A Trail of iPhone Notes Pt. 1
Going back through my phone, starting in 2016.
In a column earlier this month, I wrote about my first Facebook photos. One was of me fishing at a pond in north Jersey. Though he wasn’t pictured, one of the dudes wetting a line with my crew that warm May afternoon was Ishan Patel, a fresh-off-the-boat Gujarati Indian who’d shown up at senior cafe at Bayonne High School in the middle of the school year and sat alone. After realizing he didn’t know a single other non-Indian person at BHS, Mickey invited Ishan to sit at our table. The invitation wasn’t a benevolent one. Since he wasn’t American enough to know we were morons, we asked him every inappropriate question we could think of about Indian food (“Why does the scent of curry cling to everything it touches?”), people (“Do they really not wear deodorant?”), and culture (“Where do they put all the sacred cow poop?”). Ishan soon became a friend, and in 2016, Mickey and I met up with him for food and drinks in the Little India neighborhood of Jersey City1.
It was an awesome night of catching up, drinking imported beer, and eating food so spicy that, even at a 1-out-of-10 scale, my colon was decimated by night’s end. I miss Ishan. I miss senior cafe at BHS. I miss a lot of things and, as such, am always trying to figure out ways to travel back in time to relive them.
In that spirit, I recently started listening to John Green’s book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, on Spotify. Even though my first and primary exposure to Green’s writing was through the film adaption of The Fault in Our Stars, which I watched alone at an AMC theater in Hartford, Connecticut, during my summer internship at ESPN in 2014, I’ve grown a deep admiration for his entire catalog. Much like my Argentine literary hero, Hernan Casciari, Green has figured out how to leverage his early fame and the internet to tell stories to an enormous community of people willing to support even his most non-commercial projects.
The Anthropocene Reviewed, adapted from a monthly podcast Green hosted from January 2018 to September 2020, is a collection of essays reviewing different features of what he calls “the human-centered planet” on a five-star scale. The scale is really only the bait that Green uses to tell a much larger story. Googling Strangers and Velociraptors receive two-and-a-half stars. Canada Geese and the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest three stars. The Human Capacity for Wonder four stars. Diet Dr. Pepper four-and-a-half stars. And Polish goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek (the hero of the 2005 Champions League Final) five stars.
The idea for the post I’m sharing with you today comes from Green’s review of the Notes App, a feature included in every version of the iPhone since 2007. In his essay, Green ventured back through his phone, selecting one note from each year. He then presented either its context or a fuller picture of his life at the moment of writing. (He gave the Notes app three-and-a-half stars.)
Like Green, most of my writing since I was 13 has occurred online. I’ve never kept a physical journal for longer than a week. I don’t have notepads lined with story ideas or poems stored away in dusty bins in my parent’s basement. For the most part, my ramblings have appeared on blogs (Livejournal, Blurty, WordPress, now Substack), social media platforms (from Myspace to Instagram) and in Google Docs and Gmail drafts.
I got my first smartphone a decade ago, just before moving to Connecticut. That May, I had quit my full-time job as a bill collector for Jim Clayton and headed north in a rental car, and then a borrowed GMC Yukon from my parents, to my $10/hour internship at ESPN. The decision to abandon the business world I knew for the chance to chase a dream meant my ex-wife and I would be financially underwater for the summer. Still, I was confident that I could convince my new boss (the only other Argentinian I’ve ever met named Brian) to give me a full-time job that would kickstart my career as the next Wright Thompson.
That first smartphone was a $100 Android from Walmart. Six months later, with no job offer coming, I reluctantly finished grad school and signed a contract working for two sports sociology professors at UT who had a contract with the U.S. State Department and, coincidentally, ESPN. I purchased my first iPhone in September 2015 and have been loyal to the brand since.
In the spirit of Green’s essay, I’ve gone back through my Notes from the last nine years. There are hundreds, most of them Bible verses, sermon notes, quotes, and ideas for stories. I’m sharing some of the more interesting, nostalgic, sad, unusual, and memorable ones—most of which I can’t remember writing or never took any action on—with members of my Attic Club in Part II. Below are the first six.
December 5, 2015 – Civic, oil change, 35,651 miles, 10,000-mile filter
This was my first note, written around the time of my divorce, when I was saving money by changing the oil in my car with Jairo, my first and closest Knoxville friend. We met as bill collectors at Clayton Bank; he’s since shipped out to Dallas to peddle diesel fuel for another billionaire.
When I first moved to Knoxville, my ex-wife and I shared a 1998 GMC Jimmy gifted to me by my folks when I left New Jersey. It wasn’t much fun splitting a car in a place with no sidewalks or light rail stops, and few bus lines. In 2012, my mom and grandma gave me money to lease the Civic, which I bought three years later.
While my motivation for changing the oil with my friend was to save coin, it was also an excuse to spend time together shooting the bull outside of work. It’s hard to do that in this season of life, with three small kids, when any free time is precious. Last week, a neighbor (and reader of this Substack) asked me to help him build a backyard playset for his daughter, and my first thought was of what I’d miss out on for the time spent being a Christian. Jairo was always a sport, and in that spirit, I helped my buddy, too.
Jairo and I changed the oil a half-dozen times in his old rental on Avondale Ave. His daughter was one. Once, when his wife left her with us, we got distracted talking soccer outside and walked in to find her eating their dog’s food from the bowl. A few years later, the dog was deported back to Honduras. Jairo stayed and became an American citizen (and the protagonist of the feature I wrote about Knoxville indoor soccer culture published by a now-defunct alt-weekly). I haven’t changed my own oil in at least seven years.
The Civic was a great car, and I miss her. It was in the backseat that I made out with Haley on our first date, Taylor Swift playing from the speakers. She took us on our first adventures to Ozone Falls and the World’s Largest Treehouse, back and forth to see my family in Bayonne at least a dozen times. Her last great gift to me was being worth the $7,000 of trade-in value that I used to buy Perla, my Honda Odyssey.
October 21, 2016 – Look up Doctor Dog
I can’t remember writing this one. Seeing as I was an independent contractor with awful health insurance in the fall of 2016, my first thought was that Dr. Dog is the name of an Indian dentist in town. But really, they’re a darn-good indie rock band whose No. 1 song on Spotify (“Where’d All the Time Go?”) has a music video that suits the theme of this Substack and this story.
May 29, 2016 – Cardin’s real milkshake with strawberries
Another one that I had to Google. Cardin’s was a drive-thru diner slash ice cream joint in east Knox County. I can’t remember ever going out there, but I must’ve. In 2019, Cardin’s closed permanently after the owners retired. Three years later, the local newspaper placed it No. 9 on its list of 10 Knoxville Restaurants We Miss Most, based on reader submissions. Nowadays, Haley and I buy our ice cream either from Cruze Farm’s Gay Street location or Bruster’s on Emory Road. I get waffle cones, though I’ve always had a thing for Neapolitan milkshakes. After I bloodied my opponent in the first (and last) real fistfight of my life, I was awarded a large chocolate one from the iconic Magic Fountain in Bayonne.
December 9, 2016 – Outfits that work (by pant color). Khaki with blue/orange pattern shirt and blue tie and/or gray sports coat, gray untucked shirt, red or white polo. Gray with light gray shirt and black tie, black sports coat, or blue, red, or black dress shirt.
A year after my divorce, I’d remade myself as a smooth-talking, finely-dressed dude looking to charm the pants off the single babes of Knoxville. For months before I made a new group of single friends like Colin, I headed to the mall on Friday nights to buy sports coats, dress shirts, and slim-fit pants from Dillard’s, Belk, or JCPenney. Then I’d go eat dinner at Salsarita’s or Bida Saigon and take in a movie alone at Downtown West. One Friday night, a friend who was one of the managers at the theater asked who I was all dressed up for when I showed up in a blazer and tie for a late-night showing of The Nice Guys. On that occasion, it was me, myself and I. The first movie I took Haley to see a year or so later was Stronger with Jake Gyllenhaal, and I didn’t dress nice because she told me early on in our relationship that it was annoying that I always wore dress pants when she was in shorts and a sweaty tee shirt.
December 27, 2016 – How to make tostones. Green plantains, 1-inch slices, 3 minutes on each side, then smash with bottom of glass and peel off with fork, then 1 minute on each side.
This quick recipe came from another of the Three Amigos. I’ve never been much of a cook, but I knew from romantic comedies and Mickey’s advice that women like it when men invite them over to their apartments for candle-lit dinners.
At the time, I consumed all kinds of content about being a better man (Art of Manliness; Real Men Real Style). Still, I hadn’t gotten any relationship off the ground that justified watching YouTube tutorials for how to make pasta on a second date. A month before writing this note, I’d gotten back from visiting Mickey in the Dominican Republic, where I was reminded of just how good and simple fried plantains are. So his rec was well-received.
Despite that, I didn’t cook for a girl until Haley and I made roasted chicken thighs together in the oven the first winter of our relationship. They tasted somewhere between “okay” and “terrible.” But that didn’t matter because we were in the kind of love that didn’t require me to dress nice or know how to cook—and she mostly ate dry cereal and microwaved cheese quesadillas anyway.
February 11, 2017 – The Argentinian I met at Academy Sports was named Victor Fanelli. Need to try to find him somewhere. He’s a scientist at Oak Ridge.
While coaching girls’ soccer for Emerald Force SC, I often went to Academy Sports to buy gear for training sessions and apparel to look cool on the sidelines at tournaments against counterparts from lesser footballing cultures, such as England.
I may not be good at much, but I have a Sixth Sense for picking out Argentinians in the wild. Some dead giveaways in men include absurdly tan skin, long unkempt hair, shaggy beards, yelling in public, a dopey demeanor suggesting they might’ve just woken from their siesta, and shirts that are unbuttoned to the sternum. In this case, Victor was with his family, so it was the way they pronounced the double “l”/ “y” that gave them away. I introduced myself and we chatted briefly in the checkout line.
There are so few Argentinians in Knoxville that I always get excited when I meet another (it helps soften the frustration of being unable to buy chimichurri, alfajores, or yerba mate in any grocery store). Most who’ve settled here are scientists with advanced degrees. My family are a different kind of Argentinian: my dad a laborer from the countryside, my mom a shy homemaker. I’m sure I looked up Victor’s ORNL profile, as I did before writing this, and figured there was nothing we had in common besides buying Malbec at the liquor store and supporting the same national team, so I didn’t bother reaching out.
Three years later, my friend Claudia, who runs the Hispanic community center in Knoxville, introduced me to a couple of Argentinians who, despite also having advanced degrees, quickly became some of my closest friends in town (also readers of this Substack). Maybe I was wrong to judge Victor and not reach out; Juan and Ines are kind, down-to-earth people I miss and hope to reconnect with in the motherland soon.
When I met Victor in 2017, I didn’t have kids. Now I have three, all of whom I’m trying to raise in the right way: eating skirt steak and blood sausage on Sundays, drinking mate on weekdays, and being willing to exchange blows with anyone who doesn’t admit Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of the modern era (and the “Hand of God” the beautiful game’s greatest goal).
That’s all for now. The next couple of notes are about heartbreak, love, and trying not to kill my former neighbor’s dog in the middle of the night.
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A useful piece of trivia: Jersey City’s Little India has the highest concentration of South Asian people in the Western Hemisphere.