Scandinavian Airlines, Flight 932
Daisygreen and I are en route to Italy, where we’ll be for two weeks. We have been invited to the Tuscan wedding of one of her writing partners. We’re on the same page: why go to Italy for three days when you can go for a fortnight? Which has led us to this relatively cheap flight on Scandinavian Airlines.
The seats recline impressively. The in-flight entertainment is robust. The dinner is serviceable. The breakfast is weird. The flight attendants are all in suits and ties. The safety video is a strange animation that I keep expecting to turn into something dark, like an Adult Swim cartoon. Instead, the banality of seeing animated avatars assume the "emergency landing" position proves to be unsettling enough.
Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup
We’re waiting on our connecting flight to Milan. Like a lot of the European airports I've been to in the past, this one is gigantic, clean, and bright. But there are also familiar brands here. There are two Joe and the Juice bars. There is a Starbucks that's only a kiosk, outfitted with one of the fancy coffee makers that you probably got told was a perk at the WeWork you have an office at.
There is very little English being spoken, which soothes me. I love hearing people speak in different languages. I love how it's something I can't even try to understand.
Milan
Later, Daisygreen and I are walking to the Duomo while she pontificates about Milan’s vibe.
"It's not a city where people visit, it's a city where people live." She says this while people on electric scooters whiz by in the opposite direction in the bike lane. "I feel the same way about New York. Whenever I see tourists there, I'm like, 'what are you doing here?'"
I get it. The people in Milan are rude, but not that stuck-up Paris rude. The Milanese are the rushed, hurried kind of rude that comes from living in a city with a big population and a small surface area. These people are not here to cater to us, the interlopers in their lives. They are walking fast, not looking around, moving forward like sharks in linen suits. They are just trying to get to the next thing, whether that’s vaping on the stoop of a closed bank, or window-shopping and eating gelato with your friends, or just wandering around.
This is something that Europe has a leg up on America for, by a long shot: the wandering. No one seems to be wandering in America. And if they are, you look at them like a fucking lunatic.
For dinner, we eat pizza. Mine is rich and salty: egg yolk, fior di latte, guanciale, pecorino. It's practically a carbonara pizza, very tasty. Then we have gelato: chocolate, stracciatella, hazelnut. Then we sleep.
Trenitalia Intercity 665
We are headed to Santa Margherita Ligure, a city on the Italian Riviera where we’re staying for the next two nights. There is a young man sitting across from us wearing a white t-shirt covered in metal studs. It remains the most Italian item of clothing I've seen someone wear on this trip, even though I can’t put my finger on what makes this shirt “Italian.”
We woke up this morning and learned that the writer’s strike had been called. Signs point to it lasting for a while. There is currently a gigantic gulf between what the writers want and what the studios and streamers seem willing to do. Unfortunately, the studios and streamers are chasing the Big Tech ideal of unfettered growth. Growth, growth, growth forever, workers be damned!
What the current wave of studio bosses seem to have forgotten is that perpetual growth is unsustainable; maybe impossible. The best case scenario is stability. However, they have chosen to go the fucking insane route and play hardball with people’s livelihoods. So there’s a strike in the air.
Portofino
There are influencers everywhere, influencing. They take pictures wearing their nicest clothes. Not us. We're in dirty hiking clothes. We smell terrible. We have dressed for utility and comfort, not to look great in pictures. We do not give a shit about sundresses and nice jeans. We just want to be functional.
I scroll through an endless feed of picket signs, angry writers, and opinions on what might happen next. Daisygreen reminds me to get off my phone and look at the ocean. She has a point; it did take us two hours to make it to the lighthouse bar where we’re having lunch. Nothing in my phone is as good as watching the bartender feed olives to a seagull.
We eat dinner at a restaurant where, for a while, we’re the only ones dining. The waiter is funny and charming. He suggests we order the fresh pappardelle with pesto. We order two, I tell him he sold us.
"I did not sell. You sell a car. I made a suggestion."
Daisygreen asks what wine pairs well with the pasta, and he throws up his hands with mock exasperation. To him, the notion of pairing is a red flag.
"The French, they don't make food as good as us, so they're always on about 'oh what wine do you pair this with, or what cheese?' We just say Coca-Cola, water, red, white, whatever you want."
She orders a white wine, laughing. He apologizes.
“My ex-wife is French. I hope she's doing well…”
He pauses, then takes our menus.
“…in the best cemetery in Paris.”
Who needs Dick’s Last Resort when you’ve got snarky Italian guy at Ristorante Puny?!
Shortly before we leave, a French couple is seated at the table right behind us, also in his section. A switch flips, and he’s on his best behavior the whole rest of the night. Poor guy!
Cinque Terre
It’s a beautiful region I’d never heard of before planning this trip: five little fishing villages dotting the coastline, connected by miles and miles of hiking trails, an express train that runs back-and-forth through the mountains every hour, and a few roads that I'm sure are twisty and treacherous. We are here for two days. We have a ball.
We eat our weight in pesto and focaccia. We hike for hours. We lounge on the beach in Monterosso and on a rock in the bay at Vernazza, taking a few dips in the ice-cold Ligurian Sea. We see just shy of a dozen cats, each time going "oh my God, a CAT!" and trying to befriend it. We buy souvenirs.
In between it all, we talk about the strike. I keep waking up and checking for news first thing in the morning. There is no new news. There is, however, a widening loop of activity: crews aren’t crossing picket lines, shows are getting shut down, the workers are displaying incredible solidarity, the studio heads are acting like this whole thing is a minor inconvenience and not a big deal.
There are some stories that bring us joy in the way that only stories about organized labor can. We cheer on the defiant PA who left to pick up lunch orders, refused to cross the picket line upon his return to the studio, and gave the food to the striking writers. We marvel at the three-man picket line that shuts down production of a network show after marching for six hours. We laugh at the never-ending array of good picket signs.
But even when it feels like the conversation around the strike has run dry for the day, I can’t stop trying to see what my friends and colleagues did while I was asleep, just so I’ll have another thing to obsess over while they’re all asleep.
Assisi
After juggling six hours of train travel, clumsily scaling the language barrier between us and one of the operators of the agriturismo we’re staying at, and strolling through the Umbrian countryside dodging cars on narrow streets, we make it to this beautiful hill town.
Upon arrival, we notice something strange: an abundance of people in medieval garb. Men in tights and tunics, women with their hair covered in flowing wimples and cauls. After some Googling and translating, we figure out that we’re here for the tail end of Calendimaggio, which seems to be an excuse for the entire populace to dress up and compete in silly competitions. Big theater kid energy. As former theater kids, Daisygreen and I are enthralled. We‘re at the right place, at the right time. It’s the spectacle I needed to distract me right now; a new spectacle that keeps me out of my phone.
Daisygreen does not know the 11th Step Prayer, better known as the St. Francis Prayer. Seeing as we’re in St. Francis’ old stomping grounds, I teach it to her while we navigate winding streets in search of dinner. Tonight, one line sticks out more than it has before:
“For it is by self-forgetting, that one finds.”
I think about this line a lot the next day – while doing my morning pages, while I am editing this essay, while Daisygreen and I eat some of the best sandwiches we’ve ever had, while we’re touring the Basilica of St. Francis, while we’re ambling through the Bosco in the not-quite-summer heat.
What occurs to me is that these two days are the ones I have been the most out of my phone and out of the obsessive hunt for updates. That every time I check Twitter or Instagram, it feels like picking at the scab over a FOMO-induced wound. That I would much rather be out here than in there.
It’s already easy enough to tap into my unrecovered self while I’m traveling domestically. Internationally? Game over, man. No meetings, no phone calls, barely any meditation and prayer. Combine that with out-of-sync coverage of the writer’s strike, no standup in over a week (and a few more days yet until my next set, in Florence) and a scattershot sleep schedule, and I’m more of a mess than I reckoned.
But being in St. Francis’ city has given me all the impetus to self-forget I could ask for, throwing stimuli at me that are both quiet and loud. This realization rings in my head with the clarity of church bells. This is the sound of finding.
Daisygreen and I eat dinner overlooking Umbria while the sun sets. It doesn’t beat the sandwiches. But, for the first time in a few days, I don’t check my phone at dinner. Tonight, that’s enough.
This is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing your point of view about all of that. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.
Nicely done. Love that line: "For it is by self-forgetting, that one finds." Sure feels good to avoid the clutter of social media