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On My Brother Pat’s Wedding

“Find the river.”
— R.E.M.

It was summer 2013 in Portland as I recall. Hugh was nine. We stayed with my parents, and my grandmother Barbara was there too—eighty-eight at the time, lucid, funny as hell. All the relatives were around. It was that kind of week: people coming and going, meals stretching, the house absorbing it.

On the day of the rehearsal we took Hugh to the Science Museum—Sachie, Hugh, Claudia, and me—and we ran late because of it. That was the trade. By the time we got to the rehearsal dinner the mojitos were gone. This had been the big promise. Everyone laughed when we found out Barbara had had three of them. It wasn’t scandalous. It was just Barbara.

The rehearsal dinner was in a tall pink building downtown, or near it—one of those Portland landmarks that stays more as color than address in memory. The night had that soft, anticipatory feeling rehearsals sometimes do: no one tense yet, no one released either.

Junko was there. She was Sachie’s aunt on her mother’s side, and we had paid for her to come. Sachie wanted to repay her for years of quiet kindness. Junko was a nurse, like Sachie. At the time there was nothing remarkable about her being there, except that she was there, which later would come to matter more than anyone knew.

II

After the rehearsal dinner there was movement in different directions. Kate was around, her husband too. Later—after drinking somewhere else—he got into an actual fight. Not an argument, not raised voices: a fight. I don’t remember the details and don’t need to. Kate and Matt are divorced now. At the time it registered only as background noise, the kind you note and then step away from.

At the party Junko danced. She danced and danced, and people noticed. They commented on it, openly, approvingly. She was light on her feet, joyful, fully there. Jeff was dancing with her—this was when he was still with his second wife, Lisa—and everyone seemed pleased by the sight of it. It was one of those moments that didn’t announce itself as anything special, except that later it would become impossible not to remember.

That night back at the hotel, Mike and I went down to the bar with Pat. We ordered a bottle of champagne. I’d had a few drinks already at dinner, but Mike wanted it and I was up for one bottle. We drank it and immediately ordered another. I was less up for that, but I went along. When it came time to pay, Mike said, “No money until October. Peace out.” He was in a career transition, trying to get back to Seattle, broke. I picked up the bill.

It didn’t feel dramatic. Just one of those small, late-night imbalances you carry quietly and don’t do anything with.

III

In the morning Mike wanted to go running. He was hungover. I wanted coffee. We walked together for a while along the river, then I peeled off to find caffeine. Mike puked, rallied, and went running anyway. Classic Mike.

I was hungover too. The ceremony started around one. We went back to the hotel and got dressed. I was glad I wasn’t in the ceremony. Sarah had insisted on tuxes, which meant fittings and mild resistance and then compliance. It was fine.

We drove to the church and met some of Sarah’s brothers—she has a few. Everyone was nice. The ceremony itself was intensely Catholic. Very Catholic. All the rituals, all the structure. It didn’t alienate me or convert me. It just was. I don’t remember much beyond the density of it, the sense of time being held in place by repetition.

There’s a photo from that day that I still have. Mike and Pat and me, all in tuxes. I look impossibly thin. I look young. I was thirty-nine.

IV

We stayed a few more days. At some point Glenn and Barbara were at my parents’ house together. My parents have a big place, the kind that can absorb people overnight without strain. Barbara was leaving. Glenn—her only son—was staying the night.

She was saying goodbye, already halfway turned toward the door, when she stopped and looked at him.

“Glenn,” she said, “I love you, but hit the gym.”

She said it without malice and without hesitation. Love first, then truth. Glenn loves his food and drink. Everyone laughed. Barbara was eighty-eight. She was lucid. She was still very much herself.

That’s what I remember.

Dedication: For Pat and Sarah, and their three lovely girls.
You still owe me a mojito, though.

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On My Brother’s Mike’s Second Wedding

Epigraph

“All we need is just a little patience.”
— Guns N’ Roses

I. Leaving Anyway

The wedding was in June, which was just a little inconvenient for me. School was still in session, and I had to miss work to go. I remember wishing that it had been in August. But once I decided I was going, the resistance fell away. I locked it in, and then I was genuinely excited—mostly to see my family.

I hadn’t seen my mom, Mike, or Pat since January 2018, before COVID. I hadn’t seen my dad since October of that year. That mattered more to me than the logistics or the calendar. So my wife Sachie and I flew from Japan to Seattle, and my son Hugh flew in separately from New Zealand, via Auckland and Los Angeles.

We landed at Sea-Tac and cleared international arrivals quickly. We had a few hours before my parents arrived to pick us up. They had rented a van, partly because it was a three-day event and partly because they were making breakfast on the last morning, which required supplies. While we waited, Sachie and I sat in the only open area we could find outside arrivals. We both needed a cigarette, so we took turns—one of us watching the bags while the other smoked. We bought two Starbucks coffees, which cost sixteen dollars. I ordered an extra shot in each, not realizing the Americanos already contained doubles.

While we were there, a man nearby was clearly overdosing—probably fentanyl, maybe heroin. He was nodding, drooling. The police came first, then EMTs. They all knew him by name. Sylvester. After about an hour, they took him away on a stretcher. No one around reacted much. It felt routine. I was just sad, thinking about how much damage fentanyl has done in the U.S.

I texted my mom. They were running late. Hugh arrived through domestic customs and joined us. When my parents finally came, they looked good—just older, of course. We hugged and walked back through the airport to the van. My dad had forgotten where he’d parked it, so that took a while too.

Once we got moving, things settled. Sachie, Hugh, and I loaded into the van and drove north to Anacortes, about two and a half hours. It was mid-afternoon. Hugh slept most of the way. Conversation came easily. It felt natural, like time hadn’t broken anything, just stretched it.

We had an early dinner at a restaurant on the water in Anacortes. Pat and Sarah drove up from Portland with their three girls and joined us. John Innes and Kristi had been invited but were tired from the drive and didn’t come. I had raw oysters, another seafood dish, and a margarita. My dad ordered one beer and then told the server, “Please bring another one in exactly twelve minutes.” He always does this. He usually has two beers this way; that day he had a third later. I find the whole thing very funny.

I ordered a second drink—a Negroni, which wasn’t on the menu. The waitress said she thought the bartender could figure it out. It arrived with no ice. I considered sending it back but she was busy, so I let it go.

It was sunny. I sat in the sun so Sachie could have the shade. After dinner, Pat, Hugh, the two older girls, and I walked down over some stones to the water for a while. Then we went to a supermarket for beer, wine, and light provisions. I wasn’t sure how I’d sleep—I don’t always sleep well when traveling—so I bought a bottle of wine just in case.

We drove to the lodge where we were staying. It was really nice. Sachie, Hugh, and I had our own apartment. I took a walk behind the lodge to sneak a cigarette. Sachie probably found somewhere to smoke too, but I’m not sure.

Later that evening, we went down to Pat’s room for beers. The girls played on the lawn outside, and Pat chased them around until they were breathless and laughing. Watching him with them, I was struck again by what a great dad he is. I drank wine instead of beer—I was still dealing with a lingering COVID hangover and a newer gluten intolerance—and eventually drifted off and fell asleep on the couch.

That was the first night.

II. Crossing Over

In the morning, I woke first. No one else was up yet. Eventually my mom got up too, and we drove back to the supermarket for coffee. She bought me a pair of sunglasses—nothing fancy, just functional—and it was good to have time with her, talking at length. The coffee place sold Turkish coffee and tried to upsell me on baklava, which I regretted again not being able to eat because of gluten.

We all had breakfast later. It was underwhelming. I had yogurt. Around eleven, we drove out to the ferry terminal and got into a long line of cars. Sarah handed me one of those popular sparkling drinks in the U.S.—sweet, artificial—and I couldn’t finish it. The wrong kind of sweet.

On the ferry, I fell asleep. People were working on puzzles at tables. My parents stood outside because my mom has vertigo and gets dizzy. When we arrived at Friday Harbor, we went straight to the supermarket. There was no food at the camp except the rehearsal dinner and the wedding dinner, so I stocked up: hummus, corn chips—my mom handed me a huge bag of them—cheese, olives. I also had some soup at the market, which was excellent. I tried to get as much as I could because I knew options would be limited. I also bought wine.

The drive to the camp was supposed to be ten minutes, but the sign was tiny and we missed it. We overshot the turn and had to double back using Google Maps. We arrived mid-afternoon.

The camp was down a dirt road off the highway and much larger than I expected. There was a main lodge, a big lawn, a collection of cabins in different shapes and sizes, a barn where the wedding would be held, and a garden set up for the rehearsal dinner. We used metal push carts to haul our things from the parking lot to the cabins.

My parents were staying in the main lodge. Our cabin was about 150 meters away, next to Pat’s family. It was clean but very small: a tiny kitchen, a bedroom, a cramped closet you could barely move around in, a loft for Hugh, and a bathroom awkwardly placed between the kitchen and the bedroom. Kelly, his wife Courtney, and their kids Jacob and Ang were in another cabin. John and Kristi were nearby as well. Mason was staying in some kind of shared space. Between our cabin and Pat’s was a fire pit, and Sarah had already hung laundry over the chairs.

Smoking was allowed, but only at a few designated ashtrays—those tall black plastic ones on poles. The signs said that if you littered, the fine was one thousand dollars per cigarette butt.

I was a little concerned about whether the food I’d bought would last. I ate chips and hummus. Sachie went into the woods to smoke and put her cigarette butts on top of our garbage can. I told her about the rule and asked her to use the ashtray instead. She did.

Later, we gathered at the lodge. I brought wine. One of the camp staff asked if we wanted to hear the house rules. Mike said, “Lay them on us.” The rule was one open drink at a time in the lodge. It closed at ten, but we could use the nearby fire pits and deck afterward. I put my bottle of wine out of sight. Mike responded to the rule with a polite “Uh-huh, sure,” and I got the impression he had no intention of following it.

My dad, Hugh, and I drove back into town to pick up pizza for dinner. I ordered a cauliflower-crust pizza because of my gluten intolerance. We ordered too much—one pizza each plus one for my mom and Sachie—but that was fine. We ate, talked, and I drank wine. Mike, Colleen, and Felix were there. Colleen took Felix to bed. Later, Sachie asked me to go back to the cabin to get a bottle of white wine. I did, and we drank it. The rule wasn’t enforced. It was a relaxed evening.

That was also when I saw Eric Hillyard for the first time.

III. The FIRST NIGHT AND NEXT MORNING

Eric Hillyard is a character and a half. He’s one of Mike’s good friends from high school at Saint George’s, and one of only two people from that era who were there. The other was Dan Clarke—known as Jerry—who was officiating the wedding. Eric didn’t have a formal role. He didn’t need one.

I gave Eric a big hug when I saw him. I hadn’t seen him since high school. He razzes Mike like nobody else, but he was polite and warm with me and bowed to Sachie. He was drinking quite a bit. After ten, my parents went to bed, and Eric, Mike, and I gathered around the fire pit between the cabins.

Eric smoked a cigarette. I smoked two. We tossed them into the fire pit. Later, back at the cabin, it occurred to me that the cigarettes probably wouldn’t burn up completely. I was pretty cooked, but I walked back in the dark with my phone light, dug around in the ashes, found all three cigarette butts, and put them in the ashtray. I figured I’d just saved Mike and Colleen three thousand dollars.

Eric had told a joke that landed too close to home with Mike. Mike said it went too far. I got the impression this wasn’t the first time. It didn’t blow up, but it didn’t land well either.

I went to bed. Sachie and Hugh were already asleep. I slept fine.

The next morning I woke up first again. I ate more hummus and corn chips and went down to the lodge for coffee to see who was around. Free coffee was available. It was rehearsal day.

I don’t remember much of the day before the rehearsal itself. Earlier, when Hugh and I had gone into town on the pizza run, we’d stopped at a hardware store and bought a frisbee. Hugh played with the little kids—Colleen’s brother’s kids and others—on the lawn. I mostly hung around. Food was running low, and I was looking forward to dinner, which was scheduled for around five.

Before dinner there were family pictures, but before that something happened that I didn’t witness directly. Mike told me about it afterward.

They had hired a photographer, a makeup artist, and a band. All freelancers. The food was provided by the camp staff. Colleen was getting her makeup done and had asked for it to be light. Apparently it wasn’t. Mike saw it and said, “Babe, she pancaked you.” Colleen initially wanted to let it go, but they talked and then fired the makeup artist on the spot. Mike told me about it calmly and said that decision was kind of on him.

I didn’t judge it. What I found myself wondering was how much of her fee she got paid. I didn’t ask. I assumed she was paid for the day. The photographer had traveled a long way. I didn’t know whether the makeup artist was local. I hoped she was.

That evening, people gathered in the garden. Both sides of my family were there, along with Eric, Jerry, Mason, Kelly, John Innes, and others, as well as Colleen’s friends and family. The mood was good. But John was in bad shape.

By his own admission, John was pretty depressed. Both his parents had died, and something unresolved involving his father had happened before his death. He hadn’t been able to say goodbye properly. He’d had to have a few just to get ready to come to dinner and face people.

John and Kristi left early and Mason and I walked to the parking lot for a cigarette. There were ashtrays there, and I didn’t want to risk a fine. Colleen’s friends were smoking weed cigarettes back in the garden. Mason told me about a recent breakup that had been serious. He said he’d been immature for a long time and that the relationship and life had forced him to grow up. From his demeanor, it was clear that was true.

That night I also saw my Uncle Jeff’s third wife for the first time—she is from Mexico. Hugh talked with Jeff about his soccer influencer work. Jeff was impressed and invited Hugh to stay at his place in California anytime, for any length of time. Hugh was flattered and grateful.

Things wrapped up early. There was no repeat of the fire pit scene from the night before. I talked a lot with Amy, but mostly I was with Mason. Then we went back to the cabin and went to bed.

IV. DAN CLARKE/ BILL CLARKE DREAM

Wedding day morning felt like more of the same. I was low on cigarettes. I ate more corn chips and hummus from the seemingly endless bag and got coffee in the lodge and waited. Jerry was around. We talked. He’s had an interesting life—some wildness there—and I could see why Mike likes him so much.

Dan Clarke’s father is Bill Clarke, brother of Janet Mann and brother-in-law of Paul Mann. All Saint George’s power brokers. My dad and Bill Clarke were friendly once, but it went sideways. After that, my dad would complain about him endlessly in the car to my mom. Typical Ross behavior at the time, although I never understood the core issue

At some point that morning I thought about a dream I had years earlier, one that has stuck with me. I’m including it here as I wrote it at the time.

2/27/18:

Two intersecting and yet separate dreams about Bill Clark. These will take some unpacking.

I. I am with my father and someone else in a car on a rainy day. We are parked and Bill Clark is there. He looks like the real Bill Clark as I remember him, overweight and not too smooth. Bill Clark was an intermittent arch-enemy and then sometimes ally of my father at Saint George’s in the 90s. The encounter in the car is the culmination of several encounters with Bill in the dream and some of these have been just he and I. Bill is telling me through these encounters how much he admires our IB program and what I am doing with it. He stresses how important it is that I keep going. At the car, he does this again and looks a little desperate. Because he is so clearly sincere even my father who was his enemy gives him the space to say his piece. For my part, I am grateful for his kind words however the car kind of needs to get moving. I thank him from the window. I think he is about to get wet from the rain.

II. I am meeting with Bill Clark again, however a very different looking Bill Clark. Here he is trim with a wire grey beard cut short and a nice suit. He looks very distinguished and a little intimidating. This Bill Clark is also supportive however is much more firm with me. He tells me that I need to get on my hands and knees and beg and plead for resources. Somehow I get the image of a turtle on its back, open to the sky. This is the posture I need to adopt according to Bill. Nothing can be taken for granted and I have to beg. He is quite clear and I understand the wisdom in what he says.

Comment: This is a super interesting dream that bears unpacking. The two Bill Clarks are polar opposites and the second one is more regal and correct in every way. Why the former enemy of my father? This dream is so packed with symbolism.

Not long after that, it was time to shift gears and get ready for the ceremony.

V. The Ceremony

Before the ceremony began, I practiced rope-tying with Colleen’s brother and Pat. I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, but I had been enlisted to help tie Mike and Colleen’s hands together at the end of the ceremony. I was nervous. I had to go first, and as with the e. e. cummings poem years earlier at Mike’s first weeding, I had limited information. Mike told me it would be fine. Colleen’s brother Kevin and I made a joke of it together. Don’t fuck the whole wedding, bro. We got on well.

The rope was thin. There were several strands, intertwined.

Around four, people gathered again at the lodge. Only certain people had drinks. The rehearsal had gone smoothly. We had a clear walk-out order. My family walked out right after Mike and Colleen so I could be in the front row and step forward when it was my turn.

Everyone took their places. Jerry gave a classic, funny speech about being unprepared. Mike’s vows were sincere. Colleen received a huge round of applause when she walked out.

The ceremony was short. The moment came quickly. I stepped forward and did the tying. The ropes were longer than I expected and hung down toward the ground. I stumbled and nearly tripped over them, but I didn’t fall. Thank God.

The ceremony ended, and we moved directly into the barn for dinner.

VI. The WEDDING DINNER

Dinner started with oysters and a watermelon margarita, which I passed on. I drank red wine and hit it pretty hard. Dinner proper was pasta with sauce made by Colleen’s dad. I couldn’t eat it. I was hungry and ate oysters until there were literally none left. I got the last ones.

I spent some time standing outside with Kelly and his kids, Jacob and Ang. We talked. Inside, I sat with family. Hugh had the pasta and then went over to Colleen’s father to thank him for the sauce, which was a classy move.

After dinner, Kelly, Mason, Sachie, and I went out back for a cigarette. I was out and bummed one from Sachie, and it was the first time I’d ever seen Kelly smoke. I got to know Jacob, who was almost done with high school, and Ang, who was a couple of years younger.

I was wiped and left early. Sachie and Hugh came back later. Colleen’s dad gave a speech. My dad didn’t. Katie—my cousin through Amy—gave a great speech. Katie has Down syndrome, and everyone applauded.

That was the night.

VII. Dispersal

The next morning my parents were making breakfast, and the relatives who had stayed in town came back for it. My mom was prepping food. Amy brought gluten-free bagels. I had half a bagel, some fruit, and coffee and talked with people as they moved in and out. Breakfast was a performance, and it justified the van rental entirely.

We packed up and said goodbye to Mike, Colleen, and Felix. They were heading to a nearby island for a short honeymoon. From there, we drove first to the rental house where Pam and Steve were staying. I did laundry while everyone else went whale watching. I was keyed up about it—laundry had accumulated, and I don’t like traveling with dirty clothes. The door was left open, so I walked to the market for more soup and found my way back.

That evening we went back to the same pizza place. I had another cauliflower-crust pizza, a gluten-free beer that was just okay, and a glass of wine. I sat with Amy, her husband David, Sachie, Hugh, and Katie. I paid attention to Katie—she’s been developing early-onset dementia and I wanted to see how she was doing. My mom paid for dinner, which I appreciated.

We stayed at a hotel five minutes away that my parents had pre-booked. It was a large suite. Sachie and I took one room, my parents took the other, and Hugh slept on a cot in the living room. Hugh, my dad, and I played shuffleboard downstairs. I won. It was very relaxed. I had what was left of a small bottle of vodka, drank some, and poured the rest out.

The next morning we went to the ferry terminal. We ran into Jeff’s family again. My parents talked with them while Sachie, Hugh, and I got coffee and bought chocolates as omiyage. On the ferry back, a young naturalist gave a talk about whales. I listened and didn’t fall asleep this time.

Once we reached Anacortes, we drove the wrong way for about half an hour before my dad realized it. We turned around and headed toward Sea-Tac, staying near the airport. I was starving. We said goodbye to my parents. I cried a little. My mom did too.

At three in the afternoon we went straight to a steakhouse. I had steak, fries, and a Negroni. Hugh and Sachie ate as well. We sat in the regular dining section, not the bar, because Hugh was still twenty. We slept early.

The next morning we took a bus to the airport. Hugh left earlier, and Sachie went with him while I tried to sleep. At the airport, Sachie wanted to buy a specific bottle of whisky as a gift. The plane was already boarding. She ran off and made it back just in time. I was anxious, but she made it.

We flew back to Japan. I went back to work the next day and thanked everyone for covering for me while I was gone.

Dedication

For my family, with love and gratitude.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also take up the topic of weddings.

On My Brother Pat’s Wedding

https://thekyotokibbitzer.com/2025/11/28/on-gillian-welch-and-john-innes-wedding-with-a-cameo-from-two-jewish-revivalists-and-the-sabian-symbols/

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On the Periscope Platform and Annie Hardy’s “Band Car”

“Wake me up before California
Darling boy I’ve never known ya”

— Annie Hardy

1. Periscope (2018): Ambient Human Contact

In the fall of 2018, before TikTok Live and before Instagram learned how to professionalize everything, there was Periscope.

It was a live-video app owned by Twitter, but it never really felt like social media. It felt more like radio—with pictures. You could open it and see who was live anywhere in the world, zoom in on a city, drop into a stream, leave, move on. The scale was small enough that you could more or less take in the entire active population at any given moment. There was no sense of infinite scroll. The world was navigable.

It was also completely unpoliced. People streamed whole songs, movie clips, televisions playing in the background, themselves half-asleep or wandering around or doing nothing at all. No one cared. There were no warnings, no copyright bots, no friction. It was a free-for-all in the literal sense: free time, free speech, free form.

What Periscope allowed—what it uniquely allowed—was time. Long stretches of it. Silence. Repetition. Boredom. People would just sit there and talk, or not talk, or smoke on their porch and complain about their day. That kind of stream simply does not exist on Instagram Live. Instagram demands a reason. Periscope didn’t.

I loved it because it matched my temperament. I wasn’t looking to build anything. I wasn’t trying to grow an audience or perform a version of myself. I liked cursing around on the app, listening, occasionally speaking back. It was ambient human contact: voices moving through time, present but not demanding anything in return.

Most people didn’t want that. Periscope never offered a ladder—no clear path to recognition, no reliable virality, no payoff for effort. It didn’t protect users from themselves, and it didn’t compress experience into highlights. For most people, that felt pointless. For a few of us, it felt like oxygen.

I didn’t think of it as important while it was happening. It was just there, like a short-lived commons where people killed time together. Looking back, I’m amazed it existed at all.

2. Time, Leave, and the Split Feed

From September 2018 through February 2019, I was on leave from my school. The reasons sit elsewhere and don’t need explaining here. What mattered was that, for once, I had time—real time, not time carved out between obligations. I was based in Kyoto, and in October and November I spent long stretches staying in a hotel in Akasaka, moving back and forth between the two cities.

At the same moment Periscope entered my life, I started a new blog, The Kyoto Kibbitzer. The original idea was simple: walk around, notice things, write about bars, art, neighborhoods. Periscope became a sister project—not an escape from writing, but a parallel way of paying attention. One was private and slow; the other was live and provisional. They fed each other.

I quickly settled into two distinct kinds of streams.

During the day, I walked. Downtown Kyoto, north Kyoto, sometimes Tokyo. I talked, observed, played music, responded to comments. I never put my face on camera—not once. The camera always faced outward, toward streets, storefronts, light, movement. I got a simple phone holder so I could film without fuss. The stream wasn’t about me; it was about what I was seeing.

At night, I streamed from my desk in the upstairs room of my house. I usually stood, like a DJ or a lecturer, sitting only when I was reading something. The night streams were almost entirely art: music, films, writing. I’d play songs and talk about them, read long passages from essays or movie reviews, sometimes even play sections of films on my laptop and film the screen. It was all technically a grey area, but Periscope didn’t care, and neither did anyone watching.

Once I read an entire Roger Ebert essay on air—an interview he’d done with Lee Marvin—and laughed out loud the whole way through. “If I want to be an icon I’ll do it my own way, baby,” Marvin said. Mostly, that was the night feed: attention without urgency, commentary without stakes. Occasionally I’d take it back outside to a bar, or, early on, stay up all night wandering and streaming, the phone dying fast enough that I had to carry two battery packs. But those were exceptions. The form settled quickly.

The split mattered. Day feeds faced the world. Night feeds faced ideas. Both were ways of being present without self-display. Together, they created a rhythm that made Periscope feel less like a platform and more like a place of its own.

3. A Small World with Names

The audience was small, but it existed.

A few people watched consistently. My friend Andrew, who lives in Japan but not Kyoto, would sometimes tune in live or catch the replay later. John Innes watched as much as he could, and sometimes his wife, Kristi, would drop in too. When John commented, I’d usually stop whatever I was doing and talk with him at length. Conversation mattered because it was rare.

There were others who hovered at the edges. A French guitarist would sometimes watch silently for long stretches. Later, Mela would too, though I watched her far more than she watched me—mostly because she streamed for even longer than I did. And then there were the Periscope regulars: people who drifted in and out, stayed for a few minutes, disappeared, reappeared weeks later. That was the rhythm.

Periscope allowed replays, which changed the feel of everything. Not all attention was synchronous. A stream could be watched hours later, like a letter someone opened when they had time. It softened the sense of performance. You weren’t always talking to people; sometimes you were just sending something out into the day.

What mattered wasn’t numbers. Most streams—mine included—had only a handful of viewers at any given time. Even the people who seemed central to the platform often streamed to three or four names. The world was small enough that you could recognize it. You learned who was usually awake when you were. You noticed when someone stopped streaming altogether.

Because of that scale, recognition carried weight. When someone you knew appeared in the comments, it felt like a real arrival. The back-and-forth could stretch without interruption. There was no pressure to keep things moving, no sense that you were losing an audience if you paused to respond.

It didn’t feel lonely in the usual way. It felt communal in miniature. A village square that never got crowded enough to become anonymous.

4. Killing Time Together

I was somewhat lonely during that period, and looking for human companionship. Not intensity, not rescue—just being awake with other people. Periscope worked because it was like radio, only you could talk back. You could toggle around the world and find whatever level of interaction you wanted, then move on without consequence.

Some streams were playful and I would play along. There was a beautiful Russian woman who spoke mostly in Russian and replied to my comments in halting English. She’d do things like eat honey off a spoon, theatrically, and I’d type something juvenile and she’d play along too. It sounds silly, and it was, but it was also light. Once we talked longer and she told me she wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t afford it. I’d guess she was in her mid-to-late twenties. After that, I drifted away. The language barrier was real; the connection couldn’t sustain itself. That was normal.

There was a French guitarist I watched early on. He was very good—technically accomplished, friendly—and he seemed to have infinite time. He’d sit in my stream silently for long stretches, just there. Periscope people had time; that was one of the defining traits. After a few weeks I stopped watching him. Not because anything was wrong, but because it was all one thing. Skill without movement. No arc. Attention drifted, and that was allowed.

Other streams were even more minimal. I remember a woman in Oklahoma who would sit on her porch, rip bongs, and talk about her day. That was it. No premise, no performance. Just presence. That kind of stream doesn’t exist on Instagram Live. Periscope tolerated people doing nothing in public.

There was also Max, a trans woman from eastern Canada. She complained about her mother, about being broke. She usually had no viewers. Every time I came into her stream she lit up. Once I sent her fifty dollars for an art commission, and she reacted like she’d won the lottery. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being seen. On Periscope, small gestures carried disproportionate weight because the economy of attention was so thin.

People weren’t looking for transformation. They were killing time. Talking. Waiting. Passing hours together across time zones. The platform allowed that without apology. It was so free-form that it’s hard to explain now without it sounding unreal.

But that was the baseline. That was what “normal” looked like.

5. Mela: Process Recognizes Process

I didn’t find Mela right away. It wasn’t until mid-October that her stream appeared on my map. By then I already knew how Periscope worked—what it rewarded, what it ignored, what kinds of attention lasted.

The first stream I remember, she was just walking around New York City. Not driving. Walking. Taking stairs. Cutting through neighborhoods. Letting the city decide the route. Almost immediately I felt a shock of recognition: she’s me. Not biographically, not emotionally—procedurally. We were using the same method.

She would ask, “left or right?” I’d type “left,” and she’d take a left. That was it. No drama. No explanation. A shared orientation, moment to moment. I’d stay with her for hours, wandering the city together at walking speed.

People who showed up looking for something else—someone conventionally attractive to perform, flirt, deliver a payoff—would drift off. The stream filtered itself. What remained was patient, non-demanding attention. Process over outcome.

She was in her mid-to-late thirties and had worked in film props on sets around New York. At the time she was on sick leave after a back injury, which explained the free time. She streamed from her apartment, sometimes from a friend’s place she was house-sitting, and often from the streets and trains. The life context was legible. Nothing felt invented for the stream.

Eventually we connected on Instagram, but that’s not the story here. What mattered was simpler: real, undemanding, non-sexual attention feels good. In a micro-attention economy, it feels enormous.

Mela mattered because she showed that Periscope could sustain healthy, lateral connection—companionship without escalation, presence without claim. That mattered later, because it proved the platform itself wasn’t the problem. It was capable of holding something gentle and durable.

That made what came next easier to recognize as different.

6. Giant Drag (Came Late, Stayed Forever)

I came to Giant Drag late.

I first heard them sometime around 2015, years after their debut. The song was “Kevin Is Gay,” and I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. I remember stopping short. It sounded like shoegaze, but with attitude—guitars that rang and crunched at the same time, a voice that was sharp, funny, unsentimental. I thought: who on earth is this woman?

I bought the CD immediately. The record was Hearts and Unicorns. There was “This Isn’t It,” “Slayer,” and a sense that this wasn’t a novelty discovery. It didn’t feel like a phase. It felt like something I’d been missing and had finally caught up to. Ten years later, the music is still with me.

Learning afterward that the album came out in 2005 only clarified things. I hadn’t encountered Giant Drag as part of a moment or a scene. There was no social reinforcement, no sense of being early or late. The music arrived on its own terms and stayed because it deserved to. It became part of my listening life in a quiet, durable way.

That matters here, because when Annie Hardy later appeared on Periscope, she didn’t arrive as a stranger or as “a streamer.” Her voice was already familiar to me. Not biographically, not personally—but aesthetically. I knew the intelligence. I knew the precision. I knew the attitude. What I didn’t expect was where or how I’d encounter it again.

At the time, none of this felt connected. It only looks that way in retrospect. Back then, Giant Drag was just music I loved, and Periscope was just a place people killed time together. I had no reason to think those two tracks would ever overlap.

Then they did.

7. Band Car → Band House

Because the number of active streams was limited, as I have said, I spent a lot of time just cruising around the map. One night in September 2018, I landed on Annie Hardy without looking for her. The stream was called Band Car, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.

She was driving. Talking. Rapping. Singing into some kind of vocoder or effects chain. Swearing at other drivers. There was no Giant Drag material, no backstory, no explanation. She’d say, “Give me three words,” and then build a rap off whatever came in. I gave her words. Over and over. It never went stale. The language was filthy—relentlessly so—but also precise. The filth wasn’t sloppy; it landed because it was aimed.

I watched every day. She streamed every day. She had no job and very little money, and she drove for hours, talking, rapping, improvising, stopping occasionally to run into Home Depot or some other errand. I’d wait. Dead air didn’t bother me. This was how Periscope worked.

Sometimes she used gay slurs, and I balked internally. That wasn’t my thing at all. But the space itself was unfiltered by design, and she used every word under the sun. I didn’t intervene or moralize. I noted it and stayed. Admiration and discomfort existed side by side.

I talked about her on my own stream. I told people she was the best thing on Periscope. I couldn’t believe I had such unfettered, generous access to a high-level artist just living inside her process. There were others watching too, but not many. I was probably her biggest fan, or one of a few. In a micro-attention economy, that mattered.

One night, very late in Los Angeles, I’d been with her for hours. The audience thinned until it was just me. She parked the car, got out, and said, almost casually, “Do you want to do band house?” It was a first. I said of course.

She went into her garage, then into a music room. There was a piano. She asked, “What do you want to hear?” I said how about After the Gold Rush. She sat down without ceremony and played the entire song. No sheet music. No warm-up. She hit the high parts cleanly. Musicians have an astonishing memory for songs, and she had it in full.

It was the greatest musical moment of my life, bar none. The only thing that comes close is hearing Spencer Krug play “Julia with Blue Jeans On” at Urbanguild in Kyoto. This was different. This was private, unadvertised, unrepeatable. When she finished, she said, “Okay, that’s band house,” and wrapped it up.

No encore. No processing. Just the sound, then silence.

That was the miracle. And it was already complete.

8. Running Its Course

In December, I used Periscope again in New York and Boston, mostly with Mela. The rhythm was familiar by then—long stretches of time, nothing urgent, companionship without demands. One night in a Boston hotel room, where I was staying to see Phosphorescent and Jay Som, I streamed the entire film Michael Clayton from my laptop. It was a grey area, as everything on Periscope was. She watched the whole thing with me, commenting occasionally—“bad guy, ooh”—the way someone does when they’re present but not trying to perform being present. It was fun. That was enough.

After that, things ended. Not abruptly. Not painfully. Periscope had simply ran its course.

Mela moved to Oklahoma and stopped streaming. I stopped too. The app thinned out. People disappeared. The small world became smaller and then, effectively, gone. There was no sense of loss that needed narrating, no aftermath to dramatize. The conditions that made Periscope feel possible—time, openness, a tolerance for doing nothing in public—shifted. Life resumed its usual density.

Looking back, what remains isn’t a lesson or a warning. It’s a memory of a brief commons where attention wasn’t monetized and presence didn’t have to justify itself. A place where someone could play a song once, perfectly, for one person, and then stop. And that could be enough.

That was Periscope. And then it wasn’t.

Dedication

For the micro-attention economy.
I had a total blast.

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The Splinter Fraction: On the Joys of Karaoke, Communal Song as Social Solvent

Note: This is the third and for now final position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our final position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. We are entirely serious.

We affirm karaoke as one of the last remaining civic rituals in which strangers meet without preconditions and leave with fewer barriers than they arrived with. A microphone passed between an office worker, an American traveler, an Indian engineer, an older Japanese gentleman, a young woman finding her voice again — this is not entertainment alone. It is a brief suspension of hierarchy, suspicion, and self-protection. In these small rooms people remember how easy it is to be together.

Karaoke is not mandatory, nor do we idealize it. We simply encourage every citizen — once in a while, or for the first time — to step into a space where age, gender, profession, and political commitments dissolve for the length of a verse. It is a civic practice hiding in plain sight: a low-cost, low-risk release valve healthier than most vices and far more generous in its returns.

Society is fraying at the edges. But give people one Tom Petty track, one “What’s Up” howl, one chance to sing badly but sincerely, and cohesion begins again — not through policy, but through the ordinary bravery of shared song. The Splinter Fraction supports public encouragement and, where possible, public subsidy of these communal singing rooms, as engines of ease and democratic belonging.

Karaoke will not fix the world. But it will bring us back into easy congress with one another, which is more than most programs can claim.

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part IV: First Year Social Life

My first year at NAU was sober in the daylight and loosely intoxicated at the edges. I lived in a freezing back room one minute from the History building—space heater struggling, breath visible some mornings, blankets pulled over my head like I was camping indoors. I drank only socially, worked hard, slept irregularly but not disastrously. My focus was sharp. Sanjay told me I was a tough grader, precise to the point of severity. I softened slightly, not because he demanded it, but because I understood I was being a little pedantic.

Most nights I walked everywhere—my location meant I barely needed a car. Campus was small, my room was close, and the world narrowed down to the few places I traveled on foot: the History office, Safeway for cheap groceries, the bowling alley, Gabe’s apartment. Gabe—Mexican-American, small flat, Friends reruns on VCR—was the first true companion of that year. We smoked weed twice, only twice, but years later those two nights glow brighter than whole weeks of coursework.

One evening before bowling we got high at his place. He drove the back roads with “Tennessee Jed” by the Grateful Dead blasting from the speakers. I’d heard the song before but never like that. The asphalt felt lunar, pale and distant, as if we were driving the dark side of the moon. For fifteen minutes I thought it was the greatest song ever written. I bowled maybe a 160 that night—no 200—but it didn’t matter. Those early nights had the glow of being young enough to change and old enough to notice.

The department didn’t gel immediately. It wasn’t love at first seminar; more like gradual accumulation—papers returned, conversations after class, cigarette breaks, laughter by vending machines. And then November arrived, Day of the Dead, Día de Muertos, and everything clicked. Nearly the whole cohort went out to a bar within walking distance of my house. Warm light, cool air, no need for taxis. I stepped onto the second-floor balcony with a drink despite the sign forbidding glassware outdoors. Liability. Potential weapon. Potential fall. Of course that’s where I stood.

Everyone arrived a little looser than usual. Cindy loud and magnetic, Diamond telling labor-movement stories, Patrick pushing Reagan just to watch Diamond combust, Mandiola ready for his close-up. The night had the feeling of a department not performing collegiality but genuinely inhabiting it. For the first time it felt less like I’d transferred into a system and more like I belonged to one. Somewhere near the second round I knew: I liked these people. Not tolerated them. Not simply studied with them. Liked them.

A few weeks later Patrick hosted a house party north of campus—big place, temporary-feeling, the kind of grad-student rental that looks like three relationships and a semester of chaos have already happened there. I arrived early, around seven, beer in hand before anyone arrived. By eight it was full—grad students I knew, professors, plus strangers whose relationship to Patrick was unclear.

A young Russian woman approached me, dark hair, quick smile, zero hesitation. She asked if I was married. I said yes. She asked if I wanted to get married anyway. Straight to it. No preamble. No seduction arc. Just proposition → outcome. Gabe leaned over, grinning: “It is flattering, isn’t it?” And it was. Even as I understood what she might actually want—a visa, a foothold, a passport through me. Desire and practicality often wear the same mask. Still, it gave the night a story.

The house was loud by then. Diamond and Patrick shouting Reagan versus labor history like two men paid by volume. Fritz drifting through with Vegas cocktails on the brain. Cindy incandescent. Mandiola’s tooth aching but untreated, pride > pain. I wandered the rooms, comfortable but not consumed. Just observation, beer, and the sense of being part of something that didn’t need me to steer it—rare then, rarer later.

I left the party after a few hours, steady and untroubled. Year One closed gently. I finished with straight As, a department that had finally found shape, weed-echoes still in the brain, Dead songs drifting like ghost signals, and a girlfriend in Japan I was aching quietly to return to. It was a good year in many ways.

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My Time at Northern Arizona Part III: The Professors

Note: This is Part II of my series on my time at Northern Arizona University between 1999-2001. This post takes up the other graduate students in the History Department. Part I: Decision and Arrival, can be found here, and Part II: The Other Graduate Students can be found here.

The Professors: Eight Points on a Compass

Graduate school I feel is often remembered less for the curriculum than for the people who taught it, and Northern Arizona University was no exception. The department wasn’t Ivy, wasn’t elite, wasn’t powered by grants or theory-cliques — but it had shape, it had character, and it had real smarts. Here is a quick portrait of the eight teachers that I remember. Some I took their class, some I tutored for, some both, and some I just got to know in the halls. Here they are.

Sanjay

My advisor by inevitability: the only tenured professor in the department who worked on Asia at all. Indian, Penn PhD, postcolonial thinker with a full loyalty to subaltern studies; ambivalent on Gandhi in that very specific way that people trained in the 90s often were. He let me study Japan inside his Indian frame, as long as I stayed inside the lines. It was generous, in one sense, and constricting in another. He wanted me to be Spivak or something adjacent — not who I was, not what I was built for.

We got along well for a while. I respected him, and he liked that I was a serious person. But eventually I started to lose respect for him, not dramatically, just gradually, because he wouldn’t quite let me go my own way. He believed in his model; he couldn’t imagine someone wanting another.

I tutored for him a few times. Early 1999, first term, he told me I was a tough grader — “especially on grammar,” he said, with a small smile. It was his way of telling me to ease up. I took the note and loosened up, but only slightly.

I’ll write more about Sanjay, and about the slow evolution of that relationship, in later pieces — there’s more there, and it shadows the next set of decisions I made

Sanjam

Sanjam was Sanjay’s wife — close to his age, maybe a little younger. She wasn’t tenured yet when I arrived, and they wanted that badly. Sanjay, in my opinion, crossed a line a bit with his advocacy for her, but I’ll get to that in a later piece.

She was brilliant where he was structured, but brittle where he was steady. I tutored for her a little later in my time there, and I once watched a lecture dissolve into chaos so completely that afterward I told the students I’d “take their temperature” after class. Several of them, half-joking, but actually not, called out, “Take my temperature, take my temperature.”

She stormed off to complain to Sanjay. He called me in and said, flatly, “I heard about it. Solve it with her — I’m not taking sides.”

I liked her, despite the fact that she couldn’t control a lecture room. I still remember her saying Gandhi “messed with her,” which she meant in a semi-endearing way, I suppose.

She eventually got tenure, and last I checked, she and Sanjay were still at NAU.

Karen Powers

As I mentioned in Part I, Karen was the first person I met at NAU. I walked in cold off the road — black turtleneck, black blazer, no housing, no plan. Karen shrugged like this happened every Tuesday and found me a room one minute from campus. That was her superpower: frictionless authority, no drama.

She was chair of the department for a while before John Leung took over, and she was a much better chair than Leung. That said, Mandiola knew her far better than I ever did; I never took her class and I didn’t tutor for her either.

Susan Deeds

Susan was older than Karen — early sixties, I think, though I never knew for sure. She was beloved by students and professors alike: warm, intellectually generous, and possessed of a kind of quiet emotional intelligence that set her apart. She carried herself with ease, without self-importance, and people naturally gravitated toward her. She wasn’t chair during my time there, but she functioned as the department’s emotional center of gravity anyway.

I never took her class and didn’t tutor for her, but she was unfailingly kind whenever our paths crossed. She gave good, grounded advice and I benefitted from that. Even with no formal tie between us, I always felt better knowing that she was around.

John Leung

John Leung was a Mao specialist, a gout sufferer, and later chair of the department. He was an odd fit among the mostly Southwest historians — solitary, limping, sometimes using a cane, half-in the building, half-out. During my first year, when I was tutoring for Sanjay, he came in to give a guest lecture at the end of the term. He delivered one kick-ass lecture — the best of the year.

But when I later tutored for him and had to sit in his class every day, it was pretty poor, to be honest. Everyone has one great lecture in them, I guess.

In my final term I took an independent study with him and wrote a long, decent paper on Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. He never read it and didn’t pass me. So from my point of view he was lazy, and I don’t have a great deal of respect for him, though he was always polite and warm in person.

Dave Kitterman

Kitterman was the Germanist and European historian in the department. He was writing a book on ordinary Germans and complicity when Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men landed first and ended the race before he reached the track. It didn’t break him — it just redirected him into steady teaching. I would go to his office hours and he would talk about losing the race to Browning. It was a career disappointment.

When I was tutoring for his post-WWII Germany class, he eventually allowed me — after a bit of pushing on my end — to lecture on the Baader-Meinhof group in the 1970s, the left-wing (sort of) terror group in Germany with links to Palestinian organizations. The lecture came just before exams, and not only did he trust me with the room, he let me put a Baader-Meinhof question on the final. I felt like I earned the chance, and I’ve always been grateful for the opportunity. I’d give the lecture a B+ — I was a little too into Luke Haines, the singer and songwriter for The Auteurs, who made an eponymously titled concept record about Baader-Meinhof that genuinely rocks. Haines sings:

“Some of the dumb ones just don’t understand
there’s no manifesto
there’s no formal plan
it’s just burn warehouse burn
burn warehouse burn”

Kitterman also let me give student essays back one by one over the course of weeks, which was a real bonus for my schedule. Overall, he was an important and respected professor, and I learned a great deal from him.

Bob Baron

Bob Barron was in his late fifties or early sixties. I believe he taught general U.S. history, and he also offered a Marx seminar, which I took in my second year. It was the only class at NAU that actually challenged me, other than Linguistic Anthropology, which I’ll get to later. Barron had a favorite line; he dropped it often:

“My goal isn’t to teach you everything — just enough to be dangerous.”

He meant it — knowledge as edge, not encyclopedia. And then the twist: he ran a side business as a grant doctor. Five hundred dollars an hour, guaranteed success. A Marx scholar monetizing academia better than the capitalists he assigned.

Barron was a funny guy, and I worked my ass off in his seminar.

Mike Adamson

Finally, Mike Adamson. 6’7”, basketball-big, American Southwest scholar. Mandiola tutored for him I believe and talked about him, but he was pretty peripheral to my path through the school.

Eight professors, little hierarchy, some ego. NAU wasn’t a prestigious place to teach, but I think it was a decent one. The professors could be themselves with almost no pushback, and each of them was their own little world — their own graduate tutors, their own quirks, their own ways of working.

And Kitterman let me talk Baader-Meinhof, which was a big moment for me, actually.

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part II: The Other Graduate Students

Note: This is Part II of my series on my time at Northern Arizona University between 1999-2001. This post takes up the other graduate students in the History Department. Part I, Decision and Arrival, can be found here.

NAU — The Graduate Students

The History Building was located near the northeast of campus, and as I mentioned in Part I it was mere minutes for where I was staying in my first year of the program. There was one graduate office on the second floor — a narrow room with four aging computers, a stubborn printer, and more bodies than desks. Some students shared chairs. Some wrote standing up. You could hear arguments through the walls, even with the door closed. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was the whole ecosystem: every thesis, every grudge, every friendship, every theory, all pressed into what was a pretty small space.

Cindy

The center of the room was Cindy. Early thirties, beautiful, charming, half-brilliant and fully aware of her own gravity. She studied the Southwest like almost everyone else in the cohort, but she made scholarship look like a party you had to be invited to. Men tried. None succeeded. She never dated within the department, but she flirted like a form of cultural exchange — a compliment, a smirk, a dismissal, repeat.

A number of us would go bowling from time to time, and when I bowled a clean 200 one night (still my best score ever) she called me Zen — partly for Japan, partly for the way I moved through things without forcing them.

As mentioned, Cindy flirted lightly with all the single guys in the department, and she and Mandiola had a particular dynamic going on. More on that below.

Lance and Gretchen

Orbiting Cindy were Lance and Gretchen, a long-term unmarried couple renting a big place in the low hills behind campus. Lance was military reserve — rigid posture, some money behind him. Gretchen was smart and generous; they held Thanksgiving at their house and the whole department came. It was clear to me, however, that she lived in Cindy’s shadow a fair bit.

Their relationship read like a stable table with a crack underneath. They had been together for a while at that point, though I don’t believe it ultimately survived.

Dave Diamond, Patrick, and Gary

At the other end of the room sat three men who could fill a bar with argument, and did.

Dave Diamond — mid-fifties, blue-collar history etched into him. Fishing boats, oil platforms, mines. He smoked dope daily like other people drink coffee. His thesis was on one apple orchard. Not agriculture policy in general — one orchard. He traced labor, yield, frost, policy, immigration, machinery, exploitation and renewal through a single patch of earth. That was Diamond: narrow focus, infinite depth. He was grumpy in the best possible tradition, and as I’ll mention later hooked me up with a little green from time to time, and I liked him.

Patrick was about twenty-two, a conservative, and worshipped Ronald Reagan. He believed the free market solved more problems than it created. Diamond thought Reagan had gutted the working class and could give footnotes from memory. They shouted at each other constantly, sometimes in the office, more often over drinks— full volume, full conviction — then they would move on like nothing had happened. They weren’t enemies. They were the ongoing argument.

Gary stood between them philosophically but never took the middle. Libertarian, Western-minded, big on personal risk and responsibility. Motorcycle helmets should be optional, ICU bills be damned. A man should be free to crack his skull if he wants to. You couldn’t move him. His logic was dry and clean. I wrote about Gary and his helmet policy at length here, and here is an excerpt:

Later that year Gary’s brother, also a biker, died in a motorcycle accident on a New Mexico mountain. It was a sad day for the department and for Gary. His brother was a biker and a cop, and I happened to walk past the church where the funeral was being held. There were dudes in Hell’s Angels jackets and cops in dress uniform side by side. Gary came by the graduate student office a day or two later. Yeah, he said, a funeral like that is the only time you’ll see bikers and cops side by side. He talked about his brother and how much he loved his motorcycle. I offered my condolences, but then curiosity got the better of me, as per usual.

“Gary, I have to ask, was your brother wearing a helmet?”

“Of course not. He died like he lived, free.”

“Does the accident make you think any differently about helmet laws?”

“If anything, it makes me more opposed to them. The right to ride without a helmet is what makes a biker a biker. Without that, we have nothing. My brother would feel the same.”

The three of them — Diamond, Patrick, Gary — were a triangle of conflict that never quite resolved. I liked them all in different ways and they all added color to the department.

Scott Fritz

Then there was Scott Fritz — early thirties, soft-spoken, spaced-out, gentle. Loved Las Vegas with an almost devotional sincerity. Not for gambling. For cocktails at 3 a.m. in glass palaces of light. He was in line for a major scholarship until Mandiola took it out from under him. I’m not sure what Scott was studying, but probably the American Southwest as well.

Mandiola

Mandiola and I were the outsiders. Not Southwest scholars. He was studying semiotics. I was studying Asia, oral history, and collective memory.

He was born in Chile, raised in LA, carried two languages without ceremony. His mind was fast — too fast in many ways. He had been married, and at this time was seeing P., an English professor who was at NAU on sabbatical. I met her twice; once over pizza with other members of the department and once more. We didn’t like each other at all, which Mandiola found hysterical. That was him: always drawn to drama — either generating it or laughing at it.

He was the loudest voice in the room. His banter with Cindy dominated the grad office for weeks — compliments tangled with insults. It wasn’t romantic. It was force meeting force, and they both held their ground. I also wrote about becoming friends with Mandiola in my piece I Have a Crush on Katie Park of the Bad Moves; here is a little bit of that:

A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other.

Me

I was twenty-four, newly returned from Japan, married but alone in Flagstaff. I ran most mornings, didn’t drink in my tiny freezing room, and wanted to get straight As. And I got them, with just one A- to keep me honest I guess.

Summary

  • Cindy had presence.
  • Lance and Gretchen had the house on the hill.
  • Fritz had Vegas dreams.
  • Patrick had Reagan.
  • Gary had principles made of stone.
  • Diamond had an orchard.

And Mandiola and I — for all our differences — were the sharpest minds in the room, and it is he that I would spend the most time with and remember the best.

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival

Dateline: Kumamoto, Japan. Fall of 1998.

I am living in a small apartment near downtown, tatami under my feet, a low loft overhead, the city moving quietly outside. I’d been teaching English conversation long enough to know I was going nowhere in that job. It wasn’t a crisis; it was a slow stalling-out. Good enough money, students I liked, but no real future. A life you could idle in forever.


Most nights I sat on the floor with a notebook, paging through information on American graduate programs. I wasn’t dreaming about tenure, an academic ladder, or a nameplate on some elite office door. I wasn’t trying to become a history professor at all. What I wanted was simpler and sharper: a way back to the U.S., a life I could actually live inside, and a path that might let the woman I loved come over later, maybe as a nurse, once her father’s condition — only after marriage — was met.

I emailed Tom Wilson, my old Asian History professor from Hamilton, and asked if he would write on my behalf. He agreed, and somewhere out in the system his recommendation went off to people who would never meet him. He also wrote back: don’t go to Northern Arizona; go to Chicago, my school. You can become a professor. It was kind and sincere and completely beside the point. He was thinking career. I was thinking oxygen.

The search itself was slow. I compared cities, programs, costs, climates. When I landed on Northern Arizona University and started looking at Flagstaff, it just felt right: high desert, pine trees, a small city you could walk, not a sprawl you endured. The history program was solid enough, and it wasn’t a teaching-credential track. It looked like a place where I could move forward, not just sideways.

When the offer came back, it was more than just admission. NAU gave me a scholarship and in-state tuition, even though I had never lived in Arizona. That got my attention. Schools don’t hand out cheaper rates to out-of-staters for fun. For whatever mix of reasons — Japan, Hamilton, Tom Wilson’s letter, my file on someone’s desk — they wanted me. That was enough.

I packed up my life in Kumamoto, said goodbye to Washington — my second English conversation school, not the state — and flew back to Spokane. From there I bought a red Toyota pickup for four thousand dollars from a teacher’s husband at St. George’s; he was a cop. It was almost all the money I had. I drove away with a truck, an acceptance, and not much else.


The road south was long and winter-empty. I followed a paper map through states I barely knew, slept in a couple of cheap motels under thin blankets, and kept going at first light. The truck held together. I did too.

Early January, I rolled into Flagstaff. Cold air, bright sky, nothing arranged. I had no housing lined up and almost no cash. I parked on campus, put on black trousers, a black turtleneck, and a black blazer, and walked straight into the History building like that was a normal thing to do.


Karen Powers, the chair, treated it as if it was. I told her I’d just arrived and had nowhere to stay. She didn’t flinch. A friend of hers, she said, had a room to rent a minute from campus, three minutes from the department. We walked over.


It was a small back bedroom, six hundred a month, a parking space in the yard, and a shared bathroom with the guy in the next room. No kitchen, no run of the house. Not ideal. But it was available, and it was there.

I took it on the spot. That same day, I moved in.

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The Splinter Fraction: On Protected Medical Access for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)

No donors. No handlers. No lobbyists. No funding. Operating without permission.

I. Why We Begin With MSF

Before anything else, before any national issue or domestic reform or culture-war detour, we begin with the one thing the modern world seems like it has forgotten: medical access in conflict zones is a non-negotiable, universal right.

The wounded do not choose their side. The child bleeding in a stairwell did not start the war. The mother sheltering in a hospital basement does not need a political explanation. The combatant with shrapnel in his leg remains a human being.

MSF has understood this for more than fifty years. They cross borders without fanfare, enter conflicts without permission, and treat anyone who needs to be treated. Their work is not only medicine — it is witnessing. It is bearing public testimony when nobody else will. It is showing up in the places the rest of the world abandoned.

What once were norms — medical neutrality, access for clinicians, protection of humanitarian corridors — have eroded into something like ritualized hand-wringing. Politicians gesture, diplomats issue concern, and then nobody in power actually does anything.

So the Splinter Fraction begins where morality is clearest:
MSF must have full, protected access to every conflict zone.

If the world cannot guarantee medical care to the wounded, then the world has lost the plot.

II. What Lost Norms Look Like

For decades there were at least understood rules:

  • you do not target medics
  • you do not bomb hospitals
  • you do not deny evacuation of the wounded
  • you do not turn humanitarian corridors into traps
  • you do not criminalize medical care
  • you do not shoot at ambulances

These rules were broken plenty of times — but they were rules. They existed. People invoked them. Violators felt the need to lie about it.

Now?
The lies are gone.
The shame is gone.
The norms are gone.
And the global response is often:
“It’s complicated.”

It’s not complicated.
You don’t shoot at people carrying stretchers.

It is astonishing how quickly power can normalize barbarity. The erosion didn’t happen because the world is confused — it happened because the world is distracted.

Someone has to say the simple thing in plain language: If you obstruct medical access, you are in the wrong. There’s nothing else to discuss.

III. MSF’s Independence Is the Model

This is where the Splinter Fraction takes its structural lesson. We are a Trans-Pacific Political Partnership of two people. Our tagline is “Two People Is Enough for a Movement” and our motto is as above: no donors, no handlers, no lobbyists, no funding. Operating without permission. Because we can. Because somebody has to. I am based in Japan and my counterpart is based in Washington State. Our reach is limited but our passion is not.

MSF is not independent because they write the word on their annual reports. They are independent because 97–99% of their funding comes from private individuals and private foundations.

No governments control them. No political blocs shape their language. No corporations buy their silence. No lobbyists tell them who they are allowed to treat.

This is radical in the humanitarian world.

The IKEA Foundation can donate €35 million. Five million can arrive overnight for Ukraine. Ten million may go to Mozambique. But the point is: no single donor owns them.

Millions of private donors provide the base. A handful of principled big ones layer on top.
If a donor walks? MSF keeps going.

This is why they can:

  • enter a war zone without permission
  • call out war crimes publicly
  • withdraw from compromised operations
  • stay when governments collapse
  • speak when power would prefer silence

Independence is not sentimental.
Independence is paid for.

IV. The Bridge: How MSF’s Ethics Become Ours

When we say the Splinter Fraction has no donors, no handlers, no lobbyists, no funding, and operates without permission, this is not simply branding.

It is philosophy.

We are modeling the civic equivalent of MSF’s operational independence.

MSF proves a simple truth: You cannot be morally clear if you are financially entangled.

You cannot speak plainly if someone owns your microphone. You cannot hold anyone accountable if you’re tied to the same power structures you are meant to critique. You cannot tell the truth if you are required to protect your funders.

MSF’s framework translates flawlessly into the civic sphere:

  1. Independence of funding
  2. Independence of voice
  3. Independence of action

MSF treats bodies on the ground. We treat the moral body politic.

Both require the same thing: freedom from ownership.

The Splinter Fraction is borrowing MSF’s spine, not their brand.

V. Non-Negotiable: Protected Access

Here is the movement’s first line in the sand:

Every combat zone must be open to MSF. Full stop.

No footnotes.
No caveats.
No “context.”
No “complexity.”
No soft language around “access challenges” or “security dynamics.”

If you obstruct medical access, you are in the wrong.
If you target clinicians, you are in the wrong.
If you deny treatment to the wounded, you are in the wrong.

There is no neutrality here. There is only whether you allow a human being to live.

This is the Splinter Fraction’s first global stance. And there will be more.

VI. Conclusion

In the end, this could not be simpler:

If the world cannot guarantee medical access, then nothing else we legislate or argue or vote on means a damn thing.

People are dying in stairwells, in makeshift shelters, in ruined hospitals, in ambulance queues held at checkpoints by men with rifles. They are vulnerable. They need help. And the world looks away.

We don’t.

We stand with MSF every time, and against any actor who obstructs them.

This is our first act as a movement. Two people, independent, loud, and unbought. Operating without permission because permission has failed.

More lines are coming.
But this is the first — and it is not moving.

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On Gillian Welch and John Innes’ Wedding (with a cameo from two Jewish revivalists and the Sabian Symbols)

New Note: My great friend John Innes and his now wife Kristi’s wedding in August 2018 in Redfish Lake, Idaho was ultimately defined not by chronology but by attunement: the way memory moves not as a straight line but as a series of charged returns to people, places, and emotional registers that refuse to sit still. The Idaho weekend is never just “what happened,” but how it felt to drift between social orbits without fully belonging to any single one of them—listening more than participating, absorbing more than declaring, and finding meaning in the small overlaps where lives briefly align before separating again. In that sense, the writing itself behaves like Gillian Welch’s line: “I wanna do right, but not right now”—a suspended ethics of attention, where clarity exists, but timing remains its own force.

Epigraph I:

Take a look on your wedding night
in your wedding book —
see what name I signed.
— Paul Westerberg, “Nobody”

Epigraph II:

I wanna do right / but not right now.
— Gillian Welch, “Look Out Miss Ohio”

Gillian Welch: Look Out Miss Ohio

The singer/ songwriter Gillian Welch writes characters who are honest long before they are virtuous. “I wanna do right, but not right now” from “Look Out Miss Ohio” (Soul Journey, 2007, track 1) isn’t a confession — it’s a stance. The speaker understands the weight of responsibility, feels the moral horizon, knows exactly what she should be doing.

She just isn’t there today.

There’s no apology in the line and no rebellion either. It’s human suspension — the gap between intention and timing.

That’s why this line belongs at the start of the story of John Innes‘s wedding to his now wife Kristi up in Redfish Lake, Idaho. The entire weekend lived inside that same tension: wanting to be steady, grounded, present, clear — but feel ever so gently tugged in the direction of just a little trouble. Fatigue, history, travel, and emotion all pulled on us at the wedding, and Gillian Welch speaks to that moment better than anyone.

Gillian Welch is at her sharpest when she performs micro-anthropology — cataloguing the small human behaviors that make a place feel alive. “April the 14th” {Time (The Revalator, 2001, track 5} is basically a field report: burned couches, local bands, odd events held in anonymous spaces. It’s observational, almost ethnographic, but warm.

What you get is:local color, emotional temperature, social microclimates, and.the way a place feels from the inside, not the map.

And when I travel I enter the micro-anthropologist mode, big time. April the 14th has the band out in front from Idaho and the girl passed out in the backseat trash. I have all the wonderful, strange, moving, funny, and sometimes sad recollections from the weekend at Innes’ wedding.

CHAPTER 1: ARRIVAL IN IDAHO

I flew into Idaho from Japan via L.A.. late in the day on I think it was a Friday in early August, 2018, and checked into a roadside motel. Nothing memorable about the place except proximity, but it was pretty nice, had a pool I didn’t use, and provided the privacy I needed.

I dropped my bags and went out for food. There was a taco spot near the motel — simple, quick — and I ordered tacos and a beer. I remember listening to the locals around me. They were fascinating in that regional, unselfconscious way: talk I don’t hear in my normal life, a small window into Idaho that I only caught by overhearing. I was mostly fascinated by how people made a living up here. I didn’t join in. I just listened.

After eating I walked back to the motel and slept. Not deeply, not badly — just normal. In the morning I woke medium early to catch the bus up to town. Travel mode. No rush, no drama.

CHAPTER 2: THE MARKET, THE BOOKSTORE, THE JEWISH PAIR, THE STARBUCKS SINGER

I got into town around 10:30 and walked over toward the open-air market. It was already busy — not crowded, just alive in that small-town summer way. Stalls with produce, crafts, the usual mix of local pride and tourist bait. I didn’t buy anything. I wasn’t really looking to buy; I was just passing through.

After a lap of the market I headed to a bookstore — the small independent one you always find in places like this, curated enough to be interesting but not pretentious about it. I browsed for a few minutes and then bought a copy of the Sabian Symbols, an astrological work from Elsie Wheeler from the 1920’s that was channeled and all about symbolism of each birthday. I was actually looking for this exact book, so it felt just a little fated.

I took the book and my suitcase and walked a few blocks until I found a coffee shop with outdoor seating. I was reading, or trying to, when a couple about my age — maybe a little younger, late thirties — stopped near my table. This was a couple, a man and a woman, and they said to me right away:

“Are you Jewish?”

I said no. I told them I was reading the Sabian Symbols, and they said, “Oh,” in that way people do when they’re trying to place you — trying to make sense of a stranger’s choices. It turns out that they were on a sponsored trip around the American West and their job was to “find Jews and remind them of their obligations.” This seemed like a pretty good gig to me, and I said so.

This all led to a short conversation, maybe five minutes at most. We talked about astrology — nothing deep, nothing personal, just the light kind of chat you have with people you’re never going to see again. They were curious, open, friendly enough. Then they left. No strong emotion, no lesson, no coincidence. Just a small morning encounter in a small Idaho town.

After the coffee and the brief conversation with the Jewish pair, I walked over to the reception site — the place where the wedding reception was set to happen. It was closed when I got there. I’d misjudged the timing. Nothing was set up yet, no people, no noise, just an empty space waiting for the event to begin.

With time to kill, I headed to Starbucks. Small-town energy — a mix of locals, travelers, and people who look like they’ve been sitting in the same chair since breakfast.

Inside, there was an older guy, late 50s or early 60s, and he was singing for the store. No stage, just a dude with a guitar case in the corner. Seeing him made me think of Bruce Innes, John’s dad who had had so much success with the band The Original Caste with his then wife Dixie, and had a hit song called “One Tin Soldier.” However, Bruce’s life had taken several turns, and in his later life he was performing for rich people’s parties in and around Sun Valley. Bruce had had a bad accident when he was struck by a car a few years prior to this, and I think he was retired from full time gigging, and it occurred to me that Bruce was but one or two steps up from the Starbucks player. Must be a tough life I thought, unstable gigs, possibly no insurance, no security, just the hustle and the tunes What did he make? What were his days like? Did he have other work? Did he play this store every day? A million little questions on how people make ends meet in this mountain town.

I stayed put at Starbucks for a while because it was still early and the reception wasn’t set to start until 6 PM. A few hours of nothing in particular — just sitting, watching the door open and close, letting the day stretch out around me. Small-town time. Travel time. The kind of hours that don’t count as waiting because you’re not in a hurry.

People cycled through the Starbucks — commuters, tourists, locals who clearly had a routine. I stayed at my table, read a bit, drifted, watched the singer come and go in my peripheral vision. He had his own rhythm, his own orbit, and I stayed in mine.

At around 5:45, I headed to the restaurant where the reception was to be held. People were starting to gather, the early movements of a wedding weekend folding into place: staff preparing, guests milling around, the faint hum of logistics turning into occasion.

Nothing dramatic happened on the walk over. It was simply time to join the weekend.

CHAPTER 3: THE RECEPTION


When I got to the reception area around 5:45, the first familiar face I remember seeing was my mom. That made sense — she was the one I could approach without any social calibration. I wanted to let her know, gently, that I hadn’t gotten any clear information about the actual start time. I’d been floating most of the day. No ride, no schedule, no coordinated entry — just me making my way through the town, the market, the bookstore, and the Starbucks hours. It wasn’t an apology. Just a check-in.

She took this in, and I shifted from solo traveler to being folded back into the fabric of the weekend, embedded in shared, and in my case somewhat distant, history. At the reception, the clusters formed naturally—Spokane people on one side of the small garden, Hamilton College people on the other, with the familiar drift between them. My brother Mike and Mason Anderson were from Spokane by origin but moved easily in the Hamilton orbit; they had enough cross-history with John, and I to did as well.

There were appetizers going around, the kind people take absent-mindedly while scanning the crowd. Early reception energy—light, warm, slightly chaotic but in a pleasant way. The food was amazing and I learned that Bruce Innes has paid for the reception while Kristi’s parents covered most of the wedding. Given what I knew of the two families relative finances, this seemed reasonable.

It was time for dinner, which was steak and lobster with plenty of drinks for all. I ended up sitting with Marc Campbell, my close friend from Hamilton, and his wife, who happened to be Jewish herself. At some point I told the story of meeting the Jewish couple that morning—the pair who stopped at my table outside Starbucks and asked if I was Jewish, and then shifted immediately into a short, funny, totally nonchalant conversation about astrology when I told them I was reading the Sabian Symbols.

When I finished the story, Marc didn’t miss a beat. He looked at his wife, grinned, and said:

“Yeah—she needs some reminding.”

And everyone cracked up.

It was one of those jokes that lands because it’s affectionate and slightly self-incriminating, and because everyone in the circle understands the marriage dynamic without needing it explained. It was warm, disarming, and exactly the kind of humor that loosens the first hour of a reception.

Around me the conversations deepened. The clusters held but bled into each other just enough—the Spokane families, the Hamilton set, and anyone else in the Innes inner-circle. After a few hours the reception wrapped and it was time to take the bus up to Redfish Lake where the wedding would take place.

CHAPTER 4: THE BUS TO REDFISH LAKE AND DRINKING AT CAMP


There were two buses to Redfish Lake and we left the reception around 8:30 PM. On the bus I ended up talking to Claire Innes, John’s sister, for the first time at any real depth. That was nice. The bus gave us that suspended space where small talk can turn into something more—a 40-minute window where you’re not going anywhere except where the bus is going, and conversation happens because there’s nowhere else for the energy to go. It wasn’t all that deep, but it was real.

The landscape started to shift as we got closer—pine, lake light, that kind of thing. I was tired and slept a little on the 90 minute drive. People on the bus were in a good mood, half-travel, half-weekend, half-wedding expectation. When we arrived at Red Lake, the bar was open. Open open.


The open bar was one of those facts that tells you everything you need to know about the atmosphere at camp. It was close to 10 PM when we dropped our bags and hit the bar. It was: this is where people gather; this is where the weekend lives.

Now I know for sure that Mason, Mike and I were drinking at the bar that night and I think perhaps John Slack and Chris from Hamilton were there but I may be conflating this night with the next. As Ian Murphy, my great friend from Hamilton says, “Matthew is the writer; he’s allowed some artistic lefts.” In any case, we were all drinking pretty heavily but the alcohol was moving through me like water and did so all weekend. I guess I was just keyed up and the booze couldn’t touch me. Mason, on the other hand, was another matter.

Mason Anderson via Group Chat: I got trashed the night before the ceremony and couldn’t get out of bed day of, I struggled through ceremony in bad shape, didn’t feel good during dinner, gave my speech after Kristi’s brothers but before Marc. Hangover immediately lifted after speech, I drank a normal amount ceremony night after that speech fog lifted. Matt, you saw me drinking after the speech and kind of warned me to be careful considering my condition just a few hours earlier, but I knew I wasn’t going down that path two nights in a row.

Now the artistic left — was Slack there? I tend to think maybe no because Slack and Chris and Brett Stratten were staying in a cabin up in the hills above the camp, but I remember so vividly drinking with Slack that night and/ or the next that I’ll put it here. Let’s place Slack here on night one because on night two there was a lot of other action that will distract from the focus and attention that Slack deserves.

So, Slack was already drinking heavily by the time the bar pulled into focus, and as he drank, he talked about San Francisco. Not the postcard version — the part he lived through. He told me how the city burned him out, how by the end it felt unlivable: the homelessness, the open drug use, people using the bathroom on the street. He’s socially liberal and doesn’t posture about politics, but he said plainly that the city’s condition broke something in him.

He had been working in micro-tech, something with a social angle to it — not pure profit, but not nonprofit either I gathered— and that sector has its own kind of moral exhaustion I guess. Slack carried that. He said San Francisco didn’t just overwhelm him; it took something out of him that he was still trying to get back.

He was still coming down from that era, still coming to terms with what those years did to him. He wasn’t dramatic about it, but he was pretty emotional, and I could see he had been through it. I had been through it too, and was about to go through it more, so I could empathize. Red Lake wasn’t just a wedding for him; it was one of the spaces where he could be himself without any excuse.

We all wrapped up the session sometime after 1 AM and went to our rooms.

CHAPTER 5: NIGHT ONE / MORNING ONE


Night one at Redfish Lake, I slept almost not at all. I shared a room with Mason, and he had his sleep apparatus going — loud, steady, intrusive in a way that made real sleep basically impossible. A whole machine-respiratory rhythm filling the cabin. Anyone who knows that sound knows it’s not malicious, it’s just incompatible with light sleepers. I spent most of the night drifting in and out of shallow sleep, more tired than asleep.


Mike slept well. He was in the other bedroom, and he hadn’t had too much to drink that night, so he got a full night’s sleep — or close to it. Different room, different conditions.


When the first real light came in, I got up. No point in staying in bed when there’s no sleep left to chase. I threw on shorts and ran down to the lake to swim. The water was freezing — the good kind of freezing — the kind that shocks everything awake and resets the system. I didn’t warm up first, didn’t hesitate, just ran and got in. It was early enough that the camp was quiet, no one moving yet, just the trees, the air, and the cold water.


After the swim I ran barefoot through the camp back to the cabin — towel, shorts, nothing else — the same way you do when you’re in a place that isn’t yours but feels momentarily free.

Breakfast opened at I think 7:30, and I went right when it did. I was one of the only ones up. The only people I saw were Marc and his family. Everyone else was sound asleep. That was morning one: no sleep, cold lake, early breakfast, chatting with Marc in a quiet camp.

CHAPTER 6: LATE MORNING INTO AFTERNOON


After breakfast with Marc and his family, I walked back to the cabin. By then more people were starting to stir — my mom and dad, Mike, and Pat’s family. They weren’t heading to the lodge for breakfast; they were eating from the coolers and provisions they’d brought in their cars. That’s the Spokane way, the camp way — practical, self-contained, familiar. I’ve never been a cooler person, but it works for them.

Mike wasn’t eating. He never eats in the morning — at least not in that era. Morning food wasn’t part of his rhythm. He would eat later, and when he did, it would be a lot at once, not spaced out across the day. At some point I noticed Mike and my mother talking off to the side. It was a complex financial discussion — one of those conversations where you catch only the edges and know immediately you’re out of your depth or simply not part of that pattern. Their tone made it clear it was serious but controlled. I didn’t follow the content; it wasn’t for me.


The late morning drifted into early afternoon. Everyone was in their own pre-wedding mode — some getting ready early, some not ready at all, the usual mix of prep and pacing.

I just hung around, balanced between worlds, waiting for the time to come. I didn’t need anything, didn’t have anywhere particular to go. Eventually the clock got close enough to the start that it was time to get dressed.


I got ready and headed over to the wedding site a little before 4 PM. Early enough to be in place, late enough not to look too eager. The air had shifted — you can always feel when the wedding part of a wedding weekend is starting to switch on.

CHAPTER 7: THE WALK TO THE WEDDING/ THE WEDDING


When it was finally time, I left the cabin and started the walk to the wedding. It was about twelve minutes from the camp down to the beach — long enough to feel like a transition, short enough to do alone without thinking about it. I walked by myself.


That was fitting. The whole weekend had that shape for me — moving between people, never fully anchored in one group, carrying my own thoughts through the motions. Halfway down the path, I saw Brett Stratten.

I hadn’t expected to run into him in that exact moment, but there he was — familiar posture, familiar presence. And the first thing out of my mouth was:

“Is that Brett motherfucking Stratten?”

That line is the real bond — twenty years of friendship in five words. He grinned, and we slipped into step together, the two of us walking the final stretch as a pair. When we reached the wedding site, we filtered into the group. I wasn’t a reader — Mike, Mason, and Pat were. Those roles made sense: they fit the Spokane-Hamilton-family lattice in a way I didn’t. I was a guest, and that was correct. I was there for John, not for ceremony.


The air had that pre-wedding calm — the quiet before everyone stands, the moment where the lake holds all the sound and the trees feel like part of the architecture. People found their seats. The energy settled. And Brett and I took our place in the gathering, ready for the ceremony to begin.

The ceremony itself is mostly a blur in my memory. I remember pieces, impressions, more than the sequence and exact events. Everyone did great — the readers, the families, everyone who was part of the choreography.

John was nervous as hell, but he handled it beautifully. You could see it in his posture, in the way he looked out at the crowd, in the way he held himself steady against the moment. There’s a specific kind of nervousness that comes from caring deeply and wanting to do something right. That was John’s energy that day.

Kristi seemed solid — grounded, composed, exactly where she needed to be. She moved through the ceremony with a steadiness that matched the setting: the water behind them, the small arc of guests gathered, the quiet confidence of someone marrying the person she loves in a place that fits her life.

Everything went smoothly; nothing slipped. The ceremony did what ceremonies are supposed to do: mark the moment and then move everyone into the next phase of the evening.

After that, the energy shifted — the applause, the small laughter, the collective exhale. The blur dissolved into the flow of the reception and the night that followed.

CHAPTER 8: THE AFTER-PARTY AND THE NEXT MORNING


The after-party started early — before 5 PM — under the tents near the reception grounds. People drifted in from the ceremony, and the energy shifted from formal to loose almost immediately. The crowd was a mix of Hamilton, Spokane, family clusters, and random older people whose connections would make sense if you’d grown up in that world. A few were old teachers, including Betty Barber, which was great. I was hungry.


For the main course we had to choose between salmon and beef; I went with salmon. The food came quickly, and so did the drinking. Slack was drinking heavily right away.


Mike was drinking too, but looser, easier. John Innes’ cousin Dean was drinking heavily as well — loud, emotional, open. At some point Dean made an unscheduled speech. It went off the rails fast — not in a dangerous way, just in the way emotional men sometimes lose the center at weddings. People were kind, but there were raised eyebrows. It shifted the entire energy of the party.


After that, John and Kristi went back to their cabin early. The rest of us — the Hamilton group, Spokane, and Dean — moved to the bar. And this is where the night flipped.

Dean threw enough money down to cover almost the whole night for the entire crew.

No one argued. No one questioned it. It was pure chaotic generosity, the kind that can only happen in the exact emotional temperature of a wedding after-party. The vibe became: “Fuck it, we ball.” That’s the only accurate summary.


Before the bar a funny thing happened. Mike and I queued up to sign the wedding book came around. People signed it the way people do — polite congratulations, best wishes, etc. But I had a streak of mischief so I reminded Mike about the line from Paul Westerberg cited in the epigraph. And MIke, in a move that still makes me laugh, simply signed the book “Paul Westerberg.”


Not a joke spoken out loud — a joke left on the page, waiting for someone to notice days or weeks later. The perfect nod to Nobody, the perfect Westerberg gesture, and the perfect imprint of that night. It belongs in the wedding book exactly as he wrote it.

As the night deepened, the drinking picked up across the whole crew. Slack kept going hard — the same charged San Francisco energy running through him that had been simmering all day. He was animated, intense, talking fast and drinking fast.

Mike and cousin Dean were off together, and their drinking got a little messy — not dangerous, not out of control, just loose, loud, and emotional in that late-night, wedding-weekend way. Two guys feeding off each other, the volume creeping up, the edges getting softer.

I spent the night toggling between groups — Slack on one side, Mike and Dean on the other, Brett drifting through, Chris keeping steady because he was driving. People peeled off slowly as the hours passed. No one announced they were leaving; the night just thinned out.

By around 4 AM, we finally got everyone to bed. Not gracefully. Not disastrously. Just the natural end of a long, full, chaotic night.

I never slept. Not a minute. By the time the light began to seep into the cabin, I was fully awake in that wired, hollow way that comes after a four-hour slide from loudness into silence.

At 7:30, when the lodge opened for breakfast, I went straight there. I was one of the only ones up.

Marc and his family were already eating — they were always the earliest risers on that side of the weekend. The familiarity of their presence steadied the morning. We talked a little, easy and tired, and at some point Marc asked if I’d be willing to read his wife’s book — about “having it all” before it was published. I said I would.

A little later, my mom came to see me off. She’d woken up early just for that. My dad was still asleep, which was also completely in character.

Breakfast was $15, exactly the kind of fixed-price lodge breakfast that hits differently when you haven’t slept at all. Coffee, food, quiet. Functional. Then it was time. My ride to the airport came right on schedule, and I said my goodbyes and headed out.

CHAPTER 9: THE AIRPORT AND THE FLIGHT TO LA


The ride to the airport was quiet in the good way — that calm, reflective space after a long wedding weekend. The Idaho morning was bright, the roads almost empty. I felt the exhaustion from two nights of missing sleep in my bones, but it was a clean exhaustion, not tangled with worry or unfinished business.

At the airport, I ran into Marc and his wife again. Small airport, small plane. We talked a bit before boarding, easy conversation, the soft landing after a heavy night.


We boarded the small plane to Los Angeles — the kind with low ceilings and propellers you can almost feel spinning. The flight wasn’t long, but it was enough to let my brain downshift.


When we landed in LA, I headed to the airport hotel I’d chosen on purpose — two days of decompression before returning to Japan. It wasn’t a luxury choice, it was a necessity. I really wanted to decompress before flying home to Japan. The hotel was simple and clean, but it had no restaurant, just fast food outlets underneath.


So I walked about five minutes to a Marriott or something similar — one of those mid-range hotels with a real restaurant, real food, real wine. I sat at the bar, ordered beer and then wine, and ate properly for the first time in a day.

Then came the real moment of the night: I started reading Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards on my Kindle. And then, after finishing it, I immediately reread it in the hotel room. I devoured it.


It was so honest — painfully, beautifully honest — the kind of musician’s memoir that refuses myth making and instead talks about life exactly as it is lived. I’ve always resonated with Wareham’s tonal clarity: the unsentimental self-observation, the refusal to lie to himself on the page, the gentleness underneath the bluntness. That book met me right where I was — exhausted, reflective, a little cracked open. It’s one of those moments where the right book finds one at exactly the right emotional aperture.


I read until I finally slept properly — the first real sleep since the motel three days ago.

CHAPTER 10: RETURN TO JAPAN

I returned to Kyoto and re-entered my summer break. In two weeks I was scheduled to attend the Faculty of Astrological Studies at Oxford for summer school so I was getting geared up for that. That is a whole other story, so in the meantime thanks for reading about John Innes’ wedding.

Dedication:

For John and Kristi —
it was one hell of a wedding.

And for the Jewish couple —
thanks for talking a little astrology with me, baby.