A shift in the plot

It might have been in my window seat up on a plane over Las Pampas, watching the fertile land grow drier as we neared the mountains and Chile beyond. It might have been sitting alone at one of the delightful everyday steakhouses with an ojo de bife inbound, complemented by a bottle of Malbec where you drink what you can before tapping it and walking the rest home. Certainly it was present when after more than a week of aimless strolling, I sat down on a bench in the Jardines Botanicos Carlos Thays reading Memoirs of Hadrian before leaning back and letting my eyes close for a little while, the trees swaying in the light breeze above. I'm not sure when it happened exactly but at some point there was a shift and the things once put at a premium, such as being alone at the bottom of the world, seemed to matter a whole lot less than I remember they did. 

It wasn't always to be this way in Argentina. I once dated someone from here, one of the truly great women of my life, and for a moment in time in the grip of the pandemic it appeared this place might be something more, be a place revisited, be part of a new ever changing idea of home which future kids come to think of as I do Texas. These are glimpses offered to each of us every so often of what life could have been had things gone differently, had someone not gone to school, had someone not cared about a career, had place not mattered, only people. I still remember driving her over the Appalachians and across the American heartland to Ann Arbor, moving in a few boxes and saying goodbye, and now years later I walk around her homeland trying to absorb something that is just a bit too out of reach and which I may be just a bit too old and far along to try for anyway.

This is okay. I'm surprised how okay it is. I have played passive observer to worlds not mine for as long as I can remember and I come back to New York feeling grateful, embracing the strivings of my life, its current iteration, its current idea of home and that which makes it sing. It is glorious dropping into foreign lands for a time, and I hope I never lose that sense of wonder and possibility, knowing what it is to get lost, to be confused, to misread a situation, to stumble on words, to not know how something is done here, every little thing a math problem to be solved. But then too there is nothing like the foundation of home to steady and expand yourself. There is a beautiful concept in psychology called automaticity, speaking about tasks such as a commute or eating that become automatic through repetition, which thus releases mental capacity for other things. On familiar roads living in the automatic, you create space to dream. And so back on familiar roads far from Palermo shops and Mendoza vineyards, I dream.

A canvas clean

A brush lands on a canvas clean,

A chance to start anew,

The sky, its changing reds and blues,

A pauper or a queen,

Depends upon your veil or view.

 

What colors might you choose?

Through the portrait’s tone and style,

Embrace the long and empty mile,

The gentle hours meant to amuse,

Lost in free exile.

 

Where you start and where you end,

Enabled by this empty slate,

Now freshened by the trusted fates,

And poisoned by a friend,

or balanced by the weights?

 

Out there you start anew,

Bursting out a better man,

Wise to worlds and greater plans,

Whose lessons thus accrue,

From back where you began.

The Richardson

It's a Tuesday and I find myself not ready to be home, so I venture across the street to what can only be given that sacred title of my neighborhood bar. It is dark, which is a prerequisite, with a lot of secret corners to hide away and a big bartop that wraps around the space. I brought a book which I can only read by candlelight, but there is a band playing with a wonderful singer, so I often sit back and look up, surveying the tapestry of characters, some of which I have seen there before but most I have not.

I love so much about this place. I love that from my window peering down over the bed I can look out and see the pool table across the street and hear voices when it is busy, never too loud, just background noise off in the distance signaling activity and life. I enjoy its class, but in a measured non-pretentious way, which you find at these spots that are not in the middle of the popular New York neighborhoods where everyone wants to go and be seen, instead, in this case, slightly removed and off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where you can hear trucks roaring by and you really only go if you live nearby. I love that it is open until 4am every night of the week, because this means consistency, you know you can rely on it, that it's there for you as you come home late and if you are seeking out just one more. I love how it is never that busy, but there are always people, a mix of the young and the old, and that crossing into the back room at night or sitting outside on Sunday afternoon might as well be crossing borders into different countries.

It occurs to me that The Richardson might be the coolest bar in New York. I think this because its energy signals what is cool now in the year 2025, on this day to real people that live around the corner and seek out the same things people always have with a drink in their hand. When I take an out of the way walk around Greenwich Village, as I sometimes do these days looking to tap into a slice of its bohemian past, I see a lot of places clawing onto what once was. The Stonewall Inn, Kettle of Fish, Dantes, Figaro, all these names sell themselves on a previous iteration from generations ago when Jack Kerouac roamed the streets drunk and E.E. Cummings sat in the back writing his next play, at a time struggling artists could actually afford to live and drink there. The story is common now. Someone wealthy, perhaps a fancy restauranteur, bought a once-family owned enterprise in the 2000s or 2010s, spruced it up, sometimes changed the location entirely, and kept the name. They sell themselves on the coolness that once was headquartered in The Village, only now it is all a movie set or a new house built to look like it is old.

I am fascinated by questions that attempt to mark a current version of a previous past, because it understands that the world is constantly evolving as the centerpoints of creativity, power, and culture shift with the times. Is Kendrick Lamar today's Bob Dylan, both Pulitzer Prize winning lyricists? Was Mitch McConnell the newest iteration of Lyndon Johnson, wielding unprecedented power in a fractious Senate Chamber? Is there even a Greenwich Village or Left Bank anymore, just now somewhere else, or is it instead spread out and decentralized across universities and made obsolete by the Internet? Impossible to confirm and highly subjective, of course, but thought experiments to contextualize the here and now. In the smallest of ways, such things come to mind as I sit at The Richardson looking out down Graham, thinking amongst other things of the old hobo symbol from the depression noting to a weary traveler: this is the place.

Lord Huron, and more

My first festival ever was Austin City Limits. I can't remember basic things like the year or who headlined or really anything at all, but I do remember walking around Zilker Park between stages and accidentally stumbling across bands I would not otherwise have listened to, being pulled in by something catchy and staying longer than I planned. It was a now defunct duo called Chiddy Bang that I liked best that year. Their riffs still stand out to me now, and I can recite their lyrics pulled from a part of the brain I long forgot. When I retreat back into them at odd moments, I realize this might have been my first reminder that live music is a fleeting point-in-time experience, because bands, like humans, break up and move on. While you can listen to the streamed song or a physical record, you aren't able to embark on the magic of seeing them play together in person again once they have decided to make a show their last. What I heard that day in Austin I'll never be able to hear again.

I have clearly reached the age where bands take on a nostalgic factor, but lucky for me, many groups I've listened to since I was young and impressionable still play. I've made it a mission to hear as many of them as I can while they are still around, playing catch up, to be sure, but allowing for new takeaways and realizations. Months ago I was shocked at how old and fat the lead singer of Wilco was, sort of an awkward dad on stage, but still belting out perfect melodies. Counting Crows no longer has dreadlocks and his hair is thinning, but his voice sounds strikingly the same. My Morning Jacket comes to Brooklyn this fall, while Mumford and Sons armed with a new banjo player will be at Forest Hills Stadium and Empire of the Sun, which I still remember hearing for the first time at a 24 hour coffee shop in Austin and being floored, will play at The Mirage having put out new collaborations with younger artists. These all served as the soundtrack to my coming of age, pulling from their own unique places, and this transports one back to different times and states of mind like nothing else quite can.

So it was that I found myself at the High Water festival in Charleston this past weekend, embracing this new era of life when live music is something to seek out and travel for. In this case, Lord Huron was the ultimate draw, as no group has quite captured for me this feeling of nostalgia, mythology, the creation of whole little worlds, a longing for things you didn't quite have and lives you never quite lived. The last time I saw them I held someone's hand with the Rocky Mountains behind me and a lightning storm off in the distance dramatically lighting up the sky with each strum of the guitar and hammer of the drum. I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you. The haunting line belted by Ben Schneider fit for the loneliest nights and quietest days, now interlinked with a moment in the outskirts of Denver and a world that was quickly swept away.

But if a band was with you from the beginning, it remains yours until the end. Despite claims of songs being ruined or discolored by those associated with them, I welcome this ability to feel something more, for the meaning to change ever so slightly. It was never just words, but where you were and who you were with when you heard them for the first or hundredth time. This poetry, alive, rings out to me still. I yearn for it as a stable landing place when things are foreign or tumultuous. I seek it out in the subway or during long car rides upstate. I turn to it when cooking or showering, filling the nooks and crannies of my house, as if it will sink itself into the wood and brick, or the parts of me in need, for there is always a part of you in need of your favorite artist.

Oh where did the time go?

It's been delightful,

May you laugh and sing your life full,

May you learn the reasons why,

May you live until you die.

In another life I was a musician on stage, calling my poetry songwriting, my keyboard supporting a lead singer as part of an indie rock band, or perhaps forming an anchor to a jazz trio that jams away in dark secret basements as a crowd dances around. That was another life. In this one, I'm in the back of a crowd, listening, listening, my foot subtly keeping pace with the beat, smiling when another person hits something just right, just so, in a way only they could, to the benefit of all those lucky enough to be there.

Decoupling

My apartment on Richardson Street, just a little deeper into Brooklyn now, might be the nicest place I've been in yet. Someone at some point, no doubt because it was built to own, put a lot of money and thought into the fixtures, the amenities, the details around a wooden shelf here and a warm lamp there. I love how old brick extends from the floor to the ceiling on one side, making the place feel real and lived in. I lay there some nights on a wonderful mattress that holds me, high up in the roomy clouds, before waking in the morning from a deep sleep, and feel above all, comfortable. I can look around at the books and the sheet music and the records, which have all managed to fit in their rightful nook, thinking all has worked out okay.

It wasn't always this way. The pathway here was more than anything a path I didn't want, and I still look back longingly on what it was to pair your life to someone, to be in the world together in partnership, to no longer direct your energy to frivolous things, the search, the chase, the chance, the chaos, and instead be focused and deliberate from the quiet morning coffees to the peaceful tea-filled evenings because you were together and that was enough. I recall fondly thinking what it was to live without the questions that had always plagued me, the hows and the whys and the constant justifications and internal battles, instead leaning in for better or for worse because it just felt right. These were the things that drove me and that I will never regret believing in for the period of time that I did.

I would've asked for the longest time, for a large chunk of adulthood if I was being honest with myself, whether I believed in this whole concept at all. A brief survey of the couples around you, old divorced ones, young miserable ones, overcommitted tired ones, people who feel "tied down" and "in need of a break" and who head to Las Vegas to "let loose," examining any of this even at its most generous point doesn't paint an portrait that is appealing. And I drifted around uncommitted for what feels like the longest time. Then I met her, and for reasons unable to be catalogued on checklists or dating app profiles, and in ways I could never make anyone including her ever quite understand, the great questions of my life about moving in and marriage and children and what it was to look at someone and say yes just drifted away because of a feeling as strong as any I've known.

We are now more than half a year down the road, and in the quieter moments I've found this all breeds some level of confidence and hope, even when baked into the loneliness of packing things back in boxes and saying goodbye to things you love and retreating back out the door the way you came, locking the magnificent empty apartment one last time before venturing back out into a world you're a bit more alone in. Confidence and hope not just because I say I get it, this idea of why we dive back in again and again, the merits of exposing yourself to pain and vulnerability by leaning in and loving and relying on another. Even more, because I know it is something I can do, am capable of, and even might maybe want out of life, should I ever be fortunate enough for it to cross my path again.

Several Years Later

When I look back at writings from the last time I seriously wrote, I wonder, as I gather most do at this point in their lives breathing in a certain scent of nostalgia, how it all could have gone so fast. Time moves quicker now, it must, and in the blink of an eye an apartment in the nation's capital with a view of the horizon bled into a dimly lit New York City cave where nothing grows, the sink water occasionally pours brown, and outside an impossible number of people walk and talk and execute their days. Attempting to chronicle this, all these years at once, the chances taken, the money lost and gained, the great migration across the river, the heartbreaks endured along the way, and the little triumphs that come as surely the world's most complex place grows into something more understood, more yours, all this must be the most futile effort. Yet I look back now, slightly more weathered suddenly falling closer to forty than thirty, recommitting to the fact that doing so carries some worth.

My mother asks why the pause, and I do not have an answer. What can it be other than letting things get in the way, a shift in priorities, and a general loss of momentum? Someone told me once, you must enjoy not having free time, likely in response to back to back days and nights slugging away at a chaotic Bleecker Street bar following a full week spent around a midtown office, and that must in part be right. But if it all had to be measured, this was an era that began almost immediately doing what was required to make it work. I am not alone. So many have done this before for so much less across the island at the center of the world, and all are more resilient for it. What is the prize? Joining a tapestry of events and shared experiences on top of steel, concrete, and brick in a place that matters to humanity, even if it is just for a short period of time, when you could otherwise exist in places that will soon be forgotten if they have not been already. This was always the draw, what led me here, and what cradles me now as we embark on a new year certain to invite new questions, thoughts, and choices. So with this in mind, we suddenly fast forward, like a film timeline guided by explanatory subtitles, well into the future even though only a second or two have gone by.

Restarting again here has felt heavy, heavier with each month and year that went by, but perhaps it is just putting something down, one true sentence, and accepting that it does not have to be everything, just a small piece that speaks to the nature of a cold wind blowing across the harbor, down the East River and under the Williamsburg Bridge, up the numbered streets and over McCarren Park before landing at my doorstep in early January as a new year rears its head curiously and asks, what shall it be?