‘The basic reason for my life is that there comes a time when I’m guided by a great hunger.’ — Clarice Lispector This is what I look like Right now, 2026. New Year traditions. Dolled up for a portrait and breaking in the spine of a fresh journal. Here are the books that kept me company, someone else’s memory, parting gifts, love letters, adopted observations, monomaniacal word vomit, along with sacred mementos I harvested along the way. With bittersweet ecstasy, 2025 earned itself the title, ‘The Year of the Outlaw’. I was lucky to see my loved ones in the tiny cracks of time that I found myself back home. Some thought I was dead, others checked my location to see where my little bubble would appear next. I lived on the long stretch of black top, drove for thousands of miles, slept in a score of motels, crossed state lines, crossed hearts, read through a pile of books, cried a bucket of tears, spent twenty two nights at concerts, laughed into various belly aches, collected stories from strangers, bargained with karma, and wrote long enough to grow sick of reading my thoughts pathetically recycle themselves on paper. I didn’t wear anything other than the same three pair of jeans year round and only pried my cowboy boots off if I was contractually obliged. I started a book club that was interrupted by an arbitrary, yet necessary, sabbatical. I fell in love with filth. I waited in vain. There’s a scar on my shin from the fall I took in Sante Fe and a constellation of pimples on my face for every time I began to worry. Borrowed wisdom, borrowed time. Seven acres of worship. A violent Saturn homecoming. By the end of Winter, the debt I owed to freedom was surrendered with a gentle exhale. I’m profoundly grateful to be so human. To feel so alive. To condense my strange little year into an obscure caption that begs to be misunderstood. I’m especially grateful to Clarice Lispector for guiding my mind, and to the music that narrated my journey along the way. I now understand that passion can absorb fear. A Sisyphean lesson in Patience. A hedonistic pursuit. The curtain calls, the knife is sharpened, and now I’m piercing through the body of being and eating my slice.