SBZ and I whiling away our evenings on the hair covered couch when living in Boston was new and anything and everything. Minga was like our echo machine of all the energy outside and below the bay window on Commonwealth and Massachusetts.

My mouth was sour milky, sticky, sickly from the burnt caramel ice cream that I tongued entirely as we walked towards Central Square on a hot summer night like you read about. I looked up and saw this building which somehow seemed like it was conceived and built just so I could take a picture of it at this moment. Now. Exactly like this. Exactly like my mouth and stomach and mind felt.

Shahin asked me if I would shoot their Paris show except we got drunk a little too early and I forgot to charge the camera batteries so I borrowed cameras from the french fans at this stinky, scorching little dive. I didn't know how to work any of the cameras and it was dark and I was electrified by the whole evening so I just kept clicking away. The resulting shots look like the memories of a group of total strangers who were at the same event.

Dina and I accidentally drove into the Democratic Republic of Congo but we were actually trying to get to a hotel on a lake in Rwanda. Because, at a hotel, we could get a beer that wasn't made from bananas. We ditched the scene to find some real life and found a beach full of wooden screens and nets. Drying racks for small, salty, squeems.

The floating market in the mouth of the great Mekong river delta is just a faint echo of the boom times earlier last century when wooden boats like bouquets of greens and melons and rice would clot the riversides until you could walk across the packed boats like a bridge. Now it's food and gas shortages that stand up in my memory as we watched a few, resilient sellers skim by.

Martin took me to the market in Kirundo - Roisin and Marjan were coming over -  so we could buy a goat for dinner. At the top of my list, however, was twine so I could hang Dina's sweet hammock. Everyone in the market stares and it's OK. But when he stared I stared back. I could feel no sensation but sweat and breeze. I don't even remember taking this picture.

It's the Glasgow School of Art - it's Mackintosh - it's Christmas Eve - it's us banging away on the door oblivious to the fact that they're all gone home for holidays and it's the pissed off janitor that eventually warms to us and gives us the most amazing private tour of a building I've always loved, and inside, it's still an art school, just like mine, and the stairwell landing tells the universal tale of late night, last minute touchups by sleep starved artkids. I could still smell the fumes.

I never thought I'd stand in one place long enough to watch the sun set from a reflection on a piece of wood. But I did.

To me, Seattle is a question. We stole away to use some airmiles, snowboard at Whistler and make some money working for Kevin. Like always, we oscillated. We saw Eternal Sunshine and afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about it. If you knew everything at the beginning, everything you know now, would you still do it?

The magic hour in the UK feels just like the magic hour in CA.

Mt. Bisoke. The jungle is like a black hole but grey instead. Mist like Hitchcock. 4 Kalashnekovs surrounded us, attached to soldiers who were protecting us from gorillas and guerillas. At the top I was wet but I couldn't tell if it was sweat or mist, if I was cold or hot, if I was hearing words or thoughts. I was vibrating.

VIP treatment, champagne, tasty bites from a very good looking server, and another one, and four more and then for some reason, somehow realizing quietly that we three are the same person in different bodies. We're worse than family and better than friends and probably the best thing I've seen all night is us.

Clerkenwell, pints outdoor after a day of walking, after a week of agony, after a month of strain, after a year of friction and ill feelings with the same person over and over, after tilting the last of my second pint, glancing up, up and above to inhale the sky before I thought of walking away.

Why Niagara Falls? We drove from Detroit to New York to the place with sushi strip bars. On the way, in a cornfield, I jumped out and broke off an ear and took a bite and suddenly realized that corn was maybe not always supposed to be a food product. It confused me but I was mostly confused that summer. All we did was take pictures we never looked at.

Dear Travis and Summer: This is how I feel when I am with you. I am warm and smiling and slightly buzzed and always thinking about where we're eating next and always looking for the two of you side by side, doing whatever because this is the life of living slow, then fast, then slow, then fast and it's 4 in the morning and we're outside with 400 other people on a Wednesday night in Santander. 

It was a mad dash, an escape, to Austin, to Michelle, to a bar with cold Lone Stars and hot tequila shots to take the edge off. Is this what vacation is supposed to feel like? Wandering around at night with nothing to do but talk and talk. This corridor was the week, was an illuminated, electric, blurry tunnel of energy that only we could feel.

I never really take time with graffiti when I see it because I don't usually like the style even though I'm mesmerized by the skill required to do it. In Chile, the graffiti is painted with brushes which makes me smile because under cover of night, some kid is painting stylized letters with a brush and a can of paint, lots of cans of paint, and waiting, waiting, waiting for it to dry so he can do the next layer. It must take all night.

I made that model of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill while the whole place reeked of cumin, cardomom, coriander and clove and Rami was so sweet to pawn me off onto Julie without warning her that I was a horrible landscaper of models. That summer, every time I looked at a building, all I saw was the scale model it came from and gave a private moment of silence to the sucker that had to build it.

Chill is the wrong word. The air wasn't that cold but it was heavy with water, frozen blue water, frozen mist suspended in wool fabric that lined the sky like a bedspread. And the bird didn't seem cold even though this wasn't ever quite what I'd imagined the home of a Swan to be. The few times I'd imagined where swans lived. But it wasn't cold, really, it was just Scotland in winter.

Walking around this strange city, this cold city during one of the coldest winters of my life looking for similarities in the streets, looking for comfort in some familiarity, any familiarity to home but finding nothing but head and body throb. Nothing felt right, I was a foreigner for the first time in my life and I was sick. I stood in the middle of the street, in Santiago, and felt very lonely.

They're standing on what will be a major road between Kirundo and Kigali and I can't even begin to imagine how it will alter their lives. We drove on the existing road for what seemed like days and just did what we would do on any other road trip. When we got to the Burundian border crossing, Dina had to wake up the guards so they could stamp our passports. Good times. 

It was a good idea, the outdoor showers, except the designer forgot that from the 4th floor balcony, without even craning your neck, you could see all the pasty white traces of covering on the scorched skin of European and American vacationers as they blithely stood there getting wet. We tried not to look.

Can a whole week be compressed down to this, down to this one dish, down to a single sensation on the tongue? I was so full already when this came but since it ended up being the best mole I'd ever had, I finished it. It even looks perfect. In my mind, even the wood is part of the recipe.

The Mother was from the Phillipines and she was a tough negotiator on behalf of Jesus. She was a hustler and an executive and a landlord and a teacher and a neighbor and a mom and a doctor all together, that's what she felt like. But even she didn't know why infant twins never survive. One always dies. Always.

The american kid said he did it three times a week, that it's nothing, but 4 AM, that busted van, with McDonald's sopa and that poor kid who got sick on those switchback mountain roads with no guard rails and MET life insurance signs at every turn and the view of the stepped, steep, rocky cliff towards death, with no brakes or oxygen at 13,000 ft, all to get to the Andes to go snowboarding for $5 US and get a view of forever was worth it.

Italians from Philly talk more with their hands than with their mouths. It's Punk city. If Fuck The World isn't tattooed on your toes then it should be. (It is.) Guys like this are not normal except in Philly. And Baltimore. In fact, in Baltimore, guys like this are everywhere. In Baltimore you can get a late night fried chicken fix or a switchblade or a bong or a hooker all in the same store. (You did.) If the great American novel hadn't already been written, you could write it. And maybe you should.

He performed someone else, electric, vitriolic, louder than possible, a jitterbug with an amplifier, irresistible and also more himself, more human and vulnerable at this volume and afterwards some kid did a mock interview of the band for a zine and I remember thinking that this was the first real rock experience of my life because I was transported, mesmerized by what sound and sight could do, even to someone I knew intimately. The music was horrible.

I thought RJD2 was british but in Berlin one night, I found out he was from Ohio or something and his show was just OK even though we'd taken a cab like 50 euro out of the way to get to some underground music scene venue that was actually pretty cool but still only sold Heinekens (in Germany!) and had no lights so everyone was vague and indistinct until the bathrooms where light flooded from everywhere.

Because JLo's booty is the gold standard south of the equator. That's why.

1) Yes, they are.

2) No.

3) 3 out of 4, but maybe 4.

4) Always.

The swirling pockets of air above Buenos Aires. Flying without the familiar hum of engines in what amounts to an aluminum canoe with a windshield is stomach tingling. El hijo Juan waited for us all to come down - the old ambulance that Mariana and Alejo converted into the company car was the only thing heavy enough to keep him grounded. Rest in peace, Juan.

She always told me that you can't literally feel and touch what's captured in a photo because it's just an image. What did I know, she was the photography professor. Later, at some point, I decided that this was bullshit. Can't you feel this wood? I did touch it right before I snapped the picture and when I closed my eyes, this is what my hands saw.

It's usually spicy and greasy and sizzling, if you're lucky, and on a stick and this one, this innovative Indonesian woman, made kebobs that should never be in the same place twice because she would have build up a loyal fan base that was too much for her meager supply but I admit I did keep looking for her and her cart as I continued to lick the streets of Jakarta that week.