“I’m a dinosaur”, Corwin said.

“Yeah?! Well, I’m an Icelandic chick”, said the Icelandic chick.

The Icelandic chick did NOT trust that Corwin was, in fact, a dinosaur.

That pretty much sums it up. That’s Corwin. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Fine…. I met Corwin in late 2010 on Crosby Street in SoHo. We sat outside of Housing Works and had coffee. I still lived in Seattle and had come to NYC to check it out before moving there a few months later. Corwin, being from Washington State (like me), knew who I was from the interwebs. At this time, I was a concierge at the W Hotel in Seattle and a hobby photographer, while Corwin had just been canned from his job in retail at Freeman’s. Corwin told me to NOT move to New York City.

Good thing I didn’t listen. Or…maybe I should have listened, and my life would be a lot more simply these days. Who knows. Anyhow, I moved to NYC on the last day of December of the same year, and one of my first nights after moving, I decided to meet up with Corwin for as cheap of a meal as possible.

This required me to go to Williamsburg. A distant land. I lived on my friend’s couch on Suffolk and Delancey, and even though Williamsburg was normally walkable, it was -17 degrees Celsius, and I was wearing leather soled Carol Christian Poell boots which were not suitable for snow trudging, and realistically, probably not suitable for wearing in any weather conditions at all.

I walked.

I met Corwin on North 7th and Bedford at a falafel place which I think no longer exists. Corwin was fucking WEIRD, man. It was amazing. We spoke in bizarre sentence fragments for the entirety of the evening, and basically every day since then.

A text transcript between me and Corwin may read something like the following:

Corwin: (Picture of Corwin’s cat, “Shane Finn” laying provocatively on the bed)
Corwin: “thots?”
Me: “can he not!?”
Corwin: “i know”
Corwin: “u did louis vuitton?”
Me: “Ya. I own the brand”
Corwin: “thata rly nice man. As do I.”
Me: “I have two monogram bags”
Corwin: “k”
Me: “I’m gonna do some fear-based grocery shopping”
Corwin: “yes!!!! I have vibrant strategies !!!”

And it just goes on like that for 14+ years. I am quite sure that Corwin and I have never actually talked about anything aside from a few film recommendations and a controversial dialogue about Woody Allen.

We did go to Iceland a few times. Once Corwin drank an entire bottle of whiskey the night before a road trip, (probably the Dinosaur/Icelandic chick moment) and proceeded to vomit over the pristine volcanic landscape as we tried to get to our destination.

Another time in Iceland, Corwin and I went to Skagaströnd where we got drunk at Iceland’s biggest (and only) Country Western bar and were served white bread and mayonnaise sandwiches at the home of the bartender after the vehemently refused to serve us any food at the bar, while she herself ate tortilla chips in front of us.

Corwin’s birthday is 2 days before mine, and thusly we have spent many birthdays together. Tbilisi, Reykjavík, Helsinki, Riga, Copenhagen, a road trip around Scotland, and a weekend of gambling in Abu Dhabi. Ok we never went to Abu Dhabi…. But we did play blackjack at the Princess Casino in Batumi and cleaned UP…spending our winnings on cha-cha and hundreds of dollars on tubed meats to feed the myriads of stray dogs across Georgia.

This year we celebrated our birthdays in Copenhagen with his mom and his girlfriend. We went to restaurants and ate lunches which were more expensive than expensive dinners. Corwin complained repeatedly about the taste of Danish tap water and insisted that it ruined any attempts to make coffee at my apartment. My juvenile palate does not agree.

Back when I used to make real money, I took Corwin and Ariel (from a previous Context story) to 11 Madison Park. Corwin proceeded to take charge of the wine ordering, as I know nothing about wine and shopped by ‘cheapest’ at the grocery store when I used to drink. We had 700 courses of amazing food which I probably didn’t fully understand. The first bottle of wine was around 150-200$. When we finished that, the sommelier asked if we’d like another bottle, to which Corwin left creative direction to the sommelier, resulting in a bottle with a price tag which I still cannot believe, and regardless of how good the wine tasted, still makes me sick to my stomach to think about.

(He will say it wasn’t really that expensive, btw.)

I have travelled to more places with Corwin than any other of my non-Fashion-Week friends. We’ve eaten at the nicest places, had the best coffees, tried the stupidest wines, and been to the best museums and shops possible. We’ve seen incredible landscapes, felt skin-ripping winds, pet stray dogs and cats, and posed with Icelandic ponies against their will. We’ve had soup. Talked about running (a lot). Taken small ferries. We’ve been laughed at for being American. We’ve been to the worst bakery in Denmark (it’s in Lohals, FYI.) We’ve put goji berries on an iPhone for photographs. We’ve rolled up in the “clerb”. We’ve eaten tiny meals, and Pony Kicks. We’ve been to Little Fridays in Riga. We met and tried to pet the late Pikku Pompa in Helsinki. We’ve also been chastised outside of a Danish pasta restaurant (Fabro) for having the audacity to ask one of the owners how long the wait for a table might be…

But we’ve never fought or had an argument.

That pretty much sums it up. That’s Corwin. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thanks, Corwin.