The best story I heard at this year’s Featherston Booktown was told by Trevor Mallard, former Labour MP and Speaker of the House in Jacinda Ardern’s government. This was during a panel convened to retell campfire stories of the mad Jacinda years and wonder why they suddenly seem so far gone.

Mallard, a grandfather himself, said he’d often babysat Jacinda’s young daughter Neve when the Prime Minister had to work. The packed house—many Jacinda fans, and many grandparents—murmured in delight.

Then Mallard told us a funny thing. He said he’d known Jacinda was going to resign way back in October of 2022, a full three months before her shocking announcement.

How did he know? Neve told him.

She was only four at the time. She didn’t say Mommy was quitting. She just told her friend Trevor that she wouldn’t be going to school in Wellington next year. Mallard caught the drift, filed it away, and kept his mouth shut.

This, of course, is a fairytale. Here is the small child of legend, the princess who does not yet realize her own power. One boring afternoon in the castle, the queen leaves her in the care of a wise and doting elder. The girl carelessly lets slip a powerful secret. Using magic only she possesses, she reveals to the elder a future he himself cannot see.

We’ve read and watched quite a few such mythic, all-seeing children in this house of late. Elsa, Moana, Harry. Luke and Leia. Half the Studio Ghibli films. Lately we’ve been reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy every night before bed. Our hero Lyra, long abandoned by her aristocrat parents and raised by the Trevor Mallards of her fantastical Oxford, is just going on twelve but she’s the only one who can read the all-knowing alethiometer. Pullman’s marvelous books follow her like a lamp.

Neve is gone now. She lives with her parents in Sydney, like so many Kiwis these days.1 Seems the Boston years have given her an American accent, too.

The Anzac Hall in Featherston was wall to wall grey, my own head included. The youngest people in the room were on stage: TVNZ reporter Te Aniwa Hurihanganui and Post columnist Henry Cooke, both star journalists in their early 30s. They might have been students performing for parents at a school play. The sets were all in place. A sausage sizzle outside, a coffee cart, a tent full of books. What was missing at Booktown, beyond those bright-eyed performers, was any sense of a future.

There was the past, rich and deep. The Anzac Hall was hung with sepia-toned photos of Māori and Pākehā heroes gone by, plus a few handsome long-dead horses. The assembled pensioners cheered every turn in the Jacinda legend. The first part, anyhow. Even retired MP Chris Finlayson, the panel’s National representative, seemed bummed at its ending. “Events blow you off course,” he said.

There was the present, too, forked and vexing. “What’s left of Ardenism?” Cooke asked, with more force than strictly necessary. “Nothing. It’s all gone.” He was talking policy. Let me talk vibes: we, the booklovers of Booktown, are precisely what’s left of Ardenism. There was a time. That time is gone. Where do we go now?

A restless wind flapped the hall’s heavy curtains. Mallard said our challenge was to stop the rise of populism in New Zealand. He was not issuing the challenge himself. His voice was quiet and reflective. Across the stage Finlayson shared his weariness, and his fear: “I hope to god it doesn’t happen.”

The session ended and we all left the hall so the blue-aproned volunteers could check our tickets upon reentry. This caused a funny dance on the ramp outside as several score senior citizens queuing to leave the building u-turned en masse and became several score senior citizens queuing to reenter. Nobody complained. I saw a few Greytown faces I know drift happily by in the churn. We come and we go, eh. When I shuffled back into the hall, coffees in hand, I saw up on the picture rail a new full-color photo of King Charles. He looked old. His face is crazy pink.

The afternoon panel on the media was a bit of a dud. Time slowed to a crawl. The discussion promised a survey of an industry clearly on fire, but the moderator served up softballs she could’ve asked any reporter in the last fifty years.

What was the favourite story you’ve ever covered? The best answer came from Hurihanganui, who recounted her report on Masterton police randomly photographing Māori teenagers on the street. The cops were building a database of kids they’d reckoned as future criminals. Te Aniwa busted ‘em, and they stopped.

Can’t stop ‘em all, though. Mike McRoberts, former star TV anchor, said he’d recently seen an AI deepfake of his own face hawking miracle cures on Facebook. He believed it, too. The AI was that good. The scam was for eye medicine. Robot Mike McRoberts said he’d had to quit Newshub not because the channel had shut down, but because Mike could no longer see.

The future, it turns out, is a stolen face. If we think we recognize what’s coming, we’ve either been lied to or we’re blind.

The media panel got restless. “We are falling apart,” said Duncen Grieve, founder of The Spinoff. He was fulminating against Meta, which gleefully profits from scammers like Robot Mike McRoberts who steal millions out of New Zealand each year. We hate them but we keep posting and scrolling precisely because it’s a place to share information and lies without the check of the journalists on stage. Without all the fuss of books, he might’ve added. See you in 2030 at Featherston Phonetown.

The panelists noted that it was social media that recently hounded TVNZ reporter Maiki Sherman out of her job. A Substack run by a former National staffer dug up an old account of old misbehavior.2 After two weeks of an online pile-on, one of the country’s few remaining Māori TV journalists packed it in.

“We’re being picked off,” McRoberts said.

Hurihanganui said she’d always received harassment from viewers—she’d learned to ignore it, just the price of the job—but the harrassment now was surging.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Nobody did.

In the world of His Dark Materials, Lyra would ask the alethiometer. But oracles only tell, and cannot do. Lyra has the secret wisdom that’s fated to remake the world, but first she’s got a long dangerous journey ahead.

One of her protectors is Iorek Byrnison, king of the polar bears. He wears a suit of armor he forged himself. He doesn’t say much. He’d be terrible on a panel. As we read this week Iorek is leading his charges south. A hole has been torn in the sky, the ice is all melting, and Iorek must find the bears a new home. No luck so far, only barren mountains as far as the eye can see. Iorek gathers them for a short speech. He calls for strength. He offers no comfort.

Be prepared for strangeness and for new ways, my bears. //

As I write this Aotearoa’s got 44 days of diesel left. That’s counting fuel on the boats that haven’t arrived. That’s also counting contracts for fuel still being refined in countries that are themselves running out of fuel, so we’ll just see, won’t we? There’s an online countdown you can watch in real time. Airlines are sketching out their New Zealand shutdown plans. RNZ has told us to stop gas thieves by parking next to a wall.

is not the only one feeling the March 2020 vibes. Last weekend I was strolling through CubaDupa with an American friend who’s spent a career in disaster management: “Just like Covid,” he said, waving at the happy crowd. “The last party before everything shuts down.” Not half a block later we walked right past former Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, humble star of NZ’s pandemic response.1 I love the man, but I shivered like a black cat had crossed my path.

Here’s the difference: Last time the breakdown was a virus. This time it’s America.

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Now one could score Covid as China’s fault, but the source hardly mattered once the virus broke free. My son is keen on the idea that viruses are maybe alive, but also maybe not. This is an odd comfort, looking back: six years ago the world was brought to its knees by either a voracious, shapeshifting bug or an inanimate, self-replicating void. Either way it’s not our fault.

This time the crisis is definitely human. Iran’s the one blocking the Strait of Hormuz, but those shipping lanes were open last month. It’s America that broke the energy supply chain, led by one particular American too stupid to read. Iran blocked the Straight way back in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s been the big red button on their desk ever since. That’s one reason why no American president until Trump ever pulled the trigger.

America’s always gotta pull the trigger somewhere. Trump’s only the latest. We started this whole show: Eisenhower, saintly hero of D-Day, ordered a coup in Iran in 1953. draws a neat downward line from the Bush Sr.’s liberation of Kuwait to George W. Bush’s war-by-lie in Iraq to this new lark in Iran: “Trump is doing something even dumber but in some ways less radical by operating in the space Bush opened.”

Americans are all operating in that space now. We’re been there so long it’s hard to see through the smoke. We are either New York Times reporters filing breathless updates on the new missile we used to kill kids playing volleyball, or the exhausted masses scrolling past the same old white noise. It’s a bubble either way. The PrSM does an airburst right above its target, see, and blasts the whole zone with “tungsten pellets.” It’s a giant Doordash shotgun.

I went down to my local the other night. The Tooth Fairy needed to break a bill so I brought my book and drank a pint. The publican and I chatted as he wiped down the bar. Tony’s Kiwi and Irish both, which gives him a lyric sort of stoicism. The world’s going to hell, we agreed. Just get on with it.

Sorry, I said. For the war.

I didn’t mean it.

On one level this was just that American twitch of self-deprecation we do to make someone sympathize with us. My life is so crazy! etc.

But underneath the comic flopsweat runs two deeper reasons.

The first is learned indifference. Americans on the exhausted left or the shriveled center have spent the last ten years on an ever more brutal course of zen training, learning news cycle by news cycle to separate ourselves from all this shit. We know America does bad things. Our grandfathers, our CEOs, our tax dollars, our bombs. But not me. Not us. Not the sides of America I love, which every year I hold farther apart from the America I hate. We bomb a girls’ school and I’m Peter denying Jesus three times before the cock crows. I tell you I do not know that country.

This sets up the second motive. My apology is really an implicit request for this hard-won separation to be recognized by my Kiwi peers. I said sorry because I need Tony to brush it off. I need him to tell me it’s not my fault. This is not forgiveness, not quite. To ask for forgiveness I’d have to work out my own complicity with this war and all the wars before and all the wars to come. Too much for a weeknight at the pub. Where do I begin? Where does a nation end?

So I said my little sorry. I did my little shrug.

Tony brushed it off and kept wiping down the bar. I said goodnight and walked home under the stars.

See? I’m in the clear.

I’m in the clear until the fuels runs out. America, the world’s largest oil producer, will muddle through just fine. New Zealand, the hermit kingdom so safe in the last pandemic, is now cast to the world’s darkening edge. just cropped us out of a map of global oil shipments. Luxon’s on the phone begging refineries in South Korea and Singapore not to forgot these distant islands as the crunch comes down.

In the meantime we’ve got American family flying down for the Easter holidays. We should be fine? New Zealand isn’t set to run out of jet fuel until May, but surely they’d start grounding flights well before.

Funny, ain’t it? Last time around the worst part of New Zealand’s isolation was not being able to see our family back home. Maybe this time they’ll get stuck on our couch. Sorry not sorry! //

Been a on a live music kick lately! Beats the screen, every time. Some notes—

The Warratahs, 21 March at the Wairarapa Event Centre

A small-town show from New Zealand’s venerable country band. I’d call their sound Americana but that’s not right, is it? I was just about the youngest person in the crowd. Barray Saunders does lonesome-in-place real nice, whether that’s Wellington (“Mt Victoria Rain”), a thunderstorm in an Australian hotel (“The Wheel Inside”) or just “Taranaki.” I hoped to hear “Letter to America” but realized with a start that you just can’t play it anymore. At intermission everyone bought a Trumpet ice cream cone. “Maureen” got ‘em dancing. For an encore they came out and played a rousing version of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” which bowled me right over. The crowd remembered it from the actual 1960s, and the grandmothers danced in the aisle. An American song, I thought—we’re not dead yet!—but Pete’s ghost told me to let it go. It’s not about the hammer, bro. It’s about the danger, the warning, and the love.

CupaDupa, 28-29 March in Wellington

CubaDupa is Wellington’s great annual street fair. The vibe is Montessori Mardi Gras, full of DIY costumes, performance art, and live music. Big shoutout to Empress and Lord Woo and all the Wairarapa heads owning the Laundray Stage on Sunday afternoon. The Australian post-punk killers Gut Health made their NZ debut and absolutely tore down the Wellington Airport stage. Think Blondie with two drummers: faster, meaner, cooler, and way less blonde. But my favorite was Debt Club, who ripped it up at San Fran on Saturday night. They’re a charming young Pōneke five piece with a sax front and center. A mate of mine said they sound like an ‘80s sitcom theme song, and he’s not wrong? I hear the unabashed sincerity of early Springsteen and The Hold Steady, plus rainy-day Wellington introspection and indie mustaches. I’ve been jamming their EP all week. Go see ‘em yourself! //

New Zealand is too damn far away. But listen: my boy Doug (@truckersatlas) has been the tour manager for Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s R.E.M. cover project three years running now. Three years now I’ve heard the stories. As he planned this year’s run he laid it out: “Dude. Come to Athens.” We only get one shot at this pageant. I burnt the savings. I got on the plane.

I caught up with the tour in New Orleans, where my oldest bestie Andrew is the unofficial mayor. Together we followed the band to R.E.M.’s hometown of Athens, Georgia for two shows there. It rocked, y’all, and now I have thoughts. A rich pageant deserves a long letter! If you want great concert photos, has you covered. If you’re not a fan, read this one as a travelogue from the American South. If you dig the post, leave a comment or share it with another fan, all that good social stuff! The whole point of the tour is to keep talking about R.E.M., right? Here we go—

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R.E.M. is not a t-shirt band.

Metallica is a t-shirt band. R.E.M. never settled on a color, a logo, a typeface. Illegibility is the whole point. R.E.M. is headspace band, a housecat band, an unlikely empire built on interior weathers and weird poetry and dreams. A good T-shirt, like a good cover band, must be easy to read.

My sister Nora made us all t-shirts anyways. Pure reverence, with a wink. She’s broken an unspoken rule, shouted out our mumbled secret. She debated the design but her chosen lyric was never in doubt:

I BELIEVE
IN COYOTES
AND TIME AS
AN ABSTRACT

It’s a line from I Believe, from Side 2 of Lifes Rich Pageant. It’s a perfect snapshot of the R.E.M. aesthetic: a soaring yawp (I believe!), a poetic image I can’t explain but just makes sense (I believe in coyotes!), and Michael Stipe’s genius freedom from standard grammar (‘and in time’ would neatly complete the list, but and time arrives as a new and separate thought.) It’s also a nifty summary of Nora and I’s own R.E.M. fandom. She first played the band for me in our 1990s Phoenix childhood full of silkscreened howling coyotes. Even then the American frontier myth had shriveled down to a t-shirt. We Zonie kids had nothing else to believe.

My sister wore her shirt to the Austin show. “It was a crop-top, right?” asked a dude I met at the 40 Watt. “Yeah, I saw her. Right up front.”

Time is not an abstract.

Fabled 80’s comedian Bobcat Goldthwait is the tour’s opening act and joyous cheerleader. “I’m a VHS comedian in a TikTok world,” he declares, and we all salute. In truth me and my boys—deep forties all, dead last of the Xers—are the kids of this crowd. Doug reports a mini-generation gap in the tour, too. Shannon and Narducy, both in their 50s, are devotees of R.E.M.’s jittery, urgent ‘80s stuff; they’re generally less big on the blockbuster ‘90s albums that swept in us tagalongs with anthems and warm hugs. The forward march of these tours, one album a year, will soon bring the debate to ahead. Shannon’s been teasing a run next year for 1987’s Document, which includes The One I Love and It’s the End of the World as We Know It, legit charting singles you still hear on what’s left of radio. Doug tells the story with a mischievous grin: “Next year they’re gonna have to play some HITS.”

New Orleans, House of Blues, Feb. 24.

Doug’s pissed. The House of Blues stagehands were backstage watching The Big Lebowski and refused to lift a finger hauling gear. That tracks, Andrew says. Live Nation bought the club awhile back and now runs it like an upper-deck concession stand, all flat screens and Mich Ultras in the 24 oz can. Whatever. Gen X kids expect the sellout. Doug heads backstage and Andrew and I quit the cramped VIP balcony to show off our t-shirts on the floor.

Shannon & Co. blast off and it’s great! Begin the Begin and These Days are a revelation live, louder and faster and meaner than I hear them on the album. This is what the old heads are on about! Shannon twitches in a flowered silk jacket. Fall on Me and Cuyahoga leave me weeping. I have loved these songs for thirty years and never expected to hear them live.1 Is such a miracle even allowed? Here comes I Believe and I have my arm around a stranger and we are bellowing about coyotes.

But I’m going to keep this mad letter down to one song per night. See the setlist screenshots above and below? They’re the real deal, if digital copies are real. Doug types them up as .rtf files every night. The coloring-in is mine. After ripping through Lifes Rich Pageant—so good!—Shannon brings his sister Sarah out to play viola on Nightswimming. As R.E.M. goes, the song is as legible as a Hallmark card: nostalgia, growing up, and skinnydipping. For me, tonight, it’s also quite suddenly about Becky Staggers, a quiet, serious, and brilliant second violinist in our high school orchestra who died of a brain tumor in what would have been her junior year. Or rather it’s about one warm, empty 1994-ish night when me and two friends stood around a driveway in suburban Tempe AZ, bouncing a basketball and talking about her death.2

Vijay Tellis-Nayak has stripped his piano part down and handed most of the melody off to Sarah. The viola is a gawky and sad instrument, born for a song like this. I played it for years as a kid and it always sounded to me like the lonesome honk of geese overhead. I cry at this song too but for the first time I feel the whole project as less tribute than cover. Nightswimming is itself a cover of a memory the singer can no longer access, and in New Orleans I heard Nightswimming as a cover of that cover, a memory of a song about memory. A picture in reverse. The song was no longer R.E.M.’s alone, or even R.E.M.’s song at all. Nightswimming is public record now, scripture to be read, a thing alive and alone and flying south.

So we joined the tour.

I chugged a THC seltzer for brunch. Rock and roll, y’all! The band’s at our same airport gate, looking bright-eyed and well-kept and altogether younger than me. Andrew and I board and there’s Michael Shannon and his new bride in first class, mooning like lovebirds. As we settle into deep Economy the rapture is already descending: I AM ON TOUR WITH R.E.M.

Athens, The Rialto Room, 25 February.

Doug’s off at the band-only dinner at an undisclosed location. Andrew and I are embarrassed by how good it feels to listen to music while sitting in a chair. Jason Narducy does a lovely set of his own songs, including one about holding his new granddaughter. He’s only 55. What have I done wrong?3

Then Peter Buck comes out and I AM IN THE ROOM WITH R.E.M.! Peter sits in a chair, too. Beside him sit his old mates Kevn Kinney of Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ and longtime R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey. It’s Kevn’s night; Peter and Scott are watching chords and following along. It’s all very chill but then Peter pulls out a mandolin and with a single strum it’s suddenly THE MANDOLIN, the Losing My Religion mandolin heard round the world.4 I felt a great disturbance in the force. I shoot a glance at Andrew. He felt it, too.

I live in Athens now.

America still does bar tabs! Leave it open or close it out, the Rialto bartender asks. In civilized countries we just tap and go but here they demand commitment. Make a choice, cowboy. I dunno, man. I have left too much open in my life. Proper Americans know how to close that shit out and move on. Leave it open, I said, and asked if she could charge my phone, too. No prob. Card and phone vanished behind the bar. That’s my whole life right there, I said. She smiled. “You live here now.”

All lead singers are actors.

After the show we met some of the band at the Manhattan Cafe, an unrestored dive that is clearly Athens’ finest drinking establishment. Wilco bassist John Stirratt has joined the band this year (!) and is just the nicest dude. I babble about seeing Wilco play Antone’s in Austin on a hot night in summer ‘99. He remembered immediately, happily, and better than I did. Bless that man.5

Vijay was also very cool and happy to chat. He confessed to me that he didn’t much like the album version of Nightswimming—the piano was too sturdy, too mechanical. He was glad to play it with a lighter touch and wouldn’t mind experimenting further, but that wasn’t the job at hand. His job, as he saw it, was to make Shannon comfortable up there.

I went to bed that night a-puzzling that one: Is an actor singing with a band different than just a band? Aren’t all lead singers actors? Are all actors lead singers? What comfort do we ask a cover band to provide?

Pilgrimage No. 1.

I though we were just going to see some shows. Turns out we’re attending a full-on R.E.M. convention, and all us convention-goers are trying to score lunch at Weaver D’s, the legendary soul food joint whose slogan R.E.M. borrowed to name 1992’s Automatic for the People. Weaver D’s has been sold and is maybe closing that very weekend? Nobody knows for sure. A long line of old male record dorks take selfies as we wait.6 One of the owners—perhaps the daughter of owner Dexter Weaver?—comes out to shoot her own video and we all cheer on cue.

A cook in an apron—Dexter? Too young—tells the crowd that he might need help unloading the food service truck when it comes. This does not suggest a short wait for lunch. Twenty minutes later the truck arrives and the cook is swarmed by a dozen willing disciples. It’s quite the American tableau: the cook is a black man wearing an apron, his disciples all white men in hipster glasses. The cook leads them to the truck, but it seems there is only a single box of shortening to carry. The cook hefts it easily on his shoulder and turns back to the kitchen. The disciples follow, empty-handed but beaming. They would shoulder his burden, but it’s too weird to ask.

Back at the street the uniformed food service man disappears into his truck. When the show is over—the cook in his kitchen, the disciples in line—he emerges with three more boxes on a dolly and quietly finishes the delivery.

Athens No. 1, 40 Watt Club, Feb. 26.

Night two for the t-shirts. Unwashed ‘cause we’re a traveling band. I’d give you forty dollars, says a woman next to me. Should I take it off right here? No. A fresh one, please. None of us are that young anymore.

The 40 Watt is just about as old as me and remains the platonic ideal of a ‘80-90s indie rock club. No flatscreens. No stupid drinks. Last of the breed, the cool bartender says, chatting like we’re already mates. Live Nation is sucking ‘em all up.

BILL FREAKIN’ BERRY is three feet away, sitting in a booth with his wife. Andrew was a childhood autograph hound at Spring Training games and knows the drill: he calmly, coolly, tells Mr. Berry Hi and says Thanks For All Your Music and shakes his hand. Then Mr. Berry turns and looks me in the eye and we shake and I also say Thank You. Time is an abstract. I am home.

Jetlag and booze and fun have wiped me out. Athens No. 1 is by necessity the quiet night, the note-taking show. I was so hyped for New Orleans I barely noticed Shannon but now he’s all I see. Is he comfortable up there? He’s skinny like Stipe but head and shoulders taller. He doesn’t dance much; when he does, his moves are less intentional, more possessed. There’s something in this whole project that discourages a direct comparison. Maybe it’s our Gen X fixation on authenticity: Shannon doesn’t even try to be like Stipe, right, because that would be fake. But c’mon. Let’s talk about the passion, shall we?

Stipe is a poet, an angel. Shannon is a wizard and a preacher. Stipe is Jesus, Shannon is Moses. In Exodus the Israelites are guided through the desert by a pillar of fire by night (Stipe) and by day a pillar of cloud (Shannon.) Stipe comes to us bearing mysteries from the future; he mumbles, he bleats, he soars. Shannon proclaims bitter wisdom from the deep past. He booms. He argues. He jabs a finger.

And thus the tour koan: does Shannon know the words to Gardening at Night? Do any of us? What’s the song even about? Who cares? A cover band is first and foremost a legible copy of someone else’s art. But what happens when the absence of legible meaning is the original art’s whole deal?7

If I remember right, Vijay played Gardening straight in New Orleans. In Athens he dips his keyboard line in an unexpected psychedelic shimmer. Andrew raises an eyebrow. The sound is not ‘right’—it’s uncomfortable, but exciting? Go for it, man! Shannon dives right in. The lines I never caught from Stipe still elude me. Maybe Shannon’s scat-singing up there. Now he leans out over the crowd, his long frame hung on the mic stand like an elm caught in a powerline. He glares, he proclaims. One line I catch: The sun just hurts my eyes… As Shannon sings the words, he raises one hand to his brow and pantomimes shielding his eyes.

Pilgrimage No. 2.

Next on the R.E.M. Week’s posted schedule is a visit to The Trestle. That’s the old railroad bridge featured in Civil War-esque sepia tone on the back cover of R.E.M.’s first album Murmur. The day is bright and climate-change warm. The original rotting Trestle was torn down and rebuilt in 2021 as part of a new urban park. What was once a gothic dead end is now a jogging trail, with carefully-matched replacement timbers linked up with snazzy pre-rusted steel arches to form a new Frankenstein bridge. It’s a classic Ship of Theseus: to preserve the past, you’ve got to straight-up replace it.

Healthy couples with strollers glide along The Trestle overhead but we pilgrims stand around the muddy creek below and pose for album photos in our stinky shirts. Other conference-goers soon join us. I take a trestle photo for a couple R.E.M. dudes up from Atlanta. We agree someone should put a plaque right here by the creek. We talk band talk. We all hope this whole carnival of sorts continues next year. Doug is discreet about his insider status but here weighs in to suggest the Document tour is all but locked in. Our new buddies are pleased. “It’s not a tradition that I want to give up,” one says. Me neither, bro. I got so few anymore.

Then a pretty woman half our age—yoga pants, mountain bike—brakes as she pedals awkwardly through our little prayer group. “Excuse me, guys.” We clear the path.

Athens No. 2, 40 Watt Club, Feb. 27.

My credit card slept overnight at the 40 Watt. I would leave it open there forever. Doug’s big brother is in town now, with an old buddy of his. R.E.M. heads both. I last saw them at Doug’s wedding twenty years ago, and now the brother’s got a kid in college and another nearly out the door. I wish time was an abstract.

For Athens No. 2 I have recovered, got silly on Guinness pints at the professor bar, and I am ready to render summary judgement and rock my ass off. The club is packed, the VIP section heaving. We rock: Andrew and I stand on a cracked vinyl booth for I Believe and together sing the descant in the last chorus and my heart spilleth over.

And I judge: Cuyahoga wins the tour. So much good stuff but that’s the song that broke out for me. It’s a classic R.E.M. jam: major-minor mix, a belter chorus, a political/historical analogy dreamily unexplained. I always liked it, even if it sat a notch outside my top five or even top ten. But it’s been a banger sing-along all three shows, and on Athens No. 2 I hear it anew: Cuyahoga is our national anthem. Should be. Will be.

Only Shannon can make this pitch. If Stipe is himself an avant-garde revival of Old, Weird America, then Shannon is one of its great modern interpreters. He’s been a murdered President, a Supreme Court Justice, Superman’s nemesis, an everyman farmer struck by apocalyptic visions and ‘70s Elvis with a pistol in his boot. “America the Monster,” as he himself called his sadistic government agent in The Shape of Water. Dude was giving strong Captain Ahab vibes justing checking in at the Delta counter. He would’ve been a killer John Brown. Somebody give him Lincoln already.

All of this rides in behind him as Shannon delivers Cuyahoga’s opening line: Let’s put our heads together / and start a new country up. He sings it straight the first verse and with a deliberate anti-Trump sneer the second.8 The idea seemed cringe my first two nights. We are largely an old, satisfied bunch of white folks with good health insurance. But now it’s like, why the fuck not? Wasn’t America just started up the first time?

Back up here: Cuyahoga—bless all y’all non-fans reading this deep—is an impressionistic retelling of an almost Biblical American legend: that time in the dark 1970s when we trashed Ohio’s Cuyahoga River so badly it caught fire. Stipe’s lyrics swing big and carry heaps. There’s national identity proudly evoked and Native American history awkwardly recounted. There’s colonization, selective memory, and violence. Here comes Woody Guthrie: This land is a land of ours. Then Woody gets weird: This river runs red over it. The river is blood, but the blood is not the land itself, or its possession. The red comes in a flood, but the flood will pass, come again, and pass once more. The big sing-along chorus—we all call out Cuyahoga, the mispelled Mohawk word for crooked river—gathers into an inchoate longing for a place and nation that can one day sit in comfort atop an unfathomably large continent thick with history, pain, and beauty beyond reckoning. Rewrite the book and rule the pages / Saving face, secured in grace.

But it’s also just, y’know, about kids swimming in a river. Cuyahoga is our great national Dayswimming. The song forgives us. The song loves us backwards and forwards, without condition, and with something very much like hope.

And this, this, is why the whole tour works so well, why it’s truly caught fire this year, why a couple of small-club cover-band shows turned into R.E.M.-Con, and why Shannon just might spend 2030 singing Everybody Hurts to packed mid-sized houses across the fading American empire. Stipe once called for an American revolution, Shannon alone can sell it fresh, and we’re out here dying for something to believe.

Wars are no longer local, Feb. 28.

We wake up Saturday and Trump has bombed Iran. Nobody cares. That’s my hangover talking, but also the Great American Hangover: we’ve been bombing the Middle East my entire life. I am out of words, out of gas, out of futures. Doug drives the band north while Andrew and I hunt down a Bloody Mary and another fried chicken sandwich. The pale sun shines bright as it can on a Great American College Town. It’s game day. The bars are filling up, and the frontyards of frat houses. Shirtless boys circle the beer-pong tables. A cloud of chartreuse bridesmaids float out of their hotel and into a waiting trolley. They look amazing. The trolley is actually a bus. The bridesmaids will never wear those dresses again. It’s the end of the world as we know it. I’ll be back in Athens next year. //

• March 3: The Everyday Haiku

• March 10: How to Start a Story

On to the letter. My kids drew me new section breaks. One is named Darcy.

I met an American who’s moving back.

She’s a subscriber to this newsletter, in fact. She came to a workshop of mine last month. We were out on the sidewalk afterwards, chatting in the summer afternoon.

All the usual reasons, she said. Family and schools.

I nodded. I feel the pull, too.1

There was no triumph to her announcement. Her face was open, her eyes searching.

It’s the least certain big decision I’ve ever made, she said.

I wished her godspeed. We hugged, because we’re Americans. Then she walked one way and I walked the other.

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To be an American outside the US these days is to be forever searching for an ending.

When does this end, I wanted to yell at the Super Bowl when Jenny turned it on last Monday afternoon. I work hard to hate the self-satisfaction, the player-soldiers trotting back and forth on their endless commutes, the sideline’s corporate ladder in matching Republican khakis. But football on TV is an old childhood dream. I got sucked back in and the NZ weekday disappeared. I got all choked up when Bad Bunny spiked the football and then we turned off the second half and I walked around the empty house in a daze listening to the cicadas roar outside and wishing my kids would learn Spanish like Jenny and I did. Like all Americans should. Like all Americanos in the hemisphere. But now we’re not in that hemisphere and so my kids won’t. Seguimos aquí. The End.

Here’s another ending. A mate and I went to the Nick Cave show in Wellington last week. Nick stood up there in his sweaty black suit and jet black hair and dedicated a song to Elvis freakin’ Presley. I half expected the Kiwi audience to boo, but they didn’t. Many were older than me. They knew us when we were cool.

Nick Cave is older, too. He’s a gothic freak who’s long loved us Americans for the gothic freaks we truly are. His current show is a soaring American-style gospel revival that includes a showstopper ballad about the electric chair2; in his next life our man is coming back as a Flannery O’Connor story. His Elvis song was Tupelo, named for the Mississippi town where the King was born. It’s an oldie, from way back in 1985; I swear he played it just to see if it still walked a Biblical forty years later. Elvis was “a hero of mine,” Nick said. Was that a weariness in his voice, a note of doubt? What’s the King’s present-day exchange rate?

Tupelo’s a thumper and the Bad Seeds hammered it like they were tearing the temple down. Looka yonder / A big black cloud come! I bopped in the dark and knew, just knew, that I was witnessing the last song any performer on the TSB Arena stage would dedicate to Elvis Aaron Presley (1935-1977). The End.

Nick Cave is, in his Australian way, an avatar of American soft power.3 Hell, so is this newsletter. But soft power is the think-tanky 30,000-foot view, a vague roll of national thunder. On the scale of a single human life, a single human family—the only scale on which we can make those big decisions—soft power is much harder to calculate.

When we were living in China they built concentration camps for the Uyghurs. A million, maybe 1.5 million of its own citizens were locked up for brutal ‘reeducation,’ their children stolen, their mosques and cemeteries and ancient cities razed to the ground, their great writers disappeared. We squirmed, but we had good jobs and new babies; we stayed until the pandemic pushed us out.

Now ICE is buying up warehouses to do the same in America. One’s in Surprise, Arizona, not far from where I grew up. There’s an absolute death star outside Dallas set to lock up 9,500 souls just down the freeway from where my father was born. For the second time in our family life, ‘concentration camps’ enters our where-to-live decision tree. But this time it’s home.

When a fellow Texan came by the house last weekend, driving home from a camping trip in the Tararua Range, we drank our tea and talked of moving back. It’s a familiar party game. We run the numbers, the worries. Obamacare til the job kicks in, but what job? In what distant suburb could we afford a house?

New Zealand’s an ending, and a good one. But we keep the door propped open, the breeze of home blowing through. China was more than camps, and Texas too. Texas is my brother-in-law sending a photo of an absurdly stacked BBQ plate. Texas is a video of my nephew in his junior high basketball game, dropping a sick crossover as he drives to the hoop. Texas is family and schools.

Americans down here have a Facebook group. I’m a dedicated lurker. It’s a kind place. There are regular tips on finding Mexican food and Benadryl and tax lawyers. Say you’re moving here and folks pour out the advice. Say you’re new and folks clamber to meet up. Say you’re lonely and cold and Kiwis don’t talk to me, not like talk talk, and the group’s NZ lifers say it’s alright, moving anywhere takes time, the loneliness will end.

When someone posts to say they’re moving back—family and schools—sometimes another leaver will pipe up from back in the States to say I feel ya, honey. The rule is that if you leave New Zealand, you’re supposed to quit the group. But enforcement is voluntary. The leavers linger as long as they need.

There’s another Facebook group for Americans who are moving to New Zealand but haven’t landed here yet. Also a nice place, but with a whole different energy. New Zealand here is a shining future, a party invitation. There are introductions with smiling family photos, and so many questions. Advice on moving pets across the sea? Tips on Christchurch schools? Does New Zealand have dishwashers? T minus one week til we’re in Aotearoa!!!

They seem pretty certain.

After the Nick Cave show, me and four Kiwi dads found ourselves in a half-empty cowboy bar.4 The bartender was a young woman with black hair and empty eyes. I caught her accent straightaway.

Where ya from?

Boston, she said.

Austin?

Boston, she said, and our summit was done.

There was no line for the bull. I climbed up and wrapped the rope around my hand once, then twice, like they do in rodeos back home. I sat up straight and proud. I raised my free hand high. Real cowboys don’t touch the bull. I gazed out across the bar, silent except for the screaming hip-hop. Kiwis do not cheer, they do not yell woo.

Seated at the bull controls was the bartender from Boston. She did not meet my eye. She twisted the knob and the bull began to roll. I held tight. I felt good up there. Then Boston twisted the knob again. The bull gave one quick jerk and I tipped over like a teapot and began a long, slow slide down the bull’s vinyl flank. I white-kunckled that rope. I would not go easy. I kept my free hand high, waiting for applause or forgiveness or release.

Boston waited, too. I guess that’s her job.

I let go and fell to the mat. We dads downed our beers and went up the street for Chinese. Hundred bucks says the bar’s closed inside a year. //

On the move from China, and the uneasy soft power of American country music:

The last time I heard Bruce Springsteen make a Big Statement on deadline, I was driving through the Sangre de Christos at twilight. It was September 21, 2001. I was in Colorado or New Mexico, or a mountain pass in between. I’d gone up there to hide and watch the aspens turn. The radio in my truck was spilling over with call-in shows, all wild grief and howls for revenge. Suddenly a bunch of stations switched over to the national memorial concert broadcasting from distant New York. I wound through the darkening forest as all my Boomer Uncles played one song each with no introduction or applause: Tom Petty, Neil Young, Paul Simon. But it was Bruce who opened the show with a new song, “City of Ruins.” Despite the title it was all in major chords. Come on, he sang. Rise up. Night fell. There were no other cars on that mountain road, but I wasn’t alone.

The memory came flying back to me this week when Bruce released “The Streets of Minneapolis” in response to the ICE murders in Minnesota. It’s raw and angry, and also in defiant major chords. When I listen to it here in faraway New Zealand I feel a great comfort to hear the names of Renee Good and Alex Pretti sung by the voice that first sung America to me when I was boy with his first tape deck. Now I’m a dad hitting repeat on the Spotify and trying to sort an unfamiliar ache in my chest. Can the Boss still make me hope?

I want to love “Streets of Minneapolis,” man. I’m raw and angry, too. I absolutely want an America where Bruce is out there giving ‘em hell. But I’m struggling with this one. I can’t decide whether the breakdown is his, mine, or just the meanness in this world.1

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You’ve gotta cut some slack to anyone trying to rhyme with Minneapolis on deadline. We’ll take our stand for this land / And the stranger in our midst is pretty great! But I wince every time I hear Minneapolis, I hear your voice / singing through the bloody mist. It’s a clanger. Sounds like a splatter flick.

I mean, I get it. The mist is Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot at point-blank range.

Maybe I’m just being squeamish. I refused to watch either video. I have this idea that by opting out of Snuff Film Discourse I become some noble monk in a high tower preserving the last scraps of our basic decency. It’s not working. But when I hear the spray of American gore sung over the same ol’ straight-ahead Springsteen uplift as, say, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” I get sick to my stomach.

I get sick to my stomach and run home to The Rising.

That’s the 9/11 album, remember? “City of Ruins” is the final track. Bruce had actually written the song for his dear, downtrodden Ashbury Park a year before the planes ever hit the towers; prophets get lucky like that. The Rising sold a bazillion copies and was beloved by critics across the political spectrum. It’s got hope in spades.

Too much hope, honestly. Time has not been kind. The Rising is not a great album. It’s repetitive and preachy and too long by five or six clunker songs.2 Where “Streets of Minneapolis” works in a tradition of old labor fight songs that tell stories and name names, The Rising is deliberately, often maddingly vague. The songs are full of symbolic kisses and Biblical-ish imagery and prayer-like repetition; in their best moments they succeed as elegies and hymns. The overall affect of baggy, loving, and firmly nondenominational uplift reminds me of the low-key suburban Episcopal church in which I grew up: I’ve got warm feelings for the place and its people, I understand the role it plays in a functioning society, and I ain’t been back in years.

But to listen to The Rising now is to hear not Bruce’s failures but our own. The album dropped in July 2002. We were already in Afghanistan; we’d invade Iraq the following spring. In November 2002, with The Rising still on the charts, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and with it ICE. You can draw a straight line from 9/11 to Minneapolis. We did not rise up.

You can also chart our descent in Springsteen’s bloody mist. I’d forgotten until this week that The Rising has its own version: in “The Nothing Man,” a shell-shocked survivor is haunted by memories of “a misty cloud of pink vapor.” Springsteen first wrote the song in ‘94 about a veteran of an unspecified but presumably American war; the pink vapor’s a battlefield memory. For 9/11 Bruce didn’t change a word.3 On The Rising we hear the same line as bodies falling from the Towers to the street below, blending with the nightmare cloud that swallowed Lower Manhattan as the buildings collapsed.

A generation later, the mist has changed again.

In The Rising the bloody mist is violence delivered by an Other.4 It’s also over and done with, a nightmare neatly tied off and ready to be mourned. In “Minneapolis,” meanwhile, the bloody mist is the American government shooting Americans, and ain’t nothing over yet. Since Pretti’s murder ICE has already kidnapped two more kids from Liam Ramos’ school. Area gun sales are brisk. In Minnesota and beyond, this shit’s still just getting started.

For contrast consider Christchurch. New Zealand loves its Bruce! After the 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people, fans in the city begged him to come play. He finally made it down in 2017, playing a ten-minute version of “My City in Ruins” that left “many tear-stained faces” in the soldout stadium crowd. Today a rebuilt Christchurch is having a moment. It’s where Kiwis move when they’re not moving to Australia. When the violence lasts only ten seconds and ain’t even human, a community can eventually rise up.

Not America, not yet. We’ve got some fighting to do. Choose your Springsteen.

The Rising is The West Wing, a shimmering liberal mirage of victory. The Rising is the last gasp of The End of History. The Rising is a podcast with Obama. The Rising is Uncle Bruce giving you a hug and a hammer and ride to the Habitat for Humanity jobsite. The Rising believes America—place, people, and ideal—will prevail.

“Streets of Minneapolis” is Andor and One Battle After Another, a struggle both righteous and grimly endless. “Streets of Minneapolis” is This Machine Kills Fascists and Hasta La Victoria Siempre. “Streets of Minneapolis” knows we won’t ever win, not for keeps. Not in America, not anywhere. “Streets of Minneapolis” accepts there will be blood. Honors that blood. Makes the blood taste good.

One’s half a dream, half a lie. One’s a truth too dark for a dad to face every day.

The bloody mist exists so that one day there will be no more bloody mist.

I drive through a new countryside now. Green paddocks. Stony rivers. No aspens. Aotearoa’s native trees don’t change their color, and the transplanted gums and pines don’t either. In the minvan I listen to Ezra Klein. Gotta have something to tell my Kiwi mates who ask what the hell is going on up there.

We’re sinking into the mist, is the best I got. How far and how fast, god only knows.

The mist will come here too, one day. The mist is everywhere.

At the gym I hop on the treadmill. Enough Ezra. Gimme Bruce. “City of Ruins” is too slow. The Rising kicks off with “Lonesome Day.” Gimme the lie, gimme the dream:

It’s alright / It’s alright / It’s alright / Yeah
It’s alright / It’s alright / It’s alright / Yeah
It’s alright / It’s alright / It’s alright / Yeah
It’s alright / It’s alright. //

The best part of this newsletter business is also the best part of the internet: I’m here in Greytown on a bright summer morning, and y’all are out there across the motu and around the world. On this screen, however, we’re all hanging out together in the same…place, if that’s the word?

calls the internet a fairyland and that works for me: “where ordinary rules dissolve, where time slips, where travelers risk forgetting who and what they are.” To the list I’ll happily add forgetting where you are. I write and y’all kind people read and we all cheat geography together. Magic, ain’t it?

I’m going to break that spell with an invitation to some very in-person, real world workshops next year—details below. But first, back to the internet:

From My Clay Jar to Yours

is another writer here on Substack whom I admire. He wrote a recent post wondering what the hell ever happened to cosmopolitanism, which he defines as “a notion that identity is synthetic and isn’t primarily conferred by ethnic or nationalist bloodlines, that a person is, fundamentally, a ‘citizen of the world.’” Americans in particular have turned inward, he notes, though the phenomenon is everywhere. He works quickly through the familiar reasons—the siloing of the internet, identity politics both left and right, our stubbornly tribal nature—but the big picture he drew really hit home. I grew up thinking the Peace Corps was the coolest job on Earth. Until Kahn mentioned it I hadn’t thought of it in years.

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I grew up a ‘90s kid looking desperately outward at the wide, wide world. Our family hosted foreign exchange students in boring ol’ Phoenix, Arizona, and both my sister and I went on our own exchanges as soon as we could. Adulthood came and I never stopped moving. I did the Eurail pass, I taught English in Mexico, I built a trash collection service in a Honduran village. Then I turned pro, trading all that rambling experience into cool gigs as a foreign correspondent in Bolivia and a university lecturer in China. Now I’m a dad raising American-ish kids in New Zealand. By this point you could fairly say this endless international exchange, and the synthetic (not fake, but made) global identity it’s given me, have been life’s chief source of meaning.

For better or worse, my fingers want to add. The flinch is ingrained. I have learned to apologize for being so damn weird. Sometimes I even apologize to myself. This year I’ve somehow both vowed to become Kiwi and to remain American until death. In aggregate, it seems, I’m a proud cosmopolitan. On any given day I’m a shrunken nationalist just lookin’ for a wall to hide behind.

It’s hard out there, keeping that cosmopolitan vibe afloat. You need good times and money. You need hope and privilege and open doors and plane tickets. You need to see the world not as a crowded rock to squeeze for food but as thing to believe in, whole, for its own sake. I still want all of this, for my kids above all. I fear I am watching it slip from my grasp. From all our grasp.

I started this newsletter as a return to the dream: cosmopolitan letters from an internet fairyland where I am American and not, Kiwi and not, and yet a believer in both. I’m stoked to have piled up all these words, but I’m most fiercely proud of you, my warmly divided community of readers: this mailing list runs about 40/40 NZ/US, with another 20 percent the world over. Find me another such club out there! Nobody bails when I go deep on small towns on either side of the split, either. We’re a legit binational-plus tribe, we are. Citizens of the goddamn world!

I don’t use the phrase lightly. At NYU Shanghai we taught cosmopolitanism til we were blue in the face. I can recite the story of Diogenes without looking it up. He was the original cosmopolitan, coiner of the term. He was also batshit crazy. He lived naked on the streets of Athens and slept inside a large clay jar. He didn’t need any more shelter. The world was enough.

Which is the true fairyland? The faith that nations, with their sad little walls, will make your soul complete? Or that you can find the same completion without their shelter, a ghost of the world curled up in a jar on the street? Which traveler has truly forgotten who or what they are?

Workshops in the Real World

This summer in Greytown, New Zealand I’m throwing a bunch of great workshops at Mrs. Blackwell’s Village Bookshop. Call it a residency, like I’m Celine Dion in Vegas belting out the joys of writing! We had great fun at last year’s workshops—see the photo up top—so we’re back with more:

Writing to Reveal is the closing workshop of The New Zealand Stationary Festival on January 10. After a day celebrating the joy of sleek pens and bitchin’ notebooks, we’ll explore how regularly scribbling down your thoughts can lead you to wisdom you never knew you had. Tickets here. (Buy a full festival ticket for a killer totebag.)

January 10: Writing to Reveal with Dan Keane

Writing Your Life is a series of stand-alone workshops on genres and methods of autobiographical writing. Our memories give us everything, and with practice you can learn to fashion them into all kinds of art on the page. In each Tuesday evening session we’ll read examples, learn a few tricks, then write and talk our way through the craft together. Great conversation, great vibes. You’ll learn a bunch and leave rarin’ to write:

February 10: How to Write a Place

February 17: How to Write a Portrait

February 24: An Elegy for Something Lost

March 3: The Everyday Haiku

March 10: How to Start a Story

Attend as many as you like! Click each link for tickets. If you want to attend all five, you can sign up here for a discount and a free Midori notebook (Japanese, top quality, paper like ice cream.) I’d love to see you there!

Deeper into Fairyland

These letters will pause for the holidays and the first part of next year (which is very much still the holidays here in work-to-live New Zealand.) To my darling paid subscribers—thank you, thank you, thank you!—I’ll suspend paid subs until February. I’ll use the time away to hang with the kids and read without purpose. I’ve also got a new project I’m cooking up and I need to disappear awhile to get it together. Watch this space in 2026! Til then—the South Island, a bach, a hut or two, and long days on the green op-shop reading couch under the window. Fairylands all.

Now my daughter’s asking to hit the Greytown pool. My son wants the Carterton pool. Place always wins. My warmest regards to you & yours, in whatever nation the holidays catch you. Ngā mihi nui, y’all. See you next year in fairyland. //

Whanganui is a city, and the Whanganui is a river.1 The city is home to around 40,000 souls, plus one: the river has famously been granted legal personhood. On the day after Thanksgiving we drove into town in a tired summer twilight, and the river was the first soul we met.

We needed the welcome. Our secret American feast had turned to its lonely comedown. Other drivers on the road from Palmy, the fishermen down by the bridge, the boys doing manus off a downtown dock—to them it was just another Friday. The river, though, dozing wide and brown between its concrete banks—the river knew.

We checked into an Airbnb in a quiet suburb and slept off the last of the pie. The next morning we took the kids to the farmer’s market along the old tram tracks by the river. On the riverbank there’s a big silver sphere, a miniature tribute to Chicago’s lakefront Bean.2 The Whanganui version has a strange cut in the side, as if it were a giant sleighbell. The cut is a silhouette of the river’s path from its birthplace among the North Island volcanos down to its Whanganui mouth and the Tasman Sea. The river looks super cool, like a wild snake coiled around the sphere’s equator. The sea is just a straight line at one end.

Walking up from the river along Drews Avenue we discovered the Mystery Phone? The question mark is an invitation. You push the buttons and recorded voices tell the history of the town. Jenny managed the kids’ turn-taking while I parked the minivan. I didn’t try it myself but the kids thought it was pretty cool. They’ve never known a world where you received information by holding still in one fixed spot, as if in prayer.

We never taught them to pray, either. But that’s another letter.

The souls of Whanganui were kind to us. The waiter at breakfast swore he heard us talking work; I could definitely claim the expense. The dude at the vintage shop—wild patterned shirt, a complicated salt-and-pepper mustache—said he’d see us at the show that night. In the afternoon we joined a procession of families from kid dinner at the hipster burger bar to kid dessert at the ice cream shop, where a dad chatted us up as if we were already neighbors. They’d moved down from Hamilton just to afford a house. “Best kept secret in New Zealand, I reckon.”

I did go to the show. Go where you’re invited, that’s the rule. I left Jenny with the sleeping kids and once again parked the minivan downtown. The streets were all but empty—there is no silence like a weekend night in a small New Zealand city—but I spotted a pair of young lovers strolling up the hill, heads together and dressed in draping black, each carrying a bottle of wine.

I tailed the lovers to the Whanganui Musicians’ Club, where local bands were throwing a benefit for Palestine. The Musicians’ Club seemed at first just another example of New Zealand’s beloved community halls: the worn wooden floor, the kitchen with instructions taped to the fridge, the door left open all night.3 A band wailed away on the low stage. The show was BYO—the lovers knew—and around the walls had gathered a cheerful moraine of Woolworths bags and six-pack boxes. I sipped free water from a red paper cup and talked Phoenix Suns basketball with the volunteer doorman.

Next up was a surf-rock band called Space Trash. They were great! The small crowd jittered and bopped around the floor. At one point the lead guitarist leapt from the stage to join them. Fans danced around him as he soloed, and one even reached over and unbuttoned the guitarist’s shirt—one button, two, then three. The guitarist held still for his undressing but never missed a beat. I would’ve filmed the whole thing. But not a soul took their phone out, so I didn’t either.

Between sets I chatted with a friendly retiree three years up from Masterton. “We wanted more,” he said, gesturing with his paper cup at the crowded dirt yard outside the club. He directed me to Dancing Dave. Everybody knows Dancing Dave, he said. He’s from Arizona, too.

I found Dave in the darkened yard out back, checking the time on his vape. He wore a feathered fedora on his head, a peace medallion around his neck and a white beard braided down from the chin. Alabama, he said, not Arizona. His ex-wife, though—she was from Arizona. They’d met on the shuttle bus to Lost Wages, as Dave called Las Vegas. She was pretty cute. “I wouldn’t kick her out of an airplane.” But Reagan was president, the nuke plant in Alabama caught on fire, and the young couple bailed for New Zealand. She left him for Wellington not long after. Still, he was happy here, all these decades later, even though New Zealand had changed. “When we got here you could drink from any river in the country. These days it’s only a couple streams way up in the mountains somewhere, and who’s gonna go up there?” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Now it’s just a big shithole. But it’s the best shithole in the world.”

On Sunday morning I dared to try the Mystery Phone? myself. My god, the tech nostalgia. The heavy receiver in my hand. The sturdy leash of the cord.

I pushed the button labeled “Whale on a Train.” A voice spoke in my ear:

In November of 1933 a whale beached up the coast at Hāwera. The director of the Whanganui Museum, a man named George Shepherd, wanted the specimen for his collection. He traveled up the coast, dismembered the carcass, and shipped it home on the train. Back in Whanganui, he secretly laid the whale parts out on the museum’s roof to finish decomposing. Neighbors complained, but no one could place the smell. Once clean and dry, the skeleton was his museum’s centerpiece for years.

Then the Mystery Phone? told me Shepherd’s museum is now the Whanganui Musician’s Club. At the Saturday show we’d danced under the ghost of a rotting whale.

Today the skeleton lives across the street in the present-day Whanganui Museum. Turns out the whale was a whole new species, which Shepherd proudly named for himself: Tasmacetus shepherdi. Halfway down its spine any non-scientist can easily spot two swollen, deformed vertebrae. This spinal defect may have killed the whale. We cannot know for sure. In his museum photos Shepherd looks flinty, doubting. The whale herself says nothing.

Downstairs there’s an exhibit dedicated to the history and culture of the Māori iwi who have long called the Whanganui River home. As befitting its status, the river speaks from every placard in the first person: “I am a river system that consists of many elements and communities, who need to work together to heal me.”

Same same. I read too much fiction. Feed me any story and I will don the I.

The artifacts, too, raise their hands to speak:4

“I am a hīnaki (eeling basket).”

A paddle: “I am made from dark wood, with a plaited muka cord tied around my handle.”

Three rocks with holes bored right through their hearts: “We are fishing sinkers, made of coarse grey stone.”

We are indeed.

My kids were tired and ready to leave, but as we crossed river towards home I called a final stop at the beach by the airport. One cannot visit a coastal river town without meeting both river and sea. That’s the prayer, kids. The river completes the trip, and so shall we.

We shuffled out through the dune grass. Sunday drivers zipped by on dirt bikes. I stripped to my shorts. The kids walked fully dressed into the waves. //

On New Zealand’s community halls:

Thanksgiving arrives here in a weird spring silence. Halloween is every year more a mad US/NZ mashup, all sugar and plastic and roses in bloom, but come November the exchange goes quiet. Kiwis are drafting summer away-messages and finding child care for the Christmas work do. Americans turtle up and wait. We’ve got our own funny little holiday first. After years of skipping we’re all in again, joining a big Friendsgiving over the hill in Welly. No Kiwis invited.

Not to be rude, y’all! Both sides seem happy to set some boundaries. The split recalls China Mieville’s The City & the City, a novel set in two cities that exist side by side in different slivers of space-time. Citizens of each are forbidden from even seeing the other, and everyone learns to look away. On Thursday in American Wellington we’ll pull the kids from school for a ritual feast. On Thursday in Kiwi Wellington it’s just another Mini-Friday.

Now the hero in Mieville’s novel is a detective who must slip between the two cities to solve a crime. Reader, c’est moi! The mystery here is twofold:

1. What makes Thanksgiving so awesome? Because it’s awesome.

2. Does New Zealand, lacking the day itself, still perform versions of this awesomeness elsewhere in the calendar?

Pour a glass, cut some pie, and read on to find out. Kiwis, please tell me where I’ve got it wrong. Americans—just tell me I got it right.

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A Day to Share Your Feelings

At my childhood Thanksgivings we’d go around the table and everyone would say something they were thankful for. This was gently excruciating, but gave the dinner a pleasant ritual heft. I can’t remember the last time I did this. Friendsgivings abroad come off more as dinner parties; in Shanghai we ate our turkey off steam trays at the bar. This is a loss, I think. Gratitude’s the vegetable of emotions. Learn to express it or die too young.

New Zealanders famously hate talking about feelings. The cliché is true: my last therapist here froze up mid-session and gave me a worksheet instead. One-on-one the gooey stuff comes out, greased by coffee or beer. Still, holiday-wise Anzac Day (April 25) is a public show of reverent grief with a far higher per capita participation than our own equivalents. Americans, when was your last Memorial Day parade? I’ve been to like four here. It’s a thing!

A Day to Not Be England

Thanksgiving is for small-r republicans. At that first mythic feast, the Indians had never been royal subjects while the Pilgrims were stoked to finally be out on their own. Their big move—Head West, Steal Land—would become the great American song and dance.

It’s wild to me that New Zealand—more carefully stolen, but much further west—still clings to the long faded empire who conquered it. Y’all do what feels right, I guess. Close schools for the King’s Birthday, make space for another country’s flag on your own. When you do break away, and break away you will, we’ll throw you a dinner. Maybe fry up a local bird.

A Day to Binge

Binge drinking is celebrated here, especially for blokes. Here’s Samuel Moore’s tribute to hungover Kiwi dads:

The word here is dusty, which I love. Dusty dads are far less loved in America. We’re still Pilgrims at heart. Meritocracy is the road to heaven.

Food, though! We’re kings of the binge.1 To an American eye there’s a moderation in New Zealand that presents as scarcity, or perhaps scarcity presenting as moderation. Coffees are tiny. Get to the potluck early or it might run out, like completely. I’ve seen blokes at a barbecue spend the whole afternoon drinking only the beer they brought themselves.

So we’ll bring two pies to dinner. Hell, better make it three. Skipping pumpkin to roast our own kumara (sweet potato.) Two orange pies. One purple. Abundance, baby!

A Day of Survival

As the myth goes, the Pilgrims would have died in their first New World winter without help from their kind Native American hosts. Some early settlers did, in fact, starve. In 1590 the Roanoke Colony famously vanished entirely. Our Thanksgiving gratitude carries beneath it a cold whiff of that first brush with death.2

I haven’t caught the same note in the NZ frontier stories I’ve read. Settlement here begins properly only in 1840, basically yesterday. It’s warmer, especially the North Island. The Crown’s got your back. There’s much loneliness and struggle, but the whole 19th-century slash-and-burn is recounted in a very business-like tone: I’m writing from Greytown, the country’s first planned inland settlement. Planned, with no suspense. Jane Campion’s The Piano is about a luxury item stuck on the beach. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter is about a family maybe freezing to death.

A Day of Truce

Thanksgiving used to be a day for the left and right factions in your family to either fight about politics or avoid the fight in a show of love. Newspapers this time of year once filled with well-meaning columns on the virtues of talking to The Other Side. All this is gone now: the newspapers, the columns, my dear National Review-reading grandfather.

Did I arrive in NZ too late to hear the same sermons? Did this country ever appoint a day to meet the Other Side? Maybe they don’t need it. I am still shocked to meet sane, educated Kiwis who regularly switch between Labour and National. Those days are slipping away here, too. For good reason, bellows each half, and deeper we descend into our cocoons.

A Day of Motion

Thanksgiving is for leavers. The Pilgrims got on the boat, and this year some 80 million Americans will travel more than fifty miles just to eat turkey.3 In John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles the holiday is less about family than sharing all those conveyances plus a motel bed with John Candy. Our truest American selves live at the airport.

Kiwis travel heaps, but you can catch the odd parochial suspicion here of movement for movement’s sake. This week the curmudgeons texted in to RNZ to complain that their fellow countrymen would dare fly to Auckland for a Metallica concert. A minority take, to be sure, but one built on a deep national myth that real Kiwi life belongs to the regions, the paddock, and the beach.

I submit that the Auckland concert pilgrimage is a Kiwi Thanksgiving of sorts: A holiday fueled by happy travel to the city where most of the country lives, rather than the iconic summer escape to coastal oblivion.

On the Auckland concert run:

A Day to Face the Settler Myth

New Zealand’s got us smoked on this one. Waitangi Day (Feb. 6) does the heavy political lifting at summer’s end. Matariki (July 10 next year) has become an official midwinter celebration of Te Ao Maori’s place in national life. In its new, wider adoption Matariki even has an emerging menu of soup and bread. Sometimes there’s kumara, or sweet potato. You sing waiata, or Māori songs. You look back, you look forward. A nation unites in truce across the settler/indigenous line. Our kids make lanterns and name the stars. Gratitude’s in there, clearly. Works for me.

On Matariki:

Americans my age, meanwhile, grew up with Thanksgiving’s cheerful old lie about Pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal of truce before centuries of slaughter kick off. These days we’ve replaced the slaughter with football. Back in the day before T-day dinner I’d meet my buddies at the park for our an annual touch football game. It’s a tradition. You call it The Turkey Bowl.

My friend is a twin. He and I were goodie-goodies, nerds, try-hards. We played as The Pilgrims. He went on to be student body president.

His twin was the rebel, with a twinkle in his eye. He and his friends were skaters. They played as The Indians. He went on to build bitchin’ custom 4x4s and post videos of himself burning rubber on residential streets.

Even as a boy I had a sense that my buddy and I were playing on the side of—I don’t know what, exactly. Order and civilization? Truth, justice, and the American way?

Almost goes without saying that none of us boys were actually Indian. Arizona’s got one of the country’s larger Native American populations, but I never saw any Navajo or Hopi or Tohono O’odham or Apache or Pima or Maricopa kids in our semiprecious freeway suburb. Never played played football with any, either. I wish I had.

Nearly forty years later I’m settling into another settler republic.

The Pilgrims invited the Indians, or so the myth goes. We probably should have invited the Kiwis. They’ve carried us through some weird winters. Taught my kids, bought me beers, showed me how to be cool about all the rainbows.

But here’s the thing. The Thanksgiving of myth is invented by America’s newest arrivals. It’s a housewarming party with the new roomies. It’s the beer you crack when the last box is off the truck.

Our Wellington Thanksgiving is the dead opposite. A tradition hauled from the Old Country. A reunion thrown by the leavers. We’ve rented a room to eat a bird that doesn’t live here.

“Wait,” my daughter says. “What are we even eating tomorrow?”

Turkey, sweetie.

“Is that like chicken, or…?”

Pretty much. It’s going to be super fun. Just a meal with your friends, and some new friends too. And we made all this pie!

“I don’t like sweet potato. So I’m not going to try it.”

You have no choice, sweetie. It’s your heritage. //

I read a version of this letter at Say The Thing, a monthly open reading series hosted by at Wellington’s Underworld Tavern. Thanks to Simon for the deadline & and a great night out!

Here’s how we cover Red Wind days in New Zealand:1

1) Post a photo of your fallen tree.

2) Post another photo once you’ve cut it, cleared it, and stacked it.

Last week’s hurricane-speed gales—three of them, scattered uneasily over seven spring days, some foretold and some out of the blue—laid down trees all over the Wairarapa. I could do a slide show here of dad-chat before & afters, but I’ll skip to the winner above. This planet-size macrocarpa met its maker last Thursday night out on mate’s farm. You win, bro. No after-photo required.

That’s his pic, and his dog named Punch. Punch is a good ol’ dog. I think Punch is sad about the tree.

In-person small talk follows the same routine. A teacher at our kids’ school detailed her family’s tree-clearing, then checked in on mine.

You come out alright?

We lost two silver birches in the front yard, I said. But we just rent, so I ain’t touching ‘em.

Dead silence. Gentle horror.

Baby trees, I mean! Skinny little things. Nobody got hurt.

Ah, she said, and we scooted on to the safety of weekend plans.

You can map a nation’s borders by the jokes that don’t land.

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An American Knows His Rights

I was just cribbing a line from the late Mitch Hedberg: “I went to the Home Depot the other day, which was unnecessary…I need to go to the Apartment Depot. Which is just a big warehouse with people standing around saying Hey, we ain’t gotta fix shit.”

I do own an axe. I could go all George Washington out there, I guess. I tell myself I’m too busy. Anyhow I never bought a chainsaw.

A Nation of Lumberjacks

Kiwis just love to cut down trees! Fair enough. On a rainforest island, stumps equal civilization. I’ve seen model train setups of frontier times full of tiny, reverent stumps. Te Papa has an entire exhibit about clear-cutting, featuring both a petrified stump cut by ancient Maori adzes and a settler diary’s rapturous account of bush-clearing fire.

A Neighbor’s Axe, Part 1

When I first moved here I needed an axe to split a load of firewood. The local farm store had two models. I bought the fancy one, with a plastic handle in high-viz yellow. I felt proud, hefting my new blade in the garage’s fluorescent light. I told my boys down at the pub. Don’t buy an axe, mate, they all said. I got a shed full.

The Chainsaw Store

Instead they talked of chainsaws. Hard truths I’ve learned: sheep die and chainsaws break. Everyone hates the chainsaw shop in Greytown. Everyone hates the Carterton chainsaw shop, too. The stories are shaped like any car dealership tale. The damage is worse than you think. The dealer shrugs. Better to let it die, he says, then tries to sell you a replacement. The storyteller marches out, broken chainsaw in hand, and calls a mate to borrow his.

A Neighbor’s Axe, Part 2

America did the same epic clear-cut, but we don’t think about it much anymore. We switched stories once we hit the plains. Back in the primeval Wisconsin forest, Pa Ingalls famously hears the chop of a neighbor’s axe and freaks out. The mere sound of a fellow American cutting trees nearby is a pinch on his freedom! So he drags his family out to a stolen stretch of Kansas and builds a national metaphor on the prairie.

A Nation of Deadly Trees

Yeah, we’re closed, our principal called through the car window, her orange safety flapping like a set of high-viz wings. Wind screamed through the playground. In quieter days the two giant oaks watch over the kids like the Ents of Middle Earth. In 130 kph gusts you never know when such beasts will turn.

I drove home with the radio off, gripping the wheel as the hatchback skittered back and forth over the highway. At perhaps the same moment in Wellington, a falling branch killed a doctor walking alone on Mount Vic. Another walker found him sometime later. We don’t know how long he lay there, under a tree, out in the wind.

A Nation of Colonizer Trees

Wellington is all low-slung pohutukawa, curved for the wind. Cross the hill to the Wairarapa and you’re back in the interior North Island’s imported shire. Some invasive species are more welcome than others. Roses are beloved, but I’ve seen murdered Australian magpies pinned to a fence.

Foreign trees get a pass. When our landlords planted three very English silver birches in the front garden it felt like Greytown hosting an off-season Christmas Festival around Matariki each July. An angry local wind took the first birch a couple years back. Now another’s laying down, and the last is loose like a tooth.

The Hospice Juniper

I do own a yard tree. Not in New Zealand, but back in Texas. Years ago I bought an old adobe house out in Marfa, which I’ve kept ever since as a rental and a shrine. Out front of the house there’s a ragged old juniper, planted hard against the railroad ties that hold the yard’s slack caliche in place. It’s the American high-desert sort of juniper, more shrub than tree, with waxy leaf-ish feathers just this side of needles. Like pohutukawas they’re low-hipped and built to bend. A storm strong enough to knock it down would take the house first.

I bought the place from a friend’s grandfather, now passed on. Cuida ese arbol, he told me. Lo plantó mi papá. Take care of that tree, my father planted it. He gave no further instructions. I promised I would. Ain’t much to do, with a desert tree. They get lonely. You talk to them. You tell their stories from across the sea.

One season I brought my beloved childhood cat home to that house to die. I was 25, Tank was 23. She and I would sit out on the stoop and watch the trains roll by. She liked to rub her face against the juniper’s gnarled trunk to catch the scent of the local toms. Tank’s gone now, buried out back. The juniper waits for my return. //

On walking through trees, and burning them:

I’m so proud: my daughter’s photo is now featured on the front page of her school’s website! She’s up on stage, reaching for the sky. She’s got a feather in her hair and a moko on her chin. She’s a blonde American-born seven-year-old dancing the haka.

And now, on the website, she’s a mascot of our dear rural elementary, and thus—let a proud dad scale up here—a minor local symbol of the nation now raising our kids.

A symbol signifying what, exactly, I’ll be years in reckoning.

I will not link to the photo here. Allow me my parental illusions of protection. I reprint it here on social media only in doctored form. I didn’t know what to use to cover her eyes. I’d get any Māori symbol wrong, and anyhow my daughter isn’t Māori.

Last year when I dragged my son’s sweet smile into these letters I used a New Zealand flag, which fit that particular post just fine. To be absolutely fair—parents, you know the struggle—I will do the same here.

Looks goofy, though. It’s that dang Union Jack in the corner, plastered over a moment as decolonizing as any in my whole gringo-ass life.

But that’s New Zealand, ain’t it? For better, for worse, and for all the days in between.

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There was a haka again in Parliament this week. Last year’s famous performance, led by MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, was a strategic act of protest against a bill that would unilaterally rewrite New Zealand’s founding treaty from a distinctly settler point of view. Maipi-Clarke killed it, the clip went viral, and the bill was dumped.

This week’s haka was an admittedly smaller moment. Newly elected MP Oriini Kaipara had long run past time on her maiden speech, then joined her supporters in the gallery for a waiata, or Māori song. When the song ended, someone in the gallery feted Kaipara with a haka. She returned the salute, as one does. Kaipara, a former journalist with TV charisma and a sonorous alto, can certainly hold a room! But without a nation-shaking bill on the docket there was, to some eyes here at least, a note of indulgence to the whole affair. Reasonable people can quibble over the proper time and place. Watching the clip I can almost sympathize with the exasperated Speaker Gerry Brownlee as he tries to keep the session on schedule.

But only almost. Here’s Gerry, as the supporter’s opening chant rings down from the gallery: “No, not that.”

Kaipara ignores him and jumps right in, throwing her eyes wide.

Gerry: “The guarantee was that would not be taking place.”

C’mon, Gerry. Respect the game! Tell her again she’s over time, sure. Bang the gavel if you must. But the big man’s dread, as it was with Maipi-Clarke last year, is clearly directed at the haka itself.

My Pākehā mates are nodding here. They see their grandfathers in Gerry. They see their dads who still pretend they don’t understand a single Māori word.

Me, I’m still surprised even after five years here. When you’re new in a country you fall hard for its highest ideals, or perhaps just those that match your own dreams. We arrived during Covid and Jacinda straight-up tucked us in the night before lockdown. I’ve seen the rollout of Matariki as a national holiday, when Jacinda joined a host of Maori leaders to boil kumara together on the roof of the national museum at dawn. I know intellectually that New Zealand has a reactionary rump-end determined to die on its colonial hill. But I don’t feel that shadow in my bones like I do the US version.

My daughter in that temporary-tattoo moko is descended, in one narrow line, from a slaveowner in antebellum Georgia by the immelodious name of Kinchen Thweat.

She doesn’t know it yet. I’ll let her dance without that fun fact a while. One day I’ll tell her and she can dance with it, too.

We contain multitudes, eh Gerry?

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The guarantee in moving to New Zealand was that the haka would absolutely be taking place.

The haka is 100% Pure New Zealand, front and center on the damn tourism website. See the student hakas for the murdered in the Christchurch massacre, done in school blazers between road cones in the street. This very month I watched the All Blacks perform a banger in front of their Aussie rivals on a big screen down at the South Wairarapa Workingman’s Club. The room was nearly 100% Pure Old White People and you could hear a pin drop.

Come on down, Gerry, to the Wairarapa Events Centre on a weekend morning in the spring. Sit with a hundreds-strong crowd of parents, grandparents, teachers, and fellow students to cheer on their kids as they sing and shout their hearts out.

Stay to watch my little girl. She and her mates have been practicing all year. Oriini Kaipara celebrated joining Parliament; now watch my little girl join Aotearoa.

Stay until the end of the show, Gerry. Half a dozen schools from across the valley, each with their own hakas. More than one featured the proud local chant: Ko Wairarapa! It was 100% Pure New Zealand up there, mate. No mics. No screens. No Disney. No AI. No shoes.

The kapa haka teacher from Featherston School, just down the road from ours, apologized as she took a moment to herd her massive squad on the stage. Ka pai, the crowd called back. Then the kids from Feathy gave a rousing show, led by an utterly captivating Year 6 (?) boy and girl who could go toe-to-toe with Kaipara any day.

Now watch, Gerry, as the Featherston high schoolers out in the audience—these kids’ big brothers and big sisters, their neighbors, their babysitters, their friends—rose from their seats and began shouting a haka back to the stage.

Shouting’s the only word for it. These teenagers were all the way in, not a breath held back. The boys’ shouts cracking, wild and deep. The girls’ shouts the shouts of women. They knew all the words by heart, Gerry. The little kids up on stage stood transfixed in their love.

A wave broke inside my chest. Who the hell am I? But tears are tears. I am here now.

Anyone ever shout how much they love you, Gerry? They never did for me. Our people don’t do that much. Which is fine. Takes all kinds.

Maybe we oughta try shouting a little more, Gerry.

Here. Stand up. We can learn a few new words, we can.

Deep breath, Gerry. Ready?

Now let ‘er rip. //

On the Hikoi, and the haka last time:

You can’t buy half-size sneakers in New Zealand.

Say it louder for the kids in back: A whole country with No. Half-Sized. Sneakers.

Our last trip to the States I dropped this fun fact on friends and relations. Men shrugged—we’re cowboys—but a cold doubt flickered in their eyes. The stylish Texan women made their horror plain: How can you LIVE?

We get by, I said, and spat in the dirt.

And now, both here and there, we’re getting by without Disney+.

There are the limits the market places on your shopping. New Zealand is far away, with more hooves than feet. You cannot buy half-size Vans or Converse here. The makers won’t ship ‘em, and the retailers won’t stock ‘em. No half-size Nike Dunks or Adidas Sambas either. You can usually get a full range of the sporty stuff—running shoes, hiking boots, etc.—and some brands do half sizes on their own websites. New Zealand has no Amazon. Australia does but it’s a mixed bag and pricey to ship. A lifelong 10.5 Vans man like me is out of luck.

Then there are the limits on shopping you place on yourself. We’ve canceled our Disney+ subscription, though in truth it was only half a political gesture. We were growing tired of buying it every month, and their craven cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel just gave us the nudge. I’m glad to see him back, and watch the once-mighty Disney bend and scrape for our forgiveness, but I don’t feel inclined to return. I don’t think we’re alone in this. Buying stuff takes energy. Subscriptions—buying something over and over and over again—are their own special drag on the soul. Let it go, the princess sang. Let it go.

Feels good, not buying so much stuff. But I don’t always know what to cut.

As it happens, one of Disney’s most famous movies is a fable about cool shoes that fit. Cinderella only gets to go to the ball because she’s got a fairy godmother to hook her up with dope kicks. At party’s end she leaves one behind as a calling card. When the lovestruck Prince sets out to find her again, he seeks not her face, her voice, her intellect, or her charm. Instead he tests every women in his kingdom to see if their bodies match a magical consumer object. The lesson is clear: You ain’t got the shoes, you ain’t shit.

Cinderella debuted in 1950 and was a massive hit, dragging a stalled Disney out of debt and minting the princess formula that would drive its conquest of American culture. That year, or thereabouts, also marked the beginning twitches of the Great Acceleration, an unprecedented explosion in human economic activity that would soon see the whole world switch from cobbled leather to rubber soles.

America switched to sneakers, and grew to worship our brands as national icons. As a boy I plastered my bedroom walls in Nike ads torn out of Sports Illustrated. Poems, they were. Incantations to summon the individual glory buried within. Just Do It.

New Zealand switched to sneakers, too. But they’re trainers here, that hopelessly uncool word. Trainers are ubiquitous here—mostly American brands, but also loads of Asics from Japan—but far from sacred. Roadside statues are raised instead to gumboots and jandals. Everyman shoes, indifferently sized. Zero flash. Better in mud.

I have my own Cinderella story here. To my first Kiwi wedding I wore a blue suit with a pair of black Vans Old Skools, size 11’s and fresh out of the box.

Now the suit-and-sneakers look ain’t hardly a thing in America anymore. Groomsmen in matching Chucks have been basic American wedding fare for decades. The dapper New Zealand MP Rawiri Waititi scandalized his dreary conservative colleagues by rocking a mint pair of Jordans in Parliament; Republicans and Democrats alike have sported sneakers in the Oval Office and nobody bats an eye.

But let’s run the logic here. I didn’t have the cash to buy leather dress shoes, so my glass slippers were Vans for less than one-third the price. You can only pair casual sneaks with a wedding suit if they’re factory clean: that’s the rule. I am cool right now, here, tonight! I get cooler as I work ‘em on the dance floor, even cooler as I thrash ‘em in the gutter as we stagger to the after party! Tomorrow the squares will polish their dress shoes, but mine will die and rise again as daily-wears. American cool is disposable, because an American can always buy more.

The morning of the wedding I thought about none of this. My stupid NZ Vans were a half size too big! I walked laps of the house in worry. The damn things looked and felt like Interislander ferries on my feet! Nobody can tell, Jenny said. Nobody cares.

People do care, though. I care! I see Kiwis walking around in Chucks a half-size too big all the time. The toes curl up like elven boots.

You can do better, I whisper to them in the grocery store, on the train, at the zoo. You should be able to buy the things that best express your truest self.

I really, really liked Andor. I’ll have to pay Disney+ again one day to show it to my kids.

In a just world, I suppose, your true self shouldn’t have to buy shit.

I want less.

I want to want less, anyhow.

I want my dear America to want less.

I want New Zealand to get some shoes that fit.

What’s enough? I once stopped at a Greytown crosswalk to let a family of five go by in the rain. Mother, Father, three teenage kids, all wearing the exact same black Kathmandu raincoat. Kiwis know the one. I sat in my car and watched them go. I salute you, my ducklings. But I cannot live that way.

At the actual wedding, of course, I was the only man in sneakers. The garden was a sea of Kiwi dads in buffed Chelseas and pointy Oxfords. A mate of mine gave my Vans the nod: “I had a pair of those when I was a kid.” //

On a recent rainy weekend I took my kids and a friend to the bowling alley in Masterton, where I gave them too much pocket money for the arcade out back. As they pumped those heavy, gold NZDs into the claw machine I gawked at an ancient two-person shooter lurking in the corner. On the red player’s burnt-out screen the baddies scampered through a bright haze. The blue player’s screen was dark, the blue gun fiercely taped to its holster. The game was Time Crisis II. The copyright date on the cabinet was 1997.

Time crisis, indeed.

What the hell was this artifact of the past doing in my New Zealand present?

What shiny American future was I forsaking by raising my kids here?

Does America even have a shiny future anymore?

Is my new country stuck in the same cursed timeline as the old?

Easy answers first. Masterton ain’t rich. New Zealand is a long way from the metropoles where shiny new things are made. Shipping costs are insane. Hard to imagine either the bowling alley or its customers springing for the replacement.1

The timeline question is weirder.

Yanks in New Zealand like to say this country feels like it’s still living in the 1990s, or the ’80s or, god help us, even the ’50s. There are clear problems with this take—hang on, I’ll get there—but the feeling is real. To an American, New Zealand is the cabin town of the Western world, a pretty village tucked away in the global Catskills where us city cats flee to cosplay simpler times. In Kiwi English: To Americans, New Zealand is our bach.

We say this with affection, I promise! We love barefoot kids climbing trees at school. Smalltalk straight out of Mayberry. Cafes with more gossip than laptops. Less phones out, less terror of lawsuits, less guns. Butcher shops! Less crap to buy. Stores close early. Homemade flyers for the rugby. A few ignored Starbucks. No Amazon.

We say it in frustration, too. Lordy, the dim small-c conservativism of prize roses and a white picket fence. The blokey emotional repression. A stone-age indifference to school bullying. Cramped and shoddy public buildings. A Kiwi mate of mine rolls his eyes at the very ’90s chicken-and-cranberry sandwiches still haunting cafe cabinets.

We’re not entirely making this up. There are timestamps. Humans crossed the landbridge to the Americas millenia before they sailed to Aotearoa. Our European settlers arrived centuries earlier, too, and we’ve already kicked out the British. The Sixties didn’t really hit NZ until the ‘81 Springbok tour. I still see Wellington office bros in skinny jeans.

But this story leaves out all the ways in which New Zealand has totally lapped us. First in the world for women’s suffrage (1893, to our 1920). Carterton just up the road here elected the world’s first transgender woman mayor in 1995. NZ’s early internet banking beat out third-party payment apps: Kiwis swap account numbers with total strangers while the Peter Thiels of the world never see a dime. The decolonization conversation here is miles ahead of ours, deep and rich and often thorny but filled with genuine future-seeking joy. A Māori scientist way younger than I am is building a fusion reactor outside Wellington, at a company he’s given the hopeful sounding name of OpenStar. The government’s already banned cell phones in schools.

The 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings—that one’s in lockstep with American time.

The 2022 siege of Wellington, NZ’s own Jan. 6—also right on schedule.

Last time I went to grad school I read Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, a very cool slab of theory that smashes what the German-born anthropologist saw as the central “conjuring trick” of his trade. The western observer, he noted, always claims to live in the present while placing the people they study in the past. The conception of time is an expression of power, and the mighty wield it like money or law or language or guns. American colonists did it to the Native Americans. New Zealand colonists did it to the Māori. You bend time to separate yourself from the other.

And that’s the classic American expat move—with a twist. We cast New Zealanders in an idyllic past, then try to crawl right in after ‘em.2

It’s a lie, is the point. Even the envious expat version. We are all of us in the present, all of the time, everywhere.

Fabian published his book in 1982. I think it hit harder before the internet.

On the internet we’re all stuck in the crowded, angry mall of the now.

The mall’s a pretty American place, too. The Christchurch massacre was livestreamed on Facebook. The siege of Parliament in Wellington was supercharged by a well-documented surge in online misinformation into a country that had largely gone under the radar. One researcher called it a flood of “US-style content.”

So both countries share this uneasy present. Where do we go from here?

Time Crisis II has nine levels. It’s Dante’s Inferno as a light-gun shooter game. An evil billionaire has launched a vast network of satellites. Now he’s loading one with a nuclear weapon, with plans to sell it to the highest bidder. You’re a secret agent with a 9mm semiautomatic who must perform nine mass shooting events in order to stop him. The billionaire’s satellite network is named Starline.

Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service debuted in New Zealand in 2021. I first saw his satellites one night that summer while camping on the banks of the Whanganui River. Thirty, forty, fifty of ‘em, soldiers following one man’s orders in a dead-straight line across the heavens.

I had a sense we’d escaped something by coming to New Zealand. That night I knew escape was a game you play over and over. The satellites left silently as they had come, rolling away over the Pacific. One future had ended, and another began. //

On time machines and the internet:

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Too much death for breakfast this week.

I have plenty to say about Tom Phillips, the Kiwi dad who kidnapped his kids and hid them away in the bush for 1,358 days, minus the odd burglary in town. On Monday morning he shot a cop, and now he’s dead.

But I’m running on fumes about Charlie Kirk, an American dad and right-wing activist. On Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning here in NZ, he was speaking at a university, and someone shot him, and now he’s dead.

When the Phillips news broke I was standing at the kitchen counter in the spring sunlight, packing lunches for my kids.

When the Kirk news broke three days later I was standing at the same sunlit counter, packing lunches for my kids.

Packing lunches can be exhausting. It’s always a performance of hope. The hope that my kids’ days will go well, out in the world without me. The hope that they will grow up strong in life full of friends, mentors, and fresh fruit conveniently sliced. The hope that they won’t get shot.

Fair to say I never liked either of these dads alive. Now their sad, ugly ends are messing with my hope.

Stick around and I’ll find some hope in Barry bloody Crump,1 whose famous New Zealand novel about a dad with a gun I was reading this very same weird week.

But first—the stupid myths behind these stupid deaths.

America’s got the Good Guy with a Gun, a lonesome cowboy who dispatches justice with a single shot and then rides off into the sunset. The myth once pretended to have rules: the killing must be done, but it’s cloaked in honor. In the famous final scene of Shane (1953), the myth’s purest distillation, Alan Ladd’s buckskin-clad demi-god delivers what reads now as a dark American prophecy:

Joey, there’s no living with... with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.

Joey screams his name again and again but Shane rides off into the bush. The Good Guy with a Gun can never be a father. The Good Guy with a Gun lives outside society precisely so he can nip back in every now and then to shoot a Bad Guy.

Pākehā New Zealand, meanwhile, has the Bad Dad with a Gun. He cares nothing for justice, society, or women, only his own primeval bachelorhood in the Edenic bush of his mind. Three years into the Tom Phillips saga North and South ran a whole cover story detailing its many antecedents in NZ literature and film. Sometimes these legends escape civilization before fatherhood catches them; if they do have kids, their isolation and control is the whole point. From Roger Donaldson’s 1981 film Smash Palace: “She’s my kid and I’ll do what I want with her!”2

Both nations should’ve long since put these stories down like sick lambs.

But they haven’t. Not yet.

The Good Guy with a Gun is one hundred percent the fuel behind America’s gathering dark. Everyone’s a gunslinger, nobody’s a father, and everyone craves a target. We’ve followed a straight, nihilistic line from Shane’s noble regret to Kirk himself declaring that “some gun deaths every single year” were “worth it” to carry on America’s gun-loving dream. They’re not. The latest self-annointed Good Guy just showed us why. The whole mess is stupid, enraging, and deeply sad.

I want to say New Zealand’s maybe a bit farther along? No dad I know here takes Phillips’ side, but that’s a small pool. Kiwi Reddit has been delightfully merciless over a case of Jack Daniels & Cokes spotted at his campsite. But the Bad Dad energy abides. The ugly misogyny still directed at Jacinda Ardern is straight out of John Mulgan’s Man Alone.3 Kiwi Facebook is serving up Pro-Tom AI slop. Even Phillips’ own mayor had to hand it to him:

My goodness, Tom’s shown his resilience over that time, and so have the children.

That’s not resilience. That’s mental illness.

His kids, though—they showed resilience by surviving four years as prisoners of their crazy dad.

Resilience, as it happens, is one of the core values taught at the small rural New Zealand school where my kids eat those packed lunches every day. Kia Aumangea. Be resilient.

Not the false resilience of raising your kids friendless and alone in the mud. Not the false resilience of shooting a cop.

Not the false resilience of Kirk’s racism, bigotry, and smirking support for political violence, no. Not the false resilience of his campaign to harass and intimidate other speakers on university campuses. But never the false resilience of shooting someone as they talk.

I’m talking about the resilience of a physical, spiritual, and emotional sort that one might learn on a tramp through the bush.

I’m talking about the resilience of Uncle Hec and Ricky in Barry Crump’s Wild Pork and Watercress (1986), a novel better known in America for its retelling in Taika Waititi’s 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople. [Spoilers ahead.] Uncle Hec, a stand-in for Crump himself, is categorically a Bad Dad with a Gun. He threatens to “flatten” his adopted nephew all the time, and eventually follows through with a punch. Hec only drags Ricky into Te Urewera, a rugged labyrinth of green hills wedged between the North Island’s volcanoes and its remote East Cape, in the hope that Ricky will give up and leave him alone to fulfill his solo Kiwi fantasy.

Time passes, and miles. Kilometers, whatever. Hec and Ricky count the distance only in streams and ridges. The novel quiets down into an almost zen-like pilgrimage, one the much cheekier film skips past in montage. Old man and man-to-be just walk. They climb cliffs. They name unnamed places. They snag leftovers from backcountry huts. They hunt wild pigs with only their dogs and a .22 rifle. They do weeks-long laps of the hills they know. Months-long laps. My feet hurt just reading. They eat a goddamn kiwi bird. The nation falls away behind them. The cops give up the chase, and other hikers flee them on sight. They have become like ghosts. They are free.

And here’s the key: Unlike Phillips, Hec tells Ricky to decide when they leave the bush.

Ricky waits a few days, makes the call, then out they go, resilient as hell: “We got a few hassles coming up, but we can handle them,” he declares. “We’re okay now.”

I love this quiet subversion of the myth Crump himself wrote and performed for decades. Imagine an American version. Imagine Shane the Good Guy gunslinger telling little Joey—Hey, maybe I’ll stick around and help your dad build this town.4

You can break a nation’s story open.

The Bad Dad can turn good. The Good Guy can put down the gun.

Maybe the lost men will still read it the wrong way. Maybe you can crowd a nation so full of Guns and Good Guys there’s no going back.

I don’t know how either story ends.

But I’ll tell you what. I once got lost in the bush with my son. We were headed back from Totara Flats hut in the Tararua Range. We’d slogged through 9 kms the day before and now faced 9 kms out. He was six years old. I was in over my head. It had rained all night and the Waiohine River had risen over the trail. We walked through the muddy water until we couldn’t follow it any further. There was a moment there on the bank—fifteen minutes, a thousand years—where I could not find the trail. I can still feel that cold rain on my face. I can still see my boy there on the wet river stones, his eyes searching the ridge above us. There it is, he said, and pointed up through the rain at a trail marker I couldn’t see. I follow you, I said, and up we climbed. //

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On American anger:

On getting lost in green hills:

So I went to the store to buy a cucumber for the kids’ lunches. One single cucumber was $6 NZD, about $3.50 US. I turned around and walked out.

New Zealand’s late-winter produce scene is grim. The carrots still kick ass, though. Fat, sweet, and on special this week. $6 NZD for two 1.5 kg bags.

New Zealand carrots are way better than American carrots.

I’m standing in the parking lot, comparing national carrots.

Stop. Just stop.

They’re carrots, man.

All I want is my kids not to get, like, scurvy. And for their parents not to go broke.

So we roasted carrots for dinner and loaded the dishwasher and the kids fought about taking baths and then took their baths and we all read together and the kids fought about brushing their teeth and then brushed their teeth and then we put them to bed and slumped on the couch and tried to watch a show.

I’m tired y’all. I’m gonna call it a night.

I’m not an expat anymore.

Being an expat takes so much goddamn energy. There’s so much discovery all the time. There’s a lot of jumping up and down and pointing at shiny things. When you’re an expat it’s always Monday morning after Creation, the dew sparkling on the bright green leaves. You walk around the garden, naming things. Look at those carrots! They’re so…carroty…

You take a lot of pictures of food. The coffees on cafe tables, the beer lit by a foreign sun. You insist upon the significance of sunsets, or here in New Zealand the weekly rainbows. You study the new rules of hugging, the new rules of shoes. Every time you screw up the local language it’s a revelation of the mysteries of the human heart.

Even the bad days are a grand drama. Visit a foreign ER and you’re in a movie. Take an awkward trip home and you’re in another movie. Return to your chosen country and eat a nice bowl of noodles on the street and the universe is sending you a sign. Not a sign to stay, no. Nothing so dull. A sign of deeper meaning, a fairy dust of grand significance, a revelation whose full force lies forever just out of reach. I was struck by such a vision one pandemic morning in Carterton, walking to the dairy with the roses all in bloom. This was it, dude. This was where I was meant to be. Not New Zealand, mate. Earth.

I was high, is what I’m saying. Expat life is a hell of a drug.

It’s the same for nomads and slow travelers and backpackers and van-lifers and RVers and all the OE kids in London clubs. I’ve not technically lived all those lives, but fussing over methods is absolutely part of a drug ritual. You compare dosing regimes, side effects, stash boxes. What continent, what language, what time frame hits best? We want the highs of new connection with an easy come-down of lyric estrangement. Cut it too weak and you’re lost. Cut it too strong and you just might get stuck there, and nobody wants to get stuck. Are you getting the visuals? Are you getting the wanderlust, the freedom, the saudade?

Expatness is a drug because you can’t explain your trip to people who aren’t on trips of their own. Those who haven’t tripped yet may listen awhile in envy and hope, hoping to gather a few tips. But to your loved ones with sober, settled lives you’re forever recounting some long and pointless dream.

Expatness is not like being drunk. Drinking makes you feel like a local anywhere. Expats drink even when the locals don’t. In Abu Dhabi they hid the expat liquor store in a parking garage. There was one tiny green door, and inside that door a line of full-size grocery carts.

Expatness is more like weed, or now I guess CBD or THC or whatever. You are simultaneously fascinated by the revealed truth of the world and with the distance between the world and your own mind. The people in this country, when they say green, do they mean the same thing I mean when I say green??? But you don’t ask them. Asking breaks the spell. Expatness seeks the knowing of not-knowing.

Zero stones thrown here. There is legit wisdom down that road—the flimsiness of borders, the thinness of your human soul. It’s healthy for all of us to get out of our own heads from time to time. That this particular mind expansion—expatness, nomadism, all this easy privileged wandering—can be so brutally restricted by passport, class, and race is an awful injustice, in precisely the same way that the uneven distribution of food and medicine and education and loving homes is an awful injustice. All humans should get all the goodies! Everyone should drink nice scotch, everyone should get regular screenings at the fancy private clinic, and everyone should blow their minds living a season or two in some far off country where they can afford everything they need and yet have no illusions they’ll stay.

It’s a good time, man. I’ve been out here blowing my mind for decades.

But now it’s Tuesday Morning Coming Down in a rural New Zealand parking lot, too broke to buy my kids a cucumber.

It’s the kids who have dragged me out of the bubble.

When they were 4 and 6 they said cute things like New Zealand is boring and When do we move to the next country? Now they’re 7 and 9. Now they say I think we should buy a house here and Which high school will I go to and I will never leave my friends.

We’ll see, I say. We’ll see.

Ocean Vuong, from the novel he wrote to his mother who brought him to America1: What is a country but a life sentence?

America is our life sentence, Jenny and I. Wherever we go, wherever we stay.

America will not be our kids’ life sentence. Or not their only one.

This is basic immigrant math. Jenny and I flew down here as expats on the hoof. I never meant for the party to end. The sober permanence of the i-word scares the bejesus out of both of us, and our loved ones across the Pacific too.

But I’m not the expat I was anymore. My tolerance is shot, my brain is fried. I just want a good night of boring sleep in the ordinary place where I happen to live. And a job. And a residency-track visa.

I’m an immigrant.

When I’m at loose ends I call my old friend . He’s an immigration lawyer in Texas who writes The Firewall, a fierce on-the-ground dispatch from the detention centers where his clients are held. When I called him last week it was ten o’clock at night in Texas and he was just driving home. He’d spent the day holding emergency consultations with groups of unaccompanied Guatemalan minors. The Trump administration was hustling to deport them over the holiday weekend without due process, back to the mess they’d fled from. As he drove, Jonny told me about the kids he met—the soft ones, the hard ones, the quiet old souls in folding chairs under the fluorescent lights. You don’t have to sign anything, he told them. No matter what the agents say.

Jonny’s an immigrant, too. His Irish parents raised him in Dallas.

He pulled into his driveway. His wife and one-year-old son were waiting inside. I’m in trouble, he laughed. I wasn’t supposed to be working so late.

Kiss ‘em both for me, I said, and we promised to talk again soon. Then I went into the kitchen, boiled the jug for tea, and started peeling carrots. //

How we wound up in NZ & why we stay, a story in three acts:

Thanks for reading! If you liked this one meant something to you—if you’re somehere on this same journey, or know someone who is—I’d love to hear about it.

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I wrote about this bid for a national bird-loving consensus in my review of Ellen Rykers’ Bird of the Year published this week in Newsroom. The book pairs a breezy history of New Zealand’s annual avian popularity contest with short, often intense profiles of 81 native species in various states of survival. It’s a book-length eh that hopes to build a national consensus around bird conservation in Aotearoa that’s not as simple as it might seem. Love hurts, even love for birds. Check it out here—

Read the review

This was a strange reading experience for an immigrant! Bird of the Year is a proudly New Zealand book celebrating only native New Zealand birds, with Rykers often playing a cheerful border cop. From my review:

But read these profiles straight through like a novel and a curious avian nationalism emerges…Rykers salutes the “exclusive club of New Zealand natives” while vigilantly policing its membership. Adélie penguins and Fiji petrels are “interlopers.” The kōtuku, tauhou, and warou are welcomed after blowing over from Australia; the banded dotterel is teased for flying back the other way. Pūkeko, which crossed the ditch maybe a thousand years ago, are “low-key Australians.” Ancestry and legal status are carefully legislated. North Island tīeke “whakapapa back” to an island in the Hauraki Gulf, while the immigrant barn owls earned their “citizenship” in 2008 when a nesting pair hatched three owlets on a farm near Kaitaia. I envy the barn owls. I flew my own chicks here as hatchlings, and we’re still years from getting passports.

But it’s a good book! The illustrations are excellent, too, and there’s a zillion of ‘em. There’s lots more in my review, including the ugly bits where this very same New Zealand once slaughtered some of these now-beloved species wholesale. Rykers had a tall order, writing-wise, and she’s produced something a good deal more interesting than you’d expect from a glossy coffee-table book. I felt more Kiwi after reading it.1 Still not sure this interloper can pull off the eh.

You too can vote for Bird of the Year! The 2025 ballot is now posted by Forest & Bird, the conservation organization that runs the contest and commissioned Rykers’ book. (Scroll down, there’s a ton to choose from.) Online voting begins September 15. The birds all have to be local, but you can caste a ballot from anywhere on Earth.

And in the spirit of Rykers’ book I’ll close with my recent bad cellphone pic of our local kererū (his kind won Bird of the Year in 2018). We’ve got five here in Greytown proper, two mating pairs and one lonesome widow. The solo dude’s been flapping up and down our street all week, scoffing seeds from the still-barren kõwhai trees. We’re neighbors, certainly. Compatriots, I’m not so sure. Can a kererū ever be a Kiwi? Can I? But no matter. I adore him. What photo, what nation, could ever do him justice? //

Mōrena! Let’s have coffee with Sam Hunt. In spirit. In Wellington.

The first-ever american.nz meetup is tomorrow, Friday 15 August, at 10 a.m. at the Thunderbird Cafe, 154 Featherston Street in Wellington. All are welcome! Much NZ/US madness to talk about. I hope to do these elsewhere, too. Abrazos to all y’all farther afield!

I’ll be taking the train in myself, notebook in hand and cosplaying “Walking the Morning City, ” Sam Hunt’s loving ode to Wellington Station. He wrote the poem in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, when he would’ve been riding the Kāpiti Line down from his famous party at Bottle Creek. Lordy, I’ve been that young man. Still am, really, every time I ride a train. I wrote my own letter to Wellington Station just last year, chasing a dad update of Sam’s dreamy quest.

Half a century on the world of his poem has faded. There’s no overnight from Auckland anymore, and no store in the station to buy a pen. When we need to seem unlonely, we pull out our phones. But we’ve still got coffee, unemployment, and hope. I pretend to write letters all the time. Tomorrow these winter streets might even see the morning sun.

Walking the Morning City

Walking the morning city
the opposite direction
workers walking toward me
walking from the sun:
I have no job to go to
so walk into the station

watch the all-night Limited
pull in at the platform
pretend I’m waiting for
a friend who never came:
pretend I’m disappointed
vamp my blues harmonica

buy a lightweight pad
& biro at the station store1
coffee at the cafeteria
pretend to write a letter:
have no one to write to
so drink a cup and leave

walk down morning streets
lightweight in the sun
no one to tell this to
’cause no one is my lover.
This morning more than ever
I’m set on finding you. //

This is the second and final download from our annual America run. In the first letter I wrote about what’s changed. This one’s about a habit, and a song, that are still blessedly the same.

Our car died on I-70 outside Salina, Kansas. While we waited for the tow truck, a local sheriff’s deputy kindly pulled up to wait with us on the highway shoulder. The deputy was a dad about my age, with mirrored shades, a Santa Claus belly, and salt in his beard. We chatted in the tall grass as the kids hunted for snakes. We talked family roadtrips, Colorado memories, crazy drivers. Then came the confession.

“I never was a seatbelt man,” the deputy said. “Then I went to the academy and saw the videos.”

All at once I was home. Kiwis are friendly folks but with strangers they cling to consensus and common sense. Americans, man, we’d rather spill our weirdest bad ideas than let a minute go by in silence.

So we were buds now, the cop and I. We’d both believed dumb things. Mine, I guess, was flying my family halfway around the world just to strap them into a dodgy 2011 Honda Pilot and drive across the Great Plains in high summer.

The cop didn’t judge. Kiwis, bless their hearts, will tell you how to ride a bike. The cop understood my broke-ass flopping about on I-70 not as a failure of fatherhood but as the latest imperfect expression of my dreamy, chaotic American self. I contain multitudes. I contain searching Kansas for autoshops open on a Sunday.

Maybe this is proper American freedom: to be your own mess, and to be seen for it. Or maybe it’s just the relief any traveler feels coming home to a conversation he can never really leave.

And here’s where I tell you the cop had a Thin Blue Line flag tattooed all down his left forearm, drawn tattered and torn as if it’d been through a war. Goddamn, I hate that flag, which drains America of all colors but the gleam of a badge. Goddamn, I hate the general American veneration of bloodshed.

But I was happy to let it ride. I needed to let it ride. We shelled out for the monster plane tickets, didn’t we? I flew home to take confession.

The Honda Pilot needed a new alternator.

“We’ve done four Pilots in the last month,” the mechanic said. No judgement here either. Bad Pilot alternators were just the lay of the land. He was a small, sturdy dude with a long red beard, a laconic Gimli in transition lenses and oil-stained basketball shorts. I gave him my keys. The tow truck driver took us to a hotel downtown.

Downtown, man, because I always want to be somewhere. We ate at a fast-casual Mediterranean franchise on the day of its grand opening, at a table under a giant plastic olive tree. We took the kids to the tiny Salina art museum, which had a cool show of UFO-inspired art. An installation by the late UK artist Susan Hiller included first-person accounts of encounters around the world, including one from New Zealand. I’d have better notes but I was chasing kids back to the hotel pool.

While we’re confessing: in my next life, or maybe later in this one, I will commandeer the penthouse of the United Building, one of those half-empty Prairie Deco skyscrapers that haunt the Plains. I’ll sleep on the floor with the windows open to the wind. I’ll file these letters from a typewriter propped on an old milk crate, writing bad poems about the mad continent ten stories below.

Gimli had the new alternator knocked out by Monday noon. I summoned an Uber to take me to the shop and drew a red minivan driven by a quiet, silver-haired gent. We did not speak. The AC was cold enough to store food. We’d gone a block when his satellite radio hit Like a Rolling Stone.

That opening crash—aw hell, man. But I flew home in search of such moments, didn’t I? I sang along under my breath with squawky young Dylan. I sang along over my breath. What do I care what the driver thinks?

HOW DOES IT FEEL, to be chasing down a resurrected Honda Pilot in the dead goddamn middle of the America I left but can’t stop returning to? We cruised past the Union Building and the churches and the dairy drive-in advertising SHARK MONTH and made for the south side of town. Always the south side, in America. The trees get smaller, the paint flakier. NO DIRECTION HOME.

What will we do in New Zealand, when our PhDs are done? What hell is America bound for? What hell is New Zealand, for that matter? Where can I feed my kids? Where can I best replace my hip in 30 years? Just pick, bro.

Nah. Better to be lonely. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. I took pictures of the houses as they rolled past the chilled minivan window. Proof I loved it all. Proof I didn’t fucking belong. YOU’RE INVISIBLE NOW. YOU GOT NO SECRETS TO CONCEAL.

No song better twangs the lonely expat drift. But it’s an unavoidably American song, one of our top-shelf greats. I know it didn’t swing in the expat Star Wars bars of LatAm and Asia. Can’t imagine it clicks in old-blood-and-stone Europe either.

New Zealand’s young and unfinished enough, yeah. But it’s too dang small, too hedged in. Here every direction, home or otherwise, pings you right off the ocean or a wire fence. RNZ takes less than minute to read out the whole country’s weather, and that’s saying all the town names twice. You’re at home on an island, or you ain’t.

The song ended and we pulled up at the shop. The Pilot waited in the yard like a found lost dog. The mechanic’s assistant was upside down under the dash of a Ford Focus Titanium, a ragged cottonwood looking down.

“Thanks,” I told the driver through the open door.

He caught my eye and grinned. “I’m a Bobby fan, too.”

And for a moment, out on the street, we were brothers. //

We’ve changed, America and I. Below are some of the differences I noted in a six-state swing through the motherland last month. See the next letter for a few things that remained the same.

Bent’s Old Fort is (mostly) closed. This adobe castle on the high plains of eastern Colorado, in operation from from 1833 to 1849, is the platonic ideal of an Old West trading post (it’s in Lonesome Dove, y’all.) The National Park Service rebuilt the structure in 1976 for the bicentenial and ran it as a living history site for decades, with park employees in period costumes cheerfully explaining the polyglot culture of the American frontier. The rebuild was already showing its age, but a huge snowfall last December caused enough damage that the Park Service worried it might collapse. There’s a fence around the fort now, and scaffolding throughout. A ranger shows up each day at 11 to give a limited guided tour of the downstairs rooms—you can still stand in the old kitchen, on the original flagstone hearth—but the whole place has haunted, melancholy air. Peacocks wandered the old livestock corral. The fort’s live-in cat slept on the dining room table. The ranger who gave our tour was plainly bummed out. Three to five years, he guessed a rebuild might take, should the funding ever materialize. He turned away, and stared out at the endless sage. Of course, he said, we are…governed. We said no more. The dusty corral was littered with peacock feathers. You want some? the ranger asked my kids. Take ‘em all.

The funding rapture. Federal money once taken for granted is now a loose Jenga block in every industry my people work in. Universities, obviously. Clinics that rely on revenue from Medicaid patients. Small publishers that rely on NEA grants. Mortgage bankers wondering what’s coming for HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. In public schools, everything. We took the kids for the free summer lunch at my brother-in-law’s school. The next couple tables were full of kids in the summer day camp, fed and cared for and spared the screens while their parents worked. Next year, who knows.

My nephews are huge. Expected and totally normal, but no less a revelation. Their pre-teen faces have these big jawbones now. Their eyes are half haunted by their fathers and half secret storms of early adolescence. I struggled to speak to them outside standard uncle-ish grunts. I could watch their beautiful faces for hours.

Self-driving Ubers. My sister just took her first, a short hop across downtown Austin. Pretty cool, she said. My 13-year-old nephew points out they’re way safer than human drivers. We old folks pushed back, as old folks do. My nephew’s never driven. What’s learning feel like when you start out knowing the robots do it better?

Plastic glasses in restaurants. Pint glasses, cocktails, even those big margarita goblets. Who cried out for this? They’re unreal in your hand, too light, with no loving clink against my wedding ring. Beer in a plastic cup tastes foul, much less call-brand whiskey. But the cheaper simulation always wins.

“Beer is dying. It’s all alcoholic seltzers now.” Tastes better in plastic glasses, I guess.

THC drinks. I drank one in “pineapple passion fruit” flavor. It tasted like diet Theraflu. I got diet stoned.

Alcoholic coffee creamers in single-serving jars by the register. “The message of many things in America is “‘Like this or die,’” wrote George W. S. Trow in 1981. A simplification for 2025: The message of many things in America is ‘Take drugs.’

The PassItOn signs are getting desperate. The earnest billboard campaign for basic human values has been around for years, but now the values are getting even more basic. This one in O’Hare was like, at least we have a country! I saw one in Omaha for love, as in the romantic kind, like hey, maybe you should try this one weird trick?

This abandoned Chevy Suburban at a beloved Colorado trailhead. That’s police tape. I don’t know what’s going on here. The driver’s window was smashed out from the inside. The passenger seat was full of dusty power tools. In the hutch between the seats was a notepad with the name and phone number of a Colorado Springs realtor written in fat black marker.

The fear. People I love have altered their daily routines to avoid locations that could be targeted by ICE raids. I will not detail this further online. ‘Careful’ was the euphemism we used in China. America now fills me with care.

The very public Zoom call. We’re mad phone addicts—yes, more than Kiwis. Americans laptop in public because it makes us look busy, which is the very reason Kiwis don’t. But the young woman setting up shop on Saturday morning at Bruegger’s Bagels in suburban Minneapolis with headphones, mic, laptop, and a laptop stand has lost all distinction between home and restaurant, work and play, alone and together. She got free refills, though. We all did.

The wobbling gravity of return. Last year I sat in a circle of baby aspen trees and knew, sure as I was born, that I would come back to America. This year I sat among the same aspens and did not feel so certain. Trump and all, sure, but I’m talking more mysterious gut-instinct stuff. Sometimes you know something without being quite sure what you’re knowing. The wobble did not come with any greater certainty about New Zealand. It’s a loosening, this feeling. Not a tightening. Not yet.

The kicker here is that William Bent himself was the first person to close down Bent’s Fort. In the summer of 1849 the Cheyenne, his local Native American trading partners and allies, were suffering a terrible cholera epidemic. The rival Apaches were circling, reports David Lavender in his swashbuckling 1952 history of the fort. Maybe Bent just got restless. On August 21—my birthday—he ordered his family and staff to clear the place out. Bent lead the burdened pack train to a campsite five miles east down the Arkansas River. Then he rode back to the fort alone, and blew it up:

He rolled kegs of powder into the main rooms. Making a torch, he moved from apartment to apartment, setting fire to the wooden roofs and to the piles of junk accumulated through years of living. As greasy smoke spiraled into the sunset light, he reined out through the gaping gates and eastward along the river.

Behind him, the death boom of the prairie’s greatest feudal empire split the sky. //

In the days after the Texas floods there were storms all over America. I missed an evening connection at O’Hare and found shelter at a Chicagoland La Quinta. It was past ten p.m. when the crowded shuttle dropped me at the hotel, a five-story prison block wedged between a freeway and an aging concert arena in the hardluck suburb of Rosemont. I couldn’t sleep, I’d never got dinner, and I felt that ol’ American twitch: overtravelled, a state or three from home, going on midnight, stranded out on some chain-hell strip miles from anything like ‘town’ and anxious to consume something, anything, that might split the miles from the sleep.

The Five Guys was closed, the Outback was closed, the Potbelly Sandwich Shop was closed. All this from my phone. Used to be you had to walk the strip in the dark, scanning distant fast-food joints for signs of life. Only out of tradition did I ask the human at the front desk.

The Cane’s is open ‘til one, he said with a smile.

Never heard of it. No matter. The names of chains pass between Americans as signs of comfort. You belong, fellow traveler. The fat of the land awaits you.

I followed the hotel clerk’s directions through the parking lot past a long and weirdly dim wing of the hotel. It wasn’t that late, but every window was already dark. Everyone on their screens, curtains drawn.

Not me. I was hungry. I braved the night.

At the street I dashed like a cat across four lanes of traffic. On the far side fat weeds posed in the dirt of the verge. A silent car wash. The shuttered Five Guys. The last of the Potbelly night shift shuffled to his car. The arena’s flashing sign offered Los Tigres del Norte this November. A half-mile north a Target logo burned like a setting sun.

Texts from my college boys: floods in North Carolina, too. One forwarded a clip of coffee-colored rapids topping the fenceposts in a friend’s yard. I was alone on the street so I cranked up the sound. Water as angry static. The camera pans. The sky grows dark. No one speaks.

There was no night inside Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. Three mirrored balls in the ceiling. Fresh Prince’s Summertime on hidden speakers. Commands in giant red letters: ONE LOVE and EAT. By the bathrooms a cardboard cutout of a pretty young TikTok star squatting on her roller bag. On every wall a cartoon dog in sunglasses driving a van.

HOW HUNGRY ARE YA? called the young man behind the counter.

The menu listed only combos. Could I have just the sandwich?

OF COURSE. He punched the screen. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?

I surrendered my credentials.

DAN THE MAN! he crowed.

I fall for it every time.

I ate my sandwich outside on the patio, listening to the passing cars thunk-thunk over cracks in the concrete street. The corporate playlist partied on.

The TikTok star watched me eat from a life-sized window decal. Her teeth were perfectly white, and her smile—I mean, in America you can never escape the image of a pretty girl giving you that look. New Zealand does without these looks somehow. I am out of practice. I willed my eyes to the cartoon dog.

Now the patio speakers played Mr. Jones, the ‘90s Counting Crows hit now thirty years into a life sentence on cheerful corporate playlists.

And we stare at the beautiful women
She’s looking you
Oh no, no she’s looking at me

The TikTok star is named Livvy Dunne. She was a gymnast at Louisiana State University, in Cane’s hometown of Baton Rouge, and graduated last year. Her campaign’s a hit, by which I mean that the Cane’s employee reddit is full of tales of drunk young men doing unspeakable things to the cutout, offering to buy her for cash, or stealing her away into the night.

It’s all part of the show. Last month Livvy Dunne herself posted a video in which she visits a Cane’s, eats a basket of chicken fingers, then kidnaps her own cutout. Livvy shoves Livvy into a black SUV and drives a lap of the parking lot, her cardboard daemon’s head smiling from the sunroof. Warhol never did it better.

Believe in me
’Cause I don’t believe in anything
And I, I wanna be someone to believe

The sandwich was pretty good.

I walked back to the hotel. On the second pass I realized the wing of darkened rooms wasn’t just dim but abandoned. In one window room a stack of mattresses, in another a pile of furniture. Some rooms showed signs of life. In one second-floor window someone had scrawled a heart. In another, YA YA in white paint. From inside I guess it read AY AY.

On the ground floor the wing’s single glass door was propped open with half a blackened cinderblock. I drew closer. You have to look. What hallway I could see was scattered with dust and trash. Beyond a few feet the darkness inside was total.

Safely back in the new La Quinta I blinked in the lobby’s dazzling white. The same clerk stood behind the desk. I asked about the abandoned wing. Are the two hotels connected? What happened over there, anyway?

But history was not his job. His job was comfort.

Outside, yes, the hotels are connected, he said. But inside there is no connection at all. //

Lots of ways to listen and watch: Substack | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

And welcome to the american.nz podcast! I’ve been writing these letters for a year or so, and now I’m hungry to talk to all kinds of folks. More episodes to come (and more letters, too.) Holler anytime at dan@american.nz.

Show notes:

01:40 | Why do Kiwis have more sex? Or do they?

03:06 | Founded by Puritans, but fascinated by “boobies and bottoms.”

07:30 | Decriminalized, but still stigmatized.

10:25 | “Our legal name was Tui Auto.”

11:30 | The abusive American client—and why he’s not American in the book

16:40 | “The vast majority are just normal guys.”

19:30 | Expat privilege, Kiwi values, and the American Dream

20:45 | Americans as “temporarily strapped billionaires”

24:50 | Professional boundaries in Brothel HR

29:30 | “Is what you did in Whangārei a net benefit to the people in the community?”

32:30 | Dark feelings. Practical Thoughts.

37:30 | Staying in New Zealand, isolation and all.

The study we discussed is here: Average Number of Sexual Partners by Country 2025. The theme music is “Winds in the Wellington Trees” by Anton Hughes. I shot the intro outside Greytown, with no wind at all.