Burnout // Hawaii

Toward the end of September, I needed a nap. But not just one nap, it seemed, multiple naps per day. I couldn’t sit in front of my computer and work for more than an hour and a half at a time for several days in a row. My sleep was erratic, I definitely wasn’t eating properly, and there were days where I couldn’t will myself to get out of bed at all. I developed fevers periodically that would eventually wane, headaches that wouldn’t go away even with Advil for days on end, and when out attending events I could barely stay awake. Beginning sometime this summer, the smallest occurrences would cause my eyes to well with tears: when I was interviewing the curator of the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, her description of artist Tracey Emin’s “I Can Feel Your Smile,” made for a friend of the artist who, after her husband passed, was feeling guilty for her own moments of happiness; driving up the FDR past the skyline of Long Island City; episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine. Though it perhaps goes without saying, this was not my usual state. Which, frankly, stressed me out even more. I went to the doctor, hoping something would be revealed in my heart rate, blood tests, my balance, even? I cried in his office, so concerned there was something wrong with me. He tried not to look at me, but commented on my Velvet Underground t-shirt; Lou Reed was one of his favorite artists. The tests all came back clear, and my heart rate was normal. It’s possible you might have a stress disorder, he said. When was your last vacation?

In the moment I had to think, and eventually after some consideration and some math, the answer revealed itself to me: four and a half years. It was the last time AS had been free from work, when I went to visit her and later GD in California. Now AS and I were planning a vacation together for June 2020. How could my body possibly hold out until then given its current state? I would probably collapse, lose my mind, or both. Every trip home, every visit to friends, I brought my computer and I worked almost the whole time. A workaholic from a young age, it had finally begun to affect my health.

One night shortly after, I went to sleep. Or rather, I tried, as was the norm these days. In the midst of my tossing and turning, I had an idea: what if I went to Hawaii in time for my birthday? I had always wanted to go, I had nothing particular lined up for that week yet, and it was a safe place to travel to alone. How much would it cost? A quick Google search in the dark on my phone as I lay in bed revealed a much more affordable price than I had expected. Could this really be possible? Could I do this? “Yes,” my mother said when I got her on the phone the next day. “But you have to promise not to bring your computer.” And I started crying immediately, so relieved to have some sort of reprieve on the horizon. I don’t think I had ever taken a real vacation like that before, let alone by myself. I booked my tickets and my hotel not too long after. It was done: I was going to Hawaii. Something inside of me lightened, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Just a few more weeks.


*

The lightness of my own carry-on bag as I boarded the plane was not just literal, but metaphorical. I had left a great weight at home. I smiled as the Hawaiian Airlines flight video played, a woman hula dancing on a beach to indicate the exit rows, a woman and child in front of a shave ice truck to show when to put on safety masks. I quickly learned that “mahalo” meant thank you, I read books, I watched movies, neither of which I ever usually let myself do on planes because I felt I should have been working. But this time, there was nothing to work on except myself.

That night, I took myself out to dinner at Zigu, a restaurant not far from my hotel but miraculously not crawling with tourists. I ate soft spicy tofu and amberjack in a crushed peanut sauce I practically licked from the plate. Next to me, a woman from San Diego by way of Honolulu asked me what brought me to town. My birthday, I told her, and not only did she buy me a sake to celebrate, but the waitress later brought over a dish of ice cream with a candle in it. I had forgotten to blow out a candle on my actual birthday two days prior, so it was especially lovely. Two of the guys behind the sushi bar where I was sitting had lived in New York, they said between sizzling pans and grills. They didn’t miss it.

My first day was unnerving. I woke up at 5:30, jetlagged out of my mind, in time to see a magnificent sunrise, a rainbow of pastels, pinks and purples and tangerine hues blended together like cotton candy. I turned to look at my phone for a few minutes and it was gone. When I woke up to sunrises after that, I kept the phone far away from me. Around 7, I went down to the beach and ate breakfast, not quite sure what to do with myself. I read, I laid down, I watched surfers, but around 9 I felt antsy. What should I do now? I went back upstairs to put away my camera and my brain whizzed, confused, anxious. WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING? I talked myself down from a ledge. The answer to this question is that you are supposed to be doing whatever you want. What do you want to do right now? I asked myself. At that moment the answer was ‘take a nap.’ So I did. I had no problem figuring out what to do or making decisions after that.

I took myself to lunch in the Kaimuki neighborhood, to the Koko Head Cafe, where I treated myself to a bowl of miso pork belly I can still taste, both sweet and salty, and a bacon-cheddar-kimchi scone to go. I stopped by Da Shop, an independent bookstore, and got a book by a Hawaiian author, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, recommended to me the day before by my Lyft driver from the airport. I visited the University of Hawaii at Manoa after that, where I was greeted by a real live rainbow while Guns ‘N Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” played on the radio. A true nerd at my core, I bought a sweatshirt at the campus store before heading over to Waiola Shave Ice. There, my lychee and coconut shave ice with mochi both melts on my tongue and suppresses the heat of the day. I watch the sunset and treat myself to a dinner of spam musubi. At the hotel bar, I order a sweet, dessert-y cocktail and start talking with a Naval officer. He’s covered in tattoos--a wolf on his hand, a galaxy sleeve on his arm, and more that I can’t even count. He’s getting a pig and a chicken tattooed on each foot tomorrow, he tells me: when the Navy brings the animals on board, they keep the pigs and chickens in wooden cages so if anything happens to the boat, they’ll float. He asks what brings me to Hawaii and I tell him. Am I here alone? I am. That’s ballsy, he says. Is it? I say. Maybe I mean, it’s boss, he says. Later he tells me he was one of the sailors charged with retrieving bodies from the USS John McCain incident in Singapore. Surely something like that is ballsy, no? And I wonder, is a woman traveling alone as dangerous as carrying corpses to the shore?

The next day, Hawaiian food for breakfast at Highway Inn--sticky poi, juicy lomi salmon, salty pulled kalua pig--followed by record shopping at Hungry Ear Records, where of course I walk away with a Don Ho album, because how could you be in Honolulu and not do that? Perusal of downtown, still gentrifying with new cocktail bars dark during the day alongside a wave of homeless bodies asleep on the streets. At Tin Can Mailman, Hawaiiana from the 20th century; I get a vintage poster for my mother, a page from a 1947 Esquire pinup calendar for myself. Owning my tourist fantasy, I take myself out to the Royal Hawaiian hotel, a pink cake of a hotel dating back to 1920, for a Mai Tai, as that’s where the drink was invented. Soon, I make the acquaintance of a man who treats me to the drink, as well as a slice of fluffy pink coconut birthday cake and pizza, as well as a lovely couple from Oregon celebrating a new phase of their marriage. We follow each other on Instagram, and I fall into bed slightly toasted, but happy.

In the morning, I hike Diamond Head, a crater with high lookout points once used to protect Hawaii from invaders. The lookout point I will climb that day is 761 feet high. I’m by no means alone when I do it, as the hike receives something like 3,000 visitors per day. But I’ve walked an hour from my hotel, and I’m quite tired and hot when I arrive--’twas not the finest decision I’ve ever made. But I fill up my water bottle, a lovely German woman kindly shares some extra sunscreen with me, and I’m off to climb the crater. After a long swirling but gradual climb and something near 100 stairs, I’m at the top. This magnificent view of Waikiki, turquoise water, boats, a lighthouse, palm trees, coastline, houses, greenery for miles. And I did it myself. It’s a sentiment I’ll turn back to many times throughout my trip.

I plow into lunch at Rainbow Drive-In, so hungry after my hike I forget to taste my food. I promise myself I’ll come back and try it again. I head home and put on my bathing suit, but fall into bed instead. I wake up and actually head down to the beach this time. I see people boarding a catamaran for a sunset cruise and I notice myself thinking, “I wish I could do that.” So instead of wishing, I make myself a reservation for the next day. That night, though, after I watch the sunset, I treat myself to dinner at a place called Town, also in Kaimuki. A magnificent salad of butter lettuce and green goddess dressing and oranges and millet, cloud-like gnocchi in brown butter with roasted sunchokes, a slice of chocolate tart drizzled with olive oil, and their famous lemonade accented with parsley (which at first I wince at the thought of, but the taste was clean and refreshing). I would go back in a heartbeat, but this time I would try not to fall asleep at the table...I head home afterward and fall into bed, instead.

Saturday, a visit to the farmer’s market. I buy a dragonfruit, which is bright fuschia on the inside, that I eat with a spoon sitting on a curb while people mill around me. Later, an iced tea, some grilled shrimp on a stick--the man behind the counter gives me an extra order in exchange for a smile; this is how you know boys in Hawaii think you’re cute, I chuckle to myself. I decimate them, leaving a pile of their shells in my wake. While taking pictures of the nearby cactus garden, my sandal breaks and I head back to the hotel. After a costume change, I seek out another pair of sandals and while my visit to Inter Island Surf Shop, open since 1959 (I vow to only patronize local businesses at all times if I can help it, but especially here because Waikiki is littered with American consumerist nonsense and I did *not* come all the way to Honolulu to go to a Cheesecake Factory or a Forever 21, thank you very much). While my search fails, I make the acquaintance of Barry behind the counter, who has lived in Honolulu since 1963 and has been surfing since he was 13 years old. He talks to me about surfing in the area, how to find the best waves, how to keep my stuff safe on the beach, as well as some history of the store and surfing in Hawaii. It’s still one of my favorite parts of the trip.

I chow down at Rainbow Drive-In again, this time actually tasting the fall-off-the-bone sweet and tangy shoyu chicken with creamy mac salad and white rice; yet again, I can’t eat the whole thing, served on a paper plate inside a white cardboard box, but I desperately want to. I visit a store of some 15,000 vintage Hawaiian shirts, but even after an hour or so, I leave empty handed, and thank goodness; it was so overwhelming after a while, I just wanted to leave. I walked back home the way I came, via the Ala Wai canal, where much of the water from the mountains drains. I head to the beach, and then to my catamaran ride. I stand on the boat in my bathing suit and cotton dress shirt, my hair in a bun, and I let the wind whip past me. I watch this tangerine orb descend into the clouds and I realize how important it is that I did this thing for myself; not just the catamaran ride, but this trip, and by myself. One of the sailors asks me how I ended up here and I tell him. My eyes begin to get weepy again. I can’t believe I went without something like this for so long, where the only objective was to do whatever I wanted, to relax, to see the world around me with fresh eyes and to enjoy myself. People drink Mai Tais and play Prince on the radio and sing along. The sunset fades to black and the moon glistens across the water. The lights of Waikiki first twinkle in the distance and slowly return to view.

Beacon Beckons

As much as I love New York, one of the great pleasures of living here is also leaving it, even if it’s just for a day. When AR told me that Beacon, New York was just a hop, skip, and a jump from Grand Central (read: an hour and 45 minutes by train) and you don’t even need to rent a car to get around, the premise intrigued me. What if, one fine winter weekend, we went? And so with Mag this past Sunday we did.

We met bright and early at Grand Central and I went up to the golden booths where the ticket salespeople were to ask for mine just like Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor. “One round trip ticket to Beacon, please.” I don’t think I knew how much I wanted to do this until I got there when the premise of the machines presented themselves to me and I decided to be a 1930s movie star instead.

We hopped the correct train after first mistaking another one, and soon we watched New York City pass us by with stops in Harlem and the Bronx and all the little nonsense suburb-y places on the way until it became a little more country, a little more picturesque, a little less corporate America. The train ride didn’t feel long, either, since we laughed and talked and ogled the Olympic bobsled team the whole time. Cliffs and mountains that looked like dirt cake covered in powdered sugar sped past the window and ice floated in the chilly river as I took pictures.

Beacon is a small city in Dutchess County, New York, a former mill town that became a sort of funky, arty enclave New Yorkers now venture to to encounter things like fresh air and reasonably priced coffee. Arriving at around 11:15, we staked out a spot for brunch/lunch and ended up after a picturesque walk down Main Street (yes, Main Street), past all of its updated buildings that house galleries (like one for beach glass that’s in a converted firehouse), brunch spots, smoke shops, newfangled donut joints, and grocery stores. We ended up at the Yankee Clipper, a teeny diner inside what looks like a chrome train car. We drank coffee and ate a variety of breakfast and non-breakfast delights. Then Mag led way back through town, down a hill, to Dia: Beacon, the town’s contemporary art museum (there’s another one in Chelsea here in the city). She is an arty lady and has been before so she knows the way. I significantly lag behind because I keep stopping to take pictures. “Everything about you is a New Yorker except how quickly you walk,” AR says. He’s not wrong.

Dia: is a high-falutin’ sort of place, with deep philosophical installations that are nice to look at and interesting and make me think but also make me miss photography museums that I understand. Much of it is impressive but not necessarily art that you’d think fondly of when you leave home during a long vacation. None of it will make your house a home. Unless, that is, you have a rather large, austere house you want to fill with either white canvases painted white or intense sculptures made from ripped-apart machines (I actually really liked these pieces by John Chamberlain and perhaps would put them in my house--you know, my country house on acres and acres of land just a train ride from the city that I don’t have) or a giant wedge of wood or a pile of broken glass. In which case, this is definitely the place for you. AR, Mag, and I take a family portrait outside of its dead but still sculptural tree installation outside and we part ways, she heading back to the city and us to find some sort of pastry to eat and records to buy.

We complete our tasks at All You Knead Artisan Bakers with a peach cheesecake turnover and Hudson Valley Vinyl, where I find the Richard Hell and the Voidoids album Blank Generation, which I never expected to see in person, much less in Beacon, New York. We drink tea and coffee at Bank Street Cafe, then walk to the train, a gaggle of does hobnobbing amongst the trees (suddenly I feel like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny) and a fabulous sunset of technicolor pastels sending us off into the night.

Vive La Cleve

Montenegro, the French Riviera, Palm Springs, and Austin are just a few places on the list of locales I would like to visit. Cleveland was decidedly…not. 

I had already visited as a college student in Pittsburgh and gone to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since it was just two hours west of our campus, my friend J and I had taken a road trip out there to cross it off our senior bucket list. My impression of the city was that it was…clean. There was barely anyone walking around on the weekend we went, hardly a piece of litter strayed from its rightful receptacle. It wasn’t dirty or loud or anything I had come to know from cities in my short 21 years on earth at that point. 

The occasion arose, ALiCo’s wedding, for me to return this year, just last week, and I was excited to celebrate my friend’s nuptials. But having exhausted what I thought was the one cool thing in the city, what on earth would I DO there for TWO WHOLE DAYS?

But where, I critiqued myself, was my sense of adventure? Why didn’t I lose the ‘tude and discover what was really great about this city that so many people probably overlooked, including myself? It was, after all, still a city, so there HAD to be something interesting there, besides the Rock Hall. 

So I looked up some stuff and lo and behold…Cleveland, I owe you an apology. 

Turns out this Midwestern city is nothing to sneeze at, especially not given the proliferation of public art, amazing restaurants, historical architecture, and sweet main streets that made up my trip this time. 

EH, her boyfriend S, and I all drove out there from New Jersey, with a stable of ideas of things to do in our back pockets. EH was most excited about the world’s largest rubber stamp, which is not actually rubber but a giant sculpture called ‘Free Stamp’ by Claes Oldenburg and his late wife Coosje van Bruggen. It says ‘free’ on it in mirror image as if it were actually going to be used to stamp something at some point. We were also curious about the West Side Market, a huge indoor food market, and eating a Polish Boy, a treat native to Cleveland that’s a kielbasa in a bun topped with barbecue sauce, fries, and cole slaw. I also discovered that the city has undertaken a huge public art initiative (which I swear I must have said in awe and delight thousands of times as we drove out there, and even while we were still there), so big in fact it is catalogued online. My groans of ‘we’re going to Cleveland’ turned into enthusiastic shrieks of, ‘We’re going to CLEVELAND!!!’ 

The day of the wedding we had the morning and afternoon to ourselves, so our friends DW and EL joined us, and we all piled into EH’s car and drove the 15 minutes into the city. Everything in Cleveland, we would learn, is 15 minutes from each other. Our first destination was West Side Market. 

“It’s a market…” ALiCo said. 

“We know!” we all said, excited.

“No, but like… it’s a market.”

“Yes!”

So, West Side Market is just a market. Partially. One building of it is oodles and oodles of fruit vendors selling everything from cherries to rambutan, from bananas to dragon fruit. The vendors cut up lots of different varieties in hopes of selling their wares, or they’ll offer you different things to taste. It turns out I don’t like papaya, but at least I tried it!

Westside Market

The other building, however, is what we were looking for: food counters by the dozens, with fresh pastries, coffees, crepes, jerky, smoothies, pasties (the pastry kind, not the boobs kind), cheese, pirogies, and RuPaul knows what else. The market was built in 1912 and features over 100 vendors. We strolled through the aisles trying to select what we wanted to eat for breakfast, sampling different wares along the way. I saw apple fritters the size of my face, blue mashed potatoes, infinite kinds of pirogies and seafood and glittery meringues, but ultimately I settled on delicious, juicy homemade lamb jerky from Badstuber and Sons, and a green tea smoothie from Juice Garden. Juice Garden also made an incredible vanilla bean lemonade that was strangely perfectly balanced and easily one of the best things I consumed all day.

Apple Fritters
the size of my head

 We then went for a stroll up Market Street, having a gander at all of the new restaurants and breweries and cafes in the area. We wandered into Ohio City Farm, an urban farm right in the middle of the city, and walked through on the paths, eyeing all of the curly kale and peppers and tomatoes that are all grown by local farmers. It turns out this particular urban farm, at almost six acres, is one of country’s largest.

The Free Stamp was next, and it really was quite marvelous and giant. I’ve since learned sculpture is one of 44 giant objects designed by Oldenburg and van Bruggen and placed all over the U.S. and the world, the others being things like a set of giant shuttlecocks in Kansas City, an umbrella in Des Moines, and a bent spoon and a cherry in Minneapolis. We took a bunch of pictures like tourists and—despite how much we viciously loathe tourists here in New York—it was incredible fun. I even got a good one of DW dancing in front of it.

EH calls this one
"Crushed Under the Weight of Freedom" 

Victorian Arcade

We walked around downtown after that, visiting the gorgeous Victorian shopping arcades with ornate windows and gold ornamentation. We saw more public art, this time featuring bright pink metal sound tubes that you could speak into and from on opposite sides of the park. It was a piece called “Dialogue” by Buffalo, NY-based artists Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster, and was brought to Cleveland by a public art initiative between the Cleveland Public Library and public art non-profit LAND Studio called “See Also,” which looks to bring inspiring artwork from all over to the small park that’s next to the library’s main branch.

Having worked up an appetite, we drove next to Banter, a restaurant that’s been open for about a year and half in Cleveland’s Gordon Square/Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. They serve sausages and poutine only, and you can select a beverage from their extensive beer, cider, and wine refrigerators in the back. We were seeking a Polish Boy, but also ended up sharing poutines—the original with French fries, gravy, and cheese curds, and the Vladimir, with “frites, braised Ohio lamb stroganoff, mushroom, borscht gravy, curds, and orange zest” for the table. Everything. Was. Amazing. The gravies were thick and flavorful but not too salty, the French fries somehow maintained their crispness despite being under mounds of sauce, the barbecue sauce had hints of nutmeg and was so good EH bought a bottle of it. Interestingly, they didn’t even sell bottles of it, but they put some in a mason jar for her when she said she wanted to buy it. I see they deliver on Uber Eats, but do they deliver to New York???? Actually, I'm lucky they're not here because if they were I would go every day and weigh 1,000 pounds. 

Closeup of "Dialogue"

So we had a fabulous day, but on top of that every single person we encountered was SO NICE. People were patient and kind and understanding and polite in ways that sometimes I forget people are (and maybe even forget to be myself) living in New York. It’s good to be reminded of this, and it’s good to get out of New York every once in a while. And if you are leaving the city for a minute, might I suggest Cleveland?

Miss Manhattan in Paris

I found out I was going to Paris nine days before I got on the plane. It was for work, to write about different aspects of the trip (more on this after the articles come out!), but I also ended up having a nice amount of time to myself to wander the city aimlessly, which is usually my favorite thing about traveling.


My first day there, we landed at about 9:30am, and my free time began shortly after that. I set my sights on a touristy option first, a visit to Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, and then resolved to amble about in hopes of not looking like an annoying American after that. Visiting the English language bookstore,  named similarly but not actually related to the one in New York, would cross another literary establishment off my list, right behind City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

I resolved to take the Metro there, as it was a shorter trip than it would be from my house to Union Square, and huddled in front of the ticket vending machine, hoping I did not look like a tourist. But the line I used, Line 1, was very easy to understand, and I shoved my tiny Metro tickets into the entryway like a non-tourist (I hoped, anyway). Shakespeare and Company was a lovely space, with a practically ancient staircase, twisty, turny bookshelves, a piano, a designated bookstore cat, and spaces for their legendary Tumbleweeds to sleep.

I had asked HanOre if she wanted me to bring her back anything from Paris (she lived there for a semester while in college), and she had only one request: "I would like you to leisurely eat a fresh baguette, preferably in some garden or park, and have the time of your life." So, after Shakespeare and Co., I discovered by way of the website Paris By Mouth (recommended to me by another gal on the trip), that the baguette voted the best in the city in 2016 was a mere seven-minute walk away at a bakery called La Parisienne. I walked in and waited in line for one of their baguettes, asked in French for un baguette, s'il vous plait, and was answered in English. Well, I tried, at least. I got a traditional white baguette for about 1.2 euro, and wandered out of the store. It was a Monday when lots of things are closed, so unfortunately the nearby fromagerie was not available. I bit into the baguette and it crunched under my teeth in a way that no attempt at a baguette in America ever had. Its insides were fluffy but chewy and just a little bit eggy in flavor. It was nice to know what a baguette was really supposed to taste like.

I made my way past Notre Dame, crunching along as I went. It's funny, but at the time I forgot that the French actually sit and eat their meals in places like humans, not like Americans who want everything on the go. So I perhaps looked my most American as I crunched over the bridge past the famous cathedral and through Ile St. Louis. To my credit, there was a gentleman walking out of La Parisienne crunching on a baguette as he walked down the street when I got there...but hindsight is 20/20 and he may have been American, too. Le sigh.

I decided I was finished crunching my baguette as I found myself in front of the The Hôtel de Ville, which is not a hotel, but the Parisian city hall. If only New York's city hall could be such a feat of architecture, people might actually want to go. I was on my way to Kilo Shop, another recommendation by HanOre, where consigned and vintage clothes are sold by the pound. Miracle of miracles, I ended up with an '80s hot pink leather jacket for 16 a mere euro, a feat which would never, could never happen in New York.

Time before my evening engagement was winding down, I had a baguette in my purse, and a plastic bag filled with a leather jacket, so I made my way back from whence I came. Not before sitting and enjoying a latte as the French do...though if I'm honest, I was jonesing for a hot take-away beverage all day. They don't do those in France, silly American, unless you go to Starbucks, and j'ai patently refusé. Coming all the way across the Atlantic just to have Starbucks, can you imagine? My soul was crushed simply thinking about it.

*

The next time I had a moment to myself, I went to Jeu de Paume. Though 'jeu de paume' actually was a ball and court game that was a precursor to tennis, Jeu de Paume is a museum that's set up in a former 'jeu de paume' court outside of the Tuileries gardens. It's dedicated to modern and post-modern photography, video, and cinema work. While I was there, I was able to see the work of surrealist and documentarian Eli Lotar and video artist Peter Campus.

As I left the museum as the sun was setting, the Eiffel Tower and Roue de Paris in the distance. I stared and whipped out my camera, not worried for once about my tourist tendencies. I watched the blue sky fade to orange, then hopped back on the Metro.

Whiskey-upon-Hudson

At 9:30 am this past Saturday, a white Mini Cooper rolled up to my apartment building. In the driver's seat was SE, Ray-Bans perched on his face, one hand perched confidently on the wheel. In the mere moments I was outside the steaming humidity swallowed me whole and I was relieved to plop myself in the rush of air conditioning inside the car. We plugged in our tunes--which would evolve throughout the day from The Black Keys Pandora radio station to a medley of Ben Folds and No Doubt anthems to yelping pop punk songs from our pseudo-emo youth--and made our way to upstate New York for the day.

Though we had to pass through the corporate suburban wasteland of New Jersey first, where Targets and Kohl's and Houlihan's and, yes, even TGI Friday's peppered the landscape instead of...anything else, we eventually arrived back in New York. Outside of the city by probably a little under an hour, New York is a curling highway running through mountains and rock and forest. It is green and spread through with country roads, the occasional log cabin, and the occasional Donald Trump sign. At one point, though, as if we turned some magical corner, the Trump signs evolved into gay pride flags and  I felt like we were back in Manhattan, but with far more trees and Grateful Dead paraphernalia.

We had gone upstate, to the New Paltz area, to visit the Hudson Whiskey Distillery at Tuthilltown Spirits. We were to arrive and take a tour of the facility, have a whiskey tasting, then lunch at the former Tuthilltown Grist Mill turned restaurant next door. But we arrived to the area a bit early and instead poked around an antiques store. Musty toys (like Barbie Paper Dolls from the 1960s and even an NSYNC marionette) and glassware and jewelry ran through the store, chaotically shelved together to fit as much as possible in the tiny space. I ended up with a copy of James Thurber's The Thurber Carnival from the 1940s and a Lake Placid Olympics pin with a tiny athletic raccoon printed on it, courtesy of SE, who also did not leave empty-handed, by way of a petite American flag pin.

Outside of the antiques store were signs for something called the Sunflower Arts Festival, which happened once a year. We resolved to check it out after our tour, but upon pulling up to the distillery we realized it was in the field mere steps away from the distillery's front door. We were still early when we arrived, though, so we decided to poke around. Tall, circular metal structures at the distillery were painted over in a splash of bold, colorful designs, and around the corner at the fair there was a music tent, an array of standalone "ghost" doors painted in an explosion of bright colors as if they were canvases. 

Next to those, artists spraypainted murals onto canvas (one of them later turned out to be the famed (Meres One, founder of the dearly departed 5 Pointz aerosol art project in Long Island City, Queens). In some tents nearby, local artists and children painted still lives of sunflowers, people sold handcrafted jewelry, baked goods, home-bottled hot sauces, dried lavender, and a host of other goodies. People sat on a sloping hill dotted with planted sunflowers and listened to the band, some young women hula-hooped to the strum of their guitars, running for shelter when a rather heavy sunshower reared its head. There were more piercings and tattoos and tie dye than I expected for upstate New York (I was more prepared for the Trump signs, quite frankly), but SE told me the area is known for its crunchy, granola spirit. Who knew?

Shortly after we went into the distillery for our tour, led by a man named Lion with a skull tattoo and several ear piercings. He walked us through the whiskey's development, from its history as a distillery to its beginnings as grain to a fermenting mash, to a boiling liquid to a cooled liquid to a barreled liquid to a labeled and sent off liquid. I marveled at the structures and containers used for everything and I felt like I was in a sort of steampunk factory fairyland, everything a hooting and churning or pumping brown or silver metal. My favorite part was seeing all the barrels used for the stuff, how each one is filled up with a gas station-like pump labeled with a date and was from a different cooperage in the country.

Post-tour, it was time for our tasting, where we were able to sample all the beverages produced at the distillery, whiskeys and ryes as well as a delectable cacao liqueur, blackberry cassis, and bourbon maple syrup. I slurped the latter out of a tiny plastic cup as if I were coaxing cough syrup onto my aching throat. I can still taste it.

Post-distillery, we made our way to the adjacent Tuthill House restaurant. As I mentioned, it's a former grist mill, so it was perched on top of a gorgeous waterfall flowing over shiny rocks. Inside I had one of the best cocktails I have ever had, called the "Beet Poet." It featured, I quote, "Walnut & Pistachio Infused Indigenous Empire Wheat Vodka, Beet, Black Peppercorn, Fresh Lemon, Ginger." Praise be to our lordess and savoir RuPaul, did that make the simmering heat outside feel like it had disappeared (the buzz it brought on was not unwelcome, either). We dove into burgers afterward and had another gander at the Sunflower Festival before driving home.

Well, not entirely "home" home, though we did head back to the five boroughs. We realized that since we had purchased the car for the entire day, we should really make use of it and go to a place for dinner we wouldn't normally be able to get to as easily without a car. We chose Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for Italian food, specifically the restaurant Mario's. My father had grown up going to eat Italian food with his family there and parts of The Godfather were filmed there. We dove into an herbed carrot salad and seeded bread and olive oil and caprese salad and chicken scarpariello and tiramisu and all of it was simply heavenly. Dessert still on our lips, we walked back to the car, lolling and sated, a day of whiskey and sun behind us.

The Age of Maine

As you live in New York for longer periods of time, you start to realize how important it is to leave the city for a while periodically. Not because you love it any less, but because you see more often how it's easy to get stuck and let the constant motion of the city overwhelm you. You need times where you sit and relax and do nothing, in a place where everyone else is doing the same. Sometimes I can only do this by going out to Coney Island or Manhattan Beach, but sometimes I have the opportunity to go a little further away and it's always a pleasure.

HanOre was kind enough to invite me on a trip with her family to their lake home in Maine for Memorial Day Weekend. We would take a bus out to Boston, spend the night at their home there, and then drive up with the family the next day. At first I found the length of the driving trips daunting (four hours to Boston, two hours to Maine), but the time passed quickly with reading, chatting, and the napping I found myself doing--it was as if I had saved up many of the sleepless nights I had been having for the past few weeks and was ready to cash them in.

The drive to Maine took us up through a forest, onto twisty, dirt country roads, and past the occasional deer. The Ore family's gorgeous home had been constructed from wood by hand by its former owner, featuring multiple spiral staircases and lofted, nook rooms without walls. We assembled the dock, had lunch, and then...sat. And it was so lovely to know there was absolutely nothing I had to do besides that. I had no deadlines, no pressing emails to attend to, no clients calling me. I stood and stared out onto the lake, the sun casting light on its softly rippling water.

We watched the sunset and I realized how long it had been since I'd seen one. Perhaps I've written about this before, but living on the east side of Manhattan does not afford me views of the Hudson River, where the sun sets. Until this point, it's fair to say I had probably gone months without seeing one. It's strange to think that living in Manhattan removes one from nature's daily schedule like that but, as I've said likely many times before, it's a trade off. Here in Maine, the sun looked like a giant egg yolk descending into orange and yellow clouds before it was whisked away by nighttime and the creaking of crickets. We greeted the darkness by roasting marshmallows on the grill, reaching into the woods to grab sticks and hoping they weren't actually snakes. Succeeding, I let my marshmallows catch fire while HanOre lovingly toasted hers.

In the morning, we assembled the dock and HanOre's sister, J, proceeded to jump off it almost instantly.  She did it the night before, too, before we had assembled it. "Will you jump off the dock with me?" she asked me later in the weekend. Having dipped a toe in earlier, I knew it was freezing cold, but it still wasn't the coldest water I had ever jumped in.
"Yes," I said, giving a forthright nod of my head. "I haven't jumped off anything into freezing cold water in about 10 years." When I was at summer camp in North Carolina, about that long ago, I did this kind of stuff all the time. I was looking forward to doing it again.
"Oh," her sister said, "so since you were my age?"

J jumping off the dock
before we assembled it.

"Oh godddddddddd," I groaned, laughing. It's true, J was 16 years old and that was indeed my age 10 years ago. But age is not what makes you older, necessarily. I jumped in the lake. Twice. Cold flew through my bathing suit and squeezed me tight--it wasn't so much the first impact of the water upon the jump that was especially frigid, but swimming in the water around the dock to get out that really caused me to verbalize my shivers. But I would easily do it again, and hopefully not in another 10 years.

Another of Maine's delights is, unsurprisingly, lobster. In New York, ordering such a treat would easily set you back something like $35-40,  if not more. And in Maine? A 1 and 3/4 pound lobster will set you back just $10. We picked up the creatures at a fish market a few miles from the house. I watched as the sales clerk placed a bag of them on the counter.
"So there are live animals in that bag?" I said.
"Yep," he said. "They're delicious."
"Try not to think about it," HanOre said. I would actively not participate in their boiling later, but I daresay I very much enjoyed the result of it. I cracked open the bright red shell on my plate and dipped its warm, chewy contents into salted butter with gusto. We are what we are.

Another sunset brought us more wine and more marshmallows and more sleep. In the morning, we somehow woke up early and went out on the lake with the jet ski. I had never been on one before, and was interested to find it was kind of like a water motorcycle, the thrill of speed without scary consequences. We buzzed around the lake in all sorts of directions, trying not to piss off the neighbors who were possibly still sleeping. Soon we would head back and pass out on the dock a while longer before we had to pack up the house and leave. We fell asleep in the car as her parents drove us back to Boston.

Now, back in New York, I find there's constantly a fine, humidity-induced dew over my face; the subway is starting to get hot and sleeves are becoming impossible. In the 1970s, when my mother was living in New York, she would go away to the country every weekend, and now I understood why. There seems to be an endless supply of cool breeze and bodies of water close by, quiet nights not ringing alive with ambulances, police sirens or garage doors. I am perhaps one of the few people who still really loves New York in the summertime, how hot air brushes your face in the depths of a July evening and how a margarita tastes that much better when you've really had to swelter in the subway to get to it. But I would be an insane person if I said I never wanted to go back to Maine.

 Many thanks to the Ore family for a glorious weekend.