds like. The first contains a mystery among its two listed toppings: “chips [fries], 4 sauces.” There is no explanation for any of the four sauces, but the truck’s 37-year longevity lays a solid foundation of trust. The fries, less mysteriously, are crisp, toothpick-thin shreds of potato, piled on in the dozens if not by the hundred. Every item features these, as assumed as the sausage and bun.

The other offerings might have threatened overcomplexity, if there were more than three of them, and if those three weren’t only slight variations on each other. The Completo adds white and red cabbage, carrots, and cheese to the Simples. The Vegetarian is the Completo without a sausage. The Vegi Dog is the Completo with a soy-dog.

Whatever the choice, there are few grander vistas with which to enjoy a hot dog. On a calm, sunny day, the tidal pools at the base of the cliffs turn transparent with a brilliant cerulean filter. In rougher weather, or as the winds turn as sunset goes to twilight, slate-grey waves thunder and spray under a sky bathed in purpling orange.

There are those who frown upon the hot dog. Or who would at least, when traveling, bypass a hot dog stand for its lack of that dreaded culinary quantity so predominantly analyzed by fools: “authenticity.” That is their right. They do not deserve the little yellow truck that slings its plebian fare at the end of the once-Known World. They will watch the Atlantic sunset from behind tall glass panes, safe inside the staid white country club dining room of the Michelin restaurant down the road. They will not be inconvenienced by the gusting wind, the warming sun, the whine of passing cars or clinging grill-smoke. They will move soft pale fish in lemon-caper sauce onto their forks with soft pureed potato. They will not eat the wondrous hot dog on the side of the road.

What Spotlight lacks in fun and silliness it makes up for in earnest, hardboiled drama. It’s a film about righting wrongs and taking down the man, through the pen rather than the gun. Though there’s dark subject matter—if you’ve never seen Spotlight, it’s about the Boston Globe report that formed the first major expose of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church—it’s ultimately a hopeful film whose trajectory feels inevitable as we follow a team of dogged investigators who methodically pry away at the foundations of one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Performances are powerful across the board, from the quiet—an against-type Liev Schreiber as the antisocial yet straight-shooting new editor of the Globe—to the bombastic—Mark Ruffalo as a bulldog thinly disguised as a reporter, and Stanley Tucci as fast-talking courtroom David to the Church’s Goliath. Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, and a host of legitimate Boston accents pitch in to ground the film.

And, spoiler alert, they get ‘em. They get the Church. It’s great.

But Spotlight isn’t an exception on my comfort watch list. It’s representative, if anything. Maybe I’m screwed up some kind of way—but I don’t think so, necessarily. Because as dark as some of the subject matter in the following films is: they’re all hopeful stories. They may be nihilistic, cynical, even anarchic; yet there is a light at the end of each and every one of these dim tunnels, and at least one flawed, determined “hero” (really stretching that term for some of these protagonists) leading us toward it. It makes sense, to me, to find comfort in watching someone fight a tough fight against an unspeakable, yet human, evil, and find a way, through the pen or the court or, surprisingly rarely in these films, the gun, to bring it into the unsparing light of day.

The following are my favorite deep dark comfort films (and one limited series). Enjoy, and be comforted by the darkness.

Sicario (2015)

Sicario is a grim movie. Streaming apps frequently and bewilderingly categorize it as an “action-adventure,” and while there is gunfighting and there are a few explosions, it’s not exactly “adventurous.”

Instead Sicario is a matte landscape of the war on drugs. The longer you watch, the more unsettling the film becomes (and it begins pretty unsettling). Denis Villeneuve (of Dune) films the American southwest in constant overcast, with every action as grey as the sky above, continuously descending into black the farther along we go. Johan Johansson’s score, deep and haunting, redefines the music of tension.

None of that sounds even remotely comforting. However, the film is anchored by multiple stellar performances that pop against the dreary background. Emily Blunt leads as Kate Macer, a capable if frustrated FBI agent offered (what seems like) a chance to make a serious impact on the narco-economy. The mesmerizing, implacable Daniel Kaluuya is her stalwart, no-BS partner. Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro give a pair of career-best performances: Brolin as slime incarnate, the quintessential oily CIA operative, twelve steps ahead of everyone; del Toro as the enigmatic Alejandro, a “consultant” and “expert” in narco trafficking (emphasis on the “ “). Collectively they litter the film with moral and ethical conundrums; what does it take to make a “material difference” in the war on drugs? What is a “material difference?” Is that a war even worth fighting? How far is too far to act against a system that displays such casual disregard for a human life? Which system, specifically, are we talking about?

Sicario culminates in, I’ll say, a kind of relief. And in the end, it’s a pretty film with excellent scenery and great actors chewing it up. There’s a comfort in that, at least.

Michael Clayton (2007)

As the titular Michael Clayton in this Patterson-esque legal thriller, George Clooney embodies the disheveled underdog, a role he was not born to play but does to surprising effect. It is his most fascinating role.

In Michael Clayton, beleaguered lawyer/fixer/babysitter-to-the-rich Michael Clayton is caught between a rock, a hard place, and a soft place. The rock: the big New York law firm he works for, and their bigger, multi-billion-dollar multi-vertical corporate client. The hard place: that client’s Chief Counsel (an Academy Award-winningly nervy Tilda Swinton) and her own pair of fixers. The soft place: Arthur, Michael’s mentor, friend, and father figure, one of the firm’s top litigators, who has gone off his medication and suffered a prolonged mental break that threatens to cost the firm and its client hundreds of millions of dollars in a class-action case. Powder, keg, match.

Michael Clayton is an uncomfortable film, thanks mostly to Tom Wilkinson’s portrayal of Arthur’s one-man schizophrenic revolution and to Tilda Swinton’s sociopathic response to it. But that discomfort serves a purpose—to question why we’re uncomfortable. Is that what it takes to make a man realize that a system he is so thoroughly embedded in is so thoroughly broken? Is that what it looks like, when a career carpenter decides to burn the house down?

Still, we watch Michael tackle one problem after the next and the next in a downward spiral of fixing. It’s not that he’s ineffective—he is, as we’re told, the best at what he does—it’s that these events, for once, are out of his league. He’s one man, and they’re The Man. The fight grows increasingly futile; and still he fights. All while trying to get to his son’s baseball game (he’s an American hero).

If nothing else, the film features one of the great endings in thriller history, worth the price of admission (about $3.50 to rent) alone.

See also: Dark Waters (2019), another lawyer vs The Man drama (starring recurring bulldog Mark Ruffalo) based on the real-life discovery of the cancerous effects of Teflon.

Miami Vice (2004)

It’s bizarre how little neon and sunshine there is in Michael Mann’s 2004 revamp of his own hit 1980s TV property, Miami Vice. Where the original series has become a meme of 80s machismo and the “buddy cop” genre, this film sets the cheese almost entirely (almost entirely) aside in favor of a Heat-like hardboiled crime drama, with a few more boats and beaches sprinkled in.

Featuring a pair of memorable turns from a long-haired and mustachioed Colin Farrell and a suave Jamie Foxx as Miami PD Vice operatives Crockett and Tubbs, Miami Vice is a gritty narco epic that deserved more than what it got (largely, sneers and derision) on its initial release. Sometimes you just want to watch a couple fictional cops-who-are-also-friends take down some terrifyingly bad dudes, and that’s what this film gives us in delightfully gruff fashion.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

I remember the conversation around The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2011 going largely to the tune of, “Do we really need another Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie? The Swedish version is good enough! Why does Hollywood have to remake everything??” Having watched both movies in the last year, I can say that it is a very good thing Hollywood—David Fincher in particular—remade this one.

It’s not that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) is bad. It’s totally fine. Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist are excellent, and the film benefits in verisimilitude (fictional believability) from being set in its native language (Swedish). But it’s also a little shallow, comparatively, snipping away some of the twistier plot threads, and more straightforward. Its sequels are also, unfortunately, a bit of a slog.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) on the other hand is one of the better mysteries of the last decade. Like its cinematic predecessor and the book they’re based on, it plunges unflinchingly into pitch black, deeply distressing material—murder, sexual assault, and rape are gruesomely depicted—but offers us, in return, one of the screen’s most dynamic duos in Daniel Craig’s morally upstanding-if-naive journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Rooney Mara’s captivating hacker vigilante, Lizbeth Salander. They are not ass-kickers—though there is a nonzero amount of ass-kicking—they are dirtdiggers, heroes of research and analysis who spend a lot of time doing the kind of investigative work that Robert Pattinson’s moody Batman wishes he was capable of. And when they finally get their man…well, he gets very gotten. A deep dark film breeds a deep dark catharsis, but a catharsis nonetheless.

See also: Mindhunter, David Fincher’s Netflix series following the first official federal investigations of serial killers. Mindhunter employs a tell-don’t-show strategy in regards to the many terrible crimes of the many terrible murderers that is somehow more chilling, and infinitely more watchable, than depicting any of them in graphic detail. Mostly, though, it’s a joy to watch the crack squad of Jonathan Goff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv approach their…subjects…with a mix of academic fascination and human revulsion.

The Handmaiden (2016)

Speaking of catharsis…WHEW. This may be the most cathartic film I’ve ever watched. If you’ve ever enjoyed an erotic thriller, and have not yet enjoyed Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, stop now, enjoy it, thank me.

The Handmaiden boasts one of the great movie posters of our time. Here it is. It contains practically everything you need know about the movie going in. All I’ll add is that it is based on the book Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, a tale originally set in Victorian England about a young thief (a “fingersmith”) who infiltrates a wealthy household. That’s all I’ll give you, for fear of robbing you of the head-grabbing, hair-pulling, ick-inducing ride herein. It’s definitely a weird movie to say, “Hell yeah,” to, and yet: hell yeah.

The Verdict (1982)

Pivoting now to a more conservatively cathartic film in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict, a legal thriller featuring Paul Newman at arguably (a generous “arguably”) the height of his powers.

In The Verdict, Paul Newman is a loser. Literally. He’s a former hotshot lawyer who finds himself stuck working the dregs of the court, and losing those cases, too. Then, a friend does him one last reluctant favor and hands him an easy case, an open-and-shut settlement from a victim of malpractice by a major hospital. What Newman’s Frank Galvin sees, however, is his chance at that most tantalizing of rewards: a swift redemption. If he refuses settlement and instead takes the hospital—and his former, powerhouse firm representing them—to trial, well, he stands to make his clients more money, himself a chunk of change, and regain his standing in the legal world all in a single stroke. All that stands between him and that goal is an impossible case, a beautiful woman, and his damned conscience…

Watching Paul Newman lose is a treat. It’s not quite schadenfreude, we’re not getting joy out of his suffering, per say. It’s more like cheering for the underdog, in a film that does the rare thing of managing to make its bonafide movie star genuinely feel like an underdog. Frank Galvin is petty, unethical, and often flat out wrong. But despite himself, despite the seemingly impenetrable cynicism he’s constructed and the coat of alcohol he wears, he can’t help but give a shit. And when his fight turns real, The Verdict, again, doesn’t do the typical movie thing of, “Ah, now he gets it! He knows what he’s fighting for! It’s over for those guys!” The case remains practically impossible. The obstacles, if anything, increase. But we rooted for Newman as a broken man set against insurmountable odds, and we only root for him more as a complicated man set against the same. The result is a powerful, moving film about not only personal redemption, but competition, the nature of winning and losing and all the verdicts that fall between.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Mileage may vary with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye depending on whether you currently do or don’t live in LA. It’s still a great movie if you don’t live here; but there’s something immensely, personally enjoyable about watching Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe cruise down Sunset and saunter up to his (honestly, sick as hell) Hollywood Hills apartment, tie hung loose, on his 20th cigarette already in the first minute. I know that this beleaguered PI is an outdated model of masculine ‘cool,’ and yet…goddamnit, he’s still cool. There’s also a slow-burning, morally dubious mystery at play, a femme fatale, a few accented gangsters a’gangstering; but I’m here to watch Elliot Gould take it all in imperturbable stride, never sleeping, never changing (his clothes), never really seeming to worry too much about the many deadly events occurring around him…until, finally, he does.

Chernobyl (2019)

Hard to find comfort in one of the most infamous manmade disasters in history. Easier, though, to find comfort in the efforts of Stellan Skarsgaard and Jared Harris to minimize the destruction of that disaster, and then uncover its root cause, in an investigation that digs into the faults underlying the principles of a nation.

The biggest piece of pushback I hear about Chernobyl, from people who haven’t watched it, is: “It looks sad.” That’s not wrong. It is a sad, tough show about a sad, tough subject. But ultimately Chernobyl isn’t about the sadness or the toughness; rather, it’s about all the people who step up in impossible times, and all the people who enabled the impossible to occur. It’s about the insidious reach of corruption and its nightmarish effects. It’s about science and expertise, and again about complicated men grasping a chance at redemption for a lifetime of rule-abiding. It’s about heroes and heroism, and whose stories are sung and unsung. Chernobyl, for its unflinching eye on the horrors of nuclear fallout, is a supremely hopeful tale about the letting the best rise in us, and the cost of it.

Also, there’s something soothing about watching Stellan Skarsgaard growl his way through every level of Soviet bureaucracy.

Am I missing any deep dark comfort films? Send me your grim (but again, hopeful!) recommendations in the comments, please! Thx.

Memory is a story. Our very own personal historical fiction. Facts, recalled correctly, can be placed out of order. Feelings can be re-colored, quotes paraphrased, context curated, perspective tinted, filtered, and shifted. This is what I remember now and feels right, though some of it is likely wrong.

Alice and I ate our ramen in silence. 

Except for the slurping—which was loud and unselfconscious, joining the small, inspired chorus of fellow one a.m. diners. It’d been a long day at the end of a long trip. Both good, though. Both, even, great. We were tired and there wasn’t much left to say, about anything. Not so tired not to get ramen, however; particularly this stuff. We sat at the window counter of the narrow second story room, looking down over the narrower alley below, full of bars next to bars on top of other bars but fallen quiet on that Tuesday evening-Wednesday morning, and wet. It was the last and most memorable meal of our time there. In fact it was several lasts, all at once.

— — — 

I finished the second semester of my junior year at Northeastern University and flew home to LA. Two short, sunny weeks later I anxiously boarded a red-eye back to Boston, arriving several bleary hours before the scheduled meeting time for the Dialogue of International Relations in Japan; my six-week summer study-abroad program. I knew no one else on the trip. Mostly I signed up because I wanted to go to Japan, like how in high school I mostly joined chorus because I wanted to go to Germany for spring break. I lived a hard life then, lacking in opportunities and means except to travel abroad every couple of years on the thinnest of whims. Though, I could at least count Japan as extracurricular credit. The course, “International Affairs,” wasn’t so far removed from Economics, my major, that the idea was totally ridiculous. In high school I discovered I liked choir, anyway; maybe in Japan I’d discover a passion for policy. I read The Economist, after all. Sometimes.

I struggled to nap for a little while on a cold bucket chair in the ticketing area of Logan’s (Boston Logan International’s) international terminal. I was crawling with butterflies, in two phenotypes: one, the nervy kind that appear before meeting new people, especially in large groups; the other, the anticipatory kind that make a habitat of airports and chilly mornings, that flutter in a hopeful thrill for exciting events impending, flight, travel, a gaze full of unknown. They settled on me as I finally began to doze—then burst in a cloud as the other students began to arrive.

I was lucky to meet Vinny first. He was a shaggy-haired East Coast Italian, a latter-day intellectual hippie who could talk raw tomatoes and beef into ragu. He was some combination of Economics, International Affairs, and Poli-Sci, and he knew everyone. We chatted for a little bit, and then, strategically, I sat next to him and introduced myself to each new person that Vinny called over as the suitcases rolled in. I tried not to be weird; a lost cause, because in trying not to be weird you’re already doing something most people aren’t doing, which is sort of the definition of “weird.” And, yes, we’re all our own weird, but back then I expected better of people, that everyone else was certainly less weird than me. I hadn’t worked in restaurants yet.

The study abroad composed a varied group: some brainy Greek jocks, some cool nerds, some nerd nerds, a few bonafide Internationals, a couple wild cards and everyone else a little bit of everything. The leading professor had a bit of a following among his former pupils—they’d joke around with him, but were clearly determined to impress. The TAs/chaperones appeared easygoing enough. A real mixed bag of college personalities, but not incendiary, it seemed. I hadn’t decided who I should be yet, so mainly I just smiled and cracked the occasional joke. Better to be unnoticed than off-putting, in the early days.

We went through security, and on to Japan.

— — — 

Tokyo was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Inbound from the airport in Narita, the highway sweeps around the eastern outskirts of the city, presenting a panoramic view of its towering skyline and endless sprawl. LA is broad, too; but its innumerable neighborhoods are at least broken up by freeways, hills, and small mountains. You can piece the jigsaw of it together, figure it out. New York is also tall, and claustrophobic, bigger even than it appears on screen—but with hard, defining limits at the rivers, the outlying boroughs simultaneously part of the city and completely distinct from it. A dense, but fathomable metropolis. Tokyo is both, together, all at once. When you’re in it, it’s a labyrinth, a macrocosm. You feel swallowed whole. But not unpleasantly so, if you’re a city kid.

Our first days thrust us cold (culturally) and soaking (literally) into Japan. A monsoon fell the first night, a constant crash of water on pavement, plastic, and metal, drumming until its sudden cease. We hunkered uncomfortably inside; our hostel seemed built for smaller, more modular people. We crammed six healthy young American boys into a room the size of a third of a room, on two sets of bunk beds, a trundle, and the floor. The bathrooms were shared, in the hall, and there was a sink on top of the toilet. The shower was a closet I barely fit into; my shoulders bumped the walls if I moved more than an inch in any direction. The management told us on our first night that we were loud, and we’d eventually be asked not to linger in front of the hostel at night, because of all the noise of our (admittedly tipsy) talking. If we needed to chat, there were bars elsewhere, or the busy avenue just down the way. The hostel became strictly for sleep, work, and quiet. And the occasional forbidden stairway makeout.

“Dialogue” is mostly a clever title for any Northeastern summer study abroad program—but in our case it was literal. After about a day we were paired up with political students from Tokyo’s Meiji University for a cultural exchange that would last the entire trip. That weekend we bussed to a lakeside camp near Mount Fuji, an enormous active volcano and one of Japan’s most recognizable landmarks. The mountain is highly visible on clear days from all parts of Tokyo, hours away, and forms the fantastical archetype of the lone mountain, with vast, wide slopes sweeping up to a snowy peak, often shrouded in clouds. If you’ve heard of Japan, you’ve seen Fuji.

At the foot of Fuji are several lakes, and ours was called Yamanaka, the university’s camp located a short walk uphill from its shore. There we set our weekend bags down and got the camp-&-culture tour. We were presented with our blue rubber indoor slippers (not one pair the appropriate size for the wearer); then shown the onsen (shared washing room) where we’d bathe on squat hardwood stools, each with an extendable showerhead that Americans would typically see only in luxury homes or hotels; then instructed to prepare our tatami mats, where we’d sleep (here a blast of nostalgia as I realized this was the thing I used to sleep on at my Hawaiian grandmother’s house). Once settled, we played a little basketball and then moved inside to get to know each other better, beginning with our thoughts on the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was a shock—we certainly weren’t expecting that topic to open the conversation with our new pals. And in retrospect, it was a bit of a cheap tactic to jumpstart those relations. But it worked. The bombings are the horrifying elephant in the room between any American and Japanese that must at some point be addressed. It is also an oddly safe question. Who (on a trip like this) is going to say that the bombs were good? So, we agreed that the act was terrible, and that we all hoped such devices would never be deployed again, ever, anywhere, and the elephant was escorted away. Between that and the long string of drinking games we exchanged later that night, our first real lesson of the trip became obvious: “We’re not so different after all!” Which is a thing everyone on Earth knows about everyone else, but that everyone also forgets, and must constantly be reminded.

The next morning I rose early, a little cotton-mouthed but mostly un-hungover. I bathed quickly, bashfully, and thankfully solitarily atop the hard stool in the onsen. I went for a walk, about a mile down the tree-covered trail along the lake. It was still and cool, a little misty. I have always felt a powerful urge to be alone after being amongst. To worry about nothing and no one but myself, for a while. Sometimes, after particularly intense society, I need the time and the space to find myself again, and consider how I have changed. Whether I should let the change take, or cling steadfast to who I was. I walked down to the water and looked across the dappled surface at the long slope of Fuji, just visible through the fading fog, and remembered suddenly that I was in Japan, that these were special days not to be taken lightly, not to be undergone through the motions. Probably not a time to be steadfast. I decided to let the change take, and to continue to let it take me, as long as I was here.

It felt momentous. Of course it did—I was alone except for the exhaled ghost of my own breath, standing on the shore of a still lake full of ancient fish and drifting, slumbering swans, praying (or something like it) at the foot of one of the famous mountains of the world. For a little while, I was a static feature of a painted landscape. Japan is wonderful for being a static feature of a painted landscape, and in such a place all thoughts and decisions feel momentous. But what you never realize in the process of being changed, even when you’re aware of it, even when you believe you are consciously allowing it, is that being changed is the simple thing. Staying changed is the test.

— — — 

You know how it goes.

We were college kids far from home. We were unexpectedly brilliant and expectedly stupid. We were ecstatic and loud and accidentally rude. We were conscious and careful and respectful, and we were ignorant and silly and hurtful. With everyone we met, and with our Japanese friends, and especially with each other. But for all that, we mostly got along well.

There were classes, which were important, and gave us a brief cultural context of Japan past and present, and I remembered the material exactly long enough to pass the course. It was a microcosm of my college experience in that way. When I think of those five years, I never think of classes, though I did actually go to most of them and did fairly well, grades-wise. Instead I think of everything else: friends and travel and musical theater, which I did at first for fun, then increasingly out of necessity. Japan was the same. We were there for class, but the important takeaways came entirely from elsewhere.

For one:

I was already a lapsed Christian by then, by a few years. There was a pivotal choice involved in that, but not exactly whether to believe or to not believe in God. It was, like so many consequential decisions, deeply anticlimactic, obscured in the clutter of living.

Shortly after the start of my freshman year, I was in the process of deciding how I’d spend my extracurricular time. Church had been a major part of my life from birth through high school. I Believed, thoroughly and assuredly. But at college, I chose not to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes or any of the other Christian social clubs for the same reason I chose not to try out for club volleyball, which itself was an extension of the reason I found myself in Boston, and not Orange County: it was time for something different. That was another time of change, a more obvious time, and I sought it out and consciously allowed it, then, too (some of it, at least). The change that occurred at that time stuck because I lived in it, and kept living in it for five years. That’s a way to harden change—stay put in the place that changed you. Immerse yourself in the new ways until they become the natural ways. It wasn’t instantaneous, but in Boston the Belief bled out of me over time, its assuredness dwarfed by its growing inconsequentiality. I stopped praying at night, I stopped going back to church when I was home for break. Later, when I finally realized what had shifted, and how much, I did officially decide that I didn’t want to be the Believer anymore; and at the time I pitied him.

In Japan I had my first encounter with a spiritualism outside the monotheistic. Shinto and Buddhism. Shrines and temples. Quiet rituals and meditations. Water, breath, and torii. Our guides shared the history of each place, what things were and why people did that, the symbols and the symbolism. We were encouraged to wander and explore, to participate if so moved. Churches are designed with clear focal points: all attention front, center, up, to the stage and to the cross, which Jesus may or may not be mounted upon, where he may or may not be bleeding, depending how sanitized the sect. In the first shrines I kept looking for that; the focal point, the Big Thing to visit, to witness, to worship, that must be in the middle. And there are small temples central to many shrines where visitors and congregants alike gather to light incense and offer silent prayers. Some have famously large statues or ancient trees or other artifacts. But in many of them you are encouraged to let your gaze and your feet fall where they will around the grounds, as though the shrine or temple is gently ushering, “Consider this small, bubbling fountain. Does this help today? If not, perhaps this way, through the torii…” and so on down the many paths. Walk, pause, consider. Not, “Look here, think this.” Not, “Behold, The Lesson For Today.” Not the purpose-driven game, the grace-given versus the wretched damned.

Which is absolutely not to say that our trip was spent in thoughtful meditation and contemplation of the divine. If anything, much of it was spent in thoughtful meditation and contemplation of what we should eat. And more importantly, drink.

There were dozen-plate trips to the local conveyor sushi joint. There were dinners at Michelin-rated restaurants, a one-star and two-star, both Italian (the one-star, which boasted twenty seats and two employees, was better). There were gritty izakayas with “pints” bigger than your head and chewy, briney sunomono (octopus) salad and crispy, fatty karaage (fried chicken). There was one memorable Mexican restaurant where the food was godawful (the only bad stuff I ate on the trip) but redeemed by the bath-sized “Party Margarita”, a massive glass centerpiece with ten straws perched on its rim that someone had clearly poured a handle of tequila into and waved a lime somewhere in the vicinity of and not even for a second considered mixing anything more with. There was mazemen, tsukemen, and almost every day, ramen: spicy, miso, shoyu, shio, tonkotsu, some bowls minimal, as though dressed with tweezers, others overflowing with generous abundance.

We ate soba and tempura on mats in a cavernous room, and were taught the ceremony of consuming it, and the intensive process of making—crafting—the handcut buckwheat soba noodles, whose flavors were too subtle for me. The tempura was crisp, grease-less and better cooked than any fried thing I’ve eaten outside the Gulf Coast (another region which seems to guard closely the secret to frying crisply and lightly).

There were also traditional foods less familiar to me. Many pickled and fermented dishes: fish and vegetables, mostly, and mostly for breakfast, an ambitious ask of my Western stomach. But even what I didn’t love I appreciated, the flavors at minimum interesting and new. Except for natto. Snotty, slimy, gunky beans that my Japanese friends couldn’t wait for me to try, for breakfast, once someone (Vinny) told them I was a “foodie.” Now, I was, and am, a gracious guest. I eat what’s in front of me and am thankful for it. I ate one natto bean and was so immediately revolted that I thought I was imagining it. I ate another and spat it back out. My hosts loved the entire scene, as was their right.

Some of the best food was fast. There was a little cafe conveniently located between the hostel and the university called “Chococro” that specialized in, you guessed it, chocolate croissants. They were not Parisian pan au chocolate, they were chococros: small croissants with just enough chocolate and plenty of butter, many-layered and not at all bready. You could eat them in two bites if you wanted, and I did, which is why I usually got two. The McDonald’s in Japan is tremendous—you can’t tell me you aren’t at least a little thrilled when you walk into a McDonald’s in another country, anticipating both the unique items they offer and the higher standards of quality—though I probably leaned on it a little too often. There was one infamous meal where I outright refused to eat McDonald’s for the second time in a day, in the middle of a scavenger hunt—which cost our team the hunt after we wasted a half-hour searching for something else to eat, only to wind up back at McDonald’s, hungrier and more frustrated.

Far more than anything else, we made meals of the glorious goods found in Family Mart, Lawson’s, and 7/11. It is not new news that the products of Japan’s convenience stores are excellent beyond the American imagination. Take the cool, buttery, crustless egg salad sandwich on white bread; or the tender fried chicken thighs (in America, “boneless wings”) under the heat lamp. The endless varieties of Pocky, especially matcha, cookies ‘n cream, and banana. The boxed coconut-flavored boba drink, with an odd texture at first sip but acceleratingly addictive. For dessert, Coolish: soft-serve vanilla ice cream in a squeezey pouch, one of the ultimate frozen treats and among the more mind-boggling non-exports to American stores. We’d rather have poorly-mixed milkshakes or a Drumstick (though there’s always the Chocotaco).

So we ate, a lot and well. We drank, a lot and less well, but not poorly. We studied and prepared final projects, the usual essays and presentations. Some of us went out nightly, or almost nightly—once, to the clubbiest club I’d ever clubbed at, a veritable palace of dance, a bombardment of flashing lights and hammering bass that seemed to use my body as the drum, with no less than five distinct dance floors and 20,000 people on them. Another morning, a few of us assembled at three a.m. for a witching hour pilgrimage to the old Tsukiji Fish Market, where the most expensive fish in the world were auctioned, the gargantuan bluefin tuna (the old market would be razed for the 2020 Olympic Games). We sat on the floor of a bone-cold bungalow waiting room from two to three a.m., huddled and hungover, then were escorted through the market, buzzing scooters and tiny trucks hauling hundreds of thousands of dollars of fish whizzing through the drizzle around us, our clumsy isle of awe and raised phones stumbling through the midst of a functional sort of chaos; then into the auction warehouse to see the millions in pounds of tuna, each of them bigger than most of us, and worth well more than an asshole or an economist (likely an asshole economist) would rate our projected collegiate value.

There were more adventures and destinations, too many to list.

And then it was the last day.

— — —

Like I said, for the most part, we’d all gotten along pretty well by the end of the trip. I counted a good number of our group as friends, and the rest I felt good enough about but you can’t be close with everyone. My paper and presentation were coming along fine, but weren’t exactly groundbreaking. Something about the Trans-Pacific Partnership: a pan-Pacific, counter-China “free” trade agreement that I’m already bored of talking about. I did not discover a passion for policy.

All ducks counted, it had been a real super duper time, and I had been a part of it, and was happy with that. So I was a bit surprised when our professor asked me, of all people, to give a speech at the closing dinner. (All right, not totally surprised. I knew the TAs liked my journals because I made them entertaining even when I didn’t want to write them, which was most of the time, and they had told the professor as much. That’s half of giving a speech—writing it—and it was also known that I was a theater kid, so…writer + actor = speechgiver. Even then it was still unexpected. There’s a part of me that’s always surprised to be noticed.) I was simultaneously flattered and horrified. I said something like, “Oh. Uh, yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay, yeah. No problemo,” with a very confident double thumbs-up. Which is the kind of response you give when you are suddenly confronted with a major double thumbs-down problemo, but not one you can run away from.

That entire day I fretted. I’d written an outline of what I wanted to say with few concrete lines, more afraid of committing to any certain words than of improvising. Speeches are meant to be presented, spoken directly to your specific audience, not read at them. The last person I wanted to be up there was a jitterbug with his face buried in a crinkled-up piece of paper—nothing sadder. Much better to be a jitterbug who looks people in the eye while he quivers from head to toe. 

It came time for us to head over to the university for the dinner. The event was held in a reception room exactly like all reception rooms proliferate upon the face of the modern world, with beige sound-absorbing walls and a forgettably-patterned dark carpet, white-clothed buffet tables and high tops, a temporary bar hiding cases of cheap wine and coolers of beer, and rows of gleaming silver chafing dishes against the wall. A Meiji U-branded podium stood on one side of the room, flanked by a pair of tall, black, rented speakers. (I felt lucky to know how to use a microphone. A lot of smart people think they know how to use microphones. Then they get in front of one and turn stupid. They point their face away so their voice projects outside the sound-capture cone and lose entire thoughts and paragraphs to muted mumbling. Or worse, they hold the mic in their hand and waggle it around so its pointing everywhere but at their mouth, only getting every tenth word if they’re lucky. The trick to not being mic-stupid is not to point the mic at your face; it’s to point your face at the mic, from real close, and keep it there. That’s it. Send this to everyone you know who’s scheduled to give a wedding speech, and send me a dollar in thanks.) The view from the room was at least nice, though. The windows looked east, across the cityscape and away from the sun, just beginning to darken and set. I ate two small bites of whatever and gulped down a beer too fast, made some inane chatter, looked out the window. Then the professor went up to the podium and was saying some things and one of those things was my name.

I don’t really know what I said up there. No evidence exists of the speech, but I’ve held onto snippets in my head. I know I threw my friend Matt immediately under the bus to lighten up the room (on the night of the drinking games in Mt. Fuji, he spent a significant and public amount of time in the bathroom, and that’s a situation that transcends language barriers). I know I got distracted at one point by the deepening orange light painting the buildings out the window. I know I choked up towards the end, something about that night being the last time with this group of people, which can be a cheap boilerplate sentiment unless the people in the room really do matter to each other, and it really is the last time, both of which were true. That’s all I remember. But people seemed to like it, and I know at least that I said what I meant. When I finished someone handed me another beer and I gulped that down even faster than the first.

Half a third beer later there was a small commotion in the hall outside the reception room. I peeked out the door and saw that a mixed crowd had gathered around the entrance to the women’s restroom. Inside there was a floor-to-ceiling portrait window that faced west—directly at the sunset. Almost all sunsets are pretty, and many are beautiful, and a few are distinctly memorable. In the moment, they are all at least worth appreciating. But as happens, this one was genuinely extraordinary; the kind of sunset that drapes colors over the world that you feel you’ve never seen, and might never see again. It was a bookmark on the evening, more lasting than any speech or sentiment. We scrunched into the bathroom and took mediocre pictures and selfies and watched it all the way down. Or, almost all the way. I left shortly before it vanished, not wanting to see it gone.

Then, we went out. 

One of the only concrete items on my pre-trip list of Japan must-dos was: “Golden Guy.” A friend had recommended it to me—“It’s like these little alleys with tiny bars that seat like two to ten people, and each bar has a theme, like there’s a Carrot Bar and an American Bar and a BDSM bar and a bunch of different music bars, and you just spend all night hopping to the next open seat at the next bar…”—and of course it sounded, to my late collegiate ears, pretty freakin’ awesome. The problem was, when I got to Japan, I couldn’t find it on Google Maps; and when I asked my Japanese friends about it, they only looked confused. On our last day in Japan though, I searched one final time, and for whatever reason that time Google finally asked, “Do you mean Golden Gai?” (Why my Japanese friends didn’t understand this still boggles me, because when we arrived at Golden Gai they said, “Ohhh! You meant Golden Gai!” The English ‘guy’ and Japanese ‘gai’ are pronounced exactly the same.) So after the reception wound down, we hopped on the train to Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is one of the busiest parts of Tokyo—which is everywhere a busy city—and where much of the nightlife is, as well as that famous intersection with that famous dog. Golden Gai is a short walk from the station, though you can’t see the neighborhood until you’re standing in front of it. We walked right past the understated alley entrances at first, then slowly doubled back. Once you do see it, it’s impressive; like a speakeasy that’s an entire square block, except actually cool and not just trying to be, and about 700% less populated by pale men in trilbys and vests. It’s a dark maze of alleys tight enough to touch both sides with your arms extended, the eyeline littered with glowing, flashing, sputtering signage for Jack Daniels, Asahi, highballs, and the names of bars: “PIECE,” “Dream Bar,” “WHO,” “Golden Dust.” The place would be seedy if it wasn’t touristy, though it wasn’t too much of that, either. As it was, it seemed a perfect kind of place to get lost in, and spat out with the sunrise.

The thing about lots of tiny bars is that you can’t all go to the same bar. Our group of about 20 immediately sundered; three of us, Alice, Dan, and I, wandered deep down one alley into the first bar with three open stools. We chatted with the bartender over the first round; this was apparently his after-dark gig. He’d work in an office all day, get off, come straight here to open the bar, work until sometime between two and four a.m., close, then wake up at eight and do it again. I was no stranger to short sleep but this was another level. We had a couple drinks and toasted to the beginning of the next morning.

Here I think we went to another bar—but I’m not sure. At some point Dan ducked off to join a group that had discovered a club (where the unfortunate Matt of the Bathroom would be targeted for a credit card scam, the poor bastard). I waited in a long line to pee at Family Mart. It got to be late-late. Alice and I glanced at another couple bars, waffled about whether to head back, and then noticed a beacon amongst the signage: “RAMEN / OPEN.” It sat above an ascending stairway with a flickering light, out of which filtered the sounds of busy conversation and clink-clatter of plateware, and the luring aroma of deep bowls of salty-savory-porky-noodle goodness. There was no decision. We entered, automatically.

I learned later that Anthony Bourdain visited this shop in an early season of No Reservations. “Sugoi Niboshi Ramen Nagi Golden Gai,” which sort of means, “Awesome Dried-Fish Broth” Ramen Nagi Golden Gai. Ramen Nagi is one of the better-known chains in Japan, though this location is unique in that it serves only one kind of ramen: “niboshi,” or sardine broth, with handcut flat noodles as wide as napkins (like little sheets), topped with bamboo shoots, scallions, and a generous portion of char siu (pork). I am a devoted patron of all late-night booze foods, from tripas burritos in tongue-searing salsa roja to bacon-wrapped onion-smothered cart-dogs to greasy broiled-crisp pizza slices; none stand up to that bowl. It was rich, effuse with intense and unrelenting flavor, fishy but not too, salty, herby, and funky, descending still further into indescribable layers as great ramen does. The noodles were chewy and interesting, and the best bites were of the fatty pork belly wrapped in one of the napkin-noodles, chased with an extra spoonful of broth. We ate it to the dregs and wandered back out into the sleepy morning, probably caught an Uber back to the hostel (I don’t remember), and slept very, very well. 

The next morning we gathered ourselves and packed, the hostel halls thick with that gloomy, busy silence that precedes the re-entry to reality. The gap between, “I can’t believe I’m here” and “I can’t believe it’s over” feels its most criminally short in the packing.

Good-byes were brief. I felt especially lucky to have given the speech the night before, for the excuse to say things that I would have struggled to otherwise, to this group that I knew had changed me, even if I didn’t know yet precisely how. Because I lived on the West Coast I’d be on a separate flight with one fellow Angeleno, and a separate car arrived to take us to Narita earlier than the rest. A few hugs and we were gone, and it was really, at that point, done.

— — —

A thing I already knew a lot about then (or at least felt a lot about) was what I called “camp syndrome” (which almost certainly has a real psychological name that isn’t “camp syndrome”). “Camp syndrome” is the emotional hangover of returning to “real life” after a significant time spent living in a different life, in a different place, often with different people and sometimes with different rules; such as at a camp, for example. In my experience it tends to be more intense than a travel hangover—itself related to but not the same as jetlag—the severity of which fluctuates depending on the reason for travel (business or vacation, business being easier) and the people you’re with, and the length of the trip.

I always liked camp, growing up, because it involved the outside—where I liked being—and often sports and outdoorsy activities—which I also liked and was good at—and being around a lot of kids my age, who I typically struggled to connect with unless we were just around each other for extended periods of time. I was never great at introductions or first impressions, and not any better at second or third impressions, but after that I tend to warm up about a degree at a time. At the end of those summer weeks I’d come home tan, stinky, good at something new, brimming with the confidence of recently forged friendships, and emotionally relieved from intense, introspective discussions of faith (nearly all of my camps were church camps). But then I’d be home, and the house would feel so empty, and my friends, despite being inarguably my friends, were hard to talk to when they weren’t right next to me all the time and I could see with my own eyes that they didn’t hate me, and the tan, stink, and confidence would all eventually wash away to reveal that I was still only exactly who I was before. Which wasn't a bad person, or a worse person. Just…less.

Returning from Japan wrapped an intense case of camp syndrome inside an extraordinary travel hangover. There I’d felt confident, respected, even a little important—which is typically the recipe for being an asshole, but those ingredients are so miniscule in my everyday life that I think their increase mostly just balanced me out—and subsequently I felt self-confident, possessing more self-respect, and even a little self-importance. At home I didn’t know what I felt, with all the context of those feelings an ocean away. I was adrift.

A couple things had changed, for certain. I knew I wanted to do something more important with my life—until then my ambitions had been such abstract things as “write for The Economist” and “get into entertainment” (despite majoring in Economics). I’d finally realized that those goals were dreams, fictional destinations lacking a route to reach them. In Japan I had been surrounded by a number of very smart people who I was convinced would go on to do great, important things (and many of whom have), and I’d kept pace with them. So I decided I wanted to make as much of a difference as I thought they would. If I couldn’t keep being the person I was at Japan Camp, I’d try to set up a life that would return me to something like that environment. I didn’t know exactly what I would do or what goal I was aiming for; only that it would Be Important and Make A Difference. I’d discover the details along the way.

Then, at the end of that summer, I moved to New York for an internship and had a not-so-minor nervous breakdown.

I moved three times in six months and yet loved the city. I worked for the NYC Wine & Food Festival, a job that I liked with people I liked, and who even hinted at the possibility of a post-graduate job that I irresponsibly turned down on the spot. I thought I’d find something more Important, and though I liked most of the people in that office I had no respect for the actual leadership, and that more than anything was the dealbreaker. “Respect for leadership” would be a recurring struggle in my career. Laudably naive to expect that people in executive positions should be smarter and more understanding, and not so frequently incompetent trainwrecks.

I had a decent final semester back at college that was far more about the grand finale of my extracurricular musical theater career than it was about my senior thesis. I remember laughing as I left my last class, the anticlimax was so phenomenal. I knew that was the last economics I’d ever really do.

I graduated and moved home and remained unbalanced, shifting from foot to foot, job to job, dream to dream.

I worked freelance and then at my family’s restaurant for a while. Then I got a steady startup marketing job for a few years and was good at it; but I hated telling people that was what I did. Marketing? Was that what I was now? A marketer? That question, and the increasingly toxic office culture, slowly killed that career for me. Then I wrote copy, freelance, for a little bit, and learned to despise it—copy is to writing as a corpse is to a body. I went back to the family restaurant and that was at least a simple, good thing. There I could make a difference; maybe even an Important one. Eventually I started writing—or rather, actually sharing my writing, you know, where people could read it.

And here we are, a long ways from Japan and yet still, obviously, thinking about it. I’ve wondered why.

I began this piece intending to write about one great meal in Japan. Then I realized the greatness of the meal was tied to the context of the trip itself, that it was catharsis in a bowl of noodles. Then I wondered whether the meal was central to the story at all; and interestingly enough, it is. It may be a little sad, but that meal was the last time I felt concrete in life. It was the last time more things seemed to make sense than not, and I knew my place in the world and my goals even abstract as they were, and I really believed they were mine to achieve. Sitting at that counter I was on cliff’s edge and didn’t know it—like an unsuspecting idiot about to make an accidentally Darwinian TikTok—and shortly thereafter I was flailing in freefall, ears full of nothing more than rushing wind. I was changed, not how I thought, and it stuck, not in the way I intended.

I think I wrote this piece now of all times because, dire and aimless as life remains, there’s at least a sense of rebuilding about it. There are specific answers to big questions. There are paths to dreams, twisted but extant. And in the still-rushing wind, a hopeful draft of petrichor, of wet pavement in the dark morning.

— — —

When I think back to that time, I think about how much I didn’t know, and how much I have forgotten since. I regret very little of it, though there are always regrets. It was not perfect, even draped in the warm twilight of memory. But when I find myself wishing I had been better, I think that I could only have been who I was, and even that person wished he was better. He wished too much, if anything.

So while we wait for the Annoying Big (Really?) Good Thing, here’s one more recommendation for my favorite spot in the South Bay. I’ve recommended them in several lists already—but they’re worth being recommended this many times, and then many more times.

Here’s a perfect weekend morning.

Wake up at 7, or 7:30, or 8am latest (the day is already ruined for so many of you, but bear with me). Do not shower; instead immediately throw on comfy, warm clothes and check the traffic to San Pedro. It’s light, because this is LA and a grand total of seven other people are active at this blessed (cursed) hour. Start the car with all the confidence of a two or three hours-better person than the rest of the city. The pot of gold (burrito of chorizo) at the end of this rainbow is already earned.

Hit the road. With the unpacked highways it’s a blazing-fast 45-minute drive. Put on a podcast; the silliest, least essential one.

About 39 minutes into the podcast, the 110 reaches its southern delta, spilling into San Pedro and Terminal Island. The peninsular portside community is as quiet as anywhere in LA on weekend mornings. Drive down Gaffey, the pleasant main drag, past fast food and diner and gritty neighborhood joints of every brand and nationality, many of them already open and united in serving dark drip coffee to the usual early birds. Make a right on 19th, then a left on Alma. A couple blocks later, there are the next-door sibling stores. There are a few other bleary-eyed, bundled-up folks waiting around—but this line’s a mere shadow of what it’ll be in another hour.

Stop by Chori-Man first. The order window slides open. Order the Tolucan green chorizo burrito with everything. Drop a few extra bucks in the can with the taped-on note that says, “Local college students working here!! Please tip!” Then, jump in the short, sleepy line for Colossus Bread. The intrepid local baker has one of the best immediate welcome smells in the city, a breeze of a hundred variations of butter and caramelized sugar and fruit baking happily away. Get a croissant and a seasonal danish and a black coffee (the wait for espresso drinks tends to hold up the line; plus, nothing goes better with an overcast coastal morning and rich pastries and a spicy, salty burrito than bitter-plain coffee). Exit Colossus and the burrito is ready to pick up from Chori-Man. Throw the brown papered treasure in the car and drive a few short minutes to White Point Beach.

(So far, this is an awful lot of effort for what has been described as “a perfect weekend morning.” I understand. Many other iterations of perfect weekend mornings probably involve as minimal an amount of effort as is possible for a human being to exert. Breakfast may even be served in bed. But part of the reason this particular morning rates as perfect is in the effort of the journey required (if you’re from any part of LA that isn’t San Pedro) and in the choice to undergo that effort. This morning is not achieved by convenience. It’s not for the ‘gram, though it’ll be awfully pretty. It’s for the sheer, luxurious pleasance of it from start to finish. Which reminds me—we aren’t finished.)

White Point Beach.

Cruising down Western, make a left at the bluff and a right into the White Point parking lot. Pay the fee, then roll carefully down the steep hill overlooking the rocky half-moon cove below, already populated with surfers and spectators. Drive to the far end of the parking lot, where a couple dozen tall palm trees creak and bend in the gentle ocean gusts. Gather your breakfast picnic materials and proceed into the Royal Palms Beach Park, across the enduring terrazzo-tiled floor and past cavernous, defunct fireplaces scooped out of the cliff face, vestiges of a resort long gone. Pick a concrete table under the palms, waves crashing a dozen yards away. They, and the trees swishing in the intervals, are all there is to hear.

Tuck in without a further moment’s hesitation. There is plenty of time to eat, and breathe, and watch the water and the trees and the surfers in the distance and the slowly approaching man walking his two sweet dogs, one tiny and ancient and the other friendly and giant, as dog pairs oddly tend to be. There are places to go and things to do today, this weekend, next week, soon…but later. All later. For a while yet the perfect morning continues. As long as the burrito, and the seasonal danish, and half the croissant, and most of the coffee last, anyway. And a little longer still. Maybe as along as the trees swish and the waves crash. And that’s plenty.

Find The Chori-Man and Colossus Bread via their links here.

I’ve recommended Chori-Man and Colossus about seven different ways in this newsletter now. If you haven’t been, it’s officially on you.

So murmurs Jada Pinkett Smith’s enigmatic club owner, “Rome,” as the eponymous, and apparently infamous, “Magic Mike” Lane drifts into her room. With one line we understand there is history here; long, deep, messy.

It is also an insane string of words to hear in the middle of a Magic Mike movie. “A ghost is a ghost??” Where are we? Who is this? What’s happening? Did The Bard take a punch-up pass on this script?

It’s neither the first nor last, but perhaps the most memorable of Magic Mike XXL’s implications that a dense mythology permeates the — sorry, checking my notes — right, exotic dancing/stripping/“entertainment” community of the southeastern seaboard. In nearly every scene some worldly new character swaggers up to Channing Tatum’s Mike, shakes their head in disbelief, and spins out some yarn to the tune of, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Magic Mike. You disappeared, man. I heard you got outta the game three years ago. Yet behold, here you are, flesh incarnate, standing before me.” He’s a strippe-sorry, a male entertainer. And you, Magic Mike XXL, are telling me that his legend precedes him? And to such a fanfaric degree that apparently everyone between Miami and Myrtle Beach knows that Mike Lane left his strip show and started a custom furniture business precisely three years ago?

But…I do, actually, buy it. That unexpected mythos is a major part of what makes that movie dick- uh, tick. The movie doesn’t think it’s ridiculous — the lore is presented with abject sincerity. This is simply their world. In it dwell legendary figures, like Mike and Rome. When they’re onscreen, you understand the notoriety; Mike is, of course, “Magic,” and Rome, only introduced in the latter half of XXL, is a conquering presence. The gravity is certainly goofy; but it pulls nonetheless. In spite of all the preconceptions and associations we the audience may have with entertainers, to Mike and to Rome and everyone else, the world is real, the stakes are high, and the consequences of the past are playing out in real time, and given great respect.

A similar sort of thing happens in the indisputable Patrick Swayze haymaker, 1989’s Road House. The film opens at a rockin’ bar in Memphis, Tennessee. The place is packed with gyrating bodies, raised voices and the house band blending into a raucous Friday night cacophony. A couple of guys get unruly; Swayze saunters over to calm them down. He gets a knife-slash in the arm for his effort. “I’ve always wanted to try ya, Dalton!” shouts the knife-wielder, manically. Dalton (Swayze) replies, “All right. Let’s take this outside.” They head out to the parking lot. The knife-wielder and his buddies turn around to confront Dalton — only to be faced with eight large bouncers blocking the front door, Dalton standing behind them, smirking as he walks back into the club, the situation successfully cooled.

Moments later, Dalton’s patching up his arm in the club office when a man walks in, sporting a tailored suit fixed with a bolo tie, a real Southern Gentleman. He’s looking for a bouncer; Dalton corrects him. “I’m a cooler.” The man says he just bought this small town seedy bar, a fixer-upper with promise, “...the kind of place they sweep the eyeballs up after closing. I need the best to help me clean the place up.”

Dalton replies, “Wade Garrett’s the best.”

The man says, “Wade Garrett’s gettin’ old.”

This is nuts. A bouncer who’s locally famous for winning fights at a popular club? I’ll buy that. A bouncer—okay, cooler, who’s so famous that some guy who bought a bar somewhere heard of him, and decided to seek him out because he “needs the best?” And Dalton’s not, actually, the best? The best is another cooler named Wade Garrett who’s also famous enough as a bouncer that this guy knows “he’s gettin’ old?”

Of course, that’s not the last time in Road House that the Legend of Dalton and the World of Coolers comes up. Much like with Mike Lane in MMXXL, throughout Road House Swayze’s Dalton is the subject of numerous hinting proclamations, “I heard’a you!” and “You’re smaller than I thought you’d be” and “You fuck with him, you seal your fate.” All, it should be noted, long before he ever does anything of note onscreen. Ultimately the mythmaking fits because Road House turns out to be a Western; with fists for pistols and brawls in place of gunfights.

So how are we to feel about such ridiculous mythologizing in stories ostensibly set in our own world? Could there be, perhaps, something beyond the surface silliness?

The fact that both movies are set, more or less, on our Earth, in our America, in our mundane small towns and monochromatic coastal cities, is what makes the legend-building feel ridiculous. They whirl a bit of fantasy into our gritty existence, where the fantastical is usually reserved for the ancient past or distant future, or more boldly for young adults’ fiction. The subjects are important, too; one a stripper, the other a bouncer (though interestingly both of them request alternate titles, “male entertainer” and “cooler”). Stripping remains considered a socially fringe profession; a last resort. Bouncers are seen as obstacles, the intimidating guys you have to get past to get to the good times, and then they’re forgotten until the event that they become violently necessary. Is it so ridiculous to weave these outlier professions a legend, when every industry has its leaders, its faces and voices of note, that are increasingly treated with religious exultation? Or maybe it’s that all modern occupational myth is inherently ridiculous, from the toxic legions that slobber praise over Snyder, Musk, and Vaynerchuk to celebrity chef culture to the theocracy of High Fashion to, most prominently, politics — and we’ve just become calloused to the joke. What makes the unexpected gravitas of Magic Mike XXL and Road House feel ironic in comparison? What makes our everyday demagoguery so normal?

Hell, I don’t know. But the legendary treatment does make those movies better. I still laugh every time I watch both films. They are inescapably silly. Yet, in spite of the silliness, it’s admirable that the likes of Mike Lane and John Dalton are celebrated as bonafide heroes, with their own impossible victories and signature moves, that travel with rumor as their vanguard and whispers in their wake. They are respected by their own stories; and so deserve at least a little respect from us, too.

If you ever get a chance to see Magic Mike XXL in a theater with people who like it — do it. It is one of my few universal recommendations.

New Orleans is one of the country’s great food cities, if not the country’s Great Food City. I, having visited less than a handful of times, watched some travel shows, and done a bit of research, cannot produce a comprehensive dining list of New Orleans. Hell, I can’t produce a comprehensive dining list of LA, and I’ve been here 30 years. And that’s in addition to my fundamental disbelief in anything being, or claiming to be, comprehensive — which we don’t need to go further into here.

Instead, this list was built specifically for a couple friends of mine as a product of Off We Go to Eat (where I build personalized food recommendation lists for people I like). The prompt, paraphrased: “We’re in New Orleans for three days and two nights. For dinner we’re looking for ‘yummy cocktail local hip vibes,’ and for lunch ‘casual local fun.’” They did indeed go on to enjoy the vibes, explore locally, and have fun.

So with that, here’s my “Yummy Cocktail Local Hip Casual Fun Vibes” list for New Orleans; which might be the only New Orleans food list not to feature any beignets.

(Though to immediately undermine that, I do recommend both Cafe du Monde and Morning Call.)

Enjoy.

Breakfast & Brunch

Molly’s Rise & Shine (11th Ward, 2368 Magazine St, New Orleans, LA 70130). Molly’s is a brunch joint from the fine folks of Turkey and the Wolf (see Lunch). There’s comforting, filling breakfast to be had here, especially anything in between or on top of or having anything to do with biscuits. Magazine St makes an excellent walk in both directions, full of many many shops and cafes and eccentrically decorated yards and porches.

Bacchanal (Bywater, 600 Poland Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117). Here’s the thing with Bacchanal: my parents have been here and loved it, which is nice for them, but tells me that Bacchanal can’t be that cool. Then again, my cool NOLA friends (who are so cool) also love it, which tells me it might be that cool. Breaking the tie are a few chefs and food folks I follow on Instagram who’ve also been there in the last year and all loved it (and not only loved it, but practically yelled from the rooftops that it totally rules), so Bacchanal, I think, really must be that cool. Who could have guessed my parents would go to a cool place?

Anyway, Bacchanal is a bombastic wine bar/cheese store/backyard patio hangout with live music and sneaky-delicious small plates. A place where anyone with a heart and a stomach and some semblance of a brain can have a great time. Probably the easiest recommendation on this list. Also open for lunch, dinner, the whole day long. Basically, go whenever!

Lunch

Turkey & The Wolf (11th Ward, 739 Jackson Ave, New Orleans, LA 70130). Turkey & The Wolf is not just a neighborhood sandwich-focused restaurant — it is also the purveyor of the country’s best restaurant merch. You’re probably here for the stuff between the bread — the famous Bologna, the famous grilled collards, the famous Tomato — and it’s tremendous, unique stuff, but there’s also a fantastic supporting cast of sides and specials here not to be missed, with plenty of somethings for everyone. They also have cocktails, and they are also great.

Bearcat CBD (Downtown? 845 Carondelet St, New Orleans, LA 70130). Bearcat is a real cutey-brunchey-lunchey-hippy-vibey place with an expansive, accommodating, yet substantial menu. I tried to go with my cool NOLA friends but it was busy. But it looked cool, and their menu really is drool-inspiring.

Napoleon House (French Quarter, 500 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70130). Napoleon House is a legend, an old-as-old-gets tavern in the middle of the Quarter that, miraculously, resists the tourist trappings and lives up to its reputation. You’re here for the muffuletta — that glorious, olive oil-soaked cold cut discus of a sandwich — and also very solid versions of classic NOLA fare. Get a Pimm’s Cup and some gumbo, maybe some red beans and rice, and you’ll be happy. Great for lunch or a nice afternoon snack, or a late dinner. Nowhere’s bad to sit — there’s something fascinating to look at no matter where your eyes wander — but the courtyard is where it’s at. 

Dinner

Saint John (French Quarter, 1117 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA 70116). I had an all-time great dinner here with some friends the last time I visited New Orleans. It’s fine dining, but new fine dining (as opposed to dusty decrepit fine dining), and fun new fine dining at that. It’s Creole in the Quarter — and of the many, many restaurants to offer Creole in the Quarter, you could hardly do better, and could easily do far worse. Get the fish.

Herbsaint (Warehouse District near Lafayette Square, 701 St Charles Ave, New Orleans, LA 70130). Herbsaint is an upscale French-NOLA joint on all the lists. I’ve never been there, but I’d definitely like to. Expect desperately well-executed small plates that update regularly — a perfect “last night in New Orleans” dinner.

Saint Germain (Bywater, 3054 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117). The final ‘fecta of our unofficial “Saints” trifecta of dinner recommendations (tell me New Orleans is Catholic without telling me…etc). Saint Germain is a cozy wine bar with a 10-course tasting menu that accommodates dietary needs & preferences (as long as you let them know ahead of time). By many accounts, it’s a real to-do, but one that’s actually worth to-doing. Definitely make a reservation.

Jacques-Imo’s (East Carollton, 8324 Oak St, New Orleans, LA 70118). In many ways the precursor to later NOLA street party restaurants like Turkey and the Wolf, Jacques-Imo’s is creative Cajun at its most creative and Cajun. You are here to eat what Louisiana does best, with absolute abandon. It is a hell of a time; as long as you can get a reservation, or are willing to wait for a table. (If you do go and the line is wild, Seafood Sally’s is nearby and also very good.)

Cocktails / Bars / Also Dinner But Lighter / Also Lunch

Bayou Wine & Beer Garden (Mid-City, 315 N Rendon, New Orleans, LA 70119). Recommended by a friend who grew up in and worked in the city. One of New Orleans’ great dining features is the backyard (like the aforementioned Bacchanal’s), and this is an ultra-casual and spacious one smack in the middle of town near the top of the Lafitte Greenway. A little less touristed and more neighborhoody than Bacchanal or The Tchoup Yard (which is also plenty of fun), you go to Bayou purely to have a good time, occasionally more, rarely less.

Manolito (French Quarter, 508 Dumaine St, New Orleans, LA 70116). Manolito is a cozy Cuban hideaway that kinda feels like it doesn’t belong in the French Quarter, in the best way. Meaning: it’s good, it’s a genuine article, and it isn’t frequented by one million billion tourists.

Beachbum Jerry’s Latitude 29 (French Quarter, 321 N Peters St, New Orleans, LA 70130). Listen, I know this place is called “Beachbum Jerry’s.” It’s apparently an incredible tiki bar; the tiki bar to end all tiki bars, even. It has good bar bites. Sounds lovely. But…tiki bars bug me. Something to do with the wholehearted appropriation of Pacific Islander iconography and culture, probably (even if it is mostly celebratory). Then again, if I can tolerate Islands, I can tolerate Beachbum Jerry’s (and boy can I tolerate Islands — the cheese fries are especially tolerable). So here it is, recommended.

Cane & Table (French Quarter, 1113 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA 70116). Terrible name. Terrible. Name. Cane & Table…get it? Eh? Ehhhh?

But also…the food and drinks look pretty good? Plus super super cute patio seating? If you can get past the name, which is no simple ask, it might just be worth a visit. (Note: my friends can confirm it is indeed plenty worth visiting, despite the name.)

Cure (Freret, 4905 Freret St, New Orleans, LA 70115). Crafty cocktails in a refurbished old firehouse. If you’re nearby, this is an easy stop at any time of day.

The Spotted Cat (Frenchmen St, 623 Frenchmen St, New Orleans, LA 70117). The Spotted Cat is my favorite music spot on Frenchmen St; which isn’t saying much, as I’ve only spent about three hours, lifetime, on Frenchmen St. It was a heck of a three hours, though. If you do go to Frenchmen, follow the crowds and the good music; not just the loud music. The best bands are worth standing in a packed bar for (or just outside of it). No food!

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (Bar) (French Quarter, 941 Bourbon St, New Orleans, LA 70116). An authentic (former) blacksmith shop and now famous watering hole, Lafitte’s claims to be the oldest bar in the US. There’s some dispute on that point, but the daiquiris, hurricanes, drunk-but-talented pianist and smiling stumbling late night crowd are indisputably a bash of a time. One of the few tourist traps where it’s actually fun to be trapped. No food!

Got any secret Yummy Cozy Local Casual Cocktail Vibes (or whatever this thing is called) tucked away that you want to share? Put ‘em in the comments and they might just make a future version of this list!

Later skaters ✌