It's been another rough year for product development. Supply chain issues haven't gone away in this "post-pandemic" era. We’ve had some additional production woes of late that suggested a trip to Portugal wouldn’t come amiss.
I’ve traveled much of the world in the last 35 years, but these days I don’t get out much. Really. My home office is in a Brooklyn basement and I have two children under the age of 8. There isn’t much “wash your face time” much less “me time” or “work/life balance”. From sheer necessity I work from a very subjective, highly flexible 4-square model on a scale from Urgent to Not Important. As an aside, I can't believe how many Urgent/Not Important tasks there are! I won’t say working from home with kids is boring, but it is certainly monotonous...
It wasn’t until I was standing at the rental car counter in Lisbon that I realized that I hadn’t left the US since 2015 when my first child was born, nor had I left my children overnight, ever. While pondering my partner’s likelihood of survival, I realized that I hadn’t left the country without him since 2012! In that moment I had my first mid-life crisis, not quite “who am I” but “omg, do I remember how to travel, is this 20 year old at the counter going to entrust me with a car, how do I get gas and pay tolls, can I really crisscross this country by myself?” It took me about 30 minutes to get over it. It turns out I can do it all, duh. Oh! and I’m not f*cking old. Can I say that? Yup, it’s my company.
So here it is, we stayed in a nice but affordable hotel up against a nature preserve, complete with pool. I showered regularly and washed my face everyday, twice! Even did a face mask, the spa was too big a step up, baby steps here :)
And the adventure didn't stop with bathing, we drank fabulous local biodynamic wines, had espresso in the afternoon, ate piles of local seafood and gorgeous salads. And we worked, boy did we work!
I'd forgotten how deeply satisfying it can be to work without interruption and to reach a sense of completion. I love to work and so does Ku, we’re Aries who are frighteningly single-minded when it comes to execution. We slept side by side in twin beds and talked work, ate work, drank work, swam work and dreamt work for three days straight. And then we went to the factory to perfect your Blazer & Overcoat and worked some more!
I didn’t even Facetime the littles. We just sent a few photos back and forth every day, here’s one of them. They seem just fine without me (phew).
And after all that work, I met up with my good friend and creative visionary, Randolph Albright whose been living the good life in Portugal for decades, building a Gesamptkunstwerk in the countryside. His most recent publication, House of the 3 Rabbits, documents the archaeological fragments belonging to the lost cult of nature. Hear! Hear!
His hospitality is legendary throughout the creative community and he was no slack about it during my short visit. We visited an artist collective studio to check out some ceramics, went to the beach, looked at inspiring art books while we made dinner, picked lemons in the dark for our oysters, grilled hake over an outdoor fire and drank wine under the stars to a fabulous soundtrack by our friend Bernardo Gaeiras.
