Dear Big-Clouded Planet,

I’m writing to invite you to follow another Substack—fashionably late, but here we go. 

The Papaya Thief started as a blog in my early chef days at Casa Isleña, a small inn in Rincón, Puerto Rico, where I’d drive up the hill before dinner service and shake green papayas off the tree and shred for our popular salad. I was twenty-five when I became my own boss, which seems young, but by then I’d worked in probably a dozen restaurants, picking up enough skills to wing it. Art-making and writing and cooking, they follow similar creative processes (at least for me); haphazard and random, essential to walk around in circles, or sit still, be curious, willing to admire the world outside your own, especially in the corners people have forgotten about, or who are too afraid to investigate on their own. 

I’d like this (Substack) place to be a portal. What kind of portal? I can only think of space—a place in space—where stories can be found in their infinite forms, including, but not limited to: letters, photography, short films, essays, poems, food, and fiction, subjects ranging far and wide, mundane to bizarre; gonzo bozo hobo in turquoise driving mountain desert ocean.

I want to make stuff, and puff pastry. I wanna use my hands to bend scrap metal and wire into animal shapes. I wanna write about everything, travel everywhere, learn languages, pontificate alone, party with friends, create without having to consider capitalism, or secret police (wasn’t long ago we thought the two incompatible). Is it too much to ask, for somebody like myself who once saw themselves as shy and private yet secretly boiling on the inside, an anxiety which leaves us susceptible to manipulation by internal voices, and who worry too much about what other people thought, haunted by that feeling that someone was reading over your shoulder, judging us or our work—is it too much to ask to say a thing or two about a thing or two in any medium that happens to be on-hand?

With that, I open the floor to questions.

All this sounds vague and amorphous, but maybe that’s what I want it to be, like how I imagine portals to be. The world’s a mess and so is my brain (our brains) and I like to dive in and flail around to see what splatters on the wall. Whether this Stack is for entertainment or catharsis (certainly not mutually exclusive), I hope we’ll both find something interesting to discuss along the way. 

Click here to subscribe! Thank you in advance for reading and participating. 

Love,

Brendan