The Irish Goodbye

For the last several years, I've complained to anyone who would listen. Friends, family, the barista who didn't ask. I was done. I wanted out. Forty-five-plus years in the workforce, the latter half of those at Nike, and I was ready to be finished with all of it. I just never felt quite ready to pull the trigger myself. Then the decision was made for me.

I was laid off last June, and what I expected to feel... fear, disorientation, grief, an identity crisis... never materialized. Instead, what I got was amnesia. Not of my life, but of the work. The meetings, the decks, the product reviews, the organizational politics - it's like none of it happened. I don't think about it. I don't miss it. It simply left, like the Irish goodbye of a party guest.

This surprises me. I expected to cling to it at least a little bit. I expected the phantom limb of my career to itch for some time. I spent decades at one of the most recognizable companies on earth. That's supposed to mean something. And it did while I was in it. But now that I'm out, the whole experience has dissolved into irrelevance.

There are days when I feel at loose ends. Not lost, exactly, but untethered in a way that makes me fidgety. I have all this time now... an obscene, sprawling abundance of it... and some part of me insists I should be filling it with something that justifies the hours. Something I could put on a status report, which I guess is what I'm doing here.

I'm trying to resist the impulse to optimize retirement. I don't have to turn my days into a second act or a passion project or a TED Talk about reinvention (though I'll admit that I'm loving the ability to focus on my photography). Sometimes I just sit on the sofa with Newt and watch the rain fall and the strangers walk past the house. And that's the whole afternoon. I want to let that be enough.

In a few months, I'm moving to Portugal.

When I type that sentence, I understand that it should feel enormous. And deep down, I know it is. I'm selling the house. Leaving the United States. Starting over in a small coastal city, in a country that I've been to once and whose language sounds like a mashup of Spanish, French, Dutch and Klingon. This is a gigantic deal. But because I'm in the middle of it, it doesn't feel huge. It just feels like paperwork.

Right now I'm waiting for a consulate appointment so I can submit my visa application. That's it. That's the current state of my international relocation: waiting. The Portuguese immigration process feels like shouting into a well and listening for an echo that never comes. I'm meeting with my immigration lawyers this week to see if there's a way to shake something loose, but the process has its own timeline, and it doesn't care about mine.

This is the part that I didn't expect... just sitting around, refreshing a website to see if an appointment slot has opened up and wondering if a bureaucrat in Lisbon has gotten to my case yet. The anticipation alone is exhausting.

Meanwhile, the house.

I'm getting it ready for sale, which is its own simmering anxiety. I never thought I'd leave this place. When you believe you're staying forever, you make decisions accordingly. You knock out a wall here, add a bathroom there, maybe run some electrical without pulling a permit because who's ever going to know? You, that's who. You're going to know, when it's time to sell and an inspector starts asking questions you'd rather not answer.

The big things are done... new roof, old oil tank decommissioned, unsexy, expensive maintenance that makes a house sellable without making it more beautiful. But the unpermitted work sits in the back of my mind like a small, persistent hum. It's not that the work is bad. It's that the paper trail doesn't exist, and I'll have to figure out what to say about that.

So this is retirement. It's the inconsequence of a career that vanished from my thoughts almost overnight. It's the low-grade anxiety of selling a house with a few secrets. It's the excitement of a new life while the old one is still being disassembled, piece by piece, on a timeline that's a bit out of my control.

I spent years asking for this. Now that I have it, I'm unexpectedly disoriented. That's not bad. I just imagined it differently. Except for the performance anxiety, the versions I rehearsed in my head don't line up with reality.

Mostly I feel like I'm in between things. Not quite done with the old life, not quite started on the new one, just waiting for the next thing to happen.

I suppose that's what the consulate appointment is for.

The Secret Itinerary

I went to Venice with a plan. I had a concept, a title, a whole framework about temporal collapse and centuries of memory embedded in stone. I'd spent months thinking about what I wanted to capture.

It took about two days for all of that to fall apart.

I arrived during Carnevale, which is about as far from quiet observation as Venice gets. Elaborately costumed performers moved through the city in processions, stopping traffic, drawing crowds, posing endlessly for tourists. That's the point of Carnevale: to be seen, in a city where most people keep their heads down and their business to themselves.

We were staying at the Hotel Novecento, tucked away in a quiet corner near San Marco, and that distance from the main spectacle gave me something useful. I'd see the performers often enough, striking figures in masks and silk surrounded by a scrum of cameras, but always a bit out of their realm, passing through on their way to somewhere more photogenic. Around them, Venice just kept going. Figures crossing a piazza without looking up. The city's quiet, ordinary rhythm continuing underneath the performance.

That contrast is what shifted everything. I stopped trying to photograph what Venice means and began watching what Venice does: people walking home in the rain, a figure disappearing under a sottoportego, the warm amber light of the calli at night, the cool lavender of a wet alley in the afternoon. The same quiet rhythm that has been happening here for centuries.

I came home with a collection of images that I think holds together. They move from the lagoon at dawn through the piazzas and into the narrow calli, deeper and warmer, until the light turns everything to gold. They’re the Venice that exists whether or not anyone comes to see it.

The other thing I came home with was something I hadn't planned for at all… a reminder that travel is better with the right people.

Renee and I have known each other for thirty years. The last time we traveled together was Venice, decades ago, with partners and friends and a packed itinerary. This was nothing like that trip. We've both changed a lot since then, and there's something about returning to a familiar place with an old friend, both of you different now, that lets you see each other clearly again. We found a version of us that had been sitting there waiting.

And then there was An, a friend of Renee’s who met up with us at the tail end. Sometimes you meet someone and they just fit. She brought an energy and a style that changed the whole experience, a spontaneity that made us say yes to things we might have walked past, like the Gucci shoes I never would’ve looked at twice on my own. She showed me a way of being in a place that reminded me why I travel.

Like Renee and me, An recently retired and is building her next chapter from scratch. She's done it beautifully, transforming a property in Spain into a gorgeous B&B and expanding her small empire from there. Watching someone take that leap and land so well is both inspiring and a little envy-making. She's already living the version of the thing I'm still planning, a new life in Europe built on her own terms. When I move to Portugal this summer she’ll be just next door by European standards, and we've already started making plans. Some friendships take thirty years to deepen. This one took about three days.

So Venice gave me what I came for, just not in the way I expected. The images are different than what I'd planned, the experience was richer, and the company, old friend and new friend, made it all matter more than it would have alone.

The City That Refuses to Update

The City That Refuses to Budge

I keep coming back to Venice. Five, maybe six times now, and I still can't fully explain why. It's not like I haven't seen it. I've tripped over the same uneven stones more times than I can count. But here I am... again.

Eight centuries of accumulated stubbornness. That's what Venice is. Nothing gets torn down and rebuilt. Nothing gets modernized. It all gets patched up, but just enough to barely keep going. The city simply keeps being itself, decade after decade. It doesn't budge, except maybe to sink a little deeper into the lagoon.

On every trip, I make a point of visiting Trattoria alla Madonna. Same location down a dark alley near the Rialto, same no-nonsense waiters, same spaghetti nero that tastes exactly like it did the first time I walked in not knowing what to order. The menu hasn't changed. The chairs haven't changed. I'm pretty sure some of the waiters haven't changed. In any other city, it would feel like stagnation. In Venice, it's the whole point. Alla Madonna is a restaurant that never saw a reason to be anything other than what it's always been.

What pulls me back most, though, is the rundown beauty. Not the Gucci, Balenciaga, Jimmy Choo or Disney Venice. The other one… with the cracked and fallen plaster exposing the brick substrate, the iron grates in the windows bleeding rusty streaks down the marble sills, and the wooden shutters that haven't closed properly since Katharine Hepburn fell into the canal at Campo San Barnaba. Venice wears its age the way certain people do. Not hiding it, not fighting it, just carrying it like it never occurred to them to do otherwise.

Speaking of carrying one's age with grace, I did have a somewhat unique experience this trip. Walking a quiet street one afternoon, I passed a woman and her husband and thought, “Huh, that's Emma Thompson.” I mentioned this to my friend Renee with what I thought was very laid back, casual cool. She reacted by dashing off, sprinting past them, executing a dramatic U-turn, then walking back toward the couple with the studied nonchalance of someone absolutely not chasing a celebrity. Dame Emma seemed entirely unaware as she pulled a wadded up Kleenex from beneath her red tartan poncho and blew her nose.

For the rest of the trip, Renee and I hatched a plan in case we ran into them again. The scheme was simple: we'd walk right up to her husband, the actor Greg Wise, and ask for his autograph. We'd fawn over him, gush about his work, tell him what huge fans we were, then barely acknowledge Emma by asking her if she'd mind taking our picture with him. Our hope was it'd get a laugh out of them. We never got the chance, which is probably for the best. But we did get our own chuckle out of our clever plot.

That's the thing. Even a brush with Hollywood royalty feels small here. The city absorbs everything: fame, floods, centuries, the occasional starstruck friend. And just keeps going. That's why I come back. Not because it surprises me. Because it doesn't.

The In-Between

I'm leaving in six months. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm never leaving. It all feels true at any given moment, especially before my first cup of coffee.

The anxiety of pulling up roots after 30 years in Portland is starting to get to me. I want to go. I need to go, if just for my own sanity. This country feels irreparably broken, and I can't imagine spending the rest of my life constantly wondering how things could possibly get worse, then dealing with the shock - and the sad resetting of my expectations - when they do.

Aside from the state of the country, there's this weird in-betweenness… the comfort and ease of staying put, even with the chaos, versus the joy, relief and excitement of a new adventure.

I've spent the past few years photographing liminal space - that territory between the certainty of sharp, grounded focus, and the uncertainty of time, distance and memory. The blur isn't a flaw in those images; it's the point. I've been drawn to it precisely because I think it tells a truer story than the sharpness ever could. Now I'm living inside one of my own photographs. But recognizing the terrain doesn't make it easier to navigate. Turns out it's one thing to photograph the ambiguity. It's another to live in it.

The practical stuff I can handle. Lists, tasks, checkboxes. Sell the house. Get the visa. Find an apartment. Book Newt's flight. There's comfort in logistics - they provide me with an illusion of forward motion. But the mental shift is harder. I keep waiting to feel ready, to arrive at some calm clearing where the anxiety lifts and I just know. But I'm starting to suspect the clearing may not exist. This fog is the territory now, and maybe for a long time.

So I'm trying something unfamiliar - not fixing it. Just being in it. The blur is the view.

Already There

The process of emigrating to Portugal is an exercise in patience and frustration.

I’ve hired a service to guide me through it, and they've been helpful. But even so, I often feel adrift, unsure of what comes next or when. There's paperwork, and then more paperwork. Documents that need to be apostilled - whatever the hell that means. Dates that depend on other dates. Gates that won't open until others close. Appointments to be made but no slots available. Background checks that sound ominous but that I’m assured are routine. It feels like all the planets and stars need to align perfectly for any of this to actually happen. I'm someone who likes to do - to move, to solve, to check things off - but this process doesn't care. The timeline stretches and compresses in ways I can't control, and it's all just… ugh!

Then there's the house. I thought I'd never leave this place and so didn't really worry about that wallpaper that’s beginning to peel, or the roof that’s missing a few shingles (who isn't?), or the empty, underground oil tank in the backyard that’s likely now a superfund site, or the driveway that’s looking like concrete tectonic plates colliding into miniature mountain ranges. But now it all needs to be dealt with, quickly.

So when it gets to be too much, I do something that probably sounds ridiculous: I open Google Street View and walk through the city I've chosen as home. Viana do Castelo sits in northern Portugal, where the Lima River meets the Atlantic. It's not on most tourist itineraries, which is part of why I love it already. It's a working class city - small but vibrant, full of people living their lives rather than performing for visitors.

I usually start at the Praça da República, the old central square. Intimate, human-scaled, lined with buildings that have seen centuries. I can imagine sitting there with a coffee, watching the daylight change while Newt sits next to me, whining because he's ready to GO! We've become regulars, recognizing and being recognized by our new neighbors.

From the square, I set off on one of the tight streets that radiate from it. I find parks tucked into corners. Tiled facades on buildings. Laundry hung on balconies. The river and ocean are always close, accessible from almost anywhere. I picture Newt trotting along beside me, nose down in the cobblestones, finding his favorite spots.

The Santuário de Santa Luzia sits above the town on a hill. I haven't climbed it yet, not virtually anyway. I'm saving that for when I can feel my legs burn and see the view open up for real.

I've also been touring apartments, virtually. Some are perfect - light-filled, with views of the river, or tucked into those narrow streets I've been walking on my laptop. I wish I could rent one right now, before the good ones disappear. Not yet. The paperwork isn't done. My visa still needs to be approved. The house still needs to sell. July is far away and right in front of me, and between here and there is a lot of waiting.

In real life, I’m not entirely on my own. I've found my way to an online expat community - people who've already made this leap. When the process feels impossible, I remind myself that they've navigated the same maze and come out the other side. I can’t wait to meet them in person. But in my head, Newt and I are already there.

I love Italian

I Get the Aisle

Venice

I'm heading to Venice in February. I've been thinking about it for months. Not the logistics, though those exist, but what I'm actually trying to do there. What I'm trying to see and make.

I know what I'm not doing. I'm not documenting it. No one needs another golden-hour shot of the Rialto, another gondola reflection, another mask in a shop window. That Venice has been photographed into meaninglessness. What I'm after is harder to name. Something less Disney and more Dumas.

The city works on me. The light on the water at dawn, the colors that exist nowhere else, the weight of centuries pressing down on stone. Breathtakingly beautiful and casually brutal. When I look at those buildings, I wonder what it cost to build them. And I don't mean ducats.

ICM feels right. The blur pulls the past forward somehow. It helps me imagine the city as it was.

I'll be shooting the empty city. Dawn, blue hour, midnight. The edges of day when the tourists disappear and something older becomes accessible. Not the Venice we've learned to see.

threshold

I Get the Aisle

Walking on Broken Glass

Having a birthday on Christmas Day has never felt like getting shortchanged, though people always ask when they find out. My parents were great at making sure we celebrated both. Christmas in the morning. My birthday in the afternoon. Rather than feeling gypped, I loved it. It felt quietly significant... a day that belongs to many but somehow still feels like it’s just mine. It's the rarest birth date after February 29th - a statistical anomaly that's always made the day feel a little more set apart.

As a kid, the buildup to Christmas held meaning that had nothing and everything to do with me. The anticipation that everyone seemed to feel made me feel connected to the whole world, even though few knew of the coincidence. My grandmother and I also shared this premiere date, which adds another layer of meaning. And I love that Annie Lennox is a Christmas baby as well.

This year feels different. At 63, this is likely my last birthday in Portland before moving to Portugal. I've been working on something new, a Venice project exploring temporal collapse and memory, and that resonates today. Everything exists in layers—past birthdays, my grandmother's presence, the history of an ancient city, the anticipation of reinvention.

For the past few years, photography has been, for me, about capturing feeling over facts, the residue of presence rather than sharp documentation. Birthdays work the same way. They're markers that we’re forced to return to annually, but each time we experience them differently, filtered through everything that's happened since the last lap.

This birthday represents a threshold. Behind me: 45 years of work and several decades in a city I used to love. Ahead: Viana do Castelo, new light along the Portuguese coast, a practice focused entirely on emotional landscapes and atmospheric intimacy.

It still feels special, just like it always has. But now it marks the beginning of a significant transformation - one I'm walking toward deliberately, camera in hand, on broken glass.

window seat

I Get the Aisle

I Get The Aisle Seat

I'm turning 63 on Christmas Day, which feels like it should mean something. The math suggests I'm closer to the end than the beginning. Fuck math.

This summer, I'm moving to Portugal. Permanently. To a town on the northern coast I passed through once on a cycling trip. I don't speak Portuguese beyond obrigado and whatever I can butcher with my Pimsleur and Babbel lessons. I'll be the only American I know within 50 miles.

I lived in Germany during my Air Force years. Back then, I was surrounded by Americans on base, insulated by military infrastructure, and young enough that I never considered consequences. It was all just moving forward, even if it was without direction. This is different. This is choosing to be the foreigner for whatever time I have left. To wake up not understanding the conversations around me. To be the guy who doesn't know which bin the recycling goes in.

At 63, I'm supposed to be thinking about continuity, stability, proximity to friends and family. Instead, I'm researching puppy charter flights (yes, that's a real thing) so Newt can have his own seat in a cabin with nine other dogs flying to Europe. And I'm thinking about whether my camera gear fits in the overhead.

I've worked my whole life for someone else, helping create shit that people didn't need but were convinced they did. The last few years, I've been building something that's actually mine. A photography practice that looks nothing like what people expect.

There's something fitting about spending your sixties making art about impermanence and memory while simultaneously uprooting your entire life. About choosing blur and motion over sharpness and clarity, both in the viewfinder and in real life. I've built a practice around letting go of literal representation, trusting that the feeling matters more than the facts.

Portugal feels like the same leap. I don’t know exactly what I'm walking into. I do know that staying put, doing the safe thing, the expected thing, would be the sharpest, clearest path to someplace I don't want to be. The only real freedom left is deciding I'm not too old to start over in a place where nobody knows me—where the only thing my neighbor cares about is whether I say good morning in something resembling Portuguese.

Maybe I'm just stubborn enough to believe that age is only relevant if you're trying to conform to someone else's timeline. Or maybe I'm just trying to convince myself of that.

Either way, I'll find out in Viana do Castelo.

All Newt cares about is that he gets a window seat and a walk on the beach every morning.

P.S. — If you've made a similar leap later in life, or if you think I've lost my mind, I'd love to hear about it. Leave a comment or drop me a note through the contact page. I'll read it from Portugal, while trying to figure out how to order a black coffee, no sugar, please.

heaven

Portugal? Really? WTF?

A few months ago, my friend Tracy called to tell me that she and her wife were moving to France. Just like that. They'd made the decision and were doing it. Something clicked for me right then and there. What's happening right now in this country is frightening. And it feels unsafe, even for an old, white, gay guy. Yup, it’s time to act.

For decades, I've dreamed of moving to Scotland after retiring. It's hands down one of my favorite places on the planet. I fell in love with it the moment my plane first touched down in Edinburgh. There's a connection I don't really understand… I’ve always felt like I could just breathe there. But the truth is that it’s just too expensive. I don't have a hoard of gold buried in the backyard. I need to find somewhere that I can be comfortable, if not rich. Scotland just isn't it.

So I started researching. Portugal kept coming up. Peaceful - it's #7 on the Global Peace Index, while the US lands at #132. Affordable at about half the cost of living in Portland. Low barriers to entry. Ideally located on the edge of Europe. I'd been there once, years ago: A cycling trip from Lisbon up the coast to Porto, then across through the Duoro Valley. I remembered the light, the coast, the hills, the festivals, the rhythm of the place. That same feeling of being able to breathe.

Here, I spend way too much time being angry. The politics, chaos, and conflict. The “othering” of each other. I don’t feel like it’s going to change. We're always less than four years away from the next election and more insanity. And no matter who wins, half the country will still be just as crazy. And Portland's changed in the last 30-odd years. I don't belong here anymore.

I can feel it bleeding into the work. The anxiety. The distraction. I go out to shoot and I'm carrying all of it with me - the anger, the worry, the noise, the fear. Photography is supposed to pull me out of dark places, but lately I've been dragging the darkness along.

I hope moving to Portugal will change that. Being somewhere I actually want to be… somewhere that feels like home in a way Portland hasn't in years, will quiet things down enough that I can focus on the work. New cities, new light, new rhythms - but more than that, a new version of myself. I want the work to grow. I want it to reflect something other than exhaustion and dread.

I need to believe that starting over somewhere - truly starting over, not just taking a trip - will let me make images that feel like possibility instead of escape.

So yeah. Portugal. We're doing this.

recognition

Recognizing Myself

I spent 25 years making other people's products better. I was good at it. But once I left - or more honestly, was left - that was it. It was done. And strangely, I barely think about it anymore. Decades of work, all but forgotten. And now we're moving to Portugal - my dog and I - to do what, exactly? Take pictures?

It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.

Photography has been the thing I turn to when everything else feels like it's dissolving. It's therapy, except I don't have to explain myself to anyone. I just go out, move the camera, and see what happens. For years, I didn't think I was particularly good at it. I enjoyed it, but "good" felt like something other people were.

That's changing.

I'm starting to recognize something in the work that feels true. Not perfect - true. The blur, the motion, the way an image can suggest a feeling without being literal about it. The way it hits people differently. Sadness, hope, fun, transformation, transition. I'm making images that pull me out of dark places, and I want to talk about that process. Not the technical stuff (there are a thousand blogs for that), but the messy, uncertain, surprisingly good parts of building a life around something you're finally willing to admit you're good at.

This image is a woven texture dissolving into something barely, but instantly, recognizable. That's what recognition feels like sometimes. Seeing something familiar but not quite solid. That's where I am right now.

So this is the blog. Photography, Portugal, the dog, the doubts, all of it. Short posts. Honest ones.

Let's see what happens.