I’m here.
Boulder.
The mountains are doing that thing they do at dusk where they turn purple for about fifteen minutes and make you forget every bad decision you’ve made in the last six months. It’s a hell of a trick. One minute your shoulders feel like they’ve been beaten with a ball-peen hammer, the next you’re standing there staring at a ridgeline like some wide-eyed tourist who’s never seen dirt rise above sea level. Then the sun disappears, reality comes back, and you remember you can barely lift your arms above your shoulders.
Moving a house is hard.
Moving a shop is hard.
Moving both at the same time is something else entirely. Somewhere along the way the math quits working. Every box you tape shut somehow gives birth to two more hiding behind a workbench you forgot existed. Engine parts wrapped in moving blankets. Shelves full of inventory. Books. Cameras. Tools. Half-finished projects bundled in oily shop rags like evidence waiting for a detective that’ll never show up. I honestly didn’t know a person could get tired this specifically. It lives in your lower back, your hands, and somewhere behind your eyes where sleep ought to fix things but somehow doesn’t.
The strange part is that there still isn’t a finish line.
You keep thinking you’ll wake up one morning and it’ll all be over. The last truck unloaded. The last box opened. Life restored to something resembling normal. But that day doesn’t seem to exist. It’s just one Tuesday bleeding into the next, the pile never really getting smaller, only changing shape.
And yet…
Something underneath all of this feels different.
The stress hasn’t gone anywhere. My body still feels like it got into an argument with a U-Haul truck and lost. Coffee has officially surrendered. But every time I look out toward those mountains, some primitive little part of my brain keeps whispering the same thing.
You’re supposed to be here.
That’s not optimism. It’s not relief. It’s something deeper than either of those. The kind of instinct you only recognize after you’ve ignored it for far too long.
The risk was real. Hell, it still is. But I’m starting to see the outline of what’s coming, and for the first time in a long while, the future feels a whole lot more exciting than the past.
The new shop is nowhere near operational. Right now it’s mostly concrete floors, cardboard boxes, holes in walls and unreasonable amount of naive ambition. But I can already see it. I know where the benches are going. I know where the cameras will live. I know where the hot rods belong. More importantly, I know what I want this place, and Atomic, to become over the next decade or so…
It’s finally starting to feel possible.
Once the dust settles and I can find a coffee cup without opening twelve boxes, I’d like to throw the doors open and invite you guys over. Nothing formal. No speeches. Just a chance to see the new headquarters, kick tires, tell lies, and celebrate the fact that somehow this ridiculous little journal survived another chapter.
For now…
I’m going to find a couch.
Or the floor.
At this point I honestly don’t care which.
