We're Making Big Moves!
To our dinner guests, climbers, fellow hikers, and craft beer drinkers,
...consider this our farewell, our “see you later” and the remorseful announcement of our departure from Arvada, Colorado.
To those of you in the front range of the Rockies, expect an invite to our going away party on Sunday, September 23rd, 2018, location and time TBD. Our official push off date will be September 28, 2018.
Huge transitions like these always make me feel dramatic, like it will be the last time I have this beer or hike this trail or do any of the other quintessential-and-eventually nostalgic activities of Denver that I will long for once I’m gone. Anytime my life changes this drastically my body fills with nerves, like I’m tiptoeing towards the edge of the high dive at the public pool all over again. The fear is real and paralyzing, “you should just turn back,” it says, but part of growing up is hearing that voice and diving head first into the deep end anyway.
Of course I will miss the breweries, the tubing trips, the dinner parties, and the lifelong friends we’ve met out here, but when a logical opportunity brings growth, family, and financial viability to the forefront, it’s hard to turn it down. I’ll think on these last two years in Colorado as the time where Heather and I mastered our ability to work together, both professionally and personally, while laughing up the roads into the mountains and floating down the rivers in between. I will think of the friends who we’ve hosted and the friends who’ve hosted us, especially the ones who took care of our canine and equine counterparts when we were away and kept them safe (the chickens were a different story…we still love you!!) Perhaps most of all I will miss having the silhouette of the Rockies as an everyday backdrop, always there to gaze upon while I let out an “it-gon’-be-alright” sigh as I listen to Kendrick on I-70.
And I know everything is going to be all right because it always is. Any of you who’ve spent any amount of time with me know that my optimism is as incessant as it is annoying because my positivity has all the love and no fucks to give. Heather and I will road trip across the country, get married in October, and then move to Long Island for a pit stop as we property hunt for a farm with a stone house and a fireplace. The idea of creating a wedding venue to celebrate love in all its forms while being surrounded by our animals and family is as close to a storybook as I think our lives can get. We aren’t just going to be all right, we’re going to continue being happy.
When Heather and I created The Immeasurable Cookbook we learned that the storytelling and photography was just as important as the recipes. It gave us the idea to combine her photography with my writing to launch Apollo Fields, our holistic approach to documenting weddings. As we now begin the search for our venue, Apollo Fields will evolve from capturing weddings to hosting them: planning everything from logistics to the shot list and all the unforgettable moments in between. Just like The Immeasurable Cookbook, the storytelling and photography at Apollo Fields will be just as important as the recipe, only this time we’re looking for the right couples rather than the right ingredients.
We invite you all to celebrate the things in life that make you happy even if this decision puts some geography between us. We invite you to follow us on our journey as we celebrate artistry, communication, love, and hard work in ours. Finally, we invite you to embark on your own trek into the unknown where nothing is familiar and everything is exciting.
To our next adventure,
Terrence, Heather, Rumor, Riddle, & Limbo
P.S. We've already booked weddings under Apollo Fields in Colorado next year. We will be back! If you are one of those couples, DO NOT WORRY, we're not tacking on travel fees or forgetting about you guys :)
P.P.S. We love traveling! Destination weddings are our jam. We are happy to work with your budget, so don't let our home-base keep you from reaching out! It doesn't matter if your wedding is in NYC, Denver, San Fran, The Italian Countryside, or The South Of France (a girl can dream, right) hit us up. We have some sweet connects in a lot of places that allow us to work as locals, which saves everyone money.
P.P.P.S. If anyone wants to buy our chicken coop, let us know. We put a lot of hard work into that bad boy and would love to see it go to a good home. Not joking...
Photo cred / magic goes to the unbeatable Sam Hines
Turning 30 - "Am I Where I Expected Myself to Be?"
30 is one of those milestone ages that makes us question every decision we’ve made in our lives. Trapped inside our own heads we look at our regrets under a microscope, taking stock of the growth and decay of our insecurities. 30 forces us to be honest with ourselves because between all the excuses we’ve made over the years, the time has kept on ticking. We finally ask ourselves: Am I where I expected myself to be at 30?
I think most of us would say, “hell no! I expected to have a stable job, a significant other, and maybe even a house that would soon become a home.” Turning 30 feels like a slap in the face to our youth and the mistakes we’ve made but in reality it’s a valuable signpost for the measure of our progress. We need reality checks like 30 because otherwise we could go on making excuses while nobody listens.
I personally stopped making excuses early, probably around 19 when I was academically suspended from my first university, SUNY Cortland. Ironically enough, I still consider this mistake one of the best things that happened to me because it gave me a reality check that I very much needed. For the next couple years, I proceeded to take time off from school, eventually enrolling back in a community college while taking on various jobs to identify my strengths and weaknesses. I would later get accepted into an Ivy League institution only to turn them down and finish my undergraduate studies at the top of my class at CUNY Hunter in New York City. The whole arc of those 11 years began with a reality check and now I’m taking stock of my choices.
The only promise I made to myself by 30 was to become an internationally known poet. Well, in November 2017, with the help of my fiancé, Heather, that became a reality when we published The Immeasurable Cookbook and sent copies to readers in Austria, Paraguay, and Portugal. It was a high bar to set but I cleared it because I chose a good partner in Heather and always used writing as a platform to express my thoughts and channel my creativity.
Despite this achievement, the thing I’m most proud of at the age of 30 is my peace of mind. Through my study of philosophy and my ten years of experience in hospitality I have recognized that mental health is our crown achievement given the complexity and perplexity of the human mind. I’ve made most of my decisions from a rational disposition, but I’ve always consulted my conscience as a valuable litmus test for my happiness. I believe that without our conscience, rationality can lead to cold, steely, logical conclusions; yet without our rationality, our emotions can steer us towards the volatile polarities in life. My peace of mind comes from a drive to strike a balance, harkening to the doctrine of the mean from Aristotle and remembering that a happy life depends on a steady ship in rough waters.
By 30 I have lived all around the United States, experienced love and heartbreak, success and failure, and the boring stuff in between. I’m getting married in October 2018 to a partner who helps me stay focused on long term goals while I keep the ship steady. With our eyes on the horizon we’re charting a course ready for a storm, yet carrying the reflection of the sunset in our eyes. A reality check doesn’t have to be a bad thing as long as you realize you have to adjust your sails.
Nihilism: The Teenager's Escape from Reality
3.27.18 - 5004 Cody Street ~ 9:10 AM MT
I’m starting to write at 9 today, which is a step in the right direction. Once I spend a few minutes or hours sucking at the teat of mindless information it’s difficult for my mind to focus and get back on track. When I first wake up my mind may be groggy but it’s the most clear that it will be all day.
Yesterday I helped a friend, let’s call him Mark, paint a room and we talked about everything from nostalgic video games (Link’s Awakening for Gameboy) to what animal we’d want to be reincarnated as (some type of bird). He talked about that he doesn’t have much time to do anything and the time that he does have he enjoys being by himself and gaming, proclaiming that he has “no responsibilities to anyone but himself.” At the time it seemed very appealing, carrying an air of total freedom, but I can’t help but think that it’s ironically one of the reasons he’s depressed. He often uses it as a rationalization for sleeping in until noon and he never applies himself.
I remember when I used to sleep in that late and I’d feel crummy. It was tough to feel good about myself when I wasn’t leaving the stamp of my uniqueness on anything on any given day. Floating through life is fine and all, but at some point I thought, “this is how you wake up middle aged never really doing anything.” Pleasure and leisure can only get you so far but fulfillment lies in a putting in a concerted effort at something that you don’t mind doing over and over again, improving upon it every time. When you sleep through the morning and coast through the afternoon, the only thing you get in exchange is whatever you’re dreaming about.
Heather helps me by pulling my productivity towards her end of the spectrum because that’s her default. It’s also why we’re good together: because we bring each other towards a happy equilibrium. Too much of anything is detrimental, just take either Mark or Heather by themselves—unhappy and caught in a cyclical pattern of what they know and what they feel comfortable doing. I could definitely use some work getting pulled to the side of productivity but I tend to think I hover more around the center than either of them.
Mark also lets his cynicism paralyze his action in the form of anti-capitalistic nihilism. He’s not wrong—it’s just too much for a human mind to carry with it, especially if you’re going to exist within the capitalistic structure and enjoy some of the luxuries it provides. Perhaps I’m too cut and dry or I’ve bought into the system as well, but when you hold beliefs as strong as him I think that you have to either separate entirely, removing yourself from participation in the system as much as possible; or you come to grips with the futility of overthrowing it, accept the benefits it awards you, and you try to combat it in the most productive way that you can as an unique individual. I don’t think he believes in some widespread Marxist revolution to overthrow the owners of the means of production (I used to) but I don’t see any value in nihilism. It’s like a teenagers way out of the existential crisis of capitalism.
My argument against nihilism is also the same one why I don’t harbor negative feelings towards people most of the time—because they don’t provide anything useful to me. When you do things in life that have no positive purpose you are essentially keeping your needle close to neutral, perhaps even tilting towards the negative side of things, and I believe life is more than that. You don’t have to achieve greatness, you don’t have to get a PHD or discover something new; all you have to do is try to leave the unique imprint of yourself somewhere everyday (with exception to intentionally hurting others), and try to err on the side of positivity.
"We Are What We Repeatedly Do"
2.25.18 - Brittany’s House off Independence ~ 9:46 AM MT
Coming back from an Internet black hole, 30 minutes later, I’m finally putting some work in. Its really hard for me to focus when there is so much content to consume, making it really easy to divert my attention to passive activities. I’m grateful to have Brittany and Mike’s house to take refuge, although I wish their fireplace worked.
The thought that’s been bumping around my head is to unify all that I’ve been thinking about since studying philosophy in a non-fiction work about living a meaningful life in the 21st century. My immediate response to my own thought is: who are you to say how to live a meaningful life? To which I respond, I studied philosophy, Aristotle intensively, and have meaningful interactions day-in-and-day-out. If you are what you consistently do, then what does that make the average American? A consumer: products, food, entertainment--that is what our culture is known for.
I used to think about dismantling the ideology of businesses, how ethics should be enforced onto ad agencies and mega-corporations because it’s not “right” to manipulate the psyches of the masses to make a quick buck. A realization on that idea is that the inertia behind the consumerist exploitation of the American population is so great and monolithic that it’d be like an ant standing in front of a tank rather than a person in Tiannamen square. A disruption of the system through bureaucratic means not only sounds like an unconquerable uphill battle, but an exercise in futility.
Instead, focusing on the tenet of Aristotle, you are what you constantly do, in order to have a meaningful life you need to make meaningful decisions. You need to exercise discipline in your consummatory choices, recognizing the need for pain, for silence, for the higher cost of quality products to live a more meaningful life. Unless you’re willing to live a meaningless, surface-level life, in which case that’s fine for you to Snapchat your days away, Facebooking until the screen on your phone burns your retinas.
Aristotle’s tenet, then, is a phrase meaning that life is a pattern of decision-making. It doesn’t need to be framed in good or bad decisions, but rather healthy or unhealthy ones. We do not need to invoke a 21st century code of morality to live better lives, all we need is some science.
Unplugged Times
When I opened up my eyes in the fort (yes, it’s still up) this morning, the sun scorched my retinas like a prolonged flash from a disposable camera. It made me think of how far I’ve come from my hatred for the stream of sunlight that would find its way through the drawn curtains of my teenage years. In those days, the only things that were worthwhile before noon were McDonalds’s breakfast and The Price is Right with Bob Barker (remember to spay and neuter your pets).
After some reading in bed I took a stroll through the melting snow with Rumor, our Doberman pinscher who we rescued from a sandwich shop. It always amuses me how other dog walkers switch to the other side of the road to pass because of her breed’s reputation—little do they know that Rumor is scared of cardboard boxes, paper towels, washing machines and anything that’s loud; not to mention that she lets our paraplegic Jack Russell, Riddle, maintain the alpha role in our house (I must admit that I do enjoy this misplaced, stereotype-induced appearance of intimidation because my tendency to smile at strangers doesn’t exactly strike fear into people’s hearts). Taking walks like these, unplugged from the constant chatter of the Internet allows me to hone in on the trickle of the stream of mountain runoff, the honks of the distant geese, and the massive puddles that turn every sidewalk’s corner into mini ballets of pedestrian pirouettes.
Yet it’s still a struggle for me to leave the comfort of my couch, where I could be scrolling through the sea of infinite information and entertainment that lives in my phone, waiting, beckoning me to fall into yet another black hole of YouTube where after starting with one silly video I suddenly find myself, hours later, watching a clip of a cat putting on a bunny hat, leaving me wondering, “how the fuck did I get here?” It’s nuts how easy it is to be captured by these cheap, goldfish-attention-span videos that sate our lazy, passive curiosities, but that’s a real 21st century, first-world problem—anything I want, including all day McDonalds breakfast and all of the old episodes of The Price is Right are just a couple of convenient clicks away.
It’s unplugged times like walking through the snow with my dopey, intimidating Dobie that make me grateful for remembering the sound of a dialup modem coming through the receiver of our rotary phone as I try to hang up immediately, hoping not to inconvenience one of my older brothers by kicking them off one of their “super important” sessions on AIM in the basement. Perhaps it’s just my version of “back in my day,” but I can’t help but think that this evolution of technology invading our psyches is a bit more intrusive and worrisome than watching Elvis thrust his hips on a television set or the 60’s movement being reduced to a brand of countercultural consumerism. Perhaps we all want to be strong and intimidating but beneath it all we’re all just scared of paper towels and cardboard boxes like Rumor—either way, I’m just happy and grateful I can still muster the strength to shirk the comforts of convenience and enjoy the trickle of a creek once in awhile.
It is Human to Feel
2.23.18 - Bookbar ~ 3:21 PM
Lately I’ve been having a conversation with myself about my own potential. Perhaps its listening to Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, perhaps its serendipitous timing given my current “occupational struggles.” Why don’t I just say “I can’t get a fucking job,” rather than dress it up like some piece of watered down reality? I guess using phrases like these is a way for our brains to navigate the pain we feel when we have to accept a harsh truth of our reality.
My current reality is that I am afraid of my own potential. I’m afraid of putting myself out there, of putting a price tag on my work. By remaining judgment free of others, I have carved out a place for myself to be safe from judgment as well, because I guess I’d rather live in comfortable anonymity than recognized splendor—or worse—recognized failure. I’ve rationalized to myself for years that the reason I haven’t committed to a certain work is that I have always found a reason not to do it, a caveat that renders the effort futile. But I’m just coming to grips with the fact that if I want to be a successful writer I need to:
a) write (duh) and;
b) Not be afraid to approach my own potential.
Even as I sit at Bookbar on Tennyson, surrounded by the clinks and clanks of glassware, I question my happiness with getting the job at Oasis Brewery. It's another job that doesn’t push my limits, it's an atmosphere where I'm already comfortable-- it's safe. By my failure to dedicate myself to my work, my tendency to take what's safe, and my contentedness with what I have: I have paved myself a history of mediocrity. Growing pains are part of the deal when you enter a new industry or part of your life and I have spent my entire adulthood avoiding difficulty. The only time I really reached for something was bartending at Henry’s Restaurant in NYC and I achieved it and quickly became complacent. Even there, I wasn’t really pushing myself to master a craft.
The only thing I’ve exercised a great deal of self-control and awareness is in understanding social interactions. As a friendly face, I have honed the ability to make people feel comfortable and welcome to say that which makes them vulnerable. I’ve done this with a combination of eye contact and knowledge that we’re all insecure and unsure of ourselves, and I’m just willing to be the first one to admit it in a group. When someone is overly sure of themselves it strikes me as arrogant, and I’d rather be vulnerable than overconfident. That’s why I’m excited to open Apollo Fields with Heather. I know I have the ability to make all of our guests comfortable and I know Heather will execute the production side of things or die trying. I am so lucky to have found a partner so rational and understanding.
Back to the conversation on my potential -- I have learned that my biggest asset in writing is my power of description. That I can transport the reader to a place of my creation and I can have fun doing it.
All around me BookBar is buzzing with the comfortable speed of a café on a Saturday afternoon. The patrons around me pluck away at their computers, while people seated on leather couches laugh in the background. Money is exchanged over the counter and “have-a-nice-days” are cheerily spoke through the barista's lips. There’s a comfort to cafés that I wish could plop in my living room, where people talk and jest in casual business. I didn’t think about it, but you rarely find tie-wearing businessmen conducting conversations in cafés, probably because they mean business and its too important to be said over a coffee table. Keep an eye out for them - they tend to seem out of place.
But here I sit, happily plucking away, a letter at a time from my worried consciousness, conjuring up sentences from seemingly nowhere. They say that energy is neither created nor destroyed but where does creative energy come from? Logic says that if it isn’t created, then it must live dormant in each of us until we call it forth to our mouths or fingertips. A reassuring thought except for the creative individual during writer’s block-- “I have it in me somewhere, it has to be here!” like they're looking for a pair of lost keys stuck between couch cushions. What am I writing anyway? Or more accurately, why?
I like to investigate the human condition, getting at why we behave the way we do in social settings and how we can better understand one another. I like (not always) to be honest with myself, engaging in these wacky conversations because running away from them makes me feel like shit. It makes me feel like the way I used to when I would lie to avoid my harsh truths of reality. The way of life that really came to a head in my first semester at SUNY Cortland where I avoided my problems altogether. Everyday I woke in dread of the problems I’ve swept under the carpet the night before; and every night I went to sleep in a cannabis-induced shame. It takes courage to have these conversations but the alternative is a tepid reality laced with indifference, envy, and personal stagnation.
It is human to feel—to ignore this is to ignore human life itself.