The Emperor of Woodcroft!

It was early morning; if, like me, you consider early to be relative. I was enjoying a steaming cup of holiday blend when a figure appeared in the doorway of Dulce Cafe wearing a hat that only someone from the South End would consider sporting. 

It was the Emperor of Woodcroft, as beneficent a tyrant as you can find nowadays. I joined him in line, feeling that if one cup was good, another would be even better.

"Ho!" he said in the manner of an English copper. I didn't like it. The tone was all wrong. "Swilling cocktails, eh?" he said.

I could make nothing of this. "I fail to understand you," I said. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the hour one might expect to hear, 'Good morning'?"

"Out on the tiles to all hours?" he said.

I bridled at the accusation, at least I think I bridled. I'm not sure of the word's meaning, but it sounds good, and I've heard it used in similar circumstances.

"You will have to provide more detail," I said, correcting my posture and straightening the gig line of my shirt to show that I was above all his jibber-jabber. "And I look forward to hearing the explanation. I'm sure it will hold me spellbound."

"I mean you were probably out carousing, getting home just before dawn and waking the entire neighborhood. That's what I mean, Mr. Hoitie-Toitie."

This remark got me hotted up to near incandescent. The nerve! The impertinence! Again, not sure of the definition, but I'm pretty sure it's in the neighborhood of my meaning.

"It could scarcely have been later than two when I got home, and I was seeing an old friend off to spend the holiday in the Catskills." And I'm sure I said it with enough topspin to qualify for hauteur.

"Did you have a cold shower this morning?" he asked, giving me the full effect of one eye.

"I have hot water," I said.

"Did you do Swedish exercises before breakfast?"

"I'm Danish," I said, "and we don't indulge in such excess. At least my grandfather was Danish, and I believe that entitles me to make the same claim."

"Then why do you look like something from the chorus of a touring revue?" he said.

"Ah," I said, "that's easy enough to answer. I just need a second cup of Jah's mercy. That's why I'm in line."

He seemed to consider this, but after a few seconds, his inward gaze looked out again and settled near the lower portions of my facial map. His expression was that of someone who has found caterpillars in the salad.

"Ho!" he said, "what's that?"

"What?" I said, passing a hand across my face.

"You don't wear a beard," he said in the tone of an accusation.

"No, I don't wear a beard, and I'm happy about it. Too many beards taking up space in the world. I haven't seen so many beavers since the days of Edward the Confessor."

"Ho!" he said. "Real men wear beards, and your face would benefit from a mustache as well."

"I wore a mustache for years when younger," I said, and it looked horrible, much like a soup stain."

"What does Ms. Wonder think of it?" he said.

"Of what? My shaving?"

"I'm sure a bit of facial hair would provide much-needed relief to someone who spends more than a few minutes in your presence."

"What does it matter what others think?" I said, and I felt the conversation was becoming a bit sticky. I was ready to change the subject.

"That's good. She doesn't like it," he said. "You'll have to grow some hair. Take a few days off and get away is my advice. You'll probably look like Rasputin until the stuff grows in."

I will not stop shaving," and I'm finished with this conversation.  J'y suis, j'y reste about sums it up for me. The barista is waiting for your order.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Up to you, of course, if you want to be an eyesore."

"An eyesore!"

"Eyesore is what I said."

I suddenly felt the need to practice the three deep breaths. First breath: power and balance to be ready for whatever life brings my way. Second breath: to remind me that I am enough for the present circumstances. Third breath: to recognize that there is more good than bad in the present moment.

"Ho!" he said, "what's that on your chin?"

But this is where you came in, I believe. 

Saltwater Stakeout: A Tale of Two Sets

"Two productions, one boardwalk, Amy," I announced, tapping the wheel in time to the Village People's YMCA. "Two chances to get footage of behind-the-scenes action on a television set. This is what winning looks like."

I said it with the unearned confidence of a man who hasn't captured a single on-location film frame all year.

"Winning looks like pistachio ice cream underneath a beach umbrella," Amy said. "What this looks like is a man about to embarrass himself near a Ferris wheel."

She wasn't wrong. She's never wrong. It's the single most exhausting thing about her.

The Profile

On the drive down, Amy insisted on constructing what she called a "target profile" for the kind of teenager who gets cast in a Disney+ pilot. We were chasing the rumor that Disney's Saltwater, a mermaid series, and possibly a continuation of the Aquamarine story, if you believe the message boards, was shifting locations to the Carolina Beach boardwalk.

"Good hair," she explained. "Suspiciously good posture. The kind of calm that only comes from parents who've already read the contract twice."

"That's oddly specific."

"I'm not your average brain region, Bubba; I contain multitudes. You want evidence? How's this: The kind of kid we're looking for orders sprinkles on ice cream in August; that's a soft tell. Confidence without commitment."

"You've clearly given this a lot of thought."

"I've thought about little else, Hot Shot, since you dragged out of bed this morning."

We parked near the boardwalk, and I want the record to reflect that the salt air, the arcade noise, the general hum of a beach town in high season felt like a good omen and spurred me on. I've been wrong about good omens before, of course, and I was wrong about this one too. I just didn't know it yet, which is the closest thing to happiness I get these days.

The Ice Cream Stand Incident

It took about eleven minutes. I saw him near the ice cream stand; a teenager, easy in his own skin in the specific way that made Amy's "suspiciously calm parents" theory suddenly feel like hard science. Sunglasses pushed up into good hair. A little knot of friends laughing at something on someone's phone. And I want you to sit with this: sprinkles. On an ice cream cone in August.

"Amy," I whispered. "Unless I'm badly mistaken, that's the kid playing August, and I'm sure the two girls are Coral and Mia. This is going to be a perfect day."

"Don't do it, Cowboy."

I didn't listen. I never listen. It's become something of a signature move.

I drifted closer with the loose, unhurried gait of a man who is absolutely not casing a group of teenagers, which, in retrospect, is exactly the gait of a man who is very much casing a group of teenagers. I struck up conversation with what I believed was effortless charm, and asked, casually, whether they were "in town for work."

The kid looked at me the way you'd look at a seagull that had just asked to share your fries.

"We're in town because it's, like, summer," he said. His friends started laughing in the specific, merciless way only teenagers can, a sound engineered over generations to strip a grown man of every ounce of self-respect in real time.

"Right," I said. "Of course. Summer. That tracks."

"Are you, like, a cop?"

"I want to speak to my lawyer," I said, which is my go-to line whenever I'm caught doing something I can't quite explain, and it landed about as well here as it ever has.

I retreated. Not walked; retreated, in the full military sense, past the arcade, past a family arguing about funnel cake, all the way back to the car, where Amy was waiting with the patient, terrible calm of someone who has seen this movie before.

"You've been made, Genome," she said. "By a sixteen-year-old. With sprinkles."

"He could still be an actor."

"He's a teenager who thinks you're a cop. That's not a casting rumor. That's a police report waiting to happen."

Amy's Lead

I sat with my failure the way I sit with most of my failures: briefly, before deciding it was someone else's turn to be wrong.

"Fine," I said. "You take the lead."

I regretted this immediately, but pride is a strange animal, and mine had just been mauled by a teenager, and it needed to prove something— anything, actually.

Amy, to my genuine surprise, didn't gloat for once. She went quiet, thoughtful, the way she does right before she says something either brilliant or catastrophic. There's no reliable way to tell which one is coming until it's too late.

"Beach," she said finally. "Not the boardwalk. South of the pier. I have a feeling."

"A feeling."

"A professional feeling, Cowboy. Drive."

We drove. We parked. We walked a stretch of sand that grew steadily more promising: a cluster of production trucks, a taped-off perimeter, crew members in ballcaps clutching walkies like they mattered more than oxygen. My heart did that thing it does; that hopeful, foolish lift, right before it gets dropped from a height and lands in the basement.

"Amy," I breathed. "You did it. You actually did it."

"I told you I had a feeling," she said, and I could almost see her adjusting an imaginary tiara. "Ms. Wonder's instincts strike again. She practically predicted this, you know."

The Twist, Which You Already Saw Coming

A crew member in a faded gray shirt walked past close enough for me to read the words across the back.

It didn't say Saltwater. It said, RJ Decker.

I stood there a moment, recalibrating, the way you do when reality quietly rearranges itself without asking permission first.

"Amy," I said carefully. "This is the wrong show."

"I said film set," she countered, entirely unbothered. "I didn't say which one. I stand by the feeling. The feeling was correct. You're the one who assumed mermaids."

I flagged down a young woman with a clipboard and the harried expression of someone who has answered this exact question fourteen times already today.

"Is this the RJ Decker set?" I asked.

"It was," she said. "Yesterday. We're just breaking down. Wrapped this location last night."

A day late. Not even the show I was chasing. Two-for-two, if you're counting failures.

"So we found a real set," I said slowly, trying the words on for size, "from the wrong show, a day after it stopped being useful."

"Historic, isn't it?" Amy said. "Truly a banner day for investigative journalism, Biscuit Brain."

Roll the Credits

We drove home along the causeway, salt still in the air, sprinkles on ice cream still in my mind.

"Complete failure," I said, because someone had to say it, and it might as well be me, with feeling.

"Was it, though?" Amy asked. Here's the thing about Amy: just when you've written her off as the pits, she pivots, and you remember she's sometimes actually the smart one.

"You didn't find the Saltwater cast. You didn't find Decker, not really. But you confirmed both shows are circling Carolina Beach this month, which is more than you knew this morning. And you were humiliated by a teenager in front of witnesses, which, let's be honest, is going to be the best paragraph in this whole blog post."

She wasn't wrong. I've made my peace with it. What else can I do? "Next time, we go out it will be with proper intel," I said.

"Next time," Amy said, "we go back with my intel. Mine comes from Ms. Wonder. Yours got us laughed at by a child holding an ice cream cone."

On The Circular Journey, we don't always find what we're looking for. Sometimes we just get outmaneuvered by a sixteen-year-old, and the voice in our own head insists, against all evidence, that she's the professional one.

She might be right about that too. Don't tell her I said so. It only encourages her.

Life Moves Pretty Fast

I had a birthday a few days ago.

I know, I know, hold your applause. I'm the kind of person who treats birthdays the way most people treat jury duty: an obligation to be endured quietly, preferably while keeping my head down and hoping no one in the building notices.

"You do realize you're required to acknowledge your own existence at least once a year," Amy informed me. "It's practically the law."

"It's not the law. I looked it up."

"It should be, Cowboy. You spent your birthday morning organizing a junk drawer. That's not a celebration, that's a cry for help with extra steps."

She's not entirely wrong; the older I get, the more birthdays come bundled with a little melancholy I didn't order. Names and faces and places that used to be part of the celebration and aren't anymore, for one reason or another. That part doesn't get easier. I don't think it's supposed to.

But here's the thing about The Circular Journey; we rarely arrive where we set out for, and yet somehow that detour usually delivers something worth keeping. This year, in the middle of all that birthday fog, I once again found my way back to the same place I always do: an '80s movie that has spent forty years refusing to let me feel sorry for myself for very long.

Enter Ferris

On June 11, 1986, John Hughes handed the world a popular high school senior who fakes being sick to skip school, and in doing so gave several generations of otherwise responsible adults a permanent excuse to romanticize truancy. Ferris Bueller's Day Off hasn't lost an ounce of its style in the forty years since, which is more than I can say for my own '80s wardrobe choices.

"You wore parachute pants," Amy reminded me, unhelpfully.

“They were bat-wing pants.”

“They were parachute pants with a gecko-design all over.”

“Amy, we agreed not to talk about that.”

“I agreed to nothing, Bubba.”

Matthew Broderick doesn't just play Ferris Bueller;  he is Ferris Bueller, so thoroughly that it's followed him through his entire career, the way a really good nickname follows you home from summer camp. 

I know something about that. My childhood nickname was ‘Smo.’ My best friend’s father, called me Cimolio after an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers. My friend shortened it to Smo.  

“The baseball player’s name was Gino Cimoli,” Amy corrected. “You friends spelled it with an ’S’ and then added an ‘O’ to the end.”

“Whatever, Amy! I only brought it up because my friend and his father are no longer around and no one calles me Smo anymore.”

From the moment Ferris talks his parents into a sick day, Broderick breaks the fourth wall, looks the audience dead in the eye, and invites us along for the ride. As the school secretary puts it: Oh, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads—they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

Guys want to be him. Girls want to be with him. I, personally, just wanted his ability to talk his way out of anything, a skill that would have served me well approximately every time I've tried to sneak onto a film set.

Ferris can't have a day off alone, of course, nobody worth knowing does. He recruits his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), commandeers Cameron's father's Ferrari, and the three of them descend on Chicago: the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, the Art Institute, and in what might be the single best scene in '80s cinema, a parade float, a rendition of Twist and Shout, and an entire city that stops what it's doing to dance along.

Why It Still Works

When I first saw this movie, I identified with Ferris, the kid clawing to hold onto his freedom before adulthood swallowed it whole. Watching it now, older and considerably more junk-drawer-organized, it's Cameron who gets to me. Ferris doesn't just want a fun day for himself; he wants to hand his best friend a little confidence, a little proof that he's worth more than his father's approval. That's the version of the story that ages with you.

The film's two “villains," Ferris's sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and dean of students Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) spend the whole movie trying to catch him and never quite manage it, which feels less like a plot hole and more like a promise: some people are just going to have a good day no matter what you throw at them. 

The Line That Still Lands

That famous line early in the film hits differently on a birthday than it does on a random Tuesday:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

I've spent my recent birthday thinking about the people and places that used to move alongside me and don't anymore, and I'm not going to pretend a movie fixes it. But it does remind me to stop and look around at what and who is still here with me. And most years, that's enough to turn the day around.

"So," Amy said, "are we throwing you a party next year, or are we going back to the junk drawer?"

"Ask me again in 364 days."

"I'm setting a reminder, Biscuit Brain. You're not getting out of this that easily."

“I never get out easily, Princess. It’s not in my nature.”

The Summer I Turned Lazy (TSITL)

Summer is winding down here in Wilmington, and I need to talk to you about something. Sit down. Get comfortable. If you've got a friendly barista nearby, now's the time for a pistachio latte. 

By every measure I can find, this has been the biggest film season this town has seen since I've lived here, and not some scattershot pile of small productions, either. Three genuine heavyweights.

Season two of RJ Decker, ABC's 1980s South Florida crime series based on Carl Hiaasen's Double Whammy, is wrapping up as you read this. 

A brand-new Disney+ pilot is shooting under the working title Saltwater, about a teenage girl who discovers her mother was a mermaid and must navigate first love and a secret half-mermaid identity in one very complicated summer. 

And then there's the big one: the Amazon feature film of The Summer I Turned Pretty, written and directed by creator Jenny Han herself, closing the shops on Cousins Beach for good and sending the whole beloved series off beyond the horizon. 

Given that the TSITP movie is the last chance anyone gets to watch Cousins Beach magic being made, you'd think I'd have moved heaven and earth to get footage. Well, I did move some earth, but only because I got lost driving through a swamp. 

Still, you’d think I would have a hard drive groaning under the weight of glorious behind-the-scenes b-roll from all three. 

I do not. I have one still photo. Four people in a boat, leaving the Yacht Basin Marina in Southport, and they may not have been connected with the movie at all. 

What I have, in staggering abundance, is a summer's worth of excuses, which I will now present with all the pageantry they don't deserve. 

Exhibit A: Savannah 
Back in late spring, Ms. Wonder and I went to Savannah, a city so committed to its moody, moss-draped charm that I briefly forgot Wilmington. Lovely trip. Spectacularly bad timing. 

"You left during the single greatest production surge in Cape Fear history," Amy said. "On purpose." 

"It wasn't that big, Amy. Besides, I didn't know filming was starting.” 

"You never know anything at the time, Hot Shot. That's your whole problem.” 

Exhibit B: The Weather Betrayed Me 
Then I came home to an El Niño summer determined to test the structural integrity of my sinuses. Allergies and heat that could season a cast-iron skillet do not mix well with standing outside a closed film set for six hours, waiting on a "Rolling!" that never comes. 

"You had air conditioning the whole time," Amy said, "in the car that you kept driving away from three separate film sets.” 

"That's not the point, Amy.” 

"It is extremely the point, Bubba." 

Exhibit C: The RJ Decker Fiasco 
Don't think I didn't try. I checked TW Cast & Recruit every morning and paid for it. The real call times are between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m., Ms. Wonder informed me. When Amy heard it, she added, at volume, "That's when the secrets are revealed.” 

One morning I drove to Cinespace Studios fully expecting to find Scott Speedman brooding in a linen suit near the guard gate. Instead, a woman with a handheld camera shooting pickup scenes for an entirely different film, Pretty Ugly, asked me to move behind a dumpster to stay out of her shot. 

I waited there all morning hoping to see Decker. The closest I came to a celebrity sighting was a lost-pet flyer taped to a nearby window — a ferret named Reginald, last seen contemplating his life choices behind a coffee shop. 

Exhibit D: Where Has Cousins Beach Gone? 
Amy and I once raced to the Yacht Basin in Southport where a restaurant was "closed for filming." We were certain we'd cracked Amazon-level security through sheer genius, although it was a public Facebook post. 

We waited out an overcast afternoon before learning that filming didn't start until the evening magic hour. Restless, I proposed a "simple, elegant plan": drive home, freshen up, and come back later. 

It was neither simple nor elegant. Ocean Highway delivered a traffic jam of geological patience. We detoured through a real town called Half Hell, missed our exit by eight miles, turned around, and drove back through Half Hell a second time, which, by Amy's math, equaled Complete Hell. 

Exhibit E: Saltwater 
The mermaid pilot proved the trickiest of the three, mostly because everything I documented turned out to be something else entirely. The lowest point came when I willingly joined a traffic jam on the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, positive I'd found a closed set, before Amy gleefully informed me it was an NCDOT bridge inspection. Not every mystery is Hollywood. Some mysteries are just infrastructure. 

The Verdict 
Three of the biggest productions I've been privileged to be near: the finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty, the swashbuckling return of RJ Decker, and a mermaid pilot swimming quietly through the Cape Fear, and I have exactly zero mermaids to show for it. 

"You only had one job," Amy said. "Document the productions.” 

"I got some footage.” 

"You got a ferret, Cowboy.” 

"Reginald was a whole storyline!” 

"Biscuit Brain!" Amy barked. "It was a lost-pet flyer on a coffee shop window.” 

The Rest of the Story 
Here's the thing about The Circular Journey: there's always tomorrow. All three productions still have locations left to burn through, and I intend to be on set with the unearned confidence of a man who belongs there. 

"I'll be there too," Amy said, and I confess this surprised me. 

"Why? All you do on these outings is insult me.” 

"It's simple, Monkey Boy. Watching you attempt anything and fail spectacularly is, without question, the finest entertainment I get all year. I wouldn't miss it for the world." 

And so, in summation: there's always tomorrow. And apparently, wherever there's a tomorrow, Amy's there too. 

Mindfleet Paradox: Cadet Reginald's RSS Feed

Yo, check the feed, humanity! This is Cadet Reginald—the baddest, slickest ferret ever to sneak a ride aboard the FMS Coastal Voyager, speakin’ straight through your comms. I tapped directly into Five of Five, the ship's onboard Adaptive Intelligence system, and routed this transmission through my MA-1 language translator so y’all can catch the real broadcast from the bridge.

Word is, things up here in the upper decks are reachin' critical mass. Livin' under the reign of the resident teenage tyrant in command of this mindship, the Captain who regularly channels Wonderland's Red Queen, is a whole circus. No cap! 

She dropped some classic truth on the Ambassador the other day, straight-up spittin' the math: "Hold up, chief, you trippin' on a flat beat," that's what she said. "Y’all runnin' twice as fast just to stay stuck in the exact same spot, feel me? If we really tryna get somewhere fly, you gotta flip the script and step your game up, Jack."

She’s got jokes, legit! But the timin' is straight-up messy. Between dodgin' the avolition blues and keepin' the engines clean, a massive dumpster fire just dropped into the sector. 

It be like this: Ambassador promised to use his high-level connections with his slime dawgs over at Mindfleet Headquarters to get the nod for Amy to ditch the current flight plan and hit up a music festival where the rocket man himself, William Shatner, is headlinin' a heavy metal set. 

Amy tried to flex on the intercom, crossin' her arms and givin' the Ambassador a sharp side-eye: "Oh, so you want to put the Captain in a bottleneck and test my flow? That's weak sauce, Unc, real talk."

Then she dropped the bomb: she took it up a couple notches, demandin' elevation to Grand Vizier of All Cognition, complete with a corner office in the frontal lobe and hazard pay for dealin' with the Ambassador's train of thought. You know she did.

But low-key pause, dawg. The Ambassador’s real play is usin' that detour as the ultimate bargainin' chip to get Amy to toss her amped vibes for a promotion.

Amy think she runnin' the decks, but watchin' these two bipeds try to outsmart each other over career climbs and metal concerts is absolute cinema. Me? I'm just kickin' back in the ventilation shafts, keepin' my whiskers clean, and watchin' the chaos unfold.

Until that countdown hits zero, I'ma just keep scoutin' for the giggles in the mix, side-steppin' those heavy avolition blues, and pourin' one out for those random cosmic gaps where anything can pop off, and that includes watchin' the Ambassador tryin' to play the captain runnin' the dome.