36 Hours in Plymouth/Provincetown

& Boston. America, I.R.L.

Intro

Hello. I am back. 

I needed to hide from the internet for a little bit. I did this performance art piece last Halloween as a girl in a glass box. I wrote a story that it was based on. And then I lost the file :o 

Three hours into the piece, I suddenly wanted to hide. Didn’t want to be looked at. I felt like that for a bit, I think. But hello, I am back.

I’ve struggled with depression on and off ever since I was a little girl. Around twelve, I think was the age. I think if I’d made more art, besides ballet, it may have been easier. But you find the things that help you get through, and then keep going, and then feel good. 

As you all know, I’ve had a tough year. Around May things got really bad. I wasn’t eating enough and ran these insane stretches until I was withering. My sweet, New York Grandfather told me this story about a woman he knows who stopped eating and began to look awful. Now, in retrospect, I realize that was his way of asking “are you okay?” 

And then that question came again and again. 

I kept hearing this phrase in my head – “sometimes you wake up and you’re different and it’s ok.” 

I was at a meeting in Miami Beach. 

“Are you okay?” he said, “There is a light that is missing.” 

My father went to Miami with me and he expressed concern. And when enough people notice something, you start to acknowledge it yourself. I went to Kansas to heal. To be around my parents and to do something. I am a fixer. And when there is something I cannot fix I try to fix everyone around me. I tried to get my parents to give up smartphones. I tried to get my father into my deep cut vegetables because I was afraid of bread. Because when something goes on—with you, with the world— the hardest part is sitting still, you know? I put some weight back on. I was outside a lot. I went to Medicine Lodge. Stayed outside for as long as I could. 

And now I’m in Massachusetts. Because my parents were here for Miss Massachusetts USA. And, as I remind myself every day, family is the second most important thing to me, after my faith. It’s really useful to do that. To rank the things that matter to you in the order that they matter. It helps with decisions. With cognitive overload. My list is: 

1. Faith

2. Family

3. Business 

In the past, number three has been art, but now I realize God is calling me to understand how to make a good business. A business that is actually good for you, and me, and us. Working with tech. 

“Use the computer, don’t let the computer use you,” Prince once said.

I got so focused on ridding my life of tech that I forgot it’s something you can create and work with, you know? You can’t tell your brain no no no all the time because then, like a child, it will focus on scarcity and go nuts. You have to think about opportunity. I am young. You are young. We are always young. I took a five hour train here. Then a $60 car. 

I’ve spent over eighty hours on Amtrak trains over the last two months trying to find myself. And I don’t know if I did, but I do feel better. I walked by my New York Grandpa the other day. 

“You look great,” he said. 

“I like your shirt,” I said. 

When I got to Plymouth, my father and I went to a Tavern Called: 

The New World 

We followed the sound of guitar, dreamy stuff through an amp. A country voice floating over the air. This rendition of Sinatra’s My Way so good that I went up to him after to say so. I told him about the Jazz scene in New York I found myself in of people trying to do Sinatra the way Sinatra did it but he did Sinatra in his way. His name was Larsen. 

And I got a Tanqueray tonic. I love the taste of Tanqueray. Over anything topshelf. Perhaps because You know I’m no Good is one of the first songs I ever covered on the piano when everyone left my house and I’d play and sing for hours and hours. 

Tanqueray was my Dad’s drink in college too. He ordered one. Everyone should have gin with their father at least once and ask about his life. My dad was a brilliant trumpet player. He is a kind man, with a heart of gold. He is patient with me, even when I am depressed or speaking in an unclear way because brain is moving faster than a pencil or a keyboard or my mouth. We played hangman. And Tic Tac Toe, ordering fried cauliflower and broccoli on hummus with honey. 

“Try it with the honey,” my Dad said. 

He used to deliver the paper on the back of the truck in Medicine Lodge. The driver would only know he’d fallen off when the papers stopped hitting the porches.

Later we met my Mom as she exited the pageant. I wore a hat a man gave me at the Nobu bar in Midtown when he overheard me and Sean talking and said we sounded like “internet people.” 

No one recognized me except for my mother’s client. I prefer it that way in the pageant world. It’s not that I’m shy, I just like to be prepared if I’m expected to be larger than myself, you know? We went to another restaurant: 

Añejo Mexican Bistro & Beechtree Taqueria

And I have a suburban sized Margarita. No one does a margarita like a city that isn’t New York. In a glass as big as your head with a salt rim I took my finger to a few times, instead of my mouth, like a lady. 

“Do you have mezcal?” I ask. I love Tequila, until the morning. Like a lover who only texts you at 2 am. Like one I’ve finally let go of, after I had to come to terms with the fact that he’d never be good for me.

I order chicken tacos. My mother, fajitas. My father, a pork quesadilla with birria. I insist on sharing. Something I only started after living in New York and working with restaurant people. My father’s dish is by far the best, even though it’s all great. I ask for a pen and doodle. Content strategies, making like I’m productive in some way since the stress of Entrepreneurship gets to me, even when I ditch my smart phone. The birria, my first birria, requires a tilt of the head to bite into. The pork folds over the tongue, like a blanket–a perfectly sized one, like when you are still a child and a blanket is the only thing you need for happiness, or at least security. 

We walk toward the car, as a tattooed man croons, strumming a guitar like someone on a coke high–chatty, excited and bright and hopeful. An hour or so earlier, my father and I heard the same man ask someone with a hose if he could borrow it to rinse off of his face. 

For father’s day, Dad and I drive to Provincetown.

Provincetown

My first trip to Massachusetts was 2018. I was Miss Teen USA, fresh still. Seventeen.

Miss USA and our manager and I drove down the same rode, stopping at Mary Lous, taking pictures for Instagram all the while. I was still high on a new identity. Drunk on editing my own image in the way my sisters taught me. I remember speaking to a cyclist at the charity event in french. Posing on a beach near the Kennedy Compound. Facetune. A romper I returned to the stylist. Messaging East Coast boys I’d go to school with with a new found confidence that would burn out like a match. 

Now, driving the same rode, my father told me he was here thirty years ago, for work. You forget that your parents did things alone, unless you ask enough. That’s why you must ask over and over and over. And let them repeat stories and listen. Take notes even. I put on Bowie.

Bubba's by the Bay

We get lunch at Bubba’s by the Bay. I learn that my mother wore overalls to their first date, with a pager in the front pocket. I laugh because I’d just asked the interns to get me two pairs of overalls the week before. God is telling me to get minimal with some stuff. Like clothing. To focus on other things. 

My first house was across from a wheat field. I’ve been accused of being a nepo baby on the internet. Mostly on TikTok. That couldn’t be further from the truth. My Great Grandmother (or Granny to me) on my Mom’s side grew up picking cotton. The first sentence of her eulogy was that she grew up picking cotton and didn’t like it. My Grandpa on my father’s side was a lineman, fixing the power lines for the town in the rain. Both of my parents stepped into the unknown compared to their backgrounds for different opportunities. To try to create more wealth. To try to have a good life. I was raised to work hard. To be honest, most importantly.

We’re in Bubba’s. Dad and I split a shrimp cocktail and I ask if I can draw him as he talked to his father, who I overhear, had a seafood boil. I order jerk chicken over salad. He orders fried fish. 

As he talks to Gpa, I look around. At the blue curtains over the awning to my right, blowing gently in the wind. At the little bulb vases with a single flower and some sprigs on each table. 

“Nice view for work,” a man says to our host, as he approaches the restroom (I once had a professor say that words like “approach” are bad, that you either do things or don’t, but I don’t know what about the in between stages of things??? Must we always be finished?) 

Dad hung up. I talked about what I remembered of my childhood. He talked about what he remembered of my childhood. That he’d fall asleep in the play room because, even tired after work, he made sure to spend time with my brother and I. 

I am thinking of family trees. Of shapes and lineage and a Youtube comment that terrified me on the train, asking what race my father’s father was because someone wanted to know which Nation I was from in the Bible. Possibly the same account that made me turn off Direct Messages on my Instagram. It’s weird being followed around the internet like that. Flattering, until the line gets too thin I guess. Or maybe I need to more responsible with my imagination. To take interest as kindness instead of a threat. 

We should all be more responsible with our minds. Our hearts. And slowing down with my Dad, I jot down some stuff on the importance of eating. Of walking around, hanging out and listening. You are your brother’s keeper and it is greed and gluttony–of money, of resources, of content– that births conflict. 

One of the most powerful things you can do in today’s world is be patient and considerate and kind. 

We leave the restaurant and I reach out for a wooden piano. I want an apartment with a piano so bad I could carry it myself up a pre war staircase. 

“This is the perfect temperature to sit right here and eat a sandwich” someone says. And I laugh because it is a perfect sentence. An idiom I’ve never heard. 

We go to 

Provincetown Bookshop

And I find The Brother’s Karamazov, showing Dad the section in Elder Zosima’s part that started all of the heart tattoos. 

We go to

The Coffee Pot 

And I get a coffee, looking in awe, up at the menu. One of those lined ones with black letters someone placed one by one. I reach in my pocket to pay and only have Gpa’s Gideon Bible. Dad gets it. $2. 

We go to the beach. I spill my coffee on the monument, as the people next to us discuss how new it is. Wabi Sabi, I tell myself, to feel better. And I write in my little notebook, (some of which I’m transcribing now), because the mind is going and going and going and I know what I say to my father will probably not be linear or make sense. I read the bible. 

Psalms 78:38-39

I read my Bible for answers a lot. We are always looking for answers. In other people. In other things. I beliefs and ideologies and ways of being in the world. I’ve learned that if I just take around my Bible and Flip Phone and a notebook, I will look for answers in my Bible and write or draw or hum when I just need to get stuff out. 

I write when I tire my dad out talking. I wish I had a harmonica, so I could just shut up and play a nice tune for him. Something with a good plot that makes you feel good. 

“Ashely’s done with her first year of college,” the people to our right say. I think about what other people talk about a lot. I once dated this dude that would listen in on other people’s conversations, convinced intellectual discussions were the only real ones. But now, I really appreciate simple things. Like the perfect temperature to eat a sandwich. We make things. Social constructs. Buildings. Chairs. Food. Tech. And then we talk about it. That’s what being human is, I guess. 

We just need to focus on making better stuff. And then looking at that stuff and going, “this is good stuff, man… “yeah” “yeah” “yeah””. 

I WANT TO BE IN LOVE 

I read too many books by Sarah Dessen as a kid. And Nicholas Sparks ones obviously. Blushing like mad on the way to ballet, dreaming what it’d be like to have a beautiful man make me lobster on the beach. 

We go to a convenience store, because I am hungry. My Mother and I ran five miles that morning, sharing airpods listening to Sam Cooke. She watched the map as I made eye contact with all of the dogs. 

I’d love to see a survey of American convenience stores. Provincetown has guitar strings next to cereal and condiments. So much music. So many dogs. Beautiful men I look at, making mental notes to come back with Sean. 

When you’re mind is going too fast, often it’s beautiful and helpful to declare something that you like. And you don’t even have to explain it. 

“I like relish” I say to my father. 

“Me too,” he says.

And we exit–the weather is perfect, people are smiling, and we sit on a concrete slab sharing a banana and peanuts as I look at a sign for soup thinking of a man from Boston I dated for a long time. We cooked together a lot. He never asked me to be his girlfriend until. Until it was too late. He showed up with a yellow flower at the place where I have coffee and everyone watched, wondering who he was. I’d never been there with a man who wasn’t Sean. I suggested we start over. 

Seeing where someone grew up illuminates them to you, you know? Men here moved like him. I could finally visualize the stories he told me about his childhood, his parents. He was really great. I’m no scorned lover. I can recognize a good thing for what it is. And I think he’s a saint for dating me as I spiraled into a depression that I’d drown myself in Amtrak to cure. I got weird, in a way that I think Britney Spears would understand based on the section where she discusses losing herself after starring in Crossroads. If you’re reading this, thank you for being kind. And you cook like a man who grew up in Boston, and I was afraid of food when we dated. And life knocked me down and I was trying really really hard to get back up. 

We go to Tim’s Used Books, tucked back behind all this foliage. I fall in love with a one dollar book The Background of my Life by George Santanzona. I love that genre of American literature. Someone writing about their life once they get old. I wrote one quote from it down: 

“Now in what form have angels appeared?”

We enter. I have to put my coffee on the floor next to the bust of a head. Dad finds a book on the transcontinental railroad and I pull down a copy of Master and the Margarita. In Ignite a Shift, Stephen McGarvey writers about how your subconscious mind looks for things that are already familiar to it. That’s why marketing is important. Why media diets matter. I fall in love with the portraits of the writers in all the books. I am trying to draw now. You can learn anything.

Time to go. We walk to the parking lot. Lots of people sitting in lawns. Smiling. Slow life, tan, soft smiles. Lots of dogs. 

Two men walk behind us. 

“Relish,” one goes. 

“Relish!” the other repeats. 

In front of us is a small restaurant called “Relish.” 

I laugh. These are the sort of things that my ballet teacher calls “God winks.” Signs that even though we’re lost confused, afraid of our own flesh, that he is there and he will listen if you need to get stuff off of your chest or ask for peace. 

Dad and I drive home listening to Bowie, to Harper Valley P.T.A, to Little Green Apples, to this random song I made about Postmen when I was depressed. 

And now I’m going to just straight transcribe some stuff I wrote by hand: 

& (yes I wrote the & sign) I know this is a ridiculous sentence, but I was once watching this podcast with the man who apparently has the highest IQ in the world and decided to opt out of society and live on a farm & he said that there are a lot of people who are brilliant, but go crazy because they have a broad scope & then they can’t narrow it, you know? And I think that happens to all of us because our scopes are too big. 

It helps to make simple, definitive statements about oneself. To decide who you are through curiosity & declaration. 

Like me. I am 24. I enjoy grocery shopping. I love my parents. I like to walk around sometimes while eating an apple. I want to learn how to cook crab this year. 

Genesis is like that. In the Bible. God puts man in the garden & then he’s just like, “ok now name stuff” haha. 

In book club, we imagined what it would be like to name martians our own word. Make a word. I’ll reply to some in the message boards if you do. 

Transcription over. Typing now.

When I was home, my Mother reminded me that wallowing in your own sadness is a spiral. That you have to keep going. To climb out and set up systems that keep you functioning. My Mother is the smartest woman in the world. I was spiraling down for a bit, on the tail end of the beginning of a tough year, but now I’ve set goals. I’m here and I’m trying. And that’s all that matters. Is the trying. 

I make mistakes. I change my mind. I am human, and so are you. But we learn and we keep on going. The world is big. Things happen and when you feel helpless, you should focus on what you can do instead of what you can’t. You can fall in love. You can smile at a stranger. You can turn toward the sun and say thank you. 

I’ve really focused on my business as a new outlet. But to be honest, I don’t really know what to do with Hot Literati. We could make a product. We could change the community in a way that has more structure. We could honestly probably fundraise. But, just as I was raised to be honest, I was raised on a leadership philosophy that prioritizes service. 

So I’m asking you guys, what do you want this to be? 

If you’re a member of the blog, please post there. Pitch me something. Brainstorm with me. Come to office hours. I get a few submissions each month of people who want to work for Hot Literati. We could make a cool business with some jobs if that’s what you want, but like life, like love, like existing in the world, 

I can’t do it alone. 

I don’t know how you found me on the internet, but I know that you all are lovely and really seem to care and for that I say thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. 

Everything will be okay. You just have to keep on waking up and keep on being kind and curious and alive.

Boston

Quick note on Boston. We went to Lolita's--the same restaurant where I went with my Miss USA and our manager. I learned how to facetune my first photo after. We went to:

Abigail's Tea House

Where my mother and I did a tea flight as my father smiled lovingly. I walked us uphill to:

Nine's

Which was closed, but on the way there we saw the

Carry Nation Cocktail Bar

which was fun because my Dad's home town is where Carry Nation actually lived.

We got lost on the Freedom Trail. An “old geezer” checked me out as my parent called him.

I was too left brained. A little stressed. And hungry. We go to: 

Cafe Howell

And I get a banana and an americano. I think about how I need protein first, but I can’t tell if it’s a thought in my brain because of all of those what I eat and what to eat videos on the internet. I make eye contact with a woman sitting alone across the cafe. I nod. I always nod. 

I was sad to say goodbye.

 Family is everything to me. I can't wait to add to mine. But until then, I'll roam around, build a business, and give you the curiosity to do it yourself, too. Media is one thing. Exploration, empathy, and the willingness to jump based on faith (or get on an Amtrak) is another. I love the train. The sun is setting on one side. The treeline is dark on the other. There is a gorgeous stranger to my left with riply biceps and an arm tattoo and one in front of me reading John Grisham.

Travel across America. Find out for yourself. 

I missed you guys. I figured if anyone publishes my journals someday (or some of the disgustingly good love letters I’ve written), then at the very least, we should dialogue in real time. 

If you go to Massachussets, tell them Hot Literati sent you. 

xx

hailo