I Don't Recommend This
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Live, from Mexico City, it’s LA VIDA MODERNA DE ROGO!
I am coming to you from a cute breakfast/lunch (cómo se dice ‘brunch’?) spot called Barrón in the cute and quiet barrio of San Miguel Chapultepec on the last morning of a week-long vacaciones in the oldest (founded in 1325!) and highest-elevated (7,350 ft about sea level!) capital en américa del norte.
Will I continue using Spanglish for the remainder of this bulletin? Más o menos…
This was my first taste of ‘Real Mexico,’ discounting brief stops at Royal Caribbean ports of call along the Yucatán peninsula as a teenager when, admittedly, I was less interested in seeing Mayan ruins than in meeting ruined Mayas.
This was Ciudad de México—Auténtico! El Corazón del País—a place held curious in my imagination since my globe-and-atlas-obsessed youth,1 and that has, in our current Instagram epoch, gained a world-class reputation as a foodie’s paraíso.
When I shared my travel plans with friends, it dawned on me that I was late to the fiesta that is CDMX. Everyone had already been there/eaten that; some had even lived there for years. Suddenly, and unsolicitedly, I was flush with recs.
Accommodations, attractions, and—above all—restaurantes were immediately relayed with the same breathless eagerness, if in differing forms: shareable Google Maps awash with pinned locations, color-coded spreadsheets filtered by neighborhood and price point, chaotic link dumps fired off in a frenzy of texts.
As my eyes glazed over the seemingly endless data stream of MUST-TRY taquerías and MUST-SEE museos arriving in a swirl of tilde-adorned Spanish and consonant-cluttered Nahuatl, I was quickly reminded of my complicated relationship with travel recommendations—and their potential to be as paralyzing as they are productive.
Of course, I appreciate tips from trusted sources whose reporting from previously charted territories can save me time, money, and/or frustration based on lessons learned the hard way. This is especially true for general best practices: “Accept credit card charges in the local currency,” “Download offline maps and translators,” “Keep that Magen David tucked under your shirt in Tehran.”
But when preparing for a short stay in a new place, being flooded with recs can leave me feeling like Terri Schiavo in a tar pit. With its hundreds of historical and cultural points of interest, hundreds more parks and gardens, and—according to recent government data—its astounding 54,456 economic units categorized under "Restaurants and other Eating Places,” Mexico City was shaping up to be a hotbed (quite possibly, the hottest bed) of what futurist Alvin Toffler coined in his 1970 techno-sociological critique Future Shock as ‘overchoice.’
When faced with too many options, the pathetic human brain struggles to compare and compute their relative value, triggering fear and anticipatory regret about making the wrong choice and inducing cognitive fatigue as the ego buckles under the weight of conflicting impulses and expectations. The task of ‘perfect selection’—already elusive due to its illusory nature—is rendered existentially impossible by choice overload.
Even blessed as I was with ten days to explore La Ciudad, only so much could be packed into my 150 waking hours and one stomach.2 Given such limitations, it’s tempting to heed the herd and adhere to the guidebooks (I’m never above consulting The New York Times’ 36 Hours column, particularly when restricted to 36 hours). At the same time, my free-spirited Self simply can’t abide such perceived stifling of creative expression when it comes to crafting an itinerary.
Thus, another thread weaves its way through life’s tapestry of paradox…
I want to 'see the sights’ without checking the boxes. I want to go off-road and off-menu without getting stuck in a ditch or on the toilet. I don’t want a paint-by-numbers tour where every stop feels prescribed and every meal feels pre-chewed; I want to blaze my own trail and go my own way—just as long as that way doesn’t lead to the ER of a questionably-accredited hospital or the windowless van of ransom-hungry abductors.
Is that too much to ask???
Don’t let the absence of an airplane emoji in my bio fool you… I love to travel as much as the next basic betch, and I count myself luckier than drawing Jim Abbott in a Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament to have racked up as many miles as I have in my forty years.3
My Mexico City aventura manifested thanks to the confluence of several tributaries of intention that sprang from the coastal cliffs of the Marin Headlands, where Jewlie and I found ourselves at the end of March. She had flown from New York to see me in LA, and we road-tripped to SF (with an inspired and inspiring pit stop in Pine Mountain Club) to meet up with my cousin Addie and her partner Bret who happened to be in Oakland for a friend’s 40th.
I had yet to take up Addie and Bret on their invitation to visit them in Puerto Rico, where they had recently domiciled for very legitimate tax evasion reasons, but when they mentioned (over a marvelous Ethiopian meal at Café Colucci) that they’d rented an AirBnb in CDMX for the month of May—and when Jewlie dropped that she had been forming nebulous CDMX plans with friends around her May birthday, and when I remembered my LA rental was up at the end of April, leaving me sin casa (in addition to my pre-existing condition of sin trabajo)—it was decided: Jewlie and I would join them in CDMX on Quatro de Mayo.
Other than cheap tacos and loose poops, I didn’t know what to expect from our sojourn south of the border. Intuitively, I understood CDMX could be considered the La Gran Manzana of Mexico, in the sense that New York City, NY may as well be USA City, USA—but would it look and feel like NYC, or more like OKC?
Just as a towel gets wetter the more it dries, a vacation has the potential to expose a similarly riddlesome irony: its planning can induce as much stress on the vacationer as the vacation itself is meant to melt away. That stress can be exacerbated when planning with a partner whose travel style clashes with your own, as I discovered with M, who was the type to want to confirm hotel and restaurant reservations for August… in April.
Now I’m no therapist—and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night—but I have been studying Carl Jung’s map of the soul. Informed by my newfound psychoanalytic understanding, I surmise that for her, having plans locked down months in advance provided a sense of externalized certainty and security to anchor her against internalized uncertainties (rooted in existential fear of the unknown) and insecurities (rooted in psychic friction between persona and shadow).
Besides, she said, “the best places get booked up.”
For me, being asked to schedule myself into some faraway future was like being asked to predict the winner of a boxing match between D.B. Cooper and the Easter Bunny. How could I feel any degree of confidence in the outcome of a completely imaginary scenario? First of all, how big is the Easter Bunny? Is it the size of a common cottontail, or are we talking about some freakishly humanoid Donnie Darko-esque monstrosity?
Besides, I said, who’s to say “the best places” are the best places?
Thankfully, our cross-Cali roadie had taught me that Jewlie and I were compatible in the travel department, both of us residing comfortably on the same end of the structure-spontaneity spectrum. We’re the type to book one-way tickets, leaving room for the possibility of extended stays or scenic routes home; the type to ‘figure it out when we get there,’ opening the door to detours and holding space for serendipity; the type to trust that wherever we are in any given moment is exactly where we’re supposed to be. The journey is the destination, expect the unexpected, impossible is nothing, every kiss begins with Kay…
We also both understand that the concept of a qualitative “best” is quantitatively bogus. When it comes to something as personal as one’s literal tastebuds, what’s “best” to the goose is not necessarily “best” to the gander. If Coca-Cola is truly THE BEST, how to explain Pepsi being in business? If Green Book was truly THE BEST Picture of 2018, how to explain my new tattoo?
For someone like M—so in thrall to social authority and her superego that she wouldn’t so much as glance at a venue’s menu unless it had been featured in Eater—not getting a table at the top-rated restaurant in Rome would have ruined her entire trip. Not because she couldn’t enjoy an equally exquisite cacio e pepe at any of a hundred other trattorias or tavernas, but because she wouldn’t be able to properly signal her cultural capital when asked by her fellow Brooklyn aesthetes, “Where’d you eat?”
Meanwhile, I’d be just as happy eating with my beloved behind the dumpster of a Papa John’s as I would be in the basement of Roscioli. Why? First and foremost, because I’m happy with myself—and therefore, I can be happy anywhere. Second and subsequent, if I’m with of the love of my life, wherever we are together is the best place to be. Third and nextmostly, LIKE I GIVE A FUDGE what you think about where I choose to ingest food! My dinner, my choice!
My biggest issue with recommendations, whether from Pete Wells or a teller at Wells Fargo, is the saddle of expectation they come riding in on. If told THIS IS THE BEST, I am instantly tainted by a conformist bias and inevitably expecting THE BEST. But what happens when I get there, and it’s… just okay? At the very least, I’m disappointed. At the very most, I’m spiraling into an identity crisis. Am I an idiot? A pleb? What did I miss? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME???? WHO AM I????????????????????
EDITOR’S NOTE: I am no longer sitting in Barrón. In fact, I left Mexico City on May 12, and I’ve been dragging this piece across the finish line in the dos semanas since.
I could say the delay was caused by the flurry of travel, the distraction of activity, and the unsettling of routine: Jewlie and I went from CDMX to Cabo San Lucas where we both went scuba diving for the first time (and got engaged), to Los Angeles where we picked up Buscemi and celebrated my dear friend’s 40th, to Atlanta where I met Jewlie’s parents and we shared the good news with them in person, to New York where we just shepped nachas with my parents.
I could say it’s because I’ve been so overwhelmed by the feeling of being freshly-fiancéd that the idea of doing anything other than staring deeply and lovingly into Jewlie’s eyes now strikes me as an utter waste of precious time.
I could say it’s because, after being non-stop stuffed to the gills with THE BEST mix of Michelin-starred gastronomy and antojitos served up by anonymous street vendors—and successfully surviving my first 27 los desayunos, almuerzos y cenas with nary a nausea—I succumbed to hubris on our final night and ordered a salad from a Condesa bistro that was apparently topped with E. Coli in addition to grilled chicken. Montezuma took his gleeful revenge over the next several days, my urgency for the nearest baño supplanting my urgency to write.
But I think the real reason is this: I’m being called to something higher.
I started this Substack on my 40th birthday, which now appears about as distant in the rearview as my 41st feels fast approaching. From the outset, I made it clear to prospective readers that the point of this project was simply to write—to productively channel long-blocked creative energy that had begun flowing again since my completion of the Hoffman Process.
I also made a pact with myself to write solely for the sake of writing—to focus not on what fruits might come of the labor, but on the labor itself. To that end, I deliberately chose not to cultivate paying subscribers—making Rogo’s Modern Life free for all and all for free—if only to avoid any externally imposed pressure to appease those behind a paywall.
And something remarkable happened… in five months, I wrote forty-five personal essays, produced eleven podcast episodes, and compiled three archival collections of jokes and comedy scraps. 376 of you subscribed—including 20 who paid, purely out of generosity of spirit.
Impressed by my own proliferation, I began to notice another unforeseen consequence: a creeping, self-imposed pressure to keep up the pace, to hit arbitrary deadlines, to ‘come up with something’ to write—and then to toil away in rewrites.
Meanwhile, for every word I’ve published to this Substack, another sits scattered across a dozen dangling Word docs, chunky thought barfs and wispy idea farts saved to drafts, awaiting cohesive edits and a spit-polish. Amid dirty poems and parody songs are the beginnings of several books. There’s a manifesto about A.I. There’s a memoir about HQ. There’s a treatise on ‘the Self’ (in which I introduce a novel convention of the all-caps SELF). There’s even a multi-volume series of conscious relationship guides Jewlie and I are co-writing under our banner: The HinJew Sexistentialists.
And that’s just the wedge of the iceberg lettuce.
The time has come to enter my author era. This summer, I’m shifting focus to finish one of these goddamn books. Maybe two! I also have several more episodes of my podcast in the can, including the sixth installment of the recently rebranded RELEASE: A Life Beyond Bars, as I redouble my efforts to share Gerjuan's story and promote his art.
In the meantime, I plan to continue tending lovingly to this here ‘stack, albeit with a more relaxed hand…
That is, the hand that isn’t taken.
Forgive me this Proustian moment, but I’m just now recalling that one of my most prized Bar Mitzvah gifts was a ‘fancy globe’—topographically embossed, perched on a gyroscoping metal stand, most likely straight outta Hammacher Schlemmer—with whom I would while away my pre-internet afternoons, intermittently spinning and stabbing my pointer finger at random locales as the world turned (often to the detriment of my interphalangeal joints), trying to land on the most far-flung destinations and fantasizing about the exotic boobs that might await me there.
I am not normally a jealous guy, but nothing awakens my inner Donny Hathaway more than ruminating on those lucky ruminants and their FOUR stomachs! DAMN YOU, BOVIDS!
Current country count: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czechia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, Sweden
Congrats Scott! I’m so happy for you guys 🥰
Congrats on the engagement! As for some potential next steps (besides the book or books) another trivia nerd found himself sin trabajo last week, Tony Reali, who started out as a sports trivia nerd prior to his PTI and ATH stints. Maybe a collaboration on his new website/you tube channel?