Diary

5/5/26

Today was the first day this week where I didn’t have work or really any plans. I slept in late and finally dragged myself back to the gym. Leg day. Missing even a week or two throws me into a strange headspace. I have to keep reminding myself that life occasionally intervenes, and that not every lapse needs to spiral into some existential crisis. For most of my adult life I’ve had a tendency to let everything dissolve into macro tracking and two-hour gym sessions. Having abs is fun but honestly not worth the full-time effort. Today felt like a reset in several respects.

My friend K happened to be in town from Los Angeles. We talk on the phone occasionally, but somehow we hadn’t seen each other in over two years, which feels insane. She’s staying at her parents’ place on Central Park West and 73rd Street, one of those beautiful old buildings that makes New York feel like a movie set. I rode my bike uptown, met her for lunch, then we wandered around Central Park for a couple hours catching up about life, relationships, work, all the usual evidence of time passing. It was genuinely nice to see her.

Afterward I biked all the way back to Williamsburg. My weekly poker game is tonight, but after spending the day walking around in the sun, part of me wants to stay home and skip it this week.

I think I’m turning into a homebody. I was never like that before. I used to want to be out constantly, orbiting bars and parties and openings and whatever else felt culturally adjacent enough to justify leaving the apartment. Now all I seem to crave is domesticity. A wife. Kids. A quiet kitchen in the morning. Sometimes I fantasize about moving back to California.

I don’t know what I’m going to do this summer now that my grandmother passed away. Visiting her was always the thing that pulled me back home to San Francisco. I may still go just to see my uncle, but honestly I think I mostly want to reconnect with the geography of my youth. I miss the redwoods. I miss Mount Tamalpais. I miss the Mill Valley depot. I miss the pace of life there, the strange combination of beauty and calm that Northern California still holds in my mind, whether or not it fully exists anymore. If I could wave a wand, I’d probably already be settled there somewhere in the hills, living in a quiet house, maybe playing golf a couple times a week, aging into something softer and less performative. If anyone wants to lend me $10,000,000 to make this dream a reality, DM me for my Venmo.

I want normal things now. Or at least what used to count as normal things. I have very little interest in becoming a forty-year-old flâneur wandering downtown forever, turning nightlife into an identity because he never figured out what else to build. That’s not the kind of man I want to grow into.

Well, it’s 7:10 now. Maybe I should head to poker after all.