Author: Kyle Hayes

  • Dawn Patrol

    Dawn Patrol

    There is a moment before the day decides itself. A hush. The city holds its breath, streetlights humming like distant hymns, the Rio Grande moving somewhere you can’t quite see. You turn on the television and the anchors talk logistics—lift-off times, pilot briefings, winds at five hundred feet. They say Dawn Patrol the way a foreman says day shift, voice flat with utility. Experienced pilots rise before sunrise, sample the air, and radio the numbers so the rest can follow. It is a system, a safety net, a way to choreograph the sky.

    All of that is true. None of it explains why you wake in the dark and put on layers you haven’t touched since last winter.

    I went once—before dawn, coffee scalding my palm through a cheap lid, a breakfast burrito warming the other hand because the desert pretends it’s summer by day and remembers it’s a high plain by morning. I went expecting to watch balloons fill. Fabric, fire, lift. A diagram with flames.

    What I got was a glow.

    On the field, the balloons lay like sleeping animals, bright skins spread across the grass. Then the burners woke—one, then another, hissing like some prehistoric choir. A body of color rose where there had been only shadow. Then the flame cut, and the color collapsed back into the night. It was breath, not mechanism. Inhale. Exhale. Light. Dark. Over and over until the timing took on a pulse.

    Some mornings, a dozen of them rise together, a Dawn Patrol show choreographed to music—since 1996, people say—as if we couldn’t admit that we’ve always wanted the night itself to have a soundtrack. You stand there with thousands of others, strangers knitted together by cold and a shared tilt of the head, and the field becomes a stained glass window lit from the inside. No sermon necessary. The windows preach in orange and blue.

    I didn’t expect the characters. Darth Vader drifted up first, glossy black helm drinking fire. Then Yoda, ears like sails, face wise and ridiculous at the same time. I laughed out loud. Not a cynical laugh—something closer to relief. As if a muscle you didn’t know had tightened, it finally let go. Wonder snuck in wearing a costume. For a few beats, I was younger than the hour, the cold, the years I carry in my shoulders. I was just a person in a field, neck craned, mouth open.

    I took too many pictures. Everyone does. You can feel how flimsy the phone is in your grip compared to what’s happening above you, but you try anyway. Later, you scroll those photos when the day turns officious and small, and they feel like contraband: proof that the sky once made room for joy before 6 a.m.

    The news will always explain Dawn Patrol as a service to the Mass Ascension—pilots sampling the invisible, calling down the conditions so others can rise with some measure of certainty. That’s real. It’s also a poor translation. What happens on the field isn’t data; it’s discipline. Standing in the dark and waiting for light is an ancient ritual. We practice it for exams, for diagnoses, for shifts that start before dawn. Out on that grass, we rehearse it for a different reason: to remember that hope is not loud. Hope flickers. Hope needs tending. Hope is a burner you ignite again and again until the fabric holds its shape.

    You eat while you wait. Eggs, potatoes, green chile tucked into a foil-wrapped cylinder—the kind of food that tastes better outdoors, better in the cold, better when you’ve decided to be awake with other people who have also decided to be awake. The coffee is almost too hot, and that’s the point. It scalds reality into you. It locates you in the body while the eye is busy chasing fire.

    Balloons do not promise much. A canvas, a basket, a bottle of fuel, a willingness to negotiate with the wind. They are humble in that way. Honest. They rise when the air says yes. They bow when the air says no. That humility is part of the love here. The desert teaches it daily—no water without asking, no shade without planning, no shortcuts through noon. Dawn Patrol is the desert’s lesson painted in flame: attention first, then ascent.

    I have returned since that first morning. I’ve stood through other shows, other glows, other crowds bundled into a single breath. But the first time is the one that lives in me. The shock of color against a sky that wasn’t ready for it. The burn of coffee and chile at the edge of my tongue. Vader and Yoda rising like jokes the universe told to remind us it still has a sense of humor. The way thousands of people could grow quiet together without being told.

    What stays with me isn’t the scale—though hundreds of balloons carving a horizon is a kind of madness worth seeing. What remains is the practice: wake before there is a reason, bring your own heat, and stand still long enough to witness. Let the first light come from within something—within a balloon, within yourself—before the sun claims the credit. Accept that the work of rising begins in the dark, where the world can’t yet see you, where the radioed wind is just a voice naming what the invisible intends.

    They’ll talk about the Box on other mornings, about the clever wind that carries you south low and north high so you can drift out and then come home again. But the Box is a later magic. Dawn Patrol is earlier, older. It’s the choice to step into the unproven, to measure a future with nothing but flame and nerve. It’s a handful of people going first, not with bravado but with care, so that when the mass ascension comes—and it always comes—the rest of us can rise with fewer doubts.

    I still look at those photos from my first visit. They’re poorly framed. My thumb is in one. The exposure is wrong in three. It doesn’t matter. I keep them because they’re true. They remind me of what the day sometimes tries to make me forget: that awe is something you can work toward, that joy can be prepared like coffee, and that you can choose to show up for wonder before it becomes convenient.

    On paper, Dawn Patrol is a safety protocol. In the body, it is a liturgy: fire, breath, lift, drift. In the soul, it is a compact you make with the morning—if I come to meet you, will you meet me back? Some days the answer is no. The wind turns, the field stays quiet, the burners never speak. But on the days it’s yes, the sky answers in lanterns. And for a few minutes, the world is what it could be: a chorus of small lights, rising.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Beginnings of the Balloon

    The Beginnings of the Balloon

      I like to imagine the first balloon not as a machine but as a dare. Paper, silk, fire—the audacity of lifting yourself from the quarrels of the earth with nothing but heat and faith. Before Albuquerque claimed the sky each October, before dawn burners hissed like dragons over the Rio Grande, there was France, 1783, when people looked up and saw a new verb forming over their heads: to rise.

      In June of that year, the Montgolfier brothers carried an ungainly sack of paper and cloth out onto a square in Annonay, set a fire beneath it, and watched it go—ten minutes of impossible, enough altitude to knock loose the old limits. By autumn, they carried their wonder to Versailles and sent a sheep, a duck, and a rooster into the royal air as if to ask: can life itself breathe up there? Two months later, in Paris, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes stepped into a wicker gondola and became the first to slip free of the rope, drifting twenty-five minutes over a city that suddenly looked small. Days after that, Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers gave the world a second path upward—hydrogen—launching from the Tuileries to show that there were many ways to translate fire into altitude. France was the cradle of ballooning; the first breath, the first animals, the first men, the first gas. The sky, once myth, grew technical. 

      What the French began as spectacle and science was, at root, a theology: a belief that we could climb. That theology made its way across oceans and centuries until it found a peculiar home in New Mexico, where dawn is a kind of religion and the horizon is an altar without walls. If France invented the act, Albuquerque invented the season.

      The beginning here was humbler—parking-lot humble. In 1972, a local radio station (KOB) threw a birthday party and asked Sid Cutter—pilot, showman, the first New Mexican with his own hot-air balloon—to bring the new miracle. Twenty-one pilots were invited, weather whittled them down, and thirteen balloons finally lifted from the Coronado Center mall lot while 20,000 people craned their necks and forgot, for a morning, that asphalt was meant for cars. That was the seed from parking lot to fairgrounds to a dedicated park, from a dozen to hundreds, from local curiosity to international pilgrimage.

      What made it stick wasn’t just romance; it was the map of the air. Albuquerque owns a wind pattern so local it has a name—the Box—layers of breeze moving in opposing directions, a morning inversion carrying you south at low altitude and north above it, a tidy loop that lets skilled pilots drift out and, with a climb, drift back toward where they began. In a world that scatters us, the Box offers the possibility of return. It is meteorology as mercy. 

      But a season doesn’t bloom without people to tend it. In 1978, three Albuquerque men—Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, Larry Newman—sailed a gas balloon called Double Eagle II from Presque Isle, Maine, to a barley field near Paris, the first to knit America and Europe together with fabric and helium. Six days, 137 hours, frostbite, fear, and then France—an answering echo to those first French ascents. Three years later, Abruzzo and crew wrote their signatures across the Pacific, too. Here, ballooning wasn’t just a pageant; it was an expedition, a frontier reopened.

      Albuquerque enshrined that hunger in a museum whose very name reads like a dedication: the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum. The doors opened on October 1, 2005, a house for artifacts and a hall for stories—Ed Yost’s modern ballooning breakthroughs, Joseph Kittinger’s high-altitude courage, the Double Eagle’s audacity, and a thousand quieter feats of navigation, patience, and nerve. It sits north of town near the field, a kind of reliquary where flight is preserved not as myth but as craft.

    Still, museums and records are the scaffolding. Culture is the body that climbs it.

      Each fall, chile roasters roll out in front of grocery stores and seal the air with smoke and memory. The Sandias blush watermelon at dusk. And then, before even the sun admits morning, we drive to a park carved into the valley floor and stand under fabric that billows like lungs. Dawn Patrol lamps the dark. Mass Ascension repaints the sky. The burners sound like giant animals breathing; a chorus of whoosh and hush. Children point at cows and bees and dragons peeled up from the earth. Tourists cry into morning newscasts about bucket lists and first times. Locals—some of whom claim to be tired of it—still pause in their driveways when a low flyer ghosts the rooftops, or when a chase truck idles at the curb, and a balloon folds itself into a duffel the size of a life packed up between strangers.

      How did something invented in France become so beloved here? Because New Mexico has always been a country of ascents and survivals. Pueblo, Hispano, Black, Chicano, Diné—the genealogies here are layered as sediment, hard-earned as water. Ballooning fits our theology: small craft, large sky; simple tools, exacting attention; courage, and then surrender. The Box promises a kind of return, but the practice itself is drift, humility before the wind. It’s hard not to see yourself in that.

    And there’s this: Albuquerque takes care of things that gather us. We might joke that we’re a city of two left turns and a long light, that we’re grit and pothole and stubborn ache. But every October, we become a city that wakes at 3:30 a.m., bundling blankets and burritos, teaching our children to be quiet in the presence of something bigger than us. The Fiesta has hosted gas races older than the century, welcomed pilots from dozens of nations, and stitched international myth to local ritual. Year after year, the numbers climb and the field fills and the sky blooms. But the math is the least of it. What matters is that for a week, every day is interrupted by awe, and awe becomes our everyday language. 

      I think of those French firsts—the sheep and duck and rooster blinking over Versailles, the two men in Paris seeing their city surgically reduced to streets and sparks, the hydrogen globe lifting to a second sun—and I think of how, centuries later, three men from this desert wrote a line back to that beginning with a long, cold arc across the Atlantic. The story is a loop: France to New Mexico, museum to field, dawn to dusk, out on the low wind and back on the high. A Box, but also a bond.

      The roots of ballooning here are the same roots that hold so many New Mexico things in place: attention to weather, reverence for land, craft passed from hand to hand, and a willingness to meet the morning with both courage and caution. That’s why it’s no longer just an event. It’s an inheritance. It’s how a city remembers its capacity for wonder, not as escape but as evidence—that we can still rise, and that, if the winds are kind and we are careful, we might even find our way home again.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Land of Entrapment

    The Land of Entrapment

      I was raised in the Quad-Cities — an area that, to this day, feels suspended in amber. It isn’t just the winters that freeze you to the bone, when the wind whips across the Mississippi and leaves your face raw. It’s the people, the rhythm of life, the way the place still breathes as though the 1980s never ended.

    Factories were our backbone then: John Deere, International Harvester, Caterpillar, The Rock Island Arsenal, and ALCOA. Their names were more than brands; they were birthrights. People clocked in and out not just for paychecks but for identity. Houses were bought once and held onto for a lifetime, just like jobs. Men retired in the same overalls they wore when they started, women retired in the same churches and kitchens that shaped them. It was a life that promised stability. Predictability. A bubble.

    But bubbles keep things in as much as they keep things out.

    I had seen time move differently elsewhere — places that reinvented themselves, cities that shifted, people who didn’t cling so tightly to sameness. And once you see that, once you know the world isn’t fixed in place, it’s impossible to believe that standing still is survival.

      I left Iowa more than once. The first time, it was the military that pulled me out — not a choice so much as a summons. Later, work carried me away. And yet, I came back, each time.

    Coming back felt inevitable, like the bubble had its own gravitational pull. But deep down, I knew I couldn’t keep circling the same orbit. There’s a difference between leaving because the world demanded it and going because you chose to.

    That’s what Albuquerque was for me: a choice.

      On paper, the decision made sense.

    No hurricanes to rip through your home. No earthquakes to split the ground. No volcanoes threatening fire. No endless rain to drown the days. It wasn’t Phoenix, where the heat presses against your chest like a punishment. It wasn’t the overcrowded sprawl of the West Coast. It was manageable. It was human-sized.

    And yes — the racial makeup mattered. I wanted a place where diversity wasn’t a buzzword, where the face of the city itself carried the mark of many histories, not just one.

      When I arrived, I heard the jokes: The Land of Entrapment. Come on vacation, leave on probation. They were said with a smirk, half-warning, half-truth. Albuquerque has its shadows. Addiction, poverty, violence — scars on a city that has seen too much. But to stop there, to see only the flaws, is to miss the marrow of the place.

      I didn’t know I liked landscapes until I saw the Sandias burn pink at sunset, watermelon hues spilling across the horizon like the desert itself was blushing. I didn’t know I needed vast skies until I stood beneath them, their sheer immensity forcing me to recognize how small I was — and how alive.

      Then the culture. The way Catholic feast days blur into Pueblo ceremonies, how murals tell stories, how music leaks from church doors and lowriders in the same breath. The way traditions survive here is not as nostalgia but as living practices, stitched into daily life.

    And the food.

      If the Midwest were pot roast and casseroles, Albuquerque is chile — unapologetic, fiery, alive. Chile roasters appear outside grocery stores in September, flames licking metal drums, smoke curling into the crisp air until the entire city smells like memory. Red or green isn’t a question of preference; it’s a declaration of identity. Enchiladas stacked high and smothered, tamales at Christmas, burritos at the Balloon Fiesta — food here doesn’t just fill you, it binds you.

    I’ve said before that I wasn’t raised on green chile chicken enchiladas. I was raised on soul food, or as most people now know it, “Southern Cuisine”. That food was survival dressed as a celebration. It was what you ate to remember who you were.

      But Albuquerque taught me to make room for new rituals. When I’m sick, I still crave soul food, but I’ve learned to crave enchiladas too. I’ve learned that “red or green?” comes as naturally now as “sweet or unsweetened?” once did. I’ve learned that my hands, though clumsy, can roll tortillas and fold tamales.

      Food, I’ve realized, doesn’t erase what you came from. It layers it.

    Iowa was entrapment too — but of a different kind. Entrapment of sameness, of repetition, of a rhythm so predictable it could suffocate.

    Albuquerque’s entrapment is something else. It seduces. It draws you in with Chile smoke in the fall, with the way the mountains change color by the hour, with a culture that makes you feel like you’re walking through both past and present at once.

      People warn you about it: The Land of Entrapment. But I’ve started to hear it differently, not as a warning, but as an invitation.

      Because here’s the truth: I don’t want to leave.

    What began as a practical choice has become something more intimate, something stitched into me. Albuquerque caught me — with its flaws, its grit, its beauty, its food — and I don’t feel trapped. I feel claimed.

    That could be what home is. Not where you start, not even where you end. But where you finally stop running, because you no longer want to.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Taste of Home, The Taste of Here

    The Taste of Home, The Taste of Here

      There are nights when homesickness sneaks up on me. Not the kind that makes you want to book a ticket and run back, but the quieter version — the one that comes when you’re alone in your apartment in Albuquerque and your body aches for food that no one here makes.

      I wasn’t raised on green chile chicken enchiladas. My comfort food wasn’t rolled tortillas smothered in chile sauce, or tamales wrapped in husks and steamed until the masa gives way to tenderness. I was raised on soul food — though these days they like to call it “Southern cuisine,” as if renaming it erases where it really came from.

      I grew up on collard greens cooked until they surrendered, cornbread golden and crumbly, fried chicken with skin that cracked when you bit into it, mac and cheese that clung to your fork like it loved you. Those weren’t just meals; they were testimonies, proof of survival passed down on plates.

    And yet, here I am in New Mexico, learning to find comfort in different flavors.

      When someone offers me tamales now, I don’t hesitate. I ask, “Red or green?” without thinking. At the Balloon Fiesta, I know when I show up, to get in line for a breakfast burrito and a hot coffee to fight the predawn chill.

      I’ve even attempted green chile chicken enchiladas in my own kitchen. I call them “passable,” and that’s being generous. They’re edible, sure, but I know enough to know they don’t hold a candle to the ones made by someone whose hands were taught by generations. Still, they’ve become a ritual. A way of saying to myself: You belong here enough to try.

      Still, when I’m sick, I don’t crave green chile. I crave the food of my childhood. Fried chicken. Collard greens. Sweet potatoes baked down until they bordered on candy. Food that came from a time and a place that shaped me before I even knew it.

      That’s the thing about food — it doesn’t just fill you. It remembers for you. It pulls you back through time, reminds you who held the spoon, who stood at the stove, who called you in from outside when the plates were ready.

      No matter how far you travel, those cravings remain like old ghosts.

    But here’s the surprise: when the homesickness hits hardest, it’s not because I want to return to where I grew up. It’s because I want to return here, to New Mexico.

      That’s the contradiction I live with now. I miss home, yes, but home is no longer the place I left behind. It’s this desert with its endless skies and its Chile smoke drifting outside grocery stores in the fall. It’s the quiet of mornings when the Sandias catch fire with the sunrise. It’s the ritual of learning to love food I didn’t grow up on.

      When I’m away too long, I don’t miss the streets of my childhood. I miss the taste of green chile folded into eggs, the tamales shared at Christmas, the balloon-lit sky at dawn. I miss this place.

      Maybe that’s what it means to belong somewhere new. Not to erase what you came from, but to layer it. To carry collards and cornbread in one hand and green chile enchiladas in the other. To know that your soul food still holds you, but so does this food you had to learn.

    The older I get, the more I realize home isn’t fixed. It shifts. It stretches. It welcomes and demands at the same time. And if you let it, it changes you — until homesickness no longer means going back.

    It means going forward.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Waiting for Pumpkin Spice

    Waiting for Pumpkin Spice

    I have a sweet tooth no matter the season.

    If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you already know about my disastrous history with cake — failed layers that sank like bad relationships, frosting that slid off like it had somewhere better to be. Cake and I have an uneasy truce: I respect its existence, but I don’t trust it in my kitchen.

    Pie, though — pie is a different matter altogether.

    Pie is forgiving.

    It doesn’t demand perfection; it rewards patience. It lets you work the butter into the flour until it feels right, and enables you to taste as you go. A pie can be rustic, uneven, a little rough around the edges, and still come out beautiful.

    Fall is the season when pie becomes gospel.

    Pumpkin, of course, with its deep, spiced filling that perfumes the entire house while it bakes. Apple, bubbling over with cinnamon and sugar until it spills onto the oven floor and burns just enough to make the kitchen smell like caramel. Pecan, glossy and rich, is a dessert that feels like a holiday no matter the day. Sweet potato pie, which in the right hands can taste like memory itself.

    This is what I love about pie — that while it bakes, the entire house becomes a sermon about comfort. The smell isn’t sharp or cloying like the sprays you buy in the store. It’s honest. It seeps into the walls, into your clothes, into the way you breathe. It makes you want to put on plaid and furry slippers, sit down with a mug of something hot, and just be still for a while.

      I know Albuquerque doesn’t get many cold days.

    But those few that do come — those rare mornings when the frost laces the windows and the Sandias catch the first light — I savor them. That’s when the heavier blankets come out, when the kitchen becomes a refuge.

    That’s when I want green chile stew simmering on the stove, a pot of pinto beans in the background, and cornbread in the oven. That’s when I make my baked macaroni casserole and lace it with green chile, because everything tastes better with chile when the air is cold.

      If fall is a religion, then chile season is its holiest feast.

    The roasters show up outside grocery stores, filling the air with the sound of the drums turning and the smell of blistering green chile skins. You can’t drive across town without catching the smoke in your nose, without being reminded that it’s time to stock up. Because the fresh green chile sells fast — faster than the weather can catch up.

    Green chile isn’t just for stew. In New Mexico, we put it in everything:

    • Green chile cheeseburgers, smoky and hot, are a state treasure.
    • Green chile chicken enchiladas, stacked or rolled, with a fried egg on top if you’re doing it right.
    • Breakfast burritos, smothered or handheld, are eaten at sunrise with a strong cup of coffee.
    • Rellenos, stuffed and fried until the pepper gives just enough heat to make your eyes water.
    • And yes, even green chile apple pie — sweet and spicy, proof that our chile has no boundaries.

      Some people wait for Christmas.

    I wait for this.

    For chile smoke in the air, for pumpkin spice in my coffee, for pies cooling on the counter, for the kitchen to smell like something worth coming home to. I wait for the few days when I can bundle up, when the air sharpens and the Sandias blush pink, when life feels like it slows down enough for me to notice it again.

    Because fall, for me, is not just a season. It’s a ritual.

    And while the rest of the world counts down to Christmas, I’m here, counting pies, stocking chile, and letting the smell of pumpkin and cinnamon remind me why I love this place, this time, this season.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • When the Air Turns in Albuquerque

    When the Air Turns in Albuquerque

    There’s a moment in Albuquerque when the air shifts and you know — without anyone needing to tell you — that summer is over. It’s not dramatic. There’s no storm to announce it, no hard edge to the sky. But one morning you step outside, and the heat that’s been pressing on you all summer is suddenly gone. The air has a crispness that cuts right through the haze.

    This is the air that makes you breathe a little deeper.

    This is the air that reminds you that fall in New Mexico is something holy.

    You smell it before you see it.

    Outside almost every grocery store, the roasters appear. Metal cages filled with green chile, spinning over open flame, popping and hissing until the skins blister and the air is thick with the smell of heat and earth and smoke.

    That smell is the anthem of autumn here. It gets into your hair, your clothes, the fabric of your car seats. You can’t escape it, and you don’t want to. It is the smell of the harvest, the smell of a city stocking its freezers, the smell of family kitchens about to come alive.

    The Chile roasters feel like a signal: time to slow down, time to gather, time to get serious about food again.

    The mornings turn cool, just enough to make you pull a hoodie over your T-shirt before heading out. The sky is still impossibly blue, but the light is different — softer, angled, as if it’s trying to remind you to look up and notice it before winter comes and steals it away.

    By late afternoon, the air warms just enough to make you consider peeling off that hoodie, but by sundown, you’re glad you didn’t. Nights are cold enough now that you crack the window and wake up with the chill brushing your face, pulling the heavier blankets closer around your shoulders.

    This is when you start taking longer routes home just to watch the Sandias turn that watermelon shade they’re named for.

    Something about this season sends me straight into the kitchen. Maybe it’s instinct — that ancient urge to prepare for the cold, to fill the house with smells that promise comfort.

    I start thinking about posole, about green chile stew, about beans simmering low and slow on the stove all afternoon. About roasts that take hours, about soups that taste better the next day, about meals that make you want to eat them by the window, wrapped in a blanket, with a book you’ve been meaning to finish.

    The coffee gets hotter. Pumpkin spice shows up in the morning routine, not as a gimmick but as a quiet ritual. I start debating pies — apple or pumpkin first? Maybe both. The oven feels less like an appliance and more like a hearth, a place to gather around.

    Fall does something to your insides. Summer is all noise — music from car windows, late-night parties, conversations shouted over the sound of swamp coolers. Fall is quieter. It asks you to turn inward, to sit with yourself a little longer.

    I find myself staying in bed just a little more, not from laziness but from gratitude — for the cool air, for the weight of the blankets, for the chance to just be still before the day starts.

    And I like it.

    I like the way this season invites me to slow down, to cook slower, to eat slower, to let the world grow softer around me.

    Every year, this shift feels both familiar and new — like returning to a house you used to live in and finding the furniture rearranged.

    The Chile roasters spin.

    The blankets come out.

    The hearty meals return.

    The city smells like smoke and earth and promise.

    I don’t know why this happens — why the season has this power over us, why we trade light linens for heavier ones, why we crave soups and pies and longer mornings.

    But I like it all the same.

    And maybe that’s enough: to notice the change, to mark it with food and ritual, to let the air turn you toward the kitchen, toward the table, toward yourself.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Struggle Has a Voice

    The Struggle Has a Voice

      I am writing this beneath the blood moon. At least I think it is — the night sky glows strangely, like it’s carrying a secret. It feels right to write tonight, because what I’m carrying feels like a secret too.

    The struggle is real. I hear that phrase all the time. It’s become a punchline, a hashtag, a shrug of solidarity when life is inconvenient. But tonight it is no meme. Tonight it is marrow.

    For me, the struggle isn’t just about bills or work or the thousand small indignities of life. My struggle is quieter, crueler. It is about staying on the right path — a path that has felt steeper than usual lately.

      It is hard to say this without sounding bitter, but the truth is this: the wrong path seems paved with gold. The wrong decisions glitter with profit and applause. Every scroll of my screen is another reminder that what the world rewards isn’t always what I’ve been taught is righteous.

    My struggle has a voice.

    It is mine.

    And it whispers:

    “Why are you doing this? Nobody cares. No one reads this. You’re not helping anyone.”

    And sometimes I believe it.

      Years ago, I heard a phrase: “If doing the right thing was easy, everyone would do it.”

    That phrase has become a spine for me. I hold it upright when everything in me wants to slump over and quit.

      There are those I will never ask if they read what I write. Because deep down, I know the answer. They don’t.

    And yet, there is a strange freedom in not knowing for sure. Mystery is oxygen for the weary. If I asked and heard the silence confirmed, maybe I would stop. And that would kill something sacred in me.

    So I keep going. Not because it’s easy. Not because anyone is clapping. But because somewhere, someone might find these words years from now and know that they were not alone.

    What I want — what I am learning to want — is to get to the point where I don’t care whether anyone reads this.

    I just want the words out there, carried on whatever current will take them.

    Because maybe that is the work. To keep speaking into the night sky, whether or not there is an echo. To keep writing even when the moon turns red and the world feels upside down.

    To choose the more challenging path, not because it is glamorous, but because it is right.

    And tonight, under this red moon, I remind myself: the struggle is not a sign I am failing. The struggle is proof that I am still fighting.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Death of the Family Reunion

    The Death of the Family Reunion

       There was a time when the family reunion was a sovereign nation. It was its own country—borderless, sprawling, stitched together by folding chairs and potato salad, the language of inside jokes and side-eyes, the music of Stevie Wonder & Michael Jackson playing under the shade of Pine trees. A time when cousins you hadn’t seen in three summers ran up to you like the years hadn’t passed at all. When your great-aunt sat in the middle of the picnic like a tribal elder, commanding respect simply by being.

    But those days are dying.

    Today, we still have the cookout, but it’s smaller—more intimate. Just mama and them, maybe a stray cousin or two, whoever was close enough to text the night before. The sprawling tree has been pruned down to a sapling. Third and fourth cousins have become strangers. The great-aunts and uncles who used to hold court, the ones who could make feuding relatives hug just long enough for the picture—they are passing on. And no one has stepped up to replace them.

    The family reunion wasn’t just a party. It was a performance of survival. It was where the family came to bear witness to itself. You’ve got to see the uncles who hadn’t spoken in years sitting at the same table, grunting through peace for a few hours because Big Mama asked them to. You saw your cousins—those living testaments to the places your blood had wandered—The Quad-Cities, St. Louis, Albuquerque—all gathered in one place. You saw what your people had endured. The reunion was a history lesson with Kool-Aid and pound cake.

    And then there were the secrets. Every family has them—the ones you whisper about in the kitchen when you think the kids aren’t listening. The reunion was where those secrets were kept, not because they were shameful, but because they were binding. The elders held them like scrolls, as if they were holy texts. They knew which stories to tell and which to carry to their graves, and somehow that discipline kept the family whole.

    Now, the elders are gone. The scrolls are scattered. The secrets have slipped into the wind, sometimes aired out in group chats, other times left to die in silence. And without the keepers of the covenant, we are drifting.

    We live in an era of curated distance. We say “family” but mean it like a password, not a promise. The younger ones, the ones raised on social media and soft boundaries, have little appetite for gathering with people who once judged them, who might still hold the memory of their worst mistakes. The old guard could make you come anyway—make you show up, make you sit in the heat, make you pass the potato salad to the cousin you swore you’d never speak to again. They could force you to remember that family is not optional.

    And yet, here we are—choosing.

    There is grief in this. Grief not just for the elders who are gone, but for the version of ourselves that was possible when we stood together. Grief for the messy, complicated love that once kept us tethered.

    But there may also be a call. We may have to decide whether the reunion dies with them or is reborn through us. It’s our turn to be the ones who hold the secrets, who call the roll, who get the feuding cousins to show up just long enough to remember that they still share a name.

    The family reunion is not gone. It is waiting—like a pot on the back burner, simmering slow, hoping someone remembers to stir it.

    The question is whether we will.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Thinking of Family Reunions makes me wonder, what’s your favorite dish to eat or to bring? Please leave a comment.

  • The Last Ingredient House

    The Last Ingredient House

    I was just running in for a couple of things — Mozzarella cheese, maybe some crushed tomatoes. The kind of trip you make when you’ve already decided the night’s ritual: I was going to make pizza. And by making pizza, I mean the whole thing — crust proofed over two days, sauce coaxed slowly from garlic, basil, and crushed tomatoes, Cheese grated by hand until my knuckles risked losing skin.

    At the register, the cashier noticed the haul — the Cheese, the flour, the good olive oil — and smiled.

    “Making pizza?” she asked.

    “Yes,” I said. And just like that, a conversation bloomed.

    She told me she came from what she called an ingredient house. A house where the kitchen was a kind of altar — stocked with the quiet assurance that if company came calling at the last minute, her mother could turn out a beautiful meal without panic. Beans soaking on the stove, onions already sweating in cast iron, a roast pulled from the freezer because it had been waiting for just such a night.

    I nodded, letting the phrase roll around in my mind: ingredient house.

    My own home growing up was… not quite that. We had food, sure — plenty of it — but a lot of it came sealed in boxes with microwave instructions printed in cheerful fonts. Frozen lasagna, instant potatoes, and cans of soup you could doctor up if you felt ambitious. There was love in those meals, but also an efficiency, a shorthand. Meals that required only heat or water, not intuition.

    The Age of Premade Fresh

    Now, we live in a time where you don’t even need to own salt. Walk into any grocery store and you’re surrounded by the new altar — pre-marinated proteins, ready-to-bake pizzas, trays of vegetables already washed, chopped, and glistening under plastic. Fresh, yes. But fresh in a way that requires no relationship, no waiting, no patience.

    And then there’s DoorDash — the pandemic’s golden child. The savior we thanked when we could not leave our homes, when fear of each other turned kitchens into bunkers. Now it lingers, reshaping our sense of effort. You don’t even have to boil the water anymore. You just scroll, tap, and wait for a stranger to leave your dinner at the door like a sacrament.

    What We Lose

    Standing there at the checkout, I realized I wasn’t just buying Cheese. I was buying memory. I was buying slowness. I was buying back the hours required to knead dough, to wait for it to rise, to smell the kitchen change as it bakes.

    I thought about her ingredient house — the kind of place where a pantry wasn’t just storage but possibility. And I wondered what we lose when we give that up. When dinner stops being a verb and becomes an algorithm.

    There is something quietly radical about knowing how to feed yourself from scratch. About putting your hands in dough, trusting yeast to do its slow, invisible work, and showing up for it when it’s ready. Something stubborn and beautiful about refusing the constant seduction of “just heat and serve.”

    What’s Next?

    Sometimes I wonder what comes after this. If premade fresh is today’s answer, what’s tomorrow’s? Meals that make themselves while you scroll? Nutrition is delivered intravenously, so you don’t have to chew. Or maybe a return to ingredient houses — not as nostalgia but as rebellion.

    Maybe that’s why I make pizza this way. Because there’s a small act of resistance in it. In a world of frictionless consumption, I choose friction. I choose to slice garlic thin enough to smell on my fingertips hours later. I choose to shred Cheese until my hands ache. I choose to wait for the dough to rise because I want the reminder that some things — the best things — cannot be rushed.

    And maybe, if I keep doing this, my home becomes the ingredient house I didn’t grow up in. A house where you can pull a meal out of thin air, not because it’s convenient, but because you’ve kept faith with the slow, stubborn art of feeding people well.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Please click here for my Pizza Crust and Sauce Recipe.

    14-Inch Pizza Crust
    Homemade Pizza Sauce
    Basic Pizza Assembly Guide
  • The Price of the Right Path

    The Price of the Right Path

    I usually don’t let things bother me. I’ve learned to keep my head down, do the work, walk my path — even when that path is quiet, lonely, unglamorous.

    But this week has been different. I’ve been sick at home, just me, the couch, and the endless hum of YouTube filling the silence between doses of medicine. And that’s when I clicked on a video from one of my favorite channels, Knight Talk.The title said it all: I’m Sick of This Sh*t.

    Within moments, I understood why. An OnlyFans creator was on-screen, laughing and smiling, casually showing the receipts of her success: $82 million.

    Eighty-two million.

    I stopped the video. Couldn’t finish it.

    It hit me harder than I wanted it to. Not because I begrudge anyone making a living — we don’t know her life, her circumstances, her hunger. But because it felt like something else was happening in that moment. Something spiritual.

    I work hard. I try every day to keep my hands clean, my conscience clear, my choices deliberate. I try to stay on the right path — even when the wrong one looks easier, shinier, faster. And then I see something like this, and it’s as if evil itself leans in close to whisper:

    “All this can be yours.”

    And I wonder if the wrong path is the only one still paying.

    This is not a new question. It is as old as Job’s lament, as old as the desert where Christ was offered the kingdoms of the earth. It is the voice that says, Why wait for goodness when you can have glory now?

    And it’s not really about OnlyFans. It’s not even about money. It’s about the way we are asked, over and over again, to watch the rewards of shortcuts pile up while we keep grinding away for pennies and peace of mind.

    Some days it feels like we are all contestants in a rigged game: who can stay righteous the longest while the world parades its golden idols in front of us?

    I know this is part of the fight — the invisible war that doesn’t make the highlight reel. If doing the right thing were easy, everyone would do it.

    But it is not easy. It is not fast. It is not glamorous. It is the long obedience in the same direction, as Nietzsche said. It is the quiet refusal to cash out your dignity for a quick hit of security or fame. It is choosing to build something that will last beyond your own life, even if it means watching someone else build a mansion in the time it takes you to lay a single brick.

    And maybe that’s what bothers me most: not the money, not the platform, but the gnawing truth that integrity is slow work. Slow enough to feel like punishment some days.

    I don’t have a neat ending for this. No sermon about how it all evens out in the end. Maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps the wrong path is truly profitable — for a time.

    But I know this: the work of staying on the right path is shaping me in ways a shortcut never could. It is building something in me that eighty-two million dollars cannot buy.

    And maybe, when the whisper comes again — All this can be yours — I will have the strength to whisper back: No Thanks, I’m Good.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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