Something Worth Disappearing For

Wake up. Room already too bright. The alarm I definitely set for eight—gone, silent, done with me. Monday morning, and I hadn’t been here in weeks.

Some readers noticed. This journal ran without me through the end of October and into November, other hands keeping things moving while I was somewhere else entirely. Not in Tokyo, operating as an inconspicuous pretzel vendor. Not in Las Vegas, having run off with some improbable combination of Scarlett Johansson and someone’s younger sister. Just gone. Deep inside a project.

It was one of those ideas that arrives over a burger in a Berlin courtyard in the right light at the right hour and feels, in that specific moment, like it might actually work. Like it might make real money—the kind you’re supposed to use to buy things that are meant to be free. The only way to find out was to stop talking about it and build the thing and see if it survived contact with reality.

I can’t tell you what it is. Not being coy—it’s genuinely too early. The version that exists right now gets worse the moment you describe it to someone who isn’t already inside it. It’s either a real thing or it’s elaborate smoke, and in both cases you’ll find out when there’s something to find out.

So I logged the nerd hours. Club Mate and open tabs and a growing uncertainty about whether I was building something or just performing the idea of building something. Now it’s in other hands—people with money who will decide whether any of it survives. My part is done.

I’m back here. I have new ideas for this journal that I’m equally unable to describe yet, which makes this entire post an elaborate confession that I have nothing to tell you. I was somewhere. I made something. I’m back. That’s the whole story, at least for now.