Everyone You Meet
Mythical heroes in Florida, hitchhikers from Tokyo, friends and lovers from everywhere
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: just a few people I’ve met along the way.
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Ingredient List
🎵 : “Four Seasons” by Mayaewk // I found this guy on Instagram and loved him for his reels, which are basically him smoking cigs while working on music. If I can’t do it, at least I can watch someone do it. Anyway, this lofi EP is perfect background music, especially the sampling of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
📺 : Watched an entire season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on my flight home from Venice. Which then made me doubly annoyed at all the grating social behaviors and absurd and arbitrary rules in airports and on airplanes. Also watching “1883,” which is completely over the top in its writing as every line from the narrator carries the weight of civilization on its shoulders, but I don’t even care– it’s a great escape.
This Past Week
On the heels of my “Smoking, I Love You” menu from a couple weeks ago, I found myself in Venice, Italy, on a work trip for Believe in the Run. A place where, against all odds, Italians manage to make smoking look cool again. They do it so well and look so good, you’d think it was healthy. Cured meats and aged cheese at every meal, prosecco in every glass, a cig on every walk. This is a recipe for world peace.
Anyway, Venice was beautiful and magical, and though we were only able to spend a couple proper days in the city, it was enough to remember for a lifetime. I was lucky enough to do an unsanctioned race at the break of dawn with a handful of other Italian runners; racing through empty plazas and darting through back alleys as the sun was rising over the birthplace of international commerce was something I’ll never forget.
Course 1
A Word of Gratitude: Panhandle Sushi
Back when I was in a touring band, we played a place in Tallahassee, Florida, called The Engine Room. Like most venues we played, it’s now permanently closed, probably because they depended on degenerates like us to keep their business afloat.
At the time, however, it was owned by a man whose name matched his personality, both impossible to forget.
His name– and this is for real– was Truewill Laughing Life Bucky Boomer Manifest Destiny George James Mashburn. We just called him Truewill. At the time, it was the longest name in Florida, which is saying something– to hold a weird record there means you’re essentially deep South royalty. He gave off a hippie vibe and rarely wore shoes, had a scraggly beard and wore loose clothing. According to internet searches, his grandparents were some of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Florida and owned the only private residence in Florida designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
While the Engine Room wasn’t a Prairie-style work of architectural genius, it did always seem to be under construction when we played there. Truewill lived in a space connected to it, which had a bunch of couches and milk crates for storage. Whenever we played there, he would let us stay inside the venue, which mattered a great deal in August because it had air conditioning. He would also open the bar to us after the place closed– a dangerous prospect for any business owner– and partied with us until the sun came up, which we wouldn’t know since the place didn’t have any windows. I’ll never forget sleeping until noon in that dark cave, waking up in a womb with lungs tight from tobacco and sawdust.
The first time we played there, he took us out to a sushi lunch, an unheard of gesture by a small venue owner. We were lucky if we got two drink tickets at most of our shows. This was at one of the lower points in our touring, when we were dead broke and hungry all the time. I know, because I remember sitting in the van after one of our shows there and calling restaurants to see if they had any leftover food at the end of the night. He probably never knew how much that lunch meant to us.
Point being, he lost a ton of money having us play at his venue. It didn’t matter to him, he just wanted to have a good time and provide the same thing for a bunch of kids slumming their way through the South. To this day, he seems like someone out of a Flannery O’Connor story, a man with grace who just walked into our lives as we were passing through town. Truewill, he lived up to his name. Every last word of it.
And for that I am grateful.
Course 2
Appetizer: Leftover Pancakes
A few years ago, I met a friend for dinner and a couple drinks at the Hull Street Blues Cafe in Locust Point here in Baltimore. Despite it being December, it was a mild evening so I rode my bike around Inner Harbor and back again coming home. On my return route, I was sufficiently in the buzzy warm zone of the evening, enjoying the beauty that comes from a nighttime bike ride. It was an eerie evening, the kind that Edgar Allan Poe would’ve loved to die in. Fog settled on the water like a half-baked snowfall and the streetlights struggled to do their job.
I was taking the slow route, riding on the bricks along the Inner Harbor promenade, when ahead of me, I saw something out of the ordinary, even for that evening. A figure in the fog, with a hiking backpack and way too many things hanging off his body. A cross between a hobo, a one-man band, and Waldo at the beginning of his travels. As I got closer, I noticed a sign on his back, written on a tablet, attached to his pack with a couple paper clips. The sign read, “To NY Walking Now.”
Pause.
If you ever want to rob me while I’m not expecting it, put a cryptic message on a sign and hang it somewhere, maybe even trail some loose corn to another sign. It’s my catnip, it will be impossible for me to avoid.
Unpause.
Of course I had to figure out what was going on, so I stopped my bike next to him to size him up. He was a shorter Asian kid, and I’m not lying when I say he looked like a traveler whose entire possessions somehow exploded but were still attached to his body. Fastpacking or lightweight thru-hiking this was not. Sleeping bag, soft cooler, cheap and overpacked hiking pack– he had it all. Hiking boots? Nah, just a pair of low-key and worn-out New Balance 574s.
I asked him what his sign meant, and through a combination of broken English and Google translate, he told me he was from Japan and was on a transcontinental journey from Santa Monica to New York City. The original goal was to walk the entire way and arrive in Times Square for the New Year’s Eve ball drop, but due to many unforeseen hiccups, it turned into a combination of hitchhiking and walking. He had ten days to get there.
It was 10:30 at night when we crossed paths. In Baltimore. His plan was to just find a spot to sleep, but I knew that his Google maps would be taking him through some of the worst parts of Baltimore in one of the worst years for crime. I told him that if he could make it, I lived about five kilometers away and that he could stay with me for the night. After what so many people did for me on the road when I was his age, I had no other choice. I swear I’ve never seen a happier person in my life when he translated that offer on his phone.
I rode my bike home, and sure enough, right around midnight, Ken from Tokyo showed up on my doorstep. I set up an air mattress for him, showed him the shower, did his laundry (and boy did it need to be done), and fed him some leftover pancakes and bacon. I know that feeling he felt, because I’ve felt it many times before. The feeling of rest.
He knew very little English, but we got to know each other a little bit that evening and the next morning.
It just so happened that we were driving up to Pennsylvania the next morning to spend Christmas with my family. I told him there was a spot in the car if he wanted it. So all five of us piled into my Toyota Corolla and we headed two hours north, ninety miles closer to his goal. He had lunch at my parents house and my mom told him he could spend Christmas with us, but again, he had a goal and had to get going. So we packed him some more food, and drove him down to Route 22 where he started walking again.
A week later, he made it to New York City.
Course 3
The Main: Suckling Pig
I used to hear the phrase “It’s all who you know,” and thought it meant that to get anywhere, you had to have deep ties to the head of a large bank or a mafioso or another puppet master sitting high above the rest of the world. You just needed someone to pluck you up and set you down in a C-suite, by some stroke of good luck or fortune.
That’s unlikely to happen to anyone, anywhere, and if it were, you’d probably fail immediately. Put me in front of an Excel sheet and I can google my way through it for about four hours before I resign myself to scrolling on X, seeing how much worse the outside world is than my own.
While I never met that fabled CEO to drop me into a life of luxury (though I did accidentally sit beside the Adidas CEO a couple weeks ago at a panel discussion without knowing it, missed opportunity), in looking back on my life, I’ve recognized that there is nothing more powerful for forward movement than the connection with others. Because building a network of people and real relationships is the key to experiencing life in all its fullness as it opens up infinite possibilities and pathways. I am constantly, endlessly, trying to build connections in my life. Not because I’m trying to get ahead or go somewhere, but because I’m genuinely interested in what all these people are doing in the world. It’s been the most rewarding part of my life, hands down.
Of course, that web has to start spinning somewhere, and it’s always fun to trace it back to its beginnings.
My origin story, my entire life, started with Samantha. I say my entire life, because up until ninth grade, I wasn’t much of anything. I was basically an NPC in my own video game. Pretty quiet, liked by everyone, hated by none, but I was mostly in the background of it all. Not great at moving out of my comfort zone, not totally sure who I was as a person, zero clue where I was going in life. To be fair, I was 14 years old. I don’t think I was alone in that regard.
At that time, my core group of friends from middle school were going in one direction, which was more into drugs and drinking, while I was going off on my own, drifting somewhere. Then one day in class, Sam invited me to her youth group.
It was there that I found my people.
I know the picture you have in your head. It probably resembles the cast of “Saved!”, the very underrated 2004 film starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, and Patrick Fugit. Very conservative, very uptight, lots of judgment, very little fun.
Aside from being conservative– which meant a different thing than it does now– the other stereotypes didn’t really apply. The kids at this youth group listened to The Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis and Nine Inch Nails, MxPx and Starflyer 59 on the Christian side. They got their clothes from Salvation Army and military surplus stores– polyester pants, vintage army clothes, Doc Martens, Adidas track jackets. They were weird, they were confident, and they changed my life because they gave me the permission to be those things too.
Sam was part of this group, of course, as was Andy, my best friend to this day. Ethan, who I thought was the coolest person ever, is now the CEO of Diamondback Truck Covers, a multi-million dollar company that employs nearly 150 people in a small Pennsylvania town. Andy was their brand director for the past decade. Samantha’s husband is the chief sales and marketing officer.
Connections matter.
Samantha was also friends with some of the cool kids in high school, a group I never thought I’d come close to connecting with. But as I built my confidence and embraced who I was as a person, I started making even more new friends. Magically, the more I was myself, the more people wanted to be around me.
Authenticity is a buzzword these days. Everyone talks about how it matters, especially when it comes to social media and separating yourself from the noise. High school is where I learned it first, and I learned it without anyone telling me. I just looked at my other friends and thought: “I can do that.” Those friends helped me figure out that I should probably go to college, my college friends helped form my view of the world, and from there it’s been a wild ride of meeting people all over the world from truly every walk of life.
I won’t bore you with all the ways I made friends and acquaintances since then, but I’ll tell you this– making friends and meeting people is how I ended up where I am today, in one of the most blessed positions in life. It’s how I joined a band (again, Samantha), it’s how I met my wife (her best friend was one of my best friends at college), it’s how I landed every job and finally ended up as someone who reviews running shoes for a living and co-hosts one of the top running podcasts in America (meeting the founders of Believe in the Run through running).
Connections matter, but the strength of those connections matters too. It’s not about showing up to networking events, putting on your best profesh face, and trading business cards while trying not to get hummus on your button down. I’ve been to one of those, once, and I wanted to leave within the first five minutes. Corporate networking events are the equivalent of trying to go viral by posting whatever you think the algorithm wants. Or trying to convince a girl she should date you. The harder you try, the worse it goes. It has to be natural.
Because, again, authenticity matters when it comes to connections. That means planting seeds, tiling the garden, caring about the people you’re talking to and their life and work. Not as a way to get ahead, but as a way to be a part of the world and experiencing a diversity of experiences. Instead of a superficial handshake and a “let’s see how we can work together,” work with them without reciprocation, for the sake of having them in your life.
Sometimes it requires a bit of extra work.
One example among many: Back in 2017, before I was at Believe in the Run or had any running connections whatsoever, I had DM-ed an editor at Runner’s World with a piece I wrote about my brother and his opiate addiction, which many of you have already read. To my surprise, he loved it and wanted to publish it. Fantastic. But I knew that if I wanted to write more for Runner’s World– a major publication with a wide reach– I needed them to remember me, to gain a toehold within, especially since I had no references or portfolio of pieces at the time.
They did pay me a little bit for the piece, but I came back to them and asked for entry into the Runner’s World 5K/10K, which was taking place the next weekend in Pennsylvania. Not because I wanted to run the race, but because I was hoping to get face time with the editors that worked on my piece, to build a base for later pitches. They were caught off guard with the request, but made it happen, and sure enough, I ran the race and met the editors. One of them, Matt Gross, said: “You should write more.” Those words meant a lot to me, and another seed was planted, from him to me.
From there, I was able to pitch more pieces, which resulted in my first feature in a major publication (again, a story in Runner’s World). This was years ago and Matt moved on after Runner’s World was bought by Hearst. If he’s reading this, he’s probably cringing at my self-editing skills. Nevertheless, we remained in touch, and he invited me to a backyard BBQ at his house in Brooklyn last fall. Never thought I’d see two roast suckling pigs on a back patio in New York City, but there it was, and it was glorious. It was a great time hanging out with and meeting new people, including more writers. Matt is also a fantastic travel writer, and is always kind enough to give me recommendations abroad, which is how I had a memorable experience at a robot sushi place in Tokyo. All of that is great, but I consider him a friend and value his perspective on the world.
Connections matter.
Then there’s Tom, who lived in the storage unit behind my house here in Baltimore. I wrote about how his hoarder tendencies led to an infestation of rats within our alleyway once he was evicted (Menu: Rats), which I was then responsible for eradicating. Point being, he had a ton of junk. Most people in the neighborhood stayed clear of him, but he kind of reminded me of my grandpa, always sitting outside on a chair and smoking. They also shared the same name. You could smell his smoke from a block away, so I’d oftentimes saunter back on a summer night and talk to him, eventually figuring out his life story.
One day, I was fixing the window on my car because it got stuck and wouldn’t go up. I pulled off the panel and saw that a screw had come out from one of the moving pieces, and I couldn’t find one to replace it. I walked back to Tom’s shed and asked him if he had any screws lying around. Being a full-blown hoarder, he did, of course. I fixed the window. I also bought a bike off him that I used for a few bikepacking trips.
Connections matter.
Tom smelled horrible. He smoked cigarillos endlessly and it permeated his body through and through. His hands were stained all kinds of dark hues, nicotine and dirt embedded so deep it was never coming out. He didn’t shower. I have no idea where he went to the bathroom, but I’m pretty sure it was in jugs. He was also very lonely, which is why it was impossible to exit a conversation with him once it was started.
One time, I had beers with him inside his unit where we practically sat knee to knee on folding chairs on a cold winter night. I wanted to learn more about him and where he came from. He was from western Maryland but had no family left. He worked for many years at a flower shop and was in a bad car accident where someone broadsided him while he was out delivering those flowers. He lived off the remainder of that settlement and whatever social security came through each month.
After we were done talking, I told him I had to leave and reached in the dim light for the handle of whatever jury-rigged contraption he called a door. He reached over and put his hand on mine to guide it. I was a bit thrown off at first, but I realized after the fact that he probably had zero physical connection in years. Another time, without warning, my two-year-old gave him a hug and a kiss and that pure act of kindness lit up his face more than anything. He always asked about how the boys were doing and tried to give them little toys that were really just junk. Nevertheless, a Peanuts lunchbox still sits on their bedroom shelf.
Tom took terrible care of himself, and nothing you could do or say would convince him to change his ways. Eventually, a harsh winter and bad habits of all kinds piled on top of each other until he came down with a bad case of gout. He waited too long before going to the hospital, which resulted in him losing most of his foot. I went and visited him, the only person who did besides the neighbor that brought him there.
He got out of the hospital but eventually went downhill. His unit was unlivable, so he moved to the van he kept in the parking lot next to it, unable to move for days at a time. A couple of us checked on him, but he refused to get help until he was on his actual deathbed. The paramedics came in full face masks and convinced him to go to the hospital, and I told him it was going to be okay, that they were there to help. This was in the first couple weeks of the pandemic, so everything was shut down and everyone was kept out of hospitals for the next year.
Eventually, I lost touch with him and his cellphone number didn’t work the next time I called. I never talked to him again, something I still feel guilty about. Maybe I should have tried harder. Considering his health at the time, I can only imagine that he died alone sometime in the past few years. He had nobody in his life, save for a few neighbors that came around the alley to see how he was doing. Even they faded away.
Connections matter.
Course 4
Dessert: Italian Wine
Lastly, I actually did have a four-course meal in Italy this week, at a beautiful restaurant in the foothills of the Dolomites. It’ll probably go down as one of the best meals I ever had. The food and wine were great, for sure. But the setting and the people were what made the meal what it was. Time spent with friends, cultivating relationships both old and new. Another stop on a journey that’s been wonderful and unpredictable and beyond my wildest imagination.
End of Menu
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.
I'm a firm believer in everyone you meet can teach you something -- this was an awesome read
This was a phenomenal read.