Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

In which I think about my mission here, with thoughts wandering to a baseball cap, boobs, and fried pickles.

1:1 Body Body Body

I'm cutting into my first Viennese schnitzel with Milena Kagel at Gasthaus Automat Welt when I ask her what her thesis is about (very interesting '80s political metaphor project). "I have no idea what you've been up to," I admit.

"Well, I guess I move silently," she said.

"Then I guess I move loudly. And now with a Substack." Which can be doubly worse.

Or better? Here's a text I got today from one reader: "I want to let you know how much I admire the way you approach the world. I often find myself trying to think like you in order to psyche myself into some spontaneity or approach a problem more creatively. I live vicariously through you in a lot of ways and I hope you’re proud of yourself because I’m proud of you." This isn't the first time this reader, or others, have had similar sentiments. So clearly I'm doing something right, being loud and clear with what I'm up to. But that platform comes with great responsibility. For example, this newsletter feels like a partially serialized memoir, which is instantly causing ethical quandaries. A joy of a memoir is things settling out, events taking on more nuance with age and reflection.

When I recently met an old friend, I wanted to describe how much their hands had changed in the years since we had interacted, how that was a fascinating way to see time pass. Then two weeks later I found out they just had eczema—if I had published that as I observed it, I wouldn't've been proud. When I do stupid things in my 20s, it could be a fun interlude in my memoir, once I've grown. If I describe them as they happen, it'll be a lot more embarrassing, and I'll have a lot more chances for my family serialize their disapproval.

At C'est ça, a magical French dinner spot with Keerthi and Lau, I brought up some reporting guidelines for an event I might attend. They said I could only stick to describing my own experience and to anonymize everyone else, out of privacy concerns and respect. The light was fading behind my hosts' heads, we were slowing on plowing through the cheese course of Shropshire blue and creme de montagne.

"That's so much grey area, right?" I said. "What counts as my experience? If I observe someone interesting, are my observations about that person my experience? If I make a new friend, how can I tell my story about my time with them without including them?"

Lau proposed a broad level of standard anonymization to shorten that grey area.

"But Pearse works best in the details," Keerthi said. "He shines when he can get specific. How can you do that and be anonymous?" It's true. I adore the curious names, the mannerisms, the backstories. Just read on and you'll see. And at the same time, I know some people are scared to tell me things because I could write about them.

So those are a few challenges I'm juggling as I write: a lack of full understanding, a desire to protect myself, and an obligation to keep secrets for those who ask. I don't have many answers here. But I just know I don't want to leave any chips on the table. I don't want to skimp on nuance, surrealism, and humor. I don't want to give you a half-life. I think my Uncle David would be a good person to ask, he kept a blog going during a giant road trip and breakup. And I know in my heart of hearts he'll tell me there's no solution, because there isn't.

For now, I might write some stuff and wait to publish it. I might alter names and identifying characteristics, or recreate conversations (like above, I feel like I got Keerthi’s wording wrong but opinion right). The standard memoir kind of stuff. I’m also writing this as a living diary for myself to remember, and will have to work harder to manage that—I want to add comments to myself to remind me who people’s real names are, or details I cut for audience attention, bits like that. Thanks for understanding.

2:2 Strong Distant Memory

In almost the opposite side of the world from here, there's a town called Taupō, New Zealand's "year-round tourist trap" since it offers hot springs, skiing, fishing, and one of the country's best hikes, across a grand caldera. After six hours of crossing the caldera, half solo and half with an Utrecht youngin', I had tried to time out my ending with a New York hot dog restaurant listing their surplus items on the surplus food app Foodprint. Wouldn't it be great to expend yourself across shrouded fields of volcanic flow, and then wolf down two Coney dogs? The only surplus foods available en route to my Taupō hostel were nectarines and cucumbers. Fine, I told myself, cucumbers were the hot dogs of the berry world. I got 10 cukes, a kilo of stonefruit, and plated a gorgeous post-hike meal, while using the armful of fresh produce as a way to make inroads at my hostel. This was Taupō after all, we were all up to adventures, surely. We could all use a cuke, surely? But I was met only with stares, or people dug into their devices, not even responding to my offers. Dissuaded and sweaty, I retreated to my bed to unpack. At the adjacent bunk, my neighbor was also unpacking. Her pink hair/camo cap combo seemed authentically cool, not like the post-ironic Los Angelenos would wear it. Would she like any cukes or nectarines? She turned to me, strikingly pretty in an Elvish sort of way. Yes, one cucumber and two nectarines please. Oh. I instantly began to attempt to pass this most phallic combination to her in the least phallic way possible (rolling the nectarines one-by-one into her hand).

Her name was Autumn, an indigenous Canadian from the West Coast on her first big solo trip. I was headed north, to return a rental car and catch a cheap flight. She was headed south, to volunteer for the National Haka Competition. We had one night of overlap; she was the only person in Taupō I connected with. In the hostel's smoking area, she showed me her arrest photo, and I gave her my Moments of Moral Beauty and Appreciation journal to browse. Halfway through she started giggling. What was it? Oh, she had just gotten to the part of the journal about boobs. Well, I explained, if I have to list 3 things a day to see beauty in, it makes sense that a totally normal portion of them would be boob-related. That's a millennia-old tradition. She agreed, and returned the vulnerability by reading me some of her poetry on the municipal bean bags of the lakeside Taupō park. The only goddamn thing to do in town was an open mic at the Irish pub, and the listed start time was wrong, so we killed an hour eating fries in the park, writing beside each other and letting the lake go opalescent with the sunset. I remember enjoying one of her poem's lines about spider silk, but that is the extent of memory.

The Irish pub wasn't really "open mic." One cover band played the classics of the 2000s, Cranberries and otherwise, and we nursed $10 pints while sitting besides each other, which I think is one of the most intimate and fun ways to sit (despite the lack of eye contact) because you're looking at the same thing together. Autumn told me how rez rats are different than other kinds, how her ex tried to show affection by leaving canned fish on her doorstep, how she drives the elderly around back home and they sometimes pay her in cigs. At the back of the pub, I pressed my finger into a County Tyrone on a map of Ireland. "That's where my family is from," I explained. "That's how I'm going to get into Europe." We were getting ready to walk back to our neighboring beds to sleep and go our separate ways. But on the adjacent wall to the Irish map was a setup I've never seen: at least a dozen frames, half containing signed bras donated to the pub, and half photos of braless women weighing their breasts on the pub's scale. The camera flash was harsh and direct, the haircuts dated the photos to Jackass-era aughts. It seemed that, at one point in the pub's more gonzo era, they encouraged this sort of thing from busty, partying patrons. "Those can't be accurate measurements," I said. "How do you get all of the boob? What happens if you leaned in with more of your body?" These boobs did not make their way into the Moments of Moral Beauty and Appreciation journal for that day. Instead, it was Autumn's laugh. The next morning, she had the donated cucumber for breakfast. I haven't seen her since.

1:4 Moments of Moral Beauty and Appreciation

From recent days:

• Watching films shot in Vienna’s Prater park while in the Prater Museum, despite not speaking German. Watching the crowd react to the nuances I wasn't getting, but sharing in the universal language of cinema and humanity — I understood a lot of it.

• The quasi-aria of dedicated fans at an indie rock concert in Schlesischer Busch, knowing the background vocals to a song by Ezy Schubert and singing as a group as the band went hard.

• Being on an impromptu walking tour with someone who loves gorgeous public housing as much as I do.

• The absolute lack of rushing that I had for my first meal in Germany, under the shade at the marketplatz. I had nowhere in the world to be but there.

1:3 Reloading

I used to enter Goodreads' giveaway contests all the time, and I won a handful of times, including one of FSG's packages for their 2018 Brian Phillips essay collection "Impossible Owls." Fine book. 7/10, according to my Storygraph. But alongside the paperback came a blue hat embroidered with the words SEA OF CRISES. This was the title of Phillips' Grantland essay about shady business deals and rigged sumo games around the Sea of Japan, but I liked how the phrase stood on its own. Anything I do can create a SEA OF CRISES. My current location? It's a SEA OF CRISES. I wore the hat for years (I tend to lose hats), bringing it to NZ and now to Europe. Here I am sporting it during King's Day.

Well, it brings me only a small bit of joy to announce that the SEA OF CRISES hat is the first of probably many things I'll misplace in Europe. I replaced it with a 2-euro pink cap purchased in Kettenbruckengasse Flea Market that immediately broke. Moment of silence for all the SEA OF CRISES has provided.

2:1 Side Quest of the Week

• Locate various members of my distant family, and those potentially related to my distant family, on headstones in the Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery.

• Assigned by: MOTHER. Status: JUST BEGUN

2:6 Ephemera

April 2025 Ephemera

Berlin map / printed photo of some unidentified creature.

6:5 Under the Bed

There really might be something under the bed this time.

1:5 Where in the World is Pearse Anderson

Since my last newsletter, I’ve traversed Berlin and Vienna, and am further south now, heading south in the coming days.

This new hostel is on a massive party street, featuring an alley of interconnected cocktail courtyards and karaoke bars that really channelizes sound and anxiety towards me. It’s the weekend, and busy.

For some reason, the “Eco 40-60” setting on the European laundry machines takes 3 HOURS to wash clothes, so I’m writing this late into the night to stay up for that. In the lobby, at 11 PM on a Saturday, are two dozen teen girls, each wearing a conservative dress, each having a separate phone call with someone else. They are speaking American-accented English with Hebrew words slipped in and something Germanic (Yiddish?), so this all screams Orthodox Israeli. Where could they be going at 11 PM with all their checked luggage? And will my socks ever be dry and warm again?

As I go south, let me know if you have recommendations for the following cities (in descending priority):

1. Venice

2. Bologna

3. Parma

1:6 Square Meal

It took less than a week to start buying surplus groceries in a new continent. I give you: a baguette baked with brie, grape jam, apple slices, and twice-roasted white grapes. Fried egg with salad as a starter. The hostel literally did not know what hit them.

May Day lunch, including the leftover Gouda Gouda and the coffee that cooled during the 90 minutes I slept that entire night.

Later added to my system: hazelnut chocolate, grapefruit radler, four tiny Jagdstolz Kräuterlikör bottles, two Berliner Lufts, and unfortunately Burger King train station fried pickles (I think here's where I went wrong).

Good morning America. Pearse out.