1. Initial Epistle - Welcome to Boundless Bypass

Stories and sentences steeped in banter and personal bookmarks. The weekly-ish epistle that's a boundless bypass wherever we are.

Editor’s note: This week’s epistle is an inaugural one. Thank you for being here.

Every week or so, the Boundless Bypass is published — a comprehensive albeit accessible epistle of:

• A song for the issue

• Musings or longer-form writing on a key topic

• A postcard

• Listings of interest and intrigue along with a round-up of things that I’m ‘tabs open’ on

Our song* this week is: So Here We Are, the 2005 Bloc Party gut punch.

This is Boundless Bypass. There’s no limitations here in how we question the duality of the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. Curiosities, vagaries, specificities, and fixations. Stories matter here because stories are our connective tissue everywhere.

More frankly, I like the in-between parts of life that frequently only make the footnotes in our memories or retellings.

Often I feel intrigued by these moments as much as the main event.

The bits we might not share because they’re in the sidebar category or more niche. The bobs we might overlook or only think to share when we’re in an unexpected situation, circumstance, or frame of mind. For me, it’s the ordinary and the extraordinary. It’s textured and imperfect and fascinating.

I’m inquisitive about all of the shades — muted, emerging, heavy, buoyant, dark, saturated, and synesthetic. 

I think this is why whenever I’m somewhere and I don’t speak the language, the words I wish I knew how to say are:

How are you? How is your day going? What’s happening with you?

This isn’t for everyone, I know that. The truth is also that I rarely get that far. How do you ask a question like that when you barely have the words for the interaction to begin with?

Our comfort with this kind of question and sharing about these things is personal, cultural, linguistic, and, often, contextual. Much like the sentiment of the happiness scene in About Time**. The point is that these arguably non-descript particles are essential to the whole. We need the small as much as the big.

And what I truly care for is to connect and to feel that moment.

In my mind, there’s a boundlessness to what we can connect on however we make the mistake of sticking to the main road of the things we think are more compelling, shinier, or meaningful. These aren’t the roads that build the connection though. I’ve found that it’s the bypasses that build connection and bring us together with common tendrils of depth, lightness, and range. And when we prioritise the bypasses, there’s a boundlessness to what our connections, our experiences, and our growth can be.

But how do we get to the connection I’m reaching for and trying to get to in conversation and what does it feel like?

To me it feels like the friend who you can send just a picture to with a “What do you think?” Or, it feels like the joke you carry on with a sibling over years; when it’s like-minded, it just works. Then there are the other ones that are more random yet just as meaningful even in their whimsy. The pervasiveness of why a single emoji might be beloved above all others. Or the catharsis of a shared cry to specific songs even in separate rooms and separate countries, unknown to each other across oceans.

In all of these places and across all of these moments, there’s feeling and humanity in all of it.

This brings me to inviting connection and trying to pave the way there through writing.

Boundless Bypass is the somewhere that I’ve mapped out for this kind of sharing. You’re so welcome here and I’d love for you to come down that lane with me, read these words, and then connect in comments and messages and sharing our individual stories.

Connection lives in all of this. Through discussing ideas, reading and recommending writing, cultivating creativity, researching topics and places, exchanging ideas and arcs of work, sending postcards, or journeying through food: there’s exploration in everything.

The point of Boundless Bypass is to have these conversations and find the connections in all of our experiences however and wherever we have them. I’m all for living it, talking about it, and writing about it.

Sometimes it’s about travel and often will be because this takes up a lot of my life (and I will talk about why in an issue soon). Sometimes it’s about how deeply peripatetic we are even when it might feel like we’re in a chapter that’s akin to moss time. Equally, we’re acknowledging that what is fulfilling is daily travel built on the sacred: the worn path to the front gate to survey your street, the slow walk to the preferred bench at the local park, the recipe known so well that the familiarity acts as a kind of nourishment.

Boundless Bypass is about the highway of life and celebrating it for what it is and what it personally looks like. There’s always threads of mine that relate to threads of yours while being ineffably distinct in their own right. This is our shared connection. The journal ethos here emphasises staying in your own lane and loving it sick. It’s an encouragement and emboldenment to expand at your own rate and with what feels in alignment for you. So here we are.

Kutaisi Botanical Gardens, a snowy January 2024 Sunday. A full postcard from Kutaisi is on its way.

What are the Listings?

Listings have traditionally been used to share ‘What’s on’ in Arts and Culture in cities and communities all over the world. They can be innovative and grassroots, linked to activism, and help people find out what’s happening.

I think most of us now turn to a range of sources for these listings. We follow certain people, we use word-of-mouth, we receive a curated, algorithmic list on our ‘For You’ pages.

The listings I trust most are the ones that are from people I know and from people whose work I adore. In the 2000s and 2010s, I lived for blogs and mastheads like Frankie Magazine. For a time, I used Instagram in the same way because it was where most sharing was happening, but I yearned and still yearn for the immersive quality and energy of magazines, independent voices, and extended pieces.

In Boundless Bypass, I hope you feel like a pal is sharing with you in the same spirit of listings.

I also love a power ranking of recommendations and obsessions like nothing else (To Do lists, not so much; Shopping Lists, conversely, are another thing entirely).

Listings for Friday, February 2, 2024

• This Gracie Abrams Like A Version of Ethel Cain’s American Teenager — this raw, spellbinding song is one I’ve lived inside for the last couple of years. Stunning cover and so obviously I’m repeating, repeating, repeating…

• I just gobbled this Sentimental Garbage episode on How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. My advice is to inhale this then mine the back catalogue and live your best life.

• An older Grub Street with Dwight Garner that I’ve thought about a lot since reading earlier this week (recommendation via the podcast Cool Story with Bri and Bridie). Two listings for the bulletpoint of one!

• The most evocative poetic reminder to Get Drunk in all different ways.

• Currently reading The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy via BorrowBox to understand more about the history and realities of this harrowing conflict; if you’re looking for books and want to support civic services, using your local library is a particularly meaningful way to do it (e-books and audiobooks are typically included).

Let me know what’s on your mind and where your postcards are from this week.

Until the next epistle, Aoife

*Every week’s song will be added to this evergreen Boundless Bypass Spotify playlist. Super excited to share music here a la the MySpace days. Please comment if you miss sharing and discovering artists this way while also creating a vibe for your page.

**My last watch of About Time was on a flight…crucially involving much quiet, behind-mask sobbing…throughout.