Yucatan, Retro GoGo and the Return to the Ruins
Underwater Portraits are Not My Thing
Before I started this blog, I used to think I never really went back to the same place twice. Turns out—that was a lie.
The truth is, I’ve always been a move-forward kind of person. New passport stamps. New cities. New chaos. But the Yucatán? That one kept calling me back. It helped that I had family there. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever would’ve gone if they hadn’t been.
We were on a film break—somewhere between projects. Maybe Locke & Key (the TV pilot that never took off), Abduction, or Warrior. I can’t remember exactly.
What I do remember is we had just gotten our first GoPro. Naturally, we spent half the trip underwater, trying to become some kind of mermaid–National Geographic hybrid.
Patrick loved taking underwater portraits, and I was... absolutely terrible at them. Mostly because I hate being underwater. It fascinated me how he could grin through it like he was still on land. I, on the other hand, looked like a panicked blowfish—cheeks puffed, eyes wild, desperately aware that I couldn’t breathe. There’s no way I came from sea-dwelling ancestors. And if I did, I must’ve died out quickly.
We filmed each other floating through cenotes—hair swirling, limbs drifting like dream creatures. Always experimenting with whatever we had on hand. The creative energy between us was relentless, always evolving, always generating new ideas, art pieces, and paintings.
It was there that we came up with a new series—one of the few we actually collaborated on. We called it Retro GoGo, inspired by retro aesthetics and, well, the idea of a Go-Go lounge. The art felt like that to us.
Retro GoGo was pure play. We painted animal heads on odd bodies, conjuring surreal characters pulled from our surroundings and our slightly delirious imaginations.
He designed them. I painted them. Even after we returned to the States, we kept going. In the end, we made 25 paintings. Here are nine of them:
As a scenic artist for film and television, I’ve always been obsessed with the beauty of aging—how time, weather, and life leave their marks. I became enamored with the wear and tear of beachside living: sun-bleached wood, rusted metal, peeling paint. That natural distressing told its own story, and I began weaving it into my paintings. Years of observing how surfaces break down—how layers of pigment, texture, and material slowly shift—taught me something profound: impermanence makes everything more vivid.
I think about the cracked, sunburned colors of small Mexican towns. The eerie stillness of the Mayan ruins. That hilarious night we sat through an entire film about Chichen Itza in Spanish, nodding as if we understood a single word. (We didn’t.)
All of those moments bled into the art. The experiences, the memory, the textures—they thread themselves through the loop holes of my life. They became reference points on the map of my story.
And so, I went back. In memory and in real life. More than once, I found myself again in the sun-blistered sands of Mexico. Always for different reasons.
Now, as I write this and record the next podcast episode, I’m realizing something: I go back to places when I don’t have closure. When the memory feels... unfinished. If the last imprint doesn’t sit right, I return—not for nostalgia, but to rewrite the ending.
To gather the fragments of myself I left behind.
We leave parts of ourselves in places, in people, in stories we weren’t ready to finish. And I think that’s why I kept returning to the Yucatán. Not just for the ruins—but to rebuild something of my own.
The Yucatán taught me that returning isn’t a failure to move on. It’s an act of healing. Sometimes the only way forward is to go back, just once more, to remember it better.
That’s what Cosmic Interference is all about—the private podcast series where I share the stories I don’t tell publicly. The ones that rewired my compass. The cosmic nudges, the heartbreaks, the synchronicities that cracked me open and rerouted everything. If this resonated with you, you’ll love what’s waiting inside.