Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It’s been ages (well, a month or so) — I’m in constant scramble mode (or is it burnout mode?) these days. Finishing up the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things, and catching up on life itself. I published a big update to Roden a few days ago. One of my many todos post-walk has been to dig through the film I shot while walking the Tōkaidō in May.

Roden Readers — Hello from the land of … burnout? Well, not burnout-burnout, because I’ve been busy with a billion things here in the background. But from the land of slight newsletter burnout? Yes? But even that’s not entirely true. Because in May (eight-billion years ago in contemporary time) I published some 40,000+ words to my The Return to Pachinko Road pop-up newsletter of me walking from Kyoto to Tokyo over seventeen days.

Ridgeline subscribers — Time is yours, he said, and it was — time, ours, for the next week as we walked across Bali. Time and sweat, so much sweat. Leeches? They were ours, too, but with less blood and horror than expected. (“Our record is thirty on one person!” they told us. We maxed out at just a handful, no boots sloshing thick with our own juice.) Stink was also ours, as were home cooked vegetarian meals and mangosteens and shared cigarettes and crossword puzzles and sleeping side by side on elevated wooden platforms and Jean Valjean’s lyrical plight and bandanas and making our guide laugh so hard he cried and a single flat white coffee so perfect and mythic and unexpected it can only be explained as Indonesian jungle magic.