Posted on by Matt Thomas

On One Evening in Adelaide

Note: This recollection dates to June 2010, when I traveled to Adelaide, Australia for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop. At the time our school’s governing body, officially Ritsumeikan, but semi-affectionately known around town as “Keichimeikan,” (the cheap school) had begun investing heavily in International Baccalaureate training, and for a brief but memorable stretch I found myself traveling widely across the Asia-Pacific region attending workshops and conferences. Adelaide happened to be the first stop on that circuit.

The encounter described here took place midway through that week. Like many moments that occur while traveling, it was both ordinary and oddly memorable — a short conversation, a near-comic personal embarrassment narrowly avoided, and then a small gap in memory that I still cannot fully explain.

For privacy I refer to the person involved simply as “M.”, and a few identifying details have been softened. The strange behavior of my phone afterward — messages arriving out of sequence and the device occasionally insisting it was in Adelaide or Nagoya — was quite real, though I have never had a satisfying explanation for it.

In Japanese there is a phrase that captures the mood of such moments perfectly: cho fushigi — very mysterious.

Epigraph

Half hours on earth

What are they worth?

I don’t know.

David Berman

I. Adelaide

I was in Adelaide for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop, sometime around June of 2010. In those years our principal had suddenly decided that IB travel was a worthwhile investment, and so for a brief and glorious period I was dispatched all over the Asia-Pacific region like a slightly rumpled educational attaché. Workshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and, in this case, Adelaide.

The school hosting the workshop was one of those extremely well-appointed Australian private schools — immaculate rugby grounds, manicured lawns, a cafeteria that would have put many universities to shame. The workshop itself was perfectly pleasant. TOK people tend to be reflective types and reasonably good company, though after two days of epistemology everyone is usually ready for a drink.

Which is how, on the second evening, a small group of us ended up at a bar a few minutes from the hotel.

II. M.

At some point the table thinned out until it was just the two of us talking. She was from San Francisco. Let’s call her M.

We were sitting close, leaning in the way people do in bars when the music is slightly too loud and the conversation slightly too interesting to abandon. I told her about my small blog, Classical Sympathies, which at the time was still young and full of ambition. She told me she wrote long travel essays and posted them on Facebook where, she said with a shrug, they had gathered a modest but loyal readership.

Like a complete peon, I offered to host them on my site.

She smiled politely and said she’d probably keep them where they were for now.

Which was entirely reasonable.

The conversation moved on. We started talking about family — fathers, specifically — and the strange emotional weather that tends to gather around that subject. It was one of those unexpectedly intimate bar conversations that sometimes appear between near-strangers and then vanish again.

III. A Minor Emergency

There was, however, a complication.

Let us say that during the course of this conversation Young Mr. Johnson began to make his presence known.

Nothing dramatic. But enough that standing up suddenly would have created a situation. So I employed the classic defensive maneuver familiar to men everywhere: crossed legs, careful posture, strategic angles.

A small but significant crisis was unfolding beneath the table.

Eventually the situation resolved itself through patience and good fortune. When the moment seemed safe, I made my exit with what I hoped was dignity intact. We exchanged Facebook information, said our goodbyes, and I stepped out into the alley behind the bar on the way back to the hotel.

At that moment I felt something close to relief.

By the grace of God, I had narrowly avoided making a spectacular fool of myself.

IV. The Missing Ten Minutes

And then something strange happened.

I remember stepping into the alley.

The next thing I remember is being back in my hotel room.

Fully clothed. Completely sober. The evening still early — maybe ten-thirty, eleven at the latest.

What I did not remember was the ten minutes in between.

No walk back to the hotel. No elevator ride. No keycard in the door.

Just a small, clean gap in the record.

V. The Phone

The truly odd part came later.

For the next year and a half my phone behaved as though it had lost its grip on reality.

Texts appeared months after they had supposedly been sent. Messages from April surfaced in October. Time stamps were wrong. Location data wandered.

Sometimes the phone seemed to believe it was still in Adelaide.

More often it insisted it was in Nagoya, a city I had visited only once for a consulting visit to a school in the hills.

It was never anything dramatic — just enough small glitches to make me raise an eyebrow every now and then.

VI. Cho Fushigi

I never saw M. again.

We remained distant Facebook acquaintances for a while. She became, I believe, an English teacher back in San Francisco. Her essays continued to appear occasionally in the feed, and then eventually they stopped.

The phone eventually sorted itself out as well.

Technology, like memory, tends to repair its own small fractures over time.

Still, every once in a while I think about that short walk down the Adelaide alley and the ten missing minutes afterward.

And the only phrase that really fits is the one the Japanese use for such things.

Cho fushigi.

Very mysterious

Dedication:

For Molly. Thanks for the half hour baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may enjoy the two essays linked below, both of which take up similar themes or charged, fleeting, and romantic encounters.

Simona
Mariko
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?

What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.

The episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.

In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery

The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.

That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.

To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.

Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.

The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been the optimal viewing condition. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.

At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” though that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully believed nothing. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.

The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers simply waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.

Hovering over them was their boss, the perpetually enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s great pleasures.

In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.

He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.

It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.

Three Essential Episodes

Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.

The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.

The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.

The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance.

What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.

His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.

When the Mythology Expanded

Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.

But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.

At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.

Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.

Why It Still Matters

And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.

The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.

It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.

For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.

The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there

Dedication

For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?: An Objective Investigation
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Trying (and Failing) to Learn Go

Note: This essay reflects on my long and mostly unsuccessful attempt to learn the game of Go. I first encountered the game through Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which portrays Go not merely as a contest but as a cultural ritual tied to patience, tradition, and dignity. Like many readers, I came away with the impression that the game contained some deep strategic wisdom.

Naturally, I tried to learn it.

The attempt did not go well. Despite buying a few introductory books and trying computer tutorials, I quickly discovered that the game required a kind of spatial patience and intuition that I simply did not possess. The books remain on my shelf as evidence of that early ambition.

The essay also reflects on a friend who has continued studying the game seriously for years, meeting regularly with a teacher and approaching the board with a patience I deeply admire.

Finally, the piece briefly touches on the modern transformation of Go through artificial intelligence. Even as machines have surpassed human players, the quiet ritual of the game continues wherever people sit down together and place the stones.

Epigraph

This game is bloody impossible!

— Matt Thomas

I first heard about Go when I was around twenty-one.

This was 1995 and I was going through what might fairly be called a Japanese literature phase. I was reading Natsume Sōseki, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yasunari Kawabata, along with a terrific mystery writer named Seicho Matsumotowhose books I devoured with great enthusiasm.

Somewhere in that run I encountered Kawabata’s famous novel The Master of Go, which tells the story of an aging master playing a final match against a younger challenger. The novel is less about the tactics of the game than about ritual, tradition, and the quiet passing of an era. The old master loses, and the loss seems to symbolize something larger than a board game.

It made Go sound mystical.

Naturally I decided I should learn it.

This did not go well.

I bought a couple of books with encouraging titles. One of them was called Get Strong at Invading, which sounded promising. Invading! I imagined bold strategic incursions and elegant positional mastery. The whole thing seemed very Japanese, very subtle, very deep.

Then I tried actually playing the game.

At the time I had a computer program that included a beginner tutorial board — the little 9×9 version, which is supposed to be the simplest possible entry point into the game.

I was completely hopeless.

Not slightly confused. Not rusty. I mean utterly lost. I stared at the board as if it were some kind of philosophical diagram whose meaning had been explained to everyone else but me. Stones appeared, shapes formed, and somehow everything I did made the position worse.

Within a short time I realized a painful truth.

I was a complete washout at Go.

I gave up quickly.

The books remain on my shelf to this day.

Go, as it turns out, is not chess.

Chess feels like an argument. Pieces attack and defend, plans unfold, and even when you lose you usually understand why. Go feels more like weather. Stones accumulate quietly across the board until suddenly there is a vast pattern you cannot quite explain but which apparently determines everything.

Experts talk about influence, thickness, and sente.

I am still trying to figure out which group is alive.

My friend Dean, on the other hand, actually plays the game.

Every month or so he meets with an older Japanese gentleman who teaches him. Dean told me once that the teacher has very few students, so he feels a kind of obligation to keep showing up. I admire this enormously.

Dean is a patient man. I have known this since about 2003. He has the stamina to sit with the board, to think, to place stones carefully and let the game develop at its own pace.

Patience is not my natural game.

While Dean studies Go properly, I have mostly watched from the sidelines as the larger story of artificial intelligence unfolded around the game. I had followed the earlier moment when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov back in the 1990s, and I suspected something similar had eventually happened in Go as well.

Sure enough, the breakthrough arrived when AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, defeated top human players. Even the greatest masters of the game now study the moves produced by machines.

The machines, it turns out, understand Go better than we do.

Even attempts to escape the machines do not entirely succeed. When Bobby Fischer invented Fischer Random Chess — now called Chess960 — he hoped to eliminate opening theory and restore creativity to the game. Yet modern engines have mastered that variant as well.

Even Fischer’s attempt to outflank the machines eventually became another playground for them.

Which leaves the rest of us where we began.

Dean continues to sit across the board from his teacher, patiently placing stones and learning the game properly. The ancient rhythms of Go continue quietly in small rooms all over the world.

Meanwhile I remain stuck where I started, staring at a tiny beginner board and wondering what on earth I am supposed to do next.

And the books, I should add, are still on the shelf.

Dedication

For Dean, who plays the long game.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like the essays linked below.

On the Strangest Soundtrack of the 1990s
On the Song “Encounter at 3 AM”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Note: This essay gathers together several different periods of my life when money was tight and the margin for error was thin. Some of these moments go back many years, including a student exchange year in Dunedin, New Zealand, when a bureaucratic oversight left me without a meal plan for most of the academic year and forced me into a very basic daily routine of trail mix, apricot bars, and coffee. Others come from later phases of adulthood: early teaching years in Kumamoto, young family life in Kyoto’s Mukaijima district, the strange suspended months of COVID, and the present day.

I include these episodes not as a complaint but as a recognition of how common this experience actually is. Living paycheck to paycheck is often imagined as the result of bad choices or personal irresponsibility, yet in reality it is frequently the ordinary condition of people who are working hard, raising families, paying tuition bills, navigating institutional decisions, and simply trying to keep their lives moving forward.

The story of my friend Mandiola, included here with his blessing, illustrates another version of the same pattern. A long career in education, a series of institutional shifts, and one administrative decision were enough to push a once-stable life into years of financial improvisation before things slowly stabilized again.

What these experiences have taught me is less about money than about perspective. Hunger sharpens the mind, small kindnesses matter enormously, and the distance between stability and struggle is often much smaller than we imagine. For that reason, the real lesson of living paycheck to paycheck is not resentment but compassion.

Epigraph

Money won’t save your soul.
— Tim Burgess

A lot of people talk about living paycheck to paycheck as if it were a kind of personal failure. A budgeting problem. A lack of discipline. A mistake someone somewhere made.

In reality it is something far more ordinary than that. It is simply the condition in which millions of people live their lives. Often quietly, often competently, and often without anyone around them quite realizing how narrow the margin really is.

I first learned that margin in Dunedin.

I was on exchange at the University of Otago and through a small bureaucratic mix-up I was not on the meal plan. I had no work visa and no savings. My parents sent twenty dollars here and there, but it took months before anyone realized the full situation.

So for nearly the entire academic year I developed a system.

Breakfast and dinner came from a large white bucket in my room: trail mix, carob chips, raisins, peanuts. Lunch every day was the same: one yoghurt-covered apricot bar and one black coffee at the campus canteen. NZ $3.50.

Day after day after day.

My roommates didn’t know. They just thought I hated the mutton they cooked every night. And to be fair, I did hate the mutton.

Every once in a while a friend named Maren would buy me a Snickers and a Coke at the student club and we would sit there watching the O.J. Simpson chase and the trial coverage on television. Those snacks felt like luxury.

But even then I understood something important.

I wasn’t even the hungriest fellow.

After Dunedin, life improved but the margins never entirely disappeared.

In Kumamoto in 1997 I was earning about ¥250,000 a month teaching English at NOVA. It wasn’t a fortune but it was enough. I could go to the izakaya, drink Asahi, play pool, and date the woman who would later become my wife.

It wasn’t abundance, but it was livable.

A few years later, from 2002 to 2004, my wife and I were living in a subsidized apartment in Mukaijima on the Kintetsu Line outside Kyoto. I was working part-time as a social studies teacher and earning roughly the same ¥230,000–250,000 a month.

Our rent was only ¥40,000 thanks to her hospital job in Uji. The apartment had three large rooms, a kitchen, a genkan, and it was surprisingly well insulated.

Our son Hugh had just been born and wasn’t yet in daycare. My wife worked night shifts and often made more money than I did.

We weren’t rich, but we made it work. And we were happy.

Then years later came another version of the same story.

During COVID I took leave from work and drifted into a strange suspended routine. I spent most of my time in my room playing chess online, watching chess streamers, and talking on the phone.

My peak rating reached about 1200, which I was absurdly proud of.

My expenses were minimal because my life had contracted. I only went out drinking with a friend named Philip maybe three times a month, usually to places like Takimiya’s, Stones, or Rub-a-Dub.

Things were precarious, but manageable. Barely.

And then there is the present.

In January of 2024 I had roughly $60,000 in savings and no debt. My wife and I also had about $20,000 in gold and platinum and a couple of retirement plans. It looked, on paper at least, like stability.

But the final years of my son’s schooling at the University of Auckland slowly drained those savings.

As I write this in March of 2026, at age fifty-one going on fifty-two, I have about $3,000 in the bank and another $3,000 on a Kyoto Bank credit card. My ANA card covers most day-to-day expenses, but that line of credit has already been cut once and could disappear again at any time.

I am a professional educator with thirty-five years of experience. I am gainfully employed and reasonably skilled at what I do.

And yet the margin remains thin.

But my story is hardly unique.

My friend Mandiola is sixty-three years old and has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He knows that city better than almost anyone I have ever met. His first job after high school was delivering maps for a map store, which meant driving all over the city and learning it street by street.

Later he earned a degree from a University of California campus and became a high school teacher in the Beverly Hills public school system.

For a while things were stable. Then life intervened.

Divorces, relocations, graduate school that never quite finished, and years of improvisation eventually brought him back to Los Angeles where he landed what he considered a dream job in an independent study program. He taught the children of show-business families and even got to know people like Larry King through the students he worked with.

He loved the work. He was his own boss and taught every subject except music. After school he played board games with the kids.

He was, in his words, in hog heaven.

Then a new administration arrived. He calls them the Chicago mafia.

They decided he was too expensive and too independent. He was replaced, after years of conflict and legal battles, by what he describes as three bureaucratic drones.

A $60,000 settlement kept him afloat for a while, but the money vanished quickly.

When I visited him in Los Angeles in March of 2024 he was essentially broke. He struggled to cover his mortgage, his association fees, his car insurance, and groceries at Trader Joe’s. He borrowed money from friends, from his mother, from anyone willing to help.

Eventually he pieced together work again through substitute teaching and tutoring. Today he earns about $4,100 a month and is just months away from retirement eligibility.

Even now he occasionally borrows money.

Not because he is irresponsible, but because life sometimes simply runs that way.

And that, in the end, is the point.

Living paycheck to paycheck is not a moral failure. It is a structural reality for a huge portion of the population. Careers falter. Administrators make decisions. Tuition bills arrive. Children grow up. Systems fail. Life shifts.

Hard times can strike almost anyone.

What those years taught me — from Dunedin to Kumamoto to Mukaijima to the strange suspended months of COVID and the present day — is how little we actually need to survive, how hunger sharpens the mind, and how enormously small acts of kindness can matter.

But most of all they taught me how close to the edge so many people really are.

Which is why compassion is not optional.

It is necessary. Now more than ever.

Dedication

For the middle and lower classes.
For now and eternity.

Note:

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Other City

Note: This piece grew out of a long fascination of mine with what might be called the “night economy” — the network of bartenders, servers, managers, taxi drivers, and late-shift workers who keep a city alive after most people have gone home. If the daytime city is governed by office hours and commuter rhythms, the nighttime city runs on a different clock entirely.

The two figures mentioned here, Haku and Haru, are part of that world in Kyoto. Haku runs the bar at ING and seems to operate on a schedule that would puzzle most daylight citizens, opening in the evening and closing well into the small hours while somehow producing food, music, and atmosphere in a space not much larger than a good-sized living room. Haru manages a shisha lounge in eastern Gion and moves easily between the daytime and nighttime rhythms of that neighborhood, which has its own distinct ecosystem of bars, touts, and late-night wanderers.

The small bar Ishimaru Shoten, tucked down an alley off Pontocho in the Kiyamachi district, serves in the essay as a kind of neutral ground — one of those places where the various inhabitants of the nocturnal city briefly cross paths once their shifts end.

The central idea is simple enough: most cities contain two cities. The first is the one that tourists and office workers see during the day. The second comes into view only after midnight, when the people who keep the lights on, the drinks pouring, and the plates spinning begin their own quieter rounds.

Epigraph:

Last night, I told a stranger all about you
They smiled patiently with disbelief
I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried
And I know you did it all
In spite of me

Morphine, In Spite of Me

Most people believe a city goes to sleep around midnight. This is not true. Around that time a city simply changes populations.

The day city winds down: office workers, shopkeepers, commuters heading home, lights switching off floor by floor. But another population wakes up. The bartenders. The shisha managers. The taxi drivers. The people who work the strange hours when the streets are quieter but the human drama is often louder.

This is the other city.

If you spend enough nights wandering around it, you begin to recognize its citizens. They are the people who actually know how the place works after midnight.

One of them is Haku.

Haku runs the bar at ING. He opens around seven in the evening and closes somewhere between three and four in the morning. Prep starts around six. By the time the first customers wander in, the night has already begun for him.

He has long greying hair and rotates through a collection of Rolling Stones T-shirts, something like twenty-eight of them. I have never seen him wear anything else. He smokes constantly, drinks Sapporo if he is drinking at all, and otherwise survives on black coffee.

Somehow he produces a full menu in a kitchen that appears to consist primarily of a Bunsen burner and sheer stubbornness.

Haku’s bar has rules. No Japanese music is the main one. The other rule is that the bar itself is reserved for singles. Groups can sit elsewhere. The bar is for individuals who have come out into the night alone.

But Haku’s real gift is music. He reads the room the way a card player reads a table.

If the crowd is German he might throw on Rammstein. If Scandinavians wander in the speakers might suddenly fill with black metal. Australians get The Saints. If I’m there he might put on My Morning Jacket. The world rotates through the speakers depending on who happens to be occupying the stools that night.

Simply and totally the original man.

Another citizen of the other city is Haru.

Haru manages the shisha lounge in eastern Gion, a part of town where the nightlife becomes a little more ambiguous. The streets there are full of micro-touts, men and women both, gently trying to guide passersby into Thai or Japanese dancer clubs. Small space heaters glow outside doorways and mama-sans smile from behind them like patient spiders.

I never go into those places, though the invitations are often persuasive.

Haru opens the shisha lounge most days at noon sharp. If she is not there, someone named B. or a long-haired young guy handles things until she arrives. She tends the charcoal, mixes my Malibu Milk, and quietly extends the session when the official time runs out.

She knows my habits well enough by now that when I head up the stairs she doesn’t assume I am leaving. She knows I am just stepping outside to smoke.

For a long time she existed in my mind simply as the shisha girl, one of the many figures who keep the other city functioning. But then one night I ran into her somewhere unexpected.

The place was Ishimaru Shoten, a tiny late-night bar down an alley just west of Pontocho in the heart of Kiyamachi. Outside the entrance hang bright red, green, and blue lamps that glow like a small carnival in the dark.

I first discovered the place at four in the morning on a very long night. I was broke that evening, absolutely skint, and there was a very aggressive Japanese guy at the bar who clearly believed the entire establishment belonged to him.

The bar woman, who is about forty-five and still hot as blazes, was batting her eyes at me with what seemed like professional enthusiasm. Meanwhile I realized with growing clarity that I did not actually have the money to pay for the large bottle of beer I had just ordered.

But men are predictable creatures.

I understood immediately that if I played my cards right the territorial guy would buy the drink for me. So I joked with him, gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, made it clear I recognized him as the reigning emperor of the room. He razzed me a little but saw that I was no threat to his throne.

Sure enough, he covered the beer.

I stumbled home to the Royal Park Hotel on Sanjo Street as the sky was turning pale, crashing into bed around five-thirty in the morning.

Weeks later I returned to Ishimaru and found Haru sitting there.

I teased her gently about sometimes opening the shisha lounge five or ten minutes late when she bikes over from home. I suggested she must be hungover. She laughed, not the polite laugh people sometimes use for customers but a bright, real laugh.

She said she was happy to see me.

And that was when I learned her name. Haru.

We talked for a while. I drank a White Russian and ate dashi maki while she sipped something that might have been shochu or nihon-shu. I felt a strange rush of adrenaline the whole time, those goosebumps that run up both arms when the night suddenly opens into possibility.

Not necessarily romantic possibility. Just the larger sense that anything could happen.

Anything can come.

After twenty or thirty minutes she said goodnight and promised we would meet there again sometime. We did run into each other once more about a week and a half later, though the evening remained just as light and brief as the first.

But something had shifted.

She was no longer simply the shisha worker in my mental map of the city. She was Haru, a fellow traveler in the other city.

And that is the thing about the people who live their lives after midnight. They know parts of the city the rest of us never really see. They watch the celebrations and the arguments, the flirtations and the quiet breakdowns. They see who walks home alone and who finds someone to share the long dark streets.

Every city has two maps.

The one everyone uses during the day.

And the other one that only appears after midnight.

Dedication:

For the men and women of the night. Who keep the drinks coming and the plates spinning. It’s a rocky world, and you rock it baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the two essays below, which also feature Kyoto and Osaka nightlife in all it’s beautiful glory.

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl
The Night of Fucking Adam
Posted on by Matt Thomas

When the Taxi Driver Loses the Plot

Note: This poem is a reconstruction. The original version appeared briefly on my first blog, Classical Sympathies, sometime around 2010, and like many things from that early site it was eventually lost in the digital shuffle. What remains here is an attempt to recreate the spirit of the piece from memory.

The poem itself is a mash-up of two real taxi rides that somehow fused together in recollection. One took place in Adelaide, Australia, during a ride from a hotel to the airport where the driver became thoroughly disoriented and began looping through unfamiliar streets. The other occurred years later in Kyoto, somewhere north of Sanjo, when a similarly confused driver managed to transform a short ride into a wandering tour of the nighttime grid.

Over time the two rides merged in memory into a single universal experience: the moment when a passenger realizes that the person holding the wheel may no longer fully know where he is going.

The result is presented here, perhaps a little mythologized, as a small recovered relic from the early days of the archive — a lost classic of the wandering taxi ride.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
took another right,
the meter ticking bravely
in the middle of the night.

The city slid past sideways
in a crooked grid of light,
and every turn he promised
somehow made the journey slight.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
muttered to the wheel,
as if the streets were hiding
some essential missing deal.

A restaurant we’d passed before
returned into my sight,
which meant the haunted driver
had again chosen wrong from right.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
took another right,
and wiped his brow dramatically
beneath the yellow light.

Now when your taxi driver loses the plot
this could go on all night,
because the man who holds the wheel
is captain of your flight.

You sit behind his kingdom
like a mildly troubled guest,
while every wrong decision
slowly multiplies the rest.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
leans forward in his seat,
as though the road might whisper
some confession through the street.

The meter ticks its steady hymn
to time and mortal plight,
while hostage to the haunted man
who’s searching for the right.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
takes yet another right,
and somewhere in the city
dawn prepares its quiet light.

But we remain in orbit
of his navigational blight—

for when your taxi driver loses the plot
this could go on all night.

Note: If you like this poem, you may also like the poems linked below. Happy reading!

An Open Book
Some B-Side Poems
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians II

Note: This is the second piece in our series “On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians.” You can find the first installment here.

The encounters described here span more than thirty years and several cities — from a first arena concert in Pullman, Washington in 1991 to small club shows in Cambridge, Osaka, and Kyoto in the decades that followed. As with many memories of live music, the exact setlists and dates sometimes blur, but the rooms themselves — the sound, the atmosphere, the strange and fleeting meetings between artists and audiences — remain vivid. These sketches attempt to capture a few of those moments as they were experienced at the time.

Epigraph

No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd

In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud

— Dire Straits, “Skateaway”

Live music produces strange meetings. Sometimes you meet the musicians themselves. More often you meet a moment — a room, a sound, a feeling that sticks with you for decades while entire years of ordinary life quietly disappear.

Here are a few such encounters.

I. Initiation

My first real concert was the On Every Street tour in 1991.

The band was Dire Straits, the venue was Pullman, Washington, and the company was the usual Spokane crew: Seth, Innes, Kelly.

I was the biggest fan in the car by far. The others liked the band well enough but I was the one who had studied the records, who knew the guitar parts, who was ready for the moment when the lights dropped and the first notes hit the arena.

They played everything: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Sultans of Swing. It was a great show, though at the time I had no real way to judge such things. It was simply enormous — lights, volume, spectacle. I bought the black and blue tour shirt and wore it for five years.

At the time I thought concerts were supposed to be like that: huge, polished, and far away.

I would later learn otherwise.

II. Revelation

Several years later, during the Hamilton years, I saw Red House Painters at the Middle East in Cambridge.

I went with Ian.

The room was small, maybe a few hundred people at most. Nothing about it resembled the arena in Pullman. And then, near the end of the set, Mark Kozelek began playing “Little Drummer Boy.”

It lasted nine minutes.

You could hear a pin drop in the room.

No spectacle. No lights. Just absolute concentration from everyone present. When the final notes faded the silence lingered for a moment before the applause came.

Afterward Ian and I drove back toward New York through the cold night with the windows cracked open, heaters flying out into the darkness, and Hell’s Ditch blasting through the car stereo to keep us awake.

That was the night I realized concerts could be something else entirely.

III. Chaos

Not every show produces reverence.

I once saw The Fall with Ian as well. The band’s leader, Mark E. Smith, seemed to be operating in his traditional mode of total hostility.

The set was short — twenty-eight minutes by my estimate. Ian later checked the official record and insisted it was forty-three. Either way it felt brief and volatile. Smith barked into the microphone, glared at the band, and treated the entire enterprise with the air of someone barely tolerating the existence of the audience.

Which, to be fair, was exactly what many people had come to see.

IV. Theatre

The strangest performance I ever witnessed may have been Cat Power at Club Quattro in Osaka.

The evening began badly. An opening act — a woman in what appeared to be a fairy costume — sat at the piano and played for what felt like an eternity. Forty-five minutes at least. Perhaps longer. By the end of it the audience was openly confused.

Then Cat Power appeared.

Or rather she refused to appear in the conventional sense. Instead of remaining on the stage she wandered through the venue with a handheld microphone, singing while walking among the crowd, occasionally placing an arm around a patron or leaning against the bar.

At one point she came right up to where I was standing near the back rail and sang a line or two before drifting off again into the room.

The entire show felt less like a concert than a piece of improvised theatre.

V. Ritual

A few years later I saw Damo Suzuki at Club Metro in Kyoto.

Damo had once fronted the legendary German band CAN, but this night bore no resemblance to those recordings. Nothing recognizable from the catalog appeared.

Instead he stood a few feet away from the audience with long black-and-grey hair flowing, bellowing and chanting over a constantly shifting improvisational band.

It was less a performance than a ritual.

Damo passed away not long ago. I’m grateful I saw him when I did.

VI. Canada Night

Not all memorable shows are mystical.

Sometimes they’re simply loud.

One such evening occurred at Club Quattro in Osaka when Broken Social Scene and Death From Above 1979 came through town.

The Canadian ambassador was present and delivered a brief speech before the set explaining that Death From Above 1979 represented a fine example of Canadian enterprise because they were “only two men making so much noise.”

The room was packed with Canadian expats and the atmosphere was celebratory chaos.

The ambassador was probably correct.

VII. Breakdown

Not every concert goes well.

I once saw Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the small Kyoto venue Taku Taku. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lineup. The guitarist appeared to be brand new and could barely navigate the chords.

Will Oldham tried to push through but quickly grew frustrated and began openly calling the guitarist out from the stage.

It was uncomfortable for everyone involved.

The show never recovered.

VIII. Redemption

Fortunately the story has a better ending.

Some years later I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy again, this time at the beautiful Kyoto venue Urbanguild.

Everything worked.

Low benches and tables filled the room, Heartland beer bottles glowed green under the lights, and the band played a relaxed, confident set drawn mostly from the Bonnie “Prince” Billy catalog with a few Palace songs mixed in.

Opening the evening was an instrumental group called Bitchin Bajas whose sound reminded me faintly of early Phosphorescent if Phosphorescent had chosen to make instrumental records.

After the show I found myself talking with three members of the band while they drank beer and ate fries.

They were humble, friendly, and slightly surprised that anyone in Kyoto knew who they were. We talked for a while about touring and the constant challenge of trying to make a living as working musicians.

Eventually the conversation drifted off and the room began to empty.

The music was over. The musicians were just people again, finishing their drinks and preparing to move on to the next city.

And that, in the end, may be the most interesting encounter of all

Dedication

For live music fans everywhere.

My true people.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essay below on the four time I met Yo La Tengo. Happy reading!

On the Four Times I Met Yo La Tengo
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Wearing Only the Color Black

Note: Clothing essays have a way of sounding more intentional than the habits they describe. In reality, most personal “styles” are not carefully engineered systems but small practical decisions repeated over time until they become a pattern. Black clothing, in particular, tends to accumulate this way: one shirt becomes three, three become six, and eventually the wardrobe settles into a quiet monochrome.

The appeal of black has been noted in many places — from musicians and writers to bartenders, stagehands, and city dwellers who prefer a certain anonymity in public life. It simplifies choices, travels well, and works in nearly every setting from classroom to barstool.

None of this was planned in advance. It simply turned out that black shirts, black trousers, and a good pair of shoes made the day a little easier to begin. Over time that small convenience hardened into habit, and habit into something that might almost be called a uniform.

Epigraph:

I could listen to all my friends
And go out again
And pretend it’s enough,
Or I could make a career of being blue
I could dress in black and read Camus,
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth
Like I was 17
That would be a scream
But I don’t want to get over you

The Magnetic Fields

At some point in my adult life I realized that I wear almost nothing but black.

This wasn’t the result of a manifesto, or some deep philosophical commitment to minimalism. It simply happened. One day I looked in the closet and noticed that nearly everything hanging there was black: shirts, sweaters, jackets, trousers. Even the socks.

But the habit actually goes back much further. In high school I developed what could fairly be called a monotone sartorial program. The uniform was simple and extremely effective: a black turtleneck, black chinos, black loafers, black socks, and — for the sake of total conceptual coherence — black boxers as well.

I never felt better.

There was something immediately satisfying about the whole arrangement. No fuss, no pattern matching, no color balancing. Just black on black on black. A complete system.

People probably assumed it was a bit of a pose. High school audiences are naturally suspicious of anyone who appears to be making a stylistic statement. But black is also just a normal color, and the outfit was apparently acceptable enough that nobody made too much of it. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious or intellectual. I just liked the way it looked and, more importantly, the way it simplified the day.

The system continued into college.

At Hamilton College the core wardrobe remained black, but I added one important layer: a tan trench coat. It cost $199 at the Men’s Wearhouse in downtown Spokane and felt, at the time, like a serious investment in adulthood. The coat went over the black shirts and black trousers, and on top of that I wore a tan floppy felt hat.

That was the look.

Looking back, it probably struck some people as theatrical. A young man walking across campus dressed entirely in black with a trench coat and a floppy hat could easily be mistaken for someone attempting a role. But at the time it didn’t feel like an imitation of anyone. Later I became aware of figures like Johnny Cash, the famous “Man in Black,” or the elegant nocturnal wardrobes of Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. But when the wardrobe first appeared in my life it was entirely sui generis.

I was just doing me.

Over the years the practical advantages of black clothing became increasingly obvious. Wearing mostly black eliminates an astonishing number of small daily decisions. You don’t stand in front of the closet wondering whether this shirt matches that pair of trousers or whether the shade of blue is slightly wrong for the jacket. Everything works with everything else.

Shopping becomes easier. Cleaning becomes easier. Packing for travel becomes easier. A black shirt can be worn day after day without drawing much attention, and a good pair of black chinos can quietly carry a person through an entire week.

In this sense, wearing black is less a fashion statement than a small act of logistical efficiency.

The habit also works remarkably well in cities. Black is neutral enough to move through almost any environment without attracting attention. Restaurants, classrooms, airports, bars — the wardrobe fits all of them without adjustment.

This turns out to be particularly true in Kyoto, where I now live. The city’s narrow streets, dim bars, and late-night corners seem almost designed for dark clothing. Walking into places like ING or Mafia or Haku in a black shirt and black trousers feels perfectly natural. No one notices, and that is exactly the point.

One unexpected side effect is that Kyoto locals often assume I am a local as well. Something about the overall look apparently signals familiarity rather than tourism. While visitors frequently move through the city in bright outdoor gear and colorful jackets, the monotone wardrobe seems to blend easily into the quieter rhythms of the place.

I never feel out of place.

Which may be the real secret of wearing black: it allows you to move through the world without the constant small negotiation of appearance.

There are, of course, occasional deviations. Every now and then a pink shirt or a purple one appears in the rotation, like a brief holiday from the system. But these are temporary excursions. The gravitational center of the wardrobe remains the same.

Black shirt.
Black trousers.
Black shoes.

Some people wear black because they believe it signals seriousness or artistic temperament. Others wear it as a form of rebellion against brighter fashions. For me the explanation is much simpler.

It works.

And once you discover something that works every day, there is very little reason to stop.

Dedication:

For the LL Bean turtleneck. You rock baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy this one.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Strangest Soundtrack of the 1990s

Note: Until the End of the World exists in multiple versions, the most expansive being the nearly five-hour director’s cut released years after the original theatrical run. The longer version allows the film’s wandering structure — its globe-spanning travel, technological speculation, and philosophical detours — to breathe more fully, though it also requires a certain stamina from even devoted viewers.

The soundtrack occupies a special place in the film’s legacy. Director Wim Wenders reportedly asked participating musicians to imagine the kind of music they might be making a decade in the future when composing their contributions. The result is less a literal prediction of future sounds than a fascinating snapshot of major artists working at the outer edge of their early-1990s creativity.

As for the film itself, it remains a curious hybrid: part road movie, part technological fable, part romantic obsession, and part philosophical meditation on images, memory, and dreams. Like many of Wenders’ most ambitious projects, it is best approached less as a tightly engineered narrative and more as a long cinematic journey — one whose most memorable moments often arrive when the plot pauses and the mood takes over.

Epigraph

In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man
In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
We wanted the union, oh the union of the woman and the man
— Peter Gabriel, “Blood of Eden”

I love Wim Wenders. My favorite of his films is Until the End of the World, followed closely by Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire is good too, though perhaps a little chalk. The American Friend — with Dennis Hopper wandering through a Patricia Highsmith plot — is offbeat and charming in that peculiar late-70s European way.

The End of Violence is terrible.

But Until the End of the World is something else entirely: a sprawling, beautiful, occasionally baffling film that might best be described as a magnificent mess. The director’s cut runs close to five hours, and even devoted fans tend to fade somewhere around hour three. That’s not really a criticism. The movie feels less like a conventional narrative and more like a long road — something you travel through rather than simply watch.

The story centers on Claire Tourneur, played by Solveig Dommartin, a restless Parisian drifting through life when she encounters a mysterious traveler named Sam Farber, played by William Hurt. Sam is carrying stolen technology — a device capable of recording images directly from the human brain — and he is trying to reach his father, a scientist working in the Australian desert. The purpose of the machine is unexpectedly tender: Sam’s father believes it may allow his blind wife to see again by transmitting visual images through Sam’s eyes.

But because the technology has been stolen from a corporate research project, Sam is being chased by various interested parties who would very much like the machine returned. This sets the film in motion. Claire becomes fascinated with Sam and begins following him across continents as he attempts to evade his pursuers.

What follows is one of the great wandering journeys in cinema.

The story moves through Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and eventually Australia. There are gangsters, satellite technology, eccentric scientists, and the faint sense that the entire world has become one enormous road. The film is technically a thriller, but it rarely behaves like one. Wenders is much more interested in movement, landscapes, and the strange emotional gravity that develops between two people traveling together.

The relationship between Sam and Claire is itself slightly unstable. Part romance, part obsession, part philosophical partnership. At times it almost feels like a kind of mutual kidnapping. Sam keeps disappearing, Claire keeps chasing him, and neither seems entirely capable of escaping the other’s orbit.

It probably didn’t help that the two actors reportedly did not get along during the making of the film. Hurt, already an established star after performances in films like Body Heat, brought a certain American cool to the role. He had that slightly detached, inward quality that made him so effective in the early 1980s. Dommartin, on the other hand, plays Claire with an intensity that borders on obsession. The tension between them gives the film a strange electricity. At times it feels less like romantic chemistry than two people circling each other warily.

Eventually their journey brings them to Australia, where Sam’s father is conducting his experiments in the outback.

And then comes one of the great scenes in modern cinema.

Claire and Sam are flying over the Australian desert when the plane suddenly loses power. The engines fall silent. Instead of plunging toward the earth, the aircraft begins to glide, drifting quietly over the vast red landscape below.

There is no panic.

Just sky.
Motion.
Silence.

And then the music enters.

Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel begins to play.

Gabriel’s voice arrives slowly, almost as if it were rising from the land itself. The plane floats over the outback. The desert stretches endlessly beneath them. For a few minutes the film stops being a story and becomes something else entirely — a meditation on distance, longing, and the strange human desire to see and be seen.

It’s one of those rare moments where cinema and music fuse perfectly.

The soundtrack surrounding that moment is one of the most unusual ever assembled. When Wenders commissioned the music for the film, he asked the participating artists to imagine the kind of songs they might be making ten years in the future. The film itself was set slightly ahead of its time, so the idea was that these musicians would try to anticipate their own sound in the coming decade.

The lineup was absurdly strong: Lou Reed, R.E.M., Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, U2, and others. It reads almost like a summit meeting of late-twentieth-century alternative music.

The idea was that they would create future music.

But artists rarely predict the future.

What they tend to do instead is deepen the present.

Listening to the soundtrack today, what you mostly hear is 1991 at its most imaginative. The musicians push their sound slightly outward into darker, more atmospheric territory, but they’re still working with the tools they had.

And the tools were 1991.

Still, several of the songs are outstanding. What’s Good is classic Lou Reed: dry, philosophical, slightly amused by the whole strange business of being alive. Reed had an unmatched ability to deliver lines that sound both cynical and strangely tender. At one point he sings, “life’s like bacon and ice cream / that’s what life’s like without you,” which somehow manages to be both ridiculous and oddly moving at the same time.

Then there is Until the End of the World by U2, written during the band’s remarkable early-1990s creative surge. The song carries the darker propulsion of the Achtung Baby era and hints at the experimental atmosphere the band would later explore more fully on albums like Zooropa and the Passengers project. The lyrics, told from the perspective of Judas speaking to Jesus after the betrayal, give the song an almost Biblical scale.

But the emotional summit of the whole enterprise remains Gabriel’s Blood of Eden.

When that song arrives during the silent glide over the Australian desert, the movie suddenly lifts into another register. The wandering plot, the strange technology, the global chase — all of it falls away for a moment, leaving only the image of two people floating above the earth while Gabriel sings about the ancient longing between man and woman.

The future, it turns out, rarely sounds like the future.

It usually sounds like the present imagining what might come next.

Dedication:

For Lou. What’s good baby?

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Three Fundamental Types of Drinkers

Note: The taxonomy presented in this essay should not be interpreted too strictly. Like most human classifications, the categories are somewhat fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, wander into Six. Cities, companions, and the general momentum of the evening all play their roles.

The individuals mentioned here — Jon Brooks, my brother Pat, my brother Mike, my father Ross, and my friends Philip and Mackenzie — are cited with affection and respect as exemplary specimens of their respective drinking styles. Any exaggerations should be understood in the spirit of barroom anthropology rather than scientific certainty.

The Simon Joyner lyric used below as the epigraph comes from one of the great chroniclers of American barroom life, whose songs capture with particular accuracy the strange fellowship and wandering philosophy that often emerge around a table of drinks.

Epigraph:

I met the drinker for the drink/ back when I was drinking everything/ but the kitchen sink.

Simon Joyner

Human beings go out for drinks for many reasons.

To loosen up after the day.
To bond with friends.
To flirt.
To seek the company of the opposite sex.
To complain about coworkers and bosses and get it all out of the system.
To chase novelty.
To see what the night might offer.

There may be pool involved. There may be a little weed involved. There may be laughter, storytelling, and occasionally the pursuit of romance. Some people even manage to get into fights, though I have always considered that an unnecessary complication.

Whatever the precise motivation, if you spend enough time in bars — conferences, faculty gatherings, Kyoto wanderings — a pattern begins to emerge.

Drinkers, broadly speaking, fall into three categories.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s remarkably reliable.

I. The One-Drink Person

The One-Drink Person possesses a trait that fascinates the rest of the drinking world: sufficiency.

One drink is enough.

Not “enough for now.”
Not “enough before the next bar.”

Just enough.

The One-Drink Person orders calmly, often something familiar.

“I’ll have my usual IPA. Just the one.”

They sip slowly. They participate in the conversation. They are fully present at the table. And then, at some point, they stand up and leave with perfect dignity while the rest of the group is still negotiating whether a second round is happening.

I know two pure examples of this species: Jon Brooks and Pat Thomas.

They are calm, stable, and mysteriously immune to the centrifugal forces that tend to expand most nights.

There is also a fascinating adjacent species in my father Ross, who is technically a Two-Drink Person. Ross orders two beers spaced exactly twelve minutes apart for what he calls the “maximum fade.” He informs the waitress of the twelve-minute interval with great seriousness, as if he were conducting a controlled laboratory experiment.

Among the other tribes, the One-Drink Person inspires both admiration and mild suspicion. Their discipline seems almost supernatural.

II. The Three-Drink Person

The Three-Drink Person represents the ideal of civilized social drinking.

Three drinks produce a predictable arc.

Drink one warms the room.
Drink two brings the conversation fully alive.
Drink three arrives at the sweet spot: relaxed, sociable, cheerful.

Then the Three-Drink Person goes home.

No drama.
No philosophical speeches.
No mysterious late-night decisions.

In theory this is the perfect category.

In practice, however, there is a complication.

Many people who identify as Three-Drink People are not actually Three-Drink People at all.

Their most common sentence is something like:

“I’ve only had four, chillax.”

Which is when the observant barroom anthropologist begins to suspect that the Three-Drink classification may be partly aspirational.

These days I am more or less a Three-Drink Person myself. But this is a relatively recent development. As recently as the late COVID years — say 2023 — I was still operating comfortably in a different category.

III. The Six-Drink Person

The Six-Drink Person rarely begins the evening intending to drink six.

In fact the Six-Drink Person almost always starts with a sentence that sounds very reasonable.

“I’ll just have one.”

But the night has a tendency to expand around them.

One drink leads to another conversation.
Another conversation leads to another round.
The stories become louder.
The table becomes friendlier.

The evening begins to acquire momentum.

At a certain point the Six-Drink Person may also say something like:

“OK motherfucker, we are going to arm wrestle!”

This is generally a signal that the night has entered its advanced phase.

My brother Mike is the purest Six-Drink specimen I know. Mike goes for it. If the night has possibilities, Mike will find them.

My friend Philip also operates comfortably in this zone. These are the drinkers who power the great stories.

They are responsible for a very large percentage of legendary nights.

Also, it must be said, a fair number of mornings that begin with a quiet promise to take it easier next time.

A Personal Adjustment

My own shift from Six-Drink territory into the Three-Drink category happened fairly recently.

One evening earlier this year I was sitting at ING and realized something unusual. I had already had two drinks. I ordered a third Negroni, and suddenly a small voice in my head said: that’s probably enough.

The old circuit was still there.

Concrete. Ishimaru. Haru.
The whole Kyoto 4-a.m. constellation.

Their siren songs were faintly audible.

But that night I did something unexpected.

I finished the third drink, paid the bill, and went home.

As Homer might say, Odysseus stayed on the ship.

The Final Observation

Most people believe they are Three-Drink People.

Very few actually are.

In reality the species are fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, slide quietly into Six.

And certain cities — Kyoto among them — possess a remarkable talent for turning what begins as a perfectly innocent One-Drink Plan into something much more expansive.

Which is how, sooner or later, every barroom anthropologist eventually arrives at the same conclusion:

The taxonomy is real.

But the night always has the last word.

Dedication:

For drinkers everywhere. I love you, bro.

Note: If you liked this essay, you might also like the ones below, which also deal with Kyoto nightlife in all its glory.

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl
On a run-in with Damon Krukowski in a Kyoto Basement