Greetings from baby’s first private-jet flight! This is NOT the airplane I mentioned at the end of my last dispatch, nor am I with the people I thought I’d be with—nay, we’re not even headed to Vienna. But before I get ahead of myself, which I am so often wont to do, let’s zoom back to the Drift party I went to the night before I did not get on a rich man’s plane to Austria. You know what? Let’s start even before that so you can understand why I ended up at that party in the first place.
Flash back to five years ago: I’m in a dive bar down the street from Russian Samovar with Lance Oppenheim, Kiara Barrow, and Rebecca Panovka. We’re exchanging hats. Rebecca and Kiara are explaining the lit mag they’re about to launch, and Lance has just wrapped the filming of his first big doc, Some Kind of Heaven. Me? I’m still swearing I’ll actually write Scammer oh so soon, the book I’d spent the last 10 years saying would be published any day now. Incredibly, all four of us have literal hats for these various projects, and we dabble in a bizarre little merchandise bazaar. If the trio of Harvard grads who had actually made something believed I wouldn’t also achieve my dreams someday, they hid it well. And look at us now!