Monday

New Delhi, India: Population 30 million

It’s a steaming hot humid afternoon in New Delhi, India, the first weekend of July. Monsoon season has begun, and while yesterday’s brief shower was torrential, and quickly muddied the road to the factory, it was nothing like the relentless barrage wreaking absolute havoc up and down the very long West Coast of the vast subcontinent. India does everything extra.

I’m in Delhi to pick up large suitcase-sized scale models of buildings we’ve designed, to mule them to the International Building Decoration Fair (CBD Guangzhou) in China. Outside a brief foray to the mainland for made-to-measure clothing during a Hong Kong visit, and a one-night stopover in the deep innards en route from NYC to an Australian wedding, this will be my first time exploring China, if five days adjacent a conference center in Guangzhou can be called exploring.

More than a decade ago I skipped Burning Man and went instead with a friend on a two week journey East—nine days in Japan and four in Hong Kong. Japan quite simply blew open my mind – in comparison to so many other countries, where life unfolds on the streets, it was hard not to be aware of just how much of Japan takes place in private, behind closed doors—not least because so many of said doors closed directly on us when we tried to enter.

The streets of course were still lively—Geishas in full regalia teetering on tiny shoes, dozens of Japanese Elvis impersonators done up in doo-wop, teenagers in wild cos play outfits, men standing idly bent over adult manga comics in 7-11 stores ogling cartoon women scrubbed of genitalia, salary men in starched white shirts and loosened ties sitting opposite enticingly dressed hostesses in conversation bars pouring out their hearts with each pour of whiskey. And yet, anyone pausing to sense the night knew the real adventures were elsewhere, out of site, hidden on the third floor or the basement of the myriad buildings lining Tokyo streets.

And of course the food. The cleanliness, the ritual, the precision, the way you may have to wait 30 minutes for someone to even just come say hello. The expertise, the years of training just to make rice, the professionalism and craftsmanship, save for the wayward shrimp running across the omakase counter in Kyoto, our chef pausing for the briefest awkward smile before diving behind the counter to catch our dinner. And I remember too so vividly that first meal in Hong Kong following the exactitude of the Japanese: the noise, the smoke, the chaos, the maître ‘d grabbing food off our table while seating other guests, the fervent mania a stark contrast to the carefully orchestrated experiences a few islands away.

But this will be my first five days truly on the mainland. I lived for a year with a partner from China and somehow picked up exactly none of the language, despite a deepened curiosity to visit and a refreshed appreciation for at minimum four types of soy sauce. I’m excited to set my feet there for real—China, which for my life in the US felt, subconsciously or not, like such the other. It’s even richer in irony, too, with the World Cup in full effect in North America, to fly from India to China, which together make up roughly 40% of the global population and 0% of the futbol tournament, at a time when political power and influence seem inevitably shifting back from whence it came.

Make that four days, actually. Turns out the models, which along with a brief presentation from one of our founders will make up our contribution to the exhibition, aren’t quite ready. I went to meet our manufacturing partner at his factory, a cavernous multi-story workshop on the outskirts of Delhi with entire floors dedicated to textiles, woodwork, fabrication and leather, only to find his teams enough behind schedule to trigger a reactive chain of last-minute contingencies changes for flights, hotels, transport.

And so I sit now again in isolated splendor at The Oberoi Gurgaon, a little like Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”, meandering the interiors of the few lounges and restaurants, biding my time mildly stir crazy rather than engage with the gargantuan struggle and enormity of the rain, chaos and traffic of Delhi. Where would I even go? And how? Instead I’ll return to swimming long, solitary laps in the outdoor Olympic-size pool, a lone figure in a manicured garden, followed again in the evening by fine dining for one for one more day.

Wednesday

Guangzhou, China: Population 27 million

The model maker was initially supposed to deliver the models. They require precision and craftsmanship and careful packing, and together comprise four large wooden crates. He was to take them to China himself, deliver them to the team, see the exposition. But visas being situationally problematic, Indians can’t get them for China so easily, while those who hold UK passports can. And so I was enlisted, voila, happy to do my part, even if my contribution this time meant more brawn than brain. (Easy now, you.)

The plan was to take the three models, in four boxes, to China, where I’d hand off one to a colleague to take to our London headquarters. From there I’d continue to Jakarta, deliver one to our newest office, before finally bringing the last model back to Bombay, where it would take pride of place in our (soon-to-be) new office in Ballard Estate.

That was the original plan, anyway, which as you already know was delayed. So one more night in Delhi, and the following afternoon (yesterday) I was to meet the crates at the airport. The rains had started again, this time enough that the driver who was to deliver the cargo was unable to get his van to the factory. And so the models, bulky and heavy, already a day late, were hand carried a kilometer of muddy road to a waiting car as I clock watched from the hotel wondering if yet another day in caged luxury beckoned.

When my phone finally beeped with WhatsApp photos of the crates reaching the car, the volume of rain falling in Delhi meant app-based transportation wouldn’t arrive for nearly an hour, and so I rushed to the airport in the back of a hotel-provided luxury sedan. In Indian airports, those without tickets aren’t allowed in the building, and so I met the delivery car outside the international departures drop-off and proceeded to stack four hulking crates onto one small overmatched trolley. With one hand guiding the precariously stacked cart, and the other pushing my carry-on, I managed to navigate two lanes of traffic, convince the outside passport checkpoint my cargo was harmless, and finally enter the terminal.

If the prospect of an overnight flight on a budget carrier in seat 21A doesn’t excite you enough, try rolling up to check-in with enough extra baggage that after six people spend 25 minutes speaking amongst each other they send you (with said trolley) across the airport to measure the crates to see if they’ll fit through the x-ray machine. Then wait while four young men tap the crates, smile at you and nod, and speak in Hindi while you gesture frustratingly at the obvious ease with which the cargo will clearly fit. Then be escorted back to check-in where bemused passengers watch you lugubriously pull the crates off the trolley to be weighed, and, sweat now profusely cascading down your shiny head, re-stack the crates on the trolley as airline staff stand in close vicinity and the check-in line watches with amusement.

I’d arrived at the airport 3.5 hours ahead of my flight, in my case an historically unheard of amount of precaution. After the joy of check-in, and wheeling the trolly to oversized baggage on the opposite end of the airport, I still needed to cut the line at immigration to narrowly make the final boarding call for China. The check-in team at IndiGo, perhaps taking pity, had been kind enough to block out the middle seat for me as well so that I might at least attempt to angle my legs and body to invite some sleep. I was exhausted and drenched in sweat, but figured most of the heavy lifting was behind me. (Is it ever though, really?).

After a long, sleepless flight and a series of malfunctioning e-Visa machines which had me navigate the Chinese immigration line twice, I managed to collect all four crates from two different carousels and the excess baggage counter. By the time I exited the Guangzhou airport, it was 5 AM and I found not one but two men standing in the tout line with my name on signs, neither of whom knew the other. After some genuine confusion on everyone’s part, multiple phone calls, and an interpreter, one man and his crew relieved me of the crates, and the second fellow silently ushered me in to the back of a car with blacked out windows and delivered me to the hotel for a much needed shower.

Saturday

Shenzhen, China: Population 19 million

As it turns out, the models weren’t just late, they’re largely incomplete. And so after being set up and showcased in the fluorescent light of this gargantuan venue, it was decided they’d need to come all the way back to India for refurbishment. My trip to Jakarta, now superfluous, is still on—too the need to repeat the crate carrying exercise at least three more times. But that’s for later. For now, there’s China, at last! So, where to begin?

Scale. It has to be scale. The enormity just of the conference center alone is enough to confirm China has not been pfaffing about. Where 40 years ago there was cropland, dirt roads and empty vistas, today there are gleaming high-rise buildings, magnificent pedestrian walkways lined with neon LED lights inlaid in criss-cross patterns, and elevated highways that rise and sink through mists, trees, clouds and clean, organized neighborhood parks. Manicured shrubbery lines newly paved streets, and rental bikes are parked neat and tidily according to color—canary yellow, sky blue, forest green.

Compared to India, China feels a century in the future. There must be half a dozen buildings in Guangzhou taller than the Empire State Building, and at the tops of them are luxury lounge bars serving craft cocktails, jazz bands, and views looking down on the weather and upon a city whose bridges are lit-up neon and across whose building facades spin advertisements for telecom companies in blinking light. The malls are pristine, shining and new, and packed with diners and shoppers and extraordinary brave choices in footwear and fashion. Anime robots and cartoon critters hawk everything from the movies to fast-food, and Chinese girls in small skirts and oversized sweatshirts repeatedly flash two splayed fingers and wink one eye as they smile and pose for friends capturing the moment from devices in phone cases decorated with Swarovski jewels and rabbit ears.

In Shenzhen (75 minutes south on a bullet train), a four-story visitor center in a polished steel oblong meteor of a building showcases intricate city models of the industrial, energy, business, technology, and education zones under construction. Workers hold industrial hoses and burnish concrete on the lower floors of newly opened corporate hubs, while in the towers above, orange vinyl tubes spill out of occasional windows, massive slinky-like temporary ventilation ducts to facilitate ongoing building, building, building.

Yes, scale, organized, relentless, focused scale, and as the current American administration rushes headlong into the past—ceding any and all advantage in technology, education, science, and diplomacy while funneling wealth to its corrosive inner circle at record levels—China plays the long game, and the future rises rapidly.

At the convention hall in Guangzhou one can walk a kilometer and half in a straight line and still not exit. Up one floor, down two floors, it didn’t matter. Food courts and conference rooms were endless, and in the exhibition spaces, cheerleaders in matching outfits threw confetti as they marched through temporary exhibitions set up by toilet manufacturers, textile salesmen, furniture fabricators, and lighting companies. A small orange ball opened into a toilet if you walked near enough, and a robotic arm slowly made coffee inside a display case featuring an animated video of a flirty ‘girl-next-door’ in what looked like a flight attendant outfit, alternately smiling at bright butterflies and donning a cow hat and flipping her hair and giggling suggestively as milk squirted in to my Americano.

Influencers in sequined gold dresses stood in front of microphones recording messages on cell phones and older women in overalls passed out flyers for discounts on products I couldn’t decipher from the pictures. A young woman sat next to me and told me she was an English teacher, 23 years old, and had handed-in three boyfriends. I explained to her handed-in by referencing homework. She laughed, checked her phone, amended to ‘had.’ She guessed my age as 27 before moving on.

Men smoked cigarettes on benches between out buildings, and at urinals inside the venue, and on the back of motorcycles, and in the front of stores selling noodles and dim-sum on the streets adjacent to my hotel. Groups of young women celebrated birthdays with cakes shaped like kittens, and women of the night with beckoning eyes and size ten high-heels whispered offers of massage as I waited for taxis outside fancy hotels or walked in late to my own.

An American-sounding model-handsome pony-tailed, UK-trained Chinese chef served us smoked pork and grilled steak and mushroom ‘faux gras’ (“You miss the cruelty but the taste isn’t bad”), mocked today’s kitchen hands as “daddy-issue having ‘yes chef’ The Bear watching pussies,” and complained his grill man doesn’t salt the steaks now that he has a girlfriend. “Does he even know what a vagina looks like anymore?”

There was the chain-smoking van driver arranged by the conference to return me to the airport who repeatedly used his translate app to ask if he should drop me at the parking lot or the terminal, despite having in the back the four large crates and 72kg of excess baggage. And a spa attendant who explained the dramatic difference in services offered as ‘focusing on men’s grooming products, in particular the triangle area.”

Yes, three days in China: The sheer immensity and gleaming modernity of the train stations and convention halls—the stunning products of only-in-China organised labor and collective constitutional ambition; the inability to sleep for more than 75 minute stretches and the accompanying fog of stupor; the awkwardly regal and proud look of the severed, poached head of a now-beige and dissected dismembered chicken; the sweet crunchy texture of bright-red candied jellyfish; the insouciant nonchalance of which entire rooms of humans focus intently on the small screens in their hand; the proliferation of small furry animal toys on the belts and backpacks of men and women and boys and girls of all ages.

Sunday

Guangzhou (27 million + 1)

Some days I just don’t want to write. I lose the patience it requires to try to (poorly) capture the sheer volume of overwhelm. Days like this I catch myself wishing I had a rudimentary job in a small California town, a simple home to call my own, a woman, a dog, a local bar that serves a good burger and shows a game I want to watch.

Some days I want easy. Some days I want small.

Some days there’s frankly just too much to sift through, too many side-tracks, moments that feel, in the moment, interesting enough, or tellingly poignant, or so ludicrous or sad or sexy or wild that even when it’s happening, my mind is telling me to hit record. (The writer’s lament, perhaps, to be simultaneously in the moment and removed from it, to mentally record the particulars of the experience while still in the middle of actually experiencing: considering how to frame it, what to recall, the details that matter, or don’t, or even, in my case, the particular person who might read it, and just what to express to you, or hold back). So meta, isn’t it, this experience of recording moments of consciousness while consciousness of how the moment being recorded affects the experience itself.

Some days, I don’t want to write, even if the desire to share remains. In Robert Heinlein’s 1960’s Sci-Fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the stranger simply ‘groks’ anyone he meets—instantly and immediately understanding each and every aspect, thought, emotion and history—and some days I wish I could do the opposite (korg?) and provide you a totality of what I’ve seen and experienced simply by showing up. Narcissism of a different sort, perhaps, this belief that what I experience is worth your time—riding the bullet trains at 304 km/hr while being served freeze-dried bite-sized packages of roast duck and smoked-tofu vacuum packed in plastic on the business class car; wandering the Disneyland/Las Vegas/Burning Man cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, seeing 3,4,500m towers undulating in light and casting neon shadows across gleaming steel and glass and burnished concrete landscapes. It’s enough to make you think any future you imagine will manifest here first.

China. Try to say it out loud and not here Trump’s voice. Want to feel like you live in a time warp, even centuries behind the day and age you know it to be? Live in India and travel to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and witness clean streets, paved roads, well-cared for infrastructure, and the absence of incessant noise and horns (and not just those on cows).

Want to feel inept at your profession, if your profession is somehow architecture and your training is anything but? Visit specific buildings in foreign cities with architects and watch them watch buildings. Want to feel inept at relationships and deeply isolated? Spend most of your time time zones away from those you love, surrounded by languages you don’t speak and references—humor, music, movies—you don’t know.

Want to think that at a certain age you become comfortable and secure enough to not feel the wobbles, the emotional anxiety that can hit suddenly, no matter the adventure, the setting? There is no place to visit where you don’t bring with you all you are; no place to go which life’s roller coaster can’t reach, no mantra or rationalization to quell the anxiety that seeps into every inch of your being when you accidentally glimpse a text you wish you hadn’t, when PTSD of a corporate sort vanquishes an inquisitive perspective and instead you’re wondering, again, about your future in the middle of your present.

Some days I don’t want to write.

Tuesday

Jakarta, Indonesia: Population 42 million

The last time I was in Indonesia, fighting in the 25-year East Timor war for independence was still raging. Even so, the western tip of Timor was visitable, at least for a landing and jumping off point, and it marked the beginning of a glorious month traveling this magical island chain on a tiny boat with a Welsh woman I’d met in the shadows of Uluru at a hostel in Alice Springs, Australia. I remember the fantasy-like experience of sleeping on deck under the stars and feeling like a layer between myself and the universe had been peeled away, diving into the night sea to marvel at the phosphorescence, making love on deserted beaches, watching the dragons of Komodo island flicker long yellow tongues to smell prey, and the wild visual of looking down from a volcanic peak at sunrise at the shimmering blue, red, and green mineral lakes of Mount Kelimutu.

I had long hair at the time, and, to Indonesians, bore a not-too-distant resemblance to the Lorenzo Llamas posters which frequently adorned the inside walls of jitney vans taking locals along island roads. At one point, wearing a cut off T-shirt and placing our backpacks on top of a long-haul van, I felt a hand rubbing up and down my chest. My arms full, I looked down to see a sun-wrinkled elderly man half my size, in rags and sandals, his three remaining teeth stained betel-nuit red, smiling brightly and innocently at his first experience with body hair.

Times have changed. My long hair is long-gone, and the deserted islands of Lombok and Flores are too, I’m told, replaced with five-star resorts, beach-front towers, and international airports a 10-minute walk from your villa. Tonight at the Ritz-Carlton (I told you times have changed), I met an older woman in the elevator, a lively blondish-red curly haired Canadian whose voice I’d heard (hard not to) at a neighboring table while I sat feverishly trying to keep up with emails streaming in from time zones further west.

She was a UN Peacekeeper, in Jakarta making daily treks to the outskirts of town to train the local army. “It’s our last trip,” she said forlornly, in that still semi-cheery way Canadians say everything. “Because, and excuse me for saying it, well, your President. When he killed US A.I.D., he killed this too, so this is our last training.” Along with US A.I.D., Trump’s DOGE disaster wiped out funding for much needed civilian interventions around the world, and viral breakouts like the Ebola epidemic are being more easily transported trans-border because the safeguard which used to be in place are no longer.

I quickly assured her she wasn’t alone in her view of American leadership, and on our way back to our rooms we commiserated about the changing world and ‘back in my day’. As much as I tend to avoid ex-pat communities even where I’m actually an expat, there is something comforting in these moments of connection, which, even in subtle, momentary ways, anchor you again when spiritually it feels as if all around you is adrift.

The last time I was in Jakarta it was literally just to leave Indonesia. I’d separated from Susie in Bali and gone to Jakarta to catch a flight, ironically enough to Bombay, to support a college roommate who was getting married. I didn’t see much of Jakarta then, and won’t this time, either. The days have been spent shuttling between office and hotel, the lone meal out a team lunch at a newly developed outdoor mall, the lone late night spent in the hotel library with two other strangers watching France v Spain at 3 AM.

Even so, it’s impossible to escape the kindness of the Indonesian people. In each encounter I’m met with a smile, a bow, a quick tapping of hand to chest which I interpret as honoring our common humanity. Even the traffic here, in the most populous city on earth, proceeds politely and with almost no honking, drivers’ patient with others who need to pull in, turn, change lanes.

‘Thank you’ in Bahasa is “terima kasih,’ which translates literally as “accept affection”, and it feels accurate, genuine. A taxi driver, a chamber maid, a fellow guest in an elevator, the check-in team at the hotel. All of them kind, patient, welcoming. If I’m cynical, it’s because I’m foreign, white, tall. But I’m not, and I don’t think it is.

Friday

Bali, Indonesia: Population 4.3 million

Sometimes I forget how hard it is to live in India, how even the simplest task can feel monumental, the noise or the damp or the dirt magnifying the difficulty like a new trick in an Olympic gymnastics’ routine. We sink in to our routine, to our days, marveling at the resilience and adaptability of others while downplaying our own for the sake of just getting on with things. But spend a week or two somewhere in relative ease and the contrast smacks you immediately upon your return.

I’ve spent all of 36 hours in Ubud, Bali—enough to feel almost immediately returned to the years I spent backpacking. I see the travelers now, the long hair, the sandals, the t-shirts…in my day (oh god, the surest sign of age), there was no cell phone, no internet, nothing but paper maps and Lonely Planets and notes jotted down in journals from conversations at cafes with travelers heading the opposite way on those backpacker circuits.

Today the cafes offer Wi-Fi and Aperol Spritz with kombucha, yoga training and vegan protein smoothies, and it’s easy to long for the simplicity of life on a small island, the peaceful zen of watching a rice farmer in the paddies, the slivers of pink behind the clouds as the day begins to wind down with the sun. In my moments of insecurity and overwhelm, I wonder how long I could last on my savings in a simple accommodation a short walk to the sea on an island adrift so far from the teaming cities I know as home.

Sometimes too I wonder the same in my moments of calm—could I write that novel without anything more than a comfortable bed, a warm body of water, an internet connection to check the scores and the news? And yet, invariably, something pulls me back. Connection. Ambition. Curiosity. Habit. Bali last time too was brief, the contentious last days of a short, intense romance, and this time even shorter as work beckons – back to Jakarta, back to Bombay. One more time each checking-in the crates, picking them up the other side. They’ve seen a lot of the world in the last two weeks, even if they’re unaware.

The Australian outback, comprising nearly 75% of the country, even today remains largely uninhabited, with a population roughly the size of San Francisco’s. Food, water and shelter are scarce, and weather conditions vacillate between extremes, and quickly. Intimate understanding of the terrain can be the difference between death and survival.

In the centuries before colonialization—and long well-after—Aboriginals developed stories to chart the land and log direction, location, and information crucial to successfully navigating the terrain—a deeply buried toad to be squeezed for water, a thatch of edible weeds. These ‘dreaming tracks’ functioned doubled as as both map and creation tale, and each person had their very own. These tracks are known as songlines.

During a chance encounter in a Melbourne café nearly 30 years ago, in the same week I arrived in Australia, I struck up a conversation with a man sitting at the same table (so commonplace when we are in a travel mindset, so sadly rare when we’re ‘home’). In offering me welcome advice for the country, he recommended a book by the British writer Bruce Chatwin, of whom up to that point I’d not yet heard.

Chatwin lived a fascinating, spectacular—and spectacularly short—life, including starting at Sotheby’s as a teenager and eventually running their Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. He started and abandoned an archeology degree at the University of Edinburgh, covered much of the world writing for The Sunday Times, and dying before the age of 50. He spent much of his short time on earth exploring the above question about what does, or doesn’t, drive us to explore.

Chatwin was one of HIV/AIDS’s early well-known victims, and he finished The Songlines as his illness took hold. The book is set, fittingly, in the wild Australian outback, where Chatwin, grounded by incessant tropical rains, and suddenly aware that he’s dying, recounts the lessons he’s learned from a life of observation; in ways a modern, adjacent tale to Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, in where an exiled man shares his wisdom with the locals before returning home.

I like to read books about the places I am in when I am in those places—Midnight’s Children and Shantaram in India, Bukowski in LA, even Chatwin’s better known In Patagonia years later, when I had been living in Argentina during a semester of graduate school away from London.

Back at the cafe and, for whatever mysterious alchemy that has us act on some recommendations and ignore others, I went out and picked up the book that very same day. And though I haven’t opened it again since, it’s one of those books I remember deeply enjoying.

I don’t always remember what happens in the books I’ve read but I usually remember if I liked them or not. Much like meals, movies, parties and lovers, when their memories surface unexpectedly, so too do fragments of emotion, pixilated images and wisps of sensation in the periphery—a birthmark, a freckle, the headphones playing sea sounds accompanying bites of emulsified foam at Fat Duck.

In the book, Chatwin is stranded in the outback, his plane ill equipped to battle seasonal monsoons and unable to take him to the remote areas he wants to visit. Instead, rather than exploring the world outside, he holes up and—in real life, likely terrified and aware of his ticking clock—intersperses stories of past travels and the lessons they’ve imparted, with stories of Aboriginals, perhaps the oldest civilization on earth.

Today, lying under a palm frond near the southern tip of India and alternately reading and plunging in to the Arabian Sea, Chatwin again came to mind.

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Thursday night when I arrived in Varkala I was equal parts at one with the full moon and the calming metronome of ocean waves reaching sand as I was feeling somehow out of synch and detached from my own life. It has been a very circuitous route which has taken me from Brooklyn to London to Bombay, and there are moments scrolling LinkedIn or jealousy swiping through IG stories when something deep in me twinges and I become covetous of bigger incomes, vibey western office culture, and creating work in which I feel deeply confident.

I see posts from previous colleagues announcing funding rounds, or incompetent former clients who’ve somehow landed powerful jobs requiring the integrity and creativity I know they lack. And I experience that wavy ambrosia once more: longing, nostalgia, remorse, regret, my age.

Returning briefly to London in March crystalized some of the subtly yet profound changes in which I’ve been so immersed as to be nearly oblivious. On a Saturday I walked through Victoria Park and along the Regents Canal, which has in no small way anchored both the longest and most recent stretches of living in the city of my birth. I lived on the canal for five years in the ‘aughts, before the Olympics, when the park was mostly empty, and on the rare warm summer weekend I could wander across the bridge from my flat with a blanket and a book and find blissful solitude almost anywhere.

In 2003, when I moved to London for the first time, Shoreditch was just beginning to gentrify. The White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square helped propel Brit Pop to international fame – Tracey Emin’s bed, Damien Hirst’s floating sharks. Pete Doherty was shooting up (charts, arms), dating Kate Moss, and hosting one-off gigs in his bedroom. Florence, before the machine, would bound up on stages in between sets, flying on class A’s and singing at the top of her lungs; it was not uncommon to see Amy Winehouse stumbling in alleys or catch Bjork DJing for 35 people. The artisan coffees, day trippers and £400 trousers you find today on Redchurch street had not materialized—it was, at that time, dodgy fried chicken joints named after any state but Kentucky, rundown textile shops, tooth-challenged streetwalkers, and late-night Halal chippies.

These days, East London is what Notting Hill and Chelsea were in the 90’s—vibrant, desired, hip, influential, touristed. Even so, Broadway Market on a Saturday in the sunshine remains my favorite London activity. The market abuts the bottom of London Fields, and along the few short blocks are enough food vendors, boutique artisans, vintage racks, pubs, coffee shops, oyster bars and ethnic restaurants to fill most of my rambling weekend desires.

One can hear an old Italian man sing rat pack classics, enjoy a cardamom bun or a piece of French cheese, admire the latest fashion mash-ups, and watch today’s ‘kids’ scrounge pocket change for warm pints. I flashback to my own days of weekend boozing and instead sit with a coffee and watch the world amble past. The markets in London aren’t so different from those in Brooklyn or San Francisco, and the culture of them makes sense—I know how to walk these streets, know what to expect, move through the crowd as anonymously as a tall bald man with earrings and prying eyes can.

But what I’ve realized, only just now, 80-something countries in and nearly seven months living in Bombay, is the difference between adapting to a new culture and cultural adaption. Let me explain.

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In Bombay, my life vibrates with some similar rhythms to what it was in London only a few short months (and what feels already like a lifetime) ago. I am up before 7, drink my cinnamon ginger water, make a coffee, exercise, shower. I make a smoothie, and I go to work. In London work was often solitary, setting up at the dining table or the office to write or, so modernly, consult. In India, work is a 30-minute ride in the back of a taxi, the incessant horns and maddening traffic outside the car a stark contrast to the isolation of being driven silently through it.

In London, while there were varying phone calls and the occasional in-person meet-up, much of the work was solitary--me and the table and an aging collection of CDs on rotation in the background. In India, I’m in an office of 25 people, but apart from the office manager, I’m the only non-architect, and other than the Italian, I’m the only non-Indian.

After work it’s the same (longer) ride home. For the first three months evenings were making a salad for dinner in a sterile temporary rented apartment, living out of two suitcases, surrounded by someone else’s things—in this case, all of them blue or pale blue, as per the AirBnB motif. There were of course the occasional nights out, the Diwali parties, the thrill of answering the ‘how long have you been here?” question with a number of weeks instead of months and watching eyes widen.

But for the most part, even having now found my own place, again surrounded by my own things, I’ve adopted much of the life I had in London. I still cook for myself most days, still work mostly in isolation, still stick to familiar times for eating, and still eat largely the same—understandably with a modicum more Indian food at lunch.

At a dinner party last month, a woman of a certain age asked how I was adjusting to India, and I told her I thought I was doing pretty well. After all, I’d moved across an ocean to a dramatically different reality, in a foreign city where I knew one person, in the awkward position of being boss to a team of people half my age in an industry I knew very little about, and at age when most people are settling in to their final communities, not starting all over again, alone.

I’d battled a bad cold when I arrived, lived out of suitcases for months—including six weeks longer than expected because the moving company forgot to ship my belongings—and despite that, felt like I was starting to make friends, build community, even recognize a few people around the neighborhood.

“But you have no driver?”

“Yes, correct,” I said. “It’s a lesser expense for the company to take a taxi, and I don’t need someone to just drive me to work and then wait all day.”

“And you have no cook?”

“Yeah, it’s just me, and I haven’t really made arrangements for anything like that.”

“And what about a maid?”

“Well, yes, someone comes to the apartment three days a week to clean but I’ve told her to stay home on weekends as I don’t want the intrusion.”

She paused and looked at me with a sigh.

“Darling, you are in India,” she said, shaking her head in disapproval. The way she said India stretched the first syllable deeply, like there were multiple Ns in the word, as if ‘In’ was twice the weighting of ‘dia’, and it pulled me in closer. She shook her head subtly, resting a hand on my shoulder, “You are supposed to be living like a king.”

She looked at me deeply while she said it, and winked. She took a moment to let that sink in, to let my imagination linger on just what kingly living might entail. She went on a little bit after that, telling me I could send a driver out to run all my errands while at work, that a cleaner should come every day, that a cook should be waking me up in the morning with breakfast, that three days a week come monsoon would be dramatically insufficient.

As she was talking, a realization metastasized suddenly in my consciousness, a thought perhaps germinating in my subconscious since London in March. It wasn’t the myriad changes I’ve gone through in such short time that stand out, or even the simple pleasures I’d forgotten I missed—the luxury of a quiet street, walking without people grabbing my arm or banging on the car window for money, a hamburger. No, what landed suddenly were the changes I haven’t made, the habits to which I still cling.

--- --- ---

Rather than living a new Indian life, I’ve been living my old life in India. I’ve been fairly successful actually, having done quite well at porting my old life to my new world. But is that really the adjustment I wanted to make? Did I come here to rebuild my old life somewhere new? Do I want even want to be living an Indian life, or, more accurately, the kingly life of an expat in India?

Well. You know… . Hmm.

Outside of Mar e Lago or Texas, I know few places that love a tall white American more than Bombay. The first few months felt a bit like living someone else’s life in the best way possible. There were the outlandish holiday parties, Indian weddings, music festivals in Thailand, riding the coattails of my team’s remarkable work as guest of honor at India Art Fair parties, on film festival stages, at the launches of new buildings. I was everyone’s new plaything, freshly introduced, the recipient of myriad invitations.

But now, returning habitually in the evenings to a flat with my own things, from a job I started last year---well, yes, things feel different, if not quite fluid. I have a guy who builds furniture, a woman who delivers plants, a place I buy chicken, a store which imports cheese. I watch the fiery sun sink as a glowing orange ball behind the polluted horizon and sometimes don’t even think twice.

I have stopped taking it personally when scooters and motorcycles force me to jump to the side. The cows in the street don’t draw my attention. Barefoot children in rags grab at my clothes and I walk on, stepping over rail thin humans sleeping seemingly sounder on sidewalks than I do on my king-sized imported mattress. No one will ever mistake me for being Indian, but I’m noticing subtle shifts. I’ve even found dogmatic axioms of the old life that give way surprisingly easy: a previous version of me struggled to go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink; now, if knowing someone else will wash them, sometimes they sit for a day, even two.

Lost in Translation was an apt phrase long before it was an excellent film, and no matter the AI, it’s more than language. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been at a restaurant or a café with an Indian and ordered something as simple as a masala chai, only to be met with a stare of incomprehension.

“Masala chai,” I’ll say again, slowly, clearly. The look comes back blank. At which point, invariably, whichever Indian I’m with will look at the server and say ‘masala chai’ in English, with their accent, and it’s instantly understood. The waiter gives the ubiquitous head nod—the Indian one, with chin as fulcrum, which I now regularly unconsciously mimic as a ‘yes, I understand’ (and which I now interpret here to mean ‘I acknowledge you’ve said something’ rather than tacit agreement to actual action).

It happens in restaurants so often, this gap in translation, that I’ve finally given way and moved from confounded to, on those occasions where I’m able to observe without judgment, and to extrapolate, illuminated.

I move through the world quite often unaware in the moment that someone can experience the same conversation and come away with a completely different summary. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been stunned at a reaction to my behavior—the message received so implicitly different than the one intended to be sent. Work. Love. Friendship. I can be so misunderstood when I think I’m being so clear. And that’s with people with whom I share a culture, so imagine the potential for confusion now.

Yes. Now. That’s the question, isn’t it, or the conundrum. There’s irony, or fate, in coming to India at this phase of life, likely the majority of which is behind me, with the fundamental questions (what, where, with who) still so widely unanswered. Will the next 12 months find me with cook and driver, shooting off asides in Hindi, wearing kurtas? Probably not. But as I sit, on this final day of 54, watching the sunlight fade and the heat drop mercifully below 90 F at last, who’s to say. That, perhaps, is what drives those who wander, and wonder. As my mother so fittingly said once, “I’m not scared of death; I’m just pissed off I might miss something.”

My best friends came to visit from SF three weeks ago, and the excitement of their company, the shared adventure in Sri Lanka, the nights of cards and dice and camaraderie came and went; and with it, the inevitable void upon their departure, the thud of landing, again, alone.

It’s been 8 months now in this latest iteration, this ‘why not’. The excitement of new has largely settled, despite so much more to explore. Work and routine carve their inevitable way in to clay of potential. That “oh my god anything is possible here’ quickly reverts to the mean, to the me, to the common denominator that continues, London/California/London/New York/London/India/TBD.

--- --- ---

Travel broadens the mind, makes manifest differences you can’t grasp from Instagram, and reminds me just how little I know. Much the same as I sometimes wonder what’s happening at this very moment in some place I once passed through—a crossroad in a remote Indonesian village, a volcanic island town in Nicaragua—there are times I wonder what it’s really like to walk along the Ivory Coast or pass a random Thursday night on the steppe in Kazakhstan.

Why is it, again, that some men wander and some stand still? Some mornings on the way to work I get that inevitable longing for ‘other’—the city, the relationship, the career—which previously felt right, felt forever. And I question my decisions, even as I remind myself not to, even as I silently chant whichever mantra du jour.

Last week I saw a post on LinkedIn that was gaining some traction, “What becoming a father for the second time taught me about B2B sales”, and I burst out laughing. I’m certainly not mocking fatherhood, and I’ve spent plenty of years ‘selling’ everything from logos to lasagna, but something about the juxtaposition hit me.

I burst out laughing and the absurdity of it all, and I wished intensely I could transport out to whichever universe it is where my dad, Bill Hicks, and Thomas Jefferson are smoking a joint, and get their take. Who are we, anyway? Why do the people I read about not remotely resemble the people I know?

The meta in my mind implodes at the absurdity of my chatbot and yours conducting the conversations that will define what we know as truth. I cry at the absurdity of an India civilization imbued with thousands of years of wisdom fostering a culture where the ocean is so teeming with sewage we can’t swim. I shake my head in disgust at the absurdities of the US Department of Defense War asking for $200 billion more to bomb Iran when the National Cancer Institute hasn’t issued a single dime in grant money this year. The President actually called the Pope soft on crime.

Am I too far out of the fishbowl—not far enough? Am I such a cultural nomad that I can’t decipher the culture? It is true I am usually the outlier, observing at a distance before jumping in to the middle. Maybe I’m actually so out of touch it doesn’t really matter. Or maybe Chatwin was on to something atavistic and prescient all at once. Wandering, wondering. We pass through so quickly, don’t we. Who’s to say, maybe we can wander and stand still at the same time.

Traffic in Bombay, like travel anywhere, is best understood through personal experience. The incessant horns, the free-for-all of auto-rickshaws, the indefatigable dance of scooters motorcycles cows pedestrians, the impossible near misses of car truck elbow foot. Instagram or AI can conjure the world for your eyes, but there are more profound senses than sight.

These might not be the most dangerous roads on the planet—I’ve heard stories of speeding death wagons in Johannesburg, villainous gangs in Caracas, machine gun traffic stops in Lagos—but Mumbai’s streets are the most crowded and diverse I’ve experienced, and that includes New York, Hanoi, Santo Domingo and Tokyo.

In traffic this week my rickshaw spent 11 minutes navigating a single block. Nothing too unusual, I realized, as we were forced to wait as a man in drag walking a cow in make-up impeded any vehicular movement. When we did start again, vying for angles with banged-up taxis and families on scooters, we came within inches of sideswiping a convertible Bentley.

Cars and cabs and rickshaws and cows and men in worn sandals wheeling metal piping on rusted carts, students in uniform, workmen in sandals, women in bourkas and urban professionals in slacks and button up shirts all smash together in streets alternatively dusty and dry or soaked from monsoons. Everything, from everywhere, all at once, in one place.

In the rain, on the back of motorcycles, young Indian men comb their hair and text on their mobile phones as if the rain weren’t there, as if it were simply water pouring from the sky. A visitor or relative newcomer to town is tempted to take it personally when a motorcycle veers into his path, cuts him off on a pedestrian sidewalk, screams a horn from inches away. The ex-New Yorker in you might immediately speak up, or wind up. It takes some time to understand that no one really cares.

Traffic is also a frequent topic of conversation when location features prominently in the discussion, as it did when I tried to figure out where in this endless city to call home. The old money locals and expats in south Bombay extoll the virtues of the Sea Link, a relatively new ocean-front ‘coastal road’ 8-lane addition that mollifies the necessity of crawling through the true madness to go north or south. The occasional cab driver opts for this route—to avoid tolls, or perhaps heartened by a directional App promising quicker passage—when taking me from the older, colonial elegance of Colaba and Fort to the newer towers of Whorli and hip, Bollywood-star studded Bandra West, where I currently stay.

The seven-mile ride to work generally takes 45 minutes and involves a minimum two dozen violent explosions of my driver’s horn—and that’s after letting ‘rush hour’ pass. Multiple times I’ve leaned forward from the back seat with a gentle hand on a shoulder and a pleading shake of my head, “no baba no”. On a work trip to Delhi last week, I spent 75 minutes in a taxi navigating four kilometers from a clients’ office to a hotel. Had I known in advance, I may have opted to walk, even with air quality at a malignantly unhealthy 660.

There are elements of 2003 Shoreditch and 2010 Williamsburg here in Bandra, strangely familiar iterations in a country of such foreign cultural norms. There are concentrations of musicians, actors, and artists, models and creatives, modern-day influencers and social trend-setters, who flock to the area for its vibrant bar scene as equally as they wonder about the neighborhood’s future and mourn its past as high-rise residential buildings sprout like asparagus stalks, surprising eruptions in a flat landscape. Yes, similar to the West, but extraordinarily different, Indian style: hectic and extreme, colorful and joyous, rushed and yet slowed all the while by endless, endless traffic, 25 million people trying to get from here to there.

But nothing comes close to demanding disruption like the speed bumps, or what they call ‘traffic thresholds’ or ‘sleeping policemen’. These are car wreckers, axle manglers, destroyers of vehicular momentum. These are not the speed bumps you might encounter in suburban New York or adjacent a country school in England. Those lightly raised blips are slight nuisances at best, generally smooth, vaguely rounded, mild in height. When a driver doesn’t notice, or notices too late, there’s a little bump, perhaps a head to ceiling knock, followed by some form of laughter, a mock complaint.

Not here, though, no ma’am. These things are monumental, severe, and not to be taken lightly. No matter the vehicle, the place in society, the exorbitant wealth, the speed bumps here democratize and demand respect; and sports cars, trucks, taxis and auto rickshaws alike slow to nearly a dead stop to inch over them slowly, cautiously.

Stop lights here are suggestive at best, the art of walking through traffic Vietnamese in its trust and necessity. In the crowded international hipster capital of the most populous country on earth, people simply go where they need to go, and it’s accepted and expected that drivers disregard anyone or anything that isn’t bigger. At my size, this gives me a slight advantage among pedestrians, but means nothing in the back of a taxi.

It’s just one of the many juxtapositions in this city which pushes the limits at both poles; extreme wealth and devastating poverty live together on the same block. Exquisite tropical plants and trees flourish despite rotting garbage and air thick with pollution. Among the foliage, even the green is brown.

In Bandra, where old Portuguese bungalows are giving way to mid-rise towers, emerging titans of industry navigate pockets of slum and the dry season stink of drying fish on their way to Thursday night cocktails and glamorous bar crowds, pushing quickly past the outstretched hands of women holding infants and pantomiming feeding themselves in desperate acts of panhandling. The free-wheeling scions of yesterday’s industrialists busy themselves with fashion, flare, cocktails and a different class of ‘speed bump’ altogether.

Yes, Bombay, where the privileged class powders their collective nose with as much gusto as those in the East End of London or the West Village in NYC. With traffic such an integral part of daily life—necessitating the proliferation of private drivers and night-driving specialists passed around covetously on the expat WhatsApp chat groups—speed bumps don’t find much space in conversation.

But they should.

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Speed bumps aren’t all that slow the pace of travel. Waiting for my morning ride to work, I watched as traffic on the narrow, sporadically-paved lane my temporary flat faces, came to a complete stop. Up the hill from Boojee Café (artists, hipsters, morning athletes in Lycra; smoothies, coffee, kale salads and candy-flavored vapes) amid the usual communion of rickshaws, scooters, roadside samosa sellers, and rolling wooden carts laden corn and sweet potatoes roasted slowly over open cans of embered charcoal, a parked delivery truck had narrowed the road, requiring drivers coming toward me, including my taxi, to simply stop.

As more cars arrived from feeder lanes they eschewed self-preservation, darting in to empty space rather than moving left to enable oncoming traffic to pass. Horns blared more than normal (and normal is a deafening cacophony). A five-minute backup swelled to 10, 15, 20. As things got worse, I did what any calm, respectful foreigner in Bombay would do and waded into the midst of it all, banging on cars with a smile, directing (demanding) newcomers back up, insisting rickshaws and scooters pull aside, in the hope my taxi might inch through and begin the long trek to the office in Lower Parel.

(A note, dear reader, on Mumbai v Bombay: I thought it would matter, the lexicon, assumed somehow referring to this crowded, loud, dirty, energized, magical city as Bombay would reek of colonialism and disregard; but no, I’ve been assured, either works, the two interchangeable, used by all, Indian and foreigner alike, and I simply like ‘Bombay’ better).

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When I first started writing about speed bumps, it had been seven weeks since I’d left London, landed in India, dove headfirst into a country about which I knew little and a career about which I knew less. India, magical mythical mystical India.

In my 20’s, in the middle of what would become two years of backpacking, long hair and an awful lot of exploration, I flew from Bali—the plan had been to explore SE Asia, but a friend summoned me in need of wedding support—and came to Bombay for a week of wedding-like ceremonies between a non-practicing Hindu and a non-practicing Muslim. As thin as I’d ever been, suffering from heat rash, and out the $700 I’d foolishly lent a traveling Welsh girlfriend—I was coddled in that first week in luxury. The bride’s father was the youngest son of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, a successful businessman, and as generous as he was gregarious. I spent that first week being pampered by house staff, treated to luxurious meals, and chauffeured around a very different Bombay.

After the wedding I took a 12-hour bus ride to Goa, which lasted 24 hours—the bus ride, not the time in Goa—and then spent the next three months exploring north and south, fearless, ignorant, curious, fascinated. As much as the memories of last century blur with time, there remains so much that’s vibrant still of those initial weeks in India.

It was 1997 and I traveled with a Walkman and two cassette tapes, a Lonely Planet book as my only map, and coconut oil for my then long, curly hair. I remember vividly losing my cool at an elderly man who swiped my spot on a cattle car train when I’d gotten up to lean out a window for a desperately needed jolt of fresh air. When I demanded my seat back, he threatened me in front of the other passengers, pulling off one of his flip flops and holding it aloft as if to strike me. I remember vividly too moving instantly from furious indignation to laughing acceptance, as this man half my size and three times my age held aloft one beaten flip flop, the top of it slowly waggling back-and-forth in the still air as dozens of Indians stared up at me.

Getting robbed in a national park, a 1200-mile motorcycle journey, meeting the man who became and remains my closest friend, a near death experience on said motorcycle, enough attention from strangers to cure any desire of fame—the preamble to this century’s experience lives still as a rich tapestry in my mind.

When I landed in India then, Bill Gates had just visited for the first time, and his trip was national news, foreshadowing a future that has come to pass in the last three decades. Information technology and outsourced call centers were then only nascent, aspirational, and difficult to imagine among the ancient textile centers of the day. At the time, India didn’t rank in the top 15 economies in the world, and I couldn’t imagine the reality I now experience every day, where the Uber app summons a rickshaw and the neighborhood banana cart takes payment via QR code.

India now is the most populous country on earth, and has birthed a diaspora that outnumbers the population of most countries. Its economy is the world’s 4^th biggest, and expected to move shortly into the top three. Opportunity and excitement abound, which is perhaps why no one else seems to talk about the speed bumps. The country of India may only be 80 years old, but India is 3000 years of rich vibrant history, so forgive me for tripping over the past a little, for noticing with newcomer’s eyes some of today’s impediments to tomorrow.

Do not get me wrong, though. Despite the bureaucratic nightmares, the excessive waiting for what one would expect to be a quick answer, the languid nonchalance which meets my own panicked urgency, I have landed squarely, softly, exquisitely in the beating heart of the madness.

I’ve been ushered in to a Diwali party at a house which occupies the entire top three floors of a new rise building and features a lap pool overlooking the city, a DJ stage, and club-like rows of toilets for partiers. I’ve been whisked past long lines at government buildings and nightclubs, presumably because of the color of my skin. I have experienced what feels like minor-league celebrity status, a shiny new-toy of the very-well-heeled. Outside of Mar-a-Lago, very few places love a tall white American like India.

Soft launches at hot new restaurants where everything is free. Celebrity-filled gatherings with fine-dining canapes at retail outlet openings. Exclusive holiday parties at private member clubs. Exquisitely catered weekends at palatial estates across the harbor in Alibaug, Bombay’s Hamptons. After parties at the homes of Bollywood figures. Invitations to private gatherings of local politicians. Yes, yes, the landing has been mostly soft.

New friends have opened their homes and their rolodexes, introduced me to their families and colleagues. People I met in passing have insisted I join gatherings attended only by their closest circles. I’ve been given guided tours of neighborhoods, been welcomed into 7 AM workout groups, been offered the services of car and driver of a family staying home for the afternoon.

I have been feted in grand style (well, attended grand fetes anyway, but what’s a little hyperbole in a country that lives for it). I have made acquaintances from myriad corners of society, and even some friends, in a sea of increasingly familiar faces. In this city of 25 million, I’m convinced there are actually only 214 people, all of whom know each other. In those fleeting moments where I’m able to genuinely welcome the unknown with optimism and curiosity, I’m learning more and more to lean into gratitude and possibility.

--- --- ---

Like the roads here, though, it hasn’t been without its hiccups, its challenges, its speed bumps. There have been long stretches of solitude and isolation, magnified by the persistent anxiety of coming home to a rented flat filled with the unforgiving detritus of cheap decoration and a two-burner camp stove. There are the long solo rides to and from work each day. The 12.5-hour difference from California makes it a good time to call home, but most days I ride quietly, watching an endless skyline shrouded in humidity, UV and pollution, sporadically attempting Hindi on Duolingo, or writing emails and office procedure documents behind the quasi-protection of noise-cancelling earbuds to drown out the honking.

How is it, exactly, that I’ve ended up in India, in architecture, in the sixth decade of my life?

There are also the work days themselves, in an office where my foreignness extends beyond race and age to professional background, shared experience, and common language. I am tasked with evolving the culture and habits of a company headquartered thousands of miles away, of learning a different business at the same time I’m learning a new city in a new country, simultaneously looking both for a new home for myself and a new office for our expanding team. I have made mistakes, lost my patience, gotten sucked in to the weeds when my job is to look over the tall grass to the savannahs ahead and design the infrastructure to enable our ambition.

But these are just moments, learning moments, speed bumps of the English countryside version. The people here, the team I work with, the strangers in the streets, are all kind, and I’ve been extended patience and grace as they learn me the same way I’m learning them. In the moments where I’ve earned some respect or been able to navigate challenge smoothly—learning to lead from the back, exhibiting a local’s tolerance for spicy food, showcasing an experienced traveler’s respect, rather than an expat’s disdain, for the unexpected—the road has opened momentarily and I’ve glimpsed the potential for relatively smooth terrain ahead.

There will of course be greater challenges, tougher moments, periods of wonder, of missing ‘home’, or Thanksgiving, or watching my Sixers. And at some point, my time as shiny new toy will fade and the next batch of expats will arrive. But for now, these speed bumps are Western—minor, temporary, subtle impediments to life’s new flow.

--- --- ---

Bengali author Nirad Chaudhuri, who died in 1999, wrote, “India is so vast and so populous, the individuals who form the exceptions may well run into the millions.” And so far, it has been my good fortune to meet many of them. The level of creativity here is profound, and as film and design festivals proliferate, new buildings go up, and cafes open, the decision to uproot my life and jump in unprepared feels better and better.

Even the oddest episodes can provide surprising little moments of reassuring joy. A global list of the world’s top food cities listed Bombay as 4^th, the lone non-Italian outlier in the top eight. And just today, on one of the expat chat groups I joined, someone posted a new poll result showing Bombay as the happiest city in Asia.

Perhaps. It’s certainly its most exuberant. Here there is no embarrassment in being that guy on the dance floor, or the first to volunteer from an audience. If the top range is 10, Indians will go to 14, shamelessly and with utmost encouragement. I love this quality in so many ways—there’s no chance you can dress up too much or get too excited, and the exuberance for indulgence and celebration is as endless as you’d expect in a city that starts late and goes all night.

Like everywhere, of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and India is no different. I’m told that when a new political party wins an election, half the developers go to jail—a sign of the inherent connectivity between politics and power and what seems to be a universal truth about politicians and real estate. Here, though, nothing feels hidden, everyone knows the rules, and that shared overt understanding just might be the one crucial difference.

Expect to negotiate, a lot. Don’t take it personally. Welcome the stranger who demands to know who you are, why you’re here, where you’re from. Accept that 15 people can do one person’s job less efficiently. Realize that no matter where you go, no matter what time of day, you are never alone.

And that—this tangible sense of interconnectedness, where somehow 1.5 billion people can still feel like global underdogs; where a country can swell with nationalism over cricket despite an increasing religious schism; where there is immense civic pride in all things Indian and simultaneously zero civic pride in clean streets, air or water—combined with the promise of a booming economy and what feels like the again rise of the East, helps add to the sense that anything here is possible. And there’s very little a speed bump or two along the way will do to stop it.

The walls in my home are now mostly empty; packing boxes, foam rollers, a small wooden seated figure from Tanzania, and the few remaining plants I’ve yet to give away sit scattered about the living room. An orange themed rock from a distant birthday trip to a beach in Costa Brava rests on the table just behind my computer and next to a $50 billion Zimbabwean note from this year’s birthday, along with three candles, an incense burner, Chapstick, and a pile of European coins.

I had a wonderfully bittersweet meal with friends tonight – laughter and shared plates on a terrace overlooking St. Paul’s and the churches of Farringdon. When Pete died this spring, we forged even closer in our grief, and I’ll miss the kindness and comfort of their company. Nostalgia seeps ever closer to the surface in recent days, challenging my ability to exist in the moment.

Last week Thursday, just before morning light turned to the heat of day, wide-eyed with wonder and stretched from exertion, I’d biked away from Rufus du Sol’s sunrise set at Burning Man and arrived at the Temple, ready at last to say goodbye yet again. Walking past tributes quietly, ignoring as best I could others in the same state, and sobbing through snot and tears, I wrote tributes to both Pete and Craig—Craig, who’d died the week before Pete a continent away. This is how it happens, I suppose, how we go from being young men to men who think they’re young but tell stories of friends lost and gone.

Earlier this evening I read the news that Oliver North and Fawn Hall married last month, and even more came roaring back. I spent the summer before my junior year of high school in Humboldt County with my dad, sleeping in for the only stretch of my life and riveted to the television when awake watching the Iran-Contra Hearings. Absorbed in youthful intrigue and wonder at my place in the future, fascinated by the lies and subterfuge – I was certain I was watching my generation’s Watergate—oblivious as we all were to hanging chads, Clinton’s cigar, Y2K, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two more sleeps here, two more sleeps.

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There are many ways in to this story, many places from where to begin:

Reflections and nostalgia on the precipice of monumental change… Sadness and pain in recollection of who I’ve lost, of who I lose a little more each day…Gratitude for what’s been, and what’s about to be…

Or even just entering right here, right now, remembering last week’s meditations at the Temple, and a long-considered, hastily-written letter on the back of a black and white 8x10 photo crinkled with dust and love from its long journey—snapped in New York, stored in California, found in London, burned in the desert outside of Reno—now tacked and taped to the wooden base of what would soon be a Sunday night inferno, next to so many others, muddy and tear-stained, anguish and joyful, lost and remembered.

Oh the burn.

On my travels I’ve fallen for myriad writers, for books self-discovered books and those the adults talked about late at night at Stink House in Trinidad: JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, George Cockroft’s The Dice Man—A novel by Luke Rhinehart”, Rohinton Mistry’s heart-shattering Family Matters, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Shantaram, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins...

The Bulwer-Lytton literary contest, which began in the 1980’s and no longer exists, invited readers to craft the worst-possible opening line of a fictitious novel, or, more intriguingly, change a single word in the opening line of a noted work. I remember this from high school, and a winning entrant who took Camus’ “Mother died today, or was it yesterday” and changed it to “Mother died today, or was it father.”

In the years since the contest ended, I’ve day-dreamed about turning back the clock to paraphrase HST’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which begins “We were halfway through the desert when the drugs took hold.” In my version, “We were halfway through the drugs when the desert took hold,” and unfailingly, when it comes to mind, I think not of Las Vegas but the distant outskirts of Reno, an hour past Gerlach, to the dusty alkaline lake bed of the Burn.

A man-child friend from elementary school in Trinidad, a giant, kind bear of a man, called me up just after I’d returned from falling in love in Poland. It was 2000. I’d recently moved to SF, and had never heard of Burning Man.

“Camping gear, food and water, and any Halloween costumes you have,” he told me. “Gather those up in your car and meet me in the morning. We’ll be gone a week.”

“Ok.”

It was 25 years ago that I went for the first time, and from that moment until now it continues to be the most beautiful place on earth: shock, joy, art, tears, loneliness, epiphanies, medical tents, the bike-induced split-labia of a dominatrix, 30 hours parked in line in a two-door car with four strangers, heatwaves, windstorms, flash floods, sunrise dance parties, the gentle rocking of boots knocking on a mattress next to me as I tried unsuccessfully to nap in a club called “Fallopia” entered only by squeezing through giant cloth pussy lips…

Maybe that’s the way in to this story. Maybe we’re already in it. I’m thinking of this now, somehow, my final evening on this, my third time living in London. Earlier today I turned over the keys to the now completely empty flat (without possessions so quickly transformed from home to house), have removed all trace, have completed check-out, have checked-in for the morning flight.

--- --- ---

The second-floor lobby of the Shoreditch Citizen M Hotel is floor to ceiling glass panels, the décor pop modern. Blue and red cloth chairs with Batman pillows abut café tables under shelves of vinyl albums and kitschy vases decorated in now-ubiquitous styles cribbed from Mondrian and Lichtenstein. The muted pink blue flat London sky gives away the northern setting sun. It’s less than a minute away from straight up 19:00 pm on Friday night, and I’m a stone’s throw from Brick Lane, where I landed during my second stint 22 years ago.

Two years ago, to the day, I took the keys to the 3+ story garden home in Islington, excited to settle after 12 weeks of couch surfing following a move from New York for a new job. In the next 4 days any idea of settling disappeared: my New York Michael and my mother arrived, separately (I am surrounded by Michaels), a woman with whom I’d had four dates left her luggage at the house for a European trip and moved in when she returned, and I was excused from the new job quite unexpectedly.

Ten years ago, also to the day, and also unexpectedly, my father died.

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“Yesterday it was my birthday…hung one more year on the line. But I ain’t worrying and I aint’ scurrying, I’m having a good time.” My dad’s birthday is September 4^th, and perhaps because that date is now so closely linked for me with September 12^th, that line has repeatedly popped in to my head, slowly, and with instrumentation, just as it sounds on the record.

For 15 months in high school, to ease myself to sleep, I pressed play on a tape of Paul Simon’s anthology ‘Love Songs and Negotiations’, among whose songs is Have a Good Time, from where this lyric comes. Lately it’s been playing on repeat, no doubt connected to ten years and eight days since I last wished my dad a happy birthday.

June, July, August. Multiple times throughout each month I’d find myself lost in thought, wondering how, or if, to mark the date. “I really should sit down and write something to publish that day, to mark the day,” I told myself. But each month came, each month went, and with it, the urgency, the opportunity.

I’ve been busy. New York for a workshop, off the grid for a week in Reno, LA for a memorial, a house to pack in London, and India, again and again, India, to organize from afar, to try and fathom. The three months I spent freewheeling there on a motorcycle in 1997 feel wholly irrelevant—another world, another century. It feels strangely appropriate to have no idea what to expect—how does one even begin to understand how to navigate India from anywhere but India. And now it’s just about here, almost tomorrow, and there’s a flight to catch and a life to begin. It’s night time again, and already tomorrow there, and the right words have left me, or not yet arrived.

Driving through Chicago in 1998, in another four-day span, I somehow met and moved in with a producer of Oprah’s talk show, before moving out and moving on. The one day I went for a taping, Paul Simon was the guest, and after he’d been brought on stage to the strains of ‘Graceland’ piped in to the studio, after throngs of portly middle-aged midwestern women in bright sweaters leapt to their feet in dancing welcome, Oprah brought him down to the front row, to me, where I leaned way down (way down—Paul’s five-foot-two) and whispered in his ear, “your fly is down.” Because it was.

He didn’t respond, and at the first commercial break, we told a stage-hand, who told Paul, who turned slightly away on his stool, zipped, turned back, and looked at me with a quick tilt of his head and that super quick smile/smirk that said both “oh” and “thanks.” Shortly thereafter an audience member asked him if there really was a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline, to which Paul smiled longer, paused, and answered “I’m sure there is now.”

My dad liked that story—and Paul Simon, and thinking of it now reminds me of the letter I wrote to my dad last week in the desert, on the back of that 8x10. It was short and staccato and I’m sure he would have edited it had he been around to read it. I told him there were so many things I wanted to tell him, so many moments in my life I wanted to share, so many times I reached to call him in the last decade. He doesn’t know about Ukraine or Gaza, that I lived in Brooklyn, that my career and reputation were nearly destroyed by my stalker or the anguish that caused, that for nearly two years on the Internet searches for my name returned warnings to hide your children.

He doesn’t know about the new life in London, the new start tomorrow. He doesn’t know about the end of journalism as he knew and loved it, the advent of Artificial Intelligence, my artificial hip, the storming of the Capitol, TikTok, Greta Thunberg. If Covid-19 or Trump’s first term didn’t kill him, this second one surely would have. He doesn’t know about Doris or Adora, that visits to the mound are limited, that Lebron’s still an All-Star, that Cassius Cat got the cancer, that Dante wrote a book. I think of all the things he’ll never know, and wonder too about what all the things I might.

--- --- ---

One, two, three, ten days. Just like that. The flight, the flu, the juxtaposition of such wealth and extreme poverty, all on the same block. The ocean a hundred meters away, un-swimmable from pollution. The tuk-tuk rickshaws that arrive via Uber app, the monsoon rains that descend like warm plague, take over, and vanish just as quickly.

The ancient and the new, the madness and the magical, the lush vibrant flora, the ancient lanes and crumbling slums and the hidden modern eateries tucked behind crumbling facades and bamboo scaffolding. A whole other world to experience, another adventure I won’t get to share.

One, two, three, ten years. Ten years and 11 days now, more precisely. Tick tock tick tock, and as quickly as that it’s a whole different adventure, a whole different beginning, a whole different career, a whole different side of the world. Whole. It’s a funny word that—whole— when you consider it means the entirety of something. The same sounding word, absent the ‘w’, means precisely the opposite, the absence of everything. Am I whole, even with this hole?

And now it’s a completely different song that jumps to mind, that eases me forward, that enables the release, that’s keeping me whole, that shuffles me off to sleep. Again I hear it, the notes and the melody. Do, do, dee dee do do. Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’, into the future.

It’s hard to conjure a welcome scenario in which you’re sent for an MRI of your head in search of a growth. If struck with inexplicable convulsions, dizziness and pain, you might think, yeah, let’s go. But even then, it’s a daunting conjure.

This week feels especially fraught. Anytime in the next 30 days, actually, feels really, really inconvenient at best.

In the next four weeks I will be in Lisbon for 40 hours, Reno for a night, the desert—that beautiful, Burning desert—for a week, LA for three days and a memorial, and London again for a week. In that time there are visas to secure, contracts to sign, movers to coordinate, plants to give away, friends to hug, a house to pack, and a move thousands of miles away to a country and a career that were never on the bingo card.

So the possibility of something other than clarity or inspiration growing inside my head simply feels unwelcome and excessive, literally. I just don’t have the time. Which is what I’m telling myself, in cold comfort, to distract from the infrequent but powerful waves of heaviness and concern that rise up in unexpected moments.

It’s my left ear, of all things. Not the fake hip or worn shoulder or the at-times crippling back pain. No, it’s the ear and whatever’s going on deep inside that little tuft of cartilage I take for granted.

A friend visiting in July looked down the couch at me during a pause in the movie.

“What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“You don’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

I walked upstairs to find a blaring radio stream on a cell phone—my phone. I turned it off and walked back downstairs. The following week, taking a call mid-café counter order, I switched the phone to my left hand to free my right for a credit card only to find the caller silent.

“Hello? Hello?” I looked down to see if it had been disconnected, but the speaker icon remained red.

“Hello?” I tried again, baffled. Having retrieved the card, I put the phone back to my right ear, and then heard the caller clearly.

Fragments of information I hadn’t properly considered coalesced. In restaurants of late I’ve taken to watching the lips of companions. Lying on my right side in bed I have to raise my head from the pillow to hear the conversation. I’ve kept the closed captions on the tv for weeks now, even after my mom returned to California.

So today a train ride to West Ealing, nearly to the airport, to stick my head in a tube, close my eyes, and wait to see if they find something growing in my brain.

THURSDAY

I’d had my hearing checked a year ago, and the results for both ears were consistent. On a matrix with decibels running on the Y axis and frequencies, or hertz, on the X across the top, both ears were good good good and then dipped at the 3000-5000 frequency range before popping back up to good—a graphed visual that reminded me of looking at a ladle on its side.

This time, the left ear dropped below good almost immediately, and at the 3000-hertz frequency mark, simply plummeted off the graph.

“Acoustic neuroma,” the doctor said, “I want to check for an acoustic neuroma.” When I asked, he told me it’s a rare, slow-growing benign tumor in the head. It was also what the July visitor, herself a radiation oncologist, had posited.

Nothing to worry about in the long run, I was assured, maybe surgery or radiation, nothing fatal. And I remembered immediately my father’s insistence that it’s only minor surgery if it happens to someone else.

And so I wait on this precipice of dramatic life change, wondering what the results will show, and where and when they’ll find me.

FRIDAY

A friend brought someone to meet me in Brooklyn at a party two weeks ago, a performer and entrepreneur, a host of adult-themed parties and cabarets, and a wrangler of artists for whom big corporates pay handsomely. She is intensely, wonderfully, completely present in person when in the same room, anchored and grounding.

Equally she is very lightly tethered to earth and resonates with ethereal spirits when physically removed, connected to and channeling other entities and vibrations. She spoke of elders and ancestors and intuition – “I imagine in to feeling what the feeling of having feels like, and I embody that, and it manifests.” And it did, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government support and the christening of a brand-new cabaret.

This week a Romanian technologist who studies human psyche and likewise takes her cues from the astral sat me down and spoke to me of enneagrams and archetypes. She sat nestled in the corner of her white fuzzy sofa, adjacent to walls of meticulously curated rows of immaculately conditioned leather boots, studded heels, thigh-highs and green fuzzy platforms, and told me of her life in a transforming society, and of carrying a hand-grenade in her school backpack as a teenager—protection in a transforming country, she insisted, as if it were expected.

Somehow, in the context of her story, it made strange sense, and reminded me of a skit long-ago with a comedian lamenting the challenges of his elementary school and it being “so tough we had our own coroner”).

I’m a Taurus—like her—but my moon is in the House of Aquarius; logic over emotion apparently, comfortable with leadership, the humanitarian. “If it’s not fun, you’re not interested,” she said, and I nodded along, ingesting and digesting the pieces that made sense, that aligned. This did.

At least that’s where I’ve been, she insisted, my sun in Taurus, reliable, solid. “But we are the opposite, and you’re going where I’ve been, and I’m headed to where you are.”

I tried for a while to use the notes app to record what she was saying—my ear being what it is—and after a while let the words run over me. I looked over the metal tree of roses on the back of her couch, the stand of aluminum light-up pine cones, and out into the quiet streets of Aldgate East, listening to her interpret the implications of the day and hour and minute of my birth that May afternoon more than five decades earlier, only a few miles west of where we sat.

My “house” as it were, as well as any moon I look at, will soon be in the east, almost the Far East, the vast Indian subcontinent, and it will invariably test my logic, emotion, leadership and comfort—not only with archetypes, but with architects as well.

WEDNESDAY

Five to ten working days, they told me. It will take 5 to 10 working days to get the MRI results back. It’s been eight so far, and I’d be lying if I said I’d been successful at finding serenity, at staying squarely in the moment.

I have a good friend who drowns out any bad news by speaking loudly and pretending it away. Mind over matter, ferocity over fact. For me it’s better to know than to not know – that at least leads to processing, or at least some version of it, in aspiration of the man I’d like to be, or am, or something.

“Go to your doctor and ask,” a friend in NYC texted.

“Why don’t you call your GP,” a friend suggested.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” my mother implored.

The wisdom of our elders and the alchemy of the mystics, the lessons to be extruded from the trans-generational trauma of our ancestors—these visions, these insights, they come when we are in a liminal state, open to more than the five baseline senses—or four and a half as it may be, the current state of my ear what it is. So I’m spending more time in silence (no pun intended), wondering if I can tune my antennae.

Because of late, I seem to be floating often in liminal spaces—geographically, emotionally; between New York and London, Lisbon and Mumbai, independence and connectivity, the city and the impending desert. It’s the 13^th today, and the 13^th of next month I’ll be on that plane, heading east to the unknown, or less known. The dates are lined up as if indeed charted in the sky some time ago, mapped out in the stars long before they landed in my calendar. September 11 come the movers; September 12 is two years (and my last day) in this home, and 10 years too to the day my father died. It is me, not papa, who is the rolling stone.

Strangers from the internet came today to take away a sofa. I gave them a plant as well—she’d mentioned the abundance of them in the house, asked if they too were available. There’s a slight dust ring on the book shelf surrounding the circle where the plant pot once was, and the suddenly empty space in the living room where the L-shaped couch lived reminds me again of the temporal, the impermanent. That’s all there is, ever, isn’t there, and yet…and yet.

There’s a woman I met at an ecstatic dance gathering with whom I occasionally exchange body work. Every session begins organically enough, a check-in, some tea, some tears, and expands into whatever happens to be present for either or both us. This afternoon I was face down on a tatami mat in the sunshine in her living room, my shoulders locked up, holding whatever deep tension my consciousness attempts to avoid.

She uses her hands or her feet or her weight or her leverage, and somehow her intuition seems always to find what I need it to. We enter into each meeting without explicit direction, and invariably the combination our bodies lead us to places where the emotional has congealed in the physical, to hardened thoughts and stuck energies requiring release. We—you, me, her—might be liminal, or subliminal, but we are always embodied in the physical—sometimes grounded, always anchored, the reality of our being in contrast to the “surreality” of our pondering.

THURSDAY

The morning began at the Indian consulate, waiting to file a work visa application. I sat waiting in the large, sterile, unassuming welcome area—eerily similar to an NHS Accident and Emergency— one of two white skinned people in a long room filled many. Brand new babies in search of legal assertion of birth; British residents waiting for overseas citizen cards, Indians renewing passports.

Are we who we say we are, beholden to the declarations and statements in all the paperwork? How easy is it to slide between definitions of self, of home, location, career. Marks and letters come spitting out of printers, defining our parameters, our future. Yes, you can enter, no, you can’t stay; what stage is the cancer, how much time do I have left?

Afterward I biked to the doctor’s office, implored the front-desk to help me see results. As it turned out the MRI had been sent to them within two days of the imaging, and still no doctor had reviewed them, no transaction had been sent to the specialist, no one had called me.

Three women looked over the counter at me and back again to their computer screens. I tried to read their faces, tried not to read their faces. I signed a form, showed them a piece of plastic with my photo on it. They printed results for me, held back any recognition in their faces, waited and watched me read the results.

“IAM and CP angles on both sides are unremarkable with preserved cochlea, semicircular canals and vestibulocochlear nerves, no acoustic neuroma. No abnormal signal intensities in the brain parenchyma. No SOL. Mild mucosal thickening and irritation in PNS. Conclusion: IAM structures bilaterally are unremarkable, no acoustic neuroma. No definite abnormalities in brain.”

No definite abnormalities in brain. Soon, though, nearly everything will be definitely abnormal—my surroundings, my home, my work, me. Deep relief washes over me. And now I wait for yet another piece of paper, permitting me to work, a ticket for entry into a whole new liminal space.

--- --- ---

When I looked up from the print-out they’d passed over the counter, their smiles were warm, empathetic, calming. No acoustic neuroma. No definite abnormalities. I will need to check again with the Romanian, be retold of the expected indefinite abnormalities, the implications set in motion centuries before, results of a more celestial MRI.

I’ve never really fit well into any archetype, and always been somewhat on the outside, not quite regular. Clothing sizes are usually just off. At an executive retreat years ago the workshop proctor easily categorized my colleagues using Myers Briggs but struggled to place me. Co-workers I’ve met first online always tell me I look different in person. My mother commissioned a painted portrait of us years ago and the artist gave-up, unable to capture me on canvas.

No acoustic neuroma—exhale—and no answer either, as yet. What? Did you say something, were you talking? Liminal, again—partnership, country, profession, progression. Liminal, fluid.

“People talk about a transition economy with AI and its implications on work,” the Romanian had said, “but no one’s talking about the interior transformation. This is what I fear, I ponder. Work is how so many of us define ourselves. It’s the first question so many people ask. When that shifts, where are WE? What do we stand for, how do we matter? That’s the real age of transformation that’s beginning. That’s what awaits.”

I’ve been waiting a long time for the revolution.

Not just waiting; urging it on, willing it forward, marching in the streets, occupying Wall Street. My activist parents met protesting segregated lunch counters, marched on Washington, helped propel this country’s environmental movement—of course I came out firing, righteous, opinionated. I even went to work at The White House, hubristic enough to think I could change the world.

But I’m nobody’s hero, no official spokesman, no one’s inspiration. At most I’ve been a thorn in some sides, doing what I can from a distant remove—protesting wars, boycotting businesses, challenging authority. It’s played a big part in my life, including getting me fired, or arrested, or sometimes both.

Revolution isn’t always linear, or as definitive in the moment as it is in history books, or even clear at its inception. Revolution is messy, and usually violent. That’s what I’m told, what I see, what they said when Luigi Mangioni hopped off a rented bike and shot a father of two in the back one morning in Manhattan. There are murders we justify, innocents killed circumstantially, oft-ignored directional adjustments to the long arc of justice.

Revolution is also human, ingrained, genetic, inescapable. What is human history if not the story of disagreement, conflicting values, defiance in the face of power, a contested suggestion in the public arena.

Imagine my elation, then, when revolution finally approached, came thumping, pulsing energy rushing to the surface. Unstoppable, this groundswell of energy and righteousness, this propulsive force to end injustice, to right wrongs, to foment equity, to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to clean the air, to allocate resource, to align incentives.

At last, the revolution is here. And it’s the wrong fucking revolution.

--- --- ----

Mahatma. Malala. Mandela. Martin. This is not their revolution.

Harvey Milk. Che Guevara. Rosa Parks. George Washington. This is not their revolution.

Revolution is supposed to rise from the oppressed, heaved forward incontrovertibly in righteousness, the unbreakable force of generations of powerless, repressed, downtrodden—the manifestation of generations of ancestors, finding the light.

What’s happening now in America is something else entirely—cynical, insidious, capitulating. It’s more than corruption, revenge, distortion. It’s the intentional dismantling of safety, of justice, of education, of fact, of history, of balance; the callous desecration of hard-fought agreements co-authored by centuries of civil discourse in the progressive churn of what was the world’s most welcoming melting pot. It is nothing less than lions in the pasture, gourmands in the kitchen, Gary Glitter in the daycare.

Blatant, shameless, atavistic to its core. This is welfare checks for Warren Buffet, sand for the Sahara, the obese feeding in view of the starving. This is manifest destiny as point of pride, institutionalized racism, a justification of church for rape of state.

This is not revolution—it’s revolting.

-- -- --

There is a very compelling force at work right now in America, infiltrating every corner; it is a sinister, dark, cynical force. And it is gathering strength at enormous pace, consolidating power unabated, steamrolling constitutional law, dismantling protective infrastructure, and destroying safeguards for the poor, the average, the environment, the less able.

And it’s not just Trump. It is a brutal confluence of weakened institutions, silent corporations, capitulating lawyers, opportunistic greed, cowardly universities, delusional legislators, unchecked lies and a vacuum of opposition.

Could part of it be Artificial Intelligence? If you consider the ease with which someone can clone your voice, steal your identity, or post exceptionally realistic videos of you banging a labradoodle at Diddy’s freak off, perhaps. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently reported that human intellect has declined since 2012, so make you what you want about that factoid and technology’s relentless march.

The power required to serve a single AI query uses 16 ounces of water, so imagine the environmental cost—that’s some ironic god-winking right there, fossilizing ourselves with fossil fuels to power artificial intelligence. It’s no wonder Chevron announced the construction of gas-based power plants adjacent to data centers, literally fueling demand.

Could it be unprecedented consolidation of resource? Consider that three white men collectively own Starlink, The Washington Post, Twitter (X), Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Whole Foods, WhatsApp, AWS, Tesla, Space X and Blue Origin, and, for a minute there, the keys to the US Treasury and government as a whole.

Rich white men have controlled the vast majority of resources before, of course—but the scale and speed of this is unprecedented.

No, the force I’m talking about is alienation, de-humanization, a deep-seated disempowering, a loss of agency and self-determinism. It’s disconnection. It’s hard to even read the news (or what passes for it) these days—so much noise, so little time…so little appetite in the flooded zone for anything more than skimming headlines generated by apps with dubious algorithms.

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) described alienation as “our estrangement from our work, our nature, and ourselves” and blamed it on the division of labor in capitalist societies. Of course, capitalist societies have evolved since Marx’s death in 1883—radio, x-rays, even the internal combustion engine came later—so it’s tough to measure today’s era using his standards.

Make no mistake, though, we are ever more absent from our present, ever more oblivious from our consciousness, ever more disconnected: from the humanity in humans, the natural in nature, the communing in communities.

Are we content with all our content, connected by our connectivity?

--- --- ---

What began with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing dark money to rule politics snowballed when the same court legalized corruption and granted immunity to a felonious President. A supplicant congress, a dearth of organized resistance, a swelling hoard of weaponized militias, and we are now living the consequences. “In” are bribery, bigotry, corruption, racism, misogyny, violence. “Out” is, literally, equity and diversity; gone are regulation, oversight, education, science, truth.

Senator Tammy Duckworth recently posted that there are 33 Americans who earn more than a billion dollars a year. That’s 0.00002% of the population who just got a big beautiful tax cut – trillions more for our deficit and a trillion less for Medicare. More money than the entire national federal prison budget was just allocated to build concentration camps to house the men and women who pick your produce, teach your children, cook your food, clean your house.

We’ve gutted the agencies which fund education, regulate pollution, and provide oversight to reduce corruption. We are investing in masked goon squads who bust in to restaurants to arrest tax-paying dishwashers, but there’s no money to fund Sesame Street or, say, federal officials who issue flood warnings or traffic control agents who safeguard public travel?

Prioritize incarceration over education, weapons over food, kickbacks over hand ups, and we reap what we sow. We are pulling students off streets because they voice dissent. In America. Today.

A few facts about these United States:

· The US ranks 29^th on the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, just behind Slovakia, and 69th in safety and security on the Legatum Prosperity Index, which considers factors like crime and personal freedom

· Maternal mortality rates are lower in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and Turkey, among others, than they are in America; we are tied with Lebanon

· We have a higher poverty rate than Cambodia

· We are number one in our incarceration rate, and that was before the mandate to arrest 3000 immigrants a day

No matter the causal alchemy, the result is crystal clear—in a world more inter-dependent than ever, we are segregating humanity, boiling oceans, uprooting societies, instigating mass migration, and increasingly at war within our own borders.

Is this the revolution you wanted? Are you comfortable further from justice, stripped of agency, made to feel helpless in a world careening closer and closer to the edge?

-- -- --

I love a good story. Love to hear one, love to live one, love to tell one. What pisses me off about this revolution is that, objectively, it’s a damn good story. The hero’s journey is rife with valleys and mountains, triumph and failure, lawsuits and bankruptcies and convictions and comebacks, and a takeover like none we’ve ever seen. Indeed, even hyperbole doesn’t do this epic justice.

Think about his extraordinary life: developer, playboy, casino magnate, Miss America owner, king of New York, real estate titan, talk-show guest, tv star, tabloid icon, Democrat, Republican; from bankrupt to bankrolled, from President to prosecuted and back again. Voted out a felon, a fiend and a sex offender; shot at, struck, bloodied but unfazed; impeached twice and re-elected. It is a hell of a life, and a damn good story.

Look a little closer at any chapter of this extraordinary life, though, and you won’t find enduring partnerships, deals upheld, workers paid, promises kept, or long-term friendships (Epstein aside). It’s hard to find anyone who has worked closely with Developer Donald for a period of time who sings his praises, sticks by him, vouches for his character.

In fact, what Donald Trump has developed, everywhere he has gone, is a wide swath of chaos, abuse, lawsuits and lies. Where Donald goes, lawsuits, verbal abuse, racism, sexual harassment, bankruptcy, and impeachment (twice) follow.

Look around, though, he’s sitting pretty damn comfortably in his gold-plated catbird seat. His ‘Make America Hate Again’ party dominates both houses of a whimpering, gutless congress; his appointees rule a historically partisan Supreme Court, and he is free to craft fictional narratives and shamelessly enrich his family through cons that make Trump University look like child’s play.

Just this month we’ve seen the sad capitulation of Paramount, which cancelled Stephen Colbert CBS show and paid Trump $16 million to settle a case every expert pegged as flimsy in hopes of securing approval of the network’s sale to Skydance media. We’ve seen Trump’s reactionary $10 billion lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch for publishing Donald’s hand-sketched love letter to Epstein. As if erasing Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson while welcoming Apartheid’s masters weren’t enough, this week Trump even threatened to force Washington’s football and Cleveland’s baseball teams to bring back racist mascot monikers (considering his ties to the NRA it’s a wonder he isn’t calling for Washington’s NBA team to dump ‘Wizards’ and go back to ‘Bullets’).

This is a “hero” story of a different nature, a different force. This is dangerously unhealthy. Not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the institutions that surround him are silently stripping off any remaining cover.

Gulf of America. Greenland. Canada. The Panama Canal. Military parades. $400 million dollar flying bribes. Shit.

--- --- ---

When is the moment when you do have to raise your voice, take a stand, make sacrifice, embrace discomfort, actually fight?

If you have agency, it’s time to act—imperative, actually, urgent.

If you have social capital, it is time to spend it.

If you’ve earned influence in your community or your company, it’s time to exercise it.

If you’re in a position of wealth, if you have the ability to hire, to teach, to lead, it’s time flex it.

If you have surplus financial capital, it is time to wield it.

Is injustice new? Of course not. Do good people sometimes do bad things? Absolutely. We’re all human after all (well, most of us). I’ve never been a big fan of nationalism, my country’s or anyone else’s, but what we’re seeing now is on an entirely different scale, a tectonic realignment of power to favor the powerful.

The US Federal Government employs nearly 3 million people—or used to, until recently. Are there lifelong employees who should probably move on? Of course, Clarence Thomas. But the abject gutting of foundational government pillars doesn’t bode well, for me, you or anyone who believes in the need for American ideals and the values of democracy. Replacing leadership with myopic quid pro quo is exactly how you go from authoritative soft power to violent autocracy.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes summed it up quite nicely about 375 years ago, contemplating the collapse of government: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The Melania Center for the Arts, anyone? Is this really the singularity we envisioned, the fourth turning we so anxiously awaited?

--- --- ---

Earlier this month we witnessed catastrophic floods across large swaths of the United States—New Jersey, North Carolina, New Mexico. Perhaps none were more devastating than those in Texas, which to date have taken the lives of well over a hundred people, with dozens more as yet unaccounted for.

Among the many tragically lost lives of the young girls at Camp Mystic Christian camp was 9-year old Janie Hunt, the great-granddaughter of American tycoon William Hunt, whose generational wealth derived from drilling for oil. Now, I’m not much on celestial redemption (although I do love me some Passover story-telling), but if one wanted to squint their left eye just so and ponder a mythical fable, the ingredients of otherworldly justice could be pulled from the facts of the story.

Climate change. Flooding. God. Oil. Texas. Despite my own slowly growing spiritual practice, I’m not much of a religious man, but that’s some Tarrantino-esque biblical ingredient list right there, amigo.

Still, god, in whichever incarnation to which you adhere, is not rushing down to save America. She’s got bigger fish to fry. If you are concerned at all about justice, health, equality, safety, peace, or truth, it’s time to act. This is the moment to revolt, not for revolt, or this revolution may be the last one we see.

There are pictures of joy in the showreel for sure—moments where ‘like’ turned to ‘love’, big business deals closed, friends said “I do”. For some reason I vividly remember running circles in a cavernous sports bar in Washington DC, lightly drunk and exceptionally elated when Ed O’Bannon and the ’95 Bruins won the national championship, screaming the chorus to The Offsprings’s “Come Out and Play” (‘You gotta keep ‘em separated!’)

Unfortunately, though, it often feels the most vivid recollections stem from trauma, from loss, from shock. I remember exactly the moments I learned of death—my father, his mother, my aunt, my tennis coach in high school who hung himself in his garage. I can tell you exactly what I was doing when I learned my mother was gay, Trump won the 2016 election, and the Challenger shuttle exploded (washing dishes at Ron and Rosie’s; on a date at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club concert at Terminal 5 in New York; and hitchhiking home up Albion Ridge Road, respectively).

It’s a grey, mild afternoon in London today, Sunday, March 23^rd. It’s the first weekend in spring and the weather is soft and mild. There’s a singular pink rose in bloom in the garden, arcing high across the fence from the neighbors’ side of the brick wall, and when I stare out the living room window, as I am now, it arrests my attention, hints at the blooms to come.

The day began peacefully, slowly, lazily—lying in bed streaming the soft morning jazz of Newark’s WBGO weekend programming, shaking the cobwebs gently. We were out late last night, wine and tequila with a few of my closest friends in the world. I hardly drink these days, and it felt a treat to enjoy a long boozy lunch and an evening of drinking, a smoke between courses, all the time in the world; laughing, loving, sharing a meal, reuniting across town, across an ocean.

I’m as intentional as I’ve ever been with friends in this chapter of my life, when distance and change and perspective splinter the status quo, force a reconsideration of old habits, focus attention. Previously I poured myself in to all friendships, even if at times they didn’t feed me back. Yesterday was a full-system re-charge, a powering up; grace and nurture and reassurance personified. But I fear it will be long-forgotten, when all is said and done, and what will remain with me forever instead is news of Pete, and missing Craig.

--- --- ---

Last month in Santa Barbara, my dear friend Craig, having lost his keys during a Sunday afternoon at his local sports bar, climbed the side of his building to the roof and then down to the balcony of his third-floor apartment, something he’d done before. For some reason, this time, he fell. Three stories up, and it wasn’t a broken leg or a busted arm, something we could tease him about after it healed. Maybe he ricocheted off walls and balconies; I’m assuming he landed on his head, and that was it, life over in a flash; despite my best intentions I continue to replay that moment again and again, hoping the lights went out suddenly and without pain.

I’ve known Craig since college—he and one of my former roommates met in 4^th grade in The Valley—and as a group we’ve been part of so many moments of joy: weddings and parties and celebrations; yearly drafts for fantasy football and basketball leagues—excuses to gather old friends, revive old tropes, reconnect. They all blend together.

There have been literally thousands of text messages across multiple threads, or simply direct, usually punctuated in Craig’s signature touches—the GIF of Kenyan Olympic runner Ezekiel Kemboi dancing with gyrating hips and spinning his arms; a celebratory “LEEEESSSSSSSS GOOOOOOOOO!!” that I can’t even type without hearing his voice; a reference to Mike Trout and Craig’s beloved Anaheim Angels baseball team.

The last time I saw Craig was this summer in Montreal, where a few of us gathered for our football draft over labor day weekend and renting, I now recall, a third floor apartment with a rooftop, for a long weekend of debauchery (in which he starred), biking (which he skipped), and fine dining (which he complained incessantly about and loudly wished for a cheeseburger, before drunkenly demanding to pick up the check for everyone, which he did).

College friends being college friends, there’s every opportunity at every gathering for talking shit, opening old wounds, mocking whatever’s possible. For Craig, though, never. Never a personal insult, never a harsh word about anyone, never anything but kindness and laughter, tequila and Reggae, cigarettes and beer—always a smile, always a hug, always all the time in the world for you.

The week before he died we were redrafting our basketball fantasy league, a dozen of us scattered around the world, all via text. I was in Florida, Craig in Santa Barbara, and our draft picks were side by side—one round he before me, and the reverse on the way back.

“God damn it Zach you keep poaching my guys,” he texted me separately. “Was hoping he would come back. Made another mistake. Great pick.”

I wrote him back, told him I was in Miami, just coming out of a festival, wholly unprepared, trying hard to reassemble the pieces of my mind, very happy to have had the time to swim, to reconnect, to soak up time with my people.

“Yaaaahhh Zach !!!!

Nice

Flew back from the Tahoe reggae

Fest yesterday morning and

Worked for a halfie

Talked to lead singer of rebelution waiting for the plane out of Reno

Miss you brother

Montreal was so fun

Your boys should fly out to Vegas for next draft

Super cool”

A few days later I took the redeye from Miami back to England, tired, full. When I landed in London the next morning, plane still taxiing, I turned on my phone and was greeted with a series of pings all in a row. There were text messages from friends in California, all from UCLA, all part of the football and basketball drafts, all.

“Some bad news, give me a call.”

“Hey, are you up?”

“Call me as soon as you can.”

It was 11:30 AM in London, 3 AM in California—too soon to call. My stomach dropped. I convinced myself that something had happened to one of the newer people in the draft, maybe someone I’d never met, and it would be tragic and a shame, but removed. That must be it.

Some hours later, text threads from people waking up in New York came through, and the words ‘died’ and ‘Craig’.

What followed is what you’d expect—shock, disbelief, those moments where you’re being and your conscious mind aren’t quite syncopated and you find yourself slightly shaking your head, confused. I made phone calls when California woke up, only able to sputter out a ‘hello’ before whomever had answered and I just started crying, unable to really speak, gasping for air and struggling for comprehension, together and alone.

The tears would come in waves for the next few days, taking me by surprise at the slightest trigger—a newspaper story, a Bob Marley tune, a Facebook tribute—overcome in sporadic moments, quiet and ruminative in others. At the recommendation of a friend, I lit a candle and spoke to Craig directly, out loud, telling him I loved him, trying to laugh at some of our adventures, sputtering through sobs most of the time, wishing him well in whatever’s next, saying a prayer for his family.

Later today in California, friends who’ve gathered in LA from New York and San Francisco are driving to Santa Barbara, to celebrate his life—to laugh and cry with each other, to tell stories and honor the man and his community, to hang his journey in that same sports bar, to console his family and raise a toast. Sometimes it hurts extra to be so far away. Sometimes all the noise and distraction and navel gazing—love, family, location, vocation—feels so ephemeral, like trying to grab flecks of eggshells that nestle in the raw whites; there but not, slippery, elusive, challenging to grasp.

--- --- ---

I was on the toilet this morning when the phone rang, when I heard Rob’s voice, when I got the news. Pete would appreciate that, I’m sure, would chuckle in his distinct way, pushing up his glasses, tilting his head back slightly with his side-eyed grin.

I’d been expecting it I suppose, fearing it. The doctors were supposed to bring him out of an induced coma three days ago, to check on the damage from the heart attack that came from nowhere, no signs, no warnings, Pete the athlete struck down from a clogged artery they call the “widow-maker”, his body falling out of bed, rousing his wife.

She’d performed CPR, called the ambulance, cared for their 4-year-old daughter, calmly and remarkably in the manic of that early morning. She’d called me that afternoon to tell me the news—was steady, soothing, taking it in stride.

‘They’ll bring him out of it later today and then see if and how it has affected him,” she told me via text the following day. On Thursday unable to wait any longer I wrote back to hear the news; she replied quickly, ‘no news I’m afraid but we’re meant to sit down with the doctor this afternoon to go through the test results.”

No follow up call came that evening, nor anything on Friday, and I froze, unclear on how to toe the line between my own desperation to know, and sensing intuitively to honor the unfathomable agony engulfing his family and allow some space. In the silence, our minds fill in the gaps, so frequently in the worst ways possible.

Pete’s a drummer, and 20 years ago we went to Croatia together. We hadn’t needed much of an excuse then, but news of an inaugural music festival in the north piqued our curiosities. We didn’t know many (most) of the acts, but it was a new country for both of us, involved music and the beach, and one of the acts was a band called The Bays, no one I’d heard of, but Pete idolized their drummer.

The first day there we both stepped on spiny sea urchins while swimming with women we’d met at the beach, valiantly (and in my case unsuccessfully) trying to avoid the pain. We laughed trying to piss on our own feet, hoping it would help. We danced until sunrise no matter, and spent the next sunset on a party boat cruise, the sun sea salt and chemicals hitting perfectly. I can still see Pete’s face in the summer sun, see his red and white checked shirt flowing open, showing off his athletic, solid beer belly and what he called ‘the singular ab.” A remix of Kings of Leon’s ‘Your sex is on fire’ dropped, the music pulsing the crowd enough to get the boat rocking. Pete had one hand holding the mast, in the middle of the action, his head thrown back, singing at the top of his lungs in pure blissful joy.

…The longer the silence, the higher my anxiety—our anxiety, as friends and teammates shared fears and concerns across messaging apps—and I found myself unable to sit at home Friday night, wandering the neighborhood aimlessly. I stopped at a local pub along the canal close to my house, where American owners have installed a New Orleans’ themed menu. I sat quietly by myself among the din of patrons, nursing a pint—the only other solo patron a grey-haired woman in a long dress on the couch opposite, eating cornbread with a fork and drinking white wine. I watched a tall lithe man in a Hawaiian shirt, who appeared slightly younger than me, play a clarinet that stretched down to the floor, and a woman slightly older strumming a mini guitar, the duo singing 70’s standards and old bluesy showtunes. Pete would have been right at home.

I met Pete through a co-worker who played on his lacrosse team, and Pete and I became fast friends. He was working at the BBC at that time, dealing with worldwide broadcast blah blah blah blah. All I heard was ‘worldwide’, and I laughed, and that became my name for him. “WORLDWIDE” I would yell his name in joy and bear hug him, to this day, and we’d talk music, women, sport, life.

We used to run around together a good deal back in the day, and we both loved the dance floor, which is how he nicknamed me. “Dude, getting it man. You’re like, a Wall of Ass.” Worldwide and Wall of Ass—those were the days, man, those were the days.

I have a photo of Pete on my phone I took on that Croatia trip, a few actually, back when Pete had the big bushy red beard, the curly full head of hair. This one I took literally lying on the sand with a Canon Eos Elan, a film-camera I still have, facing the sea at the beach. Pete is lying on his back, his head and shoulders on the sand toward me, the rest of him submerged in sparkling, calm stunningly blue water—carefree, at peace, an endless horizon in the distance beyond him.

We met for a coffee a week ago, a Friday. Pete was interviewing for jobs, and I’d helped him a couple weeks earlier build a PPT presentation for an interview. He was keen to get a little work in together, catch up after my trip to Florida. He had surfaced an amazing opportunity—his area of specialty, fellow Canadians, a company run by former Hockey teammates, and a quickly coalescing network of his friends and colleagues all validating his bonafides. Life was looking up.

We mapped a plan of attack, did a little work, had coffee, caught up – I told him about Craig and processing that loss, my adventures in Florida, my own life love work updates. As much as Pete was fired up about the potential job, mostly what he wanted to talk about was Hazel and the blessing he’d had in having a couple of months free. He spent nearly every day with his daughter, and she went from nervous swimmer to ace in the pool, throwing off her floaties, diving to the bottom of the pool to retrieve coins, swimming hard. I’ve never seen him prouder in his life, and he lit up from the inside talking about her fearlessness, about how fortunate he was to have such an incredible daughter, how happy he was with his family, his new house, being in London, excited for the future.

Pete was good. He was really good.

We parted ways late in the day, me headed to an ecstatic dance gathering, Pete checking out a bike store before he went home to his girls. The next morning, Pete being Pete, he wrote me a note out of nowhere..

“Sorry about the loss of your friend, mate,” he said. “His story kinda got lost in the mix yesterday. Someone’s son, brother, partner and friend. My condolences.”

--- --- ---

Fucking Pete. How could a heart as big and strong and beautiful as yours just…end? But that’s the news that came today, this Sunday morning, the reason for the silence; the arterial clogs impacting oxygen to the brain, living up to its widow-maker moniker. “Irreparable” was the word they used, inarguable, devastating, final.

On Monday I met up with mutual friends, men who’ve known Pete even longer, since high school. We met in Shoreditch, at The Ten Bells just off Brick Lane, where Jack the Ripper lurked in the alleys a century before me and Pete ran wild in the pre-gentrifying East End, still edgy then, still interesting.

Later in the evening we walked to Columbia Road, to meet Pete’s brothers and a handful of his hockey mates. We cried, we hugged, we laughed, we told stories over beers, we sat helpless, aching alongside his brother Paul, all of us desperate to help, and helpless to really do much but try and get some food in him as he sat slumped in agony. The CT scans showed that the grey and white matter of Pete’s brain had essentially merged, dissipating. Pete’s body was strong, breathing on his own, but there wasn’t really much of Pete left behind the eyes other than the body’s basic functioning. Irreparable.

--- --- ---

Yesterday at noon I took my bike to St. Bart’s hospital near Smithfield Market and after locking it up, walked through cobblestone passageways to the tall, modern wing of the hospital that’s tucked behind the sandstone historic facade. I passed a rack of bicycles and remembered that when I’d left London in 2009 I’d given my then-bike to Pete. I paused and looked around, wondering if somehow my recently stolen-again bike would miraculously appear, one last gift from Pete.

The ICU is on the 6^th floor, and Paul met me, hugged me tight, ushered me through the mazes of corridors, the doctors and nurses in scrubs going about their business. I flashed to 2015 in San Francisco, my own time sitting vigil in San Francisco, waiting for my father to be resuscitated, reliving the anxiety, the pain, the loss. I was unsure what to expect, and, also, exactly certain. Some memories remain crystal.

I hugged Pete’s wife, cried in her arms—her consoling me, of all things. They let me go in on my own, to have one last meeting, one final goodbye. An oxygen mask covered his face, a tube stuck in his mouth, needles in his neck, his eyes closed. Hand-made posters were affixed to the wall next to him, pictures of Hazel, the family, notes of love. Out the window I could see landmarks to the East, the places we used to explore.

“Worldwide,” I said, sitting down next to him, holding his hand, collapsing in tears.

At the sound of my voice his eyes opened, stayed open. I started talking, or trying to, mostly crying, the sweat from the bike ride mixing with the tears, the snot dripping down my face, hanging my head, shaking with emotion.

He blinked a couple times, kept his eyes open some more. The rational part of me knew, remembered sitting next to my grandfather as he lay dying—the natural chemical impulses of his body moving his legs involuntarily—nothing more than physical machinery.

But every ounce of my spirit knew Pete was listening, that somewhere in there he heard me, he recognized my voice, was trying to spit out ‘wall of ass’ with a smile. I told him how much he was loved, how many people were praying for him, were gathering to mourn and honor. I told him we’d take care of his girls no matter what. I told him how much I missed him already, how much he meant to me, how my mom, without ever having met him, had wept with me on the phone, knowing how much he meant to me.

His wife and his brother came in after a while, after the tissues had piled up on my lap, after the nurse had brought me a chair. We sat talking, holding Pete’s hands. Soon it was time for me to go, and I kissed Pete on the forehead, told him I was in no hurry, but that I’d see him later.

Last night, after consulting with the doctors and reviewing protocols, the family made the choice to ensure Pete died with dignity, on their terms. They pulled the plug, and he’s on his way to whatever waits, his brother playing a carefully curated playlist that includes the Kings of Leon, to accompany his passage.

My dear friend Pete. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband, someone’s father. Do me a favor Pete—say hello to Craig for me, and maybe my dad too. Soon enough, my friends, soon enough.

The station itself isn’t much more than a big box, a shelter from the sun—blisteringly hot even in February—and the cars that roll up to dispose of rail passengers creep slowly to avoid the giant potholes and broken dreams that litter the sporadically paved road.

It may be a few short miles from the surgically enhanced Latino glitz of South Beach, the laundered money and steel and glass towers of Brickell, and the thrumming sun-drenched hipster vibes of Wynwood’s painted walls, but the station is worlds away from the Miami of your mind. It may as well be rural Louisiana, or a deserted rust-belt town in August.

I’ve seen my share of buses and trains, and their stations. Starting from the age of 6 or so I was often put on the Greyhound by one parent and collected 6 hours later, in the adjacent county, by the other. Rural living what it is, ‘stations’ tended to be restaurants, cafes and gas stations along the northern reaches of California’s 101 highway—a far cry, thankfully, from the gritty rundown crime-magnets bus stations tend to be in bigger cities.

I even rode the Big Dog (as the adults used to affectionately call Greyhound) cross-country a few times to visit New York relatives. In those days of nearly a week on the bus, the one time we took Amtrak—stuck in deep snow somewhere in Utah, it was the only way out—felt like a luxury, one that may get even more out of reach in the immediate future, as DOGE moves to privatize the train, and the rest of the economy.

But here I was in Miami in February, where I’d come to join friends for Love Burn, a regional event affiliated with the bacchanalia and radical self-expression of Burning Man. It’s called Love Burn because it’s always the week of Valentine’s Day, and it’s become a definitive date in the calendar for a core group of friends to reunite (from NY, Israel, London, Florida), dance, swim, explore, expand, deepen, rejoice.

The gathering has become ever more important in the last couple years, as post-pandemic ripples have pushed many of us outside of shared neighborhoods, cities, states. It was even more important this year, in what has been, and continues to be, a profound season of loss—friends, friends’ parents, free speech, the rule of law, political integrity, the constitution, democracy.

(As I write this, a dear friend of 20 years lies in an induced coma in a hospital two miles away, his recovery from heart attack uncertain, his wife and 4-year-old daughter holding vigil with his family; in California, college friends are gathering to celebrate the too-short life of one of our inner-circle, gone by way of freak accident and a buckled ladder.)

--- --- ---

The festival complete, the other half of my beard shaved, I’d retreated to the penthouse apartment of a college roommate for laundry, dinner and a night in a bed, before hitting the road again, this time to Tampa, to visit yet another friend who’d recently lost a parent—four friends in two weeks, and not including uncles and cousins. Father time, undefeated.

The tracks from Miami extend north, hugging the coast through the Carolinas and Virginia and Washington DC before crossing the Mason-Dixon line to the vastly different sensibilities of the Northeast corridor, to Trenton and Philadelphia, New York and Boston, different worlds, different climates, different passengers. But at the southernmost Amtrak station, the line ends abruptly, and waiting for the train feels somehow like the end of the road, not the beginning.

But the beginning it was, and boarding brought both relief from blistering heat and a strange submergence into a very different America. I sat next to a fantastically obese young woman, who spent the hours on the train never once leaving her seat, smiling kindly whenever our eyes met, absorbed in ricocheting back and forth from soap operas on her phone to using ChatGPT to solve high-level physics equations.

Somewhere near West Palm Beach, synchronicity being what it is, I read a short piece in The New Yorker about George Hamilton returning home to West Palm and being urged to run for mayor–West Palm and neighboring towns apparently over-indexing on very orange old men. Shortly thereafter the train turned slowly Westward, arcing over the top of Lake Okeechobee on its way across swampland and orange groves and the flatlands and stubby green shrubs of central Florida.

A few hours later, in the bar car, waiting for my tea and a highly-recommended hunk of lightly-microwaved coffee cake (don’t), three men sat at two tables, drinking merrily and talking football. The eldest of the three (vodka) sat alone—lanky, well-worn, sun-leathered, cowboy hat, denim denim denim—laughed loudly. In a voice half ranch-hand and well-oiled, he praised ‘THEM BUCS” loudly, ‘OH YEAH, THEY’RE COMING BACK, THEY GOT THAT MOMENTUM” he chortled, laughing in drawl.

The other two men, thick of forearm and wearing Eagles gear (beer), chuckled at each other and shared easy smiles. “Ain’t no Brady no more fella,” one said, smiling, friendly. Ah, the salad days of Super Bowl victory—I remember it like it was 30 years ago (Cowboys). Three men drinking and talking football on a government train in the middle of Florida in 2025. America the beautiful.

I walked back up the train, feeling oddly empowered at each pressing of the release button between carriages, when the doors slid open in hydraulic exhale. I walked the aisle through an America both familiar and distant: big bodies strewn comfortably across large seats, the detritus of long-haul public travel on full display—jacket blankets, glowing screens, salty snacks and water bottles, chargers draped across laps, the quick glances up, the split second of eye-contact as I walked past.

America has from its inception been a country of vastly different experiences, cultures, communities—the benefits and by-product of so much space. Perhaps now what’s different is only how we cluster—whereas before people largely stayed where they started, the communities who form in Brooklyn and Portland, South Beach and Austin, come together with an expectation and a knowing—political leanings, organic or packaged, pickup truck or hybrid. But it’s in the liminal spaces, the flyover states, the hubs of public transit, where one experiences just how separate our realities.

--- --- ---

I know my host in Tampa from our time together in business school, and we’d remained close, both of us in or around New York City until we departed in the same post-Covid season, he and his family for the sunny climes of McMansion Florida, and me returning to the greyer skies of London. His boys are 13 and 11, and the life in Tampa is markedly easier for them, if less exciting for the adults.

The gated community in which they live feels like retirement meets summer school, mixed together in suburban, mid-America paradise. The trucks in cul-de-sac driveways are gigantic and sparkle in the sunshine, most likely never driving over anything other than smooth asphalt. Neighbors know each other or meet quickly walking dogs. The houses surround man-made gator-filled lakes, and kids of all ages zip around in unsupervised packs, pubescent gangs on e-bikes and electric scooters.

In addition to his day job, my host is also a cooking sauce entrepreneur, a kitchen gearhead, and a meat geek. We ate ribs and burnt ends with all the fixings, walked his dog Smokey, and caught up on life and loss, friends and family, and the challenges of losing a father. We played pickleball and tennis, took the golfcart from the clubhouse across the highway to the bar, and spent late nights listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan and drinking bourbon in the jacuzzi.

I experienced Friday Night Lights the junior edition, a dozen football fields on an uncommonly cold Florida night overrun with flag football playing kids of every size. The next day at the little league game (his son plays, he coaches), 11-year-old kids with their names on their jerseys spit like professionals, kicked dirt from their spikes, and practiced a little swagger as a boombox introduced each at-bat with custom walk-up music for every player—Snoop, Drake, Bad Bunny; signs of the times.

Perhaps one-day I’ll build a forever home in the sunshine, anchor into family, geography, stability. In the meantime, I’m spoiled with a network of good friends in sunny climes—"privileged adjacent” if you will. It’s not the worst way to be, and I give thanks every season for the work and energy I invest in community. Nothing feels as important.

The sun high, the weekend ending, the family dropped me off outside the NY Yankees minor league sporting complex on their way to watch the Yankees play spring training baseball, and with a sack lunch of leftovers and a book to read, I said goodbye and walked to the highway, catching a hired car back to Amtrak, and a return to the end of the line.

--- --- ---

The train to Miami was late, and getting later. The time of departure ticked by, and still no train. Fifteen, 20, 35, 40. Nearly an hour later the hulking head of the train appeared, glistening metal in the sparkling sunshine—all these decades later and sometimes I’m still caught off guard at how much of the train sits beneath the station platforms, how tall from the ground the carriages sit.

I found an empty pair of seats and tucked myself up by the window, facing the direction of travel (one of the quirks I’ve developed later in life, like the need for pillows so soft they’re nearly absent), popped in my ear buds and pulled out a book. Five hours of time to read, write, look out the window—yes train, yes.

Not long after, at the first stop, more people got on, and the seat next to me was taken by a short, squat, barrel-chested older man—baseball cap, lively eyes, thick fingers from a Sheryl Crow song. We acknowledged each other the way grown men in these situations do – quick nod and right back to our own attentions—and the train started up again.

Soon enough, the train stopped. Not at a train stop, nor for any obvious interruption, just…stopped, right there on the tracks, trees and grassland for miles, silence. Time elapsed, passengers stirred. My neighbor held open the Amtrak app and pushed it in to my eyesight “now due to arrive 6:48”—we were originally scheduled to get in close to 5. I nodded again, sighed in commiseration, returned to my book.

Eventually the train started up and the carriage settled back in to travel mode. Then we stopped. Started for a moment, stopped again. The pattern repeated. The sun moved slowly across the sky, the light shifting subtly, the bright afternoon giving way to stultifying heat, the shadows flickering with the tree-branches in the breeze.

Returning from the bar car (whiskey, double), my neighbor again sat next to me, leaned over, flashed the app. “7:24” He opened a chocolate bar, super-sized Snickers, and offered me one of the chocolates. I took it, shrugged a nonverbal thanks, and returned to my book. I didn’t realize I’d opened the door. We started again, stopped, started.

“7:41”

“7:58”

“8:19”

--- --- ---

Just after West Palm Beach, back to hugging the coast moving now at pace and near enough to Mar-a-Lago to dream of revolution, he leaned over, reached up and removed the ear bud from my left ear. I had a moment, a flash of confusion, and then turned to face him—not upset, not too surprised to be honest, just wondering what was on his mind as I looked down to meet his gaze.

He started talking, and didn’t stop until we got to Miami. He was a retired police officer, he told me, from a local precinct just down the coast. “We were the guys who arrested the second guy who tried to kill Trump, the guy from the golf course,” he said. “We should have killed him.”

“Did he actually try to kill Trump,” I asked? “I don’t remember there being a shooting.”

“Stuck his gun through the fence,” he said. “We should have killed him.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of his wife, who happened to be sitting in the seat in front of him, with Trump, beaming. “She’s a pistol instructor for the NRA,” he said proudly. He told me he had a brother in the Teamsters, that he and his wife raised Jack Russel show dogs, that they liked to go on cruises.

“I have to tell you, mate, I can’t stand Trump,” I said. “Can’t stand the way he treats people, disagree strongly with most of his policies, think he’s in it only for himself. I think he’s racist, sexist, a liar. I really, really don’t like him.”

He hardly flinched or showed any disregard to what I’d said, wasn’t the least upset or offended even. He told me he’s a Christian man, born again, and that the scripture predicts a rapture. “I’m not bothered or concerned about the President,” he told me calmly. “Whatever happens is in God’s hands, it’s his plan.”

He’d started out young on the force, and early on there’d been a string of burglaries along the railroad tracks. “The guy would wait for the train to go by, and when all that noise came rattling, he’d take a hammer and smash shop windows when no one could hear.

“So, we found this out, and we staked out a block of places along the tracks where we figured he’d hit next. We had with us a police dog, and sure enough, train comes by, and we see the guy come and smash the windows. We were waiting on the inside, and when he stuck his head in to try and open the window, that dog grabbed his head in his teeth, held him there while we ran around and put the cuffs on him.”

He was just a young cadet at the time and the excitement drew him in. He was with the police captain when they raided the man’s house, found a bunch of stolen property, pushed the guy to come clean. The captain had the suspect in cuffs on the second-floor terrace of the house, threatening him, and the guy was mouthy, didn’t give a shit. The police captain was screaming at the guy, and in a rage took him and flung him off the balcony, killed him.

“I stood there, didn’t know what had happened. Captain looked right at me, set his gaze, said matter of fact ‘can’t believe he jumped.’ I just nodded.”

He spent most of the rest of his time on the force undercover, infiltrating gangs. Shorty big neck, that’s what they called him, and he knew people from the Gotti family, as well as others from the Gambino’s. He told me about the hookers they’d bring in to the Embassy Suites and the stir it would cause, and the filter he’d insert deep in the back of his throat, so he could smoke crack with other mob heavies in the 80’s to ‘pass’—the filters somehow capturing the smoke before going down his lungs, the exhalation enough to keep him straight.

He told me that the real story behind the American Gangster film, the confusion in the local gangs that the perpetrator was Black. He said he’d watched a family burn to death, unable to get in the house to save them. He said dead bodies didn’t bother him, and death gave him no fear, partly owing to his religious faith. But when they wanted him to go to the ports in Miami with other police offers, he refused to go, too frightened to blow his cover. He felt lucky to get out when he did.

I took my ear bud back from him, pulled the other one out, sat listening and trying to type notes furtively in to my phone while holding his attention, listening to the stories, wondering how much was true, assuming most of it was.

“Crime now is all computerized, it’s done different. The big drugs are flown in with drones and dropped off. The real problem is that there’s no fear, the law just doesn’t help. The gangs hire the kids, the juveniles, because there’s no penalties, no threat, and these guys are just brazen, don’t give a fuck, scared of nothing.”

--- --- ---

All civilizations crumble—at least so far. In recent weeks, with the administration’s abject disregard for legality, civility, integrity, it has felt ever more like a great turning is under way, a seismic shift. Ask the wise women of your community, consult with your elders, listen to the healers and the mystics attuned to the energetics of our planet; observe the collapsing ecosystems, the heating planet, the condoning of war and violence, the disintegration of government for the people, the rise of nationalism, the fear of other, the lack of accountability, the shouting down of nuance and consideration.

It is not the barbarians at the gate I fear, but the ones inside the wall, the algorithm-driven extremists entrenched in forever wars of their minds, playing zero-sum games with the lives of people they’ve never met, nor want to; feverishly dismantling protections and demonizing ideas like equity. Is this really our future—further isolated inside bubbles of our own making, ignorant of the reality of a shared planet—false borders, fabricated truths, fake news?

The train eventually arrived, coming to a long slow stop at the very end of the tracks. Passengers gathered their belongings, packed their bags, lined-up in the aisles waiting to disembark, to walk down the platform, through the station, into the warm Florida evening: Cruise ships, Cuban restaurants, family reunions, home at last, the arms of a lover—to where they all scattered I don’t know, the retired cop and his wife included.

I myself was fortunate, met by a friend with a sweet smile, a waiting car, a plan for the night. Some things we’ll always have in common I suppose—as hard as we sometimes try to draw lines across humanity, to segment and separate, rank and classify. This was after all just another American train on a Sunday evening in February, easing across swamps and citrus down the East Coast of America, to the end of the line.

Dear reader—

I come to you, proverbial hat in in hand—sheepishly apologetic, mildly ashamed, certainly delinquent—and not so overdue, I hope, as to have lost you forever. Of late I’ve failed in my battle with the empty page, fighting sporadically; paragraphs and pages abandoned mid-thought, mid-sentence, incomplete. Inertia trumped inspiration, winter descended, and profound election horror spread its debilitating curse. I found myself in creative hibernation, empty, lethargic, stuck.

But today, today…today is different.

Today in Washington Jimmy Carter was laid to rest—Jimmy Carter, the last dinosaur of integrity-driven leadership? It’s no surprise really then that his funerial ceremony, his ascendence to the heavens in which he so fervently believed, is taking place while across the country, a different one-industry town is in flames.

Hollywood is burning, a hellish destruction only Hollywood (or Gaza, or Beirut) could imagine; unquestionably driven by a warming climate and the inevitable dearth of resource in an ever-more crowded world. Deep in Texas, Starlink satellites beam images to Fox News—clear skies over Los Angeles, the only turbulence in sight the ruckus at the southern border.

Oh yes, it’s coming, my friends, it’s coming. Certainly you remember, yes? The revolving Cabinet members, the parade of advisors, the blunt avarice, naked corruption, self-serving lies? Oh yes, beware the chaos.

Actually, don’t beware—be bold! If there is a lesson to be learned, an energetic signature to embody, a silver lining to be found in the pre-apocalyptic machinations of the moment, it is this: now is the time! Now. is. The. Time!

Dive in to your dreams, unleash yourself from fear, hesitancy, self-doubt. The invitation is obvious, the impetus as plain as the AI-generated face on your dating profile—manifest your wildest reality. There are proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East, fire fear and frenzy roil America, the glaciers are melting at both poles, and the atavistic corrupt criminal sex offender Felonious Chump is soon to retake the White House. My dear friends, for what are you waiting?

Harboring dreams of abandoning the 9-5 to start a commune in Bali? Do it. That dance class you’ve been meaning to take? Yes. The business you’ve always wanted to start? Mm-hmm, let’s go. The neighbor you’ve been crushing on? Why not. The future is in question and largely up for grabs, and everything—truth, wealth, power, gender—is fluid, subjective, and subject to change. We’ve jumped the chasm, dear friends, cleared it by a mile, so let’s embody our deepest dreams together. Let’s make 2025 the year we collectively embrace our imaginations and let fly. Tick tock, Tik Tok, who knows how much time we’ve left.

Un abrazito feurte,

--Zachary

Part 1

Crossing the Atlantic

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective.” -- Kurt Vonnegut

It’s December 24^th and the captain’s voice over the intercom promises a smooth flight at 35,000 feet. We shouldn’t expect too much turbulence ahead, at least on the airplane. Clear skies and winds in our favor, apparently, and, with a verbal wink he informs the believers among us he’s keeping a close watch on NORAD, who’ve been tracking Santa’s movement. Unlike our own departure, Rudolph and co. are right on schedule.

The flight to California was last-minute, a spur of the moment decision to go home and spend time with mom. I’m in the window seat, the first time in years, enjoying the solidity of the cabin wall as pillow and the relative calm of noise-cancelling headphones. A few hours in, the lights off, a member of the cabin crew walks past, notices I’m awake, and gestures at me. It takes a minute to realize his instruction, and when I finally raise the window shade I’m astonished to look down and see Greenland’s dramatic topography.

We’re flying over the top of the earth’s pole, London to San Francisco, skimming just above the mountain tops—low enough to make out contours on small beaches wedged between fingerling extensions of jagged, glacial tundra. The angle of the flight path must mean a lower altitude, and Greenland is just beneath us, all around us. It looks like the lovechild of the North Pole and Finland—bright white snow, frozen fjords, alkaline rust-colored rocks sheared smooth from centuries of icy pressure. Receding ice sheets extend from the bases of mountains to the coast, their sheer faces ending in abrupt, steep drops, dividing snowy ridges and descending to small inlets. The ocean that meets them is rich, deep blue with frozen swirls, white whirly slices of ice diamonds, scattered across blue velvet.

Greenland is in the news again of course, together with Panama imperial targets of Felonious Chump and his sneeringly vile American expansionism. Rounding up immigrants by the millions, building concentration camps along the border, watching Russia do whatever the hell it wants. He’s baiting us again, and we take it, lurching reactively, permanently aghast, fretting about the coming Canadian invasion.

And all the while lecherous sycophants wring their hands in sinister anticipation, plotting eviscerations of the social compact, of corporate obligation, greasing the skids for rapacious greed.

This man, so casual in his destruction, so flippant in his callousness, so smug in his hatred, so entrenched in petty childhood trauma. In the days that come, the shocks will only get louder, the threats more visceral. The wealthiest will be ever-more empowered—rewarded with tax breaks carved from public funding for the most in need. The din is building toward tomorrow’s crescendo, the ugly bleating of opportunists flocking to Washington to cheer the dismantling of the guardrails of our wellbeing.

I am wondering about the future of this country I’m flying back to; this country, my country. We heard his threats, his lies on video, his misogyny on tape, the attempts to blackmail Ukraine, to steal the election. We learned of his convictions for fraud and sexual abuse, we waited for verdicts on theft and corruption and watched the piously religious flock to a faithless man. We saw him mock the poor and the disabled, the black and the brown. And we stuck our hands up and said, in the face of science, truth, and decency, “more, give me more.” We did this, America, we did this with eyes wide open, willingly. Do we really believe ours will be the first empire in history not to crumble?

Part 2: Bridging the Divide

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a line on my right hand that fractures late in the curve, bends hard to the right, extends and forks again. It’s my life line I’m told—or was, years ago, by a palm reading hobbyist in a youth hostel in New Zealand. Most life lines are continuous, unbroken, a smooth bending half parabola, the arc of a life yet lived. Stop for a moment, please, and look down, now, at your own right hand, look and see what the future holds, if the map accurately explains the past. Is there a smooth, continuous line that begins in the middle of the base of your palm, curving up fluidly, softly, to the right? Does it start and stop without rupture, confidently promising a stable tomorrow?

My line forks at the very outset, like the handles of a divining stick, and then fractures, severs, stops suddenly half-way through before restarting fresh again, adjacent, overlapping; the end of the first part further up the palm than the beginning of the second, like a barnyard gate opened to let in sheep. It’s a fresh start of sorts, that line which begins anew; not so fresh as to never not exist in conjunction with the beginning, mind you, the biography gone before. But fresh perhaps in perspective, context; rebooting halfway through, wiser somehow and yet still nascent, opportune, potential.

When I was in high school dreaming about playing basketball professionally, I used to lie in bed the night before games and look at my hands, wondering what they had in store. I was never that caliber of athlete, though—not remotely close—and so instead these hands have supported me with writing emails and typing reports, washing dishes, stripping floors, giving massage, carrying newspapers, waiting tables. Looking again now at the lines on my palms I wonder what secrets they might carry—have been carrying, this whole time. Are there clues embedded, hints of the future, a secret code understood by previous generation, knowledge lost, like Atlantis or the secrets of the pyramids, human ingenuity disappeared over time?

The tradition, mostly followed, holds that on the last day of the year, I write a letter to myself, in advance of the year to come. Reflections on the year that was, the progress, the challenges, the gains and the evolution. But that bit is generally brief, a short pause looking back. Mostly in those moments I think about what’s coming, my dreams, goals, intentions—a time capsule today of what I hope to manifest tomorrow, and the 364 tomorrows after; and what that will mean, what the days might bring. Love, health, fitness, peace—the themes tend to be familiar, recurring, aspirational.

I’ve done this in pen on paper in a park in the northeastern reaches of Australia; on a computer at a café in the heart of New York City; in a journal on the cobblestone streets of the swanky parts of Buenos Aires; watching the ocean in San Francisco; alone with my thoughts in London, on the porch of the cabin in Mendocino. It’s generally a grounding exercise, calming, empowering, an hour or so of comfort, curiosity, remorse—space to reflect, to visualize, to envision. In the moment it feels intensely poignant, a promise to self, a call to my highest incarnation, a mapping of a future in attempt to reduce the distance between the life I imagine and the life I lead.

Breathing, and stretch work. Stretching, and breathwork. These are the foundations of this year’s resolutions. I’ve told myself many of the same thing for many years, things you’d expect: this is the year I learn an instrument, the year my fitness becomes paramount, the year I shed fear and self-doubt, the year I emerge from an old story and create space for new.

The truth is I’m probably not as far off as it can seem, nor are you. That’s true for most of us, despite the incessant voice in your head. The human body completely regenerates its cellular structure every 7-10 years—simply get out of your own way and physically, you’re auto-renewed. The mental refresh is much more accessible, a daily chance to breathe and shift. It’s not easy of course, but it is simple. I’ll admit, despite what I know and my own exhortations, I’ve been more root vegetable than root chakra these days. No longer, fam, no longer—the time for change is now.

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Part 3: Stretching the imagination

“Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”-- Aldous Huxley

I was born in London, and for the first year of my life an NHS nurse came to the house every week, to check on my wellbeing (and my parents), see if I was taking the nipple, eating well, growing as expected. It was state-sponsored healthcare of a time as long gone as the thick, curly hair with which I first emerged. Decades later, in a conversation during a Thanksgiving trip home, my mother voiced her shock and disappointment that modern Americans weren’t in full revolution over the state of healthcare in the country.

This was before Obamacare, at the end of the 1990’s, the height of HMO scandals and blatant theft. How could we continue to spend more money on health than any country on earth, with frighteningly inadequate quality of care. Reagan’s deregulation created avenues for massive corporate profits at the expense of public health. My mother wasn’t wrong—most reasonable people would have looked at the data and come to the same conclusion, whether or not they had the gumption to put on shoes and take to the streets.

At the beginning of last month, Brian Thompson, a man just 50 years old, and a father of two, was shot in the back in bright morning daylight, killed on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. He was of course the CEO of United Healthcare, a highly profitable insurance company with a well-earned reputation for refusing prior authorizations and denying fundamental medical coverage, manipulative schemes to drive stock price and earnings. The resulting public discourse opened some eyes—drowning out the minimal sympathy for a young murdered father and the family left behind were the loud, anonymous taunts and a lot of snark about his ambulance ride being out of network.

Back in California this time, tucked up in the woods behind the Redwood Curtain, sitting next to a wood stove and drinking tea with activist peaceniks from the 70’s, I expected deeper empathy, more nuanced consideration amid conversations about the state of the country, the oncoming storm, the politicization of science, the broadening gap between have and have not. I was wrong.

“Revolution isn’t pretty. It’s violent and bloody, and necessary.” These are not the words of George Washington the crowds who stormed the capitol on January 6^th, those strong on crime freedom fighters who attacked policemen and women. This is not from Castro’s Cubans, Reagan’s Contras, the Syrians or Sudanese. This is from an octogenarian, a peace marcher, a school teacher. This is a call to arms by the unarmed; this is the guidance from our elders. Are we listening?

Donald and Elon. Trump and Musk. (I liked it better when musk was a scent and trump a suit). Arguably the two most powerful men on earth have leveraged the LA fires, the loss of more than 12,000 homes, the evisceration of communities, not to rally support and resources, not to extend help, care, empathy and concern. No, these men, these wealthy, wealthy men, they’ve used the tragedy to marshal support for far-right groups in Germany, to attack California’s diversity initiatives, to berate colleagues, to blame the victims.

In recent weeks (read: since the election) corporate giants including Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Tesla, Nestlè, BlackRock, BMW, Unilever, Disney, and Budweiser have all rolled back or abandoned public commitments toward addressing the climate emergency, to Net Zero Emission alliances, to programs that provide equity and fairness, to governance and risk management. Facebook even abandoned any pretext of truth, opting to trust the will of the loudest, and used the opportunity to install a Trumpian acolyte (and domestic abuser) on its Board of Directors.

Is this your vision for America, our country, our planet? Are you bothered? Do you mind? Will it surprise you to see pit mining in the Grand Canyon, oil derricks in your favorite national park, armed soldiers pulling dark-skinned men from cars, border agents tearing children from their mother’s arms? Are you cool to stand by and watch, happy to Netflix and chill for a couple years, wait it out? Asking for a friend.

Part 4: Connecting the Dots

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be inaugurated, again, ascending once more to the (very) White House, the throne of power. This time he has a well-documented playbook, fresh immunity from the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress in his pocket, and a freshly emboldened posse of extremists who’ve moved beyond truth to a reality of self-serving declaration.

Remember the people who came forward last time, impossibly rich, extraordinarily unqualified, and heinously immoral men and women like John Bolton and Betsey DeVos? Remember how even they left appalled, leaders of the military warning of the dangers of Trump? Just imagine the circling vultures now, veneers stripped away, gleaming teeth bared and growling.

The ceremony also happens to be taking place on the day of observance for Martin Luther King, Jr., because god loves irony. If the moral arc of justice is bending toward righteousness, it’s taking a path reminiscent of the lines on my palm.

During last week’s confirmation hearings, I watched the nominee for Attorney General, the chief legal officer of the United States of America, refuse to acknowledge who won the 2020 election. She then claimed that Trump’s direct pressuring of Georgia’s secretary of state to find 11,780 votes was ‘taken out of context.’ Chief legal officer, mind you.

Donald Trump, nè Trumpf, child of German and Scottish immigrants, husband of a Slovenian immigrant, ex-husband of an immigrant from the former Czechoslovakia, has promised dictatorship on day one, specifically attacking immigrants. Simultaneously he’s tasked Elon Musk, an African immigrant, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a child of Indian immigrants, with fixing the government. Dario Fo, Bill Hicks, Joseph Heller, George Carlin—where are you when we need you most?

The man who gathered oil executives together so Trump could promise a blind eye in return for a billion dollars? He’s being put forward as Minister of the Interior, a lovely little quid pro quo. A man who doesn’t know we’re responsible for severe weather events and biodiversity loss is being put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. It continues, department leaders in stark opposition to the doctrines of their departments. I am waiting for P Diddy to be given the reins for child protective services, for Charlie Sheen to run the FDA.

If necessity is the mother of invention, exasperation has certainly donated sperm. This year marks a quarter century of the century, and it’s off to a hell of a start. That bike I told you about, my emotional support bike which was stolen when I got back to London, that I found locked up a month later and recovered? Just last week the bastards cut through the wrought iron fence of my home, stealing it again, ignoring the more expensive bikes up and down the street and taking mine. The city where I went to university is on fire. The country I’ve spent most of my life in has re-elected Trump. I’m trying not to take it personally.

Hurricanes in the US, floods in Europe and China, droughts in Africa, typhoons in Asia, melting glaciers, rising seas—the evangelists are getting the biblical times they manifested, aren’t they? Ignore for a moment the brutal, fierce destructive force of the US military, of hard power writ large. Consider briefly the consequences of the erosion of soft power, the loss of influence gained from leading by example. The flood gates have opened everywhere for nationalism to rear its head unashamedly; in Germany, France, Italy, Argentina, Russia, Denmark, Poland, China, Hungary, Finland, Sweden…

It’s time, my friends, I implore you, it’s time. Take that risk, push that boundary, explore love and creativity—do it like there’s no tomorrow, because who knows if your palm is right. Challenge yourself to have the courage to let go and see where it takes you, where it takes us. Cook for your neighbor, convene your community, inhale deeply with curiosity and optimism. Look around you—hell is freezing and boiling over simultaneously ; we have in fact managed to boil the ocean.

What I’m saying is that anything is possible now, my friends, anything. We’ve jumped the shark, crossed the divide, leaped across the void, hurdled the fence, trespassed in to the unknown. Now that we’re here, let’s get to it. I’m counting on you.

I write now to urge you to action, to exercise the right for which so many have died trying to achieve or protect, and which so many of us take for granted.

Please, please vote.

Tomorrow, November 5^th, the same day England commemorates a failed plot to assassinate a king for refusing to grant religious tolerance, the US votes to potentially elect a self-proclaimed one who has shown very little tolerance at all.

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November,” goes the refrain, recalling Guy Fawkes, who was captured and killed in 1605 while guarding a pile of gunpowder his co-plotters hoped to use to blow up the House of Lords and foment revolution. I can hear fate’s snarky giggles now, imagining the worst possible outcome tomorrow, the same fateful day, and a restoration of the man who galvanized a failed coup of his own at the US Capitol 400 years later to try an overturn an election.

Earlier this summer I listened to an interview with James Comey, the former FBI director and lifelong Republican. Comey, now an author of political high-crime thrillers—and historically forever linked with Hillary Clinton’s emails—was asked his take on his former boss. I found his answer candid, insightful, and chilling.

“Trump makes promises to everyone, all the time. He’ll say anything, it doesn’t matter, so I don’t pay any attention to his promises,” Comey said. “But he follows through on his threats. I would urge everyone to pay attention to those.”

Those threats are myriad, ever-growing, and deranged. What happens if a twice-impeached convicted felon with an armload of vendettas, a hand-picked Supreme Court, newly-granted immunity, potential support from both houses of Congress, and a militarized Justice Department, is granted his wish to rule like a dictator on Day One? Is your money on Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, or Liz Cheney as the first woman Trump decides to grab by the pussy and throw in jail?

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It’s difficult for any of us, really, to see outside our fishbowls. Growing up in small-town California, I used to think I was worldly because I was born in London and had parents from New York. Then I went to college, traveled around the world, and came back to small-town California with a fresh awareness of how little I knew.

I used to think I had a keen sense of zeitgeist and a much-evolved sense of equity in the workplace, or the street, or my community, because I’d helped build Change.org, and my own activism for progressive rights—environmental, human—signaled a deep understanding of ‘other’. Then I went out and started actually listening to the experiences of friends who aren’t tall white men, and my understanding of my ignorance deepened further.

In my backpacking days it was oddly common to find Americans who’d sewn Canadian flags onto their rucksacks. The accent was similar enough, and reputationally, border crossings, hostel reservations, and travel in general were much easier under the maple flag than the stars and stripes. ‘America’ is always a topic of interest for strangers meeting Americans in other countries, and in those days the questions came heavily influenced by Hollywood, pop charts, and limited perception – Hollywood beaches, easy women, streets paved with gold.

These days, the American accent—at least in London—begets questions mostly of Trump, the election, and the state of the union. Can Kamala really do it? How long was Biden’s health a known-secret? Why aren’t you better managing Israel?

Last week I had lunch with a new colleague of sorts, a gentleman I met through a sustainability-focused alumni club affiliated with my graduate school. This man, M., grew up one of 10 in Cameroon, and is well-traveled, having spent significant time in Russia, China, Washington DC, and London, to name a few of his stops.

At his core, and in his work, he is a banker, an analyst, and now one affiliated with a highly-respected and much-referenced global standards body covering accounting and soon accountability, vis a vis sustainability. Over souvlaki and white wine, he compared America poorly to Narcissus, who was so taken by the beauty of his own reflection, he died (please do excuse my simplified mythological reduction; I paraphrase heavily).

“With America, it is a different pool,” M said, his accent elegant and refined, British-twinged, and redolent with laughter. “America is not staring into water, but mercury—shiny, gleaming, and highly poisonous.”

“Watch China,” he tells me. While the noise in the States is so loud, the yelling so constant, self-absorption reigns and signs are missed. China is calmly doing what they say: training an army of millions, establishing beach heads across Africa and Central and South America, building ports and access to resources. “Where do you imagine GDP in 10 years from now of Russia, India, China, Indonesia? Do you believe even more than one country currently in the G7 will even be in the top 10 of economies by then?”

For those keeping score, in addition to the US, that’s Canada, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Japan. Oh, myopia, how doth though smile at your omnipresent hue.

--- --- ---

North Korean forces have been deployed to join Russian fighters in Ukraine.

The COP16 Biodiversity summit in Colombia ended in confused disarray yesterday with negotiations suspended and a lost quorum as delegates rushed to catch flights.

The United States sent soldiers to Israel to support missile defense.

There are nationalist, dictatorial, fascist-esque governments in China, Russia, India, Italy, Hungary, Argentina, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, Kazakhstan…

…It’s not difficult to continue with that list, to greatly expand it based on your stance, your ideals. So where does that put us, now, today? And what state the world, come tomorrow? Regardless of outcome, stick your hand up if you foresee a calm, peaceful aftermath? Yeah, me either.

All empires crumble. China, Portugal, England, Spain; the Turks, the Ottomans, Hitler, the Romans. The difference, perhaps, is that no previous empire collapsed while sitting on an arsenal of nuclear weapons and the most destructive fighting force in the history of humankind. As an environmentalist, I can work my way toward a small measure of existential relief knowing the planet, in the long run, will be just fine. Getting to that point could involve decades of increasingly violent, turbulent experiences for an ever-expanding population of humans on an increasingly resource-limited planet. But the planet will survive.

We might not be there though. Maybe a tiny fraction of us will—the wealthiest, the strongest, the resource-rich whose local environment provide the air and water survival requires. Maybe a new generation of humans—a greatly reduced race of person, much wiser to the required balance of the planet’s eco-system, more spiritually enlightened, somehow globally united. Or the Musk family, a few thousand of Elon’s descendants enjoying life on Mars (pro tip, for the interested few: while spending tens of millions trying to help elect Trump, Musk is also offering his sperm to friends and family, as he believes not enough ‘good’ people are having babies).

There were leading sustainability indicators during Covid, which I think of as a little test-run of how the nearly 200 countries on earth respond to a shared crisis: remarkable scientific advances, isolated outbreaks of cooperation and generosity, a few weeks of 7 pm pots and pans. But on the whole? Meh.

The irony, then, is heavy, and trending cynical:

—>A vote to crown an American King on the anniversary of England’s attempt to overthrow one.

—>The vow to “make America great again”, from the man who will only serve to hasten its demise.

—>The millions of Trump voters who will be hardest hit by the financial impacts of his policies.

—>A US baseball tournament calling itself the World Series. (Sorry, still bitter about the Yankees).

There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote I roll out often in ‘business’ circles or in conversations about ‘Sustainability” with business and organizational leaders who are more focused on quarterly returns than quarter-century returns.

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective,” he wrote, and the lesson embedded goes far beyond measures of finance or efficiency. It’s a sharp-eyed indictment of a much wider-spread disease, and one I’m terrified we as US voters might make tomorrow.

Let it not be so. Cross any fingers you have, and vote. Please, please vote.

In the largely carefree days of the summer before my second year of university, I made the acquaintance of one Christopher Caliendo, an American composer of proud Italian heritage. We’d crossed paths at the campus gym a few times and one day got to talking—me from a small town, he from Queens, NY, neither of us inherently LA-cool, and both open to meeting strangers.

Christopher was a keenly energetic self-promoter and had the chops to back it—I quickly learned he was the only composer in Vatican history to be twice commissioned by John Paul II. He’d also won the prestigious Henry Mancini Scholarship for Film Composition, and Mancini had invited Christopher to UCLA to finish his graduate work.

I myself had recently joined the staff of The Daily Bruin (“LA’s third most-read daily paper”, thank you very much) and the quiet summer months offered nascent writers the opportunity to pitch and publish features. Christopher, as expected, was more than happy to sit for the interview and talk about his life, which is when I learned about ‘appreciation dinners.’

Once a month he’d invite a group of friends to his house in Venice Beach for a pasta dinner and, following the meal, gather everyone in a seated circle. Choosing a talisman from a random assortment of props—conch shell, sheep’s horn, conductor baton—the group would pass the object, ceding control to whomever held it, with the imperative to share the positive events of their lives, the things going well, recent joys, appreciations, and achievements.

“It’s so natural for us to default to talking about problems, struggles, whatever challenges we’re facing, and I wanted to create a space that was different,” he told me. “If we can create time to explicitly focus on the positive, to be intentional in making room to honor what’s going well, it gives that positivity more energy and is reinforcing, even inspiring.”

It feels strange remembering how novel the idea was then, how foreign a concept, even with my hippy commune roots. It was compelling enough that I’ve adopted the dinners into my own life, replicating them in whichever city I’ve lived—San Francisco, London, New York; no matter where it’s happened,  the appreciation for appreciation dinners has always lasted longer than the dinners themselves. (Sometimes for reasons unexpected—the grade-school friend going on about how wonderful I was, thinking it was a ‘Zachary appreciation dinner’; a dear friend I’d met through dating her girlfriend, thinking I’d called people together to announce my coming out).

There is power in intention, which is always a good lesson, if not simply a reminder, of the option we have every day to tailor our perception, to choose our focus. You can look up into the moody London fall skies at dusk and marvel at the way light shines off the hull of an airplane and the ingenuity that got that plane there in the first place; and you can look at that same plane and wonder what terror runs through the veins of children in war zones who’ve learned to fear the sight of engines overhead.

It isn’t that one choice is right and the other wrong; and it doesn’t have to be one or the other, although these days nuance in public discourse feels an awful lot like it will go the way of Lonesome George, the now extinct giant Pinta tortoise. It’s been some time since I’ve hosted an appreciation dinner, but perhaps it’s time again, as appreciation has of late been at the forefront of my mind.

--- --- ---

Two weeks ago I returned to London from New York, having crossed the pond to officiate the wedding of close friends. If you want to truly deepen into appreciation, pull yourself out of a mid-October ocean swim, stand on a beach on a spectacularly hot sunny day in front of 130 people under a cloudless blue sky, look deeply in to the eyes of people you adore, and help tell their love story to their closest friends and family. I promise, appreciation galore.

It was the highlight of an immensely rewarding trip, full of connection and reconnection—long walks with old friends, a potluck to gather my nearest and dearest, two separate 50^th birthday parties, a ‘man dinner’ (intentional, vulnerable, tender, invigorating), powerful one-to-one conversations which continue to reverberate and inspire (if not course-correct), and a long boozy farewell gathering to soak up and reinforce the bonds of community.

As is the case with humans of a certain (any?) age, the lives of those in our inner circles vacillate, and there is always challenge, pain, confusion—the cycles of love and life cresting and falling with work, health, family, circumstance. It is (too) easy, for me, to be drawn in to the lives of those I love; I’m learning to show up without being drawn in, to hold space while holding back.

There is a proverb with which I’m sure you’re familiar which says ‘no news is good news’—if you haven’t heard anything to the contrary, you can assume all is well. (If you actually follow the news these days, you may be tempted to think ‘no news is good news’ a simple declarative statement, but I digress).

Last week I was listening to the radio (yep, still) and heard the following top of the hour update, lightly paraphrased below:

“More than a hundred people missing and tens of billions of dollars in damage from the devastating effects of Hurricane Milton in Florida. Dozens killed in Lebanon last night from IDF strikes against Hezbollah. The US is escalating its presence in the Middle East by sending forces to Israel. The Arctic is warming at more than four times the rate of the rest of the earth.

The stock market is up 108 points.”

If that doesn’t speak to the indefatigable nature of human optimism, to the evidence of multiple opposing realities holding simultaneously true, I’m not sure what does. My dad used to joke that the only difference between a brown-noser and an ass-kisser is depth perception, and while I try to refrain from embodying either, the fundamental truth remains—perception is reality. And reality, as it Lily Tomlin so eloquently put it, is nothing more than a collective hunch.

So what better gift than to again make time for what’s good, to hold space and intention, to celebrate the blessings of existence—accentuate the positive, and all that. Even the toughest moments of being alive beat the alternative, so with that in mind, please, join me in inhaling the wonders of humanity, exhale any sort of anxiety you’re holding, and imagine yourself sitting down to fresh pasta, a glass of red, and a dozen beautiful humans sitting next to you. If you cock your head to one side and slightly blur the vision in your left eye, why, you can see the good in any moment, even this close to the election.

--- --- ---

Sitting down to write, an alert came through that a federal judge has ordered Rudolph Giuliani to turn over most of his possessions and cash to a receivership in the name of the mother/daughter Georgia election officials he falsely accused of costing Trump the election. The accusations lead to a storm of insults and threats on the lives of the women and their families; and now it leads to seven days in which Rudy G. has to turn over his apartment in NYC, his vintage Mercedes once owned by Lauren Bacall, 26 watches, and even some furniture and his TV. There is good news everywhere, if you pay attention.

--- --- ---

On Monday I called my credit card company. In the crisscrossing of time zones and exuberance of reconnection I’d forgotten to pay my bill, and was curious if I could request away the accumulated $60 in financing and late fees. I explained to Jennifer that I’d been in New York to officiate a wedding, had lost track of things, and simply forgotten. I wondered, could she, in this moment, find any room to help, any way to consider the circumstances?

“That’s ok, we’re all human here, let me see what I can do,” Jennifer said.

It’s nothing new, this whole idea that kindness begets kindness, that you catch more ants with honey than vinegar. Plus I’m a man, and for years I did what every man knows you’re supposed to do when you come upon an obstacle, a wall in the way—close your eyes, put your head down, and run as fast as you can directly into it. I can’t say when, but one day I learned that you can actually raise up your head, take a deep breath, and just walk around the damn thing.

There was a brief moment of silence as Jennifer’s words sank in, before I let her know how grateful I was, how kind of her it was to hear me, how much I’d appreciated the ‘we’re all human here’ response. “I actually just texted that exact line to a friend last week,” I said, still in that exalted state of surprise and gratitude.

To which Jennifer took an audible breath (I imagined her in a cubicle wearing a headset under fluorescent lighting in an office park in a suburb, sitting up a little straighter, setting her jaw ever so determinedly) and said, “the robots are coming for all our jobs, but I’m not going to let them take my humanity, not today.”

--- --- ---

Yesterday as I walked along the canal toward the Angel tube stop and a coffee-shop rendezvous, I passed an elderly man with a walker, coming toward me, head mostly down, moving slowly and cautiously—walker forward, step, step; walker forward, step step. As I neared, he looked up, and I simply raised a hand in greeting, to say hello. His face broke in to a wide smile, his eyes warm, meeting mine. The interaction lasted a second, at most, and I took joy with me for the rest of the day.

--- --- ---

On this most recent trip to New York, while three fathers huddled outside smoking and checking the meat in a smoker, I entertained five little people by letting them launch themselves off the couch and on to me and the bean bag. In a rare quiet moment, one of them paused and in a conspiratorial whisper asked if I’d liked being a kid. It’s quite a disarming question from a seven-year-old, and I laughed and told her that yes, I did like being a kid. She agreed it was fun to not work.

Two nights later, at the aforementioned man dinner, I learned about epigenetic trauma, and the idea trauma can be (is) passed down genetically—not so difficult to fathom traumatic experiences impacting the eggs of a woman, and therefore her offspring. It doesn’t necessarily change your DNA, but can influence which genes are activated. It can also be overwritten by life experience to the contrary.

Last night I stood outside as the very last smears of deep blue turned black, looking up into the branches of the tallest tree in the neighborhood, feeling the gentle breeze, following the flight of dropped leaves as they floated downward. That tree happens to be in the back garden, and looking out today the sky is grey, cold, a little wet—London at its prototypical. The leaves have congealed in bright little piles, yellow orange and brown, a Monet writ large.

Paul Simon’s ‘Love Songs and Negotiations’ is in the CD player (yep, still), taking me back to high school, when for a year it was the soundtrack to which I fell asleep. That was years before leaving rural for urban, country for city, before meeting Christopher, before learning about appreciation dinners.

It’s common—prototypically human, even—to wax nostalgic about simpler times, times before obligation and awareness challenged the ease with which we move through the world. Experience begets awareness, and awareness influences experience; the circular economy of our individual existence, long before we know about brown-nosers, ass-kissers, or the subtle differences defining the two.

It’s less common, in my experience, for us to wax optimistic about possibility, to do the hard but simple work of attuning our awareness to what serves, to filter for fantastic. The pre-requisite for experiencing the magic power of intention is to at first believe that magic is possible. After that, any dinner can be an appreciation dinner; it’s simply a matter of perception.

He’s calm, healthy, humble, profound. He is fearless. Not play in traffic, lick a wall socket, go home with P Diddy fearless; no, not reckless fearless, teenage boy driving fearless. The time for that has long gone.

No. At the end of this story is a powerful man, an evolved man, a live-in-the-realm-of-service man. He is fearless in an embrace the unknown sort of way, the welcome the hard conversation sort of way, the speak your truth sort of way—fearless in the way that empowers (himself and) others to live within vulnerability, to trust in the universe. He is a man who welcomes the unknown with optimism, whose faith in the divine blossoms from a faith in himself, a man diving into the mystical abyss without the inhibiting fear of imagined ill consequence.

A precursor to experiencing magic (wonder, miracles, love) is the belief that magic (or wonder, or miracles, or love) exists. It’s simple, really—hard to embody, but simple in scope. Yes, hard, but simple, like faith. At the end of this story is a beautiful man.

--- --- ---

Some time back I read a story about the genesis of inspiration. The author began in the 1940’s, somewhere in the mountainous American west. Expansive wildfires were rampaging unabated, and in response, crack teams of firefighters from around the country were flown in to try and contain the spreading disaster.

On one particular afternoon, the most elite of  teams parachuted on to an adjacent hilltop, to fight a deadly blaze from behind.  A sudden shift in wind sent flames roaring unexpectedly up their hill, ambushing the men just after they’d landed. As the group turned to flee, one man, in a flash of inspiration, set fire to a circle of grass around himself and dropped to the ground, flattening himself to the hillside. The oncoming inferno, starved of fuel, skipped over him—sparing his life alone, and changing firefighting forever.

This man had the experience, knowledge and insight about fire from the time, effort and dedication of his training, but inspiration for his sudden action came in an instant—the proverbial light bulb moment, like when a mathematician whose been staring for months at an unsolved equation suddenly grasps the answer as she’s stepping off a bus.

To enable inspiration, we must get out of the way of our conscious mind. Scientifically, the brain processes information much faster than we can follow, and across multiple dimensions. Imagine the difficulty, really, if walking and chewing gum required your conscious, intentional direction for every action of the body—every breath, every swing of the arm, the lifting of the knee thigh foot. Thankfully, the brain is way ahead of us, processing hundreds of sensory inputs simultaneously and subconsciously. For our firefighter, and our mathematician, inspiration derives from the preparedness of their training and the distraction of the conscious mind by the immediacy of environmental stimulus.

I’m no scientist of course—nor a mathematician or firefighter for that matter! So what are we doing here, you might ask, discussing brain function, the unconscious, inspiration? Let me try this a different way, dear reader, a new angle, if I might; a confluence, if you will, of a wedding, a teacher, and a long-lost friend.

--- --- ---

I wrote recently about the beginning of September, how it serves as a reset, a yearly emotional check-in, a spiritual ‘pass Go’ moment—end of summer, start of fall, the anniversaries of my father’s birth and death both—as good a moment as any to still the chaos, find my breath and sink into purpose, into direction, into grace.

My father actually used to talk about what he saw as life’s three big  personal questions: what, where, with who. And I don’t have a definite answer, at the moment, for any of them. Previously that awareness would set me wobbling—distraught, depressed, playing debilitating games of comparison, envy, bitterness, what if. When asked I might have found myself stabbing at answers, repeating the suggestions of others, looking backward at previous definitions.

Yes, questions of love and location, work and purpose, money and partnership all remain.

But seasons aren’t the only things that change—narratives can too, in particular and especially the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. Did you know our bodies regenerate our entire cell structure every seven years? Physically, you’re a completely different person today than you were in 2017. Emotionally and spiritually, you needn’t wait that long.

Carlos Castaneda, writing about his peyote infused desert journeys, recounts telling his guru Don Juan about a constant figure on the periphery of his vision, never in focus, always lurking. Don Juan tells him that figure is death, and explains that when one accepts death’s ever-present proximity, death will no longer be a distraction.

In fact, that awareness can serve to liberate our true selves, can free us to eviscerate unhelpful narratives, to embrace the simple, hard truth that each day is a chance to deepen, to renew, to reinvent. Not in the George Santos I’ll just make shit up vein of (re) invention, but in the genuine embodiment of imagining possibility, the active stripping oneself down to a pure essence from which to build sort of way. At the end of this story is a beautiful man.

--- ---

So, anyway. Shortly after having shared the piece about September and my dad, I woke to a post on a social network from a woman I hadn’t thought about in years, whose memory always brings great joy. She was for me a safe haven, a kind harbor, and the greatest of gifts—a teacher. In a small town, the importance of a good teacher seems to magnify. And JY wasn’t just a teacher, she was the teacher’s aide to the notorious Ben E. Shepherd, a name that used to strike fear in the ragamuffin ragtag Trinidad Union Elementary School kids.

This is what she wrote in response to the story:

“Dear sweet and adorable Zach,

I remember you fondly in your 7th and 8th grade years I remember you and your short, pudgy body dancing on your desk to the tune of Jungle Love (oh e oh e ohhh) when my back was turned. I’m not sure you remember how I knew what you were doing—-I had your number!

I remember your dad too. Poker parties with the Skyhorses, races with him on the freeway to see who could get to the skate party first in Blue Lake…he always won. That was the year I bought you a winter coat to keep you warm. I don’t think you knew how fun and adorable you were to me. You are a part of many of my fondest memories. I missed your years of higher education and you sprouting up tall A teacher? Wow! If you’re ever blessed with a child, I hope he or she or them are as full of spunk, brilliance and delightfulness as You! YOU are truly a blessing in my life,

Thank you”

I’d actually been thinking about displays of gratitude earlier in the week, having seen a former colleague’s 5-year anniversary celebrated online by his new company in a beautiful tribute, and it had set me to thinking about who in my life I might call out and simply thank. And then this note hit, and it moved me to silence. Sure, I have questions about racing on the freeway, but, a coat, a woman on an assistant teacher’s salary buying me a winter coat? Let’s talk about grace, about a heart and soul so compelled. Ooph, wow, even now, days later, I am floored but no longer silent, repeating the anecdote to friends and family, to myself.

And then a funny thing happened. A friend came to visit, in the midst of a European sojourn, in a moment of profound change. We met nearly 30 years ago, in Los Angeles, the first time I tried the drug ecstasy—a long beautiful night of dancing and laughter, of friendship and joy, of sunrise and giggles, of falling in love with the world, as is the case when your body unloads its serotonin and dopamine all at once. We saw each other again once more in Northern California, and soon I was off around the world and she out of college and on to various towns and jobs.

But we wrote letters—I was a prodigious letter writer back then, sitting in cafes or on beaches in far flung climes, furiously scrawling out my heart in near impossible to read penmanship, sealing these missives of love and wonder with a regal “Z” stamp in fresh melted wax. And she wrote back. Often. There’s something about hand-writing letters that opens the soul—maybe its that we can share so vulnerably without immediate reprisal, that we can hold on to the idea of safety despite sharing. And so after nearly 30 years apart, she came to London for 30 hours together, armed with chocolate and a stack of letters she’d miraculously kept.

And as we sat in the kitchen, me making dinner, she flipping through the various addresses to which I’d written to her, she picked a letter from the pile and began to read. Astounding, both the wisdom I seemed to have at that tender age (and since forgotten—ah, the magic of the road), and the similarity in what occupied my mind then thematically—purpose, partnership, romance, wonder. Listening to my own words from so long ago, memories and smells and people and places flashed back for the first time in decades, lifetimes lived and forgotten.

And then something remarkable happened. Well, maybe not remarkable; maybe exactly as expected, serendipitously, a sign from above (or beyond). On the first page of the second letter, K. reading out loud, I actually referenced JY, that very same teacher, that same human who hadn’t been in my consciousness in years and who had surfaced just that week, just in time. In the furious scribbling of my letter, I’d noticed my writing slanting upward, and recalled right there in the letter that I’d learned from my teacher the upward slant signifies optimism.

I’d shown K. the post from JY in our conversations, in our connecting again, in our making sense of where we were in our lives. And so when she read the letter aloud to me, and came to that passage, she stopped short. We stared at each other, mouths open, eyes wide. We’d been deep in all the feels of long-lost friends reconnecting, stories of family and love, of children and divorce, of self-discovery, of the second half of life now unfolding for us both in ways unclear and unchartered, at the excitement and occasional wobbles of a second half wide open.

Sometimes coincidence is just that; other times, we notice more intently, imbue meaning, summon fate. But when events like these pile up and happen in bunches, we do more than notice; we stop. We look deeper. We might even look up, and wonder, or nod our heads in affirmation; smile, trust.

--- --- ---

For the last few months I’ve been planning a wedding. Not my own, mind you, and not planning in the sense of organizing caterers or hiring a band. No, I am officiating a wedding, and have been writing the service, tinkering with flow, tasked and privileged with helping craft a narrative. And one can’t help (well, I can’t help) but get emotional. It is a humbling honor, and has been a tremendous joy to do the work – to spend time with the couple, to interview them separately, to speak with family members, to envision the day.

There are billions of people on this planet, and if you’re lucky, you get the chance to meet a lot of them, in a lot of places, doing a lot of things. If you’re like me, you also get to marvel at the brilliance and magnetism and sexiness and creativity and talent of so many of them. People blow my mind—what we create, what we build, what we discover. We are bombarded with options in this life, for work and love, for path and purpose.

And yes, of course, writing someone else’s wedding—as it did the first time I served in this role—inspires the odd daydream about my own path, and where and to whom it leads. Even more, though, it allows me to resonate with and sink in to the beauty of love, and what’s possible when we express it purely and fearlessly; when we take chances and risk hurt and expose our vulnerabilities and allow ourselves to be fully seen. In that lies growth, in that lies joy, in that lies trust in the universe, comfort with self, ease in our movements, power in our connections.

And it’s now nearly here, this wedding, a few days out. At this moment—at this precise exact moment, with the Middle East on the precipice, the US elections next month, the planet warming precipitously fast, the path of the hurricane in ruins—I’m sat comfortably 41 floors up, drinking coffee in peaceful silence and looking out across the Lego-like skyline of New York City. Millions of lives and endless possibilities, rivers and oceans and helicopters and boats and trains and cars and bridges connecting strangers and boroughs, cities and states.

It’s all there before me, before us, waiting to be welcomed, open to interpretation, primed for adventure, for exploration, for definition, for love. At the end of this story is a beautiful man.

The start of September is the weekend of Burning Man, and Labor Day, and the once-a-year gathering of college friends for a party disguised as a fantasy football draft, which has been happening for more than 30 years. It is the wedding anniversary of dear friends, the end of summer vacation, the start of school, and the beginning of “Papa was a Rolling Stone”…

It is the turning of the page for a new season here in the Northern Hemisphere, and that matters too, as we’re all impacted by and creatures of our environment. Kids returning to classrooms has an energetic shift that’s bigger than just family households; even hearing shouts from a playground or seeing hordes of uniforms on street corners—these things too affect me, though I’m no longer a school teacher and don’t yet have children of my own.

It’s also the time of September 11^th, every year, which has been for all my life primarily my amazing cousin Jennifer’s birthday, but which now also brings with it a more widely shared recognition. For my part, in addition to Jen, I now also reach out to my friend David, who while walking down the stairs of a burning tower also looked in to the eyes of the firemen walking up; David, who made it out, an ever-present reminder to honor those who didn’t, and the fact that he did.

And, of course, it’s also my dad.

My father was born on the 4^th of September in New York City. He was an accidental child—his parents and his older brother fled Nazi Europe, arrived at Ellis Island with $7 dollars speaking zero English, and settled in Washington Heights with no plans to expand their family. His mother stood daily for weeks, one leg on a box and one on the floor, a primitive (and ineffective) old-country cure for pregnancy, but to no avail—Sidney Dominitz entered the world Sept 4^th, 1941, to a family with little enough resource he wasn’t even afforded a middle name.

(The visual of sweet, loving grandma Blanca standing akimbo always makes me laugh, as much for the fact that my grandmother was likely hardly taller than the box itself. My father used to joke that she was so superstitious she never walked under a black cat).

And my father died nine years ago today, September 12, 2015 in San Francisco, shortly after being released from the ICU with cheers from the doctors and a promise of full recovery from a street collapse brought on by a strange combination of heart medication and trying desperately not to piss himself, after being turned away from a local shop’s bathroom. The combination, apparently, can stop one’s heart.

The original meaning of “September” is taken from the Latin for ‘septem’, or seven, as it was originally the seventh month of a Roman calendar year which began in March. There are also seven days between my father’s birth day and his death day, seven days where he’s more prominent in my consciousness than usual. And each year I miss him just as much – some years even more.

-- -- --

I’d just landed at JFK from Genoa, Italy, when my mom called, her voice and tone in greeting terrifying me even before the words came out. I had spoken to him just a few days prior, on his birthday, and his voice had been strong, positive. I can still remember the moment, standing at the bottom of the stairs, on top of a rose garden, during a break in the aforementioned wedding, looking down a lush valley toward the very same Italian port where some 75 years earlier his parents and older brother boarded a ship with only the belongings they could carry, fleeing their homeland and all they owned, forever, in search of safety as much as a new life.

He’d driven the four hours from Humboldt down to Albion, visiting my mom and staying over to spend time with friends and then leaving his car. She’d driven him the rest of the way to the city (as we call SF), on his way to Stanford’s hospital, to run some tests to see if a new heart valve might ameliorate some of his deteriorating health conditions. He suffered from COPD and congestive heart failure, and a stroke five years prior had forever changed him, from gregarious life of the party to a much-diminished old man sinking further into his clothing and his thoughts.

In San Francisco when I arrived my father was in the ICU, tubes everywhere, intubated and in a controlled coma, his body temperature reduced. I spent two days at his bedside in the ICU—have pictures, still, selfies even, him in the background, tubes in his nose, me smiling after nurses and doctors had shared encouraging news. He was going to climb out of it, we were told, and I was buoyant enough I sent my mom home, took up her post watching over him, distracted myself with work-like activity.

My dad had massive hands, thick fingers that bent in odd directions from years of basketball. It always felt odd to me, when I passed him in height, when I became the more dominant ball player, when I felt like I was a man, to put my hand in his and feel again like a little boy, his fingers and palm swallowing up mine. On his last day in the ICU, as they slowly brought his temperature up, he was responsive enough to respond to my voice, to squeeze my hand when I asked him to signal that he heard me.

On Friday, my third at the hospital, I arrived to a smiling nurse who led me into a new room where my father sat upright, conscious, speaking, funny. That moment. That moment. I felt like the nightmare was over, that medicine and science and magic and universe had all conspired to bring joy back, to bring hope back, to bring my dad back. He wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready.

I called my mom to figure out how we’d deal with the coming months, when she in Mendocino and me in New York would need to figure out how to provide the support he’d need , how to be present for what we were told was going to be a long stay in the hospital and a longer recovery elsewhere.

I made plans to fly back to NYC the next day—I had tickets for the finals of the US Open, I had work, I had a cat. Things felt like they were returning to normal. Then my dad asked me conspiratorially if I knew why everyone was here, telling me they’d come for the surprise.

“Why everyone is where, dad?”

“Here. The hardware store.”

Terror, again, in my gut. My father was an editor, a newsman, a grammarian, a walking fact book. He was my search engine before there were search engines, reams of (often useless) information stored in his synapses.

“Dad, we are not in a hardware store.” Silence.

“Dad, who’s the President?”

After a pause, “Clinton?”

“Dad, what was your mom’s name?”

“Blanca.”

“What’s my mom’s name?”

A pained look, a moment.

“Laura?” Laura was my mother’s mother, and a nemesis of my father.

“What was your wife’s name?”

“Sydelle.”

“What’s my mom’s name?”

“Laura.”

“What’s my name?
“Fuck you.” A laugh, from me, a semblance of normality.

I spoke with a nurse, and a neurosurgeon shortly came. He asked my dad to count backwards from 100 by 7, asked him to spell words (wrong test—dad passed those easily), asked him what year it was. They took him for further testing, and I waited anxiously.

He’d had a mini-stroke, the doctor said. They could see the big black spot on his brain from his stroke years earlier, and this, I was told, was more like a splash, a spray, little spots, and that the knowledge he was struggling to recall would more than likely return, that this was just temporary, that he would be fine.

I exhaled. I called my mom, again. I helped relocate my dad to a room outside the ICU. I put a ballgame on the TV. I made sure he was comfortable. He was lying down, and his face looked pained, and he was holding a hand above his head, lightly touching his forehead, as if in deep thought, as if troubled.

“Dad. Are you ok? You look like it hurts.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he insisted. I believed him.

I kissed him goodbye. I went and got a massage, my back and body in knots from sleeping sitting up, from hours at his bedside, from hospital lights and mental anguish and fearing the worst. I went back to my best mate’s place for dinner, opened the nicest bottle of wine we could find, shared it with him and his wife, toasted my dad and his resilience, the coming out of a harrowing week. I went to bed that night exhausted and relieved. I turned off my phone. I collapsed.

The next memory I have is of hearing a knock, and then Mike’s voice. I was groggy, not sure if I was dreaming. It might have been six AM. Then the bedroom door opened, and my mother was there, rushing to me, throwing herself on the bed and holding me. They’d called me numerous times in the night. When I didn’t answer, they’d called her. She drove the 3 hours back down to the city, through the darkness of the last hours of night, to make sure she could tell me in person, to be there with me.

-- -- --

“Your relationship with him will continue to grow, it will keep changing.”

When I returned to New York two weeks later, two different people who’d lost parents told me this, separately, two people who didn’t know each other.  The first was a close friend with whom I shared a love of the Yankees, many joints, gin martinis, and long conversations about politics and women and baseball and New York City. He’d lost his mom earlier, his dad had come out late in life, and we had much in common. I heard what he said, but I didn’t, really.

The second was a colleague from work, an amazing kind incredible angel of a human who plays bassoon at secret beatnik gigs and is the best copy editor I ever worked with in both catching errors and kindly inviting change, a woman much older, much wiser, much softer. She said the same thing, and I heard her, I really did, but I didn’t understand it, really.

I was still lost in denial, still deep in mourning, still unable to stop myself from collapsing suddenly in to tears. I didn’t yet know that it would be years before I’d stop reaching for the phone during a basketball game to call him, or that even now I struggle to let go of some of his crazy, his negativity, believing it, falsely, to be my own. No. I was in the throes of loss, holding on tightly to whatever I could, and I wasn’t able to process what was being shared.

-- -- --

Now, nine years later, it makes perfect sense, Adam, of course I get it, Claire. Duh, yes, absolutely my relationship with my dad changes; how could it not? As I age, as I move through life phases he encountered, as I get old enough to see beyond the short horizons of youthful inexperience, my understanding of him grows, the forgiveness we all (should) extend to our parents deepens. I appreciate more profoundly how blessed I was to have a father so intimately, so lovingly, so consistently in my life. I feel less connected to some of the habits I wish I hadn’t copied, and more gratitude for the gifts he passed on to me: his humor, his love of words, his passion for basketball and politics and activism, his absolute dedication to protecting the environment, for speaking out about what matters. It strengthens me still, in my moments of weakness, when I wobble, when I doubt.

I still can get sad about my dad. That feels pretty normal. If I tally up the times in therapy I’ve disintegrated into sobs, 85% of them it is in memories of, and in missing, him. Most of the time, though, thoughts of him make me smile and laugh, or scrunch up my face and my mind in some form of memory, joy, emptiness, and love. He and my mom split when I was four and it took time but their relationship turned in to one of best friends, and she helps me keep him alive as well. My mom’s sister sends me messages on his birthday. My friends who knew him reach out, to help me remember, to share their love.

And I still tell some of his jokes, and I still have some of his bad habits. I still wear his softball shirt, sometimes when I’m missing him more poignantly than usual. I have an old photo of him and mom from the early sixties. He’s in a jacket and tie holding up a Daily News front page, my mother in the foreground holding up a lapel pin I can’t make it, pulling her jacket out and away from her. When my dad died, a lot of my mom’s history went with him, and she can’t remember the photo, why the headline, or who took it. Still, it’s my home screen on my phone more often than it isn’t.

When he died, he was wearing two necklaces. One was a bead necklace I’d made for him in grade school. It had been torn off his neck so much playing basketball that the iteration that survived is about 5 wooden beads, their colors long gone, on a metal thread he finally switched too after so many game stoppages where he’d get everyone else to drop to their knees and help collect the scattered beads. I have that somewhere with what’s left of his ashes, and his watch, a cheap thing that stopped working long ago.

The other is a fairly simple tree of life, made from thin silver strands hand wound together, the picture of which I’ve included here. I wear it nearly every day, and even more in the beginning of Septembers.

Families are already dissipating at the beach as the men, newly arrived, begin their day. The clock ticks past 1 PM. Kids unsheathe ice pops, mothers chatter in floppy hats and matching sandals, fathers pick at the meal’s detritus, downing cold beers in the hot sun after fried fish lunches at tables in the sand.

Daylight glistens off the water, only the most pleasant hint of breeze dances across the beach, a smattering of welcome clouds amble by—a moment of shade, a lazy parade of wispy shapes floating above. It’s the way a summer beach town is supposed to feel – holiday encampments down leafy dirt roads, a mish-mash of apart-hotels in various states of construction, sun-soaked teenagers welcoming puberty in giggly little cliques, shouts of happy toddlers squatting naked in the sand, speed boats hauling screaming tourists on yellow inflatables, adults two glasses in before lunch is even served.

Tucked into finger inlets betwixt jutting rocky cliff heads is an inauspicious parabola of soft, beige, sandy coastline. Nestled below a long-stay family caravan park, half-house summer dachas and dusty green boughs of bulging green-not-yet-ripe fig trees and apples still a month away from sweetness, sits the coolest beach bar in all of Sozopol. A tan flag flutters gently above a singular open structure—big dog facing little dog, separated by an ampersand, and all three—dog, ampersand, dog—black shaded outlines, profiles only.

The bar is open on three sides to the beach, centered on an elevated wooden platform overlooking the sea. There’s a hammock and a swing, wooden stools and high tables, canvas and wood deck chairs, and racks of coolers adjacent to the long wooden counter. It’s a classic beach bar, low-key flex, high-key sexy, the staff and DJ young, tan, cool, in t-shirts or flowing linen, a cast pulled from beer commercials and fashion catalogues.

The music is electro, funk and pop infused house, happy and upbeat—Bill Withers remixed, even, local beer and foreign gin and tonic flow freely. The bar staff is friendly, welcoming in an ego-less way so many American bars aren’t, and speak enough English to facilitate your afternoon buzz. You can pay or not—they won’t bother to collect your money until the day’s end, no card required. An adjacent one room kitchen serves unexpectedly good bacon cheeseburgers, battered shrimp, and jalapeno fries. It’s the riviera 30 years ago, Greece without tourists, European August without overwhelming crowds.

On fat soft bean bags strewn liberally under don’t-pay umbrellas, the Americans are redolent with laughter and smug disbelief, proffering coffee-flavored tequila shots to new friends in loosely fitted string bikinis. Tan, lithe bodies are strewn across the beach, often face down on said bean bags, sleeping off last night’s club, asses arced insouciantly upward, the outtakes from Caligula, perhaps, or the view from Leonardo DiCaprio’s every day.

The bodies of twenty-five-year-olds are taut in ways the men’s no longer are, kinetic even in stillness, an unrelenting reminder of bygone youth. A flippant offer to share the umbrella’s shade has been accepted, and as the afternoon progresses, there are rounds of citrusy cocktails and the buzzy chatter of new acquaintance.

It could be real or imaginary, so surreal is this steamy afternoon. There is jet lag at play, a lack of sleep, a dearth of food. Tequila does wonders, rolls back years, obliterates inhibition. Tears flow—they could be of joy, or maybe something deeper—hopes and partners both flicker to and fro, the pairs interchanging fluidly, morphing into various configurations around bathroom trips and ocean swims—an overtly shifting choreography as bodies slither from lap to beanbag to bar to lap.

It’s a Monday in August on the Black Sea, and anticipation is building.

--- -- --

True story: At a fireman’s 50^th birthday party, a Long Island soiree attended in equal measure by thick-chested beer-drinking Trump-voting fire-fighters and tequila-drinking mushroom-eating polyamorous devotees of Burning Man, an American man met a Bulgarian fire twirler performing for the crowd. Hot, right?

Embraces turned to embers, embers turned to sparks, sparks turned to fireworks, and a romance was kindled in a backyard tent. It burned hot fast, as summer love sometimes does, a short-lived singeing romance and heart-connection, timed perfectly to heal (distract?) from recent events on both sides of the human equation, before the fire flamed out and friendship moved steadily in.

Fast-forward three years and our American heroes are in Madrid, plotting August adventures in unexplored climes. A map is unfurled. Calendars are aligned. Geopolitical threats, airborne viruses, dangers of foreigners abroad—none of these are taken in to consideration. Daring, these Americans, these men of outlandish courage, these well-worn soldiers of travel and experience. The divining rods are instead sea, sun, sand, and affordability—not every American hero is a banker. Fire girl (an endearing nickname, and one she welcomed) is consulted, and a response and recommendations, via the ‘gram, come quickly. Glances are exchanged, then smiles; the decision is final, “I like” from both.

-- -- --

Bulgaria was a communist country for almost fifty years following WW2, and at the dissipation of the Soviet Union found itself suddenly freed from socialist satellite. The country eventually joined the EU, and is still very much modernizing—they’ve averaged two parliamentary elections a year for the last 4 years, nearly 40% of the population speaks Russian, and, when planes land, passengers erupt in applause.

Car-hire apps haven’t yet encroached the Bulgarian seaside, and the, ahem, eldest of our explorers lands late following flight delays which jettisoned his first opportunity for sunset. Inside the small arrivals terminal are a smattering of sandaled well-wishers with signs in Cyrillic, cheap thong sandals, and potent aftershave. There is a lone taxi stand inside the building, and with help from his seat mate who happens by (and who spent the flight distributing food to children randomly scattered about the plane, insisting she missed cucumbers in yoghurt more than anything else from home), a car is ordered. Shortly a stout young man, small of stature, thick of neck, walks through sliding doors, gestures to follow, and turns quickly around. Heroes wheel their own carry-ons.

The car is a dated Mercedes, low to the ground, and on a whim our passenger takes the front seat, for legroom and visibility, he says, pantomiming. There are few turns required to leave the initial airport thoroughfare, an intersection at the outskirts of a port town with glimpses of squared-off post-war cement-block buildings, and soon a four-lane tree-lined ‘highway’, divided by thick metal girders and a connecting railing. The road was paved a long time ago, the ruts and peaks of long-settled concrete molded by heavy load-baring trucks and, assumedly, infrequent maintenance, frequently pitch the Mercedes from side to side, a danger to those susceptible to seasickness.

Twenty minutes in to the ride the driver unfolds a metal device in his lap, the size of two cell-phones. A screen blinks to life, divided unevenly into four quadrants, with lines of what looks like 1980’s computer code in white font on a black background. There’s a splash of orange in the top right corner, with a series of numbers that change frequently, like the digital password key of a security firm or a commercial bank. There is club music on the radio. The men are not speaking.

The drivers’ attention shifts often to his lap, the glances lingering ever longer. At one point the car is in the left-hand lane, the passing lane closest to the center divider. Is it the ridges underneath edging the car further to the right? Is it simply a bend in the road? No. No.  The car is angling, suddenly, sharply, to the right, veering at pace. The metal girders flash in the headlights, and our passenger acts quickly, unconsciously, reaching out of instinct, grabbing the driver’s wheel, yanking hard to the right.

-- -- --

There is phone reception, but not much. The highway is lightly trafficked, the road not quite desolate but certainly remote. It is a moonless night on a dark thoroughfare in the middle of unknown territory, rural Bulgaria, less than 100 km into the EU. One man is thick, young, tattooed, and, notably, owns the car, has in fact been hired to drive, at a fare locals wouldn’t pay. The other is a newcomer to the country, speaks not a word of the local language, uncharacteristically asked to sit in front, has grabbed the wheel of a speeding car he’s not driving.

There is a moment of shocked silence, somehow a pause even on the radio. The car has not slowed. The two hands on the wheel belong to the driver. The electronic device sits face down between the seats. The car is squarely centered in the left lane, the girders flashing past in illumination safely to the left. No words are shared. The silence extends. The music resumes. The passenger in the car is in shaking, somewhat nervous, slightly unnerved, noticing perspiration under his arms and the clammy contours of newly sweaty palms.

Eventually the trees shadowing the highway give way to expanses of lights, an intersection, slow local roads occasioned with potholes. The driver checks his phone; the passenger does not react. The car stops, reverses, leaves the lit street for a dark winding dirt road. The window is down. The night is still. It is quiet outside. If the car were to stop, an argument to ensue, say, violence incited, would anyone hear? Do communist bears hit in the woods?

The road becomes again paved, houses appear, the car comes to a stop. The passenger gets out, retrieves his luggage, awkwardly places a credit card on a hand-held phone-fed device thrust in his direction. Technology beeps. There is no eye contact. The driver leaves, a companion arrives to guide a shaken late-comer inside. There is an open terrace, a soft breeze, a cold beer. Our heroes have arrived.

-- -- --

A week prior, in London, via WNYC , Mohammad Yunus is being interviewed on the radio. Yunus initially came to global prominence after founding pioneering community development Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, providing microfinance to the urban poor. The bank has given loans to more than 10 million borrowers, 96% of whom are women, record-low rates of default, changing “development” and tranches of the developing world, forever. Later, the bank’s low-cost housing program helps earn Yunus a much-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. He too is a hero.

Politics being the realm of the absurd, he’s on the radio being questioned about his pending embezzlement charges and the threats of jail or excommunication—sham accusations from a tyrannical leader in the final, flailing days of power. Impossible he’s guilty, someone thinks while pouring coffee; like seeing Mother Theresa arraigned on loitering charges, or believing Hillary Clinton could mastermind a child sex ring from suburban pizzerias.

But that was last week. This is Tuesday, and over fruit and yoghurt, after instant coffee and a YouTube workout that’s improbably included sets of Bulgarian split squats, the older man’s Google searches (‘who is Tim Walz?’) are interrupted by, yes, of course, Mohammad Yunus.

His picture leaps out from the screen, all smiles, Nehru collar, front page of the Internet, newly elected leader of Bangladesh. In a country of 170 million it is student protests that have, remarkably, flipped the script, chasing into exile the long-term authoritarian leader, his tormentor. He is beatific in the photo, saintly, even, at 84 years old. The mood of the country is euphoric, welcoming. Somewhere Joe Biden has seen the news and wondered. So have our heroes, who welcome this new ideal of ageless possibility as a sign, embracing what might be instead of what might have been.

-- -- --

It’s day two. The previous afternoon’s adventure has energized already high vibrations in the amygdalas of our heroes. It has come to light that another ageless hero, Lenny Kravitz, is playing an outdoor show at the port in Burgas. Between jokes about micro-financing women-led business (inspired both by Yunus’ news and the frequent experience of tall white men on holiday and their tendency to be approached by a particular cohort who’ve previously experienced other tall white men on holiday), as well as the recollection that half of our heroes was born prior to the parents of yesterday’s companions, tickets for the Kravitz show are procured. There are advantages to being unplanned.

The younger of our heroes, well into his forties, is a car guy. Watches car shows, records them in absentia, has pointed out on walks to and from beach the Maybach’s and the Beamers, the exorbitant costs of not just these cars, but these cars, here. He knows the features, the makes, the models, the prices. He also struggles with stick shift and parallel parking, a source of endless bemusement for his passenger as they make their way back along the fabled highway of arrival, temporarily leaving the beach for adventures of a more urban sort.

The sun is setting through clouds both heavy and sporadic, shards of light splintering into dusk. Traffic deadlocks in town, trails of brake lights snaking through clogged avenues where streets meet port; Bulgarians by the thousands bunch in walking congregation, policeman wave away vehicles. Desperate to find a way out, our heroes turn accidentally down a dead-end street where miraculously the city’s last parking spot awaits, hidden from view by a large delivery truck, the final few meters of road before sidewalk takes over. Let seasoned men celebrate small graces ebulliently.

On the walk from the car clouds burst open, and yet, good fortune continues to shine on our heroes, adjacent as they are to an outbuilding’s overhang. Taking cover from warm wet rain they debate which song will open, try to remember which songs exist. An hour later, drinks in hand, toward the relative rear of throngs of screaming Bulgarians, a surprising number of families, and, as it turns out, mere yards from yesterday’s drinking partners, the first chords of ‘Are you gonna go my way?’ ring out and in a burst of dry ice and strobe lights the shredded torso of the sexagenarian rock star appears on giant screens, sending the crowd into a frenzy.

Even from here, 75 yards from stage, there is a surge forward, the palpable magnetism of unquestionable rockstar energy. The men don’t need to speak; wisdom sometimes echoes wordlessly. The crowd presses forward, the men stay back, content, drinks in hand, nodding along to songs from high school, college.

Wisdom—nay, age—also sometimes echoes with sound.

“How ya doing?”

“My back hurts.”

“Food?”

“I’ll find a spot to sit.”

The grilled meats and fresh breads from the concert vendors are surprisingly flavorful. The men sit on an elevated kerb, parallel to the stage, languidly sharing food and watching various people come and go on the periphery of direct sightlines to the stage. Puffs of chemical vape cloud spit into the air like the spouts of hyperactive migrating whales. Heavy streaks of make-up, shadows and strobe lights deepen the mystery of chronological origin. Our heroes, one of whom is a girl dad, debate—no, observe—the ever-earlier onset of adulthood.

Lenny, adjacently, seems to have found youth, looking ever the rock star. The Burgas crowd is swooning, and Kravitz is extolling them back, promising multiple returns on a world tour he says will last for years. Word on the street is that he is celibate, which sparks further discussion and vehement disregard. The final strains of the last encore can be heard in the distance as our heroes emerge back on the streets, in advance of the crowd, to retrace their journey.

-- -- --

It is the juxtaposition of holiday that such long days stacked side by side can pass so quickly. In between there are visits to the old town, cobblestone markets, and the hit and miss meals of cliffside restaurants. There is the proverbial late night out at bar Elvis, the crowd young, heavily painted, surgically enhanced. Young women suck continuously on ever-larger vaporizers, at times passing mid-stride, eyes-wide, mouth suck sucking in mindless comfort like the baby in The Simpsons. Drinks are bought, conversations aborted, the gap not so much language or age as mentality and awkward self-awareness.

At one point our heroes duck inside an antique store, open late, and chock-a-block with knick-knacks from a bygone era. There are faded olive green army helmets, walls of double lensed 1950’s film cameras, speakers from the earliest hi-fi systems, arrays of binoculars and field glasses, and the leather helmets and steel bayonets salvaged from behind the iron curtain. One of the men stops to inquire about an antique wrist-watch, which he buys as a gift for an upcoming client meeting. There are references to Christopher Walken and conjecture about the timepiece’s origin. There are men telling stories.

The final night in Sozopol finds our heroes again on separate paths—one winding his way via London back to New York, the other meandering his way through a night market on the outskirts of the old town. The scene is mostly street fair—serving street fare—with carnival games for kids and beach clubs for older kids. At a high-stooled open-air bar, our last remaining hero takes in the gold medal Olympic basketball game, where heavily seasoned American stars Lebron James and Stephen Curry will their team to victory, age over youth, experience trumping athleticism.

-- -- --

The rented apartment included a phone number for a taxi, and Tony arrives the next afternoon just past 6 pm. He is a grizzled man with tan leathery arms, a protruding paunch, and sparse, thick-accented English. The taxi is more of a sawed-off El Camino with a small camper than it is sleek road car. Our hero greets him with a frozen bottle of gin and the last of the freezer’s ice creams.

Tony admires the bottle with a pleasant grunt and stows it in the back of the camper.

In the car, the man again sits in the front, siding for leg room and a view, wary of contributing. Tony revs the engine and the car moves slowly, very very slowly. Going up the first hill the speedometer doesn’t pass 20, and it is in kilometers. There is a long way to go before the airport. Cars are passing on the left—not just cars but trucks, slow vans, family-laden wagons alike, passing Tony on the left.

Tony opens the ice cream, cocks his head, starts to bite. The road opens up, the taxi doesn’t increase its speed. Tony is silent, save for the chewing of the ice cream. Time feels static but our hero is aware it is passing, half-laughing half-crying that this evening might just be the first time Ryan Air leaves on time.

“Good ice cream,” Tony says, folding the wrapper and the now empty stick into the storage space on the inside of his door. He nods to the passenger. The car is picking up speed now, again on the fateful highway.

“What time is flight?,” Tony asks, and our hero softens, pleased to know his driver is aware. “8:30” he lies, shaving off 15 minutes in a passive-aggressive maneuver, hoping to inspire a heavier foot on the gas.

“Plenty time,” Tony says, sitting back into his seat comfortably, exhaling. At just that moment the taxi enters a bend in the road, around which is revealed a line of brake lights in both north-heading lanes. The taxi stops, the highway a parking lot. They are not far from the airport in kilometers, perhaps 20, but worry stabs quickly at the heart of our passenger, flashing forward to a mad panic at a foreign airport and being that guy; a roadside motel, the exorbitant cost of rebooking.

Tony is speaking into his phone, a jumble of sounds from deep in his chest that could be Bulgarian, could be anything. He is nodding. He makes another call. And another. He listens. He speaks. He nods. He hangs up.

“There is crash,” he says. The taxi is moving in slow paces, 20 feet, 25 feet, in between stops. To the right is a turnout where three cars have pulled off the road, and families have gotten out, opened drinks and food, deciding to wait it out. Tony pulls off, and our hero is feeling less than heroic, looking around, trying to figure out how to politely express a concern that perhaps he, they, do not have the luxury of waiting out the traffic.

But Tony’s taxi doesn’t stop, it keeps rolling, heading for a stand of trees. “This is the slowest kamikaze dive ever,” thinks our hero, when at the last minute there is a break in the branches and the taxi exits the turn-out onto a steep decline, a hidden, rutted dirt road. Tree branches smack and scrape against the sides of the taxi, and the car bounces jarringly back and forth. Thorn bushes drag across the metal like nature’s fingernails on industry’s chalkboard.

In glimpses up and to the left the passenger can make out the line of stalled cars on the highway. Here, though, he and Tony are recessed, sneaking along an abandoned frontage road. There are occasional breaks in the trees to the right, revealing fields of sunflowers and cornstalks browning in the August heat.

“Road not so good,” Tony says looking out the windshield, unflinching as branches smack, before turning to the passenger, reassuringly, “but we are quickly.”

Soon the frontage road flattens, finds its way to a paved intersection. Tony steers the taxi back onto the highway, where behind him he can see the line of cars snaking in the distance.

“Crash before bridge,” he says, smiling.

Tony started the day in Istanbul, driving six hours to deliver Russians to Bulgaria. He made the trip 102 times last year. Bulgaria is closed to Russian airplanes, but Turkey is not, and Russians fleeing the war or looking to park assets have been buying up Bulgaria. Russians have too many apartments in Bulgaria, according to Tony. He shakes his head and looks back out the windshield on to a largely empty road.

“This taxi made the trip more than 100 times?” our passenger asks Tony. Tony smiles now again. “Not this taxi. I have Mercedes. S Class.”

Our hero wonders aloud why he bothered with the gin, and both men laugh. They arrive at the airport with more than 90 minutes before scheduled departure. The flight will not leave on time. The cost of the ride was either 50 Euro or 90 Lev. Our hero hands Tony two local fifties, waits for change. Tony pockets both bills, closes the back of the camper, and nods to our hero.

His door shuts, the taxi again rattles to life, pulls out on to the road, back to the highway, back to Sozopol, another day behind the wheel coming to a close. Inside the airport terminal, in a glassed-in waiting area, our hero watches the bright, flaming orange ball of sun sink slowly behind a Wizz Air jet, behind the distant hills, watches the landscape change in the crepuscular light, imagines the waves of the warm, unseen Black Sea.

For those of us who appreciate people watching, the sidewalk catwalk offered a gleeful procession of opportunity. If it’s not the beach, there are few summer pleasures as satisfying as an outside table, a second glass of wine, and a little time to while away.

There are the usual suspects of course, magnets for lingering stares and whispered commentary—the impervious rude boys at the top of their lungs, the gym rats in too-small t-shirts, the flamboyant colors and cross-cultural pollination of fashionistas, the sexy as fuck, the scantily clad. And two of my favorites: the body language of obvious first-dates, and goths in sunshine—it’s not my highest self, but there’s something about watching the obvious discomfort of this tribe, in heavy make-up, big boots and black clothing, look so miserable waiting for darkness.

Wine down, wind down, and the leisurely walk home along streets usually traversed in haste, taking in summer window displays, newly opened outlets, old shops never noticed. Blowing its cold air into the warm street is an ice cream shop, the welcome bank of colors and flavors under cooled glass, angled forward, tempting us even more. Hell yes, ice cream, hell yes.

There’s a small group of people who are obviously not together congregating at the entrance, where sidewalk meets display case, spilling out in to the street. We tuck in casually at the back, looking over the heads of those less vertically elongated, plotting which flavors to try, which to buy. Growing up I was a mint chip guy (to be fair, growing up I was an eat-whatever’s-in-my-face guy too, hence the nicknames ‘bubble butt’ and ‘fat Zach’), but these days I’m wont to veer – summers of chocolate and pistachio litter my past.

After a couple minutes the person closest to the counter is handed a two-flavored cup and pivots without a thank you, spoon in hand, and leaves. This isn’t the order line, it turns out; it is a group of 8-10 people waiting for their orders to be delivered. Stepping back, I see a line of stanchions supporting a rope of undulating velvet, and, ten yards down, three large digital screens on the continuation of the ice cream counter. Behind that are a series of tables, high-tops, maybe 7 in total, mostly filled with chattering customers.

There are two groups of people at the order depots, pointing and scrolling to input their orders. I am feeling suddenly old. We approach tentatively. There are no buttons for “can I please taste the pistachio”, only pictures and scrolls, choices of cup or cone, scoop size, toppings. It isn’t naturally intuitive, but we get it, eventually—a small cup of coconut , another split between chocolate and dulce de leche (I spent some time in Argentina; the second one is mine).

It takes two passes but we manage to finalize the order, to pay. We shuffle back down the inside of the ropes, toward the waiting crowd at the end of shop, the one spilling out in to the street.

I’m watching the young man behind the counter. He’s taller than me, perhaps 6’3”, wiry black facial hair, glasses, Indian of origin, or Bangladesh, maybe. One arm is noticeably bigger than the other, the development affliction of tennis players and scoopers both. He is working hard, fast, silently. We can hear the orders dinging in from the groups behind us, the printed tickets piling up. He is alone. I count. There are 17 other customers in line, not including us, and more people walk in semi-continuously.

A group of young women has crowded around the digital kiosks. They interrupt the man scooping curtly, no please or thank you, asking (demanding?) to taste flavors, oblivious. The shop, a chain, has posters up showing Instagram-ready cones, shaped like roses. He is using a slicing tool, working quickly, shearing off small wedges of ice cream to build the rose-shaped desserts, petal by petal, sometimes three flavors to a cone. It is hard, precise work, under the gaze of at least 34 sweet-craving eyes

The line is getting longer. There are customers wanting tables cleared, extra spoons, more napkins. He is by himself, rapidly and meticulously crafting ice cream roses. He’s in front of me now, across the counter.

“Don’t you miss the talking?”

He pauses and glances up over his glasses, smiles exasperatedly. “So much. That used to be the best part of working here.”

It’s difficult to imagine a retail setting less suited to automation than the local ice cream store. In my memory—and not just from last century, but from last week, or last month, in ice cream shops in Bulgaria, in Denmark—half the fun is the line. OK, maybe 30%, but still. You get to observe reactions as people try flavors or see their orders in real life, being passed across the counter. You get to watch little kids as jumpy and excited as they’ll ever be, watching in anticipation their cones get made. You get to go through FOMO anxiety wondering which flavor is truly, exactly what you want right now.

And then when it’s your turn, you talk to the person serving you. You ask about their favorites. You get the story behind custom flavors or the owner’s inspiration. And it’s ice cream for Christ sake, ice cream! We’ll wait. It’s worth it. No one in line for ice cream gets mad and storms off.

I’m not opposed to automation. It’s a tool, like a hammer; you can build a house or kneecap a stranger. The tool itself isn’t inherently bad, it’s how you use it. (Men have said this before).

But this? Blocky electronic 2D screens in place of a second or third person to welcome you in, proffer a couple tiny spoons of temptation, tell you about their favorites, wink as they pile on a little extra?  No thank you. Not here, not for ice cream?? Keep your book bans and your transgender toilets and your human rights kerfuffles; this shall be my yolk to bear in the culture wars, damnit!

Or will it?

I’m at that phase of life—curiously examining long-held beliefs, less inclined to fight feedback than to listen closely for insight—whereas before I would rush to judgment, now I’m increasingly interested in the ego-free examination of observation. The MBA in me understands throughput, inventory management, margins. The comms professional in me understands the power of AI and the potential for time saving, for expanded consideration.

Maybe AI knows. Over a cold mint tea in the back garden, I asked ChatGPT to write me a short story about the impact of AI on the local ice cream parlor, in the style of Hunter S. Thompson, because why not the king of gonzo. Here’s what it (it? Does ChatGPT have a pronoun?) said:

The local ice cream parlor, once a bastion of sticky fingers and melting cones, is now under siege by the cold, calculating hand of artificial intelligence. You can see it in the automated order kiosks that replace the eager high school kid who used to hand you a double scoop with a smile. The vibrant chaos of the shop, once filled with indecisive children and parents trying to decode the flavors of the day, is now eerily efficient. The soul of the place has been gutted and replaced by sterile algorithms predicting your flavor cravings before you even step foot inside. The line, once a place of human interaction and patience-testing, is now a thing of the past as orders are shot out at blinding speed, as if the AI itself is trying to rid the place of any lingering humanity.

Well, look at that—and they say AI has no self-awareness. It’s not bad—not great, but not bad. I’ll stick to the real thing though, Hunter Thompson and the high school kid both. Especially when it comes to ice cream.

I fucking love the Olympics. Always have, since Carl Lewis in 1984 and the great confluence of A) the US not boycotting and B) living with my dad who, unlike my mom, was in a house with electricity. I’m not usually one for nationalism or overtly patriotic gestures—the connotation feels different when you’re American vs say New Zealand—but come Olympics, I find myself cheering wildly for the red, white and blue.

Do you remember watching Michael Johnson run? The strength in his body, the way his head seemed not to move at all despite the speed. I still marvel today watching the sprinters in slow motion, the strength, the power, the arrogance. They are the sports cars of the human race.

Rowing? The only time I think about rowing is either warming up at the gym on that machine, or when I happen to be biking past the Thames near Putney and see teams out on the water. But making coffee last week I flicked on the BBC and found myself in tears watching the UK women’s 4-person team win gold by about … well, by about the size of that pole vaulter’s junk.

Rowing doesn’t cross my mind for 206 straight weeks, and then, of course, the Olympics hit. When England edged out the Danes for gold, the commentator recounted the story of one of the young women in the UK boat. As a child she dreamed of competing in the Olympics, and, frustrated with her training, threw away her journal. Her father, who passed last year, had gone in to the trash to find and save a particular entry where she’d written her goal of rowing in the Olympics, and saved it, only showing her years later.

Sobs. Absolute sobs. Not just little sniffles, but sobbing. I’m listening to this story and it cracks me wide open and all at once I’m that father saving his daughter’s goals and I’m that girl desperate to achieve. Anyone that’s competed, anyone that has stayed out in the rain and the dark shooting free throws or catching passes, anyone that follows sport closely knows that feeling. And I love that about the Olympics—it is passion squared, repeatedly.

It’s true, I do get emotional at times, am quickly moved to tears. I’ve been known to cry reading the morning paper, listening to the radio, even on the Stairmaster at the gym watching the news—tears of joy, tears of sadness, it doesn’t matter; human stories hit me hard sometimes, therapy be damned. Triumph, pain, dedication, sacrifice—if you want stories of human endurance, mind over body, the Olympics can’t be beat.

Anyone who saw it remembers American gymnast Kerri Strug on one ankle, or Derek Redmond,  tearing a hamstring in the Barcelona 400, determined to finish on one leg in the arms of his father who’d rushed to his side. I swear to you, this moment, a Wednesday morning in London, I am CRYING again just writing this, thinking about that man on the track, family, love, determination. Fucking Olympics.

-- -- --

It would be nice of course were The Olympics wholly removed from global affairs, from political machinations, from the lower reaches of humanity; but of course they are not. In my short lifetime there have been multiple boycotts, warring countries whose athletes get excluded, the horror of the massacres in Munich, and more than a handful of scandals about doping, gender, and political influence.

In theory, we’re all born pretty equal—helpless squealing little infants with endless possibilities. I try and remind myself this watching the Olympics, or Cirqu du Soleil, or Charlize Theron. And while some of us dedicate years of our lives to less than 10 seconds of sprinting or contorting our bodies improbably while spinning through the air, others grow up learning to hate people we’ve never met or dedicating our lives to battlefield martyrdom. Ah, humans, you blow my mind.

I’ve watched the Olympics while living in the US of course, but also while living in Australia and living in England, and traveling through Central America and now, this year, Bulgaria. The perspective shift is illuminating, even shocking at times at what’s covered, or what’s not—a visceral reminder there’s always unseen layers, different versions of the same event. I’m no fan of equestrian, field hockey, or skeet shooting, but if those sports are the sports the broadcast nation excels in, those are the sports you’re going to see, like it or not.

Even Snoop Dogg, the official mascot of the games for the United States and, conceivably, the next President, should he decide to capitalize on his popularity. (You want a story of remarkable triumph, by the way, how is it Snoop has gone from murder trial to national icon?! To think he’d partner with Martha Stewart and between them SHE’S the one that’s done time?). But you don’t see Snoop in London, other than on Instagram or online. On the BBC, sadly, both Snoop (and basketball) are largely invisible.

-- -- --

In the summer of 2005, I was living in London when the city was awarded the 2012 Olympics. My flat mate at the time, British by way of Majorca, was ecstatic, as was the entire nation. London was electric for weeks, buzzing with pride and anticipation, the plans for (re)development hotly debated, the papers full of opinions, celebrations, and of course warnings about impending catastrophe and surefire financial ruin—the Brits being British after all.

John Ross—activist, author, muckraker, best friend of my pop and my former flat mate at Stink House in Humboldt County—was at that time in his late 60’s, with one good eye and twice as many teeth, and, incredibly, on his way to volunteer as a human shield in Iraq, joining other activists in lying on top of buildings in the summer heat, putting his life on the line to prevent US bombing attacks in Dick Cheney’s despicable war.

He had stopped in London on his way, and I’d gone to the couch, giving him my bedroom for a couple days, cleaning up after him in the bathroom, doing his laundry, listening to his stories. My flat mat—in true style—had been gracious and welcoming in opening up our little flat to John, and on the evening of the Olympic announcement, the three of us had been out to dinner in Shoreditch, eating Vietnamese food and enjoying the unseasonably warm London weather.

Sam, himself a nascent storyteller as musician and film maker, was ecstatic about the Olympics, the excitement, the potential for London. Between bites of spring roll and swigs of beer, we talked about what it would mean for our corner of East London, along Victoria Park (our flat was on the canal, and we spent many a day with the door to our terrace open, enjoying the park, the water, the swans). The park was ground zero for the development of the games, the stadium to go up just north of us.

John Ross had a different take.

Johnny grew up in Manhattan’s west village, as a young punk delivered drugs to Coltrane and his milieu, and in the late 50’s tore up his draft card and moved to Mexico, where he spent much of his life, as well as his death. He’d written books like “The Annexation of Mexico”, and spent time in Chiapas in the heart of real revolution, cavorting with and writing about Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic masked anti-capitalist leader of the Zapatistas and their Army of National Liberation.

Overlapping the Olympic announcement and his time as a human shield, John would also publish “Murdered by Capitalism”, which won a San Francisco Chronicle ‘Best Book’ award. It’s a quasi-fictitious tale extracted from the life of E B Schnaubelt, hero of both John and my pop. Schaubelt’s brother—and likely E B himself—was involved in the famous Haymarket affair, a massacre at a labor rally in Chicago in the late 1800’s.

(From the review: After spilling bourbon on Schnaubelt's grave, its pugnacious and very dead occupant becomes Ross's mentor, sidekick, and boozing companion through this epic telling of the hallucinatory, carnal, and ornery histories of the American Left and John Ross's own remarkable life.) Gonzo journalism meets radical activism.

Schnaubelt, by the way, moved to Northern California after the bloodletting in Chicago and set up a lumber mill as a workers' co-op. One night he happened to hear someone outside messing with his machinery, and upon investigation, was shot and killed by a watchman hired by big lumber, who had no patience for worker-run competition. Schnaubelt’s widow fled, but not before erecting his headstone in the tiny cemetery in Trinidad, California’s smallest incorporated city, population 400.  

The epitaph? “E. B. Schnaubelt 1855–1913, "Murdered by Capitalism." “

My father’s grave, not accidentally, is a few yards away.

-- -- --

But back to London, and that dinner, where John put down his wine, cleared his throat and proceeded to eviscerate the pinchy Olympics as a capitalist tool of imperialistas, a weapon against the common man and a major force of evil. Even in dissent John was always compelling powerful, a remarkable teller of stories and an accomplished poet who often gave readings at jazz clubs, beatnik hang-outs and Bay Area book shops—naturally hip, even before the eye patch, the goatee, and the beret and Arafat black-and-white checkered scarf that came to be his trademarks.

I felt for Sam, who’d been so gracious and hospitable, trying to enjoy his dinner and a beer and coming up against the wrath of John. It wasn’t personal of course, but it was powerful—it certainly changed the tenor of that meal, and sticks with me as an Olympic moment of sorts, and a continual reminder about the myopic gaze of assured perspective.

-- -- --

Such is the nature of fierce resolve, I suppose, of Olympic-level determination. The countless hours to master one’s craft, the resilient belief you can make a difference no matter the odds, the uncompromising dedication required to train your body to run faster than any human before you ever has, to jump higher, to write more, to polish the lede, to endure when the world gives you every opportunity to stop, to quit, to not push.

Years later, living in New York, I was again with John, this time walking to a reading for what I believe would be his final book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City. He was making an East Coast swing, enjoying a remarkably prolific late-in-life period, and was carrying a thick pile of hardback books in a canvas tote on a warm, muggy New York City evening.

It wasn’t a far walk, but the bag was big and cumbersome, and I wanted to help. John was a lot of things, and he was also family, had known me since I was seven years old, had been and was a recurring presence in my life, however sporadic. A big part of his connection to my pop—other than two leftist hippy New York Jew newspapermen connecting in the remote far wilds of Northern California—was a devout love of basketball, one that more than rubbed off on me. Sid and John loved few things more than each other’s company, a jar of red wine, Humboldt green, and hoops on the tee-vee.

So it’s hard for me to consider the Olympics, the drama of sport, a story well told, without thinking about where it started—my training ground, my own early-year journal entries about dreams of success, if you will.

“John, let me get that for you, that looks heavy,” I said, reaching for the bag.

And he looked at me and smiled, that ever-boyish smile, eyes glistening with wisdom, with edge, with age, experience, with encouragement.

“That’s ok,” he said, “ it was a lot heavier when it was on the inside.”

Copenhagen in the sunshine is glorious; like, top ten cities on earth glorious. The parks, the castles, the sculpture, the blondes—everything sparkles a little more when the sun is shining.

Sunshine In a place like Barcelona doesn’t really matter, nor in LA; t-shirt weather every day. But in cities where warm sunshine is the rare gift (hello London, ciao San Francisco), the heat draws everyone out, and they stay long into the evening, drinking and laughing and breathing life into the streets. Darkness doesn’t fall until well past 10 pm in these northern summers, and the thrumming energy of a warm night is palpable if you’re even remotely in tune.

The same is true here in Copenhagen, where every other store is a bakery, drinking starts at lunch, and somehow everyone is still impossibly gorgeous, suspiciously kind, and catalogue sexy—walking around feels as if you’ve been dropped into a Truman Show-like infomercial for a Viking wellbeing lifestyle brand.

Which makes some sense, actually, as the city began as a Viking village more than a thousand years ago, and water is still the dominating feature. Bridges—old and new, functional and showy in twisting polished girders, bridges even to Sweden, the New Jersey to Copenhagen’s New York in that everything is 50% cheaper—connect inlets and spits of land, tourist cafes and wilderness, making for glorious adventure as you explore the city’s dual island anchors.

Copenhagen is also a wonderful example of what happens when cities are designed for humans instead of cars. Bicycles—and bike lanes—dominate the landscape, and the ease of moving from place to place obviates haste; things slow down, the spirit exhales. Bike lanes are wide, well-paved, a priority—age, outfit, heel-height are irrelevant—the city pedals calmly by, stylish, helmet-less, European.

-- -- -- --

I almost didn’t come to Copenhagen, which would have been the second time. Let me explain.

In 1975, in London, my mother decided she was finished with her marriage to my father (“tired of raising two children” she later told me, her only child). Then a teacher at The American School at St. John’s Wood, she’d secured a teaching gig in Copenhagen, and we were set to take the short flight to a very different life.

Just before we moved, the job fell through, and my mother, at a loss for what next, or where, took me to Westchester, New York, dropped me with my father’s brother’s family, and set out for California. Not liking LA, she tried San Francisco; not liking San Francisco, she responded to a friend’s invitation to come a few hours further north to, at that time, a very rural Mendocino, where the dominating feature was neither water nor redwoods but weed.

And so instead of old Europe, Scandinavia, schnapps and smorgasbord, we moved to a converted chicken coop on a little hippy commune, forgoing not only Copenhagen and a new language but also electricity, plumbing, and bike lanes.

Empowerment is a common trope these eat pray love days, this social media world—ownership, authenticity, self-determination, the hero’s journey. We may be adrift in the sea of life but we have oars at our disposal, poles in the water, to steer the course! It’s your life, take control of it, we’re told, and the self-help life-hacking personal-coaching gurus are abundant—“those who can’t, teach” writ large.

But how different my life—my language, perspective, proclivities—were it not for a decision made by someone I’ll never meet, for reasons I’ll never know? Similarly to not coming all those years ago, coming to Copenhagen this time, too, was largely due to the decisions of others.

-- -- --

My college roommate was in Stockholm for his birthday and a week of spring-nutting (he is a fairly recent convert to the church of Springsteen, and there are thousands of these ‘Springnuts’ who follow Bruce around the world, comparing setlists in reverent adulation). At the last minute I booked a one-way to Sweden and surprised him (roommate, not Bruce)—exploring the Nobel Museum, scootering around the city, and hitting The Boss’ last show. On Friday as Justin left for the airport, I, along with a mutual friend who’d likewise turned up for the celebration, decided on a whim to try Copenhagen, and hopped the evening train.

My connections to Copenhagen, other than that near miss nearly 50 years ago, are fairly tenuous. I’d actually been once before, a hardly-recalled Thanksgiving weekend nearly 20 years ago, a feast I barely remember, and a trip which included late-night warehouse parties and an unhealthy amount of liquid celebration. My godfather Chris, a man I don’t remember meeting but whose exuberance lives on in my mother’s storytelling, was Danish, as are two close friends—a designer and an architect—both of whom I’ve worked with and whose recommendations I happily solicited during the 5-hour train ride south across flat green expanse and calm, flat blue skies.

With my travel companion, a vegan chef and marathoner with whom I shared an apartment building in Manhattan for nearly a decade, we rented a little two-bed flat on the top floor of a five-flat walk-up in Vesterbro, the former red-light district-turned-hipster central, funky a la Shoreditch or Williamsburg, but smaller, older and very much more quaint.

We arrived so late (Friday night in Europe, unexpected train delays, the global outage from CloudStrike’s poorly executed software update that let everyone know just how much our lives are in the hands of others)—that after collecting keys at a local bodega and dropping our bags, we had enough time for two cocktails and a cup of olives ($50!) before the bar closed and we clomped up stairs to collapse.

The next day—glorious sunshine, rental bikes, edibles—we ventured out, not quite aimless but certainly open, and ended up under a bridge at a local wine shop, alternating between glasses of white and plunges in the canal. Like in Stockholm, the waterways of Copenhagen are clean, safe and refreshing, and anyone is invited to jump in anywhere, anytime.

And so it was, a spectacular Saturday in the sunshine, lightly buzzed, mostly naked, happily chatting with whoever was close by—sharing tables, stories, bottles. We met two women who worked at Noma, momentarily elevating our hopes of getting in off the waiting list (we didn’t). They were drinking wine and contemplating matching tattoos, and between glasses of wine and a lesson in helping them learn to roll, I provided the creative inspiration for their inky design (which they did, two hours later, with photographic evidence).

And I started thinking more about fate, decisions, and just how much our lives are determined by the decisions of unseen strangers.

-- -- --

There is of course the endless ‘what if’ game – what if my parents hadn’t met, what if Gore had challenged the election, what if I’d been 6’6” and incredibly athletic—but closer to home, what about the things we believe we control? College essays we thought incredible that perhaps were never read; the wrong stranger who takes the empty bar stool to your left; parental teaching gigs evaporating last minute.

Traveling through Delhi in the late 90’s a backpacker turned me on to a book called “The Dice Man: A Novel by Luke Rhinehart”, actually written by a man named George Cockroft. The book tells the first-hand story of a psychologist with an idyllic life (wife, child, thriving practice) who late one evening, after a dinner party, decides he’s not yet ready for bed. Angsty, curious, and slightly drunk, he picks up a dice (I looked it up, ‘dice’ is now also singular), lists out six options—including one heinous choice, to make it interesting—and leaves his decision to to a fateful roll.

That throw of the dice starts his life down a dramatically different trajectory, and his philosophically-driven reasoning for challenging fate v determinism, luck v chance, leads him to fame and notoriety—at one point during a nationally televised interview, he throws multiple dice to find answers to incoming questions. The book to me is fascinating—and an all-time favorite—enough so that in the mornings I’d walk to the Ganges in northern India, surrounded by history in what truly felt like time travel, hesitate, and rush back to whichever hostel I was  staying to keep reading. When the book was originally published (coincidentally in 1971, the same year I was published), the allure was enough that dice communities sprung up in real life, largely, of course, in Northern California.

In San Francisco in 2002, me and Mike Madick—who I met in India and foisted the book upon when I’d finished—had our own dice weekend, where I narrowly escaped applying for work in a strip club and ended up instead in the Sierra foothills at a folk music concert. And when I moved to London a year later, an enterprising theater group put on a show inspired by the book, conveniently when Mike was visiting. Of course we went. Incredibly, so too did Cockroft and his wife, flown in from upstate New York, and we were able to buy him a drink and tell him of our adventure—thrilling for us and clearly a not uncommon experience for the author.

But back to Copenhagen, fate, and the very long rabbit hole one’s mind can wander down if he were to consider all the near misses, the left turns instead of right, in a long life of daily, constant choice.  And what might have been had others made decisions that went your way.

-- -- --

On Sunday we woke to the news that Joe Biden had withdrawn his candidacy for re-election and thrown his support to Kamala Harris to take his place. And I couldn’t help but think again about the alchemy of choice and the doorstep Ms. Harris suddenly fills, due largely to the decisions of others—not strangers, of course, this time, but a profound series of what if’s and could have been’s, that leave her at the precipice of truly profound change.

(For the record, I’m no fan of Harris, at all—despite her bonafides I find her false, cold, and profoundly ineffective and absent as Vice President, watching, in my opinion quietly, as women’s rights over their bodies and minority’s rights to vote evaporate. I’ve heard too from multiple sources that she’s horrible to her team, and her callousness is part of the reason she’s been sidelined the last few years. Let’s not forget that when SHE ran for president, she was out of the race even before the Iowa caucuses).

Biden too was on the fringes of the presidency until Rep. Jim Clyburn rallied Black support for him in South Carolina and the party subsequently united in fear of a possible Bernie-led ticket. I wonder if Clyburn’s backroom dealings had any impact on Biden’s selection of Harris, but that, my friends, is what they call conjecture. I will also note here, publicly, that I will absolutely vote for Harris, as many times as possible, as I’d vote for a table spoon, an eight-year-old, or a dead horse before I’d vote Trump).

And so again, a bright sunny day, an existential nod to whimsy and circumstance, and continued exploration of what life might have been had mom’s job not suddenly disappeared. After stopping at a collection of old shipping containers and warehouses that’s now home to waterside food stalls, cocktail bars and dance halls—and of course another swim—we biked through Christiania, an artist community in the woods that used to be the center of illicit drug sales and in its funky come-what-may architecture and reuse of old buildings and wooden shacks seemed as close to Mendocino as Denmark could offer, further fueling my marveling at the workings of the universe. No doubt, had we moved, I somehow know where we’d have been living.

On our last day we took a train to a neighboring town to see the Louisiana Museum, world-renowned for its integration of art, architecture and landscape. It’s indeed a beautiful experience, the setting and grounds perfect I imagine for a European Great Gatsby party, or the mother of all burning man micro-festivals.

Art, of course, is subjective—and subject to dramatic change. I’ve always loved Alberto Giacometti, and the Louisiana has a large, lovely permanent selection of his. Other than that, the rest of the exhibits didn’t do much for me—paintings done from photographs blown up to massive proportion; a welcoming section from Denmark’s abstract surrealist Asger Jorn; etc.

Walking back to the train I started thinking about art and the fleeting, ephemeral ways in which it becomes ‘great’, or not. It’s now an asset class as much as a practice. Remember the global rush to NFTs and the artist Beeple, who posted a digital image daily for 13 years, summed them together and sold an NFT for nearly $70m. Would you pay that now, if you could?

Edgar Allan Poe, now of course a global icon, died penniless and largely unknown; so too Van Gogh, Henri Toulouse Lautrec, and even Vermeer to some extent, becoming ‘great’ only after death, when people they or may not have met, decided, lobbied, changed minds.

What a fascinating world we inhabit, even the longest of lives a tiny blip on the universal scale. And every day, in whatever town or city in which we happen to be, we are continually making choices—rationale, impulsive, studied, spontaneous—whose knock-on implications we can truly never know. Where you sit for lunch, the shop you stop for coffee, the stranger you flag for directions; what course, this magical life of ours. We’re only ever a handful of fleeting instinctive mental firings away—yours, someone else’s—from a confluence that could forever change the rest of your existence: what you do, where you do it, who you love, the language you’ll have to learn.

Or not.

The Olympics opened last night in grand fashion, in ways only the French could pull off – sexy, insouciant, arroga…

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I have, for most of my life, had very good taste in men.

Sure, I’ve made mistakes, misjudgments of the sort where lives crash suddenly together, ripe with potential, only to be tempered in equally rapid disintegration: a fellow American in Nicaragua shaming local customs; the charming young man in an Indian wildlife park who robbed me blind; the fella I met at a sports bar in DC who invited me to his Sunday BBQ and then watched Rod Woodson (half-black, half-white, perennial superstar) get burned in coverage, and yelled to laughter and encouragement from his friends , “that’s his nig*** half”.

Likewise, I’ve had friendships sour over time—fights and slights about nothing, slow blooming grudges which entrench with distance, the inevitable chasms of a transient world. I’m not always right.

I can be, it’s true, demanding, in friendships and relationships both. Kindness, presence, commitment, responsibility—table stakes I demand, as much as one can demand such things. I give intensely, fully, and expect the same back. Community is paramount for me, an only child who has lived so many lives, in so many houses, with so many families, in so many cities, in so many countries. Few things bring me as much joy as hosting gathering, cooking too much food, drinking too much wine, creating a space to bond, to grow, to explore. Community is, quite simply, my version of home. I nurture it, curate it, leverage it, crave it.

And so, yes, even since grade school, I’ve had very good taste in men.

It has congealed over time, and expanded, this group, these men who anchor my existence, provide me comfort and continuity, friendship and joy. Men from adolescence and high school, men with whom I’ve lived because our parents were dating, or living together, or both; men from college and grad school, from work and from play, from traveling and standing still; men from New York and LA, San Francisco and London, men from all over the world.

I can’t say exactly what it is these men share, the  specific je na sais quoi. It may simply be they tend not to be dicks, as frankly I’ve not much time for that kind of energy. It could be they tend toward thoughtful or provocative, experienced or creative, and thus it is me that’s drawn to them. Or perhaps it is simply that from my vantage point I’m blind to the genetic foible that enables their collective tolerance of little old moi, I’m just not sure.

Whatever the case, I know that when these men meet, it results quite often in wholly separate friendships, independent of my orbit, generating the proverbial outward celestial ripples, the shuddering of the universe as sure as those from butterfly wings.

These relationships sustain me, bolster me, grant me the foundation I so greatly crave, so tirelessly build. They are anchor and sanctuary alike, security and illumination, helping me see, digest, accept patterns and behaviors of which otherwise I might not be so aware, and therefore able to address. Men with compassion, men with empathy, men with humor, men with kindness, one by one and together, fueling my evolution, strengthening me at the roots.

----

Comparison, it’s rightly said, is the thief of joy. It’s also impossible to avoid, proving the lesson ever more poignant in its profundity. I am wont—or have been, rather (as I amend my own language to create space for change)—to spend a good amount of time casting my gaze backward, wistful for what was, wasn’t, or might have been. Jobs, lovers, relationships, lives. Of course, time spent looking backward only means less time in the present, and if there’s an expression that cuts deeper than comparison’s happiness hijacking, it is this: ‘Youth is wasted on the young’, and never has anything been so true.

Some years ago I flew from New York to Los Angeles for the bachelor party of a friend who lived ten blocks from me in the East Village, the focus of which was neither strip clubs nor cigars but a guided ayahuasca ceremony in the hills southeast of LA. In all my experimentation I’d never tried ayahuasca, and I found myself suddenly wrought with anxiety. We were a small handful of men, most of whom I knew well, all of them younger, wealthier, and either married or madly in love—and some both. At the time I was not only single but solitary, processing the recent sudden death of my father. As we sat in a circle in the home of our guide, daylight fading, preparing for the journey, we shared aloud both our intentions and our narcotic experience, to enable accurate dosing. It occurred to me the coming experience might in fact be quite unpleasant, painful, a catalyst for depression, longing, sadness, regret.

As the evening—and our minds, our inhibitions, our lives—unfolded, conversation came and went, or happened around me, echoing across my skull, those moments when you’re unsure if the voice you hear is yours, or even there. Men wandered off, curled up, stared at softly blinking fairy lights or stars, or closed their eyes and stared even harder. When morning came (sleep had not), I took a long walk in the hills, welcoming sunlight, crunching through scrub brush and chaparral, through dry burr-filled grasses, watching pink and orange and yellow electrify the horizon and light up the trees. I was overcome with peace, profoundly grateful for a father whose presence and interest in my life, whose love for me—no matter the imperfection in its expression—was never in doubt.

---

Two of the most important men in my life—my ride or die I met traveling in India, and my soul brother who likewise sprung from the wilds of Mendocino County—Californians with whom I’ve taken ‘boys trips’ to New York and Joshua Tree, to Austin and Nashville—were traveling with their families last week and convened in Valencia (Spain) for the overlapping of birthdays and vacations. As it happens, a year prior, the man with whom I spent grad school in lockstep, in as intensely beautiful a friendship as ever I’ve experienced, happened to have moved there with his family.

And again, ever the duality, always the paradox, the pair of ducks (two mallards), in conjuring this gathering, I wondered if things might be more difficult than expected, might hurl me toward sad introspection. I am recovering from what was likely covid 4.0, limping and limited from an injury to my ‘good’ hip incurred from an overzealous masseuse (I can’t even, and no, not like that), and as ever, entrenched midlife crisis, the number of which I’ve lost count.

It has been a remarkably traumatic 22 months (more later, I promise), and joining men with wives, with families, men who know the answers to at least some of where what and with who – milestones I crave, imaginings for which I reach when darkness comes in quiet moments—can trigger comparison, even if it is with the men I love most and for whom I want nothing short of endless and ultimate joy and success.

(Just yesterday, in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, shortly after admiring Pablo Neruda’s pipe and a poem which hurled yet another man in my life toward love and family, I came across this quote from Bertrand Russell, who, for a time while traveling in my 20’s, had captured my attention:  “Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise.”

I arrived on Thursday, and after tapas and gambas and ‘jugo de Valencia’ stayed up til the wee hours of Friday morning with little Sam, lightly drunk and deeply anxious, watching Biden’s post-NATO press conference, conflicted in wanting a final, decisive trainwreck and aghast at what might come to pass. After insisting on the capabilities of his VP Trump, Biden segued into a 30-minute master class on foreign relations, crushing our hopes and the next day conversations included the pros and cons of us all moving to Spain, or Panama, Mexico, or Thailand.

Friday afternoon the others arrived, and I was again reminded at just how fragile our existence, how constant our change, how blessed our abundance, how deep our machinations beneath the surface. My own anxieties fell quickly away, basking (basque-ing?) in the presence of these men, in our friendships. Across a lazy shaded outdoor lunch, an evening beer among the chattering masses, late-night cocktails recounting a week sailing the Balearics, and a walking heart-to-heart well after midnight—these men, again, unfolded and exposed, connected and unburdening, sharing, teaching, learning.

There are lives in the balance, dreams and hopes in question, among us, this community of men. There are battles with demons and depression, purpose and employment. There are partnerships in flux, in neutral, and invigorated yet again. There are careers winding down, or paused, restarting, forking unexpectedly after decades. There are parents who are aging, or fading, or no longer. There are children who bring joy, worry, possibility, wonder.

---

Saturday was the day we’d planned for those many months ago, and we gathered, these men and their families, and one more, and others. We were close to 20 in all, and we ate and we drank on the palm-lined boardwalk, a seaside restaurant in the Patacon. The kids came and went, from table to beach to playground and back, in a way somehow only possible at beachfront group vacations in Europe. We lit candles on cakes and marijuana joints on the beach. Sangria and paella, arroz and alcochofas. We swam in the ocean for hours, we laughed on the beach until sunset—telling stories, rekindling connection, deepening community, expanding.

As with the ayahuasca, my worries were superfluous. There was no reason to fret, to fear, to cower at comparisons sinister creep. Not here, not today, not with these men, this loving family. We stood, at last, at the end, rolling up beach towels and fastening umbrellas, dusting off sand, counting kids, glowing as one does at the end of a long lovely day spent rejoicing in the sunshine, accidentally recreating the gatherings we’d experienced so obliviously ourselves as children.

We said goodbye for the evening—showers and leftovers in the not so distant future, and not knowing exactly when we’d see each other again, not knowing the following day Spain would win again both Wimbledon (Alcarez) and the men’s European futból championship, or that we’d wake to find the trajectory of the world potentially shifted by the trajectory of a bullet in Pennsylvania which sent Trump briefly to the ground and then bloodily, defiantly, rising again.

I stood for the bus ride home, sandy, sun-kissed, heart-full, the pleasant, languorously slow journey intermittently scored by the overhead bell signaling stops. In the heat of Spanish summer, the bus eased peacefully through concrete and stone streets, moving slowly on its journey, undeterred like molasses down a spoon, riders getting on and off, people and neighborhoods I might never see again.

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.” 

– Albert Camus

Oh, America.

My father’s father was the 13^th of 13 children, and the only one to survive the holocaust. Married to a Czech, living in Vienna, and escaping via Genoa, were it not for the welcoming embrace of Ellis Island and the home of the brave, I’m likely never born.

Almost 800 million people face chronic hunger globally—more than double the US population, and nearly 1 in 10 people on earth; and America now celebrates the 4^th of July with a hot dog eating contest.

Oh America.

If you missed it, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old ‘Chevron Doctrine’ which mandated subject matter experts oversee safety regulations; it’s now the Court—the politicized, upside-down-flag flying, charter-jet-flight-taking, sexually-harassing, corporations are citizens Court—who’ll have final say on regulating the safety of the medicines we buy, the airplanes in which we fly, and the air we breathe.

In a pique of celestial irony, the Potomac River was awash in algae blooms July the 4^th. Washington DC’s citizens, restaurants, hospitals and hotels have all been warned to use only bottled water—likewise the tens of thousands pouring in to watch fireworks and toast freedom.

Oh America.

“It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Order the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

I know. You’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking. A lot of people have to be, right? You’re the President. There’s an actual felon on the loose, a predator found libel for sexual abuse, awaiting trial in three more states on federal charges, who has already tried once to bring down the government using mobs and militias. The Court has ruled, you’re now immune. SEAL Team 6, man, SEAL Team 6!

Instead, it seems, he’s in danger of becoming another RBG, a tremendous legacy overshadowed by hubris, an overstayed welcome, and an unwitting cog in the dismantling of democracy (and in Biden’s case, someone who has been a remarkably successful president on many fronts – inflation, jobs, the pandemic, infrastructure, green energy…). If anyone in DC has a great Lord Almighty outfit, would you mind camping out near the Oval Office with a sign, and make yourself seen? It may be our only chance.

As some of you know, I worked at President Clinton’s White House, and can confirm existence of the deep state. It’s actually been hyper-active since the first Presidential debate, and I’m still connected. I feel it’s my patriotic duty to share, to the best of my recollection, the conversations of a recent gathering at Camp David to decide the fate of the union.

Tensions were high long before the fateful debate—they started when Roe was overturned and only got worse as the courts began to slow roll Trump’s trials. But in the last two weeks, post-debate, post-Chevron, and with the legalization of bribery and now the court’s enabling Presidents to rule with impunity, alarms went off and the veritable bat signal went out, which I happened to glimpse.

I managed to slip into the compound unnoticed – a shaved head, aviators and a well-fitted suit, and I pass easily for Secret Services. I made my way down the corridor and into the conference room, took up guard inside the door, and played it cool. Attendees were dressed casually, slunk deeply into well-worn leather chairs around a large, circular mahogany table laden with imported olives, whiskey, smoked venison, and a giant wheel of Vermont cheddar.

Joe Biden: “Folks, we’re in a bit of a pickle. I’m going to need your input to win this debate.”

Kamala Harris: “Mr. President, uh, the debate was last week sir.”

Biden: “It was? How’d we do?”

Harris: “Not great sir, not great. But we’ve got a bit of a lifeline with the Court’s ruling on immunity.”

Biden: “Immunity!? I thought we were done with Covid.”

Elon Musk: “Mr. President, the Supreme Court has actually ruled that Presidents are immune from prosecution while performing official duties. And as President, anything you do is official. Carte blanche, sir, tabula rasa, you know what I mean? We now have options to remove any obstacles we choose, if you know what I mean. We don’t even need to hide it. I have this little satellite company…”

Harvey Weinstein: “A sitting President, back to the wall, an enemy from within threatening democracy itself!! This is a great story, a great story. A comeback! Who doesn’t love a comeback? Imagine, we open on mobs of seething militants at the nation’s capital, pushed back by an army of thong-wearing Amazonian goddesses, glistening in perspiration, fighting the tight Lycra of their outfits as much as the mob...”

Harris: “That’s not exactly how things happened Harvey.”

Weinstein: “Hollywood, babe, Hollywood. No one cares about truth anyway—even my conviction was undone! We can take liberties. Come a little closer, I want to hear your thoughts.”

Harris: (rises, walks to a closer chair) “What I was saying was OH, WHAT IS THAT? Harvey, move your hand!”

Weinstein: “Excuse me, just trying to adjust your seat.”

Mitch McConnell: “Mr. President you’d be doing some of us across the aisle a solid here if you just went ahead and removed Trump. I’ll promise to support new nominations for you, you know my word is as good as the gold in Fort Knox.”

Musk: “Speaking of gold, senator, can I just thank you again for Citizens United—nice little way for some of us American newcomers to have a fair say.”

McConnell: (silent, staring straight ahead)

Musk: “Mitch? Mitch? Senator? (waves a hand from across the room, to no avail). “Harvey, can you poke him, see if he’s ok? I mean, his eyes seem open.”

Weinstein: (looking up from Kamala’s groin, excitedly) “What? Poke? Where?”

McConnell: “uhhhhhhhhhrg. mmmmmmmmm”

Biden: “When I was a boy, my father said to me, ‘Joey, you work hard, you plan for the future, and you’ll have the chance to touch lots of people—.”

Weinstein: “Preach!”

Biden: “—and so I have. I’ve touched lots of people across this great country—"

Weinstein: (leans in, alert)

Biden: “But we’re divided. And we could use some help. Elon, is that thing ready?”

Musk: “Yes sir.” (Musk fires up the hologram machine and Abraham Lincoln appears, floating above the cheese and olives, a towering figure with a thick beard.)

Biden: “Abe, we could use your help. The Republic is once again at a crossroads. Congress is split and frankly ineffectual. You wouldn’t believe some of the people there.”

McConnell: (now face-down on the floor, emitting faint muffling noises)

Biden: “States are making it harder for Blacks to vote, and your old party is eradicating the rights of women, the poor. We could use your sage advice.”

Weinstein: “On multiple things Mr. Lincoln—would love your thoughts on this play I saw in DC I want to option…”

Abe Lincoln: (Firing a malignant side-eye Weinstein’s way) “Always happy to help Joey.” (Strokes his chin) “What if you had, say, a black woman, maybe from an immigrant family, somewhere high up in your administration, to make a stand, be a voice, talk about the importance of the right to vote and what it means to be an American.”

Harris: “Like a Secretary of State or something?”

Lincoln: “Something like that.”

Musk: “Times have changed a little Mr. Lincoln. Truth is, well, we’re past truth, it doesn’t get enough ‘Likes’ anyway. Now adays we’ve got chatbots and algorithms—makes it pretty easy to figure out what to say, actually. Don’t even really to need to think about it anymore.”

Lincoln: “Well if the truth doesn’t matter anymore…”

At this point the hologram began to fade, and McConnell’s murmuring quieted. Musk was trying to post a photo of Abe, and Harris bolted up from next to Weinstein, whose trousers now hung limply around his ankles as he lurched for the whiskey. An aide burst in to summon the President—something about his son, apparently. In the confusion I was able to slip out quietly, but not before snatching a wedge of cheddar and a fistful of olives.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” 

— Alice Walker

In a delicious little twist, against the backdrop of headlines dominated by a US election five months away, July 4th was also actual election day here in London, the city of my birth. After 14 years of a conservative-led austerity plan that saw 5 prime ministers, Brexit, taxes at an all-time high relative to GDP, a steady decline in productivity, a stagnation in weekly earnings, and large increases in homelessness, hunger and student debt, the left-leaning Labour party won in a landslide

Earlier in the day—before the votes had been tallied and the new government sworn in—I was in the sauna at my local gym, post-swim. An older black women walked out of the sauna, and a young man took her place on the bench. She shortly returned and asked the man if he’d move over. He stood up suddenly, gestured angrily at her, said something I didn’t catch, and stormed out.

People started talking immediately, ‘did you see that?’ ‘what’s wrong with people’. Conversation grew heated, passionate—elderly locals complaining of a loss of community, the degradation of respect, a nostalgia for a time once was. A middle-aged Black woman to my right complained about the politicians and lack of action.

“Did you vote?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re all the same.”

Oh England.

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

– Elie Wiesel