A Middling Winter

Hello from relatively temperate Budapest. This dispatch includes some winter thoughts, an update about the documentary, and the launch of a new and meaningless audio series.

I have mixed feelings about mild winters, but winter means something different to people in different snow-yielding regions. Winter in the Midwest means gray. Snow is snow, and snow is annoying after a while, but the gray is what really gets to you. Winter in New York means a mishmash of uncomfortable weather that makes it very difficult to plan your attire for the day in a way that readies you for any environment you are likely to encounter. Rocky Mountain winter is fanciful, fun, plenty of sunshine, and what-are-you-complaining-about ruggedness. Budapest winter is a tease, ever-lingering on the snow threshold, rain, mist, an occasional flurry. You can see winter’s charms from here, but only in your imagination.

Here are a few photos, with commentary:

I've been going to the gym since January 2nd, and I thought myself very rugged to make the two-mile roundtrip trek on foot, at a light jog, rucking my gym bag, even when the mercury fell a few degrees below zero. A real Bear Grylls type. Along the way, I passed a public sports field where a couple of teams were engaged in soccer practice:

And they were just wee little kids, seven or eight years old, going for it. Mad props, Kids, for showing me I'm not so badass after all. We did get one good day of snow, and it was just delightful. The melt came swiftly, but it was lovely while it lasted. I took these from my window, and I like the effect the window screen has on the photos.

On another occasion recently, I took a stroll across the Árpád bridge and snapped this photo of the Danube. There's something particularly wintery about the scene, the way the clouds hover and throw the light of the Parliament back onto the surface of the river. The bony trees. Riverboats gone, hiding in dry dock.

And perhaps most lovely is this effect that the subway window reflection has on my pate. I would not count my visage from the eyebrows up among my most favored features (I recounted to my sister recently how I noticed on Zoom calls that if I pitch my head a certain way, the shape goes from dome to cone), so I didn't really need this:

Oh well.

That reminds me of a fun little fact about Bullet. Like me, his common name is a nickname that he was gifted as a newborn. His head was misshapen from the rigors of The Big Exit/Entrance, and his father said it looked like a torpedo. His mother objected. He was too small to be compared to a torpedo–he was more like a bullet–and the name stuck.

First Production Trip for Bullet

I'm off to New York and D.C. this week to work on the film. I'll film with a few of Bullet's family members and meet some of his friends from his decade in New York City in the 90s, which was just before his exodus to Budapest. Notes to follow on that.

(I also put up a page on Facebook for you dinosaurs and nationalists still using that platform.)

An Audio Series

2025 is the year of shipping and sharing. Getting work into the world. Although I have a few more substantial things in the works, I'd like to make an understated announcement about an audio series that I cannot imagine anyone would want to listen to.

As of today, I've recorded 42 entries, which could best be described as a mundane journal that begins as a window on the expat experience but then meanders through other nonsense.

I started it in 2023, but then life happened, and I stopped. A year later, I went back to listen to those first recordings, and I realized maybe I should have kept going with it. Who cares what comes of it? It's all raw material for my future biographers. (There will be competing publications, both unauthorized and wildly more popular than anything I prehumously produced.)

Truth be told, I do it for myself to remember the little things that nostalgia and selective memory tend to gloss over. But then I discovered that the audio journal fed my nostalgia—in a bad way, in a good way. Hell, I don't know, and I don't care.

The first 12 episodes are up, and I will roll out a few new ones weekly. No music (for now) and minimal editing. Just me yammering on, making smoothies, cooking, going for walks, bellyaching, self-deprecating, and just blah, blah, blah.

It's also on Spotify if that's your jam:

That's all for now. Love you, mean it.