The letter didn’t just change my year — it changed the kinds of questions I was allowed to ask.

Up until then, most of my questions had been survival questions. How do I make rent? How do I keep working? How do I get the next thing built before the last thing collapses? Even the studio itself was part of that: curtains, slop bucket, hotplate, the kind of illegal living arrangement you don’t exactly advertise. But it worked. It didn’t feel like hardship. It felt like bliss. I was inside my own invention.

Then suddenly money arrived, and with it a strange new pressure — not the pressure of scarcity, but the pressure of possibility.

I remember asking myself a whole storm of questions, one after another, like they were coming from different versions of me. Should I leave Artpaper? Should I finally take a real trip? Should I just focus on art and develop new ideas? Should I hire help? Should I buy a new car? Should I celebrate like an idiot — get drunk, disappear for a week, pretend I’m not still the same guy in the illegal studio? Should I do something completely impractical, like learn to fly?

These were new problems. I didn’t have a method for them yet. I didn’t even have a philosophy for them. All I had was energy and instinct — and a sense that the clock had started ticking.

I made one very smart decision right away: I asked Lynn to plan the trip. She was good at that kind of thing — methodical, grounded, capable. She didn’t float around in the dream the way I did. She could turn a wish into a real itinerary. She mapped it carefully, step by step, like she was building a structure you could actually walk through. We went to Italy that summer. I still have the notes. I still have tons of slides. We could probably write a whole book about that trip if we wanted to.

But we won’t.

The truth is, the trip was only one thread, and this is where I made my mistake.

When we came back that fall, I didn’t simplify. I didn’t choose. I didn’t commit to one clear direction and let the rest fall away. I tried to do it all.

I didn’t leave Artpaper. That was a mistake — not because Artpaper was bad, but because it was already becoming too heavy to carry alongside everything else that was beginning to grow. I knew it, and still I didn’t do it. I postponed the decision. I stayed in motion. I stayed busy — as if busyness could save me from consequence.

At the same time, I kept moving deeper into other worlds. I was working with Aldo on Genet’s The Balcony, building sets, saying yes to his ideas before I even fully understood what they were. Aldo had that power — if he was obsessed with a thing, you could feel it like gravity. And I liked that. I liked being pulled into the ambitious orbit of another artist. It made my own ambition feel normal.

I also visited my folks. I flew home and stayed for a longer stretch than usual, because I could. And while I was there, I bought a new truck — a Mitsubishi, brand new, from Mario, my father’s old friend with the Pontiac dealership. That purchase felt almost ridiculous, like stepping into my childhood assumption that you could simply go out and buy a new vehicle if you needed to. But it turned out to be one of the better decisions I made in that period. It grounded me. It gave me a feeling of solidity. It made life a little easier.

And then there was flying.

When you win something big, there’s a moment when you want to give yourself a symbol — something that says, this really happened. For me that symbol was flying lessons. I chose it the way a boy chooses it. The sky. The cockpit. The idea of lifting off the ground and having the world drop away underneath you. I can see now that it was partly celebration and partly psychology. It was the feeling that the old limits had cracked open.

I was also working on what would become the island project — the larger version of Bird City — and I started laying the groundwork for structures around it. I even formed a nonprofit: Double-X Collaboration. It was supposed to be practical. Paperwork. A board. Funding. A form you could hand to the world so the world would take you seriously. At the time it felt like I was just being responsible. Looking back, it was something else too: the first moment I stepped into scale.

And here’s the strange part. Despite the chaos — despite the fact that I made some questionable choices, and avoided decisions I should have made — I was also building a foundation. The ideas were multiplying. The work kept expanding. I didn’t know where all of it was going, but I could feel the runway forming beneath my feet.

Every year after that got bigger.

And I didn’t yet understand the danger of that.