To quote Jack Paar, as I was saying before I was interrupted…
I’m here. I am here. I am still here. And so are we all.
To also quote one of the foundational voices of our time, it’s been a second since I rapped at ya. You may be asking yourself, where did I go? (Or maybe you were just glad I wasn’t glomming up your inbox?)
First, I went to China. I was working on a project that I can’t say too much about right now, but it meant spending about a week in Beijing. Going to China was not something I ever expected. Not that I was against it, it just seemed impossible that I would ever find myself there. And yet, there I was. In freaking China.
It wasn’t anything like I expected it to be because it was so…normal. People going about their business. Stores, restaurants, coffee places, all basically just like here. Except no one speaks English and the offerings are different. At this point, in my life, I’ve been a few countries. Canada is like Earth-2 America: a lot of the same things, just slightly different. Spain was OLD and somehow both cosmopolitan and insular. Jamaica is a beautiful, broken place, in its nature, in its infrastructure, in its poverty, in its people.
China was nothing like any of those places and yet somehow like nearly all of them. Beijing felt like several different cities. The starkest difference was going from the glass-and-concrete, 60s/70s brutalist architecture to the “old city” where suddenly, you’re looking at very modern things like a Pizza Hut in a building that’s clearly centuries old. But that’s also just a place where people live and work.
It was the most foreign place I’ve ever been. That’s not a bad thing. It just wasn’t, for all of the surface similarities, anything like Los Angeles or New York. I’ve never felt further from home. Because I don’t think I’ve ever been further from home. When I went to Barcelona a couple of years ago, that was the furthest I’d ever been from somewhere I called home. Beijing was even further. Both in terms of distance and time (the 15 hour time difference is mind-bending), but in spirit and culture. Despite being across the street from a giant Adidas store, it really felt like a different world.
And then I came back to this country. To ICE officers at LAX. To a battered entertainment industry. To a country soaked in stress, anxiety and frustration. I was never far from it while I was over there, not really. My phone worked. I had unfettered internet access. But being physically distant allowed for some emotional distance. Coming back, though, everything picked up right where it left off.
Except me. The physical jet lag was kind of a lot, but the emotional lag hit harder. The Doldrums hadn’t broken, not at all. Finding my stride, my LA legs again took some serious time. And I’m still not fully there.
But I am here. And I’m still going. So are we all.
I’m making some changes to this newsletter, though. Some time away let me re-adjust my mind and my expectations and my intentions. I’m still sending out two a week, but they’re both going to be essays. I want to share my work with you all, but I also want to share NEW work but I don’t have the bandwidth right now to write new things that I can share.
So, going forward, Friday will be my pop culture essays, deep dives on shows I love, responses to things I’ve watched. As I’ve mentioned here, I’m determined to watch 365 movies this year, leaning strongly towards movies I haven’t seen (though there will be some comfort watches in there). I’ll let you know what I’ve been watching, what I’m seeing, how it all works together.
These Wednesday dispatches will be the more personal essays, more of the wider culture stuff, more about my own writing process. So basically, I’ll be rapping at ya more. I hope that’s okay.
I’m glad y’all are still here. I hope you all stick around.