Find Your Irvine

And know when to leave it.

Behold, the cleanest my desk has ever been.

It’s been said that as you approach the end of something you think about the beginning. I have found that to be true! More and more, toward the conclusion of my time at the Bulwark, I found myself returning to the start and what it was like: the Berman office, the WordPress, Charlie, the Pandemic, the Thursday night livestreams, the early triumphs and unavoidable fuck-ups (a little like learning to dance and stepping on your partner’s toes), figuring it out as we went. It was fraught and tenuous. It was only supposed to be a six-week thing while we all got back on our feet following the shuttering of the Weekly Standard. But I believed in JVL and Bill, I believed in Adam, Jim, and Ben. Hell, I’d follow Mona into war. There were no promises at the start, we, or I, at least, were in it for the love of the game (and the crushing weight of student loan debt).

There was something cool about it at the beginning. It was different and new and I got to make it shiny. We were pirates, dissidents, rebels with a cause. It took a lot of personal and professional risk¹ to bring it into being and to get it to solidify into something real. Things change, slowly, then all at once.

And change they do! As a subscriber to the Churchill school of thought that “to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often,” I hope a lot more changes for them.

One manifestation of this philosophical bent is that I love time loop movies. The concept of repetition in general, really, is an area of personal interest. Samsara, tessellations, anniversaries, echoes, fractals, doppelgangers, mirrors, metronomes, déjà vu, bivalves, diacope, habits, rituals, all that good stuff. I cry every time I watch Groundhog Day. But the most fun take on trope, by far, is Andy Samberg’s 2020 “Palm Springs.”²

To spoil it, Samberg’s character Nyles, while attending a wedding in the desert, stumbles into a cave with a mysterious portal that traps him in a time loop. Two more guests from the wedding unwittingly join him in journeying through the cave portal, hijinks ensue. One of the other trapped guests is played by JK Simmons, who delivers a poignant soliloquy after making peace with their circumstance:

In many ways, the Bulwark was my Irvine³. I knew its rhythms and routines. It gave me a clear sense of aligned purpose. I could have stayed forever. Wanted to, in fact. It would have been really cool to design plaques or mementos, another watch, at 10 years. But nothing gold can stay.

As a swan song, I illustrated the masthead and drew each of my colleagues.

I also screenprinted custom totes for the last all-staff I attended.

I had never used Procreate before, but was a simple process. I brought all the source photos into separate files and traced them layer by layer, outlining features, filling with washes of color, minimal detail work for the sake of time. I was surprised to find that despite having taken almost all of the source photos myself and having worked with many of them for a good decade, that I had not truly looked at their faces, that I did not really know them. I was struck by the odd intimacy of it, physically tracing them revealed not just their present visage but through the reduction to line each face was distilled to their essential form as if untouched by time and I was suddenly able to conjure what they must have looked like in youth. I felt like I was pantomiming Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedrals’ short story, somehow simultaneously both the unhappy narrator and the blind man. “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” I felt a swell of tenderness with each portrait, for each person, an overwhelming sense of gratitude and camaraderie that we had all made something together and that there was something meaningful in documenting it and making it a little more beautiful. I am less sure of that now, and harbor a quiet reflexive self-disgust at my collapse into sentimentality. Carver’s narrator walks away from the story with a new understanding and profound sense of connection. When I was done with the illustrations and after I presented them to the team, I was left with the opposite feelings, slightly disoriented and estranged.

When we launched the Bulwark, I was 25. I’m now 33. During those 8 years I escaped from an abusive relationship, changed my voter registration, adopted a dog, ran several ultramarathons (and the Boston marathon!), quit the bleach and grew my hair out, moved back in with my grandparents, published 20 poems, photographed more than 100 weddings and engagements, fell in love, eloped and got married, had to put down the dog, moved a couple more times, and went back to grad school. In my last year at the Bulwark I had multiple miscarriages. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Thoreau and the cost of anything being the amount of life you exchange for it.

In Palm Springs, they get out of the time loop by sacrificing a goat. A little on the nose, biblically speaking. Then they blow themselves up at the threshold of altered time. It takes what it takes.

I made a few final contributions before leaving. The JVL has a posse stickers were a fitting end. The original Andre the Giant designs that inspired the stickers were created by a RISD student. I am also a RISD student! Look at that repetition, look at God. I wanted to make mic flags for all the show hosts but ran out of time and was only able to get one for Tim produced. Cookies for the office.

I used to not particularly like the ending of Palm Springs. We see Nyles and Sarah, the other character who was trapped in the loop, floating in a stranger’s pool, sipping beers, laughing. It seemed like a less funny version of the end scene in Finding Nemo where we see the fish from the dentist’s office tank finally made it to the ocean, bobbing in plastic baggies saying “Now what?” But that really is exactly what it’s like. I started a new job and very much feel like I am floating in a stranger’s pool while vaguely intoxicated by delight in the limbo of adjustment.

xo- Hannah

1. There was even a bomb threat to the office and a lot of rape “jokes” on Twitter in the early days.

2. “Edge of Tomorrow” also wildly underated. We just watched “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” and think it could have used a couple more loops or a montage at the beginning in lieu of the exposition dump that Sam Rockwell’s character delivers in the diner. “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” is a cute take on it.

3. And what is Trump if not a seismic event leading to a brink of absurdity challenging our ability to comprehend time and reality?