Brian Mayer

I’m beginning to viscerally understand the reality that so many before me have learned since time immemorial: finding stuff you need during a war is hard.

It’s not just the difficulty of procuring military equipment that always seems to be in short supply. There’s a speed at which basic everyday goods are destroyed during conflict for which even the most perfect supply lines aren’t efficient. Homes can’t be built, food can’t be grown, arms can’t be mended, and cars can’t be manufactured in quantities anywhere close to the rate at which they are destroyed. Every bomb that destroys a hospital or a warehouse or a house is creating aftershocks far beyond the initial devastation and pain — and those aftershocks are, even a month after the Russian invasion — emptying shelves in towns all across Europe and beyond, driving up prices and making procurement of critical goods impossible. Of course, it is always the most critical goods that are gone the fastest. Try finding tourniquets in bulk right now, or bullet proof vests, or Jeeps within 1000km of the border…you’ll get the idea (and, if you can find any of these PLEASE tell me).

This is why I am 2 days into volunteering for this effort and I’m getting texts from Lviv to Kharkiv asking me for help sourcing everything from food to equipment to medicine to everything in between. Kharkiv is one of the hardest hit cities and refugees pouring over the border were telling me yesterday that 70-90% of the city has been destroyed already. Every kitchen and pantry in rubble is a family that needs food; every hospital in rubble is a slew of patients that need medicine. From what I gather, civilian volunteer groups all across Ukraine are begging their counterparts in Poland, Romania and elsewhere in Europe for help and almost none of the effort is working through official channels. Now, of course there is an official effort of course organized by governments and their militaries — but what I’m seeing is that, on the ground, this war is being fought and won by the volunteers, which is every single person and structure and vehicle and piece of equipment and dollar (hryvnia?) in the country. Putin thinks he’s facing an army of 250,000. He’s facing an army of 44 million.

I’m also learning intimately about the fog of war. Even in today’s hyperconnected world, where I’m getting information directly from the front faster than most folks at home are seeing it on the news, you never can be entirely sure who you’re talking to or whether or not they are for real. I’ve only gone through trusted sources (friends of friends of friends…) and I can safely hope that the massive humanitarian package I’m delivering to the border tomorrow will be safely shepherded across Ukraine to Kharkiv to aid the hardest hit victims there…but you never know for sure.

Everyone I’m talking to or about inside and outside Ukraine right now is “a guy” — a guy who runs a civilian brigade, a guy who picks up packages at the border for delivery, a guy who serves in an artillery unit who needs equipment, a guy who finds used cars in Europe to send to the front, a guy in Poland who fronts the money for the cars and finds drivers, a guy running a daily rescue convoy to Lviv, a guy who builds DIY drones…and all of these guys are acting voluntarily and with great common cause, working through informal networks of friends and countrymen, volunteers and military liaisons. I don’t know the last names or even Facebook profiles of most of the people I’m trying to help. I just know that they need help, and until I was actually here, I don’t think it would have been possible to understand the scale of the need and the complexity of the problems.

One example: when the war broke out, Ukraine apparently forbid the banks from allowing money to leave the country, which might seem like a sensible solution. But the result is that many essential supplies inside of Ukraine quickly ran out and Ukrainians couldn’t move money to Europe to pay for replacements. Even now, there are Ukrainians pooling money to buy expensive (and critical) thermal detection drones and other military equipment and have the money but can’t use it. I understand that now PayPal and some other P2P solutions work in a limited fashion, but it still isn’t nearly the same as allowing bigger bank-to-bank transfers. (I’m speaking with one of my ‘guys’ now about how to get Bitcoin bought in Ukraine, sent over, converted to Zloty and used to purchase goods in Poland. If you have any ideas please let me know.)

Another example: the entire Ukraine economy will collapse if shops can’t re-open and sell goods. This is made impossible when goods are donated instead and provide impossible competition. We don’t want to hamper Ukraine when it needs recovery most, so we have to be careful that the humanitarian aid we send is only sent to volunteer groups serving the people most in need — not the folks with money who can afford to buy from stores (yes, stores are still open in many parts of the country especially in the west).

So this is all the stuff I’m learning in between playing the role of an Uber XL driver, which I pulled off successfully today. I woke this morning in Przemysl late — we all did, having been working at the train station until 1am the night before — and made it back to the train station around noon, where there was a throng of refugees waiting for bus and train tickets to their next destination. It didn’t take long to find some people who needed to go to Warsaw, but it did take long to load them all into the van with their luggage, between finding out where they were going (only one of them spoke English) and having two young kids in the group. We finally loaded up and hit the road.

The mother of two young daughters spoke very good English, was well dressed, and, as I would learn later, was very well traveled, whereas the single woman with a cat spoke no English, smelled heavily of cigarettes, bought a beer for the road, and I suspect it was one of the only times she had left the country. The (cultural? class?) gap between these two women could not have been further apart, and it occurred to me that, absent this extraordinary situation, they probably would never run in the same circles let alone share a 6 hour car ride together. Travel makes strange bedfellows indeed.

We drove in silence for almost 2 hours (most of them were sleeping, and all of them were exhausted) before the teenage boy in the back noticed my “open door” alert was on. That’s when I learned that he spoke English too. When I asked him where he was from he said “Ukraine” and when I said “which city” he looked down and didn’t answer. I stopped asking questions after that.

After another hour, we pulled into a mall in Lublin, Poland where Jonathan and I had loaded up on supplies the day before. They used the toilet and the grocery store was open so we bought some food. After Lublin, my English-speaking passenger — soon to be a new friend — started telling me about their story. She, her daughters and her mother and law (who was sitting next to me in the front seat) left Odessa the night before, after deciding it was too risky for the girls to stay in the country. Her husband and her parents stayed behind. This morning, six bombs hit a factory or oil refinery outside Odessa. The main city is safe for now, but no one knows how long that will last.

The mother and teenage son were a different story that I couldn’t quite piece together. He had come from Israel through Ukraine, where he apparently had four brothers. However, he didn’t speak a word of Hebrew, and the mother evidently did speak a few words. She asked if I could take them back to the border later this week — and I don’t exactly know what they needed to do in Warsaw, or if both of them or just she is coming back.

The single woman with the cat didn’t speak a word of English and all I know is that we dropped her at the airport and we met her sister, to whom the cat apparently belonged, and her niece. I don’t know where she was going or where she came from.

This is all to say that every refugee has a different story, and you never know what they have seen on their long journey. You want to know, but they don’t always want to tell you. And some of them really want to tell you everything. My new friend and her family are going to England to settle with a host family, and we exchanged Instagram profiles. I hope I can host them in New York someday. The others I probably will never see again.

My original plan when I came here was to use Warsaw as a home base and move supplies to the border and people back. From my first round trip effort, I’m learning that moving people back is certainly the most rewarding, but supplies are far more effective. I could move, like I did today, 7 people every day and it would take me decades to make a dent in the refugee crisis. Besides, there are much larger and cheaper people moving alternatives, so I decided that I will happily carry refugees on the way back from supply runs (there will always be folks who need transport) but I will not make refugee carry the main purpose of my trip.

Which brings me back to square one: supplies, supplies, supplies. I am assembling an authoritative list of what is needed right now, and if you have any leads or can help in any way, please let me know ASAP since I am in a position to line up assistance while I’m here.

You can DONATE now and we will get these transported to Kharkiv and other hard hit areas:

• Grains, pasta, flour, canned foods
• Tea, coffee, cookies
• Pampers, toothpaste, tooth brushes, wet wipes, liquid soap, shower gel, shampoo, sanitary pads
• Sweets and toys for children
• Water
• OTC medicines

We need help sourcing these to Europe but can pay for them so please reach out if you have LEADS:

• Painkillers (injections), blood-stopping medications, insulin, hormones, anti-shock (adrenaline), antibiotics
• Tourniquets, cardio meds, bandages, medical dressing
• Power banks
• Travel pillows
• Eye masks
• Foldable duffel bags

Defense forces support — everything here is hard to get *and* expensive…if you have any LEADS or want to DONATE please let me know:

• Drones
• Used SUVs or Jeeps
• Helmets
• Bulletproof vests
• Android tablets

It’s important to emphasize again that NEARLY THIS ENTIRE EFFORT IS VOLUNTEER DRIVEN. I haven’t encountered a single “official” NGO yet — not World Food Program, not Doctors Beyond Borders, not Save the Children, not International Red Cross — I know they’re operating and I’m sure they’re doing great work and there are lots of makeshift refugee camps sprung up all over, but the major need right now is not taking care of or transporting refugees, it’s getting goods into Ukraine, and even if every NGO is operating at full capacity, it isn’t enough for what Ukrainians need right now. We have to support an entire country’s economy that isn’t supporting itself — and that means getting supply runs up and running, funded by donors and run by volunteers. It has to be volunteers because money isn’t flowing easily right now so normal market mechanisms are broken.

You can donate directly to me on Venmo: @bmmayer, I will continue to post on my Instagram @not.my.brand on how the money is being used, 100% will go towards the goods above, refugee transfer and resettlement, and transport costs, and if you want to earmark your donation for humanitarian needs *only* please specify that, because otherwise we are not differentiating types of need, just prioritizing them.

I can’t thank you all enough for your donations so far, and although we have more than enough money at the moment (only spent around 20% of what has been donated so far), this may change. Regardless, every penny will be spent on supporting refugees or getting supplies into Ukraine, and I will provide full transparency in future reports. For now, you’ll just have to trust me and let me be your “Ukraine guy.”

Writing to you from border with Ukraine. Thank you all for your donations so far. I’m finding that fundraising is proving a lot easier than sourcing the supplies needed. We gave out 130+ power banks that you all donated in about 3 minutes flat, and those were the only ones we could even find to buy today. Tourniquets, power banks, thermal underwear (it’s snowing right now in Poland at least), and most of housing in Poland and elsewhere in the EU are all in short supply. I hear 30k people are still coming across the border every day. Thousands of Ukrainians are going back, too. Hearing stories of landlords back in Odessa demanding rent, bosses calling people back to work, etc. It’s a fluid situation and lots of needs on both sides of the border. There is almost no official supply effort: everything is volunteer driven. The official train station staff doesn’t speak Russian or Ukrainian and don’t seem to know anything about where trains are going or how to find busses. This is a tiny border town and is completely overrun. Very few police keeping order. People helping friends and friends coordinating efforts from the inside.

It’s overwhelming being here. It feels like it’s a war zone in itself. We’re waiting now for the next train to come from Lviv— its already 7 hours late. When it arrives an army of volunteers from all over Europe is here to help people find housing and food and medical care. There’s a great team from the UK I’m connected with, a team of Russian language Masters students who are all here. One of them is putting me up tonight in their hotel so I will drive back to Warsaw tomorrow.

My companion today on the road, Jonathan, whom I met when I picked him up at 7am this morning, is a Montreal based Polish-Canadian documentarian who spent 10 years telling the story of Polish refugees from WWII and where they settled (see his doc here: https://memoryisourhomeland.com/). I learned for instance that a sizable group of Poles ended up in Uzbekistan, Iran and Tanzania during WWII. He’s here now making a doc about the refugee crisis here and with Syrians on the border with Belarus, where his family is originally from. It feels like both of us are chasing our family history.

On the phone with a former work colleague in Lviv, he tells me his wife and children are safe in Poland. He wasn’t worried about their safety in Lviv, but he didn’t want his kids to see what was happening. “This isn’t just about Ukraine” he tells me, “this is the whole world. If you only knew…it’s so senseless.” He tells me the biggest needs right now are “dozens” of HD tablets of a certain model needed to work their artillery equipment, and vacuum medical systems for bullet wounds. My new friends in Kharkiv, also connected today, are running a civilian brigade and need humanitarian aid and medicine, especially insulin and injectable pain killers. Refugees crossing the border need power banks to charge their phones and contact their families and find lodging after multi day trips. Everyone needs something different. Trying to source thermal imaging drones right now for the defense effort. All the ones in Europe are sold out.

We’re meeting families who have been traveling for 3 weeks from the east of the country under heaviest bombardment. Volunteers are telling me this is the second wave of refugees, meaning the ones who have survived hell and managed to get out, as opposed to the first wave got out fast and early and had money and connections in Europe. The people in this wave all have stories to tell. One woman, her mother and daughter came from Cherniv where the mother’s cancer clinic was bombed. They needed to get to Germany to see a doctor. We put them on a train bound for Prague, a private train donated by a Czech businessman that runs supply trips to Lviv and takes refugees back. Another grandmother-mother-daughter set (there are a lot of these, while all the sons of Ukraine are at war) are a family of professors. The grandmother was teaching for 60 years before Covid. The mother is also a professor and speaks great English. I buy her coffee and speak to her as she’s waiting for hours to buy train tickets. She made her daughter take school books instead of her toys.

One of the few young men I met must have been 15, in from outside Chernobyl with his mother. He’s telling me stories of bombings every night, except the few days when Biden was in Poland (for appearances). His Russian “friends” are in denial that there’s a war on and call him a liar. This apparently isn’t uncommon. He and his mom are on their way to France to stay with a family that volunteered to host them in Normandy. Everyone has their own story. I have listened to a lot of crying tonight. It’s emotionally draining. Have to keep a calm composure.

I’m fielding donations and coordinating supply drop offs in between running errands for refugees who need help. Jonathan and I carried a woman’s bags a couple blocks to get her to her friend’s aunt who lives in town. Hundreds of refugees don’t have immediate next destinations and are sleeping in the train station. People need transport to the makeshift refugee center set up at the Tesco in town. They recently started offering outdoor showers to refugees. It’s below 40 degrees F outside. The government has done basically nothing.

The donations are helping tremendously as the most serious supply needs will need to be sourced from increasingly difficult (and expensive) options. Prices keep going up. It’s clear that my efforts for the next week are going to be focused on securing and transporting supplies to refugees on the ground, and getting supplies to our partners in Ukraine who need them. I will assemble the list of what I plan to bring back to the border tomorrow.

I thought I would be needed to take refugees to various ports of call in Poland but that doesn’t seem to be as necessary given all the organized transport efforts. Will find out tomorrow if my shuttle services are needed.

It’s 1:30am now and all of the trains have left for the night before they start again at 4am. Got some late night shawarma for dinner and crashing in a volunteer’s hotel room. Made many new friends today. Will send more updates tomorrow from Warsaw.

When someone wants to take your picture, you may feel self conscious. You may feel like your hair isn’t quite right or you “take terrible photos.” And yet, you are being asked to create a permanent record of You in this moment in time. Someone cares about you enough to ask to preserve this memory and they want you to add to the digital fabric of the universe. Don’t be selfish. Life is too short. Show off your angles.

Throughout time great philosophers from many different walks of life have shared similar advice: the struggle is what makes life worth living.

Buddha famously taught that life is struggle. Marcus Aurelius wrote that hard work is what defines humans vs all other animals. Karl Marx of course defined all of history through the lens of class struggle.

All three men, and many other people throughout time, have lived in extremely different eras, cultures, and geographies, but came to more or less the same conclusion about humans and our role in the world. Why?

My guess is, other than the fact that humans and human nature haven’t really changed in hundreds of thousands of years, that they’re on to something about the world and our place in it. If I may be so bold as to summarize all of their teachings briefly: humans are born and live as creatures doomed for death — for many thousands of years, an early and painful death. To live in a perpetual state of destitution is only to live out one’s natural destiny for a human and the obscure creatures that we are. On the other hand, to live any life that creates good cheer for one’s self or for others, that improves one’s health and wealth, that creates good in the world, is to rise above our base nature, and to do what no other animal has the ability and capacity to do.

This what the Struggle is: it’s our resistance to the fate nature throws at us to destroy us. And in response, we always have a choice. To sit back and let the universe win is the easy choice. To stand up and create our own meaning, build our own environment, define our own happiness—these things require struggle. This is why so many great philosophers have emphasized the Struggle, and this is why you must, too. Because to ignore it, or to be defeated by it, is to give up on what makes life worth living.

I was walking to work this morning and made my way into one of those scaffolding tunnels. I heard a sound and looked up and realized the tunnel was still under construction, and above me a laborer was standing on the framing coaxing a steel girder into place.

The first thing I thought, after “that’s gonna fall on someone’s head and these guys are gonna get their asses sued” was that, at that exact moment, I was surrounded in all directions by people at work.

I realized that any given day in the city there work, day in and day out, subway attendants and transit cops in the caverns below me, white collar types and temps and janitors in the high rises above me, shopkeepers and sous chefs and taxi drivers and priests and baristas and pharmacists and teachers and garbage collectors in the stones and bricks and windows and streets and alleys and nooks and crannies of the city all around me.

Then I looked around and saw the commuters just like me on the sidewalks, the finance and legal types with their dark suits, the techies with their white AirPods, the personal trainers busting out of their gym logo emblazoned T-shirts, and every other type of hard working New Yorker the city has blessed us with, even if they aren’t doing it for the money: the volunteer workers picking up trash in the park, the Hare Krishnas handing out their flyers, the Boy Scout troop on their way to the Intrepid Museum, the college students rushing to the morning class they never should have signed up for.

When you are in a city at work, the work is happening all around you at all times. It imbues the pavement with a mythical quality where power and wealth and excitement is felt with every footstep, the energy of people being productive and getting better and trying harder.

This is not the way it is everywhere. Not everyone is so lucky to live in a place with so much work, so many possibilities. People often get stuck in towns without jobs and can’t leave because family obligations or technology or cost makes it impossible. Those of us who live in a city at work often don’t even realize that we’re the fortunate ones.

Being in a place like New York City where you can live and work every day with millions of complete strangers, all pulling their weight together, is a true privilege, and every time I take the time to observe the city around me I appreciate it even more. I work for NYC, and NYC works for me.

When your hair starts falling out you finally start to get all the jokes you’ve heard from comedians and on sitcoms over the years.

I, for one, am terrified of the inevitable so my new best friend is the bottle of Propecia in my medicine cabinet that some company brilliantly rebranded as “Hims.” There’s a topical cream, too, but it says on the bottle it will make my hair fall out before it starts working so I’m a little scared to try it.

I know time only moves forward, but that doesn’t make it any less unwelcome. There are times when I’m invited out now and I’d rather stay home watching Netflix than down shots with friends and that’s unwelcome, too.

The impact of aging on me is minimal, but compared to the almost non-existent burdens in my life, it probably hits closer to home. It’s the only thing in life I can do absolutely nothing about.

So, hello Hims, and goodbye Jew Fro. It was nice while it lasted.

I just finished Dignity by Chris Arnade and it tells the story that no one in America wants to hear but everyone needs to hear: the story of the true divide in our country, between people whose lives are upwardly mobile and have hope, and people who aren’t, and don’t. Most of all, it tells the story of how our attempts to fix the problems of the forgotten ‘back row’ of American life are perceived by the people they are trying to help: as condescending, elitist, and often exasperating of these problems.

Contrasting the bickering of the political class on either side of the aisle with the real, lived struggle of millions of people, Arnade holds a mirror up to the society that many of us are so fortunate to be a part of — we ‘front row’ elite, who live in New York City and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago and Austin and DC, who work in politics and law and medicine and tech, make decisions that affect the lives of millions of people every day, and have almost no awareness of how these decisions actually impact people beyond statistics. And what’s more, we often presume to know what’s best for people without talking to them or understanding them.

Arnade does not make the book about politics, although he easily could have (he does interview people about the 2016 race when it was happening, but it’s in a broader context rather than the main point). He explicitly says that the book is not about ‘how we got Trump’ or any attempt to diagnose populism, although it’s hard not to read between the lines and see the connection. Really, it’s just a book about people from all over the country—in big cities and small towns, of every race and age—who all share one thing in common: they have been left behind.

Books like this are important because they don’t attempt to create solutions—this book has no solutions—but instead, hold a mirror to our own hypocrisy about poverty and spur us to take action.

The “Air Bud” principle, from the 1997 classic Disney movie Air Bud, is the argument that something is legal because it is not explicitly illegal. It comes from that famous line: “Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball.”

I’m surprised I don’t hear this being referenced often, because it is a cornerstone of constitutional limited federal republics. After all, the entire premise of our constitution is that it specifically grants certain powers to the government and those powers and rights not reserved to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. This is a built in Air Bud defense: if it isn’t illegal, it better be legal.

Free countries tend to follow this general principle. Totalitarian countries have very different laws: if it’s not expressly permitted, it is presumed to be forbidden.

I almost never get jet lag, but when I do, it usually takes the form of extreme, full-body punishment. It’s like the travel gods’ version of a hangover and can stay with you for days. If you are unfortunate enough to be stricken with an airborne virus on the flight, it’s not just the drowsiness that sticks to you but a host of other ailments.

I long for the day when someone invents a pill to eliminate jet lag — but then again, such a pill would probably eliminate sleep altogether. That inventor would billionaire, and I would be a happy, happy man.

She leans back in the cushions of the wide berth chair, feet resting on the ottoman, draped in a blanket, laptop balanced delicately on her lap. Her left arm dangles up and over the back of the chair, forming a half halo around her face. Her hair shines in the dim light and her eyes flicker, focused intently on the glowing screen in front of her. As she carries her contemplation forward she brings her hand back to the keys and starts to tap out a rhythmic creation, a prose percussion, right on her keyboard. As the words flow more freely the corners of her mouth twitch upward and her lips part in a broad smile.

Watching an artist at work is like watching a frog creating ripples on a pond. It is enchanting, magical, seductive. There is an impermanence to the experience that will be washed out with the next file save — the only record of her struggle will be the words on the page and nothing more.