I look up at the menu.

“Umm… mit Sahne… Does that—okay, that means cream. I think that one has cream. And Apfel. The one on top is definitely apple. And obviously—obviously—the Vanille must be vanilla.”

I have found myself in Stuttgart; shoulder to shoulder in the midday rush of a Christmas market. The half-timbered gables encircling the plaza rise up into a cloudless afternoon sky, awash in a supple light. They settle into a soft summa cavea—an arena. And I imagine that through their squarely-lidded fenestrations, all manner of warmth can be observed unfolding below:

Toe-headed children wending and weaving through the rows of wooden stalls, then ducking beneath the bistro tables to conspire with innocent grins; their parents above, sipping mulled wine and drifting off with the sound of faint giggles from below. An elderly couple, each slightly a-slant, strolling arm in arm with a singular attention, quietly admiring the sinuous curves of a collection of wooden bowls and spoons; their maker brushing aside a long, shaggy strand of hair from his face to peek from his stall between a jug and a vase, savoring their delight.

I arrive at the front of the line and look back toward the menu. But something is happening. My jaw is slack, and even English words have become difficult to form. The periphery dulls, and a matted blur of colors creeps inward, collapsing at the center into a wash of gray.

And the warmth in that arena suddenly makes me feel cold.

“I remember… Why didn’t they… I miss…”

Ah.

What if.

I’m surrounded by people, and now entirely alone.

Graceland

“Any one of them will be good. I have tried them all.”

An oracular voice intrudes on my digression, and I think that I must have been staring off for a while. The Swabian inflection is very much in command of the English language, and yet very much under the duress of a tongue that is obstinate about where it ought to land when a th or s is enjoined of it. A native—its bearer, the man propped against the bar beside me.

From the robust brown galoshes that anchor his feet to the cobbled ground, I follow his frame up. Up a pair of slender legs, to a torso draped by a jacket that folds, here and there, into deep escarpments, ready to slough away any sense of moisture and stiffness. Across his narrow chest I find an elbow cocked at a casual angle. My eyes then follow his arm as it’s refracted up into a long hand. There, loaded heavy against its palm, his head—fixed in a contemplative tilt.

And in just a glimpse, I catch his eyes with mine. Behind the shield of thick-lensed readers, floating in a perspicacious gaze of glacial, Germanic blue. In the chatoyant strands of light that flit across them, I see a familiar place: that untraceable expanse where contemplations diffuse from the head and mingle with the vapors of mulled wine that perspire hotly against the December air. Featherweight, they drift away into the sky, lost forever in their own dissipation.

His body is here, yes. But the man’s heart, I can tell, is lost somewhere next to mine.

First impressions such as these are often the only reliable ones—cemented before the mind’s revisions get to work at marring the integrity of the other. Even still, I endeavored to make conversation with him. Because though notoriously unreliable, last impressions still possess the greater truth of a man. And something of his presence compelled me to collect his.

He is pliable, even beneath the pitiable morsels of small talk that I thrust upon him. They soften him back into the man he must ordinarily be. First impressions vanish or are hidden away. I attempt to tell him in my fractured and stultifying German that here in Stuttgart, we are in the region that my grandfather’s family came from. It makes him uneasy for some reason. The statement hangs in the air—aborted and swelling into a dead silence.

For me, such unplanned moments are always a cause for great distress, and so I maneuver to racquet the suspended corpse back into his court. I unleash a lazy lob:

“So, have you been to America?”

What he returns is nothing short of a devastating ace.

“Yes, I have. You see, for my 25th wedding anniversary, I told my wife: ‘I want to go to Graceland. I want to go as…’”

Hesitantly, he admits it:

“…as an homage to Elvis Presley.”

I am a bit surprised. Gyration seems foreign to his lanky body. But he proceeds to relay the profound effect that those early waves of Anglophone rock and roll had on him. At around sixty, I figure that he was among the first of German children to be inculturated into that transatlantic zeitgeist. I imagine that they were starved for something like it, and that it arrived as manna of sound and color, raining into those sullen postwar valleys.

I imagine him small, bouncing around and singing along off-key as the needle jumps across a scratchy Beatles record, parents none the wiser to who Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds might be. He assures us, though, that he never could get into the Kinks—that they were for “a certain kind of person.” But Elvis—despite the man’s wife—Elvis, it seemed, was his first true love.

He is mesmerized by the memory of the music, and I can see him hearing it all over again for the first time. He recalls to me one of the legend’s momentous live performances, and the exact date on which it occurred. I ask if he had been there to see it.

“Oh no. If I had been a little bit older, perhaps. If I could have put together the money, then…”

“…then maybe.”

Like a memory of a memory, it had been imprinted onto his young, impressionable mind through the fuzzy frames of a VHS recording.

And something has begun to stir in him, and I can sense it. So I ask, clumsily, if he had “felt the presence of Elvis” during his visit to Graceland.

“Yes.”

Another stretching quiet follows of its own accord. Then tears begin to pool in his eyes. Their apertures swell and gloss, crystallize and dissolve one million times over in a moment.

“When we left, I began to feel terrible. A sinking feeling. I was overcome, and I began to cry, and then I began to weep. Our guide was asking me:

‘What is wrong? Are you okay?’

And I said no, and I asked him, ‘Please sir, is there any way we can go back? Is there any way we can turn around? Can you ask the driver to return to Memphis? Please… you can leave me there and continue on with the journey.’”

His voice is trembling now.

“Please… I have to go back to Graceland.”

What I recall beyond this last recorded moment, to that in which we parted ways, is scant. Only that after that sudden public flood of his inner world, conversation receded quickly back into the inconsequential. I could not bring myself to muster my own pearl of equal price.

As we left, I looked once more into his eyes and asked his name.

“Klaus.”

Longing and the color blue were my last impressions of him.

On Eyes

That same blue I saw ensconced in pairs like precious jewels, high on every other clean and angular face wading through the market. And they are precious, indeed. A wenged or ochred iris can, in one glance, masterfully conceal a deep truth—but in the very next, inadvertently betray it. One of blue, though, cannot escape its own incapacity for obfuscation, nor its propensity for reflecting truths in such a manner that they are never wholly revealed.

I sensed this of blue eyes even as a child, when I would look into those of my grandfather.

In the late ’90s, his daughter Kristine—who in every photograph I’ve become acquainted with is a vibrant and glowing woman—was dealt a terminal blow.

“It’s leukemia.”

Then static, I imagine, as her words reached my grandfather over the telephone.

As its bloom metastasized from cell to cell and bone to bone, it began to crowd her out of her own body—began to waste it. It took with it her white blood cells and her hair, leaving only a few translucent strands of each. It reduced her life to the sterile confines of a hospital bed, and my grandfather’s to the chair right beside it.

Then, in 1997—two years before I was born—when the chemical weapons had finally failed to eradicate the cancer, not long after a last-ditch bone-marrow drive turned up no sufficient match, and in those fleeting moments when my grandfather was taken away from that chair against his will to get something to eat…

she died.

It was privately agreed upon by his remaining daughters—my mother and her two sisters—that the depths of my grandfather’s despair, which he rarely, if ever, outwardly displayed, knew no bottom. Of course, I didn’t need to have known him before to understand this to be true. I could see it plainly. In his slickened stare across the wood planks of the bowling alley lanes where we spent every Friday afternoon. In the gentle, rhythmic tap-tap-tapping of his fingers against the table, against his knee, against the soft, pillowed arm of his recliner.

Or in a trip through his blue eyes.

Looking into them, I could always know his strength and his warmth—and on occasion, a tinge of pain. But I never could apprehend the brittle and anemic infinitude beneath. There, quietly and secretly, I believe he was always grasping, searching, and reaching for Kristine.

It is said that yearning is a hallmark of “grief disorders.” But is not grief reserved for the missing of those things which were once physically present?

See, I do not believe that his was a disordered grief, because I do not believe that it was grief at all. The word is woefully insufficient in its attempts to capture the magnitude.

He perseverated over an alternate life—one in which he was triumphant against the forces of nature that tried to steal his daughter away; one where she lived and grew old and had children of her own.

I know this not because he told me, nor because I could see it—but because I sifted through the relics he had left behind in his basement after his own death five years ago. Among bottles of narcotics prescribed to her, reams of medical records and appointment cards, was a single sheet of paper that belonged to him and him alone: a therapeutic worksheet.

All I recall of its contents was that a simple printed text proffered an even simpler question regarding “grief,” to which my grandfather had provided a one-line answer. One line, escaped from his inner world through the stubby tip of a Ticonderoga pencil.

I do not recall the words, nor the sentence they formed—and perhaps for the better, as they do not belong to you or me anyway. I only recall my sense of their weight, and how the paper became heavy in my hands, such that it dropped from them and floated down, back onto the pile of all things to be sorted.

But I know that in the strokes of his cursive was not a gently lapping nostalgia for the bygone. It was a gut-wrenching wave of limerence for the impossible.

The bus cannot turn back; Graceland is irretrievable.

Kristine, long buried and gone.

And so on.

“Grief.”

I find myself in the south of Germany now, set backward on a train fixed in forward motion down the rails. On that paradoxical axis between the actual velocity of my life and a disappearing view of the direction my heart would prefer it to take. And in the countryside, I see my longing—and realize that mine is much the same.

I watch its blighted whisper swelling and heaving with the hills, and in a white howl sweeping down into the valleys below—the hiss of frost abrading the edges of deadened forests and lacing northern exposures with decay. It creeps quietly up the stiffened boards of horse stalls, rendering them vacant and alone. Beneath its weight, a proud Bavarian house—straight-facing and stern-browed—groans. Smoke rises from its stack, but I know the hearth’s stone is somehow still cold.

In this desolated place, I see the burial ground for objects of forlorn. And I look down at my hands to find nails plastered with clotted mud.

A perennial and cloudless night begins to fall, arriving with the ambient clangor of midnight bells and a choir of ineffable pain.

But in its firmament, the most precious gems of things impossible are arrayed—a gorgeous tapestry of distant planets and unreachable stars. And here in Germany, I have lost myself looking up at them. Even if for just a moment; even if they never return my gaze.

Ah.

What if.

The Golden Ticket

After a brief stint in Lyon, France, we chose Turin as our next destination primarily for its proximity to the northwestern crook of the Italian Alps. A resort called Bardonecchia was only an hour-and-a-half away by train, and tucked up into the same general range as the opulent slopes of Val d’Isère and Courcheval. The same idyllic European skiing for a fraction of the cost. However, it wasn’t totally immaterial to us that Turin was also a city holding an old thread in the tapestry of our ancestral heritage. It was the birthplace of our paternal great-grandmother, Teresa. Arriving into the world on the last day of that festering century that was the nineteenth, she saw Turin for the last time when she was just fourteen years old—one year before the entire European continent would boil over into war. It was that year that Teresa was entrusted with the future prosperity of her lineage in the form of a one-way steerage ticket on a steamship across the Atlantic. She was accompanied only by her brother—who I believe was even younger—and a man in his twenties: a distant relative, a family friend, or perhaps a stranger…I can’t recall. I only know that my great-grandmother did name her only son after him. In any case, her family had come across in waves, synchronized to the savings that could be cobbled together by her father, who had immigrated six years prior and went to work in the mines around Trinidad, Colorado.

Though three generations and more than one hundred years had elapsed by the time that we arrived in Turin, I did briefly close my eyes to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see if I felt like I had returned to something.

~Scroll for scenes of old Turin~

I did not. I felt nothing but the cold air and the city’s permeating grayness. Unsurprisingly, any genetic expression of affinity with that place had been sifted away with the sands of time.

Working Girl to Ancient of Days Pipeline

We stayed on the city’s outskirts, sharing a sparse bedroom in a postwar apartment that was owned by a man named Gino, who became immediately indebted to me for €2. I sensed it was a place where most of the debt floating around was off-the-books. The neighborhood was gritty. Every other vertical surface was graffitied, and every other dog was a pitbull. Every person smoked fervently including the children, I think. The old men shuffled around aimlessly by cane in the daylight, and played cards and drank beer at flimsy tables in the cafes late into the night. The young men were hidden from sight, God only knows where.

The women worked. Or more accurately: they toiled. They hustled down the sidewalks chasing money to be made; money to be paid nipping at their ankles. Painted on their faces were not the cosmopolitan glows of morning esthetic rituals, but rather the dull fog of mornings faced with more pressing realities than concealing the size of their pores. Many pennies had been pinched by the creases permanently etched into their countenances.

One morning, very early, as we passed by the supermarket, we noticed an especially ancient and old one, who had long exceeded her days of carrying out any kind of productive labor. She was fixed into a wheelchair, seemingly abandoned to freeze amongst the fruit displays. I thought she might actually be frozen, until, just as we passed, she cocked her head ever so slightly, turned up her lip into a quarter-smile, and stared amusedly at the nothingness occurring on the pavement below her. She reminded me of a nature documentary I watched once on the wooly bare caterpillar, which basically freezes during the winter without dying. “Conservation” I thought. By the time we returned, she and the chair were gone.

Of course, it was a sort of adaptation I supposed. And I think the environment has a lot of effect on genetic expression. If I’m remembering my high school biology correctly, genes are malleable. They can adapt themselves to almost any conditions.

Similarly, jeans are quite malleable, too. Jeans can even be adapted for skiing…

Après-ski

Being from Colorado, I have always understood that there are certain mountains purely for sport, and certain for spectacle, and that this division traces its roots back to skiing’s origins in Europe. It’s much like golf in that sense. Admittedly, though, I only became vaguely aware of the present notion of “Après-ski” within the last few years, via osmosis from rich New Yorkers who flitted back and forth to Aspen on weekends, and bobble headed influencers filming themselves slope side, donning absurdly large Cossack hats.

Of course, this is yet another ritual that has been co-opted from its European heritage by status-hungry Americans who display very little meaningful appreciation for its cultural provenance. Taken hold of by grainy, Kodachrome photographs of fur-draped Europeans leisurely sipping Aperol on the veranda of a half-timbered lodge, the algorithmic churn has convinced everyone that you have not skied unless you’ve worn a Haute-couture ensemble for the occasion, consumed some epicurean delicacy that had to be flown in to the remote mountain village, and taken a $50 swig of Veuve Cliquot from a shotski—or at least orchestrated your instagram to appear as such. It’s in the same vein as the Saltburn psychosis: devoid of lineage, context, or restraint.

~Check out Tony Kelly’s “Club Paradiso” photo and you’ll better understand the seduction~

If you would like your vibe on the mountain to be giving ‘old money’, I respect. But respectfully, that is not the skiing that I came to know and love. Status on the slopes for me was not the label on your ski suit per se, but more so the sheer speed and skill with which you could rip down the mountain. And yet, even for all of my petty resentment for all those laughable fools who wrap themselves in waist-cinching Prada gore-tex, only to teeter and totter once down a measly bunny slope, I was incredibly embarrassed to have to wear jeans for our ski day at Bardonecchia.

President’s Day Weekend

We skied on the Monday following Bardonecchia’s opening weekend. Reddit had informed me that it draws a much younger crowd, and is not nearly as pretentious as its adjacent French counterparts. The throngs of teenage kids who scrambled on to the first train to the mountain, still half asleep, affirmed these assessments. Being a Monday, I considered consulting Reddit again, on whether or not European adolescents attend school at all. It did make me happy though, and a bit nostalgic. After three ski-less years, it felt a lot like the days I spent skiing growing up.

Every year over Presidents’ Day weekend, our family would pack into a modest two story cabin in Leadville, Colorado, along with anywhere from twenty to thirty other aunts, uncles, great uncles, grandparents, cousins and the occasional unrelated hanger-on.

We would, for three days, drive the ten miles up to the slopes of Ski Cooper, and, from open to close, pack in as many runs as possible. Poles thrust back and chin tucked on an open downhill, savoring the sweet burn in our thighs from a run through the glades. I often wore a hodgepodge of hand me downs. A ski suit from a cousin one year, the down coat my dad had skied with in the 70’s, the next. The older folk would claim a good chunk of the picnic tables in the lodge, guarding over coolers full of food the women had cooked the night before. I remember that an order of chicken strips served up in the cafeteria was a prized luxury rarely ever indulged in. And our Après? A visit to the Leadville rec center, where we would organize a riotous and violent game of kids vs. adults swimming pool basketball, followed by a sardine-packed soak in the communal hot tub to nurse our shaky legs and wounded egos. Maybe it was a spectacle in its own right, but only because everything flowed from a pure love of the game, if you will.

Soup and Sandwich Combo

All things accounted for, I could not have asked for a better day to herald in the end of my three-year ski drought.

There was a gorgeous blue sky. Temperatures reached up to fifty degrees and then some. I didn’t even have to wear gloves. The snow was a tad icy in the morning, but by noon, had at least softened into a skiable soup. The $40 day pass provided access to three different mountains. And it was actual European skiing. The experience of slaloming from mountain to mountain, village to village, with church bells delivering a sense of time to an otherwise timeless kind of day (Vail, of course, being a Potemkin village erected in the 1960s to mimic this real thing).

So why then, did I care whatsoever that I had to wear denim on this day? Well, because I crave material status almost as much as I detest it. The environmental pressures to blend in with the trend are strong these days. But stronger still are certain aspects of my inheritance that have remained more fixed than any affinity with my ancestral homelands.

On that day, we did enjoy a few hot cappuccinos between runs, but only ate the ham sandwiches that we had packed the night before. We probably could have sprang for a hot meal, for an Aperol Spritz. We probably could have even bought ourselves a pair of ski pants. But aside from the fact that we literally have negative space left in our bags, we didn’t really need any of those things to have a good day.

Maybe that frugality, that wooly bare caterpillar/ancient frozen woman conservation mindset, is so ingrained in me because my great-grandmother was a poor woman who came to America from a dirty city in the dirty hull of a steamship, to a place where all the men in her life would have to do the very poor and dirty work of extracting coal from the earth—one of whom even ended up getting a leg blown off. Maybe because she was a woman who piled stacks of old newspaper next to the commode to be used as toilet paper. Maybe because her daughter—my dad’s mother—once ran over a jean jacket lying in the middle of the road, reversed, picked it up, took it home, washed it, and gave it to my father to wear—after all, denim is a very malleable product.

As for genes, though? I suppose I’m not so certain now. Because along with jeans, I wore a blue coat that day—thrifted for twelve dollars before we left on our trip.

Maybe one day, if I make obscene amounts of money and my knees turn to porcelain, I too will slip myself into a cashmere robe after a couple of breezy runs down the bunny slope, and spoon exotic caviar into my mouth between sips of champagne. If that is ever the case, I have no doubt that I will relish in it. However, if it is the case, my child (God willing) will still learn to wear the blue coat that I dug out from a plastic bin in the basement with pride, and savor in the simplicity of an overnighted ham sandwich.

Why? I suppose because it’s important to understand that skiing down a mountain is like life: you don’t really need much outside of what God has provided to enjoy a good day of it.

Turin was a place that felt seductively easy to get away with a crime. And as we surfaced from one of its train station’s graffitied orifices, the first one that we theoretically considered was carjacking. Avoidance of another grueling ruckwalk to our accommodations was, it seemed, paramount to the vanishingly small possibility of foreign imprisonment.

I get it, pearl-clutcher; I’m sure you have never even so much as deigned to accelerate one mile beyond an arbitrary speed limit, let alone in a vehicle, shall we say, borrowed from a stranger. But please consider this for a moment: on our backs are packs sufficient to summit Everest, filled far beyond capacity. They’re weighing in at nearly fifty pounds. In addition, worn backwards on our fronts, like a sort of cruel pregnancy simulator, is a JanSport-type backpack. Mine, as the receptacle for all of our miscellaneous items—rocks, a pair of binoculars, every charger cable and cord known to man, my dirty undergarments, and four books I’ve read one page of in total—is egregiously distended.

If Google maps suggested to you a thirty-minute walk under such conditions, your porcelain knees would demand a yank-and-go even if there was a baby carriage in the back seat.

Naturally, it all seemed plausible. It seemed, in fact, reasonable. Theoretically of course. That was until the synchronized shuffle of orthopedic Mary Jane’s against the sidewalk caught our ear. A battalion of five-foot-nothing Italian grandmothers had assembled, canes in hand. See, we had one of them growing up, and their foreboding glare is one of the most formidable deterrents to bad behavior known to man. From every angle, beady brown daggers were drawn down on us. Tempting as our theory was, we decided to shoehorn our wide loads onto a narrow bus, instead. We couldn’t bear to imagine the correction those nonnas might have administered to two naughty little meatballs.

However, in the days that followed, we would go on to commit a crime far more unthinkable than Grand Theft Auto…

I hear the old folks when they say,

‘It’s funny how time slips away.’

I hear the old folks when they say,

‘Days gettin’ shorter every day.’

Lyrics from the song As Long As We Last by Daniel Norgren

Madrid

We arrived late Sunday afternoon, sobered from our three days of indulgence in Barcelona.

As we meandered out of the Atocha station, a collection of stately civic buildings rose on the slopes of the basin we found ourselves in. Their composition greeted us with the restrained and dignified gravitas I found to be characteristic of the city. The sun was hanging low in the sky. Painterly tufts of clouds clung to the cathedral spires on the horizon. I thought perhaps that meant the heavens were closer here.

The air was crisp, and judging by the thick bundles of down coats and wool scarves drifting through the streets, one might have believed that winter had arrived. But the atmosphere was indifferent to seasonal fashions. It refused to accept the coming monochrome sleep. Our nights were ushered in by blazing orange sunsets that bled out onto a pastel blue expanse, our mornings roused from darkness by a fervent blush of rose colored light. The London Plane trees that lined every boulevard still clung tightly to their last gilded leaves.

It very much seemed to me that Madrid was still holding on to the final glow of autumn. It called to mind that wisdom Ari had shared with us in Iceland: that the greatest bloom is the one before death.

I’ll Take a Tin of Fish Over an Original Goya Any Day

We proceeded to make the most of our four days in Madrid.

We toured the Prado Museum and gawked at the psychedelic fish-people of Hieronymus Bosch between throngs of equally amused Chinese tourist groups. We saw the grim works of Goya, which I was honestly not very impressed by in person. Many seemed hastily executed, and dark only for darkness’ sake. But what do I know? Ryley’s lone comment regarding them: that somebody needed to check on the guy. My favorite works were the realist paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, because they reached inside of me with an open hand, sharing a little nugget of the depths of the Spanish heart with my own.

Unfortunately due to legalities, I think I can’t post the paintings, but later you can google “A Hospital Ward during the Chief Physician’s Round”, “And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive!”, and anything by Martín Rico.

We joined in on a hostel pub crawl, guided by a twenty year old Madrid native named Ivan, who was on his second day of working there, and had exactly €4.18 to his name. He told us he wanted to visit Colorado to shoot guns like in GTA, earning Ryley’s approval. Naturally, then, he bought Ivan a €4.50 beer. It was that evening that I discovered the Spanish-speakers challenge with the glottal-stopped “T” in my name. Many referred to me simply as “Pain”.

Unfortunately due to legalities, I think I can’t post the photographs from this evening

We took a day trip to Granada to wander through the labyrinthine terraced gardens of the Alhambra. It was there that I realized I concur with the Spanish on an important matter: an afternoon ramble through a well-kept garden can be just as restorative as one spent inside, reclined in front of a fireplace. On the curb in front of the welcome pavilion we ate canned sardines and a bag of potato chips.

One evening, we stopped into a small cafe that was serving hot sandwiches and coffee. It was operated by a husband and wife duo who were getting on in years. I could tell they were married by the fraught tone of their dialogue, cut through only by loving glances to one other from behind the counter. There, I somehow managed to order the tuna, ham, banana and pineapple sandwich on white bread.

As I said, Barcelona had been our food tour. Madrid, it came to be understood, would be for experience. My favorite of which, the one that, should I have seen or done nothing else, I would still have left feeling fulfilled, was walking through El Retiro.

The Path

El Retiro is a vast park threaded with hedge-lined paths that are tucked beneath towering pines, birches, and the ever-present London Planes. Walking through it, I thought that one could completely lose themselves on a path, and then find themselves again on another in a single afternoon.

I liked it for its beauty of course. Its orderly arrangement scratched my relentless itch for coherence. But I liked it much more for the backdrop it provided. Against it, I felt as though I could display and consider every thought that had been gathering In my mind.

Walking through the park, I thought I should like to take every path before me, because I feared I’d feel unfulfilled if I left any undiscovered. Of course, this is often my approach to life. To desire every possibility, and feel immense regret for any amount of it not seized. All the while, forsaking any gratitude for the gravel churning under my feet in the present.

El Retiro began to remind me of Central Park. How I left many of its corners unexplored, even after three years. Madrid began to remind me of New York City, and how it was, for me, only ever a transitory place. I considered how transitory thinking has bound me more than once to the notion of ‘point A’ and ‘point B’; everything else in between reduced to nothing more than a means to an end.

Then I began to think of the whole world. Of my gluttonous ache for the fact that it is simply too large to try and swallow whole before one dies. The vain tragedy that, inevitably, there will be plenty of crumbs left on the table when it’s all said and done.

My mind slowly waded into the past, then swam out fervently into the murky waters of my infinite forgone futures.

I nearly drifted out of the moment entirely, until I reached a small fork in the path. With a real life divergence ahead, I realized I had wasted precious time beneath that tree-lined corridor of ephemeral fall warmth; squandered a precious moment of hello and goodbye all at once, because I was busy racing to reach somewhere in my head; busy ending up nowhere at all.

Then, from beneath the hedges, a truth crept up on me.

Life is a whole lot better if you give up on trying to force it into permanence, and rather, meet each moment in its refusal to last. If you willingly walk down the path in front of you, grateful for all that it has to offer, instead of chasing down those that were never meant for you to begin with.

The next morning, our last in Madrid, I took my third and final stroll through El Retiro for no particular reason other than to enjoy the crunch of gravel underneath my shoe.

“Hasta la vista.”

From Madrid we took an evening train to Girona, a town in eastern Spain. By the next morning we were back on the rails again, beginning the leg that would carry us out of the country toward Lyon, France.

I took notice of the gentleman sitting across the aisle from me. An old man with stark white hair neatly coiffed, aside from a few fly aways that he occasionally patted back down. His blue eyes were reflective of his faded blue jeans. He reminded me of my grandfather.

He looked intently out the window the entire time, taking in every town, industrial park, rail station, valley, summit, and perhaps every tree that we passed by. Almost like a child. Nobody, it seemed, had taken notice of him. But he had taken notice of all things.

I felt melancholy. I imagined he was gathering up the images he might like to see at the end.

Then he checked his phone. And again. A specific message chain. There was a photo of a smiling child in the ‘received’ column. His grandchild, I imagined. I thought perhaps he is just collecting one more image. I thought he must be aware that he is near to the end of his path.

I looked out the window, too, and thought:

Winter’s sleep will inevitably call, and autumn will go. The final golden leaf will drift from the bough of Madrid’s most unyielding London Plane, and I will have long left, back to the comforts of home.

Past will forever be becoming future, hinged only by the fleeting moments of present in between, and in them, I will never swallow the world whole, just the piece which has been allotted to me.

Time will surely slip away, and the days will grow shorter, as the old folks and Daniel Norgren say. I will utter goodbyes that are never met with a hello again. I will wander down my path, and eventually, I will meet its end.

So, what images will remain with me, then?

The ones that I grasped for and imagined? Or the ones that I lived in and breathed in?

Our train ascends the residual hills as they slowly gather into mountains. Real mountains. We cross into the blue depths of the Pyrenees, an umbered Iberian glow smoldering behind us in the distance.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Ps. 90:12

“Hola, primo.”

As the Pyrenees broke open into the Iberian Peninsula, the vistas framed by the train window revealed a place not so distant from home. A more expressive, more roughly hewn elder cousin to the landscapes of southeastern Colorado began to emerge. The geology swelled and contracted with a practiced ease, its every contour shaded by the flora in a warm terracotta palette. Dusty badlands carved sinewy relief into the ochred waves of wide and rolling plains. Residual hills, shadowed in deep green, gathered at the foot of rust-red sediment that desperately reached for—or perhaps once did reach—the heights of a mountain. As we neared the coast, the paled blues and sun-bleached sages of the stone pines, agaves, and olive trees carried that same measured rhythm right up to the edge of the Mediterranean.

In both tone and imagery, the Spanish countryside possessed a well-worn and arid masculinity. Over the following week, as we explored the nation’s two great cities of Barcelona and Madrid, I came to imagine that same temperament living on in the Spanish cast of mind. Each place—its cuisine, its architecture, and its people—felt consonant with the spirit of the peninsula.

Of course, I did find it funny that I found everything so beautiful. Because, for reasons that shall remain a mystery—a part of my own personal mythology—I hadn’t wanted to come to Spain.

Chemin de Fer, Chemin d’Enfer

In the 1830s, Pope Gregory XVI banned railroads (as well as telegraph lines and gas street lights) within the borders of the Papal States, coining the infamous pun:

“Chemin de Fer, Chemin d’enfer.”

In English: “Road of Iron, Road to Hell.”

By the time we arrived in Barcelona, I was prepared to canonize the man. Prior to departing from Pau, I had accidentally purchased tickets for the same train twice, which was admittedly my fault, though I preferred to blame it on the French. However, the first leg of our journey somehow arrived to Toulouse half an hour late (or retard, in French), causing us to miss our connection to Narbonne. Entirely their fault. In turn, this tardiness required us to purchase a second ticket for our Narbonne-to-Barcelona leg.

All told, I was out about sixty-five dollars and two extra hours. Not catastrophic in retrospect—but after a day of travel, I was nearing my wits’ end. So as soon as we checked into our hostel, we immediately made our way toward food.

And wine.

“Eat your food with gladness, drink your wine with a cheerful heart.” — Eccl. 9:7

After assessing our finances in Madrid, it was retroactively determined that Barcelona had been/would be our ‘Food tour of Spain.’

Being that I like food but am by no means a “foodie” (whatever the hell that is), and that I’m often too hungry and (generally) too well-mannered to photograph my meal before I consume it, I lack both the gastronomic memory and pictorial record to articulate the experience of Spanish cuisine down to the minutiae. Thus, I will venture with great care to paint the experience for you with a very broad brush.

We had two dinners in Barcelona: one, a proper sit-down, single-plate meal, and the other, tapas. A few identifiable threads ran through both: rich, hearty, and protein-heavy, softened by flavors of distinctly southern European sauces, seasonings, and accoutrements.

And tarragon. Lots of tarragon.

A particular standout was, of course, the Jamón. A magical sort of cured meat.

I asked Ryley to describe it for you:

Jamón comes from a pig raised on a farm where it is only eating acorns. It’s then aged in a barn for days, sometimes years. The meat takes on this really rich, nutty flavor. So it’s food not just in its raw form; it’s been developed and perfected through trial and error of time, and became something that is unique to Spain.

Aside from the food, a certain scene from our night at the tapas bar rendered itself as quintessentially Spanish to my mind: a pig’s leg, carved down to its glossy bone over the course of the evening, jutting out over the bar with its hoof poised like a ballerina’s toe. It hovered mere centimeters above the rim of a woman’s wine glass.

She wore a wide-brimmed, matador-red hat and spoke in a breakneck torrent. Words, hands, and brocaded silver jewelry all moving in concert. Everything seemed to agitate her except the swine’s foot suspended over her Tempranillo.

“France is flamboyant,” I thought. “Spain has flair.”

And speaking of Spanish wine: I know nothing about it, other than a bottle or two was consumed that night without protest.

Gaudí Sycophants, Please Leave the Room

Barcelona is the home of Antonio Gaudí, and therefore, I am supposed to grovel about having witnessed his works there in person. Honestly though, what more can be said of them?

I found myself more intrigued by the things that still seemed to be enlivened by the Spanish people themselves—the Arc de Triomf, built as the entrance to the 1888 World’s Fair; the greenhouse in Parc de la Ciutadella, with its exquisite botanical motifs representing Spain’s native plant species; the phenomenal flea market and antique shops; and the endless miles of apartment blocks, and their shops and cafes down below at the street level.

Spanish classicism, Andalusian vernacular adaptations, even the local strains of Catalan Modernisme all refused the effeminate frill of their continental contemporaries. Barcelona’s architectural lines were sturdier. The ironwork more upright and deliberate. Everything felt weightier and more geometrically disciplined, yet never stiff.

In the practice of daily life, it seemed that even utilitarian objects took on these characteristics. And everything was dressed in that familiar earthen palette I had first observed from the train window.

Certainly, I thought, the spirit of this peninsula has been realizing itself through the hands of its people.

Tequila Is Mexican, Not Spanish, Dummy

The one thing ‘Gaudí’ I was sad to have missed was an interior tour of the Sagrada Família. Regular entry had been sold out, but I considered lining up for the 9 a.m. “International Mass” at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, which would leave me with about 30 minutes before our train departed for Madrid. However, our Saturday night was spent in a Barcelona pool hall, lubricated with margaritas sans any sugar (i.e., tequila on the rocks; i.e., idiocy).

Besides that, something didn’t sit right with me about the idea of gawking at its ceiling in the middle of a Mass, nor did the idea of a Mass for unlucky tourists, for that matter.

We left for Madrid that Sunday before noon, either more or less heathen for having missed it.

I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Lourdes

Those answers began to come following the single touristic outing we made during our stay.

On our first night, someone in the house had offhandedly mentioned that Lourdes was in the next valley over. The Lourdes where, in 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette was visited by an apparition of the Virgin Mary on numerous occasions. There also, Bernadette discovered a spring with waters that have subsequently been attributed to around 7,000 miraculous healings. Seventy-two of these have been officially deemed ‘scientifically inexplicable’ by the Catholic Church.

Timidly, I asked Will if he would drive us there in the Skoda. It’s difficult to explain, but just as with the paint, I had the feeling that I ‘ought to.’ I was embarrassed to even ask, but after some lighthearted fun was made of it, he happily obliged.

As we searched around the site of an immense basilica for the miraculous spring, I think each one of us wondered if it was truly holy water, or just some Machiavellian charade. The vibes were incredibly difficult to read. And in all honesty, I have been on some shaky ground in the faith department as of late. But I certainly did want it to work—to maybe heal some of my own spiritual maladies. Maybe, even, I prayed for it to work.

When we found the spring’s grotto, I noticed an old woman bare-kneed on a slab of stone praying the rosary. Nearby was another bundled up in a wheelchair. She was being pushed by a young man I assumed to be her son. He was soaking wet from the rain, and I thought they must have been there all morning. Will’s mother had spoken of her visit to Lourdes before the three of us had left; about how sobering it was to see all the sick and dying people whose last hope was a miracle. Sick or not, I thought that most of us at some point have hoped beyond hope for a miracle.

The indiscernible vibes had crystallized into something profoundly solemn.

I turned on one of the taps and let the water run over my fingers. I traced a cross on my forehead with it. As I walked away, the subtlest shift seemed to occur inside of me. Though it is another word I disdain, often even more so than cozy, there is no other I can think of to capture it. I felt a faint tinge of happiness; happiness that I haven’t felt in a while. However faint a blip, it did register.

Naysayers and skeptics will say that I made it up or placeboed myself.

Sort of how the uncouth would call a lovely chocolate-colored wall shit brown.

Fine. So be it.

Because that is the very nature of reality, captured so eloquently by the words of William Blake:

“The Sun’s light, when he unfolds it, Depends on the organ that beholds it.”

Much of what is, is merely a matter of how one sees it. And I had been looking at a lot of things with my eyes, at the cost of seeing from my heart.

Thoughts

I retired to the bedroom when we returned to the house. It was the perfect place to fulfill the idea of retiring to somewhere.

I sat and thought.

And what I thought while I sat was that lately, when I look in the mirror, I have been very harsh with myself. Harsh towards the things that I can see on the outside, and harsh towards everything on the inside, too.

I thought:

My perception of me is not very good. In fact, it’s often very bad. I look towards the past, and towards the things which I have accumulated from it, and I only bring my failures and regrets to the fore. I look at the present and I feel uncomfortable in it. Uncertain in my own ideas, shaky in my footing. I look out beyond myself and see how, like a virus, this sort of outlook will infect the way that I see the world, too.

And then I asked:

Is any of this real? Can any of this be true? Or is it merely the door of perception through which I have chosen to observe reality?

Because then I thought of someone like Will, a person I look up to for his optimism. I see that in certain ways, the world looks kinder to him. And in turn, I think it looks back on him kinder, too.

I thought about how I have spent the last four days in someone else’s treasured place, and was nonetheless graciously welcomed into it. How I spent that time unhurriedly; leisurely, drinking tea by a fire for hours, in the pleasant company of pleasant people, who I believe enjoyed my company, too.

I asked myself:

Are the Pyrenees nothing more than a mountain range? Or is that gentle giant Goliath spirited away somewhere in their vast and furrowed slopes?

Is the holy water that runs from the spring at Lourdes a hoax? Or is it miraculous?

When you look in the mirror, or out on the world, do you do so in hatred? Or in love?

I realized that while reality may be a set of immutable facts, we have the free will to interpret them as we see fit. Reality is a gift given, not an object self-made. It is about the way you receive it; the way you perceive it.

I then considered the future. That moving forward, I ought to open a door through which I might perceive things differently. Because I ought to see this reality—this life—for the gift that it is.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite,”

William Blake

Three Stooges

There was a lot else going on in it, I know. But maybe you were keen enough to take notice that in the previous journal, there were three dumb and barbaric Americans dining out on that ill-fated day.

“But Peyton, you only have one brother, don’t you?”

Yes, as far as I know. But I would say that I do have a brotha-from-a-British-motha named Will. And aside from his accent, he is red, white, and blue through and through.

Friendship is Like Aging Cheese

Will and I met about a month before our first day of classes at CU Boulder. And from then on, slowly but surely—like blue mold funking up a block of cheese—acquaintance ripened into friendship.

Three years on, over Christmas break of 2021, I found myself traveling through the European continent for the first time with Will and a few other special people I’d come to know. Will and I were by then fully fermented friends. More mold than cheese, which I think to both of us is preferable.

However, on January 1st, 2022, while we were all in Nice, France, chaos struck. What we had initially diagnosed as a New Year’s Eve hangover was actually the (not-so) deadly Omicron variant of COVID. As you may recall, crossing any border was virtually impossible without a negative COVID test. As such, our plans to visit Rome were dissolved like a cheap packet of Emergen-C in water. Per bureaucracy’s orders, we began our search for a quarantine spot an ocean away from home. But by a stroke of divine providence, I would say, we didn’t have to look very far. Will’s family had a cottage in the French Pyrenees that we could escape to.

Gentle Giants

I was already familiar with the region’s general location and topography due to a prolonged obsession I had with maps and cartography as a kid, though I only ever sought it out in my atlas because Goliath, my first childhood pet, was a Great Pyrenees.

Gentle giants, they are; tender enough to midwife the birth of a lamb, and courageous enough to defend an entire mountainside from foxes, wolves, and the like. And there I was, years later, crossing the contours of the country that my dog’s ancestors had, for centuries before, guarded. Soft rolling hills spilled into kindly valleys that preceded a more remote and removed ruggedness up towards the mountain peaks. Its tempered winter climate that, at times, was cold, wet, and gray didn’t hesitate to permit just enough sun and warmth to sustain an abundance of green laurels, ivy, and mistletoe. A graceful and restrained majesty all around. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the fever I had upon arrival, I thought: “This whole place is sort of like a gentle giant of its own.”

Though the photograph should speak for itself, that first visit felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

However, when it just so happened that Will and his parents would be at the cottage over this Thanksgiving while Ryley and I were on our Beverly Hillbillies Grand Tour of Europe, it was a foregone conclusion that I should return there once more, with the additional privilege of being able to return with my brother.

Picking Back Up in Pau

Will and his parents were waiting outside the Pau train station in a trustworthy Skoda station wagon. Diesel. I think there’s really something about a diesel station wagon…functional and cool in a practical old-man kind of way.

As for Ryley and me: it felt like someone had sludged vegetable oil in our tanks. We had been in transit for the better part of the last 48 hours. Reykjavik—London—Paris—Bordeaux—Pau. They eyed our packs and must have thought we were taking up residence with them. Certainly they could tell we were hungry. We piled into the car for the one-hour drive from Pau to Castet that would precede a few switchbacks up to the mountainside cottage.

“There’s chili on the stove at home,” Will’s mother offered cheerily.

Music to our ears.

Lessons in Leisure

We spent most of our mornings, afternoons, and evenings doing the most enlivening things a person can do: leisurely engagements of little to no worldly consequence. Chatting over tea in front of the wood-burning stove, hacking away at thick hedges that will inevitably grow back with the return of spring; dining together slowly and then toasting a small glass of port before bed. An unbusy idyll that clears away the detritus accumulated over what it actually means to live.

I was given the opportunity for a foray into a bit of architectural and interior design, as well.

Our first morning there, Will took me out to the rear of the quaint 18th-century stone cottage.

“This concrete slab that runs over the laundry room below has some real water issues. It just pools up and then leaks down. So we are thinking of extending the roof from the house over top.”

Indeed, water is often the most pernicious force working against your home. And it had done a real number on the slab. However, to my mind, extending the existing roofline posed some challenges. Firstly, the slab was an odd shape, which the existing roofline would be unable to follow. Moreover, adding six to seven feet of bellcast roof eaves and a jerkinhead gable peak would not exactly be a DIY project. Most importantly, I felt it would risk compromising the aesthetic integrity of the existing structure.

I thought for a moment, then asked: “How do you use this space now?”

“We don’t really.”

There was a double door from one of the bedrooms that led out to it, but I could see that the outdoor space was simply too vast and exposed to feel comfortable. A shame; it was east-facing, and the morning sun as it rises over the mountains there is rejuvenating.

Then an idea entered my mind: Why not build a roof directly on the slab, following the line of its perimeter? Cheaper, easier, and complementary to the existing architecture. Of course the true virtue is that it would create an intimate balcony for the bedroom. A nice place to drink tea and watch the sun come up.

I put pencil to paper and drew up a perspective.

“How clever,” both Will and his dad remarked. Spoken in their British accents, it felt especially edifying to my ear.

“We had never considered that.”

Lessons in Perception

Back inside, the remnants of a years-long debate over what color to paint the presently yellow living room walls were brought to my attention. Four samples of varying shades of grey had been rolled on behind the stove. None, however, were working, and this was evident to everyone. Will’s mother asked my opinion. Very reluctantly, I said,

“Chocolate brown. The room wants to be chocolate brown.”

An anxious silence followed, and so I stumbled into an expanded thesis. I explained that, especially at night, a light color was causing the room to feel too vast—sort of borderless and unenclosed. It needed a deep warmth, so that the walls would ‘hug’ you, if you will. With the way life is lived in this place, it ought to feel—and as much as I hate the word, it was necessary to use—cozy.

Will and his dad were sold, no questions asked. His mom offered what I sensed to be a tentative buy-in, but turned the tables. She enlisted me to go with Ryley and Will into the town to procure a sample of my choosing. The stakes had been raised. I was nervous to assert my opinion, to suggest someone else take a risk. But much like the roof, it was what intuition said ‘ought to be.’ It was sensed and felt, not purely ascertained by functions of the mind. The presence of the room, the collection of its physical members, its orientation relative to the path of the sun…the way I saw all these things undeniably cohered into the words chocolate and brown.

It turned out a smashing success. Even I was surprised by how nicely it looked.

See, perception can sometimes be narrowed by habit; unseen possibilities can remain so because the viewer has simply become too comfortable gazing out from the same vantage point.

“Perception,” I thought. “I’ve finally mastered it with my panopticon eye!”

Not so.

Perception extends far beyond the physical.

Good-humored as he is, Will’s dad smiled coyly over his shoulder as he finished painting on the last of the sample can:

“They’re going to leave and say, ‘Haha, fools! We’ve gotten them to paint their walls shit brown!’”

In a sense, he was right. The deep and charactered color could, in the right light and if one so chose, be perceived as that of feces. And it got me to wondering: how could they really know if it was my practical joke, or my professional opinion? How could I even know? How was I certain that I hadn’t practical-joked myself into practically joking them? Was there even an objective way to look at the wall? At anything?

I had thought the roof and the brown were two good ideas, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t??

I perceived that I was perceiving a quandary.

But alas, all questions receive their answers in due time.

Within fifteen minutes of being seated, our party has become the source of mass confusion amongst the restaurant’s waitstaff. They are huddled in conclave over an adjacent table, where our three pots of Onion Soup are being held in limbo. They speak in frantic whispers; wholly taken by a collective state of stupefaction.

It’s the cappuccino cups sitting in front of us. Coffee before a meal in France…oops! Major faux pas. But the three of us were in dire need of sugar and caffeine; undoubtedly, we were plummeting into a low only our American diets could have cultivated.

The European mind couldn’t comprehend this.

Thus, It was—I must assume—an act of vengeance carried out by our waiter that I was not dissuaded from ordering the Andouillette.

Ah—Andouillette, you think to yourself. That sweet and spicy smoked Cajun sausage.

“Cajun food…the French were in Louisiana…the suffix ‘-ette’?…maybe some smaller more dainty version…it’s cheaper than the horse steak.”

This was my line of reasoning, and would have been yours as well, had you also refused to google image search the menu item.

Oh how mistaken I was.

Andouillette is one of the most vile concoctions I have ever had the misfortune of consuming, and I once ate paella cooked by a 93-year-old man in a dingy kitchen that was actually inhabited by himself and a featherless pet bird with “worms”.

This infernal dish arrived to the table as a plump, wet log; tied into a gnarled knot at one end, and split open at the other to reveal its pinkish gray innards. It announced itself with an odor so acrid, so horrendous, that I can still call it to mind days later and gag. After staring for a moment in horror, I  finally lifted a forkful of its slick and quivering meat to my mouth…Ladies and gentlemen, let me suggest that should you ever find this same sausage on a plate before you, it’s best to hold your breath upon the first bite. The taste, I’m afraid, mirrors the scent with an unwavering fidelity.

So, after forcing a few morsels down in disbelief, I politely offered a taste to my companions. Certainly they also ought to have the privilege of experiencing the inventiveness of this fine French cuisine.

They both took a tentative bite, and as I watched their faces contort, I become certain that I had not imagined, inflated, or exaggerated any of what I have just described.

We all concurred:

Andouillette looks, smells and tastes like nothing other than shit.

The reason being, I discovered later on, is that it is essentially pig entrails stuffed inside of—you guessed it—a pig’s colon! Apparently the stench from the colon is nearly impossible to neutralize. Makes sense!

However I also learned that there are some Frenchmen so head-over-heels for this poop sausage, that they established an association dedicated to its preservation and promotion. They call themselves the Association Amicale des Amateurs d'Andouillette Authentique (Friendly Association of Lovers of Authentic Andouillette). They don’t just find this meal fit for consumption, but actually delectable.

And, well—fair enough, I thought.

I was forced to watch Food, Inc. in the fourth grade (look it up…or perhaps don’t), and I still shamelessly scarf down a Big Mac every now and then. I like to mix cottage cheese and tuna from a can. The regional delicacy where I am from is unironically called a Slopper.

Given my own dietary sins, who am I to judge? Maybe it is true that there are just certain European quirks that the American mind cannot comprehend.

And this, my friends, is where the real journey I have taken through the French Pyrenees begins: with the inkling of a notion that perhaps most everything really is a matter of perception.

Stay tuned for France, Part II.

I also feel it worth mentioning that I horked down a good chunk of the thing by the time it was all said and done. 1) because I felt directly challenged by the waiter, the country of France at large, and the sausage itself; and 2) because as a child, unfinished food sometimes aroused the reproach from certain adults to “consider the starving children in Africa”. Well, I can assure you, they’d probably hate Andouillette too.

The Golden Circle

At 8 a.m., we set out into the darkness, bound for the country’s southwest interior—the 155-mile Golden Circle. We are guided by a naive and childish American wanderlust, of course, as well as the Churchillian voice of a prerecorded GPS tour I bought on a whim from Expedia—an incredibly lucky purchase, since I would have had no idea where to stop otherwise.

The guide speaks incessantly, filling our heads with geological facts and Icelandic tall tales of elves and trolls. As his voice emanates through the speakers, it seems to masculinize the Mazda—a transformation from feminine to effeminate dandy.

His narration engrosses me with an entitled sense of satisfaction in the spectacle that the country is seemingly obliged to deliver.

By 11:30 a.m., we’ve covered roughly 40 miles of the journey. But each mile driven has felt virtually the same as the last. And at every stop, I have found my lofty expectations thwarted.

Iceland has met us on its own terms. Sleet has been falling all morning from a winter storm hovering over the southwestern corner of the island. The entire route thus far has been freshly blanketed in snow, making it nearly impossible to appreciate the unique details of the geology described by our guide. Dense clouds have hidden any views of the landscape. A simmering frustration begins to swell in me as I realize that more of the country might have been missed than actually seen.

“Do you see that volcanic peak up to your left?” our guide asks with a misplaced optimism.

No, we do not.

But as we crest a high ridge running along the base of that invisible volcano, the yellow glow of a town materializes from beneath a thick cloud of steam. “Hveragerði,” our guide informs us cheerily, “is a geothermal hotspot. If you have the time, I’d highly recommend making this stop!”

We have nothing but time. It is the only antidote left against the inclement weather. And as we drive the backroads through the town, a greenhouse and geothermal park tucked away on its outskirts catches our eyes. We decide this is where we will wait out the storm.

Through the window of the tropical refuge, we watch a geyser explode between bites of buttered bread that has somehow been cooked via geothermal heat. As the steam from the eruption dissipates, we wander from our seats overlooking the park into the garden portion of the greenhouse. A quietly amused man sits at the far end, cross-legged and seemingly installed as a permanent fixture among the greenhouse’s scenery.

As soon as we enter, he introduces himself. “I’m the gardener here,” he states assuredly. I extend my hand to shake his and ask his name.

“Ari—it means eagle in Icelandic.” He flaps his arms like a bewildered bird.

Somewhere around sixty, his face has the structure of a mitten palm—soft, expressive, and deeply lined. Two dancing eyebrows gracefully convey all of the emotion that his halting English can’t quite manage.

As he relays his struggles with a fickle olive tree and other temperamental species inherited from the previous gardener, my eye wanders to a concord grapevine growing in the corner. It reminds me of the one I’ve been tending at home. I ask him about it.

“It is dying. I should have known—it was trying to tell me.”

There’s a hint of intrigue in his voice.

“We had a great harvest this summer…many grapes. But you see, it’s like this: birth goes up in wartime, during a depression. Distress makes something work harder, put out more energy. If you have a weak plant, disturb the roots—dig them out, poke at them. Hit them.”

He makes swift, violent motions with his hands.

“The next spring… it will bloom.”

He hangs on to the end of his breath.

“But the biggest bloom… it is right before death.”

The three of us look solemnly up toward the vine.

Outside, the geyser explodes once more.

I contemplate life and death as steam and flames erupt from a fissure in the ground.

We decide to resign the remainder of the day to these forces of nature; decide to accept that we may spend the rest of it trekking through slydda, as Ari called the weather.

As we turn toward the door to leave, Ari catches my arm:

“Remember, my friend, to enjoy Iceland.”

His words are a cudgel against my spoiled sense of disappointment. And, as a matter of fact, the weather does eventually clear—approximately three hours later—at our final stop: Gulfoss Falls.

I look out at the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of gallons of water that churn through deep creases in the ground and spill over sheer cliffs. Above it, a pastelled afternoon sky is being revealed from behind the clearing clouds.

When we arrive back in Reykjavik, we sit for dinner at Old Iceland; an unpretentious refuge tucked into a storefront on one of the downtown’s cobbled side streets.

We give the fermented shark a try—a shameless tourist gimmick once eaten only by starving fishermen.

Ari’s words ring in my ears as the ammonia creeps up my throat:

“Enjoy Iceland.”

Snaefellsnes Peninsula

The following day, we decide to go out once more. North, up the coast this time, and with a more dignified humility about us. Even our guide sounds more measured—almost, dare I say, masculine.

It is supposed to rain, and as such I brace myself for disappointment at the whims of nature.

But as we drive, clouds are gathering inland and over the sea. Visibility is perfect along the coast.

Just a few miles outside of Reykjavik, we round a bend in the highway, and I am awestruck at what lies ahead: a soaring high-wind peak rising into the clouds and sweeping steeply back down to Earth, into blackened banks that meet the cresting, crystalline blue waves rolling in off the Atlantic. In the distance, a range of peaks, cliffs, and plateaus arrays itself along the coast as far as the eye can see. The primordial beauty is so raw, it conjures to mind the first verses of Genesis.

Eyes wide, fixed beyond and above the road, I can do nothing but pull off to the shoulder and stare.

In perfect unison, the landscape choreographs a stare in return. It faces us down indifferently—lets us know that we are privileged to look upon it. It is a sight that makes a man feel infinitesimal in his loftiest endeavors, and infinite in his mere existence.

For three more hours, we traverse the alien land, our minds straining to form new categories for the things we see. Sweeping plains that teem with the majestic Icelandic horse; lava fields draped in precious green moss; ravens perched in skeletal groves of birch that give way to kelp-strewn beaches where seals sleep.

Our turning point comes atop a pass, roughly one thousand feet above the coastal plains, and about one hundred feet below the dark flank of an ancient volcano’s peak. We step out of the Mazda.

“Why are you going to Europe in winter?” many had asked.

My friend, because I am in a winter of my own.

I stare up at the blackened face of the volcano, then out toward the sea. Clouds gather, and sheets of rain streak the distance. Wind flushes my cheeks red.

Here is death, I think—heralded by the marching waves and carried on a raven’s wing. I breathe out, feeling it leave my lungs.

I breathe in, and feel new life stirring. Somewhere inside, I sense my roots are being disturbed. This will serve me well come spring, I think.

We return to Reykjavik and eat hot soup from a bread bowl for dinner. At the hotel, I sink up to my ears in the hot tub and look up into the primordial dark.

I think I understand now what it is to enjoy Iceland.

No such thing.

We have been hard at work having fun, but at long last come to you with our first field report.

Please pretend to enjoy my writing while you scroll through the amazing photographs Ryley took.

Primordial

Our plane touches down at Keflavik International Airport at 6:00 a.m. sharp. Glacial cold creeps in through our coats as we descend an open-air staircase from the plane directly onto the tarmac. I look up and into a primordial darkness. Every star is visible as a twinkling pinprick in the blackness. We have arrived at the Earth’s furthest reaches.

A bus delivers us from the tarmac to the terminal, and after EU Border agents scan our passports, fingerprints, and retinas, we pile into another bus from the terminal parking lot to the rental car office (apparently we are not yet on any “lists”).

Bus-to-airport-to-bus proves my clumsiness in maneuvering a 50lb pack, a matter I resolve to correct before the end of our trip. I consider that the easiest way to do this would be to sell all my belongings and the pack as well. But alas, it is borrowed; I will have to learn to wrest control over my oversized companion.

By 8:30 a.m., we have loaded up our things into the trunk of a sporty Mazda crossover that is a bit too feminine for my liking. But it is an automatic and an all-wheel drive, and will get the job done no matter what gender it identifies as. After inspecting the vehicle and completely missing the chip in the windshield (more on that to come), we commence the 50-minute drive from Keflavik Airport to Reykjavik.

Save for the street lights, it is still pitch dark.

Endurance

Situated on the shores of Faxáfloi Bay in the southwest corner of the island, Reykjavik stands as Iceland’s capital city, and will serve as our base of operations for the next four days. As its outskirts rise above the dash on the horizon, it strikes me as larger than I had expected; as a true city. Certainly Iceland’s largest, and perhaps its only.

And just as the city’s true nature begins to reveal itself, so too does the ruggedness of the country’s landscape. The silhouettes of jagged snow-capped peaks off in the distance are traced against the black sky. In the dim-lighted halos cast over the edges of the highway, wiry clumps of alpine grass cling to life.

Rush-hour traffic begins to collect and condense—Icelanders on their way to work will suffer two more hours at their desks without sunlight. Peering in at their faces as we drive, I am certain that they are all clinging to life as well.

Here, for the grasses and people alike, endurance seems a necessity.

Remote

We park the car downtown at around 9:30 a.m. and decide to walk around, as our hotel room won’t be ready for another three hours. I am thankful that we have a trunk, no matter how curvaceous, to store the packs.

Telepathically, the two of us agree: we are hungry.

Our first stop is a quirky cafe on one of Reykjavik’s quaint downtown streets. The exterior is painted bright orange, a color that to our subconscious must have indicated warmth. It is indeed warm; both in temperature and aesthetic. The interior is decorated in a hodgepodge style that could only be described as quasi-Buddhist Americana, with a touch of African flair. Somehow, it all blends together cohesively—it is true that if you fill a space with enough knickknacks, the eye can only look at everything at once, and amalgamate it all into a unifying blur. Maybe this is why the idea of ‘grandma’s house,’ with all its odds and ends, is so comforting to our minds.

I judged that the proprietor of the cafe was an American expat, evidenced by his accent. I judged more specifically that he must have come from New York City, evidenced by his newsboy cap, personal memorabilia adorning the walls, and self-assured attitude. I know the type all too well.

We place our order with the New Yorker American and take a seat near the front counter. I notice a patron exit from a door that says “bathroom”; she leaves it ajar. The Star Wars theme music seeps out from behind it, intruding on what I assume is an “American Classics for Restaurant” Spotify playlist, playing the likes of Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac in the cafe.

The New Yorker American cannot escape his roots, even here. Neither can I, as I quietly hum along to Sweet Caroline and Star Wars simultaneously.

Moments later, I discover that the room was indeed as advertised—a bathroom, only Millennium Falcon themed… clad in aluminum and lit with blue LEDs. A cardboard cutout of Princess Leia watched with prying eyes as I relieved myself.

Our meals arrive at the table. For Ryley, a grilled cheese and tomato soup, and for myself, the breakfast crepes with a side salad. Each plate is around 2900 ISK (Icelandic Krona). In American currency, that’s about $23 each. I cannot even blame the New Yorker American for price gouging—this is merely our first taste of the consequences of the island’s remoteness.

A remoteness that, we will soon learn, has been at work shaping Iceland long before the idea of a grilled cheese ever reached its shores.

Austere

After our meal, we walk just up the road from the cafe to Hallgrímskirkja, a Lutheran Cathedral that stands as Iceland’s most iconic architectural work.

Erected atop a prominent hill, the plaza in front of the church offers an excellent point from which to survey downtown Reykjavik and the bay beyond. However, the eye is naturally drawn from the expansive view back to the church itself, as it is quite an intriguing site to behold.

Due to many factors that would bore you to death, the Nordic countries found it difficult to cement an architectural legacy of their own during the 18th and 19th centuries, as there was little extant indigenous classical tradition to extend into the modern era (one notable exception might be the Swedish Grace movement, which is worth a Google image search). One hour in Reykjavik has proven to me that this was especially so for Iceland.

Thus, Hallgrímskirkja’s form does not emerge from an ancient liturgical or civic tradition; rather, it seems to literally grow from the land itself.

Drawing on the basalt columns that are so unique to the nation’s geological identity, two axial wings rise parabolically into a stark central bell tower. I will spare you from any further architectural commentary and leave you with the single word that came to mind upon first seeing the structure: austere.

Intrepid

As we step back outside of the cathedral, I realize that the bronze figure in the plaza is the likeness of Leif Erikson; Viking explorer and native Icelander. I eavesdrop on a walking tour huddled at the statue’s base. The guide tells a group of Asian tourists: “Many people think of Columbus, but this is 400 years before.”

This is true: Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 armed with an imperial charter. Erickson, by contrast, arrived on the coast of Newfoundland around the year 1000, guided by nothing more than an intrepid spirit.

Primordial. Endurance. Austere. Intrepid. An image of Iceland and its people has begun to cohere in my mind.

My Personal Icelandic Canon

From Hallgrimskirkja, we drive to the National Museum of Iceland. Wanting to be one of the ‘good’ tourists, I commit myself—naively—to diligently reading each display placard.

I learn that Iceland was settled in 874 AD by Norwegian Vikings. Startlingly late in civilizational terms. And yet, their descendants actively preserve an extraordinary wealth of relics. I come to find that the spoken Icelandic language is likely the closest thing to Old Norse that we can hear today, and as such, its integrity is still fiercely guarded. For example, when the Icelandic military procured its first tank, they simply invented a new word in order to avoid adopting ours: skriðdreki—which translates literally to “crawling dragon.”

Though the artistic artifacts displayed evidenced a culture lacking any high-art tradition, there is much beauty in the sparseness of a people so pressed for survival. Volcanic eruptions, plagues, and famines had time and again decimated significant portions of the island’s population, and yet they retained an unadorned delicacy in their woodcraft, wool-work, and functional objects.

Then came the Baðstofa—the recreated communal bedroom of a traditional Icelandic farmhouse. To peer in and realize that, well into the 1950s, rural Icelanders slept, worked, and lived in a single dim room is genuinely arresting. As is the fact that they pickled nearly everything that could be pickled and fermented the things that couldn’t.

When we step back outside, it is nearing 4:00 p.m.—sunset.

I add one more word to my personal canon of Iceland and its people: Special.

And in the coming days, as we set out across the country in our feminine Mazda, we’ll learn just how special.

Where We’re Going—the final track of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score—deftly carries the weight of the film’s most arresting closing sequence. Call me a cinema philistine (I am), but it remains one of the few moments in modern film that leaves a knot in my throat, even eleven years after I first saw it in theaters. Not merely for the resolution of that improbable narrative arc, but for the way the organ’s rising chords resonate in a personal chamber of the heart.

And presently, the question returns, the one the organ asks with each swelling phrase: Where are we going?

Physically and corporeally? My brother and I are set to board a 757 bound for Reykjavík, Iceland—our point of launch for seventy-seven days of wandering across the European continent, a journey still largely uncharted.

Temporally and spiritually? Only time will disclose that verdict.

What I do know is that the unknown we’re heading towards feels strangely intimate: a place where the sight of other languages and landscapes—of other lives—may reveal something long hidden in our own. In wandering foreign lands, one may stumble into oneself.

And so we invite you to join our journey. Through the Substack app, in your inbox, perhaps even on printed pages, if you can figure that out. Where we will keep a running travel journal of photographs, reflections, interviews, and dispatches from the road.

Wherever we end up, we will see you there.

And on the path, I find two stray pages, blown out of an abandoned book. I slow down a bit, to read a fragment of a story, but I manage to step into the vignette of a fragment of my own; so vivid with the people and places I haven’t heard from or been to in some time. But of course, I am glad to be reminded, and so I smile at the woman passing by with a stroller; her little infant sound asleep in its carriage. She smiles too.

I walk a while, then bend over, clean in the way of whoever is coming behind me, to pet a dog. I look into his eyes, and he into mine.

I think a moment; he thinks a moment.

Of the way we both acknowledge that I’m something he is not; and yet of the way we both acknowledge, that in the pleasantness of these scratches, we must both acknowledge God. I know because I smile, and the dog smiles too.

Then, around a bend, a late summer bloom growing through a crack at the top of a wall, just above my head--catches my eye. I step into the dirt and crane my neck to get a closer look. It is tiny. Minute. No bigger than a thimble. But the way its petals’ vibrant and deeply purple hues unfurl out of a wiry green bud; how it, too, cranes its neck, looking for a ray of sun—is stunning—reminding me again: I simply must acknowledge God.

Finally, I am close. Through the old oaks and the lindens, the towering London planes, I can see the clearing; a big swath of grass, dotted with people, where I will set myself down and think for a while, of mundane things; and He will remind me.

But as I near it, I see a rainbow in the distance, rippling like a bright and varicolored wave. Little bodies circumferencing its edges, little arms whipping, to make its surface undulate. Then suddenly, they slow, and up it goes, as though it should like to float away into an endless summer sky. But tethered to little hands it remains, billowing into a bright and varicolored dome. The little souls disappear beneath it. I draw closer, and hear the sound of little whispers escaping through its kaleidoscopic membrane.

And then, just as suddenly, wide-eyed and frizzy-haired, they emerge. And their little lungs are exhaling big laughter; their little faces are painted into big smiles. Norman Rockwell could have found all the world's joy condensed into each one of their little frames.

And I feel a tear that from my eye is not so distant, because I too once played a game of parachute, and I think, or am reminded, that I felt much the same.

But the spectre of my past self demands it — that I cobble together the world’s longest epitaph, so he can find the metaphorical headstone marking the burial place of his soon-to-be dead dreams. He demands a eulogy. His reasons are carried on the Spotify sound waves echoing as I write: the Electric Light Orchestra mourning his Shangri-La; Sheryl Crow interrogating me as to why the hell his happiness makes me so sad. And then, the Beatles, corroborating his fear that his name is actually Eleanor Rigby, and that he will be buried alone with it when he dies to this city. Because this city doesn’t really give a sh—

—I’ve been trying hard not to curse.

So instead, I shriek, in self-important agony, because dammit, present me still does want to write something about dying to myself, and in turn, to New York City. But none of the words come together quite right. Then suddenly, a moment of clarity between paragraphs. As I close the deal on my first Facebook marketplace sale, it occurs to me: just like you can’t unload a piece of junk until you know why you don’t need it anymore, you can’t eulogize a dead version of yourself until you know why it died.

And so I splay myself open on my apartment’s flaking parquet floor, open a new document, and begin the autopsy of my own spiritual cadaver. To study why its body is leaving the place it thought it might actually die in. To decide what actually could be said at the funeral of the version of me that, come end of August, will have once inhabited New York City; decide what his headstone could read.

And now, for your macabre viewing pleasure, I present below the findings of my examination:

Exhibit A:

Part of me hated it here. Certainly the humidity, which has melted my brain more than once. The ever-present aroma of human excrement reminding me how thin the membrane between private suffering and public space here really is. The first of every month, upon which a host of corporate entities and rent-seekers would bleed me dry. My unventilated bathroom, which is actively manifesting mold spores as I write. So on and so forth. But aside from all of that, part of me hated me here. I tried too hard to be like the significant people; like the coterie of beautiful people. I savored my envy of those who ‘had it better’, like the client who once refused a green stone slab because, as he explained, the only two things he liked green were his money and his landscaping. I became intoxicated by vain conceits that blew up my head, such as when an Instagram Influencer approached me at a bar because I “looked like I was from Connecticut.” Of course she immediately retreated when she found that I wasn’t, and that I didn’t have green money or green landscaping.

I hope you cringed at both of us.

Despite all of my conniving attempts and pretentious desires, none of it was quite enough to camouflage me amongst the other half. Perhaps I was merely a garden-variety dandelion, out of place in a bed full of so many cultivated blooms. Or perhaps here, in this garden, clout trades only in lies, theft, and deceit, and beauty passes only if it’s skin deep. Perhaps the man this city demanded of me was one I simply could not pretend to be.

Exhibit B:

Part of me loved it here. The crispness of its deciduous autumns that revived my soul more than once. The ever-present mechanical hum, promising infinite and interminable possibility at any hour. A newfound penchant for thrift and frugality, born out of the three month period in which I would transfer a singular light bulb from lamp to lamp. My crooked apartment building’s roof, from which I could face squarely the southeast corner of the World Trade Center and see a little bit of my stubborn determination in its reflections. So on and so forth. But more than all of that, part of me loved me here. I learned to be like the scrappy people; like the handful of humble people. I found something admirable in my neighbor Joey, who sat me down on his stoop one rough night and said, “Look cuz, I don’t got no son, but I’m gonna talk to you like you my son,” before gifting me a few blocks’ worth of street wisdom. Something sobered me in the presence of ‘John Murphy, I’m Irish,’ the resident homeless man who shuffled down my street often and cried tears of joy once because I had treated him like a human being.

Despite all of my resistance, I found I much preferred the beauty and significance of simple people, and simple things. And I found that in this garden, I had grown into a persistent and relentless weed, and that this might mean I was better suited for a sunburnt patch of dirt, or a crack in the concrete. Maybe the man I asked of myself here was, on some days, one I was proud to be.

And thus, I thought, maybe it was best that this new man should leave.

You didn’t think autopsies were this sentimental, did you? You probably also didn’t know that about 5% of autopsies return inconclusive results. As you can see, this might be one of them.

Because I can’t confidently name the cause of death. I can’t say exactly why the version of me that once thought, here, he might become everything he ought to be, no longer fits in the skin of the present version of me. I am of course terrified to say that in some sense it may involve failure, weakness, or simply the outer limits of my human potential—another casualty of this city’s ceaseless churn. But I also can’t say it wasn’t natural causes—that when I heard a strange voice telling me it was time to go, it really was just time to go. Now If that is the case, I can definitively say that to move forward into someone new, part of me had to die.

Because I would need more room. I can’t buy more gigabytes for my brain, or more Drive space in my heart. And that’s fine. The man who lived here, who fought humidity and mold and his own vanity, has done all he can. I will fold him up like an old map and place him in the ground he grew from. Then I’ll walk away, lighter, toward the next patch of dirt that’ll have me.

Maybe someday he’ll get a proper eulogy, but I’m nixing the epitaph — he would certainly prefer a marble headstone over granite, and I don’t have the money for either. Still, I think he would be proud of his death, and who I will be in his place. I think he would breathe a sigh of relief now that I am finally following the path laid out for us, instead of hacking through the overgrowth of hubris to make one of our own. Of course he never would have imagined that I would dare to leave my coveted seat from which I design the luxuriant homes of billionaires to learn how to stand at a work bench and use a hand plane. But he would probably attempt to soothe any anxieties over it by reminding me that Mr. Sinatra once said “If we can make it here, we can make it anywhere” — even in a wood shop.

And the deep irony of it all would not be lost on him; if nothing else he was perceptive. With all this talk of death and rebirth—and my newfound Faith that God has a plan for my life—he would have to just smirk and say:

“You know, that’s funny…Jesus was a carpenter too.”

For a man one scene removed from the final curtain call of his ‘youth’, perhaps there Is no better book to read than that of Ecclesiastes. Because it is at this threshold that Many fatalizing sacrifices must be made, the consequences of which can Sometimes seem Overwhelming. Especially if said man has chosen to follow Christ.

I would count myself among said men. Maybe, dear aether, sweat Substack void, you would too. And maybe it is the case that this path that you have chosen has proven itself much less certain, in certain ways, than the one which you Rambled along before.

Certainly, I myself have found this to be true. Sometimes terrifyingly so.

Because sometimes I wonder if I’ve merely cloaked my disappointments in a theological garment. If I’ve woven together a myth to soothe the anguish of my failures. If I’ve anchored myself to a lie, so that I might have an excuse for having sunk to the back of this exhausting race. If I’ve baptized my Retreat from ambition in a false sanctity; a pathetic attempt to abate the Rabid envy in my heart towards those who are farther along than me. If I’ve chosen to extricate myself from “the world” not out of some noble renunciation, but because I am too weak a man to take all that I want for myself.

Sometimes, Yes, I wonder if I’ve imagined the mythic arc of Christ’s redemption. Only so that I might drape meaning over the pitiful corners of myself that I see when I look in the mirror.

Sometimes, doubt overwhelms me.

But as Koheleth taught, there Is nothing new under the sun.

And all…all is vanity.

As your dreams for this life slowly fade with the opening of a new set of eyes; as they are Hollowed out by A new, more blinding morning light, seasons of Doubt will inevitably arise. But There is a strange and melancholy balm to be found in Ecclesiastes: that above all Our scheming, striving, and hustling, there is a world to come—one that will prove our faith not so futile as whatever it was we were chasing before it woke.

It will bring a joy not stolen away by empty promises. A joy that endures, no matter how downtrodden or forgotten you may feel in this world.

And though it may feel impossible to forsake the life we once envisioned for ourselves, it cannot be denied: naked as we came, so too shall we go. And as I prepare myself for the next act, one movement closer to the final, I find a strange peace in knowing that its arc will look nothing like the first.

“...he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart..

-Ecclesiastes 5:20

Memory lies still,
as a glassy tarn;
locked between two craggy peaks,
a trough for spring somnium,
the slough of winter’s arcane recollections.

Ephemeral reflections
of vaulted firmaments conceal
shallow depths suffused under crystal film;
truths obscured by lucent sheen
deceive the thirsty, errant eyes—

—of a nomadic mind;
in elliptic drift arrives,
to stand upon moraines that bank
pooling skies, oneiric tides
sluicing through a hollow sphere of time.

A mind sojourned one thousand nights—
ancient as the bristlecone pines—
will root at water’s edge,
with gnarled neck,
down towards the tarn forever bent.

To scry upon glacial retent,
a thousand more at water’s rim it stays,
and into placid dreams will stare;
though years will never break the plane,
nor mind submerge in memory stilled, again.

That dissolution--the collapse of ‘reality’ under the pressure of an overwhelming vortex of preternatural, outside-of-time ecstasy--feels in hindsight like a stolen glance at a reflection of divine eternity in a convex mirror (again, at the county fair…maybe you took acid and walked through the funhouse). It’s something you can’t quite grasp because it reaches beyond the limits of your mind, and something you definitely weren't meant to see.

And every so often, the human timeline gets its own trip. Every so often, a fissure appears, and more than a single mind is sucked through it, into the centrifuge. Sometimes, even one thousand. On an off chance, one million. And perhaps, dare I say, on rare occasions, very nearly the entire human race.

These moments of myth smuggled in under the guise of history intimate what undergirds the foundations of our perceptible material reality. But unlike an acid trip, you might be quick enough to slip your arm through the crack and snap a picture before it closes.

And now I would like to present to you two photographs that I believe are from the other side.

The first: Kombat, by Max Alpert

(1942, RIA Novosti Archive via Wikimedia Commons).

Kombat is one of the most stirring images I have ever encountered, aside from anything taken candidly of me (those are stirring in a much worse way). If you are a man, and this image doesn’t speak to some nascent impulse deep inside of you to go to battle…please, go drink some creatine.

The photograph freezes a young Soviet commissar mid-motion, allegedly minutes before his death, capturing a raw vector of human force on the bloodiest battlefield in history (the Eastern Front, WWII, for the uninitiated).

His body cuts across the frame like a bolt of lightning suspended in time, and maybe outside of it. With pistol raised, pointed heavenward, and face seized in a final primordial cry of glory for Mother Russia, his youth is stripped bare of any illusion. Down to unbridled, masculine, base matter. Colorless extremity renders the ground in a blinding white, the sky as eclipsed by an unnatural darkness--a reversal of the heavens and the earth. Bridging this inverted order is the haloed figure of the soldier, like a human arrow tearing through the cosmic veil.

It’s tempting to call it propaganda. Maybe it is. I wouldn’t trust official Soviet statements as far as I could throw them. But that’s not the point. Staged or not, the image reveals something more real than reportage--something closer to revelation. A flash of what Trotsky once prophesied when he wrote:

“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”

(Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 1924)

In Kombat, we see that ascent made flesh--granted, in a decidedly more violent way than predicted, though something tells me Trotsky secretly anticipated this. And at this precise moment, the apotheosis is nearly indistinguishable from death.

Perhaps I find it striking too because there is no personal intimacy as the viewer. There is no ‘man’ to interpret, perceive, or understand. Just a glimpse at the cresting wave of the human future.

He is the hammer and the sickle. He is ‘kombat’. He is no man, and so he is every man.

A rabid revolutionary archetype, mid-step toward the conquest of eternity.

The second: Zeppelin Field (Nazi Party Rally Grounds), floodlit

(photo: 1937, German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons).

To ingest the image of the Zeppelin Field at the moment of its full illumination, is to drink down in one gulp the seductive aesthetics of unmoored human striving towards transcendence. Kind of like drinking a 72oz lemonade at the county…

Nevermind.

It satiates a thirst. You may deny it, but that primal urge exists too, somewhere deep within you.

A monumental marble grandstand arrays itself outward with severe symmetrical discipline, into recursive arcades framing 74 standards bearing the black, hooked cross encompassed by a white disc. These flanks converge at the structure’s center, into a stark dais at the summit of a steeply ascending plinth.

In the fore are the many; thousands of indistinguishable brown-shirted bodies arrested beneath the terrifying grandeur, listening intently, right hands readied for a salute at the voice of the one.

And cradling the entire scene?

52 carbon-arc swords, splitting the south German sky.

Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light”.

Stone, flesh, and an unholy radiance arrange themselves into a single word, proclaimed by the scene’s epochal aesthetic grammar:

POWER.

And on December 11th 1941, in an 88-minute address to the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler made clear the inhuman ends towards which this power was to be directed:

“We will take our fate into our own hands and create a new order worthy of our race and our history. Our Creator has given us the task and the strength to do so.”

(Adolf Hitler, Reichstag speech, December 11, 1941. German Federal Archives)

But this ‘creator’ was not some external deity. This was not the Christian God. Rather, it was the Übermensch memetically ingrained into the Nazi metabody (pretty sure I just made that word up). They were not being, but becoming. Retrocausally authoring their own destiny and authority.

In this sense, the creator was the creature. The god forged from human will alone, the last body to rise out of its own blood and seize total dominion. If this photograph sounded like a song, it would most certainly have to be Algiz – Konvergence Of Life And Death, by the black industrial group MZ.412. I warn you not to listen, as it is possibly demonic, and also you will most likely hate it anyway.

But its ominous lyrics may as well have been etched into the grandstand’s cornerstone:

Exposed with swords we plant the growing seed,

A seed that grows to be a living tree,

This tree shall stretch its branches to the sky,

And we shall rise to cast the heavens down.

The seed of that tree which was planted under the glowing night sky of the Zeppelin Field reached its final maturity in the blood soaked plains of eastern Europe, where the commissar met his vainglorious death, along with countless other millions of souls. That terrifying fissure has since closed, its aesthetic intoxication mostly vanished, and the heavens certainly still remain fixed in the sky.

For the last 80 years, it’s pretty much been business as usual.

But I think anyone would be hard-pressed to say that time hasn’t started to quicken up a bit as of late. Like we might be on the come-up again.

In the opening salvo of Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling Homo Deus he proclaims:

“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

(Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper, 2015)

AI, botox replicants1, brain-chips, and Starlink…I think (or maybe mainly just have faith):

Fear not.

Because it’s a tale as old as time, really. Ever at the threshold of back-door ascension. Fleeting moments in which the image is captured, but never truly realized. The Gravitron always seeming like it’s almost stopped spinning.

What was it Lucifer said? Something about ascending above the clouds, I think…

See, creation has always craved Theosis. But Heaven can’t be hijacked. And tripping on acid at the county fair, dying for the revolution, or engineering the ritual purification of an entire continent in search of a glimpse at the ‘divine’ is like swinging a crowbar at blast-proof glass.

Many men have died in an attempt to become god. Only Christ has become man and conquered death.

So my advice? Think twice before you drop that acid, think three times if anyone tells you that you can find the Truth any other way,

…and don’t think at all before you pull out your camera.

Maybe it’s more real than some of the before-and-afters I often read here. Maybe not. All I know for certain is that it’s honest. And it’s long (sorry, but there’s a nice photograph at the end).

I don’t really have a lesson to teach or a side to argue, either. Perhaps just the sound of the dark middle and the long silence on the scratched side of the record about what it costs to believe.

Take it as you will.

I recently told a friend that honesty was the best policy…so I figured I should start following my own advice.

Some among us were born to be saints.

I was not.

I emerged from the plastic cocoon of the late '90s, lulled to sleep by formula milk and muffled laugh tracks bleeding through the drywall like ghosts rehearsing a broken bit.

At the age of 3, my deal was sealed. T’s were dotted and I’s were crossed, because I wouldn’t have known any different. A soul scribbled away, contract signed in Crayola; I toddled toe to heel, pulled by a silent command down to a dark basement, to the bottom of stairs that felt too steep to ever climb back up again.

And some silence weighs you down like gravity.

So there I knelt, bare knees sinking into matted carpet thick as skin soaked too long in bathwater, beneath floorboards where grandma and grandpa sat slumped in leather recliners, anesthetized by Ambien and a sixty-year hangover from ration books and atomic silence. I guess hearing aids couldn’t catch the quiet horrors unfolding underneath their feet.

Sugar, sitcoms, the suburbs, and secrets…See, no saint was ever a product of the ‘American dream.’

My third eye opened in the summer, age 6, between country club poolside sips of fruit punch siphoned up through a bendy straw, when I realized I could lie through my teeth and still hold down a drink. The dark enlightenment at the bottom of a Hi-C.

Chlorine. Small crimes. A slippery slope and baby teeth.

God, watching through a popcorn ceiling.

I could push a power mower by nine. Trace out the illusion of control and lay down a nice checkerboard on some over-saturated turf while I watched the prairie just over the fence line dry up like a bone; ride home. In the third row, tan leather seats, drive-thru paper bag soaked through with grease; too thin a veil, like the innuendo painted over pornography playing on the radio. Mom pulled in the driveway, and I was sad when we got home; neighbors cut down the big tree…wanted less leaves to rake.

That’s when I figured the only things worth keeping alive were the things that were fake.

But I spent those years in Catholic school—It was real to me. Pressed shirts and pleated pants; tartan ties only loosened for a playground search party through a sea of shapeless gray pebbles, hunting for the one that could catch the light.

Two fingers traced the path: on the forehead, over each shoulder, two fingers pressed at the center of my chest. I’d pray I would find it, then open my hand…but only pale gravel ever turned up in my fist.

It was real to me though, ya know? I struggled to multiply past the number nine, never had a good foundation in math because I’d drift off from my desk trying to add up a never ending loop of time.

Forever

But they told me it was eternity—heaven and hell—the Ten Commandments in Arial, on sheets of 8.5”x11”; pinned to cork board, a laminated reflection read like I was toeing their line. They said I was made in God’s image, but when I turned the shower knob far as it would go, I still couldn’t melt the filth from inside.

That’s about when I figured God must be blind.

And the years rolled on.

Stopped begging for His help around the age of 12, and when I got a phone that could search, I stopped asking for His advice. Needed something new cause I went through the motions, but they never ended right. In the basement. In the chapel. Different place, same pose; distant Grace for distanced souls.

I was just tired of being told to kneel all the time.

A couple people said God called me to be a priest, but I let it go to voicemail and unplugged the answering machine. I didn’t want a cassock. I wanted an Abercrombie jacket. With a fur lined hood and the washboard abs underneath. I wanted the cover of a checkout aisle magazine, not the Resurrection scene. I wanted what was on the family computer at midnight—eyes wide, pupils waxed, broadband signals pumping a fluorescent glow. Gave up on Mercy ‘cause I wanted to know what it’d feel like to make someone else ache like me.

Figured real love wasn’t on the Disney Channel, ya know?

People told me I was mature for my age, but I don’t even think they knew what that could mean, I was just a teenage boy with a broken body, taking three showers a day, just trying to make his soul feel clean.

And that’s when I figured which eternity was for me; how God’s verdict coming down would read:

GUILTY

And the years rolled on.

‘Wake up.’

Comb hair like it matters. Paint a smile. See a stranger staring back; open casket in a mortuary mirror. School--Practice--Home. Dinner at home. Green Broccoli, red rage. Scream at the dinner table. Scream without moving your mouth. Open the laptop; bypass safesearch and stare at the page. Think about sex. Think about death. Bedroom, bed, bypass dreams. Scream into the dark without making a sound. ‘Sleep.’

But don’t sleep.

Never sleep.

Stare up at the popcorn ceiling.

‘Wake up’ again.

Repeat

October came in my eighteenth year and it reminded me of me. Yellow cottonwoods, rusted oaks clinging to a river bluff; a letter jacket emblazoned with patches and pins broken in in the fall, a girl I loved under my arm, crisp air, and football. The season of the liminal; first loves and dying leaves; brittle beauty climbing up the trees. Truths carried on the wind too quiet to hear, so don’t look too long ‘cause they might disappear.

Autumn to winter, winter to May. Talked a lot back then, I just didn’t know what to say…

Graduation felt like selling a house, but one I was never allowed to live in--pack up your things and hand over the keys. And at some point, inspections will come knocking, peeling back drywall, checking foundations…they looked in the basement, found the rot, and foreclosed. I smiled at the ceremony but a darkness followed me home. Locked the bathroom door behind me and met a naked and vacant reflection. A red sign—CONDEMNED—was nailed to his chest.

I stared at him and wondered how I could move out without making a mess.

But the years rolled on…

Sex, drugs, and EDM. Pop a pill and let your eyes roll back under laser lights. Take a shot, take off your clothes, and let a stranger spend the night. God made me ugly, so I turned the blade back on me to make it right: fixed my eyes on the past, I was taking revenge for all the things I didn’t wanna see. You know what it means in August when someone asks if you wanna ski? We were at a university, but it looked more like a Kool-Aid communion. Rolled up bills, crushed up pills, bodies on the floor, a phone lit up.

Said “Mom” on the screen.

Instagram with a side of cyanide. Jim Jones dropped a like for our “Revolutionary Suicide”.

And I guess I never really moved out, just packed my body into someone else’s bed--twin XL in the dorm, a piss-soaked sofa down the street, and a Target shag rug on the floor of a friend’s. Hauled around my soul in a duffle bag, let anyone unzip it, rifle through the contents, and steal a few things. And usually they’d shove their shit back in its place; I could never tell if it was a couple pounds lighter or busting at the seams. It’s a permanent dark when you lose the plot early on, and when you read the same page over and over again, you’ll never see dreams.

I thought I’d find something by twenty-one, but that tab of acid was off; I opened my fist again, but I could see right through my hand; there was a hole in my palm. I was bleeding, man…I looked up cause I was tired of taking revenge. I wanted out of the basement, so I thought about making amends.

And the years rolled on.

Twenty-seven is creeping up quicker than I’d like, so I flew back home to sift through the wreckage one last time, see if I couldn’t get ahold of whatever it was I’d been trying to find. The garage looked like a yard sale on its final day: plastic tables bowed under the weight of all the junk dredged up from the basement—all the things we’d left behind. And there it was, shoved in a forgotten banker’s box, wedged between a stack of A+ report cards and a note I wrote to Dad: I’m sorry. I’m just trying to survive.

The Contract.

Faded and creased, like a road atlas charting a trip back through my own life.
I stared at the fine print like it could pick the lock on the door I’d been banging on since the day I opened my eyes.

I was never evicted, I just misread the deed, and it started to make sense why God did this for me. Maybe if things had gone different, if I got dealt another hand, I’d have went on to become a priest. Proud and precocious, empty platitudes spoken from a pulpit built on sand.

A boy in the pit was the only way I’d ever become a man.

But I was desperate for a loophole—some clause to spare me the final sacrifice, a backdoor into holiness that skipped the last wound. The mind can rationalize, the flesh can beg, but they’ve both got to die because the soul longs to commune.

Searched every damn clause, I promise you’ll never find it. You can break every law, but in the end, terms and conditions are binding. Nothing else can cauterize the spirit—not sex, not drugs.

And not even the person you love.

They can't hold the weight of your own soul’s salvation; can’t spin in reverse the motion of the Incarnation.

So I sat on a park bench the other night and laid it all on the line. Bound my own heart to the wood and raised up the knife—one last look down that long spiral of time, my old life, took a breath, and then whispered:

goodbye.

Because God sent Abraham a ram. But Christ told us: pick up your cross, walk up that hill—and die.

And the years will roll on.

You’ll look up through the popcorn and see into the sky; some days you’ll be strong, others you’ll be crushed under the weight of their night. But keep patience and fortitude, even if barely enough to get by.

“Oh, you’re a saint!”

No.

Just a man walking the razor-thin line of Faith, with two broken feet and a tear in his eye.

.

Her name was Juliette if my phonetics were lost on you. She corrected the man through a plume of cigarette smoke, with a special daggered emphasis on his hard, Midwestern pronunciation of the delicate letter “J.”

However, for me, hers was one of the few names I heard that evening which my English-speaking tongue could successfully reproduce and didn’t require the accompaniment of a lesson in linguistics. Despite whatever diverse origins your forbearers may have possessed—and without any scientific evidence—I believe the formation of the soft palate is the first cultural vestige to be shed by the first native-born American generation. After all, I do have trace amounts of French blood coursing through my veins. But, for my ancestors, a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance beginning at the age of five was, perhaps in more ways than one, the most successful tool in service of their assimilation.

And, much as the French artisans, heiresses, and tastemakers I encountered that evening would be embittered to admit, English is the lingua franca now. The Sun King died 300 years ago. We were standing outside under the glowing skyline of Manhattan, not Paris. Anglo-American ascendancy was fait accompli; a hard “J” would have to do.

But one foreign language is not entirely opaque to the speaker of another, if one can only see past the fact that language is merely one of many vehicles for the conveyance of an idea. An image. And by no means is any one image exclusively tied up within the oral and phonetic mechanics of the words used to express it. That is because most ideas—and images, if not all—are in some way familiar to the universal human experience.

And so what was Juliette, outside of her unabashed and endearing Frenchness? Beyond the confines of her patrilineal heritage of proprietorship over one of Western Europe’s foremost lighting ateliers? Aside from the voiced postalveolar fricative that was the first letter of her name?

She was a person, yes, both body and soul. But before we can speak of her as a person, we must first confront the truth that she was also—and perhaps primarily—an image. In equal parts constructed and inherited over the 40 years of life she had lived (a guess, of course—never ask a woman her age, especially if she’s French).

To both direct the crafting of bespoke bronze chandeliers, and move in the world in which she inhabited—elegant, rarefied, impression-driven—was to learn the art of image-making. Not the filtered image of social media, but the subtler choreography of glances, pauses, the precise weight of a smile. Face to face, one’s presence had to be sculpted, managed, and projected. Because in such a world, the image is often not just performance, but survival.

It was strange to witness as an outsider. Though my only touchstone to the French language was the memory of my friend's exaggerated le formage, delivered at every restaurant with a dedicated caricature during a trip to the country a few years ago, I could still sense something unfolding behind the words. And after about four overly-syruped artisanal gin martinis, I gave up on trying to catch every third phrase uttered through the thick accents I only half-understood, and just watched.

At any given moment during the duration of the evening, no less than a third of the guests were spilling out of the doors, onto the sidewalk, and into the street. There’s something quintessentially European about smoking a cigarette now, even if it's a Marlboro. But the throng of smokers huddled in intimate circles outside wasn’t simple spillover. It was a rigidly deliberate chaos; a cosmically choreographed waltz. A spot closer in proximity to the front door signaled the social gravity with which one’s image was able to pull orbiters in; there are, after all, 290 moons in our solar system, eight planets, and whatever Pluto is now—each circling at its own distance around a central force (heliocentrism vs. geocentrism regrettably cannot be addressed in this essay). The richer, more layered, more charged a person’s image was, the nearer to the center they could afford to be. Some can only sketch themselves in the thin, instructional lines of Target silhouette art. Fine. Good enough. Others, though, manage to render their presence with the engrossing chiaroscuro depth of a Caravaggio.

Juliette and most of her fellow compatriots that evening were masters of this kind of portraiture—the Italians could paint, but the French seem to have an inborn aesthetic inclination that reaches far beyond the canvas. Endless revision, refinement, and rehearsal of the living self.

Such sophisticated brushwork is rarely replicated by those kept outside the gates of Swiss boarding schools, ancestral estates, and centuries of cultural fluency. And yet—and I intend this not as a slight—much of their paint had been laid down, dried, and gessoed generations before they were even born.

See, many arrivistes possess one thing that Juliette never could—a blank canvas. They come from nowhere, leave no roots, and carry no name. But they are free to create something as transfixingly opaque as a Rothko, as seductively jarring as a Bacon, or as soberly ‘real’ as a Wyeth.

Take, for example, another woman standing near to the door, and only displaced from Juliette by one spot. She was nearly gorgeous, dressed tastefully in head-to-toe designer, and trying desperately hard to prove to the rest of the circle that the sun had not in fact set three years ago on her twenties. She was a plus-one who was working in pharmaceuticals, at present, developing a “Xanax vape.” Something about that feels proprietary, but they were her words, not mine. She was from Pittsburgh, a fact I had to forcibly remove from her.

Jarring. Seductive. And a gravitational pull, no less.

Buoyed by a cunningly acquired perceptivity and polish, a ruthless ambition, and sheer force of will, the woman from Pittsburgh held that spot close to the door all evening. And as I watched her—our orbital paths not so far removed from one another—I recognized in her something uncomfortably familiar.

The effort. The hunger. The labor of creating a self that might pass, might impress, and might be invited in.

Because, in all honesty, I too was painting. Maybe not in oils, and certainly not with the pedigree and skill of one of the masters. But something had taken shape on my canvas. And that something was deemed acceptable by those in the circle. With every borrowed word, every calculated smile, every carefully modulated inflection, I was sketching the person I hoped I might become.

I hoped I was a Wyeth, but I think to them I appeared as something more like the Portrait of George Dyer; amorphous, unidentifiable, and yet oddly captivating. But Bacon, ever the realist, revealed the truth of what Dyer was in the reflection of the mirror: broken, hidden, lying to himself.

And even someone as poised as Caravaggio’s courtesan remains painfully and forever ensnared by their stultifyingly demure pose. I think you can almost see a bead of sweat emerging from one of the invisible pores on their forehead.

As I waited for a light, cigarette hanging limply out of the corner of my mouth, I couldn’t help but wonder to myself: Is this art, or is it camouflage?

In moments like this, I often return to the words of architect Louis Kahn, who captured the paradox of self-image in a way no philosopher ever quite did:

You say to a brick, “What do you want, brick?”
And the brick says to you, “I like an arch.”
And you say to brick, “Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, brick?”
Brick says:
“I like an arch.”

Even a brick wants to be more than it is. Even if it comes at a cost.

And as I searched around the circle, trying to see more intently into each set of eyes, and then turned my gaze inward, I recognized that any words spoken that evening had all, to some degree, been in service of an image that wasn’t really true. And hiding behind the utterances was an idea that anyone could recognize: that our raw material just wasn’t good enough; our canvas was torn.

The cigarette fell out of my mouth.

The thing of it is, no matter if your surname is etched into the stone of a European estate or scrawled in Sharpie on a Midwestern public school desk, the impulse remains the same…it’s a native thread running through all human experience. To cover up the cracks we fear others will see. The urge that we’ve got to pile on layers of paint, hoping the world will see us the way that we want to be seen. And most of us today do a damn good job of it. No matter the language or the place, each person can discern the image another projects. But in that recognition, they can also glimpse the shape of what lies beneath it.

I may not have read any Balzac, but I remember a quote of his that said you can’t fake everything at once—gaze, breath, walk, voice. One of them will always betray the truth. It reminded me of another evening, not so long ago, when my carefully contrived identity unraveled under the weight of two shots of tequila. Granted, tequila has always been a two-faced friend to me. And what was intended to be a carefree night ended in a blur of tears. Moreover, I was in the presence of a person whom I would have preferred not to have seen me in such a vulnerable state. I think I made many confessions of my insecurities; those cracks I had tried to cover up on my own canvas. But what this person told me stuck.

“I see you for you, beyond your wounds.”

Both relief that I was drinking gin, and those kind words, lingered in my mind as I still stood on the sidewalk outside of the party, the cigarette dangling from my lips. Perhaps it was their weight—or the absurdity of the moment—that caused it to slip. I retrieved it from the ground and offered it back to the person I had bummed it from, unwilling to let smoke fog up this newfound clarity. Because in that moment, I saw the same in the people around me. Despite all their efforts, I could still discern the faint outlines of what was true within them.

In Juliette, as her eyes lit up even at the passing mention of her children. In the Pittsburgh woman, as she admitted that she wasn’t actually born in Pittsburgh, it was just where she got her first period, and so it felt like the place that she was from. Jarring, as I said—but I could see in her eyes, beneath a crass, sardonic lacquer, a true sentimental longing for the place her heart felt to be home.

I saw it also for a moment in my own reflection, after a genuine smile inadvertently slipped across my face and seemed to infect everybody else with one, too.

And so here is the simple truth of the matter:

Who “you” are runs deeper than the sound waves of vibrating vocal cords reciting your name. It transcends the geographic borders hemming in the blood flowing through your veins. It is richer and fuller and more profound than any familial lore, any personal history, any insult, slander, or saccharine love letter received. “You” are not an outfit, a pretty face, a successful career, or a university degree.

And perhaps, through a cloud of Marlboro smoke—or maybe a puddle of tears—someone else might recognize that “you.” Not the image of you, you so carefully constructed and yet couldn’t help to have made so teeteringly fragile. No. They might have seen something far beyond that. Through the haze, they may have sketched the silhouette of your real shape. And in that puddle, soaked up a reflection of your true face.

And what is found there, deep down—perhaps deepest down—can only be good.

Because “you” are not your own creation. “You” don’t hold the brush.

To fancy yourself a Caravaggio, or a Bacon, or even a nameless artist inking heavy, deliberate lines on a Target canvas, is to waste precious moments being something that’s false. You are not an idea. You are not an image.

You are soul and sinew stitched together in the image of God. So let Him paint the most honest, unvarnished, and real version of you.

~Thanks to Elina Araja of Prexels for the artwork~

Its voice rings of a fuzzy, familiar memory — that feeling of detaching from the wretchedness of one’s body, and vaporizing into a diaphanous cloud of greenish skunk-scented haze.

It often makes me wonder…were the Gnostics really wrong? Why does there exist an impulse to literally escape from the flesh? Pot-heads, self-harmers, and yogic ascetics all have this end in mind; albeit achieved through very different means.

But as anyone who has given up on weed will know; it’s really just a bit of a cop-out.

Perhaps the ideal for any soul intertwined with flesh is not total separation of the soul from it, but rather, the soul’s marriage to it.

The body as the lawfully wedded — and submissive — bride of the soul.

To live out, in our present corporeal form, the highest virtues striven for by the soul. To bring the flesh to bear witness of all that is good within.

But perhaps the inverse of this is to allow the soul to bear the mark of the flesh. In which case, there is only one outcome: the soul conniving a plan for escape.

The flesh, without intact will or regard for the soul, is nothing more than a beast; or perhaps, in the most terrifying sense, more than a beast. It is physically powerful, but also disturbingly evolved—a bipedal organism with a hypertrophied cerebral cortex, capable of abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and self-deception in equal measure. It has eyes fixed in a forward gaze towards a horizon of infinite manufactured desires. It has also constructed for its own aid an unfathomable artifice by which it subdues the nature that would otherwise impede it.

And this type of beast is wholly consumed by its primordial, animalistic drive.

To assert its dominion over the whole ‘person’ for which it is avataring, the beast first bludgeons the will into silence — violently and ruthlessly — leaving it limp, bloodied, and hardly capable of even the slightest resistance.

And then, the beast turns its eyes towards the final obstacle in its battle for existential supremacy — the soul. And with its brutish hands outstretched, inches from encircling it in a vice grip from which there is no escape (because the beast intends to wring it of its purest essence like a dishrag)…the soul retreats.

What choice for preservation does it have but to flee from its tormenter, the very vessel that carries it?

But alas, and much to the chagrin of the ‘astral projectors’ on TikTok who pedal quartz crystals from a Guangdong warehouse, the soul and the body are not so easily divorced. At least not in this life.

As long as the soul has locked itself in the bathroom, curled up in the fetal position and soaked by a puddle of its own tears, the fleshly beast will be there too, fists pounding against the door, screaming “LET ME IN!”.

And the ‘person’ in which this domestic dispute is transpiring?

Well, some sit in cushy $20,000 rolling chairs in Manhattan high-rise offices as they mull over a third mass layoff for the fiscal year, while others sink the bodies of missing persons into freshly poured concrete slabs dug out of their basement.

But most? Most just end up inert.

Imbibing 4 hours worth of Instagram reels a day on their fondleslab, nourishing their body with lukewarm “fast casual” food delivered by a third-world immigrant on a bicycle, and closing out their evenings by swallowing a high-dose SSRI chased down with a hit off the dab pen.

To their credit, it’s hard to give up on weed.

Look around tomorrow on your morning commute and count how many glazed sets of eyes you see. How many faces seemed to have stared into the void, and are transfixed as it stares back.

These are the people whose souls have had to flee.

And when you get to your office, 10 minutes late because you needed an $8 latte, stop in the bathroom, look in the mirror, and tell me you don’t see the same thing.

Twenty days ago, the Denver Post delivered its polemic against the Pueblo Municipal Court’s practice of “weaponizing” contempt of court charges against so-called “low-level” offenders. The piece alleged that the court uses such charges in order to inflate sentences for municipal offenses, such as loitering, trespassing, and shoplifting. A litany of commentary from close orbiters of the state’s judicial system, sympathetic stories of reformed criminals, and indeed the facts as presented, all seemed to corroborate this assertion.

Of course, this carefully crafted narrative was not merely a narrow critique of these specific judicial methods (a critique whose merits will be contended with in due course). It was an authoritative dictum handed down from Denver elites on the perceived superiority of their views on crime and justice. While the smug and sanctimonious judgments that perennially radiate out of Denver often fall upon deaf ears in the rest of the state, this one ought not be ignored. It is imperative for anyone who values local autonomy and ways of life to recognize the perilous nature of what is being proffered. 

Framed within the context of the contempt of court debate, thought leaders in Denver used the article as a pulpit from which to broadcast their perspectives on “low-level” crime in general. Rebecca Wallace, a policy director at the Colorado Freedom Fund (CFF), stated, “When you’re talking about 200-day sentences for simple failures to appear for low-level offenses, my level of concern is extreme”. Wallace went on to suggest that alleged increases in stern punishments meted out by Colorado municipal courts indicate “a resurgence in cowboy practices”. For those unaware, the Colorado Freedom Fund is a non-profit political activist and lobbying organization that advocates in part for the decriminalization of “low-level” crimes (such as loitering, trespassing, and shoplifting). Interestingly, the founder of the CFF is Elisabeth Epps, a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives, who was only recently unseated in a primary race this June. Epps is a “democratic socialist” and self described “abolitionist”. Though it is difficult to discern any coherent logic behind these labels, her voting record and public statements indicate that they can be broadly understood as meaning an advocate for the significant diminishment and devolution of laws, law enforcement, and the judicial apparatuses of the state. For example, last year, Epps cast a vote against legislation that would have strengthened the penalties for selling drugs that led to someone’s death. Epps also cosponsored legislation that, if successful, would have allowed municipalities in Colorado to operate what are euphemistically called “safe drug-use sites”. These are physical locations in which people in active addiction can consume heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, or any other illicit substance under “medical supervision”. It is no coincidence that the CFF acted in lock-step with Epps on these matters.

Naturally, the Colorado Freedom Fund was not alone in using the Post’s article as a platform to thrust this dangerous brand of criminal justice reform on the public. Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (CCJRC) stated that punishing defendants with jail time for missing their court dates is a “misuse of the criminal legal system on a profound level”. Donner went on to insinuate that this “abuse” is especially repugnant because minor offenders are, quote, “not actually criminals”. Since the late 90’s, the CCJRC has wielded considerable influence in the state of Colorado, from developing legislation to direct involvement in district attorney elections. Similarly to the CFF, the CCJRC advocates for radical reforms such as lowering punishments for violent felonies and decriminalizing drug-related offenses. Donner is such a reform zealot that, even in the face of Colorado earning the top spot in motor vehicle thefts per capita in 2022, she had the gall to criticize legislation that increased the penalties for those crimes, calling it “soundbite policy”. Donner’s alternative solution was quoted as follows: “It’s a million dollars every time you put 20 people in prison. How much does it cost to buy those steering wheel locks? If we spend a couple of million dollars to put them in high theft neighborhoods, wouldn’t that be more effective in reducing crime?” (For reference, $20.3 million worth of cars and trucks were reported as stolen in Pueblo last year alone). 

Most long term residents of Pueblo implicitly understand the corrosive effects that even so called ‘minor’ crimes have had on the city’s economy and quality of life. And it is most likely that this knowledge has come through first hand experience. Restaurants and shops struggle almost daily to address loitering and shoplifting on their premises. A pleasant dinner downtown, or in Bessemer, or increasingly in any part of the city, can often be tainted by the sight of a drug-induced delirium, on full display from one’s dinner table. Every supermarket in the city is now patrolled by private security during business hours, and at your neighborhood pharmacy, a new row of merchandise seems to be placed behind lock and key with each passing day. Accounts of cashiers handling money with gloves at gas stations and convenience stores have been circulating on social media recently. It is their attempt to avoid touching what is described as a proliferation of bills tainted with fentanyl residue. While these instances provide a disconcerting reminder of the current state of Pueblo’s reality, perhaps the most sobering anecdote I will offer is the story of Esther Valdez.

During the public comment portion of a city council meeting earlier this summer, Ms Valdez described in vivid detail the peril in which she and her Lower East Side neighbors have lived for nearly four years. At the end of her block there sits an abandoned house that has been consistently occupied by vagrants who engage in all manner of illicit activity. Ms Valdez told of her neighbor, a woman of 75 years, who is now too afraid to walk to the nearby Dollar General for her basic necessities because in order to do so, she must pass by this abandoned house. However, Ms Valdez insists that “drug use, partying, and fighting” are not the most present dangers posed by the squatters—rather, it is their fires. Ms Valdez stated that there have been no less than four fires on the property in the last year. Any habitable remains of the abandoned house were burnt up in the most recent blaze, but the flames subsequently jumped to the home directly adjacent. Residing in that home was a young family, who was left truly homeless after the flames engulfed their house and took from them everything. In the aftermath, as Esther put it, “nothing ever happened”. The squatters were not removed; they simply dragged a mattress into the back shed. In her concluding remarks, Esther Valdez wondered aloud if “one by one they will burn us out”.

Steering wheel club locks, nitrile gloves, and a constant state of gnawing anxiety are the new norms of life in this small city of little more than 100,000 people. These realities severely impact Pueblo’s ability to retain its intelligent and driven youth, attract new families and employers, and provide a decent quality of life for its current residents. Whether one is cognisant of it or not, these facts have inflicted dangerous psychological and social wounds on the individual, and the community at large. This is, of course, to say nothing of the effects that the endemic burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and wanton acts of homicidal violence have undoubtedly had. And yet, as evidenced by every instance of commentary that I have presented, the vanguard of criminal justice reform in the state of Colorado commands that these are realities that you must lay prostrate in submittance to. 

If you hope to one day leave behind a community that you are proud of, a community that your children can call home, then it is absolutely pertinent to understand why such a future presently finds itself in grave danger. Do not be mistaken; the debate being had is not how to treat crime. The debate being had is whether or not crime exists at all. How can we work towards minimizing or eradicating antisocial behaviors in our communities when the consensus regarding what actually constitutes them is unraveling before our very eyes? How can we expect to maintain a civil society when the practice of punishing those who fail to abide by commonly agreed-upon standards is anathema to our lawmakers? How can we bring up peaceable and productive members of society in an environment that will aid and abet them in their every transgression? We already watch in horror at what has been deemed permissible today. Do we dare even question what it may be tomorrow? If at this juncture you find within yourself a stirring sense of dismay, then I have accomplished what I set out to achieve. Because perhaps the most significant obstacle in the way of surmounting these challenges is apathy. By resigning yourself to these castigations issued from Denver and beyond, or by retreating further away from problems that will inevitably find their way to you again and again, you risk saddling far greater pain on the generations to come. Whether you are a local politician, business owner, or everyday citizen saddened by the degradation of your community, confronting the truth of these matters head on is the only way to overcome them. Anything else is in service of dangerous delusions.

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