The Slow Burn: Maine
A reflection on Maine and the fear, pressure, and freedom that come with finally letting go of something you created.
The Slow Burn: Kansas City Cigar Festival
Last week, several of the Brolos and I attended the Kansas City Cigar Festival. The festival was Saturday, but we decided to make a weekend out of it. Because apparently a bunch of grown men with an unhealthy amount of cigars can't simply arrive at an event, attend it, and go home like normal people.
We left Dallas around 6-ish Friday morning and pulled into Kansas City around 4:45 that afternoon. In between were gas stations, snacks, questionable decisions, lunch at Bite Me BBQ in Wichita, and a quick stop at Old Town Cigars. Shoutout to Old Town, by the way. They had an awesome selection of boutique cigars, including some of the old-school Metapas from before Foundation rebranded them as Aksum. Those aren't exactly sitting on every shelf anymore.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Shawn arrived at my place a few minutes late and blamed traffic. In his defense, he wasn't lying. 380 in the morning is a complete nightmare. North Texas has grown at a ridiculous pace, and it seems like no amount of construction can keep up. Every road is simultaneously being expanded and somehow getting worse.
We loaded Shawn up and headed to a bougie neighborhood in Prosper to grab Justin. We made it through the gate, pulled up to the house, and there he was...sitting in a camp chair, bags packed, already smoking a cigar.
It was a sight for sore eyes.
Naturally, we immediately started roasting him for not even making it to 6:00 a.m. before lighting one up. His defense was that he was "afraid he would be left out." Justin is the newest cigar smoker in the group, but the man put the first number on the board that weekend. Kudos.
Next up was Mr. Babyface himself, Mark. Picture this: it's roughly 5:30 in the morning and Mark is standing outside next to his truck, bags packed, looking like his parents just told him they were taking him to Disney World. Everybody was ready. And for the next eight hours, we absolutely destroyed my car.
Four men. A few boxes of cigars. Windows cracked. Ash everywhere. I don't think it will ever smell the same again. But that's the price you pay for making memories around something you love.
We put Justin in charge of picking lunch.
This was our first mistake.
This was our first mistake.
Barbecue in Kansas was on the agenda, and being from Texas, barbecue isn't just food. It's somewhere between a tradition and a religion. Based on our lunch experience, Kansas apparently has a different theology.
How do you serve smoked meat without a smoke ring?
Dry turkey. Oily chopped brisket. No bark. No snap on the sausage. Justin claimed his ribs were good, but I'm convinced he was just trying to save face after leading us into a place that was marginally better than a Dickey's.
Which ain't saying much.
We forgave him eventually.
Mostly.
A few hours later, we pulled up to the Airbnb around the same time as Paul, aka PT, who had driven down from Omaha. Jay would eventually make his way over from St. Louis. Suddenly, this thing we'd talked about on Discord wasn't happening on a screen anymore.
Naturally, our first order of business was more food.
Dear Lord, why did we eat so much food?
Every time I turned around somebody was asking, "Where are we going to eat?" I thought nicotine was supposed to be an appetite suppressant. Apparently nobody told us.
That evening included a Walmart run, where I learned something about PT that I will probably remember for the rest of my life: that grown man drinks chocolate milk like it's water. I've never seen anything like it. We're talking about a group with some pretty large personalities, and somehow PT's chocolate milk consumption might have been the strangest thing I witnessed all weekend...and it got very strange, indeed.
After Walmart, it was finally time to get down to business.
Patio chairs. Cigars. Drinks. A table full of guys who, not that long ago, were mostly usernames on a Discord server.
The herf stretched late into the night. We laughed about everything and nothing. We told stories. We busted each other's balls. Somebody would light something interesting and pass it around. We'd talk about cigars for a while, then life, then cigars again.
Eventually, like these conversations tend to do when people actually get comfortable with one another, it got deeper. We talked about struggles. Jobs. Families. Religion. Faith. And how those last two can sound like the same thing while looking very different when they're actually lived out.
Nobody planned that conversation.
Nobody put it on the itinerary. It just happened.
That's one of the things I've grown to love most about cigars. They give you something to do while you're sitting still. They give you permission to stay a little longer. Nobody is checking the clock because there's still an inch left to smoke. So you sit. You listen. You tell another story. You ask another question.
And every once in a while, somebody says something they probably wouldn't have said if everyone had gotten up and left twenty minutes earlier.
That night, lying in bed, one thought kept running through my head: Man, my life is so good.
Not because we were in Kansas City. Not because there was a cigar festival the next morning. Not because of anything we'd bought, smoked, eaten, or planned.
Just because there were a handful of people sleeping under the same roof who had driven hundreds of miles to be there. People who probably never would have known one another if somebody hadn't lit a cigar, joined a Discord, and decided to stick around.
Just because there were a handful of people sleeping under the same roof who had driven hundreds of miles to be there. People who probably never would have known one another if somebody hadn't lit a cigar, pursued relationships, and decided to keep showing up.
The next morning, we finally made it to the Kansas City Cigar Festival wide-eyed and ready to hunt. Limited releases. Festival exclusives. Hard-to-find stuff. New brands. Old favorites. A couple of the guys practically cleaned house.
And don't get me wrong, I love that part. I'm a cigar nerd. Put me in a room full of manufacturers, retailers, and cigars I haven't tried before, and I'm going to have a good time.
But somewhere along the way, I realized the festival wasn't really the story of the weekend.
It was just where we happened to be.
The story was the car ride. Justin sitting in a camp chair smoking before sunrise because he was afraid we'd start without him. Mark waiting by his truck like a kid headed to Disney World. Bad barbecue. PT's inexplicable dependence on chocolate milk. Twenty-something cigars permanently embedded into the upholstery of my car. A patio full of laughter. And a conversation that went deeper than any of us probably expected.
That's Brolo.
We've said from the beginning that this thing was never supposed to be about hype. It's about connection. Cigars just happen to be really good at creating the space for it.
They slow us down long enough to notice the people sitting across from us. They turn usernames into friends and friends into people you start planning road trips around. You might start by talking about wrappers, factories, blends, and what somebody has in their travel humidor. Give it enough time, though, and you're talking about marriages, kids, work, failures, faith, hopes, and the things keeping you up at night.
That's the good stuff.
That's why we say Light Up & Lean In.
The lighting up is easy.
It's the leaning in that matters.
Somewhere between Dallas and Kansas City, surrounded by cigar smoke, terrible barbecue, chocolate milk, and a bunch of guys I wouldn't have known otherwise, I was reminded again why we started this whole thing in the first place.
We went to Kansas City for a cigar festival.
Turns out, the cigars were just the excuse.
