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VINTAGE UNDERGROUND
RESCUE NOW
PERSONAL WRITING
ABOUT
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE ARCHIVES
The excerpts below are linked.
Click here for the full substack.
KISS THE SUN & PUT IT OUT THERE
It’s easy to write in private. Half-baked ideas, sloppy spelling, and an audience of one. I’ve been doing it for years now, and I’ve piled up over 400 pages of stories and memories. After watching the SNL 50th Anniversary documentary, I was hit with a heavy dose of inspiration. What they’re doing in that studio—and have been doing for the last bazillion years—is magic. Losing their minds, throwing ideas at the wall, seeing what sticks, refining it, killing it, hopefully laughing at it, then showing it to the world Saturday night. There’s a carefree urgency to the work that has made it what it is.
I write every day for work. Headlines, scripts, and concepts that get shaved down through the process of reviews, word counts, legal, and all the other mumbo jumbo of advertising—and that’s fine. But as I turn to my Google Drive every morning, I remind myself of the juicy stuff—the Hunter Thompsons and Hemingways of the world. The old-school vagabonds who spilled raw emotions and gutsy prose onto the page. The style of writing that grips, fucks, and makes you think about the beauty of words. It doesn’t always make logical sense, but it just feels right.
“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.” -Hunter S. Thompson
SOHO RUNS
Background…
At the time of this writing, I was one month into my move to New York and living in a shared Airbnb with four roommates. My life consisted of job hunting, food stamps, and running around the city meeting with anyone and everyone who would spare me the time of day. In the moment, it was awful. Looking back, it’s a period of my life I’ll forever cherish.
This piece includes fake names, real people.
Being an ignorant, new-to-New-York rookie, I still hadn’t set up a Citi Bike account. I told Paul I’d be late and tried my luck on the R line. I rode one stop, and then again: “Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay—there’s a holdup with the subway signals. We’ll try to get up and running as soon as possible.” Time to open a can of man, I thought. I was 1.3 miles away, and it was already 12:30 p. m.—the new time Paul and I had agreed on. I shed my puffer jacket, grabbed my bag with both hands, and broke off running through SoHo. I found my flow and managed to scrape together a runner’s high. It was a true, gritty, shitty, New York do-what-you-gotta-do moment. I kept thinking, if I make it and get a job from this… oh boy, imagine the story.
And I made it, alright. And the first thing he said was...