JUNE

A few days after Worden’s Ledge, we made a trip to see a Jackie, one of Stardust’s former coaches who owned a horse farm just outside town. The original purpose was to do more location scouting, we were hoping to film on her land. But we ended up gaining way more from the trip – it was inspiring to see how integrated Jackie and her husband Herb were with their land, their work, and their horses.

We tried explaining our interest in making films to Jackie, and she was supportive. But we realized we also really wanted what she had – the ability to be herself, to do the work that was really meaningful to her, and to be able to bring everything that was unique to her training, skills, resources and interests into what she did.

We told her about the last minute trip we had planned to London, and explained we were trying to get outside our usual environment to inspire some new thinking. Jackie invited us to come back and share what we had learned when we returned. We left feeling invigorated and excited, our day at Jackie’s had filled us with optimism, and we left for London with even more excitement. We bought some extra gear to help us with filming in London and started packing for our trip.

London was a few days later. After an eight hour drive through the beautiful forests of Pennsylvania, the war zone of New Jersey and the pure insanity of Brooklyn and Queens, we hopped on a seven hour flight from JFK and jetted across the Atlantic.

On our drive, we talked a lot about our customers. The importance of a mailing list. Of custom packaging. The importance of writing genuine thank you notes to the people that supported us early on. Of needing to get away from our reliance on social media.

We filmed as much of our trip as we could.

We walked, tubed, trained and bused our way around London; along the South Bank of the Thames to see some famous landmarks and to visit the Tate Modern. We were doing fairly well, but had a few big challenges.

One, we were really struggling to get work done. We didn’t want to spend the whole week inside the apartment where we were staying, but it was challenging to get work done at the local tourist traps and we didn’t know the city well enough to choose better options for working.

Two, Stardust’s bipolar was especially bad by the third day, the stress of travel was mounting and she wasn’t getting the time needed to take care of herself. We were trying to do so much that it was starting to cause problems. Still, we continued to do as much as we could.

We made it to Camden Town, where Chad booked an appointment at a tiny tattoo shop. The next day, we vamped it up at Highgate Cemetery then schemed over chateaubriand and wine at The Paternoster Chophouse across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. We were trying to see and do as much as possible while working around the minimum hours we both needed to put in at work.

We were really in the dark with regards to what we were doing, we figured we’d just pick a bunch of tourist spots that appealed to us and film us at them. We were also trying to document the challenges of working abroad, in the hopes that as we found solutions, we could write about what worked for us and share that knowledge as content.

But it was hard, because of the day job. While Stardust was pretty much able to work anywhere, Chad was struggling with internet connection, making reliable hours and being available to colleagues back on the West Coast (now a staggering 8 hours behind). He hadn’t even told them he was on travel!

We put our heads together the day before last. Our evening at a Polo match really did it – we were fed up with being surrounded by people that were nothing like us. The crowd, the drinking, and the homogeneity of the audience struck us as uncomfortable. We were getting increasingly frustrated with all the noise, the rude people and feeling like we were trapped. We decided to do something different. We decided to do what we did best:

Get lost.

On our last day, we sought out Brixton Market for coffee then ended up in Peckham. We got lost several times after losing our internet connection before chancing upon Frank’s Cafe. There, Chad had an epiphany about the direction of his upcoming work, induced by several visual and audio art installations spread across a massive rooftop that overlooked the London skyline.

We had a long conversation about dreamspaces, the past, and the future. We started to see how Filthlamb might tie together: by creating art spaces that induced a sense of wonder, we were able to think more creatively and purposefully about what we were doing. Perhaps we could build a space that helped people to think differently? We could both pull from our artistic backgrounds to design an amazing location; Stardust could use it as a jumping off point for coaching, we could host (we still liked the idea, we just didn’t want to be so confined with guests), we could use it as a place to make our films, to write.

But what did that have to do with t-shirts?

We could have called it a day after that, but pushed on to one last neighborhood, Shoreditch. As luck would have it, we stumbled into London Fashion Week where Stardust was mistaken by the paparazzi for a fashionista before we happened upon the Nomadic Garden, another art community that felt like we were walking through a dream. It was there, finally, that we realized why we had come to London in the first place—to immerse ourselves in art communities and spaces less-travelled by the average tourist.

Maybe, fashion was part of it. We’d done something different because we’d seen what people were wearing. We knew something important was happening because the style of the people we’d seen stuck out so much. Maybe we needed to use our t-shirts to communicate something? Maybe we needed to put forward a specific point of view with our clothing?

Stardust had been pushing Chad a lot to explain what his art was for. After visiting Frank’s, it had become a lot clearer. Chad wanted to use his art to help people access dreamspace. But now it was Stardust’s turn. What were the t-shirts for? She realized she wanted to use them to send a message. We had been feeling increasingly constrained by our work – Chad in terms of feeling unable to go and experience things on our trip due to being tied to a computer, and Stardust was feeling “stuck” in academia. We realized we wanted to say something much more concrete.

On our way home we talked about making soundscapes, not just visual but audio that would help people access dreamspace. As it got dark, our conversation turned increasingly esoteric. Stardust downloaded some Alan Watts, and it was eery how much what he was talking about – ego, the way in which societies shape our thinking, god, suicide, the importance of realizing how connected we all are, science and the problem with seeing things as automated – all connected to the conversations and challenges we’d been having and dealing with. Stardust even recorded Chad reflecting on the hour of audio we’d listened to, late at night, during the final hours of our drive.

We knew we wanted to leave the country. After our trip to the UK we realized we could live outside the US if we needed to. We no longer felt safe. We felt trapped, and we realized how hard it would be to get things off the ground in a country that was becoming increasingly chaotic.We needed a logo. We researched people local to Cleveland. We found someone and got a quote, it was high but we knew the value of good design so we added it to our “to-do” list and figured we’d be able to save up for it in a few months.

Then, as if the Universe had been listening to all our complaints about being tied to organizations, it happened.

Chad lost his job.

We were angry. We felt lied to. We felt like the rug had been pulled out from under our feet. What had seemed like a fairly sensible project with a reasonable amount of funding now seemed like a pipe-dream. We started to doubt what we were doing. No health insurance. Most of our funds were eaten up by the move. And now half our income was gone.No money for wallpaper. No money for logos. No money for buying t-shirts. Everything came crashing down.

And what little trust we had in organizations was rapidly eroded. We realized how hard it was to get out of relying on established organizations. How scary it is to try and build a life for yourselves and to then have the security you are relying on taken away. How organizations punish you for leaving. We were pissed.

The stress sucked. But we refused to quit. And now we realized we had to start thinking differently about a lot of things. We started exploring alternate revenue streams (grants for start ups, competitions for business ideas). Since we couldn’t afford wallpaper, Stardust started painting a background, drawing on inspiration from London, the recent struggles they’d both experienced, and her desire to start exhibiting her work under a new pseudonym. Since we couldn’t buy our logo and branding, we started working on our own shirts to sell as part of a fundraiser. We worked on our website. Developed a mission statement. Got a few designs together with a starting logo that Stardust designed. Put our favorite phrases on shirts and ordered a few pairs. We planned to start wearing them in our videos. We were pretty upset but we just kept pushing on.

We went back to see Jackie. We weren’t sure what we were hoping to hear, we just wanted to be back on that farm and back in the place where we felt like things we going to be ok. We told her about our trip to London, about dreamspace, about the idea to have a location where we could create and inspire and coach. Jackie listened, and encouraged. She asked if we knew about a woman based at CWRU who coached out of her industrial loft. Perhaps there was an opportunity to collaborate? We spoke to Herb, who asked us what we were trying to do. I tried to explain, but it was hard to know how to describe something as big and as fuzzy as what we were currently trying to do. Chad reminded me to talk about coaching people and helping them to get out of organizations. Herb perked up, he seemed interested in the idea. But we struggled to explain the t-shirts, the videos, and overall picture.

On our drive to Chagrin falls for ice cream and dinner that night, we had a few major epiphanies. We realized that we were underprepared to talk about what we did. We realized that it didn’t make sense to try and explain everything that Filthlamb was to people who didn’t specialize in that aspect of our business. Chad told me about the absolute importance of a really solid fucking story. He explained that the stories we believed growing up get passed down as facts – we are still going to school and paying huge sums because while it’s now not very profitable to get a college education, we still tell that story because it gets people in the door.

In order to change things, we needed to introduce a new story. That was our mission – to show people how to live their own best lives. Not to follow or copy what we were doing, but to figure out for themselves what that looked like and to do it. We didn’t have a really solid story yet, but we resolved to start working on it. We were going to need it in order to start writing applications for grants and awards. We were definitely going to need it in order to explain who we were and what we were doing, to do talks, and to sell an idea.

We also realized that we wanted to make videos for people who were doing their own thing, and to help them market their businesses. Based on Herb’s recommendation to start off with a few for free, we pulled together some footage from our first day with Jackie as a sample of what we could do.

After talking to a few colleagues about dreamspace and Frank’s, two people suggested “Otherworld” which had recently opened in Columbus. Even though we were now stressed about money, we decided to go – we wanted to make videos about our pursuit of dreamspace – we’d call it the Mythadventures of Stardust and Panda – so we bought tickets and made the drive.

We soon realized we had fallen for the trap, again! While Otherworld was incredible, it was overrun with tourists, instagrammers, and families. It could have been a “Franks” but it was so busy we weren’t able to have the experience we had wanted to. Fuck. We realized that what we really truly needed was to find the spaces that were undiscovered. We needed to get away from everything and find the places that let us really dream, and they were not the places that most people knew about. We got burned, but we had some important realizations on the way home, so much so that we missed the party we were supposed to go to because we decided to get lost trying to find a place called Helltown on the way home!

We realized we wanted to create a few separate types of videos. And that we needed to be a few different people in order to do them. Stardust and Chad would host “Mythadventures”. Dr. Jane would coach and host “The Mad Scientist”. Chad did not want to coach! Baxixt would be art. Chad Michael Ward would be art. We got to work on our website, writing our personal bios, making the appropriate links between pages, uploading our store.

Now what we needed was content.

PART 4

MAY

By early May we decided to call Filthlamb “Filthlamb Creative” to signal that we are doing art “stuff”. FLC could be our company name, Filthlamb would sit under it, and Filthlamb creative under that, along with the coaching company.

Stardust started talking a lot more about coaching. She wanted to support outcasts, people who wanted to be successful but on their own terms, people who often saw things from a different perspective or were willing to do things outside the mainstream, but who were struggling to turn that into a viable business or lifestyle.

She decided to use the term “Weirdos” as a shortcut for her clients to give clients permission to start there. She figured that by starting out by calling herself out as a weirdo, and identifying other weirdos, she could start in a place where your core weirdness is where we begin. “aka The Weirdo in Me honors the Weirdo in You”. From there, she realized she wanted to tag the company as “Life Connoisseurship for Weirdos”. We are a company of contrasts, so the idea of two opposing ideas appealed to her instantly.

We started planning the types of videos we wanted to produce. Some were designed to be educational. Others were designed to be more advertisements for what we offered. We talked about using BTS footage as sales material to show people what it was like to work with us, we had a lot of fun working on set, and we really wanted to display that in our videos.

We needed money for setting up a company. We researched setting up an LLC vs an S-Corp and decided upon an LLC, and found the costs of setting up as an official business in OH. Because our funds were depleted from the move, we decided to open up our home as an Airbnb to start a business fund while we found our footing.

Our first Airbnb guests were our last. We felt uncomfortable with people in our home – everything we owned was stuff we had had to make the choice to bring with us, so while it wasn’t worth much, it felt very sentimental. Stardust worried about leaving her cat. Chad didn’t like feeling like his privacy was invaded. We felt awkward creeping around. We didn’t like having to battle the laundry for dry sheets, or the anxiety of being always on call.

Our mental health was taking a toll – we’re both easy to worry and this was triggering all sorts of unhappy feelings for us. We decided to put ourselves first. We decided to cancel the following bookings. One of the things we were learning was that if something wasn’t feeling right, to get out of it and pivot as rapidly as we could. If we were going to live a better life, it didn’t make sense to do things that we really didn’t like doing, especially if they weren’t contributing to our bottom line in a really significant sense.

We decided to get back into the woods to find our footing and re-establish what we were doing. We went to the Arboretum. We took some sample footage of the trees, and marveled at how quiet everything was. When we were away from the crowds, we were able to think. We were able to remember why we had come – to have access to the locations we didn’t in LA for shooting, sure, but there was also something deeper. We were finding that we needed to get out into nothing for a bit, to walk and talk and move freely.

A weekend later we tried the same thing but in a different location. We took a short road trip to check out a covered bridge and shoot some new headshots for Stardust that she could use on her coaching website and profile. Stardust found herself reflecting more on academia. She had been struggling more and more with how rigid the structure was, and coming back to OH from LA, while great from the perspective of feeling more involved on campus, had been a shock. She had grown and changed a lot in the last few months, and found it difficult to re-establish who she was with her colleagues. The more she thought about Filthlamb, the more she realized that what she wanted from her life was the freedom to travel and explore the world around her.

As we drove back, we revisited the idea of traveling. What if we brought our photography with us? Started filming our travels and insights? We realized we didn’t just want our business to be about one location – we wanted to get on the road and explore and bring people with us. We wanted to share what we were learning with others. We returned home that day with more clarity than we had felt before. Things were starting to come together!

We started researching gear. We ordered a DJI Osmo II and took it for a test shoot around the local cemetery. We started filming ourselves doing regular things – trips to the coffee shop, us in the apartment. We started getting excited about what we could do with only a little bit of gear. The only major sticking point now was how this all tied together. What did a cool shoot location, filming our travels, coaching, and t-shirts all have to do with each other? We thought about this a lot – on car rides to Trader Joes’, sat down at coffee, late at night before bed.

One morning, working in the Cleveland Art Museum, Stardust discovered the term “Nomad Capitalism”. She had been investigating the benefits of getting her US citizenship, and had been looking into paying taxes abroad as a US citizen. Learning about how other nomad capitalists were traveling constantly but also being intentional about where to go inspired us. The high costs of medical care in the states lead us to consider Medical Tourism, perhaps we didn’t need to be tied down to the US full time, but also didn’t need to be constantly on the move? Perhaps there was a way to get stationed for a few months to a year in a location and then to move on. Stardust started thinking about taking on short term teaching jobs at Universities around the world. Chad could teach photography and film workshops wherever we went, we could just charge everything to and through the company and not have to pay insanely high employment taxes.

Something about watching a few girls have their prom photos taken, and the elderly people sat at lunch in the art museum cafe hit Stardust. Time for another epiphany: Time was running out. We didn’t have limitless funds, we didn’t have limitless time in what was feeling like an increasingly hostile country, Chad was a few years older, and it was bizarre that no one seemed to care how little time we really have on the planet. The enormity of the life we were visualizing, the amazing opportunities that were starting to blossom, it seemed like more than a lifetime could capture. Stardust made a quick note for a video essay: “I just found out I’m dying…and you are too.”

She realized she wanted to talk much more frankly about the limited time we all have on the planet, and the dangers of just going along with what everyone else is doing and failing to live life on your own terms. She even researched becoming a death doula to become more qualified about talking about death!

Throughout all of this, we kept our eyes and ears open for inspiration. We started looking at ways we might video and document our lives more in the way we wanted to show our story. We stumbled across a film by a Marc Weber film “A Place with No Words’, about dying, and how to make film with limited resources and real life.

Over time, we were trying to live and work more outside our place. Stardust in particular struggled with being cooped up in the house all day, so we kept trying out different coffee shops, spots on campus, and struggled to find places that were workable. We’d get to a place and there was no space to work. We’d settle down only for Stardust to get depressed and want to leave. We’d work for a few hours but then have to go and grab food somewhere. As we battled the struggles of trying to work from “home”, we were also battling the challenges of mental illness. Bipolar didn’t really care if you needed to get work done, when sadness hit we just wanted to crawl into the safety of bed, and when mania hit we couldn’t sit still long enough to have a productive day. It was a daily challenge.

One of the ways we decided to deal with it was to laugh at it. We talked about making some deliberately funny videos, Instructional while being funny, about the difficulty of working outside the home. We figured it would help to laugh at ourselves, and there was so much to draw from! Screaming children, tiny tables, covered in wires, walking down to campus on a sunny day only to have the weather change and have to walk back in the rain, etc. We discussed doing Video Journals to show the reality of what we were experiencing more authentically.

We decided to just start filming and to see where we got with it. So, a few weeks later we made our first trip to Detroit for Chad’s 47th birthday. Stardust had booked an airbnb a few months before as a surprise, and we figured this was our opportunity to try filming on the go. That night, we gorged on BBQ at Slows and caught some live jazz at Baker’s. The next day, we hit up the Detroit Institute of Arts and The Henry Ford museum for some great inspiration before devouring a scrumptious dinner at a haunted mansion.

Once we got back from Detroit, we decided to started scouting locations for our first music video in Ohio. We went to Warden’s ledge and drove even further down to Columbus to scope out the gates of hell. We filmed the whole thing, and again noticed that our biggest breakthroughs and happiest moments always seemed to happen on the road.

Whether it was driving to/from Detroit, or scouting locations, we always seemed to have our best moments when in motion. The idea of staying in one place seemed less and less appealing – sure we liked being able to come home after a trip, but we really wanted to have the ability to move around too. Even just filming our locations inspired our work, we were finding new ways of putting treatments together as a result of getting outside, and we loved discovering new places to eat on the side of the road when we were driving.

The car was our happy place.

PART 3

APRIL

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Four months later, after negotiating a telecommuting setup with Chad’s day job, we moved our belongings into a giant metal box to be shipped east and packed the remainder into Chad’s car. We hit the road.

Like so many others before him, Chad has often dreamed about driving across America. This was the first time either of them had actually done it.

We spent three days speeding across the states, first to Santa Fe–where we found the art installation that we’d come to see, Meow Wolf, closed for the day. Onwards we drove, Oklahoma City was next. We stumbled upon the somber World Trade Center Bombing memorial after our evening meal. Then St. Louis for incredible BBQ and Indianapolis after that, where we nearly crashed our car in the late evening on a confusing highway turnpike.

We drove late into the night, screaming along to System of a Down when we started feeling sleepy, rushing to get into town so that Chad could start working remotely from Cleveland. Time was ticking, and he felt the pressure of needing to keep regular hours, as work was already buzzing him by day two on the road.

We drove thousands of miles, invaded dozens of coffee shops, consumed hours of audiobooks and even took one very strange trip down into a surprisingly patriotic underground cavern in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

We drove through the migration of monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico, and were horrified to collide with far too many of the black and yellow insects, finding hundreds of them trapped in the car grill on a stop for gas!It was there, on the road, that we both realized how much we loved to travel and how much we loved taking through our thoughts traveling together; and–during those long hours and long stretches of deserted roadways — we talked more and more about how we might expand our business, and how to make it fit the life we wanted to have.

We thought about renting out the industrial loft. (Maybe we could even save up enough to buy one?) and traveling for a few months at a time, mopping up the locations we adopted to fuel our writing. The desert towns and midwestern farms we were driving by gave us so many ideas for novels, short films, and even locations for shoots for (there it was again!), a clothing company.

As we drove more, Stardust started talking about her coaching training. It was starting to become clear that in order to go into business, we would need to pool as many of our skills together as possible. We spent hours talking about how Stardust had inadvertently (and sometimes intentionally) coached Chad over the past 6 months – in fact, everything that lead up to the idea for the industrial loft, and then on to building a business in Cleveland, had looked a lot like coaching! Indeed, the idea had come up a few times when planning the move to the loft, sure, there was an opportunity to teach photography workshops, but how about coaching clients too?

So, by the time we got to Cleveland, the plan looked a bit like this: spend a few months riding out the lease on Stardust’s apartment in Cleveland Heights, then look at renovating a new space downtown to open up as a studio location for workshops and studio rentals for photographers and artists. Stardust would do coaching, and maybe we’d start working on some t-shirt designs as a side business once we had space. We started settling into our new routine; Chad would get up and work on day-job stuff, as Stardust wrote for her dissertation, and in the evenings we’d try out a new place to eat or drive to a new location to scout for photos and video work.

There were a few challenges, sure; daily harassment from Stardust’s ex, battling bipolar, managing the difficulties of being overweight (Chad) and needing constant stimulation to keep from falling into depression (Stardust). But overall we were happy with where things were going.

We had money to invest in our business, far more than we would had we stayed in LA, and were starting to work out a weekly budget for groceries so that we could cook from home and take better care of ourselves. We realized that the ups and downs were important to document, it was what made our story “real”, and we wanted to be as honest as possible about what we were dealing with as we were trying to get our business off the ground.

As we walked up Mayfield Road hill one afternoon, we realized that the story we wanted to be telling was not about being perfect people in a glamorous world running a perfect business. We wanted to share our struggle.

Chad noted “here I am, an overweight guy trying to get up this fucking hill, and if I can do it, anyone can do it!”.

We realized that what mattered was our story, and that while we wanted to inspire people to get out and travel, we also wanted to be clear that in many ways we were the underdogs, we had some really big challenges that we were always going to need to overcome, and we were never going to be done battling our demons.

As we continued to find our groove, we continued to talk about going into business together. Our plan evolved and changed and evolved again.

We talked names for the company. We wrote a bunch down. What were we trying to say? We tried to throw some different terms together, Chad wanted to create a word out of two words. Stardust was obsessing over the perfect name for the brand, staying up late into the night, fueled by a manic surge of energy that wouldn’t let her sleep.

Late that night, Stardust padded through to where Chad was sleeping and nudged him awake. “What about just going with Filthlamb?” she posed. The idea had been for just a clothing brand, but it had stuck with her. It exhibited so much of what our work was about – contrasting opposing ideas, being based in the rural east coast/midwest. Chad said yes. And the more we started using it, the more we liked it. Filthlamb was born.

Once we had our name down, we stared to prioritize more intently. Filthlamb gave us a visual to work with, and was the foundation for a lot of how we conceptualized our projects. We were a pair, in the style of Die Antwoord, or Run the Jewels (who we were listening to obsessively. We also loved “Trigger Warning” and were inspired by Michael Render’s entrepreneurial approach to solving social problems).

We were characters. We needed a space to work, sure, but more to the point, we needed to “be” Filthlamb. Filthlamb wasn’t just a location anymore. It was an idea.

We had only intended to be in Cleveland for just over two years, long enough for Stardust to finish her PhD program and then it would be off to somewhere new, somewhere fresh. Maybe opening studio space here wasn’t in our best interests, we realized. The costs of moving had been huge, and we were exhausted from our trip. It was hard to imagine, after days of unpacking and moving our stuff around, putting it all back into boxes and trying to get a whole new place together in just a few months. What if we just decorated our current apartment and worked out of there? There was room to host clients – we intended to turn the living room and dining room into a parlor and study – and we could rent out existing studios for larger shoots. Hell, we could even rent out our spare bedroom as an Airbnb. No need to wait until we were in a killer loft, we could make the front end of our apartment look cool enough to be attractive to travelers! We made an airbnb profile and scored a bunch of bookings right out the gate, probably due to our insanely low rates.

PART 2

FEBRUARY

We took a 7 day trip to Cleveland.

Stardust’s apartment in Ohio was a lot bigger and she had a guaranteed income for the next year due to her research grant. We stayed for a week, and tried to determine if Chad would be able to see himself living there for a few years. Chad agreed, he had a day job but they were willing to let him work remotely. We started making plans to get everything from LA out to Ohio and gave ourselves three months.

Back in LA we raised some money for the move; Chad booked a few music videos and photoshoots and Stardust agreed to help out a bit, as Chad was covering her rent while she was in LA and she was interested in learning some new skills. She fell in love with developing mood boards for music video treatments, and started coming with Chad to meet clients and work on their visions for their videos. By video number 1, Stardust was getting to art direct. By video 2, she was designing treatments. By video 3 she was directing. There were some ups and downs, learning on the job was by no means easy and tight budgets and long hours lead to the odd blow up between them. But Stardust loved being behind the camera, and Chad thought she was doing a pretty good job.

Often, we’d talk about what could have been with the industrial loft. Chad suggested that we go ahead and do it anyway, just in Cleveland. It made a lot of sense, rent was way lower, and we figured we would just finish up the lease on the apartment in Cleveland that June and then move to an industrial loft in the warehouse district of Cleveland in late summer. We started eyeing properties, and figured out that we could rent a pretty big place for less than we were spending on our combined rents, and began asking around for recommendations for live-work residences.

Because Stardust was still working on her research and writing, and Chad was editing videos and photos when he got back from his day job and on the weekends, we often met at the Coffee Bean after work to write, chat about plans for the future, and get out of the house. It was on one of these days that the idea for a clothing company called “Filthlamb” came up.

We made a few pairs of leggings and t-shirts just to play with some ideas, using photos we’d taken on our Cleveland trip, but we sold nothing and figured it wasn’t the right time.

We spent the last 3 months making the absolute best of living in LA. Stardust’s manic restlessness demanded that we leave the house often, sometimes in the middle of the night! To help, Chad started keeping a list of things to do nearby; places to try out for food, little spots of interest in the neighborhood, and bigger events on weekends. While it started out to keep Stardust from feeling so cooped up in our tiny space, Chad realized how much he benefited from it too.

Little by little, we became more adventurous; Chad started trying foods he wouldn’t have eaten before, and we started building little surprises into our weeks to keep things new. Over time, we started making plans for bigger trips, we’d always dreamed about a drive to Portland and back but now that we were leaving the West Coast, we started looking at other opportunities – a trip to Red Rock to see Wardruna in October, plans to go to the East Coast for Stardust’s annual academic conference. We thought about filming our cross country road trip but figured that taking photos and writing a bit was plenty to deal with for now.

Throughout our last months in LA, we developed some norms; we said “yes” to as much as possible. We ate dinner together every night. We looked after each other when we were sick. We went through surgeries. We worked in bed ship. We built a life, and the more we poured ourselves into it, the more we started looking for ways to preserve it. We had a good thing going, our mental health was better and we were starting to feel alive again, and we intended to do everything we could to preserve our new way of life. We started saying goodbye to friends, and preparing for the jump.