In the time since that first bike trip, I’ve been up to some stuff.

  • Finally got my butt to Europe, and spent two summers traveling the continent extensively [one highlight: my tour around Scandinavia—half of which I spent chasing down my lost passport—where I booked shoots, sherpa-ed camera equipment barefoot down mountains in Lapland, and was a sneaky stowaway on a cruise ship, among other things]

  • Did pyrotechnics installations and other wacky constructed nonsense for regional burns on three new continents.

  • Made my modeling debuts around Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, and the Caribbean.

  • Ran out of cash in Cuba with my sister, prepared ourselves to squat in some bushes [since couchsurfing with locals is illegal in Cuba and could implicate local host families] and dumpster dive, then somehow wound up in an Amanda Palmer music video and learning backgammon on Hugh Howey’s catamaran.

  • Collected high-alpine air and soil samples atop mountains near Yellowstone about which no hiking/climbing beta is published because they’re generally too treacherous for the general casual-backpacker public.

  • Unearthed a feverish passion for martial arts, and have trained intensively under a Shaolin master in Manchuria [on three separate trips and counting], under Nak Muays in Thailand [where I had my first fight in 2019], and under female wrestlers in London.

  • Developed a working level of Mandarin [though, with about 600 characters under my belt, literacy still eludes me…]

  • Accidentally helped inspire my favorite editor at Vice to quit his job in order to pursue his dreams. Then bombed a screen test at their Brooklyn office because I didn’t know how to extemporize on the spot about how I thought the US-North Korea Summit would turn out. Then was featured on the front page of the NY Daily News wearing a taco-like costume in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which I hadn’t known about [let alone known I’d be participating in] until the night before.

  • Endured some of the most difficult personal trials of my life—even a few years later, those are stories not yet ripe for the telling.

…and so on.

That said, hardly a week goes by where I don’t think about my bike tour, which was easily one of the most identity-whittling endeavors of my life, for better and for…well, better [if one takes the agathist view].

I knew I needed to do another one. I mean, shit, I already went through the trouble of getting a touring bike and all the requisite gear.

Y’all. The time has come. Summer 2021.

Some projects are in order, because I seem to enjoy taking challenges and then adding additional layers of complication and challenge to them. “Projects” may just mean a blog and concurrent photo shoots…or it may mean something different, something bigger. Watch this space.