SPQR

In reading over the full history of Rome, as I did in the weeks leading up to my long awaited excursion there, you are struck by many things, some reminding you it was a world not entirely unlike our own, and others exemplifying how very different it was. It's hard to imagine, for instance, a bustling city of 1m people without any form of refuse collection. It is easier to relate to the heartfelt engravings on tombstones for children, spouses, and parents to which there was no shortage of across the empire. Overall, I think you're hit by the sheer magnitude of time itself, that nearly 2,000 years ago a giant colosseum was built of brick and marble that bred stories even the children of today seem to know by heart. Rome is this collection of stories that have captured the imaginations of human beings of every age since it was first founded on its seven hills before any written account exists.

So I had a reason to go, and I went, and in crossing the Tiber River and surmounting the Capitoline and Palatine, then looking out at the Roman Forum at sunset, I'd be lying if I said I found a complete and lofty bliss. If anything, those peaceful ruins brought a peculiar overwhelming heaviness, as if I could feel the long years of loss and relegation hovering in the air around me. It's not that people died there, Caesar and slaves, emperors and common folk, every dynamic name we've ever heard. It's that such a powerful idea, the zenith of civilization spanning the once known world, rose and fell, was forgotten about and glossed over, plundered, buried, and only recently, reborn. When you find a quiet spot on this (spiritual?) swath of land, putting away the cameras and turning off the audioguides, I think you feel the whole weight of that somewhere in your heart. What does it mean for our own time, our own importance, when something so magnificent can all but disappear, with not even a photo or a painting that depicts what exactly it looked like in its prime?

“Consider the past; such great changes of political supremacies. You may foresee also the things that will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of things that take place now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for 40 years is the same as to have contemplated it for 10 thousand years. For what more will you see?”

Up the road a ways, deep into wine country, I found myself in a wedding, that of my closest friend, wrapped up in all the emotions you feel when two people, two of the very best you know, are in love to a degree that touches everyone they meet. That brings emotions you can't quite get your head around and probably never will, a brightness and a similar heaviness in your heart that is difficult to describe. It was there that beautiful mornings on the Piazza led to slow afternoons with beers or spritzers, culminating with a few nights of festivities, my own little bit of blossoming love standing there at my side.

From Rome to Montefalco and back again, it occurs to me that most people in the world will never get that, all these things lumped together: a beautiful wedding in Italy that brings every single human being to tears; driving across the countryside with the windows down and a girl you love grabbing your hand; walking the streets at night and insatiably seeking out details, the plaques on the walls, the buildings built atop buildings built atop buildings, and those four millennia-spanning letters, SPQR, written on manhole covers, simple words in a dead language which have come to define and help usher in the modern world.

Perhaps lastly then, an afterthought, wandering down side streets after a delicious meal late one night once everyone's gone, and accidentally finding the Trevi Fountain, lit up triumphantly, the horses and the gods jumping up out of the water and into the air, the whole scene practically devoid of people, and then tossing a coin in without making a wish because there just aren't any wishes worth making and things need not change one bit from how they are. Calling these people, places, and things my collective reality has been one of the great joys of my life. Living them has been one of the greatest privileges I'll ever know.

Tea to Sea

Tea has been in Sri Lanka almost 150 years, and in a different time, old colonial planters set up shop in the hills, building rustic bungalows and estates to house their operations. Many of these I've had the good fortune of visiting, tucked away in perfect solitude, and there I often think about these men, now dead, and what lead them from their homes to such magnificent isolation when that imperialist fever ran so high.

I love the panoramic views of the high country. I wish I'd gone up there more, braving the windy roads and the traffic, because once there, it's always worth it. The little garden terraces are perfect for reading in, and the surrounding trails great for clearing your mind. The old bungalows smell of aging wood and when the doors and windows are open throughout the estate the cool breeze rushes through from one end to the other. At night, I like the study rooms best, quiet and easy. My memory one night alone with a book, drinking a negroni with a little Sinatra playing in the background, will be one of my favorites to keep tucked away when looking back on this place.

Down those hillsides in any direction, brings you to sea, sprawling sea, encircling this little world and blocking out the rest. Thousand year old kingdoms, decades of civil war, and a tsunami have influenced millions of people across 65,000 square kms, and yet, billions around the world can go their entire lives without ever even knowing a Sri Lanka exists. It is within this tiny bubble that I passed a year of my life, and over the course of that meandering journey I often found myself musing on the purpose of it all, and the benefits, being able to talk at length about truly random things of limited significance. I'm still not sure of the answer.

But the reminder here in Sri Lanka, perhaps more so than ever before, is that within those insulated bubbles lies all there is - life, love, sprawling histories, pride and struggle - for the people who live within the bubbles themselves. Much of that we on the outside are bound to never understand. We are resigned to the background, taking notes on what we see.

If I'm being honest, Sri Lanka will be a place I seldom think of again. At times it has brought me complete bliss, other times enormous frustration, but mostly it's just a place I passed a lot of time that went by faster than I can believe. There is nothing profound in it for me, this blip on a map, nothing that calls out or inspires feeling. And in that, I join the teams of legendary explorers and tourists and outsiders who passed by these coasts, and stayed awhile, thinking what a peculiar little island it was, all before heading off someplace else.

Colombo Fashion Week

“I think we’re all just lost and don’t know what to do,” one girl told me at lunch in between rehearsals. I’d taken the glorious opportunity, sitting with a model, to journalistically interrogate her on the ins and outs of her profession. What always stood out to me while attending these shows was the deadness in the eyes of those who were walking, and I’ve always wanted to know more about what sat behind that void.

So she said things like that, and when I think about it more, I’m not sure what one expects in a world driven by simple aesthetics. You are judged again and again by strangers on how you look, with no need to ever contemplate what goes through your head. This conditions someone to nothingness, condemns them to feeling lost, and as a result you get beautiful people on runways far less secure than the average person on the street - which in turn makes the girl on the street that much more beautiful. That would probably be the first and most profound takeaway, now having walked the runway myself. 

In the end, the most surprising thing about the process is this: it’s in fact, exactly what you’d expect with very few deviations. There is that standard very gay organizer who, quite mercurial, screams and curses at models when they mess something up. Everyone is obsessed with photographing themselves, examining how they look, practicing their walk, and perfecting an image. People really do tell you to lose weight or slim down – this was brought up to me multiple times when an arbitrary pant selection didn’t fit. A designer does tell you to come to his room for last minute fittings, and then asks if you got laid last night in a way that suggests it happens between models all the time. You do spend hours in makeup. The transitions really are chaotic and people do yell. The clothes are mostly just plain awful. Really, I had nothing in common with this world and these people. And all of it, with the right mindset – I am sorry to admit – is actually quite a bit of fun. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some kind of allure to all the superficial prestige that comes with these mega-productions, when you stand up and take center stage, and people then compliment you after.

So between when I was asked on a Friday night after a number of beers, to when I agreed after some cajoling, to when I wound up on a ramp the following Thursday in front of 200 people wondering how the fuck that all happened, thus began, and probably ended, my career as a male model, reaching its zenith at Colombo Fashion Week in 2016.

Keep Austin Weird

It is, and always has been, one of my favorite places in the world, with so much of something you can't put your finger on that you just can't quite find anywhere else, something you feel when entering the country BBQ restaurants and live music venues and localized businesses and when walking in front of the state capitol and when entering a new bar that didn't used to exist but is now the most popular place in town. You feel it when university kids blend with lawyers and technology entreprenuers who then mix with Whole Foods aficionados and coffee shop hipsters and cowboys. You feel it when passing the rich estates out by Lake Travis where you used to ride your bike, and around the Hyde Park condos you used to call home. You feel it in the buzz, most accurately defined by the age old city mantra: keep Austin weird.

So my old life met my new life, in the best of ways, during a few days back in Texas when December turned into January. As these things go, if you tune in just right, you step back and can clearly see all the good things that once happened alongside all the good things that happened once you were gone. These things are both true together, one not cheapening the other, and you find a balance with it, not longing for something different or nostalgia for what once was, but recognition that there is a peace and a rightness when one situation no longer exists and a new one now does.

Because I ultimatley believe life happens in phases, and I have always found my rhythm when I let myself float, without struggle or fear or a need for direction, but a trust in what life has in store when you ask the right questions. Like this, my life has gone, stage by stage, year on year, this time my right hand held by a left hand cloaked in lovely knit mittens, while my own left hand turned a wheel, driving in delightful silence down Lamar, up Congress, on 6th, 5th, and 4th streets, passing the intersection of Rainey and Driskill, up 620 by Lakeway, slowly along the drag via Guadalupe, all before taking Interstate 35, like so many times before, up away from it all in another big triumphant goodbye. These are the old routines probably best kept old routines while a new city booms in the background.

Whenever there is a setback and things seem unclear, whenever I get unsettled amidst uncertainty, I take comfort in the historical unwavering path of growth and progress which tells us: there are many wonderful things that can happen; many of them will happen; most of them are invisible to us now, but yes indeed, there is a way for them to happen. 

Northern Mid-West

The father of a close friend, who is now dead, told me once that he could trace the happiest moments of his life back to a time all his possessions could fit in the back of a car and he could just drive and drive and drive. We were out for dinner at a steakhouse in Melbourne, and I still remember the glitter in his eye, looking back at something he was out of something he had become. He was one of the genuinely great people I have known in my life. He had my enormous respect. But overweight, all too wealthy, owning multiple houses and automobiles, he remains, almost cemented in death by heart attack, exactly what I think about when I think about excess.

In my head, I went back to that conversation somewhere between North Dakota and Wyoming, a few clothes in the back of the old blue Versa, and not a whole lot else. The flat farm pastures slowly got more rugged until the rocky mountains began, iced over in the winter, clouds swirling somewhere just beyond. Small unexpected towns where everyone knows everyone nursed their own breweries and coffee shops and book stores, much to my pleasure when I stopped driving and needed a place to be before starting out again. Bighorn National Forest - certainly the climax - went way up and way down in canyons and along cliffs, my thoughts trailing somewhere close behind. Let's call Casper, Wyoming the conclusion of the first half of another bit of lovely tradition, and the end of the Northern Mid-West.

Mile marker after mile marker, year after year, these excursions, however practical or impractical, have become somewhat sacred to me, a methodical importance I have trouble explaining accurately but which probably explains itself.

My attempt: being alone with nowhere in particular to be and with no specific route to get there and with no one expecting you by any specific time, it centers you. Out there weaving and wandering, there is great value in no one knowing exactly where you are or where you will be next. It is quiet space where you foster you and you come out of it being something more clear than you were before you went in, something that would fit well in the Tao Te Ching when it says:

"The wise are guided by inner needs
and are not concerned with the senses.
Therefore the wise person rejects the
without,
while embracing the within."

The East Coast

Running out onto the beach up to the red rocks and the lagoon, I couldn't help but feel at least a little depressed, if not a hatred for all humanity. A line of bottles and plastic bags and cans spread out where the waves stop in the sand, mixing with dead fish and cow shit and - I'm not making this up - one big hypodermic needle that I only narrowly missed in stride. Black birds bit into the washed up fish and the water itself was murky and gave off a smell, and the whole dark scene together brought forth one big thought: we just ruin everything good and most of us don't even think twice about it.

Across the pond and just beyond that East Coast horizon, the forests of Sumatra are burning and have been for weeks. The sky turns to a fiery haze which drifts with the wind into three countries. People wear masks and cough and wheeze, and in some old chamber thousands of miles away, Congressmen still legitimately debate the science behind climate change and our human impact on the world.

I'll tell you, on my more pessimistic days I have a hard time seeing this all ending well. Like a bad dream, I sometimes vaguely imagine a planet we have rendered unlivable simply because we like living in boxes, we like short-term fixes, and we like things and having things now. That image in my head is always so painfully apocalyptic, and it makes me yearn for a quiet corner of Yosemite in winter, because there I remember feeling something that seemed like no human hand had ever touched.

So carrying all that - thoughts, premonitions, fears for our children - from the East Coast at Trincomalee, you'd do well turning around and going back through the center. There you pass an impossible amount of green, the kind of green where it's actually hard to spot something not green, then paddy fields filling up in the rain, always one worker out there hacking away at something, lean and cut and dark with his shirt off, then a million identical roadside shops that are actually just someone's house with a little shack in front, then Buddhas of all shapes and sizes, at least one for every town, always looking so peaceful and knowing as each person drives on by, then more lazy stray dogs napping in the road under the incredible expectation that every car going 50 MPH will simply drive around them, then at one point elephant droppings lining the highway, but no sign of elephants, but you know they are out there somewhere, which makes you feel a little better inside. 

Singapore, this time

It's the conversations I love most, those that wander more widely as one pitcher of cold beer turns into many pitchers of beer, because you find out in the real world the average person does not want to talk in depth about specific goals for December next year, and what country they want to travel to next (Myanmar would be amazing, but due to their first democratic elections, the Philippines would be more relaxing, while Nepal continues to suffer from a string of bad luck). They do not want to talk about the psychology around going to the gym, or not going to the gym, or the sociological merits of monogamy at three in the morning. They do not understand why a customized leather kindle case means more than a brand new car ever would, because in a present that thoughtful everything you need to know about kindness and generosity and human connection can be found. Most are too busy and pressed to grab a bottle and just walk around the Singapore Marina observing all the strange things that pass you by, before ascending the Marina Bay Sands and drinking $20 dollar negronis as smog blows in from Indonesia and blocks out the sun.

It's been that way for years, really, as far back as I can remember, through shifts in a restaurant, the hours after a triathlon, and the sprawling youthful Saturdays with nothing to do but go through boxes of pizza and watch college football games. It happened like this in Austin and Guatemala and New York City and Kuala Lumpur. It happened on a car ride up to Louisville, Kentucky, and back from Shiner, Texas, and another one all the way up to a small place tucked away under Sri Lankan tea plantations. These are situations you can copy and paste in every corner of the world and each time it is good and maybe even a little bit better because time has gone by and there is more life to both catch up on and think back to. It is built for the sentence that begins, "remember that time..." and you think back and remember that time not exactly wanting it to be that time again, but certainly observing the merits of all those many stages of life now gone.

In all of it you realize how rare these groups of human beings are in the world, those where simplicity and authenticity are everything, fresh and adaptable to any circumstance, always keeping to its core. You realize you are lucky to have these unspoken things hard to put your finger on, those subtle comforts, that dose of sanity, which are always just a hop, skip, and a jump away from a place that more often than not pressures you to wear a mask, look normal, eat dull dinners, and blend in with crowds.