The Doe’s Latest Stories

During a whirlwind Twitter flirtationship last fall, I mentioned that I was a prolific hoarder—of stolen stickers, journalistic quotes, monuments I've licked, proverbs, heartwarming porn outtakes and stamps, to name a few. In a gesture of true altruism, my virtual belle asked for a sampling from my collections, thus stroking my ego to near bust.Over the course of our brief romance, our flirtation fell into a pattern in which exposing our taste became a shorthand for exposing ourselves. It was hot, and I choreographed the striptease with according care: Dress up just to get undressed with a few lines of copied-and-pasted prose; build the tension by name dropping an Austrian expressionist; wink cheekily with a pornographic blooper; tickle a niche French proverb up her thigh.The cymbals rolled. I was aroused by the eroticization of my taste, by stripping myself of the seemingly endless layers of personality that separated the real her from the real and, more importantly, really interesting me. As my date DMed me photos of her DVD collection and slipped me passwords to watch paywalled lesbian documentaries, I’m sure her body temperature was rising, too.

Were we turned on by each other’s dances, or the stylized performance of our own?

Sharing Taste Is a Common Approach to Compatibility and Bonding

In her 2019 book, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, sociologist Eva Illouz speculates that choosing a partner based on common taste is a fairly young tradition, birthed by a consumer culture that encourages singles to seek out partners with whom they can engage in leisure activities—such as long walks on the beach and brewery crawls—rather than general companionship. As taste is formed by both personality and class, it is actually a pretty good indicator of a couple’s compatibility and ability to form lasting bonds. So, far from being some sapiosexual kink, I imagine the peep shows my date and I performed for each other must be a common and more or less productive mating dance.But were we turned on by each other’s dances, or the stylized performance of our own? For me, the answer is without a doubt the latter.The whole ordeal slaps of autoeroticism. As with any get-to-know-you activity, trading tastes presents the opportunity to enhance—or at least refine—the “you” that there is to know, with the added advantage that curating a personality out of favorite albums and a signature drink is simpler than building from scratch. This idealized version of yourself shifts based on who exactly is on the receiving end—it turns you into the version most likely to be hired, befriended, respected or perhaps the most alluring, loved.In my mind’s eye, the woman I conjure when I share my eclectic collections with a potential partner is a fuzzy, nostalgic persona, like the wives that movie protagonists capture on home video before they die or go missing. “There’s this one scene in a foot domme clip I found yesterday that warms my heart,” I imagine her whispering through the camera. “I just added it to my list of uplifting porn outtakes.” How am I supposed to create her and not be turned on by the fantasy of becoming her or at least being perceived as her, the perfect product of my perfectly-distilled self?

Collections Reflect a Nostalgic Past and Idealized Future

I imagine this must be the root of my love for collecting: a fantasy of being appreciated for my taste. This, in turn, I would blame on my well-buried aspirations to be a character in a Sally Rooney novel, which is to say Sally Rooney herself, which is to say a Mary Sue, which is to say an exceptionally normal person who is exceptional in her normalcy. Incidentally, I don't think Sally Rooney has good taste. I simply believe that, if I were appreciated for my taste, it would signal that people really get me, without having to put my own words to whatever there is to really get. There’s a part of me that wonders if this autoeroticizing of taste is a gendered phenomenon. After all, Mary Sues are just Manic Pixie Dream Girls written by women who had the gall to romanticize themselves on their own terms. Womanhood is nothing if not a Sisyphean self-help project to become these archetypes, which we consume, modify and regurgitate into aspirational “That Girl” TikToks. “These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image,” writes Jia Tolentino in her 2019 book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. As a woman, a bachelorette, someone with whom could be fallen in love, my taste is a testament to both the elusive, authentic, classic me that existed—fuzzy and nostalgic, at some unnamed before-time—as well as to the idealized me that could be in an alternate future, should the right partner view the right iteration of me, given the right light and playlist murmuring in the background.The persona that emerged from the collections I sent my Twitter sweetheart was inherently half of a pair. “Look,” I was saying as I explained the origins and proper use of avoir le melon. “These are the kind of culturally astute conversations I believe we are capable of; this is the kind of couple I believe we could be.” Nostalgic past or idealized future, we were hot together. I suppose that if she were equally turned on by that version of her, and the version of us that I reflected back towards her, we would have become the earthly iteration of that couple. Or perhaps, as Illouz suggests, I simply didn’t choose the right taste around which to structure our intimacy.

I imagine this must be the root of my love for collecting: a fantasy of being appreciated for my taste.

Mixtapes: The Ultimate Seduction by Taste

History would suggest that the cultural commodity best suited to seduction is the mixtape or its successor, the Spotify playlist. Unlike other collections that flaunt an individual’s personal taste (like, for example, a list of world monuments you’ve licked), this collection comes the closest to owning up to its agenda. “He wanted to give Diane things she couldn’t get herself, to turn her on to new things, to share his access, to provide, to shore up his girlfriendable-ness,” muses Paul Polydoris as he records a mixtape for a lover in Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. In theory, one could curate any collection into a relationship proposal—my virtual belle’s tailor-fit film and literary recommendations seemed to attain a similar goal of providing and definitely shored up her girlfriendable-ness, not least because Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl was among them. But I’ve yet to see anyone parallel the emotional impact of a mixtape by collecting stamps with a special someone in mind. “This is the mashup of your tastes, my tastes and what I think we would sound like together,” the mixtape says. “This is my proposed soundtrack to our partnered life.”I have received two mixtapes in my life from a cousin and a long-distance friend, respectively. Notably, I didn’t listen to either of the mixtapes, which are technically mix CDs, until almost seven years later. One in particular isn’t quite my style, and as I cringed through my first listen this summer, I wondered what kind of dynamic duo my friend had in mind when she burned two and a half hours’ worth of Demi Lovato and the Ready Set to send across the Atlantic. I imagine that, just as I do with the snippets of my taste that I dropped into my fling’s DMs, she returns frequently to the version of her that she dutifully queued and finds a vain pleasure in seeing a perfect persona reflected back.

My relationship with my mom has always been a close one. It’s the kind of relationship where the love feels so big that if you think about it too much, you’ll end up crying in the supermarket. But like most people’s relationships with their parents, it’s complex. As I grew up, the men in my life were toxic and difficult. My father’s famous words before I was born were, “I’ll probably have nothing to do with her until she’s 2.” Twenty-six years later, I’m still not sure he even knows what my job title is. When I was 18 months old, my mom divorced him, and he became an angrier, almost vengeful figure who had no real interest in spending time with me but insisted he got to see me because it was “his right.” Six months later, my mom gained a new partner—a bullying, psychologically abusive, narcissistic man whose name still makes me sick to my stomach. He was in our lives for 10 years. As I grew up, I had lots of problems—I was constantly anxious, I had OCD, I was bullied and I was constantly scared to be away from my mother. Even sleeping in my own bed at night was too scary. None of these things are really a surprise now, considering what was going on. Throughout my life I’ve suffered with periods of severe mental health issues, and even when I wasn’t depressed, I felt scared and ashamed. Scared of others, myself and the future—and after graduating from university—the feeling intensified. I spent a year in the city in which I studied, chopping and changing between temp jobs, trying to afford rent and spending 40 hours a week doing jobs that were panic-inducingly dull. Feeling completely defeated, anxious and questioning what the point was, I felt I had no choice but to move back home with my mom and her new partner.

Every day I grew angrier and more afraid.

I Didn’t Feel Safe in My Mother’s Home

They live in a quiet middle-of-nowhere village, the perfect place for a 20-something to start questioning how on earth they got there and what the hell they were going to do next. For the first couple of years, I got a job in the local pub, tried to start my illustration and writing career, and traveled up and down the country desperately seeking an escape from something I couldn’t put my finger on. By March 2020, when the news of the pandemic was increasingly real and we entered the U.K.’s first lockdown, I could feel myself start to panic. Like many people, my coping mechanisms were running from what was eating me inside. I’d go and visit my friends, get a large distance between me and my home and try to keep myself incredibly busy. I started going for walks each day, and the walks got longer and longer until eventually, I was walking miles and miles every day, trying to keep moving from the invisible thing that was chasing me. I could feel that the tension in the house was getting worse. My mom and I were bickering a lot, and I could feel those age-old feelings of terror and panic around my new stepfather. Everything in me was telling me, “You are not safe,” despite the fact that there was no actual danger present (well, apart from the virus that had the potential to kill you).Something I’ve learned trauma does to you is pickle your brain and teach your body to feel enormous amounts of fear in what would otherwise be a perfectly normal situation. Every day I grew angrier and more afraid. I felt increasingly unsafe in my home, and my body was telling me my mother couldn’t protect me. My anger toward her turned into frustration at the fact I couldn’t even articulate what was happening in my head. Why did everything make me feel sick? Why did I feel like I was betraying the young girl inside me? Why did I keep feeling furious at her even though she was just trying to live through a pandemic herself? Why did our relationship leave me feeling a deep well of sadness?

My Therapist Suggested I Seek Relationship Counseling With My Mother

One day, my mother and I were driving to a spot to take a walk together. Out of nowhere, we started to talk about the past. For the first time, I started to make sense of what was eating our relationship. “I feel like I’m always either angry at you or guilty…I think my stepfather ruined our relationship,” I said.As my mental health started to deteriorate, my therapist suggested that my mom and I seek relationship therapy to heal the wounds of the abuse we’d suffered together and fix what was between us. I agreed, but I don’t think either of us fully knew what was in front of us. We arrived at our first session in the dark and rain of late September. Sitting in front of our new therapist, she asked us why we were there. I went through the past, trying to place some distance between it and myself as I spoke about the very basics of what had happened. Each session started with us describing some seemingly menial event during our week that had bothered one of us and how we’d not communicated properly or how we always believed the other one to be angry with us. These tiny details revealed themselves to be deep wounds stretching back over 20 years. One tiny exchange of words in our kitchen had turned into a knived trauma that had cut us both. Each interaction became a map of our entire lives. It became apparent very quickly how long we’d needed to do this, and as the fog cleared, we realized how much space and hurt there had been in what was, for both of us, our closest relationship.

These tiny details revealed themselves to be deep wounds stretching back over 20 years.

Therapy Has Allowed Us to Be Honest and Open About Everything

That therapist’s room will always be a significant place in my mind, especially the paintings on its walls that my eyes would jump over as one of us cried. I remember looking over the spaces between the fire exit sign as I talked about my stepfather yelling insults at me, or looking at the dimly-lit lamp as we discussed the intensity of love between us, or at the gap between the heater and the wall when I realized that, as the old cliche goes, I was the only one who could fix myself. We’ve been in therapy for nearly a year now, and over that time, the room and our therapist provided a space to release everything that needed releasing. It allowed us to connect with one another in ways that we’ve never been able to. It’s allowed us to forgive ourselves and each other for what we’ve been through, and it’s ignited the most enormous compassion for the person I love the most, helping me to forgive her for her mistakes. It’s also let me see that, through all of the things we’ve been through, for everything that has gone wrong, she has always tried her best to do what she can for me. Every single parent makes mistakes, not always from lack of love but because they were not given what they needed when they were children. That understanding has helped me get closer to feeling that she loves me, and one day, I’ll be able to feel that fully and know that it's always there wherever I go. We’ve both been able to step back and see our relationship and look at the details. It’s easier to see your house is on fire when you’re standing on the steps in front of it.

I’m Starting to Regain the Love I Had For My Mother

When I look back on the course of events that led to this incredible experience, I think about the very human aspect that exists within all of us—the part that looks for the good in even the hardest of times. The timing of this experience could not have come any sooner or any later. COVID-19 has been one of the most life-changing events on the planet, and this horrendous year has revealed the intricate details of people’s lives, many of which have been ignored. Although it’s been the most testing period of my life and countless others, I’m grateful for what it has given me, for what it’s opened my eyes to. It’s put me on a path to something I didn’t realize was possible. It’s shown me not to accept these feelings I’ve carried around my entire life. And it’s starting to make me realize that I’m allowed to feel loved. Sometimes I still slip up and panic or lose trust in her, but we’re getting better at getting back to that safe feeling much quicker. Now I feel like I can tell her what’s going on inside of me, and it makes me trust a little more that she’ll be there throughout. I’m learning not to run, but to stay and look at the feelings that are in front of me, knowing it’s safe to let them out. It’s helped me to leave behind the anger I had toward her and let me get closer to really expressing the earth-shattering, enormous love that I have for her: a love that terrifies me but a love that is intrinsic to who I am.

She hopped up on the living room couch to dance, the heels of her white go-go boots sinking into the plaid cushions. Blasting from my parent's stereo was the Rolling Stones' “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” the reverberation of Charlie Watts's drums amplified through the speakers. My cousins cheered her on as she swung her thick mane of blonde hair, her face tanned caramel from hours of sunbathing on the beach. Her large, hazel eyes scanned the room until she spotted me in the hallway, and the lips she'd painted pink with Yardley gloss curved into a mischievous smile. Wild and free, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. And she was my sister.Cherie was older than me by six years, but the differences in our ages never bothered her. We were inseparable from the start; she carried me everywhere on her hip and told people that I was her "baby monkey." The nights she snuck out of our parents’ home in her go-go boots to dance at the clubs, I stood by my window, watched the dark arms of the sky cradle the moon, and waited for her to come home.

We Promised We’d Be Each Other’s Best Friend, Forever

So much of my childhood was spent with Cherie. We sat for hours cutting out patterns for Betsy McCall paper dolls, drawing Arabian horses on her giant sketch pad and singing along to her Herman's Hermits albums. She taught me how to play Crazy Eights and War, our card games lasting long past my bedtime. The nights we craved sweets, we pulled out my toy Easy-Bake Oven and made dozens of cakes and pies, eating them until our bellies ached with food and laughter. On a school day, if one of us was sick, the other would feign illness so that my mother would keep us both home. We'd watch Dick Van Dyke reruns, eat crackers and sip ginger ale in our pajamas while snuggled together on the couch.Growing up, Cherie's bedroom was always my sanctuary—it was a peaceful place that smelled of sandalwood incense, fresh paint from her easel and the White Shoulders perfume she frequently wore. Every inch of wall space was covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, wild animals, peace signs and anti-Vietnam War slogans. At night, she'd switch on a black light lamp to illuminate the patterns on her psychedelic posters, bringing them to life in the eerie blue glow from the bulb. I curled up next to her as she told stories of Puff the Magic Dragon and of the faraway, mystical places we'd visit together one day.In the dim light of her room, she promised that we would always be more than just sisters—we would forever be best friends. I believed it since she understood me better than most and defended me at every turn when I got into trouble for bad grades or mouthing off at my parents. We often joked that we were the black sheep of the family and so different from our siblings and parents. Our rebellious nature is what bonded us from the beginning.

Wild and free, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. And she was my sister.

In High School, Cherie Had It All

I watched Cherie bloom during her high school years; her weekends were filled with movie dates or rock concerts and an endless stream of party invites. She had it all—popularity, beauty, a fun job at a fast-food taco place, a cool boyfriend who drove a VW Beetle and the honorary title of runner-up homecoming queen during her senior year. She was my idol for many reasons, but mostly, I respected the special connection she shared with animals. Cherie had a fascination with birds and an encyclopedic knowledge of every species. She took beautiful photographs of hawks, eagles and owls and sketched them every chance that she had. Her artistic skills were impressive, and whenever I studied her drawings, I felt more than her admiration for these birds; I saw her desire to share their fierceness, beauty, resilience and freedom. She volunteered at a wildlife rehab center and fostered so many birds at home that my parents built an aviary in our backyard for the critically injured ones that would never fly again. Little did I know that those wounded birds would become the metaphor for my sister's life.

She Was Not as Fortunate in Adulthood

Her unraveling began slowly: two failed marriages, single motherhood, financial struggles. It chipped away at her self-confidence until there was nothing left but the shell of the carefree girl I remembered from high school. She seldom sketched or picked up her camera anymore. She was too busy supporting herself with a job at a pet grooming salon. She wore her disappointment like a heavy winter cloak. The light in her bright hazel eyes dimmed to gray. I got married, had a family and worked several part-time jobs, which meant that I didn't visit Cherie as often as I should have, despite her invitations. Over the years, she continued a downward spiral into depression, trapped in a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting and emotional binge eating. By the time she was in her early 50s, she had numerous health issues associated with obesity. My sister was killing herself with food, and I didn't know how to stop her. No one did. Something had broken inside her, leaving her heart cracked in too many places to repair. She had become like the wounded birds she once cared for.In the early hours of Halloween in 2009, the heart that had once been filled with hope and joy stopped beating. When the monitors screamed their flatline goodbye, I knew my sister had taken flight like an eagle from the unhappiness that had caged her for so long. An autopsy report stated that she died from pneumonia with a heart three times its average size due to her obesity. I preferred to think her heart was large because she had loved so much.

As Her Sibling, the Guilt of Not Being There for Her Ate Away at Me

I drifted for days after her death, suspended between anger and guilt because I never told Cherie how sorry I was for not being the sister and best friend I'd promised to be. At her funeral, I delivered a eulogy to a crowd that needed to hear she lived a beautiful and graceful life. But I knew better than that. She had been dying inside for years, and no one could save her.Shortly after Cherie's ashes were surrendered to the wind, a red-tailed hawk circled my yard and settled in the pine branches above me. I looked into his dark, unwavering gaze and saw my sister watching over me. Her loss haunted me deeply like a phantom limb that never stopped aching.

She had been dying inside for years, and no one could save her.

Grieving the Loss of a Sister Means Remembering the Good Times

Over time, the sharp edges of grief softened into a well-worn quilt that surrounded me whenever I thought of her. I listened to my ’60s music playlist of the Mamas & the Papas, Steppenwolf and Deep Purple and remembered the things my sister had loved: strawberry smoothies and iced frappuccinos, snowy mountain tops, orchids in her garden, winter nights and the soulful voice of Andrea Bocelli as she cooked in the kitchen with her dogs by her feet. Remembering her moments of happiness was the only way to push past the grief that had muted my world when she died.Although the empty pages my sister left behind can never be filled, I can still close my eyes and see the happy girl in white go-go boots dancing on the sofa. She turns to me and smiles, her joy radiating beyond the darkness like a shooting star that leaves a bright trail across the winter sky.

We love a bit of nostalgia in Britain, we really do. From the pomp and ceremony of the royal family to the “Keep Calm and Carry On” kitsch of the 2010s, the lunge for sentimentality is a recurring trope of that most slippery of ideas: Britishness. For most people living in the U.K., a bit of nostalgia sits absolutely fine; it’s a comfort blanket to cling to when faced with scary change. But for those of us trying to create new things, forge new experiences and find new answers to the immediate and unavoidable questions of today, being met head-on by a society looking the other way creates a worryingly divided society.The rest of the world is slowly catching up with Britain’s wistful indulgences of the past ten years. “Britain is drowning itself in nostalgia,” cried The New York Times back in 2019. “Brexit has exposed my country as a solipsistic backwater,” rued the author. It’s true. Rather than realizing the error of our ways and humbly going about our business, the dismal trade negotiations and less than amicable European Union divorce proceedings have emboldened a group of politicians and a section of society into even more ludicrous, nostalgia-driven acts. The government-funded culture wars have created a raft of daft new guidance. “All U.K. government buildings in England, Wales and Scotland will fly the union flag every day,” reported the BBC in March. Rather than addressing the calamitous Brexit process, the government instead announced the first “festival of Brexit.” The stifling debate over statues, history and empire has led to a cozy, state-mandated view of history and a governance unwilling to properly come to terms with its past.

Do we enjoy these songs through the lens of meta-nostalgia?

The Songs We Used to Enjoy Have a Meta-Nostalgia Now

As a person working within the creative industries, the theme of “easy history” has seeped into my work, too. Recent discourse on hauntology and its application to music is a complicated matter, and its overbearing presence in select circles of the left does a disservice to the musicians who are genuinely pushing boundaries.Within weeks of 2021, we heard the loss of rapper MF DOOM and supreme producer SOPHIE, two musicians rightly described as pioneers in the world of envelope-pushing popular music. But the new year also brought with it Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s Silk Sonic project and its “Leave the Door Open,” which obviously became a lockdown bop. It’s catchy, well-constructed, meticulously produced and smooth as anything, but it’s also unquestionably retro, feeling a tad exhausted under the weight of references. Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia from the previous year offers a contrasting sparkle, and as a result, the British singer’s album has been almost universally accepted as among the finest releases of the year. But, despite offering more knowing winks in the traditional postmodern mold, it sits as a congealed version of lots of new-ish pop. We’re in a phase of musical post-postmodernity.That musical nostalgia has completed another cycle during lockdown. My first experience of live music post-lockdown came at the start of May, in one of those new, edgy shipping container developments that repurposes an erstwhile symbol of international capitalism as a softly sold night out. There, the live band (playing to rows of mostly nonplussed drinkers) fell back on tune after tune of “before-times bangers.” Tunes that, in 2018, might have brought out your best mumbled sing-alongs (your American Boys, your Mr. Brightsides) suddenly fell into this vacuum created by a year without mutual musical experience, robbed of those messy nights out where the tragic and comic blur. Confusion reigned in the containarena. Where do the nostalgia hits hit? If we can’t dance along from our socially distanced seating, do we still sing crazily like before, but from a sedentary position? And do we enjoy these songs through the lens of meta-nostalgia? (Maybe I was the only one thinking this last question.)

Nostalgia is like a natural resource. If you take too greedily without replenishing, it becomes unsustainable.

It’s Hard to Feel the Same Way About Songs I Loved

As a 23-year-old, hearing “Mr. Brightside” ushers in a chain of sentimental experiences. I can think of at least four distinct eras of exposure that all have a claim to the nostalgic impulse. There’s the angsty “I swear, it’s not a phase” phase of teen experience, with music heard through tinny earphones via even tinnier MP3s. That’s followed swiftly by the high school house party experience, a people-pleasing mix that will almost certainly feature 90 percent of the previous year’s Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation.There’s the university experience, where that “safe bet” mix is turned into a mid-sized regional club’s main selling point. Finally, there’s today, a few years removed from all of that, where sudden thoughts of “coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine” actually make you want to scuttle back inside that cage and die of cringing embarrassment. Here, the space for consequence-free nostalgia is very small indeed.Nostalgia is like a natural resource. If you take too greedily without replenishing, it becomes unsustainable. During lockdown, robbed of external influence, it was nearly impossible to determine the “now.” I mined my playlist of throwback hits for all of its worth. Listening back to the same one from the previous week, I found myself unsuccessfully trying to find an ounce of feeling from these songs that once made me feel like a million dollars. Now, we find ourselves in a world that is quickly opening up, complete with fresh experiences and new people. It’s the perfect time to trash bin nostalgia and look toward the unknown, no matter how scary that may seem.

The first real concert I ever attended was Billy Joel. I was a freshman in college and went with my roommate and a woman we both had a huge crush on; she eventually ended up dating him, to my considerable unhappiness. Joel was probably my favorite musician at that time, and I knew all the words to all the songs, so I was ready to do my part when he pulled back from the mic and gestured to the stadium crowd to fill in the chorus for the encore performance of “Piano Man.” “Sing us a song, you’re the piano man!” we roared with obligatory, enthusiastic literalness. “We’re all in the mood for a melody / And you’ve got us feeling alright!” As I warbled off-key with the assembled throng and watched Joel look up at us, I thought how satisfyingly disorienting it must be for him to hear the words he’d written about his future success in the past come raining down on him in the present, a perfect nostalgic sphere of yearning, hope and retroactive sentiment. The moment felt frozen inside time or outside time, not least because we all knew he orchestrated that very same moment night after night at every concert venue. It was a predictable apotheosis of nostalgia—one I still remember some 30 years later. The piano man said, “Remember!” and I did, even as time tinkled on like the keys, and I lost the girl and my roommate somewhat later lost the girl and I came to slowly, dimly realize that Billy Joel’s music, which had made me feel all the feelings and nostalgias, was actively and egregiously terrible.

My longing for a different past is pretty understandable in context.

I Was the Typical Billy Joel Fan

Pop music, terrible or otherwise, is generally supposed to be a way to get you nostalgic. In her wonderful book, Dialectic of Pop, Agnès Gayraud argues that pop is music created for recording technology—it’s meant to be listened to remotely, at a distance from its creation. The space between the Piano Man thumping away in some bar and the global packaging and celebration of that same Piano Man on an endlessly turning vinyl is built in; the song is always about remembering the song, the way I remember myself fantasizing sentimentally about Billy Joel remembering his past. The sentiment, in fact, is precisely in glomming onto a different, better past—one in which I could imagine myself looking forward with clear-eyed mushiness to a future of self-adulation, rather than looking around at a present, damp wasteland of romantic failure and dubious musical taste.My longing for a different past is pretty understandable in context. I grew up in a virtually all-white ethnic enclave not that far from the Allentown Joel famously sang about. The manufacturing base had given way to an economy composed almost entirely of funeral homes and fast-food joints. The average age of the population was the second-highest in the country behind Miami. My dad was a history professor at the local college and looked forward to retirement. He and my mom introduced me to a smattering of oldies and hippie protest singers like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, but their interest in contemporary music was pretty much nonexistent. Though I lived through it, I missed virtually every musical development of the ’80s; I was as obliviously alienated by Michael Jackson as I was ignorant of the existence of the Smiths. The first time I heard Public Enemy, I thought it was an air-raid siren. Like Billy Joel said in his smug anthem to his own determinedly hidebound aesthetic, “Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways / It's still rock and roll to me.”

Musical Nostalgia Is a Real Thing—Particularly in Pop Music

Joel was from New York and was a grown-ass adult, but he knew as little about music as I did. Or rather, he knew just a smidgen enough more that he seemed exciting and daring without frightening me with air-raid sirens or radical Black politics or any sound or thought that might feel out of place in a funeral home. He was my Pat Boone, the guy who took scary new sounds and blandified them by 75 percent so they’d titillate but not frighten Middle Americans like me. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was pseudo-hip-hop for apolitical boomer-wannabes without rhythm. “Scandinavian Skies” was post-Beatles psychedelia if you found the elfin yodeling of the Cocteau Twins too unnerving. “Pressure” was new wave arranged for musical theater, a sad keyboard can-can that only the most rube-ish rubes (like me) could mistake for jaded aggression. And then there was An Innocent Man, his album-length tribute to, and grim parody of, doo-wop and early rock. It’s hard to pick a nadir on that album, but the Frankie Valli pastiche “The Longest Time” is perhaps the most ruthlessly soulless. Joel’s enunciation closes like a damp, flabby fist around the tune’s hectoring melody, leaving behind only the dried husk of joy. From this distance, that dried husk looks a bit like my younger self, flailing in some Allentown analogue, so romantically unsuccessful that even Billy Joel’s boilerplate relationship advice (“Tell her about it!”) seemed profound. I can say I hate his music now, but I can’t exactly disavow it. Every song of his, every word and melody—from the big drum intro on “She’s Right On Time” to the echo effect framing the shallow Vietnam non-moralizing on “Goodnight Saigon”— (“And who was wrong? / And who was right-right-right-right? / It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight.”)—is all burned into my back brain from thousands of cassette repeats. Listening to Joel still gives me little flashbacks to my old house with the two-tape deck turntable—or my dorm room boombox—playing as I sadly waited for my roommate to not come home.

I can say I hate his music now, but I can’t exactly disavow it.

Billy Joel Is Bad, but I Still Feel Nostalgic

Billy Joel isn’t just my history either. He’s my historiography, the performer who shaped my sense of how you experience the emotions of being a time-existing-emotion-experiencer. Joel’s music is a relentless exercise in nostalgic self-mythologizing. Just from consecutive songs on Turnstiles: “Angry Young Man” is about how he used to be one but is older and wiser; “I’ve Loved These Days” is a schmaltzy ballad in which he imagines himself in the future looking back on the present with wisdom and sentiment; and “Miami 2017” is another schmaltzy ballad in which he imagines himself in the future looking back on the present with wisdom and sentiment, but with a dollop of irony and a slightly goofy science-fiction twist. (New York has been destroyed and everyone moved to Miami to remember it.)Joel’s music offered me the chance to be a person with a past and depth by creating a safe bubble of nostalgia—a world in which new sounds and new thoughts didn’t need to intrude on the untrammeled now of yesterday. I didn’t know much but I wanted to feel like I did. Billy Joel was the perfect person to give me that illusion, with that pasteboard piano bar, populated by guys named Davy who were still in the Navy and who were absolutely not supposed to be gay. Now, looking back, I still want a better, more meaningful, more vibrant retrospective biography, just as I did then—one in which my taste was not quite so terrible and my love life not quite so futile and clichéd. But our nostalgia chooses us, not the other way around. Billy Joel played me my memory, and I can’t blow it out of my nose. It’s sad and it’s sweet and I know it as complete as when I wore that younger dope’s clothes.

The year was 2005, and I had just had my mind blown by My Chemical Romance’s album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Growing up in an Afrikaans household in South Africa meant that very few of my high school peers fell under the same emo label I did. Where they were peppy and fashionable, with a preference for the corny style of couples dancing called “sokkie,” I liked customizing everything I owned with studs and pin badges, photography (even if I wasn’t very good at it) and digging through the shelves of the local record shop. I had friends, and I was never bullied, but when I look back at that time in my life, I can’t deny I felt a sense of loneliness. My interests were diverging from everyone around me, as was my style, and although I won’t be so cliche as to say I was misunderstood, the people closest to me often thought it was “just a phase”—talk about cliches, huh?I don’t know how I found Myspace, but once I signed up, everything changed. Unlike social media platforms today that constantly enforce an ideal of perfection, Myspace encouraged individuality, however eclectic. I remember spending hours looking through themes for my page before settling on a black-and-neon-pink graffiti-style backsplash covered in skulls and bones, only to change it up again the week after…and then again a week after that. It’s funny how that kernel of expression felt so liberating in the bubble of uniformity I was desperate to escape. My page represented me, changing and evolving as I did. When I noticed people responding to my online presence, it boosted my confidence to manifest my creativity and the things that made me different in real life, too.

I don’t know how I found Myspace, but once I signed up, everything changed.

Myspace Gave Outsiders a Way to Find Each Other

Myspace—when it was still stylized as "MySpace"—made it easy to connect with people who shared your interests, and before long, I had friends by the hundreds who, despite having never met in the flesh, just got me in a way that the people around me didn’t. We could talk about bands, give each other music recommendations and gush over albums. The community I found there was like fuel to the fire. The more bands people recommended to me, the hungrier I became to find music that connected to me in a real and emotional way. That’s how I found Escape the Fate, Blessthefall, the Devil Wears Prada and numerous other bands. And then, of course, there was the music player embedded on your page. The songs I selected to feature were carefully chosen to match my theme, which in turn matched my mood. To this day, hearing Death Cab for Cutie’s “Title and Registration” always sends me back to the mid-aughts. I always think of Myspace as the social media platform that encouraged wearing your heart on your sleeve, way before anywhere else started promoting the “it’s okay to not be okay” mentality. Maybe it was just within my community of scene kids, but putting yourself out there with weird music, bold fashion choices and honest statements about how you were feeling was not only accepted but cool. You could be honest without being judged. You could be weird without being judged. You could connect with people from continents away without being judged (and get on like a house on fire). To your fellow misfits, you weren’t just going through a phase—it was just you, the most authentic version of yourself at that point in your life. And if you’re dying to know if it was just a phase, the answer is no. A decade and a half later, I continue to like what my mother calls “noise”: post-hardcore, metalcore, emo, punk. My hair is blue, and I still wear band T-shirts most days. Every now and again, though, I wonder if I would’ve eventually suppressed this side of me if it wasn’t for Myspace.

I wonder if I would’ve eventually suppressed this side of me if it wasn’t for Myspace.

I Can't Imagine My Life Without My Myspace Experience

It would be hypocritical to crucify social media platforms today for their uniformity and the need to follow trends (the latest being the insufferable need to post proof that you’ve had the vaccine). I suppose for many of my misfit friends, Myspace, itself, was a trend at the height of the scene-kid phase, but back then, even trends were indulged with creative expression instead of mindlessly following along with what everyone else was doing. Myspace unlocked the best parts of me. The love of music that was encouraged there would even lead me to work in the industry years later. The yearning for authenticity and the ability to recognize and talk about that feeling—however low or euphoric it may be—was a privilege. And I still miss the ability to rank my friends from one to ten. (I’m joking…maybe.)Myspace may not have been able to keep up with more streamlined platforms like Facebook and Twitter—hell, I was in line to sign up for them myself the first chance I got. But it had something special that nothing else had been able to replicate since: originality. Other platforms might start out with it before falling into the sinkhole of #trends. Does the platform still have that originality, now that it’s struggling to stay alive? Maybe not. But I am grateful to have experienced Myspace’s golden days. They truly did change my life.

Once you have a certain amount of tattoos, you stop being so precious about them. This is what I like to tell people when they ask what my ink means. Sure, that pine cone isn’t as evocative to me anymore, but it’s fine—it’s part of the story. All of these scribbles across my skin, gathered over 20 years or so, make up a map of all the people I’ve been. I get to carry with me all these old versions of myself and make sure we remain on speaking terms. Everything I’ve said is true—it’s how I feel most days. But on a bad day, another feeling creeps in: I look down at the four-leaf clover on my arm, the one I share with my ex-husband, and I absentmindedly start thinking about how I could position another tattoo to cover it up.But should I? We got married, which was great, and now we’re divorced, and that’s OK, too-ish. Would covering it up be like trying to erase part of my story? I’ve had a tattoo covered once before but that was because it meant nothing to me. If I had this one removed, it would be because it meant too much. If I feel like this now, years later, does that mean I should just go ahead and do what I want with my body? Or is it a sign that I’ve still got some stuff to sort through? The answer to both questions is yes—and it resolves nothing.

Our tattoo mocks me, not because my marriage failed but because I dared hope for a bond that would last.

The Clover Tattoo Leaves a Bad Taste

Memories are layered. I have a scraggy feather tattoo that I got after a very unsettled time in my 20s, but looking at it now, all I feel is sympathy and affection for that old version of myself. I have a tattoo of a San Francisco landmark, and while my feelings for the city have changed over time, looking at it reminds me of personal evolution. There’s a rush of feeling associated with each tattoo, but while all the other ones have landed somewhere palpable, the clover still leaves a bad taste. My ex-husband and I got those tattoos just after we got married, representing the wild luck that led to our wedding only months after meeting. I understand now that it wasn’t luck at all—it was a decision, one which came with an underlying belief that I didn’t yet realize I had: I thought being married would create a partnership. Not because marriage is in any way magical but because it steers your actions toward building togetherness. I still believe that this is an important component of lasting relationships. But I also know that it’s not a given that this is going to happen just because you’re together. In the month before we married, we did sit down to talk about what we wanted, and we both told the truth as we understood it. We all want to think we can be the best versions of ourselves.

My Guilt Over the Divorce Has Turned to Anger

The divorce was my call, so for a long time, I felt like it was my fault. We only met once after I moved out: to sign the divorce papers, which required me to list the reasons for his so-called “unreasonable behavior,” a ridiculous requirement to throw around blame that has since been abolished. I didn’t want to do it by myself because he’d also have to sign the papers, and I didn’t want him to feel assaulted by this list. We got married together, so I thought we should try and get divorced together, too. We had a collaborative enough divorce, but it turned out to be the last thing we’d ever do together. When people ask me about it, I tend to just say, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” which is certainly true. But the way I feel when I look at my stupidly optimistic wedding tattoo tells me I feel something else, too. My feelings of guilt have given way to anger, and I think it’s because I feel like he didn’t live up to his end of the deal. I might have divorced him, but he was the one who decided we should never have anything to do with each other again. After our romantic relationship ended, I wanted us to be friends—family, even. I didn’t expect him to salt the earth. Our tattoo mocks me, not because my marriage failed but because I dared hope for a bond that would last.

We got married together, so I thought we should try and get divorced together, too.

I Want to Repair the Relationship With My Ex

I know that time might change the symbolism of this tattoo for me, as it has with others. Memory is far from the accurate archive we think it is, and it changes all the time. But I can’t help but think that maybe I’d have an easier time folding my brush with matrimony into the story of my life if I got to do it on my own terms instead of being constantly mocked by an unlucky clover.For now, the clover will stay—I’m holding out for a better outcome to the story. I want to see if I can get on speaking terms with the person I was when I got that tattoo, and also with the version of myself who has to live with being so profoundly and publicly wrong about something I felt so sure about. It feels like a good lesson. If only I could figure out how to learn it. And yes, I may still get rid of my tattoo.

I was born in 1984, a time when hip-hop was emerging, synthpop was peaking, mullets and perms were en vogue and the Corvette was the coolest car in the world. It was a time of oversaturated color. I remember the brightest yellows and oranges lining the interiors and packaging at McDonald's and the rich reds and greens after getting our Kodak film developed. Long before the shrill blue of halogen lamps, streetlights left a yellow halo raining down as day transitioned into night. I've been returning to this place a lot lately. As an artist, it's a well from which I draw significant inspiration, this time of youthful simplicity when Technicolor and Dolby sound were the technological leaders of the day. We used to play outside all afternoon on our dead-end street and at the local park.It started with Big Wheels and Huffy BMX bikes, progressed to rollerblades and street hockey and eventually matured through lots of skateboarding on makeshift wood ramps. Throughout it all, I became intimate with the feeling of pavement embedded into scraped knees, palms and elbows, picking rocks and dirt out of patches of blood, marks of youth, subtle growing pains. I remember when my father came home with our first computer, a Macintosh Plus. There were a few games we could play, in gray and black pixels with the big plastic mouse offering one giant control button wired to the machine. The computer wasn't super interesting at that point. It was really just a glorified word processor spitting out printed text on spools of paper with rippable holes on the sides so they'd stay aligned on the printer.We may have had some homework assignments or projects that asked us to insert plastic disks to open applications and create digital stuff, but outside was much more magnetic, our Legos were more compelling, our new pingpong table was way more fun. Ultimately, being with people and engaging with physical objects felt right as a kid. Today, as a 36-year-old artist, it still does.

The next thing I remember was porn.

I Started Burning CDs, Using AIM and Watching Porn Online

It wasn't too long until we upgraded to a newer computer. The screen became color and plastic disks turned into shiny plastic CDs. I'll never forget the day when the blue, white and yellow America Online CD came in the mail. I'd heard about it already; kids at school talked about getting online, parents setting up emails. I was confused by the whole internet thing, the modem that dinged and danged as it took over the phone line and connected to some other web.We were given a technological gateway to step into a new world of mass communication and information on a scale seen never before. Not only was this technology a gateway, but the mid- to late-’90s was a time when our attention was quickly transitioning. We were becoming enveloped in all the trappings that AOL and the internet had to offer.I know my parents set up email first, but for us kids, it was AIM that really mattered. (AIM was AOL's instant messaging service.) We could chat all day and night with friends and occasional strangers and discovered new ways of conversing through symbols, sound, text and abbreviations (lol, brb, ttyl).The next thing I remember was porn. I remember hanging with friends who had better connections and would pull up pictures of naked women from sites across the net for us to stare at for hours. This quickly became a private activity with a bit more physicality and a growing offline folder of saved images hiding among my saved homework documents.As the internet speed picked up, we started to get free music. Winamp or iTunes were our libraries, but we could plug into LimeWire, Kazaa and Napster to download all the music we wanted from others who opened their hard drives for the scouring. I vividly remember when the first kid in high school got a CD burner and began making CD mixtapes for us. He charged $5 a mix, and we could put whatever songs we wanted on it and even make our own art for the cases.

Texting and Dating Became Intertwined

Throughout this progression of technological innovation, I was going through my teens and discovering my sexuality, creativity and passions beyond the screen. Our family had a shared Nokia cell phone for emergencies that I started taking with me when I’d go out, but it wasn’t until freshman year of college when I finally got my own phone and began T9 texting ferociously. I developed entire relationships with crushes through those phones and the power of my thumbs.It was beyond comprehension how quickly screens delivering music, chats and porn would be obsolete next to the screens in our pockets delivering dating apps, sexts, selfies and videos. I used to be so judgy about dating apps, heard sketchy stories about people meeting on Craigslist for sex and was generally nervous of stranger danger. But, by 2010, it was standard practice to be dating online, and I quickly joined in. With internet culture, what had previously been taboo quickly became vogue. I began meeting women online and going out on dates, sometimes just for casual sex and sometimes a little bit more, but nothing materialized into a deep, ongoing relationship. I just couldn’t imagine meeting my person online. It felt so inauthentic.A few years ago, I got really sick and had to distance myself from screens for a while. I would feel ill when I’d open my computer, and I limited time on my phone to only what felt necessary. As I returned to connect with my authentic needs for healing and life, I met a woman at a party who became my wife. But within a year of this necessary respite from the screen, I was back, compulsively checking Instagram, email, text and Facebook minute by minute regardless of what else I was doing.

I still struggle to control myself and put it down or keep it away.

I’m Always Aware of My Screen Time

I recognize the addiction, the habit that feels all too natural—to reach into my pocket and grab the phone, to keep it next to me at all times, to open it up and see what’s new even when my notifications have been turned off. I still struggle to control myself and put it down or keep it away for long periods of time.I wish it wasn’t so difficult.When I got sick, I also stepped away from my corporate life and became a full-time artist. I painted objects, paper and canvas with bold, bright primary colors. These shapes and colors were bringing me back to my joy before the internet arrived. Perhaps my respite is this colorful immersion that brings me back to a pre-internet age. I sit writing this in a studio filled from floor to ceiling with these colors, bursting with energy and love and holding space for a piece of me that still exists before the world changed.

Giggsy, Teller and I had been enjoying a spring evening driving around the darkened countryside. It was a crisp and clear night, and we shared stories and laughs and tales of female conquests, as lads do. But our mission was incomplete. Our plan had been to find a quiet, rural pharmacy and liberate its dangerous drugs cabinet and register.We’d been knocking around together for a month or two. We had a penchant for narcotics that no end of pharmacies could satisfy. We were in the fortunate position of not being in a hot car for once, though to describe it as strictly legal would be stretching it. None of us held a license, but these were the pre-digital record days. We had even been pulled over by the local police at around 11 p.m. They said we seemed to be in a hurry away from somewhere. It proved to be something of a fool’s errand when their bemused faces receded into the dark of the rearview mirror. They were for sure looking for other vagabonds; otherwise, their search and interest would have carried a little more voltage. They knew us all by name and face and we gave them a half-hearted routine on police harassment. They did go as far as to say, just as they turned away, “You do have a license, don’t you Johnnie?” I smiled and never skipped a step as we remounted our wreck of a Ford Escort steed. The car was barely drivable, let alone safe. After this near miss of sorts, we decided to cut our losses and invest time in smoking the little hash we had, drinking a few beers and sleeping in the car in a hidden lay-by, just off a back road in the local mountains.

You’d have liked us but would never have chosen us as matches for your daughters.

We Stole Cars and Robbed Pharmacies

Giggsy was as close as you can be without being blood, perhaps closer (as life has taught me in the many intervening years). He was like a little brother, and I, in turn, was close to the rest of his family. Teller was a pal. I’d gotten to know him when I got wind of his plot to steal my real brother’s motorcycle. Punches were exchanged, but, as is the way, we found each other tolerable, fun and useful to be around. We were young but carried monkeys on our backs the size of small houses. The three of us had ended up working together on some pointless government scheme, earning £29 a week. The high life was not available at that pay rate. No life was available. But we weren’t interested in money, just punk and politics and drugs. Yeah, drugs! Usually, we worked away from our locale. We’d steal a hire car from the Manchester Airport, then rob a pharmacy or two, then “plot-up” in a hotel on the funds taken from the registers for as many days as the drugs and cash lasted. Depleted, the dawn of sickness came, and need forced us ever onwards.Fortunately, on the night I speak of, the pressure was mediated by the fact that, in my pocket, I had a generous Rx prescription for methadone ampoules and Valium, plenty to keep us going for a few more useless miles. The more useless, the better, I thought. We spat in the eye of conformity and were unapologetic users. Trust me, you’d have liked us but would never have chosen us as matches for your daughters.

My Car’s Suspension Collapsed and We Tumbled

If you’ve ever got drunk and stoned in a car you intended to sleep in on a chilly April night, you have some idea of how we felt in the morning—other than, perhaps, the egg timer of opiates running down, the early morning melancholy described by Burroughs and the visceral need of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” a song conceived the year I was born. We were getting sick and, as I now recall, my sister’s then-boyfriend happened to pass. He was a local jock, to coin an American term—a big, tough, drunk motherfucker and the father of my nephews and nieces. He looked at us sideways and quipped as he leaned in through the window, “You fuckers smell.” He told us to stay out of trouble.My assigned pharmacy was a 25-mile drive. For the sake of discretion, I kept my medical shit as private as possible for the sake of my mom and family. Another fool’s errand. If only I’d picked the one three miles away.We were driving a difficult country road, strewn intermittently with city dwellers that had no idea of how to drive winding, faster roads I was driving fast but not beyond the 60 mph speed limit on that road. All I recall is coming to a right-hand bend, not too steep but able to slip away from you. Just as I hit the apex, the rear right suspension collapsed and we slid, hit a concrete bollard and then the car tumbled over and over. The noise was infernal and the whole incident seemed to last an eternity. I had my seat belt on. I felt Teller hit me at some point in the roll. Giggsy was in the back.As the car came to a rest, I was in a daze. People came running from stationary cars. Someone grabbed me and sat me in their car. I was trying to shake them off but went into some kind of shock. I turned back and somehow Giggsy had ended up in the boot of the car. Teller was unconscious in his seat. I fucking wailed. I knew this was as bad as bad can be. Pale, worried faces pressed against my peripheral vision and scared the shit out of a few tourists.

I was fucked.

The Paramedic Told Me My Best Friend Had Died

I won’t labor the details here. I could see passersby swarming around Giggsy and Teller. I was ensconced in the front seat of a Samaritan's Jeep, getting so sick I almost stole his car to get to the pharmacy. I can never forgive myself for that thought, but it showed me the depth of my dependence. My prefrontal cortex was completely hijacked. I was fucked.Two ambulances arrived within around 30 minutes. I’ll never know if their timing would have made a difference. A kind old paramedic strapped me in my seat. I was unharmed but in shock and going into withdrawals. I begged him for information. He looked me square in the eye with nothing but compassion and said, “The lad in the back didn’t make it. The other in the front is touch and go.” Giggsy was dead. Teller was in a coma for nine long days but survived. I felt my soul darken, and yet another part of me broke.Needless to say, no one seemed to give too much of a fuck aside from friends and family. I’d just killed one of my best friends, and as the process worked itself through, I had my day in court and was fined £400 for careless driving and driving an unroadworthy vehicle. I went mad—literally mad. The guilt was endless. I would rage at the moon screaming, “Why not me, you fucker, why…not…ME?!” I drank and used and fucked and on and on and on until the pain disappeared as I ended every night unconscious. About a year later, I was convicted of robbery at a pharmacy. I got five years. I fucking laughed and deserved every minute of that time.

I Received a Message From Beyond the Grave

Four years later, I was sitting in my office in London, opposite my then-partner. She helped me get a job and interesting stuff to do straight out of the jail gate. I never told her about the crash. She told me she was psychic and consulted a spirit guide, and one day, she jumped up and shouted. “We have to go—now!” She took me to the “spooks” place as I would call it, gently mocking. I remember sitting in the cafe, waiting for her, reading the NME about the formation of Black Grape.She came down an hour later. “I was told I was sent here for someone else, someone not ready to be here for himself because he still has a black aura,” she said. That frightened me but rang true. Then she asked me, “Did you know a guy by the name of Giggsy?” I nodded, went cold and felt a wave of nausea. She said the message was from Giggsy. He said, “There is only love on this side.” She caught me as I fell.I have no more words.

Grad school is hell. I entered it exhausted and thrilled, needing to stop and ready to go. It was my top choice; it was Harvard. It would be fantastic. I’d done what I was supposed to. Two weeks in, I had a messy breakup, one I should have seen coming and should have initiated. I was least prepared for how it affected my academics. I expected it to have no effect. The highs and lows of my grades were a cycle somehow independent of my disastrous mental health, but they always averaged high enough to keep my educators impressed.But I was worn down by burnout, living alone with a liquor store or bar on every corner. I got wasted nightly and blasted music through my headphones like I was a kid drowning out the school bus with emo-pop again. I rewatched the same sexy teen TV shows over and over, tracking the plot through a wine-soaked fog only because I’d seen them so often. I lay under the shower for the white noise, made physical against my skin, and tried not to think. It was a kind of awfulness I hadn’t experienced for years. Everything between then and the breakup surged to the surface in lists of my faults, memories of awkward moments and misspoken words, flooding me every second of the day. I couldn’t think about the breakup, or I’d stop being able to delude myself into believing it was temporary. Then I might really be miserable.

Not allowing yourself to think is bad for an academic career.

I Found the Glee Fan Fiction I Wrote as a Teenager

Not allowing yourself to think is bad for an academic career. I dropped the first class in my life. I showed up in other classes with alcohol still sloshing in my head. I lost track of my thoughts every few seconds and saw in the faces of my professors and classmates every expression on a range between pity and disdain. I pretended not to know where my headaches and stomachaches were coming from and successfully deluded myself into ignoring the red hands printed in purple stains around my apartment. I wrung every bit of serotonin I could out of YouTube and video games, Netflix and old favorite albums.Down that drunken hole, alone in my apartment and having run through all the old favorite TV shows and movies and music I could bombard my senses with, I resorted to scrolling through my external hard drive. After a series of half-written first chapters of derivative novels, I found an embarrassing amount of my Glee fan fiction.Maybe because it was high school, maybe because I was desperate to be good at singing in spite of my lack of talent: This was the only fan fiction I’d written with a self-inserted character. I hadn’t thought much about that character for a long time, but I read through all the eloquence of a 15-year-old fangirl, mostly copy-pasting song lyrics, and I found myself attached to the character from the outside. I look back at high school and never stop cringing. But for some reason, this character drew me in.So I went and I found the original three chapters of something I’d written that had given my character an original story and read those before I passed out. When I woke up, I got through the routine of barfing and taking some meds, then I found a different half-finished version of the story I’d written, one I’d whipped up during a midterm season I wanted to ignore. I read it during my classes, trying not to vomit on the floor of the classroom. I slept off a migraine for two days.

My Grades Got Worse as I Began Writing Again

I had old fan fiction and a half-baked idea. I hated being in school. I hated the idea of it ending, of having to figure out a new me at the end, of having to figure out what job I was going to get with a useless degree from a prestigious school that didn’t involve getting a doctorate.I spent November of my second year writing a complete story based on the skeleton I had. It sucked from the get-go. It was malformed and built out of a corpse of something I would have no longer liked living. So I started again, and as it came together, so did I. I remembered what it felt like to want to do something. To want to do anything. I let myself become the obsessive writer, with all the alcohol and suicidal ideation. Now, I’m supposed to tell you it made me a better student. Or that it helped with my alcoholism. The latter is marginally true—paying attention to the writing kept me from thinking much about what made me want to drink and kept me distracted from the idea itself. And, it turns out, in the space between 14 and 25, I had become a better writer.The brightness of the spark in the story threw my burnout into higher relief, and I became a worse student. The manuscript was a nightmare, unruly and refusing to work, made of pointed edges. When they cut me, I bled a sludge of fermented teen angst. It was grueling and demanded all my time. I never transformed into a better student; I became a worse one. Hands caked in the muck of bad prose, terrible characterization and a boring plot, I began to realize the breakup didn’t help, but it didn’t matter. The fight I’d been losing was between who I should be and who I was. Between what I wanted and what the world wanted of me.

The fight I’d been losing was between who I should be and who I was.

Rewriting My Character Helped Me See a Better Future

I’ll spare you the rant on the destructive nature of the academy as it is and leave you with this: I had to become a shitty student to become someone whose life I liked.There’s this idea that when you do well in school, you owe it to the world to keep going up—in academics, in industry, wherever. You can do anything, everything. Or so you keep being told. If you don’t, if you aren’t always at the top, you aren’t living up to your potential. It’s wasteful. Encouragement from teachers and parents so easily becomes disgust. But why does having an option mean you have to take it?Well, turns out I couldn’t take it. Trying broke me apart. But stripping a story and a character down and watching them come together stronger, into everything I always knew they could be, made it a little easier to believe I wouldn’t stay in pieces.

During my university years, the TV show Friends was one of the most-watched series of all time. In fact, it was so popular in my shared student house that the gentle hum of Chandler, Phoebe, Rachel and Joey’s voices became almost like white noise. Cozy and constant, it was a comforting blanket that we all relied upon. From heartbreak to hangovers to long hours of studying and general boredom, we would lay on the bed together laughing at Chandler’s quippy one-liners, Monica’s neurosis and Ross’s general goofiness. We all had a favorite episode that we’d play on repeat. Mine was that one where Ross gets stuck in his leather trousers, but for my friends, it was the classic “The One Without the Ski Trip” or “The One With the Cop.”As this was long before the time of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, our choice of TV shows was limited, so we watched things differently. One of us would invest in the box set, and we’d watch it until the DVD became too scratched to work properly. I often wonder now if we would have devoured it so intensely if other shows were around to take our attention or whether it would have still stood up as such a classic? I imagine it would be the latter.

I also relished an opportunity to take a trip back in time to an era that was so much more carefree than my present situation.

The ‘Friends’ Reunion Made Me Feel Weird

Like millions of others last month, I tuned in eagerly to the long-awaited Friends reunion. While I hadn’t really sat down to watch an episode in quite a long time, I still cared about what the cast was doing. I also relished an opportunity to take a trip back in time to an era that was so much more carefree than my present situation—married with a business, a child and another on the way. Just a few clips in and the sight of the old set with the now 20-year-aged cast made me feel a bit, well, weird. It was like opening an old photo album of ex-boyfriends and memories that, while happy and hedonistic, were hard to look at for too long. I wanted to push it back under the bed, where it wouldn’t be pulled out again until another 20 years or so. Why? For me, so many of the episodes are evocative of a certain time or event, loaded with far more emotion and nostalgia than they probably should. I loved my university years and, while I’m not one to fear or dislike aging, it’s a period of time that I miss a lot. I think that’s why it feels a little bit painful. It underscores the fact that it’s a part of my life that will never be again and, in all honesty, it makes me a bit sad.

The women had felt the need to hang on to their youth and beauty with quite obvious aesthetic tweaks.

It’s Important to Leave Some Things Where They Belong

But not only that, the reunion made me realize how much has changed not just in my own life but in the world in general. The cast itself seemed heavier in spirit than their younger and fictional characters that were so etched into my consciousness. It was like lifting the curtain on a behind-the-scenes view that I didn’t really want to see. I felt for Matthew Perry (aka Chandler Bing), who seemed lost and quiet and so far from his on-screen persona, not to mention depressed that the women had felt the need to hang on to their youth and beauty with quite obvious aesthetic tweaks. The show’s creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, were asked if they’d ever consider creating more episodes. Their answer was a straight-up “no.” I couldn’t help but feel relieved and agreed wholeheartedly with their sentiments that no attempt should be made to continue the characters’ stories and pick up where they left off. They had tied things up so nicely, they said. Why would they want to mess with that?There are some things—like my university days and our friends in Central Perk—that should be left in the place we remember them: happy, undisturbed and forever young.

It never crossed my mind that I would live anywhere but on the American land that I loved—in a farmhouse surrounded by weeping willows, enclosed with a white picket fence. Why would I consider living anywhere else, when my family, my history and my comfort were here, in this country brimming with diversity and determination?Then I met someone with whom I wanted to live the rest of my life. Instead of being American-born and bred, he was British-designed, complete with an accent and a constantly filled cup of milky tea. In a matter of months, my reality and my future transformed. My new husband and I moved into a small, rented, terraced house in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. The rooms were tiny. The garden was tiny. Even the oven was tiny. But it was home, and we did what we could to make it cozy. I had to adjust to driving on the opposite of the road, to the unique Merthyr accent that barely could be classified as English and to a whole group of new people that I had never met before. I was often overwhelmed with the change and the inability to run home to my mom for relief. But even when I wanted to run away, I didn’t regret my new life and learned to appreciate the different culture.Yet, I was left with memories of people, places, smells and tastes that I could no longer experience. All I could do was reminisce about what I missed about home, nostalgically wishing I could hold onto the feels of my familiar.

I was left with memories of people, places, smells and tastes that I could no longer experience.

Loss Is Different When It’s Long Distance

My grandmother, whom I called Maw-Maw, was one of the dearest people I ever have known. She lived in a house in the Louisiana country surrounded by pecan trees and cotton fields. My sister and I would visit her for weeks at a time during the Christmas and summer holidays, where she kept us inundated with German chocolate cake, Folgers coffee and Wheel of Fortune. She liked to call me her “black-eyed Susan” in her deep Southern drawl and describe the different birds she could see out the window while perched on the baby blue front-room couch. My affection for her was immeasurable. After a year of living in a terraced Welsh house with my beloved husband, I got a call from my sister in the middle of the night. She was aware of the five-hour time difference, so I knew it must be urgent. “She’s gone.” I couldn’t control the heaving tears that flowed in response. There was no closure, no goodbye. In one five-minute conversation, Maw-Maw simply ceased to exist. I closed my eyes, eager to see her red hair and her wide smile, desperate to create visual images of each room in her house, eager not to forget little details of her wood-burning stove or photograph-filled drawers. There were other people I had left behind when I moved across the Atlantic. Friends who had become siblings. A sister who had become my friend. Parents who had raised me, whose homes I had grown up in.

I Could Go Home, but I Could Never Go Back

When I was in high school, weekends and snow days were spent roaming the neighborhood on bikes with kids like me who had no concept of the world outside our own. Our biggest problem was whose house to stop at to refill on popcorn, Pop-Tarts and hot chocolate. We frequented the local park to play volleyball and had sleepovers after watching Pride and Prejudice, dreaming we could one day end up with our own Mr. Darcys. On a visit back to the States, my husband and I drove around the idyllic neighborhood that I once had explored with friends. Mom had moved to another state and our house was now filled with a family I never would know. The kids I had spent hours with had grown up, moved states, married, birthed children and moved up their career ladders. The homes I had known so intimately had transformed into just another set of lifeless houses I didn’t know, devoid of the people who brought them life and meaning. My childhood had disappeared. I wanted to feel the naivete of my youth again. In that insulated bubble, I didn’t worry, as adults must, about paying for rent and electricity. I was protected from death, abuse, poverty and politics. All I knew was my daily routine, which rarely diverged from Cinnamon Toast Crunch, math lessons, Dawson’s Creek and bedtime.Visiting my memories in real time reminded me that that life no longer existed. I will never feel youth again. The sweetness of the memory is tainted with the reality that none of it is real anymore. Time and time again, when I feel homesick for my homeland, I have to remind myself that the America I left 10 years ago is not the America that exists today. Presidents have come and gone. (Some a blessing, some a curse.) Friends have changed, but I haven’t been there to change with them. My parents have moved into houses I don’t know. Maw-Maw isn’t watching her favorite game shows anymore. Even my old stomping ground, the local shopping mall, has been demolished. There is so much about America I no longer would recognize, no longer love.

My America has changed. I have changed.

My Homeland and I Have Drifted Apart

After living in Wales for nearly a decade, I see America through a different lens. I suppose that you can see more clearly, more objectively, when you are not in the thick of it. I see the racism, the shootings, the extremism, the xenophobia, the obsession with success—the over-the-topness of just about everything. My America has changed. I have changed.And when nostalgia creeps in, reminding me of what I’m missing, of what I abandoned, I quickly remind myself that those memories are just that: memories. They can be recalled and retold but can’t be relived. Better to live in the moment, content with my present and appreciative for my past, instead of pining over people and places as they used to be, wishing I could have them again.

I have always been fascinated by the depths our bodies can endure. The duality of our mind both creates walls and destroys them. When we are tested, we are capable of much more than we think. This train of thought has led me down a path of all different self-experiments and, in the summer of 2018, a perfect storm of sleep deprivation, drugs and an ultramarathon led me to discover “the edge.”It began at my business partner's wedding, a beautiful affair on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Upstate New York. In three days, I was due to race an ultra-marathon on the other side of the country in the Nevada desert at Burning Man. I had the best intentions to behave myself at the wedding, but one cocktail turned into several, then someone slipped me some ecstasy and mushrooms, and the evening was off to a wild ride.The night raged on and culminated with lovemaking at sunrise with a lady friend on a mattress we pulled out of a dusty supply cupboard. Sunday morning delivered one of those ghastly headaches that open bars at weddings are famous for. I ambled my way back to Brooklyn to pack for Burning Man. By the time I packed, I’d managed to eke out three hours' sleep before flying to Portland to collect our RV. I told myself everything would be fine.

Then someone slipped me some ecstasy and mushrooms, and the evening was off to a wild ride.

Traveling Kept Me From Getting Any Sleep Before the Race

We arrived in Portland on Monday around lunchtime and picked up our RV. The race was in 17 hours and maps said it was a 12-hour drive. We hit the road stopping only for fuel and supplies. We carefully hid a considerable cache of recreational drugs intended to last us six days at the Burn. My friend and I split the driving and, around sunset, I started to hit my first wall.A wall for me is an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. It’s the body's “low battery” warning. I tried to nap, but by the time I found a comfy position in the RV, it was my time to drive again. I cranked a Red Bull and some techno music to find a second wind. We arrived at the famous Burning Man traffic jam around 3 a.m. By the time we were through the gates, only an hour remained before the race.As I laced up my shoes, I hit my second wall. Three hours of sleep in three nights started to catch up with me. Imagine the finish line, I thought. I trudged towards the start line. Butterflies formed in my stomach, adrenaline coursed through my veins. The energy of 300 eager ultramarathoners brought upon a much-needed third wind and I was ready to race.When people say Burning Man has something for everyone, it’s true. If your thing is subjecting yourself to a sustained battering of your legs, aerobic system and mind, then there’s an ultramarathon for that. These are the deranged masochists of Burning Man. Many are dressed in costumes. There are tutus, a Superman, a leprechaun. One guy is fully naked except for his shoes. The race is four full laps of the festival. I told myself I am exactly where I am supposed to be.Running is an easy sport. The only real thing you need to do is not stop. Some say it’s the art of dying the fastest. The hard part is convincing yourself to not stop. Your mind wants to throw up walls and convince you that you are in danger and should no longer go on, but the mind also has the power to overcome. It’s as much about inner strength as it is about outer strength. Mind over body.

Running on No Sleep Wasn’t So Bad—For the First 42 km

At 5 a.m., the starting bell rang. We made our way through the dark campsites and out onto the playa, full of lights, art, cars and music. The Milky Way bore high overhead. By the second lap, light appeared on the horizon, and the sun rose over the playa revealing revelers who were still partying from the night before.By lap four, the sun blazed overhead. I found myself sitting in 11th place. At 42 kilometers in, I felt a third wall coming on. My legs started to feel heavy. My mind convinced me that I was doing some permanent damage to my joints as my knees and ankles screamed in pain. My lungs stung from the heat and my eyes were red from the dust. My pace slowed to a crawl with the finish line in sight. I told myself to keep going but the body refused to listen. I stopped.At this point, I heard measured panting from behind. A fully naked man in his 50s slowly jogged past me. I tried to move my legs to keep up with him, but my legs had no more to give. There is a slow sad irony of being overtaken by a naked man in a marathon. You can’t help but check out his dusty tanned butt cheeks as they slowly pass you. A strange torture.In the wake of his cheeks, I found a fourth wind. If a naked man could finish this race, so could I. Using energy conjured from an unknown source, I found the willpower required for the last eight kilometers. Shattered and dusty, I rolled into the finish line in a little under four hours. An honorable finish considering the sheer lack of sleep. My friends were there to greet me.

A fully naked man in his 50s jogged past me.

It Took Four Days for My Body to Reach Its Limit

It was 9 a.m. and my crew was rested and ready for action. Someone slipped me a tab of acid and we were off on our bikes exploring the playa. The acid and excitement of exploration brought on a fifth wind. The acid negates the exhaustion and we bounced from party to party. With a little top-up of ketamine, we headed off to a sunset dance party. By the time 4 a.m. rolled around, I was in awe of my body. Still standing and into my fourth sleep-deprived night. Alas, the sixth and final wall hit me. I knew this experiment should end. Delirium overtook me and I asked my friend Nicole to escort me safely back to camp. We zig-zagged home and on the final turn before our camp, the world turned black.Nicole dropped her bike and raced over to my dusty, tangled body. She removed my bike from on top of me as I regained consciousness. My eyes fluttered open and I saw a frightened look upon her eyes. I laughed like a hyena. “What’s funny?” she said. “Only those who have been over the edge know where the edge is,” I said. “And we found the edge.”

The visit began in the night, stepping off the train with luggage and no phone service. My girlfriend and I had only been dating four months and decided against our better judgment to book plane tickets and fly across the Atlantic Ocean, a lesbian equivalent perhaps of moving in together immediately or buying a dog while drunk after brunch.We had never traveled together and didn't know what to expect abroad in terms of hospitality towards an openly queer couple, having only spent time together in New York City and Philadelphia. I quickly booked a bed-and-breakfast online in Sussex before flying out, pretending I had planned our sleeping arrangements for weeks. I wrote the address down in a notebook, assuming we'd easily find the place when we arrived.

It was bitterly cold, everything black in the dark.

Our Adventure Began at a Victorian Mansion

After asking around at the corner pub and walking up what was essentially a cliff-face in the dark for over an hour, we ran into a man on the street who directed us toward what looked like a Victorian mansion in the shadows, with looming red-orange brick, more vertical than horizontal. "There's no way that's the place. I'm not knocking on the door," my girlfriend exclaimed, standing motionless on the driveway while I walked down the sidewalk toward the front door. I held my breath before knocking, the way one holds their breath in a tunnel when they're a child, exhaling only when the light comes back.I didn't see any lights on inside, and I kept thinking of the poet Alice Notley's “Mysteries of Small Houses,” like a tape repeating in my mind. "I'm here/In the Rebel Motel, with/my grape-colored sweater/and mate tea, whose smoky odor's/bound up with first rooms and foods here/sex and snow I..." The line in my head ends with “I,” because I can't possibly know what I'm supposed to do if no one comes. Finally, I heard the sound of someone walking downstairs. Soon, a man, let’s call him "G," creaked open the door. "We've been expecting you," he said."Babe! We're at the right place!" I yelled.The Virgo apprehensively walked with the suitcases towards the door, as if I were also a strange man in the dark. G led us up a flight of stairs whose walls were filled with Christian iconography—wooden crucifixes and Virgin Marys—as if we were in some kind of Catholic gift shop with original William Morris wallpaper. Bird heads peeked around the Marys, looping out of Escher-like lattices that seemed to pop out at us. "You'll meet my husband in the morning," he said, after leading us to our room and wishing us goodnight.

The Bed and Breakfast Had Its Quirky Charms

In the morning, a tray of tea and milk was silently waiting in porcelain cups outside our door. At breakfast, we learned that G and "H" (his husband) were actually Buddhists with an affinity for Virgin Marys and a singular passion for returning the house to its original interior, which had become a full-time job. This was evident in the bathroom under construction near our room, with its in-progress installation of 19th-century plumbing.We eventually fell into a short-term rhythm, spending the days by the sea with our friend "A" and her partner, and nights and evenings wandering the house. On New Year's Eve, the four of us walked along the English Channel after midnight, writing wishes for the new year onto slips of paper and tucking them into empty wine bottles from the pub where A worked. We threw them into the ocean. It was bitterly cold, everything black in the dark: beach, sand, sea, sky, even the wind.Later, we returned to the house and wandered the halls in the dark, stumbling into an unknown room that we deciphered to be the opium den. A boiled water for tea and we drank it on the chaise. I wanted to feel like Oscar Wilde, but I felt like an awkward, androgynous spider in a funhouse, my two fathers sleeping below our own canopy bed somewhere in the house.

I wanted to feel like Oscar Wilde, but I felt like an awkward, androgynous spider in a funhouse.

The Mansion Became a Queer Gathering Spot

On New Year's Day morning, we made our way down to breakfast and War and Peace was being read aloud on BBC Radio. "A British tradition," one woman said. Another woman whipped out a bottle of hot sauce from her hiking pack, drenching her sausage, beans and overcooked egg. She exclaimed that food always needed hot sauce, and you always need to be prepared with your own, especially when traveling.Another woman agreed about the necessity of keeping hot sauce on your person (in either a backpack or a large back pocket), and it turned out that the four women at the table with us also had partners, and that the three pairs of us, combined with our hosts, made this an unexpectedly very queer Victorian New Year's house, listening to Tolstoy and eating hot beans. "How did you find this place?" the Virgo asked later. "It's bizarre." I honestly couldn’t remember.On our final way out, we passed red velvet chairs, like butterflies folded open, and towering lamps. We said goodbye to the massive greenhouse behind the house. I wondered if ghosts had ghosts as well, and if they were all queer living together in this house, its own universe outside of time, or if they only gathered at New Year's to listen to the radio and pour hot sauce on their Victorian breakfasts.

Before I’m even out of the hospital, I have a plan to buy drugs. If I could have dope delivered to me in the ICU, that’d be perfect. I’m half-asleep in a Chicago hospital and there’s an IV in the exact vein that got me here. My body’s frail and I’ve been wearing the same jeans for two months. Five years from now, I’ll be three years clean of heroin, which means there are still two years left of this bullshit, and it’s going to get worse. Rock bottom wasn’t death; it was change. I romanticized my toxic behavior and convinced myself this was my path, a pilgrimage to becoming something. I was meant to be a forgotten soul. My entire life, I’ve been trying to write the perfect excuse and suicide note.My sense of self was entangled in addiction. It caught me in my prime and I struggled to breathe. My conscience decided our salvation wasn’t coming.

Rock bottom wasn’t death; it was change.

Getting Clean Never Seemed Like an Incentive

Once you’ve convinced yourself that you’re a bad person, your brain does everything it can to keep that sense of identity. I spent six years killing off any possibility of redemption. When I tried drowning the person I was, I felt myself disappear. If I’m not a disappointment, then who the fuck am I? I’m not a successful person. I’m not a happy person. I’m nothing. Trying to become anything other than that would have been a lie.Whenever I tried to get better, I self-destructed. I sensed myself fading away. If I got better, then what? Would I be forgiven? Would I be responsible? The expectations that come with being a good person don’t outweigh the hell that dope sickness brings. Why get clean? If everyone already thinks I’m lost, why try proving them wrong? I was content being no one, but I wanted to be someone special. I just didn’t want to put in the work. It’s a junkie’s paradox. I wanted to get help, but I’d rather get high in a South Korean bingo hall.When I wake up in the hospital, I’m alone. I had no idea what hospital I was in, or who brought me there. The only thing I could see out of my window was a brick wall. I have a song by Karen Dalton stuck in my head. Dying while the sun is still out feels derisive in a way. I think about people yanking out their tubes and storming out of the hospital, clothes in hand, ass peeking out of their hospital gown. The thought crosses my mind, but I figure I’d get to eat if I stayed.I have to get to Chinatown at some point to see Bea. I don’t know if that‘s her real name, but I know I can get a bundle of cheap, decent dope from her. At this point, I’ve already been to rehab twice, and I still wasn’t interested in getting sober. My short-term memory deteriorates when I’m going through withdrawals, so I couldn’t answer any questions about what happened earlier that day.

My Parents Grew Up in Abusive Households

A nurse hands me some bullshit pamphlet about addiction, where it said how difficult it is for addicts to accept praise for getting clean. I’ve never been good at taking compliments. I imagine it’s hard for any children of abused children. You never believe you’re good enough. You lose your passions, your sense of purpose. That’s where I was. My father came from a physically abusive family, and my mother’s mother was an addict. She was a big fan of O.J. Simpson and was adamant he was innocent. I don’t know what that says about my Mimi, but she was probably right. She smoked slims and wore a lot of gold. I’ve been conscious in the hospital for about 30 minutes when I decide to bail on free food and check myself out. I don’t have my ID, so I figure they won’t have my information. While I’m gathering my shit, I’m trying to figure out what I can pawn. I can never find time to get a job, but I can con and steal like a fucking Bond villain. I loved drugs, but part of me loved buying them even more. Every day felt like a coming-of-age movie. How was I going to get across the city with no money but still get high? I could try to find a purse or wallet to snatch, but I’d been arrested a couple of times for stealing credit card information, so I wasn’t going that route. I’m leaving the hospital and realize I’m not that far from Chinatown. I won’t have to spend money on a train or bus now.

I can never find time to get a job, but I can con and steal like a fucking Bond villain.

I Was My Drug Dealer’s Best Customer

Whenever new Apple TV devices would come out, they were oddly easy to steal. For some reason, Best Buy and Target didn’t lock them in cases or anything. So, if you were wearing a loose enough jacket, you could snag about four of them. Also, if you walk around a stockroom like you know what you’re doing, no one really fucks with you. Never underestimate the power of a nice red shirt. At the pawnshop, you could get about $50 for each of them. The relationship between addicts and pawnbrokers is complicated. It can be parental at times. They know what you’re doing there but they want you to be safe, but they also want you to come back. It’s similar to the addict-dealer affair. There was a point when my drug dealer told me I was her best customer. I was the best person she knew…at buying drugs. I’d finally been recognized for being talented at something. It felt like she cared. That was the most affection I would receive for months at a time. For me, a major part of addiction sprawled from loneliness and lack of confidence. I think, subconsciously, I started using to feel better about myself on an egotistical level. If I hang out with junkies and coke whores, I’ll feel better about myself. At least I’m not as bad as them, right? Eventually, I’d pass them up. I always want to be higher, to get as close to death as possible. It's a temptation. It’s the apple. It’s losing teeth and selling things that aren’t yours. It’s taking advantage. It’s being fucked over. It’s lowering your standards. It’s creating a complete lie to get yourself in the door. It’s coming home and leaving in the middle of the night. It’s telling your family to leave you to die. It’s making them sorry they didn’t. It’s wrecking your car and leaving any job that gave you a chance. It’s not texting back and canceling plans. It’s getting pissed off when your friends won’t help. It’s loving someone for the weekend. It’s bringing poison and poverty into their life. It’s dead bodies. It’s the unknown. It’s the emptiness. It’s all just shit.It’s not being able to tell if I’m lying to myself. It’s crying for bad people. It’s panic and empty promises. It’s being done. It’s being tired and weak from running.

Growing up, my mother and I were really close. My father walked out on us when he and my mother divorced, so, naturally, she and I had a pretty decent relationship. We moved back to her hometown when I was nine and, when she wasn't working, we usually watched movies or went for scenic drives. Sometimes we'd have long talks about our family or what was going on in the world. I had a parent, a mother and a friend. I'd come home from school and I'd know that after all the constant bullying, low test scores, struggling to pay attention, I could confer with my mother. There would be no backlash, no ridicule. I depended on her for that.After I'd turned ten, she met an abusive and narcissistic asshole. He made our lives a living hell. He'd come home from work, sit down, have a beer and watch TV. Three beers turned into ten pretty quickly. He had a nervous disorder and was prescribed an entire list of medications, none of which mixed well with alcohol. One time, I went downstairs to find that he was using a floor lamp as a baseball bat. He aimed a Mason jar at my head like he was hitting a fastball. My mother and I were both the victims of his hate.They were married after four years but finally separated around my junior year of high school. It felt like a completely different world with him gone. He ruined our lives for seven years. However, there was a part of him still with us after he left: his political beliefs.

It seemed like their whole relationship was built on the hatred of each other and the hatred of other people.

My Mom’s Right-Wing Boyfriend Began Influencing Her

My mother was a moderate Republican before she met him. And when I say moderate, I emphasize moderate. She was mostly indifferent about the government, never really going out of her way to worry about politics or bring it up around others. She lived in her own bubble. She had hobbies and dreams, she was pretty happy. And when she wasn't happy, she didn't focus on her unhappiness. She'd go through the emotions she needed to and she'd move on. However, she was impressionable. He, on the other hand, was insanely right-wing. He worked at a correctional facility and often came home spouting racist obscenities about the inmates. He'd say the hard "r" at the end of the N-word without remorse. I remember asking my mother why she was dating a racist, and she'd go, "No, he's not racist, he just deals with a lot at work." He was very clearly a racist, and I don't know how she could excuse it so nonchalantly. His interests started to meld into hers. She started hating illegal immigrants (even though she had been an illegal immigrant for a while until she finally got her citizenship). She said she wasn't racist toward people of color, but that she was just "prejudiced," as if being racist and prejudiced wasn't a possibility—or even the same thing. She would call Latino communities "chimichangas" without a second thought. Seeing both of them carry on like this made me extremely uncomfortable.

It Got More Challenging to Maintain a Relationship With My Mom

I was taught from a young age about that ancient way of thinking, and here it was, in my own environment, the fire being fueled by the people with whom I shared a house. I not only avoided having my white friends over, but I also avoided having any friends over. I didn't want my white friends thinking that I was the spawn of racists, and I didn't want to take the chance that any of my friends in other ethnic groups would be mistreated by my mother and her boyfriend. I'd come home and hear them agree with each other while they watched far-right propaganda on TV, and soon after, I'd hear them get into a screaming match. He was a domestic abuser. They hated each other. I don't know how they were together for seven years. But it seemed like their whole relationship was built on the hatred of each other and the hatred of other people.After he'd left, I was just finishing up my junior year of high school, which was also my last. I had enough credits to graduate and I wanted to escape the area I grew up in—I wanted to meet new people and, most importantly, I wanted to get a break from my mother. She was still the person he'd transformed her into, even after they separated. I was pretty much a stereotype, at least, for the military recruiters in my area. I was a lower-class white kid wanting an escape.Sure enough, I joined, shipped out to training, came back home for two weeks (most of that time being spent with my girlfriend), and prepared for a new life. I had a pretty decent run in the military after that, and my mother was doing fine. Until my time in the military came to an end.By the time COVID-19 hit in January, phone calls with my mother were getting shorter. It was like she was a completely different person. I'd see her post on Facebook saying the virus was a PSYOP or that the 5G towers were spreading it. It was like my mother had been replaced with another person. She started talking to me on the phone about someone named "Q" and how she thought JFK Jr. was still alive and was fighting an "underground war.” She even told me that there were secret underground tunnels run by Satanist, adrenochrome-injecting, Democratic pedophiles.

I was starting to lose my mind.

QAnon Has Completely Changed My Mother’s Identity

At this point, I was fully convinced that my mother had lost it. My time in the military, however, was shortened by the unluckiest of circumstances. I took the honorable discharge and got out. I needed a place to stay until I got back on my feet. So I went home. I was living with her. I couldn't walk in the kitchen to get food without her shoving some Q-adjacent propaganda down my throat. We'd get into countless arguments, back and forth, to the point where I started avoiding her. I hated talking to her. I hated the sound of her voice. The conspiracies got worse and my tolerance weakened. I was starting to lose my mind.Then, the election came. Joe Biden won. My mother and her boyfriend were both in disbelief. Everything their Q had prophesied about Donald Trump staying in power and about the "war against the Deep State" finally coming to a turning point—it was proven false in one night.Today, in the spring of 2021, we rarely speak while living in the same home. She tells me the vaccine will kill my girlfriend and me. She pleads for me to stay home to "protect against Chinese military invasions" through Canada. She and her boyfriend "gear up" with survival supplies and ammunition. She even asked me if I was ready to fire at police or military if Biden "ordered them" to come take away their guns. One of us will blindly fire at another American to uphold a conspiracy theory on the internet. One of us will not. And that is, sadly, the difference between us.

The first thing I noticed outside the metro station, other than the bone-chilling cold, was the ridiculous giant bunny begging me not to eat him or his friends. He was so cute, and yet so pitiful and so preposterous all at the same time. How could anyone eat anything that cute, even if it was delicious and nutritious? And why in the world were all these smelly hippies shrieking at us about “revolution”? And what in the heck did any of this freak-show outside have to do with the supposed solving of alleged man-made “climate change” going on inside, anyway?It felt like an insane acid trip. But it was very real. And you are paying for it all.My colleagues and I were on our way into the 25th United Nations Conference on the Parties, better known as the U.N. COP25 in Madrid. Just like the last 24 times they gathered, its members were developing a plan that would supposedly save the world from this horrible toxic pollution known as carbon dioxide—a “pollution” that is literally exhaled in large quantities by every single person on the planet, every single day, and is necessary to all plant life on earth.It was quite an “ambitious” agenda, to use the language of the U.N.'s confab. While it sounded so noble to the uninitiated, I couldn't stop thinking about Pinky and the Brain, the infamous genetically engineered cartoon lab mice who, each episode, “try to take over the world.”Of course, the hippies and the vegan lady in the bunny suit were at our entryway. That entrance is for the humble proletariat—all the tax-funded rent-a-mobs, the cheerleading squad (they prefer to be called journalists), and the legions of lower-level bureaucrats and servants who make the summits happen.The VVIPs you see on the news—also known as “Very, Very Important Persons”— have their special own entrance reserved just for them, no riffraff allowed. That way, when they get off their gas-guzzling private jets and step out of their fancy limos and helicopters, they don’t have to go past the cute bunnies or the hippies shrieking at the plebs.

It felt like an insane acid trip. But it was very real. And you are paying for it all.

Most of the Conference Was Spent Complaining About Trump

This was only my most recent adventure at one of these U.N. climate summits, which I've been attending since 2009 in exotic locations all over the world as a U.N.-credentialed reporter.If the average American could see what I have seen, or experience what I have experienced, the “climate crisis” would have been solved years ago. Indeed, the scam artists behind the whole thing would have been run out of town and probably tarred and feathered. To call the U.N. summits a clown show is a terrible insult to clowns everywhere.The U.N. climate extravaganzas are always weird and uncomfortable, especially for an American. But the one in Madrid—it moved there from Santiago at the last second after the communist revolution in Chile got too hot too quick—was especially outrageous.If an alien had shown up from outer space to find out what world leaders were doing at this COP25 conference, they would have likely concluded that they were having a billion-dollar, two-minutes-of-hate session to rage against U.S. President Donald Trump and the horrible, fat, evil, racist, fascist, polluting basket of deplorables who elected him. It seemed like every speaker spent most of their time whining about how evil Trump and America were. The sideshows put on by tax-funded “non-government organizations” were doing the same thing. And the propagandists posing as journalists were, too.Even the Americans, like current climate czar John Kerry, a man who flew in a private jet to Iceland to receive a climate leadership award and defended the PR fail by claiming that private jets were “the only choice for someone like me,” could only speak of how horrible Trump and America were.

The Fearful Rhetoric About Climate Change Hasn’t Proven to Be True

Much of the rest of the event was babbling about how there were just too many plebs for the planet to sustain. One burned-out hippie, the producer of what he claimed was the top documentary in human history, got to speak at least a few times on key stages about how there needed to be fewer people and especially fewer Swedes.Being married to a Swede, naturally, this anti-Swedish racism piqued my curiosity. “Don't have children—and I'm looking at you white men,” said the old white guy. Billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner told me something similar in Rio De Janeiro in Brazil at the U.N. Sustainable Development conference in 2012. He has five kids. But then, he's not a pleb.Speaking of hypocrisy, at the Madrid summit, my team and I ran into former New York City overlord Mike Bloomberg as well. Naturally, the man was surrounded by at least three heavily armed bodyguards. And obviously, he came in one of his private jets, too—quite a sacrifice to leave behind his CO2-spewing helicopters, yachts, mansions and more to save the planet for us plebs by forcing us to use windmills and bicycles—if we're lucky! Bloomberg even agreed to take his picture with me, until his handlers growled, demanded to know who I was. They whisked him away.Another semi-VVIP I ran into at a U.N. climate summit (this one in 2009) was Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. He had been blabbering about how his nation was going to sink under the waves unless the world did what the U.N. was demanding right now. Apparently, “science” had spoken, and it was not for us to question, only submit.Interestingly, one of the key sea-level scientists for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Swedish geophysicist named Nils-Axel Mörner, had been measuring sea-levels in Nasheed's part of the world for five decades. His findings suggested that sea levels were not only not rising, but they may also even be declining. Obviously, I asked Nasheed about this. Boy, was he angry. With the blood vessels almost popping out of his eyes, he claimed Mörner—again, a scientist who worked on the U.N. IPCC, supposedly the top authority on The Science™—was not “worthy” of a response. Then he proceeded to claim to me, falsely, that the pope had killed Galileo.U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by Wikileaks later proved that the U.S. government was offering big money to the regime in the Maldives to build a deeper harbor—something that made no sense if the nation was truly about to be swallowed up by the sea—if they would play along with the climate hysteria and support the U.N. deal. Nasheed was later convicted under anti-terrorism charges in his home country, though the top court finally overturned the conviction in 2018.The silly rhetoric is typical, though. At that same U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, I got to hear Saint Al Gore, who had just arrived on a CO2-belching private jet, lecture us about how “the entire polar ice cap…could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” He cited models that claimed there was a 75 percent chance of this occurring.It sounded scary and made for terrifying click-bait headlines. But of course, five years came and went. Then seven. Then ten. And yet, the polar ice cap never became ice-free—not even close. Meanwhile, according to NASA, there is massive ice growth in the Antarctic that is causing a net decrease in global sea levels. But don't tell Nasheed.

It would be easy to fill a book with all the crazy stories I’ve heard from these clown shows.

The Climate Conferences Often Turn Silly

It would be easy to fill a book with all the crazy stories I’ve heard from these clown shows. In Cancun, the clowns opened the COP with a prayer to the Mayan goddess of creativity without mentioning her association with cannibalism and human sacrifice. Yes, seriously.After that, pranksters from an American grassroots organization managed to dupe almost every U.N. delegate that was asked into signing a petition to ban a dangerous substance known as Dihydrogen Monoxide. The chemical kills thousands each year and is a major component of acid rain, they were informed. They literally supported a petition to ban water. But you can trust them—they're the experts following The Science™.The adventures of Lord Christopher Monckton, who I've gotten to know pretty well, have been priceless, too. In 2012, the British aristocrat impersonated a delegate from Burma and spoke to the whole U.N. plenary session about how the so-called science behind the man-made warming hypothesis needed to be investigated. The year before, he jumped out of a plane in Durban to prove the sky was not falling.At an earlier U.N. summit, filmmaker Phelim McAleer dressed up in a polar bear suit and went hunting for the disgraced “scientist” at the center of “ClimateGate,” the scandal involving hacked emails that broke out shortly before the summit. The tax-funded legions at the summit seeking more climate loot were not amused.And who could forget the Gore Effect—a mysterious phenomenon I have personally witnessed numerous times in my career—involving snowfall at U.N. climate summits starting as soon as Gore's private jet lands in town.

We’re Losing Billions of Dollars So U.N. Fat Cats Can Travel the World

Full disclosure, in case you have not realized by now: I think the U.N.-backed hypothesis that man's emissions of CO2 are driving global warming—I mean, “climate change,” or is it “climate crisis” now?— is just as silly as the crazy man-made “global cooling” hypotheses peddled in the 1970s. Ironically, it was often the very same fanatics and propaganda organs disguised as news outlets now trumpeting the alleged man-made warming. And no matter how hard they try to deny reality on Wikipedia, the evidence is there for all to see.Going to these U.N. climate summits for over a decade makes it clear that even our would-be overlords peddling the man-made warming hypothesis do not believe it. If they did, why would they show up in fleets of private jets? And why would they try to drastically cut American CO2 emissions while shifting all of the economic activity to China, where the regime is building coal-fired power plants faster than we can count them, and where CO2 levels per unit of output will be drastically higher than in the United States?Something doesn't smell right. I wish you could smell it yourself.Don't get me wrong—I love the environment, and you should, too. But nations squandering billions on this non-issue so U.N. fat cats can travel the world and party at our expense is grotesque, especially while real pollution, needing real solutions, goes unaddressed in China and other nations conducting the crazy climate clown circus.

Before COVID-19 hit, I had just finished displaying paintings at Art Basel, an art bonanza that sweeps Miami Beach by storm every December. The trip was my first big venture into the high-level art scene, and having my artwork on display across Wynwood and South Beach gave me an incredible sense of accomplishment. As an emerging artist in New York, I felt this could be my moment. Seeking out galleries, in-person showings and tangible artwork was the reality at the end of 2019. Then the coronavirus hit a few months later. All my shows for the year were canceled; galleries closed. I was left wondering where my career as an artist would go. That’s when I started experimenting with digital art and the world of virtual reality.

I tossed it up to mania and never really looked into it. Until now.

The Art World Is Quickly Turning Into a Digital Space

The beauty of digital art is the affordability and the convenience. It's a more streamlined approach to expression—there are no costly supplies and no messy cleanup—and the images come out incredibly vibrant and clean. But the drawback has always been a complex question: “What do you do with the file when it’s done?” Sure, you could print it out, display and sell it, which is what most artists, including myself, do. But what is stopping someone from just downloading your art and printing it themselves? Enter the world of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. I had heard about these way back in 2017 with the explosion of crypto kitties—cute little digital cats you could buy on the Ethereum network. Back then, I really didn’t see it as anything special. It was one of the earliest attempts at using blockchain technology for fun and leisure, but during the 2017 Bitcoin boom, these cuddly little drawings were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I tossed it up to mania and never really looked into it. Until now.Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, has crushed sales in NFT art, surpassing over $100 million in sales. He sold his latest for a record $69 million. Other artists have followed suit, with pieces (often with cryptocurrency as their inspiration) selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Similar “meme” pieces, like the crypto kitties, have emerged, too. The art project HashMasks has set the standard for some of the unique ways art can take form on the blockchain. Each portrait, inspired heavily by Jean-Michel Basquiat, has six different features—a character, a mask, an eye color, a skin tone and an item in the back. Each has a certain degree of rarity and comes with the ability to change the name of the piece within certain limits. Many HashMasks have paid homage to “meme” figures involved, like Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin (the co-founder of Ethereum) or slogans around the crypto space. More often than not, life-changing technology starts out very rudimentary. What begins as a meme or a joke or even something serious can blossom into a real solution for a sector. What makes NFTs special is they provide a solution to what gives assets value. Digital files, whether they be art or digital trading cards, can be easily reproduced and duplicated. NFT artwork can be “tokenized,” meaning the piece of digital art is put onto the blockchain, where it is verified, sourced and authenticated. The history of the owners is recorded, and you can ensure that the lineage of your artwork begins with the artist. What’s the difference between the Mona Lisa and a printout or a forgery? It all boils down to what gives something value—its originality. For some, this all still sounds like science fiction. (Here’s another explainer if you’re still puzzled.) At a recent art show, the first time I’d had my work displayed since the pandemic began, I was chatting with other artists about NFTs. It’s still quite complicated to understand, and even more taxing to set up. It reminds me of the early interviews about the internet, where newscasters would joke about “electronic mail” and the novelty of buying something online. When a new technology first hits, it’s rarely user-friendly—it’s clunky, and most people dismiss it. With time comes refinements, and that’s what I see in store for NFT technology. Sure, the average user will have to look up tutorials on how to download a crypto wallet, how to exchange tokens, how to do any of these things. But the process is already being streamlined. Only a few years ago, it was incredibly complicated to even buy crypto. Now you can buy it on your cash app. These things take time.

Interactive Art Exhibitions Are the Next Emerging Experience

As an artist, what excites me the most is the “metaverse” around artwork of the future. I’m still interested in tangible art and displaying my canvases in real galleries. It would be hard to imagine a world without physical paintings, but I think there can, and will, be a growing shared space with digital art displays. We’re already starting to see it now. Artechouse NYC is an interactive art exhibition, billed as an immersive audio and visual journey through fractals. It’s one of the first of its kind, a fusing of art and technology that allows users to explore many sensory experiences. As enjoyable as a traditional gallery or museum can be, digitally-minded exhibitions provide a different experience altogether. My first time visiting one was at a Meow Wolf in New Mexico. It’s an immersive walkthrough art exhibit that guides you through different installations. Ever want to open your fridge in a mock apartment setup and enter into another realm? Or how about sliding down your washing machine into another world? Meow Wolf brings them to life. They’ve done an incredible job at combining the tangible world—crafting different places you can walk through and climb on—with technology and visual displays of art.Another possibility I see emerging—and it already has to some extent—is virtual reality artwork. I recently purchased an Oculus during quarantine and noticed it had a drawing app that allows you to draw three-dimensional models inside a virtual world. The technology is still developing, but how incredible would it be to take a tour through worlds other artists create through a VR headset? Through technology, the possibilities are endless for the artistic mind—as long as the artist and the consumer are both interested in sharing a different, complementary journey. The evolution of a metaverse, I think, is inevitable, both for the art world and our entire society. A shared space, a convergence of the physical world and the virtual world, will keep developing, especially as augmented reality and virtual reality constantly improve and trickle into every sector of our lives. Art will be its first frontier—and as an artist, I’m excited to start exploring these opportunities.

Art will be its first frontier—and as an artist, I’m excited to start exploring these opportunities.

NFTs Might Bust, but They Have Long-Term Capabilities

Of course, art has always best been displayed on walls, which is why NFT technology will allow you to house your one-of-a-kind digital piece—complete with its certificate of authenticity—on a digital display on your wall. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently announced that he’s starting an online NFT art gallery, where collectors and artists can converge to display their pieces. Motivational speaker Gary Vaynerchuk has also been quite outspoken about NFTs and believes they’ll be here to stay, especially for the art and collectibles game. It’s hard to imagine how many avenues there are for creativity. It’s like trying to predict where the internet would be back in 1999. Will this just boom and bust? It’s hard to say. I would think not. In the short term, most projects will fail, but the ones that succeed will have a lasting impact. NFT solves a true problem in society. We are increasingly dependent on tech, and with that comes the need for verified authentic content. It gives the power back to the artist, at least for now. My one fear is the space will become too saturated too quickly, and will be seen as a get-rich-quick scheme. People are already making millions on NFT artwork, and everyone wants in, from Logan Paul to Lindsay Lohan. I see its potential being huge long-term for the art scene, but it will have to get past a lot of the current noise in the space. So for now, I’m digging into this as much as I can. It's refreshing to have a secondary space to explore, aside from trying to get my work into shows and in-person galleries, which often come with red tape and exclusivity. It’s going to be up to the many emerging websites, like OpenSea or Nifty Gateway to ensure artists are able to have their work speak for itself, rather than the traditional art scene—which relies so heavily on networking and the right connections. I tried for a month on OpenSea to get verified to sell my own NFTs, but they were swamped with requests. Eventually, they changed their policy so any artist's work would be instantly available without stringent verification processes. The space is still developing, and I’m here for the long haul. I’ve still yet to sell my first NFT, but I’m optimistic about what the future holds. It might come here quicker than we think.

It’s early, maybe 6 a.m. I’ve just been seated at a local roadside diner. The booth seats are clad in red leather and most of the boots are muddy. Damp rain jackets hang by the door. Wool shirts are tucked into pants held in place by suspenders. The smell of bacon permeates the air. NPR plays softly in the background. It's about the coffee for me, but maybe I will have some food. Outside the partially fogged window, steam rises from the warming earth. It’s chilly in the morning all year. A lovely expanse of bright green fields rolls down along the hillside. I couldn’t ask for a more picturesque, pastoral view. For a few seasons now, I have traveled back and forth between Upstate New York and Vermont, keeping bees. Their lives are my life. I revolve around them. I’m not sure where the potatoes I am about to eat have come from, nor the bacon, but that’s not really the point. Obviously, food comes from many places. Insane though it may seem, if you have ever done any farming, very little of our daily consumables in the continental U.S. actually come from local land. That said, in this specific area of the “North Country,” as many like to call it, farms do still exist.

Very little of our daily consumables in the continental U.S. actually come from local land.

My Dream to Bring Regenerative Farming Practices to Rural New York

A few bites into my five-dollar plate of eggs and potatoes, I begin to notice the conversation going on around me. It is early June. The cornfields are very wet. Old farmers sit comfortably, jackets slowly drying from the electric heat, talking in that slow cadence of a person who has relaxed into their trade. “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is often a dream around these parts. They say that summer is late this year. Rain has slowed growth and bogged down the machines. I think of my own land. In 2018, I closed on 100 acres in the Adirondack State Park. I bought this tract to prevent the last large field within town limits from being planted with GMO corn. I will not admit this fact to my dining companions. The property was clear-cut about 25 years ago and is now a tangled mess of saplings and logging ruts. Beavers traverse it with an industry that puts all the local humans to shame. It is most commonly used as a playground for four-wheelers and deer poaching by the neighbors. I both love and hate this about it. “My land” would have made a decent cornfield, though this year it would be wet like all the others. I often wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. My dream is to establish a combination meadow and forest sanctuary modeled after a food forest for humans, but designed solely for pollinators. After all, who says that we are biologically more important? Black locust, basswood, willow and sumac parade across the foreground of my mind. Fields are for dandelion, milkweed, clovers and trefoil. Fruit trees are popular with locals of all kinds, but they cannot take over the landscape completely. The forest wetlands must survive. I’m hoping this project can support both the local, native bees and my managed, imported honeybees.

Regenerative Farming Is About Balancing the Needs of the Land and People

Navigating land use in a small, rural town can be tricky. Pure conservation isn’t the answer, but compromise can help. Rotational grazing increases nutrition for livestock, which in turn improves the soil, reduces energy outputs in husbandry and supports pollinators. Leaving wild space at the edge of mono-crop planting preserves critical habitat that keeps bees alive. But all of these things are more work and less money. Even a swale of a few feet will shave dollars off the crop. Rotational grazing is more labor that many farmers can’t afford. Fencing costs money. Seeds cost money. Labor costs money. And change is hard. Here I am, having breakfast in a town where more than half the windows on Main Street are boarded up, and I want to start a conversation about environmentalism? I want to talk about what the earth needs? What the bees need? When the people don’t have enough food? Well, yes. I’m not suggesting we outlaw the use of barns, or conventional dairy, anytime soon, but I still want to talk about it. In Vermont. In New York. In Canada. Everywhere that food grows, this conversation. Please. If you really think about it, does hauling the poop to the field and the grass to the barn make sense? If I had to choose a single regenerative agriculture practice that I believe could make a long-term difference to the health of agricultural ecosystems in upstate New York, I would choose rotational grazing. Let’s free the cows from their barns, bring the poop to the fields, and feed the bees and the earth and the people all at once. Do it for the plants. For the farmers and their stock. For the diners. For the bees.

Starting a Dialogue as an Outsider Is Challenging

The Adirondacks are home to a fascinating enclave of progressive farmers, young and old, working to restore sustainable practices for food production and land stewardship. It is a wonderful movement to be a part of, but many of us are not from here. Government programs have the power to provide grants that bring the food to the people who grow it, and their neighbors. But how can I engage people in the conversations that need to happen when I am still an outsider? The grocery store in the town where I live went out of business, so now folks drive 20 minutes on the highway to the closest Hannaford, or they shop for food at the dollar store. Meanwhile, fields overflow with rich abundance that many of the locals can’t afford. Most of the chances I actually get to talk about these issues happen in the auto shop or at the gas pump. I stand shoulder to shoulder with families who have lived in this area for generations. I ash my cigarette on the same concrete floor as them. We share a water supply. Who am I to say they should do something different? I find that the closer I get with them, and the more I listen, the more I find we have in common. I keep bees on about 12 farms within a 30-minute drive of the aforementioned diner. During some seasons, the local farmers plant hay and cover crops that please me. Other times, they don’t. Did you know that the tongues of honeybees are not long enough to reach the nectar inside a red clover blossom? Something as simple as allowing cows to graze on the fresh green land instead of feeding them hay in the barn, or planting white clover instead of red, could make or break my season as a beekeeper. But how will anyone know that unless I befriend the folks who poach deer on my land?

Do it for the plants. For the farmers and their stock. For the diners. For the bees.

Change Requires Communication—Even When It Comes to Farming

The politics of this area, and many like it, are difficult. People want different things. They prioritize their own needs over the needs of the land and community, and who can blame them? Life must go on. I am four years into this project and I’ve accomplished very little. The land is still not cleared, and money is tight to even keep it in my possession. But for every challenge, there is a success. A neighbor heard my truck straining to escape from the quagmire that is my driveway. He pulled me out, I gave him honey and now we are friends.Each basic human interaction, every beer at the local watering hole, brings me one step closer to sharing what I came here to share. I’ve never loved the term “permaculture.” It’s created quite the buzz, and yet it neglects to mention many generations of wisdom built into agriculture in most areas of the world. Intelligent, respectful and practical land use is a major priority for me. I would like to have coffee with the corn farmers before heading home to my bees. I would like to listen as much as I speak. I would like us all to live past 2023. We are in this together. We are survivor stock.

A vast cloud of sun-soaked bodies drifts idly past my bedroom door. All eyes seek the queen. The twist and shimmer of their glistening wings flood my eyes with light. I breathe easily in their presence. The soft scent of lemongrass fills my lungs. I awake abruptly to an actual swarm moving into one of the empty wooden boxes outside my window. They rush and clamber over one another, pressing stacks of tiny bodies urgently into their new chosen home. As they settle, the ambient smells and sounds of suburban South Florida filter slowly into my awareness. I hesitate to leave the dream. Sewer gas wafts upward from a neighbor’s foundation. Trucks hustle along a nearby road. Wading birds pluck earthworms from beer cans. Several small dogs strain against their leashes seeking squirrels, seeking one another. Lawnmowers spring to life like a fleet of voracious grazing animals, hungry for ever-greener pastures. They pass unobstructed through the peace of morning, seeking food and uniformity. They are intolerant of wildness, immune to disorder, loud in every way. I run outside, breathless. I am clad in a sarong, hair flying in all directions, amongst the bees. The grass is better groomed than I am. The boxes this swarm chose to inhabit are stacked high, in relative order, ready for the work of spring. It is December. I did not expect a swarm. I left this stack of boxes out some time ago. Most remain empty, but little is wasted. Here in Florida, all things grow. And when they are finished growing, they start again.

Bees Are No Longer Welcome in Southern Florida

Bees make decisions about their housing arrangements using an intelligent social dance. A scout travels in early morning, pressing forward through the humid air. She finds a row of boxes that smell familiar. Maybe they’ve had bees in them before. She enters the one that smells the strongest. It’s hard to say precisely what she does in these most private moments. Presumably, she walks the boundaries of her new abode carefully. Measuring. Tasting. If satisfied, she will return to her mother colony and report her good fortune with a dance that tells not only the quality of her new potential home, but also the distance and direction of travel. The passion of her dance will determine her reception by fellow swarm-mates. Her success is another story altogether. Many colonies think they have found solace, only to be met with a spray can. Vehicles labeled “pest control” patrol the streets, but what exactly is a pest?I catch, keep and sometimes even save bees in the urban wastelands and agricultural margins of the Sunshine State. I grew up here, surrounded by mayhem and natural beauty, soaked in saltwater and glyphosate runoff. I watched the fields and swamps of my childhood give way to farms and then development. Gated communities pushed wildlife west as the insatiable thirst of humans drained the Everglades to build developments. And yet, tucked away on two acres of mangrove preserve in downtown Fort Lauderdale, I lived out a shoeless, mud-covered childhood.

Perhaps that is why I started this business: I was, in all ways, in search of a home.

Urban Beekeeping Is About Preservation

Twenty or so years later, in the spring of 2019, I hung 100 empty boxes baited with swarm lure, caught 80 colonies of bees and started my business. Today, I raise and sell queen bees to keepers across the country for colony expansion and genetic diversity. I also offer live bee removal as an alternative to pest control services. Unwelcome swarms can thereby be safely relocated and thrive in an environment that is safe for both humans and bees.As I planned this grand heist, I traversed state and private land, seeking green sanctuaries for my buzzing friends. I scoured the satellite images on Google Maps for pockets of wildness, then drove by to check if they were already claimed. There’s a large homeless population here, and often, the spots I targeted were ideal for bees and people alike. I’ve spent more than a few nights tucked into the hidden green margins of urban life. Perhaps that is why I started this business: I was, in all ways, in search of a home. There are many stories I could tell about why the bees need saving, but the truth is that I needed it more than they did. I needed solace, purpose, motivation and meaning. I needed camaraderie, long silences and many hours of work. I needed food, water, shelter and rest. We all need a safe place to rest. I share mine with the bees.

Food Gleaning Is Key to My Operation

Along the borders of the largest subtropical wetlands area in the continental U.S., I found abundance and degradation in equal parts. Limbs heavy with tropical fruit overhang torn sheets of foam and old shoes piled into shopping carts near major highways. High-rise condos line the coast. Lawns consume the landscape. Small saplings grow from floating islands of trash. The flood of humans is merciless. Gluttonous. Selfish in the extreme. Biodiversity is threatened by loss of habitat, and almost everything is touched with poison. And yet, every cavity left by humans in their mad rush to build paradise is filled with bees. They move into mailboxes, trailers, walls, planters and composters. They swarm out of chimneys and into the trunks of cars. They build their sweet, lovely, fascinating homes with the same stalwart enthusiasm here as they would in the purest of nature. In the heart of pre-apocalyptic civilization, the bees remain wild. In addition to swarm catching and general apiary management, I remove bees from housing developments and farms alike. I cut their combs from the edges of buildings and attach them with rubber bands to small wooden sticks. I gather all the bees in a box and move them to approved locations. I fight to keep these locations for more than a season. People sell the land to corporations, who strip it of forage and fill it with concrete, all the while claiming to support the local ecosystem by removing invasive plants. Everything here is bought and sold, including the bees.

The Contradictory Nature of Beekeeping in Florida

Beekeepers swarm from all over the country in the fall to build up their hives on Brazilian pepper, the very plant the state is trying to eradicate. Those bees grow fat on natural food, but by December, the nectar flow stops and they are pumped full of corn syrup. Some commercial operations keep entire warehouses of sugar for winter feeding. Very little of it comes from Florida, which makes me wonder why we drained the Everglades to begin with. But that doesn’t matter when spring is upon us. Bees must grow, by any means necessary, to make grade for California almond pollination. Huge trucks packed with heavy boxes travel west in February and my little hives breathe a sigh of relief while they are gone. We struggle to compete. I make their populations far denser than they should be, in order to comply with state standards for “safe” queen production. I feed them until I wonder if my teeth are rotting by proxy. The sugar I pull from dumpsters is overflowing with organic produce, cast away to rot and then defended halfheartedly by disenchanted security officers. If I show up about an hour after closing, everything is free. The lumber I find is behind business and construction zones. I check Craigslist and Facebook marketplace for free roadside objects of all types. Coconuts? Pallets? Yes, please.

Are we all lost? And how do we find our way home?

Urban Beekeeping Connects the Past and the Future

My tiny slice of paradise lies midway down Palm Beach County. I am less than 15 minutes by car from the Florida Everglades. Many important designations characterize my Southern home. World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve, Wetland of International Significance, predominant freshwater recharge areas for all of South Florida. There is no other ecosystem quite like it, and yet the “River of Grass” no longer flows. And the native people? These are sad stories. Cruel. They say the ecosystem here is found nowhere else on earth. But I wonder, is it found at all? Or is it lost? Are we all lost? And how do we find our way home? The questions that reside here are as heavy as the summer air. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the intensity of them, or crowded by the extreme overpopulation. And yet each evening, after a brief thunderstorm, the pressure lifts and a cool breeze comes in off the ocean. The setting sun paints buildings and beaches alike with brilliant strokes of color. Tiny clouds awash with pink and orange bring magic back into this strained and pungent world. The sky sparkles with small yellow and black bodies as bees fly back and forth to their hive entrances, glimmering softly until the moment of darkness. The ocean presses inward, saltwater travels into underground aquifers, the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Homestead sinks imperceptibly lower into the mire, and I count my blessings. It’s a pirate’s life with bees.