It All Starts Here

But it didn’t start here. It started decades ago.

There are about two weeks a year in Florida when you can open everything.

No AC. No humidity pressing against the glass. Just sixty-something degrees and a breeze moving through the house the way air is supposed to move — freely, from one end to the other. Every window. Every door. It lasts maybe two weeks if you’re lucky, and then the heat comes back and you close it all up again until the following winter.

I wanted those french doors open.

There was a room standing between me and them. Not literally — there were sliding glass doors off the gym and the kitchenette that got to the pool just fine. I wasn’t blocked. I just couldn’t get that room open, and something about those two weeks of perfect air made that suddenly unacceptable.

So I looked at what was actually in there. A broken inversion table my parents gave me as a Christmas gift — still usable in a way, never fixed, never thrown out. Boxes of empty picture frames that had been waiting years for a purpose. Papers. Books that had drifted from other shelves. The kind of accumulation that happens not through carelessness but through motion — life moving fast enough that some things just land wherever they land and stay there.

I told myself I was clearing the room to open the doors.

That was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

The shelves were already there. So was the bookcase. They came with the house when I bought it in 2017 — left behind by a woman I never met. A widow. A grandmother. The neighbors spoke highly of her. The house was immaculate. She was moving into assisted living, and she left behind a life’s worth of built-ins, and a Steinway baby grand in what had been her formal dining room.

I turned that room into a music room. Hung two guitars on the wall, kept the piano. On the night of the housewarming party, we hired a singer to play it. My parents asked if we could turn the piano down. You can’t turn down a Steinway. That was a good night.

But her shelves were waiting in the other room. And I’d just cleared enough space to finally see them.

The picture frames I’d found in all those boxes — I filled them. They’re sitting there now, waiting to be hung. I’ll get to them. Everything in this room is either already in its place or on its way there. That’s how the room works. That’s how I work.

I have north of 300 books. Many I’ve read once. Many I’ve never read. Two small cabinets hold my childhood books — the ones that survived every move, every clearing, every version of my life that came before this one. Bedtime stories. Picture books with cracked spines. The ones my parents read to me and the ones I eventually read by myself with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep.

They’ve been in storage for years. Closed behind cabinet doors. Out of sight in the way that things go out of sight when you don’t have a place for them yet.

They have a place now.

On the shelf, in protective sleeves, is every Emmitt Smith card I’ve ever kept. Not a display — a record. The physical evidence of a collecting instinct that started in the early nineties with a rookie card and never fully stopped. If you’ve read All In, you know what those cards mean. If you haven’t — that’s where to start.

Next to them: photographs. Memorabilia. The specific objects that mean something to a specific person and nothing at all to anyone else. That’s the point. This room was never designed for anyone but me.

On one side, tucked against the wall: a green felt mat, my loupe, my strap tools, and a bourbon glass positioned at the corner of the frame. This is where I open watches. Where I hold something engineered to survive six thousand meters of pressure and try to understand what that means at sea level, on a quiet evening, with nowhere to be.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about this room.

I didn’t build it. I uncovered it.

Everything in it was already mine — the books, the cards, the tools, the records, the chair that needed a new home. They were just scattered across forty-something years of a life that hadn’t yet found the right place to put them all in the same room at the same time.

I moved some boxes to open some doors. And on the other side of the clearing, all of it was waiting.

The room didn’t start anything. The Emmitt Smith card was 1993. The books in those childhood cabinets go back further than I can clearly remember. The construction career that taught me what craft actually costs — twenty-four years of that.

It all started long before this room existed.

The room is just where it finally had somewhere to sit down.

Bezels & Bourbon has always been about putting the reader in a chair. Not describing the chair from across the room — actually putting them in it. Giving them the light from that window, the weight of the glass, the specific moment a record side ends and the room goes quiet and you don’t get up to flip it right away because the silence earned its place too.

I built this room so I’d have a place to write from.

Then I realized I’d built it so you’d have a place to sit.

The needle is already down. Pull up a chair.

-Jaime