I’ve always been a reflective person. My mother would probably say I ruminate, which is also true. These days I like to think my introspection falls somewhere between the two.

Birthdays, the end of a year, the changing of the seasons—they all tend to send me to the same place. But I think I prefer the change of seasons. There’s something gentler about it. A birthday asks you to take stock all at once, whereas summer becoming fall happens gradually, almost without your noticing, until one evening the air feels different and you realize another stretch of your life has passed.

It’s been a surprisingly busy summer, certainly busier than I might have imagined for myself a year ago. There’s been fishing, menswear parties, new friends, budding creative collaborations, more fishing, concerts, and a fair number of trips out of Chicago. Flights are booked for Montana this fall. There are vague but increasingly real plans for some bigger international trips next year. In the meantime, I have more weekends at cabins on rivers and lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan to look forward to.

I’ve probably traveled more in the past year than I did in the five before it. I’ve certainly spent more time outdoors. A year ago, I’m not sure I could have pictured much of this.

There was a version of my life I once thought I understood pretty clearly. Where I would live, who I would spend it with, what the next few years might look like. That version is gone now. Increasingly, I’m realizing there probably is no fixed version at all. Every year seems to produce another draft. Sometimes it is heavily influenced by another person. Usually it is almost entirely of my own fabrication. Occasionally it’s somewhere in between.

Heartbreak is a strange thing because it forces you to confront just how much of the future you imagined depended on someone else being there. For now, I’ve chosen to remain alone for this stretch of life. Not out of some grand principle, but because solitude has given me the room to see what happens when I stop trying quite so hard to decide what comes next.

There is something magical and chaotic about loving another person. The moment you build a life in relation to someone else, you surrender a meaningful amount of control over your own. Their decisions become part of the life you’re building. Their fears, ambitions, desires, and circumstances become entangled with yours. We like to talk about love as though permanence is one of its inherent qualities, but I’m not sure it is. Permanence is something we tend to assign to love after the fact. Love itself makes no such promise.

Of course, the problem of control extends well beyond love.

John Lennon famously sang that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Abraham Lincoln, in a very different context, once wrote that he had not controlled events so much as events had controlled him. Lately I’ve started to think love works a little like both.

You make plans for it. You imagine where it is going. You convince yourself that you understand what it means. And then, somewhere along the way, it becomes one of the forces rearranging you instead.

Maybe that is part of what makes looking backward so complicated. I can miss pieces of a life without wanting the life itself back. I can feel affection for what existed without believing it should have lasted forever.

Those feelings once seemed contradictory to me. They don’t anymore, albeit some days it’s still hard to feel rationale about it all.

What surprises me most now is not that the future I once imagined disappeared. It’s how much life appeared in the space it left behind. That space has filled itself in surprisingly ordinary ways.

There are fly rods leaning against the wall of my condo now. Boxes of feathers and hooks have overtaken parts of my desk. My calendar, once something I barely bothered looking at on weekends, is increasingly full of cabins, concerts, dinners, fishing trips, and flights somewhere else. I have friends in my life who were strangers a year ago. There are places across the Midwest I now associate with particular bends in rivers, gas stations, bars, and stretches of road.

None of this feels like a replacement. That distinction matters to me.

I don’t think a new life arrives fully formed after an old one falls apart. Mostly you accumulate it without realizing what you’re doing. You agree to go fishing. You accept an invitation. You get on a plane. You meet someone new. You start writing again. You become interested in some small thing and then, through the strange compounding effect of attention, that small thing becomes a meaningful part of your life.

Eventually you look around and realize the scenery has changed. Maybe this is part of why fishing has suited me so well lately.

There is a lot of preparation involved in fishing for something that ultimately gives you very little control. You can study the weather, watch the flows, tie the right flies, leave Chicago before sunrise, and arrive at the river convinced you have made every correct decision. The river remains entirely indifferent to your preparation.

So you adjust.

You walk farther than you intended. You change flies. Once. Twice. Three times. You fish a different stretch of water. Sometimes the day you had planned simply refuses to happen, and another one takes its place.

I’m wary of making fishing responsible for too many life lessons. It is, after all, mostly an elaborate way of bothering animals. But I suspect there is something useful in repeatedly putting yourself in situations where attention matters more than control. I’ve done an awful lot of that in the past year.

I don’t know what version of my life I’ll be writing about a year from now. Right now, I can’t imagine current circumstances changing all that much. But, I’ve thought that before.

In the meantime, there are still plans. Montana is on my calendar. There are rivers I want to fish before it gets too cold, people I want to see, trips being discussed for next year. I am no less inclined to imagine the future than I ever was. I’m just a little less convinced that imagining it gives me any ownership over what happens.

For now, summer is ending. The evenings are getting shorter. Soon enough I’ll be standing in a river somewhere wearing more layers than I want to admit are necessary, watching leaves collect along the bank. Maybe a dusting of snow. Then it will be winter in Chicago again.

Another season, another version. I suppose I’m becoming more comfortable meeting him when he gets here.

Some people like to fish. Other people organize their lives around fishing.

I have fished for most of my life, but until recently I belonged firmly to the first group.

Every summer since I was born, I’ve spent time in northern Wisconsin. Most of my early fishing happened from a small aluminum boat, a kayak, or the end of a dock. We caught bluegill, crappie, bass, and whatever else happened to bite. Rivers had not yet crossed my mind. Neither had groundwater, insect hatches, leader formulas, forage cycles, or any of the other things I would eventually use to make a relatively simple activity far more complicated.

As a kid, I don’t think I had the patience for much of it. I liked catching fish but was less interested in the waiting that often preceded it. As I got older, I developed a greater appreciation for both the ritual and the technique, learning bits and pieces from my cousins, who were generally better fishermen than I was. They had learned from their grandfather, a lifelong fisherman who seemed to possess the kind of accumulated, highly specific knowledge that can’t be separated from years spent on the same water.

My dad liked to fish too, though not in a way that fully resonated with me. He was perfectly content to soak a worm beneath a bobber or cast out a large lure and let it sit. More often than not, he would have two rods in play and lose a fish to whichever one he wasn’t watching.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with fishing that way. Being outside is reason enough, and a bobber disappearing remains one of fishing’s more perfect pieces of visual information. But even then, I found myself drawn to methods that required a little more attention. I never particularly enjoyed fishing with live bait, and I certainly don’t now.

For years, my preferred setup was an ultralight spinning rod, a light jig head, and a small soft-plastic bait. Usually nothing elaborate: a tube, twister tail, or two-inch minnow profile on light line. What appealed to me wasn’t necessarily that it caught more fish, though it often did. I liked the constant, low-level concentration it demanded.

Every cast required some involvement. I had to watch the line, maintain contact with the lure, and decide whether the faint tap I felt was a bluegill, a crappie, a rock, or nothing at all. Occasionally it was something much larger than the tackle was intended for—a pike or walleye or large bass that turned an otherwise routine cast into several minutes of improvisation.

The fishing felt active. I was not merely waiting for something to happen. I was trying to make it happen. Looking back, that preference probably explains why fly fishing eventually found me.

About a decade ago, while in graduate school, I traveled to northern Alaska to assist with a research project. My advisor had worked as a fly fishing guide in a previous life and suggested that we bring rods. I bought an entry-level Orvis outfit, received a crash course in casting around camp, and spent evenings after fieldwork catching Arctic grayling in a nearby stream.

Grayling are well suited to making someone believe they understand fly fishing. They are beautiful, willing, and strange-looking enough to feel exotic, with their oversized, sail-like dorsal fins appearing almost disproportionate to the rest of the fish. I remember loving the casting, the moving water, and the directness of watching a fish respond to something at the surface.

Yet, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I wasn’t hooked.

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For the next eight years, that fly rod mostly gathered dust. Every summer I optimistically packed it for Wisconsin, strung it up once or twice, and paddled around in a kayak hoping something might happen. Usually it didn’t. In nearly a decade I caught only a handful of panfish with it. I had no real understanding of what I was doing and, more importantly, had invested almost no effort in figuring it out.

Then, about a year ago, changes in my life forced me to reconsider how I was spending my time. I found myself looking for something that would bring me back to my outdoor roots while also feeling productive, engaging, and capable of occupying both my hands and my mind.

Fly fishing had lingered in the background for years. As someone who studied hydrogeology in grad school, it seemed like a natural fit. Rivers, groundwater, stream ecology, and watersheds were already interesting to me. The systems that made a fishery possible—the geology beneath it, the land uses surrounding it, the water entering and leaving it—were often as compelling as the fish themselves.

In Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, where I now fish often, that connection is particularly visible. Much of its trout water begins underground, moving through fractured limestone and dolomite before emerging from springs cold enough to support trout through the summer (in contrast to warmwater systems, where trout are often stocked for sport but cannot naturally reproduce and rarely survive through the warm months). The streams appear pastoral and self-contained, but they are tied to everything happening across the surrounding watershed. A sinkhole, farm field, vegetated buffer, restored bank, or poorly managed hillside can eventually make itself known in the water.

In a literal sense, the stream is groundwater made visible. The fishing felt like the missing piece, a way to experience those systems from inside them rather than simply thinking about them from a professional distance. The problem, as I understood it, was geography.

I live in Chicago, and in my mind fly fishing meant trout. Trout lived in mountain streams, spring creeks, and cold rivers hours away. Chicago didn’t have trout streams, so I assumed it didn’t really have fly fishing either.

What I eventually learned was that fly fishing is less about the fish than the method—and even the method is more flexible than its culture sometimes suggests. Trout may dominate the literature, photography, equipment industry, and general mythology of fly fishing, but they don’t own the sport.

There are bluegill in retention ponds, bass in suburban rivers, carp in urban waterways, pike in inland lakes, and freshwater drum cruising the edges of Lake Michigan. All of them can be caught with a fly rod.

Once that realization clicked, most of the barriers I had imagined disappeared. As with most things that capture my attention, I didn’t ease into it. I jumped in headfirst.

I read every book I could find, watched instructional videos, listened to podcasts, and ultimately signed up for a two-day introductory course through a local fly shop in Wisconsin’s Driftless region. Before the class even arrived, I pulled my old rod out of storage and began making evening pilgrimages to suburban rivers after work and on weekends.

The early results were modest: bluegill, small bass, wind knots, tangled leaders, bad presentations, and casts that looked considerably better in my head than they did in the videos I would take of myself. But fish started coming to hand. More importantly, I began developing enough confidence to understand why something had worked—or at least to invent a plausible explanation afterward.

By the time the class arrived, a few weeks of obsession had rendered much of the introductory material unnecessary. I could cast well enough. I knew the basic knots. I had accumulated more flies than any beginner had a right to own. I had read about holding water, drag-free drifts, and the general importance of putting a fly in front of a fish before becoming overly concerned about whether it was the perfect fly.

The instructors still offered valuable guidance, but the real significance of that weekend was simpler: I caught trout on a fly rod for the first time with some understanding of why it had happened.

That experience opened the door to something much larger.

The attraction wasn’t necessarily trout. It was the realization that fly fishing contained nearly endless layers. Learning to cast led to learning new knots. Knots led to leaders and tippet. Catching trout led to reading water. Reading water led to aquatic insects. Insects led to fly tying. Fly tying led to questions about forage, stream temperature, habitat restoration, conservation, public access, and more.

Every answer uncovered at least three additional questions.

Before long, fly fishing began shaping the rhythm of my life. There were predawn departures from Chicago and monthly trips into the Driftless. Campsites tucked into narrow valleys. Winter evenings spent at a vise tying Pink Squirrels, Woolly Buggers, Parachute Adams, and increasingly questionable experiments that rarely looked as convincing in daylight as they had at midnight. New friendships with people similarly consumed by the pursuit. Notes scribbled after long days on the water. Plans for future trips made before the current one had ended.

Perhaps most surprisingly, I began paying closer attention to everything surrounding the fishing.

The fish were still the objective, but they were no longer the entire point. I noticed barred owls calling beyond camp, pileated woodpeckers working over dead trees, early wildflowers appearing along streambanks, and the way a valley changed character as a storm front moved in. I paid attention to water temperature and flow rates, cloud cover, insect activity, stream gradient, exposed bedrock, and the difference between a bank that merely looked fishy and one that actually held fish. Ironically, the deeper I fell into fly fishing, the less interested I became in trout alone.

I still love trout. There is a reason they occupy such a central place in fly-fishing culture. They live in beautiful places, reward technical skill, and provide a convenient excuse to spend a day wandering through cold water. But the more I learned, the more I became interested in species many fly anglers overlook—or at least treat as something to pursue while waiting for trout season.

If I had to choose a favorite freshwater fish, it probably wouldn’t be a trout. It would be the smallmouth bass.

Smallmouth possess many of the qualities anglers admire in trout while adding several of their own. They can be opportunistic without being indiscriminate, aggressive without being predictable, and capable of turning even a modest current into a significant advantage once hooked. They eat insects, crayfish, minnows, and nearly anything else they can overpower. Depending on the season, they can be caught with delicate surface presentations, drifting flies, or streamers that are closer in appearance to something from a saltwater box than a trout box.

Warmwater fly fishing has its own history and canon, even if trout fishing tends to receive most of the literary attention. Bob Clouser developed his Deep Minnow for smallmouth on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River in the 1980s. Its dumbbell eyes cause it to ride hook-point-up and move with a jigging action. It is now one of the most widely used flies in both fresh and saltwater.

It is also, mechanically speaking, a jig that happens to be cast with a fly line. That distinction began to matter to me.

The more I tied and fished Clouser Minnows, buggers, crayfish patterns, and other weighted flies, the harder it became to maintain a clean philosophical border between fly fishing and the ultralight spin fishing I had done for years. Both methods used weight, profile, movement, and depth to suggest prey. Both depended on understanding where fish were holding and what they expected their food to do.

One used the weight of the line to deliver the offering. The other used the weight of the lure. The fish seemed largely unconcerned with the cultural and mechanical differences.

Carp complicated the distinction further for me.

Carp occupy a strange position in American fishing culture. Depending on the angler, they are a nuisance, a trash fish, something to be ignored entirely, or some combination of the three. Yet, through the lens of many fly anglers, they possess nearly every quality people claim to admire in more celebrated species, like saltwater’s prized bonefish.

A carp feeding in shallow water demands an accurate cast, careful observation, stealth, patience, and a willingness to fail repeatedly. Often the first challenge is simply determining what the fish is doing. A carp moving steadily across a flat is different from one tailing over a patch of soft bottom. A fish with its back out of the water may be feeding confidently or may already be so shallow and alert that any poorly placed cast will send it fleeing.

The cast usually needs to arrive close enough to be noticed but far enough away not to spook the fish. The fly must sink into its path without dragging unnaturally. Then the angler has to detect the take, which might be nothing more than a change in posture or the slightest movement of the leader.

I have cast at carp hundreds—probably thousands—of times and caught only a few. They are capable of exposing nearly every flaw in an angler’s approach, which is precisely what makes them useful.

Carp taught me to look before casting. Smallmouth taught me to think about movement and forage. Trout taught me about current, drag, and the importance of presenting something at the fish’s level rather than merely somewhere in the same river. Eventually, all of those lessons began following me home.

For years, I largely overlooked Chicago as a fishing destination. When people imagine great fly fishing, they probably picture trout streams in Montana, salmon rivers in Alaska or Scotland, saltwater flats in the Caribbean, or big wild water in Patagonia. They generally do not picture someone double-hauling fly line beside a bike path while a bus passes behind him on an urban highway.

Yet Chicago sits beside one of the more unusual fisheries in North America. Lake Michigan had been there the entire time.

The lake contains both native fish and the results of one of the largest ongoing experiments in fisheries management. Pacific salmon were introduced to the Great Lakes in the 1960s, in part to create a sport fishery and put pressure on the enormous alewife population. Today, hatchery-raised coho, Chinook, steelhead, brown trout, and lake trout are stocked at locations along the Illinois shoreline, including several Chicago harbors.

Around them is an equally interesting nearshore fishery. Smallmouth bass hold along rock and concrete structure. Carp move into protected shallows. Freshwater drum cruise within casting distance of shore. Northern pike, largemouth bass, channel catfish, perch, and many other species appear in harbors, lagoons, and along breakwalls.

The opportunities change constantly. Coho may move within reach of shore in spring. Smallmouth relate to warming rocks and the movements of gobies and other forage. Mature salmon appear around harbors in the fall. Brown trout and steelhead become possibilities as the water cools. Much of the year, the lake looks empty even when it isn’t.

Naturally, I first tried to approach nearly all of it with a fly rod. Sometimes it worked. Standing on a breakwall stripping a baitfish pattern on a sinking line while waves rolled in from open water felt about as close to saltwater fishing as one can get in the Midwest. There is a particular satisfaction in making a long cast into green water while knowing that almost anything could be swimming through it. Far more often, nothing happened.

Lake Michigan has a way of exposing the limitations of any overly romantic idea about fishing. While a fly rod may technically be perfectly capable of catching a coho, brown trout, or smallmouth in the big lake, that does not mean it is always the most efficient way to find one. There are days when the fish are close, the wind is manageable, and a sinking line allows a streamer to move naturally through the right part of the water column. There are other days when the wind is blowing sideways, the productive water begins beyond the range of the average fly cast, or the fish are holding closer to the bottom than I can comfortably reach.

In those situations, I don’t believe a spinning rod is a moral failure. It is simply a better tool.

A spoon or swimbait can cover water quickly and stay in the strike zone through wind and waves. A jig can probe a harbor wall vertically. A Ned rig can crawl along rock, pause beside structure, and imitate a goby or crayfish with a degree of control that is near impossible to reproduce with a fly line. Conventional tackle can help identify where fish are holding, how deep they are, and what kind of retrieve they respond to.

That information does not stop being useful when I pick up a fly rod. The deeper I got into fly fishing, the more I found myself rediscovering spin fishing—not as a replacement, but as a complementary tool.

My years with an ultralight spinning rod had already taught me more about fly fishing than I initially realized. I understood that small baits could catch large fish. I knew the importance of maintaining contact with something light in moving water. I understood that a strike might register as a tap, a line jump, or simply an unexpected absence of weight. I had already spent years casting toward cover, varying retrieves, and thinking about how a lure moved when I could no longer see it.

Fly fishing gave those instincts a more detailed vocabulary. It taught me to think more carefully about my position relative to the fish, the angle at which my line entered the water, and the way current acted differently on the line, leader, and fly. I became more conscious of drag, slack, water temperature, seasonal forage, and the difference between getting a lure near a fish and presenting it in a way the fish might accept.

Those lessons returned with me to conventional tackle. I now approach a spinning rod more like a fly rod. I pay closer attention to sink rate and line angle. I think about how a swimbait or jig behaves during the pause rather than only during the retrieve. I spend more time watching the water before casting. I consider whether the fish are feeding upward, holding near the bottom, or using a current seam that might be only a few feet wide.

The techniques themselves often overlap more than their respective cultures admit. A beadhead Woolly Bugger and a small marabou jig are close relatives. A Clouser Minnow borrows the mechanics of a weighted jig. A slowly worked Ned rig and a weighted nymph both depend on managing depth, speed, and contact near the bottom. A soft-plastic crayfish and a hand-tied craw pattern may use different materials, but they are trying to solve the same problem.

The essential questions remain unchanged: Where is the fish? What is it eating? At what depth? How is the current affecting the presentation? What will make the offering appear vulnerable without appearing unnatural?

Fly fishing didn’t replace the fishing I had done before, but it taught me more about why much of it had worked.

Spin fishing, in turn, keeps fly fishing honest. It reminds me that fish do not care about the elegance of the cast (usually), the price of the rod, whether the pattern was tied by hand, or which method requires more specialized techniques. Sometimes a fish is caught because the angler made a delicate presentation to a difficult lie. Sometimes it is caught because a piece of plastic was placed beside the correct rock.

Usually the interesting part is figuring out which rock.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of myself strictly as a fly fisherman. I’m increasingly comfortable with the simpler designation: angler.

In an ideal version of the day, I am standing in a beautiful river several hours from home, casting a fly I tied toward a fish I can see—or at least one I have successfully convinced myself is there. But I live in Chicago. A massive freshwater fishery begins only a few miles from my condo, along with suburban rivers, park lagoons, harbors, and other pieces of water that I ignored for years because they did not conform to my idea of what fishing was supposed to look like.

Fly fishing taught me to pay closer attention. Once I did, I realized how much opportunity existed nearby.

The more I fish, the less interested I become in defending one method against another. Really, I’m trying to be less dogmatic about the whole thing. The pleasure is in the accumulation: learning a piece of water, understanding a species, noticing a seasonal change, tying or selecting something that resembles the available food, and occasionally getting enough of those decisions right that a fish participates in my game.

It is a puzzle that continually rearranges itself. The water changes. The seasons change. The fish move. The tools improve, fail, or reveal new limitations. Every solution creates another question. The fly rod remains my favorite way to answer those questions. I’m simply less convinced that it is the answer to every one.

Nick Lyons’ once wrote: “the fly fisher’s sport demands more of him and he knows this—he is generally less interested in how many fish he catches than in how they were caught.” That’s certainly an ethos fly fishing has instilled in me, too, but I think it can apply to angling in general.

Ultimately fishing is a riddle and a project you get to unlock and you can do it forever if you want to. And I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

The week has already seen highs in the mid 90s, and I’m two weeks into nursing poison ivy on my feet and thigh that I must have gotten while out canoeing a few weeks ago. In spite of how much time I’ve spent outdoors over the years I’ve somehow never been exposed, and frankly I was beginning to think I was in the 10% that isn’t allergic to urushiol, because I’m around it all too often. How wrong was I! To add on to it all, I’ve also gotten a bit of sun rash on my hands, which while far more tolerable than the poison ivy rash is still pretty darn uncomfortable. All that to say, it hasn’t been the most relaxing of weeks up north. Being trapped inside has at least given me more time to dig through old concerts, stare at maps, and think about what I want the rest of the summer to look like.

All right then, I’m done moaning and groaning to you all now. At any rate, I’ve been making the most and spending most of my time out on the lake fishing. Shocking, right? On my drive up, I hit up some spots along the Prairie River around Gleason, Wisconsin, which supports a wild population of brook trout. Unfortunately I didn’t get into any—but did manage, somewhat annoyingly, to catch around twenty creek chubs on a dry fly. I was hoping to spend more time exploring that river this week but with temps as high as they are, it wouldn’t ethical to fish for trout, so I’ve been leaving them alone.

Out on the lake, I’ve done a bit of fly fishing, but with the fish holding deeper due to the temps, it hasn’t exactly been a practical tool for the job, so I’ve mostly been fishing various soft plastics on my ultralight and medium-light rods. I’ve been hitting some shelfs that seem to be holding some smallmouth in the deeper water and I’ve hooked into quite a few. I’ve probably lost as many as I’ve landed, but overall it’s been fun. The smallmouth bass probably remains my favorite fish to catch, even if I am partial to catching them in rivers over lakes. Trout fishing may occupy more space in my imagination, but if you handed me a rod and told me I could only chase one freshwater species for the rest of my life, I'd probably choose smallmouth. They’re fun, and pound for pound I don’t think anything in freshwater is stronger. This 19.5” smallmouth below was caught on an ultralight rod with 4# test—if that means anything to you, I’m sure you can respect the fight that was had.

Back on the home front, I was recently gifted some clothes from Renacts—a relatively new brand out of South Korea, they largely interpret Ivy style from the 50s and 60s. They generously sent me some pieces early in the year, too, notably a coaches jacket that I look forward to tossing back on when the weather cools down. Below are some recent outfits thrown together around the newest pieces I received:

Garment washed chinos, madras shirt, and garment washed shorts.1

It should come as no surprise that much of my listening continues to revolve around Neil Young. I just can’t get enough of that guy. I continue diving into weird and often deep corners of his output, so I feel inclined to share a recording from his October 19, 1982 performance in West Berlin, the final night of the European Trans tour. The show itself is worth seeking out, capturing Neil at one of the strangest and most misunderstood points in his career, but it's the final encore that really stopped me in my tracks. Skip ahead to about 52 minutes and you’ll see what I mean.

The song “After Berlin” occupies a weird corner of Neil Young lore. It’s one of the rarest songs he ever wrote, owing largely to the fact that it was written for a single concert and performed exactly once at the end of this tour. For an album cycle defined by sharp turns, confusion, and divided opinions, it feels appropriate that its closing statement was a song that appeared once and then vanished.

What’s perhaps even wilder to me is that, despite spending years going deep into Young’s catalog and considering myself a fairly serious Neil head, I’d somehow never properly encountered the recording until recently. I know I’ve watched this concert, but for whatever reason I didn’t pick up on the closing song. I guess that’s part of the appeal of following an artist with a catalog this sprawling—every so often, even after years of listening, something surfaces that feels completely new.

What’s really crazy about “After Berlin” is how good it is. For most artists, a song like this would be a centerpiece, the kind of track fans point to as a defining statement or a career highlight. For Neil, it’s just a one-off encore performed once and largely forgotten. That’s the blessing and curse of a catalog this deep. There are songs that would loom large in almost anyone else’s body of work that simply end up as footnotes for him. I highly recommend the entire concert, it’s become one of my favorites, but at the very least check out this closing track. It’s the only recording of it, and the quality is excellent.

Anyways, I know I’ve been quiet on here recently. I’m mostly just continuing to do my best to enjoy my summer, even if nature seems to be doing its best to stop me from doing that recently. I’ve got some drafts in progress on the topics of clothing and fishing that I’ll continue piecing together and hope to share sooner than later. I hope the slower cadence has been okay and I hope y’all are also enjoying your summer in whatever form that may take. I am sure my writing will pick back up this fall and winter. It’ll still be there when I’m ready for it.

I like writing but I don’t always know what to write about. Like my recent foray into trout fishing on the fly, it’s something you can always get better at, which is a large part of what keeps it interesting. The initial enjoyment I got from starting this newsletter is still there, though I’ll admit the momentum has waned a bit over the last few months. Part of that is probably seasonal. The weather in Chicago is finally consistently splendid and I’ve found myself wanting to spend as much time outside as possible. More often than not, when I’m not working, I’d rather be fishing than sitting at my laptop writing about fly fishing or criticizing the fashion space.

That said, I’ve realized those things have increasingly become the backbone of what I write about here because they’ve also become the backbone of how I spend my time. The older I get, the more my life seems to orbit smaller and more specific worlds. Fly fishing, menswear, specialty coffee, Japanese denim, odd museums, restaurants recommended by someone who knows someone, places with a strong point of view, etc. The broad middle ground of culture feels less interesting to me than it used to. I increasingly find myself drawn toward things that feel curated, intentional, and maybe just a little obsessive.

Speaking of being obsessive and fishing, I’ve been doing a lot of that if you haven’t noticed. I’ve fished 36 days already this year, which some quick math tells me is about 25% of all days so far. Not bad considering that includes the cold and dreary start to the year when I was at best just thinking about going fishing. Between all that and a few recent trips, I haven’t had a ton of focused time to sit with my thoughts and write. I do have some drafts in progress that I hope to finish throughout the summer. In the meantime, I suspect this space will continue functioning partially as an occasional fishing report and a repository for general recommendations. I hope that’s okay with you all.

Last weekend I did take a short fishing trip before rendezvousing with family in Minneapolis for a wedding. The wedding was a nice time spent with family I don’t see too often, and the venue, The Lumber Exchange, was beautiful. It is Minneapolis’s first skyscraper built in 1885—I love brick. In spite of being from Wisconsin and spending a lot of time up north over the years, I had never actually been to Minneapolis.

Minneapolis ultimately felt familiar in the way most Midwestern cities do to me, but still distinct enough to resist an easy comparison. It carries the friendliness and practicality of the Midwest, though physically it reminded me at times of a hybrid between Milwaukee and Seattle. I’m sure some native Minnesotans may beg to differ, but that remains my initial take. What makes it feel unique is that it’s still a genuinely thriving major city built around a pre-automobile urban core. There aren’t many places in the United States that developed before the dominance of cars and still feel economically and culturally vibrant at that scale. The older bones of the city are still visible there in a way that feels increasingly rare.

I have a substantial list of things I wanted to see from a planned trip that never materialized a few years ago, though I didn’t have a ton of free time on this particular visit. Still, I managed to work through a few highlights:

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: This was predictably worthwhile, even if it’s probably at the top of every tourist itinerary. There are numerous works by prolific artists including Theaster Gates and Isamu Noguchi, though my favorite element was something I almost missed entirely: a series of granite benches carved with phrases by Jenny Holzer. I’ve always loved Holzer’s work and there are many quotes attributed to her that I’ve sat with over the years.

Weisman Art Museum: On the University of Minnesota campus, housed inside a wildly strange Frank Gehry building that looks like it’s folding in on itself from certain angles. Several galleries were unfortunately closed for renovations, but I particularly enjoyed their Korean furniture and art collections. There’s something comforting about well-made utilitarian objects surviving long enough to become art. I think that’s probably part of what appeals to me about so much of the clothing and gear I gravitate toward too.

BlackBlue: A menswear shop I’ve ordered from online over the years, which feels like a physical manifestation of a very particular corner of the internet. Japanese workwear, denim, loopwheel tee shirts, fatigue pants—it’s the sort of place where every object seems chosen by someone with deep convictions about clothing. I picked up a fresh pack of Whitesville tees and spent a while eyeing a pair of orSlow washed black dad fit denim before deciding I should probably exercise some restraint.

Mend Provisions: A small fly shop run by a former menswear industry guy. That background shows immediately. The shop is restrained and thoughtfully merchandised in a way most fly shops aren’t. Fly fishing itself already occupies this funny intersection between sport, craft, and aesthetic obsession, so it makes sense there’d be some shops approaching it with the same curatorial instincts as contemporary menswear stores. Not the biggest selection, but intentionally curated nonetheless. This shop probably would not have been on my immediate radar had it not been for Fly Lord’s Midwest Fly Shop Tour series.

Alma: Recommended by a friend that works in the restaurant biz, they operate as an all-day cafe before transforming into an award-winning dining destination in the evening. I had an excellent lemon-ricotta-almond pancake and latte for breakfast. I’d love to get back and try their dinner menu out some day.

Matt’s Bar: A beer and burger joint founded in the 1950s celebrated for its cheese-stuffed patty, the Jucy Lucy. Not much to say here. I think this spot also tops a lot of lists, but for good reason.

Chimborazo: Recommended by the guys at BlackBlue. A casual Ecuadorian & Andean joint perfect for a relatively quick but unique sandwich. I got one with pork and plantains. I’m sure their heartier dishes are more than worthwhile.

I think adulthood has become a process of building smaller ecosystems around yourself. Not necessarily expensive ones, despite how some of this sounds, but intentional ones. You find the restaurants recommended by people whose taste you trust. You buy (relatively) fewer clothes but care more about them. Your friendships become anchored around shared interests substantial enough to endure some silence. You travel differently too. I’m less interested in checking boxes. I hate the way some people travel in that it just feels like an extension of consumerism and there is always another place for them to collect.

I used to think developing increasingly niche interests might narrow your world as you get older, but I’ve mostly found the opposite to be true. The deeper you go into something, the more connective threads you start finding everywhere else. Fly fishing leads to new friendships. Menswear leads to travel recommendations. A fly shop turns out to be run by someone from the fashion industry. One good recommendation ultimately turns into another. Eventually your life starts feeling less random, stitched together by these smaller overlapping worlds and the people orbiting within them.

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Not just because the fish are selective, although they are. Or because the casts need to be precise, which they usually do. It’s humbling because trout streams have a way of exposing exactly how impatient you are or how observant you aren’t. A trout stream can strip your confidence in about twenty minutes, or less.

I left Chicago at 5:30 in the morning and pointed the car northwest toward the Driftless for the fifth time this year. By the time I pulled into a small access point near Fennimore a little after nine, the sun was already climbing and the hills had that bright green late-spring look that only lasts a few weeks before summer properly burns the edges off everything. The Driftless always feels older than the rest of the Midwest to me. I guess that’s because geologically speaking it is. The topography is too dramatic. Narrow valleys, steep ridges, cold groundwater bubbling up through limestone and sandstone, and farmland interspersed throughout it all. It escaped the flattening force of the glaciers, which is why these trout streams still snake through the landscape instead of being buried under cornfields and drainage ditches.

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I geared up streamside and started with a dry-dropper rig: a small Chubby Chernobyl up top and a pink squirrel nymph underneath. The pink squirrel is practically a regional dialect in Wisconsin trout fishing. Some version of it probably exists in every fly box up there. Between the spring creeks, the abundance of scuds and sowbugs, and the general effectiveness of buggy little nymphs in stained water, it just works.

Or at least it usually works.

For an hour and a half I worked upstream with almost nothing to show for it. One rise. No takes. It was the kind the kind of fishing where every cast begins to feel increasingly theoretical. I eventually came to the nastiest piece of water on that stretch: a submerged log running parallel to the bank beneath one of the only overhanging trees around. It’s exactly the sort of spot you’re almost supposed to lose flies in. I threaded one cast underneath the branches, drifted it tight to the log, and near the end of the drift hooked up with a decent brown trout pinned neatly in the corner of the mouth.

It was nothing enormous, but it was satisfying and enough to shake off the skunk and settle me down for a bit.

Naturally, I tangled the rig getting him back in the water, but almost immediately after I had a violent eat on the hopper that failed to connect. One of those hits that jolts your whole nervous system awake and brings your confidence back. I couldn’t replicate that, so I took that as a sign to switch things up and tied on a small jig leech streamer I’d tied a few nights earlier.

Second cast with the new fly and I landed another brown.

Then a better fish from a deeper run that stayed connected for maybe twenty seconds before throwing the hook. That’s another thing trout fishing does well: it convinces you to start narrating victories before they happen. By the time I lost that fish I had already mentally landed it twice.

I picked up a few more fish before breaking off in weeds and switching over to a small egg-sucking leech pattern that I tied with a bright orange tungsten bead head, some black ice dub, and a bushy marabou tail—simple but effective. That eventually produced the best trout of the morning, maybe twelve inches or so, reasonably thick shouldered and healthy, sitting in softer water near the end of the easily accessible stretch. Wild Driftless browns aren’t huge most of the time, but they don’t really need to be. They look exactly like the streams they live in. They’re typically compact, sharp, and perfectly suited to the current. Occasionally someone will catch a twenty inch hen, but that’s rare. On most streams anything past the ten inch mark can be considered a solid fish.

I worked back downstream with a few more missed hits before finally calling it time for lunch.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that settles in after several hours of wading small water. It’s not a dramatic fatigue per se, just enough physical wear to make a PB&J made on your car’s trunk and a cold beer feel like a deeply responsible decision. I sat near the car on the side of the road with a Daisy Cutter and watched a family of strange looking ducks drift around downstream. Probably some sort of merganser, though I’m not sure. Then a beautiful calico farm cat wandered out of the woods and downstream after them and I had the unsettling feeling that family of ducks was going to be down a member sooner than later. Regardless, the whole morning had already settled into that pleasant rhythm where time stops feeling especially important.

After finishing up my lunch break, I moved to another stream nearby and spent a couple hours throwing a zuddler, a cross between a Muddler Minnow and a zonker streamer, into all the spots that had produced some impressive fish on a previous trip a few weeks prior. I tossed it into the undercut banks, deeper bends, and logjams. Nothing. No follows. No flashes. No life at all. That’s fairly common in the Driftless too. These streams can feel wildly inconsistent day to day depending on light, precipitation, water temperature, barometric pressure, grazing runoff, insect activity, or maybe pure randomness. The list goes on.

On the drive north that day toward my campsite, I passed a handful of cars parked along another creek I’d never fished before and made a mental note to come back sometime. That’s how these trips tend to go now. Half fishing trip, half reconnaissance mission. There’s a reason I don’t mention any of these spots by name. I haven’t been at this for a very long time, but I think it’s important to find your own fishing spots, and there’s no shortage of them to be found in the Driftless.

I got my camp set up in the late afternoon at a small, open site tucked into the hills. Not bad overall, though complicated slightly by a washed-out bridge nearby that forced some slightly longer drives than expected. Still, it was quiet. The kind of quiet where you hear every individual bird instead of ambient noise.

That evening I wandered over to another small stream I’d fished before and immediately saw fish rising everywhere. Tiny flashes beneath the surface. Soft dimples across the current. Occasionally one going completely airborne. Clearly these were feeding fish. The only problem was I had absolutely no idea what they were feeding on and trout are notoriously selective.

I rotated through a dry-dropper setup again, a few streamers, an Adams, zebra midges, assorted nymphs trying to match the sowbugs I saw on every rock I flipped over in the water. Eventually I connected briefly with one small trout on a size 22 zebra midge before losing it near my hand. Beyond that, nothing. Meanwhile fish continued rising all around me like they were mocking the entire contents of my fly box.

That’s part of the addiction, honestly. Trout fishing gives you just enough information to become obsessed without ever giving you enough to feel certain. It’s as frustrating as it is rewarding.

Back at camp I rigged up a portable camp shower I’d bought recently and hung it from a tree. Technically it worked. In practice, blasting yourself with peppermint Dr. Bronner’s and fifty-five degree water while standing barefoot in damp grass as the sun sets feels less like self-care and more like frontier punishment. I’m telling myself it’ll play out better in July or August.

Dinner was ramen, cheese and crackers, salami, a beef stick, and another beer. The sort of loosely assembled meal that somehow tastes perfect outside. The overnight low was supposed to hover around the mid-forties, which is comfortable enough sleeping weather if you’ve got decent gear and enough exhaustion behind you. I didn’t bother with a sleeping bag and just slept in some sweats and pulled a few quilts out of the trunk.

The next morning I woke at sunrise and made coffee while the campground slowly warmed up around me. There’s something deeply satisfying about early mornings before fishing. The ritual of it. Stove hissing. Wet grass. Pulling on slightly damp waders from the day before.

I drove west toward the Viroqua area after getting some recommendations from friends about a few promising stretches of water. It was very sunny though and the water gin clear, which makes for challenging fishing as the fish will probably see you before you see them. The first stream looked perfect though: rocky banks, defined seams, deeper bends cutting beneath pasture edges. I worked upstream and eventually drifted a small wooly bugger through a seam tight against structure and connected with a very solid brown trout.

That fish fought far above its weight class, darting into current and trying repeatedly to bury itself in the rocks and logs. Exactly what wild browns are supposed to do. It felt earned.

I spent the next several hours working both upstream and downstream through beautiful water with surprisingly little to show for it. Plenty of visible fish shooting around, but the bright overhead sun made conditions difficult. Driftless trout are already cautious but bright conditions can make them downright paranoid.

Eventually I admitted I needed a break and drove into Viroqua for lunch.

Small towns in the Driftless have a particular kind of charm that feels increasingly rare now. Farm town infrastructure mixed with artists, organic agriculture, Amish on horse and buggies, fly shops, bakeries, coffee shops, old taverns. Viroqua especially feels like a place people end up intentionally rather than accidentally pass through.

I grabbed a shockingly good walleye fish fry and a Spotted Cow beer at a local spot downtown, the Driftless Cafe, then afterward stopped into the local fly shop, the Driftless Angler, hoping for insight into the mysterious rising fish from the previous evening. The recommendation was simple enough: light Cahill dry flies, size 20-24. These are small to say the least so it’s not surprising I wasn’t seeing these bugs.

Back on another stream later that afternoon, I worked the usual sandstone banks and deeper runs with streamers. I picked up another decent brown from deeper water and moved a few more fish that wouldn’t fully commit. On the walk back downstream I caught several impressively sized creek chubs from one hole, their heads covered in strange spawning nodules that made them look vaguely prehistoric. These unique looking “horns” are apparently used in combat to defend their gravel spawning nests and ward off intruding males.

By evening I found myself back at the same stream from the night before. The fish were rising again in almost exactly the same places. This time I tied on the small Cahill dry fly recommended at the shop earlier in the day.

Almost immediately I started getting takes.

Small splashy eats at first, then more consistent rises directly beneath the fly. Eventually I connected with one cleanly enough to bring it to hand, which I think technically counts as my first proper trout on a dry fly. Far from my first fish on topwater, but trout are different. Dry fly eats feel slower somehow, more visual, and more intimate. You watch the whole thing happen in real time and then somehow still mistime the hookset anyway.

I missed dozens of fish. Truly an impressive number. If I were better at this whole thing I am sure I could’ve landed half of those, but I guess that’s part of the fun.

Every time I reacted too quickly or too dramatically or tried setting the hook in the wrong direction, ripping the fly away from fish that probably only weighed a few ounces. Still, by then I didn’t really care. Watching fish rise consistently to a fly you picked correctly after struggling the previous evening felt like solving a puzzle, even if you had some help along the way.

Rain started rolling in around seven. After eventually sacrificing one of Cahills to a bush across the stream, I decided that was enough for the night and headed back toward camp through a light drizzle that steadily intensified. Breaking down gear and cooking dinner in the rain always feels a little comedic, but eventually I made it into the tent reasonably dry and reasonably fed, which is really all camping success amounts to.

On the final morning I drove a few hours further north toward the Kinnickinnic River near River Falls before eventually dropping in around a park in the middle of town.

The Kinni feels different from the smaller Driftless streams. Wider water. More defined riffles and runs. More room to swing flies. It’s one of the better known trout rivers in the Midwest for good reason, especially after years of restoration work that reshaped channels, improved habitat, and brought back more natural flow patterns.

Fish were rising steadily through the some of riffles when I arrived.

I swung small wooly buggers and soft hackles tied with Hungarian partridge feathers through moving water, then switched to larger streamers around deeper pools and structure. No luck. I finally reached a particularly promising looking stretch and by the time I had positioned myself to start swinging my fly, a large beaver materialized and surely blew up the spot. Still, it hardly mattered by that point. The river itself was enough. Clear current slipping over gravel bars, trees leaning over the banks, and a little fog hanging lightly in the distance early on before the sun finished burned through. I called it a day and continued on with my day towards nearby Minneapolis where I was ultimately headed for a family wedding.

I think I’m bad at trout fishing.

But I’m getting better at understanding why people devote their entire lives to it.

Most sustainability conversations in fashion tend to orbit the same set of questions. What are things made from? Where are they made? Under what conditions? A brand might point to organic cotton, deadstock fabrics, or a more transparent supply chain. Maybe they publish a tidy impact report. Maybe they’ve even gone a step further and paid for carbon offsets—on paper, neutralizing the emissions tied to their production.

Sustainability isn’t exactly my professional wheelhouse, but I’ve spent enough time working in the environmental industry to know that last part is where the conversation usually gets uncomfortable, or at least conveniently stops. Offsets are often treated as the cleanest solution in the room. They’re the mechanism that allows everything else to continue more or less unchanged.

Offsets don’t ask anyone to make meaningful tradeoffs. A brand can keep producing at the same pace, releasing new collections at the same cadence, growing year over year, and still arrive at the conclusion that they are “carbon neutral.” Consumers don’t have to reconsider how much they’re buying, or how often. The system remains intact. The only thing that changes is that impact gets translated into a line item—something that can be paid for, accounted for, and ultimately resolved through a transaction.

In theory, the logic is simple enough: emit carbon here, fund a project that reduces or removes carbon somewhere else. Balance the ledger. Boom, net zero!

In practice, it’s far less convincing.

A lot of offset projects hinge on something called “additionality”—the idea that the carbon reduction wouldn’t have happened without the funding. The problem is that this is incredibly difficult to prove. Many projects—renewable energy, forest conservation, land management—were already economically or politically viable without offset dollars. In those cases, you’re not offsetting anything. You’re just attaching your emissions to something that was going to happen anyway.

Then there’s permanence. A significant portion of offsets rely on nature-based solutions—planting trees, preserving forests, restoring ecosystems. All good things, but not equivalent to preventing fossil carbon from entering the atmosphere in the first place. A forest can burn. It can be logged. It can degrade over time. Carbon that was “offset” gets released back into the system, while the original emissions are already long since accounted for.

There’s also a timing issue that rarely gets discussed. Most emissions from production happen immediately. Offsets, especially nature-based ones, often assume carbon will be absorbed gradually over decades. So you end up with a mismatch—carbon emitted today is theoretically balanced by something that may or may not happen over the next 20 or 30 years.

Even setting all of that aside, the measurement itself is often fuzzy. These systems rely heavily on modeling, projections, and assumptions. There’s a lot of room, intentionally or not, to over-credit impact.

None of this is particularly controversial within environmental circles. It’s just not something that makes its way into brand copy. But the bigger issue, at least to me, is not that offsets are imperfect but that they function as a kind of permission structure.

They allow companies to keep doing what they were already doing—just with better language around it. You can increase production, expand distribution, accelerate your release cycles, and still claim progress, because the emissions tied to that growth are being “handled” elsewhere. Offsets enable systems instead of constrain them

And fashion, in particular, is perfectly built to take advantage of that.

It’s an industry defined by turnover. Newness isn’t a byproduct—it’s kind of the whole point. Collections are seasonal at best and constant at worst. Products are designed with a kind of built-in obsolescence, whether that be aesthetic or physical. Even at the higher end of the market, where things are often made better and last longer, the underlying incentive is still to sell more of them, more often.

In that context, sustainability tends to show up as a layer rather than a limit. A material choice. A certification. A capsule collection that signals awareness without meaningfully altering output.

Offsets fit neatly into that model because they’re invisible. They don’t change the product. They don’t change the experience. They scale effortlessly with growth. The more you produce, the more you offset, and the story stays intact.

I don’t think this is some coordinated deception. It’s more mutual convenience than anything else. Consumers don’t actually want to be told to buy less. Brands don’t want to produce less. Offsets offer a way for both sides to participate in a version of sustainability that doesn’t require much discomfort.

You get to feel like something has been addressed without having to fundamentally change anything. And honestly, I believe a lot of brands probably don’t think too deeply about it and do genuinely think they’re doing something good.

But at a certain point, the math just doesn’t work.

If the volume keeps increasing and if the pace keeps accelerating, marginal improvements in materials or accounting mechanisms get overwhelmed. You can swap in organic materials, you can clean up parts of your supply chain, and you can offset the emissions tied to production—but if the total output continues to climb, so does the overall impact.

Which is why I keep coming back to the idea that this isn’t primarily a materials problem, but a pace problem. It’s not just how things are made, but how many are made, and how quickly they move through the system.

That’s a much less comfortable framing, because it introduces the idea of constraint. Fewer releases. Longer cycles. Products that are designed—and maybe more importantly, positioned—to stick around. A different relationship between brands and growth, and between consumers and novelty.

None of that fits cleanly into a marketing strategy. It’s harder to package, harder to scale, and harder to sell.

But it’s also where the conversation probably needs to go.

Because you can’t really spreadsheet your way out of a physical problem. Carbon accounting can be useful, but it’s still just a representation of reality, not reality itself. Offsets, for all their appeal, operate almost entirely in that abstract layer—moving numbers around in a way that makes the system feel balanced, even when it isn’t.

And maybe that’s the most honest way to think about them.

There are places you expect to find fly anglers, and then there’s the Chicago lakefront—wind coming off the fifth largest lake in the world, a long public stretch of water—it doesn’t quite fit the traditional script. Still, every now and then you see a rod bent in that unlikely way, and when you do, there’s an instant understanding. Seeing another fly fisher where you don’t expect is a bit like hearing someone else hum a song you didn’t think anyone knew.

That’s how I met Ryan.

It’s not a sentence you hear often—I met a guy fly fishing by Lake Michigan—but maybe it should be. There’s more of it happening than people think (but not that much more). Smallmouth move along the rocks, carp tail in the shallows when the wind lays down, and in spring the coho salmon push close enough that a long cast on a sinking line and a little luck can make your day. It’s urban fishing in the best sense. It’s improbable, a little scrappy, and rewarding if you stick with it.

We talked of course. You kind of have to. There’s a camaraderie to it—equal parts curiosity and quiet relief that you’re not the only one out there crazy enough to be waving a graphite stick and fly line at a big lake given all the more conventional angling methods available. This also makes the second Ryan I’ve met with a fly rod in hand in the past six months, which feels statistically unlikely but not unwelcome.

We fished together a few more times after that and then on a midweek whim that didn’t require much convincing he invited me up to Wisconsin’s Driftless. Hard to say no to that.

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If you’ve never been, the Driftless is an oddity in the Midwest—a region that somehow escaped the flattening hand of the last glaciers. Instead of straight lines and right angles, you get steep coulees, spring-fed creeks, and cold water that stays cold enough to support wild trout. It’s a patchwork of public easements and private land, cattle pastures and cornfields, with limestone filtering the water into that soft, clear green that trout seem to prefer.

The streams aren’t particularly big, at least not in the Western sense. Some you can practically step across without getting wet. But they hold more fish than they let on, especially brown trout, many of them wild, wary, and perfectly at home under an undercut bank or a tangle of roots.

I drove up separately and rolled in a few hours after Ryan and his friend Paul. They’d rented an old farmhouse that had been converted into a place you can book, perfect for a weekend getaway—creaky floors, big windows, plenty of room to spread out, impeccable beds and bathrooms, and, most importantly, water all around it. Shockingly nobody made mention of the water in the guest book. One stream ran clear and narrow through an open pasture, the kind of place where you can see fish before they see you if you’re careful. The other was broader, deeper, and tucked behind cornfields, with enough size and structure to make you think about tossing bigger flies. The confluence of the two was a 45 second walk up our driveway.

It was about as convenient as fly fishing gets without feeling like cheating.

We didn’t waste much time. A few casts that first evening, just to shake out after the drive. I didn’t move anything, which felt about par for the course for me, but Ryan hooked into a solid brown on a big streamer just as the light had nearly faded. The fish came out of one of the more chaotic parts of water available to us, ate with intent, and made a short, convincing run before coming to hand. Fifteen inches or so, thick and well-fed.

You take those small omens where you can find them.

We started the next morning on the smaller water, which looked super fishy. I tied on a sparsely tied soft hackle—some pheasant tail and Hungarian partridge feather—nothing fancy, just a nod to tradition and the idea that something subtle might work in that clear flow. Soft hackles have been around since at least the 18th century, depending on who you ask—North Country spiders meant to imitate emerging insects, swung or drifted just under the surface. They’re elegant in theory and humbling in practice.

I connected with one fish early and lost it just as quickly. That would set the tone for the rest of my weekend. Paul did pretty well fishing a similar setup further on from me.

We broke for lunch in a nearby small town, the only place that seemed to be open—the sort of place where the menu hasn’t changed in a while and the burgers are exactly as good as you expect them to be. Which is to say not very good.

Afterwards we shifted over to the bigger stream and leaned into a different approach entirely. The smaller stream asked for restraint but the bigger water seemed to be rewarding a little aggression. We started throwing streamers—big ones by Driftless standards.

Leeches tied with rabbit strips and coneheads, heavy enough to get down and alive enough to pulse on the swing. Articulated patterns like the Sex Dungeon and Peanut Envy—flies with names that sound like inside jokes and profiles that suggest a meal worth chasing. The theory is simple: bigger prey, bigger reaction. In water with some depth and color, a well-swung streamer can trigger fish that wouldn’t bother rising to anything smaller.

Paul and Ryan locked into it pretty quickly. Fish were moving, and in their case, sticking. I was moving fish too—plenty of follows, a few committed eats—but my hook sets were just off enough to matter. Either too quick or too slow, or just one of those days where things don’t quite line up. I’m still not really sure what I was doing wrong.

Eventually I did land one—a brown in the fifteen-inch range, solid and clean, not as colored up as the fish the other guys were catching, but pretty in its own way. I also donated a fair number of flies to the river. Streamer fishing in that kind of water is a contact sport—wood, rocks, undercuts—and you pay for access with rabbit strips and feathers.

Ryan kept returning to a heavily wooded bend where he’d moved a better fish earlier in the day. Tight casting, limited backcast room, and just enough current to make things interesting. We all lost a few more flies trying to thread that needle, but it felt worth it. There’s something about a fish you know is there that keeps making you want to try for it.

That night we did something I don’t really do—we kept a couple of fish. Paul had landed a few solid browns within the legal limits, and we decided on a simple catch-and-cook. No real ceremony, just what we had on hand: a bit of onion, some orange, salt and pepper, some oil, and wrapped in foil and tossed in the oven. Fresh trout doesn’t need much help.

We ran it back the next day, more or less the same program.

The small water first, soft hackles again, though with less to show for it. Not much moving in that clear water, at least not for us. A guide and his clients started in behind us, working upstream with the quiet efficiency that comes from doing something every day. Paul and I hopped ahead to give them room, and on the way back the guide asked how I’d done.

I told him I’d caught a small creek chub, which was true, and unfortunately for me the only fish I’d hold in my hand the entire day.

It felt oddly reassuring when he didn’t have much more to report at least.

Back on the bigger water, the streamer bite had slowed a bit from the day before. Paul and Ryan still managed a handful each—enough to prove the fish were there and willing in spurts—and I was ready when needed to jump down the bank and help them net. I moved a few, same as before, but couldn’t quite convert. Some days you’re on the right program but the wrong side of it, I guess.

Paul, who has many more years of fly fishing experience under his belt than I do, took a break at one point and drank a beer along the side of the river and more or less guided me for a bit. It felt good to know I wasn’t doing anything wrong from his perspective. I moved a few fish while he watched over me, one of which launched straight out of the water into the air like a torpedo as my line went slack. It was a fun moment for us both in spite of not landing that particular fish.

Eventually it went quiet for all three of us. In the end, my ledger for the day read one creek chub and a handful of almosts. Not much to photograph, but plenty to remember.

It’s easy to measure a trip by numbers—fish landed, inches gained, flies lost—and there’s a place for that. But this one didn’t really need it. It was enough to stand around moving water, to throw flies that felt too big until they didn’t, and to be invited along by someone I’d met, improbably enough, fly casting into Lake Michigan just a few weeks prior.

That, and the quiet understanding that sometimes the best part of fishing is just finding the other person who thought it was a good idea to be there in the first place.

I got home from a family trip to the Pacific Northwest at 2:30 in the morning a few days ago. That’s the kind of arrival that usually throws me off for a few days, but I’ve snapped back quicker than expected (I’m writing this, after all). It was a full trip—one of those where you cover a lot of ground but without it feeling too rushed. We flew into Seattle, spent a few days there, then worked our way down the Oregon coast before looping back inland to Portland.

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The highlights were varied, I posted some additional photos over on Instagram, but a few things stuck more than others:

Chihuly Garden and Glass was the first surprise. It’s right at the base of the Space Needle, which makes it easy to write off as something overly touristy, but it’s genuinely impressive. Dale Chihuly’s work can veer toward spectacle, but seeing the installations in person—especially the greenhouse and outdoor garden—lands differently. There’s a uniqueness to it, both in color and form, that doesn’t really translate in photos. It feels less like a museum and more like stepping into a controlled environment built entirely around light and fragility. I didn’t expect to spend as much time there as I did, but I thoroughly enjoyed drinking a beer in the outdoor garden and just taking it all in.

We went whale watching out in Puget Sound, which ended up being one of the more memorable parts of the trip. We saw a pod of orcas actively hunting—something that, on paper, sounds incredible, but in practice is a little more complicated to witness and hard to explain. Orcas in that region are part of a few distinct populations, some of which are resident and primarily feed on salmon, while others—the “transient” or Bigg’s killer whales—hunt mostly marine mammals. The ones we saw were likely the latter, given their behavior. We also saw gray whales, which are a bit more meditative to watch. They migrate something like 10,000 miles annually between Baja and Alaska, one of the longest migrations of any mammal, and you get the sense that you’re just catching a small moment in a much larger, ongoing pattern. Later on in the trip, I saw some of these on my own from the Oregon coast without the aid of a professional tour, which felt pretty special.

On a completely different note, I finally made it to Blue Owl Workshop. That was a full circle moment. It was one of the first specialty menswear shops I ever bought from online, probably around 2013, back when I was first getting into raw denim and all of that adjacent stuff. They’ve been doing it for over a decade now, carrying a pretty tightly curated mix of Japanese and American brands—3sixteen, orSlow, Studio D’Artisan…that whole world. It was good to see the space in person and connect briefly with Buster, who I’ve known in the very loose, internet sense for a while. There’s something grounding about being in a physical store that’s built around a clear point of view, especially after interacting with it digitally for so long. While in that neighborhood I also ate at Paseo nearby, enjoying what I would call a must-have Caribbean Roast sandwich.

In Tacoma one day, I stopped through the city’s “Antique Row,” which is basically a stretch along Broadway packed with vintage stores, consignment spots, and the kind of places that feel like they’ve been accumulating inventory for decades rather than curating it. I didn’t pick anything up, but it was the perfect place to kill an hour. Savoy Special Vintage was the standout. It’s a relatively small shop, but dense in a way that would reward digging—the racks span multiple eras, from military pieces and worn-in workwear to rare band tees and older Levi’s that you don’t really come across organically anymore.

The Oregon coast was about what you want it to be. It’s dramatic. A lot of verticality—cliffs dropping straight into the water, long stretches of beach, and rock formations bursting right out of the water hundreds of feet from the shore. It’s a coastline shaped by tectonic activity and constant erosion, and you can feel both of those forces at play. I would’ve liked to spend more time actually hiking it, maybe getting into some of the smaller trail systems, but even seeing it in passing was enough to make an impression.

I also went deep sea fishing while we were out there. It’s probably not something I need to do again. There’s a level of efficiency to it that strips away most of what I enjoy about fishing in the first place. You drop down a couple hundred feet when the captain tells you to, hook into something relatively quickly, and then it’s just a matter of cranking it back up. There’s not much fight, and it honestly just feels like you’re reeling in a tire. It seems less like interacting with an environment and more like extracting from it. I get the appeal, especially if the goal is to bring fish home, but it doesn’t scratch the same itch. It actually made me appreciate fly fishing more, if anything—the pacing, the uncertainty, and the need to read water and make decisions.

We made a stop at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gordon House, which was more for my mom and aunt than for me, but I’ve seen enough of his work over the years to have a serious appreciation as well. It’s one of his later Usonian designs, originally built in Oregon (the only in the state) and later moved to its current site to preserve it. Smaller scale and more restrained than some of his better-known projects, but still very much operating on his core principles—compression and release, integration with the landscape, that kind of thing. At this point, touring a Wright house feels less like a novelty and more like continuing a long-running thread.

Portland itself was probably my favorite part of the trip, although we were there for less than 24 hours. Forest Park stands out—it’s one of the largest urban forests in the country, over 5,000 acres, running along the west side of the city. You can be fully in it within minutes of leaving a main road, which is always a strange and welcome transition. The Lan Su Chinese Garden was another highlight. It was recommended to me over the Japanese Garden, and I’m glad I listened. It’s a classical Suzhou-style garden, built with materials sourced from China and assembled by artisans brought over specifically for the project. Everything is intentional—sightlines, plantings, the way water is used to reflect and obscure. It rewards moving through it slowly. I recommend trying to get a tour there if you can. Our guide, Debrah, was awesome. I also got together with a friend from work in Nob Hill for the night and enjoyed bopping around for food and drink. Grandma’s Secret was a hidden cocktail bar I came across that I’d recommend if you’re in the area.

The whole trip ended up shaping what I was listening to more than usual. I leaned pretty heavily into artists from the region—The Microphones and Mount Eerie, Carissa’s Wierd, Modest Mouse, Minus the Bear. There’s a specific kind of Pacific Northwest sound that’s hard to pin down but easy to recognize once you’re in it. A lot of it traces back to Olympia and the K Records orbit—lo-fi, emotionally direct, and a little rough around the edges.

Phil Elverum’s work as The Microphones and later Mount Eerie, in particular, feels inseparable from that landscape. There’s a rawness to it, but also a sense of place that’s very literal—albums recorded in small rooms, references to specific towns, weather patterns, and the weight of isolation. Carissa’s Wierd leans more into that slowcore space—drawn out, melancholic, and almost static at times. Modest Mouse, especially their earlier records like The Lonesome Crowded West and This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, captures a different angle of the region—restless, expansive, and a little more outward-facing. And Minus the Bear sits somewhere adjacent, pulling in math rock and indie influences but still very much tied to Seattle.

Outside of that regional deep dive, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gem Club’s new album Emerald Press. They’re a chamber pop group out of Massachusetts that I’ve listened to since high school, and this is their first release in over a decade. That gap is pretty evident in the best way. It feels patient, minimal, and very controlled. A lot of piano, strings, and negative space. Christopher Barnes’ vocals are still doing that same quiet, almost weightless thing. It ended up being a good counterpoint to the more geographically specific stuff—less tied to place and much more internal.

Back in Chicago, I’ve still been fishing a lot, but in a way that’s new to me. I’ve been spending more time along the Lake Michigan lakefront, which is something I’ve oddly neglected despite living close to it. It’s a different kind of water—open, unpredictable, and less about reading a defined structure and more about covering ground. I’ve been using my newer 7-weight rod with a sinking line and throwing larger streamer patterns, mostly tied with rabbit strips to get more movement. It’s been working, or at least some of the fish seem to like it. I landed my personal best smallmouth recently, which felt like a small milestone, but more than that it’s just been good to re-engage with a part of the city that I’ve neglected. It’s fun to get out in what is essentially my backyard, and I’ve made some friends out there too over the last few weeks.

Next up is a family wedding in Minneapolis at the end of May. I’m planning to stretch that trip out a bit, take my time getting there or coming back, and spend some more time in the Driftless fishing. It feels like a good way to break up what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward, albeit not short, drive.

For now, though, it’s a bit of a reset. Back to Chicago and back to a more regular rhythm. Trying to keep the momentum without forcing it. Getting out as the weather allows and fishing when I can. I’ve also gotten a few new pieces of clothing for the first time in a while too—nothing major, but enough for me to feel excited about them. I’ll get into that next time.

Thanks for reading.

RC

I tend to oscillate more than I’d like to admit. Between being closed off and overextended. Between keeping my distance and overcorrecting when I don’t.

I’m kind of a hater. Not in the cartoonish, internet-comment-section sense, but in the quieter, more exhausting way. I don’t naturally maintain a cheery disposition. I’m skeptical by default. I’m easily irritated. I don’t think I’m always a good time to be around, and I’m aware of that in a way that doesn’t feel particularly noble or self-aware—it mostly just makes me retreat. I’d like to change that, but the honest answer is that I’m not totally sure how.

Part of the problem is that I’m resistant to new things unless I arrive at them myself. If something is recommended to me too enthusiastically, my instinct is to dig my heels in. I don’t know if that’s a latent elitism, a defense mechanism, or just an overdeveloped sense of taste that’s hardened into stubbornness. Probably all three. Either way, it’s not especially generous, and it doesn’t leave much room for surprise or excitement. And then, occasionally, I’ll swing the other way—diving headfirst into something and letting it take up more space than it probably should.

I’m starting to realize these patterns aren’t isolated—they show up everywhere. In friendships, in relationships, at work, and just the way I move through the world.

Part of that skepticism didn’t come out of nowhere. I’ve spent a lot of time working in and around fashion, which—at least in my experience—can be a strange place to try to build anything resembling a real connection. There’s usually a friendliness to it, but it’s often conditional. People are warm if there’s a reason to be, if there’s something to gain, and just as quick to forget you when there isn’t.

It’s not overtly hostile. In some ways it’s worse than that—it’s pleasant, even charming, but thin. You have conversations that feel engaging in the moment and then evaporate completely. The people will remember what you do, if it’s of relevance to them, before they remember who you are. You start to notice how transactional it all is and how quickly a face becomes interchangeable.

I think spending enough time in that environment trained me, a little unintentionally, to expect that same dynamic everywhere else. To assume that most interactions are surface-level by default. That people are, at best, temporarily interested. I know this to be inherently untrue, but it makes you more guarded and more selective. But also, if you’re not careful, more closed off than you actually want to be.

I don’t think it’s unique to fashion, but it does feel concentrated there. Growing up in hardcore and punk music had a similar dynamic, too. Over time, these environments start to shape your expectations. You get used to interactions that are situational and to relationships that don’t quite extend beyond the environment they were formed in. And if you’re not paying attention, you start to carry that assumption with you—that most connections are temporary, a little transactional, and not especially deep.

I think I’ve internalized all of this a lot more than I realized. I’m not naturally social, and I’m not especially good at meeting people. I do a lot of things by myself—initially because I enjoy it and there’s less room for disappointment, but eventually because it becomes easier to justify than change. There’s a general piece of advice people love to repeat—that if you just go out into the world and do the things you like, your people will find you. I’ve been testing that for ages and the results have been mixed at best. It turns out that simply occupying space isn’t the same as being open to it.

And when I do try to push against that, I can feel myself overcompensate—saying yes to things I’m not actually that interested in, or trying to manufacture a version of myself that feels more socially workable. That doesn’t really hold either. I’ve never been especially good at masking and when I do something usually blows up dramatically, at least eventually.

I’ve noticed these tendencies show up pretty predictably in my romantic relationships, too. The same resistance, the same tendency to hold back a little longer than I should. I can be slow to warm up, slow to trust, and quick to retreat into my own head if something feels even slightly off. It doesn’t look dramatic from the outside—it’s more subtle than that. A kind of emotional half-step back. Keeping things just contained enough that I don’t feel exposed, but also not fully engaged.

But I’m also guilty of swinging the other direction. When I do let someone in, it’s not always gradual. Sometimes I overcorrect. I get too invested, too quickly, and start organizing parts of my life around something that isn’t fully formed yet. There’s a tendency to lose my center a bit—to prioritize the relationship over the things that usually keep me grounded. And that comes with its own set of consequences. It creates a different kind of imbalance, one that can feel just as unsustainable as the distance I default to otherwise.

There’s also a version of that skepticism that turns inward. I second-guess whether I’m showing up the way I should, whether I’m enjoyable to be around, and whether I’m quietly making things harder than they need to be. And instead of resolving that in the open, I tend to internalize it, which usually just creates more distance. It’s a strange contradiction—wanting closeness, but defaulting to behaviors that either hold it at arm’s length or grip it too tightly.

I think part of what I’m trying to unlearn is the idea that I need to arrive fully formed to be a good partner or friend. That I need to smooth out all the edges before I let someone get close—or, on the other end, that closeness requires me to reshape myself entirely around it. In reality, both instincts create their own kind of imbalance. One keeps things safe but shallow. The other makes them intense but potentially unstable.

And then there’s my disposition, which feels like the hardest thing to untangle. I’ve been jaded for a long time. Not dramatically or in a way that makes for good stories—just enough that being in a good mood often feels like effort, and sustaining one feels suspicious. I’m often hesitant to be around people, even when I feel lonely and actively want connection. I worry about being a downer. I worry about putting people off. Sometimes I preemptively isolate myself so I don’t have to find out whether those fears are justified.

What I keep coming back to, though, is that none of this feels immutable. It feels practiced, learned, and reinforced. Which means it can probably be unlearned, or at least softened?

What’s been interesting is how this has started to shift in at least one corner of my life. Over the past six months or so, I’ve found myself spending more time around a pretty specific group of people—fly fishers. It’s niche enough that there’s a built-in reason to be there, which removes some of the usual pressure. You’re not showing up to perform socially. You’re there to fish.

And something about that structure makes it easier to exist somewhere in the middle. You spend hours together moving through the same stretch of water, not talking much, then talking a lot, then not again. There’s no expectation to be “on,” but you’re not closed off either. No need to force chemistry, but no pressure to retreat from it. It either develops naturally or it doesn’t, and either outcome feels fine.

I wouldn’t say it’s completely rewritten my instincts, but it’s made me realize that the environment matters more than I tend to admit. It’s not just about “putting yourself out there” in the abstract. It’s about finding contexts where you don’t feel like you have to override yourself to participate. Where being a little reserved, a little quiet, even a little skeptical, doesn’t immediately put you at a disadvantage—but also doesn’t become an excuse to stay closed off.

In that sense, it’s been less about becoming more social, and more about finding situations where socializing doesn’t feel like a task in itself. It just happens alongside something else.

So instead of trying to become more positive, more social, more anything, I’ve been thinking in terms of guidelines. Small shifts and ways of moving through the world that don’t require a personality transplant.

One I keep circling back to is this: being open doesn’t require immediate enthusiasm. I don’t need to love everything. I don’t need to pretend I’m excited. I just need to not close the door immediately. Let things sit with me for a minute longer than feels comfortable. Curiosity can be quiet. It doesn’t have to announce itself.

Another: my internal mood doesn’t have to be the main event. I tend to monitor how I’m feeling constantly, as if my disposition is a problem everyone else needs protection from. Sometimes the fix isn’t improving my mood, but de-centering it. Paying attention to what someone else is saying. Asking a question and actually listening to the answer. Letting the focus move outward instead of folding back in on itself.

I’m also trying to accept that being pleasant is a skill and not a betrayal. There’s a part of me that equates warmth with inauthenticity, as if being agreeable means I’m lying about who I am. But neutrality doesn’t have to be cold, and kindness doesn’t require self-erasure. You can still have standards and edges and opinions without making them the sharpest thing in the room.

And maybe the most important guideline—for myself, and anyone else who feels similarly stuck—is this: you don’t need to solve your disposition before you re-enter the world. Waiting until you’re “better” to be around is a trap. The improvement often comes from the contact itself, imperfect and awkward as it may be.

I’m not trying to land on one side of it. Not relentlessly upbeat, not permanently guarded. Just somewhere in between. A little less armored. A little more available. And maybe, over time, slightly easier to be around—including for myself.

At any rate, last weekend I got back from three nights of fly fishing and camping in Wisconsin’s Driftless. That trip started off in a tee shirt and ended at around 15 degrees, which I guess feels about right for this time of year. I wrote more about it separately, but it was a needed reset after a mostly failed outing a few weeks prior. That said, the return to normal life has been…abrupt.

Work, in particular, has snapped back into place. I went from a relatively quiet stretch to juggling close to a dozen projects in what feels like overnight. Not totally unexpected—that’s usually how it goes in my line of work—but it’s still an adjustment after a quiet season. It’s the familiar trade-off: the anxiety of having too little work replaced by the stress of having too much. I’ll usually take the latter, but it’s never entirely comfortable.

I’ve also been thinking (probably overthinking) about the direction of this newsletter again. I want it to hold all of my interests, or at least not feel constrained by any one of them. That’s part of why this space exists—to let things spill over from the more focused clothing pieces into something looser.

But if I’m being honest, my attention has been narrowing in its own way. I keep coming back to fly fishing. It’s taking more of my time and energy (and money)—especially as the weather starts to cooperate. I’ve been on the water eleven days so far this year, which feels decent given the winter and my geography. After a few days of constant rain though, the rivers in Chicagoland are high and pretty blown out. Nonetheless, I did go make an attempt at fishing one the other day, tossing bigger streamers on my new 7 weight fly rod. That wasn’t doing much, but the adjacent floodplains were holding a few feet of water and I saw the occasional shadow moving around—so I shifted my efforts to traipsing through that sight fishing to carp. I saw three and naturally spooked all of them, but it was fun for an hour or so.

On the clothing front, this is usually the point in the year where I start thinking about turning over my closet. Fortunately, I’ve got enough storage that it’s not a huge undertaking, but I’ve also been putting off a more thorough culling and reorganization for quite a while now. It’s one of those projects that’s easy to defer until it isn’t. I’ll probably make a point to actually deal with all that to some degree in the next month or two.

Spending more time (and money) on fly fishing has naturally pulled me away from buying much clothing this year. Not entirely, though. eBay and Depop are still a near-daily scroll, if only out of habit. I did manage to pick up a quintessentially ‘90s sweatshirt from my undergrad—University of Wisconsin-Parkside. The integrated turtleneck doesn’t make it the most wearable every day sweatshirt, but for 12 bucks I have no complaints. Most college merch now is pretty abysmal, and usually the smaller the school, the worse it gets—or at least the harder it is to find anything worthwhile from years past. I’ve built up a decent vintage collection from Western Michigan, where I did my masters, but UWP has been elusive until now.

A friend also gave me a hat I’d been half-looking for secondhand for a few years—the J.Crew x Benjamin Edgar collab from a while back. It’s one of those pieces that feels oddly specific to me, so the fact that it surfaced through a friend who just wasn’t wearing it felt like the best possible version of how to acquire something. Thanks Daham!

On the music front, it’s been a relatively quiet start to the year for me as far as new releases go. Not much has stuck. Although I have been a on bit of a Bloc Party kick recently (I forgot how good their 2005 debut album, Silent Alarm, is). But this past week delivered two records I’ve been returning to constantly: IT’S THE LONG GOODBYE from The Twilight Sad, and Companion from Sluice.

I’ve been a longtime fan of The Twilight Sad, and this one feels like a high point in their already excellent discography. Robert Smith of The Cure is involved—playing on a few tracks and helping shape the record creatively—and you can feel that presence without it taking away from what makes the band so distinct. Smith has gone on the record saying that TTS is his favorite band, which I think has to be the highest praise a band can receive. The production is the sharpest they’ve sounded, and the lyrics land in a heavier way than usual.

Are we designed to lose?
I can't believe you made me choose
I asked, "What am I to you?"
Tried to reason, but you refuse
My feelings you seem to abuse

It’s the kind of record that feels dense in a good way. I find a little more in it each time I’ve gone back.

Sluice’s Companion sits at the other end of the spectrum but hits just as hard. Looser, stranger, and a little more irreverent. Droning guitars, sharp humor, and lyrics that bounce between sincerity and absurdity in a way that feels familiar if you’ve spent time with The Microphones or Bill Callahan.

I don’t know
What the fuck is going on
Do you?
Everything's so damn hard to do
Should I go back to school?
This song just rips 'Pink Moon'
I'll find a new thing to do
Like tie my fucking shoes
And be a good friend to you

It’s kinda messy in a way that feels intentional, but more importantly, fun.

Beyond new releases, I’ve been trying to spend more time with my physical collection again. When I bought my condo, I mostly stopped buying records and shifted toward CDs—partly cost, partly convenience, partly just a genuine appreciation for the format. Still, I’d built up a solid record collection before that shift, and it’s been sitting there a bit neglected.

Lately I’ve also been working through my jazz shelf alphabetically. There are around a hundred records there, so it’s not a quick project, but that’s kind of the point. It’s been a good reminder of how much music I own that I’ve only really listened to once or twice. Slowing down enough to revisit it feels worthwhile. I think I’ll write up a separate piece soon about some of my favorite jazz records while I’m going through the process of re-listening to all of this.

Beyond all of that, I’m heading out to the Pacific Northwest next week for a stretch of museums, parks, and general wandering with family. I’m looking forward to the change of scenery more than anything. I haven’t really left the Midwest in the past year, outside of a quick weekend in New York, so it feels overdue.

It should be a good reset—just a different kind than the one you get standing in a river.

We left Chicago earlier than expected—one of those rare small wins where the day opens up a few hours earlier than planned. It was barely noon. I’d managed to get out of work a bit ahead of schedule, and by the time we were loading the car it already felt like we were getting away with something. The last minute work call I got as I was lugging my gear down to the car didn’t help that feeling.

There were two of us—both named Ryan—I’ve never really hung out with another Ryan and somehow in the span of the last few months a few have entered my orbit. Making friends in your 30s can be tough. It’s a different thing than when you’re 20. It’s less accidental, more deliberate, and usually built around something specific—a shared, often niche, interest that gives you a reason to keep showing up. In this case, it’s fly fishing, which is about as good a framework as any. You spend hours together without needing to fill the space, moving up the same creek or driving between spots, talking when there’s something to say and letting it go quiet when there isn’t.

There’s a kind of ease in that. You learn someone gradually—through small things, like the way they approach water, the flies they reach for, and what they notice and what they don’t. It’s not forced, and it doesn’t need to be. By the end of a couple days you’ve shared enough—missed fish, a few landed, long drives, good and bad weather, simple meals and some beers—that it starts to feel like something solid, even if you didn’t quite see when it got there. And for whatever reason, that feels a lot harder to come by these days, and a little more worth holding onto now than it might have a decade ago.

We made it into the Driftless by late afternoon, the kind of warm March day that doesn’t seem entirely believable. It was pushing seventy, warm enough that I stood around our campsite in a t-shirt for a while after we arrived, letting the sun do its work after the drive.

We set up camp without too much urgency, although we both wanted to get out and fish a bit before the sun set. My tent ended up in a shallow depression just off the edge of the campground, with a thick line of trees falling away downhill to the north leading to a stream, and a clear look out over the road and the valley beyond to the west. It felt like a good compromise between exposure and shelter—it was the kind of spot that doesn’t seem special at first but settles in as you look at it longer. Ryan slept in the back of his Subaru.

With some daylight left, we went to a nearby creek and fished for an hour or so. The water looked right—clear, steady, and moving with some purpose—but the trout weren’t particularly interested in anything we had to offer. Still, there were signs. There was a brief hatch of something for just a handful of minutes—I’m not knowledgeable enough about entomology yet to say if they were midges or caddis or mayfly or something else entirely—and some persistent rises scattered through the softer water, the occasional flash below the surface, and once or twice a fish fully committing to going airborne for reasons of its own. It was enough to keep us there a bit longer than we meant to stay, but neither of us connected with anything in the end.

That night never really got cold. In fact it was about as comfortable as you can hope for in late March. It hung somewhere around fifty, warm enough that the sleeping bag felt almost unnecessary. I slept well.

The next morning started calm and quiet. After I made us some coffee, I wandered down the hill from my tent to the small creek at the bottom of the valley, just to look at it. It had that look—tight bends, darker seams, undercut edges, overall pretty shallow but with some deeper pools that I am sure held trout—but I hadn’t brought my rod down, and after a few minutes of standing there imagining where a fish might sit, I walked back up to camp and let it be, collecting some firewood for later along the way and avoiding stepping on the many wood frogs hopping around in the forest.

By the time we got moving, the weather had already started to turn. The sun held on for a bit, but the wind came in behind it, steady at first and then a quite a bit more insistent.

We spent much of the day driving—at least a few hours of it in total—winding through back roads, slowing down behind the occasional Amish buggy, and dropping into different valleys to try new water. It’s easy to lose time that way out there. One creek turns into another, one bend looks like the last, and before long you’ve covered more ground than you meant to without quite keeping track of it and you’ve forgotten to eat lunch.

There were fish around. Plenty of sporadic rises in the slower water, nothing persistent but just frequently enough to keep your attention, but they never quite translated into anything for me. Ryan finally picked up one small brown trout, which felt overdue.

At one stream easement we ran into a couple DNR folks standing around and chatting near their trucks, talking like they had nowhere else to be. To ease some lingering anxiety, Ryan double-checked that he didn’t need a physical copy of his fishing license, which was nowhere to be found, and that a digital copy or driver’s license was enough. It was. They asked how it was going, didn’t bother to actually check either of us for proof of license, and left it at that.

It’s worth noting that in much of Wisconsin—especially out in the Driftless—ownership of land and ownership of water don’t always mean the same thing. A stream may run straight through someone’s property, bend along a fence line, or disappear briefly into the trees, but the water itself belongs to the public in a way the surrounding land does not. It’s very unique to the state and something that should not be taken for granted.

That’s where the idea of a stream easement comes in, though it rarely feels as formal as the term suggests.

On certain trout streams, the state has secured what amounts to a narrow corridor along the water—sometimes just a strip, sometimes wider—where the public is allowed to pass. It’s not ownership in the traditional sense. The land still belongs to the farmer or the family that’s held it for years. There are still fences, still cattle, and still the quiet understanding that you’re moving through someone else’s place. But within that strip, you’re allowed to walk, to fish, and to follow the creek as it winds its way through privately owned landed.

Most of the time, that means staying close to the water. Boots in the stream when you can manage it, stepping up onto the bank only when necessary, and keeping your path tied to the current rather than wandering aimlessly into the fields. The boundary isn’t always marked in a way that’s obvious. You learn to read it the same way you read water—by feel, by habit, and by paying attention to where you are in relation to the creek. There are of course apps that help with all that too.

There’s a certain etiquette to it that isn’t written down but tends to be understood. Close gates behind you if you pass through them. Give livestock space. Don’t linger where you don’t need to. It’s less about rules and more about maintaining the quiet agreement that allows the whole thing to operate in the first place.

In practice, it creates a kind of shared landscape. You might spend the better part of a day fishing a stretch of water that, on paper, belongs entirely to someone else, moving through it freely as long as you stay within the bounds of the easement. It’s a system built on a mix of legal structure and mutual tolerance—it’s part policy and part trust.

And because of that, it changes the way you move through these landscapes. You’re never quite alone in the sense of ownership, but you’re not exactly a trespasser either. You exist somewhere in between, following the water as it cuts through land that isn’t yours, but water that, in a quiet and specific way, is for a time.

By the afternoon the rain had moved in and we’d worked our way to a smaller, tighter piece of water—skinny and tree-lined, it was the kind of creek that felt more like something you’d stumble into in the Northeast than the Midwest. It was characteristically very different than everything else we had been fishing. We both enjoyed it. The banks closed in, the current slipped quietly around bends, and everything about it suggested fish in the exact places you’d expect them to be. The fishing was hard and technical due to the size of the water and the tree cover, but at least the trees and being down in a valley helped cut the wind.

It was also a good chance to try out my new wading jacket—a Patagonia Swiftcurrent I had been eyeing for a while and was able to pick up on sale. It’s maybe a little big, but not in a way that feels wrong. If anything, it leaves room for colder days, and for layers I’ll probably need eventually. Out there, in the rain, it was definitely the right call to put it on.

That stretch of water finally gave something back to us both. We each tied on a green scud Ryan had handed me earlier—a fly I hadn’t thought much about until it started working. In a lot of these creeks, the most important thing in the water isn’t especially noticeable. Scuds—small, curved, shrimp-like things—drift along in the current, clinging to weeds and rocks and soft edges, going mostly unseen unless you’re really looking for them. They’re not flashy, they don’t hatch in any dramatic way, and they don’t give you much to key in on from the surface. But they’re there in numbers, and trout know it.

I finally picked up a couple browns from the places you’d expect—one tucked tight to the bank in a deeper pool, the kind of spot you almost feel obligated to fish, and another holding in a softer seam pinned between some fallen logs.

That second fish made more of it than it had any right to. It ate close, I saw my strike indicator sink, and then it turned and immediately started using the current to its advantage, darting back toward the wood. I leaned on it just enough to keep it out, felt the line come tight and alive, and then it came up—one clean jump, then another, and then a few more for good measure, shaking its head like it knew it could shake the barbless hook. I managed to prevent that by keeping the pressure on. For a moment it felt bigger than it was, all energy and angles, the rod bent deeper than you’d expect for a fish its size.

By the time I slipped the net under it, it had settled down into something more reasonable—a small brown, maybe ten inches—but still bright and more than enough. It felt like the most complete version of the whole thing: the take, the short run, the jumps, the brief uncertainty of whether you’ll actually land it.

Ryan found a few of his own not far away. Nothing huge, but solid fish—the kind that make you forget the slow hours and justifies the time it takes to find them.

We kept moving after that, more out of habit than necessity. At one point we even found what appeared to be a coyote skeleton that someone had taken the skull from—which of course made identification a bit uncertain. Along the way to one more stream we passed deer moving at the edges of fields, rafters of turkeys working through timber and fields, and a couple bald eagles flying overhead.

The whole day had a soundtrack to it, too. We’d been listening to a lot of bluegrass and country while driving—not usually what I’d put on, but it fit the setting in a way that felt hard to argue with. Some Turnpike Troubadours, Drive-By Truckers, a bit of Merle Haggard, and more. At some point I put Ryan onto Jason Molina and Magnolia Electric Company, which felt like introducing the right kind of grit into the mix.

Back at camp we cooked over the fire—hot dogs in a cast iron skillet balanced over the coals. Simple enough that it doesn’t leave you with anything to think about besides eating and standing there while the fire burns down.

That night got quite a bit colder, though still manageable.

By the third day, the wind had come back in an even more serious way. We started on a larger stretch of water that was just upstream from where we had productively fished the afternoon before. It looked good but never quite delivered. There were fish holding in it—you could see them suspended in the softer current along with the occasional rise—but they weren’t moving more than they had to.

We pushed on to a smaller creek farther out of the way. It took a bit to identify the easement and we eventually pressed down a pretty steep hill off the side of the road to get to where we needed to be. I nearly grabbed hold of a deer skeleton on the way down. The water was thin, shallow in most places, with a few deeper pools that held fish stacked up in the darker water. You could see them clearly enough to know they were there, which somehow made it worse when none of them showed any interest in our flies. To me, it felt like the kind of place you don’t need to visit twice, but on a better day some of those pools would probably give up a dozen fish. So, I’ll keep that spot in mind for another time.

By the afternoon we circled back to more familiar water. At some point Ryan and I split up, each taking a stretch to ourselves.

I decided to finally ditch the green scud and tied on a simple streamer pattern and worked along a deeper run backed up against a limestone wall, letting it swing and strip just enough to suggest something worth chasing to a hungry trout. On one pass a fish came out hard—a good brown—and took it clean. It went airborne almost immediately, a quick flash against the waning light, and then it was gone. From what I saw and felt, I’m certain it would have been the largest fish from our trip.

That one stung and lingered.

I kept at it for a while, picked up a visible follow near a bridge that never quite turned into anything, and eventually pulled out a small creek chub in a spot that had given up a significantly better fish for our friend Dave just a few weeks prior. It felt like a reminder not to assume too much, these aren’t the fish we’re after, but they are native unlike the brown trout.

We headed back to camp not long after. Dinner was comprised of a couple of polish sausages this time, again cooked over the fire. My skillet was getting up to nearly 600 degrees, so they cooked quickly and well. We turned in early, both of us worn down in that quiet, uncomplicated way that doesn’t need much explaining.

Overnight the temperature dropped hard. I was glad for the zero-degree mummy bag. I don’t usually bother zipping it all the way up or cinching it tight, but that night I did—hood up, interior collar pulled in around my shoulders, sealed off as much as possible from the cold air pressing in. The inevitable bathroom break in the middle of the night wasn’t fun.

By morning it was down around the high teens—not exactly pleasant, and getting out of my warm sleeping bag required digging a bit deeper than the morning before. In the end, we packed up as quickly as we could, hands stiff, breath visible, car less organized than on the way up, and started the drive back.

On the way out, we passed a barred owl sitting on a post just off the road. It was facing away at first, still and almost part of the landscape, I nearly missed it. As we drove by it quickly turned its head 180 degrees, as owls do—farther than seemed necessary—until it was looking straight at me through the car’s window, holding that gaze for a second before we passed out of view.

It felt like the right way to end it.

What does sustainability look like beyond materials and supply chains? How do you slow culture down without freezing it? And how do you participate without pretending purity is possible?

Most sustainability conversations in fashion try to answer these questions by focusing on inputs. A brand may use organic cotton or deadstock fabrics. They may have transparency information available about their factories and manufacturing partners. Maybe they pay for carbon offsets (as an environmental professional myself, I could write a whole essay about my criticisms towards these and how they’re ultimately ineffective—maybe I’ll do that soon). Ultimately the discussions tend to orbit around what things are made from and how responsibly they move through production.

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Those things matter, sure, but they also share the same underlying assumption—that the primary problem is materials. What I find almost never gets questioned is the pace of production.

The industry has become extremely good at making things slightly better. It has not become particularly good at making fewer things, or wanting them less often. In many ways, the system is now optimized to do the opposite. Growth mindset is a problem everywhere, but it is particularly destructive in the world of fashion. Capitalism, right?

The real environmental issue in fashion isn’t just what we make things from, it’s the pace at which we expect culture to replace itself. Ideas now arrive with expiration dates already attached. Seasonal calendars that once turned twice a year now spin continuously for many brands. Collections blur into drops, drops blur into weekly product refreshes, and entire aesthetics cycle through social media before many people even realize they existed. This is obviously most problematic in fast fashion, but honestly a lot of smaller operations increasingly operate this way too.

None of this happens in isolation. The platforms where fashion now lives, predominantly Instagram and TikTok (where more often than not you can checkout with just a few taps directly from a post) reward novelty above almost everything else. Algorithms favor whatever appeared most recently and attention gravitates toward the newest image (or Reel), the newest product, and the newest “take.”

Most brands respond accordingly. Growth demands expansion, expansion demands more product, and more product demands shorter cycles. Acceleration becomes the default. And once pace becomes the organizing principle, the inputs alone can’t solve the problem. It becomes easy as a consumer to convince yourself you’re fixing the system while participating perfectly within it simply because the tee shirt you just bought is made from organic cotton or the brand/shop donated 1% of sales to an environmental organization. That’s just marketing more than anything.

This is part of why so much contemporary “sustainable” fashion still feels strangely disposable. The materials might improve, but the manufacturing tempo remains untouched. The object is still designed to be culturally replaced before it has a chance to age.

Culture doesn’t just consume objects, it consumes attention, and that attention now moves faster than almost anything else we make as a society. Slowing things down, of course, doesn’t mean eliminating change. It doesn’t mean no new design, no experimentation, or no evolution. Culture that stops moving entirely becomes a museum, and fashion has never been particularly interested in preservation for its own sake.

But for most of fashion history, ideas simply moved more slowly. A silhouette might circulate for years before gradually fading out. Designers would refine the same shapes season after season instead of replacing them outright.

You can still see this if you spend time looking at vintage clothing. The interesting thing about most old garments isn’t that they’re radically different from what exists today. It’s how familiar they feel. You can take some vintage denim, or a pair of old handsewn moccasins, or a beat up french chore coat and they’d fit into many brand catalogues today with ease. None of these objects feel revolutionary. They exist within long lineages of small adjustments, if any at all, rather than constant reinvention.

I guess I’ve always been drawn to that.

The camp moccasins I wrote about recently are a good example. I’ve been wearing them since high school. The design hasn’t meaningfully changed in over half a century, and the construction is simple enough that the leather slowly molds itself to your foot over time. They’re familiar and don’t need to be replaced. If you condition the leather regularly and get them resoled when needed, a single pair could feasibly last you a few decades.

That’s a different kind of design value—one that depends less on disruption and more on repetition. Slowing culture down, at its best, simply means letting ideas live long enough to accumulate meaning. The irony is that many of the garments people now consider timeless only became that way because they were allowed to persist. Nobody was jumping to reinvent the Oxford Cloth Button Down.

Once you start thinking about these systems, there’s a temptation to jump to the opposite extreme—that is, to withdraw entirely, to refuse participation on principle, and to treat disengagement as the only ethical position available.

But purity for purity’s sake is rarely the answer and most of the time it simply becomes another performance. Fashion, like any aspect of culture, is something people participate in whether they intend to or not. We all buy things, we all wear things out, and we all make compromises somewhere along the way. The question isn’t whether participation happens. Instead I think the question is how that participation happens and what it looks like.

Intentional participation looks different from default participation. It might mean buying less frequently but thinking more deeply about what you bring into your life. It might mean supporting work that builds continuity rather than chasing novelty. It might mean repairing something instead of immediately replacing it simply because a newer version exists with a “refined” fit or you got a tiny hole in the elbow. And even then, it’s inconsistent.

There are still things I buy too quickly, things I convince myself I’ll wear more than I actually do. I recently fell into that trap, but I wound up returning every single thing I purchased in the month of February. Slowing down isn’t a clean break from those habits but I do think it’s good to try and interrupt them when you can.

There is no perfectly ethical wardrobe, no perfectly sustainable brand, and there is certainly no perfectly coherent system. But fortunately you don’t have to exit a system entirely to resist its pace, you can simply refuse to move as fast as everything around you insists you should.

That idea has been sitting in the back of my mind as I’ve written these last few essays. For a while I’ll admit I felt a vague pressure to produce something—to start some sort of brand, launch a product, or otherwise turn my interests into something more tangible. In other words, how can I monetize this interest just as society has told us we should? The assumption seemed obvious enough: if you care about a field, eventually you should make something within it. But production and contribution are not the same thing.

The internet tends to twist and flatten those two ideas together. If you care about clothing, the implied next step is to start a label. If you develop an aesthetic perspective, the logical next step is apparently to produce a run of hats or tee shirts that embody your “unique” vision along with a Shopify store, and expand from there. I’ve never found that progression particularly noble.

There are other ways to participate. You can help people see connections they might have otherwise missed. You can elevate longevity and encourage reuse. You can highlight work that deserves to last. You can slow the conversation down just enough for people to actually look at the things in front of them rather than always looking ahead to what’s new.

In my opinion, none of that requires scaling an idea into a company. And it certainly doesn’t require pretending to have solved problems that are clearly larger than any individual project. Sometimes participation simply means resisting the reflex toward novelty and letting certain things endure, like the camp moccasin.

Sustainability might not ultimately be about discovering the perfect materials, identifying the most ethical brands, or engineering the cleanest supply chains. Those things matter but they don’t change the underlying tempo of things.

The harder challenge is cultural. It’s developing the patience to let things last, and the restraint to resist replacing them simply because we can. In that sense, sustainability may have less to do with ideology than with discipline. It’s just the quiet decision, repeated over time, to move a little slower than the world wants us to. It’s something I’m trying to be a little better at every day.

I left Chicago before the city had properly woken up, having packed up the days before, and I slipped out of my condo a little after six while the sky was still that familiar black that comes just before sunrise. The highway was busy with commuters for a time, but mostly empty once I got out of the city. Just under four hours later I rolled into the Driftless in Western Wisconsin, where the land begins to fold in on itself—ridges, coulees, and creeks that seem to appear and disappear like someone casually draped a rumpled blanket over the map.

I met my buddy Dave a little after ten at the stream we decided to start our day at. Five other guys that had planned on coming had bailed after looking at the forecast, which, on paper, looked miserable enough to keep sensible people home, between forecasted high winds followed by possibly as much as two feet of snow. Dave and I apparently weren’t feeling particularly sensible. I figured if I prolonged my cabin fever by sitting at home, after already taking the tail end of the week off of work, that it would be worse than any weather we ran into.

The air was in the mid-40s and better than advertised—some sun, not much wind yet. Late winter in the Driftless has a rawness to it. The grass is still mostly brown, the willows are just beginning to think about budding, and the creeks run cold and clear between banks that look like they could have been carved yesterday. Somewhere up the valley we could hear a barred owl calling—the classic who cooks for you, who cooks for you all that sounds a little too conversational for a bird.

I rigged up the first fly that came to mind: a size 16 pink squirrel, a Driftless classic, that I’d tied the day before at my desk. There’s something satisfying about fishing a fly you tied yourself the day before—it’s a bit like eating something straight out of the oven. On one of my first few casts I hooked a small brown trout that darted out from beneath a nearby cutbank. He shook his head once or twice and came unpinned before I could get a good look, which felt about right for the first sign of life of the day.

Things slowed down after that. Dave landed a small brown as we worked our way upstream, hopping between the usual Driftless lies—undercut banks, little seams below riffles, and the darker bends where the current digs just a little deeper. The creek itself had that classic look to it: tight meanders through pasture and forest, and the occasional limestone bluff rising up behind you.

By noon we’d looped back toward the cars and I decided to switch things up. I nipped off the pink squirrel and tied on a size 8 black wooly bugger, another one from the vise the day before. It’s about as safe a choice as you can make on a small trout stream. The fly doesn’t really imitate anything in particular—maybe a leech, maybe a small baitfish, maybe just something alive enough to annoy a trout into eating it—but it moves well in the water and has earned its reputation as a confidence fly for good reasons.

We crossed the bridge and fished downstream on the same water. Under that bridge, where the water darkens and slides along the pilings, I finally properly connected with my first fish of the day—a small brook trout that flashed a bit of color against the gray water. It took the fly decisively and thrashed with all the misplaced confidence of a much larger fish. I didn’t need to net it, I got it to my hand in just a matter of seconds, but it then hit me that it was the first brook trout I’d ever caught, and given I had just started tying this winter, it was also the first fish I’d properly landed on a fly I’d tied myself. For a moment I just held it there in the current, looking at it before letting it slip back under the bridge. It felt like one of those quiet little milestones you don’t quite expect but end up remembering for a long time.

Moments later, twenty or so yards downstream, Dave let out the kind of half-shout that tells you the fish is worth coming to take a look at. He’d hooked a good brown. After a short, stubborn fight he brought it to his net. It was a thick fish for this size stream, somewhere in the 15- or 16-inch range, with buttery sides and dark spots glowing in the March sun, and surely enough to invoke a bit of jealousy in the guys that bailed on the trip.

I managed a small brown not long after, but the creek settled down again the way trout streams often do after giving up a couple fish. We fished a while longer without much to show for it besides cold fingers.

Walking back along the road toward the cars we heard the barred owl again somewhere in the trees above the creek. A moment later it came gliding overhead, silent in the way owls manage, slipping across the road and back into the timber on the other side before either of us could say much about it.

At this point we headed to our campsite and set things up—tents, fire ring, and the usual ritual of arranging small comforts in the woods. On the drive out of camp into the nearby town we passed a huge group of wild turkeys feeding in the woods just off the road. There must have been nearly two dozen of them scattered through the trees, dark shapes moving through the leaf litter like a small, slightly disorganized army, and one even took flight momentarily across the road over the car.

After picking up firewood in town we tried our luck again, hopping over to a few more nearby streams. The weather had begun to shift and a light sleet had started falling, the sort that doesn’t quite commit to being snow but still manages to work its way into your collar thanks to the wind that was now also howling at a decent clip.

On our way off of one of these streams we’d also come across a tree that looked like it had been attacked with a hatchet. A pileated woodpecker had gotten into it and absolutely demolished the thing—eight feet or so of trunk chiseled open from the ground up, the bark peeled back in jagged slabs. At the base of the tree sat a large pyramid of fresh woodchips. It looked like someone had dumped a wheelbarrow full of them there. The likely culprit was a dormant carpenter ant colony somewhere inside the trunk, and the woodpecker had clearly decided the entire tree was worth dismantling to get at it.

We fished for a while longer without moving anything, Dave had managed a swipe or two but nothing made contact with his fly, and we eventually admitted to ourselves that the trout probably had better ideas about where to spend the evening.

Back at camp we rigged up a slightly questionable tarp arrangement adjacent the fire and settled in. There’s a point in every trip where the fishing stops mattering as much and the sitting around begins to take over—wet boots near the fire, simple food, and the low-effort kind of conversation that only happens when there’s nothing else you need to do.

It was my first night in a new tent—a Marmot Tungsten 2p that replaced my decades old 1p model of the same tent—and I had a cot and thick foam pad set up inside that felt almost luxurious compared to the usual sleeping-on-the-ground arrangement. For a moment it seemed like we might get away with a comfortable night.

The wind had been hastening for a while, but sometime around eleven it finally showed up in earnest. Not a steady wind, but the kind that comes in long, muscular gusts roaring down the coulees and through the timber. You could hear the gusts crossing the valley before they arrived, and after a while I found myself counting the seconds—like waiting for thunder after lightning—between the sound of the trees beginning to thrash and the moment the gust blasted my tent. Our questionably rigged tarp nearby would simultaneously crack like someone whipping a towel.

Later we’d hear the gusts were pushing somewhere around sixty miles an hour, which felt believable given how the tent behaved. Lying there, it felt as though someone outside was rhythmically performing CPR on the whole structure—long heaves of fabric pressing in and then snapping back out again. Needless to say even though I was warm and reasonably comfortable, this didn’t lend itself to sleep.

Dave, in a smaller and less aerodynamic tent, had it even worse.

Around three in the morning we both got up and moved our cars adjacent to our tents in an effort to block a bit of the wind. It helped some. I think we both were able to get a few hours of sleep, though it’s up in the air if the cars actually helped or if we were both just completely exhausted by that point in the night.

By sunrise we each came to the same conclusion without much debate: there are days when you push through bad weather to fish, and there are days when the weather simply wins. This was one of those days. With the wind still howling through the valley, we packed up camp and pointed our cars back toward Chicago, leaving the creeks to themselves for a while.

We’ll be back soon.

I’ve picked up a decent number of new subscribers this past week, so if you’re new here, welcome. Every week or two I write one of these Casca Corner posts—basically a dispatch of what I’ve been up to, the gear and clothes I’ve been enjoying, and whatever music and/or media has been in rotation lately. If that sort of thing sounds appealing, you’ll probably feel at home here. Thanks for being here.

Winter persists in spite of some strong glimpses of spring recently.

This past week I committed to a trip to Wisconsin’s Driftless region for some trout fishing with a few folks I’ve recently gotten to know from Chicagoland’s fly fishing community. Most of the original group bailed due to the forecasted weather, and in hindsight they were probably right to do so. I left Chicago around six in the morning, and met my one friend who also stayed committed to the trip around ten.

That morning and afternoon were exactly what I needed. I caught my first ever brook trout, and it was also the first fish I’ve properly caught on a fly I’ve tied myself, too. That felt pretty gratifying—it’s one of those small milestones that makes the whole process feel more complete and full-circle.

The sun was shining, temps were hovering around 40, and there was minimal wind—ideal late-winter/early-spring weather. For a few hours we had both forgotten that the weather was destined to shift.

By evening, the wind started picking up right on schedule, and by the time my buddy and I had settled into our tents, gusts were clocking above 60 mph. Not great, as I am sure you can imagine. It was a tough night and we made the unanimous decision in the morning to bail and head back to Chicago, stopping in Madison at The Weary Traveler Freehouse for a beer and bite to eat along the way. This was definitely the right call as they’ve since received upwards of two feet of snow in the area.

In spite of spending a bit more time driving than fishing, I don’t regret making the trip. It quelled my cabin fever a bit and reminded me of how close some truly beautiful, world-class streams are. It has me looking forward to another potential weekend out there in just a few weeks, weather permitting. I wrote a longer piece about this trip that I’ll share separately soon.

All of this has me feeling pretty excited about fly fishing this spring, so much so I splurged on another rod.

If you’re curious, it’s a Temple Fork Outfitters Blue Ribbon 7 weight paired with a Lamson Remix S reel and Scientific Anglers Sonar Titan sink tip line—essentially, more suited to the bigger, windier water around Chicagoland (and beyond). It’s a slightly heavier setup than what I’ve been using, but I’m excited to throw bigger flies and chase some species I haven’t spent much time targeting yet. Between that and my 5 weight, I should be pretty well equipped for the seasons ahead.

I also grabbed a Patagonia Swiftcurrent Wading Jacket on sale that should make future bad weather fishing exponentially more pleasant. That would’ve been great to have this past week, but at least I’ll have it next time.

On a clothing front, the folks at Wax London Clothing sent me one of their Whiting Overshirts recently.

I went true to size in a medium and at first the fit was a bit long and boxy, but a wash and flat dry tightened the weave up nicely and I think it fits pretty great now. I’ve worn it a decent amount over the last few weeks and it’s softening up nicely in spite of its relative heft.

What stands out most is of course the fabric—I mean just look at it? I’ve never worn something with such an intricate weave and it’s been a cool mix up while still not feeling too flashy or overbearing. From a distance the weave blurs together, but the closer you get, the more you can see. I like details like that in garment, the kind that are probably not appreciated too much by anyone but the wearer.

It’s a fun change of pace from the sweaters I’ve been wearing all winter long while still feeling fairly restrained.

Musically, I just discovered this incredible debut full length release by Racecourse called July,December.

I’ve probably listened to it all the way through at least a dozen times at this point. I wholeheartedly recommend a full listen, but at the very least check out the first few tracks, My Chair and Caledonia. Released the last week of 2025, if this had crossed my path a few months ago it would’ve landed firmly on my favorite albums of 2025 list.

Beyond the fact that they’re from Santa Cruz, I can’t find much information about this young band at all. But I love the vocals, and the music itself is beautiful and intimate. They pull influences from slowcore, lo-fi, and emo and they blend it all together incredibly well.

9/10—please listen.

Another new release I’m digging is Pileup’s new album Leave The Light On, yet another slowcore adjacent record with some strong shoegaze influence. Again, this is a new-to-me band with surprisingly little discourse about them online.

Pileup is from Portland and this record feels distinctively Pacific Northwest to me. The self-titled track reminds me a lot of early Low, Codeine, and Red House Painters, and the transition into Willow Leaves make for two of my favorite pieces on the record.

I’ll probably be listening to this one a lot when I’m out in the PNW myself next month.

Otherwise, not a whole lot else going on in Planet Ryan lately.

I watched the Oscars last night. I usually make an attempt at watching most of the Best Picture nominations each year in spite of my issues with “the Academy” itself. I didn’t succeed in watching everything yet from this year’s class, but of what I did watch, I really enjoyed most of it. Sentimental Value, Train Dreams, and Bugonia were my personal favorites.

Overall the awards were mild-mannered and not altogether that entertaining. Par for the course for the last few years, as Hollywood has largely stuck to its “keep politics out” directive, with the notable exception of Javier Bardem who opened his presentation with a “no to war and free Palestine” remark. I was glad at least somebody used their platform to say something.

It’s been a heavy stretch of news for a while now if you’re even half paying attention to the world and hold any empathy. Wars, rising costs, billionaires finding new ways to extract even more from everyone else, and so much more—it’s not exactly uplifting.

Which is maybe another reason the quick trip to the Driftless felt worthwhile, even if the weather tried, and succeeded, at running us out of the area in less than 24 hours. Sometimes getting outside for a day or two is the only way to reset the heaviness of things though.

I’m just hoping that the next trip involves less wind and a few more trout.

RC

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When you love the classics long enough, you eventually stop looking for new things.

The camp moccasin has been my favorite shoe since I was a teenager. I grew up observing the pairs my dad wore into the ground — brown leather darkened almost black at the toe, rawhide laces permanently curled, heels collapsed in a way that would horrify a shoe-tree evangelist. He didn’t care for them in the way I do my footwear, the leather was often cracked from total lack of conditioning, but they were undeniably cool. They were beaten up and completely unwearable by anyone but him. The uppers had molded so specifically to his gait that they looked less like shoes and more like impressions of his feet.

That imprinting fascinated me to the point that I, for a time, worked in the handsewn shoe industry myself.

The camp moc has always struck me as one of those quietly perfect American shoes. Unfussy and unassuming. Slightly preppy, but also outdoorsy. And to be clear — it is not a boat shoe, but more on that later. No aggressive siping or nautical cosplay. Just handsewn leather, a flexible sole, and a shape that softens over time.

It’s the kind of shoe that doesn’t try very hard — which is exactly what I love about it. It earns its character slowly. It improves with neglect. It looks better creased than pristine.

And like most classics, the magic of the shoe isn’t in reinventing it, but instead in understanding it.

Let’s get into it.

A History (Because It Matters)

The camp moccasin sits at a uniquely American intersection: Indigenous footwear traditions, Northeast industry, East Coast prep culture, and mid-century leisure.

Long before it became what is it today, moccasin construction was developed by Native American tribes across the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes regions and beyond. These were soft-soled shoes made from deerskin or moosehide, cut to wrap around the foot and stitched with sinew. They were terrain-specific—flexible enough for forest travel, quiet underfoot, and easily repaired from the natural materials available to them. Construction varied by tribe and region, but the principle was the same: the leather itself formed the structure. No rigid insole board or welt, just a wrapped, hand-stitched upper conforming to the foot.

When European settlers arrived, they adopted and adapted these designs. By the 19th century, moccasin-inspired footwear was being commercially produced for frontier use. But it wasn’t until the late 1800s and early 1900s—particularly in Maine—that handsewn moccasin construction became industrialized at scale.

Maine was uniquely positioned for this. They had the ingredients: hides, labor skill, outdoor culture, and an established footwear industry. By the early 20th century, small family-run shops began producing handsewn moccasins using techniques that have since become cemented as a regional specialty, sewing vamps by hand with awl and thread before attaching lightweight rubber or crepe soles.

L.L.Bean, founded in 1912, helped mainstream Maine-made footwear through its catalog business. While perhaps best known for the Bean Boot, the brand also sold handsewn moccasins that cemented the style as practical outdoor gear rather than fashion. Leon Leonwood Bean himself is credited with creating what we today recognize as the camp moc in the 1930s.

Companies like Sebago (est. 1946) and Quoddy (est. 1947) helped further formalize the camp moc during the postwar years. Rancourt (est. 1967) came along not long after. These makers refined the silhouette and construction techniques that we associate with the camp moc today. This all coincided with the explosion of American leisure culture—summer camps, resorts, lake houses, and sailing clubs. The shoe fit the moment perfectly.

It’s also worth noting that the broader moccasin-to-loafer pipeline shaped American style in other ways. G.H. Bass introduced the Weejun in the late 1930s—inspired by Norwegian fishing shoes—which helped formalize the penny loafer in American prep and ivy style. While structurally different from a true moccasin, it carried forward the handsewn vamp tradition and helped normalize moccasin construction in casual dress.

By the 1950s and 60s, the camp moc had become a staple of East Coast collegiate style, worn sockless in summer, beat up at the heel, and softened by salty summer air. It wasn’t quite dressy and it wasn’t quite rugged. It lived in between, and it still does today.

And that’s the key: the camp moc was never formal. It wasn’t meant to be. It was designed for cabins, docks, campsites, and road trips. It’s leisure footwear—but grounded in real craftsmanship.

Maine became the epicenter of this tradition because the skill was generational. Families passed down handsewing techniques. Small factories operated on tight margins but high labor intensity. Even today, the handful of surviving Maine makers rely on artisans who’ve been handsewing footwear for decades. It’s not easily automated work, and the skillset is increasingly rare.

That’s why the difference between a good camp moc and a forgettable one comes down to construction. True handsewn moccasins require time, skilled hands, and quality leather that can withstand the tension of hand stitching. When that’s replaced with cemented shortcuts, you lose the very thing that made the shoe endure.

The camp moc isn’t just a “vibe.” It’s the product of a very specific American manufacturing lineage—one that blends Indigenous knowledge, New England industry, and postwar leisure culture into something deceptively simple.

And that lineage still shows in the way the good ones wear in over time.

Construction 101: Why Some Camp Mocs Feel Right and Others Don’t

True camp mocs are handsewn—and that distinction matters more than most people realize.

The defining feature is the moccasin construction itself. The vamp (that U-shaped piece over the toe) is stitched by hand to the quarters using either a plug or wraparound moccasin construction. In a plug moc, the vamp is a separate piece inset into the upper and sewn around the perimeter. In a wrap moc, a single piece of leather wraps under the foot and up around the sides before being stitched on top. Both methods create a flexible, almost slipper-like feel because the upper isn’t rigidly structured the way Goodyear-welted or Blake-stitched shoes are.

That flexibility is the whole point.

Unlike Blake or cemented construction—where the sole is stitched or glued directly to a more structured insole board—handsewn mocs move with your foot. There’s less internal reinforcement and less stiffness. The leather does the work.

With camp mocs, you’ll usually see:

• Horween Chromexcel or similar oil-tanned leathers — pull-up hides infused with oils and waxes that crease deeply and develop tonal variation over time. They’re forgiving and mold to the foot.

• Rawhide laces — functional, not decorative. They tighten the collar and allow for slight adjustment as the leather stretches.

• A 360° camp-style lacing system — the lace runs through the collar of the shoe, helping cinch the fit evenly around the foot.

• Camp soles, natural crepe soles, or Vibram wedges — lightweight, flexible sole units that keep the shoe grounded without making it heavy.

And importantly: no lining, or very minimal lining. The interior is often just the backside of the leather. That’s intentional. The absence of structure allows the upper to collapse and soften over time.

Even the way camp mocs age is different from other leather footwear. Because there’s no rigid midsole fighting against the upper, the leather forms to your gait. The toe box develops soft rolls instead of sharp creases. The heel counter relaxes slightly. They become specific to you.

That’s the version I’ve worn for years—soft, handsewn, and increasingly better the more they give up their original shape.

Camp Moc vs. Blucher Moc vs. Boat Shoe

They look similar. They are not the same.

To most people, these live in the same visual category: brown leather, handsewn toe, and casual energy. But structurally and historically, they come from different places.

The Camp Moc

By now, we’ve covered what defines a true camp moc: handsewn construction, a flexible build, minimal structure, and that soft, slightly collapsible feel over time.

But visually, it lives in a crowded neighborhood. To most people, a camp moc, a blucher moc, and a boat shoe register as the same thing—typically brown leather, moc toe stitching, and casual energy—and are probably all thought of as a boat shoe by the mainstream consumer. The differences are subtle, but they change how the shoe behaves.

The Blucher Moc

The blucher moc is where things get more structured.

“Blucher” refers to an open-lacing system—the quarters sit on top of the vamp and open outward, similar to a derby shoe. In a blucher moc, you still have a handsewn moc toe, but now there’s a true tongue and eyelet-facing system built into the upper.

In other words: camp mocs have collar lacing, and blucher mocs have open instep lacing

This small change dramatically alters the feel. The blucher moc tends to feel more secure and slightly more supportive. It also reads a touch more shoe-like and less slipper-like.

Historically, blucher mocs gained popularity in mid-century America as a bridge between casual moccasins and everyday shoes. They were practical, easy to adjust, easy to wear with or without socks, and often paired with chunkier soles. Many of the classic Maine-made camp shoes evolved into blucher-style variations over time.

The Boat Shoe

The boat shoe is its own category entirely.

Invented by Paul Sperry in 1935 after observing his dog’s grip on ice, the boat shoe was designed specifically for traction on wet decks. Its defining feature is the razor-siped rubber outsole for grip. They also typically utilize a thinner, more water-resistant leather and have a lower-profile silhouette.

Yes, it may have a handsewn toe. Yes, it may share the 360° lacing detail with a camp moc. But the sole is the giveaway. Boat shoes were historically engineered for slip resistance while camp mocs were not.

Boat shoes are nautical by design. Camp mocs are more terrestrial.

And culturally, they diverged too. The boat shoe became a symbol of coastal prep and yacht club aesthetics that endures today. The camp moc remained more grounded.

Why the Distinction Matters

To the untrained eye, these differences feel subtle, but they’re apparent once you’ve worn them. Construction ultimately shapes the attitude of the shoe.

• A camp moc collapses and molds.

• A blucher moc supports and secures.

• A boat shoe grips and performs.

They share visual DNA because they all borrow from moccasin construction. But they were built for different environments—forest, town, and water.

And when you understand that, you start choosing them differently. Not because one is better, but because they’re not as interchangeable as first meets the eye.

The Brands That Still Do It Right

If you care about the real thing, there are a handful of places to look:

Rancourt & Co.
Family-run, handsewn, and a great custom program. Rancourt is probably the gold standard today from a price/quality/reputation standpoint. Their Gilman Camp Moc is a modern benchmark. They offer different widths and they have many leather options available beyond the classic brown.

Oak Street Bootmakers
Chicago-based and deeply tied to Chicago’s Horween Leather, Oak Street Bootmakers offers another faithful interpretation of the camp moc. Many of their handsewn models also often feature thicker leathers, chunkier Vibram soles, and a bit more visual heft overall.

I worked for OSB in various capacities (as their photographer and director of operations) for a few years and their camp mocs have been my go-to for the last decade.

EasyMoc
A newer Maine-based operation, EasyMoc leans fully into the soft, unstructured side of the camp moc. Everything is handsewn in small batches, often using Horween Chromexcel or suede, often with slightly roomier lasts. If traditional camp mocs skew a bit too tidy for you, EasyMoc’s proportions may land in a sweeter spot. Most of their offerings are more casual without being sloppy, and substantial without being heavy.

Quoddy
Quoddy feels slightly more rugged and heritage-forward than some of its peers. They produce in small batches, also have a made-to-order program, and still rely on traditional handsewn construction, with many styles built on softer, more forgiving lasts. The leather selection also trends toward Chromexcel and heavily oiled hides that crease beautifully and age with real character. Quoddy’s camp mocs often feel a touch more relaxed and broken-in from the start.

Yuketen
Yuketen approaches the camp moc from a slightly different angle—one rooted in American craft, but filtered through a distinctly fashion- and design-forward lens. Production happens in small workshops in Maine or Mexico, using traditional handsewn construction, but the details are where things get interesting: layered panels, unexpected leather combinations, hand-cut kilties, contrast stitching, and chunkier Vibram sole units. The lasts tend to feel fuller and more substantial, and the overall silhouette can skew more rugged or more stylized depending on the model. Yuketen isn’t trying to reproduce a 1950s camp shoe verbatim—it’s interpreting it. Their versions feel expressive, sometimes even maximal. They are probably not the brand for the purists out there, but they’re compelling if you want a more unique camp moc. It’s worth noting that these do come with a significantly higher price tag than most makers.

Russell Moccasin
Founded in 1898 in Berlin, Wisconsin, Russell Moccasin represents a different branch of the American moccasin tree—more hunting camp than coastal dock. Their construction is famously robust, often built using true wraparound moccasin techniques where a single piece of leather forms the bottom and sides of the upper. Many models are double- or even triple-vamp constructions, meaning extra layers of leather reinforce high-wear areas. The result is a moccasin that feels substantially more rugged and structured than a typical Maine camp moc. Russell often pairs that handsewn flexibility with serious outsoles—Vibram lug, ripple, or wedge—making them legitimate field shoes rather than casual leisure footwear.

L.L.Bean
L.L.Bean still offers their own versions, though quality varies by model and era. They largely discontinued their camp moccasin in 2019, but have since brought back a few models. At this point though, I’d recommend any of the other brands mentioned above if you’re looking for a high-quality shoe.

However, vintage Maine-made pairs are often fantastic. Age gives them dimension, but they can be tough to find, and like my father’s old pairs, handsewn footwear can be a gamble buying used if they’ve already molded to another person’s foot. Consider with caution.

I would argue you won’t find a substantial difference in quality or fit between Rancourt, Oak Street, EasyMoc, and Quoddy — these makers utilize largely the same manufacturing techniques, lasts, materials, and in some cases even the same handsewers — but the subtle differences in style and branding may cause one maker to appeal to you more than another.

Yuketen and Russell are outliers in both design language and price point, but they may appeal to you if you’re looking for something a bit different. Despite being the originator of the camp moc, L.L.Bean’s quality today leaves something to be desired compared to the other makers, but they will still hold up well enough and can be had for ~$100.

Ultimately, the camp moc should feel easy, but not fragile. They can and should take a beating, and all of these makers offer that.

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Styling the Camp Moc (Or Rather, Not Styling)

The beauty of a camp moc is that it doesn’t need styling tricks. It’s not really a shoe you build an outfit around, it should just fit into one.

They work with just about anything: faded fatigues, full-cut denim, drawstring trousers, chinos or cords, shorts that hit above the knee, thick socks in cooler weather, no socks in warmer weather, and so forth.

The common thread isn’t necessarily a specific aesthetic—it’s their ease. They’re at their best when the silhouette breathes a little.

There’s something important about remembering what they are: a leisure shoe with working-class roots. They should look like they’ve been lived in: creased across the vamp, darkened where your foot bends, and slightly sun-faded. Maybe the rawhide laces have softened and curled. That’s the point.

If they look overly pristine, they feel wrong. The camp moc earns its appeal over time. It’s better on day fifty than on day one. Below are just a handful of ways I wear mine across the seasons:

Beyond the Camp Moc

The camp moc is just one branch of a much larger tree.

Once you start paying attention to handsewn construction, you realize how many variations exist—some are stripped down to almost slipper-level minimalism, while others are built so heavily they rival most boots.

There are handsewn loafers that blur the line between moccasin and penny loafer. Single-vamp constructions that feel closer to house shoes than structured footwear. Unlined suede versions that collapse almost immediately and wear like gloves.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are double- and triple-vamp builds with stacked leather midsoles, lug outsoles, storm welts, and enough heft to survive actual field use, such as Russell’s upland models and many of Yuketen’s layered interpretations. Even certain blucher mocs feel closer to a low-cut work shoe than a camp slipper, and can certainly be dressed up that way if you so choose.

The beauty of handsewn footwear is that the core principle stays the same—leather wrapping the foot, stitched by hand—but the expression can shift dramatically.

Once you understand the construction, you start seeing the throughline. And that’s when it gets dangerous. Because suddenly you’re not just buying a camp moc (although I’d recommend starting there). You’re choosing between silhouettes, sole units, vamp styles, leather weights, and levels of structure. The category is deeper than it looks at first glance.

Below are a handful of my favorites—different interpretations of the same handsewn logic, each pushing it in its own direction, from shoes that more closely resemble the classic camp moc, to boots, and the in between:

Why The Camp Moc Still Works

We’re in a moment where so much footwear feels aggressively engineered—overbuilt sneakers, lug soles on everything, technical hybrids that look like they belong on a trail you’ll never hike. I have an appreciation for many of these pieces, as outlined in some of the images above, but the camp moc is the opposite of that. It’s low-stakes and understated, and I think we could all could use a bit more of that in our wardrobes.

The true-to-original versions can read archival. The more elaborate interpretations feel current without trying to be. A thicker sole adds presence, oil-tanned leather adds dimension, and a roomier last adds ease.

Sizing varies some by brand, so you have to pay attention, but when you get it right, it feels right. The goal is simple: they should feel like something you can drive in, walk at least a few miles in, and forget about, not worrying too much about what happens to them along the way. If they feel delicate or overly refined out of the box, they’re probably not the right pair.

I think about my dad’s old pairs a lot.

They were never curated, styled, or protected. He just wore them—to work, in the yard, to the store—until the leather turned dark and the soles thinned and they became unmistakably his.

Some shoes look best when they’re fresh out of the box, but camp mocs look best when they’ve been lived in long enough to tell a story.

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Chicago gave us a brief stretch of “false spring” last week — 50+ degrees, sunlight, the kind of days that make you reconsider every complaint you’ve made since November — and I managed to miss most of it thanks to another illness. Classic. The city thaws and I’m horizontal.

I’m pretty much back to normal now. Work has been doing its typical ebb-and-flow thing. Nothing dramatic, just enough to keep me engaged but not enough to make me feel all that productive. I’m officially at that point where I don’t want more layers. I want air.

In a few weeks, I’m heading up to Wisconsin’s Driftless Region for a fly fishing trip with a handful of new friends. I’m really looking forward to it. The Driftless is one of the more unusual landscapes in the Midwest — untouched by the last glacial period, full of limestone bluffs, spring creeks, and cold, clear trout water. It feels older than the rest of the region, more textured, and less flattened. I’ve written about it previously, but I’m aiming to make a concerted effort to spend as much time here as possible this year ahead.

We’ll be camping, which means I’m hoping for temperatures at least north of freezing. Also, fly lines stiffen up in the cold and guides ice over and there’s nothing romantic or fun about that. Still, I’m ready to be uncomfortable in a productive way, and hopefully land a couple of trout along the way.

Then in April, I’m heading to the Pacific Northwest with my mom, aunt, and cousin for a week. We’ve built out a slightly over-ambitious itinerary (as is tradition). It’s been decades since we’ve all taken a trip together. I’m looking forward to it in a way that feels different than a solo, regional trip — slower and shared.

I’ll report back on both.

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What I’ve Been Consuming

When you’re stuck inside, you might as well lean into it. That’s been a recurring theme of these posts this winter.

James Salter’s Light Years
David Coggins recently recommended it, which was enough for me. It’s been quietly epiphanic. Salter writes about marriage, time, beauty, and decay with this almost surgical precision. The novel follows a seemingly enviable couple over decades, but it’s less about plot and more about erosion — how desire shifts, how intimacy thins, and how memory edits itself.

It’s one of those books that makes you slow down not because it’s dense, but because it’s too sharp to skim. I catch myself often re-reading a single sentence or paragraph multiple times just because of how good it is. Salter is master. I’ve already picked up another book of his to read at some point after I finish this one.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
I burned through the new Westeros series last week in two sittings. It’s nothing like Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon — it’s smaller scale, quieter, and more character-driven. There are really only two main characters versus the pantheon that must be kept up with in GoT. The stakes feel human instead of geopolitical.

You don’t need to be deep in the lore to enjoy it, though recognizing certain family names from the main series certainly adds a layer of satisfaction. It’s medieval storytelling without the pomp and circumstance. A side quest, essentially — and that’s what makes it good.

The episodes are also short, and there are only six of them, so it’s a relatively quick commitment compared to most television these days. I appreciated that.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I haven’t really picked up a new video game since I played Elden Ring over a year ago, but this one pulled me in on a whim. It swept last year’s awards circuit and, halfway through, I understand why. Maybe I’ll start making an effort to play whatever performs best at Game of the Year awards, as they seem to be winning for a reason.

The premise is strange in the right way: a world governed by a mysterious figure who erases people at a certain age each year. The art direction leans painterly and surreal. The combat system riffs on classical turn-based mechanics but adds timing and real-time elements that make it feel alive and fresh instead of nostalgic.

It’s incredibly cinematic without being hollow — which is rare. I think it would be a great game to play alongside a partner or friend who don’t typically enjoy video games simply due to how good the story telling is.

Lush — Split (1994)
I’ve been listening to a lot of Lush, especially Split. It sits in that shoegaze/dream pop space — dense guitars, floating vocals, and very melancholy. Perfect late-winter music and well deserving of an hour of your time.

A Few Objects I’ve Actually Been Enjoying

I haven’t written much about product lately which has been partly intentional. But a couple things have earned their keep.

Indigofera Blanket
I’ve wanted one for nearly a decade and finally picked one up.

Indigofera works with one of the oldest family-run wool mills in Norway, producing heavyweight jacquard blankets in 100% wool. The designs are slightly grotesque in the old-world sense — folkloric, mythic, a little strange. Not minimalist or polite (though they make those, too, but I figured go big or go home).

It’s the first truly high-quality wool blanket I’ve owned, and it makes the rest of them feel decorative. This one feels so substantial in comparison. It’s the kind of object you will keep forever.

There’s something satisfying about buying the “overbuilt” version of something you use every day. I only wish I had it while Chicago was going through the polar vortex last month. That’s okay though, because I’ll have it next time.

Aurora Shoe Company — Middle English
These have quietly become my house shoe.

Handmade in upstate New York, vegetable-tanned leather, a simple monk strap. They’re slightly goofy — Puritan, almost anti-style — which is probably why I like them. They don’t try to be flattering.

They’ve finally broken in and now mold to my feet in a way that makes taking them off mildly annoying. I’ve found they look best with bigger pants — fuller silhouettes help balance the visual weight.

They’re not cool in the algorithmic sense (although depending on who you ask, they are), which makes them more interesting to wear.

Closing Thoughts

Winter always slows me down more than I expect. Less output, more intake, and more reflection than momentum.

But maybe that’s useful.

There’s something about this in-between period — not quite frozen, not quite blooming — that makes you reassess what you actually want to carry into the next season. Trips on the calendar. Books that linger. Objects that earn their place.

Spring will show up eventually. It always does. And we continue to get glimpses of it.

Until then, I’m layering up, going through the motions, and waiting for the rivers to thaw.

RC

I want to contribute something that moves culture forward—not just something that looks good.

That impulse has followed me for years, especially as my interest in fashion, photography, and writing has ebbed and flowed, tangled together, and deepened. But it’s always been paired with hesitation. Fashion, in particular, becomes difficult to engage with honestly once you spend any real time understanding how it functions. The waste, the extraction, and the inefficiency aren’t side effects—they’re structural. Even at its best—ethical, transparent, and sustainably sourced—it’s still new production. It still asks the world for more, just with better marketing attached.

Coming from a scientific background makes that tension hard to ignore. Science trains you to think in systems, to look for externalities, and to ask where things come from, where they go, and who absorbs the cost. You’re taught to be suspicious of clean narratives and elegant solutions. Fashion, by contrast, often survives by keeping those questions comfortably out of frame—or by answering them just convincingly enough to move on.

The result is a kind of paralysis. I’m drawn to fashion not just as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a cultural one. It’s a language, a signal system, and a way people situate themselves in the world. But it’s hard to reconcile that interest with the reality that the industry already produces far more than it knows how to metabolize. Even when production is done “right,” the underlying logic doesn’t really change. Sustainability softens the edges, but it doesn’t undo consumption. More often, it just makes continuation feel defensible.

At the same time, refusing to participate entirely feels like its own dead end. Cultural stagnation isn’t neutral either. So you end up caught between two unsatisfying positions: make things and feel complicit, or make nothing and feel irrelevant. Neither option feels particularly honest.

This tension mirrors something broader in my life. I’m technically trained and work in a highly regulated, procedural field. Almost everything I do follows strict guidelines, standard operating procedures, and layers of review. There’s very little room for interpretation, let alone creativity. After spending all day working by the book, activating the creative part of my brain doesn’t usually feel restorative—it feels effortful. The mental mode doesn’t switch easily.

Then there’s the guilt. If I spend my free time improving technical skills—refining data workflows, building dashboards, or re-learning an equation I’ve long forgotten—I feel like I’m neglecting the creative side of myself. If I spend time writing, photographing, or thinking about clothes, I feel irresponsible for not sharpening my professional edge. Add fitness, reading, cooking, and the simple desire to enjoy something without justifying it, and suddenly every hour feels like a referendum on productivity.

I’m not bad at resting. I’m bad at letting myself enjoy rest.

This collapses into a vague dissatisfaction with how I’m spending my time, both personally and professionally. I don’t think this is unique to me. A lot of people my age feel it—especially those who were trained for narrow expertise in a world that no longer resembles what we were promised in our youth. But knowing you’re not alone doesn’t make the answers any easier to find.

What I keep returning to is the idea that cultural contribution doesn’t have to mean producing new objects. Fashion isn’t only garments. It’s context, preservation, reinterpretation, taste-making, writing, repair, reuse, documentation, and so much more. The recent surge of interest in vintage clothing feels like one of the few areas where the broader space has actually gotten something right—not because it’s perfect, but because it acknowledges that value doesn’t always require novelty. There are ways to engage that don’t demand adding more volume to an already saturated system.

This is where I start to feel most alienated from Instagram-era fashion culture. Somewhere along the way, caring about clothes became synonymous with eventually launching something. A micro-label. A capsule. A “small run” that somehow still needs to justify itself through growth. Liking clothes long enough now seems to obligate you to manufacture more of them, preferably with a compelling origin story and a Shopify backend.

In that ecosystem, restraint reads as a lack of ambition. Thoughtfulness gets reframed as hesitation. The highest form of participation is production, and the fastest way to signal seriousness is to put your name on a hangtag. The result is a steady churn of micro-labels that differ mostly in typography, each one framed as a corrective to the last, all quietly contributing to the same excess they claim to critique.

Not every fashion influencer or vintage reseller needs to start a brand. In fact, the vast majority of them simply shouldn’t. I understand the need to make a living, but liking clothes does not obligate you to add more clothes to the world. The current culture makes it strangely difficult to say that out loud, because it disrupts the idea that progress must always be visible, scalable, and most importantly, for sale.

Maybe that’s where my skill set actually fits. Coming from science, I’m comfortable with ambiguity, iteration, and slow accumulation. I’m less interested in definitive solutions than in asking better questions. What does sustainability look like beyond materials and supply chains? How do you slow culture down without freezing it? How do you participate without pretending purity is possible?

I don’t have clean answers. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But these are questions I hope to explore further in this space. What I am increasingly convinced of is that the pressure—to monetize every interest, to optimize every effort, and to resolve every contradiction—tends to erode the most interesting work.

What feels more honest, at least for me, is resisting the idea that contribution has to look like production. I don’t know if there’s an end state where everything coheres neatly. What I’m aiming for instead is a way of existing that’s attentive, critical, and alive—aware of the systems I operate within, even when I can’t fully escape them.

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For much of my life, structure did a lot of the thinking for me.

School is especially good at this. You don’t need to decide what to do—only whether you’re willing to show up inside a predefined format. You attend the class, complete the assignment, and meet the deadline. Rinse and repeat. Progress is visible and external. Even uncertainty is contained. As long as you stay within the construct, momentum is almost automatic.

When that structure disappeared, the ground shifted in a way I wasn’t wholly prepared for.

Being idle after school was harder than I expected—not because I lacked ambition, but because I suddenly had to invent the format myself. There were no semesters, no syllabi, and no implied next step. Time stopped arriving pre-organized. And once you’re free of those systems, every decision becomes a referendum on who you think you are.

A lot of modern anxiety seems to live right there.

I studied hydrogeology. For a long time, I thought what I was learning was how to become a groundwater scientist for the rest of my life. What I actually learned was how to become good at something early, and how tightly identity can wrap itself around competence. At eighteen, early specialization feels like clarity. At twenty-four, it can feel like a trap. And now, at thirty-one, I often have a fairly abstract sense of what it is that I even do on a day-to-day basis.

After graduate school, I pivoted about as hard as one could and moved to Chicago to take a job I’d loosely describe as fashion operations, but I was wearing many hats. On paper, it made no sense. In practice, it made a lot of sense—I wanted to be closer to something cultural, something interpretive, and something that felt alive in a way my academic training increasingly didn’t allow for. It didn’t work out, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was unavoidable—it felt like I had abandoned six years of higher education, along with the version of myself that education had produced.

There’s a quiet shame that comes with realizing you don’t want to do the thing you’ve trained to do—especially if you’re decent at it. Sports and academia are honest about endings. Careers, less so. There’s no ceremony for deciding that a former version of yourself no longer fits. You don’t graduate out of a professional identity, you just…keep going. Or you don’t. And stopping often reads as failure, even when it’s closer to honesty.

That shame is reinforced by how modern work culture rewards inertia. The classic millennial promotion goes something like this:

Here’s more work.
Okay, can I be paid more for doing more work?
No—but it’ll look good at your next annual review, when we can discuss the possibility of a raise, eleven months from now.
Oh. Okay then.

Competence turns into responsibility. Responsibility turns into lifestyle. And eventually your life becomes quietly dependent on staying exactly where you are. The salary gets comfortable. The routine calcifies. You wake up, work, eat, exercise, sleep. Repeat. It’s efficient—but efficiency isn’t the same thing as aliveness.

What’s strange is that none of this looks like failure from the outside. By every traditional metric, things are going about as well for me as one could reasonably hope in today’s America. I have a good job. I own my condo. I have hobbies and interests and friends and a supportive family. I look put together. My life probably reads as stable, even successful. And yet, I often have an underlying sense that everything is moving forward except me—that I’m maintaining something rather than building toward anything.

Part of this, I think, comes from the myth of the long-term goal. I’ve become less long-term goal-oriented as I’ve gotten older, especially when it comes to my career. We’re told that clarity arrives if you think hard enough about where you want to end up. My experience has been the opposite. The more rigid the destination, the harder it becomes to adapt when you inevitably change—which, inconveniently, you always do. And if you somehow don’t, I can guarantee that the world will change around you.

Despite pivoting back into the environmental space after my brief detour into fashion, I don’t directly use my specialized scientific knowledge most days. Studying science teaches you how to solve problems, but more importantly, it teaches you how to learn—how to navigate ambiguity, how to iterate, and how to be wrong productively. Those skills have made me useful in a role that rewards flexibility. Still, usefulness isn’t the same thing as passion, and I’d be lying if I said I felt deeply connected to the work I do every day, but I am good at it and I don’t feel like the projects I am involved with are making the world a worse place.

This is where fashion keeps reappearing in my life—not necessarily as a career ambition, but as a parallel way of thinking. Fashion is often dismissed as superficial, but it’s actually a system of signals, constraints, repetition, and variation. It’s about coherence over time, not completion. That way of thinking has felt more aligned with how I actually move through the world than the idea of a single, optimized professional identity.

“Find your passion” is terrible advice. It implies that passion exists fully formed, waiting to be discovered. In reality, passion is cultivated. It grows through attention, friction, and repetition. You don’t stumble into it—you build it by dabbling seriously enough to notice what has staying power.

That’s why I’ve become increasingly drawn to the idea of being a serial dabbler. Try things without immediately asking how they’ll pay off. If your first instinct is to monetize an interest, you’ll probably kill it at best, and come to hate it at worst. But if your instinct is to invest in getting better—to read more, practice more, and learn the contours of that thing—clarity tends to follow. Over time, it becomes obvious what things want more of your life.

There’s real resistance to this approach. Once you become competent at something, you adapt to that feeling. Competence is comfortable. It’s efficient. Why willingly return to the awkwardness of being a beginner? This becomes especially difficult when your competence is what pays your bills. Unless you actively fight against it, openness to experience naturally declines—and with it, creative possibility. I think this is why so many people feel stuck and bored with their life.

I’ve started thinking of myself less as someone moving toward arrival, and more as someone perpetually in progress. I don’t know if there’s a point where I’ll feel finished or fully fulfilled. Probably not. What I hope for instead is a gradual increase in alignment—fewer days that feel borrowed from someone else’s life, with fewer decisions made purely out of inertia.

What’s unsettled me isn’t the absence of direction, but the clarity that comes with it. When nothing is assigned, you’re forced to reckon with what you’re choosing—and what you’re quietly accepting. The problem is that most of our systems today are designed to make those choices feel invisible, actively discouraging deviation in favor of smooth, frictionless adulthood.

Lately, that reckoning has followed me most insistently into the creative worlds I orbit, where participation is rewarded as long as it produces sameness, and where the line between contribution and complicity is thinner than I’d like.

More on that in my next post…

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Technology is a funny thing. I love and hate it, often for the same reasons. For the past few days, my phone has been reminding me that one year ago I was in Puerto Rico. It’s strange how a screen can resurface something that still feels fully dimensional. A place, a version of yourself, a life that no longer quite exists, resurfacing because an algorithm in your pocket decided it was time to remember.

I remember the fifteen-mile day walking around Old San Juan and counting the stray cats. I remember riding a horse for the first time and the colossal monstera plants along the rainforest trail. I remember the rented mask that hurt my face while snorkeling in Rincón and that it didn’t matter because I’d never seen so many fish before. I remember drinking Medalla Light beer on the beach and the smell of the sunscreen. I remember the sound of the coquí frogs at night and how they somehow managed to be deafening and soothing at the same time.

I remember who I was with. I remember who I was. My life looked very different then.

Today I’m standing at my desk at home in Chicago, looking out at half a foot of snow and slush. It’s snowing lightly. I’m writing between work calls because it feels right. I’m reflecting on the past, the present, and whatever comes next because that also feels right. I’m listening to “Not In Love”—originally by Platinum Blonde, but of course it’s the Crystal Castles version remixed by Robert Smith. That’s an ironic coincidence, but I guess that feels right too. You can probably see where I’m going with all of this.

Over the last three months, I’ve written more than I ever have, excluding the time spent on my master’s thesis, I suppose. I’ve enjoyed this platform more than I expected. It’s funny how satisfying it feels to have a hundred of you subscribe to what I have to say. A paltry number compared to my Instagram following, but somehow far more meaningful. There’s something grounding about knowing a hundred people chose to sit with my words for a few minutes, rather than thousands spending three seconds glancing at an outfit photo before scrolling on.

I’m still trying to find focus in what I choose to write about. But if I’m honest, I’ve always used the internet to share whatever I happen to be interested in at the moment. On Instagram, that’s largely taken the form of clothing—and that will probably remain the primary thread here as well. Still, I’m sure I’ll continue to wander whenever I feel like it. Hopefully you don’t mind. At the very least, I hope the common themes hold together well enough that even if you arrive for thoughts on clothes, you’ll find something else worth staying for.

Writing forces me to slow down—to commit to a thought and live with it longer than I otherwise would. This wasn’t a planned project so much as something that emerged because parts of my life began demanding a different pace. I still think of Instagram as documentation, as proof-of-life. This space, by contrast, is interpretation. It’s where I try to understand what that life actually adds up to.

Writing this weekly-ish, generally themeless thing separate from my focused essays has become a way for me to take inventory with some regularity. This space exists so I can think clearly, not loudly. Some people journal and keep those thoughts to themselves. I do that too, but I’ve always been fairly public, and this is just another forum for that. I don’t know exactly what this turns into, but I know I want it to remain a place where I can think in full sentences.

In a lot of ways, that impulse is the common thread running through everything I have written so far here. Whether I’m talking about clothes, taste, music, fly fishing, or whatever else happens to be occupying my attention at the moment, I’m less interested in conclusions than consistency. I don’t really believe in finished wardrobes, finished selves, or finished ideas—only in versions that make sense for now.

A year ago I was reading Call Me By Your Name on a beach in sunny Puerto Rico under a palm tree, a novel whose themes largely explore the lasting impact of memory and heartbreak, which also feels like ironic foreshadowing in hindsight. Today I’m at home in my office in Chicago, snow piled up outside the windows, writing between work calls. The song has shuffled to “I Could Give You All That You Don’t Want” by The Saddest Landscape. It’s probably time to get back to work.

Ultimately, the details and the pace change. The point, I think, is noticing that they have.

So consider this tenth Casca Corner less of a milestone and more of a check-in. A reminder that paying attention still feels worthwhile, even when it’s inefficient. If you’ve been reading along, I appreciate you. And if you stick around, I suspect we’ll continue to circle many of the same ideas, just from slightly different angles, as life keeps shifting underneath them.

RC

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That sentence—swap jacket for boots, denim, knitwear, or really anything else—has probably passed through every person who thinks seriously about clothes. It promises relief, less decision-making, less noise, and a quiet, stable endpoint where you’ve finally figured it out.

But the concept of a finished wardrobe is a fantasy. Not because it’s poorly executed, but because it misunderstands what wardrobes actually are. Clothes don’t exist in a vacuum—they exist in time. Bodies change. Jobs change. Cities change. Winters get colder or shorter. Interests drift. What felt essential at 23 feels ornamental at 31. The idea that a wardrobe could ever be tidy, coherent, and permanent assumes a static life most people don’t actually live.

Completion is appealing because it’s marketed as peace. But peace, in this context, is just the absence of buying—for a moment anyhow. And that moment never really lasts.

How Completion Became a Product

Over the last decade, “the finished wardrobe” has quietly become a product category. Capsule wardrobes. Essential lists. The 10 pieces every man needs. The perfectly balanced closet has become laid out like a solved equation.

From a marketing perspective, the logic is clever: buy correctly now, and you won’t need to buy later. But that logic collapses the moment the next season arrives. There’s always a better cotton, a looser weave, a more historically accurate reproduction, a new dye process that fades more beautifully, a revised fit that fixes the flaws of last year’s version. Brands and stores that preach “buy fewer, better things” are still fundamentally invested in you buying again—just with better storytelling.

In menswear, this is especially visible in heritage and workwear spaces. How many versions of the “perfect” chambray shirt exist? How many reinterpretations of the same WWII-era fatigue pant, Ivy League oxford, or Type II jacket circulate at any given moment? Each one positions itself as the answer. Each quietly implies the last one wasn’t good enough.

Completion, in this context, isn’t an endpoint—it’s a sales funnel.

Why Coherence Beats Completion in Real Life

Even if marketing disappeared tomorrow, the finished wardrobe would still be impossible.

People change. Lifestyles shift. What I needed when I was commuting most days looks nothing like what I reach for now. Clothes that made perfect sense during a phase of going out multiple nights per week feel almost theatrical in quieter routines. A wardrobe built around a single, idealized version of yourself doesn’t age well—it becomes aspirational in the worst way, a closet full of evidence for a life you’re no longer living.

I’ve felt this firsthand. There are pieces I once bought because they completed some imagined checklist—“one for this situation, one for that”—that barely saw daylight. They weren’t bad clothes, necessarily. They just belonged to a version of myself that existed mostly in theory. Over time, they became less useful and more symbolic, kept around for scenarios that never, or at least rarely, actually arrived.

This is where heritage clothing is often misunderstood but accidentally gets things right. The appeal of brands like orSlow, Engineered Garments, or older Ralph Lauren isn’t that they offer a finished system—it’s that their clothes assume motion. A chambray shirt works under a blazer or sweater, over a tee, or half-tucked on a weekend without asking you to decide what it actually is. A pair of fatigues or denim can feel intentional one day and borderline sloppy the next, depending on how you wear them. These clothes reward repetition.

A finished wardrobe assumes stasis, but real life doesn’t cooperate that way.

What actually holds up over time isn’t completion, but coherence. The best wardrobes aren’t solved, but they are consistent. Coherence comes from climate, habit, and a realistic understanding of what gets worn when you’re not trying to optimize. It’s less about having one of everything and more about having multiples of what works.

For a long time, I made the opposite mistake. I treated my wardrobe like a problem to be solved, filling in gaps just in case. The result was a lot of clothes that technically made sense but never found a rhythm in my day-to-day life. Over time, the pieces that survived weren’t the most versatile on paper, but they were the ones I reached for without thinking.

Good wardrobes often contain redundancies: three similar sweaters, two jackets that overlap in function, multiple pairs of nearly identical shoes. From an optimization standpoint, this looks inefficient. From a lived-in standpoint, it’s exactly right. Those redundancies exist because the pieces earned their place through use, not theory.

Uniform dressing, in this sense, isn’t about minimalism, it’s about acceptance. Acceptance that your wardrobe doesn’t need to anticipate every possible scenario. Acceptance that some gaps will remain. Acceptance that dressing well most days is enough.

Unfinished Is the Point

An unresolved wardrobe forces engagement. Gaps require decisions. Decisions sharpen judgment. Wearing imperfect combinations teaches you far more than assembling a theoretically perfect outfit on a product page ever will.

I’ve learned more about my own taste from mornings when nothing quite works than from any “nailed it” outfit. From grabbing the same beat up sweatshirt for the third day in a row because it’s comfortable and familiar, even though I own nicer things. From realizing that the jacket I obsessed over for months mostly stays on the hanger, while the beat-up one I didn’t overthink upon buying it somehow goes with just about everything. From noticing what I reach for when I’m tired, running behind, or not trying to prove anything.

Taste doesn’t emerge from owning the right pieces—it emerges from living with them. It emerges from repetition, from mild dissatisfaction, and from slowly understanding what earns its keep and what was just a good idea at the time. The clothes that last aren’t always the most impressive ones, they’re the ones that quietly adapt to your actual life.

This is why the search for the “last piece” is such a trap. The goalposts always move. No purchase ever closes the loop, even if marketing tactics want you to believe otherwise. The feeling of being finished is fleeting, and it’s often followed not by relief, but by restlessness—by the sense that something else must be missing. Learning to stop, or at least pause, without feeling complete is a skill. It’s a form of restraint that has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with having some level of trust in yourself.

A finished wardrobe can’t respond to life, but an unresolved one can. The goal isn’t to build a monument to good taste. The goal is to maintain a set of tools that works as your routines shift, your priorities change, and your sense of self evolves. Clothes are meant to be worn, repeated, repaired, and occasionally outgrown.

The best wardrobes don’t arrive fully formed. They evolve slowly, unevenly, and a little messily. And that unfinished quality isn’t a flaw to solve, it’s the whole point.

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