August 2026
where in the world is carmen san diego
Hey freak,
I have become a person who hates screens. For most of my professional life, I fought to / have been pushed into the creation of a digital existence —digital money, digital career, digital modes of working— and it gave me the freedom I wanted while also making me someone so twitchy they can hardly watch a movie. I fell in love with a movie buff and really tried it. It’s maybe the pillar of the arts I most suck at digesting. Even on a plane I prefer to read. It’s not my idea of a good time anymore to blog like it was back in high school, in my bedroom, reblogging the patterns of the gates on Parisian streets I never knew I would see. Well, I have the delight of seeing them now, and not with irregularity.
I’m not rich, but I’ve been called deeply wealthy in experience, in travel, and in the luck that provided the opportunity for these things to happen when it simply doesn’t make sense for them to happen to a freaky freelance poet working person, one who has been forced by life to invent a way of existing in the music industry, where I found myself by accident because I thought writing about rock stars was going to bring me any stability (I was half right). It’s a story I like to tell because it was a path that did not give me stability but gave me a decent ear, a 20s I will remember forever, and access to every party and concert I ever wanted, where I met some of the people of my life. I’m not exactly raved out, either, but maybe I’m a little wiser now. Maybe I’ll never stop being a critic in some measure, but I’ve begun to think of articles and essays in the mode of short stories. I’m sure there’s something in there to parse, but I’m sure it’ll take a few years.
I have spent most of the summer in a dance between Spain and France. It has taken me to Primavera Sound, into the heart of a heatwave during Paris Fashion Week —where I found myself in rooms where the media and fashion people who enter por la puerta grande rub shoulders with the chaos twinks who entered through the trash chute for a chance to breathe the same air as Charli XCX (yeah, really), was denied entry to a party where I helped make the list (fuck Silencio, down), and I found myself working directly with a photographer I used to follow back in that sacred time of reblogging to help lift up an artist who I thought for years was an icon— and to Roberto Bolaño’s local bookstore in Blanes, where his librera said he loved detective novels before she overcharged me on a copy of Los Detectives Salvajes. The moments I appreciated most were quieter: the nights at a number of small bars in Gràcia and El Clot and Poblenou, the miracle of near-daily walks to a crisp blue Mediterranean nude beach before settling in for the day’s work (my source of income isn’t all that mysterious, yet).
The miracle of miracles was Egypt, where high temperatures and low emotional states mixed with shukran and shopkeepers, where I locked myself in the Library of Alexandria and saw Cavafy’s balcony, where I started writing short stories in earnest when my time there became more open than I had first planned, and where a need to pause my Schengen visa collided with a longtime childhood dream and research for what is coalescing, I hope, into my first novel. What comes after is kind of decided, but you’ll have to let me live it before I can tell it.
I think the other miracle was the fact that I could sustain all of this while the place where I was born was again rocked by tragedy. It was through poetry, as always, that I carved some sort of path forward. We even raised money, a grain of sand in the continuing daily need. If you want me to point you to a Venezuelan fundraiser, don’t hesitate to ask — I know plenty.
It’s not all fun and games. Of course things happen when you travel that are maybe better processed in a journal or in the actual things being written or even with a therapist. These travel lows are a part of the miracle too, of the great disbelief and gratitude that exists within giving yourself, and really incarnating, a dream. The dream is comfortable and the reality isn’t, but it’s so much better somehow.
I turned 30 earlier this year, which coincided with my last day in Mexico City, where I spent two years of my life after leaving New York. Come September, I’ll be back in NYC at least through December. There’s a job, and I missed my friends (if you’re reading this and you didn’t know I was coming back — I’m coming back for a bit! Text me!). I miss the artists too, who I can honestly say are some of the most generous I’ve met in my life, even if the scene can sometimes be………quite something (if I speak….)
I say all of this to say that I am trying to really activate this again, if only as a monthly marker, or a more useful newsletter. I thought I’d be posting interviews here, and then that went out the window when I (thankfully) was picked up by several magazines I love as a regular contributor. I imagine you’ll still see the occasional piece of criticism here. Maybe I’ll post story drafts or chapters for paid subs. Maybe I will finally stop being a neobohemian and pay rent and have an apartment with a couch in one (1) city again, and the capacity to throw dinner parties. I’m a Cancer rising with a Leo moon, and the lack of hosting dinner parties in my current nomadic point of madness just doesn’t sit right with me.
Still, really enjoying the ride. Maybe I don’t document it as well as some of these TikTok people. I can only get myself to even try to do social media by writing it out. If you’re literate and luscious and reading this right you’re doing it on a terrase with an ice cold glass of something in your hand. Well cheers, and take a fucking sip, babes.
See you in September? Maybe sooner, if you’re a paid subscriber? How will I feel about this medium? Will there still be a world in September? There better be. My best friend’s wedding is in October. Keep the world alive for then, please. After that, all bets are off.
Abrazo,
E
Pues te leí acostadita antes de dormir. Extrañaba leerte! Un besote