📍Buenos Aires, Argentina, 7.26.25

Today I walked. And walked and walked and walked. I walked so far that the tops of my feet began to burn with tendonitis. Fuck. I was even wearing my god damn hiking shoes.

But I couldn’t stop, even when I felt weak and dizzy and on the verge of passing out from some unknown ill that my mother would call anemia or dehydration. I bought a bottle of water to chug and choked on the con gas bullshit because you have to make that mistake at least once every time you travel before you learn once more to never do it again. 

What impressed me the most about Buenos Aires was the feeling of life. Of life being lived and lived so thoroughly and with so much rigor that you think these people have never questioned the point of life because they know the point of it is just to live. Sometimes I think you have to get out of the capital-centric, blood-soaked core to find a semblance of truth because at home, it’s all been washed away long ago. Is it just my western brain romanticizing poverty? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know if I’d be able to tell either way. It just felt true and real, not because of any poverty, but because there was presence—of the people and the city itself. 

This reminds me of an Erich Fromm quote—

“If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”

So if we never became isolated, compulsive, self-centered automatons and maintained the heart of community and creation,then maybe it would all feel more authentic.  

So anyway, I walked. The trees that line the streets of Buenos Aires are soaring, tangled things with fat green leaves, dark and vibrant in the cool air. I passed shops, pastry shops, corner stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, party stores, all the kinds of stores, and the people were out and they were walking and they were breathing and they were living their lives, and I was walking walking walking, and dios mio, the coffee bars! I’ve never seen so many, and with a new law of the universe that every single coffee bar has to have one of those scruffy, white haired half-crazed intellectuals—the old men with the tweed blazer and crumpled newspaper and tiny cup of espresso. A physicist or professor or writer or linguist. I giggled to myself every time I passed another coffee bar because, without fail, that man was in there. Every. Single. Time. I decided I will be that man when I grow up, or in the next life, or maybe tomorrow if I can find the right outfit and the right book and convince myself to drink sugarless espresso. It’s unlikely, but I might have to try for the fun of it all. 

And then of course, once I tired of life, I decided to visit the cemetery—Recoleta, where all the old names are buried in pretty stone mausoleums. Except when I got there, I realized I needed a ticket that I hadn’t bought, so I kept walking through the market stalls and cried at life some more. Hundreds of artisans—painters, sculptors, jewelers, metal workers, stone workers, crafters—were all there making their art while people strolled by, occasionally stopping to buy something. Some of the sellers played music, others chatted with their neighbors, and all were so present and so real. This is what it should be like, I kept thinking. Everything here has a hidden unprescribed value that you won’t find in a chain factory. A drop of life that animates it. A personness. A real sense of being. The world was a half-sketched cartoonish blob fest before, but now all the lines were solidifying and the color was becoming so vibrant, and the details were five pages of Melville describing an ocean scene. I was, quite frankly, mesmerized.

The market went on forever, but my feet were going to fall right off my legs, and so I began the long walk home when a man stopped me—a local guy, kind of greasy looking, with faded eyes and a blue beat-up gym bag. His English was barely there. No hablo I said. So he began to sing. It was a Spanish song for all I could tell, and he went on and on with it, fervent with emotion, as people walked by, eyeing us. I wanted to laugh, but I kept my face straight and clapped when he finished. Then he asked for a photo together and forced my arm through his, and I realized I was being exoticized in a way that felt a lot less innocent than it does in China. But I let him take a photo because I was still dazed from my spontaneous sidewalk serenade, wondering what portal brought me to this strange, alive world.