Eddie Huang is a Taiwanese-American multi-hyphenate who has made his cultural mark as an author, chef, restaurateur and director. A former attorney, he later turned to cooking and opened BaoHaus, a Taiwanese bun shop in New York City. He is widely known for his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, which was adapted into a popular ABC sitcom in 2015. Huang also hosted the Viceland show Huang’s World, which explored cultural identities through the lens of food. In 2016, he published his second book, Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China. In 2024, he directed, produced and starred in the documentary Vice is Broke.

In late January I wrote a piece on Canal Street Dreams titled When Survive Til’ 2025 Became a Yard Sale, a piece inspired by the feelings I had conducting a yard sale in post-fire LA. After two years of gritting my teeth trying to grind it out post-strike, I could no longer keep up appearances and let my friends know that I was moving and needed help.

They came in droves to the yard sale with stories of their own struggles. Some bought things, others came bearing hugs and handshakes, while others were in significantly worse shape after losing their homes so I just loaded up their cars with anything they found useful. For once, I felt like I had community in LA and the irony was that I would be leaving the next day.

Hours after landing in New Jersey to stay at a friend’s house, I got a DM from my friend, Daniel. He let me know that he too had similar feelings around hardship, friendship, and loneliness so we decided to keep in touch and link when he got to New York. A few weeks later, I had secured an apartment in Murray Hill, was welcomed by a screaming neighbor with an unleashed dog, and almost ended up in jail after picking up my family in Boston driving a car without registration that I rented through Touro.

The one bright spot was this dinner I had on the books with Daniel at Cosme in a couple weeks. On the day, the weather cooperated and I was able to walk the 20+ blocks downtown passing through Curry Hill, Gramercy, and Flatiron admiring this part of New York I rarely ever walked through in my previous 16 years living here.

I hadn’t been to Flatiron or a tweezer restaurant in quite some time, but it was nice and conducive to conversation. We spilled our guts, one thing led to another, and I was officially on one of those epic man dates that spans hours and eras of your life. Dessert came, dinner ended, but somehow I ended up walking another 20+ blocks back to Daniel’s apartment and ended up sitting in his nook where he showed me the inspirations for what he was working on for the Places app.

Most of the time when you talk to a tech entrepreneur, you’re talking to some guy who did DMT for the first time at Burning Man which triggered some childhood desire for belonging except his version of rosebud is a fucking Bearbrick collection and chunky Balenciaga shoes from a very regrettable era of human history. It’s painful talking to these people who never lived life but have a giant war chest to pay your whole crew to relive adolescence and play G.I. Joe with them through a vanity project.

Daniel is different.

He put me on to a few incredible Russian Artists, showed me the songs he’d play on a loop to get inspired just like I did to write, and the app he was building didn’t seem optimized for commerce or scale which I really appreciated. It was artful. It was intentional and I started laying on the floor of my living room looking at it like a coffee table book of restaurants on my phone.

We spoke about what we loved about restaurants, hotels, but most importantly places and spaces. I told him that the two places I went the most during this iteration of life in New York were the Russian & Turkish Baths and the dog run on the East River. Both places were intense, but oddly quiet or at least quieting for my psyche. They were the two places where I could hear myself in that exact moment of life and feel as opposed to waking up and banging through the tasks on my gcal like meaningless plot points. I realized that for the last 2 years, life had become too much and I emotionally detached just to get through each day and pass out before the next one.

It’d also been a very long time since I watched the big homie, Tony Bourdain, who seems to hang over a lot of my thoughts and feelings. While making the Vice doc, I went through old photos and emails, but resisted watching No Reservations. I hadn’t watched since he passed and just didn’t want to do it to myself. When we had to pull archival clips of his show, I pointed the archival producer to scan the episodes where I knew the footage was and simply signed off.

But after hanging with Daniel and talking about starting The Places Review, I went back to see him. I started with the Greece episode because I’ve become obsessed with Greece since meeting my wife, Natashia, whose family is from Hios. We laid in bed, smiled, laughed, cuddled, and I could feel Natashia watching me watching Tony or perhaps I could feel myself watching me watching Tony.

These are the mysteries I never seem to solve.

Regardless it felt meta and odd, but I kept watching.

After Greece it was Spain, Sardinia, and I ended up watching multiple seasons oblivious to anyone’s or my own watching me watching Tony because I was feeling shit again. Around that time, our son, Senna, got sick of watching Beauty and the Beast so it was time for a different movie. Of course, I put on Ratatouille, and thats when the floodgates opened.

When the ratatouille hit the table, a spell was lifted and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to cook again. I wanted to write about food again and I wanted to do it with other people. Around this time, I also linked up with Sean Thor Conroe at Ootoya for a 2 hour lunch and we started to plot the revival of the literary male rom com as well. We became homies shvitzing in the sauna talking through ideas, complaining about editors, and I’d go home after to call Daniel with sauna induced hallucinatory visions for a literary travel journal on Substack.

That’s how The Places Review was born.

Besides watching my family grow, it was the most meaningful thing I did this year. I’d never edited anything in my life and despise being edited myself, so I was guided simply by how I’d like to be edited. I picked writers I found interesting, rebellious, iconoclastic, but more than anything honest about how god damn lonely they were. Every writer taught me something and each week felt like an opportunity to live in someone else’s head with their case of loneliness and find our way out of it together.

Today, we end Volume One.

If there’s one thing I learned writing, editing, and talking to other writers about places it’s that the plot points don’t matter. The setting honestly doesn’t either. It’s about intention and feeling; it’s about the decision.

Every writer who shared a story for The Places Review made an intentional decision to do something, to go somewhere, and to fight loneliness.

It’s hard.

Loneliness is haunting and it takes hold without much notice. Sometimes when it hits, you wonder if its easier to bust through a suicide window and jump.

Fuck it.

And as corny as I may sound writing at a Substack Literary Journal paid for by a travel app, I gotta tell you the people who wrote these stories made a choice to do something about what they were or weren’t feeling in life.

There is a lot of talk in the world today about the problems we face. Every thing is a new syndrome or ailment or epidemic and I don’t discount any of it, but when something is a phenomenon, all we’re saying is that many many people are feeling the same thing or that something is going on in the world that is ailing people in a similar manner. There are countless medications, remedies, and know-it-alls on TikTok here to solve your problems.

I don’t know shit about shit but I know this.

Whatever you’re fucking feeling, walk to a corner of your home, a hole in a wall with post no bills signs, and say it. Just say it into the ether, then say it to a person, and then do something about it. If you can’t figure it out where you’re at, go somewhere. Walk, run, fly, it doesn’t matter, but go!

Sometimes I just take a cold shower, brush my teeth, and walk to the New York Public Library before it opens to wait in line with the unhoused people waiting to go in and use the bathroom so I don’t feel alone because misery loves company. That might not be your way to find community, but whatever it is, do it because the sooner you acknowledge and stand up to loneliness, the faster it disappears back into the ether where it belongs.

Download Places

I love to tell people I love Las Vegas. I watch their face warp, their mouth pucker, as they try to figure out if I’m being sarcastic or they have misread me the entire time. To them, I am not a Vegas Person.

A Vegas Person is a betting man, someone with a lot of money to blow or worse, an insatiable level of thrill to seek on red and black. She’s a stand-on-the-tables club goer. A woman who doesn’t realize Herve Leger went out of style and only just came back. She has donned the bandage dress in earnest for over a decade. Someone who doesn’t just not know, but doesn’t care, that with the right plan, you could see the real New York, Rome, or Paris, for a comparable amount to a luxe Las Vegas trip at the hotels that imitate them.

In 2017 there was an NPR Hidden Brain episode about this. An academic researcher studying patterns of conspicuous consumption says members of a certain social class simply aren’t seen in Las Vegas. It’s new money, it’s low brow. So the best excuse people can find is that I must like it ironically, I’m there simply for research and to indulge my journalistic curiosities.

I couldn’t possibly be serious.

The archetype of the intellectual in Las Vegas—in town for more esoteric reasons than its face value offerings— is nothing new. In 1972, a group of graduate students from Yale and their professors went to Las Vegas to study its architecture, resulting in Learning from Las Vegas, a seminal modern architecture text. Two years later, Gregory Dunne, better known as Joan Didion’s husband, wrote the semi-fictionalized Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, chronicling his exploits with gangsters and strippers instead of getting a divorce.

But that’s not why I’ve been at least three times a year for the past decade-plus. Sure, at first, I was drawn to the city in an ironic way. I had partied and stayed up late all over America, mostly at underground raves and alternative clubs. I was curious what the capital of Girl’s Night Out was all about. But soon, I came to embrace Vegas at face value.

Las Vegas is a mirror to America, albeit a fun house mirror. From certain angles, it can look bigger and better or warped and grim. If you stand in the right spot with some distance, you can see a perfect case study for what works commercially in America that year and why. It’s a place where rather than workshopping new concepts and trial and error-ing the novel like an Off Broadway show might, tried and true concepts are sold to the masses who have (on average, this number is up from last year) 3.4 days to explicitly indulge. Recognizable names and trusted intellectual property reign supreme. Everything is rehearsed to a tee, rinsed and repeated every day with world class precision. Every visitor can walk away feeling they’ve had a my-life-a-movie weekend.

I realize that if everyone’s life is a movie, no one’s is. Yet still, the on-demand debauchery and accessible luxury calls to me and makes me a believer for the night. It’s exactly what the town was built to provide and it delivers time and time again. I like the person I am in Las Vegas. Someone with something sparkly on, one too many garnishes in my drink, who knows it’s really not that deep. Someone not concerned with being cool, being the first, or the best. Far away enough from home to detach but close enough to make the call on a whim.

On other adventures—perhaps to locations that have inspired hotels in Las Vegas—I show up with my cultural Bingo card in hand. I’m bombarded with lists of the best restaurants, texts about what I simply can’t miss. After one trip, I create lists of my own, passing them to the next friend who visits, showing off how I do the city right, even better, than my peers or the travel influencers. The worry I may not return fundamentally changed and never get to go back lurches on the steps of the museum or bus to the ruins. It’s a challenge to avoid performing the role of the perfect traveler. With enough intention, I attempt to get there. But sometimes you don’t want to capital T travel, you want to escape.

That is when I choose Las Vegas. I’ve done the city in many ways. First, at 23 with no money, since, on a client’s dime and my own. I’ve flown Delta, I’ve flown Spirit. I’ve driven in a Prius and in a Range Rover. I’ve made it door to door in three hours and I’ve had my flight delayed 24. And every time, I have a good time. Because I am a Vegas Person in that I am someone who is dedicated to having A Good Time.

Here are vignettes from a selection of my trips to Las Vegas. Presented in no particular order.

July 2015: Topless in Europe

I’m staying at the Wynn like I’m rich. I’m not, but I might as well be with the floor to ceiling windows and view of the Strip, perfect for the Fourth of July fireworks we’ll watch. It’s a King room for me, one of my best friends, and my boyfriend. But not in a sexy, freaky way. It’s earnest. The Wynn has the classiest energy of anywhere on the Strip. It has Jeff Koons sculptures just sitting there. The Carousel Bar in the lobby is beautiful, but be careful because my friend gets turned away for wearing a sheer skirt over a bodysuit, which is extremely un-Vegasy of them.

My boyfriend is no longer drinking, which may seem horrible for Vegas, but if you give a sober person a place where they can smoke a cigarette inside and the ability to valet their car for free anywhere, it isn’t so bad. It also means it’s easier for us to get off the Strip for things like Tacos El Gordo, where my girl almost gets in a fight while snagging us a seat to eat our as-good-as-in-Mexico tacos al pastor. There’s a location on the strip now. Get all of the salsas.

The Wynn has an adults-only Euro Pool where my best friend and I are allowed to tan topless. There’s even tables to play card games while submerged in the pool. Some fabulous leathery gays buy us a pitcher of sangria. Later, back in LA, I recount this perfect moment in front of her boyfriend, who is much less pleased by the details of her topless-in-public afternoon. It’s presented as evidence in their break up soon after. Not everyone understands Vegas. They should have never changed the slogan from What Happens Here, Stays Here. I feel guilty for outing her, but the right person would have understood.

December 2019: Acid Aquarium

It’s impossible to get a reservation at the Golden Steer but I snag the last one at 10:30pm. This dimly lit steakhouse boasts a reputation with the Rat Pack and each booth is named for a Vegas affiliated celebrity. We get the caesar, served tableside by our tuxedoed waiter, a rib eye to share, creamed spinach, and fries. We take Polaroid photos in the red leather booths and linger for so long that we end up getting invited by the staff to their watering hole for post shift drinks.

Me and my roommate are in town for a music festival thrown by Amazon with an amazing lineup but a very low attendance that I did some copywriting for. We went the night before and saw Gesaffelstein, Kacey Musgraves, and SOPHIE (RIP). But back at the dive bar with the old waiters from The Golden Steer, we make a grave error and decide to take acid from the dark web for the second night in a row. Acid doesn’t really work two days in a row. But I don’t know that yet. Suddenly, my friend and I are galavanting The Strip basked in neon like we’re in Enter the Void or something.

I end up texting some guy from a dating app who’s also in town—my first date after a bad breakup—and agreeing to hang. Only I don’t tell him I’m with my friend. We end up doing the date together, like the tuxedo job interview scene in Step Brothers. She asks him questions debating if he’s good enough for me. (He’s not). We end up at Mandalay Bay where he says he’s staying, though we suspect he got a room on Hotel Tonight that minute because he’s sharing a room with friends and delusionaly is feeling lucky. I’m on a mission to see the hotel’s shark tanks, he’s on a different mission with me, but only I succeed.

We finally make it back to our hotel. We’re staying at the SAHARA, formerly the SLS, an affordable option at the end of the Strip with some good restaurants and access to the monorail. The next morning, I wake up with Facebook friend requests from the entire staff of the Golden Steer and a cavernous hangover, occupying places within me I didn’t know could be fatigued.

We try to get breakfast at the Peppermill, a diner that resembles a 1970s coke den where the waitresses wear gowns. It’s one of my favorite places in all of Vegas, but this time, I forget that smoking is allowed indoors. In our state, that will make us vomit, so we opt for Denny’s, which is a humbling experience. We drive four and a half hours back to LA in complete silence. At home, we realize my friend has lost a toenail to the bender. “A canonical party girl experience,” I say, and we laugh until we cry.

September 2013: All Grown Up

The first time I ever go to Vegas it’s for my friend’s birthday. There’s seven of us in one suite with two beds and a couch. These mega rooms are at The Venetian and even split seven ways, it doesn’t feel cheap. I’ve been clubbing with a fake ID since I was 16, so going to Vegas legally seems very trad, very normie, which instead of turning me off, is actually novel. I love how 2000s buddy comedy the whole thing is. We could be at the wildest underground Bushwick or Oakland rave, but we’re here with the masses.

We go see Calvin Harris at Hakkasan, the megaclub within the MGM. I’m talking peak Calvin Harris, one year post Rihanna collaboration. I buy a tequila-soda that costs so much I wonder what currency the price is in. We joke that we got in because the biggest club rat we know is friends with the custodian. We’ve been running that joke so long I can’t remember how we actually got in, but we definitely didn’t pay. There’s so many ways to get in for free in Vegas. It’s one of the last bastions of ladies-pay-less. There’s hardly room to dance unless you have a table—we don’t—and the club is corny and cheesy and we know that, but we love it. We are cosplaying as girls and gays on a big night out, as if we don’t go out every night back home.

At this point in my life, I’m on my high horse about some previous party habits I no longer partake in and make a scene about not staying out all night the following night. I have a reservation for the 10 am guided tour at the Neon Museum. While I’m eating a caesar salad at Grand Lux Cafe, which is a Cheesecake Factory that has a Vegas-ified name, my friends are raging and end up coming home with matching tattoos that say “content.” I wish I could say I look back and admit I had a stick up my ass and missed out that night, but I have enough bad tattoos as is and The Neon Museum is a don’t miss. The guided tour breaks down the history of Vegas and its many entertainment and aesthetic trends, as told by the city’s neon signage. It’s a great intro to the city and its backstory that incites dreams of the Rat Pack era when dress codes were enforced and hotel lobbies weren’t full of gross men’s legs in shorts and sandals. It’s crazy to imagine how something could go from the pinnacle of luxury to something so messy, but that’s everything and the reason why I can access it now in the first place. I’m the one wearing a see-through pink plastic visor this entire trip.

July 2021: Covid Casino

My friend is stuck living in Las Vegas after moving there for a man he’s no longer with. It’s the throes of Covid lockdown but the city is opening up, at least more than LA. He takes a few days off work and I tell no one and drive to Encore, where he and I stay for the weekend secretly partying. It’s surprisingly cheap because it’s Covid and not everything is open, but we’re freshly vaxxed and don’t care. I wear a lot of neon, a super slicked back high ponytail, and we listen to a lot of Kim Petras.

We book the tasting menu at Nobu within Caesar’s Palace and pretend it’s our anniversary. There’s a couple of Nobu’s in Vegas and this one is supposedly the nicest, but it feels like it’s in the middle of a casino because it is. My friend stands up and makes a dramatic speech about his undying love for me and they bring us a dessert that says Happy Anniversary in chocolate sauce. I’m feeling fancy, exactly like the city wants me to, and I order champagne. We can’t finish the bottle by the time the meal ends so I Rihanna it and just walk out with the glass in hand, Covid mask on. Nobody notices and if they do, they don’t care. The customer is always right.

During the day, we peruse the many antique shops and thrift stores in the Arts District, Antique Alley Mall, Mid Mod Furniture, and the surrounding tchotchke shops. The offerings are better priced than LA, with plenty of mid-century and post modern pieces. After, my friend takes me off the Strip to go to the Thai restaurant that Anthony Bourdain loved, Lotus of Siam. Afterwards, we end up at some townie bar where things get a little weird with some couple that wants to swing with us, not understanding the gay BFF dynamic. We leave, cackling in the car, just before things get too weird.

June 2018: A Great Last Date

I have a job I hate at an ad agency and spend my days on Instagram dozing off. I’m DMing a man I have a few mutuals with in New York, so he’s not a murderer, but I don’t know much else. When he asks what I’m doing that weekend, I cheekily reply that I’m crying because I’m not at the Blink 182 residency in Vegas. To my delight, within two hours this exchange results in him booking us both flights and a hotel, to meet for the first time on a 24-hour date in Las Vegas to see the show.

We meet at our hotel, the Park MGM around 8pm. The room is fine, a little ‘80s, but it works. Almost as soon as we land, we get the news that Travis Barker has broken a finger and the concert is cancelled. I can’t decide how much to care, because I’m here for the story either way. This guy is in the restaurant business so he has a list of cool off-the-beaten path things to do. I’m impressed.

We start at a Japanese izakaya spot off the Strip called Raku, eating a dozen rounds of bites at an unassuming bar. Already away from the kerfuffle of the big hotels, we take a cab to The Golden Tiki, a 24-hour tiki bar with a day-glo starry ceiling. There’s a bench shaped like a giant pink clam shell and shrunken heads modeled after celebrities from Pee Wee to Elvira and Hunter S. Thompson. Then we move to Dino’s Lounge, a dive bar with a biker crowd who’s in for karaoke night. There’s a giant neon sign outside boasting it as “the last neighborhood bar in Las Vegas.” I ask my date to take a photo of me in front of it and he obliges, but he doesn’t know my angles. I’m short so you have to get really low.

I’m not sure if things are going well or they’re just not going horribly, but the late night and neon lights and spontaneity of it all has me thinking this whole thing could be a great beginning to a romantic story. I check myself before I project too much on the adventure. I come to Vegas to exist in only that moment. We kiss a little but nothing else. I never see him again and steal the best parts of his itinerary as my own.

February 2023: Menthol Mission

I have a fancy dinner booked in LA but my then boyfriend (this is a different guy, keep up) tells me what he wants for his birthday is a suitcase full of menthol cigarettes, which were recently banned in California, so I cancel the reservation and we drive to Las Vegas. The drive isn’t bad if you do it right, not on a Friday or Sunday and not rush hour.

We stay at the new Virgin Hotel off the strip, which means it’s much less of a shit show, easier to park, and we can bring our dog. She sprints down the red carpeted hallways, staring back every ten rooms before I encourage her to keep going. She pees a little bit but I don’t tell anyone. We spring for an upgrade and end up in a suite with a separate living room. As he’s calling up tobacco shops with discount rates to place mass orders, I scramble to curate a sober-friendly birthday plan. My training has prepared me for this.

In the afternoon, we head to the Atomic Museum, a Smithsonian affiliated institution focused on the history of the atomic bomb and the history of nuclear testing in the nearby desert. He loves it. I’m proud of myself. It’s the menthols more than me, but I have officially turned him into a Vegas person.

At night, we head to a magic show called The Mentalist in a rinky dink theater hidden within Planet Hollywood. It’s been running for nearly two decades and has available seats the same day. The guy is guessing things people wrote on pieces of paper across the room. He’s using mind control to just barely avoid putting a drill through his head. I’m not suspending belief for the sake of a good last minute plan, but legitimately wowed. I love thinking about how a blip of a city in the middle of an inhospitable desert is the world capital for bizarre entertainment like this. Good for him.

For dinner, we eat at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in the Venetian. It’s high quality but doesn’t scratch the ostentatious when-in-Vegas itch many visitors have, so it’s never crowded and always has same day reservations. We gobble the free baguette, get a few oysters, and split chicken liver mousse and steak frites. Annual menthol sourcing in Vegas becomes our routine and we get the same dinner every time. We always get two desserts.

August 2023: Alien on Assignment

I am heartbroken and my close friend’s father just passed. The impact of these situations is nowhere near even, but we share the desire to disassociate and spend multiple nights per week together, ruminating and drinking martinis. We call it our Alien Summer. I’m on a work trip reporting on an avant garde circus troupe for a magazine nobody reads that pays me more than the ones everyone reads and I ask her to come along.

On the drive, my car, a hybrid, runs out of gas and out of battery. We’re in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a prayer. “Every good night begins with a struggle,” was a mantra my only ex-friend, the birthday boy responsible for my first Vegas trip, used to always say. He was wrong about a lot but that remains true. We make it to a station, only to then get a parking ticket for driving 105 the rest of the way. “In Nevada, we can send you straight to jail for that,” the sassy cop says. Something about that makes us laugh, like okay, try me. It would just make for a more ridiculous story. The time we ended up in rural Nevada jail. But I do have work to do.

We’re eating smashburgers and drinking martinis at Pier 17 Yacht Club, a nautical themed speakeasy outside of Absinthe at Caesars Palace. It’s a variety show by Spiegelworld, the circus troupe I’m writing about, that’s been running in Vegas for over a decade. It’s full of undoubtedly impressive acrobatic acts and humor that leans dick jokey, but more than anything, I’m mostly wowed by our server’s stories about his past life as an actor on daytime soap operas. He tells us the random extra consonant on his nametag is a residual choice from when he changed his name for the screen actors guild. Showbiz, baby.

The next day, we see one of the first performances of Disco Show, an immersive theater experience based on Studio 54 and then eat at Diner Ross, a 1970s themed diner with elaborate cocktails and disco fries next to the theater within the LINQ hotel. My friend is convinced it’s called that because it sounds like Diana Ross and I tell her that can’t be true. We ask the server and she’s right.

The next morning, we have brunch at Winnie & Ethel's, a diner off the Strip that makes everything from scratch. I’ve planned a visit to the Showgirl Museum because my friend loves costume design and we both have a penchant for camp. The museum is inside a private residence in a suburb off the Strip, owned and operated by a 60-something queen of a costume designer and former performer named Grant. At first, he plays hardball, asking how much time we have. An hour, we say. My 16 pound dog is in my arms because we had to check out of the hotel and I had nowhere else to leave her. I’m worried if I put her down, she may pee on a costume. “The tour takes three,” he says. So we stay for three.

July 2025: Never Have I Ever

I’m sitting at the third to last seat at the giant beautiful bar at Delilah within the Wynn. My best friend is next to me, the one I went to the Euro pool with a decade ago. She just had a baby. I’m in town to write about the Showgirl Costume museum I learned about the summer before and she’s in town as part of the production team on the Beyonce Cowboy Carter tour. Just two working girls.

Delilah is owned by a hospitality group I would otherwise associate with bottle service types, but they really get it right here. It’s a dinner-and-a-show concept with a live band. There’s pigs-in-blankets on the menu but we are trying to be classy so we split a rib eye and crab cake. The singer hits the Mariah Carey whistle tone and my friend and I are wowed, hooting and hollering. There may not be a lot of originality, but there’s a lot of talent in this town and I will always appreciate talent.

There’s one empty seat at the bar, the last open one in the building, and a good looking guy is approaching it. Instantly, my friend and I start to play one of our favorite games, one primed for Las Vegas people watching, and start guessing what we think his backstory is. It’s a white guy with a chain and a fresh haircut, so I guess he’s maybe an entourage member of some musician. My friend thinks it’s more scammer riches, real estate or maybe a crypto scam. He sits next to us and begins ordering a drink.

Then he turns. “Is it crazy to order the caviar service by myself?” he asks. Naturally, we encourage him to ball out. When in Rome. We start chatting and get the answer to our original question, a very fulfilling part of the game that rarely happens. He’s in medical device sales and real estate, splitting time between Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. We were both close in our own way. He looks late-20s, but for some reason, is committed to a lie that he is older than both of us, who are in our mid-30s. He says he’s in his mid-40s, though he butchers the math on his fake birth year when he rattles it off. It only makes us feel older. Like the old gals at the bar he’s flirting with as a bit. We push back playfully but ultimately go along with it.

He asks if we’re married. Neither of us are, though it isn’t as simple of an answer as it sounds when it comes out. Or maybe it is. Then he asks if either of us have been proposed to. I sip my martini—vodka with blue cheese olives but not dirty. I start thinking about how if things had gone the way I wanted, or thought I wanted, I’d probably be married three times by now. I’ve always fantasized about getting married in Las Vegas so I find myself there quickly. My grandma eloped to Vegas when she was 18. Too young to go to bars, they had pizza and root beer in their hotel room afterwards. He turned out to be an asshole but I always thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Instead of a day where you are the princess and center of attention, to instead opt for somewhere where hundreds of people are doing the exact same thing as you. It’s so mundane the love has to be the exciting part. “Not yet,” I tell him. He offers me a chicken finger.

Download Places

I vaguely remember my first time going to Disney World as a child. I was seven – older than my own son by two years, and four years older than my daughter. I lived in the Bronx, but my mom and my sisters and I were visiting my uncle and his kids in Miami, and I guess they decided it was time.

My mother was a single mom with three kids working as a public social worker, so she made our trip happen by sitting through a timeshare presentation that offered my uncle and her a hotel room and entry into Magic Kingdom.

I don’t remember anything about the park itself. I remember spending time with my cousins in that hotel in Orlando. I remember the four of us piling into a single bed, jumping off the walls, spending hours in the pool, hype because neither of us came from the sorts of families that did things like go to Disney World, or stay in hotels with pools.

My mother remembers more. A lot more. She remembers the rides I went on with her, the joy in my face, and all the pictures we took. She is disappointed that all of this is a blur to me, now, almost 30 years later. “We had so much fun.”

I wonder, as I enter my card details to pay for tickets and a hotel stay at Disney World for my own kids, if I’ll be in the same position as her decades from now. Will they remember this? What will their experience of this time-honored tradition be?

Probably very different from mine, I conclude.

After all, they won’t be staying at a hotel far from the park, they’ll be staying at the Grand Floridian, which is considered the most opulent of the eight luxury resorts Disney offers. They won’t go through the experience of driving into the park, hunting for parking, and trudging with a crowd along a scalding blacktop to get to the entrance. They’ll glide in on a clean monorail one short stop away, and slip into the park 30 minutes before anyone else is allowed to. They’ll get the deluxe-tier version of the trip I went on so many years ago – only fitting, seeing as I’ve used my talents, resilience, and luck to leap class boundaries like Superman and ensure they live the deluxe-tier version of the childhood that I experienced.

As I receive my confirmation email, my only hope is that all of these upgrades guarantee me what I’m really after: memories, magic.

#

Two days before our trip, my wife and I pour some wine, sit on the couch with tons of clean clothes to fold and dive into the world of YouTube Disney parent influencers who have created lucrative income streams by uploading tutorials with titles like “What I Wish I’d Known Before I Brought My Kid to Disney World” or “Genius Tips for Taking Toddlers to Disney World” or “An Idiot’s Guide to Disney World With Kids.”

These videos are not cinematic masterpieces. They are shot on phones attached to handheld tripods, and their principal stars are mid-30s tired parents with a penchant for Costco clothing and corny jokes. But they are extremely useful to over-achieving millennial parents like ourselves who want to optimize everything, including a trip to Disney World.

These influencers tell us which are the best rides to take our children on, and at what times of the day. They tell us the extra things we will need to buy – like a plastic cover for our stroller in case it rains, charging blocks for our phones in case they die, and comfortable shoes for all the walking. They give us tips on how to get our kids to nap at the halfway point of the day, where to take them if they’re feeling overstimulated, and, one influencer who I become fond of by the end of the night – a man who seems to enjoy being a Disney dad so much – shares a piece of wisdom that feels profound to me: Don’t try to do it all; remember why you came in the first place, to have fun.

#

The day we’re set to leave, we have packed, rounded up all the items the influencers told us we’ll need, and purchased snacks for the drive up to Orlando. It is a Friday so we send our kids to school with the intention of picking them up right after their lunch period, getting them changed out of their uniforms quickly, and hitting the road promptly at noon so we can make it to the resort and enjoy the property.

The kids are picked up when they’re supposed to be, but the rest of the plan crumbles. It is 1:30 p.m. when we finally hit the road.

I stare at the thick red line of traffic on my Google Maps, frustrated that my goal to make this trip perfect is already going South. I take a breath, and try to remind myself of the wise words of that influencer: Remember why you’re doing this.

#

When we arrive at the Grand Floridian Resort, I park under a canopy near the grand entrance of the colossal, Victorian, white-washed hotel. I notice a minivan parked in front of us, and the four people who hop out of it – a mom, a dad and two pre-teens, all decked out in Pirates of the Caribbean costumes. I look down at my plain t-shirt, and the clothes my kids wear, which are stained with snacks from the ride and don’t have a Disney character or a pair of Mickey ears in sight. Did we miss a memo?

My concern only heightens when we enter the main lobby of the resort and look up at a massive chandelier anchoring the center of it. The male staff wear cream shirts with light stripes, tucked into flowering pants and high socks and look like old-timey baseball players, while the women don long skirts and dresses with high collars, and puffed sleeves. A man in a tuxedo plays a grand piano. The families milling about in their Mickey ears, matching shirts, and Cinderella dresses seem like they’re attending a family reunion that I’m just crashing.

A cheery woman checking us in slips us some “1st Visit” badges, and I try to pin them on my children to give them something Disney related to wear – to make it clear to others that though we are inexperienced, that although I grew up poor and previously visited these hallowed grounds the discount immigrant way, times have changed and we do in fact belong. But my kids were feral from having been cooped up in the car for five hours so I gave up.

Outside, we pass aggressively manicured lawns, pristine white structures, more workers in costume wishing us “magical” stays, and smiles plastered across everyone’s faces. It is all beautiful, and yet I am reminded of first walking around my Ivy League college campus as a freshman scholarship kid, clocking all the otherworldly differences between that clean, lush campus and my block in the Bronx – feeling like an alien.

I feel better about everything once we reach our decadent room. It isn’t the beauty of the room that puts me at ease – the baby blue walls, the perfect beds, or the plush headrests – so much as my kid’s reaction to it all. They run inside, pull the curtains back, stare down at the gleaming pool below and exclaim, “Wooow.”

#

For dinner that night we go to 1900 Park Fare, a gorgeous buffet-style restaurant on the property, and one of a handful of restaurants on Disney properties that include visits to your table from actors who dress up as iconic Disney characters. We are promised visits from Aladdin, Cinderella, Mirabel from Encanto, and Princess Tiana from The Princess and The Frog.

Micheal, our waiter, an older, thin man with the air of someone who used to shoot heroin back in the day but lived to kick the habit and spin colorful, inappropriate tales to his grandchildren, deposits menus for drinks. “This isn’t Sea World,” he said. “If you don’t like it, don’t worry. We’ll get rid of it and get you something you do like.”

It was a long drive, so I order something laced with bourbon, while my wife orders a spicy paloma. I inspect the food and find an eclectic mix of dishes vaguely tied to the roots of the characters in attendance: Tikka masala and curry-roasted chicken for Prince Ali, spicy gumbo and soft cornbread for Tiana, golden tostones and rice and black beans for Mirabel, and, I guess, everything else for Cinderella. I sit down with a full plate and sip my strong bourbon and feel pretty good about the decision we’ve made to hastily book dinner here.

#

Prince Ali is the first to visit our table. He looks to be about 20 years old, olive complexion, tall and gangly, with the air of a frat boy who studies econ and has big plans to hit Wall Street post-grad. I whip out my phone to capture my kids’ reaction, but they could care less about his presence – neither of them are fans of his work. I feel bad for their iciness, and tell Ali, after my kids take half-hearted photos with him, that Aladdin was one of my favorite movies, while my beaming wife says Aladdin has the best Disney sound track.

Mirabel is next – a short, spunky, tan woman with thick framed glasses who looks and acts just like the character from Encanto. My daughter warms up to the woman quickly, while my son whines and says, “All the characters here are for girls!” My wife and Mirabel end up hitting it off the most, especially after my wife picks up the trace of a Colombian accent and Mirabel breaks character to ask where in Colombia my wife is from, and the two of them swap origin stories.

When Cinderella glides over, looking regal and distinguished, my daughter loses it. I’m talking mini-stars shooting out of her eyes, and a smile I wasn’t even aware her face could make. My son sucks his teeth. Cinderella tells my daughter about how excited she is for the ball she’s attending that night, and stands to do a little twirl. But my daughter only speaks Spanish and has no idea what this woman is saying. When Cinderella finishes my daughter says, “I want your dress.” Cinderella looks at my wife and I with a strained smile, then poses for a picture with my beaming little girl.

Princess Tiana is the grand finale. She gets a bit of love from my daughter, who likes The Princess and the Frog, but seems more interested in the french fries on her plate. My son is in the corner watching cartoons he’d demanded because he is “so bored.” He refuses to take a photo. I have a little notebook out, taking notes about everything – all the families eating this experience up as if it was the highlight of their lives – feeling a bit like an anthropologist. Tiana notices my notebook and assumes it is one of the Disney branded notebooks others have on their tables, which they use to gather signatures of each character. “Does somebody want me to sign their book?” she asks, so sure of herself that I didn’t have the heart to tell her, actually, no, it is weird to ask a person playing a fictional character to sign something in the signature of that fictional character who doesn’t even have a signature, much less formal documents to sign that require a signature because they’re not a real person and don’t live in the real world.

I hand over my notebook. The woman finds a clean page and signs “Princess Tiana” in nice script, and hands the notebook back with flair, as if she were Juan Soto signing a baseball he knows will end up encased in my home forever.

#

We woke up the next morning at 6:45. I am bloated and regret my decision to cap dinner off with two large chocolate chip cookies and a tall glass of milk. Nonetheless, I am a man on a mission to make this day magical. Within an hour an actual Disney miracle occurs and we leave the room on time. I push a double stroller packed to the brim with two children and all the accoutrements of a CVS.

At the Magic Kingdom entrance, attendants scan our mobile tickets, but for some reason we all have to place our thumbs on a scanner, too. As I enter the park and the attendant tells me to have a “magical day,” I find it more pressing to wonder what data my family has just given the Walt Disney Corporation and what they might do with it.

My conspiratorial thoughts evaporate when I lay eyes on Mickey’s Castle, which I realize at that moment is actually called Cinderella Castle. But I had already told my kids over and over that it was Mickey’s, so fuck it, this is my essay, and it’s Mickey’s. Up close, you can see the castle for what it is – an imitation. And yet, there is something momentous about being in its presence; the fact that it has been imprinted on the brains of millions of children watching the opening credits to their favorite Disney movies imbues it with some special significance. We take pictures in front of it, and within seconds my son says, “I’m tired of taking pictures.”

We hustle over to a ramp that leads to the rides, scanning our tickets yet again to indicate to the attendants that we are among the privileged who are allowed to enter this sacred space earlier than everyone else because we spent far more money to stay at a prized Disney resort. I feel a mix of pride and fraudulence – will I ever be comfortable in my skin as a class jumper? I don’t have time to answer this. We’re too busy making our way to the first ride, capitalizing on the park being so empty and quiet that we can hear all the mechanical movements of the animatronic characters and see their creepy eyes.

We are the first in line at Tomorrowland Speedway, a ride where you drive electric powered cars around a track and go about 10 miles an hour; a ride we chose first to please my son who is starting to get the vibe that “Disney is for girls.” We wait 20 minutes for the ride to open, and just as the little cars are prepared for us and my son gets giddy, my daughter looks at me and says, “I want to go home.”

#

Because we have the park to ourselves for a while, we run through rides like maniacs. We hit the Dumbo ride multiple times – the fiberglass elephants rising to a point in the sky just high enough to give my kids a thrill without scaring them. By the time we emerge from a couple of spins on Little Mermaid’s ride, the general admission crowd is in full force. The stroller parking area near the rides resembles mall parking lots, and parents whipping strollers speed up and cut each other off for spots.

We get stuck in a carousel vortex. After each ride, my son has a difficult time deciding on the next horse – he sits on one for a minute, then gets up quickly saying, “no, this one isn’t right” and repeats this over and over until the attendants running the ride shoot us daggers. At least he’s smiling.

While waiting in line for the Winnie the Pooh ride I watch my kids have a ball playing in multiple areas for them to touch shit, like interactive walls where you can move electronic honey out of the way to reveal Pooh or Tiger, and I realize the designers of Disney know their clientele better than crack dealers know feigns or Instagram knows teenage girls.

By 11 a.m. my under arms are damp and my feet hurt and I regret trying to look cute and wearing Air Maxes. We stop for a reprieve at Pinocchio’s Village Haus, decorated to look like what I imagine a beer hall might have looked like in the Middle Ages. Instead of belligerent drunks with swords, it is populated by sweaty people of all ages wearing Mickey ears. We order pizza and chicken tendies for the kids, I have a bomb buffalo pizza flatbread, and my wife has a sad Cesar salad that she instantly regrets ordering.

#

We wander around the engorged park, content and full. I can’t help but notice how international the entire crowd is. I overhear French, Italian, Castilian Spanish, and British and Aussie accents galore amidst the hum. Then, as the clock strikes 12:30, all of the colorful children who have gotten up early that morning and are now sufficiently cracked out on sugar and popcorn and soda and juice begin to throw unwarranted fits and dash off in random directions with crazed looks in their eyes. I watch as parents of all skin tones, native tongues, and nationalities collectively sigh, consider all they were sacrificing to make this trip possible and make their kids happy, angle their heads back toward the sky and briefly shut their eyes in defeat.

It doesn’t take long for my son to knock out in the stroller. But when it comes to fighting sleep, my daughter has the strongest chin of any child on earth. I try taking her on the People Mover – a slow little train in Tomorrowland that I surmise might lull her to sleep. Instead, she melts down in line. Halfway back to where my wife had posted up with the stroller, she nestles her little head into my shoulder, and I do a few laps around a restaurant, sweating under her 35-pound frame in the heat, until she finally gives in.

#

For some reason the initial marker of true success I had for this day wasn’t a feeling or a moment but a duration of time. My goal was for us to stay in the park until 6 p.m. but by 3 p.m. the prospect of reaching this goal looks unlikely.

As we search for another ride to get on, it is my son who looks me in the eyes and says, “Daddy, can we please go home.” I almost accepted defeat. But instead, we get on It’s a Small World, remembering the YouTube influencers telling us it is a nice, calm ride with AC – in other words, perfect for a moment just like this.

I decide halfway through the ride that it is my favorite one in the park. We sit in a large canoe that slowly weaves its way on shallow water through a series of cavernous rooms filled with miniature animatronic figurines playing music, dancing, and singing the iconic song, “it’s a small world after all,” over and over in their respective languages. Each section we cut through the center of is meant to represent cultures from across the world, and periodically we pass renderings of monuments like Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Egypt or the Eiffel Tower to help orient us. It’s a long ride and the pace is slow enough that we can marvel at the craft of all the figurines, the oldest of which date back to the 1960s and I’m sure offend wide swaths of people daily.

Still, the message of global unity feels especially timely considering the fact that whenever I scan news headlines or open social media it seems society is on the verge of splitting at whatever flimsy seams remain to stop us from waging an all-out war against each other.

I find the very end of the ride – when all the colors are stripped away and the cultures and nations join together, dressed in white to sing the famous song one more time against a snowy backdrop – particularly poignant. I watch my daughter light up. I feel what she feels, too: oddly moved by these little mechanical devices, their herky-jerk motions, and their deceptively simple, yet powerful song.

#

As we lurch toward the late afternoon, the Disney Magic falls off a steep cliff. While watching Mickey and his friends put on a show in front of the big castle, Elsa from Frozen appears on stage and belts out a beautiful rendition of “Let it Go” that makes the hair on my arms tingle and moves me to sing along until my daughter looks at me sharply and says, “stop, dad.” When we hit the Jungle Cruise, another boat ride where a fake captain makes terrible jokes and points out animatronic animals along the way – crocodiles, elephants, gorillas, and snakes – my son doesn’t even grin. “These animals are not even real,” he says.

By 5:45 p.m. we buy the kids their promised souvenirs (bubble wands) and tap out. At just over 10 hours, 26,000 steps, and nearly a thousand dollars spent all in on the day between tickets, food, and everything else, I feel ambivalent. I wonder if I’ve accomplished my goal – and more so, if I’m even certain what my goal was to begin with.

#

I keep thinking about this as we hop on a ferry to take us across a vast man-made lake back to the Grand Floridian Resort. We sit in the very back of the ferry, in an uncovered area we have all to ourselves.

My wife and I cuddle and watch our kids as they look out at the water, staring at the hotel in the distance, chatting excitedly about their new toys and shooting bubbles into the blue sky. For the first time in perhaps their whole lives, they let us take a nice picture of the two of them. They genuinely hug each other, and in their smiles, I can see something beyond joy, something deeper that nearly moves me to tears.

Just looking at the picture after I take it, and knowing that I will always be able to look at it, and revisit it, and remember this little moment when they are this age and this innocent and this beautiful and this pure, makes all the time and energy and money feel worth it. Here, I realize, was what I had been searching for: Proof that we’d gone. Proof that we’d made memories. Proof that this little family of ours had experienced happiness together. I realize then that this is what those photos my mom has of my sisters and I signify to her, too. That despite all of our challenges, we made our way.

My son turns back around and I notice he has a pensive look as he stares out at the water. I think about my mother all those years ago, how she must have felt watching me. As my oldest child, I wonder how much of this trip he will remember. I want to know: How magical had this all been for him?

As the boat nears shore, he turns to me. “Hey, dad.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, anything.”

“How come in all of the Disney movies we’ve watched, none of the characters ever go to the bathroom to do pee pee or poopy?”

My wife and I look at each other for a moment, then laugh. “That is a great question.”

Download Places

BACK TO STEUBENVILLE

1

MY GRANDMA died, so I went back home to Steubenville.

2

MY DAD picked me up at the Pittsburgh airport; he was hungry, so we stopped at Huddle House in Weirton: a restaurant that gluttonically rewards every meal with a free waffle;

I don’t know if it was his chiaroscuroish intention, but he sure looked trim in the midst of the West Virginia wafflegobblers.

I said, “you lose weight?”

That didn’t elicit a response. I said, “how does it feel to be an orphan?”

It’s hard to be serious with my dad. I’d seen him lose a lot of people; I’d been to many funerals with him,

—and he’s a sentimental dude: the easiest way to make him cry was to get him talking about his grandpa, my namesake: Harold, —

but I’m also never gonna ask him how he feels without burying it (no pun intended) in a joke. . .

he had a complicated relationship with his mother, and I really wanted to know how he felt, but I knew it would be hard to get a straight answer.

He laughed, “One day you’ll know all about it.”

3

BETTY POMPA ROGERS, or as I called her “Nana”,

—a bastardization of the Italian word for grandma: nonna, which evinces her relationship to Italian identity; she always pressed me to remember that I had an “eye-talian grandma!”,

and though both her parents were immigrants from Italy and she grew up on “Italian street” in Steubenville in the 1930s (where her cousin Beans Pompa used to run around with Dean Martin), she didn’t speak any Italian, it was more or less beat out of her in the name of assimilation, —

died on March 3rd 2025, at 96 years old. My dad, his sister, and my cousins were with her in the hospital room when she died, and right before she took her last breath, she exclaimed, elated:

“my family is all back together again!”

This had been her bugaboo in her chair-bound waning (never senescence!, she was sharp until the day she died) ; one day she left my dad a furious voicemail out of the blue, demanding to know,

WHO THE FUCK RUINED MY FAMILY!?

And I guess that’s something I wanted to know, too; especially when I read her obituary and was reminded what a figure of tremendous matriarchal importance she was for certain people on my dad’s side of the family:

“As a proud Italian, Betty was unsurprisingly a wonderful cook – making Italian classics, hosting spaghetti dinners in her home, and teaching her kids and grandkids Italian cooking and baking traditions. She attended all of her kids’ and grandkids’ activities from being a den mother when her boys were in Cub Scouts to supporting her kids and grandkids at band, cheering, plays, choir, softball games, and much more.”

The obituary was long as hell [(it did have to cover nine decades!) and cost $1900 to run in full in the local paper,

(I texted my dad: “loved the obit” ; he texted back: “long”)]

& ardent, covering stories from her life that I’d never even heard, painting a portrait of a person that I did not know;

like this spaghetti dinner business: why was I never invited? Why didn’t she come to my games?

High as hell one night, reading that, I really felt, for the first time, that Nana was a real person, and this real person would be perpetually what I always felt she was, an absence in my life.

How come I grew up 10 miles away and felt like she wasn’t my grandma?

AN EXEGESIS OF FAMILY BEEF

4

MY PARENTS met in Las Vegas on April 14th, 1994.

My mom (who immigrated to the U.S. from Rio de Janeiro at 19) was 25, working as a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace; she’d just settled in Vegas after fleeing a very bad situation in Los Angeles. . . :

my dad was 35, putting his life back together after the FBI busted him for bookmaking in 1990;

they met thru a mutual friend: this dude Ron, a pimp & cocaine dealer; if you knew 5 foot nothing, disheveled, cartoonishly-mustached oddball Ron, you’d think the fact that my mom & dad both were independently drawn into friendships with him was actually a perfect indicator of their compatibility.

My mom acted crazy as fuck at dinner, then offered to drive my dad to the airport (bc he was flying out to Antigua to see about this new venture), but she drove him the wrong way (on purpose), he stayed the night:

a month later, my mom moved in with him in Toronto OH.

5

MY DAD was born and raised in Toronto OH: one of only 2 cities in the entire world with that name.

I spent the first 7 years of my life there on 1324 Dennis Way. A house that endured a raid by the FBI in 1990, and by the IRS in 2003;

— there can’t be many houses that have been raided by two different federal law enforcement agencies in two different centuries. . . —

Everybody in Toronto knows my dad. A dude in my boxing class said his family was from Toronto; I said, “what’s your last name?”

He goes, “Pillar.”

I said, “I think I grew up next to your grandpa. He poisoned my dad’s cat!”

He said, “your dad is Jon Rogers?!”

WHEN my mom moved in, I don’t think a Brasilian had ever been in Toronto, — a fucking insular, unpulchritudinous enclave if there ever was one, — and she ain’t really the type to do things quietly. . .

my mom was 25, and it had been a hard 25, and now, here she was, in a little bumfuck town, all alone, except for my dad. . .

(I wonder if my dad realized how hard it was for her; honestly I doubt it, he has a lot of virtues, but emotional perspicacity ain’t one of them, which must’ve made her feel even more isolated, like her youth was truncated. And for what? Ohio? She must’ve really loved him)

. . . and she probably thought, well his roots are so deep here, his family could be my family eles vão me acolher. . .

And it’s nasty about humanity that this can read as naivety; because here’s a consummate outsider, come to roost in their henhouse unkowtowingly:

— — of course it was beef. . .

My mother must’ve been shocked.

6

FROM EVERYTHING I know, my Nana’s relationship with her mother-in-law was a horrorshow of contentiousness, and really, from what I can glean, because my Nana was a cultural outsider (she was Italian & my grandpa was Irish) with a big personality, who wouldn’t brook no bullshit;

you’d think this would be the perfect training ground to free herself from being caught in the cycles of the past, but instead, my Nana imposed everything she suffered on the next generation, —completely blind to how unfree & fated. . . —

for as long as I can remember, the way my dad’s family treated my mom was the biggest locus of strife between them. They fought about it all the fucking time.

Get a couple drinks in my mom, get her talking about Mother’s Day 1998 (where my father left her alone when me and my twin sister were six months old, to go spend the day at his mother’s house “because it’s mother’s day, she’s my mom”) and that shit gets Krakatoan quick.

She rolls off the litany of abuse right off the top of her head easily; it’s all rage, but you can tell how deep the hurt is to spark such a timeless anger.

THE BEEF was inconstant too: it’s a 30 year war, right? There’s oases of peace.

I always knew when it was back to clashing b/c I’d hear my mom awake in the middle of the night, keyboard clacking loud as hell, responding to vituperative emails with her own venom.

Three years before my grandma died, it seemed like everything was settled again.

My Nana would come stay over with my parents, and my mom would literally wipe her ass; don’t get it twisted, my mom can be difficult, but she was always above-and-beyondly doting to my dad’s parents, and her kindness was never remotely returned.

A year before she died, my Nana banned my mom from her funeral, and they never spoke again. . .

7

WHY DIDN’T my dad get the fuck out of town? Why’d he have to root himself so close to where he grew up?

I think it was an unconscious filiopieism; he didn’t think too hard about it, it was where he was always gonna end up. . . and it seems to me his strongest guiding principles are loyalty & duty, and if you don’t owe those things to your family, who do you owe them to?

But his duties as a son & a brother often conflicted with his duties as a husband & father, and he didn’t always have the most astute resolutions.

In the last few years of my Nana’s life, I continued to visit her every time I was in town, despite the fact that my mom & my sister stopped going;

my dad went to visit every Monday, —my mother never told him not to go, but he’d certainly get the cold shoulder from her on Mondays, —and he instituted a 3 strike policy: if my Nana said 3 bad things about my mother, he was out of there.

It’s telling that it wasn’t one strike.

I WOULD go visit because she was a lonely 90 year old woman, without whose existence, I literally wouldn’t exist, and she was funny; she’d rant & rave & cuss and apologize for saying the f-word and beg me to say that I loved her;

one time she read one of my substacks where I talk about my dad’s career as a bookie and for some reason she thought I was snitching on him to the feds, and she called me up going, “FUCK YOU HAROLD!” talking about how Brasilians love money. . .

The most normal conversation I ever had with her is when I was driving her to a doctor’s appointment and she asked me, “what are those things on a page that you write with?” I said, “what?” She said, “those things like when someone’s talking?” I said, “. . . quotation marks?” She said, “yes!”

She always told me she should write a book about her life; she was gonna call it My Italian Life.

It’s a shame that book doesn’t exist.

THE WAKE

8

AFTER OUR belly-bursting waffle-feast, my dad drove us over to Foster’s Funeral Home in Toronto OH for the wake.

My mother & sister had a great excuse not to attend: they were in Rio for Carnaval; we told everyone who asked in exaggerated exasperated tones:

“THEY’RE STUCK IN RIO! THEY COULDN’T GET A FLIGHT!”,

when in reality they were treating the coincidence as serendipitous, continued to samba (we might’ve been making jokes that it was upon someone’s grave;

I always talked about my American grandparents differently with my mom & sister. . . privately we referred to them as PooPoo & PeePee).

SMALL-TOWN wakes are a good reminder that you’re bumfuck-bred; literally randos I swear I never seen coming up to me like,

“I seen you play basketball in 7th grade!”, “I was in the room when you came out of your mom’s *****!”, “I was your dad’s janitor in high school!”

That last dude was Muff, who at 90 years old inherited 30 million dollars from a random relative and finally retired from janitorial work to live in a big house in Toronto with his wife AND GF.

STANDING SENTRY by the casket was my dad’s sister Aunt M, weeping up a storm, and my Nana’s caretaker at the end of her life, V—— : a woman my dad dated on & off for 17 years who he ended up dumping because she smoked crack and tried to stab him;

after their 1990 raid, the FBI referred to her as “a hub of non-gambling related problems”,

and this was a woman my dad’s family had NO beef with! Toward the end my Nana even tried to nudge them back together! (I for one am quite grateful I didn’t sprout from her loins. . . ).

My Nana looked great in the casket. Everyone kept saying, “she does NOT look 96!”

My Nana’s claim to fame was always her great beauty. Which drove a competitive wedge between her & my mother, I think.

I knelt down in front of her body, looked at her closely one last time, and I prayed to God I’d get a chance to create a family, and that it would be functional.

9

UNCLE FRANK, my dad’s brother was also in attendance.

Him & my dad are estranged, but when they seen each other they shook hands, started chumming it up like old pals.

I could see a glimpse of what it was like when they were in high school; a reality in which they would’ve been friends and I would’ve grown up with an American uncle. . . (my mom’s brother was a strong presence when I was young, but he was fucked up and that all fizzled out and he died. I didn’t get to go to his funeral.)

A woman came up to him at the wake and greeted him and he stuck out his hand, “nice to meet you, I’m Frank Rogers”

She said, “Frank, we were married. Twice!”

After a disastrous youth driving truck & being a destructive lothario in Toronto, he moved to Texas, became a horse dentist, then later went over to Afghanistan to be a mercenary.

He was telling me about a recent motorcycle trip he took, and when I took advantage of a break in his monologue to drift away he said,

“Hey! I ain’t done talking to you!”

I think of how many funny stories I would have about him if he would’ve been a part of my life. . .

10

IT’S A cornucopia of top-notch cousins! My cousins Bart: Bart Jr & Bart Sr. Two hirsute Italians shaped like barrels. Well, Bart Jr is shaped like three barrels tied together. He once bench pressed 800 pounds. Really!

I was disappointed to hear that his body is now too wrecked to continue lifting weights.

There’s Tall Zack, my autistic cousin who once killed someone “by accident” at the Walmart Distribution Center, and his wife Tall Anna: who my mom actually set up,

and the first night they had sex, Anna accidentally called my mom, — “Monica” right next to “Mom” on her contacts, — screaming and crying. . . Zack & Anna have a tall baby and seem very happy.

I have three first cousins on my dad’s side: Betsy, Frank’s daughter who he ditched on my Nana & Papa’s doorstep; and Meredith & Kelsey, Aunt M’s daughters.

Meredith & Kelsey were always my cool cousins, growing up, but the strife between our mothers made it impossible to have any kind of consistent relationship; you gotta pick sides in a war, and I side with my mother unequivocally.

The problem with that is that war usually springs from complete nonsense. So now I live in a world where I got no cousins I talk to because of, — — —

WHAT? I never got the point of all this pettiness when we’re all just gonna end up in the casket.

11

BUT HOW the fuck are you supposed to get along with your family?

It’s grim when you hunker down and think about it, how few examples there are of functional family conviviality;

think of our bedrock stories: who are the first siblings in the Bible? Cain & Abel. It’s murder from the get-go. It’s so easy to spot the ruinous petty in others. That insensible maw that rips peace apart.

Suddenly, though, you’re re-enacting the same wars in your own generation.

But there’s some stories I’m not allowed to tell. . .

12

THE CLOSEST I ever felt to my American family was in the summer of 2009. Aunt M’s husband George died suddenly at the dinner table.

It was the first time I ever witnessed how death can have like a hallucinogenic effect on people; it’s like they emerged from an Ayahuasca trip: suddenly they just want peace & love.

For like a week after the funeral, we’d go to Aunt M’s house every night; there was so much family there, convivializing, happy their own hearts were still ticking.

I had just gotten my football helmet, and I was showing it off, putting it on, and my grandpa grabbed my arm and told me I better get strong if I was gonna be a football player, —George played Center at Yale.

I remember feeling this odd, frightening feeling of gratitude for George’s death; like that’s what would allow me to be part of a big family again. . .

Later that summer, me & my sister went over to Aunt M’s house for a sleepover.

She took us to the grocery store to load up on snacks; chubby, euphoric, we got a bunch of shit, including a box of Oreos.

We put the Oreos on the kitchen table and stepped outside. When we came back in, we saw that the dog had jumped up on the counter and eaten all the Oreos.

Aunt M started screaming like a banshee, “OH MY GOD HE’S GONNA DIE!!!”, barking at me and my sister to “DO SOMETHING!”,

we were startled (& 12 years old), but eventually, she halted her complete shamblement and got something to make the dog puke.

The dog puked up all the Oreos outside; when we went back inside, Aunt M went to bed without another word.

She never invited us back over again.

13

I LIKED my Nana, but I have to be honest, I don’t like anything about Aunt M. She was the worm in my Nana’s ear, always re-igniting beef after it had died down.

Months before she died, my Nana wanted to call my mom to make amends, but my Aunt talked her out of it. Why? I don’t know; sometimes people who aren’t versed in this type of conflict assume it’s rational, but long-term combat needs delusion and irrationality to sustain it.

She gave me a hug and cheaply said, “I love you.” I didn’t say anything. I don’t even have her number saved on my phone.

She told me she would’ve read my novel, but she’s been so caught up with the Sarah J. Maas books. I said,

“You won’t like it. There’s no dragon cocks.”

IF I don’t like her, I really don’t like her unpleasant, sebaceous husband Karl; I wasn’t gonna go in, but Karl was talking mad shit.

Said he was gonna kick me out of the funeral if I pulled up.

Uncle Frank, —immediately entering my good graces, —told me he told Uncle K that if he tried to do that, “I’ll be happy to pick your teeth back up off the ground for you.”

I’m not gonna sit here and call my grotesque Uncle K an old pussy, but if he’s ever been in a fight, I’ll eat my shorts; and if he’s ever kicked anyone’s ass, I’ll eat my fucking couch.

Anyway: him and what army? Bart Jr’s on my side and he’ll launch Uncle K’s ass right into space.

Of course, Uncle K was just being a behind-closed-doors tough guy. When I pulled up, he gave me a handshake so oleaginous, I had to go to the bathroom to wipe off the grease.

14

MY DAD thru-out the wake was stately, hilarious, charming as usual; he gave a eulogy and crushed for 7 minutes, —everyone complimented his eulogy except jealous-ass Karl.

One of my favorite bits. My dad was talking about how Nana wrote letters to the editor of the local paper, complaining about the new Bishop.

My dad changed his caller ID to “STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE” and called up, pretending to be the Bishop:

“So the phone rang and my dad heard STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE and he picked it up and I said, “please hold for a call from Bishop Daniel Conlon.”

My dad said, “Betty it’s for you… you did it now!”

“Betty Rogers I understand from reading the paper you don’t like how I’m running things.” She stands her ground, and starts going at him good. I come back with, “I will take away your rights from visiting any parish in the diocese of Steubenville.”

She replied, “I will just go to Weirton.”

I was out of things to say so I said, “this is your son.”

She said, “the Bishop has a son?”

I said, “no Mom it’s me.”

She says, “JON! What are you doing with the Bishop?”

After that, she told everyone she knew how well she handled the Bishop.

15

AFTER THE wake, me & my dad went to Texas Roadhouse where we ate steaks and drank several gargantuan chalices of Michelob Ultra.

I thought, unhappily, about how I would be in his shoes one day; if life went well, for me: I would have to bury my parents.

I was trying to be OK with that; trying to appreciate the opportunities that sprung up in the face of such total finality.

After dinner we went to 7 Ranges, Steubenville’s gigantic Dave & Buster’s dupe; we played the basketball arcade game, and I smoked him.

THE FUNERAL

16

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up hungover, and we headed to Saint Francis Church in Toronto for the funeral; the same church where I attended my parents’ wedding in 1998.

Unfortunately, my Nana’s favorite priest Monsignor Kemo couldn’t perform the mass because he was banned from the state of Ohio after serving a couple years in prison for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the church.

I hadn’t been to Catholic Mass in a while. I forgot about the pageantry: the egg-shaped smoke machine the priest swung around, hazing the place.

I did take communion despite the mortal sins on my heart. The priest looked at me skeptically, but I wasn’t about to leave without a slice of Jesus.

17

MY DAD hadn’t cried once since he picked me up from the airport; I don’t know if it was all the smoke in the room getting in his eyes, but as Mass drew to a close, he started to cry.

I put my hand on his shoulder and there were tears in my eyes. I don’t know if they were for my father, or what. My Nana was dead forever now. This was the last time I was ever going to be in the same room as her. She would never again say something to make me laugh.

You don’t realize how much gets buried with a person. Especially one that’s lived for 96 years. I wondered if my dad had any regrets. . .

Funerals are a glimpse into what it will be like when YOU are dead.

Outwardly, usually, they’re full of spin about the dead; it ain’t a time for the airing of grievances; but if you’re incisive, there’s lessons all around: about how to be as a person; how to use & misuse your freedom.

I’m not the kind of person who likes to hagiographize the dead; that’s a mewling & rosy-glassed love that I never had any time for; the only way to truly respect a person, to take them seriously, is to SEE them, faults & all:

I felt bad for my Nana; guilt & regret was undoubtedly heavy on her conscience, and she would never get a chance to rectify anything.

For the first time, watching my dad cry, I felt something like love for my Nana.

18

THERE WERE 65 people at mass. More than half of them accompanied the procession of cars over to the cemetery in Steubenville for the priest to say his last prayers and put her into the ground.

We put my grandpa’s urn in the casket (which should’ve cost extra, but my dad snuck it in there). . . my grandma used to say that after he died, whenever she would buy something on Amazon, the urn would shake; his ghost admonishing her.

I think if my parsimonious grandpa would’ve overheard that the funeral cost $21,000 his urn would’ve exploded.

AND THAT’S the end of my Nana.

I’ll never know what she was really like as a person. That hurts me.

I don’t know what my life would’ve been like if I had a loving, additive, uncomplicated relationship with my paternal grandma; to be honest, I never missed that love. But I could’ve done with more stories, more subjectivity.

If all the well-wishers are right, there is a heaven, and that’s where Nana is right now alongside my grandpa; maybe they’re holding hands, or canoodling in the back room of the bowling alley where Nana once bowled a 300 and Papa liked to take his girlfriends..

I don’t care about the afterlife. I wanna know all about the people who are with me right here. Because they don’t got long to tell me who they are.

While we drove away, I asked my dad, “what did you really think about your parents?”

He looked straight ahead: “let’s go get a drink.”

RIP NANA.

Download Places

It was 1998, I wasn’t thirty yet, and my boy had invited me to visit him in Japan.

The doctors had discovered a severe aortic aneurysm and he wanted to see me before the open-heart surgery, just in case, and because he was my boy and I had the loot from my academic job, I went.

I was worried for him, naturally. He was the first real friend I had. Met at Rutgers on the first day and we really did a Voltron mind-meld, became fucking inseparable. We bonded over Japan, foreign films, radical politics and taking trips to NYC at every hour of the night to fuck around, check out a show or eat at his favorite Japanese spot on St Marks. He introduced me to jazz, John Woo, Kurosawa, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Yaohan Mall; I hit him with Alan Moore, Public Enemy, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Fanon and the Montclair Book Center. I never had a friend who was loyal before, who would hold me down no matter what and who was that spontaneous. When our Native American History professor pointed out that we lived only a few hours from a reservation my boy was like let’s go and we spent a weekend hanging out in the Six Nations, even got us an invite to meet the Tadodaho.

Yeah I was worried but to tell the truth I was even more excited because I was finally going to Japan.

I definitely idolized Japan in those days. Was one of the early Dominican otakus who had a grown up on Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets and Shogun 1.0 and Lone Wolf and Cub, and Akira, who drank deep from the torrent of news and wildness that poured out of the Bubble Economy. My years with my boy and his Japanese family only sealed the deal and when he moved back to Tokyo after Rutgers I knew I’d visit him sooner rather than later, and maybe even stay permanently like him. I had already immigrated once, and the thought of immigrating a second time didn’t seem like a big deal. I figured if I could survive 70s New Jersey, I could survive anything.

I copped a guidebook, maps of the Tokyo trains, a paperback copy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but that was it. This was before Instagram and Google Translate or Youtube, before everybody and their stepmom was going to Japan. My boy wasn’t a big one for letters or phone calls and all I knew was that I had to meet him at Shibuya Station at X time on X date, which seemed easy enough. I was confident I could handle it — which was funny, really. Besides leaving the Dominican Republic when I was six, I wasn’t actually very well-traveled. I mean, sure, compared to a lot of the cats in my neighborhood I was Phileas Fogg reborn, but in truth I’d been to London and Berlin and Amsterdam for only a couple of days each, and the DR of course, but that was it. Never traveled alone like some of my friends, always amongst the boys, or on a book tour.

When I told my campesina mother that I was off to Tokyo and wouldn’t be around for Christmas she seemed genuinely confused, even after I explained I was seeing my boy, whom she had great affection for.

But what are you going to eat? she kept asking, as though I was headed to fucking Titan. My mother was not a traveler at all, never would be, but I suspect if she was forced to travel to Tokyo or even to Canada she’d be one of those people who brought a suitcase full of food like they were on some Oregon Trail type shit.

Anyway, the semester ended and a day later I was at JFK. Don’t remember much about the flight except I was maybe one of a handful of gaijin aboard, and that no one — and I mean no one — acted up. Even the newborn in the next aisle was quiet as fuck.

2

I won’t bother you with the synaptic overload that was my first hours in Japan; the stunning delight of a place I had long dreamed of but only glimpsed in media; the overwhelming frenetic scale of Tokyo in its central places; the wild strangeness of being one Afroliminal amongst bajillions of East Asians; the uncanny confusion of a place that did every little thing different from how we did shit in the United States, a place that was unlike anything I’d known.

All I can say is that I was bowled the fuck over and only my first sight of New York City, when I was six and knew only Third World Santo Domingo, compares. To my child eyes the NY skyline my first American night – it was like a galaxy had decided to become a city, a glorious infinity.

Tokyo was the same.

Love at first shock. Stendhal had Florence — I had Tokyo, though it would take me years before I realized how truly hooked I was.

In those days Tokyo boasted very little English signage and I had more than one Japanese person run from me, like, for real, when I tried to ask for directions and I got turned around more than Theseus, but for all that I still got to Shibuya on time.

My boy was waiting for me at the appointed location in his salaryman suit, with the same wolfish grin and long-legged gait.

I hope you slept on the plane, was what he said and then we embraced. His chest, uncracked open, pressed against my chest.

My dude lived in Shimokitazawa back when Shimokitazawa was still Shimokitazawa — before they rubbled the old train station and all the gaijin flooded the place and dubbed it the Williamsburg or Bushwick of Tokyo or whatever the fuck they are calling it now.

Amazing first weekend. The Bubble economy had incinerated itself six years earlier but it was almost as if Tokyo hadn’t heard the news — the streets were teeming, the clubs and restaurants jammed, people shopping like it was the last days of money.

Don’t think we slept or sobered up those first 72 hours. In those days we were both seriously into hip-hop and fortunately so was Tokyo and so he took me to Harlem and Vuenos and a bunch of other little spots in Roppongi, back when Roppongi was the Gas Panic capital of Gaijin Tokyo and United States military personal were all over those streets and fought everybody at all hours of the night and day.

My boy, happy to see me, but also worried about his upcoming operation and about his Taiwanese girlfriend who may or may not be getting ready to dump him. (After meeting her I had my own opinion, but as no one asked me I kept it to myself.) The plan was for me to stay in Tokyo for two weeks and then fly home the day of his operation. By the time I landed back in Boston he’d either be in the ICU or getting ready for the incinerator.

His words.

The Monday morning after our weekend rage he headed off to work still drunk, and as his girl was in the apartment I took to the streets. I was supposed to be writing in coffeeshops, real bohemian type shit, but that didn’t happen the entire time I was in Japan. Too wired, too jet-lagged, too excited, too worried, too ill-disciplined to buckle down, and because I wasn’t in the middle of anything I had nothing to call me to the page. I ended up wandering around Tokyo while my boy was at the job and as he worked until 10pm on most days that was a lot of derivés, broken up only by the gym he had helped me sign up with, where I worked out for three hours every day just to kill the time.

First day, no problem.

Second day, no problem.

Third day: problem.

I woke up that morning with a mile-high depression pinning me to the futon. Half the colors blown out of my head. Simultaneously anhedonic and gripped by an impulse to place my skull under the wheels of moving vehicles or in the way of the oncoming surface trains that cut through Shimokitazawa.

I knew I suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it know it, not the way I know it now; it was less knowledge and more of a diffused recognition, an unserious awareness. Because I’d never been to therapy or lost a job or failed a class over my melancholy, I figured it a problem but not an insurmountable one — unlike the occasional agonizing neck and back spasms that could lay me up for days. I was also riding high on publishing my first book two years earlier, figured the euphoria would protect me from future engulfments.

In Japan I was proven spectacularly wrong – the depression that hit on day three was worse than anything I had experienced before. I felt like a prison wall had collapsed on me, been rebuilt and then fallen on me again. I couldn’t move or much think anything except how much I hated myself and how much I hated the fucking world. (Never crossed my mind to seek help or to raise those thoughts with anyone, which shows you what life was like in those days.)

Problem was, I couldn’t just lay around. I knew my boy’s girlfriend didn’t want my gaijin ass crowding her out in that no tatami mat apartment. I might have been new to Japan but I wasn’t so stupid I couldn’t read the air. Depression or no depression I dragged myself onto the street and sat in a nearby park for hours. (Later I took to riding around on the Yamanote Line and by the end of that trip I had memorized all the stations. Something about that circularity, about the incredible views that line occasionally afforded, suited the staccato freakery running amok in my head)

Day four: another familiar problem.

My neck spasmed in my sleep with such explosive force that I spent the rest of the trip in constant whimpering agony. Maybe I’d been tensing myself on the lead-up to the trip, storing all the Japan nerves, all the operation nerves, in my long neck. Maybe it was the unfamiliar futon or all that partying. In any event: no self-massage, no stretching, no amount of liquor blunted that deep insane pain.

And so now I Quasimoto’d around Tokyo, my neck and head wrenched twenty degrees away from center point.

My boy had enough troubles about, so of course I didn’t say anything when we got together in the evening.

Hey man, you look uncomfortable.

Nah, I’m fine. Just a stiff neck from the futon no big deal.

On day five, more hellishness. In the midst of my depression I found myself overcome by a inexplicable inability to enter Japanese establishments, besides the gym and Tower Records in Shibuya.

Like, I literally couldn’t walk into a combini or a video store or a restaurant at all.

With my boy I had no trouble going in anywhere, but on my own it was like I was a vampire that hadn’t yet secured permission to enter. I would stand outside a shop or a restaurant and couldn’t make myself go in for love or money.

I’m not making this shit up. I tried and tried for hours and just couldn’t do it.

You ever watch those people who step onto a diving board and no matter what can’t force themselves to jump?

That was me.

Such a random ridiculous thing, and instead of just grabbing food for the next day when me and my boy were out, like any normal person, I decided to will myself through the threshold problem. Didn’t fucking work. I was literally hungry the whole day, hungry and in fucking pain, spending an inordinate amount of time trying to walk into a combini or a Matsuya, but it was like a knife trying to pierce a Dune forcefield. I even tried to run through the entrance, hoping to momentum myself in, but that didn’t work either, I always stopped short.

All of that in one week.

What can I tell you? I was raped when I was young and hadn’t yet dealt with it. Here were Gramsci’s morbid symptoms writ large.

So week two. Same shit, neck, depressed, unable to enter anywhere. So I walked and walked and fucking walked and rode around the Yamanote: Takadanobaba, Mejiro, Ikebukero, Otsuka.

And one day at random I found myself standing in front of the first restaurant my boy had taken me. Our first quick meal before a reservation feast later that night. A humble Hakata-style ramen-ya between Daita and Shimokitazawa. I was about to turn away except the owner must have remember me from the week before when my boy had explained to him that I was a friend visiting Japan for the first time. From Boston, a city the owner recognized.

The thin owner stepped out and said something, waving me inside. I turned and took a step towards him. He waved again, I took another step. He waved a third time, more than a little confused, and I was finally through the door. The restaurant was empty and he pointed at a counter seat. I sat, my head and lungs feeling like they were caught in a vise. He pointed at the Japanese menu on the wall and I pulled my yen out, put the wad on the counter, and started crying.

But, like, really crying.

The owner acted like he didn’t notice. He grunted something, got behind the counter, and a few minutes later I received the same order from the week before: miso ramen with a side of yakigyoza.

He gestured towards the bowl.

And I ate.

He didn’t watch me tuck in, didn’t say anything at all. Just busied himself with prep work.

Was it the best ramen I’d ever had?

No, but at the end of my days it will probably be the only bowl of ramen I remember.

Still can’t entirely explain what happened, but I am much more aware now of how worried I was for my boy and how much shit I’d been carrying from my childhood that any big trip overseas was going to stir up.

Long story short: I ate at Mr. Yamamoto’s shop every day for the rest of the trip. But best of all, by my second bowl, by day nine, the whole compulsion against doors vanished as mysteriously as it arrived.

Like that, I started being a human again.

And that was my first trip to Tokyo, more or less. There would be dozens more in the decades that followed. Japan would become my third home after the United States and the Dominican Republic, but I’m not sure that would have happened if I never got through the doors, if I’d spent my first trip depressed, in pain, starving, and looking always in.

On the day of the operation I flew back to Boston, but I didn’t find out what happened with my boy until a few more days. Got a call in the early morning from his brother to tell me it had all gone swimmingly.

My boy called a few weeks later. I made it, he said.

You did, I said. You really did.

Download Places

One man was exactly half my age, an adorable stoner with a part-time job at Trader Joe’s. Another had a mild brain injury from overseas military service; he wrote and recorded a Neil Young-style song about me after our first date. I went out with the smart, louche, underachieving brother of a famous actor; a stand-up comic with a foot fetish and no discernible sense of humor; and a middle school math teacher whose only desire was to be pegged (an interest I did not share, alas).

Every day that summer was an opportunity to briefly connect with someone new, and to chip away at the pain of being dumped over the phone by my boyfriend of two years, like an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with updated technology and a lot more boning. This period of my life, summer 2021, felt brand-new and unpredictable and sometimes hilarious and sometimes stupid, and I knew it couldn’t (and, moreover, shouldn’t) last more than a few months. Eventually I got tired of the personal upkeep–so much shaving, so much blow-drying. I was done fielding blunt inquiries about the state of my orifices. Done explaining to men that I found no useful information in a dick pic.

And then, using the same dating app, I met and soon fell in love with a very suitable man, an age-appropriate academic with impeccable manners who was in New York that summer, but who actually lives in Gainesville, which he called “the Berkeley of Florida.”

I’ve never been to Berkeley, but I understood what he was saying: that Gainesville, because it’s the home of the University of Florida, is not Florida Man or Scarface or Disney Adults or highly sensitive national security documents stored in a bathroom with a gold toilet.

It is true that Florida is full of dangerously corrupt and stupid politicians who put their own self-interest ahead of their constituents, but that is also broadly true in New York and almost everywhere, and should not be used to discount the entire population of the large, wildly diverse and criminally gerrymandered state of Florida, for which I have had a soft spot since the first time my parents drove our family from Syracuse to Disney World in a pickup truck, in 1978.

This suitable man, still my boyfriend with whom I am still in love, continued to visit me in New York, and I started visiting him in Gainesville, which requires a flight from New York to Atlanta and another to Gainesville, or a flight to Jacksonville and a one-hour drive on a super-highway, surrounded by vaping, pill-addicted, serial texting teenagers and elderly folks whose families should have taken their keys away years ago. I almost always choose the connecting flight.

I feel relaxed and unbothered and generally well-fed and entertained in Gainesville, a progressive college town in the north-central part of the state. The deciduous trees are heavy with Spanish moss and the palm trees drop their German Shepherd-sized fronds on the streets and the city limits give way to wet woodlands and citrus groves and a prairie populated with wild buffalo and alligators. There are dozens of lakes and rivers in the surrounding area. It’s less than a two-hour drive to Atlantic or Gulf beaches, with a series of swimmable springs closer than that.

Within walking distance of my boyfriend’s home is a public park named for late hometown hero Tom Petty, whose posthumous presence pervades local culture. My friend EB, whom I’ve gotten to know over many visits to Gainesville, has tipped me off to the micro-economy built around dubious connections to Petty and other famous dead men.

“Sometimes it seems like his corpse is being paraded around for the benefit of various business owners and cultural institutions,” said EB, who grew up in a small town outside of Gainesville and now lives in the city with her husband and kids. “There’s a local ambulance chasing lawyer with an ad that goes, ‘I was Tom Petty’s first lawyer, before he made it big, and just like Tom, I won’t back down.’” See also: “Rock On: A Tom Petty Tribute Ballet.”

The metaphorical corpse of another natural blonde lends cachet to the River Phoenix Center for Peace building, a Gainesville non-profit established and administered by the late actor’s mother and her husband (not the dad of the talented Phoenix family, who led them into the Children of God cult, and out again, once he realized how rotten it was). Bo Diddley Plaza, a space for concerts and community events, pays tribute to the legendary blues and rock guitarist Bo Diddley (née Ellas Bates McDaniel), who was from Mississippi but spent his sunset years in Gainesville.

In Gainesville, I’ve eaten delicious Cote D’Ivoire seafood and impeccable doughnuts from Flatfish, Detroit-style pizza at SquareHouse Pizza, and a killer chicken biscuit sandwich at Florida Room. There are excellent farmer’s markets, and my favorite grocery store there is Ward’s, which has both a substantial hippie health food section and a butcher counter slinging pig ears and chitlins and feet and smoked turkey wings and every part of the pig and cow and lamb and chicken, with an emphasis on what’s most suitable for southern-style barbecue. The University of Florida has a world-class agriculture school, with a butcher shop supplied by the meat lab, and right outside, there’s an array of animal penis sculptures by the artist Carol K. Brown, which were installed in 1988.

A more recent addition to the Gainesville cultural scene is The Lynx, a bookstore owned and operated by novelist Lauren Groff, who prioritizes the stocking and marketing of titles that are challenged or banned in the state.

And then, of course, there’s Division I sports, a huge thing in Gainesville. The UF men’s basketball team won the NCAA championship in 2025, and the football team is a perennial contender for various titles. Football home games create absurd if predictable traffic nightmares in the small city, but also generate excellent revenues for restaurants, bars, hotels and retailers.

However, the biggest game of season, UF versus Georgia, is always played on neutral ground, in Jacksonville, which creates in Gainesville a weekend-long population and cash vacuum that’s been filled for the past 23 years by The Fest, a multi-stage punk festival featuring bands like The Spits, Gainesville’s own Assholeparade, and The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. The Fest also features stand-up comics and live wrestling.

In describing Gainesville's pace of life, its relative affordability and its cultural offerings, my friend EB used the term “velvet rut,” which I hadn’t heard before, and which lends itself to a hacky joke about adult film names.

“The velvet rut” is in fact a slight pejorative, applied to various college towns and mid-sized cities with just enough going on socially to keep an ambitious creative person rooted in place. The thinking goes, you’re (probably) never going to achieve major national artistic success while living in Charlottesville or Ithaca or Eugene or Gainesville, but the rent is cheap, the vibe is progressive, and there’s always a cool band playing downtown. Why leave?

Coming off my unsustainable no-strings summer, I worried that a committed, monogamous relationship might itself become a velvet rut that eventually turns to miserable burlap. Several years prior, I’d filled the rut of my dead marriage with gasoline and set it on fire.

I’m now four years into my relationship with this man, no longer looking at Gainesville from the perspective of a tourist. Most of the time I’m with him, I’m at his dining room table or on his big sofa with his dog, working on my writing projects while he works on his, leaving for the occasional walk or to pick up provisions for dinner cooked at home in his well-stocked kitchen, which is roughly the size of my entire New York apartment. There are plenty of regional attractions still on the list – the state park beach in St. Augustine, the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs - and if this is a velvet rut, I’m settling in.

Download Places

1.

Maybe you’ve been to Colombia, but you’ve likely never been to Armenia. If you’re a tourist, you have no reason to. There are no five star hotels or resorts, no infamous party spots, no award winning fine dining. It is a city of under 300,000 built not on cocaine, like the Colombian cities you probably have heard of, but on a different drug: Coffee.

As you drive around Armenia, and more so on the rural outskirts lined with fincas, the coffee plant is everywhere; tiny beans shading from red to green, full of a potency that can kill. The love for cafe is so real there is a whole theme park–think Six Flags–called El Parque del Cafe with coffee inspired roller coasters, and Armenia and nearby cities, Pereira and Manizales are known affectionately as El Eje Cafetero, or the Coffee Axis.

I am no expert on Armenia, nor am I an expert on Colombia. For the record, I’m not even Colombian. I’m a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, and before I stopped my beautiful Colombian wife, Marcela, outside of a class on campus 15 years ago and begged for her phone number, all I had known about the country is the same as what anyone seems to know about the country if they’ve never been there before; a series of names, specific items, and statements that goes something like: Pablo Escobar, cocaine, Shakira, burundanga, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, fine ass women, and, of late–though not specific to me at the time–excellent and cost-effective plastic surgery, J. Balvin, and Karol G.

Since getting Marcela’s digits and doing everything in my power to ensure she never leaves my side, I’ve been to Colombia five times–and to tiny Armenia thrice.

The official reason for my most recent trip in June was to take our two kids (like I said, anything to ensure she never leaves) to visit Marcela’s family, who include her 90-something year old grandmother, a couple of aunts and uncles, and as of this past May, her parents, who left Miami to retire in their homeland. Deeper than that, the trip was also an effort to keep our American kids in touch with their roots and provide them with a regular reminder that they live privileged lives in the U.S., no matter what their spoiled ass friends say, and to make sure their Spanish stays sharp so they can grow up bilingual, make their grandparents proud, prove wrong all my haters who mocked my own Spanish growing up, and secure a job wherever they go.

But what about me? Why was I going on this trip? As I packed for it the night before, I wasn’t so sure. I won’t front; I wasn’t even all that excited about going. Colombia, awesome. But Armenia, again, for the third time? What more was there to see? What more was there to do? I didn’t have great answers to these questions at the time.

2.

It didn’t help that the whole voyage was predicated on an extremely inconvenient necessity: Marcela and I had to blow five precious PTO days to secure our week in Armenia because there is only one direct flight to Armenia from Miami–a Spirit flight that leaves and returns on Sundays.

Spirit gets a bad rap because of all those fight videos–most of which take place at my home airport–but in my book we are cool. In fact, we became mad cool on this trip, because my daughter was now two-years old and required a full priced plane ticket.

This being our first flight with four seats, Marcela and I decided each of us would get one flight sitting alone across the aisle while the other parent dealt with the kids. I don’t remember how I drew this prized seat on the first flight, perhaps Marcela made the offer sensing I was already a bit grumpy about the trip as a whole, but it didn’t really matter because within seconds of the plane reaching cruising altitude, my daughter decided to cross sides and I spent most of the flight with baby girl in my lap watching clips of the OG Pink Panther.

When we landed a few hours later, it was the afternoon and my kids were tired, hungry, and cranky. So was I. My daughter caught a mega tantrum. My patience was thinner than an oblea (look it up, it’s fire). There isn’t a jetbridge in Armenia, so we had to walk down the plane steps and across the tarmac to get to the tiny immigration processing. My wife’s family were waiting for us in the pickup area and had a full view of the tarmac. This is all a long way of saying that the first piece of media that exists to document our trip is a grainy video of me throwing my daughter over my shoulder looking pissed while trying to wrangle our bags and our stroller.

Welcome to Colombia.

3.

Our digs on this trip were the same as the last three: Marcela’s grandma’s house, tucked inside a little gated community not far from the city center. It’s a house I’ve always liked for its odd, sharp angles that create nooks you can duck into if you need a breather–which is special because space is a premium in Colombia.

From the cars and parking spots to the clothes, bathrooms, and grocery aisles, it is a country built for smaller people. At 5’11, I instantly morph into an NBA small forward as soon as I step off the plane.

At casa de abuela, for example, our assigned room made a New York City apartment (rent-controlled monstrosities in the hood aside) feel generous: a sliver of floor wedged with a too-narrow twin, a pullout cot, and a pack-and-play. Each night Marcela and I folded ourselves into bed with a child on either side, pressed close not so much out of romance but to stop ourselves from rolling off.

What the house lacks in square footage, it makes up for in sheer entertainment value. Marcela’s grandma lives there with her two daughters and two sons, all of whom are in their sixties. That might sound adorable or insane. To me, it’s both—sometimes within the same hour. But the fun part is that it turns out siblings remain siblings no matter how gray their hair gets: grudges from grade school constantly resurface and get aired out, bickering erupts over nothing, and the political arguments are endless. Visiting during an election year is like front-row seats at a family cage match. All I have to do to get the party started is ask who is running.

4.

It rained all day. Pre-kids this wouldn’t have stopped Marcela and I. We would have hit museums, movie theaters, restaurants, bars. We did this the first time I ever went to Colombia, to Bogota, the capital, where my wife was born. Life was different. We had time to seek out culture, history, and inspiration. Time to wander in parks and bars, drinking guarapo and Aguila’s with the locals. Now, we are parents with two toddlers, and our first priority is ensuring our feral children–who were already beginning to destroy abuela’s home–are entertained.

So, we went to the mall.

Malls in Colombia consider children differently than malls in Miami. Back home, I’m always disappointed with whatever sorry installation they have that passes for a park. It’s the same almost everywhere we go in the city, unless the space is specifically advertised for children and hits you with a fee to get through the door. Even Burger King and McDonalds took the balls out of the ball pit.

At Flora Mall on the north side of Armenia, where we went, there was a whole wing devoted to keeping kids entertained. We broke off a few pesos to pay a woman to let our kids into a fenced area full of play kitchens, cars, Barbies, Legos and everything else their hearts could desire. The woman scrolled on her phone, ostensibly there to ensure nobody got injured. Parents, meanwhile, hung at the bar directly next to the play area, sipped on a beer, watched the soccer match.

Marcela and I slipped away to Frisby’s, or the Colombian, far more popping version, of KFC, where the chicken is fried to perfection and served with packets of flavored honey and a pair of gloves so you can go to town like a classy motherfucker.

By nighttime, my kids were sufficiently tired and clonked out. Marcela and I crawled out of the dark room like we escaped a bomb shelter and drank coffee and ate pastries downstairs, where her family gathers nightly to push aside their beef and act copacetic.

On this night, one of Marcela’s aunts, Cata, broke out a roscone–a donut but more brolic, sprinkled with sugar on top, baked golden, and stuffed all the way through with warm guava paste. I had never had it before. But it only took one bite to shake up my world and make me think to myself, you know what, maybe Armenia does have a thing or two to teach me yet.

5.

Cousins from California rolled into town, affectionately called Los Gringos because although the wife, Marcela’s blood relative, and her husband, a Californian, both speak great Spanish, their children don’t. The fact that my children aren’t called gringos–although I am called one, and rightfully so–brings me great pride.

Our kids and their kids combined forces and tore up the house again, which was enough of an incentive to get us to all roll out to Salento, a small town an hour outside of Armenia. There were only two cars, so all the kids lapped up on parents, which is normal in a country where seatbelts and stop signs are optional, and where people will stack up in everything from a moped to a horse to get where they need to go.

On the ride over, we pulled over to La Vaca Original, a dessert stand halfway to Salento that–true to name–has a huge cow installation overlooking the mountainside and sells arroz con leches and baked delicacies like pan de bonos and bunelos. I have seen it before, but my daughter–a big fan of cows, and now old enough on this trip to truly notice the world around her–stared at it for a while in amazement. Just seeing the light in her eyes made it worthwhile.

When we stopped again it was to see a river that cuts across the mountains. My son and his cousin started playing by it, throwing sticks off the side, getting way too close despite my insistence that he back up. But he’s five, so he didn’t listen to shit I had to say, and just as he was about to throw another stick, he slipped and I caught him mid-air by the shirt, dad reflexes in full effect, stopping him just as his body was to begin descending down into the river, where God knows where it would have taken him.

He had a wide smile on his face as I dragged him back and didn’t seem fazed that he almost certainly was about to get his shit rocked.

6.

Salento is one of the more visited towns in the region, full of artisanal jewelry shops, coffee shops, gift shops, and restaurants. When I came to Armenia for the first time in 2014, Salento was quaint, but with each subsequent visit, it has become an off the beaten tourist spot for the sorts of international tourists that tend to enjoy such places, meaning those scraggly Germans, Brits, and Nordics with tattered backpacks the size of toddlers.

We puttered around with the family. In the town square we rented miniature Willys Jeeps-historically revered cars because they were used post WWII to harvest the mountainous terrain–that the kids could ride around in.

We stopped into Fábrica de Chocolates for strawberries dipped in rich chocolate produced right there in the shop, Kafe del Alma for fresh pressed coffee, and ice cream paletas across the street at Delipaleteria Salento.

We climbed up a mountain of stairs that make the stairs on 167th street in the Bronx (made famous by the Joker movie) seem like a step stool to get up to one of the many miradors in the area that overlook the town and make you feel like you can reach up and touch the clouds.

7.

At some point, we were asked by a woman posted up outside of a building if we were interested in riding horses.

Yes, of course, we said.

She led us down a dirt road where a man stood with horses tied to a fence. After a quick WhatsApp exchange–our only “paperwork” for the afternoon–we saddled up. My son rode with his grandma, leaving me on a beautiful white horse with an ego that insisted on leading the pack.

The horse charged ahead on a route it seemed to know by heart. I’d ridden before, so at first I was cooling–zipping along dirt roads, taking in the countryside, and enjoying my solitude, which is hard to come by in a country of tiny spaces packed with people, in a small home packed with relatives, and in a smaller bedroom packed with my own family.

In my fitted and Air Maxes, alone on a horse, with no one around to guide me or help me, just the expanse of a Salento countryside before me, I pictured myself a modern cowboy, or some explorer riding into new, unexplored land. I’ve never been into travelogues, or settler diaries or even Gulliver’s Travels (I recall, in fact, telling a professor in college who asked me why I wasn’t engaging in discussions in class around the novel, “that shit is boring”) but for some reason, riding this white beast whose taut muscles bulged under my legs, I felt like I could finally understand the men who populated these narratives–or more so, understand the appeal of exploring a foreign terrain and all the thoughts and senses that might suddenly appear to you like a gift.

This became even clearer as my horse kept pushing faster and faster, like he was on his own mission to ride and, sensing I was game, or perhaps sensing I was having an epiphany I needed to have, decided to take me on it. He broke into a full sprint, galloping up and down the sloping pavement cracked straight through with thick vines and I thought I might fall or get launched off the side of the mountain range.

And yet, despite this fear, this feeling of near-death, or perhaps because of it, I felt so alive; exhilarated. I had the sensation that in this modern world of screens and notifications and technology and sophistication, none of it, despite all its flash and promise, could eclipse this feeling right here: the innate, ancestral thrill of flirting with the edge of destruction.

When the horse finally slowed down, I had a huge smile on my face. I laughed, all by myself, alone on that path. I suddenly understood my son’s reaction earlier that morning at the river.

8.

Our last excursion of the trip was to Parque Tematico Quimbayas, a water park about an hour outside of the city that we discovered on Instagram and figured the kids might enjoy (again, if they are entertained, all is well).

We lapped up in the car once more. My father-in-law drove the car I was in, following his nephew who knew the way. He drove for about 15 minutes, just enough to get us out of the city center, when his nephew called to say he’d gotten an alert on his phone that there might be a police checkpoint up ahead.

My father-in-law–generally an even keeled man–pulled over and started to freak the fuck out. He didn’t have his driver’s license on him because it was his American license and he didn’t like to carry that identification out of fear that people might discover he was not just a regular Colombian citizen but an American citizen, too, and therefore rob him, extort him, or worse. (These things happen.)

Fearful of the trouble that might come with getting stopped by corrupt cops without identification, his eyes, and the eyes of everyone else in my car, landed on me, since I had my license and was clearly a tourist, a capital G, gringo–who the cops are less inclined to fuck with.

I had never before driven in Colombia. Although I drive plenty in Miami, every time I’ve been in the country, a more experienced driver of the city and its chaotic, narrow roads has taken the helm. I’ve always ceded that seat with no problems. For as much as I’ve come to the country, I’d never felt I’d graduated to the point where I could drive in it, where I could deal with the stampedes of motos and cars swerving in and out of thin lanes, and the traffic lights so minuscule and few and far between that they might as well not even be there.

But something about that horse ride the day before gave me confidence I couldn’t ever reach for before. As I sat in the driver’s seat of the Camry, I was still nervous, I won’t front–even though I was 100 percent fronting to everyone in the car, including my kids who I never reveal an ounce of fear to out of some ancient machismo far too ingrained in me to rid myself of. But within a couple minutes of following the car ahead of me, I calmed down. I realized, naturally sticking my nose into lanes, cutting people off at the appropriate times, and leaning into a familiar aggression in the driver’s seat, that despite all my previous fears, I had been prepared for this.

I had learned to drive in the mayhem of Fordham Road in the Bronx, at an old driving school, with an instructor who smelled like he bathed in Newports and Hennessy, and who told me on the first day that it didn’t really matter if I used two hands on the wheel or one, but that I would look a lot cooler and like I knew what I was doing if I only used one. I had built on those early skills by driving on Dyckman Avenue in Washington Heights, where I lived when I purchased my first car and learned how to whip it expertly around all the double parked cabs and Escalades used as outdoor sound systems for the Dominicans smoking hookah late at night. And I had perfected my driving by moving to Miami, where highway speed limits were never enforced and where using your signals to alert other drivers on the road which direction you were heading in was basically a challenge for them to speed up and stop you.

Thus, I conquered the highway with ease. The road eventually narrowed to a strand of hair, full of craters better suited for a Willys Jeep than a Camry. Still, I carefully bounced us through and made it to the water park in one piece.

9.

The park appeared out of nowhere—a compound with two big pools. One had a swim-up bar, a cave behind a waterfall, and a slide that shot you out like a cannon. Outside of the pools, it was all Instagram traps—a massive swing that swung you toward the valley, a wooden hand you could stand inside, palm outstretched over the forest.

My son and I hit the water slide. Each time it threw us so fast into the water below that I was certain this particular slide would be illegal in the United States. By our fourth trip I was so focused on keeping him from flying off that I didn’t notice my $600 Warby Parkers slip away to the bottom of the murky water. When I came up for air I couldn’t see them anywhere; couldn’t see anything, since I’m effectively blind without glasses.

I parked my son on the edge of the pool and dove to the bottom, but bodies kept raining on me. When I asked the crowd up at the top of the slide to pause, I thought they’d dismiss me as a silly tourist who should have known better, but the group of beer-drinking Colombian men up there surprised me by agreeing, and wishing me well.

I searched for five minutes with no luck and started imagining the rest of the trip half-blind. Then someone shouted: “Try the slide again, land where you landed before.”

A genius.

I launched myself down again. I focused less on my velocity and more on my feet. I kicked around, felt the frames and surfaced with the glasses in hand. The crowd above clapped, and for a brief moment, I was the hero of the pool.

10.

On the following Sunday morning, we hit the airport early–mostly for the food. Airport food in America is usually buns, but in El Eden, the Armenia airport, there is an amazing, little restaurant with menus the size of stone tablets and a waitress who hates her life that you can gorge on on your way out of the country.

I got the bandeja paisa–a dish concocted to fill up farmers for a full day of work in the fields that includes rice, beans, a fried egg, chorizo, steak, plantains, and chicharron. I am not a farmer, but I figured I would be on a plane with my two children and then going through immigration, and getting to my car parked in the airport lot, so therefore the long journey ahead justified the meal.

After finishing off our food and saying our goodbyes to family, we made our way through security.

The past two times I’ve tried to leave Armenia, I have been pulled aside for a “random” check. They separate me from my family, pat me down, double check all my bags and belongings, and ask me why I was visiting the country, where I went, who I stayed with, if I had any plants or drugs on me, and so forth.

No one has told me this is true, but I believe this is done because to these cops it is unusual that American tourists who are not also Colombian actually come to this part of the country. In fact, I read the whole song and dance as one big question: Tell us, why the fuck are you really here?

But in my third time in the city, and my fifth time in the country, after having conquered a horse, the highway, and an extremely miniature version of the seas, I guess I passed enough tests, or perhaps gained a certain level of confidence I didn’t previously possess on my past trips, because the security let me sail right through without so much as one curious glance.

It felt right.

Because on this trip to Armenia I gained more than yet another Colombian stamp on my passport, updated photos with my wife’s family, and a couple pounds of fat made of delicious starch and meat. Sitting on the flight, stuffed between my toddlers, the trip no longer felt like a waste of PTO days, and the city itself no longer felt like some random, out-of-the-way town an American tourist has no reason to visit. It felt like home.

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He came to meet me at the airport around nine. He rushed to me in a frenzy, because I had been sending him distressed messages all night.

I had taken the cheapest route I could find: Indonesia to Malaysia, Malaysia to Japan, with a six-hour layover in between. I had only bought the ticket four days before, because until then Sean and I were uncertain about what we were doing. We could hardly ever make up our minds together.

By the second flight my body had turned on me. I got my period immediately after eating beef. The man next to me had one of those haircuts that was only long in the back. His breath smelled so strongly of tonsil stones that I felt sick even when he exhaled through his nose. He faced me for the entire flight and talked about crypto. I swear. And every time the plane shifted, my internal liquids sloshed.

I kept texting Sean things like “help” and “I’m gonna die.” So when I landed, he was shaken. That was a thing about us: I would unload, he would absorb. He would unload, and I would absorb. And nobody would feel better.

There were maybe three things that Sean cared about, and he cared about them with intensity. I was more balanced. I cared moderately about eight or twelve things. And I was always able to let them down. For example, I ate a tomato sandwich every day for a year. I lived for them. And then one day I just woke up and I couldn’t eat them anymore.

Sean’s three things were books, writing books, and cigarettes/coffee. One of the three had to be in rotation at all times or else things would spin out. I generally loved this about him: he was unyielding about what he wanted. He didn’t dilute it or soften it. He only ever wanted to write, or to inform his writing. And he loved it with clear eyes.

I didn’t really understand why I was in the picture. Since my existence contradicted his access to his things. So I wondered if Japan would show me a fourth thing.

He was nervous about the bnb. I couldn’t figure out why. He led us through a neighborhood of crisp-looking buildings. There was a spire dominating the skyline. It was like the Freedom Tower or the Eiffel Tower except it was a radio station that was connected to a sprawling mall. All the shops and restaurants we passed promised a view of it, as if it was not towering in the sky.

I slept for four hours. When I woke, Sean gave me a teriyaki chicken sandwich and he had washed the outfit I wore on the plane at the laundromat. He was always all or nothing. And when it was all the question hovered to me, of when it wouldn’t be. We walked through a park, then a shrine of blooming jasmine. For dinner we had cold noodles that we dipped in flavored broth. Sean ate his noodles in about one bite, then got really confused about ordering more. I gave him mine, which was fine. I am hardly ever hungry.

The next morning I wanted us to rise together and have a day, like how people do. I mapped to a restaurant that was Victorian English woman themed: dark wood paneling, old fashioned clocks, waitresses wearing bonnets. The only food on the menu was toast and pancakes that were remarkably fluffy and dry. They tasted like sponges with butter on top. The coffee was good though, served in teacups.

Gluten makes me stupid, and I swear I am allergic to maple syrup. But since we were in love, laughing about this meal was the whole point of it. Any discomfort was a way to know each other better.

There were small instances where we were off. Sean would walk fast and ahead, usually focused on one of his things, while I lingered over flowers and window displays. I wanted to follow him, and I also wanted him to wait for me, or to see my lingering as something vital. He hated wasting time. I hated rushing. In Japan there are lots of rules. Lines to stand in, arrows to follow, a whole choreography of order. There was a cartoon of a tiger winking and shaking his finger with the message “violations will be prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law.” We laughed about it.

I forget what happened the rest of that day, but I was happy I was there with him, because it automatically meant closeness. Sharing a journey, determining its parameters, having only the amount of time that we had. The sun was bright and the late spring vibes were tense and erotic. He knew Japan well, and was showing himself to me in his knowing of it. He was happy to map and lead and fix my sweater. And he was happy to show himself. There were normally a lot of questions I couldn’t ask him.

The only one of my things which was disabling me was that I had put 12k into a retreat I had decided to host at the last minute. I had never hosted a retreat before, nor been on one, and I was convinced nobody was going to sign up. I kept sending the applicants weird half-emails hinting at it. I needed fourteen random girls to commit to traveling to a remote forest in Finland to do vague activities with me. And time was running out.

That night Sean took a call with his agent out on the street. I couldn’t hear his words but I felt his courage through the window. He came back with snacks from the konbini, a cream puff and pretty cans of beer, and I finally sent a proper email to the applicant pool. It sold out in twenty minutes. We watched a show together in bed, which we had never done before. I tried to memorize what it felt like to lie with him, and do nothing together.

The next morning I felt flushed with fortune from the sell out and I wanted to shop. We hadn’t properly been to Shibuya yet and I wanted to look at dolls and books and clothes.

The trains were quiet and clean. He wrote on his phone about his secret past while I watched his reflection in the subway window.

Sean’s adjacent wish was to get a haircut and then write in a bar, which gave me two hours. I asked my followers where to go and cut in and out of their recommendations. It was a hot rain, and things were either not fitting, or so distressed as to be sad to purchase. I avoided designer bags and the psychic warfare at the Onitsuka Tiger store. I ended up in a four-story resale shop. Floors descended in quality and price until the first floor was pretty much throwaway stuff, metallic skirts with the elastic blown out. I settled on the second floor and bought Dior denim and two tops. Thrilling.

When I went to meet him he was hungry. We ducked into a tall building and pressed every button on the elevator. Each floor opened onto a different restaurant. It felt like that children’s book, where an animal visits every apartment in his building and has dinner with all the different families. We settled on the fourth floor and ordered a pancake with fish flakes, salad, eel, and ume soju that you smash the pickled plums into with a plastic stick. You could smoke inside. Sean loves eel and smoking. I love ume. He loves that I love ume. And I love that he loves that I love ume. But I do not love that he loves eel or smoking necessarily, I feel neutral about it. We went home in the dark rain.

The next day for breakfast we went to a garage-like place that served eggs, toast, and coffee, which was just fine. Sean did stuff on his laptop and I worked on my phone.

When it seemed like he was finishing, I told him I wanted to look at old books in Jimbocho. We went to three shops. The whole time I knew that he wanted to be outside, smoking or writing. In the last shop we went into, all of the books were photos of the same girl. Some were styled like porn but in most of them she just looked pretty. Posed in school clothes, a nurse’s outfit, a party dress, laughing by the water fountain with her friends.

“What do they like about this one?” I asked him, pointing to the water fountain.

“Maybe they like when she’s happy,” Sean said.

I remember that night. Sean wanted to go out with me and do something special. I stalled for way long, fucking around on the computer. Not because I had some north star to follow but because I felt that I needed to toil at something to satisfy patrons and viewership. Like suffering is the security. I have not been fighting the good fight. I got lucky with internet money when I was twenty and have been trying to prove I am worthy of it ever since.

Sean waited patiently while I found something to say. By the time I was done, it was ten p.m. We found the only place still open near our bnb. There was horse meat on the menu. He ordered everything I pointed to, like we were celebrating.

There aren’t many people who really know Sean. But I do. He wanted to keep an umbrella over my head like we were kids inside a cartoon. But the walls kept breaking down, around both of us.

Love in Tokyo felt like the weather. I held onto the moments where we were the only two people in the world. It rained and rained there. I loved the rain. I did not mind his smoking. I did not mind the authority of the books. I only ever wanted him to mind me. Maybe more than he was able. Maybe I was the one who was insatiable.

Nobody really says it, but boys are sensitive too. They are like flowers.

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My first trip to China was in the Summer of 2007; I was 25 years old and knew enough to know that China would be changed forever after the 2008 Olympics. I knew that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t see it before the transformation because I heard old timers talk about Hong Kong before the hand-off in ‘97.

Simply put, I didn’t want to miss China.

And I didn’t.

What I didn’t know was that the best part about the China I was about to witness was that it didn’t want anything at all.

***

It was my 2L Summer in law school, but I was already checked out. I had won a NYC Minority Bar Fellowship my 1L year and secured an offer at a Top-50 firm so I cruised, as I had, through most of my academic career to that point.

Most people who secure jobs their 1L year try to get a better job their 2L year, but I didn’t care because I was told that the Top-50 firms all generally pay the same amount and I didn’t have much interest in the law besides my internship at The Innocence Project, which of course paid nothing.

At the firm, my most prized skill was the ability to play fantasy football. As a writer for Rotowire, when they were the dominant fantasy sports publication, I was able to bill hours of fantasy football research to certain “matters”.

My master plan was to make whatever I could make at the firm, until I was eventually fired for being useless besides an ability to play fantasy sports, flip it into Nike SBs, streetwear, weed, then sell it all at a profit and retire.

This is what my studio apartment at 201 E. 12th Street looked like that summer.

I was mentally fat and comfortable and satiated.

In scientific terms, I was a real ungrateful, know-it-all, piece of shit, which was an unknowing pattern because nothing was ever good enough for my parents. They demanded academic excellence and I achieved it, but I was never curious which is a really boring refrain, but sometimes what is boring is true.

In 2007, I had no concept of any of this.

I saved most of the money, but set aside about 10k for a summer in Beijing because I was curious about China.

***

My Big Aunt had an old friend who’s son, Greg, lived in Beijing and offered to be my de facto guide. Greg picked me up at the airport, took me to a fantastic Sichuanese dinner at a popular restaurant with his mother then drank Moutai late into the night before dropping me off at the dorms I would be staying at.

I had signed up for a Chinese language course intending to attend some classes, but ultimately only went to two. It was still a great deal though because enrolling in the program and staying in the dorms was significantly cheaper than going to a hotel.

Of course, when being hosted you should always bring a gift for your host. I wanted to bring Greg something decidedly American, and of the moment, so I chose Obama T-shirts since it was 2007. Before Shepard Fairey or anyone else printed Obama T-shirts, I made Chicago Bulls T-Shirt Jerseys that said OBAMA 08 on them, walking around with grocery bags full of tees, selling them to people on the train, on the street, and in boutiques like Union or King Stampede.

When I gave Greg the T-shirt, he asked me, “Do Americans like Bush?”

Greg, wanting to be polite, mentioned that his decisions were confusing and that he didn’t seem to be the best public speaker. As I traveled through Beijing that summer, this was a constant theme. Everywhere I went, every cab I got into, people asked me what I thought about George W. Bush because I was clearly American by the way I dressed, but I could also speak fluent Mandarin.

I became a lightning rod for everyone’s burning questions about America, the Asian-American perspective, and how it was possible someone who seemed so “slow” and “out of touch” could be the President of the most dominant country in the world.

Going to China that summer, I expected a lot of Chinese pride.

As a Chinese-Taiwanese person in America, I was feeling it. There was talk about China’s return to the global stage coupled with the initial rumblings of Chinese fear since every thing was already made there; people were starting to respect Chinese food; there was ample attention surrounding preparations for the ‘08 Olympics and Yao Ming was becoming a force in the NBA.

But when I went to basketball courts or, say, the Forbidden City, I was the only one wearing a Yao Ming jersey.

What I did see were Allen Iverson jerseys EVERYWHERE. On every street in Beijing at that time in 2007, most Chinese kids wanted to be Allen Iverson.

Being from DC, I was a rabid Georgetown fan and still remember where I was as an 11 year old watching Allen Iverson’s first game: at this kid, Mike Isler’s house. I didn’t miss a single televised game of AI’s college career, but when Yao came onto the scene, I flipped. I wore Yao Ming jerseys everywhere because I related to his experience immigrating to the NBA, getting shit on by people like Charles Barkley or Shaquille O’Neal (people who were my heroes growing up), and I just wanted to see him win. If I could see Yao win, then it was as if I could win in America too.

But people in China couldn’t give a fuck less!

It was as if I’d been tricked into some sense of national pride for a country I didn’t even grow up in. That all the jokes I heard and all the taunts about being Chinese had distracted me from enjoying being American, which in the minds of Chinese kids at that time was SO much better.

My childhood as an immigrant in another country made me yearn for and defend something I didn’t even understand: being Chinese.

Sure, people in politics or media probably had a lot to say because they could perhaps piggy back on Yao’s success, write op-eds or do whatever the equivalent of a Substack Newsletter was in 2007. But PEOPLE simply didn’t care because they lived in a city and country where you could mind your business, provide for your family, and have fun without any acknowledgment or interaction with the global rat race going on.

They didn’t have to compete.

They didn’t need representation or reinforcement or pride about being Chinese.

They just were.

That is until the preparations for the Olympics started to encroach on their neighborhoods.

***

After two weeks of hitting the legendary restaurants everyone tells you to hit like Quanjude or Da Dong for peking duck, I started to hang out in Hutongs.

Hutongs are simply put old alleys. The word comes from the old Mongolian word for “water well” signifying the communities that would form around a water well in ancient times. There isn’t anything you would geotag in a hutong. Sure, there were a couple good noodle spots, snack spots, but really it was a place to hang out unbothered and observe “China”.

For Chinese people, it’s simply their home like how Orchard Street was simply home to Jewish immigrants or Alphabet City was simply Loisaida to Latino immigrants. In the same way I’d play ball and cop coco helado sitting on a bench in the lower, that’s what it was like in Beijing’s hutongs in 2007.

Some people may feel there’s nothing to see or do in a hutong, but to me it was everything. This was the “China” I came to see. The China that resulted from the Opium Wars, the devastation of World War 2, the decision to close its doors to the rest of the world until 1977, and landed most of the country in abject poverty.

I’d seen this version of life in hutongs from films like Shower, Beijing Bicycle, or Jia Zhangke’s masterpiece Xiao Wu about the town pick pocket.

This life was hard. What those movies depicted and I experienced observing life in the hutongs was life without any promise. They could pray, they could beg, they could work their asses off the rest of their walking days and never ascend because there simply wasn’t opportunity in the hutongs.

I didn’t know what it was yet, but I was convinced there was something to learn here.

Whenever I sat in the hutongs for an afternoon, one of the old timers would ask me, “What are you doing here? You like this?”

They didn’t understand why someone from America with money and opportunity and good health would want to be in a place like the hutongs, but after several visits a narrative started to reveal itself. My appearance started to shed a lot of its accessories: sunglasses, jewelry, hats, and eventually I started to roll my shirt up and sit with a Beijing Bikini like every one else. I went from eating Peking Duck to 5-cent noodles with barely any discernible protein washed down with Erguotou, a Sorghum based alcohol produced and distributed by government distilleries that we drank in plastic cups even though it immediately melted the edges on contact.

Of course, the therapeutic benefits of the hutong were minimal since I was projecting a lot of it.

When I wasn’t with the old timers, I got in arguments with people my age shooting dice playing drinking games. When I played basketball at the park, I didn’t respect the foul someone called and ended up in a 1v5 fist fight that spilled into the barber shop next door.

When I expressed my frustrations with life, basketball, or dice games, the general consensus from the old timers was simply to “take it easy” and look at what you have. Nothing I was frustrated about seemed worth it to them and in the same way they helped me accept my station in life, they seemed to understand the benefits to theirs as well.

But ultimately, nothing is immune to change. As the hutongs were being knocked down in the Summer of 2007, I saw photographers shooting the “New China” through the rubble of the old China. What was left of the hutongs simply framed a new portrait.

In particular, one photographer Xu Yong had work at 798, China’s first recognized and protected arts district, where I saw images like this preserving the history of the hutongs.

By the summer of 2008, China awoke from its slumber and arrived on the global chess board in an axis shifting way. When the olympics began, most of the hutongs had been destroyed. A few are now preserved as cultural landmarks with rows of street vendors installed for the enjoyment of tourists and it looks like this.

China is a super power and I can’t fault Xi Jin Ping or The Chinese Dream. This generation of children born in Beijing are starting from a place with promise. They have a chance, they have mobility, and with that comes self-determination.

While the people in hutongs helped me “take it easy”, that’s not their function. They aren’t old wisemen to keep in hutongs like Shamu at Sea World waiting to dole out advice. By joining the rat race and taking their place on the world stage, China gave its people choice.

But as we understand in America, choice can be a very dangerous thing that requires immense self-control when tethered to a world that moves and changes by the millisecond. I don’t even think it is possible to exercise the level of reflection and self-control necessary when our actions are visibly projected to the ends of the Earth with incredible force and speed without any visibility of the cost.

All of us are constantly shouting and posting into the void surprised to receive backlash or negative commentary, but it should actually be expected. How could any of us have the foresight or understanding to know how someone is feeling in another city, time zone, or country with any real certainty when I could barely understand the thoughts and feelings of people I sat with in the hutongs for hours on end.

When we visit a place for a few days, we think we saw it. We hit the top 5 restaurants, take the photo, post the video, write the newsletter, but all of those things are self-justifications. They are actions deflecting the very real possibility that we don’t know shit in an effort to preserve self-image on the internet. After spending all this money to travel, the last thing you want to feel is that you lost the plot or missed a spot or did it wrong.

I stayed in Beijing for 2 months.

I missed pretty much everything you are supposed to do besides eat Peking Duck, but it was one of the most important trips of my life sitting in hutongs on a stool with a Beijing Bikini on, getting a glimpse of China before it was gone.

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It looks simple, humble, perhaps even underwhelming, but if you spend time in New England, you know what this is: a steak tip.

I’d never heard of steak tips until my wife picked me up from Amtrak and told me, “My Mom put Senna (our son) to sleep so we’re going to get steak tips.”

Regional foods like New England steak tips, a North Shore Beef, mumbo sauce from DC, gator tails with swamp sauce in Florida, Carolina BBQ with vinegar sauce, Chengdu rabbit heads, traditional sweet wood smoked jerk chicken, Memphis-style BBQ Spaghetti, etc. are my favorite genre of food.

There’s nothing better than pulling up to a barbecue in a secondary or tertiary city where an Unc or Auntie is in the backyard with an off-cut of meat and a secret sauce.

There’s nothing worse than seeing that particular dish end up at the Cheesecake Factory.

But there’s also nothing better than the feeling after months of living abroad -somewhere like Beijing or Shanghai - when you duck into The Cheesecake Factory for the worst version of that beloved regional food because you simply need a hit of Americana realizing that Shakespeare really knew some shit when he said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

People debate the 100 best restaurants or dishes every few seasons, but anyone who has ever watched Ratatouille knows there is no match for the combination of food + memories. When food can trigger a memory and bring up feeling in the diner, that’s it. Game over. The restaurant has successfully pulled the sword out of stone.

In my experience, the regional food of your youth is always the most powerful because every single moment that dish was physically present in your life rises up like a 2025 climate crisis flash flood ironically distracting you from end of times bullshit to remind you how wonderful this world is.

For most New Englanders it comes as a shock when they come of age, venture from home, walk into a sports bar and realize that steak tips are not on the menu. They go to the butcher looking for loin flap only to be told they’ve ground it all into hamburger.

Steak tips are ubiquitous on New England menus as important as clam chowder or a caesar salad, but like jerk chicken in Jamaica or Oh-ah-mi shwa in Taiwan, they are regional delicacies born out of struggle and necessity that people in this particular region of the world created to solve a problem.

On every cow, there is about 6 to 7 pounds of what butchers call “loin flap”. French restaurants get away with selling it as a “Bavette Steak”, but Greek immigrants in the North Shore discovered that it took very well to dressings so they started to marinate it with Italian Dressing, Worcestershire, A-1, and sold them as steak tips.

While steak tips aren’t as soigné as bavette, these Greek immigrants made a lot more money than French Cafes selling bavette steak specials with loin flap leftovers because they chose accessibility over sophistication. By creating a “steak” offering for working class bar patrons who couldn’t afford Ribeyes and NY Strips, the Greeks in turn created an opportunity to make a living for themselves.

The first spot that Natashia took me to get steak tips was The Lazy Dog. We pulled up about 45 minutes before they closed and quickly ordered steak tips with rice pilaf. As we waited for the steak tips, the bartender hosting trivia night asked the final question of the evening: “What fruit has only one seed?”

“Avocado.” said Natashia.

Seeing an opportunity to be right for once in our relationship, I shouted, “Peach!”

Everyone at the bar wrote their answers down on a piece of paper and turned it in.

A few minutes later, as the bartender tallied up the entries, the steak tips arrived.

I took one bite and wasn’t immediately sold.

The texture felt like a cross between hanger steak and bottom round, which gets no one excited. There wasn’t much intermuscular fat or marbling and it was served in large chunks, but something about the marinade and the char of the steak kept me coming back.

After a few bites, I started to appreciate the bouncy, chewy, sofa cushion-esque texture of this muscular cut contrasted by the char from a hard sear. Like flank steak, tri-tip, or skirt steak, there is joy in the struggle to chew and digest. The marinade was also distinctly familiar but completely foreign. Something was going on that I couldn’t put my finger on and my obsession with steak tips began.

Halfway through dinner, the bartender announced, “A fruit with only one seed is… a peach.”

“Ah fuck I said avocado!” shouted the woman across the bar who lost trivia night on that question.

I said nothing and plowed through rice pilaf.

“You like the tips?” asked Natashia.

“Obsessed.”

“What do you think is in the marinade?”

“It tastes like Korean barbecue cut with Worcestershire sauce.”

“Really? Let me try.”

She took a bite, pondered it, and agreed.

“I could see that. You should ask my Mom. She sells marinade to a lot of places.”

Paula, my mother-in-law, works in food service and sells tips as well as marinades to a lot of the bars and grilles on the North Shore that serve steak tips, but as her generation gets older these spots are starting to disappear so I became curious.

“Paula would it be crazy if the Lazy Dog is marinading their tips in something like Korean BBQ and Worcestershire?”

“Not at all. A lot of my customers use this sauce called Aw-Sum Sauce.”

“Aw-Sum Sauce?”

“Yeah, it’s this Chinese thing called Aw-Sum Sauce.”

I checked out the ingredients: high fructose corn syrup, water, salt, soybean paste, and immediately recognized it as a simplified Char-Siu marinade.

“Oh shit, so a lot of these New England Steak Tips are basically Char Siu Sirloin Flap.”

“Yup.” said Paula.

“Wait, that makes sense cause The Newbridge Cafe has a really red sauce too.” said Natashia.

I went on Reddit to research steak tips and found that the most popular spots in order were: Champions in Peabody, The Lazy Dog, and The Newbridge Cafe, which had been open the longest. I also found an incredible article by Rachel Leah Blumenthal confirming the Greek immigrant origin story beginning at the Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus, which was the steakhouse of Natashia’s childhood.

When Natashia and Paula told me that Greeks invented steak tips, I wanted to believe them, but due to the sheer amount of things that Greeks claim to have invented, I needed confirmation from Rachel Leah Blumenthal.

The next day, Paula had to work so we didn’t have a car to drive to either Champions or The Newbridge Cafe, but everywhere we ate, I ordered steak tips. At their neighborhood seafood restaurant, Dockside, I got steak tips with fries. From a random bar on DoorDash, steak tips on salad. Three days later, I’d eaten 6 versions of steak tips all different, all either vaguely East Asian, doused in A-1, Italian dressed, or with some type of re-imagined Worcestershire.

“The Newbridge Cafe has my favorite tips.” said Natashia.

We pulled up to The Newbridge for steak tip date night and I immediately fell in love with the aesthetic and imagine that this image could be found on the Wikipedia page for “Brick Shit House”.

They have all kinds of tips at The Newbridge: steak tips, pork tips, turkey tips, lamb tips, and sausage with your choice of fries, rice, or broccoli.

I got the pork tips and steak tips with garlic broccoli while Natashia got steak and sausage tips with fries. I took a couple bites of the broccoli and my intentions to be healthy had led me down the wrong path so I immediately ordered rice.

I ordered my tips medium rare, which was a mistake. When eating steak tips, you need to forget every thing you know about eating steak because the flavor of the marinade can only be activated if you completely hammer each tip.

If you are going to eat steak tips in New England, do what Paula does when ordering anything that walked and tell them to “burn it”.

When you see the pork tips, you can see the color of char-siu that can be disguised on red meat but it was clear what was going on. They were applying char-siu to the steak tips and a memory I’d completely forgotten went off in my head.

When we opened Baohaus in 2009, Chinese-Taiwanese people only red cooked pork, but I had a lot of homies that were “no pork on my fork” so I would braise skirt or hanger and call it “steak” since it sounded more upscale. It was on the menu as the King Jaffe Joffer Bao until skirt and hanger steak prices went through the roof around 2012 making it impossible to offer it at a price that made sense in a bao.

But to see a similar innovation through the lens of Greek immigrants on the North Shore made it feel right. Like I had been on this path with Natashia and her family all along.

Obviously I was projecting all of this meaning, but as a parent with an interracial child, these moments bring a lot of joy and expunge a lot of the anxiety about my son’s identity. I don’t speak to Natashia about it much, but I remember how the Chinese kids made fun of the mixed kids at Chinese School with orange hair calling them bananas or twinkies. I remember how my Mexican homies called the half white “amigos” casper and I’m very very aware that the best part of dominoes is when people go in on the light skinned homies.

The shit is type funny and absolutely canonical American humor, but I’ve always gotten to laugh at it because my 23&Me is 99.999999% Chinese. To me, twinkie, banana, light skinned jokes were one of the few get-backs being Chinese in this country. It was my time to tell the god damn joke, but as a Dad I’m over here worrying about someone telling my kid he got hair the color of Tang in 8 years.

Senna’s, identity is significantly more complex and it’s something he will have to figure out or ignore. Hate it or love it, Confucius was a very intelligent man, but I will not make Senna read the Analects like my parents did. Maybe by the time he is in high school, we will be post-racial. HA. I doubt it, but I find peace and solidarity in the FACT that none of us can afford steak when we arrive in this country.

You eat tips, you eat flap, you eat bao, you live in East Williamsburg or West Bushwick, which are also made up names but you make it your neighborhood or your family or your steak; and that to me is a very universal immigrant experience.

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In April the extra work stopped at the Christian publisher’s warehouse; all the seasonal gifts had been returned and we’d taken the stickers off all the Bibles. My next job was at a Styrofoam factory, a huge nondescript warehouse full of massive white blocks like fake marble thirty feet tall, which we’d saw down to size with hot wires. The smell of burning foam filled the air and my brain, and the entire vast well-lit warehouse was covered in little pellets of Styrofoam which would follow you home in your pockets and shoes, almost indistinguishable from snow.

It was 2006 and I’d gotten kicked out of my first year at Calvin College, the local Christian university I’d sleepwalked into after growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan with no religious urge. I was still sleepwalking; by the first week at any temp factory job I’d accumulate a few middle-aged men missing teeth, hitting me up for a ride. They’d throw me a few bucks and I couldn’t say no without it getting chilly. It was like life was a trap I’d walked into, and no one was telling me another direction. After a long day inhaling fumes, I’d go back to the places I’d been in high school, trying to stay out of my parents’ house and avoid anybody I knew. Build up enough unsettled and unhappy feeling to make myself leave was the goal, easy enough when the only job I could get was non-union factory work. Paul Schrader once said “When you leave Grand Rapids, if you don't have a lot of energy, you're gonna get as far as Kalamazoo. They're gonna bring you back.” He went to Calvin, too. In his day the whole place was industrious Dutch Reformed celery farmers and furniture makers, with more mid-century coherence, but it was the same grey-skied flatness hours away from Detroit or Chicago. My Chinese-American mother would drive us to Windsor in Canada for dim sum.

People would move to Chicago and then inevitably slink back. No exit to the trap. The namesake of Calvin College, John Calvin, has a signature theological theme, and that is predestination, the idea that everyone is saved or damned at birth. This might have influenced the city a little bit. I’d be giving rides to factories forever.

Downtown (there are richer suburbs, but I never had any reason to go) I drove on a circuit southeast of where Grand River intersected the highway. No direction in any sense, just pent-up frustration, the feeling of waiting for something you don’t know. Abandoned apartment buildings downtown, intermittently squatted by crusties, where you could easily break in and climb to the roof with a full view of all the little tree lined neighborhoods and towards Lake Michigan, about forty minutes straight out, and near Vertigo Music, the legendary record store. Nearby was Morningstar75 and Morningstar76, both dark, twenty-four-hour smoke-filled coffeeshops; the latter next to Yesterdog with their handheld, crumpling, perfect chili dogs, both in Eastown, a historically bohemian enclave of houses with wraparound porches surrounded by Black, Latino, and remnants of older Dutch neighborhoods. Further north was Little Africa, a no-frills Ethiopian restaurant, on Fulton on a little block catering to all these demographics and more.

West Michigan felt like fate had dealt you the wrong hand. There wasn’t anything to aspire to other than fatalism, it was the center of nothing, I wanted to write and that culture did not exist here; real life, then, existed thousands of miles away. I only went places that felt like they didn’t belong, because they were the only ones claiming the space for themselves. Someone like Lou Negash, the owner of Little Africa, was an incomprehensible monument, this intensely easygoing man with no previous experience making food, who immigrated at nineteen from Ethiopia to Grand Rapids during the civil war in the ‘80s, when the whole country was in a turmoil beyond understanding. He’d gone to Grand Valley State—the other school in town—for manufacturing, but already things were drying up as he started working in plastics, and so in 1998 he opened an artifact shop, selling imported sculptures, drawings, and other regional goods. Little Africa, incredibly, turned into a restaurant by popular demand, serving the best food I’ve still ever had, with a laconic confidence and graciousness towards the inability of old white people to understand the mechanics of a finger bowl. That gratefulness and easy mastery was the antithesis of youth and my conception of this place. The opposite of the students at Calvin who all seemed there unwillingly due to fear or parents or inertia. Relaxed, in the pocket, every dream realized, with thankfulness. “You can’t plan anything on this earth, only God’s plan.” Negash says when I call him at the restaurant. “You can think about something, not finish it. God finishes it.” I agree, effusively. The older I get the more I see it. Safety, community, the ability to save money to open a little store, change it up, keep it real. No longer becoming, or searching for a center, you’ve become, you are the center, and when it hits you realize how much of life—outside of a few crucial choices—is dealing with the heaviness thrown at you with however much grace or ability you’ve got, that choice is an illusion.

It was the one time I think I really understood Grand Rapids, with nothing else to do, unable to begin or take stock of life. Feeling implicated that a place I felt trapped by could be freedom for someone else. But feelings are your reality. Banned from campus (it had been disciplinary, breaking and entering into classrooms after hours just to hang out), on the weekend I would drive to Lake Michigan and just sit at Rosy Mound, feeling self-ordered. An empty cold beach as the snow is melting, the lake coming back to life, appealing with no pretension toward extreme beauty. Loitering in order to be set free from time and predestination. Even if it’s your hometown, you can still arrive. Dinner then at Little Africa, where I’d have really the only option, an extreme, seasoned Jasmine tea along with colorful, strongly spiced vegan dishes on injera, lentils, beans, potatoes, finely mixed in sauces simple yet with enough flavor to make me believe that meat and dairy were worthless. And every platter sized and priced to you. If Lou can find a way out of Ethiopia’s most fucked-up moment of modern existence, getting out of Michigan is nothing, even if it’s an opposite trajectory. It’s not the place but the distance between where you’re from and where you’ve gone, the act of making one big choice. I remember sitting by myself, looking at the old ‘40s Dutch pastry shop across the street, sky grey as always, Lou on the phone in the back, stirring a huge boiling pot, the feeling that this was his home and as invited in it became mine, or anyone’s. That what made a place, someone carving out a place for themselves, and the more unassuming the more profound.

So unless you’ve got some heavy plan to change where you’re from, you have to leave if you want to really live. I went back to school, community college, and after started working at a different factory south of the city that refurbished brake shoes for semis full time, with different old men immediately caging a ride. My hair full of grease even after multiple showers as I took the old brakes and scraped off the pads and threw the massive metal pieces covered in grease into machines that pelted them with metal until they were clean and could be repainted and reshoed, doing this for months and months in a Zen state of consciousness until I had enough money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to New York City. I’d never been there before or knew anything about it, but then whatever I’d do would be for real.

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LEFT PANEL: TURISTÁLIA. . .

#FLEETHE4TH. . . (JULY 3). . .

RAVENOUS, HAVING BREEZED EASILY THRU JFK security, we went to Shake Shack, —our last taste of the USA for 2 weeks: we’d been a FitCouple lately (surely doomed on our upcoming romp thru Spain & France).

Gaby got a Chicken Shack & I got a Smoke Shack; fries & a vanilla shake to share: $37 fucking dollars. We chowed bigly. I was moaning, I LOVE BURGERS, washing everything down with the vanilla milkshake. . .

TURNED OUT I FORGOT ANY SORT OF OVERWEAR. I was gonna be cold as fuck on the plane. I always forget something because I pack so hastily; giving myself only about an hour before I leave for the airport. Valiantly, Gaby lent me her sweatshirt; it was ill-fitting & humiliating, but it was better than shelling out $89.99 for the NYPD hoodie at Hudson News.

WHY TRAVEL? . . . (JULY 4: DAY). . .

THERE WAS A LOT OF ANTI-TURISTA chatter coming from Spain; protests about it: people were getting water gunned: —we were nervous; we got off at the Sol station (the central station of Madrid: everything revolves around Sol),

the first thing we saw was an enormous ad for the Book of Mormon, then we turned our heads and there was a cohort of Mickey Mice soliciting photos. . .

WOW this IS, INDEED, a country determined to keep turistas away at ALL COSTS!!!

WE WERE STAYING AT A BNB with a British lady: Henrietta, she moved to Spain from London 37 years ago; she told us after Franco died & they opened the country up, their slogan was, SPAIN IS DIFFERENT; but if the Sol station was any indication, Spain’s suffering from the TimesSquareification afflicting the whole world. . .

The problem is different don’t last, like Darwin says: either the Different makes everything else like It, or It becomes like everything else. . . the world tends toward conformity. . .

the world won’t end in fire but in a billionwide, collective, synchronous whip & nae nae. . .

BUT ONE OF THE REASONS to travel is to see some shit you can’t see nowhere else, right? It would be an infernal result, the world becoming an I <3 NY t-shirt.

That Spanish difference must be in there somewhere, we were looking out for it.

THE REASON ME & GABY TRAVEL is because we liked to walk around new places in each other’s company; & stuff our faces while people around us speak different languages. . . both of us had grown up between countries: my mom is from Rio de Janeiro, both her parents are from Belo Horizonte: we’d grown up spending a lot of time in Brasil.

4 years ago, she’d sent me a message on Bumble: “I love the carioca accent [eyes emoji]”, and I was like, “yeah haha, u r hot”, and the rest is history.

HENRIETTA’S APARTMENT WAS INCREDIBLE & ENDLESS. . . the hallways were like an enormous Castilian onion, you’d peel one twist & turn away to reveal another one & another one!

Pedro Almodovar filmed a scene for his next movie there, just yesterday, she said. We asked her what the scene was and she said, “this couple is staying at a bnb and they think they have the whole place to themselves but in the middle of the night a grotesque stranger shows up with his young girlfriend.”

I said, “and then what?” She said, “I don’t know.”

I WAS REALLY HORNY: NOT from the apartment tour; just from being alive & around Gaby all day. Gaby wanted to nap & shower.

We were staying in a little room in the back of the apartment with no AC, just a window that opened onto a courtyard. Honestly, the fan blowing, too hot to get under the covers but cool enough to sleep: to me that’s ideal.

I didn’t wanna wake up from the nap, but when I heard my alarm go off, I shook Gaby awake, trying to jolt her into quick-coitus, but she swerved me, said we had a city to explore.

I WAS WEARING A GREEN button-down short-sleeve shirt with black shorts & a worn-down fanny pack, —ostensibly to dissuade pickpockets, but it functioned more as a siren to herald my impending oafish turistagem.

My apparel has always been a point of contention when traveling with Gaby, —on our first trip together, in Paris, I wore a ragged t-shirt advertising the Spot Bar in Steubenville, Ohio, with basketball shorts & flip flops as we toured Saint Sulpice, in the reverent silence, all you could hear was my clomping, smacking, flops. . ., —but I had leveled up a bit,

(and after the first day, embarrassed, I ditched the pack, I was tired of shoving things up my fanny. . .).

COMO SE DICE. . . JAMON?. . . (JULY 4: EVENING). . .

OUR FIRST STOP WAS A BAR called Matador, near the Sol station. . . The most brilliant thing about Spain is that when you say, “can I get a cerveza?” they don’t say, Oh which of the million options do you want? Do you want it in a tall glass, a short glass? Blah, blah, fucking BLAH. . . NO!

THEY JUST BRING YOU A BEER! (And it costs around 3 euros 50.) Here was a tiny middle finger to American hoopla. Spain IS different!

BEERED UP, WE WENT WALKING in the Madrid heat; clowning Henrietta because she had made such a big stink about how hot it was. Like bitch, U ever heard of BRASIL?!?!

But soon, we started feeling it. Walking up hill to El Retiro Park, Gaby was flagging; I had to make an executive decision: pitstop.

I said we should just go into the Farmacia to get some water, but the world ain’t made up of Duane Reades, you quickly realize. . . it looked hopeless. . . but when we turned the corner there was an oasis: a bodega.

We popped in; I got a triangular Toblerone popsicle. She got an extremely phallic fruity thing, we got a 1.5L bottle of water and a coconut water: 8 euros.

Easy to spot Americans: just peep who’s chugging the jumbo waters on the sidewalk. . . we were worried it would be a clarion-call to the water gun brigade, but none came.

We threw our basura away in a dumpster under a sign (maybe intentionally) ill translated into English that read: HERE YOU’RE GARBAGE.

As we walked toward El Retiro, Gaby was giving her popsicle OD sloppy toppy: given that I was still horny from being alive & un-nut, I was extremely jealous.

ME LLAMO TURISTA. . . (JULY 5: DAY). . .

HENRIETTA SERVED US BREAKFAST AT 8:30AM, where we finally met her slinky, floppy, supposedly-scaredy cat Calypso. We ate yogurt, cantaloupe, and I drank almost a whole pot of coffee with leche.

I thought, for a second, I was lactose intolerant, so I wasn’t leche-ing, but Gaby was like, “that’s pussy shit, no you’re not”, so I was back on my leche and it was treating me fine. Henrietta remembered, 15 minutes in, that she made us toast.

Then we set off for the Museo Nacional del Prado.

THE PRADO WAS AMAZING. I didn’t really fuck with paintings or museums until I started dating Gaby. My appreciation of visual art work is inextricable from our trips to museums together.

Neither of us really know anything, so we find a way of talking about what we like about the work together; we’ve discovered our own museum idiom; so it’s one of my all-time favorite things: museum-romping with her.

We strolled right to the Bosch room. Jheronimous Bosch is the most GOATed painter. . . you see so much goddamn dead Jesus in these museums that it’s like ENOUGH ALREADY!!!,

but some painters, like Bosch, transcend the familiar forms & tropes with the power of their imaginative thinking: when you see it face to face it’s impossible not to be astounded.

Especially since his famous triptych, known as The Garden of Earthly Delights can be read, I think, as an allegory about turistating:

you get Adam & Eve in the left panel, but we don’t see them ever Fall, and the central panel, it’s a hog wild fuck fest, everybody’s naked & dancing, eating big delectable fruits,

—and in Spain everyone’s telling you to “disfrutar” all the time, and that’s what they’re doing in the Bosch panel: disfruiting. . . it’s like an untrammeled world, the purity of a place before you visit it,

like when Columbus first pulled up on his first perfect voyage; him & his men were extraordinarily lucky turistas, they got to see some shit no European EVER got to see:

clouds of parrots, the bluest water imaginable, the overwhelming fragrance of new flowers: it was Eden, and never again did anyone ever get to see it unspoiled:

—and that’s what’s happening in the third panel: the infernal panel: the ruin of paradisiacal play by machinery & financial interests & HOOPLA, and the panel is full of musical instruments: they’re playing the music as memory of the central panel, all they have left are these crumbs of what untrammeled transcendence felt like. . .

I ranted that to Gaby and she said, “who said it was like that?”

“Me, I’m saying it.”

She said, “that’s ridiculous. OK! I have my own theory, what did they eat back then? Idk, slop. OK! Bosch put the instruments in the painting because it always made him think of his favorite slop, so when he looked at the instruments, he thought: yummm.”

THE OTHER, TEDIOUSLY UNAVOIDABLE SUBJECT of paintings is random ass rich people; especially when it’s Powdered Wig Central. We were talking about what will be our version of powdered wigs for the coming generations; I think a good option might be tattoos.

I don’t know how people 200 years in the future will feel if they saw a dude with an anthropomorphic mosquito with angel wings taking up his entire calf (like we saw in the museum), but I think it’ll be something close to chagrin. . .

WE WENT WALKING, POST-PRADO, in the scorching heat. Desperate to get water-gunned: we resorted to extreme turistating; we got a pencil-drawing done by a guy named Nihil: he kept saying that I deserved an award for my smile (he didn’t have a single word to say about Gaby), but I’m not sure he crushed the depiction:

And then I got a picture with a guy in a Gorilla costume,

—which was surprisingly euphoric. But no dice, water gun wise. Rather than dousing or squirting us, the people around me just followed my lead. . .

WE WALKED & WALKED & WALKED & did bits. Talking about what we would name our kids. I suggested Quandrius Quagmirius, we’d call him QQ but Gaby was right: he would always be confused.Then I threw out, Zsuquette Zslurp, or ZZ, for a girl, but Gaby was right: she would probably feel a lot of pressure to perform oral sex.

We finally settled on Wormy Wud (WW), because of the overlooked importance of worms; plus, if she did something foolish, her friends could roll their eyes and said, “wormy wud. . .”

THAT NIGHT WE WENT OUT. First to the Taberna de Oro to watch the Real Madrid game, ostensibly with locals, but it turned out there were only Brasilians there rooting for Vini Jr. I got a Heineken and a Sangria for Gaby,

—ordered it all in perfect Spanish; that’s when it occurred to me that beer is feminine. Sus as fuck. I drank 2 beers and we dipped. . .

The next bar we went in, we immediately heard baile funk music playing. Gaby was like, “let’s dance!” I was like, “I have to go to the bathroom!” She was like, “are you a big strong man, or my liddle ladybug boyfriend?”

I said, “right now, I’m a ladybug that has to urinate.”

Stepping out of the bathroom, I tripped on the stairs and went hurtling forward, hitting my shin on the stair, then I caught myself, lurched up, banged my shoulder on the underside of the handrail. I was in excruciating pain.

When we got on the dance floor, we realized the brasilian funk was just a brutal tease. The DJ had absolutely nothing good to play. We sat in the corner and I had 3 beers, trying to spot the most powdered wig like tattoos. And then we left.

AROUND 2:30AM, WE DECIDED THERE was one last thing to do: McDonald’s. At the McDonald’s, a madrileño locked eyes with me. He was holding a water gun. I saw him consider blasting us. . . and then mercy washed over his face.

I think Bosch would’ve fucking DOUSED us. . . but we were still in paradise. . .

CENTRAL PANEL: TIENE QUE DISFRUTAR. . .

ON THE ROAD. . . (JULY 7: DAY). . .

WE WOKE UP AT 6:45AM GROGGIER than fuck; crept thru the long hallway to the door; when we got there, quiet as mice, we heard huge, distant clomping; I was worried maybe Calypso had transmogrified into an immense Godzillian beast. . .

but it was just Henrietta, sleepy, in her robe, come to say goodbye. She wanted a hug, it seemed; Gaby did too, —nobody jumped. . .

WE CLAMBERED TRUNDLINGLY TO SOL. Soon as we walked in, there was a man, collapsed & unconscious being tended to by the police, —it looked like a drug OD: I was trying to avoid omen-oriented thinking, but that didn’t augur well. . .

Confusingly, infuriatingly, there are different tickets for the different train lines, —and our ostensible leader (me) was brain dead from lack of coffee; befuddledly, we bought tickets that seemed familiar; tried to get thru the turnstile: blocked. Had to go back and get different ones.

We were starting to sweat; the frustration was growing. . . Eventually, we got the right tickets, but couldn’t find the signage for our direction. We tried to ask a cop, but his mouth was so full of doughnuts, he scraped his finger across his neck in the universal symbol for, You’re dead, just to let us know he couldn’t help. . .

But after 45 minutes of here & back & over rigamarole, we were on the train.

IN SPAIN, YOU HAVE TO PAY to get off the train (no rhyme intended). We didn’t have the right airport ticket, so we had to sneak thru the turnstile with a buddy who didn’t know we were on their ass. My ass-buddy turned around and cracked up when he saw what I was doing.

WE GOT TO THE CAR RENTAL PLACE. The incredibly aptly named Carlota ran me thru the gist,

“You don’t have insurance, so if something happens, YOU’RE FUCKED! You got me, you wreck-prone SCUM!? Oh? You’re driving to France too? You have no chance of bringing this car back without thousands of dollars worth of damage. FUCK YOU!”

I gave her 5 signatures, praying to the Spanish God to bring this car back intact.

GABY’S SCARED OF FLYING, BUT she has one of the most laissez-faire attitudes to car travel I’ve ever seen; it must be the Manhattan in her: she spent her whole life riding trains & walking; she don’t got an iota of healthy respect for highway danger; so it’s harder to get kudos for my obvious car-ambulatory heroism.

The first song she played as we were pulling out was The Smiths, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”,

“And if a 10 ton truck kills the both of us/To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”

I was like, “can you play anything else?”

WHEN WE GOT IN, I warned her, “I’m gonna be an asshole, sometimes, OK? But if I am, I just need you to chill. Be cool!”

As soon as we got on the road she was bewildered by the directions and I was an asshole and we had a 1 minute spat. . . but soon we were on the road, in a rhythm, safe & EZ. . .

NOT THE EASIEST DRIVING UP THRU THERE, in Basque country. The truckful mountainside 2 lane road littered with upturned burnt cars, as if we were entering an apocalyptic zone; every 10 kilometers a new tunnel. I was gripping the wheel pretty tight.

Gaby, with her road-danger-obliviousness, was all, LOOK AT THIS!, LOOK AT THAT! to the landscape. Worse, it was starting to rain & I was falling asleep. I asked Gaby to blast the music and sing along at irregular volume intervals. . .

THE CITY IS CALLED SAN SEBASTIAN/DONOSTIA because they have two official languages, Spanish, and Euskara (Donostia just means St. Sebastian in Euskara) which is a really old & really weird language.

DONOSTIA OPENED UP BEAUTIFULLY WHEN we walked toward the beach, to the Old Town. We stopped in a big glorious square with a triumphant statue of a guy I’d never heard of; I took a picture in front of it to remind myself of time’s annihilation, not only would this vacation end, but everything would end: traveling was a rehearsal for that: a brief eternity between the receding & forward progressions of your regular life; you had to learn to disfruit your eternity wholeheartedly: it was a reminder to savor my time with my beautiful Gabriella. . .

EATING & EATING & EATING. . . (JULY 8: DAY). . .

GABY WAS SNORING LIKE A WILD BOAR; it was bad enough to where I was gonna wake her up, tell her to quit it, but when I lightly brushed my fingers against her leg, she stopped like I flipped a switch.

WE WENT OUT FOR A breakfast she was totally desperate for: supposedly the world’s best tortillas. A spot called Bar Antonio. It’s like a breakfast pie. I looked at it, it looked cheesy. . . I don’t eat cheese except on pizza & cheesecake.

I was cranky already from the surprisingly cold air: I was sans-overwear, or, overwear-less. I was in a mood, I’ll admit. Gaby went to order 2 slices, I was like: I don’t want that shit, just get one.

We sat down. I was being an asshole. I took one bite of the tortilla and it was honestly some of the best things I’ve ever ate; there’s only 4 ingredients: potato, eggs, onions, & peppers: —it was fucking delicious. It only cost 3 euros 80. I was like, “this ain’t bad. . . let’s get another.”

So I had paid for just about everything on the trip, including Gaby’s plane ticket and all but one of the bnbs, but Gaby brought all the cash; she’d been giving me some. . . I suddenly realized that when I paid with her cash, she treated it as if I was the one paying. It was a life-hack. I got all the credit for paying and none of the detriment. I paid for everything with her money all day and she treated me like a god.

AFTER THE DOUBLE TORTA we went to a coffee shop called Cafe con Leche. I was still surly, trying to surmount my surliness by acknowledging the fact. There was a pile of oranges at the bar next to an ostensible juice machine. I was like, “let me order some juice.” I practiced: “zumo de naranja.”

Gaby goes, “it’s NARA.” I ordered, “un zumo de nara por favor.” The guy goes, “naranja?” I looked at Gaby pissed, “why the fuck did you tell me it was nara!?”

“Cause you were saying ‘laranja’! It’s with an N.”

“YOU HUMILIATED ME!”

MONTAIGNE’S SURPRISE . . (JULY 9: DAY). . .

DRIVING OUT OF DONOSTIA, WE stopped in Biarritz; I had decided we should stop at Montaigne’s house on the way to Bordeaux, which was kinda out of the way, so I was feeling something of a time crunch, but I didn’t wanna express that, rush Gaby. I knew if I rushed her and the Montaigne house turned out to be super wack, I would experience the ramifications;

in Biarritz, we went into shop after shop. . . I was overfull of the little soaps and knickknacks & local merch. . . feeling fed up. . . ; Gaby said, “Isn’t this place incredible?” I said, “yeah, it’s aight. . .”

Causing what was nearly our first spat of the trip; I was wary of this, too, because we were due for one big fight and everything had been so perfect that it seemed likely that we were gonna fight in Bordeaux. . .

WE TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY toward the Montaigne house. Drove kilometer after kilometer thru bumfuck towns; having spawned in a bumfuck town, I’m always charmed & fascinated by the universality of bumfuckness.

Bumfuck is everywhere. . .

Gaby was powerful on the aux: blasting carioca funk, shaking the vineyard

shacks. Finally we turned off the road toward Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France; as we turned we were faced head-on by a troop of boy scouts, uniformed up, popping at us like deer; they were lucky they didn’t end up as hood ornaments.

We had literally no expectations. The vibe was like we were pulling up to a haunted hayride, out in the damn STICKS. The entrance is through the gift shop; there was a girl with a cartoonish French accent; she charged us 5 euros a piece and said Gaby was very beautiful while I was in the bathroom (a classic French, lesbian seduction: back off pute). . .

you get a complementary wine tasting with your entry; I was like ABSOLUTELY NOT I HAVE TO DRIVE (I had given up a long career of drunk driving after leaving Steubenville);

there was a glass of wine in my hand & I was chugging.

THE MONTAIGNE HOUSE TURNED OUT to be AWESOME. There was nobody there, no supervision, and there were GAMES! I felt like I was at Field Day in Grade School. There was knock the cans down with the ball, archery, French games we didn’t know how to play. . .

Gaby never shot an arrow before but she got a bullseye the first try, and she never threw a ball at cans, but she knocked them all down, easily. . .

MONTAIGNE RETIRED WHEN HE WAS 38 so he could just chill and write what became his life’s work, the Essays. Despite staying holed up in his tower for the last 20 years of his life, he had a lot to say about travel,

“For this purpose, mixing with people is wonderfully appropriate. So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of one of the rich embroideries on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humors of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.”

You DO try to make travel an acquisitive thing, but it don’t matter what you acquire: bullshit knickknacks, the kinda factual knowledge, the trivia he’s talking about that people vainly bring back;

what matters is the brain-rubbing; and that’s especially the joy of traveling with someone you love: it’s unadulterated rubbing-time, you spent the trip knocking your corner off against each other & the foreigners fucking surrounding you.

Montaigne was a pleasure-hound though, at the core; I especially felt it when he said,

“My travels only hurt me by their expense, which is considerable and exceeds my resources. . . I have no wish that the pleasure of roaming should mar the pleasure of repose; on the contrary, I intend that each should nourish and encourage the other. . . my chief aim in life being to live it lazily and leisurely rather than busily.”

I’d worry about my bank account some OTHER TIME. . . you gotta do whatever you can to disfruit life for all its worth. . .

WE WALKED UP INTO MONTAIGNE’S TOWER where he died on the bottom floor in the chapel and where on the top floor he wrote, —well he didn’t write we found out, he actually dictated them to an unnamed, forgotten scribe, looking up at the ceiling for quotes in Greek & Latin he had engraved there, —his Essays. . .

Afterwards we frolicked around delightedly. . . the day was so perfect, the landscape stretching away from the castle was rolling & magnificent. . . there were two donkeys in the stables;

one, Martin, with a bum, bandaged leg, so he moved very very gingerly, and a mischievous bastard named Viking who had to be muzzled because he was biting people all the time; they were posted in the stables that were there since Montaigne lived in the house. . .

I rang an old rusty bell: there was nothing more we could’ve wanted.

We kept going, “YOOO why is the Montaigne house like FUN tho???”, and cackling.

On the way out they gave us another complementary wine tasting and we bought a bottle from them; we were euphoric. . .

The prospect of a fight had completely left my mind.

RIGHT PANEL: THE WAY OF ALL FUN. . .

NEMESIS. . . (JULY 9: NIGHT). . .

DRIVING BACK, I WAS FEELING THE WINE, so was Gaby, we were vibing, but on the way back we got caught in unexpected traffic, and you know the way alcohol wears you down when it’s hot and it’s been an hour since you drank already, that weariness was starting to sink in, entering the city, there was a quibble about directions, suddenly, there was tension in the car; . . . my impression of Bordeaux was that it was a shack in the middle of wine country, but it’s actually a serious city: a serious, un-drivable city. In NYC, I’m always railing against cars, saying we gotta ban all private cars, that’s how we’re gonna fix New York’s problems, but as a driver in an un-drivable city, I was pissed. . .

We turned into the street that was supposed to be the path to the bnb, but the streets to the center of town are blocked off by retractable bollards, with like an intercom next to them, so I parked my car and I pressed the button and said, “hey, no parley Fransay, but I gotta get thru here. . .”

The guy said, “Uhh, you can’t, obviously.” “But I gotta get to my bnb.” “I don’t care, you can’t get through.” “Can I at least go in to turn around?” “NO.”

There was a traffic jam behind me. FUCK. I motioned with my hands for everybody to back up, everyone rolling their eyes at the dumb American, but eventually I got out. Gaby wasn’t pressed, I was MAD, I wanted to turn these Bordeaux pedestrians into crème brûlée, running them over-wise;

from then on, it was circle city, trying to find a way to go. Eventually we put a parking garage into the GPS. Before we got to that one, I spotted another one. There was a guy, parked, texting in the way of the ramp, I had to angle around him and slide in; my left tire went over the curb, and then my right tire did: it seemed too narrow. I was worried it was an exit. I was stressed.

Gaby said, “just go, this is it.” “I don’t know if it’s an entrance.” I saw a symbol for a bicycle, and ridiculously, I thought it might’ve been a parking garage for bicycles. “Yes it is, just go.” I screamed, “IT’S NOT THE FUCKING ENTRANCE! THIS ISN’T A PARKING GARAGE!!” She was flabbergasted, “why are you screaming at me?!”

I said, “BECAUSE I’M FUCKING LOOKING OUT FOR US!!”

Then there was a car right behind us, I went forward. . . Reader, it was indeed the entrance to the parking garage, as it obviously appeared to be.

She was ready to let it go, but I was feeling lectureful & embarrassed. I told her, “you know, I shouldn’t have screamed at you, but I’m the FUCKING DRIVER. You don’t know SHIT about driving. I make the decisions here!”

She was like, “you’re so worried about being right!” I said, “I don’t care about being right! You’re the only one who cares about being right!”

“It’s easy not to care about being right when you’re WRONG!”

WE WALKED OVER TO THE BNB in silence. She walked in front of me. We got to the apartment and it was completely beautiful. . . Gaby didn’t say a thing. She went over and opened the Montaigne wine.

The cork started crumbling. I took it from her and helped her open it, thinking my heroism could prove salvivic. I just wanted to keep lecturing her, was my problem. I pressed the point again about how she doesn’t know SHIT about driving, how even if I was wrong, I was right because I’m in charge,

—and then I said,

“I was looking out for us, I saw TWO CLEAR RED FLAGS: the tires over the curb! The entrance shouldn’t be that narrow! It could’ve been the exit! It could’ve been for bikes for Christ’s sake!!”

“When have you ever seen a parking garage for BIKES?!?!”

“IT COULD’VE BEEN!”

“BUT IT WASN’T!!”

“Oh my god, you just don’t see me!”, I tantrum-ed, throwing myself on the floor. She called me childish and I scoffed “ME?? CHILDISH?? YOU’RE BEING A CHILD!”

She walked out, said she was going to the grocery store, turned her location off. I called her 6 times. She finally answered, came back, cut a little piece of baguette and put cheese and butter on it while she drank the Montaigne wine.

I apologized profusely, but she was not happy with me. . .

WE WENT TO WALK AROUND BORDEAUX, but it was depressing, silent; it seemed like everybody in the city was having a great time except for us. I tried

to small talk a few times, but she was parrying everything. She said she wasn’t hungry; I puffed my chest out and expressed like, if you don’t wanna be happy, I’ll just have a good night myself, and I picked a restaurant, we moped there. . .

WE GOT A TABLE ON THE 3RD FLOOR of a turista steak frites place, L’entrecôte. I started off good in French, “BONJOUR”, you know the vibes; I was determined to show Gaby I wouldn’t let her mood ruin my fun. The waiter asked me what I later realized was, “how do you want your steak cooked?”

I responded, “I’ll take a bottle of wine,” thusly blowing my cover.

The only thing they have on the menu is steak frites. They bring you a portion and you pay like 20 euros a person. It was tense at first, I said, “why do you just hide away from me when you’re mad like this? Why don’t you talk to me?”

She said, “you’re just repulsive to me after you act like that, I just don’t wanna talk to you.” I said, “well how can I make it better?” “Just be nice!” “I am nice! I LOVE YOU!!”

Then it broke: we stuffed our face with steak frites & wine, I teared up several times, she did once, then we walked home holding hands.

BACK TO BUMFUCK. . . (JULY 11: NIGHT). . .

WE WERE HEADED BACK TO SPAIN: one night in a random small town as a stopgap before Madrid.

Estollo was so small that there was only one road in and out of the town. The official population is 98. We drove thru the town twice in the midst of playing children and patrons dining at the only restaurant: Bar Estollo.

THE BNB HOST, ALMUDENA, WAS OUTSIDE, in the yard, playing with her grandchildren and her blind dog.

She only spoke Spanish. We were staying upstairs right across from her room. We got settled and headed for dinner at the only option in town. . .

UNDER THE BUDDING LIGHTNING, we walked to Bar Estollo. There were about 15 people sitting at tables out on the street.

I said, “is that it?” pointing to the place with the sign that said, BAR ESTOLLO. Gaby said, “where else would it be?” I said, “idk, over there?” pointing to a building that said CITY HALL. Gaby said, “bruh. . .”

There were several empty tables, nobody sitting inside. We milled about, not sure what to do. One of the workers at the bar was toiling like an ant on probation, setting up more & more tables outside even though it was clear it would storm soon, & it was almost 10PM, & there were already more chairs outside than residents in the whole town.

We walked over to the bartender, greeted her in Spanish and asked for the menu. There was no menu, she said, but she could make. . . and then she rattled off a list of several hundred things of which we understood 65%. . . she asked where we were from and when we said NYC, she started speaking in perfect English.

Apparently she was from Estollo but had lived in London for 37 years. Stunningly, her name was Henrietta like our first bnb host who’d followed an opposite trek. . . We asked for a repeat of the menu. Ended up going with the Spanish classic: jamon plate with stale bread. I also had 4 beers total & Gaby had a glass of white wine. . .

WHEN IT LOOKED LIKE IT WAS GONNA RAIN and people were leaving, we went to sit under the cover of CITY HALL. There was one other couple across from us. The guy was evidently very popular because people kept coming over to talk to him.

I tried to eavesdrop, but their regional accents were too thick & hard to parse.

Around Midnight (Bar Estollo is open until 1AM), it stopped raining, and we left. It was 20 euros total. . . We walked back home and ran into Almudena’s gato. Played with it out on the dirt road for a while.

WHEN WE WALKED IN, ALMUDENA was watching Breaking Bad in the living room. Almudena’s only rule was no sex in her house, and she was a KEEN listener. . . so we just went to bed, with the window open: the sounds of Spanish rural life wafting dreamward. . .

THE LAST DAY. . . (JULY 12: DAY). . .

WE AWOKE TO A GLORIOUS beamed, sunshiny chirp; we opened the door and Almudena skittered past us toward the bathroom in her underwear,

“BUENAS!”

GABY WAS SAD OUR TRIP WAS coming to an end.

To some extent, the whole point of traveling is to capture time: that’s why you break out of your regular habits, take pictures, buy souvenirs, write about it; it offers the illusion of defeating impermanence; but of course, it’s hopeless, and when the END rolls around, breaking what you thought for a second might last forever, it IS indeed brutally sad;

it’s another reminder that everything will end.

When we came back after breakfast, the cat (who we called Estollo),

—who would circle our legs and dive against our feet, nuzzling his little head against our shoes, —was there; now that we were leaving, the cat was gone. . .

It made Gaby think of her late grandpa, who, when she was going back to the United States after a summer in Belo Horizonte, would hide away because he was too sad to say goodbye; the first 20 minutes driving out of Estollo, there were clouds all over the sky and Gaby cried; she also had on a gooey face mask so when I tried to touch her face to comfort her, I kept touching goo,

when she was finally wrapping up her up cry about her grandpa & time, her grandma’s favorite song, Besame Mucho, started to play. . .

THE END, END. . . (JULY 12: NIGHT). . .

WE WERE BACK IN MADRID because the next morning we were flying out. We thought we had the whole apartment to ourselves. . . At 2:45AM Gaby wakes me up in a haste, going, “someone’s at the door!”

I’m in my underwear. She drapes herself in a sheet. Someone is hammering the buzzer, pissed off. We ask in Spanish, “who is it?”

The dude on the other side of the door starts screaming at us, we couldn’t understand much, but he’s saying he lives here, he lives here.

Gaby goes, “como te llamas?” He said, “Daniel.” Which was the host’s name. So we let him in, thinking it was the host.

We opened the door. He was in his 50s, wearing eye-liner & walking with a cane. There was a girl with him who couldn’t have been older than 12. He looks at me and goes, “did you lock that?!” pointing to the latch above the main lock. I said, “yeah.” And he huffed off to his room. . .

I don’t think he knew anyone was staying in his apartment. We looked at each other like, Holy shit. . . we were disfruiting all over the damn apartment. . . if someone had walked in on that. . . and then I was like, “wait. . . isn’t this like the scene Henrietta said Almodovar was filming?”

“Oh my god. . .” Gaby shuddered.

WE LOCKED THE DOOR TO OUR ROOM; our window was open and we could hear the Madrid night in its buzzy zenith, peak liveliness at 3AM; there was always going to be so much life that went on without you,

a diabolic thing to have to accept. . . you could never live enough:

that was really the reason to travel (the same reason to read), it allowed, maybe it was just an illusion, but for a little while, you got to LIVE more. . .

Download Places

Sean Thor Conroe is a Japanese-American writer born in Tokyo in 1991. His debut novel Fuccboi was published by Little, Brown in 2022. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and hosts the book podcast 1storypod.

Read Japan: Part 1 and Japan: Part 2.

It’s now July, and all month I’ve been shuffling around my hot-ass apartment, restless, unable to write Part Three. Unable to remember what the initial point of it was.

It wasn’t till one night, when I finally got to organizing my space, and I found my baba’s old vest, one she made out of one of gigi’s old jackets, that I remembered. My baba would take gigi’s old clothes, once he died, and splice them up to fit her—adjust sleeves, hem legs or even nix sleeves altogether, as necessary, to make them into something she wanted to wear.

Honestly, my baba’s swag was not so unlike mine, the swag I aspire to anyhow, both gigi and baba had this old-fashioned elegance to how they dressed, gigi was always smartly suited and ascotted, whereas my baba, in her later years, favored loose-fitting button ups with the top button buttoned—a swag I might have outright, if subconsciously, stolen from her.

I remember, when I was little, how firm and angular my baba’s fingers were. I didn’t realize it then, but it was from all the seamstress work she did, professionally in her youth but privately all her life. Her ability to transform a garment from one shape into another, to infuse things fallen into uselessness with new life, a type of sartorial alchemy…

It’s not logical, that the vest helped me finally start writing this, and what it helped me remember isn’t literal. I’m not claiming anything, I’m just telling you—I put the vest on and I suddenly remember.

SAPPORO–TOKYO

On Easter Sunday evening—April 20—I see my dad and Sono off at the Sapporo airport and take the few-hour flight back down to Tokyo. Amelia will arrive Wednesday. My mom’s been down here all month. I initially think inviting Amelia out on such short notice might be stepping on our time together. But my mom doesn’t mind, she’s got her hands full sorting through baba’s belongings. So she says, anyway.

The flight down is strange. It seems to be populated exclusively by high schoolers. Maybe they’re all part of a weekend field trip they’re coming home from. I don’t know. I read the last fifty pages of Eddie’s forthcoming novel he sent me, I’d been reading it in the car on the drive across Hokkaido and back. I bust out laughing a couple times and almost wake the high school couple sleeping next to me in my row, he in the middle seat, his head back, she lying directly on his lap in a way that seems like it should be sexual but somehow isn’t. It’s sweet. On the walk from the arrival gate to the exit, I log into airport Wi-Fi and send Eddie the email I’d written in my Notes app, with screenshots of parts I liked. I feel equipped to start writing my essay now, having internalized the vibe of my editor—I’ll start writing Part One on Wednesday.

—

It’s only been ten days that I was up in Hokkaido, but things feel much different down in Tokyo than before. We’re on the other side of Holy Week. That time in the cruelest month when things move fast and unforgiving. Stepping out into the Tokyo night, the humidity is a wall. The cherry blossoms that were in full bloom the first week of April have all fallen, carpeting the glassy ponds out back the Tokyo National Museum pink. This is where my mom and I go the first full day we have together, on Tuesday, the day before Amelia arrives.

The exhibit is of Tsutaya Juzaburo, the publisher of many of the woodblock artists at the end of the 18th century, including Hokusai, the guy who painted the infamous wave-emoji wave. Tsutaya was literally a publisher, he made physical books, and had a bookstore he sold them out of, but was also, more generally, a maverick promoter and supporter of artists. These were all revolutionary happenings at the time, producing books that were so widely disseminated and discussed. Part of the reason they got so popular was that this dude Tsutaya grew up in the courtesan quarter of Tokyo, and the early books he put out were all about the daily lives of courtesans, what a courtesan does every hour of the day, a guide book of every courtesan on offer, likening each one to a different type of flower. This illicit, erotic, slightly gossipy element of the art was entirely new, as were the physical, easily replicable books that combined woodblock art—an easily reproducible process in itself—with text. Some of his painters in the late 1700s—Tsutaya died in 1797, at age 47—had their brushes confiscated and snapped in half by the government, who opposed this new strain of irreverent art.

It’s funny looking at these erotic woodblock prints with my mom, reading the descriptions, standing hands behind our backs...

“This all makes so much sense,” I say to my mom, “since this period we’re talking, 1777–1798, is also the last time Pluto was in Aquarius—that’s how long Pluto takes to orbit the sun, 250 years—and since Pluto has to do with transformation and power, and Aquarius to do with communication and revolutionary, humanitarian action, it’s a time of breaking free from old, outdated structures, when it comes to technology, art, etc—last time this meant the American and French Revolutions, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So this was what Tsutaya was doing, breaking free from old artistic molds, and that’s of course what we—as of November of last year, and for the next twenty years—are going through now!”

My mom is gazing at a painting and doesn’t seem to register a thing I’m saying.

After strolling through the back paths past the cherry blossom–coated pools, through Ueno, the neighborhood the museum is in, along upscale residential streets with modern houses, small winding side streets and extravagant temples, we end up at the Yanaka Beer Hall, a beautiful spot in a converted old house at the end of a nondescript alley. My mom is adamant we find craft beer. I’ve fully exited the ascetic mode my dad had me on with all his sobriety and fitness. The spot is a bit pricey, but there’s covered outdoor seating and cool pictures on the walls. We snack on steamed Japanese sweet potato and smoked octopus and edamame. We both agree that Ueno would be an awesome neighborhood to live in.

HARAJUKU / SHIBUYA

It’s hotter than Amelia expected it to be here in Tokyo, too,. The first morning we walk to the park and immediately she realizes the shirt she’s wearing is way too warm, only the shirt she’s wearing underneath it is like a tiny tank top, too skimpy to wear she feels (or I do—I swear, I can’t remember who), though it’s also true, you don’t really see a lot of super skimpy clothing in Tokyo. But so I give her my button up to wear. And the sun is blasting, she’s not prepared for that either, and I have both a hat and sunglasses, so I give her my hat as well. She looks nice in my shirt and hat—there’s something baba-coded about this.

I wouldn’t say I was nervous, I was more curious about Amelia and my mom meeting. I wasn’t sure how they would take to each other. Neither my mom nor my two sisters, historically, have been huge fans of my girlfriends. Their assessments tended to be mysteriously unanimous, immediate, and unwavering. For whatever reason, from afar, this hadn’t been the case with Amelia, they all seemed excited to meet her. Likely, I suspect, due to my reported gripes with her consisting mostly of my not sufficiently taking care of her monetarily, emotionally, and spiritually—gripes they could all get behind. It feels slightly punitive, their collective agreement, if only theoretical, that “Amelia is good for me.”

Nonetheless, third party reports are not in-person meetings, and I could tell Amelia was nervous by how she was acting, trying and failing to start a fight for no reason…

We’d taken the train out to Shibuya around 2 PM. Amelia had stores she wanted to see, and my mom was meeting a friend in the area for the afternoon. Our plan was to link at Yoyogi Koen—Tokyo’s Central Park, a park I love and remember from previous visits—around 5. When I make the plan out loud, on speaker, with Amelia in earshot, I can see her demeanor shift. “Five, like, in three hours?”, She asks. After scoping some shops, we hit Harajuku Gyozaro, a gyoza spot I liked going to with my sister back when she lived here. This time around it feels a bit touristy, but is nice for its wraparound bar seating and limited menu—steamed or fried gyoza, those are the choices. Given we’ve got to get to the park to meet my mom, we roam in the general direction through the Harajuku side streets, which gets us a bit overwhelmed. It’s all a bit much. I’ve been pounding coffees every chance I get, so I'm all, Damn, I need to pee.

It’s at this moment when Amelia tries to start a fight for no reason.

We're in a crowded Harajuku alley when I say this, and Amelia’s all, “Why don't you go into that restaurant?” to which I'm all, “No, I'm not gonna ask some fancy restaurant if I can pee in it, I'll just find a 7-Eleven or Lawson. They all have perfectly clean public bathrooms,” confidently, since in Kasai (residential) and Hokkaido (rural) this was the case. Only here in Harajuku (extremely touristy), it evidently isn't.

And so this becomes a thing, why I won’t just go into a restaurant and ask. I've got a backpack on and all kinds of stuff dangling off it, garments of Amelia’s and my own, it’s just not a situation I want to put myself in. It doesn’t seem tactful. I’d rather pee outside. Only it stops being about the restaurant. It’s that she feels I have this skewed image of myself, of being a “crazy outside guy” and “scary to proper society,” when I’m not, I’m a nice boy, and she’s a nice girl, and she wants me to contribute to this mutual self image, our image as a couple.

I eventually find a public restroom, and we continue on our way. Things calibrate. Besides one meltdown Amelia has during a pit stop at a koi pond, where she just plunks down onto the ground like a baby, she’s good—I start shooting a video of her mid-meltdown for our “Japan documentary” we keep saying we’re making, and this cheers her up.

Walking west from the clock tower through Yoyogi park, my mom tells us about the history of the trees here. There are ginkgo trees, cherry blossoms. This park smack center of Shibuya and Harajuku used to be the training grounds for the Japanese military in the early 1900s, all the way through the end of World War Two. Then for a couple decades it served as residences for the US Military. It wasn’t till 1967 that they tore down the military housing and covered one-third of the park in trees. I sip my coffee and take a bite of the matcha soft serve I got Amelia from the park vendor there. I can tell Amelia is a bit nervous but she hides it well. There’s a specific thrill to introducing someone you’ve grown so close with to your family. Amelia compliments my mom’s baggy swishy pants, which my mom takes well. On the far side of the park, we come across the basketball courts. I get all excited since this is where I came two decades ago, when I was 14, in full ball-is-life mode trying to make varsity. My mom makes some jokes about how I was moving back then, how obsessive I was, dribbling a ball everywhere I went, needing adamantly to find a court so I could do my 100-makes/day regiment I was on. They get a kick out of laughing at 14-year-old me. I ignore this uncalled-for bullying and snap a pic of the courts and send it to my basketball group chat—ball remains life.

The park spits us out into Shibuya, Tokyo’s premier shopping and commercial area. We approach from the outskirts, and make our way towards the infamous scramble crossing. It’s one of those things you must do when you come to Shibuya, cross the crossing, but it feels like damn half the people there have selfie sticks. The side streets surrounding it are nice though. We forge our way in to find somewhere to eat.

I don’t know how we end up where we do. My mom starts talking to someone holding a sign out front a restaurant, and he’s all Niku, saying they have good meat dishes, but when my mom asks “What about vegetables”, we get directed to some mall type place, and next thing, we’re headed up escalators to the top floor of this shopping center. A lot of the restaurants in this area are like this, at the top floor of these high rises.

We end up at this oyster bar, that specializes in oysters. Amelia and my mom say they both love oysters, I’m not a very picky eater but I don’t know about oysters. We order platters of five oysters, each from a different part of Japan. The ones from Hokkaido are alright, but the further south they get, the meatier and “creamier” they get. I have to choke down the last couple with my lemon sour I’m drinking, along with the hot sake we got for the table. They do a cool thing here where they bring this big tray of different mugs, of all shapes and materials, some are glass, others ceramic, and you choose your vessel. When my mom was ordering, she seemed to take a really long time, it felt like she and the waitress were speaking in Japanese forever, going over the menu, asking a million clarifying questions. This initially gives me a headache, I can’t understand what’s taking so long, but then I think maybe this whole scenario is stressful for my mom, too, and this is how she was coping with it—by getting really fixated on the menu and ordering. Though I’m sure she’d disagree.

My mom heads back to Kasai, and Amelia and I explore some. Shibuya is a magical place. Go there at night, it’s all lit up, just festive energy. We get cans—well, I do—and roam. We come across this six-foot tall boba tea structure Amelia gets fixated on and wants me to take pictures of her with—hugging it, greeting it. We take the Hanzomon line back to our Skytree bnb, exhausted and content.

GINZA

A neighborhood my mom recommend we explore. It’s just southeast of the Imperial Castle grounds in Tokyo’s center. We head out midafternoon after a relaxing Saturday morning of coffee—at Berth Coffee Roastery, a tiny third-wave spot that is very meticulous and excellent, if that’s your vibe, the best in Sumida City from my week of research—and exploring this mall by the Skytree, the majority of which time we spend in this tiny fish shop. All these little fishes and crabs in tanks that Amelia looks into each one of, while I film her looking inside them for our “documentary.” I put Amelia onto the 7-Eleven cream puffs last night after we got back. She was initially skeptical, but they’re absolutely fire, so light and fluffy. We nab one for the train ride out. The Ginza station is attached to and part of a big Kabuki theatre, which is cool, but as we step out onto the street, my initial impressions are mixed. It’s Saturday night, during tourist season, and it’s long blocks and big billboards and high fashion stores. Like Shibuya but slightly more ritzy, without the component of cool young people roaming. We hit the Uniqlo flagship store, initially for Amelia, before getting so overwhelmed by how packed it is—but not before she decides I need new tee shirts. I’ll wear a damn tee shirt till it’s brown and faded and tattered, and this will not do—I’m not longer the weird sketchy outside guy, I’m an upstanding citizen, my garments must reflect this. Baba would agree. It’s so insane in there though, I have to bail partway through the checkout line, possibly—allegedly—with my new tee shirts covertly in tow.

It’s not till after an overpriced dinner of sushi and kara-age chicken and lemon sours at a top floor restaurant, the kind where you place your orders on an iPad, that we roam away from the station, towards the Imperial Castle grounds. It’s around here, by the Ginza 5 shopping mall, that the roads become alleys not six feet wide, lanterns hanging and tables billowing out, bustling with folks drinking and blasting cigs and having a good ole time. We got some of our best footage for our nonexistent documentary roaming this area of Ginza. This, I realize, is what my mom was recommending.

For a nightcap we hit the Old Imperial Bar, inside the Imperial Hotel, which Amelia had been wanting to hit. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and is an architectural representation of the meeting of East and West. I’ve been to some good hotel bars but this has to take the cake. You walk up the central staircase of the vast entrance lobby and follow a hallway around the side of the building and inside it’s wood paneling and dimly lit and just immaculate vibes. The bar seats are somewhat low to the ground, but the area behind the bar, where they serve the drinks, is set even lower, such that the bartender is eye level with you. Each spot at the bar is lit by a circular spotlight from on high. I order a whiskey thing with raw egg in it, and Amelia orders a blue thing. I’ve never seen anyone make a drink like this. Bro laid a towel down and put every bottle of ingredients in front of you, and then meticulously poured each ingredient in. Bro was a scientist. The attention to detail, the precision, was something truly different.

Right around the end of our drink, this white dude comes up to the bar and orders a Bailey’s. He’s all, “Hi again, yes, Bailey’s again”, nodding. Somehow we get to talking. Turns out he also lives on the upper east side. Back in Hokkaido, the news was all about Japan’s rice shortage, the prices of rice were hiking and this was causing mayhem. Only, the farmers needed to keep the prices high to stay afloat themselves. My dad’s student was explaining this to us, translating the news that was on in the sauna.

But this dude, Buzz, is out here on behalf of America to talk to government officials about various rice farmers in California who could import mass amounts of rice to Japan. This was a contentious issue, since Japan generally has a hard cap on the amount of rice they allow to be imported, to protect the farmers. Only the situation was so dire, that they, for the first time in decades, were raising the cap. Trump was lifting the tariffs for this situation specifically. “But we have to be sensitive about how we approach it to not upset the farmers,” Buzz says, bowing and saying arigato-gozaimasu to the bartender, who comes bearing his second Bailey’s, bowing low. It seems fitting that this dude is here at this hotel, as the ambassador for the US’s increased collaboration with Japan in its rice production.

If drinks weren’t damn $35, we probably coulda drank all night with bro.

Before we leave, he joins us for a smoke in the smoking area, which I’d noticed on the way in and wanted to peep. It’s literally the size of a phone booth, it’s about the most intimate thing, all three of us standing in there, smoking, the top vent pulling the smoke up. He’s clearly a bit lonely on his work trip, and it’s Saturday night, but we’re quite drunk already so hit it as he lights up his second cig. All the train ride back, we riff like I miss Buzz, I wonder what Buzz is up to right now. Jokes aside, I should have asked him more questions about the rice situation. It was a colossal journalistic failure that I didn’t.

KANDA-JINBOCHO

On Sunday, we head out to Jinbocho, the used bookstore district, and link with Amelia’s friend from the Bali Yoga School, who happens to be out here also. He’s a ballet dancer. This is a must visit area for book lovers, even if you can’t read any of the books. There are bookshelves set into the outside of walls, with awnings over them. In precarious stacks. The most elaborate arrangements. And right when you get off the Jinbocho stop, that whole strip there is like this. I feel inspired by this monument to the printed word. But even when the books are in English, believe it or not, I’m actually not so big on spending long stretches at bookstores, they remind of all the books I haven’t written, whereas Amelia can spend hours browsing picture books, erotica. I find some Mishima prints on one floor, I lurk in there and work on Part One of my essay in my Notes app.

After, we hit this spot, Kanda Brazil, an absolutely fire cheesecake and coffee shop in an old basement. You walk down these rickety steps and this old man eventually greets you and writes your name down on a notepad. They just serve cheesecake and coffee and tea. It’s all dark wood paneling and low to the ground seating in intimate booths and even a bar area. You can order a coffee and cheesecake at the bar. Admittedly, my enthusiasm is partly because you can blast cigs in there. Nothing like an immaculate basement ambiance and a couple cigs over some coffee and top-notch cheesecake—not too sweet, impeccable—to get you going. I see a dude in there just posted solo, reading, drinking coffee, chiefing—what I’d do if I lived here. Amelia and her friend catch up on yoga stuff while I just admire the vibes.

SHIBUYA, cont.

On Monday, Amelia’s got a list of stores she’s intent on hitting back in Shibuya. I accompany her to a couple till I realize she’ll ask me what I think of every article of clothing she tries on, and won’t accept my stock, if totally true, response of “Baby you look stunning in everything.” Sensing turmoil like a bird anticipating a storm—it’s also just started raining—I search “barber,” have Amelia give me her location, and say I’ll come meet you back here shortly.

It’s on the far side of the Shibuya Crossing, a completely nondescript spot up some stairs. There’s literally a sign in all caps out front that says, If you can’t speak Japanese, we can’t cut your hair! My shit is all down over my ears though, the situation is dire, and anyway I’m fine to speak Japanese, I convince myself. I stride in there confident and take my seat in the row of seats, which has X’s between each one where you’re not supposed to sit, and then you shift up to the next spot as it becomes available. It’s exclusively older Japanese men.

When it’s my turn, I go “ano ne”—so—and then make a hair cutting motion, and then say, “wa ee desu?”—it’s okay? Bro looks at me doubtful a sec, and then goes, “shashin wa aru?”—you got a picture? “Hai,” I say, quickly googling “Men’s mid fade.” I see a side profile of a hot dude with sick fade, make it big, and show him. He nods, sits me down and gets to it.

I swear, I’ve never got a haircut like this. The attention to detail. Bro was doing scissor moves I’ve dead-ass never seen before. He did such a good job, I couldn’t believe it. Partway through, he started saying something to me, I couldn’t understand, and then he went, “Where.” And then, “From.” Aa soo, I say, telling him I’m from New York, demo, okaasan wa nihonjin desu. His eyes light up, and I say I’m born here, and my mom is Japanese. I swear that made him happy, and he started doing an even better job. What’s crazy is it cost me—astonishingly—1300 yen, which is like under eight bucks. I wanted to hug him. Back at the five-story designer consignment store Amelia’s still at, I’m feeling fly as fuck, finally presentable to go visit gigi and baba—their altars—like we’re planning to do tomorrow. Amelia adds to this sense of rebirth by insisting on buying me some new pants, the first thing she’s paid for on this entire trip lmao. “Wow baby, thank you”, I say.

This is what it’s about, you guys, it’s about collaboration. Equal give and take.

KASAI

It’s the night we’ve planned all week to go out to Kasai and say hi to gigi and baba, and for all of us, Nobu included, to go out to dinner.

From the Kasai station, we walk beneath the elevated rail, the Tozai line, to baba’s. There’s something so intimate about this area, the feeling I get walking here, like entering a preconscious dream. In a way it literally is. It’s where I lived right as my faculty of memory was forming. There are no big high rises, there’s a little open air mall, little shops, the market my baba would walk to every day to get premade food in little containers once she stopped cooking. There’s the ichi mai yen store (100 yen / dollar store), that we briefly pause at while Amelia looks at little trinkets. We pass the park I played at when I was a baby. It’s just kids coming home from school, old ladies doing their shopping, folks coming home from work. I show Amelia where my baba got hit with the bike the first time she fell. A boy was biking, looking at his phone, not paying attention. A quiet settles over everything, cars pass infrequently, it’s just folks walking and biking and the train periodically passing overhead.

And then it’s up the eleven flights in the elevator, along the familiar hall down to the end, my mom and Nobu greet us and we go into baba’s altar room and I light the incense stick and blow it out and put it into the ashes, and strike the gong and kneel and put my hands together and say Hi to baba, tell her I’m here, and I do the same to gigi, and my mom shows Amelia how and she does the same. She says Hi and nice to meet you baba. Baba smiles back at Amelia with that gentle twinkle in her eye on the altar, and then she does the same to gigi, and then mom does the same and we all stand there in the small living room for a sec, till Nobu says, “Shall we?”

It’s the same Izakaya we always go to when we’ve gone out drinking and eating with Nobu in the past, right by the station. He’s made a reservation and you have a private table with the seats that are floor level and your feet dip down below it, and there’s a button you can push and the waitress comes and reups your order. This is how it’s done here. You drink and order small dishes and order more dishes and more drinks as you wish. Nobu initially proposes we order a whole bottle of whiskey, he looks at me and asks if I want whiskey, to which I say “Of course”, but my mom steps in and starts saying that’s way too much, that’s crazy, he concedes, but nonetheless we go in like no one’s business, whiskey sodas, dish after dish.

The language barrier is vast, vaster than it already is when I’m alone with Nobu, which is saying a lot, but after a good few rounds of trying the dishes and laughing at Amelia’s reactions to them, and going through the different things we’ve done, the places we’ve seen, with me or my mom translating—obviously mostly my mom, though my Japanese has improved exponentially over the month—there’s one point when my mom leaves to go to the bathroom, and we’re all pretty drunk. Amelia and Nobu have a solid discussion with just me translating. Amelia asks if he likes movies, and then whether he’s ever visited the United States, which he never has, and then she asks—all with my translation, mind you!—whether he wants to. He sips his whiskey and thinks on it, and then his eyes light up and he says he would, he’d like to go to the Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan, where much of the 1984 movie Falling in Love starring Meryl Streep and Robert Deniro is set. It’s one of his favorite movies. I look it up and see that it closed in 2014, but it was on 57th Street. “That’s right near where I live!” I say. “Nobu you’ve got to come visit!”

Seeing them off, I give Nobu a big hug. I don’t know when I’ll see him next. Nobu is stoic as ever though, he just pats me on the back and says, Ja ne, “See you,” and we head back, full of food, emotionally stimulated, and quite drunk. It’s only like eight o’clock though. Registering this, we realize we’ll have time to hit the sex museum Amelia has been all week wanting to hit—it doesn’t close till ten.

THE SEX MUSEUM

Hands down one of the wildest museum’s I’ve been to. A 15-minute walk north of the Skytree, down quiet streets. Totally nondescript from the outside. We’re the only ones there. A nice middle-aged lady wearing a blue beanie greets us, almost seeming surprised at our arrival. We change into slippers and she gives us a tour. There are four floors, only seemingly obliquely related. The first floor is the “VIP room,” consisting of a collection of “Laser Disk Karaoke” videos from 1985 to 2000, which are played along with other “nostalgic music,” for events ostensibly. There’s a screen for karaoke, and black velvet paintings and wax figurines on the walls arranged, so the program claims, “in order to have a presence that seems like another dimension.”

“Wild,” I say.

The top floor is the “Toba Science Fiction Future Museum,” and consists of wax figurines of variously aged women with terrified looks on their faces having what look to be scientific sexual experiments performed on them. Our tour guide explains that this is from a science fiction story that, in the plot of the story, required that these experiments be performed for the survival of humanity.

And finally, on the second floor, is the bar area, which has images and books from a freak show tent in the 1950s, where women would swallow snakes, pull snakes out of their noses. Theres’s a disco ball going, and all around you are life size “Love Dolls.” Here you can enjoy your required drink—it’s part of the admission fee—while the Love Dolls “watch quietly,” the program reads. They’re sitting upright at the bar, elevated behind the serving area facing you.

I feel like a normie bro in this space, and the two nice ladies who serve us our drinks explain the freak show images as if justifying them. Amelia is all smiles and loves it, going over and sitting with one of the Love Dolls, touching her arm and stroking her hair, on encouragement from our tour guide.

“They’re all so nice, I love them all,” one of the ladies serving our drinks says.

The last thing our guide shows is their collection of shunga, the genre of erotic art many woodblock artists made—like Hokusai did—specifically their collection of shunga figurines. Made out of porcelain and elaborately detailed, they depict women of upper classes doing normal, dignified things—sewing, resting, reminiscing—only once you lift up the figurine, there’s another side of it, what the woman is fantasizing about, being penetrated by a man, or depicting some other sexual act. In one, a man is tattooing a woman’s back, but when you lift up the figurine he’s penetrating her. In another, a woman is sitting there all innocent, but beneath the figurine she’s touching herself. Shunga means “spring picture,” since “spring” is a euphemism for sex, I learn.

I leave feeling a tenderness towards those ladies, for committing to their strange esoteric exhibit, for shedding light on things generally hidden, along with a slightly confusing mix of arousal and... I feel unnerved. Which I think was the intended effect—it’s how I’m supposed to feel.

THE BEYOND

On our final full day, we go see the Hilma af Klint exhibit at the MOMA Tokyo. I’d never heard of her, but Amelia had been wanting to go, she’s a big influence on her apparently, and when I asked my mom if she wanted to join, she hit me back with a long text containing all this research about her, saying that she, Hilma, who’s not only a painter but a spiritualist and mystic, was hugely influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian occultist, architect, and thinker who founded the esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, and also founded, among other things, biodynamic farming and Waldorf education—what I was raised in K-8, and what my mom is still fully immersed in, as a Waldorf school teacher in San Francisco.

In fact, my mom’s discovery of anthroposophy and Waldorf education, back when I was a baby, was the impetus to us leaving Japan—for my parents to go to Rudolf Steiner College in California, to undergo Waldorf teacher training.

In short—my mom is amped to join.

We’ve relocated to a new bnb for the last couple nights, so link there and make the walk over to the MOMA together. On the way, Amelia tells my mom about the meditation retreat she’s planning in Finland next month. Amelia, like af Klint, is a mystic of sorts, doing guided meditation and serving as a type of cryptic oracle to her followers. She also, like af Klint, does drawings and images that combine objects with text to mystical effect. She’s got two weeklong sessions planned for seven girls to come and stay and learn from her.

Active in Sweden from 1880 through her death in 1944, af Klint would, in her early years, conduct “seances” with four of her friends, where they’d meditate, assume a trance-like state and do “automatic writing” or “automatic drawing,” transcribing messages and symbols communicated to them by spirits. Various motifs such as the cross, flowers, spirals and snails she received and transcribed in those seances would go on to play a major role in her later work. Her paintings have an interesting symbolic component I’ve never seen, where it’s not so much about the demonstration of technical skill as it is about the symbolic representation of the shapes, the meaning behind them. Her work reflects her attempt to “rediscover the primal unity” before the fall of man by “reconciling opposing binary forces such as good and evil or feminity and masculinity.” Titles of series she did include “Tree of Knowledge,” “The Swan”—which depicts a white and black swan intertwining with each other in different configurations, some peaceful, some hostile, each swan with the opposite-colored background—“Altarpieces,” and the most stunning series, “The Ten Largest,” consisting of ten wall-sized paintings that progress from “Childhood,” to “Youth,” to “Adulthood,” to “Old Age.”

In her paintings, blue represents femininity, yellow represents masculinity, and pink represents love. The exhibit is called “The Beyond.”

Given af Klint’s familiarity with theosophy, which believes in reincarnation, the program reads, “it is possible that she envisioned this series as a circular progression, with the final painting returning to the first.”

—

One of the details I got wrong in Part One of this series—that my mom was quick to point out that I’d botched—had to do with what one does with the bones in the funereal urn. I wrote that, after the cremation, the bones and ashes are brought home and kept in the altar. This is incorrect; or rather, it’s partially true: they’re kept there for 30 days after the funeral. After this period, the bones are in fact buried, and the temporary altar is replaced with a permanent one.

It’s the last day of April, and the burial is set for May 5.

When I learn this, I want to extend my flight and stay longer for it. Amelia does, too—she doesn’t want to leave Japan. But the funeral is the primary ritual, the burial is mostly a hassle of having to deal with the funeral people, my mom claims, plus Golden Week is approaching, where everyone has work off and travels to commemorate the Emperor Showa’s birthday. Bnb prices, my mom claims, will be through the roof.

So on Friday, we take the train to the airport and begrudgingly board our flight back. It’s been raining all morning, and as we pull onto the runway, it starts raining so damn hard, the runway looks like a lake. The planes stall for like two hours at least, taxi-ing in circles, waiting for it to subside. When we finally take off, it’s the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. We hold hands and accept our fate. It’s because baba is upset that I’m leaving, I think.

We make it through.

Still, I heard her message. Next time, I won’t wait ten years to return.

Download Places

The first time I dined at The Islands, it was re-up day.

From 2007 to 2009, my sour diesel plug lived in Crown Heights near Franklin. I’d walk over from Ft. Greene with a JanSport bag, fill it up, eat at The Islands on the 800 block of Washington Ave, and walk back to South Oxford Street.

The Islands became my de facto work lunch spot.

Around that time I got put onto The Brooklyn Museum First Saturdays parties as well and hit The Islands before, but did such terrible things in the museum bathroom that I had to adjust my gameplay for the second one.

From 2012 to 2015, I wasn’t in Crown Heights as much until I met Leon Michels who lived on Washington Ave so when I linked up with him or went to the crib, I hit The Islands.

Then around 2018, The Islands moved to the 600 block of Washington Ave, Leon started living upstate, and I was in LA.

I missed The Islands but kept tabs through Pete Wells’ NYT review and was happy that it got a star, people were paying attention, and all was alive and well.

In 2022, on one of my first trips back to NY after the pandemic, I went to the museum with my wife, Natashia, and went to the 800 block of Washington Ave looking for The Islands after. Both of us bugged out thinking The Islands had closed forgetting it moved and panicked until the internet reminded us that it was simply 3 blocks up.

The dining room was quiet when we arrived, but the food was even better. It’s incredible what the correct amount of space can do for a competent chef. The oxtails were perfectly cooked, fork tender yet not falling apart and still bounced back where you wanted it to. The seasoning was perfect with a mild heat that’s there, but not too loud letting the oxtail and browning talk.

I’m sure every thing is good and I’ve tried the jerk chicken when someone else orders it, but when I go to The Islands I get oxtail then do everything I can to convince my dining companion to cop the curry goat because that’s The Islands Day to me.

The oxtail is the bass anchoring the meal, the curry goat provides the keys, and the ginger juice operates like the brass setting it all off.

From 2022 to 2025, life was hectic and I hadn’t been back to The Islands until last month when we decided to take our son, Senna, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

We did the oxtail and curry goat per usual, but when you do things with your child, you ask different questions and resurrect old knowledge that somehow sling shots you to new revelations. When I looked at Senna passed out in his stroller it hit me how powerful a restaurant could be.

Over the course of 18 years, I’ve lived many lives but I had consciously pursued patterns in life and repeated certain actions so that my life could intersect with this restaurant. It wasn’t just that the food was best in category, but also because it’s a throw back carryout restaurant with a dining room that rarely exists in Manhattan anymore.

The Islands began as a neighborhood carryout business. Very few people sat down in the original choosing instead to order to-go and eat in their cribs. If you chose to eat there, you’d say hi to the regulars in the neighborhood you knew, but it was touch and go. You were in a phone booth.

On the 600 block there’s a spacious dining room, but still very few people in it. Usually it’s the people, like my family, from outside Crown Heights sitting down to eat alone because we don’t have a crib in the neighborhood.

This is the joy of dining in the outer boroughs; people don’t need to take up space in the restaurant. They’re utilizing restaurants differently than people in Manhattan squeezed for space trying to do business, catch a vibe, or raise the birth rate.

I was in THISBOWL (which is phenomenal) on Bleecker the other day when a fool rocking a Mets hat with over-ear headphones read a book while the woman at the adjacent table listened to a podcast after finishing her salad. This is all fine and well in Tompkins Park or at a deserted cafe, but there were over 15 people patiently waiting for a place to eat their food as these two completely disregarded it.

Everyone at THISBOWL needs a place to sit because no one can afford to have a crib on Bleecker, but Manhattan has been expensive forever. These days the issue isn’t real estate, it’s Main Character Syndrome and the way people are acting in public spaces.

There are people doing Zooms at full volume in cafes. It is now, I guess, common place to FaceTime people while at dinner. For three weeks in May, there were 6 employees from a luxury events company contracted by the Tribeca Film Festival that bogarted the communal table in our building’s common area executing their event until the manager told them that the common area was for residents not a company’s entire staff.

While I pursued patterns and repeated certain actions to interact with The Islands, I never bent it to my lifestyle or will. I didn’t break out my digi-scale to buss shit down in the dining room. The old heads who play backgammon or dominoes around the city pull up to spots like the park across from Ben’s Pizza in Soho or the Russian Turkish Baths where there isn’t a line for a table. There’s a level of courtesy in their thoughts and actions knowing where it is and isn’t appropriate to drop a backgammon set.

I will carve out an exception for loitering or taking 30 minutes to drink one beverage because that falls within the intended use of the restaurant. But loitering on a Zoom or conference call, listening to a podcast during lunch rush at THISBOWL, or pulling up to a restaurant with a laptop after 5 p.m. is fucking crazy.

The advent of communal workspaces has completely rotted people’s brains and confused how spaces should be used. People treat cafes and restaurants like they are WeWorks or Soho Houses, but they’re not. When you lease a space to do business in the city, you fill out a Certificate of Occupancy and declare your intended use. You will say residential or commercial, perhaps bar or eatery, maybe cabaret. You don’t say bar, workspace, eatery, podcast studio, Zoom background, conference room, yoga studio, valet.

It’s fucking crazy to use spaces like that.

What we are witnessing in a lot of Manhattan are selfish individuals who think that spaces and places should bend to their needs and lifestyles.

Even if you insist on being a Main Character, you should acknowledge that there are landmarks and locations in the game with certain intended uses that cannot be adapted solely for your use and enjoyment. A shop in World of Warcraft is a shop and while vendors at inns and taverns may sell some of the same items as the shops, they are not shops. They are inns and taverns.

People complain a lot about the cultural desert we’ve been living in for a few years. There seems to be a dearth of bars, clubs, neighborhood restaurants, places to dance, an apartment to rent, etc. But do we deserve nice things? Because I would argue that there are great restaurants and places to drink and places to backgammon, but they’ve been smeared by the excrement of Main Character Syndrome.

You want to act like a dickhead with your feet up on a table doing conference calls for the series xyz raise while eating pigs in a blanket drinking a nitro cold brew, COOL BRO, go get a membership at a private club for dip shits.

How can we enjoy anything even as simple as THISBOWL with the Mets Guy and Podcast Girl anchoring themselves to the center of it forcing everyone else to adjust and adapt around them.

I love The Islands Day because the food is phenomenal, but also because it is a respite from observing main characters in a game going to shit. The Islands represents what I loved about Brooklyn when it was dangerous. People could get snuffed, they would get run down, my friends at Pratt were constantly getting robbed so they acted right. It was unsafe to be a narcissist rejecting hood rules.

If people were out of pocket in a restaurant or cafe, someone would say something and it would get handled. I think that’s why I enjoy going to Time Again because there is a proprietor like Despot who will handle someone who’s out of pocket.

It’s not that complicated to understand how to use a cafe or restaurant, but I think every one’s confidence and self worth is a touch delusional at the moment. In a world where we still have to convince people to leash their dogs, it feels like people will continue Zooming in cafes because it’s not worth arguing over.

We’ll just suffer it.

Quietly.

At least I have The Islands Day.

Download Places

I was heading up to the North Shore for The Fourth on a 3:59 p.m. Premium Acela departing from Moynihan Hall arriving at Boston South Station.

Before getting on the train, I had a light 1 p.m. business lunch at Borgo which I’d like to claim for my home base, Murray Hill. Sitting on 27th street and Lexington Avenue, some may argue that it’s in proper Kip’s Bay. But whether I dined in Murray Hill or Kip’s Bay, lunch was fantastic consisting of a Chicken Liver Crostini finished with guanciale and agrodolce, some summer lettuces, and a Veal Saltimbocca, which I shared with the homie, M.

The proprietor of Borgo, T, came by our table and dropped some much appreciated knowledge about raising money to open a restaurant, which I’m currently in the process of doing.

Coming into lunch, I only wanted one to three investors at most since the pool of people with money and useful opinions when it comes to operating a small business like a restaurant is few and far between, but M suggested that having a pool of eight to twelve people contributing somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 is the better way to go.

The idea is that with more investors they bring a larger audience and network, but as I’ve learned making films you have to be careful how broad your intended audience is, especially if the thing you hope to create has any sort of identity and specificity. Each audience member brings their wants and needs and expectations that you have to account for and meet once you accept their money. If you burden yourself with too much expectation, the thing you’re creating becomes a Madewell or J. Crew or that disaster of a restaurant, Café Maud on 2nd Avenue.

T slyly and carefully let me know that he enjoyed having a large pool of perceptive self-aware investors, like M, especially when the restaurant is a run away success. It feels good to repay everyone their money and follow through on your promise when everyone is a genius, but that I was onto something with the original number of 3 since runaway success propelled by genius investors is only one of many potential outcomes when opening a restaurant.

You could also invest in a pizzeria that becomes a runaway success before the chef ends up in a knife fight with a Gambino Family member on the street in Carroll Gardens. In that scenario, you want investors who are dumb, deaf, and blind.

It’s just one example, but you have to prepare for these things.

Around 2:45 p.m., M and I departed from Borgo. I headed back to my apartment where I immediately number-two’d, showered, threw a few garments in a bag and took off to Penn Station Moynihan Hall.

I got there right as they announced that it would be on Track 7 and took my seat. A few minutes later an Acela representative presented me with a menu that featured a St. Anselm Charred Bobo Chicken paired with Chalk Hill Estate Chardonnay. I opted solely for a La Colombe Latte in a can, went to the bathroom again, and promptly passed out listening to Thompson Twins Hold Me Now.

When I arrived at South Station, Natashia was waiting for me next to a glass pyramid underneath a Dunkin’ Donuts billboard.

“Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Ok, I have two ideas. We could go to The Landing in Marblehead, which is a nice waterfront seafood restaurant that probably feels more like a date or the Anchor, which is an institution in Beverly.”

“Which has better food?”

“They both have good food, it’s more about the vibe.”

I pulled up both restaurants on the Places app and immediately understood what my options were.

The Landing was serving Nancy Meyers Culinary Institute of New England romance with a chef driven catch of the day and green apple gazpacho to start. Chef Jasper White’s New England Fusion influence is apparent from the first playful photo of seared scallops with bok choy laid over the top and local fish prepared with street corn and tajín.

In every New England neighborhood, I feel there is a beloved restaurant like The Landing which serves the purpose of a Legal Seafood with the distinct culinary flair of the academic chef in that neighborhood.

I adore these restaurants.

Then I brought up the Anchor Pub & Grille.

The fact that there was an “e” in grill felt promising. I can’t tell you why, but I just had a feeling. I looked up the difference between “grill” and “grille” and discovered that “grill” is the proper word to describe the cooking apparatus, but that “grille” refers to the automotive usage of grille.

In every New England neighborhood, there is also a genre of restaurants like the Anchor Pub & Grille. Natashia’s favorite is Tom English’s Cottage, which advertised this collection of chips as a Valentine’s Dinner one year.

You go, you play pool, you throw darts, you eat the chips they serve you, and you black out.

Needless to say I chose the Anchor.

We pulled up to the patio bar as it was blasting Lil Jon and realized that there was a tiki theme to the bar in that certain columns of the bar had tiki carvings and there was an Island Oasis frozen drink machine.

I remembered this machine from my dad’s steakhouse that the distributor gave you when you bought the syrup. I kind of hated the machine cause it always left the ice chippy, but after not seeing one in probably a decade I was nostalgic. My favorite drink to make with the Island Oasis was the Miami Vice which is a Piña Colada swirled with a Strawberry Daiquiri topped with as much rum that will fit in the cup.

This was all happening around the time Lil Jon was invented in the early-aughts.

The guy next to me was having an enormous lobster roll dripping with butter and the woman next to Natashia had beautiful haddock with bread crumbs. In between bites, she introduced herself.

“I’m Linda, but after 12 I’m Penelope.”

Since Natashia was in good hands, I walked inside past the pool table to the men’s bathroom where the door to the only stall was cracked open to the left of the entrance. Walking in, I couldn’t help but see and hear an adolescent male fighting his way through a contentious bowel movement.

“Ughhhh.”

I said a few Hail Marys for the kid and took the only open urinal. After a few seconds the guy next to me started a conversation with his dick in his hand.

“I don’t think it’s gonna work!”

“Be patient. You have to believe in yourself.”

About seven seconds later, it worked.

“Ahhhh, there it goes. Thank god!”

“You shouldn’t let the next man believe in your dick more than you do.” I told him.

“You’re right! You’re right! Gotta believe!”

I went back to the bar and Natashia had ordered a diet coke so I ordered an Arnold Palmer and she audibly laughed.

“What?”

“Oh nothing.”

A few minutes later I understood what she was laughing at when my “Arnold Palmer” showed up purplish-brown with some combination of horrid iced tea and whatever juice the bartender had on the gun. It was terrible, but also incredible because as a lover of culture and perspective I had discovered a new variant of “Arnold Palmer” I never could have imagined.

Needless to say I was excited for the meal and looked at the specials. Today there were 75-cent wings.

“We’ll have six wings,” I told the bartender.

“What flavor? I got buffalo or barbecue.”

I thought about asking for Rochester wings where you combine buffalo and barbecue, but Natashia saw the wheels turning and shook her head. This was not the place.

“Buffalo,” she said.

“What else?”

“I’ll have the fried whole clam bellies with fries,” said Natashia.

I thought about getting twin lobster tails for $37.99 since it was such a great value, but the Seafood Pie caught my eye.

“What’s in the seafood pie?” I asked.

“What? Shoot. I don’t know. Seafood,” said the Bartender.

It was a good enough description for me.

“I’ll have the seafood pie.”

“You want the wings first?”

“We’ll just take it as it comes.”

“I can get the wings out first.”

“Ok, we’ll take the wings first.”

The wings came a few minutes later buried in buffalo sauce without blue cheese, ranch, or celery, but they were incredible.

I’m telling you, this place is a gem if all they do is serve you these wings with a chippy Piña Colada or a Mudslide that looks like this.

Or a coconut margarita that looks like this.

Because the quality of life and buffalo wings in America has gone downhill.

I feel our biggest problem as a country is that we have settled for sub par wings from corporations like Wingstop, Domino’s, and Buffalo Wild Wings that destroyed the fabric of our country displacing local eateries that used to make our wings.

Gone are the local pizza shops or delis that do it right with big fat juicy wings drenched in proprietary buffalo sauce with obscene amounts of butter and flour to make a roux. Everyone will tell you that it’s easy to make buffalo wings and that all you have to do is combine Frank’s RedHot with butter, but it is a lie.

A great buffalo wing sauce benefits from flour and perhaps even a squeeze of lemon or additional white vinegar when no one is watching.

At the Anchor, the wings are sufficiently vinegary, aggressively peppery, texturally unctuous from the flour, and juicy when you sink your teeth into them.

It is the best wing I have had in decades.

The last three times I was this impressed by a wing are in chronological order the half-price Mad Mex wings in Pittsburgh circa 2000, Henny Wings at Dallas BBQ in 2005, and American Deli Wings in Inglewood around 2016.

The fried whole bellied clams arrived next and they were a disappointment. Dredged solely in flour with no egg and insufficient milk, they were sandy and dead on impact with no crunch, but I dragged them through buffalo sauce then mixed them with the excellent tartar sauce that accompanied the clams and it became edible.

Finally, my seafood pie arrived with loads of haddock, shrimp, and scallop in a light cream topped with bread crumbs. I took a bite of scallop, which was perfectly cooked, and delightfully under seasoned. I say that because I like the opportunity to season seafood myself and that’s exactly what I did next hitting it with salt, lemon, and a bit of Tabasco that really brought the dish home.

It was an elegant buffalo seafood casserole that paired perfectly with the brownish purplish “Arnold Palmer”.

About 20 minutes later, we asked for the check and the total was $58.48.

Download Places

Two weeks after my mother died, I was on a plane to Naples.

In those two weeks, I had planned two funerals in two different states, written her obituary, received her cremains, and found her a burial site. But the first cemetery plot I picked was no good.

When I first called the cemetery manager on the phone, days after my mother had died, he had said the plot had “a view of a creek.” It sounded nice. I asked for pictures to show my brother and sister. My father said it was our choice. He was overwhelmed by everything else.

The pictures were dubious. I was unsure, but everyone was having a hard time making decisions. So I went with it.

When my father and I arrived at the hilltop cemetery deep in Texas Hill Country, the creek was more like a ditch and my father crossed his arms and said, “No.”

The cemetery manager used soothing tones when he told us there were other options. That he was happy to take us around. We got into a golf cart and began a slow roll around the cemetery, searching for somewhere that was good enough for our matriarch. My mother was a formidable woman. Here’s the short version: She was born in a tiny stone house in a small village in Poland, with an outhouse and dreams of America.

She met my father in university, got married, and had my sister and I not long after. We fled Communism as political refugees, ended up in a refugee camp outside of Vienna, Austria, before being sponsored by a church in San Antonio, Texas. We couldn’t speak English. We didn’t know anyone. My parents learned to tell our story in a tidy sentence: They came to America with two young daughters, two suitcases, and $200.

My mother really hated it when I led with the outhouse. Maybe it felt cheap to her. Shameful. But it was an important detail to me. As was the fact she and my father were born a few years after the war ended. It made clear that the poverty they grew up with was incomparable to the type of poverty we faced when we came to America. That I would never, ever get it.

My mother was the driving force behind all of our family’s striving and achievement. As my brother eloquently said in his eulogy for her, she was Jupiter and we were the moons who orbited around her, shaped by her gravity.

This woman didn’t belong next to a ditch in Texas.

My father and I sat next to each other in the golf cart as we quietly scanned the land, reading the headstones. He was not just looking for a place for her, but also a future spot for himself. We didn’t have to say it.

Every few feet the cemetery manager would slow the golf cart and say, “This spot’s pretty nice, don’t you think?” in a thick Texas twang.

My father, arms still crossed, would squint and say “no” each time.

My father met my mother when he was 19 and they hadn’t left each other’s sides since, save a brief, mandatory stint for him in the army, which was probably the longest my parents had ever been apart in the nearly 50 years they were together. Since her death, he had periodically been exhibiting signs of broken heart syndrome, or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, named so because the weakened, constricted heart looks like a Japanese octopus trap.

The experience of broken heart syndrome is akin to having a heart attack — tight chest, difficulty breathing, and feeling like you’re dying. He had been oscillating between catatonia and gulping for air in the days since I watched him hold my dying mother in his arms on the floor of the room she and I had slept in together.

As we continued on the bumpy golf cart ride, he held his chest, waiting for another attack. We didn’t know what we were looking for but we weren’t going to stop until we found it.

As the cart made its way up a gravel road to the top of a hillside, we both stared at the rolling green hills stretched out in every direction. We stopped by a live oak tree and listened to wind chimes jangling in the breeze. We both gulped in the air, which smelled like mesquite.

The manager said something about the spot under the tree being one he had picked out for himself. I could tell he was trying to win us back after trying to sell us on the ditch being a premiere resting place. I had put down a deposit already so we had to make some kind of choice.

“This is it,” my father said.

“What?” the cemetery manager said.

“This is what I want for her,” my father said, pointing to the spot the man had just finished telling us was his.

“I picked it out for myself,” the man repeated. The way my father looked at him made it clear that the transaction was already done.

I flew back to California and then got on a plane to spend my birthday in Italy. It was 2019.

I hadn’t been to Italy since I was a teenager, when my mother took me to Rome in hopes of being blessed by Pope John Paul II, who for any Polish family, might as well have been God himself.

When someone who serves as the force of gravity in a family dies, the lesser bodies of mass scatter. Or, at least, that’s what happened in our family. Old wounds opened up, fissures happened, the gravitational force of grief took hold and we spun away from each other.

Our mother ruled the stars and the sky of our lives and without her, I was left to learn who I was and what system of values I wanted to live by. I could create my own code of conduct now.

Or, as my brother liked to say, “We have no one left to impress.”

I had no idea who I wanted to be now. Or what was even possible.

My brother is a decade younger than I am, the only member of our family born in America. After I moved across the country to California to go to college years ago, our relationship has mostly been over the phone while he bounced between Texas and Connecticut. We share memes and memories of our mother hyping each other up in ways only she would have — an immigrant mother telling us to get over ourselves in brutal and uncompromising ways.

My brother’s best friend, Sean, who had been hanging around our house since he was 8 years old, joined one of our text chains one day and our group chat was born. As the pandemic spread, my brother, Sean, and I all lived in our group chats just like everyone else in isolation. Most of my group chats have ebbed away, but The Villa-ins GC, inhabited by me, my brother, and Sean, still remains vibrant.

We each have our purpose. My brother and Sean do the hard work of foraging through online detritus looking for memes that speak to our moods and whatever level of doom we happen to be feeling. (Don Draper has made frequent appearances.) We annihilate each other with our close reads, we share posts from X to keep each other up to date with the most fucked up thing happening at any given moment. We hype each other up. They curate; I consume and comment. They mock me. It’s the perfect symbiotic relationship.

I almost hate to write about it, it’s that sacred a space.

During the pandemic, when we were all grounded seemingly indefinitely, we began sharing all the places we’d like to go. My brother and Sean had been traveling together for years — Portugal, Croatia — but I had yet to join them. In fact, I had only gone on one trip with my brother — to Paris, as his college graduation present from my mother. We had been on a budget. When we visited the catacombs, we got one self-guided audio tour to share. He listened and as we traversed the dark corridors, he narrated the tour in a hushed voice for me.

We ate camembert and bread in the park. Drank 2 Euro rosé. We had a nice time. We got in a fight in another park and I searched the city for him until I found him in our hotel room, acting as if nothing had happened at all. We hadn’t been on a trip together since.

When my mother and I went to Rome back in those teenage years, she woke me up at 7am every morning so we could get through another chapter of her Lonely Planet book. She was an adventurer, and by the time we left, we had seen every fucking thing in the Eternal City.

We went to the Vatican twice. I saw Pope John Paul II both times. She was too short to see over the crowds of other Polish women who had taken buses across Europe to lay eyes on him. I held our camcorder trying to get a shot as those women bullied me in Polish to let them see too.

As an ornery teenager, I didn’t appreciate my mother’s thoroughness, but I grew up to be a “planner,” too. My friends call me both an adventure bully and a travel Dom: I love making itineraries. If I’m somewhere new, I want to see it all.

My mother had big plans for her retirement. She wanted to see the fjords in Norway, take a boat down the Danube, and see the world. When she got sick, she still asked me to send photos of wherever I happened to be. My brother and I always brought her along on our trips in our group chat with her. The top of some hike in Yosemite; a gin and tonic in Porto. She hadn’t gone anywhere in retirement and my brother and I were determined to make sure we didn’t wait too long to see the places we wanted to see.

Which is how we landed in Sardinia.

My Instagram feed has long been populated with photos of the soft white sand and impossibly blue water of beaches in Sardinia. It was a place that has beckoned me more insistently than anywhere else in the world.

It’s where I wanted to go on my honeymoon. And although we didn’t end up there, in the years after my divorce, it took on an almost mythological quality of all that could have — and should have — been.

During the pandemic, after another endless late night doom scrolling, I posed the idea of the three of us meeting in Sardinia to decide if the island was going to be our final resting place — the place we’d retire, or more relevantly, the place to escape to if and when our lives ever started to fall apart.

Sardinia became the place for us to run away to. If our day or week was shit, the news cycle too overwhelming, the memes in the group chat became progressively darker. Inevitably, one of us would counterbalance the despair with images of sailboats floating on glass-like clear water casting ghostly shadows on the white sand drifting below. How could things be completely hopeless when Sardinia existed two flights away? We could liquidate everything. Who cared about trying to be good at capitalism? Everything was meaningless. We had no one left to impress.

Still, we felt tethered to our careers and to the lives we were intent on building. Each morning, like clockwork, the group chat would fill up with images of Don Draper drunk and disheveled in a bar, in an office screaming “That’s what the money’s for,” or in a car driving toward oblivion lost in some kind of existential despair. And again, we’d find ourselves egging each other on to just… go. Nowhere held the same sort of appeal as Sardinia. But no one was going to jump first.

In Spring 2023, my life imploded when the newsroom I was helming shut down. Suddenly, my entire identity was in limbo. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I had spent my adult life tying my identity to achievement and it had mostly worked. But, now it seemed I had not been able to fulfill my promise of being worth leaving your homeland and entire life for.

I was just glad my mother was not alive to see it.

What was I supposed to do in the face of public humiliation? Every part of me felt a need to disappear. In succession, I had lost my marriage, my mother, and now my career.

I had two choices. I could rush to find another job and keep pretending like hitting the markers of adulthood mattered, even though I was well past the point of burn out, or I could just drop out of my life for a while and see who I wanted to be moving forward. There was freedom starting to emerge from all of this loss.

I bought a one way ticket to Italy for the end of the summer. I was going to live out of one carry-on suitcase and one weekender bag. I didn’t know how to speak Italian. It was also the first time I had traveled solo out of the country not for work. But did I really expect a one-way ticket to change my life? Of course not. I was a realist.

My itinerary started in Milan, then Naples for a month to start the book I had been putting off since 2020. But as my trip went on, the itinerary got looser and looser. For one, I didn’t know where I’d be sleeping in Venice in November. (It ended up being in the back of a friend’s gallery in the Guidecca.) This wasn’t my typical way of traveling or moving through the world, but after the rigidity of my life didn’t pan out the way I hoped, I was open to trying something else.

I had no real plan. For the first time in decades, my drive had disappeared. Maybe, finally, it was time to face the fact that the promise of all my promise in America had reached an end. I sent the group chat photos of my wandering streets alone. I had recently made an itinerary for my brother and Sean’s trip to Naples based off of one of my own and I was retracing their steps and cataloging it for them.

I had shared my location with them so they’d periodically ask me how my dinner was, or ask me to send a photo of wherever they would find me. I was never really alone. But I was still working through a kind of chosen alienation. I knew it would get old to be swimming in my head day after day, though.

But in late September, near the anniversary of my mother’s death and brother’s birthday, Sardinia awaited. The group chat had sprung to action and bought tickets to meet me there. We were doing it, finally.

My flight from Naples to Olbia was delayed because of a thunderstorm that had overtaken the city. Still, the group chat was hyped — my brother and Sean were waiting to board their flight to Olbia from Milan and we were giving each other constant updates from our respective airports.

By the time I had arrived in Olbia, there were seemingly no rental cars left. We waited and waited, and finally a beat up car appeared. It didn’t matter. It had four wheels.

Our first stop was Cannigione, a small town on the northeastern coast of the island about 9 km from Porto Cervo, the ritzy coastal town where billionaires park their yachts for the summer. I had seen a steady stream of celebrities jumping off their boats into the sea on my feed and was surprised by how sleepy the area was by late September.

Sardinia is a Blue Zone, meaning a high concentration of the population lives past 100. The reasons are simple — good food, a strong sense of community, low stress, and lots of physical activity. It’s the opposite of a place like America, where we’re all mainlining cortisol on a daily basis and our life expectancy has started to decline since the pandemic.

In Sardinia, people live in the present moment and it inspired me to put my phone away too. Did I really need to know what the latest disaster overtaking the world was? We were fresh off the heels of Covid, already in the midst of an endless war in Ukraine, and things were increasingly getting worse at an unprecedented pace. After working in the media for over a decade, I decided I didn’t really need to know anything anymore. At least, not for a little while.

On our first night in Cannigione, we found an osteria near the town’s harbor. We were starving, and it was our first meal of the day, so we ordered a veritable feast: pecorino and bread (after devouring the pane carasau that came to our table immediately upon sitting down), lobster pasta, mussels in tomato sauce, fish stew, a spaghetti with bottarga (a briny fish roe that I don’t love, despite it being a local delicacy), grilled fish caught fresh that morning, and several bottles of Vermentino produced on the island. All that was left after our meal were crumbs and oil stains on the paper table cloth. We were toast.

By the time we got back to the house, it was dark and the feral cats who lived there encircled us. The house was out of a storybook — stone and 100-year-old wood beams, atop a hill overlooking the beach, the endless water, and mountains around us. There was a pool in case we didn’t feel like venturing down to the beach every day. The stone paths were littered with olives from the olive trees which lined the property. In the morning, neon purple morning glories and hot pink bougainvillea crept up the house and the faraway sound of roosters crowing awaited us. We drank Crema e Gusto coffee overlooking the harbor as the cats rubbed against our legs.

The charm of Sardinia is in the island cats, whether in front of your local Conad grocery or in an alleyway or on your lawn. There are wild pigs too, and bandits. Whoever welcomes you to the island will tell you to watch out for bandits — rural criminals — and seem to know whether or not the hunters have cleared your particular area of pigs. There have been bandits on the island seemingly since the beginning of time. We were told they are opportunists, so gates must be closed, and you know… you might get pulled over on a country road and have to pay or else. I chose to ignore the possibility of being kidnapped for ransom as they talked about it all with a shrug, as if they were simply a necessary part of life.

At night, with the windows open, I could hear at least one wild pig snorting and rummaging around outside looking for morsels of food that may have dropped from our table. I fell asleep thinking about bandits.

We were finally in paradise. So of course, my brother and I fought. We were two people who only knew how to be around each other with distance. The ease we found in the group chat had disappeared and we took turns jabbing at each other, with Sean as referee. It didn’t matter how beautiful the backdrop was. We were still our feral, grieving selves.

The island is unspoiled and wild. It feels like a place that time has forgotten. Rolling, rocky hills with ancient megalithic Nuraghe remain untouched, random stone watchtowers along the coast are reminders of the many invasions the island has had to endure, and menhirs dotting open fields still evoke the ancient people who had religious ceremonies celebrating the spirit of their ancestors. The island has reminders of your insignificance everywhere.

Since her death in 2019, towards the end of summer,_, my brother and I will inevitably start texting each other that something feels very wrong. We’re stuck in a loop waiting for the bad thing, but we circle around what that bad thing is. It’s a kind of amnesia, perhaps a post-traumatic grief response. We fill the group chat with nihilistic memes and ask why it feels impossible to get out of bed. Sean always knows what’s coming. Grief functions like muscle memory. Right, she’s dead. Of course.

We often find ourselves recounting the days that led up to the bad thing. Then, recount having to celebrate my brother’s birthday days after her death. Then my father’s. Then mine. Then, our wish to be flung into oblivion instead of pretending that any of these standards of being reasonable adult humans matter anymore.

Every September, we have tried to leave the country — and ourselves — around her death anniversary. But we’d never chosen to spend those bad days together before.

After days of sniping at each other, on my brother’s birthday, we called a truce. I hired a catamaran to take us around La Maddalena Archipelago. They call a nearby stretch of the beach “Little Tahiti” for a reason. Azure, emerald, neon blue, there aren’t enough Pantone shades to convey the hues on display.

Most of the beaches I went to had powdery white sand and neon blue water, and when we dropped anchor the water was so clear you could see the long shadows of the boats on the bottom of the water like ghost ships floating on glass. Because we were there at the end of September, there were only a handful of boats floating in this part of the archipelago but our captain told us that in the height of the summer season 30-40 boats fight for access to this float.

We spent the afternoon jumping off the side of the boat into the water, eating pecorino cheese and sliced salami, and drinking chilled Vermentino wine. I considered how much our mother would have marveled at a place like this. But she was gone.

Our captain took us past the famous “pink sand” beach of Budelli Island, made rose-colored by tiny pink sea creatures that die on shore and mix in with the sand. We looked, but we did not touch. The island had only ever had one inhabitant, a squatter, really. Mauro Morandi, who had moved to the island in 1989 to get away from it all and just decided to stay. Even facing eviction notices, he stayed. He finally left in 2021, after 32 years. In an interview, he said he had "always been a bit of a rebel” and was “quite fed up with a lot of things about our society.” So he just opted out and chose nature instead.

From the catamaran, I stared out at the island he had lived on for 32 years and imagined him watching the slow encroach of more and more summer boats in the archipelago. Like the one I was on.

What to do if you’re part of the problem and looking for the same solution?

From Cannigione, we drove to the southern tip of the island to Cagliari, on quiet roads through the center of the island. We stopped for lunch in Oristano, where my brother and Sean were hoping to eat the local specialty: horse. They were sold out, so I stuck to another specialty, Culurgiones in tomato sauce, pasta filled with potato, pecorino, and mint.

We pressed on to Cagliari, which I might be derided for describing as kind of like Naples but without the edge of feeling like you might die at any moment. (I have found myself in a dark alleyway in Naples, lit only by the neon glow of Virgin Mary shrines, walking quickly away from a dark figure who had been following too close, more than once. You know when something bad is about to happen to you. Cagliari doesn’t give you that feeling.)

Its historical center sits atop a giant hill called Castello, a medieval-walled section of the city that overlooks the rest. We had an apartment in the Castello district and all the windows overlooked the bay, with more boats and tankers and flamingos that migrated there from North Africa. In the morning, I’d sit on the balcony to sip my cappuccino while watching flamingos fly back and forth. The apartment had high tin ceilings, windows that looked out as far as Tunisia, and was owned by two sisters whose bookshelves were lined with books by Annie Ernaux.

After we arrived, we trekked down our castle mount for dinner on a rowdy pedestrian stretch to have beef carpaccio with truffle and three kinds of risotto at a place inexplicably called Crackers. The establishment’s name threw us off — we couldn’t have predicted how good the meal could be, and how plentiful the wine was at a place called Crackers. Or maybe we were just stoked to be alive and among young art goths crowding a nearby tattoo parlor which had turned into a sidewalk party. I wanted to be 19 again. I wished I hadn’t thrown my Doc Martens away in college. The city is young and hip and artsy and was the perfect next stop after the sleepy northern coast of quiet beach towns. We strode through the streets like hooligans, back to Castello through narrow alleyways lined with house plants and more cats.

We were starting to know how to be around each other, finally.

Our standout meal in the city was at the punk rock restaurant, Old Friend, created by two friends who believe in “gastronomic anarchy.” We had the Stand By Me 8-course tasting menu with wine pairing — and anarchy is indeed the perfect word for it. Whether you’re eating a lemon rind and bottarga amuse bouche, fish soup with geraniums, or sweetbreads with turnips, shitake and licorice, you are in for a once-in-a-lifetime experience in flavor chaos. While the meal requires trusting in the chaos, the chef Dario Torabi is a true artist. Every dish is impeccably put together and full of humor, down to the chocolate desert mixed in with a pile of river stones, leaving you to guess which is which. There is a reason it’s in the Michelin guide.

The next morning, though we didn’t want to leave, my itinerary demanded we press on for our final stop on the island as a trio, to an agriturismo in the province of Alghero. The island has a number of agriturismos, they’re all over Italy in fact, and they’re worth staying at for the farm to table and vineyard experience anywhere you might find yourself in Italy.

As we pulled up to our agriturismo, four kittens ran under a rusting farm truck. Horses galloped around a fenced in open field surrounded by apple trees. In the distance, we could see pens with donkeys, goats, ponies, chickens, and roosters. Around our little house were the herbs that would go into our food each evening. The family who has run the inn for decades greeted us with Vermentino. Everywhere we went, people were happy to see us, and curious how we found ourselves there.

I took my Vermentino and walked over to the horses, who came to the fence to see if I would feed them. We plucked apples from the trees and handed them over on our open palms. We were taken around the grounds and shown where the suckling pigs that we’d be eating as part of our dinner were roasting.

Dinner at Sa Mandra, which is also in the Michelin guide, was epic, endless, and must be finished in order to not offend. The tasting menu starts with pecorino cream and ends with piles of suckling pig, which keeps coming if you don’t tap out. In between, are dishes with ingredients drawn from the farm and surrounding farms — ricotta and pecorino with honey and rose jam, a pickled zucchini I still dream about, cured meats, sweetbreads with bright green peas, a farm egg poached in a honey bath, fregula in a creamy, salty broth, fried ravioli, and a silky lasagna that had put us all over the edge. The owner came by the table asking what was wrong with the lasagna that we had only half eaten. We looked at each other. Someone was going to have to do it and it wasn’t going to be me. I stared down at the farm cats who had been circling our legs. We took turns slowly making our way through our lasagna, chased with more house Vermentino, and sweating.

The pork came in heaps, with skin that had been perfectly roasted to a crisp. We did what we could and stumbled back to our house to have crazy dreams. We had two more nights of the tasting menu ahead of us. The next morning I asked the owner if I could opt out of eating everything and he laughed and patted me on the back. “No,” he said.

The only antidote to too much pork was more beach. I left the guys to drive the windy farm roads to Stintino and the famous Spaggia La Pelosa. I hauled ass away from the agriturismo determined to eat nothing all day in preparation for tasting menu night #2. When I got to La Pelosa, one of the most Instagrammed beaches in all of Sardinia, it was already crowded. In order to control the crowds, the beach requires a pass, bought through an app, which I couldn’t figure out how to download. The only solution was anytime I saw beach police walking up to people near me I ran into the water to hide.

There is no reason to get out of the water, ever. I spent hours walking around the sandbar and contemplating how I could spend a lifetime there. Staring at the horizon, where blue meets blue can feel like a singular transcendent experience, even if there are other people around you.

In some ways, the water feels like a call to disappear. I had spent weeks trying to figure out what I would do when this trip would inevitably have to come to an end. I would run out of money at some point. I had a life somewhere else, even though it felt tenuous.

I have been plagued with a feeling of wanting to be somewhere else as long as I could remember. Perhaps a product of not being attached to the place I was born — where I had come from.

Now I was in the place I had longed for but it didn’t necessarily feel like home either. Since the pandemic, I had taken an even more transient approach to my own life and the entire trip felt like the apex of that. Although I seemingly couldn’t even be around family anymore, it was getting tiresome to be alone all the time, too. Italy was — and wasn’t — providing a path forward of who I wanted to be. But it was starting to show me what I could be if I didn’t obsessively attach my identity to achievement.

Sardinia had provided a temporary reprieve. It showed the possibility of another life, where ambition isn’t a must, where your income and your job title barely matter. Where you can daydream about swimming out to an island to become its rebellious single inhabitant because life has begun to feel too much. Did Mauro Morandi find what he was looking for? I wonder where he is now.

At the end of the two weeks with my brother and Sean, I drove down country roads on a fog-thick morning, hit a bird taking a turn too fast, and dropped them off at the Olbia airport. Their part was done. I had one more week on the island alone.

We had escaped the sadness of my mother’s death anniversary by swimming through it. But we knew the sadness would surprise us as soon as we entered late summer again. And then we would need to start planning a way to escape ourselves all over again. Maybe separately, rather together.

Now, because the algorithm knows me so well, my social media feed features dozens of posts about Sardinian towns willing to pay remote workers to move and help rehabilitate them. There is a reason why the 1 Euro house in Italy story always goes viral online.

Perhaps we’re all dreaming of an alternative life where ambition isn’t a must and just being is enough. Or maybe that’s just me.

Download Places

When professional critics review restaurants, they tend to visit four to five times over the course of several weeks before writing a review. It’s considerate, but in my opinion superfluous.

If a restaurant is great, I’ll be back.

I understand the institution of criticism though.

When you criticize things professionally, you need umbrella insurance.

If you’re going to go out on a limb and tell people whether they should or should not dine at a restaurant, you should be sure of your opinion and the idea is that if you visit a restaurant four or five times you can be sure.

But what ultimately manifests is a very watered down, compromised, and sutured analysis of this restaurant that at first glance may or may not have been exciting or terrible.

No one cares if you didn’t like this restaurant after dining there 5 times in 3 weeks. That’s an insane lens to view the restaurant through especially when I’ll most likely just order a Manhattan, pick at small plates of local seafood, and comment on everyone’s footwear with my wife for 2 hours until the Nanny calls saying she has to go home.

It is significantly more interesting when criticism is terrifyingly correct or spectacularly wrong.

Unfortunately, most critics try to write from an anonymous perch conjuring an omniscient point of view, but it’s comical to think we would possibly view anyone as omniscient in an era where literally everything we ever believed in has turned out to be hot garbage.

In past eras, the critic or expert knew more than the individual reader, but because of comment sections, reposting, and the ability to fully sample and repurpose content in a TikTok video, the collective knowledge of the comment section + wikipedia & reddit will ultimately surpass that of the person writing over the lifespan of the article.

If they somehow don’t end up more knowledgable, they are at a minimum more powerful. What Jack Bruce jazz loops were to Smif ‘n Wesson, the op-ed is to the reel. That’s not to say half the comment section isn’t populated by people with no reading comprehension, but there are samurai like Jadakiss lurking that’ll take your essay about pound cake and step on it.

Culture has traveled from amphitheater to movie theater to television to second screen, but the rise of the comment section has essentially put us back into the Globe Theater with the groundlings.

I say that to say being a critic is a sucker job, but I did haphazardly dine at Eel Bar 4 times over 3 months between March 28th and June 14th.

They knew who I was and I said, “hello” because anything else would be uncivilized.

On my first visit, I got a table for 2 at 9 pm and met my favorite living author who I’d never met in person. This author had dined previously at Eel Bar and recommended it highly. We got the fried mussels, grilled bay scallops, stuffed Piquillo Peppers, and a pork dish that was incredible, but I forgot to take notes on because I was ENJOYING myself and lost track.

I ordered a juicy chilled forgettable red that went with everything and it was hands down the most exciting meal I’d had in New York since returning in February.

The element of the mussels and bay scallops that stood out was the light dusting of paprika or some other type of mild gently smoky but sweet chili powder that really liberated the natural essence of the shellfish. It was the effervescent amount of chili and the delicate way it played with the unctuous oily elements of the dish that really hit for me. It sounds simple, but it’s the simple turns of the dial and precise applications that make food exciting to me these days.

Deconstructing, reimagining, or plating food like Myles Turner’s legos just isn’t my kind of dining. People have cooked for 5,000 years so we should just acknowledge that whatever we have to offer here and now is bullshit contrasted against that incredible history. If we’re lucky enough to contribute anything, it is most likely a very, very tiny turn of the dial.

Eel Bar sat us next to the kitchen so I was able to watch the expediter call out every dish as the tickets came in. There were three other cooks with him that evening and whenever a dish was called out, the cooks would turn, make a few small movements and within minutes the dish would appear, the expediter would cross it off the ticket in black marker and yell towards the dining room, “HANDS!”

If you dine on a night this expediter is working, you will frequently see him standing there for substantial amounts of time with his arm in the air as he crosses tickets off with his other hand.

He’s kind of my hero.

I hate when the kitchen is ahead of the wait staff and what this man does with his hand in the air could be seen as condescending, but I see it as a silent protest and I feel the world needs more people like this expediter willing to stand for a belief. Even a belief as simple as hot food.

I like hot food.

I think food should be delivered hot.

Or cold food delivered at the precise intentionally cold temperature the kitchen fired it at.

I think it is uncouth for the wait staff to be behind the kitchen and deliver someone else’s work at the wrong temperature.

It reminds me of class projects when you did your job but because someone else has completely shit the bed, you go down with them.

That feels wrong.

Conversely, if you have a great wait staff that deserves better than what is coming out of their respective kitchen, well, I would protest that too.

I generally enjoy a good protest. It doesn’t take much for me.

I don’t know this expediter and did not introduce myself cause that’s weird. Over four visits, we made eye contact twice, but neither of us was corny enough to act on it so we immediately looked away.

I emailed Eel Bar in my capacity as a Substacker to find out this person’s name and they informed me that it is Chase Bray, who is also the sous-chef.

Watching this expediter and his kitchen literally made me want to cook the next day because there are very few things like cooking or blogging where you can pour your entire heart, energy, and lumbar region into something and immediately know it was fucking fire.

Sports are this way too. You score a basket, you hit a double, you catch a touchdown, you fire bay scallops.

My second visit to Eel Bar was an accident.

I told my wife I’d take her to a nice bar for cute drinks one Saturday evening around 8:45 pm, but typed in the wrong bar and ended up on Essex Street without a plan. She was obviously pissed clicking along in heels as we crossed Delancey going South and did every thing she could to resist heading home out of scorn.

Luckily I saw Broome Street in the distance and said I’d see if we could get two seats at Eel Bar. It was desperate times and the dining room was full, but they were able to seat us outside at a folding table.

We sat down and sipped our waters as a makeshift rap video made its way down Broome with several Eastern European-looking lil’ homies with face tats brushed past our table.

I caught the server’s eye and immediately threw out an order for fried mussels, grilled bay scallops, Piquillo Peppers, Bomba rice with rabbit, and calamari with onions before my wife could shatter a glass intended for orange wine over my head and stab me in the throat for ruining the one Saturday evening she had out this month.

Thankfully, every thing hit.

It hit so hard my wife ordered a second round of Piquillo Peppers and grilled bay scallops, when she randomly saw a friend crossing the street with some secret beef.

She immediately FaceTimed this friend and blew up her spot.

“Ummm, did you just cross Broome with a new man?”

“Yeaaaaaaah.”

We quickly finished our food, our wine, paid the bill, then met up her friend and the secret beef at Lolita Bar, which was a nice throwback.

For the uninitiated or out-of-town, google describes Lolita Bar incredibly as a “basic hipster bar”. I had three terrible Manhattans that really hit the spot watching the Lakers Timberwolves game in the corner of the bar as my 6 leg parlay blew up in my face.

The third time we visited Eel Bar was on a double date with other parents so we hit the 5:30 pm reservation. There was a time in my life - 4 years ago - when I woke up at 1:30 pm so the 5:30 pm dinner is exotic to me.

On this visit, there were significant changes to the menu. Usually in a review, the critic would compare and contrast the menus, but I really don’t think that’s the point. If you were dating someone, would you compare every outfit they wore from date-to-date? Would you love them more or less based on the cut of their jean?

I may perhaps enjoy a date with my wife more when she wears thigh high boots but I’m unwell.

“The bay scallops are gone.” Gasped said wife.

“Do you still love me?” Ok, I didn’t say that, but I wish I had because it would’ve been really funny right here.

We spent a few minutes telling our fabulous dining companions about these now deceased bay scallops and how good they were, then proceeded to order the fried mussels that were still there, the Piquillo Peppers, Bomba rice with Montauk red shrimp, Grass-fed burger with boquerones and roquefort, Rainbow trout and mushrooms pil pil, and finally a Half chicken with shell beans and tomato.

By this third visit I was up to my fucking ears in Eel Bar and I liked it. There were favorites like the grilled scallops and fried mussels, but every dish had a similar electricity running through it. There’s an excitement and urgency with every dish at Eel Bar and it really starts with the discipline and economy of movement in the kitchen. Like my first visit, I watched as tickets came in, hands got moving, and food got fired.

These guys don’t have to be this sharp, especially not at 5:30 pm with a half empty dining room, but they were. They play every dish like its the playoffs and that sense of intensity and purpose is really fucking exciting to see anywhere in 2025. A lot has been said about young people, work ethic, gen z, the fall of America, yada yada yada.

I think every generation has lazy people and every generation has insane people doing things with an intensity no one asked them to do it with like the expediter and cooks at Eel Bar.

I think these guys would be doing it anyway.

For free.

Or not.

But they seem to need this.

Like a writer needs to cut themselves open and bleed.

I went again last weekend and the fried black sea bass might’ve been the best thing I’ve had at Eel Bar to date. Again, extremely simple preparation allowing the fish to talk its shit like Guru on a Premiere track. Yes, I’m so ancient I just compared a tempura-ish fried black sea bass to Gang Starr.

Whatever.

Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is.

I’m not a critic.

I just really like Eel Bar.

Download Places

MONDAY, MAY 19

It's been two weeks since I've been back stateside. It's Monday. Amelia left for Philly on Saturday to see her mom and shoot a movie. She's been staying at mine since we got back. I've been saying “I can finally work” now that Amelia has gone traveling, jokingly, of course jokingly, but also totally incorrectly so far, since yesterday I was dead all day from turning up too hard with Harold for no good reason on Saturday night, he's younger and stronger and I try to keep up and do for a while till out of nowhere I get blindsided by the projectile vomit I instinctually try to catch in my hands—that I fail to catch in my hands—at which point I have to go, I think I’m done, bro, I’m out.

So yesterday I couldn’t do shit.

I've just gone to the store and gotten new pencils and pens and a notebook. I'm writing in it now. I started with pen, but just now switched to pencil. Amelia forgot her pencil sharpener here, I got it in Japan for her early on in the trip, at the beginning of April, before we knew we were going to meet up out there. It works super well and has a little receptacle that catches the shavings and little puffy, differently-colored animated creatures depicted on the front of it. Writing with pencil is best because, as you're writing, you're constantly reminded that you only have so many words, so much lead.

Which incidentally was exactly how traveling felt: acutely aware of your transience, of time passing. A natural motivation to act and love and move deliberately and intentionally each day. A sense, what with the passing of my baba and the fact of my sister and her babies and my mom and dad being together after all that time, of things that seemed triggering in the past no longer seeming so. There was too little time to spend angry.

This was the energy I was on. And retained, I feel, over the past fortnight back here in New York.

Till yesterday, with Amelia gone, I could feel myself plummeting back into my old orientation towards the world, of how things felt before. Of taking time for granted, of falling into timewasting habits. Writing this to remind myself how things felt in Japan, to remember everything I don't want to forget.

DRINKING IN JAPAN

In truth, it hadn’t all been roses and daisies getting to the point of pulling off the conjugal overseas meetup. We’d gotten into a nasty fight not a fortnight before we met up. It was days after I touched down, just hours postfuneral, a day of ritual and remembrance and quiet grieving, certainly, but also as it so happened a day of steady ceremonial imbibing, since high noon more or less, at the crematorium to start, then on the late-afternoon walk back from baba’s to the family bnb after dropping off the urn I as firstborn grandson was required to carry—I carried it back to baba’s—only I'd accidentally taken the lone key they all needed to get back into the bnb, and so the day drinking was compounded by the 9% strong seltzer “road can” I copped for the walk back, about a mile, at a brisk clip once I learned they were locked out, a pleasant walk past a long park I'd never seen before—

All to say, I was already on a belligerent one in my conversation with Amelia that first night, which destabilized things some.

Then the following day we went back for another meal at my uncle Nobu's, that I matched Nobu’s whiskey and beer intake during, out of respect, and then that night I had a video work meeting that I went into already sparked, it had to be late because of the time difference, and it went well, and I was feeling so exuberant and ALIVE in a way that must be connected to having buried and cremated your baba the day before and then sipped a whole bunch of whiskey the following day—it was that night that we got into our first terrible fight.

OUR FIRST TERRIBLE FIGHT

Amelia FaceTimed me coming back from dinner with some friends out in Bali. She might've had some drinks, too. I was being brash and careless, more just flippant and whiskey-ed and insensitive. She sensed this and said, Are you drunk? And then, when I laughed: I'm going to go now. And then she hung up. She didn’t necessarily hang up on me, in that she said she was gonna before she did. But I felt like she did. I tried calling back and she sent it to voicemail, and I just unloaded with some texts. Right when we'd been going so well, too, that morning we'd been at this mall with the babies and I'd gotten a whole drawing set for her, pencil and sharpener and eraser, and though I hadn't told her, she must have felt this, she was out all day trying on dresses and was sending me cute selfies of herself in new dresses all day. Only now I’d ruined it.

~

The following morning, our final morning at the family bnb, we were set to travel out to Chiba for two nights and stay on the water in a beach town, Torami. The idea initially was that my mom would be slammed logistically with funeral tasks, so it would be good for us to clear out for a couple days and then come back to Kasai when things were more settled. At the last minute, my mom decided she was going to join us.

But so I get up hungover as shit and we’re all scrambling to get packed and cleaned by checkout, I'm in my room trying to take stock of all my stuff while simultaneously uploading the week's podcast since I don't know when I'll have stable Wi-Fi again, but little Selah doesn't realize this and he just wants to play the game where he comes into my room and takes all my stuff and throws it everywhere so that I become “the monster,” he wants to play “the monster game,” only “it's not time for that Selah, we're not playing that game right now,” lifting him up and placing him outside into the hall and closing the door. Only I don’t see Toto right behind him, following his every move, and right as I'm closing the door, something seems off. It's little Toto's finger in the gap on the backside of the hinge, and I do stop closing it at the very last minute, but not before definitely closing it a little onto Toto’s precious little finger, and then it's two hours of kissing Toto's boo-boo, of complete panic, convinced I’ve crushed it, and I feel worse and angrier at myself than I can remember feeling, and I think this HAS to be karma for all the garbage I texted Amelia yesterday—

And so all of that travel day and the first night I’m trying to send Amelia apology texts. Nothing is working...

TORAMI

We take two short trains from Kasai and then at Tsudaname take the long rapid train out to Torami. A couple hours in all. On the outskirts of Chiba, in Ichinomiya Prefecture, facing west onto the Pacific. It quickly becomes countryside, rice fields with intermittent houses with older architecture. We commandeer a full train row and the one across from it. I try to listen to The Tale of Genji on audiobook but quickly pass out. It’s been just four days since flying out here and it’s been a nonstop bender.

It was like this last time, in 2015. I was twenty-four, it was a year after walking across country, I’d worked all that year making coffee at a bakery, and then finished up my degree at UCSC while renting a room out of the house I grew up in, that belonged to Diana, the woman with cerebral palsy my mom worked as a live-in caretaker for. I was deciding whether to move in with a girlfriend or buy a van and live in that. There was this uncertainty of transition I was feeling—of an era ending, not dissimilar to this present trip—not to mention the strange unresolved feeling of being back in this pre-consciously familiar environment I was nonetheless only marginally able to communicate in. Add to that the dread/fear of going to visit my dad for the first time since he’d left the states…

But there isn’t any of that frantic energy this time. There are babies around so no one has the luxury of acting like baby.

The owner of the beach house we’re renting picks us up from the Torami train station. In a camper van with a drop down bed in the back. We squeeze in. There are so many little trinkets and souvenirs on the back of the front seats, I almost don’t notice the small TV screen initially. It’s playing surfing highlights. Toto had been getting squirmy in the backseat after the long journey. I go, “Look,” pointing out the screen when I notice it. She goes immediately quiet and starts watching the surfers, mesmerized.

~

The beach house has a big backyard and a covered porch and then a second covered barbeque area on the side surrounding an astroturfed, fenced-in lawn. The ocean a few blocks away, across a two-lane highway. We sit out in the sun.

There’s even a barrel sauna on offer, but that costs extra.

My dad has been on this, saunas and cold plunges and sun bathing. He’s got a sauna on his land up in Hokkaido and runs a bnb side-business out of it, hosting people to do a sweat literally overlooking the ocean. Every morning, he claims, no matter how cold out it is, he sunbathes nude out back behind his sauna.

The babies nap, and we go about figuring out the coffee situation. There are Nespresso capsules, plus a type of instant that’s a “latte,” coffee with evaporated milk somehow incorporated. There’s too much going on to stay frustrated about upsetting Amelia. Even when the babies are napping—they could wake up at any moment. I announce that I’m going to make a coffee and my mom and sister say they’re going to, too, or that they want one, I say “OK,” or “Nice, I’m gonna make one.” I thought we were doing like a “using the bathroom first” type situation, I don’t know if they mean they want one right this second. Shiina comes out ten minutes later after putting the babies down and goes, Where’s my coffee? My dad and I both have our shirts off and are leaning back in the recliner sun chairs, facing the sun.

“I mean...”

“I thought you were...”

Shiina and my mom stand there like tsk tsk, selfish men as always—returning to our dynamic from growing up, towards my dad for not being there, towards me for being the only boy in a house with sometimes up to five women, including Diana and her other caretakers—before going inside.

~

A SHIFT

We try talking that night but it doesn’t go well. And then the next afternoon I ignore her call. That’s when all hell breaks loose. We’d spent the day walking to the beach in the morning, and then playing soccer in the backyard. There’s a swing back there, too, only it’s got concrete beneath it and transitions abruptly from concrete to astroturf, there’s a jagged dangerous edge right at the nadir of the swing, not to mention it’s set too close to the house to swing back without hitting the house. I come up with this game where I catch Toto at the highest point, and then push her while still kind of holding her to ensure she doesn’t fall, pausing at the beginning of each swing to make a game of it. She just loves it, she can’t stop laughing. Then Selah comes over and insists I return to soccer. Only for Toto to come up to me in the cutest way, all focused and determined, taking my hand and leading me back to the swing. I didn’t mean to ignore her call—I had my hands full.

And so little time with all of us together. After dinner I drink a bit more, I took the bike to the nearby conbini, biking through rice fields, I got snacks for Shiina so it wasn’t totally selfish, there’s a children’s book in the house that’s like a giraffe and all these different animals, and we sit on the couch and read it through a couple times. Toto keeps turning the pages all fast, she reads in this way where she only looks at each page for a second before laughing and turning it, and tomorrow we’ll head back to Tokyo and my dad and I will catch a flight up to Hokkaido and my sister and the babies will head back to baba’s for a night and then head back to LA. I just can’t be having daily fights rehashing everything that happened in the past, trying to prove we’re right, I say, we can call off the Japan plan, you’re right, I’m wrong, but we can’t do this anymore.

This energy shifts something, snaps us out of some accusatory loop we’d been caught in. After some tears and declarations of commitment, we’re back on a calm, if tentative one.

Walking back from dinner that night, it’s a Tonkatsu shop right on the highway there, the ocean on the other side, quiet and dark and the stars are out, and the moon rising a week from full, and Selah is going is that baba up there? And Shiina says yes that’s baba, she’s up there now, see? And Selah goes how did she get up there? And Shiina says she flew up there. One day we’ll fly up there and join her.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21

Wednesday now. Amelia went to Maryland for her little sister’s graduation. She’s experiencing a family gathering in the same way I did that week in Torami, she was venting to me and feeling triggered and I told her it’s okay, it’s what everyone experiences with their family, only she wasn’t really hearing me. When you’re in a particular, difficult circumstance it’s not helpful to realize that it’s universal. But that makes it all the more important to share about your difficult particular experiences, courageously and honestly, it helps others find the universal in their own particular experience.

~

Things went way different last I was out here. My dad didn’t have a house yet, he was renting out this spartan apartment, like low income housing, on the edge of town. It was a three-day visit rather than eleven, on the tail end of turning up all week in Tokyo with my sister the week before. We got so drunk off whiskey together, I remember, we got into a huge fight. In my defense, it was a real bomb that he dropped on me that sparked the fight—that my great grandpa, his grandpa, about whom I knew nothing growing up, whom even he barely knew anything about due to how private my grandpa was about his childhood, but just learned, took his own life when my grandpa was 1. And “Conroe,” both our surnames, was the name of my grandpa’s stepdad, who my great grandma married when my grandpa was 8.

The rootlessness of this discovery, which my dad relayed to me unthinkingly, belligerently, that first night, he was feeling stunned by the discovery himself. At the time, I’d get so upset by how absent and groundless he was, never providing a solid foundation, he shouldn’t have shared it so loosely. And this discovery gave his actions a genetic, predetermined quality. This was 2015, so he’d have been moved out there since 2012 after trying and failing to become a priest and finding himself out of money and scrambling to survive, living out of a house in San Francisco his brother, my uncle Mark, owned but hadn’t rented out yet. It wasn’t till my grandma passed in 2017 that my dad inherited the means to buy a house out there in the small fishing village in Hokkaido. And not until a year or so ago that he’s been working out and mostly sober and laying off the cigs.

We get all packed that last day in Torami and take the train back to Tokyo and see my mom and sister and the babies off at the Kasai station, before gearing for the trek up north. It’s around noon. We’ve got almost an hour to kill before the airport bus. We get kebabs from the Kasai station there and wait. It’s April 9.

~

AINU EASTER

The plan is, I’ll stay till April 20, Easter Sunday, and then fly back down to Tokyo to spend 10 days with my mom at my baba’s. Or in an airbnb if Amelia and I can work things out and she decides to come join me. My dad and his wife, Sono, have planned a trip the last weekend to drive all the way across Hokkaido to the eastern coast, they’ve been together since he moved out here, I’ve only met her a couple times. She’s out of town—incidentally down in Tokyo to visit her son, who is grown now—the first few nights I’m up there. “So we’ll be on our own for food the first nights,” my dad tells me like delivering grave news, sparking up his pickup in the long term airport parking lot, a gravel expanse surrounded by trees, after the two-hour flight and a shuttle.

It’s a Japan-only Toyota with a six-foot bed and a tiny cockpit. It’s faster to take the expressway across the island, along the coast, but we cut through, up and over the mountain, to evade the tolls. It’s noticeably colder up here, the air has a frosty sting, and there’s snow on the switchbacked summit. It’s ainu country, the indigenous natives of Japan, who hailed from up here on this northern island. There are only about 10K recorded ainu left since being assimilated. This is a big part of the trip across Hokkaido we have planned, Sono wants to take us to the ainu museum there on the far coast.

I’ve been on a mythological kick, reading the earliest Greek and Roman and Judeo Christian stories, trying to understand the gospels from an anthropological viewpoint, to understand how the Christ story ties into the earliest seasonal festivals. We’re coming up on Easter, the vernal full moon is this Sunday, and Easter is of course the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. These are all spring festivals to do with death and rebirth, and of course my baba’s birthday was the first day of spring only she died five days before, and yet it feels like everything is being renewed again on this trip, our relation to each other feeling recurrent yet clearly distinct, my dad isn’t just trying to be the “cool dad” doing whatever I’m on, smoking cigs, drinking, like he’d do whenever he’d pop up in the past, but rather has cultivated himself over this time away. He’s adamant about his changes, especially now that we’re going back into his actual life with Sono. “We’ll find you a spot to smoke, but if you could try to keep it down to a minimum,” he says as we pass vast gorges, stretches of road still coated with snow. This almost triggers me but there’s also something sweet about it, he keeps trying to pawn off these OD 20mg cherry cola Zyns on me, and that he bought in bulk online. “I’m all good with my smokes,” I say. “But thank you.”

Around the end of the drive, emerging out of a tunnel onto Lake Toya, I’m hit with the thought that we really are being reborn this Easter week, we’re embodying new roles, I’m “uncle” now, my mom and dad are “gigi and baba,” and my sister is “mom.” To say nothing of whatever rebirth is happening with Amelia. It’s real, this seasonal story of death and renewal.

And yet, all these mythological stories are based off of agricultural practices. Easter is spring because harvests. The ainu, I can’t help but realize, driving past white pines so close together you can’t see how far back they go, never made the jump to growing crops, never razed the land. They stayed hunting and gathering much longer. I can’t imagine how they survived in this terrain.

It’s a different awareness, a nonstop battle with the elements, I’ve gotta learn how they managed to survive.

~

THE ONSEN

It’s a small but beautiful house, corrugated steel and big second-floor windows facing out on the ocean. A small sauna out back, feet from the cliff’s edge. The first two nights, without Sono around, we subsist on our grocery run the first day and 7-Eleven and the restaurant at Shiosai, the onsen (public baths) in town. On Saturday, my dad cranks the sauna and we get in there for some good few rounds and lay out in the sun.

My dad is insistent on going nude, it makes sense since onsens in Japan are all separated by gender and full nude, we were in Shiosai on Thursday, that’s what we did the first afternoon, walked from my dad’s house which sits on the corner of a curve in the road, down the hill along the water to the baths which looks like a big moored ship right on the water, I’d somehow forgotten about this from last time, that all Japanese baths are full nude. You take your shoes off right when you step into the vestibule, and then drop trou in the changing room and then shower, there are a couple standing showers but the traditional way is to sit on a little plastic stool with a hole where your butt is, you lather down in front of a mirror with a removable shower nozzle, it’s true in Japan people don’t play about their bathing, you’ll see dudes taking their sweet time in there, lathering fully, shaving, it’ll all clean as the water is continually flowing into the many drains, and the onsens themselves are located according to the natural springs, like how in primeval times hunter-gatherers who first learned to stay put in one place gathered near the natural springs—

And so you shower and then hit the baths, there are different baths with different temperatures, we hit the one outside with a cover over it and then hit the sauna which has a TV inside playing the news, and then hit the cold bath and sit there naked on a plastic chair for five minutes minimum, letting the hot-cold therapy do its work, this is part of the ritual in Japan, you’ll see old dudes sitting in chairs looking zenned out after each round, and then we rinse and repeat that process a couple times.

And since the onsen is the town center in some ways, and my dad is the only white dude I see all week, and not only that but is the English teacher at the K-12 Waldorf school in town, not to mention has a huge white beard and bald head and is like 6-4, he’s recognizable everywhere, and right when we hit the outside bath the first time, the ocean visible across the way, we run into two young boys barely out of high school, one of them is literally just out of high school and since my dad has been out here for twelve years exactly—since spring of 2013—we put together that my dad taught him since he was a first grader. He speaks in a slow deliberate lilt, practicing his English of course since my dad is the English teacher. They go over his various behavioral phases throughout his years, across the bath from each other—he had a rebellious period around eighth grade but then snapped back into gear in high school.

“Other than that brief time, you were a good student,” my dad says.

“I did all my homeworks!” he says, eyes wide and unassuming and cutely indignant.

You sit in the bath and then it gets too hot and you gotta sit on the edge a sec, both boys sit on the edge of the pool, unashamed, it’s all very Call Me by Your Name–coded (pause).

~

But so my dad wouldn’t dream of wearing shorts in his personal sauna when we spark it up on Saturday, I wear trunks, and he’s got a pullup bar right there by the entrance, so between rounds, repenting for my bender back in Tokyo, I crank a set of pullups followed up by pushups followed by situps, it’s truly a divine progression from hot to the ice cold metal bath he’s got there that he fills up manually, to the exercises, to the sun, with the ocean right there.

And doing so incites some natural animalistic competitive impulse in my dad, he can’t help but put a set in, only he’s nude, so next thing I know I’m finished with my set, muscles taut and un-inflaming by the breath, buzzing euphorically, only to hear my dad grunting and look over from my reclining chair to see him ass naked doing a 40 stack of pushups, his manhood and beard hitting the walnut deck wood each set lmao.

And I think yes—things are very different this time. Lighter, more gratitude about what’s even happening rather than anger about what isn’t, nothing to prove. My dad is just a person, I’ve recurrently realized over the years, but perhaps feel more tangibly than ever in this very moment.

~

Part of the problem, before, was that my initial defense mechanism, of not needing anything, of overachieving at everything I did, being ambitious to a slightly psychotic degree, actually scared him some. It brought up stuff with his dad, of being an easygoing pacifist in a world of toxic ambitious men, to the point that he couldn’t believe that I would ever need any help. So when he was revamping his life with his inheritance, and I was actually going through hell, all fucked up circa 2017-2019, he didn’t even realize this, or want to realize this; the distance with the extreme relocation, with no designs to ever come visit, also didn’t help.

~

Sono comes home that night. On Sunday, Palm Sunday, we play tennis in the dome. It’s that my dad has adopted a physical ritual that has got him literally, physiologically calmer, I don’t think this would be the case without these physiological changes. Now that Sono is back I’m cutting out drinking, in the evenings I speak to Amelia for an hour, earlier than I normally would since the bedroom is right next door to my dad and Sono’s and I don’t want to disturb them. As the possibility of Amelia coming to meet me in Tokyo starts looking more and more likely, I cut way down on smoking, I need to get healthy and jacked for Amelia.

All week it’s very ritualistic. My dad goes to the school in the mornings to teach his classes, sing his songs with the youngins, and Sono works at home mornings so it’s just me and her at the house. We get up and she makes just the most unreal breakfasts and we speak in Japanese, discuss things I might do with Amelia when I return to Tokyo. It’s the first Japanese I’m required to speak for survival since I can remember, since I can always switch back to English with my mom, hide behind my mom when speaking with gigi and baba.

And in the evenings we read from this old book The Three Years by Emil Bock, we read what happens to Christ each day of Holy Week. On Wednesday Amelia books her flight out to Japan, and on Thursday I book the Airbnb we’ll stay in for the week.

~

THE CHICKEN AND THE SNAKE

On our final evening at my dad’s, Maundy Thursday eve, my dad tells me the funniest story. Everything feels so on the nose, the fact of us embarking on our trip tomorrow morning, Good Friday morning, into the land of the dead—of the past, my ancestral past I’ve forgotten, but also the literal past of traveling with my dad, of my childhood. But we’re upstairs in the attached kitchen-living area, sort of reading, sort of looking at our phones, commenting occasionally on something we were reading or looking at, the ocean vast and black out the wall sized windows.

I start asking about how things were on the property before, how undeveloped and wild it was initially, before he went in and razed it, like Hercules did the primeval forest, to get it flat like it is now. In the early days, he reminds me, he had chickens and a rooster. He starts going in, digging up photos. “Man, I loved those guys. They were so damn cute!”

One day, a fox came, yanked them all, left just their feet. “But they were under constant attack.” A weasel came once and jabbed the chicken in her neck and fled. My dad has trauma around this story, he spares me the details. It was just a little hoop house, what they needed was a sturdier structure. A typhoon first got the structure, blew that shit out, exposing his babies, on that final fateful raid. “But man, you gotta see this one,” he says, pulling up a video.

It's my dad with a significantly smaller beard, less jacked than he is now, out back in the no longer existent hoop house. Face to face with a snake.

With a jab, he grabs the snake by the neck, sort of on its head, and lifts it, it's gotta be three feet, and gathers the still-coiled lower part with his off-hand. He's got on big black rubber gloves. He's saying something like, "Gotcha!" He turns to the little black chicken and lifts up the snake to his face, the chicken jolts and turns, my dad laughs maniacally—he thinks it's hysterical. And then he strides towards the ocean. The camera pans, exposing a wild, dense area where the sauna currently sits, and walks out to the water's edge.

“Rewind that. What's that in its mouth?” I say.

There's orange goop in the snake’s mouth that's dangling in a weird way, making it look like it’s grinning.

“That’s yolk,” my dad says. “He was trying to eat the egg whole.”

My dad strides to the water's edge, along a path through the untamed jungle back there, and flings the FUCK out of the snake off the cliff, which is hundreds of feet down to the water below.

We both start dying laughing, playing it over and over.

“Cast that shit down to hell!”

“Begone!”

“Like Satan falling out of the sky like lightning.”

~

We pit stop the first night, Good Friday night, in Obihiro. A medium sized town surrounded by mountains. A spot my dad likes and visits with Sono sometimes, the Hokkaido Hotel Spa and Resort. It’s calling card is the onsen, but the architecture goes crazy too. Very Twin Peaks coded, with wooden bear carvings all over.

We hit the sauna then try to hit a nearby izakaya. Sono is meeting a friend in Obihiro, so we’re on our own. It’s rainy and dark and my dad gets stressed when he can’t read the damn menu.

We abort and walk across the street to McDonald’s. Go in on a Big Mac meal, claiming it’s “research for my essay.” Then head back and call it, we’ve got a long drive to Abashiri, to the ainu museum in the morning.

~

NORTHERN PEOPLES

It was one of the first things I learned about Amelia upon meeting her a year ago to the week, there were countless connections to make our meeting seem fated, but one was that we were both Swedish, only my Swedish lineage, through my dad’s mom, is mainland Swedish, whereas hers is sami—the indigenous northern peoples of Sweden.

So it comes as a stunning discovery that the museum is not only about the ainu, but about all northern hunter gatherer people, the Inuit, Eskimo, Northwest Coast Indians, Siberians, and also—the sami.

I start texting Amelia everything I’m seeing, incredulous.

This has been a hole in my thinking, focusing so much on the pagan harvest rituals of antiquity; these were for those who developed agriculture. But what if you lived in a climate that didn’t allow you to develop agriculture. Not everyone can get land and crops, sometimes you have to confront what’s around you and make do with ingenuity and skill.

The Northern Peoples can’t be detached from the resources they use to survive. Their clothes are made of seal and reindeer pelt, walrus skin, treebark.

I start texting Amelia, unable to help myself.

“Look—outfit of a Sami man.”

“Sami garment with a hood for the baby.”

“Sami wedding garment.”

Early Europeans traded with the Northern Peoples. They brought luxury goods: tobacco, coffee, and guns. These items “dramatically altered the lives of Northern Peoples.” There are sami and ainu tobacco pouches, coffee makers.

“Your favorite,” Amelia texts.

She keeps doing this funny-ass bit where she goes, “I remember how cold it was… it was so cold.” Going “Brrr,” with bunches of this emoji: “🥶.”

The progression from hunter-gathering to agriculture isn’t as clear cut as it would seem, turns out. In Hokkaido, many people relied on hunter-gathering well into the agricultural period. They had their own culture going on independently of what was happening on the mainland, up on the Okhotsk coast here and on the Sakhalin islands, in Russia, just across the water.

Their gods were different. They worshipped bears. Praying that the dead would return as bears, bringing meat and fur as gifts.

There are hunting tools: spears and arrows, fishhooks and nets; traps for catching land animals like foxes and martens— “what you needed to protect your chickens!” I tell my dad.

And tools for herding reindeers, what the sami people did. Reindeer provided food but also transportation, the sami literally rode the reindeer.

“I remember...” Amelia texts. “It was so cold.”

~

We drive one town over, to Shari, to check into the hotel. It’s a tiny town. The coast is wild and unforgiving, I can’t imagine spearing a walrus in there. The hotel has a sauna, an outdoor cold plunge. They give us gowns so we can all go in together, the hot is hot and the cold is damn cold. We sit there buzzing looking up at this tree overlooking us.

And after we shower we hit this Italian restaurant in town, we have a few nice dishes and then head back to the hotel and sip a tiny bit and read the final page from Holy Week, it’s Holy Saturday eve, Christ will rise in the morning.

And in the morning we drive all the way back, I’ve got to catch the flight by five, we pit stop at a soba spot for lunch and then keep moving, things are different now but they’re also the same, we’ve resurrected anew but we’re also always trying to resurrect, my dad and I haven’t fought once this week, we barely drank, but he’s also got new vices, his thing is pounding soft serves, it starts when we hit this famous soft serve spot on the way out, but the drive back is long and he’s gotta put in his shifts, do his part, give Sono breaks, every time it’s his turn to drive he keeps pit stopping at 7-Eleven for another soft serve, it’s the funniest shit, he’ll be ranting all geeked up for an hour after each one and then crash like a baby, we’re all dying and being reborn but it’s also perennial winter and we’re just surviving like the ainu, trying to pay respect and properly worship those around us we need in order to keep surviving—

And it’s almost end of day on Friday, May 23, I’ve got to send this piece in, Amelia will be back this evening, she finished her movie, I’ve got to get the spot right for her return—

We have our last meal in the airport, on Easter Sunday evening, my dad has taken me into his shelter all week and there’s some healing that happened there, he keeps emphasizing that this will be the last time this will happen, when else are we gonna get a chance to spend time like this, and it’s like, bro, you can always come visit, you’ve got grandchildren now, I feel slightly triggered by this easy, sentimental fatalism, but we’re here now, we can only confront what we can see before our eyes, once our meal is finished I give both my dad and Sono a big hug and tell them I love them and hop on the plane for Tokyo, excited to meet up with Amelia.

Download Places

CHICAGO — DAY ONE

My mother has a surprise, she informs me when we step into the house and I drop off my bags. Something special. I don’t ask questions. I am 36 years old, and an only child, and have not lived at home for nearly 13 years. Maintaining our relationship means occasionally cosplaying the past, I’ve learned. Several years ago, we were arguing about something—I can’t remember what—and I told her she had to stop treating me like a child. The heated and accusatory tone of our conversation abruptly sobered up. “You have to understand something,” she said, suddenly very serious. “You’re always going to be my little boy.” For the first time in my life, I grasped that she really meant it.

Ergo I follow her, as a little boy follows his mommy, into the kitchen, where she directs my attention toward the stovetop and pulls the lid off a pot. Savory steam punches me in the face; I look down to see a blob of clay-colored meat atop a bed of soggy greens. “Corned beef and cabbage,” she proudly announces. “For St. Patrick’s Day.”

I should note here that my mother is a 100% Chinese-American woman and the other side of my lineage is Russian-Jewish, traced back to the old country. The Gordons and Skebelskys and Goldbergs and Chins—branches along my family tree—are not, and have never been, genetically associated with the Irish. But we are in Chicago, where the river is annually dyed emerald-green and every mayor, even the gay and Black ones, abide by the insistent traditions of the local whites. So corned beef and cabbage it is.

I am ready to be immersed in Chicago, and reborn a Chicagoan. I’ve hit town to promote my debut novel, See Friendship, released in early March and received with encouraging warmth at several readings along the coasts. After accompanying me on the California leg, my wife Jen has headed back to New York to attend to our cat, who recently had a brick-sized poop removed via enema and shouldn’t be left to a sitter for too long. Thus I’m flying solo for the homecoming event, and my fantasies of fireworks, balloon floats, an exploding neon sign of my name above the event space are somewhat counterbalanced by my ability to also anticipate the reliably humbling experience of falling asleep alone in my teenage bedroom, beneath a poster of the Teen Titans I’ve left taped up since high school.

In interviews and conversations, I’ve coined a very technical term to describe the style of my book: “autofictional-ish.” While I suppose I’ve set myself up for this, I’m surprised by how the fabricated events of my novel have already commingled with the real life dynamics I’ve smudged for entertainment, creating Inception-style situations where I’ve lost track of what’s real and what’s fake. Old friends have hit me up to discuss the recollections that my book has triggered, and when responding I sometimes can’t tell if I’m pulling from my own memories, or from my semi-fictional narrator’s completely fictional memories. When writing I was very aware of how I personally differentiated from my character—and now I’m in the thick of it, and losing track. The thinness of nostalgia is one of my book’s recurring themes, but now that I’m physically present in Chicago I do not want to be let down by yesteryear.

The corned beef is savory, the cabbage nourishing. If she’s whipped this up before I can’t remember but my mother, in general, is an excellent cook. Once I asked why she didn’t make more Chinese food at home, and she told me: “Because I ate it three times a day for 18 years.” I think about this often, the act of saying no; a few years ago I went on a big Bartleby the Scrivener kick and the act of refusal began to feel like the basis of all human dignity.

The process of publishing a book is, I’m finding, a tug-of-war between indulgence and restraint. I’m sure there are things I should be doing, actions I should be undertaking, but I’m starting to think que sera, sera. I’ve spent 5.5 years and countless edits working on this thing, but nobody reads, anyway, and I’d rather nudge it into existence than send another false-chipper “just wanted to see how the book is treating you!” email to a galley recipient who’s also following the post-inauguration flurry of executive orders and fantasizing about the end of the world.

After eating we decide to mint my arrival with a movie, and somehow pick Godzilla Minus Zero. I pop a mild edible because we’re just hanging out, but within minutes I’m sliding into dream time. It feels like every switch in my body has been flipped off; I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired while remaining technically awake. Forty-five minutes in, I excuse myself to trudge upstairs to my bedroom.

Psychologically, perhaps I become perfectly at ease when ensconced in the familiar and comforting setting of my adolescent home. More obviously, I’ve backfired by taking an edible around my mom. (This will be the last one I attempt on this trip.) Over in New York, Jen’s heavily delayed flight is finally landing, and while I’d normally wait for her to get back to our apartment before going to sleep, I say goodnight over text and stare at the Teen Titans poster until I pass out.

CHICAGO — DAY TWO

My second day in town is already a transitional one. My mother and her partner Don have their errands, I have my job and various book-related tasks. In about a month, I’ll be hosting a screening of Superbad at Nitehawk, and the yet-to-be-launched online ticket portal will bear my yet-unwritten promo copy. While the protagonists of Superbad are both white, and both alive, my novel also concerns male friendship in the Bush era, albeit considered through a modern lens. More importantly, the movie is still hysterical—Jen and I revisited it a few years ago, on an off day during an out-of-town wedding—and I want to get people in the door, where they will hopefully drink several beers and then purchase my book. I’m also interviewed by a smart young woman who is tickled to learn I am talking to her from my teenage bedroom, given how roughly 7% of my novel takes place in my protagonist’s teenage bedroom.

This is a new vantage point, observing how other people are observing me. Promoting my book has been an interesting perspective shift, given the many years I’ve spent on the other side of the aisle, interviewing and critiquing and theorizing like every other overeducated Brooklyn dweeb. I am not conditioned to be feted and applauded; my default register is thinking “look at that asshole” at someone who is being feted and applauded. But one of my ongoing life goals is to try something new. To push away from learned behaviors toward the uncomfortable and unknown. You don’t win any points for being stubborn, or spiritually Gen X.

A few years ago, my best friend Matthew—also a writer—was grousing about how embarrassing it was to “provide a head shot,” which he had been asked to do for a reading. “The thing is, there’s so many writers who are so stoked to provide a head shot,” I remember telling him. “And worse: Some of them are very talented.”

Dinner is homemade chili doused with a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce that I purchased at a Walgreen’s nearly 2 years ago, which my mother has finally opened. (Her kitchen, like the kitchen of many other mothers, is a repository of leftovers and pantry items.) As we eat, Tal welcomes me to Chicago over text—he’s seen the Instagram stories—and says he’ll be in my area for dinner. I propose that we should get a drink at a bar down the block called the Marquee Lounge. Tal is unfamiliar, and instead suggests an Irish bar that’s exactly as good and much further away. I hold the line; Marquee Lounge it is.

My mother lives in Lincoln Park, which was famously the site of the 1968 DNC riots, where hundreds of Chicago police officers beat the shit out of the antiwar protesters. She spent her thirties in an apartment about fifteen minutes from where we are now, and in the early 1980s was robbed at knife point by a burglar who climbed three flights of porch stairs and came in through the screen door. This is also where I spent my childhood.

But gentrification did its thing by the time I was potty trained. Lincoln Park is now categorically “nice,” filled with grotesquely modern town houses and doomed-to-fail boutique businesses. (A nearby corner building once hosted two separate macaroon bakeries that each opened and closed within 18 months.) Right now, the big local trend is coolsculpting spas; on my afternoon walk, I count about four on one three-block stretch.

Make a wrong turn in this area, and you’ll be squeezing through DePaul frat boys to get a $3 Old Style. Tal’s skepticism of the Marquee Lounge comes from his good taste, his up-to-date appraisal of every city’s culinary scene. He’s the type of person who will confidently say things like “Chicago has three good bagel places right now,” to which I archly reply: “Only three?” But the Marquee Lounge is, really, just a bar. Pool table in the back, sports on multiple TVs. A group of raucous and loaded old-timers right next to us. I have gotten pleasantly drunk here on multiple occasions, and tonight is no different.

Tal and I met about a decade ago at the Pitchfork Music Festival. There are people I’ve known for much longer, who I have not yet made plans to see, but I do not want to solely rely on well-worn routines. As we drink, he quizzes me about the book and I recite things I believe are true about it. He is a curious and thoughtful friend, and I appreciate that he’s reached out ahead of my event, which he will also be attending. This sort of proactive gesture is how adult men inch toward being one-on-one friends; I reject all predetermined conclusions about the male loneliness crisis, or how guys can’t seem to open up to each other. Just fucking try—try!

He tells me one piece of gossip that makes me laugh and another piece of gossip that makes me sad, both of which I will later tell my wife. He also informs me he recently had his gallbladder removed and proceeds to narrate what sounds like a truly nightmarish hospital experience. When the bill comes, we agree that I’m paying for drinks.

CHICAGO — DAY THREE

Norman Mailer (I think) once said that Chicago is like Brooklyn without the specter of Manhattan looming over it. I love the culinary diversity, the wide open spaces, the hyperlocal customs embedded within every neighborhood, the pro sports teams, the musical history: blues and hip-hop and alternative and emo and indie and also the Hood Internet. Earth Wind & Fire are a Chicago band, did you know that? (I bet you didn’t.)

I did not abandon my hometown out of distaste and embarrassment; there is very much a Sliding Doors reality in which I’m celebrating Jeremy Jr.’s fifth birthday at the Lakeview townhouse where I’ve just paid off my mortgage. I think everyone should be lucky enough to grow up in a city. I would happily abolish the suburbs to create a chain of yawning megacities, like Neo-Tokyo in Akira or the megalopolis in Megalopolis, across America.

Tonight, my mother and Don and I have a reservation at the Chicago Chop House, an old-school steakhouse located in scenic River North, one block away from what used to be the Rock n’ Roll McDonalds. It’s been open since 1986, which I suppose is not so old-school; I was born in 1988, which would make me… oh, no. Tal thinks there are better steak houses, which is probably true, but the ambience at Chop House is unmatched—it’s dark and cozy, with low ceilings and walls lined with sepia-toned portraits of all the great Chicago builders and businessmen and politicians.

We didn’t eat at places like this when I was growing up, but the older I get the more interested I am in traditions, especially the ones that are not mine. My mother has never been one of those Chinese mothers, quick to judge or negligent with her affection; still, I feel obligated to make sure she has a good time. When New York did that big cover story on the state of Asian America that climaxed with a defiant “fuck filial piety,” I remember thinking, Well… With respect to the lived experiences of my peers, I’m sticking to the straight and narrow on this one.

We order up a feast: shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, French fries, a New York strip that is sliced and shared. The portions are generous; our prawns are plump, and possibly pumped with growth hormones. I order an ice cold martini, and then a second. The restaurant is loud, which stymies the flow of conversation. There is a slightly muted feeling to our dinner, not a jovial back-and-forth. Part of me regrets directing us here, even as the food is wonderful; I consider that it might be some ultimate poser shit to attempt impressing your mommy by taking her to a steakhouse. Maybe some traditions are not meant to be yours, even if you’re paying for it.

But the people watching is better than a movie. The Chop House is near corporate downtown, and we are surrounded by so many arrangements of businessmen in quarter-zips and fleece vests, so many beautiful young women on dates with leathery old fucks. We watch a long table of identically dressed men receive identically portioned filet mignons, each one looking like an expectant orphan boy in a soup line as the waiter sets down their plate. My mother and I discuss the possibility that by ordering their own steaks, rather than the higher-quality shareable cuts, these men are afraid of looking like homosexuals. Masculinity is a prison, we agree (in so many words), and dinner is saved.

CHICAGO — DAY FOUR

Fifteen years ago, in my senior year of college, I came down with a mysterious viral disease that nuked my motor and verbal functions for about a month, removing my participation from outdoor society. My mental faculties were somehow completely uninterrupted, though all I could think was: “My God, this fucking sucks.”

Everyday I’d fall asleep on my mother’s couch hoping I’d wake up back to normal. I’ll never forget the relief on the first morning when I felt my symptoms abate just slightly, and I realized I was well enough to stumble to the nearby Best Buy and purchase something, anything. (I ended up picking the new Weezer album, for reasons that are just too complicated to explain.) Whenever I’m hit with a bug, I retain the same faith in the restorative powers of sleep—that the right nap is all it takes to revert back to factory settings.

So I am trying not to think about the shiver in my spine and sour taste in my mouth that have nagged me since I woke up. My book event is less than 36 hours away, and the idea of being sick is so laughably timed that I just have to push it out of mind and call off work to hit the hay.

This sudden rush of maladies is part of an unfortunate pattern. My immune system is relatively teflon except for when I’m staying with my mom, where there’s a 50-50 shot that I will be waylaid at some point. Psychologically, perhaps my body yearns for a return to the past; I have had to postpone return flights because of illness, allowing me to soak up extra Chicago time and maternal care. More obviously, I’ve been on the road for nearly 2 weeks and gotten maybe three nights of good sleep.

Sadly, my nap is useless. Matthew and I have made loose plans for a one-on-one drink, during which we will talk freely as best friends and men. As the evening approaches, I concede it’s not happening. This will be the most disappointing part of my trip, this denial of alone time with my best bro, but sometimes you have to do what’s best for business and cancel. After dinner, I pop some aspirin and go to bed early.

CHICAGO — DAY FIVE

My plan is simple. I am going to get through this reading, shake some hands, then zip home and sleep forever. I can’t see anything else happening, not the way I feel right now—a combination of blech and ech that is not COVID, according to the test, but still has me feeling like a wrung-out dish towel. The book tour is possibly activating some subterranean tension that my brain cannot even consciously register. I want every event to go well, and the faint possibility that it will go bad activates some complex set of stress reactions in my body.

My mother, in heroic form, peels me three oranges, provides a Vitamin-C supplement, and picks up matzoh ball soup from a Jewish deli called The Bagel where I’ve been eating since childhood. I feel better for about an hour before collapsing back into bed. Thus I embrace the mantra of all stoics and depressives: “It is what it is.” You can go home again, but sometimes you’ll feel like shit.

As Don drives us to the bookstore, I’m slumped over in the backseat texting Jen and Matthew about how terrible I feel—50% would be a generous estimate. I’m a 2.5 on the Letterboxd scale, a Pitchfork 5.6. In an attempt to pump myself up I make several references to the Jordan flu game, how this will be my finest performance, though I’m not sure I believe it.

But as I step through the doors of City Lit, the bookstore that is hosting my reading, something happens.

I spot an old friend, Moira, in line at the register; I spot another old friend, Josh, standing near her. The mere sight of people I haven’t seen in awhile is like an airborne pick-me-up. Adrenaline, or something like it, surges through my body, and within seconds I feel totally fine. Possibly, I have never felt better in my life. As I walk through the store hugging people and shaking hands like Henry Hill at the Copacabana, all of my worry and stress melts away. It’s sort of unbelievable—just five minutes before, I was actively dreading the evening, and now it’s like a quack doctor has jabbed B12 and methamphetamine into my ass.

The event itself is a dream. Lots of people I know show up—faces from childhood, adulthood, and in-between—and as well as lots of people I don’t know. Susie, the first punk girl I ever befriended, materializes in the signing line, and I’m so happy to see her—it’s been at least a decade—that I broadcast a glossolalic stream of emotions that make her visibly tear up. The store sells out of every copy and I instruct a thousand people to meet us at the bar.

I have felt happier in my life, for sure—like my wedding day, or when the Cubs won the World Series. But this does feel specifically triumphant, in a way that is new and uncomplicated.

Matthew has done the local scouting, and settled on the Whirlaway Lounge as our afterparty. The Whirlaway is a true dive, with basement decor and a bartender who looks like she lives on-site. Inside, I am riding the high of whatever alchemic rejuvenation happened at the bookstore, and I flit between groups of people before smashing them together and insisting they meet. I feel free, delirious with good fortune. I tell Olivia I found her intimidating in high school. I cackle when Nausicaa describes a guy we disdain as a dilettante. I detail the vagaries of the publishing business to a member of the band Whitney. I insist that my conversation partner at the event, the novelist Peter C. Baker, describes the plot of the book he’s working on, nodding furiously in support.

By now, whatever illness was in my body has been replaced by vibes and vodka. The crowd peels off over the course of a few hours, but just as I think I’m ready to close out, my friend Wesley—who I have known since kindergarten—comes through the door. He is a true mensch, a computer engineer who does not even mind when people are blathering about writing—something he has weathered about 3,387 times in the presence of my friends. The last time we saw each other was at my bachelor party, nearly two years ago, where he made donuts from scratch at like 3 in the morning for all of the lads.

When I idly float the possibility that I will eat Taco Bell by myself once we leave, Wesley and Matthew mention they could also use a bite. We pile into Wesley’s car and make for Small Bar, a fake dive that allegedly sells delicious gourmet burgers, according to Matthew. My confession is that I think many burgers are “pretty good” and there are diminishing returns once you factor in cost and wait. But the burger at Small Bar, which arrives quickly and is moderately priced, is the perfect digestif to the festivities. We order too many French fries, and eat standing, and I hunch over my plate Fieri-style to avoid dripping anything onto my suit.

I take a moment to appreciate the configuration. Wesley was my teenage best friend, and Matthew is my adult best friend; they met at the bachelor party, but barely know each other. This is not a reunion of “back in the day” good time boys but a new social unit, seamlessly humming along and semi-drunkenly yapping in the bar. In the Sliding Doors version of my life where I never left Chicago, I could do this with Wesley and Matthew all of the time, growing fat and happy on an endless stream of cheap beer and bar burgers. But I’m flying back to New York in 36 hours, and must cherish the moment as it’s happening.

Wesley offers to drive us all home, and obviously we say yes. When it’s just the two of us, we catch up on each other’s families and wives before he pulls up to my mom’s house, as he did dozens of times in high school. I will permit myself this satisfying taste of nostalgia, and look at Zillow prices before passing out.

CHICAGO — DAY SIX

The end of the trip approaches. I text with Jen, who attended our friend Sophie’s informal novel launch party last night and fills me in on the hot goss. I text with Dan, who after attending the same party had an unpleasant confrontation with some pathetic downtown types, one of whom yelled “Jew!” at him over and over. Dan’s counter-insult was “obese rapist,” a factually correct claim that makes him the winner of this altercation. I do not like the thought of my friend being harassed on the street by a bunch of Twitter users, but I’m proud he fought fire with a bandolier of hand grenades.

Tonight, Olivia has offered to host a dinner in my honor—a small gathering that will allow us to catch up in an intimate setting, rather than scream at each other in an overstuffed bar. Usually during my trip I’ll squeeze in a trip to Alice’s, my favorite public karaoke bar, but this is a routine worth breaking for friendship. In the afternoon, I hoof it to Binny’s Beverage Depot, a regional liquor chain that is the preferred vendor of the discerning alcoholic—it’s as big as a Costco, and with similar variety—where I grab a couple of classy bottles of white wine as tribute.

I’m the first to arrive at Olivia’s. Ann-Derrick brings homemade apple cobbler; Laura brings homemade espresso martinis; Clayton brings homemade marinated cucumber salad; Matthew and Jessie and Helene all bring booze. Olivia, meanwhile, plates eight perfect bowls of khao soi topped with pickled vegetables and crunchy noodles. (She was a long-time Momofuku employee, and studied well.)

The mood is convivial, chatty. Laura’s espresso martinis are like liquid Adderall. Someone tells a story about a writer who wronged them and we forensically examine every detail of the interaction; we theorize about the inner life of a person we collectively dislike, and break down how it all goes back to junior year of high school. A coworker recently told me her go-to karaoke song is Eminem’s “Superman”—respectfully, Bethany, what the fuck—and when I mention this of course we start listening to Eminem’s “Superman.” At one point we are actually screaming over each other, and the music isn’t even that loud.

It is important to have a home, I think—a place where you can return, and feel loved. I do not take this for granted. I’ve considered that it’s the bedrock of my long-term mental health, the ability to hop on a plane and be welcomed by family and friends alike.

When the conversation drunkenly turns to the climate crisis, everyone agrees that the Midwest will be well-positioned to ride out the forthcoming shockwaves. I do wonder. Someone makes a dark joke about how they want to erect borders, but only around Illinois; another person starts talking seriously about how it’s time to buy a gun. We all believe in society and our fellow man, but two months into the new presidency, “the end” is in the air—especially after a bunch of drinks. “Your friends are fun,” Ann-Derrick tells me as we stand outside, waiting for our Ubers. She’d never met anyone before tonight; I invited her because emergent friendships are a force-multiplying part of life.

In about 12 hours, I’ll be hungover and sleepy, on a flight back to Jen. She’s currently at our friend Jeremy’s 40^th birthday party, and texting me updates—it sounds like a lovely time, one I’m sad to have missed. Tomorrow will be the first time I’ve stepped into my apartment in two weeks, and I am ready to be home.

Before all this began, Charlie—a friend who is also a publicist—told me I should think of my book as an excuse to celebrate with my community. I do not always have an easy time grasping what this means, “my community,” but the tour has been a lesson. When planning my itinerary, I had to choose between a long stint in Los Angeles and a long stint in Chicago. I think I made the correct decision, and that Charlie was exactly right.

Download Places

I just didn’t.

I assumed with hard work, a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee, and several late nights up in excel sheets working recipes and pick-ups that I’d be back on the bicycle. Every recipe I wrote and instruction I gave was misconstrued by the cooks in the kitchen and done in reverse.

There was a chili oil snafu where I told the cook to pour the oil at two different low temperatures over the chili and szechuan peppercorn powder, but he instead decided to pour all the chili and szechuan peppercorn powder into ripping hot oil burning it to a crisp.

I made a beef noodle soup trusting the amount of Thai bird chili that was handed to me was 1.5 oz, but was probably closer to 3.5 oz. When I served it to my partner, Dylan, his entire face turned Kool-Aid Red and at one point slammed a flat palm against the table trying to catch his breath.

At the end of the day, it’s my fault.

I should be able to eye 1.5 versus 3.5 oz and if someone doesn’t understand a recipe, then my instructions weren’t clear enough. If I choose any other perspective, the kitchen will continue to fail.

I stayed late, removed all the beef from the soup, adjusted the amount of the other ingredients, recalibrated the flavor and fixed the problem.

When Dylan came back from the gym, I made him a fresh bowl and it hit.

“You didn’t have to do this mate. The soup was good, it was just hella spicy.”

“No, I did. I don’t ever want you to worry about the food coming out of that kitchen.”

He appreciated it, we shook hands, then sat at the bar and sipped some cranberry juice before I walked the 38 blocks and 2 avenues back to my apartment.

Tomorrow, a food writer would be coming to try the menu and I had about 6 hours to get it done if I got in at 9am. I started to visualize every dish in my mind, who I could delegate certain tasks to, and how much time it would require.

Even if I didn’t have any help, I could put 6 dishes on my back and nail it, but at what level of stress? That’s the difference with age. You know what things are going to cost you.

The old me would’ve gone out drinking with Dylan, woken up at 7am cracked out, micromanaged everyone at work, sent them home for the slightest mistake because I was insecure about my own abilities on no sleep, and then done it myself to prove something.

But then what?

The food writer would love it, but how would we ever replicate that meal for 140 people?

Also that guy fucking sucks.

I had to delegate and I needed to be clearer tomorrow.

By the time I acknowledged that, I was on 14th Street and 2nd Ave.

I looked to my left and saw a Döner Haus in the old Baohaus location at 238 E. 14th Street; I instinctually just made a right and walked in the opposite direction, realizing I hadn’t eaten.

To the north was Stuy-town and to the South was Alphabet City, which had significantly better food options. Around 12th Street there were some Middle Eastern and Mexican food options with al fresco dining, but also servers. Seeing as it was 6:30pm — and my son goes to sleep around 8pm — I had about 30 minutes to eat and walk home, so something quicker would be better.

I saw a sign on 12th Street for a Sushi Counter with an arrow pointing east and immediately followed it thinking there was a sushi bar I could pop into for a few quick pieces of sushi before walking back to Murray Hill.

What I discovered was not a sushi bar, but a very simple window with logs of sushi hand rolls laid out on lunch trays in a refrigerated display. Outside were two folding metal tables, a couple food couriers, a handful of people waiting for orders, and an Asian woman that motioned for me to go ahead since she was perhaps waiting for a friend.

I got in line and was immediately discombobulated bumping into people dining in the window then accidentally stepping on someone’s shoe because I still had my headphones in listening to Whatmore Mii MUSIC on a loop, since listening to the same song for hours at a time helps me focus.

I took my headphones out and realized the world can actually be a lot calmer without a soundtrack sometimes. The cashier’s Australian accent immediately cut through the calm, but in a refreshing Matcha Lemonade kind of way.

“Hiya there! What can I get for ya?”

Without much thought I pointed at a Yuzu Yellowtail roll, a Spicy Tuna Roll, and started searching for a California Roll.

“Do you have a California Roll?” I asked not seeing one.

“No, we just took it off the menu for the Sunshine Roll.”

She pointed to a Sunshine Roll which looked like the sushi equivalent of a Hawaiian Pizza and I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

“I’ll have the Salmon Avocado Roll.” I said even though I had a sinking feeling I was about to eat some nasty ass farm raised salmon raw.

Fuck it. I’d been eating it all my life and it was delicious. I really got to stop learning about what I’m putting in my body, I told myself. What’s worse? The shit we’re eating or the stress we’re reading?

The cashier pulled the three rolls of sushi, put them in a small brown pouch with a packet of soy sauce, wasabi, and sent me on my way for $12 + tax & tip.

As I walked out, a very tall woman in a Hillary Clinton-esque suit pant and blouse combination walked in and ordered two rolls as well. By the time I sat down at the folding table outside, she was out the door and down the block with her brown pouch of sushi rolls as well.

The quality of the rolls was somewhere above Whole Foods and Hillstone, but below a neighborhood sushi spot like Tomoe. I’d say it was at the level of Sunrise Mart, which I feel is quite high for grab-n-go sushi, especially when it only costs $12 for 3 rolls.

As I finished my first roll, the delightful Yuzu Yellowtail, I noticed the Asian woman that let me go ahead of her was still outside. Before I could have a second thought, two middle-aged Asian women walked in remarking how much they loved this place, ordered, then sat in the window.

I hoped that the Asian woman outside wasn’t getting stood up by a friend since it’d been a while, but also wondered how good these rolls could be if the nori was still crispy. I guess it wasn’t the point though.

Looking at the Spicy Tuna and then the Salmon Avocado, I chose the Salmon Avocado next. In case the salmon was nasty, I didn’t want that to be the taste lingering in my mouth.

I took out the soy sauce, wasabi, and applied it liberally. To my surprise, the Salmon Avocado was fatty, unctuous, and as good if not better than the Yuzu Yellowtail.

I admired how quiet it was on an early summer New York evening in Alphabet City, how nice it was that there was still a place to eat seafood outside for $12 and be full. The Asian Woman’s friend showed up and they kiki’d over each other’s outfits, how much they missed each other, then back to their outfits.

“Where did you get that dress?”

“You won’t believe it. I got all of this at Uniqlo.”

“Stop. Should we go right now?”

“Ha, ha, ha, you’re so funny. Let’s try this place.”

“I’m dying to try this Australian Sushi.”

I didn’t realize this was an Australian Sushi concept, but should have since there were obvious signs.

Finally, I ate the Spicy Tuna and it tasted just like the spicy tuna rolls I used to buy from M2M when I lived on 12th Street and 3rd Avenue 20 years ago.

It made me laugh. The universe really talks to you in the most hysterical ways.

I sat back, watched the Citi bikers going down 12th, and thanked whatever Unfathomable Being is pulling the strings on this whole show.

At the age of 43, I’m constantly reminiscing about the past, but when I actually shut the fuck up and stop, it comes back to me.

I’ve accomplished a lot of things, but I couldn’t save the restaurant I loved during the pandemic and now it’s a Döner Haus.

This has bothered me for a very long time.

There’s not much I can do about it at this point.

But I’m still on 12th Street eating spicy tuna like it’s 2005 and that’s the great thing about New York. No matter how fast you’re running toward the future, you’re constantly bumping into your past.

Tomorrow, I will be in the kitchen and I will be better.

Maybe I’ll find the old me in there too.