Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Cheating at Golf (featuring cameos by my grandfather Bill Kolb and my Aunt’s Second Husband Jerry)

New Note:

At lot of people play golf. Most of them cheat. In this piece we will take a look at several varieties of golf cheating, taking as examples my maternal grandfather Bill Kolb and my aunt’s second husband Jerry.

My grandfather played golf for the entire time I knew him. Besides his family, golf was probably his passion. Bill was a so-so golfer at best. He could hit the ball pretty straight but never more than about 150 yards. His short game was better than his long game, and he liked to say “I just need to get it on the dance floor” (by which he meant the green.) Bill’s lack of distance played into an incident once where we were backed up behind a slower group who was messing about around the green. We were about 230 yards out, and I was planning on hitting a 5 wood approach. Bill told me to go ahead and hit, and I said I needed to wait because I might “get it there.” Bill said there was no way, and if I did he’d buy me a new pair of golf shoes. So I took out my 5 wood and smashed it right up into the group. Bill, to his credit, said “I’ll be darned,” and sure enough bought me a brand new pair of white golf shoes the next day that I kept for years. Bill’s power, naturally, receded even more as he got older, however his overall game stayed about the same. I’d guess that on your average U.S. public course his actual score would have been in the low 100s, give or take.

Now any golfer knows that a score in the low 100s, while certainly not great, is where a lot of golfers will land if they were to play every shot clean. However, very few golfers play every shot clean. Here is a non-comprehensive list of how golfers trim strokes off their total score. Some of these methods are outright cheating, while others may be agreed upon among the players before hand.

1. “Improving one’s lie.” This is a very common method of cheating that involves subtly, or not so subtly, adjusting the ball to a better lie (position) on the ground. This may include shifting the ball from wet grass to drier grass, nudging the ball out from behind a tree, moving the ball a few feet from an out-of-bounds position to an in-bounds one, pulling the ball out of shallow water onto dry land, and many other moves. In golf, a lie adjustment of just a few inches can sometimes make a huge difference, and can often be accomplished without another player seeing.

2. Flat out shaving strokes off your reported score. This rather brazen method is also quite common and simply involves lying about how many shots you hit. Players basically never do this when they played a good hole, for example a player will almost never claim to have scored a 4 on a par 4 when they actually scored a 5. This is because a 5, for an amateur player, is still a fine score. However, when a player scores let’s say an 8 (“a snowman”), or a 10 or 11 (“sticks”), the reported score may drop a few. Group mates usually know or suspect that cheating is happening, however if another player took 11 strokes this means they hit a bunch of grounders or something and it can be hard to keep track of everyone’s shots. In my experience, a cheating player may be asked “really, you scored a 7 there huh?” and may come back with “yeah 7 for me,” or the classic “oh yeah, I forgot one. It was an 8.” Basically everyone knows the cheating player is BSing, and sometimes a fellow player will call him or her on it. “That wasn’t a 7, come on dude.” But most of the time, especially if the game is not for money, people will let a few strokes here or there slide.

3. Shaving strokes by pretending certain swings were “practice.” This is most commonly seen when a player has landed in a sand trap (or “bunker”) and has taken 3 or 4 strokes to get out of there. Sand traps are great for cheating because many of them are sunk several feet into the ground, and it is often difficult for other players to tell what’s going on down there. Therefore, a player who hits a few balls into the wall of the sand trap in front of him can just fall back on the “those were just practice swings” move. If another player saw the swings, well the ball didn’t really move and it can be hard to tell. This move only really works in sand traps through because otherwise it becomes too overt.

4. Hitting the ball back in bounds from out of bounds. This is a move that I myself have pulled off many a time. I don’t respect out of bounds markers. Now, I understand that it’s not great to be crossing a busy road to get to a wayward drive and then hitting the ball back across said road. However, such thoroughfares aside I feel like a golfer should be able to chose to play any ball she can find. Nonetheless, although it is morally acceptable, this move is also technically cheating as you are supposed to take a penalty stroke or two.

5. Dropping a new ball on the ground when unable to find a lost ball. This is another very common move famously depicted in the James Bond movie Goldfinger and also I think a favorite of the Trumpster. In fact, that Trump probably stole this move from Goldfinger. A player pulls out this move when her drive or long iron has gone into the long grass or trees and after poking around, cannot be found. Here, the player will have a ball at the ready in a pocket and just casually drop the ball in a decent lie while calling out “I found it.” This move works well, and I recommend it to the golf cheater who wants to build a little subtlety into their repertoire.

6. Taking a “gimme.” A “gimme” is a shortish putt that instead of putting out the player just picks up and “counts.” Now I think this is actually against the spirit of golf in many ways because any golfer knows short putts are far from easy. In fact, short putts are fucking difficult. A two or three foot putt that a lot of players may take as gimmies are anything but, and can be extremely nerve-racking. A gimme player may shave 3–6 strokes easy over the course of a round from gimmes along. Gimme players suck, but they are everywhere, and many foursomes will just allow gimme play in the interest of speeding up the game and lowering scores. If a group is going to be a gimme group, they should really establish what this means. For example, a lot of putters have a leather grip of between one to two feet or so, and some people will play “gimmes inside the leather.” Putts inside the leather are still totally missable, however at least this is a standard. There is nothing worse than some dude looking at a 5 foot putt and just saying “I’m taking that.” Yeah, you’re taking it cause you’re missing it brother.

7. Taking a mulligan. This is only borderline cheating because it can only really be done by mutual agreement. A mulligan is when a golfer drives the ball into the water or the woods and just takes a do over. Some groups will give every player one mulligan per nine holes. I don’t really mind mulligan play, although it can reduce a total score by about 5. Mulligans are cheating, but they are civilized cheating.

8. Playing to one’s “handicap.” This is the most bizarre method of cheating, which I will explain a little later through the lens of my aunt’s second husband Jerry.

So my grandfather Bill Kolb, as you will already have ascertained, cheated at golf. He cheated at golf so religiously in fact that it was mentioned in his eulogy. Bill favored method #2 above. He might have taken a gimmie here and there, and maybe improved his lie a bit, but his go-to was just to cap his score on any given hole at 7. So if he scored a 7, he’d report a 7. If he scored a snowman, that’d be a 7 too. Sticks? Another 7. For a so-so player, capping scores at 7 is not a bad play, however it sometimes looks ridiculous. The 8>7 move is one thing, but if a player takes double digits to get the ball in the cup, his group mates are going to be aware. Bill’s devotion to the 7 cap though was tough to crack because he was absolutely consistent with it and it happened so often that one’s ability to resist was worn down and wilted. Through his 7 cap and a few other measures, Bill would usually be able to shave several strokes off his score and report in the 90s, a much more respectable outcome than low 100s. Everyone knew this, but no one could or wanted to do anything about it. He was the patriarch, he was beloved, and his cheating at golf over time became part of the reason people loved him.

My aunt’s second husband Jerry though is another matter. He favored cheating method #8, which is the most egregious and infuriating by a long shot. The dude would “play to his handicap” by playing every shot straight and scoring what he scored on each hole. Then, let’s say he made a 95 overall, we would say “hey there Jerry, 95 today?” and he’d say, “nope, 84. I played to my handicap.” What did this mean? It meant that he had recorded somewhere in a database or something that his handicap, or average score, was 84. This handicap was the purported result of an aggregated average of his rounds from some earlier point in time. Now, everyone on earth understands that just because you shot an once 84 five years ago you are not guaranteed to shoot an 84 today, or ever again actually. Dr. J used to be able to soar in the air and pull off 360 dunks, and today he can barely edge the ball over the rim. Time is a bitch, and in any case you can’t just claim an 84 because of some number in a database. It’s completely absurd. However, this was his move, every time.

I would play with Jerry and my dad and bothers, and because I have a big mouth sometimes, I would push back on his 84. “Hey man, you didn’t actually take an 84 though, you took a 95. So how is it that you got an 84.” “That’s my handicap,” he’d say, “I can’t score over my handicap.” What? Can’t score over my handicap? Yeah buddy, that’s like saying I can’t weigh over 164 pounds because I weighed that once. That’s absurd. But it didn’t matter. Dude was taking the 84 regardless. After all, he made one once.

The “play to my handicap” move bears no resemblance to how professional golfers deal with their handicap of course, nor does it track with any other sport in the world to my knowledge. No basketball player after a tough loss says, “now actually we didn’t lose because although the final score had us down by 6 my scoring average is 32 and although I only scored 17 tonight, I get +15 because it’s my average so we win by 9.” That player would rightly be seen as insane. No figure skater says, “well I fell twice tonight, but I usually don’t fall, so my score goes up by 1.2” or whatever. Golfers are full of it, I guess, and can get away with this kind of nonsense around their handicap.

Looking back, although I found both methods of cheating, the 7 cap and the play to my handicap move, annoying at the time the first remains far more forgivable than the second. The 7 cap is relatable — no one wants to see those high numbers on their card, and when done with a little joie de vivre comes across as very human. The handicap move is still pretty aggravating though. It’s like the handicap player is playing some kind of intellectual game, like they think they are smarter than you or something. Jerry is not a bad golfer per se, but he’s a 95 not an 84, and just needs to deal with it.

Dedication: For Bill Kolb, a great man but a mediocre golfer.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s, Part V. 7/27/25-8/3/25. Eight Transition Days: Money, Women, My House Fails To Sell, and I Wave My Dick All Around Japan, Apparently.

Epigraphs:

Baka. You are waving your dick all around Japan. What am I going to do with you?

Litz

I wanna know girls, don’t wanna know men.

Superchunk

Roll another number for the road/ I feel able to get under any road.

Neil Young

Something’s going to happen. Something always does.

Billions

Author’s Note:

I recently fell eight days behind on this series and briefly considered abandoning the missing week altogether. Reconstructing every hour would have been impossible, and pretending otherwise would have produced eight dutiful but lifeless entries. So I have produced something different: one long, thematic account of the money, marriage, women, music, writing, travel plans, ordinary routines, and general weirdness that comes with it all.

What surprised me during the edit was that the piece had a story after all. Much of the week was spent trying to persuade banks, apps, lenders, and machines that I existed. They rejected my address, my identification, my telephone number, and at one memorable point the year 1974 altogether. Elsewhere the people who matter most came through. Sachie called me by my old name. Zach understood the central point of my marriage essay. Readers found an eight-year-old piece buried in the archive. And my son stayed on the telephone with me for nearly two hours and called me Papa. I cried The chronology fell apart. Life did not.

===== =====

I fell behind.

There is no good explanation for this. I did not deliberately fracture chronology in order to interrogate the instability of memory. I was not experimenting with form. I simply stopped keeping up. My last completed diary entry was July 26, and by the time I looked up again it was August 3. Eight days had passed, the material had multiplied, and reconstructing every morning, afternoon, evening, cigarette, loan application, woman, walk, song, meal, nap, argument, and minor technological catastrophe in order would have required another eight days.

So this is the compressed version.

Eight days. Several dozen financial institutions. More women than I can count. One marriage at its end, one house waiting to be sold, one son suddenly talking to me for nearly two hours, four packs of Camels briefly representing unimaginable wealth, and a song essay from eight years ago inexplicably climbing above Wikipedia on Google.

Chronology can take the week off.

I. Money

Money has dominated my days of late.

There are plenty of other stories—love, marriage, sex, music, family, writing—but every one of them existed beneath the same low-pressure front. Could I get downtown? Could I get back? Could I buy cigarettes? Could I put money on an my ICOCA card? Could I book a hotel, board a train, eat something other than eggs and pasta, or convert one of the many theoretical financial instruments surrounding me into actual currency?

The strange thing was that money always seemed to be coming.

A card was coming. A transfer was coming. A lender was reviewing. A bank was processing. An email was imminent. A cheque was in transit. A customer-information update had been accepted. A human being somewhere was allegedly examining at my file.

Money was everywhere except in my pocket.

I applied to ACOM, AIFUL, Seven Bank, Promise, Mobit, Resona, Sony, PayPay, Prestia, Rakuten, SBI, and enough regional banks to constitute a tour of Japan. Chiba. Fukuoka. Nagoya. Kyoto. Every fucking prefecture appeared to have a bank and every bank appeared to have designed its website specifically not to work

The applications followed a familiar pattern. First came the promise of speed.

Approval today.

Simple online procedure.

Borrow whenever you need it.

Then came the reality.

Photograph your residence card. No, not like that. Turn it slightly. Move closer. Dude move farther away. Fuck you and fuck your face.

Use better lighting. Take a selfie. Turn your head. Hold up a handwritten note. Hold up the ID beside your face. Enter the address in full-width katakana. Enter the address in half-width numbers, whatever that means. Enter your employer’s telephone number. Not that telephone number. Another. Your birthday is invalid. 1974 does not exist. Yeah right. 1974 existed because I had personally was there. Fuck you again my friend. Fuck your face while you are at it.

Yeah. OK.

At ACOM I eventually reached a human being, which seemed promising until she informed me, with a little apologetic shrug, that the AI had said no. She could not explain why. The AI had spoken. The oracle had issued its judgment. Go home. Take a shower. God knows at this point I needed one

Lake allowed me to progress through the most Byzantine application of all time before deciding I was apparently the wrong category of foreign resident. Whatever. PayPay refused to read my ID card. Rakuten could not process Ritsumeikan’s address and telephone number despite twenty attempts. JCB rejected my birthday. Really dude? Yeah really. Kyoto Bank briefly sent me into a branch-selection circle in which code 142 somehow transformed into code 566. And back. And back again. I entered 142 again. The system contemplated this information and returned me to the beginning. Fuck.

The great Acropolis of Japanese consumer finance has many staircases and no entrance. It’s like the Winchester House of something.

The worst moment came with a lender that appeared near the top of the Google search results claimed that 1 million yen already been deposited into my online wallet. 1 million yen. The wallet showed a magnificent balance. Cold hard digital cash. All I had to do was transfer it to Kyoto Bank. Great. Fucking finally.

Then came the request. Pay ten percent of the loan first. There it was.

The scam unveiled itself with all the elegance of a man opening his raincoat on a subway platform. They had invented the loan, invented the wallet, invented the balance, and now wanted real money to release the imaginary money. I closed the window. There would be no ten percent. There would be no transfer. The million yen would continue its rich fictional life without me.

Meanwhile, actual life became an exercise in microscopic accounting.

A handful of coins. A few hundred yen on one card. Perhaps twenty or thirty dollars on another.

Enough for one round trip downtown, maybe. Four packs of Camel Blues. A dozen eggs and coffee. For a few hours I was rich.

Then I was broke again.

I. My House

Behind the immediate cash crisis sat the larger financial fact of my house.

My wide and I bought it in 2007 for roughly $380,000 after she negotiated it down from about $400,000. Good work by her. The house is around 110 years old, in Sakyo Ward, two minutes from the beautiful Kamogawa river, near houses worth millions, supermarkets, restaurants, a mall, a police station, and all the ordinary conveniences that make a neighborhood viable.

It also shares a structural exterior wall with the neighboring house. This is the problem.

The wall is concrete, substantial, and old. The two houses appear to have been constructed together, and the neighbor is in his mid-nineties, assuming he is still alive. I have not seen him or his wife in years. His adult son, who once came regularly with groceries and dealt with the practical business of keeping two elderly people alive in an old house, has also disappeared from view.

The neighboring garden had gone wild. Ours is hardly Versailles, but theirs looks as though nature had filed a successful adverse-possession claim.

Could a developer demolish our house without demolishing theirs? Probably. Kyoto carpenters have dealt with harder problems than an attached wall. Would the wall reduce the number of buyers? Almost certainly. Would it make the property impossible to sell? I don’t think so. The location is good. The land is desirable. Experienced builders know how to solve structural problems when the numbers make sense.

Still, the wall remains, silent, forbidding, concrete, holding up both houses and complicating our futures.

I began to do the math.

Sell for $380,000. Lose perhaps $60,000 to commissions, taxes, and associated costs. Net $320,000. Split evenly: $160,000 each.

Except it is not that simple.

I have paid the entire mortgage since 2007. I have paid the utilities, the internet, three cell-phone bills over twenty years, appliances, most of the groceries, much of Daisy’s food, and well over $400,000 for Hugh’s education from kindergarten through university. The house is in my name.

I could build a case in my head. I did build a case. I built it for hours.

But marriage is not a civil trial conducted by a man lying naked in bed with green tea, four packs of Camels, and a calculator.

A few weeks, after thinking about it for a while, I told Sachie I would give her half. She said she wanted nothing. I suggested $50,000, and she agreed.

This was the last conversation on the matter, about three weeks ago.

The ethical question is not whether I can prove that I have paid more. I have. The question is what I want the final act of a twenty-seven year marriage to look like.

For now, the answer is simple: honor our most recent agreement. Figure out what the house is actually worth. Sell the house. Divide whatever money comes in money.

There will be time enough to decide when the wall, the buyer, the agent, the taxes, and the actual sale price stop being theoretical and finally become real.

II. Sachie, Marriage, and the End of an Era

The financial accounting and the emotional accounting were different books.

This became clear while I was writing On Meeting My Wife Sachie, the first piece of a planned longer series about the marriage and divorce. I wanted to begin at the beginning because the end may be overshadow everything that came before it. Sachie is not merely the woman leaving our house, refusing the proceeds from the sale, arguing over our garden, or moving back toward her parents.

She was once a young woman whom I loved. I was once a young man she loved. The line Zach later singled out was: This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. That is the heart of it.

And now she is my ex-wife, a fact I find both funny and sad in equal measure.

Before resentment, accounting, separation, and twenty-five years of accumulated evidence for the prosecution, there were two people at the beginning of something. I want to give those people their due.

During these last eight days, we argued. We negotiated. She gave me ¥3,000, then another ¥3,000. She bought coffee filters but not bread or butter. She handled a cheque in a way I initially found incomprehensibly complex. I cursed, breathed in, calmed down. I listened to her explanation, and realized she was not intentionally trying to be difficult. She is just outta control.

Sachie is preparing to leave for Kumamoto in two weeks. Boxes accumulate. The house begins to feel less like a home than a staging area. We discuss bills, the garden, Daisy, our son, money owed, money promised, and who would keep which possessions.

There are moments of old intimacy in the language. I recently started calling her Sachan again. She calls me Machan. For just a minute we are back in 1997. It feels great. But it will not last.

Last week there was another earthquake in Kumamoto where my wife’s parents live. They were safe after the earthquake, and when I heard I felt a rush of relief. Her father Tetsuo is ninety-one and her mother Kazuko is ninety. I have known them for decades. Whatever has happened between Sachie and me, Kazuko still loves me. I love her too.

And I will probably never see her again. This is sad. Divorce does not merely separate two people. It closes a a whole chapter.

There are roads you no longer travel, houses you no longer own, nicknames you no longer use, relatives who become former relatives. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens. A door closes quietly, and one day you realize the entire geography of your life is now somewhere else

Still, Sachie and I talk. We make practical arrangements. We lend each other small amounts of money. We love the same child and the same dog. We can, at the best of times anyway, remind ourselves that neither of us is the villain of the piece.

The villain is time. As usual.

III. Hugh

Yesterday Hugh called. We spoke for an hour and fifty-three minutes.

This was almost certainly the longest telephone conversation we had ever had, and perhaps the longest uninterrupted conversation of its kind in years. Usually Hugh has ten minutes, twenty if I am lucky. He juggles work, plans, friends, screens, trains, a life. I am busy too. This time he had nearly two hours because he had just quit his soccer influencer job

On the phone he told me that was done.

He still likes football. He just does not want to spend sixteen hours a day editing football videos anymore. He had reached the same point with editing that I have reached with teaching: not dislike exactly, more like completion. That chapter has delivered everything it was going to deliver. It is now closed.

He had been doing most of the work while someone else took took a higher percentage. He agreed to this. Tolerated it for a while. But no more.

I told him I understood. And I did.

He is already freelancing, DJing trip-hop and electronic music, building something that is actually his. He is planning to move to Tokyo and eventually to buy a house. He casually told me he has saved about $50,000.

Fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-two. I have spent the last week trying to extract enough money from the Japanese banking system to buy a few packs of cigarettes and get downtown. My son had quietly assembled a down payment. I am so damn proud of him.

He told me he would come home tomorrow to pick up Daisy and keep her for a month or so while Sachie gets settled in Kumamoto. Later he told me he couldn’t come after all.

Typical. Hugh is a wonderful young man but he cannot keep a schedule for the life of him. Oh well. That’s just Hugh I guess.

Before that he said something that broke me open. He said in the next month he would bring Daisy back by a few times.

Just a day trip. A small kindness. An adult son anticipating the emotional needs of his father without being asked.

“You’re the man,” I told him.

“I love you, Papa,” he said.

“I love you too.”

There it was. The emotional center of the week.

Not the loans. Not Pattaya. Not the women, the house, Google, or the endless packs of cigarettes.

A son on the phone. One call. Two hours. My only son. Fuck.

We talked about Wise. I have an account somewhere but can not remember the password, naturally. He said he would refer me, earn a small bonus, and help me set up another path for my money.

We talked as two adults. Feels great.

I remember the boy, of course. Fathers always do. But the person on the phone is not a boy. He is a young a man, making decisions, leaving a job he no longer wants to do, moving to Tokyo, saving money, taking responsibility for Daisy, making time for me, building a life. What a deal..

IV. Women, Dating, and Sex

These last days there have been many women. Many many women. I find this pretty remarkable.

This is not a boast so much as a statement of fact. The apps multiply: Sugo, Tinder, Tapple, Thai Friendly, OkMeet, French sites with competent translation, text-only sex sites, and others whose names I forget. Free sites, cheap sites, sites that cost an arm and a leg. I started to develop lists. The Thailand list alone has maybe sixty names. More women than I could possibly meet. Tokyo has another half dozen. I began scheduling women the way a conference organizer schedules panels, except the conference was in Pattaya and the keynote address was sex.

At the center of all this chaos remains Litz.

Litz is real in the way the some of the others are not. Although no longer a couple, Litz and I still talk several times a day and text all the time. She knows my jokes, the invented women, her fake rivals Cindy and Julie. I tell her that Cindy is in bed with me and Julie is waiting her turn. She responds as though this ridiculous betrayal required serious adjudication. She says “baka you are waving your dick all over Japan. What am I going to do with you?” She is super funny. She is also, as many women are, totally outta control. Many men, myself included, are outta control too, however it is my experience that women are just that little bit extra outta control. For some reason.

Then there was Yua who I met online about a week ago. She has spent most of the last week, several hours a day, attempting to obtain a ¥5,000 Apple gift card, later negotiating it down to ¥3,000 so she could supposedly keep her “siblings” occupied with video games while she comes over for sex. She is 28. How young could her siblings be? I do not believe they exist at all, and are in fact just an elaborate cover for this increasing bizarre and tendential scheme of hers to fleece me for 50 bucks. For a solid week. Outta control.

Her commitment to the bit is almost admirable. Day after day she returns to the same small objective with the determination of a director of an intelligence service. Five thousand yen. Three thousand yen. Whatever I can afford. Baby what?

I began to admire the sheer disproportion between effort and reward. Either she liked me on some level, or she is perpetrating the least efficient scam in history. No rational person works six days for a ¥3,000 gift card. Yua, therefore, is not rational.

I thought of the Poison song Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Over time I have found this to be true. In this case, I reflected, every Yua has its thorn. And she is a thorny one that’s for sure. And yet I still talk to her. Go figure. I guess I am just weak this way.

Clara said she would come over from Osaka She got dressed. Maybe. She prepared. Perhaps. She vanished. Maybe she is real. Maybe she is not. Maybe she is a ghost. Maybe somewhere in Kyoto a beautiful woman is wandering around looking for me. God speed baby.

The two Lisas occupy separate jurisdictions.

One is the Yubari melon chick from Tokyo, beautiful enough that I continue to entertain her somewhat extravagant request for two extraordinarily expensive melons. I find this almost respectable compared with Yua’s ridiculous Apple gift cards. She is also extremely cute with her melons and all. At least Yubari melon exist.

Two melons for love. There are worse dowries.

The other Lisa lives in Amsterdam and floats somewhere in the broader international cloud of flirtation and scheduling.

Masha is my little Turkish bird. She communicates in stickers, goddesses, magic, feathers, and strange little fantasies. She asked for relatively small digital gifts and remains charming enough that I kept allowing for her many eccentricities. She is, of course, totally outta control. She could be an AI, a woman using AI, a woman pretending to be a bird, or an actual bird with excellent English. She could be anything really.

Then there are the many “UN nurses” imporbably stationed in combat zones. Three in five days. Donbas. Yemen. The Ukraine. Refugees. Humanitarian missions. Canadian surgeons wearing scrubs. Major Aaron. Whatever baby. You are a scammer and I don’t believe a single word you say. Oh well. Just one of the hazards of modern online dating I guess. Seen it all before. Bin.

Meanwhile Good Old Mr. Wank (oh yeah baby you know exactly who I mean) has remained the most dependable member of the cast.

He requires no gift cards, no airfare, no melons, no hotels, no flirtation, and never fails to appear when summoned. Mr. Wank rules.

Underneath this baroque carnival lies deep loneliness. I sometimes feel that sex is barely the point anymore. All I really want is to lie beside a woman, kiss her goodnight, and hold her until she falls asleep. Eventually I will sleep. If I’m lucky. That’s just the way things go as a lifelong night owl.

I love women.

V. My Writing

My writing this last week has been interesting.

My new daily series has begun to find readers. The first entry remains the leader among the new pieces. The essays on Litz and Sachie are about tied. My bisexuality piece is trailing a bit, which surprises me. Can’t always predict these things I guess.

Then my Dylan Thomas essay exploded.

The essay is eight years old, and I had redated and reposted it in 2024. For years the reliable traffic leaders at Kyoto Kibbitzer have been my Kris Kristofferson essay, Trump Gemini Dream, and my Razzlekhan essay.

Then, about six weeks earlier, On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Rhyme began climbing. And climbing.

No campaign on my part. No new angle. No obvious news hook. It simply rose beyond all expectations.

In thirty days it received hundreds of views, blowing past every other piece on my site. I searched the eassy title and found it above Genius.com, radio stations, videos, and—amazingly—Wikipedia. Amazing. Dude what is going on? Something.

The piece still holds up. It examins the song’s clever AABCCB rhyme scheme, its near-rhymes, and its general alternation between political anxiety and private hedonism. “Corset” and “Corvette.” The general and the king. Dylan Thomas dying on the barroom floor. A shower at the Bates Motel. The world collapsing while the narrators search for another drink. It is a great song and I am happy the essay is doing so well.

The success of Dylan Thomas sent me back into the archive. I reposted My Brother Mike’s Bad Book, the Mariners story in which Mike, drunk and rowdy but morally precise, heard someone defending a man shouting gay slurs and replied with four perfect words:

“That’s a bad book.”

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

The Razzlekhan essay disappeared from Word Press recently. I have no idea why. Something. I found a copy on Medium where I used to cross-post many of my pieces. I copied it into Word Press and republished it. Thank god.

Zach sent me a thoughtful note about my essay about meeting my wife. He understood piece immediately, especially the line about two young people on the cusp of life. He invited me to English Mass and told me he had begun a new essay called A Summer Day. I would be traveling, so I declined the Mass, but I am glad he is writing again. He is an excellent writer,

The archive was not dead. It had merely been in hibernation.

VI. Summer

Summer currently exists in the future tense.

Tokyo. Bangkok Pattaya. Hydra. Athens. The Czech Republic. Busan. New York, briefly, before its hotel prices restored sanity. Yeah right. I wish.

Every destination seems possible. None are booked.

I will go to Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hydra as soon as my money kicks in.

Get high as blazes. drink Pina Coladas on the beach, wear my sunnies, try to avoid a sunburn, rail women for days, spend too much money, get laid. Thank god. What a life man. What a life.

Pattaya is going to be outta control. Lovely Harmony for three nights. Matteneee for another. Jenny on my last night in town. Jenny and Matteneee are both escorts. I asked them both if we could have anal sex and if they were on birth control so I could cum inside them. They both said yes. Condoms are a necessarily evil but do suck. Hard.

Bar girls, freelancers, the beach, weed, fruity drinks with umbrellas, swimming pools. All the metier of a recently divorced middle aged man going through a soft mid-life crisis. I make absolutely no apologies for any of this. It is what it is. Life goes on.

VII. Music

Music did not sit beneath the week. It carried it.

The Grateful Dead on my long walk into town: Catfish John, Must Have Been the Roses, and Black Muddy River. Jerry rules like no other. God does he rule.

Neil Young arrived.

Unknown Legend, Crime in the City, Cortez the Killer, Thrasher, Albuquerque with the great Mark Kozelek cover, Roll Another Number for the road. Songs became routes through the day, places to stand while everything else moved.

David Lowery’s Fathers, Sons and Brothers showed up and kicked ass, predictably. He rules too. He rules beyond all things. God I love David.

Then came the Drive-By Truckers/ Jason Isbell Patterson Hood song draft with my friend chat. I love to draft with chat, although he is and remains a big fat nabber. Oh well. It is still great fun.

We left Cover Me Up off the board, which was either courageous or simply malpractice.

Our list included “Dress Blues,” “Relatively Easy,” “Outfit,” “Birthday Boy,” “Speed Trap Town,” “The Day John Henry Died,” “Goddamn Lonely Love,” “Elephant,” “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “The Righteous Path,” “Buford Stick,” “Decoration Day,” “Children of Children,” “Alabama Pines,” “Codeine,” and “Super 8.”

“Super 8” nearly broke the whole draft open:

Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well.

COME ON dude. Jesus Jason. Easy buddy.

Their combined catalog is not merely Southern rock. It is a curriculum in adulthood: fathers, sons, dead friends, drinking, divorce, work, small towns, the left behind, bad decisions, dignity, memory, hope, and the impossible notion of getting another chance after you have already used several.

Patterson Hood writes the people history forgets. Jason Isbell writes the ones who survive themselves. Mike Cooley walks in every third song, drops a perfect line, and checks out to hit the bar. The band simply rules. They all do.

I reflected on minor musical questions. Is Lucinda Willaims’ cover of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents better than the original. It’s tough but I think so. I listened several times to The Pixies absolutely shredding on Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On.” I put on Phosphorescent’s glorious cover of Corpus Christi Bay. Seam covering Breaking Circus’ Driving the Dynamite Truck. Nobody remembers Breaking Circus today. Nobody. Their version of Dynamite is marred by typical crappy 80s production which the Seam version cleans up. Whoever happened to these guys? No one knows. They are simply lost to the sounds of time, as we all will be one day.

The Mountain Goats have a new album coming out in just two days. Ryan Adams has a new one too that I am getting into.

Music is the best, and the world remained blessedly worth living in because of it.

VIII. Ordinary Days

Between the financial drama, romantic sub plots, and musical drafts, and my increasingly outta control mother my days slid by as usual.

Coffee. Green tea. Cigarettes on the balcony. Lying naked in bed half the day my PC propped up on my knees, writing. My buggy AC. Two fans on high. Porn. Phone calls. Existential angst. Sleep.

The second floor landing off the stairs remains a death trap. I toss laundry and dishes there and don’t dare step on the wooden boards lest I fall to my death. I am not remotely joking. From an actuarial perspective, the landing remains the most likely way for me to meet my final demise. I should take out insurance.

The area beside the bed improved. I removed most of the chocolate wrappers, cigarette packs, bottles, and general archaeological evidence of recent life. Beneath this material my residence card remained missing. Fuck.

A dozen voice-recording apps failed in different ways. I rely on text-to-speech apps for my writing and most of them suck. Of course. I finally found one that works well enough. They want $11.99 per year. No brainer.

I sleep in short blocks: an hour, two, four max. I woke, drank water, urinate off the balcony, smoke and do it all over again. It is, as the Feelies say, only life after all.

My body complains. Knees. Back. Ribs. Balls. My eyeballs burn from the cigarette smoke.

Sunburn across my stomach and shoulders after my five-mile walk beside the river in the sun. I look like a lobster. Oh well. It will pass,

I take several painkillers a day, trying to stay on dose, Why? No reason really. Just everything fucking hurts. I’m 52. What are you gonna do?

I’ve been slowly sipping a bottle of Napoleon Brandy for two weeks. It is too warm and I keep forgetting to get ice for it. Of course. I am just out it these days I guess.

My bicycle still scares me a little half a year after my winter crash. The roads are dry now, the heat intense, no ice to be seen, but my body remembered the crash. I remain skittish.

IX. Comedy

Life, among other things. is invariably funny.

Rainbolt, the GeoGuessr madman, who sees one sepia utility pole for half aa second along wth a patch of Polish grass, and calmly and corrently announces that we are twenty-two and a half miles west of Kraków. Make it make sense.You cannot. Rainbolt is just outta control. He’s some kind of savant I guess.

I want to re-watch the Joan Rivers documentary “Piece of Work” but I keep putting it off. Joan is hysterical. RIP to a real one.

Randy Quaid remains generally Randy Quaid. Obviously. He is insane. He just is. Dude the CIA gets up to some shit sure, but they are not in fact bugging your mind from an implant somehow magically implanted in your tooth.This is not a thing my friend. It is just not. Get a life. You’re outta control.

I remember Will Smith fucking slapping the shit outta Chris Rock at the Oscars over a totally tame G.I. Jane joke and then returning to his seat as though live global television had briefly become his living room. What a bizarre more. Will what are you doing my friend? Unbelievable.

Christian Dreyer sent a minimalist cartoon of two people in a car approaching an enormous fork lying across the road.

“It’s lunchtime!”

Totally bizarre. Dreyer is weird. No notes.

My mind drifted for some reason to the 70’s. TV shows like The Newlywed Game, The Love Boat, and The Dating Game, where an actual serial killer once appeared as a contestant, won the date, and was rejected afterward because the woman found him creepy. I was too young to watch these shows, however I am aware of them through the zeitgeist. Outta control.

The JonBenét Ramsey ransom note remains one of the strangest documents in American criminal history. The parents ate guilt as sin. They just are. It is a fact.

The alleged Trump Moscow hotel pee tape on the other hand remains unproven, although a remarkably well put together fake video circulated a few years ago because someone, somewhere, for some unknown reason, invested real time and effort into manufacturing the world’s most notorious and probably nonexistent pee video. Why? Reasons of their own. We will never know.

I began an essay called Was Donald Trump Peed On in Moscow? The likely conclusion: I do not know. Neither do you. That is the point, This does not prevent anyone from having absolute confidence one way or the other. Whatever dude. It was years ago. It’s just a little pee. So what? Let’s move on.

===== =====

Overall it has been a funny week. Then there was the Japanese loan interface informing me that 1974 never existed. Yeah right guy. Get a grip.

Then the three “UN nurses” purportedly in combat zones. Come on lady. You are a big fat clip-jointer. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Get over yourself. Get.a real job lady. Sit this one out.

Yua’s six-day campaign for ¥3,000.

The price of two Yubari melons standing between me and love.

The phrase “crap on a cross,” followed by the reasonable question of how the crap actually got up there.

This was life, basically.

Outta control.

X. Eight Transition Days

This last week did not really resolve. That is the fact.

No big loan arrived. The house did not sell. Sachie had not yet moved out. Thailand is somewhere down the line. Greece too. I cannot wait to hit the road again. I love to travel. I just do.

But something has shifted.

The archive woke up. The Sachie and Litz essays are doing well. The dailies are off to a good start. My son called. It is too hot. My AC doesn’t work. Damn.

That was the week.

Everything else—the lenders, women, cards, trains, cigarettes, apps, travel sites, melons, war-zone nurses, Greek islands, shared walls, Google rankings, impossible birthdays, all the rest—spin around this fact.

Something’s gonna happen.

It always does.

Dedication:

For Litz. You can take this D anytime you like baby.

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The Genius Razzlekhan and the Phony Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I went home with the waitress/ the way I always do/ how was I to know/ she was with the Russians too.

Warren Zevon

Author’s Note:

Some essays begin with a thesis. This one began with me laughing so hard I nearly fell out of my chair.

When Heather Morgan—better known as Razzlekhan—was accused of participating in what was then described as the largest cryptocurrency heist in history, nearly every media outlet converged on the same joke: look how terrible her rap videos are. I saw something different. Behind all the memes was someone making deeply strange, completely sincere outsider art. Whether you think it’s brilliant, awful, or somehow both at once, there is no mistaking its originality. I have always had a soft spot for artists who refuse to color inside the lines.

The surprise, though, was Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He wandered into the story for reasons best known to himself and, in my opinion, emerged looking far sillier than the alleged crypto queen ever did. Years later I still think the real story wasn’t the memes. It was how quickly the internet decided who deserved ridicule—and how often it picked the wrong target. Razzlekhan may have been the weirdest person in the room, but weird has never bothered me. Poseurs always have. This is their story.

===== =====

This is the saga of the queen of crypto hacking Heather Morgan, aka Razzlekhan, and the shameless tail chaser and phony public intellectual (is there any other kind) Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Just so we are clear about who is who here, Taleb, the bestselling author “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile” is the villain, and Morgan, who along with her husband is accused of pulling off the largest heist in human history ($4.5 billion dollars) is the heroine. Morgan was briefly a Twitter star in late February 2022 when her alleged crimes were revealed; however her stardom was not based on her hacking prowess, but rather on what was perceived (incorrectly) to be her world-historically awful rap videos, including, but not limited, her banger “Versace Bedouin,” in which, among other things, she names herself “the crocodile of Wall Street.” Here is a taste of her work (note that the real Heather Morgan appears to be in her early 30’s, and is certainly not a grandmother. Also, the video depicts Morgan rapping around the Wall Street district of New York City with three women “dancing” behind her, one wearing large green gardening gloves and carrying a flag with a design we are unable to clearly see for the entire video):

Razzlekhan’s the name/ the hot grandma you really wanna bang/ always run the gilf game/ ever since I was fif-taneee

I’m many things/ a rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO/ and a dirty dirty dirty dirty ho

Better than most writers/ creepier than most girls/ weirder than most rappers/ but I still rock pearls.

Alert listeners will note the apparent Liz Phair reference to Razz’s sexual maneuvering in her teens, suggesting that there may be at least a little guile to her lyrics. But what impresses me (and I’ll just state this right out-I think Razzlekhan is a misunderstood genius) is the straight ahead sincerity of the lyrics. I mean Versace Bedouin was released before Morgan was implicated in the crypto hack and here is her dedication at the top of the song:

Never forget, weirdest is the most original/ this song is for the entrepreneurs and hackers/ all the misfits and smart slackers.

The really hardcore music fan may pick up a possible Drugstore reference from “Say Hello”:

I say hello/ to all the junkies/ the sinners and the creeps/ I say hello to all the people in this place/ I say hello /to all the drug heads/ the prostitutes and freaks/ I say hello/ to all the people in the world!

But even I don’t think Morgan is a Drugstore fan, so the resemblance is most likely coincidental. What I love about Razz’s work here is that Versace Bedouin is a simple and totally sincere statement of intent. She tells the listener exactly who she is and what she’s about. She’s a weirdo and misfit, a hacker, a probable criminal, a business owner, and a dirty ho, and she is just letting the world know. She is, as the kids say, putting the motherfucking world on blast. Razzlekhan is coming for your bitcoin, baby, lock that shit down.

And the media loved it. The Guardian wrote a long (and pretty helpful) article on Morgan with the lead “Is this the new face of organized crime? Decoding Razzlekhan, the rapping bitcoin fraudster.”

“Who is this Bitcoin crime queen” they write breathlessly “and what does she tell us about the future of organized crime?” Well Mr. Guardian, that’s a good question that maybe I can shed some light on. Morgan and her husband (who, like the rest of the uncaring world didn’t care for her rap career-Heather I’m here for you man, just reach out) stole the money, allegedly, from the platform Bitfinix but were unable to convert much of into cash or liquid assets and had to settle for Walmart gift cards instead. So that might tell you something-I’m not sure how organized the pair was.

Mr. Guardian again:

“It is hard to articulate how it feels to be alive in an age of massive wealth disparity and multiple deregulatory lines of questionable crypto minting, but I think watching an alleged Bitcoin embezzler struggle through painful rap bars in a flat-billed cap that reads ‘0FCKS’ is a good summation of the overwhelming confusion.”

But it really isn’t hard to articulate at all-it feels great, because while Heather Morgan the journalist, CEO, and dirty ho may be facing a little legal trouble, Razzlekhan the artist, in my opinion, stands unbloodied and unbowed atop the pinnacle of outsider art along with Daniel Johnston, Mayo Thompson, and the handful of other transcendent geniuses so far ahead of their time they were subject to as much ridicule as they were celebration.

(My favorite piece of music criticism ever comes from a Pitchfork review which doesn’t seem to be online anymore of The Red Krayola’s 1989 album malefactor, ade-it must have been a re-release because Pitchfork wasn’t around in ’89 of course-where the critic accuses Mayo Thompson of “playing the guitar badly, on purpose.” And it’s pretty true. The Red Krayola is out there.)

Razz herself embraces the outsider role and speaks directly to her artistic origins and sensibilities in her artistic biography:

Razzlekhan is like Genghis Khan, but with more pizzazz… No one knows for sure where this rapper’s from — could be the North African desert, the jungles of Vietnam, or another universe. All that matters is she’s here to stick up for misfits and underdogs everywhere (…) Because Razz has synesthesia, her art often resembles something in between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare. Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended, Razz likes to push the limits of what people are comfortable with. Her style has often been described as “sexy horror-comedy,” because of her fondness for combining dark and disturbing concepts with dirty jokes and gestures. Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.

To my knowledge, no major media outlet even gave Razzlekhan a fighting chance; however I invite you to read the above self-description again with care. She is not in the least bit joking around. She identifies variously as a Bedouin, Turkish, a nomad, and an alien. Later in the same piece she identifies her influences as: Die Antwoord, Tierra Whack, Mickey Avalon, Salvador Dali, Diane Arbus, Hunter S. Thompson, Roald Dahl, and Charles Bukowski. This is a consistent, real, list of artists that a true outsider might well identify with. At the Razzlekhan level, the distance between greatness and awfulness is razor thin, artistic merit being, like everything else really, a circle not a line. In any case, judge for yourself — pull up a Razzlekhan video on You Tube (they are still there) and see what you think.

But what does any of this have to do with the author Nicholas Nassim Taleb? Well, it would have had nothing to do with him if our boy hadn’t chosen, with exquisitely poor judgment, to interject himself into the Heather Morgan/ Razzlekhan drama. Within hours of the heist news breaking, Mr. Taleb posted the following:

I have several things to say about this nonsense:

I. Check his use of “Attention” and the scare word “vulnerability.” Taleb thinks this message is super important and even urgent. He’s got to get it out there RIGHT NOW.

II. The story is obviously total BS. Taleb seems to have no sense of how Twitter works, and his narrative is so bizarre that he is basically begging us to roast him, which users in the hundreds did, of course.

III. Taleb gives no insight into why Morgan was DMing him. What did she want? Well, users, myself included, had a theory as to what might actually have occurred here. Occam’s Razor would suggest that at some point Morgan and Taleb began exchanging DMs, possibly on her initiative, as she was writing extensively for Business Insider and Forbes I believe, and maybe she wanted to ask Taleb something about one of his books. Taleb then pivoted into a bit of tail chasing, or, as one Twitter denizen put it slightly less crudely, he was looking for a little “bobs and vagine.” When Morgan was arrested, Taleb got spooked that somehow their DMs would leak, so he concocted a ridiculous cover story almost (but not quite) as stupid and unbelievable as Joy Reid’s claim that her fifteen year old blog with homophobic jokes and comments was hacked by Russians.

IV. The use of “some more recently” is a pure “tell.” Taleb’s bobs and vagineing has been going on for some time, it seems. But why in the world would Taleb think that the messages would leak just because Morgan was arrested (she was later released and her husband was held in custody, and I haven’t been able to get a status update on where she is today)? I mean there are really only two options: i) that the messages would be released by the FBI or something as pertinent to the case, in which case Taleb and Morgan would have been discussing her hacking. This seems highly unlikely; ii) Morgan would choose to release them herself in an effort to incriminate Taleb. But Nicholas baby, this is just not going to be a priority for Morgan after her arrest. I mean, she is accused of stealing 4.5 billion, and she’s got her rap career, and her husband is in prison. She has got stuff going on man; your DMs are way down the list.

All and all, this message shows that Taleb is an idiot and a complete joke. And people took note, including Edward Snowden, piping up from Russia. Check this out:

Snowden comes in with the savage take down here, and Taleb punches back with an offer to debate, what exactly? It’s not clear if this the debate challenge was issued prior by Taleb nor is it clear, at least to me, what is to be debated. Are they supposed to talk medical issues? Mental health? Hacking? Bobs and vagine? Taleb continues to make no sense, and Snowden let’s him know with another zinger:

Main Character Syndrome indeed. I would add Major Asshat Syndrome and Big Phony Fraud and Fragile Loser Syndrome as well. Because this is the guy who wrote Antifragile! Which is supposed to be about things that thrive during chaos, or in other words, things which are resilient. And nothing says resilient like faking a hacking narrative to cover your tail chasing, issuing an incomprehensible debate challenge to someone way out of your league, and tripling down with blocking random twitter users who question you. And I would know, because after I liked the bobs and vagine comment and added something like “Methinks Mr. Taleb doth protest too much,” the fucker blocked me too! Sadly that Twitter account is history so I can’t post a screenshot, however it was obvious that this huge baby was scrolling chats and mass blocking to distract from his disastrous piece of public relations. Honestly, the whole thing was super funny and Taleb showed his ass in the worst possible way.

Taleb obviously thinks he is hotshit. Check out his Twitter bio.

What a poser. A flaneur is a French term for someone who walks the streets taking things in, and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about the flaneur in his epic, and epically unfinished “Arcades Project.” Actually, a flaneur is a lot like a kibitzer. I am the Kyotokibbitzer (two b’s baby), and I love Benjamin’s work, including the Arcades Project. I bet Taleb is aware of Benjamin and fancies himself a fan. But he doesn’t know the first thing about Benjamin, because Benjamin was a humble guy who did great work and Taleb is a braggart, a tail chaser, and a bum. Deadlifts and dead languages my ass. Text is dead there Nicholas, at least your texts are, because you made a complete fool of yourself and you suck. Taleb exemplifies precisely why I dislike anyone who calls themselves a public intellectual or an expert. He is a poser and I’ll bet you 10 to 1 his ideas are stolen just like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s, another total loser who piggybacks on people who know something to pump up his image. (A sure sign of a loser is a “public intellectual” who insists on using three names. What’s wrong with Nicholas Taleb or Neil Tyson? The only people who need three names are serial killers; I mean even public intellectual number one Malcolm Gladwell only uses two names. Gladwell is known to pilfer ideas as well, but The Tipping Point is a pretty good read and the dude genuinely knows a tremendous amount about the sport of running. And he doesn’t call himself “Malcolm Julius Gladwell” or whatever. This is because he’s just a writer and knows that using his middle name would make him a prat.) Anyway, it’s totally fine to fake it ’til you make it, and most of us do to a greater or lesser degree, but you can’t fake your way into being an expert. Never trust “experts,” full stop.

So that’s the story of Razzlehan, the misunderstood genius, and Nicholas Taleb, the big phony. And in case you are asking, yes I did ask Razz to get in touch with me above. I’d say “I can fix her,” but she needs no fixing. She can DM me all she wants, and she doesn’t even have to get the Russians involved.

Dedication:

For Razz. You rule baby. So damn hard.

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On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Ryhme

Author’s Note:

This essay is now eight years old, and I honestly have no idea what happened.

For years the traffic champions around here were predictable: my Kris Kristofferson essay, Trump’s Gemini Dream, and the piece on Razzlekhan all traded places at the top of the charts. Then, about six weeks ago, this old essay on a Better Oblivion Community Center song simply… took off. No promotion. No rewrite. No obvious reason. Somehow it climbed past everything else on the site and, at least for many searches, now even appears ahead of Wikipedia and the major lyric sites for “Dylan Thomas.” I remain completely mystified by it.

I’m certainly not complaining. This piece has always been one of my favorites because it isn’t really a review at all. It’s an excuse to talk about rhyme, structure, near-rhymes, politics, hedonism, Dylan Thomas, Paul Westerberg, Conor Oberst, Phoebe Bridgers, and why some songs continue revealing themselves long after you’ve memorized every word. Eight years later I’m still hearing new things in it—and apparently, somehow, so are a surprising number of other people. I’ll happily take the mystery.

=====

This post is about the song “Dylan Thomas” from the first Better Oblivion Community Center record. For the uninitiated (which is probably everyone reading this–recently a friend texted me a funny article from The Onion entitled “Study: No Two People Have Listened To Same Band Since 2003”), Better Oblivion Community Center is Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers. “Dylan Thomas” is the single, if singles still existed. You still won’t know them.

I want to write about the song because it has a killer structure and is awesome. The structure is based around a neat rhyme scheme with fabulous use of “near rhymes” and also around a see-saw in the verses between fairly pointed political commentary and apolitical hedonism. As with all interpretation, I can’t be sure that what I hear was intended, but what the hell–communication is what the listener does after all.

Now, a lot of songs, most, rhyme. That’s obvious. But not too many songs really hold up on the page as well, as poetry. I think “Dylan Thomas” does and I’d like to explore why.

Verse I:

It was quite early one morning/ hit me without warning/ I went to hear the general speak/ I was standing for the anthem/ banners all around him/ confetti made it hard to see

So the first verse clearly alludes to our political moment–it appears politically engaged to some extent. The reference to “the general” is redolent of South American politics (I am reminded of the fabulous Drugstore song “El President”). The rhyme scheme is tricky–it’s AABCC(D), where (d) “see” almost rhymes with “speak” in the delivery although the words don’t actually rhyme, instead being only vaguely alliterative.

Verse II:

Put my footsteps on the pavement/ starved for entertainment/ four seasons of revolving doors/ so sick of being honest/ I’ll die like Dylan Thomas/ a seizure on the bathroom floor

Verse II sees a clear shift from the political to the personal, the hedonistic, the depraved. While Thomas is famous for his “rage against the dying of the light,” Better Oblivion taps the seedier side of Thomas’ legacy–the singers (most of the songs on the album including “Dylan Thomas” are duets) in verse II are seeking pleasure and there is no hint of the macro picture here. So, verse I=macro, verse II=micro.

The rhyme scheme shifts to AABCCB, with a definite rhyme between “doors” and “floor.” “Entertainment” and “pavement” I would consider near-rhymes, and the slightly off-kilter near-rhymes are for me what really make this song stand out as a piece of writing.

Chorus:

I’m getting greedy with this private hell/ I’ll go it alone, but that’s just as well

Hard to say exactly what “this private hell” refers to, however we get a sense of doubling down on the dissolute–in for a penny in for a pound as they say.

Verse III:

These cats are scared and feral/ the flag pins on their lapels/ the truth is anybody’s guess/ these talking heads are saying/ “The king is only playing/ a game of four dimensional chess”

Verse III is clearly political again, setting up a 1 for 1 see-saw (so far). “Cats” here cuts both ways–on the one hand “people” with flag pins in the era of truthiness, on the other, well real cats are feral. It’s a very clever, subtle move. Is the general from verse I the king from verse III? Probably. We live in an era where world leaders are not in the business of leading, but rather of playing elaborate, endless games.

The rhyme scheme here is a AABCCB where the second C and the second B are part of a single quote. Very nicely done.

Verse IV:

There’s flowers in the rubble/ the weeds are gonna tumble/ I’m lucid but I still can’t think/ I’m strapped into a corset/ climbed into your corvette/ I’m thirsty for another drink

This is where the song really comes into its own as a mini-masterpiece. On its own, this verse is nakedly apolitical and local–I am reminded of one of my favorite lines of all time from the final Replacements album. The song is “Someone Take the Wheel” and the line goes: “they’re fighting again in some fuckin’ land/ ah throw in another tape man.”

In 1990, Paul Westerberg didn’t give a shit about the Iraq War and wanted nothing more than to listen to music on the road. That’s an understandable point of view on the level of the human individual. What I love about what Oberst and Bridgers do with this song is how they alternate verses between the macro and the micro, the engaged and the depraved. The same conceit is used on the first song of the record, “Didn’t Know What I Was In For”:

I didn’t know what I was in for/ when they took my belt and strings/ they told me I’d gone crazy/ my arms are strapped in a straight jacket/ so I couldn’t save those TV refugees

I get this sentiment. Seriously I do. If we zoom out a bit on our world situation these days, we could easily say that every person with even a patina of ethical conscience ought to be on the front lines in one way or another. And then I look at myself and…well, I chose Medicine Sans Frontiers as the charity that gets some small percentage of my Amazon purchases. Will the future see me as a head in the sand hedonist? Probably, and with some justification.

The rhyme scheme in verse IV is again a clear AABCCB with near-rhymes (probably the first time in history “corset” has been rhymed with “corvette”), in fact the same scheme as limericks. I f***ing love AABCCB. God bless it. Also, the line “I’m lucid but I still can’t think” pretty much summarizes my entire life to date.

Verse V:

If advertised, we’ll try it/ and buy some peace and quiet/ and shut up at the silent retreat/ they say you’ve gotta fake it/ at least until you make it/ that ghost is just a kid in a sheet

AABCCB again, the scheme which carries the song with the striking exception on verse I. Verse V alludes to the theme of the record–Better Oblivion Community Center is some kind of partially defined wellness retreat–and kind of splits the difference between the political and the personal, the macro and the micro. It also serves as a commentary on the commercialization of “wellness” and is a cheeky meta-comment on the cover of Bridgers 2017 debut:

Is this a shot at some critics? A self-aware reference to a DIY cover? I don’t know, and I love the line.

Following the logic of this piece, we have a kind of scheme of the verses as well. Let’s call is ABABC where A=political, B=apolitical, and C splits the difference.

Verse VI/ Outro:

I’m getting used to these dizzy spells/ I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel/ I’m getting greedy with this private hell/ I’ll go it alone, but that’s just as well

It’s a simple AABB with the outro calling back the chorus from mid-song. The see-saw between the personal the political sort of resolves itself in the killer couplet. “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells” suggests acclimatization to the altitude–metabolization of the fear. “I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel” is an amazingly effective counterpoint line–we are living at the knife point of maniacs. Ah well, let’s hit the bar. I’m thirsty for another drink.

Seriously, check out “Dylan Thomas” and the whole record. I know no one listens to anything I listen to, but still.

Postscript: So Mr. Spotify seems to have decided that “Dylan Thomas” is my very favorite song, and cues it up time after time after I’ve finished listening to whatever I have selected. I do love this song, by Mr. Spotify there is almost making me tired of it. Change it up there Mr. Spotify please.

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My Brother Mike’s Bad Book

Subtitle: A Mariners game, a rowdy night, and the moment my brother defined himself with four perfect words.

Author’s Note:

Some stories stay with you because of what happened. Others stay with you because of what they revealed. This one has always belonged to the second category. It started as a funny night at a Mariners game and ended as one of those moments where a person’s character becomes perfectly clear in the space of a single sentence.

I’ve written a lot over the years about family, friendship, and the people who quietly shape us. This remains one of my favorite examples. Mike has always been capable of making a room louder, funnier, and occasionally more chaotic. But beneath all of that is a remarkably reliable moral compass. Four words—“That’s a bad book.”—told me everything I already knew. I still smile every time I think about them.

Several years ago I attended a Seattle Mariners baseball game with my bother Mike. The Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays, and we went out for a few drinks before the game right next to the stadium. I was amazed by just how many Blue Jays fans there were in town for the game. They were all over the place.

Now, although I grew up in a baseball family, as I got older I kind of lost interest. The games are just too long and there are too many of them. However, going to a game in person is pretty cool. Mike is still a hardcore Mariner fan, which I respect. On this night the Mariner’s star pitcher Felix Hernandez was pitching, and the Mariners won the game. However, the result is far from the most memorable aspect of that night.

Our seats were pretty good, right next to, but not actually in, the “K Zone” where the Hernandez heads were. Over the course of the first few innings, Mike downed several more beers and he got a little rowdy, as he sometimes does. Mike, in Freudian terms, has more than a little “id” in him. As I mentioned, there were a lot of Blue Jays fans in town and Mike, as a good Seattleite, took this as a challenge. As the game went on he began calling out, loudly, various Canadian cities.

“Calgary suuuucks…Winnipeg suuuucks…Lethbridge suuuucks.” Like that.

I found this all pretty amusing, if a little unorthodox. It wasn’t how I would chose to enjoy the game, but this was Mike’s style. As the Mariners built a lead Mike’s chants started to escalate, and some Blue Jays fans began to take offense. Probably this was the point. These dudes were looking at Mike, pointing, saying things. There was no real risk of a fight; however Mike was mixing it up no doubt.

Around the 5th inning or so another dude in a Shawn Kemp jersey started making noise of his own. (Shawn Kemp was a star player for the Seattle SuperSonics back in the day before some asshole stole the franchise and moved them to Oklahoma City. Fuck that guy.) At first this was all fine, because anyone in a Sonics jersey was OK with Mike. However the Sonics fan started getting a little out of line and dropping the f***** slur.

“Look at this fucking f*****. Fuck this f*****,” stuff like that.

As far as I could tell there was no reason that this guy had to target an individual in this fashion. The difference, as I saw it, between his action and Mike’s was that Mike was basically operating in good humor and calling out all the Blue Jays fans present in the spirit of friendly competition, while the Sonics fan was picking on an individual, and using a slur. Although the exact nuances of the difference are perhaps debatable, the dude was definitely out of line.

Mike noticed this guy and didn’t like what he saw. He began saying so, and someone not in our group took notice. This other guy, in regards to the Sonics fan, said something to the effect of “he’s ok in my book.” Mike didn’t miss a beat at he uttered the classic line, one I will never forget.

“That’s a bad book,” he said.

That’s all he said; he didn’t challenge the guy to a fight or anything, didn’t even directly address him. The Sonics fan was getting so abusive that someone called security, and he was escorted out.

“That’s a bad book,” reminds me of my friend from high school Cameron Turner who liked to say of something he didn’t approve “that’s sick, and wrong.” Both of these are super memorable phrases, and highly redolent of the person behind them. Mike was a little lit. Mike was razzing Blue Jays fans as a collective. Mike was attracting attention. At the same time he felt that there was no need for gratuitous gay slurs. And he was right.

One of my favorite phrases in the world is “that’s some bad action.” Mike was speaking in the same vein with “that’s a bad book.” I’ve never been prouder of anyone in my life than when Mike called this guy out.

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

Postscript: Just a little while ago Mike and his fiancee had a baby, Felix. Named, of course, after the pitcher. So that’s pretty cool. I just hope he doesn’t grow up to be a Blue Jays fan.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days of Nights of My 50s, 7/26/26: A Minor Day

I: Morning

I woke just after 6:40 this morning with the pleasant emptiness that follows a good night’s sleep and, occasionally, good sex. The room was quiet. My head was clear. Osaka was already stirring.

I brewed a coffee in my room, then wandered downstairs for another one from Lawson, bought a bag of crisps, and smoked a few heaters.

Travel logistics, I’ve have come to realize, occupies only a fraction of my days these days. The rest is spent trying to make sense of what happened yesterday.

I opened my essay draft from last night.

“She looked like her picture…but not quite.”

Good.

“She joined me in the shower.”

Fine.

“She began to stroke my dick.”

I stared at the sentence. Technically accurate. But could I do better? Try again. The morning became less about memory than rhythm. Every sentence asked a question.

Too much? Not enough? Funny? Honest? Self-indulgent? I changed “dick” to “cock.” Then changed it to “dick” again. I have no logical explanation for this. It just felt right.

Then there was the kissing. I looked at the sentence “her tongue had been just a little aggressive.” True. Funny. Fair. It stayed.

Other things didn’t. I caught myself trying to make everything dramatic. I deleted entire paragraphs. I was making progress. Outside my window Osaka continued existing without the slightest interest in whether one sentence sounded better than another.

Inside my room, however, the fate of Western literature seemed to depend upon whether I’d written “I checked Google Maps again” or “I checked Google Maps for the tenth time.” The latter had to go. It was writerly inflation. Get it outta here.

II: Early Afternoon

Whenever I edit, my brain begins making improbable associations. One sentence reminds me of a song. The song reminds me of a film. The film reminds me of another book.

Then suddenly I’m Googling Moneyball pictures because I need a photograph of Brad Pitt smiling for my essay cover.

I put on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Dirty Water with that one immortal line.

“Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you/ ain’t what that were supposed to do?”

Perfect, I thought. There’s your epigraph.

By mid-morning I’d spent three hours changing words that most readers would never notice. Dick. Cock. Looked. Seemed. Perhaps. Another cigarette. More editing.

There are days when writing feels like building a cathedral. There are other days when it feels like repeatedly moving the same chair around the living room in search of the perfect angle.

=====

After lunch I finally leaned back. The piece wasn’t perfect, but it was alive.

Yesterday had begun as a train ride, become a date, drifted into sex, wandered through a convenience store at half past midnight, detoured into Zero Dark Thirty, and somehow wrapped at six thousand words.

That’s the strange alchemy of memoir. You don’t write life. You live it first. Then you spend the next morning discovering what it was actually about.

III: Late Afternoon

Whether you know it or not—if you’re even halfway interesting—you eventually become Larry King.

“Morning folks…maybe Hong Kong… maybe the weather… coffee…”

Dot dot dot. The famous Larry King ellipsis. God, I loved that.

“Mets win…”

Always the Mets.

“Mets win… rain tomorrow… baby dies… RIP… gonna take a shit… Larry out…”

Everything separated by ellipses like every thought had exactly the same emotional weight. That’s genius. USA Today probably paid him a million bucks for two tiny paragraphs. Larry transcended journalism. It was its own literary form.

Speaking of old media guys, I think this has been reported, so I’m not talking out of school. Mandiola said Larry was up against it money wise when he died. Eight marriages. Eight divorces. Totally outta control.

After sixty-five years at the pinnacle of broadcasting, CNN, the huge interviews, all of that… supposedly there wasn’t much left. You assume people who sit on top of the mountain for half a century just become permanently rich.

Apparently not.

=====

Hong Kong still sounds attractive to me. Not just because of the escorts. Honestly, I can get dumplings anywhere. But there’s something about Hong Kong. South Korea too, though prostitution isn’t really an option there. That’s okay. I’ll get on the apps when I feel like dating.

I don’t actually want another marriage. I thought I did with Litz six weeks ago. Turns out I was just rushing in and being dumb.

Ian texts nd says a bunch of those Scott Walker songs on YouTube are probably AI. Sure dude. Doesn’t bother me. Fine brother, fine.

IV: An Early Night

I don’t have a lot to say about last night. I didn’t get an escort. I didn’t even browse the escort sites. Mostly, I slept—twice more—and finished editing and publishing my essay He Gets on Base. Other than that, I didn’t do much of anything.

Cape Canaveral remained the soundtrack of the evening. I don’t even remember whether I talked to Litz. I had the tempura soba for dinner from the store, and that’s about all I can confidently remember.

Around five o’clock, I realized I’d slept very little over the past week. As I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t really slept well since I was fourteen, with very few exceptions. A week of minimal sleep isn’t unusual for me. After several days, though, it inevitably catches up with me. This was one of those times.

Earlier in the day, I’d finished a somewhat difficult edit of my journal entry, Am I Bisexual? After publishing that, I turned to the previous day’s essay, He Gets on Base, which was also running a bit behind. I thought I could get it edited and published before going to sleep, and, thankfully, I was right.

A couple of hours later, I took a short nap. When I woke up, I washed up, drank some water, put on some fresh music, and went back to work. I don’t remember thinking about much besides finishing the essay. That was the goal, and I wanted it out the door.

I finally fell asleep for the second time around 10:00 p.m. and woke up around 3:30 a.m.—a perfectly normal night by my standards.

Overall, it was a good day. I didn’t accomplish much in terms of sightseeing or adventure, but I did get two overdue essays edited and published. I caught up on some badly needed sleep, felt productive again, and, in the end, that was good enough.

This will probably be one of the shortest entries in The Days and Nights of My 50s, but not every day needs to be an epic. Sometimes getting the work done and getting some sleep is story enough.

Dedication:

For sleep. Thank god.

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[The Days and Nights of the 50s, 7/25/26. He Gets on Base.

zmust be eighty meterswith planters all the way down , with planters all the way down it.

Some benches have backs.

Some don’t.

Obviously I’m taking the deluxe seating.

No plans today.

That’s the plan.

Maybe extend another night.

No reason to move.

Red Roof got cancelled.

Waiting on the Sony card.

Probably head back Tuesday unless Hugh suddenly decides otherwise.

I doubt it.

He said “maybe.”

That’s already twenty percent.

Then he didn’t text back.

That’s another twenty percent.

I just don’t think it’s happening.

If he calls, maybe Kobe.

I’m not cold-opening Kobe.

Women?

Sure.

Friends?

Different rules.

Bought Camels.

Pure economics.

American Spirits are ¥440.

Marble Blacks are ¥660.

Camels were something like ¥480 for twenty.

The math wins.

Star liked my pieces.

There’s something going on there.

I know there is.

She texted back fast enough.

Not saying anything dramatic.

Just…

I have a read on these things.

Music.

Nothing beats side two.

“Rock & Roll.”

Then “Sweet Jane.”

Come on.

Lou Reed was absolutely on one.

People always talk about “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Fine.

It’s good.

But Street Hassle…

Different universe.

He played twenty-plus minutes of it live when I saw him in 2003.

Incredible.

Rosie’s in Thailand.

Pink hair now.

Twenty-three? Twenty-four?

Typical Thailand.

III: Late Afternoon

arly Afternoon

Dude, whether you know it or not—if you’re even halfway interesting—you eventually become Larry King.

“Maybe Hong Kong… maybe the weather… coffee…”

Dot dot dot.

The famous Larry King ellipsis.

God, I loved that.

“Mets win…”

Always the Mets.

“Mets win… rain tomorrow… baby dies… RIP… gonna take a shit… Larry out…”

Everything separated by ellipses like every thought had exactly the same emotional weight. That’s genius. USA Today probably paid him a million bucks for two tiny paragraphs. Larry transcended journalism. It was its own literary form.

Speaking of old media guys…

I think this has been reported, so I’m not talking out of school. Manuel said Larry was almost broke when he died. I don’t know the numbers—I think Manuel threw out something like a million dollars in debt—but the point wasn’t the number. The point was that after sixty-five years at the absolute top of broadcasting, CNN, the huge interviews, all of that… supposedly there wasn’t much left.

Again, that’s Manuel’s story, not mine.

If true, it’s fascinating.

You assume people who sit on top of the mountain for half a century just become permanently rich.

Apparently not.

Hong Kong still sounds attractive.

Not because of escorts.

Honestly, I can get dumplings anywhere.

But there’s something about Hong Kong…

South Korea too, though prostitution isn’t really an option there. That’s okay. I’ll get on the apps if I feel like dating.

I don’t actually want another marriage.

I thought I did with Liz.

Turns out I was just being dumb.

No regrets.

Seriously.

I forgive myself completely.

Starter still hasn’t gotten back to me.

Hugh either, but it’s only six in the morning, so he’s asleep.

Ian says a bunch of those Scott Walker songs on YouTube are probably AI.

Could be.

Doesn’t bother me.

I barely know what he’s talking about half the time anyway.

Green gum.

Always green gum.

The black stuff is basically gone in three chews.

Do people actually chew gum for half an hour?

I don’t.

Three chews.

Done.

This bench is better.

The hotel has this long strip outside—must be eighty metres—with planters all the way down it.

Some benches have backs.

Some don’t.

Obviously I’m taking the deluxe seating.

No plans today.

That’s the plan.

Maybe extend another night.

No reason to move.

Red Roof got cancelled.

Waiting on the Sony card.

Probably head back Tuesday unless Hugh suddenly decides otherwise.

I doubt it.

He said “maybe.”

That’s already twenty percent.

Then he didn’t text back.

That’s another twenty percent.

I just don’t think it’s happening.

If he calls, maybe Kobe.

I’m not cold-opening Kobe.

Women?

Sure.

Friends?

Different rules.

Bought Camels.

Pure economics.

American Spirits are ¥440.

Marble Blacks are ¥660.

Camels were something like ¥480 for twenty.

The math wins.

Star liked my pieces.

There’s something going on there.

I know there is.

She texted back fast enough.

Not saying anything dramatic.

Just…

I have a read on these things.

Music.

Nothing beats side two.

“Rock & Roll.”

Then “Sweet Jane.”

Come on.

Lou Reed was absolutely on one.

People always talk about “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Fine.

It’s good.

But Street Hassle…

Different universe.

He played twenty-plus minutes of it live when I saw him in 2003.

Incredible.

Rosie’s in Thailand.

Pink hair now.

Twenty-three? Twenty-four?

Typical Thailand.

Then out of nowhere…

An old girlfriend pops up.

Haven’t talked in thirty-four years.

Barely thought about her except when the algorithm reminded me she still exists.

Now she wants me to call.

Why not?

Thirty-four years.

What’s the worst that can happen?

I’ll give her a ring.

We’ll see what happens.

Duder out.

=====

Then there was the kissing.

I liked writing that her tongue had been “just a little aggressive.”

Whenever I edit, my brain begins making impossible associations.

One sentence reminds me of a song.

The song reminds me of a film.

The film reminds me of another book.

Then suddenly I’m reading Moneyball captions because I need a photograph of Brad Pitt smiling.

Why?

No idea.

It simply feels right.

Then Kevin Drew enters the room.

“Good sex never makes you feel hollow.”

Perfect.

That’s the epigraph.

Sorry, Bukowski.

You’ve just been replaced.

By now I’d drifted into The Sopranos.

I’ve watched the entire series twice.

One of my favourite moments comes near the end, when Carmela asks Meadow whether she’s really leaving.

Meadow says yes.

Carmela asks, “So you wanna get out?”

Meadow nods.

Carmela smiles sadly.

“Let me draw you a map.”

I’ve always loved that line.

It’s funny.

Protective.

A little manipulative.

Entirely maternal.

Like so much of The Sopranos, it’s simultaneously warm and faintly menacing.

Good dialogue almost always carries two emotions at once.

That’s something I’ve stolen shamelessly.

By mid-morning I’d spent three hours changing words that most readers would never notice.

Dick.

Cock.

Looked.

Seemed.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

Delete.

Undo.

Delete again.

Smoke.

Coffee.

Another cigarette.

More editing.

There are days when writing feels like building a cathedral.

There are other days when it feels like repeatedly moving the same chair around the living room in search of the perfect angle.

This was definitely a chair-moving day.

Around lunchtime I finally leaned back.

The piece wasn’t perfect.

It never would be.

But it was alive.

Yesterday had begun as a train ride, become a date, drifted into sex, wandered through a convenience store at half past midnight, detoured into Zero Dark Thirty, and somehow ended as six thousand words.

That’s the strange alchemy of memoir.

You don’t write life.

You live it first.

Then you spend the next morning discovering what it was actually about.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of the 50s, 7/25/26. He Gets on Base.

Epigraphs:

So you wanna get out?
Let me draw a map

–Superchunk

Good sex it never makes you feel hollow
Good sex it never makes you clean

–Kevin Drew

I watched your face die backwards
Little baby in my memory
You told me victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

–Conor Obrest

I. Morning

I slept better than I have in a long time. As best as I can recall, I went to bed around 12:40 AM. and woke up around 6:40 AM. Six hours is not necessarily a full night’s sleep, but lately it has felt like a luxury. I woke up clear-headed, made coffee in my room, and headed down to the Lawson around the corner for another one. I picked up some potato chips while I was there, wandered back to the hotel, and settled into the morning.

The first order of business was practical. I checked my messages, replied to my son Hugh, and told him I’d be happy to swing by home on Monday as long as he let me know what time he expected to be home. “Love, Papa,” as always. I checked in on Elliott as well. Nothing had changed. As of this writing, we’re still meeting at 6:30 this evening at a beer bar in southern Osaka, and I am looking forward to it.

Once these logistics were out of the way, my mind drifted, as it sometimes does, toward movies and television.

I started thinking about The Sopranos. I’ve watched this show all the way through twice, and I’ve revisited a number of episodes over the years. I think James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli both give remarkable performances, and there are many individual scenes I genuinely love. Even so, I’ve gradually realised that David Chase’s aesthetic simply isn’t mine. Whether the repetition is intentional or not—and I suspect it is—I find both the storytelling and the character arcs to be cyclical.

The performances remain compelling, but the show continually circles back over the same emotional territory. I understand why so many people consider it one of the greatest television dramas ever made. I don’t. I like it and I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever watch the series again.

Thinking about The Sopranos naturally led me to the dialogue that has stayed with me over the years. Not necessarily the greatest lines ever written, but the ones I find myself returning to.

Roger Wade, in The Long Goodbye, pours two glasses of anisette and says to Philip Marlowe, “Take that goddamn J. C. Penney tie off.”

Marlowe calmly replies, “I’m happy to drink with you, but I’m not taking my tie off.”

I don’t know why I love that exchange so much, but I always have.

Another favorite comes from Godfather II. Michael Corleone’s sister comes to him with her new boyfriend Merle to ask Michael for money.

“Connie, I don’t know this Merle. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know what he lives on. Tell him you’re never going to see him again, and come and live with me in Tahoe.” She does of course. It’s funny, oddly romantic, a little menacing, and super funny.

Then there’s The Wire. Bodie has always been my favourite character, and one of my favourite exchanges comes in Seasons 3 shortly after Cutty gets out of prison.

“I’m surprised Avon lets y’all get your heads up.”

Bodie shrugs.

“Sometimes you got to.”

Four words. An entire philosophy.

Seinfeld contributes one as well. Kramer proudly shows Jerry his silk boxer shorts and encourages him to buy a pair. Jerry politely declines.

“No thank you. They’re just a little too delectable for me.”

Perfect.

Finally, there’s Michael Clayton. Arthur Edens has come apart at the seams strips off in the deposition room. Michael flies to Wisconsin to rescue him, and after a brief argument simply says,

“Let’s get out of Milwaukee and we’ll talk about it.”

Sometimes a single sentence can contain an entire friendship.

As I thought about these great quotes, I realized something that hadn’t quite crystallized before. I don’t dislike slow films. I dislike static ones. I love Tarkovsky, but I don’t love all of Tarkovsky equally. Mirror and Stalker feel alive to me. Nostalghia does not. Likewise, I don’t need constant action, but I do need movement—emotional, philosophical, psychological, narrative. I want to feel that a story is becoming something different from where it began.

That, I think, is the aesthetic I’m really chasing. After that my thoughts wandered to Craig Finn, the singer-songwriter who heads the Hold Steady.

The first Hold Steady song I ever heard was “Sequestered in Memphis.” At the time I misunderstood the entire premise. I thought the narrator was giving an interview to a journalist rather than being questioned by the police. Looking back, it seems obvious, but it never occurred to me then.

What always stayed with me, though, was a single line:

In barlight she looked alright. In daylight she looked desperate.

I’ve know exactly what Craig means here. I’ve been there too.

By then the morning had slipped away from me. As of this writing, I’m still working on my essay, Am I Bisexual? It should probably have been published two days ago. It’s one of the more complicated pieces I’ve written in a while, and I’d rather finish the edit properly than rush it out simply to keep the daily streak alive.

The plan from here is straightforward. I’m going upstairs to keep editing for another hour or two. I’ll get organised, probably grab a short nap later this afternoon, and then head down to southern Osaka in plenty of time to meet Elliott at 6:30.

Everything else can wait.

II. Afternoon

By nine I’d finally stopped putzing about I was about to start. I rearranged the room one more time, put on Neil Halstead instead of Ryan Adams, then Ryan Adams instead of Neil Halstead, opened three browser tabs, closed two of them, looked at hotel dates, thought about escorts for exactly as long as I had promised myself I wouldn’t, and somehow convinced myself this counted as preparation.

It did, in a way. Every writer has their rituals. Mine mostly involve avoiding the sentence I’m about to write.

I remembered a much loved Superchunk lyric:

“So you wanna get out / well I’ll draw you a map.”

This turned out to be the whole morning. Dude if this place sucks so bad just jet. I’ll buy you and Amtrak ticket. Seriously bro. Hit the brinks.^

The next few days existed only as pencil marks: maybe Osaka until Monday, maybe longer, maybe Pattaya, maybe Litz, maybe Hugh, maybe Mio. None of it fixed. Just possible roads branching away from the same hotel room.

The night before, Litz had mentioned how much she loved the ending of piece I wrote about her. I had already mostly forgotten this part, so I took another look. It went like this:

The challenges in our relationship are the product of two imperfect people, each bringing old habits, old fears, old hopes, and old wounds into something new. This is not failure. It is simply the complicated business of being human.

I made it halfway through before I started crying. Not dramatic crying. Just enough that I had to stop reading. Sometimes a paragraph waits until you’re ready to understand what you wrote.

III. Early Evening:

Around 6:30 this evening, after working for about an hour and a half on the edit of yesterday’s journal, I walked a few minutes from my new hotel to a nearby convenience store to get something to drink.

Several hours earlier, I had texted my friend Elliott to ask whether he wanted to grab a drink tomorrow night. As I walked to the store, he replied that he was up for it and suggested a beer bar in southern Osaka. I told him I would meet him there.

Thinking about Elliott, I reflected on how much I admire his intelligence. I am a high school teacher, and Elliott used to be one of my colleagues. He left the school years ago and now tutors economics online and manages various investments. He also used to teach mathematics.

I am a social studies teacher. Over the years, I have taught a wide variety of classes, and I feel that I could adequately instruct students in almost any area of social studies. Elliott’s mathematical intelligence, however, has always struck me as remarkable.

In fact, I sometimes envy the mathematics teachers I have known, because mathematics is simply not one of my strengths. I was a decent math student for a time, but I hit the wall with calculus during my junior year of high school and never took another math class. Today, I almost never use mathematics except for the calculator on my phone and a little basic financial housekeeping.

This does not mean that Elliott is smarter than I am. I consider myself highly intelligent. Nonetheless, several times over the years, I have wondered whether he might indeed be smarter than me.

Thinking about it today, I realized that this is probably because his intelligence expresses itself very differently from mine. If I absolutely had to, I could probably relearn enough mathematics to teach middle school. That would be about my limit. Elliott is whip-smart and could probably teach most of the social studies classes I have taught without too much difficulty.

I often reflect on how strongly my intelligence expresses itself in certain areas of life, while in others I am essentially incompetent. I have a solid understanding of subjects such as history, politics, philosophy, psychology, religion, and metaphysics. However, I could not change a tire to save my life.

Although I am not exactly made of money, I almost always call a professional to handle household tasks such as fixing a faucet or clearing a drain. I find these jobs to be a tremendous hassle. In fact, they piss me off. I am happy to pay someone a few dollars to come and sort them out.

As I entered the convenience store, my thoughts turned to the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin is one of the greatest television and film writers of all time. I love The West Wing and The Social Network, and I have enjoyed much of his other work. For reasons of his own, however, Sorkin insists on directing some of his films.

He wrote and directed Molly’s Game. Molly’s Game sucks ass. The script is incomprehensible and all over the place. It is, without question, the worst piece of writing he has ever produced. The direction is equally terrible. The characterization is weak, the emotional beats are overdone, and the entire film is syrupy and sappy. I cannot stand it.

A second film of interest here is The Trial of the Chicago 7, which Sorkin also wrote and directed. The script is actually quite good, and the acting is strong. Once again, however, Sorkin’s direction is awful.

The film concerns the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was not alive at the time, but my understanding is that thousands of protesters gathered in the city, largely in opposition to the Vietnam War and to the Democratic Party’s handling of it. The police responded with tear gas, clubs, arrests, and widespread violence. Some protesters fought back, and things became extremely ugly.

There are only a few major action sequences in the movie. Sorkin’s handling of them is pure trash. He has no idea how to direct physical chaos. The cameras are always in the wrong place. It is difficult to tell where anyone is or what is happening. The entire thing feels out of control, and not in an intentional way.

Molly’s Game is a bad movie, and I do not care. The Trial of the Chicago 7 could have been a good movie with competent direction. Sorkin was simply not the man for the job.

As I walked back to my hotel, I began thinking about how strange it is that otherwise intelligent people, for reasons of ego, ambition, or simple misjudgment, sometimes insist on doing things at which they are obviously bad.

Then I thought: Well, I have probably done this too.

There have certainly been times when I believed I could handle something and ended up over my skis. I suspect this is true of everyone. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and intelligence manifests itself in different ways.

Over time, I have tried to learn how to pick my spots and stay in my lane. I do not always succeed. However, I hope I do a better job of it than Aaron Sorkin.

IV: Evening Back at My Hotel

As I walked to the train station to go meet Elliot I called Annie. Annie has always been completely outta control, and she absolutely loves it. Within five minutes she’d decided to crash her ex-husband’s wedding in a tent, seduce one of the guests, reminisced about working at Spokane’s Mars Casino, told me stories involving cocaine, dresses, gambling, and an older gay man who’d taught her “everything about sex,” invited me to her hypothetical future wedding, and, after I jokingly suggested we skip straight to sex ourselves, said she’d think about it. Talking to Annie has always been like standing beside a fire hose. The stories don’t really have beginnings or endings. They simply arrive.

The morning passed quietly. I answered a message from my brother Hugh, who was planning to stop by the house in Kyoto sometime during the coming week, and sent a few encouraging replies to several women I’d been chatting with online. One woman in the Philippines was hoping to find work overseas in Singapore or Malaysia. Another, somewhere in Thailand, simply wanted to know how my morning was going. Others had drifted into that peculiar limbo occupied by most dating-app conversations: friendly enough to continue, but unlikely ever to become anything more.

After a while I found myself scrolling through far more conversations than I probably should have. Dating apps create the illusion that your social world is constantly expanding, when in reality most interactions simply fade away after a few messages. Every now and then somebody surprises you, but most conversations end not with an argument or rejection, but with simple inertia. Nobody does anything wrong. Life just moves on.

Perhaps that’s why I no longer find the process frustrating. Years ago I probably would have chased every lead, replied to every message immediately, and wondered why nothing seemed to develop. These days I treat it more like browsing a bookstore than shopping for groceries. If something genuinely interesting appears, wonderful. If not, I’ll probably enjoy my coffee just as much.

My musical companion for the morning was Craig Finn. I first discovered him through “Sequestered in Memphis,” and, like many first-time listeners, completely misunderstood the song. I thought the narrator was speaking to a journalist after a reckless night in Memphis. Only later did I realize he was being questioned by the police. Somehow that misunderstanding didn’t lessen the song; if anything, it made me appreciate Finn’s writing even more. His characters are so vividly drawn that they feel real even when you’ve misunderstood the plot.

One line has always stayed with me: “In bar light she looked alright. In daylight she looked desperate.” Finn is ostensibly describing someone else, but the brilliance of the lyric is that it cuts both ways. By dawn, they’re both desperate. We’ve all had moments where the previous night’s confidence evaporates with the morning light. Finn simply found the perfect sentence to describe it.

V: On the Way to See Elliot

After finally giving up on the day’s editing, I showered, threw on a clean shirt, and hurried toward Taishō, where I was meeting Elliott at a craft beer pub called TNT. I was running a few minutes behind schedule—as usual—but Elliott has never struck me as the sort of person who minds waiting over a pint. I figured I’d make up the time somewhere between the hotel and the station, although experience suggested otherwise.

The train ride became one of those familiar periods of suspended possibility. While checking directions and changing lines, I also found myself checking dating apps, replying to messages, and idly wondering what the rest of the evening might bring. If everything went perfectly, I’d spend a few hours drinking good beer with Elliott, head back toward my hotel, and perhaps finish the night with a date. It wasn’t exactly a plan so much as several loosely connected possibilities competing for my attention.

Somewhere between stations my thoughts drifted to Tomoyo, one of my former students whom I’d seen again at the book launch. We’d nearly gone out together once before, years after she’d graduated, but circumstances had gotten in the way. Twenty years have now passed since I first taught her, which removes any ethical hesitation I might once have felt. I found myself wondering whether I should simply ask her out the next time I am in Tokyo. Sometimes life becomes unnecessarily complicated because we spend too much time calculating the odds instead of asking straightforward questions.

That seemed to be the theme of the journey. I checked my bank balance, priced a few possibilities for later that evening, briefly reconsidered future trips to Thailand and even South Korea, nearly walked the wrong way through a station, and at one point came within a few feet of being clipped by a taxi while jaywalking. None of it mattered very much. My mind was simply ricocheting from one possibility to another while my body steadily carried me toward a beer with a friend.

By the time I emerged from Taishō Station, the mental static had largely disappeared. Elliott was waiting, the pub was less than a minute away, and for the next few hours the only decision I intended to make was which beer to order first.

=====

The Osaka Loop Line has a hypnotic quality after a while. Every minute or two another calm recorded voice announces the next station, another transfer, another reminder to mind the gap. After ten or fifteen minutes the words stop meaning anything. They become part of the rhythm of the journey, almost musical, drifting in and out beneath whatever happens to be occupying your thoughts.

Mine, for reasons I still can’t explain, wandered toward negative igloos.

I have absolutely no idea what a negative igloo is. I have never knowingly encountered one before or since. It arrived fully formed, demanded my attention for perhaps fifteen seconds, and then disappeared forever, leaving me no wiser than before. If someone were to ask me today what a negative igloo might actually be, I honestly couldn’t begin to answer. Nonetheless, somewhere between Kitahama and Taishō, negative igloos briefly became the most important concept in my universe.

The rest of my brain was scarcely more coherent. Ryan Adams was singing Drank Like a River, and I found myself thinking about the tiny crack in his voice—that moment where it sounds less like he’s performing a song than remembering something he’d rather forget. Some singers sound polished. Ryan often sounds wounded. There’s a difference, and it’s one of the reasons I keep returning to his records.

Then, just as suddenly, I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was.

I’d somehow missed my stop, wandered out the wrong exit, and was now standing in a station that looked vaguely familiar while possessing almost no useful geographical knowledge whatsoever. Google Maps insisted I was only two minutes away from Elliott. My instincts insisted otherwise. My instincts, it should be noted, have an unfortunate habit of arguing with Google.

For a few minutes I experienced what I can only describe as a minor travel panic. Not real panic—nothing so dramatic—but that familiar sensation every traveller knows, where every street begins to resemble every other street and every directional arrow seems specifically designed to send you somewhere else. I walked one way, doubled back, checked Google again, ignored Google, trusted Google, ignored it again, and somehow managed to end up exactly where I’d started.

Meanwhile my thoughts continued their usual pinball routine. Was the Sony credit card finally on its way? Should I spend part of August in South Korea instead of Bali? Would Yo still be available later that evening? Why hadn’t Jennifer replied? Why did Meinster have time to send me promotional emails but apparently not royalty statements? None of these questions had anything whatsoever to do with finding a pub in Taishō, but my mind saw no reason to separate one subject from another.

Eventually I admitted defeat and messaged Elliott. Dude I am totally lost. His reply arrived almost immediately.

Where are you?

It was the perfect question because I genuinely didn’t know.

Google claimed I was standing practically on top of TNT Craft Beer Pub. My own eyes suggested I was standing outside an Irish bar that definitely wasn’t TNT. For a brief moment I began to wonder whether the pub existed only as a cartographical rumour.

I texted him back and said I was looking at Taisho Station. He said he would be right there. One minute later I saw him across the street and crossed to meet him.

When Elliott finally rescued me from my navigational incompetence, TNT turned out to be exactly where Google had insisted it was all along. The fault, as usual, lay somewhere between the phone and the human operating it.

“You’re hopeless,” he said.

“I prefer ‘geographically imaginative.'”

He laughed. “Come on.”

One minute later we were golden.

VI: TNT Craft Beer with Elliot

The pub was everything I hoped it would be: a long wooden bar, a dozen taps of rotating local craft beers, a cheerful bartender in a baseball cap who somehow managed to keep everybody’s glass full without ever looking hurried. When one of the kegs kicked halfway through pouring my pint, she apologized and handed me the remainder for free.

“Sorry” she said.

“No worries,” I said. “I’ll always take half a beer for free.”

She laughed.

“I like your hat,” I said.

“I get that a lot,” she said.

I turned to Elliot and asked if he wanted to hear a joke.

“A shepherd is in bed with his girlfriend for the first time. She asks him, ‘How experienced are you?’ He closes his eyes…starts counting…and falls asleep.”

The bartender laughed.

Elliott buried his face in his hands.

“Please,” he said, “never change.”

“I make no promises” I said.

By the time the quizmaster welcomed everyone, we’d accumulated enough empty glasses to suggest we were taking the evening seriously while simultaneously possessing almost no confidence in our ability to answer questions about anything.

“What’s are name?” Elliot asked me.

“How about the Glorious Mofos?”

“Of course.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the quizmaster announced, “welcome!”

“He seems enthusiastic,” I whispered.

“He’s paid to be.”

We were spectacularly mediocre.

Spain had won something. Bananas were radioactive. Kobe Bryant was apparently named after Japanese beef. Beyond that we entered a sort of intellectual free fall.

“What do you think?”

“No idea.”

“You?”

“Less than no idea.”

“Write banana.”

“I already did.”

“Excellent.”

Our strategy rapidly evolved into letting Elliott answer the questions that sounded plausible while I concentrated on drinking beer, admiring the bartender, and periodically checking whether Yo had confirmed our appointment.

At one point Elliott looked over my shoulder.

“You’re really going after this?”

“I think so.”

“You ever think about…you know…not?”

I considered that.

“For about three seconds.”

He laughed.

“I thought so.”

That was one of the things I’d always appreciated about Elliott. He never judges. He asked questions. Usually he agrees with me. Other times now. Occasionally he looks at me as though I’ve completely lost my mind. But whatever I do he never tries to become my conscience. Old friendships eventually settle into that rhythm. You stop trying to improve each other and simply learn to enjoy each other’s company.

The conversation drifted from Japan to Canada, from the weather to my girlfriends, from travel plans to parents. I vented a little about my mother bitching about my writing. Elliott listened more than he spoke, occasionally nodding, occasionally smiling in that understated Canadian way that somehow communicated, I don’t entirely agree, but I understand why you’re upset.

By the time the second round ended, I’d glanced at my watch three or four times.

“You’ve got somewhere to be,” Elliott said.

“I might.”

“You definitely do.”

“Indeed I do.”

He grinned.

“Go lose your T-card.”

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my beer.

“I’ll report back.”

“You’d better.”

We settled the bill, shook hands outside TNT, and headed in opposite directions. Elliott toward another ordinary Saturday night. Me toward Umeda, where Yo-chan was waiting.

VII: On the Way to See Yo Chan

As I entered Taisho Station the JR announcements began their familiar chant once again.

The next stop is…

Somewhere between stations my mind wandered back to negative igloos. I still have absolutely no idea what one is.

The JR announcer continued serenely informing us that the next stop was Kyobashi, or Osaka Castle Park, or somewhere that probably existed. In my head it became:

“Please enjoy negative igloos. Transfer here for the glorious nonsense line. Please exit on the right.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I got it.”

I did not, in fact, have it.

Somewhere between the craft beer and the heat, I’d managed to convince myself I’d fallen asleep on the train. Maybe I had. Maybe I hadn’t. Either way, I suddenly had absolutely no idea where I was.

Oh, shit.

I checked Google Maps again. Every time I opened it, it confidently gave me a different answer.

“Seventeen minutes.”

I calculated that I would get to the shop about five minutes early. This turned out to be off. The announcer cheerfully reminded us to mind the gap.

“I’m trying to mind all the gaps.”

I got off the train and looked around. Then decided getting off had been exactly the right decision. I checked the train map on the station board. I was also seventeen minutes past Umeda. Oh great. Back we go.

I thought to myself: I need cash. Then a taxi. Then a cigarette. Possibly in that order. First I had to get back to Umeda.

The train came and I rode the short distance back. The instant I stepped onto the street, I lit a cigarette and hailed a cab. I had just a fee drags when a cab pulled up and I had to toss the cig.

The taxi driver nodded when I said, “Umeda.” Progress. Seven minutes, Google claimed. For once, we agreed. As the cab rolled through the humid Osaka evening, I realized I was no longer worried about getting lost. I was worried cause I was a little late.

I’d spent the entire afternoon imagining meeting Yo chan, and now my grand entrance was shaping up to be me arriving slightly sweaty, smelling faintly of cigarettes and carrying too little cash.

Great first impression I thought.

The driver dropped me exactly where Google said he would. Google immediately betrayed me again.

Fourth floor. I found the fourth floor. Everything was locked. No people. No reception. No Yo-chan. No nothing.

Just an eerily quiet hallway that felt like the set of a film where everyone had disappeared moments before I arrived.

I called the shop.

“I’m here.”

A reply came back almost instantly.

“First floor. It’s hard to find.”

No shit.

A guy walked over and picked me up. We walked five minutes to where the shop really was, no where near where Google said it was. Typical. This guy knows nothing. Apparently.

Five minutes later I found the place.

VIII: Yo Chan

The shop staff took me up in the elevator to the 7th and opened the door to room 701. For some reason I found this number to be fitting. There was a shower but no sink. I took my own clothes and began to rinse off. Yo chan soon entered the room. She looked like her picture, but not quite. The agency website said she 24, a fact she confirmed in person. She looked about 28 to me, and I supposed her life was perhaps not the easiest.

I found her attractive, and knew I would be able to cum. She joined me in the shower, soaped up, and began to stroke my dick. In general, I prefer to handle my equipment. It is a sensitive area, and I just know it best. I turned my back to her, and then a minute later I stepped out and toweled off. She followed shortly thereafter.

As we stepped out of the shower, she assessed my naked body. She said, “You look like Boris Johnson.” I laughed away and didn’t reply. I decided then that there were some conversations not worth extending.

We climbed onto to bed. I was already erect, and she was at half mast. She unwrapped a condom and slid it on my dick. I had never sucked anyone’s dick before, and I was both exited and just a little nervous.

We began kissing. I like a bit of tongue during kissing, however, her tongue was a little aggressive. Oh well I thought, kissing, at least tonight, would not the main event. I broke the kiss, and went down on her. She was semi-erect, however I was able to fit her full penis into my mouth. The first thing I noticed was her large foreskin. The second thing was, the act was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and she tasted neither good nor bad. I was eager to make her cum.

After a bit, she motioned for me to come back up to the head of the bed. She climbed back on top of me, and slid my dick into her ass. She had applied lube to her asshole, and hard dick slid in easily. After a short amount of time, I asked her to turn around and entered her from the rear. She began to moan and pant, and I found this very sexy. I was about to cum, and then, as I usually, do, I pulled and finished on a towel while sitting on my knees.

I then collapsed back the bed. She also sat on her knees, and came on the towel. Some of her cum landed on my leg, which I found faintly amusing. After this, I needed a cigarette. There was no smoking in the room so I asked her if I could go downstairs. She said sure, just pick me up a Pocari Sweat and call reception to get back up. I told her I would be back in five minutes, however I knew this was a lie. The fact was I would smoke three of four cigarettes and decompress for a while. This was about an hour into our date, and I had paid for ninety minutes. I did not want to re-engage in sex, so smoking and thinking quietly seemed like a good plan.

When I stepped back onto the street, the wind had gone out of my sails. Not in a bad way. Just…gone. For most of the day I’d been propelled by anticipation. Catch the train. Find Elliott. Don’t get lost. Meet Yo chan. Get the cash. Find the building. Try not to make an idiot of yourself. Then, just like that, there was nothing left to chase.

Osaka was still humming around me, but I’d become a spectator again. I checked the time on my phone. It was 12:30 AM. This immediately made me think of the Katheryn Bigalow film Zero Dark Thirty. I found myself thinking about Zero Dark Thirty. I’d never understood the criticism that it somehow endorsed torture. Showing something ugly isn’t the same as celebrating it. A film can portray violence honestly without recommending it, just as Goodfellas isn’t an argument for joining the Mafia. Sometimes a story simply trusts the audience to tell the difference.

I ducked into a nearby convenience store and bought two Pocaris, two beers, a burrito, and a pack of pack of cigarettes. I smoke another heater and drank one of the beers on the street. Then I called up to reception. There was no security, and I did not see any other customers the whole time I was there, however, at least time, I did what I was told.

Back in bed with Yo, we both undressed again and she fell asleep. I found our legs entwined. He body was very comfortable, and I can honestly say this was the sweetest part of the evening.

She woke up and pointed at the clock. It was time to go. We dressed and walked to the elevator. I leaned to give her a goodnight kiss, and she kissed me back, lightly. This was goodbye.

=====

It was after last train, so I got a taxi back my hotel near Yodoyabashi Station. The taxi rolled silently through the warm Osaka night I leaned my head against the window and watched the city slide by. Tomorrow I’d probably throw myself into another impossible plan, another train, another woman, another glorious and bizarre day. I was, by this point, quite tired.

A few hours earlier I’d been arguing with Google Maps, inventing negative igloos, convincing myself I’d missed stations that probably never existed, and experiencing a full-blown case of what I can only describe as travel boggle. Now all that urgency seemed faintly ridiculous. The date had happened. It had gone OK. I lost my T-card. I’d survived.

Travel does that. What feels catastrophic at eight o’clock becomes a mildly amusing anecdote by twelve-thirty.

But for the moment, there was nowhere I needed to be.

IX: Late Night Hotel and Bed

Back in my room I took off my shirt, washed up, and prepared for bed. For reasons I can’t entirely explain, my thoughts eventually wandered toward football. I’ve always enjoyed the sport, even if basketball remains my first love, and one of my earliest football memories comes from a Washington State game against Stanford. My mother, Claudia—CL to longtime readers—was friendly with Janet Elway, John’s mother, and at one point Janet served as something of a mentor to her. Through that connection, we ended up at the game while John Elway was still Stanford’s quarterback.

Before kickoff, Elway apparently told my mother that if he threw a touchdown, he would point toward us in the stands. Naturally, he did throw one. He was John Elway, after all. And after the score, he looked up and pointed in our direction while we yelled ourselves hoarse. I was still rooting for Washington State, which complicated the moment slightly, but even then I understood that we were watching somebody exceptional.

Elway went on to become one of the defining quarterbacks of his generation, first at Stanford and then during a long NFL career with Denver. What stays with me, though, isn’t the statistics or the championships. It’s the strange intimacy of that afternoon: my mother’s connection to his family, the promise made before the game, and the tiny gesture toward the stands after the touchdown. Sports are full of enormous public moments, but the memories that survive are often the small private ones folded inside them.

I claimed into bed, and indulged in one final reflection for the day. I thought about how funny it was that one minute you are deep in the throes of passion, moaning and panting your partner’s name, and the next you are smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and thinking about Zero Dark Thirty on the street. Sex, which feels so wonderful and necessary at the time, does tend to recede pretty quickly. However, the power of good sex, as Kevin Drew says in out epigraph, cannot be beat.

Dedication:

For Yo chan. Thank you for taking my T card baby. Godspeed. You rule.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Night of My 50s IV, 7/24/26: Am I Bisexual?

The locus of action is always in motion.

— Erving Goffman

This one goes to out to somebody watching tonight. She knows who she is.

— Bob Dylan

“Come on, baby, let’s rock and roll.”
— Michael Knott

Rock and roll motherfucking rules.

It just does.

Music in general rules. Live music rules even harder. I love almost every kind of music there is, from Appalachian folk to Georgian polyphony, from Miles Davis to Papa M, although admittedly not always in equal measure. Music has been one of the great organizing forces of my life for as long as I can remember. It has rescued bad days, elevated good ones, carried me through grief, celebrated victories, and made long train rides, lonely hotel rooms, and empty apartments feel just a little less empty. If today’s essay seems to wander off in musical directions more often than usual, that’s because today belongs to music.

The last couple of days have been filled with minor crises, accumulated errands, and one rather difficult conversation with my mother that I’ll briefly update readers on in a moment. None of these problems were especially serious in isolation. Collectively, however, they had begun to clutter the landscape of my mind. I woke up this morning with an unusually simple goal: clear away the small stuff, stay close to the hotel, listen to music, write, and otherwise leave myself alone.

There were still a handful of practical matters that needed attention. I’d been meaning to buy a new pair of headphones for several days. My hair was beginning to reach the point where even I had to admit it probably needed cutting. More importantly, ever since returning to Japan six weeks ago, my phone’s SIM card had been behaving erratically. The hotel Wi-Fi had been excellent, as Japanese hotel Wi-Fi almost always is, but every time I stepped outside I was reminded that “mostly functional” isn’t really functional at all. Since I’m planning to leave Japan again later this summer, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. Today I had a two o’clock appointment at the nearby SoftBank store, barely a three-minute walk from the hotel. The haircut could wait. The headphones could wait. The SIM card could not.

Readers of yesterday’s essay may be wondering about my mother and me. After our rather tense exchange yesterday morning, we exchanged messages later in the day. We still see a number of things differently, particularly regarding my writing and my dating life, and I doubt those differences will disappear anytime soon. On the other hand, we also love each other very much, and hopefully neither of us has any interest in staying angry for long. Families have disagreements. Good families keep talking anyway. I suspect that’s where we’re headed.

The same goes for Litz and me.

After nearly a month of trying to coordinate our schedules, we’re still trying. Unfortunately, her work situation remains remarkably unpredictable. She’s effectively working under a zero-hour arrangement, which totally sucks, which means an off day that appears available for her to travel one day can disappear the next. We’d hoped to meet in Takamatsu, roughly halfway between Kochi and Kyoto, but another last-minute change at work forced us to postpone yet again. We were both disappointed, but neither of us blamed the other. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. We’ll keep talking, keep laughing, and eventually the calendars will line up. If they don’t before I leave for Thailand and then Spokane later this summer, we’ll simply keep doing what we’ve been doing remarkably well for months now: staying close despite the distance.

Once those thoughts were out of the way, the day became pleasantly ordinary.

II: Afternoon

I left the hotel a little before two carrying both my residence card and my My Number card, even though SoftBank had only asked me to bring one. Years of dealing with paperwork have taught me that bringing too much identification is infinitely preferable to bringing too little.

The walk to the station took only a couple of minutes. As usual, I finished a cigarette on the way, tossed it before entering, and descended into the cool underground passage. Every Japanese station seems to have its own invisible weather system. Long before you see the platform, you feel the wind. Part of it comes from the enormous ventilation system. Part of it comes from the trains themselves, which push columns of air through the tunnels like giant pistons every time they arrive. Whatever the engineering explanation, it always feels faintly magical. Before you hear the train, before you see another passenger, the station announces itself with moving air.

The appointment itself took exactly eight minutes.

The young SoftBank employee helping me wore a SoftBank Hawks baseball jersey instead of an office shirt, complete with a day’s worth of black stubble. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the whole thing struck me as perfectly Japanese. Professional without being overly formal. Efficient without pretending to be important. He checked my identification, installed the new SIM, and, naturally, it didn’t work right away. We both stared at the screen for a few seconds before I restarted the phone. It restarted almost instantly, found the network, and returned to life.

Problem solved. It’s funny how satisfying it is to cross one genuinely useful task off your list.

Afterwards I wandered no farther than the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. I stopped by a drugstore and a Lawson to purchase provisions. By the time I walked back through the hotel doors, less than forty minutes had passed since I’d left. The room was cool. The new SIM card worked. The refrigerator was full. The errands were finished. For the first time in several days, there was nothing left to do except what I’d wanted to do all along. Listen to music. Write my essays. Do my job.

Every now and then, simply sit there and enjoy the fact that not every thought requires action, not every errand deserves urgency, and not every day has to become an adventure. Sometimes crossing three small things off the list is more than enough. From there, all that’s left is to press play.

There were still a couple of unanswered questions hanging over the afternoon. My son might text. If he did, we’d decide whether to meet in Kyoto tomorrow evening before I returned to what has unexpectedly become my little base camp here in Osaka.

Litz was still trying to untangle her work schedule. We’ve become surprisingly good at living with uncertainty, talking several times a day while waiting for circumstances to cooperate. By Sunday evening I should have a much clearer idea whether we’ll finally meet before I leave Japan again or whether Thailand will arrive first.

I sat down to today’s journal. As I’ve mentioned before, this daily series is still brand new, but I’m working harder on it than almost anything I’ve written in quite a while. The response so far has been encouraging. Whether it eventually approaches the readership of my St. George’s series remains to be seen, but I’m quietly hopeful.

The St. George’s essays continue to surprise me. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, that series gradually climbed Google’s rankings until searches for “St. George’s Spokane History” began returning my essays near the very top of the page, sometimes directly beneath Wikipedia and occasionally even ahead of the school’s own website.

I find this oddly gratifying.

For the first several years of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, I cross-posted almost everything to Medium with very little success. I did almost no search-engine optimization, almost no promotion, and almost all of my readership came through Facebook and WordPress. Then, almost without warning, the St. George’s pieces found an audience.

I’d like to think that somewhere along the way some perspective parents trying to learn about the history of the school may have stumbled across my recollections instead. If this is true, it makes me smile.

The series is affectionate. It’s nostalgic. But it’s also honest. I attended St. George’s from 1980 until 1992, and schools in the 1980s operated according to a very different set of expectations than schools today. Discipline was different. Student life was different. The relationships between students and teachers were different. Sexual mores were different. My only goal was to reflect those years as accurately and fairly as I could.

Whether readers agreed with every conclusion hardly mattered. They read the stories. For that, I’ll always be grateful. As soon as I began thinking about today’s essay, I knew I was going to start with music.

Music has been one of the central joys of my life for as long as I can remember.

As a young boy I wanted to learn the piano. I asked my mother several times if I could take lessons, however she replied that she could not afford them at the time. A few years later my parents’ financial situation improved enough that my younger brother Mike was able to study the cello for several years. He eventually became an excellent young player before other interests gradually took over. I was genuinely happy for him, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that I’d missed my chance.

Over time I got over it, however in the back of my mind I always to learn to play.

After a major change in my work circumstances in 2018, I finally bought myself an inexpensive electronic keyboard and decided that, instead of taking formal lessons, I’d simply see how much I could teach myself. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than a chord-finder app and an unreasonable amount of free time, I slowly made a little progress, and was able to read and play several simple pieces.

I only performed publicly once—if “publicly” is the right word. A friend named Mela, whom I’d met through the wonderful and sadly now defunct Periscope app, eventually persuaded me to play two songs over the phone. I stumbled my way through “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers and then attempted Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain.” As I’ve written elsewhere, I didn’t exactly dominate Ocean Rain. But it was at least passable. Mela applauded politely, and for one brief afternoon I felt like I’d accomplished something I’d wanted to do since childhood.

After playing for Mela, I began lose interest in the keyboard. I was never going to be good to play in public, and playing for Mela was a lot of fun. I decided to go out on a high note. Sometimes achieving a childhood dream doesn’t require becoming great at it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to discover that the dream itself was real.

III. A Lifetime of Listening

I have listened to music everyday for 38 years since 1988. Music is simply part of the furniture of my life. Like everyone else, there are genres I return to almost every day and genres I will never listen to again. Even so, with remarkably few exceptions, I can usually find at least one artist in almost every style that I genuinely admire. There are even bands—Genesis immediately comes to mind—that I respect enormously while almost never choosing to play them. Great musicianship and personal taste are not always the same thing, and I’ve become more comfortable with that distinction as I’ve gotten older.

Perhaps because I never learned to play an instrument as a child, I became obsessed with listening to music instead. By the time I was fourteen, I was spending every spare dollar I could scrape together on cassettes, and then, almost overnight, CDs when they replaced cassettes as the dominant medium. Looking back, I probably should have tried to some of my money. Instead, I spent virtually all of it on music.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Music became my education. It taught me geography, history, politics, religion, literature, relationships, heartbreak, humor, and more than a little philosophy. Long before streaming services provided almost every song ever recorded, discovering a great new band required effort. Somebody recommended them. You took a chance. You saved your money. You bought the record. If you loved it, it became part of your life.

Some artists from my teenage years have stayed with me. Others have not. This is OK with me.

The first cassette I ever bought with my own money was Martika’s self-titled debut. I haven’t listened to it in decades, but I don’t regret buying it for a second. It was the beginning of a lifetime spent chasing songs.

Soon enough my classmates introduced me to bands like R.E.M., the Violent Femmes and Fine Young Cannibals. Before long I discovered Bob Dylan and the Replacements on my own, and after that there was no turning back.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton College in the fall of 1992, I was already spending almost every extra dollar on music. That habit has never really gone away. Today my Spotify library contains thousands of liked songs spanning almost every genre imaginable.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton music had become a major part of my life. I was into artists such as Bob Dylan, the Replacements, The Pogues, Dire Straits, R.E.M, the Violent Femmes, and several others. Many of my favorite bands would soon come to be described as alternative or indie rock. Looking back, I was only beginning to scratch the surface.

One of roommates freshman year, Jake, loved music almost as much as I did, although his tastes tended to run in a more traditional direction. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were his touchstones, and before long they became mine as well. We spent countless hours listening to records in our quad, arguing over songs, recommending albums to one another, and gradually building the sort of musical vocabulary that only develops when people live together and have far too much free time.

Next door lived Ian Murphy. Ian remains one of my closest friends to this day, and he is the only person I have ever met who knows more about music than I do.

That is not a sentence I write lightly. I’ve spent most of my adult life buying and listening to records, reading about records, ranking records, writing about records, and generally annoying other people by going on and on about. Over the years I’ve accumulated many thousands of CDs and listened to what must be hundreds of thousands of songs. Music has never really been a hobby for me. It’s simply part of the way I move through the world.

Ian somehow manages to go even further. When we first met, he introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, many of whom I may not have discovered on my own. Luna immediately became one of my favorite bands of all time. He also pointed me toward the Auteurs, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Ride, and dozens of other artists, particularly from Britain’s remarkable alternative scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of those bands became lifelong companions. Others I admired without ever fully embracing. All of them expanded my musical horizons.

What impressed me most, however, wasn’t simply the breadth of Ian’s knowledge. It was his curiosity.

Ian has always approached music the way an historian approaches a historical period or a scientist approaches a research question. He doesn’t merely listen to an artist. He disappears into them. If Nick Cave captures his imagination, he’ll spend months tracing every album, every collaboration, every side project, every live recording, and every obscure appearance he can find. More recently he’s done the same thing with classic country artists such as Merle Haggard and Steve Earle—a development that amuses me slightly, since I can still remember him gently teasing me about my own love of country back in college.

We continue to recommend records to each other today. I honestly can’t imagine what my musical life would look like if I’d never met him.

IV: Musical Genres I Like I Folk/ Americana

My favorite musical genre, without question, is folk music and its close cousin, Americana. Looking back, I suspect I know why.

When I was about six years old I discovered my parents’ tiny record collection. For reasons I still can’t explain, I pulled out an old folk compilation with the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” on it. I played it over and over again in our living room. Not long afterwards I also found a Joan Baez record, and fell hopelessly in love with “Sweet Sunny South.” I had no idea what the lyrics meant. I just knew I wanted to hear the song again.


By about 2010, like many people as they begin to age, my ability to keep up with new bands began to wane somewhat. I did my best to keep up with the bands that I already knew and loved, however I found myself becoming less omnivorous in my listening. In the last couple of years, with the help of Spotify, I have endeavored to change this, and I’ve discovered dozens and dozens of new artists and bands that I really like.

Among my favourite folk and Americana artists are, in no particular order, Phosphorescent, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo and Conor Oberst.

I’ve only seen Phosphorescent and Wilco live. Whiskeytown no longer exists, Ryan Adams still tours, and Uncle Tupelo eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt. These days I probably listen to Son Volt more than I once did, but Wilco remains my favourite of the two.

I’ll never stop listening.

V: Musical Genres I Like II Indie

Alternative and indie rock became the soundtrack of my teenage years.

As I mentioned earlier, I inherited my classmates’ love of bands like R.E.M. and Violent Femmes. I discovered The Replacements on my own, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time.

Some of my favourite indie artists today include Happiness, Daddy Issues, Giant Drag, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Afghan Whigs, Luna, Car Seat Headrest, Yo La Tengo, Seam and many others.

Like folk music, indie has been a constant companion for almost forty years. I can’t imagine that changing.

I also love jazz and ambient music, but those are enormous subjects that deserve essays of their own.

VI: Musical Genres I Do Not Like

Then there are the genres I do not like. Mainstream hard rock has never really appealed to me. Bon Jovi and Van Halen simply aren’t my thing. Grunge is more complicated. I admired what bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are trying to doing, but I just don’t like him.


I don’t especially like heavy metal, although I do like several glam metal bands, probably because glam metal becoming popular, right when I was an early teenager and really listening to music for the first time. My favorite of these are Cinderella and Poison and I still have a soft spot Skid Row.

Then there is Progressive Rock or Prog. Prog and I have simply never gotten along.

Yes leaves me cold. Kansas does absolutely nothing for me. Toto has me running for the hills. And Genesis deserves special mention.

Many years ago I wrote what I thought was an entirely harmless one-star Amazon review of the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I assumed perhaps three people would read it. Apparently every Genesis fan on Earth was one of those three people.

The abuse began almost immediately. It turned out that among the hundreds of glowing reviews of the record, mine was the lone dissenting voice. For weeks strangers explained, in increasingly colorful language, exactly why I was an idiot. Eventually I deleted the review, not because I had changed my mind, but because I was just sick of the whole thing. I still don’t like the album.

VII. Evening: My Evolving Sexuality

Between about 7 and 10 PM I spent nearly three hours staring at what might have been the worst website ever designed.

It was supposedly the best escort aggregator in Osaka. It certainly aggregated everything. Hundreds of women. Dozens of agencies. Flashing banners. Pop-ups. Prices that changed the moment you clicked through. Every page had to be translated, and every time I went back it reverted to Japanese and I had to translate it again. After a while I wasn’t browsing anymore. I was wrestling with the website.

Eventually I admitted defeat.

The practical lesson was simple enough. If I wanted reasonable prices, I was probably going to have to get over my preference for outcalls and start looking at incalls instead. Fair enough. That was useful information. Three hours for one sentence.

Then, just as I was about to give up entirely, two completely unrelated things happened.

The first was my friend Doug in China. He messaged to say he’d finally finished my recently published novel The Adventures of The Thin Man and Andrea.

His note was everything a novelist hopes to hear. He hadn’t read it as “Matt playing the Thin Man.” He’d read it as a fully realized novel that happened to contain pieces of me. That was probably the single nicest compliment anyone could have paid me. I had been wandering around wondering whether the evening had been wasted, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. Doug had already given me something far better.

=====

When I was six and seven years old I was badly abused by my aunt’s first husband. I detail these experiences here. Childhood sexual abuse is the worst, and this fucking guy is simply the biggest dick imaginable. Fuck off.

It has taken me more than forty years to overcome some the effects of the abuse. This may seem like a long time ago, however this is just how CSA works. It sucks. So hard. One of the major effects was my eventual questioning of my sexuality. Around the time I hit puberty at 14 to the ago of 16 I wondered if I was gay. I was deeply attracted to girls, however the gay idea was never far from my mind.

By the time I was sixteen I had begun dating girls, however awkwardly, and my thoughts that I might be gay gradually faded into the background.

Throughout my marriage, two affairs, and a few other relationships, I remained consistently attracted to women. I never seriously thought of myself as gay. Even so, the question never disappeared entirely. It simply became quieter.

A few years ago I found myself occasionally turning to pornography featuring trans women. My favorite actress is Daisy Taylor, who is so gorgeous and whose picture leads this essay. It isn’t perhaps my favorite genre, but I kept returning to it often enough that I eventually stopped dismissing it as a curiosity.

Eventually mere curiosity became practical curiosity. Over the past six weeks I have booked four escorts here in Osaka, all biological women. Tonight, I found myself browsing agencies that advertised trans women.

The first woman that caught my eye was Mio. She was purely feminine in appearance and was absolutely stunning. Sadly however, she was working in a different city and not available in Osaka tonight.

Then I saw Takane. She was also very beautiful, and looked like a women, however perhaps ever so slightly androgynous. Three years earlier I probably would have clicked away without another thought. This time I found myself thinking, why not?

Then I remembered the great John McAfee, the software pioneer who is totally outta control. Years ago, while happily disappearing down one of my periodic McAfee rabbit holes, I came across an interview—I think it was an interview, although it may have been buried somewhere in the fragments of the autobiography he never finished.

The interviewer asked him about dating trans women in Thailand. Were they actually woman, the interviewer asked?

McAfee shrugged it off.

“Dude,” he said, “trust me. They’re all woman.” Hilarious.

Whether you agree with him or not isn’t really the point. For some reason, trying to book a trans escort in my hotel room years later, that line floated back into my head.

So I rolled the dice, as I sometimes do, and called her agency. Not because I had reached some grand philosophical conclusion. Because curiosity had quietly outrun hesitation. I was ready to spend more than I’d planned and just see what happened. The guy from the agency quoted me the real outcall price. Thirty-three thousand yen. That ended the experiment rather quickly. I thanked him and said I would call him another if I changed my mind.

VII. Am I Bisexual?

Today, I think I may simply be naturally bisexual. Whether my abuse obscured this truth, complicated my understanding of it, or is largely unrelated, I cannot honestly say.

What I can say is, my sexuality seems to be evolving rather quickly. I really have no idea where this attraction to trans woman is coming, however I do know that I will need to do something sometime soon.

Dedication:

For Takane. And for John McAfee. Baby, you are totally outta control. But man are you funny. Dude, you rock. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s III: Look, If I Want to Develop an Image I’ll Do It My Own Fucking Way.

STFU
—Everybody

Yo. Can you make that reverb pop a little bit for me?

—Conor Obrest

Everyone’s a critic.
—Slacker

I. Early Morning

Since my wife and I decided to get divorced about three months ago, I have noticed something curious. Almost everyone around me seems suddenly seems to have an opinion about how I should be conducting my life.

My family has opinions. My friends have opinions. Women I have dated have opinions. Women I have not yet dated have opinions. Complete strangers even seem to have opinions. Apparently becoming a fifty-two-year-old divorced man means acquiring an advisory board whether you requested one or not.

I am open to friendly advice from time to time. Good advice is one of life’s gifts. I have received plenty of it, and I have occasionally even followed some. But I am now fifty-two years old. I am newly divorced and dating for the first time in nearly thirty years. I am working hard to turn a thirty-year teaching career into a full-time writing career within the next ten months. I have finances to sort out, health problems to manage, a young adult son I love very much and need to keep showing up for, and a romantic life that presently resembles an international airport during a weather emergency.

I feel as though I have five full-time jobs. And everybody has a goddamn opinion.

My mother has opinions about my dating life despite not having dated since the Nixon administration. My on-again, off-again girlfriend Litz has various opinions about my daily habits. Men operating small medical clinics have opinions about where I should sit while smoking outside in the sun with my shirt off. Apps have opinions about which of my messages should be permitted to survive for more than twenty-four hours. Google Maps has various opinions, almost all of them wrong, about where I am, where I am going, how long it will take me to get there, and whether I should abandon the journey altogether.

Even the microwave in my hotel room had an opinion this morning. Its opinion was that it should be positioned ten feet from the nearest electrical outlet.

The day began around 3:30 AM after approximately four hours of sleep. This may not sound ideal. It was not unusual either. I have slept poorly since I was 14 years old, and I rarely get more than about 5 hours of sleep throughout the day.

I was staying at the Purple Eye hotel in Osaka, a wonderfully strange hotel with Art Deco ambitions that was once a love hotel, a large television, a karaoke microphone, a projector I had no intention of learning how to operate, and enough buttons beside the bed to launch a small spacecraft.

The room also has a flickering light behind my head that I cannot seem to turn off, and a water dispenser I can not operate without either burning my hand or extracting approximately a quarter-cup of cold water after several minutes of negotiation.

Both are out of control.

The phrase “out of control” has become increasingly important to me. Google Maps is out of control. Hotel appliances are out of control. Dating apps are out of control. My mother was especially out of control just this morning. Litz is often out of control, although in a different and generally more charming manner. I am frequently out of control myself, which is perhaps the point.

As the epigraph above says, everyone is a critic. Nobody perhaps is more committed to criticism than the man publicly documenting the behavior of everyone around him. I got dressed and walked to a nearby Lawson for a latte and some breakfast. I badly needed both.

The store was small and packed tightly enough to qualify as sushi-zume, a useful Japanese expression meaning crammed together like sushi in a box. The man behind the counter asked whether I wanted sugar in my latte, then prepared it himself behind the register. This felt like old Japan to me: the Japan of small courtesies, personal service, and coffee assembled by an actual human being rather than surrendered by a machine.

He mixed in the sugar. He handed me the cup. Perfect. Goldie Goldie baby.

Outside, the cicadas were screaming. Cicadas are called semi in Japanese, which I find funny because they are just about as loud as semi-trucks. They roared from every tree with the confidence of creatures who had waited underground for years and intended to make the most of their brief public career.

I sat on the stoop in front of what looked to be a deserted apartment block, right next to a small medical clinic. I drank my latte, smoked, and talked into my phone. A man arrived at the clinic pushing a woman in a wheelchair and asked me to move.

Technically, I was not on his property. It was none of his business. Spiritually, I was, apparently, obstructing the entire Japanese healthcare system. I ignored him and he went inside the clinic. This is the kind of thing that happens when everybody has an opinion. The opinion may be entirely reasonable. You may even comply with it. But you still resent its existence.

A few minutes later, another man approached me. He did not speak to me in either Japanese or English. He simply tapped me on the shoulder and crossed his forearms into a large X.

This was a far more efficient method of instruction. No explanation. No appeal. No philosophical argument. Just an X delivered by a masked man outside a clinic shortly after eight in the morning.

I put on my shirt, left it open, tucked a cigarette behind my ear, and returned to Lawson for two beers.

On the way back to the hotel, I considered the shape of the day. Pizza around eleven. A shower. Shisha at Shinsaibashi. Black wired headphones, because white Apple headphones look ridiculous and Bose headphones contain enough bass to flatten a small neighborhood. A haircut. Perhaps an early dinner. Perhaps a bar. Perhaps a date. Perhaps an escort. Perhaps not.

A great deal of my life presently exists in the word perhaps. The only definite plan was to call Litz.

The night before, she had told me that she wanted to marry me next year if I changed two habits. I was, let’s just say, quite surprised. This was a pretty big shift from her attitude just a day or two ago.

The first habit is my eating in bed.

This may sound more serious than it is. I do not generally eat full meals beneath the blankets. I am not lying there with a plate of Fettuccine Alfredo balanced on my chest. I eat crackers, Oreos, an occasional Snickers, perhaps a slice of pizza. Small foods. Bed-compatible foods. Foods requiring little more equipment than a hand and a functioning mouth.

Still, I could stop. I could eat at the kitchen counter. I could eat on the couch. I could even eat at the table like a civilized human. She eats in bed too, but whatever.

The second condition was that I listen to her more. This was also reasonable and yet considerably more difficult.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Litz wants me to listen to her. My mother wants me to listen to her. My friends want me to listen to them. I listen to my son. Even Google Maps wants me to listen, although Google Maps has forfeited that privilege through repeated incompetence.

I probably should listen more. I should also probably talk less. This became increasingly clear as I walked back to my room carrying two beers, breakfast, wine, Pocari Sweat, gum, cigarettes, and enough miscellaneous provisions to survive a modest siege.

Back in my room, I attempted to heat the breakfast wrap. The microwave would not start. I pushed buttons. I turned dials. I stared at Japanese instructions. I questioned the fundamental competence of the hotel in general.

Then I noticed that the microwave was not plugged in. The nearest outlet was, oddly, across the room. I had to lift the microwave from its shelf, carry it several feet, unplug something else, place the microwave on the floor, and stretch its cord across the carpet like a tripwire intended to kill me before lunch. The wrap heated beautifully. It was also hot enough to burn my mouth.

I thought back over the morning. Everybody seemed to have an opinion about what I should be doing this morning. My mother. Litz. The clinic men. The microwave. The cicadas. The apps. The hotel. The entire accumulated machinery of modern life.

And of course I had opinions about all of them. This is the complication.

I would like everyone else to shut the fuck up, but I am writing four thousand words about them and shipping the out on main for the whole world to read.

I may need to shut the fuck up most of all. Not yet, though. It is only nine in the morning.

II. Late Morning

Back in my room, I did what writers have always done after experiencing life for approximately six hours.

I immediately started writing it down.

The first draft is just to get things down. It exists in order to facilitate the second draft. Since today’s theme appeared to be criticism in all its various forms, I decided it would be hypocritical not to begin with my own.

“Conducting my life” was better than “living my life.”

“Nixon administration” was funnier than “Carter administration.”

Google Maps no longer merely had an opinion. It had forfeited its right to an opinion through repeated incompetence.

One sentence at a time, the morning crawled forward.

This is one of the stranger aspects of writing a journal. You do not simply remember your day. You improve your memory of it. You compress it. You rearrange it. You remove three dull conversations and keep the one line that somehow explained the entire day. The truth remains, and it becomes a better story.

As I edited, I put on Camper Van Beethoven. Their singer David Lowery has a way of making profound observations while sounding as though he is simply amused by the absurdity of being alive. That has always appealed to me.

Half the time I think life is a tragedy.

The other half I think it’s a government experiment, and we’re driving like hell.

=====

It was just about noon by this point.

Although I’d managed to check several small errands off my list the previous day—as described in A Day of Minor Annoyances—a few still remained. I needed a new SIM card, a pair of wired headphones, and a haircut. I also still wanted to smoke some shisha. I’d planned to do it the day before but never quite got around to it.

The afternoon, at least on paper, looked straightforward enough. I’d take the short train ride from Uehonmachi to Namba, wander through Shinsaibashi, pick up the things I needed, find somewhere for dinner, and take it from there.

As it turned out, almost none of this happened.

The one genuine success came when I stopped into a nearby SoftBank shop. The staff told me I could reserve a new SIM card and, even better, that it would be free. This was a bonus. With this small victory secured, I headed back toward the hotel to continue editing.

III. Afternoon

The afternoon was beginning to surrender to the evening. I began editing my morning’s work. The essay was already getting pretty long and.the spine was there. The Lee Marvin quote was there. The rest would come later. I wasn’t trying to finish it at this point. I was trying to make it better.

Editing has become one of my favorite parts of writing. Maybe even more than writing itself some days. A first draft is discovery. An edit is where you quietly remove everything that was standing in the way of the story all along.

Music took over after that.

Steve Earle first. I found myself arguing, as I always do, with my own rankings. The Week of Living Dangerously still sits at the top for me, though Guitar Town, Goodbye, Copperhead Road and What’s a Simple Man to Do? all make convincing cases depending on the day. That’s the pleasure of living with music for decades. The rankings never stay still. The songs don’t change. You do.

Then came the band Happyness.

I put on my favorite song by them Montreal Rock Band Somewhere, and within seconds I remembered why it keeps finding its way into every conversation I have about favorite songs. Some records don’t ask for your attention. They simply drift into the room and improve the atmosphere. Happyness have always felt like that to me. Quiet confidence. Great guitars. No unnecessary drama. Just songs that seem happier to reveal themselves over the tenth listen than the first.

The playlist wandered the way my brain usually does: Whiskeytown, Pulp, Cracker, Sonic Youth, Mary Gauthier. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was just following instinct. That’s still my favorite way to listen to music. One song reminds you of another, one artist opens a door to someone else, and before long you’ve traveled thirty years without ever leaving the bed.

By then I knew the afternoon was over. The shower could wait another few minutes. Osaka would still be there when I finally walked outside. One more song, I told myself. It’s a promise I’ve broken happily for most of my adult life.

IV. Dinner and Shisha at Shinsaibashi

Toward the end of my edit I dialed up Whiskeytown’s version Hey There Little Girl’s Don’t You Wanna Smoke Some Crack With Me, and for the hundredth time I found myself wondering whether a two-minute throwaway recorded at a concert nearly thirty years ago deserved a place among my twenty favorite songs of all time. The sensible answer is probably no. The honest answer is that it just might. Music has never cared much about running time or reputation. Every now and then a song simply grabs hold of you and refuses to let go. That one still does.

One of the pleasures of getting older is giving yourself permission to stop defending your taste. Twenty-five years ago I probably would have felt obligated to explain why a forgotten live recording deserved to stand alongside acknowledged classics. Now I don’t care. If a song moves me, it moves me. If it makes me want to walk a little slower through Osaka with a cigarette in one hand and nowhere in particular to be, that’s enough. Rankings are fun. I like them.

I headed north toward Shinsaibashi Station with no real plan beyond finding dinner and eventually making my way to Bar Nayuta. The streets were beginning to fill as the evening settled in. Restaurants were spilling light onto the pavement, smokers drifted in and out of doorways, security officers leaned on impossibly long wooden staffs as though they had all the time in the world, and every block offered another invitation to turn left instead of right. Osaka is one of those cities that rewards wandering. Even when you’re lost, you’re usually only a few minutes from somewhere worth finding.

V. Old Ghosts and Dinner

As often happens, I procrastinated leaving the hotel.

The afternoon disappeared into writing, music, a little wine, and the sort of gentle procrastination that always feels oddly productive when you’re a writer. Around six o’clock I finally got organized, walked over to Uehonmachi Station, boarded the short train to Namba, and wandered into Shinsaibashi looking for dinner.

On the way I noticed several policemen carrying long wooden batons tucked upright against their chests. They all carried radios clipped to their breastbone. They occasionally tapped the batons against the pavement as they walked.

Japan has remarkably little street crime. Shinsaibashi has even less. I still found myself instinctively straightening my posture and tensing up as I walked past them.

Some habits just persist that way.

Several years earlier I had a five month affair with a woman named Vicki. I met her at an upstairs open mic just a few minutes from Shinsaibashi Station. We spent five months together. I liked her very much. She eventually fell in love with me. Although I did like her, I was not in love with her, and in early 2019, as my life was becoming increasingly complicated, I ended the relationship.

I have not seen her since.

Recently I even looked into hiring a private investigator to try to find her again. The irony was that although I remembered her vividly, I somehow possessed remarkably little practical information that might actually help the PI locate her. The investigator’s fee wasn’t unreasonable, so the problem wasn’t the money. The problem was that memory doesn’t leave a forwarding address.

I still remembered where the old open mic was held, so I walked over and took the elevator upstairs, hoping against hope that she might be there. I glanced inside, saw there was nothing going on, and left. Some places deserve a brief visit simply because they remind you who you used to be.

I wandered around for a few more minutes looking for a restaurant I liked the look of. The streets were beginning to fill as the evening settled in. Restaurants were spilling light onto the pavement, smokers drifted in and out of doorways, security officers leaned on impossibly long wooden staffs as though they had all the time in the world, and every block offered another invitation to turn left instead of right. Osaka is one of those cities that rewards wandering. Even when you’re lost, you’re usually only a few minutes from somewhere worth finding.

Dinner itself was uncomplicated. I chose Café Bohemia because it is attached to what used to be the Hotel Unizo, where Vicki and I spent our second night together. The hotel has changed names since then, and is now a little more expensive than I care to pay, however Café Bohemia remains.

I ordered a Heartland beer, a plate of Bolognese, and some shisha. The pasta was smaller than expected but still excellent. The shisha was exactly as I remembered it—pleasant enough, but with an annoyingly weak draw that made every puff feel like work. After twenty minutes I’d had enough.

VI. Back At My Hotel

Walking back toward Namba Station, I found myself browsing escort websites again. I’d only been doing this for a little over a month, so I still knew very little about the industry. What fascinated me, oddly enough, wasn’t the women at first.

It was the pricing.

I have taught high school business for about 15 years, and I couldn’t stop wondering how the enormous price differences could possibly make economic sense. Some women charged modestly. Others charged sums that looked more like mortgage payments than hourly rates. All of them seemed equally attractive to me. For a while I found myself studying the market itself more carefully than the people in it.

Eventually I settled on a handful of women I was into it. By the time I reached the hotel, though, I had changed my mind.

There were essays waiting to be edited. Songs waiting to be ranked. A bottle of wine waiting for me. Suddenly, that sounded like the better evening.

From there the night settled into the familiar rhythm that has slowly become my profession: writing, rewriting, choosing photographs, adjusting SEO tags, publishing essays, and beginning the next one before the previous one had quite finished echoing.

The best nights rarely end with fireworks. They end with keys in the door, the familiar click of the lock, and the peculiar satisfaction of returning to a room that has slowly become your own. Home sweet home, even if home happens to be a small hotel room in Osaka. Two fresh packs of heaters hit the table beside a small mountain of convenience-store provisions: Pocari Sweat, a can of Ebisu beer, a bottle of wine, and a couple of small bottles of umeshu.

The room greeted me exactly as I had left it: clothes draped over chairs, chargers snaking across the floor, books stacked beside the bed, and the faint smell of tobacco that no amount of cracked windows can ever completely erase.

Before anything else came the little rituals. Plug in the phone. Hang the shirt that was almost dry and decide if my clothes from the day needed to be washed or not. Empty my pockets. Open the fridge. Take an inventory.

Somewhere in there I caught my reflection in the mirror and laughed. Another evening survived, another little expedition completed.

Outside, Osaka was still humming, but inside the room everything slowed to my preferred tempo. I checked the refrigerator. A Yona Yona Ale and some neglected soba that was quickly approaching its expiration date. I put the Pocari in to chill. I would drink the Ebisu first. Tomorrow’s problems could wait until tomorrow; tonight’s responsibilities extended no further than hydration, cigarettes, and deciding whether to eat the soba.

As the room settled into silence, music drifted from the laptop. A Michael… no, a Mark Kozelek song. His unmistakable voice. All of the sudden I found myself thinking about the movie Bound, still one of my favorite films from the Wachowskis. I have always preferred it to The Matrix. It’s tighter, stranger, funnier, and somehow more human. I especially love the line when the dude walks into a dark rom and says “It’s fucking dark in here” and then immediately gets capped. As I like to say, it’s funny to me. Great art has a way of sneaking back into your head when you’re doing the most ordinary things—sorting laundry, putting beers in the fridge, or brushing ash from the bedspread before company arrives.

By then the excitement of the night had largely given way to contentment. The room was as tidy as it was ever going to be. The bedspread had been rescued from a fresh snowfall of cigarette ash. My bladder, after several enthusiastic victories, had finally declared a ceasefire. The phone was charging. The drinks were cold. Whatever happened next would happen at its own pace.

It wasn’t one of those nights that changes your life. Most aren’t. It was simply another Osaka evening added to the ledger: a little wandering, a little music, a little planning, a little anticipation, and the quiet pleasure of returning to a place that, for now at least, felt enough like home.

VII. Late-Night Music Session

With what remained of my night, I meant to edit my most recent piece.

That was the whole plan. I drifted off to sleep for about half an hour around 3 AM, woke up, opened my draft, looked at it for all of thirty seconds, and then Conor Oberst showed up and threw a wrench in my plans.

It all started with his song Cape Canaveral. I had had it at number seven on my all time greatest song list for a while. I thought that this would still be about right, however when I played it again I suddenly realized that it was even better than I remembered. I played it two or three times, and came to the conclusion that it had, believe or not, jumped over Emmylou Harris’ Tulsa Queen, which has been my number song for the past decade. Just like that. After all these years, and all these arguments with myself, Cape Canaveral had somehow climbed to number one. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t force it. The song simply refused to lose,

I was listening to a version of the song on You Tube, and on this one Conor gives a short spoken introduction. He says:

“Yo… can you make that reverb pop a little bit more for me?”

It kills me every time. It’s such a small moment, a throwaway really, but somehow it makes the whole performance feel human. I laughed out loud every single time I rewound it. Little moments like these are why I love live recordings. They remind you there were actual people in the room making something instead of perfection arriving fully formed.

From there my night completely unraveled in the best possible way. Steve Earle. Ryan Adams. Sonic Youth, The Replacements. Moonface. Tindersticks. Lou Reed. The Church. Strand of Oaks. Craig Finn, naturally. Every time I thought I was done with my new ranking, another song would throw itself back into the fight. Easy Lucky Free jumped thirty places. Week of Living Dangerously reminded me just how much Steve Earle rules. Then Guitar Town barged back into the conversation like it had every right to be there. Which it does.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I realized I hadn’t edited a single paragraph. I had taken a short nap, and taken care of another very ordinary biological need that I had passed in when I decided not to order the escort.. I drank another beer and stared out the hotel window into the night. I had spent nearly two hours arguing with myself over songs that have been following me around for half my life.

Honestly? Time well spent.

By six in the morning I made an executive decision. My days don’t end at midnight these days. They end when I finally decide to get some sleep. Six o’clock felt like a better border than midnight. So yesterday officially ended at 6:00 a.m. and Thursday began. I turned the music off, and made my way back to the Lawson for get some breakfast. The rankings, at least for now, were settled.

Conor was sitting at number one.

Tomorrow he’ll have to defend the title.

VIII. I Call My Mom

The last thing I had to do before breakfast was call my mother, Claudia, about a text I had sent her several hours earlier.

I stepped outside my hotel, sat down on the concrete stoop outside what appeared to be an empty apartment building, lit a cigarette, and dialed her number.

My mother and I have been engaged in a serious disagreement about my writing for over four years now.

She does not like that I sometimes use real names, real initials, and real events in my essays. I have tried to explain that many of the pieces she objects to recount events that took place thirty or even forty years ago. I have also pointed out that she and my father have long admired Gerald Durrell, whose autobiographical books affectionately—and yet often pointedly—make fun of his own family. I occasionally do the same. Every family piece I have ever written has been written with affection.

Until recently, our disagreements centered primarily around my essays about St. George’s School in Spokane, Washington, which I attended from first grade through graduation between 1980 and 1992.

From my perspective, this is all ancient history.

Most of the stories involve harmless episodes: a student pulling a fire alarm as a prank, a teacher dumping a garbage can over a student’s head, classmates getting into ridiculous situations that seemed important at the time and funny decades later. Many of the people involved probably do not even remember me, much less read my writing. A surprising number, however, do. I find this deeply gratifying.

I have been fortunate enough to accumulate many hundreds of readers for those essays, and several of my music and popular culture pieces have reached into the thousands. These are hardly world-beating numbers, however I enjoy checking my statistics almost every day to see how my pieces are doing.

Recently, however, our disagreement has taken a far more serious turn.

As mentioned earlier, my wife and I mutually decided to divorce a few months ago, and shortly afterward we filed our paperwork with Kyoto City Hall. We have agreed to divide our assets equally. She will return to her hometown of Kumamoto to help care for her aging parents. For the time being I will remain in Kyoto, continue teaching, and look for a modest apartment somewhere near downtown.

At the same time, I have become increasingly committed to making the transition from teacher to full-time writer as soon as possible, hopefully sometime next spring. I expect that transition to be challenging. Every day I find myself trying not only to become a better writer, but also to learn the countless small logistical tasks that accompany trying to make a living from writing.

My mother knows all of this.

Unfortunately, she does not seem to care.

Not long after the divorce, I joined several dating apps. Some have worked better than others. Some have proved to be too expensive. Most days these days I find myself talking to dozens of women online. Most of those conversations amount to little more than discussing our day, exchanging light flirtation, and making tentative plans that will probably never happen. A handful have developed into genuine friendships, and one has become a meaningful relationship, my on-again, off-again girlfriend, Litz.

Several hours before calling my mother, I had sent her another unusually direct text asking her, once again, to stop criticizing my writing, my dating life, and my romantic decisions.

When I called, it was around six o’clock in the morning in Japan and early afternoon on the American West Coast.

She told me she only had about ten minutes. That suited me fine.

I told her I wanted to say a few things, then I would gladly hear whatever she wanted to say in return. I explained that we had now been having exactly the same argument for four years.

I told her that my writing was none of her fucking business. If she disliked what I wrote, she did not have to read it.

Likewise, she was certainly entitled to whatever opinions she wished to hold about my dating life, my romantic life, or my sex life. What I was no longer willing to do was listen to those opinions every single time we spoke. Or at all.

For the past eight months I have been dealing with somewhat significant health problems. I have seen multiple doctors, am taking various medications, and have gradually begun improving. During that time I have often called my mother for ten or twenty minutes simply because I wanted a sympathetic ear.

Inevitably, those conversations have drifted toward my writing and personal life.

While she has been consistently compassionate about my health, she becomes intensely—and, from my perspective, relentlessly—critical the moment the subject changes.

I find this utterly exhausting.

I am generally a laid-back kind of guy. I dislike conflict. I dislike unnecessary stress about little things even more. Over and over again I had explained that these are my stories, my relationships, and my decisions. Over and over again she has repeated the same criticisms.

By this point, I am completely over it.

I told her she still treats me like an infant rather than a fifty-two-year-old man living three thousand miles away, trying to build a second life after the collapse of a nearly thirty-year marriage.

Eventually I lost my temper.

I had never spoken to my mother this way before.

I said, “Mom, I know you don’t like profanity, and I’m only going to say this once.

Shut the fuck up.

Butt the fuck out of my writing.

I don’t ever want to hear another opinion from you about my writing, my dating life, my romantic life, or my sex life. Ever.”

I reminded her that she would almost certainly never meet any of these women. On the unlikely chance that I eventually settled down with one of them, she might meet her at the wedding and perhaps once or twice afterward.

Beyond that, they simply were not part of her life and none of her business.

She met my dad in 1969. They built a stable marriage that has lasted more than half a century. Like every marriage, I’m sure it has had its ups and downs, but I have always admired—and, if I’m honest, occasionally envied—the stability they created together.

My own marriage had just ended. That meant I was trying to figure out what the second half of my life might look like.

Not hers.

Mine.

After I finished speaking, I told her I was ready to hear whatever she wanted to say.

She paused.

Finally she said there really wasn’t anything she could add. She would send me a short text later.

I told her I was absolutely serious. If she could not respect this boundary—if she could not stop treating my writing and my private life as subjects she was entitled to supervise—I would never talk to her again. No son or daughter ever wants to have to say this to a parent, and I certainly did not today. However, I felt like she had backed into a corner and I could see no other out of it.

I wished her a good day. Then I hung up.

As of this writing, it is about four hours after our call. It is the middle of the day West Coast Time, and she has not reopened. I guess she is considering her response, and I suppose I would the same in her situation. I am fine to wait, because as I her told on the phone, I will not her call her for a few weeks, or even a month. If she wants to talk to me, she can call me anytime, and I will pick up. This is where we currently stand.

VI. Final Reflection

Overall, today was a pretty good day. The conversation with my mother was tough, however I do feel better haven gotten things off of chest, and essentially issues her an ultimatum. How she choses to respond, I have no idea. I truly hope that she takes the all time she needs to think it over and lets me know that she is willing to meet me half way. If she does so, I will meet her halfway as well. If she does not, all bets are off. We shall see.

Looking back over the day, I realize that my long running argument with my mother isn’t really about my writing at all. Writing is simply the latest battlefield. The real disagreement is much older than that. It is about autonomy.

I am fifty-two years old. I am a grown man. I have lived in Japan for nearly three decades. In this time, I have juggled three careers, been married and divorced, raised a wonderful son, taught thousands of students, written hundreds of essays, and somehow we were still arguing over whether I am allowed to tell my own stories.

I am simply no longer prepared to continue this conversation at all.

As I was starting this essay, I borrowed one of Lee Marvin’s great lines for the title. By the end of the day it no longer feels like a joke. In an interview with Roger Ebert from the early 1970’s, Marvin says:

“Look, if I want to develop an image, I’ll do it my own fucking way.”

I had spent much of the day getting lost, arguing with Google Maps, editing essays, thinking about old girlfriends, listening to Connor Oberst until dawn, eating convenience-store fried chicken, smoking and drinking wine, and having a very difficult conversation with my mother. And somehow all of it had become one story.

Nobody else could have written it exactly this way. That’s the point.

My mother doesn’t have to like what I write. Readers don’t have to like what I write. But the stories are mine, and so are the decisions about how to tell them.

Lee Marvin was right.

Nobody else gets to develop my image.

Nobody else gets to tell my stories.

That’s my job.

And, goddamn it—

I’ll do it my own fucking way.

Dedication:

For Lee. You sure make an image baby. You did your own fucking way, and you are my inspiration. You are my hero you glorious motherfucker.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s II: 7/21/26. A Day of Minor Annoyances.

Epigraph:

I’m so, I’m so, unsatisfied.

The Replacements

Dude, what are you doing?

Me

I: Morning and Afternoon

Today was a domestic day. Some days have a theme. This one announced itself before breakfast. It wasn’t tragedy. It wasn’t triumph. It was simply a day of minor annoyances, one after another, each too small to matter and yet somehow impossible to ignore.

Although I wasn’t at home in Kyoto, I was only about half an hour down the road in Osaka, my other city and, increasingly, my second home. I love Tokyo as well, but it’s farther away, considerably more expensive, and there is just too much going on. Osaka is more chill. I like that

When in Osaka I usually stay somewhere around Shinsaibashi, my favorite part of town, where I can happily wander for hours without much of a plan. Over the past several months I have been working hard to make the transition from teaching to writing full-time. I’ve been writing seriously for nearly two decades and have always thought of myself primarily as a writer. This spring, however, I finally decided to treat writing not simply as a passion but as a profession. The distinction matters.

Writing is the part I love. The profession includes everything else. I published my first novel, a thriller, earlier this year. I am happy with it and eager to do ever better next time. The book sold decently, and I’m still waiting for my first royalty payment. I don’t expect this money to change my life. If I’m lucky, it might pay for a few nights in a hotel, a handful of good dinners, and a strategically irresponsible number of cocktails. That’s perfectly fine. Every career has to start somewhere.

What I’ve gradually begun to understand is that being a professional writer involves far more than sitting in front of a keyboard. There are websites to maintain, emails to answer, banking problems to solve, social media to update, editors to contact, drafts to organize, and a hundred other little administrative jobs that somehow multiply while I sleep. To be honest, some of those tasks are a bit of a pain in the ass. Others are fun. Still, they’re part of the job now, and I intend to get as good as I can with them.

I am also recently divorced and dating again for the first time in nearly thirty years. Earlier this summer I dated a wonderful woman named Litz for about seven weeks. Most of this was online, and then the last eleven days we spent in her tiny apartment in Kochi City in central Japan. Eleven days in a small apartment is more than enough for minor differences to add up, and add up they did. After this time together, we mutually decided that we would not remain a couple and would no longer be exclusive. This is the right decision for both of us. We remain close friends, talk on the phone multiple times a day, and as of this writing are planning to meet for the first time in almost a month this coming Sunday. We have agreed to give our relationship a fresh start with as few expectations as possible. This will be a little tough as we have already spent many hundreds of hours on the phone and in person, however we will give it our best shot and hope for the best. Interested readers can read my longer piece on the recent state of our relationship here.

These days I am talking with dozens of women all over Japan and the world on several dating apps. Some conversations are thoughtful, some are flirtatious, some become unexpectedly intimate, and others consist almost entirely of discussions about pets, weather, coffee, and whether either of us has remembered to eat lunch. I enjoy all of it. I only block women when they ask me for money I am not going to give them. My mother finds all of this pretty remarkable and even a little shocking, which I find quite funny and so I remind her that “yeah mom you met dad in 1969 and things were a more than a little different back then. Today every single person and many married people besides are on the apps and carrying on a bunch of conversations just like me.” She laughs too.

I have been on a few dates since Litz and I ended our exclusive relationship with both professional women and regular civilians, and while these have all been nice, nothing has really materialized yet. I also have several more dates lined up across Japan and Southeast Asia over the next month and I find this really great. When I first went on the apps back in April just days after my wife and I agreed to divorce, I expected it to maybe take a few months to get anything new going. Within just three days I met Litz and we were off to the races. I had been with my ex-wife for nearly 30 years, so I think the reader will forgive me for not fully understanding the modern dating scene. Nevertheless, I dramatically underestimated how many people are online today, how badly they seek meaningful connections, how horny they are, and frankly how they can be, and I include myself in this, just a little bit desperate sometimes.

So yeah, there is a lot going on in my life right now. Today, however, was mostly little chores. I woke just after 3:30 this morning after about four and a half hours of sleep. That may not sound like much, but I’ve slept this way since I was a teenager. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but I no longer spend any time worrying about it.

I got up, made a quick coffee, and took a quiet walk through the neighborhood surrounding my hotel near Hommachi Station. It was one of those peaceful Japanese mornings that almost seems to belong to another world. The covered shopping street nearby was almost completely deserted. Every shutter was down except for a couple of twenty-four-hour beef bowl restaurants serving the early shift workers and the late night drinkers. I wasn’t in the mood for gyudon, so I wandered into a convenience store instead, picked up a light breakfast and another coffee, and walked slowly back to the hotel while the city stretched itself awake.

Back in my room I realized I wanted to stay in Osaka a few more days. Summer vacation gives me six precious weeks away from school, and I’ve learned not to waste them. My son will soon be returning to Japan in a few days after spending much of the summer traveling overseas covering the World Cup, and I wanted enough time in Osaka to write before heading back to Kyoto to see him. That simple decision turned out to shape the entire day.

I extended my checkout twice, paying a few thousand yen for the privilege of remaining in the room instead of wandering around the city with my suitcase for half the afternoon. The extra time was worth every yen. I finished editing an essay, attended to some texts, and worked for a little while on my finances, a full time job in and of itself. When I checked the TV with the intention of extending for three nights, I realized that, although it was mid-week and not a holiday, the price was suddenly jacked up by double. This pissed me off a bit, however there was nothing I would do so I started looking for another hotel that didn’t require a working credit card. That last detail turned out to be more difficult than I expected.

I’m currently replacing both my primary bank and my credit cards, which means that perfectly ordinary tasks occasionally become miniature adventures. Booking a room, moving money between accounts, confirming reservations, receiving verification codes, signing into banking apps—none of it is difficult in isolation, but together they have an ability to consume an entire morning.

After a while I found a hotel in my price range near Tennoji Station and took the short train ride across town. The hotel is a former love hotel, a little older than my previous one, and the room is enormous. It has a huge bathtub, an improbably large bed, an oversized sofa, enough switches to launch a small spacecraft, and, for reasons known only to former love hotels, more amenities than I could possibly need.

The air conditioner was already on high when I arrived, which felt like an act of unexpected kindness after walking through the July heat. I unpacked my bag, plugged in my computer, laid tonight’s clothes across the sofa, and settled in. I had time, so I did something I had been putting off for nearly two months. I took all the things out of my large suitcase, laid them on the desk, and ended up throwing several bags of old clothes and other junk away before putting the rest back. This felt great because I am a bit of a minimalist and I seriously dislike clutter. For the first time all day there was nothing that absolutely had to be done. The domestic work was finished. The night could begin.

As of this writing, it is just before seven o’clock in the evening. I just finished editing and published yesterday’s diary entry, so I am starting on today’s. My plan is to begin the evening at a wonderful little cocktail bar near Shinsaibashi Station before wandering a few blocks over to one of my favorite karaoke joints. I hope to meet a woman tonight. I’m optimistic, but we’ll see. If it happens, wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s perfectly fine too. When I was younger, I was relatively introverted. Over the years I’ve worked hard to become more outgoing, and these days I genuinely enjoy talking to strangers. I’ll probably end up chatting with a few dozen of people before the night is over. Perhaps a few will become new friends. Maybe one of them will become something more. Either way, I expect to wander back to my hotel sometime after midnight, finish this essay, get a few hours of sleep, and wake up tomorrow ready to do it all again. We’ll see where the night takes me.

II: Evening and Night

After getting settled into my new hotel, I decided it was time to head over to Shinsaibashi for the evening. Before I could think about cocktails or karaoke, however, I needed one thing: cash.

That turned out to be more complicated than expected.

The ATM had an English button, which naturally suggested that it would operate in English. Of course it did not. Add it to the list of minor annoyances that my day for some reason oriented itself around. I switched back to Japanese, poked my way through the menu, and managed to withdraw enough money for the evening. The whole episode took only a few minutes, and yet felt strangely representative of the day. Even the simplest tasks seemed to require one extra step, one extra guess, one extra little annoyance.

Even the cash in my pocket got in on the action. One of my ¥10,000 notes somehow emerged from my pocket slightly damp, despite the complete absence of rain. I have no idea how this happened. Whatever.

Outside, the evening was magnificent. As night fell, the temperature had fallen into the high sixties, and Osaka had become wonderfully walkable again. Summer nights here have a way of redeeming even the most irritating afternoons. I set off toward Shinsaibashi, thinking I’d simply grab a taxi and be there in a few minutes.

Google Maps had other ideas.

For reasons known only to itself, Google confidently informed me that Shinsaibashi was thirty-five minutes away by car. That couldn’t possibly be right. I know Osaka well enough to know when something doesn’t pass the common-sense test. Tennoji and Shinsaibashi are quite close together, but the app was operating like they were on opposite sides of the moon. They are not. I stared at the map, looked around at the streets in the area, and became increasingly convinced that either I was out of it or Google Maps was.

As it turned out, the answer was a little of both.

Unable to find a taxi, I wandered toward the nearest station hoping to sort things out underground. I asked the station guy the way to Shinsaibashi Station. He told me to take the Seninmichi Line. I walked over and of course, this is just the kind of day it was, the Seninmichi Line didn’t stop at Shinsaibashi at all. It did however stop at Namba, the stop before Shinsaibashi. Thinking about it I remembered that Namba was actually closer to the Drunken Clam than Shinsaibashi. Great. I had been to the Clam about five or six times and thought I had a pretty good sense of where it was. This would turn out to be wrong.

On the train I found myself making small editorial changes in my head to the Bobby Fischer essay I had just finished back at my hotel. I reread the essay on my phone, and focussed on one sentence: I had written that Fischer “couldn’t outrun what was following him.” Following wasn’t quite right. Chasing was better. Much better. It gave the sentence urgency. That’s the sort of microscopic revision nobody else notices but that writers somehow can’t stop making. I made a mental note to change it later.

Before leaving the hotel I’d also checked the latest stats for my blog. The Fischer essay had begun attracting readers, and the comments were starting to arrive. Other recent pieces were also moving well. This made me happy, because although I would not say I am obsessed with my stats I do find myself checking them several times a day.

At this point, I thought, I had sufficient cash, a reasonably good idea where I was going, and a beautiful July evening stretching out ahead of me. The middle part, again, turned out to be dead wrong.

Namba Station is only a few minutes from Tennoji Station, despite Google Maps claiming it is 35 minutes by car. It is not. It is more like five. Whatever dude. Do better I guess. If you can.

When I got up to the street above Namba Station, Google Maps told me that the Drunken Clam was 8 minutes away and it showed me the direction. The two blue arrows were pointing in opposite directions, but this is nothing new. I have learned over time that the arrows never have a clue as to what the hell they are doing, for some reason, and the only way to do it is to rely on the blue dotted line who generally is much more accurate. It was now close to 10 PM. I set out for the Clam and walked about 5 minutes before checking the app again. This time it had me going in the same direction, however it said I was now 13 minutes away. Typical. This seems absurd, so I looked around and at this point I still felt like I was more or less on track. I was not.

At one point I found myself standing in what appeared to be a dead end, staring once again at the little blue dot on Google Maps. The spinning wheel turned, the arrow drifted, recalculated, spun again, and generally behaved like a man trying to remember where he’d parked his car. I began to lose my patience.

A reassessment of the situation revealed to me that I was lost. I was not getting any closer to the Clam, and in fact Google Maps was insisting I was getting further away. I found myself asking the obvious question. How, after all these years, is this all still so difficult?

Presumably Google employs thousands of brilliant engineers whose entire job is making sure people know where they are. They have satellites, artificial intelligence, unimaginable computing power, and enough data to know what I had for breakfast. Yet somehow the little blue arrows still can’t tell me which way to walk down a street in central Osaka.

This isn’t a village in the mountains. It’s Osaka. It is one of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth. Tens of millions of people move through these streets every day. It is extensively mapped. If there is one place on the planet where a navigation app ought to know exactly where you are, surely Osaka is it. Nah.

I walked around in circles for another 20 minutes and then gave up and tried hailing a taxi. Google Maps was just busted. He sucks. Figure it out. I don’t know. The first taxi swept straight past me, reserved, which seemed about right. The second one stopped and picked me up. By this point I was sweating heavily in the July heat and was mopping my face with my shirt. The blast of cold air in the taxi felt like heaven.

After about a five minute drive the driver said the street to the Clam was closed to cars and it was just a few minutes away. This felt about right to me, so I paid my fare and made my way in the direction where I thought the Clam was. I was right back where I started over an hour ago, right next to Namba Station. I guess I was just being stupid and I should have just asked somebody instead of relying on the ever increasingly outta control Google Maps. But I had not. Oh well, I was almost there now. So I thought.

I was excited to sing karaoke as it had been months since my last time. Although I was a weekday, I knew from experience that the Clam would be packed. I would be lucky to get even one song in and I was going to choose Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, a real crowd pleaser. I knew that someone would play What’s Up by the 4 Non Blondes and Mr. Brightside by the Killers. These two songs are absolute staples of the karaoke scene in Japan and around the world. I was by this point thirsty and hungry and was looking for somewhere, anywhere, that was still open where I could grab a quick bite before the Clam. I felt that I was mere minutes away.

Right about then a total babe, a little chubby with rosy apple cheeks, walked past me. She made three seconds of eye contact, gave me a big smile, and winked. I smiled back. Nice. Her boyfriend noticed and kind of gave her the side eye. She glanced at him then looked back at me, smiled, and winked again! She wants the D I thought to myself and laughed. At least something was going my way.

I switched back to Google Maps, somewhat against my better judgement at this point. The large blue arrow pointed east while the smaller one pointed north. Again. A few seconds later they had switched places. Meanwhile the blue route calmly suggested I continue straight before making a short turn a block ahead. The map, the arrows, and my own sense of direction were conducting three entirely separate conversations.

So I made an executive decision to just ignore the arrows. They were not helping at all. The suggested route itself seemed about right. I started recognizing familiar landmarks. Sam & Dave’s couldn’t be far away. Neither could The Drunken Clam. Once those places enter your mental map, you’re effectively home.

As my confidence returned, so did my mood. A row of misting fans blasted cold air onto the sidewalk, and after well over an hour of wandering around in the July humidity they felt miraculous. I stood there for a few seconds longer than necessary, letting the cool mist wash over me before continuing on. Sometimes the smallest comforts are just the best.

Google Maps, however, remained committed to its own interpretation of reality. Every time I looked down, the arrows had adopted another opinion about which direction I was facing. Eventually I stopped arguing with them. They clearly weren’t interested in hearing my side of the story.

The streets grew busier. Hostesses and sex workers called out to passing pedestrians with the practiced ease of people who had repeated the same lines thousands of times. I smiled, exchanged a joke with one or two of them as I often do, and kept walking. It was simply another familiar part of the neighborhood, another sign that I was finally getting close.

When I checked the map one last time, it informed me that I was nine minutes away. An hour and a half ago minutes earlier it had insisted I was only eight minutes away. Whatever dude.

By now I had reached the point where optimism was becoming difficult to sustain. The estimated walking time seemed to change every time I looked down despite the fact that I had been walking steadily in what I thought was the right direction. It no longer mattered. What mattered was that I was once again lost. The bright, busy streets around Namba had quietly given way to somewhere much quieter. It simply didn’t feel right. I knew enough about Osaka to recognize when the city stopped matching the picture in my head.

After another twenty minutes of wandering through the July heat I was soaked with sweat and rapidly losing enthusiasm for the adventure. I wanted air conditioning, a cold drink, a restroom, and bed. The romantic idea of strolling across Osaka had officially run its course.

I finally admitted defeat and decided to grab a taxi to go back to my hotel. One pulled up right away. I climbed in, gave the driver the name of my hotel. After spending the better part of two hours arguing with Google Maps, there was something deeply reassuring about talking to a human being who knew exactly where he was going.

I thought the ride would take about 12 minutes, so I kicked off my crocs and leaned my head back against the seat to catch a few Zs. Instead the ride lasted all of four minutes. That, more than anything else, confirmed what I’d suspected all along. I’d never been very far away. The whole trip from door to door should not have taken more than 10 minutes. By the grace of Google Maps it took two hours. He is simply outta control. He does not know his ass from his elbow after 20 years. It makes zero sense.

III: Close

Back outside my hotel I walked the two minutes to Seven Eleven to get a few late night provisions. I lit a cigarette on the walk, because I smoke all day long, and also because I was still a littler stressed from my ordeal. With finally a minute to breathe I thought about ordering an escort. Although it was almost midnight, I knew the escort agencies would still be open. Some of them are open 24 hours, and others close for just a few hours in the morning. I would use the same agency I used last night to book Yuki. My date with Yuki had gone well enough, and she was very sweet, however she just wasn’t my speed and I was not going to book her again. I liked the picture of another girl on the app, and briefly contemplated booking her once I got back to my room. I just as quickly rejected this option because after my long walk around the greater Namba area I was simply exhausted. The only move was to smoke a couple more cigarettes, wash up, drink some water and maybe a little red wine, and call it a night. And this is what I did.

IV: Final Reflection

Looking back on the say, there wasn’t a dramatic event. Nobody fell in love. Nobody died. I didn’t solve any great problem or have any profound revelation. Instead I spent the better part of twenty hours dealing with hotel reservations, bank cards, ATMs, Google Maps, train stations, taxis, convenience stores, and the thousand tiny pieces of modern life that quietly consume so much of our time. Twenty-five-year-old me would have dismissed it as a wasted day. Fifty-two-year-old me isn’t so sure. Ordinary days are, after all, what most of life consists of. If you can’t learn to appreciate them—or at least laugh at them—you’ll spend most of your life waiting for life to begin.

In the end everything worked out. I found another hotel, finished some writing I was happy with, got hopelessly lost, eventually found my way home again, shared a smile with a beautiful stranger, sang no karaoke whatsoever, and ended the night exactly where I was supposed to be: back in my room, tired but happy, and with another essay nearly finished. Tomorrow will almost certainly bring another entirely different collection of small victories and minor frustrations. If today’s lesson was anything, it’s that those days are worth paying attention to too.

Dedication:

To the apple cheeked babe. There is always tomorrow honey.