I’ve started this newsletter many different times in an effort to appease you—an audience that has never asked for such appeasement. I’ve wanted to explain so many times why I’ve been missing in action for so long, but each time I type out all my depressing paragraphs lacking in both hope and brevity, something else comes along.

Something else always comes along.

You haven’t heard from me in a while, and I apologize for that. Ferris Bueller really wasn’t kidding when he told us that life comes at us fast. When I first started this newsletter, I thought I was prepared to maintain posting consistency. I’d already experienced just how fast life could go, and I thought the tide would be easy enough to swim against. It wasn’t. When you’re in the ocean and you think like that, you’re already putting yourself in danger. Life–like the ocean–is vast, beautiful, deep, and unpredictable. When you get to the parts where your feet no longer feel sand, the last thing you should do is take it lightly. I told myself I would be sending one newsletter a week because I love writing. I love writing for you, especially. It seemed like something I’d be able to execute without issue because I could still see the shore. I mistook a riptide for gentle drifting. I thought my legs were stronger.

This is how you lose the shore.

My father fell out of bed and broke his hip. Dementia made this pretty awful for him as he would forget that he was injured and then try to get out of bed again. He was scared, in pain, and at the mercy of the American healthcare system; the worst place one can find themselves. I’m very fortunate in that I have a partner who dropped everything when I told her what had happened, and within a few days, we were in LA, and I was in the hospital at his bedside.

He was tired on my first visit. He kept slipping the oxygen monitor off of his finger as we stood there with him, but he did speak a little bit and gave me a smile. I had been prepared for worse. He’d been much worse off when the injury first occurred, so I’d fully prepared myself for something awful. Unfortunately, that preparation wasn’t wasted, as the next time I saw him, my presence sparked a deep unrest in him and he begged and pleaded with me to get him out of the rehab center he’d been transferred to. He knew who I was for a brief moment, and then I became someone else. Someone meant to go and get “Andrew” from just outside his room. After some time, I left. I asked the nurses to try and manage his pain more, because to my mind, the pain was exacerbating the dementia, and if that were under control, he’d be better able to recover. I was hopeful, but it wasn’t based on anything except the naive idea that things usually work out in the end. My Dad is a strong man, right? Every checkup he has, the doctor talks about how strong he is for his age. This is just one more bump in a very long road. I couldn’t feel the drift, and I could still see the shore, so even if I’d floated a little ways, I could still make it back, right?

When we returned home, I had the opportunity to barback for my very favorite bar during SXSW. It meant late nights into early mornings, but it also meant a bit of financial relief. You may not know this, but being unemployed is exhausting. Most of the positions you’re applying for don’t even exist anymore. Companies post them in order to secure tax breaks and after you spend hours of your life tailoring your resume and writing a cover letter, they don’t even have the courtesy to reject you. You’re instead met with an inbox filled to the brim with spam and silence. Working at the bar was tangible. Fill the wells with ice when needed, slice the fruit, clear the glasses, and do it fast. I can live with that. I made good money, and I had a good time doing it. Now I could pay some bills and finally sit down to write without my anxious brain being pulled in a thousand different directions.

Except I got COVID. I got COVID for the very first time, seemingly in celebration of the 5-year anniversary of lockdown. I didn’t care for it.

So after a few days of feeling like I was going to die in my office where I’d sequestered myself, I spent a few additional weeks being unable to think or breathe properly. I’m feeling much better now. Maybe 90%. 85% if I factor in the brain fog. I’d say I’m at a solid B right now if I were to give myself a grade, and if it was good enough for high school Andrew, then it’s good enough for the modern iteration.

“There we go,” I thought, nearly certain that this was my chance. “Now that I can breathe again, the words are just gonna flow. What a fun bunch of things I get to write about.”

I was even further from the beach now, and the tops of the palm trees caught in the ocean breeze seemed to wave goodbye as they prepared to dip below the horizon. I haven’t been a swimmer for years, but it’s like riding a bike. We came from the sea, and our genes have good memory. This is the point where I got the closest to putting out a new newsletter. Pieces of that initial work have already been spliced into this one. As you can no doubt surmise, I never sent it.

We put my dad into hospice care, and all those pretty words left me again.

Before he was in the care of hospice, my Dad had a sharp decline in his condition. He no longer wanted to take his medications–of which there were many–and he stopped eating. I had hoped (again, naively) that better pain management would result in him being better equipped to recover and heal. Ever the optimist, I was wrong again. The decline continued unabated, and I found myself on a one-way flight to Los Angeles,ready to stay as long as I needed to.

I didn’t have to stay long. I sat by my father’s bedside for four days before he passed away. I read to him, played music for him, and called people that couldn’t be in LA so that they could speak to him, even though he couldn’t speak back. I tried to do everything I could for him so that when he passed, I’d feel like I’d done enough.

I don’t.

I’m not going to eulogize my father in this space. Not now, anyway. I might share a little more about my experience later on, but that’s not what this is. This is about getting words into a document, sending it, and finding my place in the world again. I’ve spent a year thinking I’m a terrible writer; no job will take me, I can’t focus, and even doing something as simple as journaling feels insurmountable. It’s all tangled inside me; cords and wires of my incessant doubts, thoughts, hopes, and horrors that have nowhere to go, so they’re strangling me from the inside.

All I want to do is breathe again, and this is the first step. The first stroke of many on my way to dry land. The tide is at the beck and call of the moon itself, but my choices are to defy it or drown. I don’t want to drown. Too many of the people I’ve lost went out of their way to keep me afloat while they were here, and now it’s my turn to help the others keep their heads above water.

Thank you for being here. Sorry if I’ve been hard to connect with, and my sincerest apologies if I’ve been difficult to be around. I can see the shore again. When I get there, I’m hopeful about what I’ll be able to build in the sand.

The Stationary Wanderer’s Lament

I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t mean that in terms of being alive (stand down), I mean in terms of location. I moved to Austin in 2009, and at the time, it was amazing. It changed my life in untold ways to escape from Ohio and find myself in a new world with a different culture. Yes, I was still in the United States (derogatory), but this country is so varied and vast that the distance I managed to cover with what little money I had brought me to parts unknown. I reveled in it. Art, food, language, it was all so new to me. I’d gone on trips before to other exotic parts of the country like Orlando and San Diego, but I never stayed very long and failed to soak it in. In fact, there was a time when I stayed with my Great Aunt Alice at her apartment in San Diego and she tried desperately to get me to engage in culture on a daily basis. Unfortunately for the both of us, I was a soft-brained internet-obsessed teen and I successfully evaded her attempts at turning me into a more culturally well-rounded individual, which I regret to this day. I didn’t make that mistake with Austin, and it was very good for me at the time.

It was swell… But the swelling has gone down.

I never intended to be here for this long because I knew the high would eventually wear off; the rush of setting foot on new soil and coming face to face with new things to learn and see. I was meant to leave so long ago, and yet, here I remain.

It’s not easy to be a citizen of the world, because no one thinks of you as such. You’re allowed to move freely within your set of imaginary lines, but if you wish to venture beyond and really indulge, you have to fight tooth and nail. You’re a citizen of the space between those lines that you have no say in. Lines drawn by colonizers and mass murderers who don’t deserve a second of our thoughts and didn’t wash their balls but somehow still hold power over us in what’s meant to be a more enlightened age. Moreover, should you wish to stretch your legs beyond the lines you were assigned at birth, your ass better have money: those imaginary numbers on a screen worth less and less every day as our economic system continues to decay like a dead deer on the side of the road in summertime. We feel stuck. I feel stuck.

Regardless of how stuck I feel, however, I am still a being on this planet. I am still a citizen of the world, and the dead-eyed bureaucrats whose children have gone no-contact with them can never take that away from me. I intend to see the world, but while I look for a job and pray that our passport maintains its strength in the face of unprecedented idiocy, I have to remember that the world nearest me is still worth exploring and celebrating, because you see, the world works both ways. I could go anywhere else in the world right now and I’d be so grateful to be there. I would eat the food, my ears would drink in the music, and my feet would feel like they were floating as the soles of my shoes mapped the subtle differences of unfamiliar pavement beneath them. I would be lost, and I would trade almost anything for the privilege to be so unfound. Conversely, someone from another corner of the world entirely could find themselves on the very street I live on and feel the exact same way without reservation. They could head into the local taco shop down the street that operates inside of the Chevron and have some of the best breakfast tacos they’ve ever had in their life, and it would be made even more special simply because, in this place, they’re a traveler.

There are corners of this city where culture still lives, and it’s important to see them before the millennial gray of gentrification knocks these people and places down into rubble and replaces them with sterile, monochromatic boxes and the exact same shitty bar for the ten-thousandth time. The soul of the city remains for those who seek it out, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. It’s exactly what I’d do if I were weaving my way through the unfamiliar streets of a foreign country, and indeed what I have done before. Tourist spots mean nothing when there are hidden spaces where locals complain about the tourist spots, all while eating incredible food, drinking drinks you can’t pronounce, and singing songs about the hidden world you now find yourself in.

When you explore these places and ally yourself with the people therein, there’s no telling where that can take you. You’re forever unable to see the bridges they’ve built if you’re content to stay lost in the fog of technocratic monotony.

You can’t just be a person who lives in a city, and you can’t be someone longing to get out and explore when you haven’t explored your own backyard. Wherever you are, no matter how long you’ve been there, you have to be a traveler.

You must always be a traveler.

I’ll see you soon, Austin.

YOUR WEEKLY MISSION

In times like these, artists are more important than ever. Not only do they have the difficult task of taking the world and filtering it through their carefully curated lenses, but they’re often targeted for doing so. There are few things more threatening to authoritarianism than genuine artistic expression, which is why local artists need your support more than ever.

Your mission this week is to support local art.

You don’t need to buy a print, CD, or a t-shirt (though that would be incredible). A lot of people are struggling right now and don’t have the ability to support an artist financially. Your local artists understand that. Getting their art in front of more eyes doesn’t cost you anything, though. Boosting them in the eyes of the wretched algorithm costs you nothing. Share their links, comment on their posts, hell, just tell them that you appreciate what they’re doing. Support doesn’t necessarily equate to money. Support can just mean a little bit of encouragement in a world constantly shouting someone down and proclaiming that them and their talents don’t actually matter, despite the fact that it’s them and people like them that make this world worth living in. If you do end up buying something from them, let me know! Let me see what you got and drop the socials of the artist!

SUPPORT LOCAL ARTISTS

(Bonus Mission: Cancel one of your streaming services. You barely watch that one, but you’re paying $10 a month for the commercial-free version. Time to send that fucker out to pasture.)

REVIEW: Minolta Maxxum 7000i 35mm Camera

The year is 1988, and Minolta has decided to release another camera that changes the game with a name that sounds a lot like it belongs on a box of off-brand condoms. This is a camera that feels good in the hand; it’s sturdy despite the plastic construction that the 80s reveled in and it’s fairly intuitive. Are there switches in places that feel incorrect to the point where you might have to bring it down from your eye to remind yourself exactly where they are? Sure! But I imagine the more you use it, the less you think about it. I only just used it for the first time, so I’m what could be considered a Maxxum novice. This is a camera where the autofocus is snappy, the shudder is fast, and the glass is sharp, resulting in photos that are bright, beautiful, and almost cinematic-looking. If you look on eBay right now, you can get the camera and maybe even a couple lenses and a flash for maybe $60. Film bros haven’t discovered that this camera slaps yet, and their oversight can be your opportunity.

I didn’t get mine from eBay. I got mine from my dad when I stayed with him for a few months in 2021 after my mom died. It had been hanging in the garage the entire time they’d lived there, and one day when I was taking out the trash, he spotted it and said, “I want you to have that.” At the time, I wasn’t really interested in film photography. I wouldn’t travel that particular road for another year and a half, but I accepted the gift and took it back to Texas when I left. I never used it. I acquired several film cameras after it and had a grand time exploring all of those devices, but something kept me away from the 7000i. I guess I thought that it wasn’t my style? That it didn’t fit with my aesthetic, or something idiotic like that. Either way, it sat in my garage, hanging on the wall. Like father, like son. It was there for so long I lost it and only recently found it once again.

When my father’s health declined, I brought three different cameras with me to Los Angeles. I only ended up using one.

SNAPSHOT(S) OF THE WEEK

These were all taken on Fuji 400 film using the only lens I have for it, which is a 35mm-80mm AF zoom lens. As a prime lens guy, I adored the versatility that the zoom lens gave me, which is a problem, because now I really want one for my main digital body and I do not have the funding for such an endeavor. I’ll get there eventually, but in the meanwhile, I can’t wait to play with the 7000i even more. I wish you could hear the sound that the shutter makes when you press that button down, because it is immaculate. If I could, I would bottle it and take sips of it from a menacing-looking flask when I thought people weren’t looking.

My dad captured a lot of our young lives with this camera. He got it the year after I was born, and until he made the shift to digital, I don’t recall another film camera coming into the picture. This camera saw a lot, and I’m proud to be its steward; the one who now wields its sharp and newly-opened eye. I hope you like the shots it took. Now that I have a better understanding of how the Maxxum 7000i works, you can expect a lot more.

I love you, Dad. Wait till you see what I do with this amazing gift you gave me.

Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to share it around if you liked what you found inside. My next newsletter will be more of my regularly scheduled programming. Should you feel moved to do so, you can subscribe, but you don’t have to. I’m doing this for the love of the game. Any money made is a welcome bonus (since I’m still unemployed despite applying to over 400 jobs), but is not expected by any means.

Also, if you don’t want to support Substack (reasonable), you can donate to my Ko-fi.

Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for waiting so patiently.