📓 May 21, 2026 — 10:36 a.m.
Okay, I am trying to relax and sit here in my studio.
I am going to reminisce about a moment in my past because I tend to always attack sadness head on.
Maybe too often.
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Back somewhere between 2009 and 2012, I was doing late-night deliveries in Los Angeles.
I worked for Don Orlando.
Older Salvadorian man.
Very intelligent.
He had made his own chorizo because he hated most chorizos he had tasted.
“I think I can make a better chorizo.”
That was his mentality.
If he saw something he thought could improve, he wanted to try.
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One night we were driving and talking.
I don’t remember every detail from that conversation anymore.
Only fragments.
But maybe fragments are enough sometimes.
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Don Orlando owned properties in El Salvador.
One of them was a small shopping center size one.
So we started riffing.
“What if it became a casino?”
“What if it had a helicopter landing pad?”
“What if it became so big they built a hotel next to it?”
Two tired men in Los Angeles laughing about turning a small pueblo into a vacation destination.
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Then somehow the conversation shifted toward aliens and the world maybe ending because of the Mayan calendar.
We laughed harder.
I remember turning red from laughing while he was trying to smoke his cigarette.
Window rolled down.
Smoke weaving outward into the night sky.
For some reason I imagine the smoke carrying the laughter away with it.
I don’t know why.
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He was my friend.
He was a role model.
Maybe he understood me more than I understood myself back then.
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I write a lot now.
More than I ever used to.
I feel the need to write.
Maybe because writing finally lets me sit with moments that I used to rush past while trying to survive my own life.
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💬 Reader question
What’s a memory that still feels alive in your head years later?
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If this felt real… I write moments like this.
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