The hotel room I secured for myself twelve months in advance sits a short walk away from Trinity College and on the south side of St. Stephen’s Green, a Dublin park named for both a medieval, 13th century church and a leper hospital. The Georgian public garden, dotted with greenery and squat little benches, is nestled close to the center of the capital city.
I couldn’t see St. Stephen’s Green from my lodgings, though. My aft-facing hotel room’s windows instead gave me a view of the grounds of Museum of Literature Ireland, or MoLI, for short; a nod to a main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguably the modernist’s most famous novel. I forget if there were tendrils of vines climbing the walls of the museum like spindly fingers, but if there weren’t, there should’ve been.
If you’re ever able to visit MoLI in person, I’d very much recommend the experience. When you go, you should keep your eye out for the ‘No. 1 copy’ of Ulysses, and for the first paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I preferred the latter literary artifact because of its cover illustration: a bat-bewinged ghoul hanging upside-down, hovering against a castle turret, creeping his way towards unseen prey cowering below.
I noted the creature’s log-width calves and gnarled, enormous feet, toes spread wide enough to pinch a cigarette between the appendages. I imagined Dracula ripping toe cigs.
While it’s my understanding that many people wince at the concept, traveling alone is my preferred modus operandi. I like to slip like silk, unseen, through any gaps I can find, occupying an unsteady kind of translucency.
What else about Dublin? I did a fair bit of shopping for myself. At the department store Brown Thomas, I bought a wallet and a black sweater dress, and at an aptly named storefront called The Sweater Shop, I picked out knitted presents for my friends.
I suited up in a nondescript raincoat, prepared to move as a pair of eyes through the city. I resumed corporeal form to speak to waiters while I sat at the bar at Etto, or at a table to myself at Delahunt.
I exchanged a few words with locals waving at New York City through the Dublin Portal. I jumped up and down with the massive, jubilant crowd at the second night of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tenure at Aviva Stadium. What else could I have done that summer but follow my favorite insane woman across the globe?
For the first time in six years, I had no immediate deadlines, no obligations; there was no one to impress, at least professionally speaking. In the mirror, back at my hotel, I felt intangible. I materialized once again in the photos of myself I sent to my then boyfriend. We made sure to keep in touch regularly when we were apart, but we weren’t too needy about it. The brevity of our dispatches only had the effect of enhancing their earnestness, somehow.
Traveling alone, just for pleasure, is a luxury that explicitly requires dissociation and denial to execute successfully.
On my last night in town, I ordered N.A. Guinness at the Cobblestone pub and wedged myself onto a sweaty stool. A guitar-fiddle medley and a boisterously drunk troubadour wailed their hardest from the corner. The NA Guinness was, for the record, one of the saddest beverages I’ve ever sucked down, but the atmosphere made up for the mouthfeel.
A Dublin resident and online acquaintance who’d once plucked an Opening Ceremony dress from her collection and mailed it to me gratis spotted my Instagram stories and decided to take care of me. This turn of events was jarring, because I had very much banked on remaining inaccessible to almost everyone else, if not entirely invisible: I was posting, after all.
I learned my new friend Susie was a Joycean scholar and a benefactor well-known to the local scene who summers next to the Irish Sea with her cute artist husband. She peppered me with restaurant recommendations and I thanked her for her generosity. Why didn’t I catch a train and visit her in-person? I finally took her up on it.
Her home is nestled, Russian doll style, within one of several stone fortresses that sit scattered along the coast. The flat-roofed structures, designed to house 20-man garrisons and to bear the weight of formidable instruments of combat, are remnants of the Napoleonic War-era British Empire.
Joyce himself holed up in one of them for six days and nights in 1904, probably because he wanted to finish something for his Substack.
Susie and her husband welcomed me, a total stranger, and insisted on driving me to the shore so I could swim. She accompanied me and watched from a rocky outcropping while I splashed around in the water, contented and freezing and thoroughly abashed; I knew throughout the excursion that I’d eventually fall short in adequately expressing my thanks.
I spent two years on staff as The Daily Beast’s culture reporter before taking a buyout last summer alongside many of my colleagues. Before that, I completed a four-year tenure reporting on entertainment and the arts for Observer. I’ve logged many, many bylines over the years on all manner of topics: Kanye West, Victoria’s Secret, Peter Thiel, mega-rich art collectors, celebrity deaths, celebrity divorces, the Whitney’s annual art gala, Normal People, TikTok imposters, etc. etc.
This year, I’ve done a couple of freelance pieces with the New York Times Magazine and The Guardian that I’m pleased with. I’ve written a good chunk of a longform project and a flurry of pitches and made some headway with job interviews. It’s been a languid time, shot through with anxiety. I have no idea what I’ll be doing one year from now. Fabulous!
Earlier this year, feminist punk giants Tamar-kali and Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, caught wind of the music I wrote (lyrics and vocal melodies) with my ex-bandmates.
Tamar-kali and Hanna asked me to perform a few cover songs at a Lincoln Center mixtape showcase in April. I still have no idea how I even got so lucky as to be plucked from the ether and chosen to perform alongside artists like Mary Jane Dunphe and Tracy Bonham, and I’m so glad I got to scream and sing in front of a rapt audience that evening; the ability to howl unselfconsciously is not one I take for granted.
In May, I decamped to my parents’ place and sunk a lot of effort into my aforementioned big weird project.
In July, in the wake of the amicable but devastating breakup that shattered my summer, I holed myself up in a friend’s house in the Hamptons for 17 days , took no visitors and underwent something akin to a hardcore emotional detox.
In retrospect, I’m not sure I would recommend seclusion as a heartbreak-recovery tactic, even in a glamorous locale; I described my conduct to my friends at this time as “going Yellow Wallpaper mode.”
Traveling alone, just for pleasure, is a luxury that explicitly requires dissociation and denial to execute successfully. You’re bifurcating yourself — leaving your day-to-day identity behind, and shedding the burden of your quotidian obligations in pursuit of temporary transcendence.
It’s a selfish practice, a closed figure-eight loop, like the end of Remainder by Tom McCarthy; a plane banking and gliding and banking and gliding, turning around and around, never actually going anywhere. Wherever you go, there you are, or whatever.
I’ve always enjoyed accumulating entirely private experiences. (Are all experiences private?) One rainy teenage afternoon, I realized there was nothing stopping me from going to the movies by myself, and it felt like I’d discovered fire.
I earned my learner’s permit when I was 15, and mostly used my newly minted driving skills to get stoned by myself in three-towns-over parking lots at midnight. I’ve since retired that particular activity with a jersey hanging from the rafters of my mind’s eye.
There’s true joy, jealously guarded, to a loner’s autonomy.
I share a deep love for frenetic travel with How To Murder Your Life memoirist and New York media legend Cat Marnell, whose writing retreat in Thessaloniki, Greece (co-helmed by Zina Wilde, an actress and entrepreneur) I attended at the beginning of the summer, having signed up for the experience somewhat spontaneously.
I didn’t need much counseling on how to break into the industry, but I wanted to mingle, try different strategies, see a part of the world I’d never visited before and make connections with new people.
I’d recommend this workshop to anyone. Cat is the type of genius whose intellect makes you feel included, not flexed-upon, and I also find her predilections quite relatable. Like me, she’s very athletically inclined and swears by her daily exercise routines.
I attended Cat’s daily prose workshops and listened dutifully as she passionately urged us to “Just Do It–Nike,” meaning: 500 words a day, minimum.
I found myself walking along pristine beaches alongside a dozen other interesting women with similar passions. I wanted to engage and to make friends, but it felt like the words I could’ve spoken to successfully achieve those ends instead curdled sluggishly somewhere in the region of my gut.
I was distracted, and probably seemed unfriendly because I was being unfriendly. I sat parked broodingly under my thatched beach umbrella while my cohorts splashed in the surf like happy children. I took pictures of a distant mountain dotted with monasteries where, we were told, no women were allowed to set foot.
In the evenings, a couple of times I skipped the seaside group dinners and zoned out for hours in my hotel room with some show or another streaming pointlessly on my laptop in the background.
Despite the malaise, or perhaps because of it, in the last year, I’ve spent more time than I ever have in my life walking miles every day around New York City, pumping something inconsequential through my earbuds and developing a pleasant, semi-permanent tan, like a just-baked sugar cookie. I take supplements and Pure Barre classes.
Last summer, after the Ireland trip, I hopped the ferry out to Fire Island and spent a week lounging around in the guest house I’d rented with my three best friends.
Miles and his girlfriend dropped in briefly, but for the most part it was just the core four of us, fucking around. This was a welcome reprieve from my relied-upon peripatetic loner routine.
Our days together stretched out libidinally as we laughed and gossiped together, lounging on wicker furniture and eating fresh vegetables and doing pilates on the roof deck. We watched 90’s Sharon Stone thrillers and played outrageous games of Guess Who! with a board Brianna modified to display 24 pictures of our enemies.
We tried to pet the flea-bitten deer traipsing across the boardwalk before we got told off by incredulous, Ralph Lauren-clad moms. We played tennis and drank iced coffee.
Once, a young guy–mid 20s–in the beach house next to us made a huge show of taking a backyard phone call in his towel. He dropped his fuzzy blue terry cloth sheath to the ground and shimmied in his outdoor shower, in full view of our crow’s nest, transparently trying to lure us into making eye contact with his penis.
On the endless afternoon we ate mushrooms, Becca’s ancient dog Artemis escaped onto the rental home’s second floor landing. The poor beast scrambled, braying inconsolably, to the brink of the roof deck, where she balanced herself on her rickety haunches until we were able to come and rescue her.
The near-miss dog incident gave us all fucking panic attacks, but disaster was, at least on that occasion, avoided.
The Game is a new project conceived by inimitable talents Becca Schuh, Matthew Miles Goodrich and myself. Thanks for following along.
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