The Quran
A birthday gift from a friend — and the first religious text I’ve ever sat down with. Completely out of my ordinary, which is exactly why I’m reading it slowly and properly. The best gifts reroute you a little.
Slipped under your door
A birthday gift from a friend — and the first religious text I’ve ever sat down with. Completely out of my ordinary, which is exactly why I’m reading it slowly and properly. The best gifts reroute you a little.
Pure nostalgia, thoroughly enjoyed. A show about a crew keeping the impossible arranged around their guy, daily — no idea why that resonates.
Smoke and patience on the weekends. But the current house special: baked pears with honey, cinnamon, and mascarpone, paired with a Croatian dessert wine. It’s the kind of dish that ends conversations mid-sentence.
Alexander runs 66 Greene, a SoHo storefront that operates as equal parts shop, listening room, and magazine — and the playlist under the same name is basically its soundtrack: a thousand tracks deep, Alexander’s own productions with HAWA, Ghostface Killah, and Rapsody threaded straight into Miles Davis and old Brazilian samba like there’s no difference between them. Put it on and the apartment starts behaving like a hotel bar.
Abstaining from alcohol at the moment — dry by choice, fast by consequence. Every glass not poured is going straight into the legs. See below for where it’s all going.
The bike is the current obsession, and the obsession has a number: the all-time bests — 126.9 miles and 8,642 ft of climbing in a single day — were set in another season, and the entire point of this one is to take them back. The comeback keeps clearing benchmarks: a 119.6-mile solo in March, Mt. Hamilton in May, 82 segment PRs on the 21st, and this week the one that mattered most — Hawk Hill in 8:41, the first sub-9 of the comeback. The ride’s own title says it best: “Sub-9 Hawk PR Attempt (success).”
source: the Strava ledger, all six years of it · the full campaign is posted in the Saddle, ground floor
Two maps are open on my desk lately: Hong Kong and Paris. Not as escapes but as where my next chapter may be. The trade I’m in is practiced at its highest levels in a handful of cities, and I intend to know them from the inside.
I’ve also been reading my own story backwards. Trying to reverse-engineer how I actually got to where I am. What did it truly take, decision by decision? Because whatever that recipe was, I want it written down, so that five years from now I can serve it again, bigger.
This city runs on hustle, and hustle makes acquaintances the way the sea makes foam. I’m after the deeper water. Fewer, truer.
At work, I’m studying my leaders. Finding and admiring the ones who have the traits and attributes I wish to possess. Humility has been my biggest ally. It’s like a trade skill, because it is. Talk less. Listen more. Watch the people worth becoming, and take notes the way I did in old hotel lobbies. The best leaders I know make everyone else feel like the main character. That’s the desk I’m working toward.
A living page. Entries rotate as the obsessions do — which is to say, often.