The come-up.

"If this were a Movietone News item... and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. They'd bring up the sound track- something stirring, to suggest the march of time." - Paul Hendrickson

The scene starts before the first note, before the eighty minutes the band keeps the bar'crowd waiting under low light and lower ceiling. It starts before a catfish dinner next door and the bottles of Abita served by a bartender named Kiss, resident of New Orleans by way of Brooklyn, to a traveler named Joshua, resident of Brooklyn, by way of Los Angeles and a sliver of the world. The true iris-in starts before anyone reading this was born, and before their grandparents' grandparents, but it's been shown in bars throughout this city and this country, and in this particular dive on Tuesdays for twenty years.

That eighty minutes of anticipation dissipates the instant the first notes leap out of the armada of brass packing the stage, the firing squad unmuzzled. The dead time comes alive with the sound of the New Orleans big brass band, all horns and jazz'told'fast. An American artform played at our national volume and speed. Tempos of weathervanes outpacing clocks.

They're telling our story like we always do, through tall tales turned gospel. Our American flamenco.

In bars in Sevilla and the East Village I'd heard plucked guitars and metal kissing wood convey the éxodo migration of Moors out of the Middle East through North Africa and into the South of Spain, coming to rest in the Andalusian peninsula but recalling the struggle, those caravan centuries, in every shuffle'heel'stamp'clap with tornadoing wrists and flourishing skirts of silken fire, wailing tones of Arabic like weeping muezzins.

The same story grown more profound for its congruency, wandering lines remaining parallel, sociology transcending mathematics, geography. The tale of history from below reaching the surface. That People's One of the United States. Yeah yeah the same story told instrumental but unequivocally American in this overpack'd room where sound and energy can't escape. The stage pregnant with ten wailing musicians. A near dozen historians blowing out biography with brass. Their notes competing like generations for legacy, harmonizing like neighborhoods to weave communities, districts forming cities. 50 equaling 1.

Ten'minute jams of the same notes, the same two'steps coming back and back again with little subtleties added to their nature to make the progress each generation's own echoed victory. Orville Wright becoming Neil Armstrong. J. Fenimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Crane to Cormac. Homer Plessy to Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama. Every tragedy our own scars worn with somber defiance. Or just defiance. Remember the Maine to Never Forget. The Twin Towers to One World Trade. Enduring the Great Depression, and the lesser ones of jilted hearts and corporate layoffs. Down the years history comes fast like machine-gun ratatats and tambourine jangles. Hurricane Betsy. Andrew. Katrina. Sandy. 
And then we reply.

The scene always starts in utero, before we realize we're actors, authors, autobiographers, but it's the story of America in every note. In every two-syllable chant as the audience proclaims the band's name in incantation. Shouted constantly, hoarsely, fiercely. As mantra, as battlecry, as promise, as the myth each generation galvanizes into reality.

"RE-BIRTH."

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Down at the end of old Bourbon Street is a place you're not supposed to go, where everybody's been. The locals will swear you away from the area before making you promise to visit.

Isolated just a bit from the noise and the neon is the lingering point to an exclamation,

is the spent ash at the end of a burning cigarette.

Past the hand grenades and hurricanes and Kentucky sorority girls lies a little speck of darkness.

Sits a little den of contradiction. 

Where they're shouting in frenzy to wire and ivory and bachelor parties have moments of sincerity. Where sleeping songs by Mr. Waits get resurrected once the patrons and piano 

have been drinking.

Leave "Sweet Caroline" and the grenadine to Pat O'Brien's; we're drinking whiskey and

calling out for Young rather than Diamond. 

Trying to avoid seeing our faces in those of the worn elders while we're glancing at tattooed ivy snaking around arms, 

past breast implants, and into toffee hair.

For longer than we've been a nation, these walls have been seeping alcohol into conversation.
The oldest bar in America. Hideout to the pirate Lafitte, 

and lesser criminals along the way.

You can visit in daylight. 
All sunshine and discordance. 
The tourist horsecarts will stop out front and a waiter will run out to drop off a voodoo daiquiri while you snap a photo with your iPhone and post it to Facebook. The bartender, 
with her ivy arms, 
will make your daughter fruit juice and call it a virgin hurricane.
But the piano will be silent,
and the 
corners will be bare. 
Or you can come by night. When the girls are lighting 
cigarettes off candles, 
when the boys are warning 
that's bad luck for sailors. 
Shoes settling into brick canoed down by the centuries of impatience, and boredom, and 
insecurities, 
and determination renewed 
by spirits.

When the years feel palpable. In the bar and the drinkers and the sing-a-long psalms.  When the line "Old man, look my life. I'm a lot like you were" finds its proper mark. They'll tell you it's haunted and it has to be true. 

In this city 

we keep coughing up ghosts.

They fill the wood

and the brick

and the off-key shouts, the claps in missed tempo.

And here at the end of old Bourbon Street,

we'll keep coming.

Past the hurricanes,

and the hand grenades,

and the sorority girls borrowed from wherever,

We'll know we always have a place to visit.

A hideout.

 Somewhere to
die by the minute.
Drawn forward to the darkness, we
martyrs to filthier causes.

Nine ward, two houses. (i and the village.)

"Advanced framing actually replaces lumber with insulation material to maximize the wall area that’s insulated..."  - makeitright.org/what-we-know/library/article/advanced-framing/

"They ask for everyone to take off their shoes, so just leave 'em here on the porch. They'll be fine."

My beaten Toms went at the end of a row of Asics and hiking shoes; apparently I was the only one who chose to bike 11 miles without socks. My bare feet pressed onto the post-industrial wood fiber floor of the visitor's center of Make It Right, the charity spearheaded by Brad Pitt to rebuild New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward with ecologically-innovative housing.

I stepped around the plexiglass donation column immediately in front of the narrow entrance and settled next to the GREEN DAT! shirts for sale, a forced pun more in-keeping with a California punk band than the "Who Dat?" catchphrase of NOLA's sports lifeblood, the Saints. After urged, I filled in a line of the sign-in sheet, leaving the checkboxes at the end of the row, for "donation," "shirt purchased," and "poster purchased" unmarked. The visitor center was the charity's model home showcasing the ones being built around the Lower Ninth Ward, at a partially-subsidized cost of one-hundred thirty thousand dollars. Post-modern in environmental function and architecture, all the scalene angles and cacophonous pigments of a Chagall. An experimental home far more natural in the suburbs of Norway than those of New Orleans.

The early 20s Make It Right hostess looked blankly at us five bike tourists, roting off the specs of the houses' green technologies in the droning monotone accent specific to hipsters rather than regions. The one full of cocktail intelligence sourced piecemeal from NPR and New York mag. Complete with flapper haircut and ironic floral leggings. I'd gone all the way to the Lower Ninth and found myself back at the Lorimer stop.

45 minutes later, our tour guide wheeled Mr. Lewis out onto his back deck, his 93-year-old legs pacing the steps along gently in his fresh red Nikes. He raved about the Saints blowout win the afternoon before, their 180 of a season following Bountygate and Goodell crackdowns and their early game stumbles. "And that SEC boy... BCS playoff already exists... it's called the SEC. Only real teams out there. You think Notre Dame is gonna whupp 'Bama or Georgia? Come onnn." His lack of teeth didn't shy away his constant smile, or the wisdom that came when words paused it. He talked LSU as we sat eating shrimp po'boys and fried fish platters, ravenously replenishing after the bike ride there from the Marigny. He only stopped smiling when he brought up Katrina.  

"The hurricane hurt us. The national media hurt us more. Calling us refugees, like we barely human. We ain't refugees, man, we're Americans. Ain't no different than you.... Wasn't right to call us that."

The middle-aged couple from White Plains brought up the Make It Right houses, the one we'd just been in. "They build houses in our home and don't bother asking our opinion. What we might want 'em to look like. They hold a contest for designs by people who never been here and then move on to the next thing. They bring in people to build them, people from I don't know where, all over." Mr. Lewis pointed to one of the workmen just across a cinder-block fence in his backyard. The house being renovated, now that the owner had decided to return; seven years after Katrina, now deciding to reassert claim to his home. "That man there's an electrician. Known him 20 years. Been one all his life. Ninth Ward's got craftsmen, tradesmen. People from this community that need the work and do it well but they ain't good enough for them to build they own neighbors' house, I guess."

I knew the argument. It's one I'd made frequently, for thoughtful liberalism, one with a small "l." One distant from the crusades against Happy Meal toys and bans on soda size. The Toms I set aside earlier were bought for style, not out of the misguided belief that their purchase makes some difference when their means of production is outsourced to China rather than employing the parents and cousins and older sisters and brothers of the children they claim to be helping in rural Africa. The argument that handouts are confining, and doomed to failure, without being accompanied by an equally aggressive support infrastructure. A means of climbing the economic ladder permanently rather than waiting for the next check in the mail.

For that half hour we had Mr. Lewis to ourselves, with the occasional shouted aside comments to the neighboring team of builders, before we went inside his makeshift trailer museum, the House of Dance and Feathers. One part personal trophy case, one part Katrina museum, and three parts presentation of second line, the steppers in elaborate costume following the brass bands that make up a parade's main line. Every inch of formica lined with beautifully garish blooms of feet-wide chiffon ribbon, meticulous beadwork, masks and feathers inspired from a culture that snaked down the generations, diluting out only slightly the voodoo influences. A woman in her 50s and her 7 year old grandson joined us in the trailer to speak with Mr. Lewis. More old friends, she didn't hesitate when asked to point out accents for one of the costumes that came with the title she had held since she was 16, Queen of the White Angels, one of dozens of local New Orleans second line troupes. As she did, I was drawn into conversation with another frequent visitor, Brian from Mobile, Alabama. "And yourself?"

"They're from California and White Plains. I'm from Brooklyn."

He nodded solemnly. Four days into my New Orleans trip, I already knew the basics of what he was about to say, but couldn't have guessed at the emotion behind it.

"When you go back, please tell the people of New Jersey and New York there are people here in New Orleans who feel for them and know what they're going through. And in Mississippi and Alabama. Sincerely, our hearts understand. We wish it wouldn't have to happen to anyone else.... Isn't really in our hands. But you're all in our hearts."

Brian and I shook hands in time for me to hear the latest proud proclamation by Mr. Lewis, the one about the pictorial book he compiled chronicling the history of second line.

"My book is in the White House. Yes, sir. Mr. Obama signed that," indicating a framed Thank You card. "Michelle too."

Brian squeezed by the rest of us to tell Mr. Lewis goodbye, for now, with a kiss on the cheek. Mr. Lewis' hand clasping the back of his craned-down neck.

"Brian's a good man. Reminds me of my grand-nephew. That boy got a tattoo the other day, came to show it to me, all up his arm. Says 'Ambitious.' " Mr Lewis rubbed his spread hand down his entire forearm. "I like it. Thinking about getting one myself. Might have to change it though. I made it through Hurricane Betsy in '65. Katrina in '05. Heart attack and a double-bypass just now on September the Twelfth." Mr. Lewis smiled, with his full eyes and empty mouth. Uncontrollably, I did the same. "Think I'm gonna have mine say 'Survivor.' "

The hipster girl in the floral tights and cigarette'ash-shaded skirt and hoodie spooned powdered Coffemate into an empty mug, followed by Sweet & Low, and finally poured in French press coffee. If not for her slight resemblance to Shannyn Sossamon I would have forgotten her face along with her name and everything else she said to us, except for her one obligatory attempt at conversation. "Where else are you going on the tour today?"

The middle-school teacher from Dana Point ventured first. "Umm... Just around the Ward. Went to a cemetery... St. Roch's?"

"About to go to a small museum." I took up the silence. "The House of... Feathers..."

"The House of Dance and Feathers," she finished knowingly. "Yeah. I've never actually been there." And then she stopped talking to sip from her mug of powdered substitutes and lukewarm coffee.

Red, red, red.

"Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"It's coming back around again,
This is for the people for the sun." - Rage Against the Machine

We’ll always own July.

You can say it’s the nature of being American. Our national celebration exploding near the month’s beginning, its resonance shimmering and trailing for the remaining weeks. A flag of exceptionalism and defiance planted where you can’t miss it. At the very start. Unavoidable. Inevitable and indomitable as the summer heat. Schools out, complexions the healthy pigment of abundant vitamin D, nature cooperating to provide our excursions with photogenic backgrounds. A nation of day baseball, gingham, Ferris wheels, lobster rolls, Sperrys, sand castles, cookouts, nautical stripes, Wayfarers, worn paperbacks, seersucker, funnel cake, sunburned shoulders and kisses beneath fireworks. 

And still some of us weren’t content. We turned to farther horizons. When everyone else was relaxing, we chose to run.

"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."

....words I reread as our train approached the city that Sunday afternoon. I closed The Sun Also Rises and put the swollen book in my lap and joined the carriage full of turning heads, mouths charmed open by conversation and anticipatory smiles. Mark, Corey, and Nicole found me to share anecdotes and insights on the San Fermin Festival that they'd garnered in the 3 hour ride from Madrid. Derek sat in conversation 2 cars behind us, Parker, Sandev, Nick, and Damian joining later that night. Together our slow paths traced back to America's farthest reaches. New York, Florida, California, Alaska. Children of the conquered frontiers, in Spain to surmount something more familiar. More personal.

We met the city in the afternoon, on the eve of the explosion. The Basque shopkeepers dressed in their starkest whites, the red bandannas of earlier fiestas knotted around their necks. Townspeople showcasing an annual pride that would soon too become ours. We arrived as tabula rasa, but it was in Pamplona we would gain our reds. Purchased with a few Euros; earned during our three-minute encierro.

It was a village of Christmas Eve, each of us tilting slightly toward the future. We would return to these streets in the morning to stand in front of the town hall for the firing of the chupinazo rocket, tens of thousands celebrating the official start of San Fermin. But for the five of us the Festival began that first afternoon, when we heard the drums. A percussion troupe marching throughout the streets, stopping in a small area behind the Plaza Mayor. A dozen men pounding kettles as dozens more of us gathered around, spilling out of surrounding restaurants and bars, called by their rhythm. It could be adopted instantly for its simplicity, its intrinsic familiarity. Their hands and sticks giving voice to our heartbeats. We had known it before we ever heard it.

On Monday the Festival was born screaming, in showers of sangria that bathed us purple. Parker was held aloft on Derek's and my shoulders in a moment captured by an Associated Press photographer, picked up by newspapers in Spain, Australia, the San Francisco Chronicle, and later one of the Wall Street Journal Photos of the Year. An image that would come to summarize the ultimate bacchanal and its emotions. A god of wine and his unleashed followers. A microsecond to exist outside of mortality. The revelry continued well into the next night as we celebrated our successful encierro with shameless dancing and massive bottles of beer in the Plaza Mayor, beneath dandelions of fire blooming in the sky above.

The sun's rise would chase us from Pamplona, as we would carry the rays of San Fermin to Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, San Sebastian, and later back to America. In the year that followed, we would recall the Festival in different ways. We'd captured it through photographs, footage of the chupinazo and our run, journals and words written here earlier, in cravings for tapas or shouts of "Muy limpia!," or me hours ago, watching news footage at work of this morning's running, on the one year anniversary of ours. Damian purchased the official poster from our year and reprints of past Festivals, perhaps framing the design from the same fiestas that Hemingway attended, or my father's encierro in the 1950's. All our adopted ways of proving tangibly what we already know deeper than words. That even in absence, we are forever there. If not as residents, then as revenants. For every year we have left to live, July 6 and 7 will bring us back to these moments. Focused softly by memory and filtered romantically by nostalgia, but always, always Pamplona.

We did not stay long enough for Pobre de Mi, the candlelit end of the Festival on midnight of the final day. Even when I find myself there again in some undetermined year in the future, wearing fresh whites and old reds, I don't know that I could ever bring myself to watch it close. For me, and for my friends, for anyone who has ever run with the bulls at San Fermin, the fiesta is eternal. It sleeps but never dies. Our 9-day blood red summer sun.

Welcome to the black parade.

"When I was a young boy my father took me into the city, 
To see a marching band...
'Because one day, I'll leave you, a phantom
To lead you in the summer, to join the Black Parade.' " - My Chemical Romance

I became a Los Angeles Kings fan because almost no one else was. 

Up to the age of 8, when I moved to California from rural Pennsylvania, my interest in sports was based on which team's logo my toddler synapses found most appealing (hat-tip to the late '80s Blue Jays and Dolphins). The 1992 move to Los Angeles introduced me to more than just my father. It transplanted me into surrounding excitements and distractions I'd previously only seen fuzzy glimpses of on our 11" television screen with its 8 stations, 3 of which were redundant local NBC's. In Linesville, I'd listened to Magic Johnson's HIV announcement on the radio of my mother's flower delivery van, and 5 years later I was sitting in the stands in Inglewood during his 1996 comeback, watching him go up against Michael Jordan one last time. Standard of living improved pretty dramatically too. My favorite food went from being my grandmother's confusingly-titled Colombian Dish (rice, hot dogs, ketchup, and frozen vegetables) to swordfish at The Palm. This was all newly possible because of my father, who was learning how to be a parent for the first time in his late 50s and compensating for the lost time. 

As the CEO of an insurance company, he had not only access but first dibs on their corporate tickets. He'd take his small allotment for Lakers, Dodgers, and Kings games, have the other games cycle through the rest of company, and then get the leftovers that people didn't have much interest in. Which meant we inherited a lot of trips down the 405 from Santa Monica to the Great Western Forum while wearing silver and black. 

Basketball was flashier and the Lakers far more successful, but the love for the game never stuck. Even if I wasn't processing these observations at the time, hockey's appeal was probably in that it was equal parts foreign and familiar. Hockey always came with a distinctively alternative rock soundtrack. The ice was the closest I was going to get to the true winters of Northwestern PA, the game inherently blue collar enough to appeal to the kid who used to wear hand-me-downs, still questioning how he had ended up with second-row tickets and all the intermission food he could eat. I'd never played hockey growing up, or even watched a game back in Pennsylvania, but NHL '94 was without question my go-to choice on Sega Genesis. At the games I was getting to see the 16-bit players from 16 feet away, with my dad by my side, his presence just adding to the surrealism. The preteen was too young to speak to the 61 year-old about Hemingway, so thoughts on how Luc Robitaille or Rob Blake was playing had to suffice. Aside from that, I don't remember what we talked about, or if we did much. Sports have a tendency to speak for themselves. Which maybe made it easier for both of us. Surrendering your emotions to the game in front of you and their extremes is always easier than creating those spikes organically. 

Near the end of our father-son pastime, just 2 years before I moved away to college and he and I drifted apart, the Kings made the move from the Forum to Staples Center. For those few seasons, our trip to the game was a 5 block walk down Figueroa from his office to the arena. The games were a little less frequent, the corporate seats a section farther up, the conversations still frustratingly eroded from my memory. As for the Kings themselves, they were still the afterthought of both the city and the league and would continue to be for the next several years. The years in which I didn't talk to my father. The years in which I went to 1 or 2 games and even then felt unnatural at not having him by my side.

That exile changed this season. I sought out the Kings in October in New Jersey with a few Devils fans from my old job. Near the start of the season, the teams were both mediocre, the seats $25 with free food and a drink thrown in. I had tickets to see them in Long Island but a paralyzing hangover during a friend's visit got in the way (hat-tip to Nicole Alvarez, who can outdrink me but apparently not outvomit me). I watched them limp into the playoffs on the last day of the season, next to my Sharks fan best friend at a NorCal-themed sports bar, forced to listen to a roid-rager with frosted tips berate my 2 other fellow Kings fans for clapping at a goal. I spent the next week waking up at 3:30am for my morning news job, turning off my alarm and immediately checking my ESPN app for the previous night's Kings/Canucks score. As time expired in Game 4 to complete their sweep of the Blues, I screamed and lifted my nephew up in the air in elation. Against Phoenix, I fought pouring rain to find the one bar in downtown Boston showing West Coast hockey rather than the NBA playoffs, getting a mid-50s couple to look up from their PDA-ing to see what I was wildly clapping at. The Game 5 overtime clincher I celebrated with tequila shots shared with a random fellow bar patron who turned out to be an actor from Desperate Housewives, reminiscing about L.A. restaurants over beers in the Village. For the Finals I was back in the same New Jersey arena with roughly the same seats as 8 months earlier, but this time my ticket cost more than my rent. Beside me were Reed & Lauren, friends from college and die-hard Kings fans who had flown out for Game 2. Our reward was seeing Jeff Carter bury a game-winning wrist shot in overtime, and being among the 200 or so people out of 18,000 that that was good news for. A week later I was back again for a game 5 I was hoping would never happen, but fully anticipating the Kings to continue their flawless road record by winning that night and clinching the championship, fully anticipating seeing my favorite team raise the Stanley Cup in person. That my lucky number 11 would pull through as their 10-0 road record improved by one more. My row consisted of 5 Kings fans who had come down from Ottawa, ones whose love for the game was also birthed during the L.A. Gretzky years. 2 rows ahead were 4 fans in from Silver Lake with jerseys from each of the Kings' eras of uniforms. We watched every possible break go New Jersey's way, palpably feeling the series' momentum shift to the Devils as they defeated the Kings 2-1. Like them, I went home absolutely crushed, listening to Devils fans on the PATH brag they now had this series in hand. Were about to spoil the Hollywood ending. I spent the first period of Game 6 at Bleecker Street Bar and watched as the Kings clinched the game, the series, their first ever title, in a euphoric span of 5 minutes during a first period power play. Behind me were 3 girls from L.A.'s Koreatown, along the bar in front of me a row of seething Devils fans. The Kings won the first Stanley Cup in their history on June 11th, my lucky number coming through after all. Text messages of congratulations poured in from friends; I exchanged a few with Reed, who was at the game, seeing in person what I wasn't able to, but experiencing the same emotions from opposite coasts. 

The next day I holed up in my friend's apartment and rewatched the full game by myself. The adrenaline and camaraderie of the revolving cast of those around me for the previous games absolutely became part of the astounding journey that this season's Kings' championship was. But this was the way I needed to end it. Watching it by myself, or more accurately with the palpable absence of my father. To share the elation, the relief, the innocent joy of an 8 year-old child over again. To go back to the emotions of the Forum for the final time. We never had a beer together. We never got to compare our experiences of running with the bulls in Pamplona five decades apart, or to discuss Hemingway. But seeing the Kings raise the greatest trophy in sports, my thoughts were on him. On the special times through the years that I look back at most centrally as us. 

A lot of people hate on sports as a waste of money, a gross exercise in commercialization and egoism, a narcotic for the masses. That's fine, as long as you recognize that occasionally it can be a genuine unifier, of classes and generations. Storage into which to pour some of your best memories, apart from a rather expensive way to break your heart year after year.

My father didn't live long enough for me nor our beloved Kings to make him proud. But their victory parade on Thursday will take them down the same 5 blocks of Figueroa in Downtown Los Angeles that we walked together to attend games at Staples Center. And it will do so in an explosion of pure emotion and with the Kings' simple colors echoing my often broken, but currently jubilant black-and-white heart. My inheritance.

Approximate sunlight.

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed." - Joshua 10:13

"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

I watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean at 5:30 in the evening. Both of us were fighting for a few more minutes in the day.

I knew going in that this was it. My last international trip for about a year and a half; the semi-retirement of my passport. When I returned to America I would begin a job with my dream television show to work for, starting at 2 days a week and being constantly on call to work the other 5. Eschewing vacation requests and treading as lightly as possible in the hopes of parlaying this opening into a full-time position. Which meant I had to take a pass on the $360 DC to Peru deal I saw online. Say no to my friend's suggestion of Radiohead in Berlin in July. I'd been the personification of Dylan Thomas' words for three years, but for the sake of my career, of my adulthood, I finally had to acquiesce to the tedium that is responsibility.

While I was grateful to travel again, this trip to Israel was itself already a segue into domestication. Gone were the hostels and followed whims that come with total sovereignty. Israel wasn't even my choice, nowhere near the top of my list for a next destination. But this trip was instead a special request by my aging mother, who wanted one last international vacation before her chronically bad feet gave way. With my memories spent with my deceased father now finite, I recognized how precious a week's worth of new ones with my remaining parent would be later in life. But a trip with her, especially in the Middle East, meant playing it safe. And aside from some freedom in Jerusalem and a day trip into Palestine on our own, we'd been on the pre-packaged tour group itinerary for the past week. With 12 hours left in the country, most of which would be consumed by sleep, the backpacker in me was fiending for some freedom.

I saw none of Tel Aviv. 10 minutes after our tour bus arrived in the city, I had abandoned my bags and my hobbling mother with her severely swollen ankle in our hotel room. With less than an hour of muted sunlight left in the yawning day, I was determined to make it the two and a half miles down the Mediterranean coastline to the old city of Jaffa before returning in time for a final mother-son dinner. The walkway contoured along emptying beaches, most people having long given up on the shy sun. Solitary shafts of frail light extended down to the water, propping up the cloud-laden sky. Every ten feet was a potential postcard landscape that I snapped off a shot of before resuming my brisk pace down the beach. 

It was an exercise in absurdity, so characteristically me. The same person who'd been to 29 countries in 150 days, who'd been to 11 cities in 6 days on this trip, was now trying to walk 2 miles to Jaffa, see its scattered highlights and be back on my way north all in under an hour. Because on the first go-round, denial is always more comfortable than defeat. 

With the sun setting rapidly, I checked my progress on a crude map that mostly highlighted the unending major hotels along the water. I was about two-thirds of the way to Jaffa, the spire of its prominent St. Peter's Church growing visible along the water. Reason, restraint, even relaxation finally settled in as my hurried pace slowed to a stroll and came to a stop. I began simply breathing, enjoying, truly seeing what was in front of me. Which meant I paused in time to fully see the clouds' defeat as the sun emerged, higher in the sky than it had appeared for the last half hour. The remaining twenty minutes of sunlight on my trip would be clearer and stronger than any of the ten hours that had preceded it. Day was breaking over Israel, the Mediterranean, and myself. Again.

With almost year and a half until my next journey, it is as distant and abstract as the names that will comprise it. Sarajevo. Belgrade. Mostar. Piteşti. Cluj. It's impossible to know how different my life will be by then, where eighteen months of infinite variables producing variables will lead me or those close by. I don't fear change (I don't think it's conceited to say I've rolled with punches better than your average 20-something) but I'm experienced enough to respect it. Especially as I'm reaching the precise age when potential leads to either payoff or failure. The point in the day when either the clouds or the sun wins. My traveling is ending for now, but the undercurrent that has propelled it, what has left me with something deeper than Facebook albums to show for it, is still continuing. As evidenced by the words and experiences here, and future others, I'm still teaching myself how to live.

If I'd succeeded in my absurdity, Old Jaffa would have gone down as the end of my travels. Just a luck in the draw of itineraries. Instead it was a sunset, by an energy with renewed intensity. I've watched plenty of sunsets in different cities, but staring west over the Mediterranean, I felt for the first time that the sun wasn't setting, it was just progressing forward. On its way to burn brighter in the lands to the West. In New York. And I'd be catching back up with it shortly. Once I came home.

Brick by brick by brick.

It could only have been a wall. 

I was late once. On an organized bus tour of nearly 60 people, it's as rude as it is inevitable. But when you're dealing with mostly gingerly-stepping retirees, it's to be understood that at least one will at some point be late. As it happened each time over the course of six days, some people around me got frustrated, my mother definitely included, but for the sake of change alone, I didn't mind that I was killing time waiting for someone on the streets of Nazareth rather than the avenues of Hell's Kitchen.

I let myself be the culprit, once, for about 45 seconds. And I was a little shocked that no one else had picked this moment to do the same. That I was the one that had pushed it farthest. Or maybe I was shocked that I still let myself be shocked.

They were late for different reasons. Missed wake-up calls at the hotel, a Southern preacher haggling down the price of a 3-foot-long ram's horn to bring back for his office wall, several people getting turned around in the folding alleyways of Tsfat. My excuse is I got lost in conversation, with no one in particular.

I didn't like Jerusalem. It was everything I thought it would be and less. Bad souvenirs, clueless snail-paced tourists, nonstop pitchmen, an approach to history either apocryphal or apathetic. The ancient that has survived into the modern day is incredible to behold, as long as you can put aside the lingering doubts of its authenticity, and ignore the great deal more of history here that has been completely destroyed. The capital of three deeply-related faiths practicing an alternating cannibalism, of both followers and foundation stones for the past three thousand years. Obsessed with the fallacy that destruction of the tangible will eradicate the transcendental. Adamantly asserting the dogma of Jesus, Elijah, Muhammad, but really just underscoring the gospel according to Tyler. That on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everything drops to zero. Solomon's temple fell, as did Herod's that replaced it. The Via Dolorosa, the path of Christ dragging the cross, isn't the actual path he took, but one that a group of 14th Century Franciscan monks particularly liked, and hence the tradition was born for unaware pilgrims to follow centuries later. Temples, truth, and theology.... all inevitably fall victim to time. Nowhere more blatantly than Jerusalem.

Aside from the Temple Mount, which is now accessible only to Muslims, the oldest public site is the Western Wall, the most holy in all of Judaism. The sixty-plus-foot high wall that surrounded the ancient temple courtyard. The afterthought of function now turned center for faith. Here believers stand with palms and foreheads against ancient stone, asserting pressure that gets them closer to God. Hoping the physics behind coal and diamonds carries over to prayers. Here they jam wadded scraps of paper into cracks of the wall, believing the words of the petition inside will then stand a greater chance of consummation. Caulking the gaps- in their lives with hope, and in Herodian limestone with notebook paper. 

I didn't write a prayer, as I had nothing to pray for nor to. Instead I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead into a contour of the wall and thought of the four-thousand years of men that had occupied that exact groove before me. Of what they might have asked for. And I thought of the walls that had come before in my life. My visit to the largest of the few remaining portions of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, tucked away in a courtyard between two more modern apartment buildings, its ten feet of height now helping to provide shade for a playground a few steps away. The only time in my travels that tears came absolutely instantly rather than a gradual buildup. 7 miles from where I stood now and a day earlier, the Israeli built security wall that carves the entire border of the West Bank, covered in painted protest by Westerners demanding its destruction and the creation of a Palestinian state. How history is as cyclical as it is ironic as it is cruel. This Palestinian barricade so reminiscent of the iconic wall in my favorite city of Berlin and its East Side Gallery. Four months earlier, my Thanksgiving day spent hiking atop the Great Wall of China at Gubeikou. My nontraditional if still entirely appropriate observation of the holiday. The John Lennon Wall in Prague, covered in Beatles lyrics birthed from cans of spray paint, that my best friend and I had added to in 2008. He tagging "Here Comes the Sun," which his mother used as a lullaby in his infancy. Among the three I contributed was "Nothing's gonna change my world," and within the year I had said unretractable goodbyes to my home, a parent, a love, a number of friends, and stability. But the absence of each only pushed me onward, propelled by a vacuum.  And still all the other walls, the Khmer-carved ones at Angkor Wat, the fragment in a Hiroshima museum stained with the blackest streaks of atomic rain, the bricks used as canvases throughout Europe, in Naples by Banksy, in Kreuzberg by Swoon, in Glasgow and Valencia and everywhere by nameless others. In Jerusalem, I was remembering these other walls and how this oldest one stood here as those others were only being built. I wasn't trying to invoke some holiness away from these bricks, but add some needed contentment back. I wasn't saying please. I was saying thank you. To whatever this is we are all a part of. If not necessarily God, then life, energy, samsara. For everything I've been indescribably fortunate enough to do already. And for everything I plan to do next.

I took my forehead away from the wall and carefully walked backwards, as is the reverent custom, to the entry gate, deposited my borrowed informal yarmulke in the pile, and found my tour group, the guide finishing another head count, one with my presence now complete. 

I was late once. And it was intentional. Because one of the central tenets that the last 3 years has taught me: you pick your spots.



Ophir raised the small logo-ed plaque on the stick and spoke into the small microphone headset. "Okay, so we're all back. Now we're going to walk through one of the oldest gates of the Old City...."

Personal jesus.

****Some of the following is potentially offensive and controversial, even by my standards. If you're going to do me the honor of reading it (and you really don't have to) then at least pay me the respect of reading until the end, and holding off on judgment until then. As always, much appreciated. - J.

"All I do is follow this hollow you around...." - Bright Eyes


I got to know Jesus through everything he wasn't...


...This was as a child, in Sunday morning catechism and 9 years of Catholic school. A strange amalgam of idiosyncratic beliefs, some disavowed by the mainstream, some the exact motivations behind church schisms. People I grew up with wore brown scapulars, a cloth necklace with two small plastic tiles, because if they were to die suddenly while wearing it, they would automatically be forgiven of any committed sins and go to heaven. A worn blue palm-sized book held prayers I recited, some worth 9 months deducted from my eventual time-to-be-spent in Purgatory, other longer appeals worth over a year. I spent a year saying a prescribed regimen of prayers and upon completion believed its assertion that as a reward, one angel from each of the 9 different levels of the heavenly hierarchy would follow and protect me. At the church I attended in Linesville, Pennsylvania, Jesus was a pastel-robed mosaic with a giant corona behind him composed of tens of thousands of small tiles. At the Spanish mission style church in North Hollywood he was a giant statue in a torn loin-cloth with a physique from a P90x "after" photo. 

...This was also during college, after I'd left the Catholic faith for an agnosticism bordering on atheism. This was the Jesus that was thanked publicly and repeatedly on Facebook by Orange County girls for being their daily inspiration- the same girls who fucked on the second date. That were simultaneously fucking 3 of my friends. The ones that were best friends with other OC girls on their way to their fourth abortion during sophomore year. That then unfailingly voted anti-choice Republican. The Jesus of the Georgian presidential candidate on his third marriage, deriding liberals for their lack of morality and family values. Then vowing to keep assault rifles as accessible as supermarket discount cards. The Jesus claimed to be followed devoutly by a massive group of people that time after time after time after time after time vilify the poor, when they're not just flat-out ignoring them. The Jesus with as much real depth as the bumper sticker they screen-print his image onto.

...This was also in 2009, while backpacking around Europe. I spent 3 months assembling him by piecemeal, along with Napoleon Bonaparte, Da Vinci, Goya. In a weird, lonely, Jungian collective unconscious sort of way, those are the additional types of friends you pick up while backpacking extensively. Beyond the hostel roommates and local girls you struggle through broken Turkish with, if you travel long enough you inherit people like Napoleon for companionship. Vincent Van Gogh. Ernest Hemingway. Eventually Jesus Christ. Self-portraits by the same artist painted at different times in their life, stringing a connection together from the Prado to the Louvre to the Met, to wherever. Battlefields following birthplace, museum relics to mausoleum. You're reliving the lives of icons in geographic rather than chronological order. And that's exactly how these dead men can live forever. Reincarnation by proxy. 

When it came to relics from the life of Jesus, who is spiderwebbed throughout a continent he never set foot upon, my skepticism prevailed. Not that of an agnostic, rather my inner historian doubting the integrity of a 2,000 year old chain of custody. I believe that Jesus existed as an individual, but I didn't believe that the moldy blood in a gold-trimmed vial in Bruges was truly his any more than I believed that church's claim it liquefied every Wednesday at 1 p.m. with the precision of a German train. The already dubious assertion that if the infant Jesus ever slept in a crib it somehow survived and ended up in Rome became laughable once I learned the same church used to display what they presented as authentic breast milk of the Virgin Mary. But still I kept going and paying my 3 Euros. Because my inner 9 year-old loves a scavenger hunt. And because as an observer, watching pilgrims meekly approach objects in darkened vaults was more beautiful than seeing them cram into Southern megachurches, arenas where the image of the evangelist on the jumbotron dwarfs the size of the one on the crucifix. I related with those that chose the conquest rather than the congregation. 

Visitors beside me fell to their knees before the wooden Holy Grail in Valencia, they whispered and pointed at the crown of thorns at Notre Dame in Paris. They arrived in buses to an otherwise obscure Roman church containing a piece of the cross, 2 of the nails that bound Christ to it, and the "INRI" sign that hung above him at the crucifixion. I personally didn't believe I was any closer to divinity, but just being there at all was enough for me.

That particular casual scavenger hunt came to an end for me days ago in Palestine and Israel. For my devout mother beside me, this meant pilgrimage, like the faithful in Europe. On the surface we were seeing Jesus' birth cave, his tomb, the rock upon which he was executed, his father's carpentry workshop- a dozen other places associated with perhaps the most influential person to ever live. As in Europe, my reaction was removed. I felt far more relief at the contentment I saw in my mother's face than any emotions of my own. It didn't surprise me that I didn't experience any revelation in the gilded Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I'd already learned in Rome The Vatican was stunning as buildings go, but a pretty poor venue for faith. 

A day after leaving Jerusalem for calmer parts of Israel, I stood on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, in a footnote of a village called Capernaum. The ruins of 2 buildings and a post-modern church built hovering above the ancient foundation stones believed to be the house of the apostle Peter's mother. Believed, even by the most skeptical historians, to be the house in which Jesus started talking about philosophy and dogma with his first followers. It was here that he really began to think.

Only the slightest outline of small buildings on the far bank of the Sea were visible in the hazy fading afternoon light. The thinnest of miniature trees protruded in clusters just out of reach from shore, encircled by lazy grey water. Low-hanging clouds dotted beneath several higher layers of the same. The day wasn't gorgeous, only pleasant. Uneventful, typical, but most importantly serene. An average afternoon that would have looked the same that day as it did hundreds, or even two thousand years before. It's where you would go if you wanted to find Jesus, rather than Christianity. A Jesus separate from televangelism, hollow belief, and hypocrisy. Even a Jesus separate from religion. But one that was inspired to think a little deeper, push himself a little farther, and compel others to do the same.

I don't believe in God. But that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. It isn't that I'm cold and cynical, although I am. It's that what I'm cold and cynical about isn't congruent with what the majority of society is as well. Away from all the distractions and the false images of Christ I've been inundated with my entire life, I realized I actually like and agree with a lot of Jesus' teachings on morality, like I agree with a lot of the Buddha's, and of Far Eastern sages. Because it's basic. Fundamental. I don't see how asserting that he absolutely rose from the dead or that Muhammad unquestionably took a night journey to have a conversation with Moses and Abraham makes what either of them said any more logical or any more relateable. But I do see, from near-constant experience, that the insistence that it does makes me not want to listen to anything further one might have to say. I'm frustrated with myself that it took me going all the way to rural Israel to figure this out. Worse, that I'm not the only one to blame.

California, rest in peace.

"The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way." - Joan Didion

The beers came with frosted mugs, lips rimmed with chili-salt like the little jars of Lucas seasoning I would buy from ice cream trucks in my Burbank grade school days. Two Coronas and a Modelo Especial while we waited for our street-style tacos in one of the booths on the more secluded side of the restaurant, where our suits drew a few less stares from the other customers. We had about an hour to kill before the wedding reception began a mile away at the Museum of Latin American Art, and while that meant drinks for the three of us while the sun was still up on a February day borrowed from summer, for me it meant guessing that tacos at an anonymous taqueria in Long Beach would be better than any I'd had in two years on the East Coast. And being right.

The Coronas were for two high school friends, one whom I've been fortunate enough to stay close with since, who has been with me in Poland and Pamplona, and far harder places in between, and another whom I've seen far less, but is still someone special in my life. I held her infant daughter a few hours before, remembering vividly us holding a ten-pound sack of flour wrapped in a baby blanket in high school, our shared responsibility during our week-long marriage for a Life Commitments class senior year. The last time I'd seen her I lived in Los Angeles, her adorable newborn just an abstract to daydream of with her soon-to-propose-boyfriend, and the couple the three of us had just seen become husband and wife was trying to make a long-distance relationship work against the odds of youth and yearning.

The ceremony was a further homecoming for me, bringing me back to the church I'd gone to growing up in North Hollywood, attached to the Catholic grade school I attended for my first 5 years in California, where I was classmates with the radiant bride. I graduated that school as an altar boy and returned an agnostic. Fifteen years removed from Sister Mary Bride's scoldings and after-mass breakfast specials at Ernie's Restaurant, I spent the sermon tracing the folded wood of the massive altar backdrop and the snaking concrete arches climbing to surround the bare cupola, thinking (characteristically) about myself and how my nine, ten, eleven, and twelve year-old eyes used to do the same half my lifetime ago. The difference now being comparison. Context. I didn't feel the awe that I did in St. Petersburg churches or Spanish cathedrals, but this actually wasn't all that bad of an effort. Something okay to leave, but never abandon. And here I was greeted with a kiss on the cheek from the collective crush of my entire high school class and a church-whispered "Welcome home" that felt more reassuring than any words that could come from the book on the pulpit.

I was at the reception for far too short of a time. Just long enough to eat, dance with the bride, cram into the rented photobooth with too many other people, and make sure my table was the rowdiest before heading up to Culver City to meet a random assortment of friends for an overdose of drinks. But it was enough for me to discover two things I could carry with me. One, that in a pinch, 2 parts Sprite and 1 part Coke can pass for ginger ale if you don't have the latter around as a mixer. And second, I got to see the bride's parents dance together, a couple that I only in that moment realized stood as perhaps the closest ideal of a marriage to look up to that I'd ever personally grown up around. I had certainly never seen my own parents in that way, and while Julienne's mother and father didn't raise me, they'd fed me enough over two decades to lay some hand in the claim. I also realized that though I loved them, both as real individuals and as an ideal in this moment, I didn't actually know for certain their first names. I'd grown up simply calling them by the Tagalog sign of respect, po. I decided not to ask, nor to go back and check the church program. Their actual names might be shared with other people I happen to know, but in my life that endearment would only ever apply to them.

As Julienne and Andy left for their honeymoon the day after, I recognized that mine was over. My life in New York is no longer the experiment of one's 20s; the box on the checklist has long been marked if I wanted to move on. Five months since my last visit and for the first time it was absolutely clear, not that I needed California, but how I needed it. It's a preservation of a fairy tale. A promise to myself that life could be easier if I wanted it to be- a ripchord to leave dangling for the rainiest of days. It's a lie obviously, one that I'm happy to tell myself because it's one of the very few I'll indulge. If I returned, it would be permanently. My life would become unavoidable, and in ways Californians don't realize, far more difficult than it is now. The Santa Ana winds are more blistering than the gush of displaced air that hits the subway platform eight seconds before the cars enter the station. Cramming onto the 6 train the few times I'm traveling at rush hour is much preferable to sitting in the parking lot that typically is the 405. In California everything is already so spread out. My move just pushed that circumference farther.

I returned to New York as late as possible Sunday night. Hours earlier during my twice-a-year game of beer pong we focused on the excitement of each turn rather than meaningful conversation. Because to do the latter would admit defeat, acknowledge too consciously the separation. No. I'm not coming back. And not that it isn't tempting, because it so clearly is. The Sunday barbecues with Pacific salt air and Mexican beers, the whispered welcome homes. It's an absolutely beautiful life. It just isn't mine. 

Still a half hour to go before the reception started. The television set in the corner of the taqueria was a satellite feed from Mexico of Azteca showing some human interest magazine, like a lower budget version of Dateline. It was muted, so all I could catch on my infrequent glances up were blurry-edged sepia tone re-enactments and the occasional on-screen graphic, chyrons in a semi-familiar language. But my intermediate Spanish was enough for me to easily translate their modest explanation of what would happen after the commercial break. Their one-word promise to be back. Regresamos. "We return." I understood it. I only hope everyone else can too.

The past presents the future.

"There's a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." - Elbow

"What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace."  - Joan Didion, "On the Morning After the Sixties"


When the L train goes above ground, the first thing you see is a cemetery. The train pulls into the Wilson Avenue stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the only station of the 468 in the New York subway to have one platform inside and the other direction outdoors. Along with the E, the cars of the L are the most modern of the system and at this hour of the day I am one of the few people heading deeper into Brooklyn, so my hungover eyes linger not on the fellow passengers slouched against rails but on absence and the blanket advertisements for Google that monopolize this particular car. The promotions for Chrome push a special feature that allows for private sessions so your browsing history isn't recorded. Our right to privacy being dangled back to us as incentive in the dystopian present. As for my present, I'm rapidly becoming a parody of myself, beginning my third trip in 11 days. A weekend in Los Angeles following 2-day stints in Montreal and DC all for supposed relaxation and pleasure. But if there ever was any to be garnered it's not visible from where I am sitting at 8 a.m. in an empty car of the most modern design the MTA offers with 2 sleeping passengers for companionship, enveloped in Orwellian marketing complete with stick figures to ensure our minds don't miss its simple points and all I have for distraction, for escapism in a world of perpetual escape, are the malaise essays of '70s Didion and in a scratched plexiglass reflection the cemetery comes into view behind me.


My transfer is at Broadway Junction and I take the steep staircase, a packed escalator of motionless people descending beside me in a steady fall. The A train continues my journey back beneath ground and the express passes empty stations of linoleum that I can tell by the font of their names are from the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the rooms leaning toward a brand of future that never came. By the time the A goes above ground I feel almost grateful, even if the blue skies and Indian Spring of the last 2 days has gone back to a grey ceiling of anonymous time, both of hour and decade.  As the train continues toward JFK it passes something I've never seen or just forgot existed because the only thing stranger in that moment than seeing a casino in outer Brooklyn is seeing one at 8:30 in the morning. Off that subway, it's then to the AirTrain at Howard Beach and its anachronistic patch of marsh, the reeds and monochrome water hemmed between the subway platform and the monorail as a dim reminder to what this land once was. Stepping off the AirTrain I walk through corridors out of a Kubrick film and look out the windows toward JetBlue's Terminal 5, a brand new structure of concrete and glass that looks most like someone picked the Lotus Temple out of Delhi to transplant here and it wilted mid-journey. And I can see the check-in counters on the level below and the balcony above them, upon which a TV crew has set up chairs and an attractive aging blonde is interviewing a man with this stark setting as backdrop, and I know that they're talking but I can't hear what they're saying.