Cold, Achey Bones

Good riddance to January—and an invitation.

At the end of this post is actually an invitation to a fun party…

Being from Michigan, I never bought into the “winter scaries”—you know, where winter is this terribly dark time, emotionally and physically, something that one must gird oneself for and talk about ominously beginning sometime in late September or early October. When I encountered those people, I got away from them as fast as I could.

I grew up loving winter. I think my teenage self viewed it as a test of my mettle. I’d get up at 5am and scrape the ice off of my car, then head to the gym early and be back in time to make it to the first bell of high school with a protein shake in my hand. Looking back, it was my way of telling myself a narrative that I controlled: “Nobody else is doing what I’m doing.” Nevermind that I was totally checked out of classes. I was a budding little Nietzschean, re-valuing the high school experience according to my will, disgusted with the last men in the seats around me. I hadn’t read a word of Nietzsche at that point, but somehow his spirit lived strong within me. When I did finally read him in college, he gave words to an existential problem that I had not, at that point, even begun to understand the depths of.

Later in life, I used the shortened days to hunker down and get more serious work done once the light was gone. I wrote the first draft of my novel. I built a company. And another one. No light outside meant “It’s time to build.” And that’s what I did. There were none of the distractions of summer. I got into the best shape in the winter months, and I got the most work done.

When I was a teen, I’d drive around Grand Rapids in shorts and a hoodie when it was 20 degrees out, like an idiot, perhaps just to make a statement to prove my longstanding theory that the legs play no role in the transmission of cold, only the chest and head. I never realized that 25 years later a senator from Pennsylvania would steal my style.

Nothing cold could shake me. But this year, winter finally got me.

We started the year on the Michigan lakeshore, where road conditions were so bad we could barely make it to the grocery store to stock up on basic supplies. I woke up on January 1st to an email from AirBNB saying that the host of an apartment that my family had stayed at in Brooklyn back in November—I had been there co-hosting an event in NYC—had claimed that he found a mysterious stain on the floor after we left which cost him $7,500 to clean up. Yes, $7,500.

We knew nothing about this. AirBNB said they had “ruled in favor of the host” because we couldn’t produce pictures of the exact moment when we left. It took me nearly 10 days and one viral tweet to get AirBNB to stop coming after us for the bill, probably realizing that it was most likely a sophisticated form of insurance fraud that used AirBNB as a vehicle.

As soon as the AirBNB situation was resolved, I came down with a bad flu—my first time in about 10 years—which essentially incapacitated me for two weeks. I’m now suffering from sort of post-viral fatigue. Meanwhile, it was bone-chillingly cold in D.C. during the month of January.

I spent many nights glued to my big leather reading chair in the living room, bundled in my hoodie with the hood up over my head, under 3 blankets, suffering through various attempts to watch new Netflix or Amazon prime series that had come recommended to me by friends, only to get frustrated by them by the second or third episode and start going off on a rant to Claire which would be interrupted by coughing to the point where I couldn’t finish saying whatever it was I wanted to say, and she would tell me to just relax, and I’ve have to bury my critiques, which had been building up inside me every minute of watching, somewhere deep inside me where terrible media goes to die that I’d care not to remember.

All of that to say: I’m glad it’s February. And thanks for your patience.

An Invitation

I’m finally turning a corner, and I can’t think of a better place to put my wintertime blues to bed once and for all than Miami.

So on February 11, 2025, I am hosting, along with Jordan Castro, a Cluny Encounter in Miami at the famous Moore. The reception will run from 8-10pm and feature an open bar in a beautiful salon—but most importantly, it will feature a lot of awesome people from the Miami area who are building The Real. We simply hope to connect them.

There are about 10 tickets open to the public left. You can get one here.

And thank you for reading about my cold, achey bones. I will take them any day to dry ones.

Luke