So this is a deeper dive into the backstory of Budapest Unscripted. Yesterday’s Kick Off was a spontaneous reflection on this moment in time in Hungary, and now we get down to brass tacks.
Note: after recording this, I updated the name of the publication from The Expat Journal to Budapest Unscripted, because The Expat Journal is common and lame :)
Good morning. It’s April 10th, 2026 and this is the kickoff for Budapest Unscripted. I’m recording this the way I record everything in this journal — life as it happens, off the cuff. No script. Raw feelings, thoughts, no preparation. I edit the entries a little bit just to get rid of coughs or long pauses or unnecessary stuff.
But as you’ll come to see, this is just life. And why? Well, it all started as a project for myself. I’ve been keeping a journal — oh boy — a daily journal with numbered entries, starting at day one, going all the way back to February 1st, 1995. I keep a day count and I’m somewhere at — I think today is 11,392 of keeping those journals.
Obviously, I’ve missed days. Not every day was a journal day. Going back and looking at those journals is — it’s like any journal. It’s like a snapshot that throws you back in time to what you were doing in May of 2004 or October of 2017. And to be honest, I don’t go back and flip through them often.
And when I do, there’s a certain experience I have looking at them. It reminds me of things that were happening then, but then I also evaluate my writing, look at how I was expressing thoughts, start to judge myself, and it becomes this mix of things that goes beyond recollection.
And just on a goof, as soon as I got to Hungary — I moved back from Los Angeles in November of 2023 — I decided to pick up one of my little microphones and record what was happening the first morning I woke up. I just wanted to remember how it felt. I didn’t do it as a conscious idea that this was going to be something I kept doing.
I didn’t know how long I’d do it, but I just wanted to do it for me. And I did it for the first couple weeks I was in Hungary. And then I got a really bad cold, a head cold, and after I healed — it was a doozy — I think it took me a while to get used to Hungarian cold bugs. There’s a story about where this cold came from.
I can trace it to an exact moment when I caught it, and that will be revealed later in the journal. But after I healed from the cold, life was happening. I was starting this new existence and establishing myself in a city where I’d lived years before, but was still largely new to me, and I completely forgot about keeping up with the audio journal.
I went on with my life and then about a year later — almost a year after I arrived, just short of it — I went in and started listening to those audio journals. It was a whole different experience going back and listening to audio journal entries as opposed to reading written journal entries.
It triggered a different place in my brain. It felt different. It was a different kind of memory, and I was like, oh shit. I should have been doing this all along. I was really kind of pissed at myself for not doing more of it. So I picked the discipline back up and recorded close to 40 or 50 more entries that covered that period in time.
And then I paused again, and that’s okay. I realized that pausing with things is sort of my deal. That’s not just a story I tell myself to excuse a discipline that dissolves like a sandcastle. It’s just the way it is, and sometimes it serves me, and it serves what I’m making.
But that’s how this whole thing came to be, and why I’ve decided to make them public. I moved back to Hungary in November of 2023 after coming to Budapest for work in August, three months earlier. I was working as a documentary filmmaker, a cultural envoy for the US State Department.
That’s a whole other story, but I was doing a number of short films on Ukrainian art and culture, and I was supposed to go to Poland to document a concert by a Ukrainian rapper named Alyona Alyona. I was going to Warsaw to document her arrival, the show, all that — and about three weeks before I was supposed to leave, they said she’s not playing in Warsaw now, she’s playing at the Sziget Festival in Budapest.
Inside, fireworks went off. I’d been to the Sziget Festival in 2002. I lived in Budapest in 2002 and 2003 for a year, and it was a city I loved. A city I had such a strong connection to, and one I’d always wanted to go back to. I hadn’t been since I left in the summer of 2003 — 20 years earlier.
I kept my enthusiasm for the change of plans under wraps because I didn’t want to seem too excited, which was stupid because I still would’ve come. I made sure I had adequate time to do the work. I very reasonably suggested three weeks on the ground and that’s what came to pass. Over those three weeks, something shifted in me.
I worked a lot the first half. They were going to send some Ukrainian writers over — a writer and a poet — for me to interview in the second half of the trip. But because it was difficult to get people out of the country at that time, especially men, those interviews fell through. So I had basically 10, 12 days to just immerse myself in being back in Budapest, and something shifted in me.
I’d been living in Los Angeles for 11 years and was feeling like I was ready for a change. It was post-pandemic. My industry there, entertainment industry-aligned, was still in upheaval. I was aching to leave. I hadn’t put my finger on that feeling, and it didn’t crystallize until I spent that time in August of 2023, back in Budapest.
Sip of coffee.
Delicious. By the time I left, it was in my heart. It’s time to move back. The message I got was that I could live closer to my art here. I was 53 years old — going to turn 54 in October — and I was like, well, fuck. I’ve been largely an independent creative for the last 20 years. A couple of jobs along the way where I worked for other people — tended bar, worked at a media institute in Indiana — but my career has been very strange. My working life has been unique. It’s been largely of my own design.
And what I was looking at was: I’m 53, and my design didn’t feel exactly right. If I didn’t adjust it, if I didn’t invest in that change, I wasn’t going to be living the life I was meant for. Which is a lot to wake up and realize. It seems like you’d need to make a drastic change. But because I’d lived in Hungary before, the city was familiar, I had friends here — moving back didn’t feel a whole lot different than deciding to move to New York or some other city. Just a little bit further, with some immigration issues.
My heart was crystal clear by the time I left at the end of August. I wrote a note to myself that said, Remember this feeling. Remember this feeling. Because when you get back to Los Angeles, your head is going to start throwing every conceivable reason at you why this is a crazy idea, why it isn’t reasonable, why you won’t be able to tie up the loose ends responsibly — and if you go in spite of all these things being left untidy, then it’s just raw escapism. You have to do this the right way.
I won’t get into too much of the six weeks that followed. But my head was — I mean, I was right. My head was just like, Nope. This is going to be a problem. And I was at this inflection point where if I didn’t make this move happen toward the end of 2023, the cost of living — my monthly nut going into the holidays when work slows down — by the time 2024 rolled around, it was going to be more tenuous to make it happen in a comfortable way. So basically, if all these hurdles were not elegantly crossed, I didn’t think the move would happen.
I kept the faith, and one after another, all these hurdles just sank into the ground. They disappeared. All the obstacles took care of themselves in a way that still seems strange to me. And when that happens to me, it’s like — this might sound a little woo woo — but it’s like, yeah, life’s clearing the path. Go for it.
I found a subletter out of nowhere. I found a buyer for my Jeep. All these little loose ends tied up perfectly. I found a place I really liked in Budapest that I could rent sight unseen. Made an arrangement with the landlord from LA. Everything worked out and I bought the ticket.
I bought a one-way ticket and I came with goals. The big thing — and one of the reasons I’m putting all this stuff out there — is that I was finishing a novel. I was in the last trimester of gestating and working on this novel.
I started the first character sketches that would become the novel — the first 30 pages — in 2008. I picked it up and then it sat. I probably worked on it for a few weeks, not really knowing what it would become, just working out some feelings and ideas about characters. Then I set it aside for probably five or six years. But all the while it was in my brain. I thought about it. Then I picked it up again and wrote another 30 or 40 pages. So maybe all in, I was around 60, 70 pages. Raw, exploratory. But in the back of my mind I always knew that was going to be the one I finished eventually. That was the one that was important to me.
Coffee.
In the fall of 2022, about a year before the Budapest epiphany, I had a novel epiphany: you gotta finish this. You’ve gotta put in the time and you’ve gotta finish this thing. I literally had that as a moment of clarity when I was driving through Utah with family — everybody on their devices or snoozing — going back to the airport after a week in Montana. I just had this empty feeling inside. Why do I have this empty feeling after such an amazing week, in a beautiful place, with people I love? About a half hour later it hit me: I’d been neglecting this project. You gotta finish the novel, dummy. That’s almost exactly the feeling and thought that came flying through the window and hit me in the head.
So I went home to LA and the next day started getting up at five in the morning, compiling everything I’d written so far, rewriting it. I worked on it every day, 5 AM, every single day — the way a writer should. That continued until the summer of 2023, when I was about two thirds of the way through the first draft. Then I had to start traveling a lot for the State Department gig, so I wasn’t getting up at five in the morning anymore, but I was still working on it.
I pulled it front and center in my creative life and it felt so right. This is me. This is what I’m supposed to be doing — at least what I really enjoy doing, and what I feel some sort of unique capability with. And so this author identity — author as something I want to be and do as much as anything else — was really close to the surface when I made the trip to Budapest in August.
The goal I had, the whole reason I moved back, was to live closer to my art. That meant finishing the novel. And the novel is set in Budapest — based on feelings, experiences, and people I encountered when I lived here in 2002 and 2003. Purely a work of fiction, but capturing something of that time. What better place to finish it than back in Budapest?
My plan was: I had a third of it left, I’d finish it in early 2024, do some editing, get it out to the world in late 2024. Here we are in 2026, and I have a release date set for November. I didn’t sleep on it at all. I just didn’t realize how much more work I was going to put into it, and how much more I wanted to.
I more or less hit the mark on when I finished the first draft. But then a very substantial second draft, and then a year of finer editing — blah blah blah. I’m still in the final editing stage and I release it about seven months from now, November 2026.
A lot of this audio journal touches on the process. You can hear me talking about being close to being done — little did I know — and things like that. So what is this journal? It’s a glimpse into what it’s really like to move to a foreign city. What it’s really like to be an expat — not a good-time expat who rents a furnished apartment in the center of town, hangs out at expat bars, and soaks up all the beautiful things about living here without trying to learn the language, without trying to immerse yourself in environments where no one speaks English and figure out how to get by.
I toss a little shade there. I’ll own it. That, to me, is what I’d call a fashion expat. I just came up with that term. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I kind of like it and may use it from time to time.
What this journal is — is the other kind. The kind where you wake up some mornings and realize nobody in this city is expecting to hear from you today. You know people, but they’re busy, and you might not talk to them for another month. You can count on one hand the people you could call up right now. You’re not part of any community. You’re just here. And it sure is pretty.
So yeah. It’s a journey. It takes you through all of that — what it’s like to be an author and a creative trying to reinvent your life. It’s not always pretty. I tried to turn on the recorder when I was feeling good, when I was feeling contemplative, when I was doing my Hungarian homework, when I was walking through the mall struggling to talk to the counter person at a Hungarian cafeteria. All raw. No polish, very minimal editing.
I’m going to throw in some other recordings — essays I’ve written — and those will be a little more polished. And every entry will have the audio element, the raw recording, plus the written piece, which is basically a cleaned-up transcript for those more interested in reading than listening. I’ll throw in images from the actual circumstances. Every now and then maybe a little video — a few of the entries already have video. Some multimedia mixed in.
I might share a sample chapter from the novel as we get further along.
So yeah. It’ll be a mixed bag. It’ll be a fun ride.
That’s what the Expat Journal really is at its core. It’s now almost 9 AM on April 10th. It’s chilly outside — beautiful to look at, blue sky — but it’s like three degrees Celsius. And we have a monumental national election coming up in two days. By the time I release this to the world, Orbán Viktor will either be reinstated as Prime Minister for another four years — God help us — or Magyar will be in.
We’ll see.
So yeah, that’s where we are. I’m heading over to Bullet’s apartment — you’ll know what that means as you get deeper into the journal. It pertains to the documentary I’m working on. One of the other goals I came back here with: get a documentary off the ground. No idea how I was going to do it, but I really wanted to make a documentary about a friend I knew in 2002, a painter whose art really affected me. Haunted me, actually — in a way that launched me into those early character sketches that became the novel. Just considering the psychology of an artist.
He passed away at the age of 50 a few years before I moved back. I think a film needs to be made about this guy. And now I’m working on that documentary.
More to come about all of that. Thanks. Welcome to the ride. I hope it’s — it is — it’s a fun little ride. To be continued with the next episodes.
