BUY THE TICKET, MISS THE RIDE

A dispatch on exhaustion, deliverance, and the people who show up.

I want to tell you about the weekend I had planned, but I can’t. Instead I have to tell you about the weekend that happened to me, which is a different genre entirely — less “itinerary,” more “interdimensional travel.”

It started Thursday night in Robby Roadsteamer’s kitchen, which is less a kitchen and more of a natural habitat. There is a plastic great horned owl on the table. The owl was there the entire time, watching with its yellow eyes as two grown men planned the liberation of the republic while a scented candle burned. Just the two of us — the calm, intimate scheming phase of any great operation, the part they montage in heist movies right before everything goes sideways. I felt anticipation the way a Labrador feels a doorbell. Wokestock was two days out. I felt ready, and feelings are all a gonzo journalist has, besides debt.

On Friday, our friends Kap and Tiana arrived in Boston and we all made a pilgrimage to Herter Park, where a butterfly landed on the stairway to the empty stage and sat there like it was running a sound check. I took this as a good omen, because I am an idiot, and omens are wasted on idiots. Nature was clearly trying to tell me something — beautiful things are brief, do not schedule around them — and I responded by photographing it until it fluttered away from us.

After that, we all went back to Robby’s house. I ended up staying up all night because apparently I believe sleep is a conspiracy invented by mattress companies.

Let me say something about staying up all night at my age. Your twenties forgive you. Your body files the paperwork and moves on. Past age forty, an all-nighter is a payday loan from a lender who knows exactly where you live and isn't afraid of swinging a baseball bat if that's what it takes to even things out.

By the time Echo Romeo rolled in at 1:45 in the morning I was communicating primarily in nods and lazy gestures, running on the fumes of fumes.

Which brings us to Saturday, 6am, and possibly the strangest twenty minutes of my weekend. I had an extra bed in my hotel room. I offered it to Echo, walked him up, handed him a keycard, watched him crawl under the covers, killed the lights, and went down for a smoke like a responsible degenerate. I contemplated taking a ride to the coast to watch the sunrise when I realized I’d forgotten my wallet, went back up, and — Echo was gone. Bag still there. Bed barely dented. The man had evaporated. I stood there in bewilderment, asking myself stupid questions: Did I hallucinate him? Did the owl get him? I would not see him again for hours. I’d learn later, at Wokestock, that he’d gotten an early-morning text that required immediate action — because that’s what Echo is. A man who will leave a free bed at dawn because somebody, somewhere, needed him more than he needed the pillow. Activists like Echo are indispensable, and also impossible to keep track of, and these facts are related.

Before I could even finish being confused, my phone buzzed. It was Chelsea Gods. Wheels down from San Diego, 7am, having crossed the entire continent on a red-eye to be there. I invited her to breakfast at the Westin because when a friend flies 3,000 miles, you buy them eggs — that’s just the social contract. We ate, we drank coffee, we laughed, and we plotted. We took the elevator up to the ninth floor and walked the entire length of the hotel to get to my room at the end of the hallway.

Then we both collapsed into the two beds like two felled trees, with three hours until checkout and a DO NOT DISTURB sign that the housekeeping staff interpreted as a personal challenge. They breached the doorway at 9:45. They breached it again at 11. Chelsea slept through some of it. I slept through none of it, because the universe had decided it wasn't done with me yet.

Echo rematerialized exactly at noon with the timing of a stage magician. He retrieved his bag, and we headed off to Wokestock.

I’m not going to write in depth about Wokestock. Not the middle of it, anyway. I’ll tell you the edges: a bald eagle in full costume wearing a sign reading HELP! ICE HAS GONE TO THE BIRDS!, waddling past the benches of people with tremendous purpose.

A papier-mâché rabbit in golden lace looming out of the trees while the music played.

Some unidentified festival-goer wearing ANTIFA stamped across the back of a pinstripe button-down like a country club monogram.

Robby Roadsteamer, arms spread wide on the hillside – wearing sunglasses, a smile, and a giraffe onesie – king of the beautiful absurd thing he and his friends helped build.

We sang, we hollered, we danced for hours. The rest stays unwritten. Certain kinds of magic die when you pin them to a page, and I’m a journalist, not a taxidermist.

On Sunday, the machine finally ate me.

Understand my anticipation here. GonzoFest. New York City. July 19th. The Thompson family — Hunter’s family — whom I have not seen in over a decade. I did everything right, which should have been my first warning. Alarm at six. Bag packed. Through Logan security like a man who has finally gotten his life together. And then the notification, and the email, and the seven words I did not want to read: We’re sorry but your flight was canceled. A 74-minute hop to LaGuardia. Canceled. I got on the standby list and discovered I was 24th in line for two seats, odds so bad that calling them a lottery insults lotteries.

I gave up. I rebooked the Westin. I booked a Monday flight home. And I sat in that lobby — no room ready, no sleep banked, no chance at getting to GonzoFest to reunite with the Thompsons — completely and totally depleted, surrounded by cheerful strangers with functioning itineraries. I texted the Thompsons to say I wouldn’t be able to make it, and they texted back WE WILL MISS YOU 😢 in all caps, and I sat with that, because it was somehow both the wound and the bandage.

Here’s what I know about disappointment that comes from things beyond your control: it’s just love with nowhere to land. You can’t argue with it, can’t outdrink it, can’t file a complaint with Republic Airways DBA Delta Connection about it. All you can do is give it somewhere to land.

Mine landed on Chelsea Gods.

I texted her to let her know what had happened to me. She caught a Lyft to meet me at the Westin. She was there within an hour. We sat down for breakfast again at the same table like we were reliving the previous day. Then we left our bags with the bell hop, stepped outside, wandered east for about a mile, rode a bus through a narrow tunnel, boarded the subway system and hopped on a ride to Fenway Park, where Chelsea documented everything while wearing a DEPORT MELANIA hat and a t-shirt citing scripture that does not, strictly speaking, exist.

Then we went to Tasty Burger for a vanilla milkshake and some more calories. After smoking another joint, we made our way to the Boston Tea Party Museum, where Chelsea held a pink teapot purse aloft under a portrait of Ben Franklin like it was the true Declaration, and I laughed until the weekend’s whole ledger balanced. And somewhere on a love-locked bridge with a historical plaque honoring hardcore kids who funded a record label by selling Yankees Suck shirts, I noticed something: the disappointment was gone. Not managed. Not processed. Gone. Airlines had taken my Sunday, and a friend had simply handed it back.

That’s the lesson, if this mess has one. The itinerary is a rough draft the universe edits without your consent. The friends are the final copy. GonzoFest happened without me and the world kept spinning. But Chelsea flying across the country on no sleep, Echo vanishing at dawn to answer a fellow activist’s call, or Robby building a festival where a bald eagle can feel free to express itself — that’s not the consolation prize. That was the whole tournament, and I almost missed it by staring at a departures board.

So: thank you, Robby Roadsteamer, ringmaster of the joyful resistance, keeper of the owl. Thank you, Echo Romeo, the disappearing man, proof that some people sleep less than I do and for better reasons. Thank you, Chelsea Gods, patron saint of showing up, who turned one of my worst Sundays into one of my best with nothing but a Lyft app and a felony-grade sense of humor. And thank you, Boston — every beautiful weirdo who gathered on that hillside in Allston, every bunny and eagle among you. You held the whole thing up.

I’m writing this from the plane, flying home to St. Paul with a heart that is still intact and a story better than the one I had planned.

---

If this dispatch made you laugh, or ache, or both: please share it with someone who shows up for you. And if you've been reading free for a while and this publication has earned a place in your week, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure — the work stays free to read either way, because that's the point. But every upgrade helps fund the next story I can't plan for.

Closer to the edge, as always. Thanks for keeping me there.

— Rook