NAKEDJEN

on my mind…

  • Magic Bubble

    The theme today is magic, which is convenient, because I have a magic Honda.

    Or had one.

    Have one.

    Fuck.

    I don’t actually know which tense to use yet.

    Her name is Wanda, she is a 2003 Honda Element, green more or less beneath twenty-three years of road dirt and political opinions and Grateful Dead stickers and playa dust and whatever else has permanently attached itself to her body, and at this point she is held together by playa dust, virtue, and my own heart.

    Literally.

    Wanda is a car.

    I feel like I need to establish that immediately, perhaps mostly for myself.

    Metal and glass and rubber, four tires, an engine, a peculiar square little body that looks as though somebody at Honda took legos and designed a toaster and, somewhere late in the process, realized it would be infinitely better if dogs could live inside it.

    I know Wanda is a car.

    It isn’t helping.

    I whispered her into existence.

    I mean that literally.

    I was standing in a dog park in Santa Cruz, a dog park I happened to be fighting for tooth and nail at the time, which feels completely appropriate in retrospect, since apparently even my automobile origin stories require some form of civic disobedience, and I was there with Buddha and Stella when I simply said out loud to nobody in particular that I needed a new car for the dogs.

    That was the whole shopping process.

    No spreadsheet, no financing calculator, no weekends spent walking through dealerships while some twenty-six-year-old man in a polo shirt tried to explain torque to me as though I had wandered onto the asphalt accidentally and might need assistance finding my way home.

    I said what I needed.

    A man named Kevin heard me.

    Kevin was a gentle man.

    Not a gentleman.

    A gentle man.

    There is a difference, and Kevin, who is no longer with us, understood something that I have come to believe matters enormously in this life, which is that sometimes a human being says something they need out loud and the most useful thing another human being can do is simply listen.

    He looked at me and said, “Nakedjen, you need to talk to my friend. He has an Element he has to get rid of or his wife is going to divorce him.”

    Twenty-four hours later I had Wanda.

    That was it.

    Somebody desperately needed this ridiculous square Honda out of his life; I desperately needed a vehicle that would hold Buddha and Stella; the universe, for once, appeared to be running an extraordinarily efficient inventory system.

    The back of a vehicle covered in various bumper stickers, including one that reads 'My vacation is your worst nightmare' and several others promoting places and organizations like 'Santa Cruz', 'Trinity Alumni', and dog-related stickers.

    I paid almost nothing for her.

    A song.

    Less than a song.

    Maybe a chorus.

    The strange part is that I could probably sell Wanda today for more than I paid for her all those years ago, which is funny until you think about groceries and housing and insurance and fuel and automobile repairs and the increasingly absurd amount of money required simply to keep an ordinary human life moving forward in America.

    Eventually anyone who owns something old reaches the same miserable little piece of arithmetic: how much money do I continue pouring into the thing I already own before I am forced to find considerably more money to replace it?

    Repair it, replace it, finance something else, keep driving it until a piece literally falls onto the pavement.

    Wanda has reached that equation.

    But Wanda was never really an equation.

    She plays CDs. And only CDs.

    She is old enough to remember when music was something you carried with you, something you held in your hand and chose deliberately and slid into a machine because those were the songs you wanted on this road, in this weather, during this particular version of your life.

    I made CDs for Wanda.

    Not playlists.

    CDs.

    I wrote names on them and chose songs for particular roads and particular summers and particular departures, and the Oregon Country Fair absolutely required its own music because there are some things in life for which Spotify’s algorithms should simply not be trusted.

    There were CDs for driving north and CDs for coming home and CDs for the kind of road where you knew that eventually there would be a river, the dogs would get wet, the windows would come down and absolutely nobody would care what time it was.

    Wanda has seen Oregon.

    All of it, it feels like.

    Roads folding through trees, hot springs, rivers, Buddha and Stella shaking water everywhere, the windows open, the whole car smelling like wet Labrador and whatever we happened to be eating while Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead played through speakers that were never particularly impressive but somehow sounded exactly right.

    Always the Dead.

    Wanda wears them too, those stickers layered across her body beside all the political ones, little declarations of allegiance slowly fading in the Utah sun. Little Salty and I call those stickers: character.

    There are songs I cannot hear without seeing her dashboard, just as there are roads I cannot remember without hearing the songs that played while we traveled them, because eventually the music gets inside the road, the road gets inside the car, the car gets inside the life, and somebody comes along years later and says it is just an old Honda Element.

    Fine.

    Put on the Oregon Country Fair CD.

    Tell me that again.

    When I left California for Utah, I put my life inside Wanda, and I don’t mean that in some grand poetic way.

    I mean my actual life.

    I made a CD for that drive too, because apparently I have always believed that if you are going to leave one life in the rearview mirror and point yourself toward another one you cannot yet see, you should at least choose the music yourself, so I picked the songs for California disappearing behind me and Utah waiting somewhere ahead with whatever it intended to become, songs for Buddha and Stella and me crossing from the known into the completely fucking unknown without having any idea yet which parts of us would survive the crossing unchanged.

    Buddha, Stella, me, everything I could carry from the world I was leaving into the one I had decided to enter, stuffed into every possible corner of that little square vehicle until there was nothing left to do but point ourselves toward Utah and go.

    Somewhere along the way we drove into an El Niño storm that had absolutely no business letting us through.

    The snow was insane, the wind was worse, there were stretches of highway where I could no longer tell where the road ended and the rest of the world began, and I remember both hands on the steering wheel with Buddha and Stella behind me, California disappearing somewhere back there, Utah theoretically waiting ahead, everything I still considered my life packed into this Honda Element while I understood with complete certainty that we were going to die.

    I don’t mean I worried we might die.

    I knew.

    There is a particular kind of silence that happens when fear moves past speculation and becomes certainty, when there is nothing left to negotiate with except the steering wheel in your hands and whatever god or universe or mechanical engineering might still be listening.

    I may have prayed. I probably said please. Knowing me, I absolutely said fuck. A lot.

    Wanda kept moving through the wind and snow and whatever the fuck that night was, carrying the three of us and everything we had decided mattered enough to bring along, until somehow we arrived safely in Utah. I’m not sure how.

    There were other storms after that, too many to bother naming, other roads where I had no business driving and other nights when I wrapped both hands around that steering wheel and asked the universe for another favor, but somewhere very early in our life together I stopped wondering whether Wanda would get me home.

    She always did.

    There was a magic bubble around that car.

    I know how that sounds.

    I don’t care.

    From the moment I got her I felt protected inside her, and eventually something happened that I love a whole lot more.

    The magic bubble got bigger.

    It stopped belonging only to me.

    A woman wearing a pink hat and tank top is organizing items in the back of a parked vehicle. The vehicle contains various supplies, including a cooler, a blanket, and cleaning tools, in a dusty outdoor setting.

    A Honda Element is, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the finest dog transport vehicle ever created by human beings, and I will hear no opposing arguments at this time, but it is also an astonishing little service machine because the seats move, the doors open wide, practically anything can be stuffed inside and, before you know it, you have stopped thinking of the car as transportation and begun thinking of it as a way to get something useful from where it is to where it needs to be.

    Food rescue became one of Wanda’s great callings.

    Restaurants, stores, events, anywhere there was too much food in one place while somebody somewhere else did not have enough, we loaded boxes and bags and trays and produce and bread and whatever could become dinner instead of garbage into Wanda and carried it to community refrigerators or directly to our unhoused neighbors.

    I made music for that too, because feeding people in winter has its own rhythm, loading Wanda until the back disappeared beneath food and blankets while some song I had deliberately chosen played through those old speakers, driving through a sleeping city with coffee in the cup holder and whatever we had managed to rescue behind me, the music keeping company with the work because sometimes service is solemn and sometimes it is joyful and mostly it is simply what you do next.

    Winter mattered most.

    When the temperature dropped and the city seemed to disappear behind locked doors and heated windows, Wanda carried coffee and food and blankets and socks and whatever somebody might need tonight, not after a meeting, not eventually, not theoretically.

    Tonight.

    Sometimes the thing a person needed was Wanda herself.

    I have let unhoused people sleep inside her.

    For twenty-three years I have never locked Wanda’s doors.

    Never.

    People occasionally hear this and look at me as though I have just announced that I keep my Social Security number taped to the windshield, but I trusted Wanda, I trusted people, and I trusted the magic bubble enough to keep a black and yellow bin inside filled with snacks and useful things anyone could take if they needed them.

    I had one rule, written on a note.

    Please do not make a mess.

    That was it.

    Not KEEP OUT.

    Not PRIVATE PROPERTY.

    Not DO NOT TOUCH.

    Please do not make a mess.

    There are entire political philosophies considerably more complicated than that which have accomplished less.

    Somebody hungry, cold, tired, stranded or needing somewhere safe for a little while could find something inside that ridiculous old Honda, and sometimes Wanda’s service meant driving somewhere while other times it simply meant staying exactly where she was with the doors unlocked.

    She made room.

    That was what Wanda did.

    She made room.

    Burning Man simply made that more visible.

    Of course Wanda went to Burning Man.

    Eventually she became the official vehicle of the Love Beets, which was never formally decided and certainly never voted upon; it simply became true in the way certain things become true after enough years.

    Wanda is known on the playa.

    I realize that sounds ridiculous.

    She is.

    There was music for this work too, a CD made specifically for taking care of the artists, because if Wanda was going to cross the playa carrying coffee and electrolytes and cupcakes and grilled cheese and whatever else might make somebody building impossible beauty in impossible heat feel cared for, then obviously she also needed the right fucking soundtrack.

    There is another CD in Wanda right now whose only job is arrival.

    Not Reno.

    Not the highway.

    Not Gerlach.

    Arrival.

    The moment the playa opens in front of us and Black Rock City stops being somewhere we are going and becomes the place we have reached, that CD goes in, because some thresholds deserve their own music and this one always did.

    Artists see her coming.

    People working in the heat look up and recognize that square, dust-covered Honda moving toward them and know there is a reasonably good chance something useful, delicious, cold, hot or ridiculous is about to arrive.

    Electrolytes.

    Hot coffee.

    Cupcakes.

    Ice cream cones.

    Grilled cheese, art-side.

    You could be somewhere in the middle of a desert working for hours on something enormous and absurd and beautiful, exhausted and covered in dust, look up and see Wanda coming across the playa and understand:

    Good things are on the way.

    That may be the purest definition of what I ever wanted Wanda to be.

    Good things are on the way.

    Open the doors, feed somebody, give them water, pour coffee, put on music, figure out what they need, make room.

    One night there was a wounded Army veteran who wanted to see the art but used a wheelchair, and the playa is not exactly famous for being uncomplicated when you are traveling by wheelchair.

    The chair fit inside Wanda.

    He fit inside Wanda.

    We fit inside Wanda.

    So we went.

    I drove him out across the playa at sunset into that impossible temporary city glowing in the darkness and gave him a private tour of the art, and I remember being extraordinarily happy, not because I was helping someone, since that kind of happiness can become a little too pleased with itself, but because for one particular moment in one particular desert I happened to possess exactly what another human being needed.

    Not money.

    Not wisdom.

    Not influence.

    A fucking Honda Element.

    The chair fit.

    So we went.

    There are nights in a life whose value cannot be calculated.

    That was one.

    A green SUV parked on a dusty landscape with a bicycle strapped on the roof, set against a sunset backdrop.

    Wanda was never really an equation.

    Buddha rode in Wanda.

    Stella rode in Wanda.

    Later, Clyde.

    Dogs have slept in that car and waited in that car and stared at me from that car with the specific expression dogs reserve for humans who have stopped somewhere entirely unnecessarily, and after enough years the interior began storing something stranger than dog hair or paw prints.

    There are places inside Wanda where I can still see Buddha.

    Not hair.

    Not a scratch in the upholstery.

    Buddha.

    There are places where I can still see Stella.

    That is different.

    This is where writing an obituary for a car becomes very fucking inconvenient, because apparently I am no longer talking about a car.

    I am talking about who was alive inside it.

    Buddha is gone.

    Stella is gone.

    Kevin is gone.

    Wanda carried things I cannot put back inside her: Buddha and Stella and Kevin, California before I left it, entire summers, certain rivers, people I used to know, versions of myself I cannot return to, all of it somehow having traveled inside those four doors even though there are no straps for those things, no cargo hooks, no clever Honda seat configuration capable of folding memory neatly into place.

    Wanda witnessed my life.

    Maybe that is what I have been trying to say.

    She knew me before Utah and before so much else, when Buddha was alive and Stella was alive and Kevin was still standing in a Santa Cruz dog park, when I could put an Oregon Country Fair CD into the stereo, point the car north and believe without even thinking about it that there would always be another river.

    She carried versions of me I cannot go back and retrieve.

    Maybe that is what an old object becomes after enough years, not sentimental exactly, but a witness, a storage unit for places and creatures and versions of ourselves that technically no longer exist except that somehow we can still see them when we open a door.

    This morning I went outside and found another piece of Wanda lying on the ground.

    The college kids had been careless in their reverie the night before and an orange road block had been knocked hard enough into the front passenger side of Wanda to break a piece near the windshield, which they apparently left smashed on the pavement without a note.

    Sigh.

    I picked it up.

    Underneath was playa dust.

    Layers and layers of playa dust.

    Beneath that, glue.

    Of course.

    At this point, as I have said, Wanda is held together by playa dust, virtue, and my own heart, with whole sections where the original engineering surrendered years ago and I simply continued believing in her through glue and duct tape and replacement pieces and whatever somebody could rig to keep her moving.

    I stood there holding this stupid broken piece of my stupid car, looking at dust that had been sealed beneath it for years, realizing there was an entire desert hiding inside an old repair.

    Of course there was.

    Wanda has been carrying places around with her too.

    Santa Cruz, Utah, Oregon, the playa, roads I have forgotten, roads I will never forget, some of them apparently held together with super glue and dog hair.

    The college kids saw an old car.

    That is what I keep thinking about.

    They hit it, broke something and walked away because they saw an old car.

    I saw Wanda.

    I stood there in the morning holding another piece of her in my hand, knowing perfectly well that she is a car and discovering once again that knowing this is absolutely no fucking help at all.

    I could sell her.

    Someone would give me money for Wanda, probably more money than I paid for her in the first place, and God knows I could use money because who couldn’t, but each time I try to imagine assigning a number to Wanda something inside me rejects the premise.

    What is the market value of getting Buddha and Stella safely through that storm, or the resale value of all that rescued food, or the going rate for a night when somebody had nowhere warm to sleep and Wanda’s doors happened to be unlocked?

    How much is the black and yellow bin worth?

    How much for a wounded man and his wheelchair beneath a playa sky?

    What is Kevin worth?

    Stupid question.

    Exactly.

    Wanda was never really an equation.

    She arrived in my life as a magic gift, so I have decided she should leave it the same way.

    I am donating her to the Humane Society of Utah.

    The car I whispered into existence because I needed something for Buddha and Stella gets one more act of service on behalf of animals, and I would like to believe, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that the magic bubble transfers with the title.

    I have also written a love note and tucked it inside Wanda for whoever gets her next, because apparently simply signing over the title is not enough for me; I need whoever opens that note to know that they are climbing into something that has been deeply, ridiculously, extravagantly loved, something that carried dogs and food and children and strangers and friends and entire versions of one woman’s life across deserts and rivers and mountains and impossible snowstorms, something whose doors remained unlocked because I believed trust was worth practicing, something that has spent twenty-three years making room.

    I don’t know who will find the note or when they will find it or whether they will read it and think the woman who owned this ancient Honda before them was completely fucking insane, which is fine, because the note is not an instruction manual and it is certainly not a warranty; it is simply a little bit of love left behind in the place where I have already left so much of it, asking whoever comes next to take care of her, let her remain useful, make room when they can, and know that somewhere beneath the stickers and glue and road dirt and playa dust and tumbleweeds of dog hair there is a magic bubble.

    I thought perhaps I should tell them.

    Just in case the magic needs to know where to go next.

    I don’t know how magic works.

    There is no box on the paperwork.

    MAGIC BUBBLE:

    YES.

    NO.

    Still, I want whoever receives whatever comes next from Wanda to inherit some infinitesimal residue of Buddha and Stella and Kevin, Oregon river water and Utah snow, Bob Weir and playa dust and Love Beets and coffee spilled somewhere I never completely cleaned, all the dogs and children and boxes of rescued food and people who slept inside her, everyone frightened or happy or hungry or simply needing to get somewhere who crossed the threshold of those doors and became, however briefly, part of what Wanda carried.

    There is one more thing I am leaving inside her.

    A CD.

    You think I’m letting her go without a soundtrack?

    I have spent twenty-three years making music for the roads Wanda and I were about to travel together, for Oregon and Utah and the playa, for artists waiting in the dust and winter nights when we carried food through the city, choosing songs before I knew exactly what would happen because I always wanted the road to have a soundtrack before the story arrived.

    This time I am choosing music for a road I will not take with her.

    That is different.

    I will tuck the CD inside Wanda with the love note, and whoever comes next may find it tomorrow or six months from now or never, may understand immediately or think it is just another strange artifact left behind by the woman whose political stickers are still fading across the bumper.

    They might just throw it away. The only possible thing that stills plays a CD is Wanda’s own ancient excuse for a radio.

    But perhaps one afternoon they will be sitting inside this ridiculous square Honda wondering who the hell nakedjen was, notice the disc, slide it into the old player and press PLAY.

    I hope they do.

    The songs will never ever explain Wanda.

    They cannot.

    The music can’t preserve what is leaving.

    It cannot.

    It is more because I have spent all these years choosing songs for departure and arrival, for crossing deserts and state lines and versions of myself, and there is something I cannot bear and something I deeply love about sending Wanda into whatever comes next with music waiting inside her.

    A soundtrack for the first road without me.

    I won’t know where she is going.

    I won’t know who is driving.

    I won’t know whether there is a dog in the back or food stacked behind the seats or someone tired enough to need a safe place for the night.

    I won’t know what the weather looks like through her windshield.

    I won’t know when the song begins.

    I just want the music there.

    Waiting.

    In case somebody hits PLAY.

    Shortly, I am going back to Santa Cruz.

    Now I have Clyde.

    I need a car for Clyde.

    That sentence feels familiar.

    There will be beaches and dog parks and strangers standing around talking about dogs and weather and whatever else people talk about before they accidentally alter the course of one another’s lives, and I know perfectly well there are sensible ways to purchase automobiles involving websites and dealerships and Carfax reports and interest rates and Harry, undoubtedly, keeping a spreadsheet.

    Fine.

    I am going to try something else first.

    I am going to stand somewhere with Clyde, perhaps on a beach, perhaps in a dog park, perhaps beside someone who has absolutely no idea they are about to become part of this story, and I am going to say the thing out loud.

    I need a new car for the dog.

    The first time I said it, Kevin heard me.

    Twenty-four hours later there was Wanda, and inside Wanda there turned out to be an entire life: Buddha and Stella, California and Oregon and Utah, snowstorms and hot springs and rivers, rescued food and unlocked doors, a black and yellow bin, the Love Beets and the playa, a wheelchair beneath the stars, Bob Weir, coffee, cupcakes, grilled cheese, sunrise, Clyde, me, somehow all of us fitting inside one ridiculous square Honda.

    That was home.

    That was pure magic.

    I don’t know much, but I do know that once, standing in a dog park, I asked the universe for a car for the dogs.

    The universe answered.

    Her name was Wanda.

    Two black Labrador dogs wearing sunglasses sitting in a car.
    • Nakedjen Songs for Wanda
    • Can’t Find My Way Home — Blind Faith
    • Into the Great Wide Open — Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
    • Blue Sky — The Allman Brothers Band (live)
    • Big Yellow Taxi — Joni Mitchell
    • This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody) — Talking Heads (live from Stop Making Sense)
    • The Weight — The Band
    • People Have the Power — Patti Smith
    • I’ll Take You There — The Staple Singers
    • Lean on Me — Bill Withers
    • Get Down on It — Kool & the Gang
    • Genius of Love — Tom Tom Club
    • Rapper’s Delight — The Sugarhill Gang
    • Celebration — Kool & the Gang
    • Burning Down the House — Talking Heads (live from Stop Making Sense)
    • Franklin’s Tower — Grateful Dead (live)
    • Good Times — Chic
    • Lovely Day — Bill Withers
    • Wildflowers — Tom Petty
    • Brokedown Palace — Grateful Dead
    • Dancing Barefoot — Patti Smith Group
    • Road to Nowhere — Talking Heads
    • Ripple — Grateful Dead

  • The Long Way Around

    I have been unemployed since November, which is a sentence I have repeated often enough that somewhere along the way I apparently started believing it meant I have not been employed, and last night, somewhere between twenty-five students in Indonesia laughing their way through English words some of them had been afraid to say an hour earlier and me sitting here in Salt Lake City trying to convince them that there really, truly, absolutely was NO WRONG ANSWER, I had one of those rather inconvenient realizations about myself that had apparently been following me around for months, patiently carrying the evidence in its mouth, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to see what it had brought me.

    Because what the fuck have I actually been doing since November?

    I worked Sundance, whatever WORK means when the currency is exhaustion and movies and taking care of people; I executive produced a film; I went to Bali where I was supposedly going to repair my nervous system and instead came home carrying villages and people and plans in my pockets; I showed up for graduates in Myanmar; I spent twenty-four days helping search for August; I worked on Purple Alert until it became LAW; I went to Burning Man convinced I had absolutely nothing left to give and then, apparently by muscle memory, kept finding whoever needed water or help or somebody willing to sit down in the dust and stay there for a while. And yesterday, before I taught a room full of people in Indonesia how much fun it can be to get the answer completely WRONG, I somehow found myself talking with someone who might actually be able to help bring solar power to villages there.

    Meanwhile this little creature has been following me around with all of that clenched between its teeth while I keep announcing, to anyone who asks and especially to myself, that I am unemployed.

    A smiling woman with long, wavy gray hair sits in front of a bicycle, reflecting on her father's advice about empathy and perspective.

    And I know exactly whose handwriting is all over that particular bit of nonsense.

    ALBERT.FUCKING.NEAL.

    My father grew up on Cape Cod, which explains the accent and nothing else about the man. I grew up at his dinner table, where current events weren’t current events so much as an entrance exam you passed before you were allowed the peas, and I was expected to read the Washington Post and the New York Times every day, know what was on fire in Washington and Moscow and Beirut before supper, then sit down and discuss it with a man who did not care, even slightly, that I was a child.

    I was three.

    THREE.

    Other three-year-olds got applause for knowing the cow says MOO. I was expected to have a position on foreign policy.

    I am the SON my father never had.

    There it is.

    I don’t say that with sadness, or even accusation, because what he handed me at that table was enormous: the conviction that citizenship isn’t a noun, that paying attention is an obligation, that if you’ve been given access, education and a voice, you use them, and that it’s a kind of indecency to know someone is in trouble and decide it isn’t your problem.

    The thing about ALBERT.FUCKING.NEAL is that “that’s great” has never actually been a complete sentence. There is no period after it. There is barely even a comma. You can hear the BUT already warming up in the bullpen while you’re still telling him the good news.

    I could call him from the actual village in Indonesia, standing beneath the first solar panel while twenty-five newly fluent English speakers sang the national anthem and I simultaneously found three missing people and passed another piece of legislation, and somewhere around the time I said, “Dad, you are not going to fucking BELIEVE this,” Albert would already be leaning over the dugout rail waiting for the next pitch.

    “Yeah, yeah, Jennifah, that’s great, BUT WHAT ABOUT…”

    And apparently I learned his punctuation.
    I can put a period after almost anything except my own usefulness.

    Which is how I found myself last night, after those students had spent an hour making me laugh so hard I forgot for stretches of time that I was supposed to be the teacher, already thinking about what I had not done yet. Not what had just happened, not the faces that had changed over the course of the hour, not the student who had started out barely willing to speak and then kept speaking, not the sheer ridiculous JOY of watching people discover that being wrong in English is survivable. I was already somewhere else, mentally circling the next thing, the next problem, the next person who might need me, the next pitch coming in before I had even decided what happened to the last one.

    ALBERT.FUCKING.NEAL’S question, except now I didn’t even need Albert.

    Yeah, yeah, Jennifah, that’s great. But what about…

    What about the job. What about the money. What about Washington. What about the people I haven’t helped yet.

    There is apparently no bottom to WHAT ABOUT.

    And in a little while I will call him and tell him about last night, about the students and the laughter and the fact that I made WRONG the safest possible answer and somehow that loosened the whole room, and I will tell him about the solar conversation too, since that happened yesterday as well and even I have to admit that teaching English in Indonesia and possibly finding a way to get power into villages there is not exactly a wasted Saturday.

    He will listen. He will be proud of me. He will mean it.

    For about eleven seconds.

    Then, somewhere before either of us has quite finished with the good part, I will hear the familiar little turn in his voice.

    “Yeah, yeah, Jennifah, that’s great, but what about Washington?”

    And maybe this time I will say it back.

    “What about FUCKING Washington, Albert? What do you think I can actually do? I think it’s too late.”

    Which is not a sentence I like saying out loud, especially to him, and certainly not one I was raised to say, but there it is anyway, sitting between us like something neither of us ordered and now have to eat.

    And I know ALBERT.FUCKING.NEAL well enough to know that “I think it’s too late” will not buy me even twelve seconds of silence; he will come right back over the top of it with WHAT DO YOU MEAN TOO LATE, as though I have just tried to sneak an unsupported argument past him at the dinner table and he has caught me before I can reach for the peas, and suddenly I will be three and thirty and sixty-two all at once, expected to explain precisely when I think the country crossed whatever invisible line I am talking about, what I have done about it, what I intend to do next and, most importantly, why the hell I am sitting here telling him there is nothing left to be done when there are still people standing up.

    And then, because ALBERT.FUCKING.NEAL is not above bringing in reinforcements, he will say, “Your grandmother would be pushing you out the door, Jennifah!” which is a dirty move, honestly, because once he puts my grandmother in the room I am no longer arguing with one eighty-six-year-old man on the phone, I have generations of Neals at my back apparently wondering why I am still standing in the kitchen talking about how hopeless everything is instead of putting on my fucking BOOTS.

    And the worst part is, I know exactly what he means.

    There are still people standing up.

    So maybe the answer to WHAT ABOUT FUCKING WASHINGTON is that I am out the door, Albert. I have been out the door. The BOOTS are on. I just keep getting waylaid by the actual world before I ever make it to Washington: a missing man, a room full of students, somebody sleeping outside, a village without power, a person who needs me to stay five more minutes.

    I keep stopping. I keep showing up. I keep moving.

    Maybe that is not the route you had in mind for me, and maybe it is not the route I had in mind either.

    Maybe I am taking the long way around, Albert.

    But I am already out the fucking door.

  • Cakes are Steady

    Today was a full day.

    More than that, it was one of those days where I caught myself thinking, I live here. Not because I have an address here. Not because I know every little alley or speak the language. It was something else. I felt seen. I felt loved. I found myself wondering how to make this way of living… stick. How to carry it home with me when I eventually have to leave.

    Mostly, though, I just want to share the moments.

    This morning, on my way to coffee, the boys on our street were busy setting up the stage for tomorrow’s festival. I stopped to tell them they were doing a great job. I also noticed a few places that could use a couple more bolts.

    Now, this is Bali, and we all know everything here is held together by zip ties and prayers. But tomorrow there are going to be lights hanging everywhere, musicians moving equipment on and off the stage all day and well into the night, and those load-bearing supports are going to be asked to do exactly what load-bearing supports are supposed to do.

    So I asked for bolts. And a drill.

    They laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

    I explained what I was thinking as I tightened everything up. It probably would have been just fine. It almost always is. But a few extra bolts now mean everyone sleeps a little easier later. Then I handed everything back, wished them luck, and left them to keep building.

    I wandered into Seniman, which was absolutely packed this morning. I sat on a rocking chair at the counter, smiled at the baristas, and before I even had a chance to think about ordering, my espresso appeared. There are very few things in life better than people who quietly know your coffee order. I thanked all that is holy for espresso, drank it, and today I didn’t linger. I had places to be.

    On my way up the hill I stopped to chat with Gusti at the little warung on the corner. She asked how much longer I’d be here, and when I told her about ten more days she smiled and asked if I was hungry. I reminded her that my homestay feeds me breakfast every morning and that after that I don’t usually want to eat again until much later in the day. I promised I’d stop by before I leave. She seemed satisfied with that arrangement.

    Then it was off to Mikos.

    I hugged Kochang, slipped into my bathing suit, and climbed into what may have been the most perfect pool on Earth today. I floated for a long time doing absolutely nothing except watching the trees.

    Now, you can call me crazy. It won’t be the first time.

    The trees were talking. One would bend ever so slightly. Just a tiny movement. Then another tree would answer back across the garden in exactly the same rhythm.

    Boop. Bop. Bedeeep. Boo beep.

    I know. I know how that sounds. Maybe you’ve heard it, too? That’s what I watched for the longest time. A conversation carried on entirely through leaves.

    There were also these bees that looked more like hummingbirds than bees. Huge things. They buzzed around the flowers while I floated there listening to the trees gossip with one another.

    Kochang never seems to remember that I’m rarely hungry. She does always remember that I’m allergic to bananas.

    While I was busy communing with trees and bees, she appeared beside the pool carrying pancakes and watermelon.

    “As a snack,” she said.

    I laughed.

    I’ve secretly been wanting pancakes this entire trip, but almost everywhere here makes them with bananas, so I’ve simply gone without.

    Not today.

    Today I sat on the edge of a swimming pool eating banana-free pancakes with giant bug friends, and honestly, it was glorious.  I am so damn spoiled. 

    Eventually I had to wander home because my beet juice guy was waiting for me. I changed back into my clothes, walked down the hill, and checked in on the boys again. By then the stage itself was finished and they were already rigging lights. Keduk walked me through tomorrow’s schedule. The whole village wakes at seven in the morning for a parade. Then come the offerings, the food, more music, and after sunset… the street party really begins. Those are the performances everyone comes out to see.

    The whole street is so proud of this celebration. The boys, especially, have worked so hard to put it all together.  

    I’m proud to be part of it.

    I picked up my beet juice, chatted with everyone there for a while about all sorts of things, carried it home, tucked it into the refrigerator, hung up my wet swimsuit, filled up my bottle with more water, and headed right back out again.

    Kochang was waiting.

    She was taking me to her village for another celebration. I climbed onto the back of her scooter, held onto the back of the seat and off we went into the Friday afternoon traffic towards Penang. 

    This is what I really mean when I say I feel like I live here now.

    These invitations don’t feel like they’re being extended to the crazy American woman who’s passing through. They don’t feel performative. They feel genuine. Yesterday I attended one of the most extraordinary cremations I’ve ever witnessed. A beloved priestess had died, and her family and community celebrated her life with so much joy that I couldn’t stop smiling through the tears.

    Today was another celebration of a life well lived.

    As a death doula, I understand this language.

    Here, death isn’t hidden away. It isn’t whispered about. It’s carried. Sung. Cooked for. Prayed over. Celebrated.

    The belief is that the spirit continues its journey toward another joyful life, and I find that breathtaking.

    Life here feels the same way.

    Wake. Give thanks. Share food. Build stages. Help your neighbors. Ride scooters. Laugh. Families don’t scatter here. They gather. For everything. 

    Mothers. Fathers. Daughters. Sons. Grandparents. Aunties. Uncles. Cousins. Great-grandparents. Everybody. Living together. Growing older together. Showing up for one another every single day.

    It’s noisy. It’s chaotic. It’s absolutely bursting at the seams with love.

    LOVE.

    All caps.

    It reminds me so much of my grandparents’ house in Massachusetts. You never quite knew who was going to be there, but there was always room for one more person at the table. Always another chair to pull over. Always another story being told. Always enough food. Always enough love. 

    Today, sitting beside that pool and later sitting in Kochang’s family compound, I kept asking myself the same question.

    How do I keep this alive when I’m no longer physically here?

    Tomorrow I’ll wake before dawn to help the kids with their festival. 

    Yes. Of course I will.

    Later in the morning, I’m meeting my friend to help with another wedding. Not because I have to. Because I want to. Somewhere in between I’ll sneak into Seniman for espresso, and much later I’ll wander over to Gusti’s for dinner.

    I have this feeling that the biggest thing I’m bringing home isn’t going to fit into my suitcase. It doesn’t have to, though. 

    It’s this slower heartbeat. This softer way of moving through a day. This feeling that maybe home isn’t always a place. Maybe sometimes it’s simply the version of yourself that finally remembers how to arrive and to make certain the cakes are steady. 

    Thanks for coming along. 

  • Hidden Beauty

    I used to think I traveled to see beautiful places.

    Now I think I travel to understand how beautiful places stay beautiful.

    This morning, as I walked to coffee, I noticed that many people on my street were dressed for a funeral.

    I’ve participated in a few funerals here now. They are true celebrations of life, and everyone participates. They are not hushed affairs tucked behind closed doors. Children wander through. Scooters slow down. People smile. Life and death somehow occupy the same street without competing for space.  

    Then I saw the priest.

    He was extraordinary. Like central casting had been handed one simple instruction: Give me a Balinese priest.

    The most beautiful elderly man, with a flowing white beard and long white hair, dressed in robes so impossibly white they seemed to gather the morning light around them. A smile that lit up the entire street and sky and all of our hearts. A beautifully carved wooden cane covered in intricate engravings. I mean…just…wow.

    I didn’t dare take a photograph because it simply did not feel respectful. Later Ring laughed and told me I absolutely could have taken one, but honestly, I was content just to witness him.

    At exactly the same moment, literally twenty feet away, these boys were fixing the electricity.

    Boys pulling electrical wires in Bali

    I have become completely fascinated by the infrastructure here.

    It isn’t polished or hidden underground where nobody has to think about it. It lives right out in the open where everyone can see it. The electrical wires seem to have a relationship with gravity that is…negotiable. They’re tossed high into the trees. The ladder appeared to be assembled from PVC pipe, duct tape, optimism, and accumulated wisdom.  Also, kind of brilliant because it is easily carried from place to place. Sometimes a zip tie seems to be carrying an unreasonable amount of responsibility. 

    Somehow, it all just works. 

    I also know there are moments when it doesn’t work and everyone simply waits. Nobody stomps around demanding answers. Nobody immediately starts looking for someone to blame. We wait. Someone fixes it. The lights flicker back on and machines go whiirrrr. 

    “Yay, electricity!”

    I’ve started wondering if what I’m looking at isn’t actually electrical infrastructure at all.  I think it is actually human infrastructure.  Plain and simple. 

    For weeks now our neighborhood has been building a small road that connects one road to another. I’ve been watching the whole thing unfold one wheelbarrow at a time. First came the digging so the water would drain properly. Then sand. Then glorious rebar, which anyone who knows me understands is practically a love language. Yesterday, between rainstorms, they poured concrete. Today the entire road is covered with plastic sheeting while it cures beneath a brilliant Balinese sun.

    Road construction in Bali neighborhood

    Every day a different group from the neighborhood shows up and every day they all participate together to make this road just a little more road. 

    If Ring is the heart of this family, Bonny may very well be the engine quietly humming underneath it all.

    She designs beautiful clothing. She’s raising children. She’s building an atelier at the front of their compound. And she has her own taro chip business.

    Three flavors.

    Delicious.

    Nakedjen helping with taro chips

    On Monday, after the beach, she asked me to help.

    Within about five minutes I found myself transported back to my early Clyde’s Cookies days because once you’ve spent years helping small businesses grow, your brain starts seeing possibility everywhere.

    Bonny has managed to get these chips to the point where they are quite popular in her village. People ask for them. They’re served at local events. But after helping her on Monday, I couldn’t stop wondering why they weren’t everywhere.

    This afternoon I wandered into one of Ubud’s biggest souvenir markets carrying Bonny’s taro chips and quite innocently asked where I might find more.

    They didn’t carry any. Not Bonny’s, but not any at all. That seemed odd because Taro Chips are actually a snack time favorite here.  Especially among kids.  The local version sold at the Indomart has a silly Monkey on the package that is also, of course, available as a stuffed animal! 

    BONBON TARO CHIPS
    BONBON TARO CHIPS made in Bali, Indonesia

    The manager and several employees after realizing I was serious about my inquiry were soon opening bags, tasting chips, asking questions, photographing the packaging on their phones while I insisted, perhaps a bit enthusiastically, that they call Bonny directly.

    Not next week. Today. Right now.  Get these chips while you can, people.  Before she makes a deal with Indomart! 

    I made them write down her phone number. I made them take photos of the packaging because everyone here does everything on their phones. I explained that these didn’t just belong in the souvenir section. They belonged in the chip aisle. Why would you fill your shelves with Lay’s when you could be supporting a woman who lives twenty minutes away?

    Here’s the thing I want to whisper into today’s full moon magic: If Bonny sells more chips, she doesn’t simply sell more chips. She hires the aunties in the village who are asking for work. One business becomes several women earning an income. One opportunity becomes many.

    That’s infrastructure too.

    The kind you can’t see from Google Earth.  

    I’ve become the Pied Piper of taro chips this week. I’ve handed them to aunties. To children at my coffee shop. To desk managers at resorts. To strangers. I’m fairly certain I’m now conducting an unsolicited international marketing campaign one crispy slice of taro at a time.

    But really…

    How else is something beautiful ever supposed to travel beyond the edge of the village?

    Everything Happens To Everyone

    Earlier today I sat drinking my coffee and the wall on the gallery just across the way had these enormous letters painted across the front.

    EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO EVERYONE.

    I’ve been thinking about that sentence all day.

    Everything does happen to everyone.

    Death. Broken electrical lines. Roads washed out by rain. Businesses trying to grow. Children needing shoes. People looking for work. Joy. Grief. Opportunity. Everything. No, really.  EVERYTHING. 

    The difference, I think, is the infrastructure.

    Not the electrical kind. Or the rebar and steel. 
    The human kind. The people who quietly keep showing up.

    The priest. The boys with the ladder made of PVC and hope. The neighbors carrying buckets of concrete. Bonny. The aunties waiting for work.

    The people who keep beautiful places beautiful.

    I woke up this morning and also booked a flight from Salt Lake City to Jackson, Mississippi. I’ll barely land in Utah, collapse on top of my professor and Clyde and hug both of them fiercely and then I’ll be back on another airplane.

    Different roads. Different people. Different work.

    The details will change. The question won’t.

    Who is quietly holding this place together?

    I’ve started looking for them everywhere.

    The full moon was starting to rise as I walked to get my beet juice this evening and I passed the same boys who had fixed the electrical wires and the aunties I’d stood beside this morning at the funeral. They asked where I was from. 

    “America.”

    They erupted into laughter, dancing in the road, chanting, “O Bam Ma! O Bam Ma!” before proudly pointing to themselves. “He’s ours!”

    I laughed all the way down the road.

    After a day spent thinking about death, infrastructure, and what it means to show up for another human being, it felt like the island had slipped one final gift into my pocket.

    My heart could not help but swell.

  • Catching My Breath in Bali: Embracing True Hospitality

    The Professor said something to me yesterday that I still haven’t been able to shake, we were texting back and forth after I spent the whole day with Ring and his family, and I’d sent him a photo from the backseat of Ring’s car where Ring’s two kids had climbed over the seats to inspect me up close, which honestly felt entirely appropriate — imagine being two or three years old and your dad just casually announces that today you’re bringing home this strange gray-haired American woman with questionable tattoos and an alarming enthusiasm for coffee, and they were completely unfazed by the whole arrangement, didn’t even blink.

    The Professor looked at that photo for about three seconds before he wrote back, “you look different.” Now this is a man who has spent the better part of fifteen years watching my face, he knows every version of me, Festival Jen, Burning Man Jen, Migraine Jen, Grief Jen, the “I’ve had four hours of sleep and somehow we’re still driving with the dogs to Santa Cruz!” Jen — so when he tells me I look different I tend to pay attention. At first I figured he meant happier, or more rested, maybe Bali had finally succeeded where every overpriced moisturizer on earth has failed. Nope. It took me almost a full day to understand what he was actually seeing, which is that I’m breathing. Not metaphorically, not in the inspirational-Instagram-quote way where somebody writes just breathe over a photo of a mountain they’ve never once climbed.  I mean my body has quietly started doing something it stopped doing years ago. I am breathing all the way down into my diaphragm, which is a sentence so absurd I barely believe it myself except my therapist has been trying to convince me of this for years, my friends have been telling me for years, and if I’m being completely honest with you, I don’t really breathe in Utah. 

    That’s maybe the truest sentence I’ve written in a while. I don’t breathe in Utah, I hold my breath there. I hold my breath at the Coffee Garden, which is probably the safest place I’ve ever known — think about how wild that is, Alan and Dieter built this beautiful little sanctuary full of artists and misfits and queer kids and old professors and everybody who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit anywhere else, and even there, some ancient part of my nervous system remained unconvinced we were safe enough to fully exhale.

    Trauma is such an exacting little bitch. It doesn’t just build memories, it builds posture, it rearranges your shoulders, it decides where you’re going to carry your jaw, it teaches your lungs to negotiate with oxygen like there’s a shortage. It whispers don’t get too comfortable, don’t relax completely, stay ready, something is coming — and the infuriating part is that after enough years you stop even noticing you’re doing it, holding your breath just starts to feel like breathing, you adapt, because human beings are spectacular adapters, we can normalize almost anything if you give us enough time. Apparently we can normalize living on tiny little sips of oxygen. Who knew?!  Not me. Not until Bali.

    Every morning here I wake up before the sun, and I genuinely could not tell you where the sun comes up from on this particular corner of the island because islands are wonderfully confusing that way, ocean over there, jungle over there, temples everywhere, my internal compass has basically shrugged and said good luck. I pull on my Converse and my yoga pants and head out before most of Ubud has even opened its eyes, though the birds have not only opened theirs, they’ve apparently called for a full choir practice, there is so much birdsong here it you wonder if you should start learning the tunes. As daylight begins to break through, the women carrying canang sari, those tiny woven offerings made out of palm leaves and flowers and gratitude and intention appear like apparitions and then the sweeping begins — god, the sweeping, I have become completely enchanted by the sweeping. Every single morning somebody is quietly taking care of something, a doorstep, a temple, a sidewalk, a family shrine, and nobody is doing it for applause, nobody’s particularly interested in documenting it, it’s just what you do before the day starts, you prepare your little corner of the world for whoever might pass through it. I keep wondering what America would feel like if we spent less time yelling at each other online and more time sweeping.

    Yesterday Ring picked me up. Actually — that’s not even true. Yesterday Ring and his family made room for me. Those are two completely different sentences. His wife was there, his two beautiful kids were there, and we drove from Ubud to Sanur for the kite festival and an afternoon at the beach, which is only twenty-seven kilometers away and somehow took three glorious, ridiculous, completely unhurried hours, and if you’ve never been to Bali that probably sounds impossible and if you have been here you’re already laughing. The traffic is legendary, scooters flowing around cars like schools of fish, entire families balanced on one bike in a way that, honestly, makes you HOLD YOUR BREATH, temple ceremonies just appearing out of nowhere, trucks stopping, dogs wandering across the road like they own the place, which, honestly, they absolutely do. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by any of it, least of all Ring, he just drove, and we talked, and the kids climbed over the seats to tell me very important things I only understood about half of, though I’m fairly sure I agreed to several imaginary adventures and possibly promised to play the important role of a superhero at some point.

    The thing that really got me wasn’t even the kite festival, though the kite festival was magnificent, giant creatures sailing across an impossibly blue sky while whole families gathered on the beach cheering them on, joyful in that deeply communal way that feels rarer and rarer these days. But that wasn’t the point. The point happened in the car, somewhere between the villages and the rice paddies and the scooters and the little roadside temples draped in black and white cloth, when it hit me that Ring wasn’t giving me a tour, he was giving me his entire Thursday, his family, his kids, six hours of a life that already belonged to people he loves. He wasn’t spending time on me, he was sharing it with me, and there is a difference so enormous I still don’t quite have the language for it. I’ve spent so much of my life being the one who takes care of everybody else that I almost didn’t recognize what was happening — I’ve been the Fluffer, the doula, the organizer, the woman carrying snacks in her backpack because somebody’s inevitably going to need almonds, the one who remembers birthdays and medications and spare phone chargers and where everybody parked the damn car. I know how to be that person, it’s one of my love languages. What I apparently don’t know how to do is be cared for without feeling like I owe somebody an apology for the inconvenience of it.

    This is exactly what Bali keeps insisting on. Sit down. We’ve got you for a while. Drink your espresso. Walk your ridge. Ride with our family. Breathe. We’ll sweep, we’ll make the offerings, we’ll show you where the ocean is, you just be here. Maybe that’s why I look different in that photo, not because Bali changed me but because for the first time in a very long time my nervous system believes someone else is standing watch, and it doesn’t have to, not today, not for these few precious weeks.

    Maybe that’s what hospitality actually is. It’s not luxury, it’s not five-star hotels or infinity pools or welcome drinks with orchids floating on top, it’s someone quietly convincing your body that it’s finally allowed to exhale. This is what we’ve always done for each other at our very best, long before social media, long before airplanes, long before passports and guidebooks and algorithms and all this noise we’ve built around ourselves — we made room. Around a fire. Around a table. In the backseat of a little car driving across Bali with two curious kids and a man named Ring who probably has no idea he just handed a tired American woman something she couldn’t have found in any guidebook on earth.

    He gave her back her breath.  He let her exhale. 

    Now that… that feels like a story worth carrying home.

  • A Day of Hope: 118 Laughs, Tears, and New Citizens

    Today, 118 people put on the word AMERICAN for the first time, on purpose, in a room with vaulted wood beams and white fabric draped across the ceiling like something built for a wedding, not a government ceremony. Light came in sideways through all those big windows. Little American flags in every hand. When it was finally official, the whole room stood up and waved them at once — flags going up in every direction, people crying, people laughing, phones out trying to catch it. I don’t think a single person in that room will forget what that looked like. I know that I certainly will not. It was such a gift.

    From 38 countries:

    Argentina. Bangladesh. Bolivia. Brazil. Canada. Chile. China. Colombia. Dominican Republic. Ecuador. Egypt. El Salvador. France. Guatemala. Honduras. India. Indonesia. Ireland. Italy. South Korea. Marshall Islands. Mexico. Nepal. Netherlands. New Zealand. Nicaragua. Panama. Peru. Philippines. Portugal. Samoa. South Africa. Taiwan. Thailand. Trinidad. Ukraine. Uruguay. Vietnam.


    Thirty-eight countries. One room. One oath.


    In the afterglow, many of them stood up and just talked — about coming as a child and seeing the Wasatch and how important those mountains still feel, about being a Nanny first and then a mother and wanting, knowing, there was a better life here, the international students who praised the higher education they received and then knowing that opportunity resides in America, the years it took to get to this exact folding chair. Then they promised, out loud, to show up now. Vote. Volunteer. Pay attention. Some of them registered to vote before they even left the building.


    I used to teach citizenship classes in a tiny room in Santa Cruz, mostly to farmworkers who picked strawberries and artichokes and brussel sprouts all day and still showed up at night to memorize the preamble. I have never seen determination like that. Today I saw it again, times 118.


    As I walked Clyde this morning, before the ceremony, the New York Times reported that ICE is quietly deporting people right here in Utah, and that immigrants and refugees in this state are too scared to go grocery shopping. Both of these things are real, in the same country, on the same Tuesday. Nobody should be afraid of the cereal aisle.


    America was never one face, one accent, one flag on one lawn. Almost none of us can point at a map and say right here, forever. We’re all from somewhere. Today 118 people made it official, in public, on purpose, and I got to stand in the room and love every single one of them.


    Thank you, Deborah Fiona Eyer, for the invite. As always, you know how to make the shape of my heart change.


    Out in the parking lot after, I passed a woman still holding her certificate. She looked overwhelmed, in the good way. I stopped and said, “I’m so proud of you. Thank you for choosing America.” And she came apart, right there. So I hugged her. Hard. The kind that doesn’t let go first.


    Love is a verb. Today it looked like a parking lot hug and a hundred and eighteen little flags going up at once. I’m so glad I could participate. 💜

  • The Maps Are Written Across Our Hearts

    Every year when June rolls into July, some part of my nervous system starts looking for Interstate exits, and I do not mean this metaphorically, although perhaps I do because the older I become the more difficult it is to separate the actual road from the one that has been unspooling inside me since 1986, that long ribbon of asphalt and possibility and bad coffee and improbable miracles and the certainty that somewhere beyond the next exit ramp there would be music, or friends, or a circus, or a field, or a dog, or a broken transmission, or Jerry Garcia himself sitting quietly at the center of the whole strange wheel asking us all, quite gently, just how much freedom remained in America and whether we intended to use it.

    July has always felt less like a month and more like a tuning fork struck somewhere deep inside the rib cage, because the body remembers before the brain does, and somewhere around the end of June my internal compass begins spinning wildly, looking for truck stops and ticket stubs and glove compartments full of maps that no longer exist, wondering where the circus is setting up this year, where the bands will bandaloop, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, whether there is coffee at the next exit, whether there is pie, whether there is a field nearby where tired travellers can throw down sleeping bags and look up at the stars and ask one another the really important questions, such as where did the dog go and who has jumper cables and is there an extra ticket and when exactly did we all decide that strangers were dangerous.

    The Grateful Dead taught me one version of America.

    The parking lot was an experiment, a temporary city appearing overnight on asphalt and empty grassy fields and grilled cheese and optimism, a place where money occasionally mattered and occasionally disappeared altogether, where miracle tickets materialized from thin air and somebody always seemed to have an extra sandwich or an extra blanket or room in the van, where your transmission could fall out in Indiana and a garage owner would stay awake all night teaching you how to repair your own car while his wife fed you dinner and you slept in a cornfield beside the garage listening to the stalks whisper like the Pacific Ocean, and where eventually you discovered that gifts do not come with strings attached, that miracles are often folded inside free tickets, that somebody stops when you are broken down, that somebody shares what little they have, that somebody teaches you how to repair the engine instead of repairing it for you, and that no matter where you go, there you are.

    The Oregon Country Fair taught me another version. Same song, perhaps, but a very different verse.

    You entered through the gates and somebody hugged you and stamped a peach on your arm and said, in one way or another, welcome home, and eventually I tattooed that peach onto my own skin because some religions require baptism and some require communion and some simply place a peach upon your arm and send you wandering through the trees with music and art and children and ice cream and impossible ideas about how human beings might live together if they chose kindness over commerce and curiosity over fear, and somewhere beneath those magnificent fir trees you begin to understand that home is not a place at all but a practice, something we make for one another, something we carry, something we offer.

    In the between times, I found another temporary city in the desert, and what it taught me was not terribly different from the parking lot or the Fair. Build the city yourselves. Bring what you need. Share what you have. Somebody always runs out of water. Somebody always loses their camp. Somebody always breaks down. Somebody always sits beside somebody else beneath impossible stars on what feels like a truly impossible precarious piece of art and says, “I’ve got coffee. Tell me what happened.”

    The band plays its final song. The parking lot empties. The Fair does a final sweep. Jerry dies. The dust doesn’t stay. The map disintegrates in the glove compartment.

    This is what I have been talking about all along.

    The maps.

    Not the maps on our phones. Not the blue dot telling us exactly where we are every moment of every day. I mean the old maps. The Rand McNallys folded into impossible shapes and stuffed into glove compartments until the creases finally split. The state lines and county lines and interstates and back roads and roads that simply ended in gravel and dust and faith.

    My maps.

    The weathered notebook that always traveled beside me, filled with health food stores and diners willing to make grilled cheese after ten o’clock and pay phones that still worked and the woman in Eugene with the extra couch and the basement in Ohio that somehow held all of us and the garage in Indiana and the kitchens where we could always make more sandwiches and fill our coolers with ice and beverages before heading back out onto the road.

    The attic in Pittsburgh where a gaggle of filthy hippies once landed and laughed until morning and where years later, after the roads had bent and folded and delivered me back there carrying an entirely different version of myself, somebody I loved quietly helped put me back together again.

    Those were my maps. Not red states. Not blue states. Not electoral maps. My maps are made of people. The people who stopped. The people who stayed. The people who answered the phone. The people who wrote their numbers on the back of a ticket stub. The people who said, “Call me if you need anything.” The people who said, “If you’re ever passing through.”

    I know this is why our Americas all look different.

    Mine looks like parking lots and Oregon forests and dusty roads and kitchens full of soup and coffee and dogs and people making sandwiches.

    Yours may look like a fishing dock off the coast of Maine. A church basement hosting an NA meeting somewhere in the Carolinas. Your grandmother’s porch with a view. A diner serving pie all night at Exit 141. A station wagon headed west. Or East. Or to catch a baseball game in an endless summer of baseball games. Pick-up trucks to pick up a stray dogs because they need a place to call home.

    The shape of our America is the shape of our own hearts.

    The maps are written there.

    The lines still run from mine to yours and from yours to somebody else and from theirs to a frightened stranger standing beside a highway wondering if anybody will stop.

    I really believe that is what the country has always been.

    Not the lines we draw between ourselves.

    The names we write beside them.

    So, here we are. All of us together inside the largest and strangest experiment of them all.

    America.

    Somewhere, probably even right now, somebody is sitting beside a dark highway with their hazard lights flashing. Somebody is lost. Somebody is afraid. Somebody is wondering if anyone will stop. And somewhere else, perhaps only a mile away, perhaps at the next Interstate exit, perhaps sitting at a kitchen table drinking coffee, perhaps reading this very thing by the light from a cellphone at 2:13 in the morning somewhere outside Winnemucca somebody is already reaching for their keys.

    We all have our roads. We all have our lines. We all have our maps.
    And we all have our exits.

    This is another thing the road taught me. You never really know which exit is yours. You pass hundreds of them. Thousands. Rest areas and truck stops and little towns with one blinking light and pie shops and motels and places you promise yourself you’ll visit someday, and then one day you find yourself taking an exit you never expected because your transmission gave out or your heart broke or somebody got sick or somebody died or somebody called and said, “Can you come?”

    We ride with our hands on the wheel and our hearts beating in our chests and we simply do not know. We do not know if the next exit is ours, or the one after that, or the one two thousand miles down the road. That uncertainty is not the frightening thing. It is the reason for everything.

    I do not know where my exit is, and you do not know where yours is, and America herself does not know where hers is, the whole point is simply how we choose to travel. Choose to show up.

    We do stop. We share our sandwiches. We find the lost dog. We answer the phone. We write our numbers in the margins and on the backs of ticket stubs. We make coffee. We put our hands over our own hearts. More importantly, we put our hands on the hearts of others and ask, “Still beating?”

    Babump.

    Babump.

    Still there.

    This? This is what America needs from us right now. Not spectators. Not passengers. Not people standing beside the road arguing over the map while the engine overheats.

    AMERICA is sitting there herself with her hazard lights flashing and one hand pressed against her chest, and perhaps what she is asking is exactly what every frightened traveler has always asked somewhere beside a dark highway in the middle of the night.

    Is anybody coming?

    Yes. We are. Because this is our country. This is our map. This is our heart.

    The lines still run from my heart to yours and from yours to someone else’s and from theirs to a stranger sitting beside a road somewhere wondering whether anybody will stop.

    And someday, though none of us knows when, we will each take our own exit. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe thirty years from now. Maybe somewhere we never expected. Maybe somewhere we’ve been driving toward all along.

    So while we’re here — while the engine is still running and the coffee is still warm and the maps are still folded in the glove box and the names are still written in the margins and the kitchen lights are still burning and the hearts are still beating — we might as well show up.

    We might as well keep each other breathing.

    That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

    America needs all of us right now. Every last one. And if you call yourself an American — if you put your hand on your heart and mean it — then that means you.

    So pull over. 💜

  • Utah Is on Fire and the Fireworks Are in Aisle Nine

    I have just come home to Salt Lake City and Utah is on fire, and I do not mean this poetically, although honestly, Utah does enjoy making everything biblical and dramatic and vaguely Old Testament in July, so here we are, once again, surrounded by dry grass, hot wind, evacuation alerts, smoke maps, firefighters working themselves into ash-covered saints, dogs hiding under beds, veterans and refugees and babies and every person with a nervous system bracing for the nightly neighbourhood reenactment of “freedom,” while fireworks are stacked for sale in the aisles of the grocery store as if this is perfectly normal, as if this is not the sort of cognitive dissonance that should make all of us stop next to the ice machine and the rotisserie chickens and the family-size tortilla chips and say, wait, hold on, are we really doing this right now?

    Before anyone starts clutching their sparklers and typing with their thumbs full of liberty, I know what month it is, I know where I live, I know Utah in July is not so much a month as a prolonged ignition ceremony with snack breaks, I know we begin with the 4th of July and then we just keep right on going until the 24th when the pioneers allegedly rolled into this valley, wiped the dust out of their eyes, looked around at all this dry, flammable majesty and said, “This is the place,” which apparently, generations later, has come to mean this is the place where we spend most of July scaring the bejezzus out of every dog, every sweet person with PTSD, every baby trying to sleep, every elder trying to remember what quiet feels like, and every canyon full of sweetgrass waiting for one yahoo with a lighter and a pocketful of constitutional fireworks to become the plot twist nobody needed.

    I am not anti-fire.

    Please.

    Let us not be ridiculous.

    I am a Burner, for fuck’s sake, a woman who has spent a good portion of her adult life hauling water and snacks and weird forms of devotion across a dry lake bed where people build impossible things out of dust and scaffolding and crazy grit and love, then set them on fire under the supervision of people who understand wind, perimeter, safety, ritual, consequence, and the very important difference between sacred flame and Chad from down the street launching aerials into a neighborhood full of juniper while declaring himself a patriot.

    I love fire.

    I love the bloom of fireworks in a night sky when they are handled by professionals who know what they are doing and have permits and water trucks and actual plans that do not begin with “hold my beer” and end with the county sheriff asking everyone to evacuate.

    I love spectacle.

    I love celebration.

    I love light.

    I love the crack and shimmer and gasp of it, the moment when a whole crowd looks up together and forgets for three seconds how divided and tired and mean we have all become.

    What I do not love is carelessness dressed up as tradition.

    What I do not love is selling explosives in grocery store aisles while Utah is literally burning in every direction, while we are watching acres disappear, while animals are running, while people are packing medication and photographs and dog food into cars just in case, while firefighters are out there trying to convince the flames not to become weather, while smoke sits in the valley like an unwanted relative who refuses to leave and makes everyone’s lungs feel personally insulted.

    I do not love the part where we ask for help with one hand and sell the problem with the other.

    FEMA has authorized federal funds to help fight the Iron Fire, which is a sentence I find almost darkly comic in this particular American moment, since depending on which political carnival ride you happen to be strapped into, FEMA is either a vital public agency or a government bogeyman hiding under the bed with your tax dollars, but apparently when the hills are on fire we all remember very quickly that mutual aid is not communism, it is what keeps the flames from eating the next ridge.

    And still, here we are, Utah, with the fires burning and the air turning into a throat lozenge from hell, selling fireworks next to the groceries, smiling brightly through the smoke, acting as if we can call something a national emergency and then we spin around and hand out spark boxes with patriotic branding and a coupon for more for the arrival of all those pioneers.

    I do not think we get to have it both ways.

    I really don’t.

    I do not think we get to say we love this place, we love these mountains, we love these canyons, we love this big dry weird holy bowl of a valley, we love our families, we love our neighbors, we love our firefighters, we love our dogs, we love our veterans, we love our freedom, we love our pioneers, we love our heritage, we love our God, we love our country, and then spend the hottest, driest, most flammable weeks of the year treating the entire state as if it is a disposable party favour wrapped in red, white, and boom.

    I know fireworks are legal.

    So are many dumb things.

    Legal is not the same as wise.

    Legal is not the same as kind.

    Legal is not the same as neighbourly.

    Legal is not the same as, perhaps we should not tempt the desert into becoming a funeral pyre just so Kyle can light the “Mega Patriot Screaming Eagle Thunder Dragon 5000” in the cul-de-sac while everyone’s Labrador trembles behind the washing machine.

    This is the part where someone will tell me I am trying to ruin everyone’s fun, which is hilarious, truly, since I am a woman who believes very deeply in fun, possibly too deeply, a woman who has built entire temporary civilizations around coffee, glitter, grilled cheese, electrolytes, radical hospitality, art, dust, nakedness, body joy, and the spiritual necessity of occasionally doing something weird under the stars, but I also believe fun has to survive contact with the actual world, and the actual world right now is hot and dry and on fire and full of living creatures who did not volunteer to become collateral damage in Utah’s annual month-long pyrotechnic identity crisis.

    I am asking for restraint.

    Not forever.

    Not joylessness.

    Not a statewide ban on wonder.

    Just the tiniest little teaspoon of common sense stirred into the Pioneer Day punch bowl.

    Maybe this year, while the fire crews are out there doing the kind of work most of us cannot even imagine, while families are refreshing containment maps, while the air smells wrong, while the mountains stand there looking dry and tired and entirely too ready to go up if we breathe on them funny, maybe we could decide that freedom also includes the freedom not to light shit on fire.

    Maybe we could decide that being a good neighbour matters more than making the sky explode from your driveway.

    Maybe we could decide that dogs and babies and veterans and refugees and exhausted people and traumatized people and firefighters and wildlife and lungs and canyons and whole communities deserve one July where we do not confuse noise with patriotism and sparks with devotion.

    Maybe we could put the fireworks back on the shelf and go eat pie.

    Maybe we could stand outside and look at the mountains, while we still have mountains to look at, and remember that they are already dramatic enough.

    Maybe we could wave a flag without setting the hillside on fire.

    Maybe we could let July be July without turning every night into a tiny war.

    Maybe we could be brave enough, just this once, to celebrate by not making anything worse.

    I know.

    Radical.

    Possibly un-Utahn.

    Someone alert the Governor.

    But here I am, home again, looking at fireworks for sale in the grocery store while the state burns around us, and all I can think is that irony has finally put on boots, walked into the aisle, picked up a box of TNT Pop-Its, and asked all of us whether we have completely lost the plot.

    And honestly?

    I think the answer might be yes.

    But we could still choose differently.

    We could still choose the mountains.

    We could still choose the dogs.

    We could still choose the firefighters.

    We could still choose the air.

    We could still choose not to be the spark.

    Wouldn’t that be something?

  • PING. Be Early to the Right Thing

    Friday is the new moon, which has always felt to me like the sky turning out its pockets and turning off the lights so we can finally tell the truth.

    So here is mine, loud and clear.

    I have done the polite part. I have done the boots-on-the-ground, rustling-the-bushes, digging-under-the-dirt, logical-rock-turning part. I’ve made the calls. I’ve sent the “just checking in” notes. I have played the game by the usual rules with a bright mouth and a hopeful heart.

    And still, what I am looking for hasn’t fully stepped out of the shadows. So now, I’m doing this the Nakedjen way.

    Pssst.

    If you have ever said to me, “I wish I could do something with you, Nakedjen,” this is me looking you dead in the eye and saying: The gate is open. Walk through it.

    Not “someday.” Not “let’s grab coffee.”
    This.

    The film is PING.

    It’s a story about ambition, identity, and the high-voltage cost of being “exceptional” in a world that wants to eat you for breakfast. It’s smart, it’s dangerous, and it’s painfully relevant. We have an extraordinary team, a killer script, and a direct line to Sundance. This isn’t a “maybe.” This is a machine that is already humming.

    What we need now is the investment to bring it home.

    I am passing the hat. I know it’s unconventional. But when have I ever been the patron saint of conventional?

    I am the woman who gets naked and rides escalators because she can. I am the woman who will stand on the back of a moving horse and jump through fire to make a point. I am the woman in custom Doc Martens, stomping a path toward the things that matter while everyone else is looking for a paved road.

    I know how to make magic out of dust. I’ve done it a thousand times. I know how to turn a bare patch of ground into a republic of joy. I know how to turn strangers into a family and a good idea into the kind of night you remember for twenty years.

    PING is alive. It has a pulse. And it needs extraordinary hearts to match it.

    If you have ever wanted to play with me, build with me, get gloriously dirty with me, or bet on something that actually has a soul—Come on then.

    Be early to the right thing.

    Do not watch this from the sidewalk. Do not wait to hear about it later and wish you’d stepped inside the tent while the lights were still warming up.

    Come to Utah in June. Come be part of the strange and beautiful machinery. Help make the kind of art that tells the truth with its lipstick smeared and its boots still dusty.

    Invest. Introduce me. Raise your hand. Tell your friend with the secret appetite for art. Tell the person who is tired of the boring and the safe.

    Do something wild.

    This is the whisper before the drums. The match struck in the dark. The stomp of the boot that says we are here.

    Come make some movie magic with me.

    I’ll bring the snacks.
    There may be beets.
    You do not have to eat them.

    Let’s make some magic together while we still can. xo

    #PINGfilm #newmoonmanifesting #indiefilm #utahfilm #nakedjen #sundancebound #customdocs #makemagic

  • POOF!

    I am known, in some circles, as a fairy.
    The Beet Fairy.

    For years, Vive supplied the cold-pressed beet juice that quite literally helped keep me on this planet. Not as a luxury. Not as a lifestyle accessory. As medicine. As ritual. As one of those stitched-in things your body comes to trust before your mind has even caught up.

    This morning I was waiting for my juice delivery.

    Then it didn’t come.

    So I did what so many of us do now when something beloved suddenly slips sideways. I went looking for the answer myself. No text. No email. No little human tap on the shoulder. Just absence. A missing delivery. Then the quiet discovery that after nearly thirteen years, Vive Juicery had closed.

    That was how I found out.

    No goodbye. No handoff. No soft landing. Just poof.

    Black Lab sitting on a stool in a messy kitchen covered with beet juice bottles and vegetable scraps.
    A black lab sits calmly amidst the delightful chaos of a kitchen covered in beet juice and vegetable scraps.

    Maybe that is why it hit the bruise so directly. I am apparently still one giant exposed nerve ending over being let go from the acupuncture clinic in much the same fashion. Another Irish Goodbye. Another community I was inside of until suddenly I wasn’t. Another place where I did not get to say goodbye. Another thread cut so cleanly it somehow bled more.

    I have not recovered from that.
    Not really.
    Maybe not at all.

    I miss helping.

    I miss it with a force that startles me. I miss it in the marrow. I miss it like phantom limb pain. I miss the direct, human, ordinary holiness of being useful to another person in real time.

    Yes, I still help. I help all over the damn place. I help in line at Coffee Garden. Let me sort out the pastry case with you. Tell me what kinds of sweets you usually love. Let’s find what’s just right.

    I help at the Apple counter at Costco, explaining to a stranger that the employee doing spreadsheets, shipping, data sheets, all of that, probably does not need the spaceship. The graphics or web person absolutely does. Get the more robust machine. Get the memory. Get the AppleCare. It is a business expense anyway, right?

    I help at Warby Parker like it is my god damned job, choosing frames for a woman I have never met as though her future face is somehow my responsibility.

    I keep doing this. Everywhere. Like some feral customer service department roaming the earth in search of purpose.

    I miss people.
    I miss service.
    I miss usefulness.
    I miss the tiny spark that passes between two people when one says, “Can I help?” and the other one exhales, relieved, because the answer is yes.

    I miss the community of helping.
    I miss the rhythm of it.
    I miss the feeling that my care had somewhere to go.

    Yes, I gather signatures. Yes, I show up. Yes, I speak up for affordable housing, for democracy, for the vulnerable, against cruelty, against ICE, for all the jagged broken-hearted things that matter. I do all of that.

    This is different.

    This is the grief of not getting to be of use in the ordinary, intimate, daily ways that once shaped my life. The grief of no longer being inside the circle of care. The grief of being built to help, only to find yourself standing there with your hands still full of help, nowhere to set it down.

    So when eight little bottles of juice did not appear on my porch this morning, it was not just a delivery glitch. It was one more vanishing. One more touchstone gone quiet. One more place where continuity dissolved without a goodbye.

    That sounds dramatic, maybe. Grieving a juice company. Fine. Call me dramatic. I am not really grieving juice. I am grieving what happens when the small, reliable rituals that hold a person together simply stop speaking. I am grieving the shock of finding out that something woven into the fabric of your life has quietly slipped out of the loom. I am grieving the way endings arrive now with no witness, no handoff, no human warmth.

    This is what I keep thinking about:

    We are living in an Irish Goodbye economy.

    Businesses vanish.
    Communities vanish.
    Jobs vanish.
    People vanish.

    You are in relationship, however imperfectly, until suddenly you are not. You are of use until suddenly you are outside the door. You are waiting for the thing that has reliably arrived, until it doesn’t. Then you are left to piece together the ending by yourself like some emotional raccoon rooting around in the dark for context.

    I understand all the arguments. Protect your peace. Preserve your energy. No one owes everyone every explanation. I know. I really do. I understand that people are tired, burned out, underwater, overextended, one hard conversation away from becoming a puddle in public.

    Still.

    At what cost?

    At what cost do we keep disappearing from one another like this?

    Trust is not built in grand gestures. Trust is built in continuity. In small acknowledgments. In the dignity of a heads-up. In the simple human instinct to say: hey, this is ending. Thank you. You mattered here.

    When that does not happen, something erodes.

    Not just loyalty.
    Not just goodwill.
    Something softer. More essential.

    The belief that we are actually in this together.

    That may be why so many of us feel so untethered right now. Yes, the world is on fire. Yes, democracy feels like a folding table in a windstorm. Yes, we are out here gathering signatures, speaking up, protesting, trying to keep one another fed, sheltered, seen.

    Underneath all of that, another grief hums.

    The grief of disappearing from one another.
    The grief of institutions, workplaces, businesses, communities, all using the language of care or family or service or belonging right up until the moment they evaporate.
    The grief of no goodbye.
    The grief of no witness.
    The grief of being left holding love with nowhere to place it.

    Maybe that is why I keep helping strangers in random retail environments like a woman possessed. Maybe I am trying to stitch myself back into the human fabric one tiny interaction at a time. Maybe I am trying to prove that service still exists. That tenderness still exists. That someone can still look another person in the eye, say, “I’ve got you,” and mean it.

    I wanted my juice this morning.
    Yes.
    More than that, I wanted continuity.
    I wanted the medicine to keep medicining.
    I wanted one small beloved thing to arrive exactly as expected.
    I wanted not to lose one more thing.

    Instead, I got another lesson in impermanence. Another reminder that the world can change shape while you are standing in your Uggs on the porch.

    Thank you, Vive, for the years you nourished me.
    Thank you for the medicine when it was medicine.
    I mean that.

    This hurt.

    Deeply. Weirdly. More than I would like to admit.
    Yet not weird at all, really.

    Sometimes eight missing juice bottles are not eight missing juice bottles.

    Sometimes they are every goodbye you did not get.
    Every room that went dark without warning.
    Every place you poured your care that disappeared before you could say:

    I was here.
    I loved this.
    This mattered to me.