There’s a specific kind of insanity in seeing a man hack through a wall of tropical vines while wearing a full steel breastplate. In any other movie, that armor would make him look like a hero. Here, it just makes him look like an idiot. Having walked through South American jungles myself I could feel the humidity trapped under layers of metal and thick cloth, steaming the already exhausted men alive. It’s a literal physical weight that separates them from the land they’re trying to conquer. Instead of adapting to the river, they cling to these heavy, rusting shells as if the steel is the only thing keeping them “civilized.”

The most surreal part for me was the sedan chair. Seeing this ornate, gold-trimmed chair, something meant for the tidy, paved streets of a European city, being hauled through knee-deep swamp water was genuinely jarring. It is of course a piece of furniture that represents status and high society, yet out in the wild, it’s just a massive, useless hunk of wood that forces starving men to work even harder for no reason. It’s a perfect visual of how stubborn these people were. They’d rather die carrying a heavy chair than admit that their titles and social ranks didn’t mean anything out in the mud.

Then there’s the cannon. They struggle to keep this massive iron weapon on a rotting wooden raft, guarding it as if it’s their greatest asset. But what is a cannon supposed to do against a silent, invisible enemy hidden in the trees? When they finally fire it, the sound is huge and terrifying, but it hits absolutely nothing. It’s just noise, a loud, desperate attempt to feel powerful in a place where they have no control at all.

By the end of the film, when Aguirre is alone on that spinning raft, the “empire” has basically rotted away. The fine clothes are rags, the cannons are junk, and the armor is just a rusted coffin. It’s a haunting image because it shows that they were ultimately weighed down by their own refusal to let go of the things they thought made them superior. In the end, they were just men trapped on a pile of sinking wood, surrounded by the wreckage of their own vanity.

The more I listen, the more I notice something that contradicts our modern imagination. We’ve been conditioned to view the Depression-era man through a lens of stoic, granite-jawed silence. We imagine a toughness born of iron and dust. But in these recordings, the voices aren’t projecting strength; they are surprisingly open, vibrating with loneliness, embarrassment, and the aimless drift of the dispossessed.

This emotional honesty was forged by the era itself. Much like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s masterpiece, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl didn’t just move people; they erased their sense of place. When families were driven off their land, millions of men were forced onto freight trains not for adventure, but for the desperate hope of survival. The music was born in this vacuum of stability. These songs don’t bother hiding the feeling of being lost. They instead document it with a startling, quiet directness.

One song that I found to carry a staggering weight is Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting for a Train.” Rodgers never bothered with spinning a heroic yarn about life on the rails. He more so sounds like a man who has run out of options. There is a pivotal moment where he asks a brakeman for help, and the response is a cold calculation of whether he has the money to be treated like a human being. It is a transaction of dignity, and you can hear the sharp sting of humiliation in Rodgers’ voice. To me, his signature yodel becomes a high, lonesome frequency for the things words can’t quite carry, echoing across empty tracks.

If Rodgers captures the sting of the moment, Cisco Houston’s version of “500 Miles” captures the long, echoing ache of the aftermath. The lyrics are deceptively simple, yet they mask a profound psychological burden. The singer is hundreds of miles from home, but he cannot bring himself to return. The “five hundred miles” is both a measurement of track and the distance between who he was and who he’s become. Houston’s delivery suggests that the shame of returning empty-handed is heavier than the miles themselves. Each time the chorus returns, the distance feels less geographic and more like a moral failure.

What defines these songs is their lack of pretense. The singers aren’t trying to prove their grit or shout down the world. Listening feels more like overhearing someone thinking out loud in the dark, a solitary figure sitting beside the tracks with nothing to do but watch the trains pass and wonder where life went.

Later icons like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly kept this spirit of honesty alive. They were singing about hard work, yes. They were also documenting the resilience of the human ego when it has nothing left to lean on but a melody. It’s the same voice continuing through another generation, refusing to let the struggle be polished away.

I think that ultimately, these hobo songs endure because of how human they remain. Beneath the myth of the wandering rail-rider is someone who misses home and worries about the future. These singers offer small, fragile confessions carried along the railroad lines, waiting for someone, even a century later, to finally listen.

Henry could understand parts of it. He had learned Russian the way he learns most things, quietly and without ceremony, as if knowledge were something you accumulate simply because it exists. He listened closely, occasionally swaying to the beat or singing along, the language another pattern unfolding in front of him.

I realized about halfway through that I did not need the vocabulary. The bass carried its own gravity. The repetition felt intentional, almost mathematical in its structure. Even without translation, I could feel the architecture of it, the way it built and held itself together. Standing next to him, I understood that he was not withholding meaning from me. He trusted me to find my own way into it.

He likes math, that weird shit like topology and group theory, where shapes stretch and fold but remain fundamentally the same, where symmetry is something you prove instead of assume. He likes linguistics, the mechanics of how language fits together beneath everyday speech. He likes physics and chemistry for the same reason, I like to think, because they explain why things hold, why they break, why they react the way they do. Old Russian science fiction films appeal to him, the ones with clunky practical effects and grand, improbable theories, the ones they treat the universe like a puzzle worth attempting.

I do not understand most of this in any formal sense. I cannot follow the proofs or equations he fills notebooks and whiteboards with. But I recognize the expression he gets when something aligns, when a system makes sense to him. It is not excitement in a loud way. It is focus, almost relief, as if the universe has briefly revealed its wiring to him as a reward for solving yet another of its great secrets.

The second concert was at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and neither of us were experts. He actually does not know much about jazz. He just thought it would be interesting to go, and that was enough reason.

My favorite music moved without lyrics, instruments circling one another in long, patient exchanges. A piano line would wander and resolve. A horn would rise, then soften. The drums seemed less like counting and more like breathing. I could not explain what was happening technically, but I felt the tension when it gathered and the quiet when it settled.

We listened without trying to prove we understood.

That is something consistent about Henry. He does not wait for mastery before he allows himself to care. He enters subjects the way other people enter rooms, attentive and unafraid of not knowing everything yet. Russian grammar, abstract algebra, particle behavior, analog circuitry, speculative futures born of post-Soviet hope, a jazz set neither of us can analyze properly. They are all variations of the same impulse: to see how things work beneath the surface.

I think people sometimes mistake his quiet for distance, when it is actually concentration. They see the calculators with Cyrillic lettering, the stacks of old textbooks, the papers filled with symbols, and assume it is eccentricity for its own sake. What I see is someone who cares deeply about structure and possibility, about the hidden frameworks that hold the visible world in place.

At both concerts, I felt like he was letting me stand inside that way of seeing. He was not simplifying it for me or performing expertise. He was simply sharing space with me inside something he found meaningful. There is a kind of respect in that, a belief that I am capable of sitting with unfamiliar things without needing them reduced.

I may never understand Russian fluently. I may never grasp topology or explain a chemical reaction beyond its surface description. But I understand what it means to be invited into someone else’s curiosity.

And that feels like its own kind of language.

The night is balmy in that Miami way that feels personal, like it’s doing this to me just to spite me, damp air pressing its palm flat against my back. The thick black hoodie was a mistake, but it stays. It always stays. Underneath it, the same polo I wore yesterday. It’s a hand-me-down, obnoxious scarlet, collar permanently tired. It would tell on me, would announce itself in dark half-moons and ill-fitting sleeves, and I decided, long ago, not to give it the chance.

The earbuds refuse me. Of course they do.

I want the music in my head, not outside it, want the bass to occupy the space where thoughts keep lining up. I think of her. Her name arrives before her face, which is already a problem. The name feels wrong in my mouth, like borrowing someone else’s shoes. She likes me. This is the central issue. She likes me and I do not dislike her, which is worse, because it means explanations, means staying when leaving would be cleaner. I picture her laugh, which is fine, and her hand on my arm, which is also fine, and the future stretching forward in a series of fine moments that never quite click into want. That is not fine.

The 8 bus is late. That damn bus is always late. I’ve begun to think of it more an idea than a vehicle.

I pull the earbuds apart, almost there, almost, and then they tighten again, offended by the attempt. I think briefly, absurdly, that this is a metaphor, and resent it. Not everything is a metaphor. Some things are just annoying.

Sweat slides down my spine. The hoodie absorbs it loyally. I consider taking it off and immediately don’t. I imagine the looks. Not cruel, just noticing, far worse. I let the thought pass, unexamined.

A car passes. Someone laughs somewhere behind me. The city continues, indifferent, well-adjusted.

I check the bus tracker app. Five minutes. Always five minutes. I could stand here and stew in it, in the warmth and the wires and the almost-relationship, or—

I wrap the earbuds back around my fingers, give up on music, pocket the whole mess, and decide to walk. Walking feels like control. The sidewalk stretches homeward, cracked and familiar, and the idea of moving without waiting loosens something in my chest.

I step away from the stop. The night follows me, warm and breathing. The hoodie stays on. The girl stays in my head, but quieter now, less insistent, a song playing in another room.

I walk. The bus arrives behind me. I do not turn around.

Kafka’s hunger artist fasts in public for years. People watch him. They argue about whether he is sincere. They try to decide what kind of person would choose this life. Eventually, interest fades. The hunger artist does not. What has always struck me about the story is how little the artist changes compared to how much the meaning around him does.

Marty Supreme works in a similar way. As a character, he is defined almost entirely through extremity. Everything about him feels turned up, tightened, exaggerated. There is no casual version of him. No private neutral space where the performance switches off. The character only exists at full volume, and that totality is what makes him compelling and exhausting at the same time.

When I read Kafka, I am always aware that the hunger artist’s suffering is real to him but unstable to everyone else. The audience keeps trying to translate it into something legible: discipline, ego, fraud, artistry. None of those quite fit. The hunger artist does not fast to prove anything. He fasts because he cannot eat. The explanation arrives too late to matter.

That delay feels important when thinking about Marty Supreme. The character invites interpretation but resists resolution. Every attempt to pin him down feels provisional. He looks intentional, even strategic, but the more I think about him, the more I wonder whether that confidence is misplaced. Kafka trains me to distrust clean explanations for extreme behavior.

What interests me most is how enclosed both figures are. The hunger artist cannot stop fasting without ceasing to be himself. Marty Supreme cannot step outside the persona without collapsing the character entirely. The performance is not a mask. It is the structure holding the figure together. Once that structure cracks, there is nothing underneath that the story seems interested in showing us.

Kafka ends “The Hunger Artist” by replacing the starving man with a panther. The crowd prefers the animal immediately. The panther’s vitality is simple. It does not ask to be interpreted. I think about that ending when I think about Marty Supreme, because it raises an uncomfortable question about characters built on extremity. How long can an audience sit with something that refuses ease?

I find myself unsure whether Marty Supreme is meant to be understood at all. That uncertainty feels deliberate. Kafka’s hunger artist is not misunderstood because the audience is foolish. He is misunderstood because the performance does not translate. Marty Supreme may operate under the same condition. The character holds our attention while withholding clarity.

This comparison has reframed how I read Marty Supreme. Not as a puzzle to solve or a statement to decode, but as a figure constructed around endurance. He persists inside a role that cannot soften without disappearing. Kafka understood how cruel that structure can be, even in fiction.

What both figures leave me with is less an answer than a tension. How long can a character survive once the performance becomes the only way they exist? Kafka never resolves that question. Marty Supreme does not either. That refusal feels intentional, and it is probably the point.

When I’m home alone, I almost always leave the window open instead of running the AC. The air isn’t always gentle, sometimes it’s thick with salt, sometimes it carries the faint burn of gasoline. But it feels alive. I like the way it moves across my skin, the way it reminds me that the world is still breathing just outside.

Most of the time, the noise is a comfort. On nights when my thoughts start looping too fast, the sound of the street steadies me. The hiss of passing cars is like reassurance: people are still out there, moving through the city, going somewhere, coming back. Life is still in motion.

But there are other nights. The rhythm breaks. A pause in the flow of traffic. A car slowing outside, lingering. An engine idling just a little too long. The shadows from the streetlights stretch across the palm leaves in ways that make them look like they’re reaching. And for a moment, the air through the open window feels less like a comfort, and more like something watching me back.

Still, I keep the window open. I’d rather feel the night on my skin than shut it out. The sounds and scents of Miami—gasoline, salt, a hint of rain—become part of the house when I let them in.

Sometimes I wonder about the people in those cars. We’ll never meet, never speak. Yet for a breath or two, we share the same piece of night.

Last fall, I picked up this awesome Ninja Turtles t-shirt at a comic book store while visiting my brother up north with my family. I wasn’t even looking for it — just flipping through the rack, pile of vintage Daredevil issues in hand, and there it was. Edgy, oversized, and weirdly nostalgic. It’s been close to a decade since I last watched the show. But something about it made me want to take it home. It felt like a note from a past version of myself.

This summer, I finally cut my hair. Really cut it. I’d been carrying around this overgrown mop of hair I always just pulled back into a ponytail to keep it out of my face.  Looking in the mirror, I didn't see a completely new person, free of flaws, unable to do wrong. Just me, lighter, freer, and feeling right. I walked out of the salon with hair that felt like fresh air on the back of my neck — and a weird grin I couldn’t seem to hide.

I caught myself the other day — short hair, old cartoon shirt hanging soft and loose past my hips, no particular agenda — and thought: I think I’m becoming the kind of person little me, with her pigtails and hand-me-down polos, would have passed by on the street and whispered to herself, “Wow… she’s so cool.”

And that realization didn’t come with fireworks or fanfare. It felt soft. Like finding a photo you didn’t know existed of a version of you you’d forgotten you missed.

My dear Colombian grandmother just about had a heart attack when my mom sent her pictures of three neat braids of my hair lying by the sink at the salon I begged her to take me to. She was given two daughters who were far more interested in academia and climbing the ranks of their respective industries than in perfecting their eye makeup. I often regret not being the kind of granddaughter she can take out to get her nails done or gossip with about drama in the Royal Family.

But she's still the woman who raised my mom and my aunt — two incredibly successful women whom I look up to more than anyone else. We trade the chisme for talk about Dostoyevsky’s existential themes and her family’s military history. I like to think we get along, and that she’s generally made peace with who I am, including my decidedly unfeminine style.

After all, she bought me the shirt.

I don’t have it all figured out — not even close. But I think this moment, this version of me, is a sign I’m headed in the right direction. I’m not chasing coolness or trying to be anything other than me. And somehow, in doing that, I’ve looped back to something honest — the kind of thing that says hello in an baggy t-shirt, or a breezy haircut, or the feeling that I’m becoming someone that I could have looked up to.

The music was playing on the Victrola record player on my bookshelf, spinning steadily under the weight of intention. The Bluetooth speaker, wirelessly tethered to the turntable, turned that analog pulse into a physical sensation. A direct line from the grooves of the vinyl to my bones.

And Unknown Pleasures is the right album for that kind of listening.

Released in 1979, it’s Joy Division’s debut, yet it sounds like a final chapter. It’s a record thick with dread and distance, with Peter Hook’s basslines crawling under your skin and Ian Curtis’s voice floating like some haunted spirit just beyond reach. Everyone talks about the atmosphere, the reverb, the black hole of Martin Hannett’s production. But lying there, the speaker on my chest, what I noticed most was the weight.

Each bass note became a pressure point, a reminder that music is physical. That sound is vibration. That vibration is movement. And that movement—when close enough, when personal enough—can feel like comfort. Like a heartbeat from the outside in.

It reminded me of all those anxiety tools recommended to me by therapists and well-meaning friends of friends—weighted blankets, deep pressure therapy vests, the low hum of white noise. But instead of neutral sound, I chose despair in post-punk form. And weirdly, it worked. Because Unknown Pleasures doesn’t ask you to cheer up. It doesn’t sell catharsis. It just sits with you—aloof, maybe, but present. It feels no need to fix you.

“Disorder” kicks off like a panicked transmission from someone who’s already too far gone. The drums are sharp, the guitar clipped and skeletal. But that bass—it’s alive. The speaker pushed each note through my ribcage like Morse code: you’re still here, you’re still here, you’re still here.

By the time “New Dawn Fades” hit, I was adrift in a sea of slow waves, the low end rolling through me like breath. The album’s arc isn’t linear. It doesn’t build or resolve. It circles, repeats, mourns, fades. It doesn’t pretend the world makes sense. Listening with my whole body made that more obvious—and, paradoxically, more reassuring.

Because when you’re alone with this album—not just emotionally, but physically, bass thudding against your heart—it feels like it recognizes your outline. Not your face, not your voice. Just your presence. A form in the dark. And maybe that’s what I needed: not a lifeline, but a shadow companion. Something that vibrates when I do.

There are plenty of ways to appreciate music. Audiophiles chase clarity. Critics chase meaning. Fans chase nostalgia. But there’s a different kind of appreciation that comes from letting an album physically resonate through your bones. It’s not about hearing—it’s about being heard, wordlessly.

Unknown Pleasures isn’t a weighted blanket in the traditional sense. But its low-end warmth, its detachment, its refusal to look away from discomfort—it all mimics the sensation. The grounding. The honesty. And sometimes that’s what you need at the end of the day. Not comfort through optimism, but comfort through recognition.

So if you ever feel frayed at the edges, try this: drop the needle on side A. Let the crackle drift across the room to your speaker. Put it on your chest. Press play on “Candidate” or “Shadowplay.” Let the music seep in, not just through your ears but through your sternum, your spine. Lie still. Let the ghosts talk.

They won’t fix you. But they’ll keep you company.

I remember the first time I swam in Biscayne Bay. I was seven or eight. My camp counselor handed me a foggy snorkel mask and said, “Go look.” I kicked my way out to a patch of reef just off the boat and put my face in the water. And there it was. An alien city, pulsing with color and movement, alive in ways I couldn’t put into words.

It felt like stepping into another world. Brain corals the size of beanbags, parrotfish crunching away at rocks, purple sea fans waving like fingers. Even then, I knew I was seeing something sacred.

Now, when I swim in that same patch of water, it’s… quiet. Too quiet. The coral is pale, brittle. The fish are fewer. And that otherworldly feeling, that joyful sense of wonder, has been replaced by something heavier: grief.

What’s happening in Biscayne Bay isn’t sudden. It’s been unfolding in slow motion for decades, like a creeping illness that’s hard to notice until it’s everywhere. The coral isn’t just “dying,” it’s being pushed past its breaking point, over and over, until it just gives up.

Last summer, the water in some parts of the bay reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit. I remember stepping off the dock one afternoon and the water actually felt warmer than the air. That’s not normal. Not even close.

And coral can’t survive that. When it gets too hot, the corals eject the algae that live in their tissues — the algae that give them color and, more importantly, energy. Without them, the coral starves. This is what scientists call bleaching, but the word doesn’t capture the heartbreak of it. It’s like watching a forest go gray overnight.

Every time it rains hard in Miami (which is often), storm drains overflow. Lawn fertilizer, oil from streets, trash, microplastics, leaking septic tanks, it all washes right into the bay. The water turns murky and thick with algae, and the coral suffocates.

And yet, the construction doesn’t stop. More high-rises. More seawalls. More boats. More everything. I’ve seen mangroves ripped out to make room for waterfront views. I’ve watched manatees float lifeless in canals where the oxygen levels dropped too low. Biscayne Bay is being loved to death.

So why do I keep going back?

Because I still love this place. Because even in the heartbreak, there’s beauty. Last month, I saw a school of baby barracuda darting through a seagrass bed. A small, healthy elkhorn coral growing on a rocky outcrop. It felt like a victory. A whisper that it’s not over yet.

There are good people working to save the reef. Coral farmers, scientists, volunteers — folks diving every day to outplant lab-grown corals that might withstand higher temperatures. I’ve met them. I’ve helped once or twice. It’s hopeful, but it’s also Sisyphean. We’re planting coral faster than nature can keep up — and still slower than destruction is happening.

This isn’t just about nostalgia or beauty. Coral reefs protect our shores, support fisheries, bring in tourism dollars, and anchor marine biodiversity. Their loss is not abstract; it will touch everything from flood insurance to food security to our sense of identity.

So, what do we do?

We vote like the ocean matters. We support local restoration efforts. We stop fertilizing our damn lawns. We talk about it, even when it feels uncomfortable. And we mourn honestly, without turning away, because mourning is a form of love, and love makes us act.

Every time I slip into the water now, I wonder if I’m seeing something for the last time. That might sound dramatic, but it’s not. That reef I first visited as a kid? It’s almost gone. But I still go. I still look. I still believe that bearing witness matters.

Because if we stop looking, we stop caring.

And if we stop caring, it’s already too late.