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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.

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Why Pale Waves Hits So Hard

Subtitle: From “Red” to “Not a Love Song” and Beyond

A deep dive into the band’s emotional architecture, generational melancholy, and why their hooks stay with you long after the chorus fades.

“I’m the only one you want — they just fill the void.”
— Pale Waves, refracted

It started with “Red.” Not a slow burn — more like a temperature check that came back clinically elevated. One song, one groove, one sly little melody running its fingers along the back of my neck. I put it on thinking it was a fluke, some algorithmic curveball, and then suddenly I was ten songs deep, then twenty, then living inside Pale Waves’ entire catalog before I had time to pretend I was making a choice. “Red” didn’t introduce me to the band so much as trap me in a mood: sleek, hungry, neon-lit, dangerous at exactly the dosage you want. It’s the kind of song that feels like you’re being pulled by the collar toward something you definitely shouldn’t do — which, of course, is exactly why it works.

And here’s the thing: I missed them. Pale Waves actually came through Tokyo pre-pandemic — Shibuya, one of those tight little rooms where the sound ricochets just right — and I couldn’t get myself organized. Life was too loud, work was too much, and I let the date slip. I’ve made dumb choices in my life, but missing that show? I genuinely regret it. There’s a very specific kind of shame in knowing you passed on a band right before they detonated in your bloodstream. It’s like the universe held the door open and I just didn’t walk through. Now I listen to “Red” and “Not a Love Song” and imagine what that night would’ve felt like — the sweat, the lights, the bassline kicking up old memories — and I know I blew it. That’s part of the story too.

Adult me knows exactly what I missed. It wasn’t just a concert — it was the moment to catch a band right before they became a band you have to chase across oceans. Pre-pandemic Tokyo had this pulse, this easy access to indie acts who’d drop into Shibuya for one night and disappear, and I let Pale Waves slide right past me. Now the landscape’s different. Post-COVID, a lot of bands never fully came back to Japan; the touring circuits shrank, the economics got weird, and the scene still feels like it hasn’t fully woken up. If I want to see Pale Waves now I’ll probably have to fly to England, and that’s on me. That’s adult regret — the kind where you can name the loss precisely, and you know no amount of streaming will fix it.

And that’s the part that stings: I was already in a cracked-open phase back then — loosening, becoming more porous to the world in that very specific pre-pandemic Tokyo way. A Shibuya show like that would’ve widened the fissure. I don’t even need the exact date to know it. I could’ve stood in that dark little basement room, basslines running up my spine, and let myself feel something louder than my schedule. And I didn’t go. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t quite in the habit of saying yes to the things that might’ve helped me open faster. That’s adult regret: knowing where the hinge was, knowing you didn’t turn it, and knowing it would have mattered — not massively, not mythically — just enough.

What I’m really grateful for is that I stuck with them. Through the years, through the algorithm cycling them in and out, through the slow-drip evolution of their sound — Pale Waves stayed in my orbit long enough for me to catch them at the right emotional angle. And that angle turned out to be 2024. Not a Love Song comes off their newest full-length, and you can hear the maturity in it — the confidence, the invitation, the bite. It’s recent, yes, but in a strange way it feels like the song they were always writing toward. And maybe it’s the song I was always listening toward. I didn’t go to the Shibuya show, but I stayed in the relationship. The band kept doing the work, and so did I, and now we meet here — in a track that hits harder than anything they’ve made before — and knows exactly what it’s doing.

That’s the thing about that line — “I’ll be the reason that your father gets so fucking mad.” I don’t respond to it as rebellion. I’m not wired that way and never have been. Pissing off my parents was never the objective; it was just the wake behind me. The real truth is simpler, and more dangerous in its own quiet way: I’d follow her anywhere. That was always the engine. Not defiance, not swagger — just that clean, unmistakable gravity — someone pulling you forward without even trying. And Pale Waves captures that better than almost anyone: the feeling of stepping over a line you didn’t plan to cross because the person on the other side didn’t give you a choice in the best possible sense.

What Pale Waves understands — and why Red and Not a Love Song hit like they were written in the same room as your adolescence — is that desire isn’t ideological. It’s kinetic. It’s momentum. Their songs don’t ask why you’re following someone, or whether you should, or what the consequences will be. They just capture the tilt of it — the way you lean forward without noticing, the way your body decides before your mind catches up. Their best tracks feel like the moment your foot leaves the ground and you realize you’re already crossing the threshold. That’s why the lyrics sound dangerous but never cruel: the danger is simply that you’ve already committed. You’re moving. And once that motion starts, it’s almost impossible to stop.

In the end, Pale Waves didn’t crack me open in 2018. They were there, pulsing at the edges of my life, but I wasn’t quite porous enough yet. I missed the Shibuya show, missed the easy chance to let the night do what nights sometimes do — nudge you forward, pull you sideways, unfasten something. And that’s fine. I don’t need to rewrite that version of me. He was doing his best with the life he had.

What matters is that the band stayed close. I kept listening, kept circling back, kept letting their songs take up a little space in the background until suddenly, in 2024, they weren’t background at all. Not a Love Song hit at exactly the angle I was ready for — older, clearer, more awake — not cracked so much as intentionally open. It landed in the version of me who can finally hear what they’d been working toward all along.

And that’s the real loyalty story here.
Not fan-to-band.
Human-to-self.

You don’t always meet the right music at the right time. Sometimes you meet it later — when you’re able to feel it fully, without flinching or rushing or worrying what it means. That’s what this new album is for me. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not some lost Shibuya night I can’t get back. It’s something quieter and more earned: the sound of arriving in my own life at the same moment a band I’ve followed for years arrives in theirs.

And if I need to fly to England to hear these songs live?
Fine.
I’m ready right now, baby.

Dedication: For everyone who ever missed a show and still wonders what might have been.

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On Why I Told the World to Fuck Off for 36 Hours

Subtitle: And Saved My Life in the Process

So I called you a cab and they called you a hearse,
and I knew what they were talking about.
— The Mendoza Line, “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)”

Note: This piece pairs naturally with my recent essay On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl). Both pieces are about the small moments that hold us together when we are breaking apart. You can read that piece here.

By 2012 I finally understood what I had been circling back in 2008 without fully naming: the business hotel wasn’t just a neutral space — it was a controlled dissociation chamber. A place where my mind could flatten without collapsing. A room where the world muted itself into CNN-colored soft focus, where time thinned out, where nothing asked anything of me. I didn’t know it then, but all those mid-range rooms — the bland art, the sealed windows, the gentle hum of an air conditioner tuned to the exact frequency of psychic anesthesia — were teaching me a skill I would need later: how to disappear just long enough to come back intact.

So when the pressure finally broke, when I had been working thirty straight thirteen-hour days and felt myself sliding toward the edge of something unnamed, I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, checked into a business hotel, turned my phone off, and told the world — or most of it — to fuck off for thirty-six hours. And the shocking thing wasn’t that it worked. The shocking thing was realizing I had been preparing for it years earlier, in those identical rooms where the towels were always clean, the windows always closed, and 9-ball was always on.

So I ducked into the nearest konbini and bought a latte from the machine — the one small ritual that still made sense. The warm cup in my hand steadied me just enough to get through the turnstiles. Kyoto Station felt too bright, too full of intersecting lives and needs, the air full of other people’s urgency. I didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb anyone else’s story; I barely had enough for my own. All I knew was that the next Shinkansen to Tokyo was leaving in eleven minutes, and if I didn’t get on it, something in me would snap in a way I wouldn’t be able to walk back. The latte was cooling fast, my hands were shaking, and every part of my body was saying the same thing: Go. Now. Before you say yes to one more thing you don’t have the energy to carry.

Once the room was arranged — bag on the stand, shoes lined up by the door, Pocari Sweat sweating slightly on the desk next to the bottle of red — my whole system downshifted into something like relief. Not joy. Not peace. Just the quiet recognition that, for the next thirty-six hours, my time belonged to me and no one else. I didn’t have to speak. I didn’t have to answer. I didn’t have to hold anything together. All I needed to do was sit on the bed, take a long drink of Pocari, a short drink of wine, and let my body loosen by degrees. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was just freedom in the smallest, most essential sense: I get to be here, in this room, alone, and the world can wait.

After the first wave of relief, the question always arrived: Do I go out?

Tokyo was right there.

Akasaka-Mitsuke humming five floors beneath me, restaurants lit up like little stages, the crossing full of men in suits walking fast enough to convince you they knew exactly where they were going. I never did. So I’d sit on the bed and pull up the map — not to plan, but to orient. Izakaya here, ramen there, a bar tucked down some side street with red lanterns and a name I couldn’t pronounce. Nothing fancy. Nothing difficult. Just food, warmth, and maybe one drink that wasn’t red wine from a convenience store. I wasn’t looking for a night out. I was looking for simple movement, the kind that doesn’t require performance or decision-making. A walk, a meal, a seat at a counter. A single beer poured by someone who didn’t know my name and didn’t need to.
That was the whole question every time: stay in the bubble, or slip into the Tokyo night just long enough to remember I was a person.

Stepping out into Akasaka-Mitsuke wasn’t lonely — it was liberating. The air felt different the second the sliding doors breathed me out into the crosswalk light. I wasn’t hiding from anyone. I wasn’t avoiding anything. I was simply off the clock in a way that almost never happened in my real life. No one knew where I was, and for the first time in weeks, that fact didn’t carry a threat or a stain of guilt. It felt clean. It felt earned. I wasn’t missing; I was saving my own damn life by giving it a night without responsibility. The freedom wasn’t dramatic. It was simply this: I could walk in any direction, and every direction was allowed.

Out in the Akasaka night, I felt like the version of myself that gets buried under work and obligation — the real me, the one who just wants to wander and see who’s out, what’s open, what energy the city is holding. I wasn’t searching for anything dramatic. I wasn’t looking for revelation or escape. I was just checking things out — the izakaya with the red lantern, the alley with the quiet bar, the group of people laughing too loud on the corner. Dabbling. Moving lightly. Letting Tokyo show me whatever it wanted to show, without needing to make a night out of it. It was the simplest, purest freedom: explore until something feels right, and stop when it doesn’t.

I walked the Akasaka backstreets the way I always do when I’m in this mode — cutting down alleys, taking long cuts and shortcuts that don’t make geographic sense but feel right in my body. Tokyo is a city you navigate by instinct, not logic. You follow energy. You drift. You take the turn that looks interesting, then the one that feels safe, then the one that’s pulsing with life. Sometimes I’d follow the Google map to the place I thought I wanted to eat, only to walk past it and keep going. Other times I’d catch a glimpse of something through a noren curtain — warm light, the sound of laughter, a chef moving with the right kind of ease — and that would be the signal. It was never about the spot itself. It was about finding the right spot, the one that matched the night’s frequency. And over the course of the evening, I usually did both: follow the algorithm, then abandon it; trust the map, then trust myself.

Eventually I found the place — an oyster bar tucked behind one of those half-lit alleys where Akasaka feels a little European and a little dreamlike. Warm light, wood counter, the soft clatter of shells, and a chef who moved with the kind of quiet competence that settles you the moment you sit down. This was exactly my jam: an oyster platter arranged like a small geography, cold and briny and perfect, a bowl of clam chowder steaming in front of me, and a carafe of white wine that I poured slowly, deliberately, one glass at a time. Spendy, sure — but in this mode spendy isn’t excess. Spendy is permission. Spendy is dignity. Spendy is saying to yourself: I get to take my time with this. I get to have a meal that cares for me back. And in that moment, slurping an oyster with the city humming outside, I could feel the night open around me in the cleanest way.

The white wine hit me in that way good pairings do — not as a buzz, but as a reminder of how people take care of themselves when they’re not drowning. White wine and oysters belong together; everyone knows that, and sitting there I felt myself re-enter that understanding. The pairing wasn’t fancy. It was human. It was the kind of small, civilized pleasure most people allow themselves without thinking, and I’d been so buried under work and obligation that I’d forgotten what that felt like. The red I’d had earlier had already warmed me, softened the hard edges, and now the white layered over it, sharpening the night just enough to make everything shimmer. I was slightly buzzed and buzzing — not out of control, not hiding, just finally aligned with myself again.

I left the oyster bar with that warm, gentle buzz humming through me — the kind that makes Tokyo feel lit from within — and walked until I found the sort of place I always look for on these nights. A spendy cocktail bar: dim lights, bottles arranged like small works of art, a bartender in a crisp vest moving with that Japanese mix of precision and grace that makes you feel taken care of without being noticed. I took a high seat at the counter and ordered something I never drink in real life — a proper cocktail, layered, balanced, spendy. Spendy was the point. Spendy meant: I am worth slowing down for. Spendy meant: no one is waiting, no one is watching, no one needs anything from me. I sipped slowly, letting the night stretch out in front of me like a long exhale, feeling myself settle into the version of me that only Tokyo brings out — curious, quiet, open, free.

The bar I ended up in wasn’t some sleek Tokyo cocktail temple — it was better. Two bartenders from Nepal were working the counter, the kind of guys who’ve lived ten different lives before landing in Japan, commuting in from way out because Akasaka rent is a joke. We talked the way travelers talk when no one is trying to impress anyone — about where they were from, how far they lived, what Kathmandu feels like in winter. I wasn’t performing, just listening, rapping with them in that easy drift that happens when you’re slightly buzzed and buzzing in a foreign city. I ordered red wine — not more cocktails — because that was the right shape for the night, and when I finished my glass one of them poured me another, full to the brim, “for the gentleman.” It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t special treatment. It was the small grace of the night saying: You came to the right place. You came at the right time. And you’re not carrying anyone else’s weight right now.

When I stepped back out into the night after the second glass of wine, the whole neighborhood felt like it belonged to me. Not in a macho way, not in a performative way — just in that rare, private way where the city’s pace matches your own and you fall into step with its pulse. Akasaka was quiet but lit, humming but not crowded, and for five or six blocks I felt like I owned a slice of it. My slice. The alleys, the crosswalk glow, the last trains whispering underneath the city — all of it moved around me without touching me. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t disappearing. I was just walking back to my faded little hotel in a state of clean, earned sovereignty, knowing the world wasn’t tracking me for once. And for those fifteen minutes, Tokyo wasn’t a megacity. It was mine — exactly the size of the person I was in that moment.

Back in the room — my little faded Akasaka hideout five or six blocks from the bar — I didn’t overthink a thing. I drank more red wine, chased it with Pocari, stripped down to my boxers, and let my body fall exactly where it wanted to fall. There was nothing left to hold, nothing left to manage, nothing left to translate. I slept like a baby — a full, unbroken twelve hours, eleven to eleven — the kind of sleep that only arrives when you’ve been carrying too much for too long and finally set it all down in a room no one else can enter. No dreams, no interruptions, no alarms. Just the deep, uncomplicated sleep of someone who gave himself thirty-six hours of mercy and actually took them.

When I woke up around eleven, I felt clear-eyed and ready for more of exactly what the night had been—a continuation of me time. No urgency, no guilt, no one waiting on anything. Just hunger in my stomach and calm in my body. I didn’t rush. I stayed in the room for hours, drifting between the bed and the window, drinking instant coffee, sipping a little more Pocari, scrolling nothing, letting the quiet stretch. I could go out or stay in—either was fine. The whole point was that the day was mine to waste or spend however I wanted. After twelve hours of baby-level sleep, I wasn’t reborn—I was simply functional again. Hungry, steady, grounded, and free.

The next day I was set to return to Kyoto. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go — and the Thin Man cleans up quick. I showered, shaved, packed my bag with the same neat ritual I’d used the night before, and stepped back out into Akasaka like someone who had never been tired in the first place. Before heading to the station I picked up omiyage — the small gesture that makes the return feel seamless — something for the office, something for home. It wasn’t guilt; it was continuity. A way of saying: I left for a day and a half, and now I’m back in the world with all the edges smoothed. By the time I boarded the Shinkansen back to Kyoto, I was already shifting into IB mode — the coordinator, the problem-solver, the guy who keeps the whole thing moving. But now the engine was clean again. The reset had worked. Thirty-six hours alone in a faded Tokyo hotel, oysters, wine, a long sleep, a morning that belonged only to me — and suddenly I could re-enter at full tilt. Not as a martyr. Not as a runaway. Just as myself, restored enough to carry everything again.

Dedication:

For Akasaka — whoever designed that little slice of urban order also re-ordered my mind in the best possible way. Thanks there, baby.

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On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl)

Epigraph:

Heather, remind me how this ends

Dolorean

I’ve been trying, lately, to understand the early spaces in my life where safety and memory intersect — the brief rooms in time that opened something in me before I even had language for it. Some moments don’t turn into stories, but they still leave a shape. This is one of those moments.

The Christmas Dance wasn’t held in the high school that year at all. It was downtown, in one of those Spokane venues that tried to look older than the city around it — chandeliers, carpeted floors, bathrooms with real mirrors. We had been dancing all night, the kind of teenage drifting where everyone is shy and bold by turns. And then it was over, and people were peeling away, breaking into rides and carpools and winter air.

She and I ended up in the hallway.

We were already wrapped into each other — that soft, accidental teenage cuddle that feels both unplanned and absolutely right. The near-near kiss wasn’t something either of us aimed for. It was just the way our faces happened to be turned, the warmth, the pause, the sense that one more inch would have turned the moment into something else entirely. Instead it stayed suspended, held in the exact shape it needed to take.

Her name was Blythe.

I used to say I wrote poems “for girls who told me they were pearls,” but that was just self-mythology. In truth, I only ever wrote for one girl. And she never asked for anything.

Most of the real fun we had wasn’t during dances at all. It was in the gym at Saint George’s in Spokane. For high school games, boys and girls, the gym would be packed, and during the boys games she would sit in the front-row, and every single time I did anything even vaguely ok — a decent pass, a shot that actually went in, a little rebound — I’d look over mid-play and smile, and she’d already be smiling. She was in my corner before I understood what that meant. She didn’t push. She didn’t need to. She just stayed.

There was a suspended electricity in those years — innocent, unclaimed, lightly glowing. We never really dated. We never made a move beyond the moment that almost happened and didn’t. But she calibrated me. She was my corner girl. And that mattered.

The ending came the way some endings do when you’re young — clean as scissors. She graduated. Life tilted. The season shifted. Nothing dramatic, nothing painful. Just a quiet snap. A door that didn’t slam but simply shut.

I miss what we could have been, but I don’t regret a thing.
Some connections aren’t meant to become stories.
They’re meant to become orientation.

I don’t go back to that time for longing. I go back because that was the first time safety arrived before desire — and because that pattern stayed with me. It’s how I know when something is real.

I don’t need anyone to remind me how it ends.
A hallway, a graduation, a clean break.
What I keep going back for isn’t the ending anyway.
It’s the part before — the girl in my corner,
the room that opened in front of me,
the feeling I carried forward.

Dedication


For Blythe, who stood in my corner before I even understood what that meant.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy the ones below which take up somewhat similar themes.

Mariko

https://thekyotokibbitzer.com/2026/02/10/simona/

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On Why I Don’t Think People Are Stupid

Epigraphs

“The self… is something that one does.”
— Erving Goffman

“Most people are running on less air than they admit.”
— Myself

I’m was at my local, ING bar in Kyoto, on a Friday night recently. The bar was half-full and I was sitting at the bar facing Haku, the Master. The Master has a very specific role in Japanese bar culture, which I will write about in more detail at.a future point. At one point a large Australian guy with a goofy necktie and shorts (!) got up to use the bathroom and started talking to me on his way back to his table. He turned out to be a massive music geek — the kind who could rattle off entire discographies, sub-genres, bootlegs, and obscure side projects without stopping for breath. This guy was off-the-hook, in a good way.

And every time he mentioned a name I didn’t recognize — and there were some — I heard myself say, “I don’t know that one.” Which was true. But right behind the truth, like a soft pressure behind the teeth, was the pull of a different line:

I might have heard of that.

The little social maneuver that keeps you from losing footing in a conversation. A tiny verbal hedge — not to appear smarter, but simply to avoid looking out of the loop.

I didn’t use it. Not that night. But I could feel the pull of it.

And this is where the issue comes in. We see moments like that, other moments too — the small hedges, the conversational feints, the soft dodges — and we assume the other person is being evasive or dim. It’s a common enough misread. The sociologist Erving Goffman would say we’re mistaking the face-work for the face, the performance for the person. Most of adult life is a choreography of tiny adjustments meant to preserve dignity in rooms that are, in a way, more pressurized than they appear.

I’ve misread people this way too, more often than I’d like to admit. It’s easy to do. You walk into a bar, a meeting, a lobby, a dinner, and you start tracking the surface behavior — the deflections, the little pauses, the canned lines — without registering the pressures underneath. You forget that everyone else is doing what you’re doing: trying not to look foolish, trying not to fall behind the conversation, trying not to reveal how little air they may be running on. And if you’re honest with yourself, you’ve probably made the same mistake once or twice — assuming so-called stupidity where there’s really just someone trying to keep their footing.

Once you start thinking in terms of air, psychologically speaking, a lot of human behavior kind of snaps into place. Most adults are operating in rooms—literal and metaphorical—that feel tighter than they look. Workplaces that punish hesitation. Relationships where honesty has a cost. Conversations where losing face feels like falling off a cliff. You can watch people brace themselves against these pressures: the fixed smile, the extra sentence, the too-quick agreement, the sudden laugh that doesn’t quite match the moment. These aren’t signs of stupidity. They’re evidence of someone rationing whatever psychological oxygen they’ve got left. A person with plenty of air moves freely. A person with none moves with constriction. And nearly everyone you meet is somewhere in between.

You can see this most clearly in smoking areas — those little outdoor, and sometimes indoor, pockets where the smokers step out, but so do the people who “just need a minute.” It’s one of the last places in adult life where the frontstage drops almost instantly. Nobody is performing out there. They’re too cold, too tired, too frankly over it to keep the act going. You get fragments of real conversation in those spaces: the outward complaint about a boss, the unguarded revelation about a relationship, the offhand confession that would never surface elsewhere. Goffman would have called this a protected frame, a place where the stakes are low enough that a person can breathe without the threat of losing face. Laud Humphreys found something similar in his own research: when the public stage gets too tightly patrolled, people create hidden rooms off to the side — not because they’re deceptive, but because they need air. Smokers know this intuitively. Most adults do. If you want to see who people are, you don’t watch them inside. You watch them in the places they go to recover themselves.

The trouble is that we’ve built a culture where it’s far too easy to write people off as stupid. Someone fumbles a point, misreads a question, overplays a joke, reaches for a half-remembered fact — and we take it as evidence of a deficient mind. It’s a convenient explanation, but it’s also a lazy one. Most of the time, what you’re seeing isn’t a lack of intelligence at all. It’s someone managing their oxygen, protecting their face, doing the quiet calculations that let them stay inside the conversation without falling through the floor. People aren’t idiots; they’re just compressed a lot of the time. And when you’re compressed, you behave in ways that look strange from the outside but make perfect sense from the inside. If you’ve ever felt that tightness in your own chest — and you have — then you know exactly what I mean.

If you look closely, most of what gets labeled “stupidity” in adult life is something else entirely. People hesitate, double back, second-guess themselves, or let a thought trail off — not because they don’t understand, but because they’re scanning the room for consequences. They’re gauging tone, adjusting for status, trying not to embarrass themselves or anyone else. That slight wobble you see isn’t ignorance; it’s self-preservation. Most confusion is just caution in disguise. I’m reminded of this every time I step into a smoking room — those little unofficial classrooms where waiters, consultants, cops, hotel staff, bartenders, and people, perhaps, on both sides of the law gather for a minute of air. People talk plainly in those spaces. You can learn more about intelligence, pressure, and human behavior in five minutes in a smoking area than in a week of formal conversation. Once you see people that way — not as idiots, but simply as adults trying to survive tight rooms — you read them differently. You read them with more depth, and more accuracy.

Coda

I’ve seen this play out in real time. Years ago, at a large student event I was helping to run, a few kids pushed just past the edge of the rules. It wasn’t chaos — but it was enough that you could feel the room tense in that particular way adults do when something might become a problem. We didn’t have the usual layer of senior oversight that day; it was just us, reading and reacting to the situation as best we could. And once you’ve been responsible for a big, delicate event, you learn how differently people perceive the same moment — how something that feels technically alarming can be, in practice, entirely survivable if you stay calm.

What stood out to me wasn’t the misstep itself, but the speed with which the narrative around it could have hardened into something much darker. In the absence of context, adults often reach for the most dramatic interpretation available — not out of malice, but out of reflex. Yet when you’re close to the ground, when you actually know the students and the rhythm of the event, you can see the difference between a moment that needs steady hands and one that needs alarm bells. I won’t pretend it’s always an easy call — it isn’t — but it’s a call worth taking the time to consider in real time. We’re much better about these judgments today, much more attentive to context and the whole field, but I sometimes wonder if a little controlled rebellion doesn’t still exist, and for reasons that are, frankly, understandable.

You realize, in moments like that, how rarely adolescent behavior is actually about ignorance. The students weren’t trying to sabotage anything; they were trying to navigate the tension between who they felt themselves becoming and the structures that still treated them as children in so many ways. What looks like recklessness from a distance often reads, up close, as an awkward attempt at agency — a signal that they want to be trusted with the real world, not the simplified version institutions hand them. And that’s something institutions rarely have the courage to provide.

I think about those in-between spaces a lot. Not the conference halls or the meeting rooms, but the five-minute pockets on the margins where people finally let their real face surface. Adults and students both. You can see the pressure lines ease, the performance drop half an inch, the truth of what they’re trying to navigate flicker through. Those moments tell you more than any official report ever will. W.H. Auden once wrote that from murals and statues we glimpse what the Old Ones bowed down to — but never the situations where they blushed or shrugged their shoulders. It’s the same for modern institutions: they’re good at capturing ideals as concepts, less so at catching people’s actual humanity. Those liminal pockets remind me that everyone in the room — kid or grown-up — is doing the same basic thing: trying to stay upright in a tight space without losing who they are. That’s why I never read these episodes as stupidity. They’re just people showing their real face for a second, in a place where they feel safe enough to do it.

Dedication

For those who learned to survive the tight rooms —
and for those who taught me where the doors really are.

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Everybody Always Argues with the Decoy

Epigraph:

You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on baby.

Don Henley

Most of the time we’re not actually arguing about the thing in front of us. Instead, we’re fighting the decoy — the safe, tidy stand-in we put there to avoid touching whatever’s underneath. You see it in houses, offices, relationships, etc. You see it in yourself most of all. The argument, the quirk, the habit, the “I’m fine,” the thing you pretend matters because the thing that really matters still feels radioactive.

Once you start noticing this pattern you can’t unsee it. You realize how many tiny skirmishes in your life were just rehearsals for a truth you didn’t want to say out loud. And how many times other people came at you sideways not because they were petty, but because they were protecting something tender and didn’t know another way.

This is where the essay begins.

I. The Decoy in Yourself

My own decoys have never been super dramatic. They show up in the places no one would think to look: diet, routine, food rules I adjusted and re-adjusted until even I couldn’t remember what the point was. I’d get fussy about what I could or couldn’t eat, what was “safe,” which days were exceptions. It felt like control, but it wasn’t. It was a decoy — something tidy to fuss over when the real issue was elsewhere.

Surface-level arguments make excellent shields. They give you something to grip, something you can adjust without changing anything that matters. They let you believe you’re fixing the thing, when really you’re just polishing the handle of the locked door.

Everyone does this. The trick is noticing it early enough to stop polishing.

II. The Decoy in Others

If you can spot it in yourself, you start spotting it in everyone else.

Someone blows up about dishes, or a missed message, or a tone you barely remember using. But it’s not about the dishes, or the message, or the tone. The decoy is standing in front wearing a name tag, and the truth is sitting in the back of the room with its shoes off.

You learn to listen for the emotional key change — that little drop in the voice where the deeper thing is trying to come through.

People don’t argue about the thing they’re arguing about. They argue about the thing they can name.

III. Decoys in the Wild (Home)

Take playing music around the house. Someone wants it louder, someone wants it quieter, someone keeps changing the song halfway through. The conversation is supposedly about volume or mood — but everyone knows it’s actually about space, attention, presence. It’s rarely about what it seems to be about. It’s about how seen (or unseen) someone feels that day.

Decoys let people stay safe inside small arguments because the true ones feel too exposed.

IV. Decoys in the Wild (Office Edition)

Workplaces are full of decoys because no one wants to name what’s actually happening.

Take something as apparently boring as office seating. One person wants the window, another wants the corner, another complains about the AC blowing on their neck. It all looks like preferences — but the real story is proximity to power, avoiding someone who drains you, or trying to reclaim a little control your job doesn’t actually give you.

No one says that, of course. They argue instead about airflow.

And by the time you see it clearly, it’s almost funny — how earnestly everyone insists the argument is about a chair.

V. When Someone Shows You Who They Are

Then there are the moments — the small, good ones — where someone cuts through all of it.

Like today: I emailed Kohei from my work to say I’d be five minutes late for supervising gym CAS (weightlifting), expecting the usual shuffle or ripple of inconvenience. But he just took it. No commentary, no guilt trip, not even a pause.

A gesture that clean tells you everything you need to know. Not about the schedule. About the man.

It hits you that for all the decoys you and everyone else keep arguing with, some people just solve the problem and move on. No storyline. No subtext. No self-importance. Just a straight, humane act.

If you’re paying attention, you learn from people like that.

VI. The Bottom Line

If there’s a moral here — and I don’t always like pieces with morals — but nonetheless, it’s this:

Try to catch the decoy early. It saves everyone a little time and a little quiet pain.

Some days you’ll manage it. Some days you won’t. And that’s okay too.

For Kohei, simply.

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An Open Book

Note: This little poem was originally written way back as early as 2008, and is also collected in a piece about John and his dad the pretty famous singer songwriter Bruce Innes, and that can be found here. John and I were together both in high school and college, and had a lot of great times together.

As I’ve written about before, Innes would tell his students marginally true stories about my time at St. Georges’s school and Hamilton College. I did get up to some things, I admit, but Innes does like to exaggerate a bit. All in good fun, and good faith. In any case, one time one of his students became kind of interested in my story, and wrote me asking for information. So I wrote him this back, in verse. This poem is below.

The reason I’m re-printing this today is, I’m finally working on a book. Well, I’ve been working on it all along, and now I’m just arranging things. The book will have, among other things, some oral history in the form of interviews. I have done a few and am doing more, and would like to expand my interview scope a bit. So if that sounds like something you would be interested in, for whatever reason, do let me know. And as always, thanks for reading.

“An Open Book”

Not really in the mood
but you’ll think me quite rude
if I don’t make a reply
around me on the plane
folks eat, are entertained
no one’s writing save I

So I’ll take a look back
to days at the dog track
where I ended up by mistake
thought we could beat the odds
just silly teenage sods
there was no money to make

I know not if J.I.
has spun a pack of lies
concerning my personhood
Yes, I wrote poems for girls
who told me they were pearls
ah–but they weren’t any good

About a cold river,
and the rest of his quiver
of myths and exaggerations
well if someone was shoved
it was done out of love
or congratulations

So to upstate New York
in a trench coat–what a dork
but the world took pity
the life there was fine
but naught was on the line
should have gone to the city

I did two things quite well,
needing something to sell
I wrote brilliant excuses
‘bout ridiculous capers,
couldn’t finish my papers
I claimed aces, held deuces

My second great skill
is one I hold still
I fell for crazy ladies
locals, Russians, and Turks
they all drove me berserk
with a boatload of maybes

Four years in the dorms
and countless reforms
led to little of note
I left sans a sob
a plan or a job

and without my trench coat

Dedication: For Innes. Let’s rock this little decade baby. And for biographers everywhere. It’s an interesting genre.

Note: If you enjoyed this poem, you may also enjoy “Some B-Side Poems.” You can read that here.

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On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)

A hotel room: the same cell in a different city — clean towels, a window, and the sense of being contained but cared for

Mark Sandman, refracted

A haunted hotel room, unblessed, charged with static; objects shifting on their own.

The Church, refracted

New Note: On the kibbitzer (two b’s there Mr. Auto-Correct baby), I am re-printing certain select pieces for a little while while I work on another writing project. Today I am re-printing this piece on hotels. This piece has gone through several iterations over time, it is in fact probably my most heavily edited piece, and concerns the experience of staying at business hotels. In a way this is perhaps my very best piece in that it is one of only three that survive from my first blog Classical Sympathies, which I started in 2008, right around the time I began working to build the IB Course at our school. Of course given later (and earlier) events, this was no coincidence. Essentially, the blogs were, for lack of a better phrase “trauma blogs,” or, to put it more positively, recovery blogs. I like that–let’s stick with it. So this piece was about finding safety, physical and psychological, in a hotel room, while at the same time knowing, paradoxically, that hotels, especially fancy ones, are sometimes, or even often, the target of violence for various reasons.

Note: I have stayed in a number of such hotels over the years and engaged deeply with the room-space in each case. At this point, I am prepared to say that I am “good at” staying in hotels (an absurd claim that I advance nonetheless), and feel authorized to advance some notes toward a general hotel theory. Facility as a hotel guest though not exactly a marketable skill, has yielded some insights about the general, perhaps archetypal, nature of the modern hotel stay. Despite at this point considerable experience in the field, I continue to find the hotel experience at once comforting and bizarre, and hotel rooms, when properly apportioned, womb-like and exercising a specific and fascinating gravity. Also, the first draft of this piece was completed when Larry King was still alive.

This piece also mentions my “fugue state,” and it is true that as a PTSD response to childhood sexual abuse I would sometimes, more than once for sure, slip into a kind of state of taking automatic actions which I recall, but only somewhat. During these states I would arrange and re-arrange the room, the things in my bag, etc. in a way to place little reminders to myself in the future. It is a little hard to explain, however once again psychologically literate folks will follow along.

Finally, in my opinion, this is a pretty funny piece. Not as funny as Mason Anderson but still not bad. And it advances the absurd, yet still somehow defensible, position that I am “good at” staying in hotels. I hope you enjoy it.

Part I:

The TV was turned to CNN, which was focused on violence somewhere. I could not tell where. The experts in their suits and hairsprayed hair presented the conflict as if conflict was inevitable. They agreed it was happening now and could be prevented, but at the same time at the conclusion of the piece they smiled politely and signed off as if the violence was also occurring in a land so distant it might as well be the past.

Emily Maloney

I have stayed in quite a number of business hotels, in quite a number of countries. This piece provides, in essence, a sort of “psychograph” of the business hotel experience. Three features of business hotels that we may want to consider are: i) like airports, all business hotels share a single ethos, an un-pindownable character that feels, wherever one happens to be geographically speaking, of a piece; ii) the effect of the television offerings, in particular CNN International, on the business traveler, is one of overwhelming relaxation, bordering on complacency and even numbness; iii) as a corollary to i), it is far easier to enumerate how business hotels resemble one another than to lay out any salient differences.

Oddly, minor local variations only seem to further reinforce a central sameness. Checking into an 11th floor room at a classic example of the species, for instance the Numzau Tokyu Hotel, half an hour south of Tokyo, Japan, one is affected at once by that strangely pleasant fugue state, a state of mind almost exactly halfway between bliss and malaise, attendant on “business” hotels. Once inside a business hotel, especially those neither top-of-the-line nor quite down-and-out, one is confronted with a kind of disembodied space which seems at once connected to a global network of similar hotels (accomplished in part through the simultaneously soothing and hypnotizing effect of CNN International) and disconnected from the local environment. The traveler is sucked into global weirdness through a combination of the flat, post-political window of CNN, the persistent low hum of the air conditioner, and the anodyne staleness, almost spartan, quality of the decor.

Oddly, any “artwork” or decorative flourishes that a hotel room may possess only serves to further a sense of featurelessness; the art in question being almost exclusively of the most banal nature–bland seascapes, abstracts denuded of all edge or verve, and those odd non-paintings that, try as you might, you forget the second you exit your room. One has to remind oneself that a business trip means that there is work to be done–the TV, the slight high resulting from contact with the bowing attendants, the men in black, and the blushing young lady who carries your bag, the knowledge that your company is footing the bill–all this lulls you into a kind of sleep of the spirit.

Turning on the TV, you feel that you could spend years, lifetimes even, staring at CNN’s Larry King (the long-dessicated one), the post-racial female anchors who bring that special Code 46 feel of the non-overt future, or the exquisitely paralyzing “World Weather,” before awakening in another age, the Rip Van Winkle of the travel world. When CNN finally wears out its welcome, one’s choices of pay channels open up the fascinating worlds of…golf (the Golf Channel), silicone starlets (the Playboy Channel), intimate acts in close-up (the “adult channel”), and, most fittingly, drama set in outer space (the Battlstar Galatica channel). This profile of options, golf, softcore, hardcore, and outer space, the result, presumably, of reams of data on the tastes of business travelers like me, the mobile working male, I want to find depressing, but the menu has something beautifully efficient about it. Not wanting to get sucked into the anesthesizing vortex of any of these choices, I have to force myself to rise from the supine contemplation of the only-vaguely Chinese news anchor and move on with the day.

My senses are momentarily quickened by a report of an attack on a hotel in Pakistan: a horrific assault which has taken place at a Marriott in Islamabad. Oddly, the reality of this event quickly fades, and what Richard Todd calls the “non-ness” of the Marriott up the road strangely becomes the non-ness of violence–the attack in Islamabad conveys, through the lens of the CNN International, not exactly shock, but a continuing and deepening sense of global weirdness only slightly tinged by fear resting on the realization that as a business traveler in exactly this kind of hotel, I am the target. Oddly, this realization is not as disturbing as it ought to be: my fugue state is such that I am more in, more of, Islamabad than Numazu, but not wholly there either. Instead, I am poised somewhere between Islamabad and Battlestar Galactica, cavorting with post-racial android news anchors who bring me news of a planet this 11th floor, air-conditioned bubble of a non-space has left far behind.

Part II:

In part II of this essay will we delve a little deeper into the business hotel experience using as a lens “J.G. Ballard: Conversations.” Ballard probably needs no introduction, but for those who have yet to fall until his influence, he is the author of “Empire of the Sun” and “Crash” who wrote dozens of fantastic semi-Sci Fi short stories in the late 1950s and through the 1960s including “Prima Belladonna,” Thirteen to Centaurus,” and “The Terminal Beach.” Ballard novels, in my opinion, are not as uniformly satisfying as his short stories; at novel length his “obsessions,” beach resorts, empty swimming pools, gated communities, plastic surgery, car crashes, the interplay of sexuality and technology, tend to wear a little thin.

In “Conversations,” Ballard offers the following defense of his insularity and thematic repetition: “I think the values of bourgeois society by and large have triumphed. We’re living in a world where people at the age of 22 and 23 are thinking about their mortgages. It is a fact, and there’s nothing much on can do about it, except cultivate one’s obsessions and one’s own imagination” (144), but this approach works better in his short stories (which Ballard has not written for nearly two decades now), where his limited set of concerns are reflected and replayed through a panoply of settings and situations such that he resembles a virtuoso musician building off of certain stable base elements to create endless riffs and improvisations.

As a boy, Ballard was, famously, incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, and this formative experience informs both his autobiographical “Empire of the Sun” and his short stories. But instead of literal prisons with externally imposed walls and limitations, Ballard’s characters seem over and over again to be immured within prisons of their own creation. Story after story features some variation on one of two related themes; scientists careening off on private quests that eventually destroy them or people seemingly sequestered or restrained who turn out to be acting in psychic complicity with their imprisonment. Ballard himself admits to the centrality of the prison experience in “Conversations” when Mark Pauline asks him “Writing Empire of the Sun hasn’t helped you forget those horrible years in the camp” and Ballard responds “But I’ve been writing about it all the time–I just wrote about it in disguise” (138).

“J.G. Ballard: Conversations” was overseen by one V. Vale, who, to all appearances, is a full-fledged Ballard maniac, and contains a number of Vale’s telephone conversations with Ballard and other Ballardians including the composer Graeme Revell and Ballard archivist, David Pringle. Ballard has a lot to say about that particular semi-reality fugue state described in my earlier post. As noted above, Ballard has a special fascination with self-imposed psychic incarceration: “I have a nightmare vision of a gated community of extremely expensive houses inside a larger gated community. It’s bizarre” (72). Ballard is also concerned with the dual themes of self-immurement and the mind-meld that occurs between the individual and their media systems. These two themes may not seem to be obviously related, but after reading 300 pages of Ballard on the telephone, all of his particular obsessions do seem intertwined, and connect with my experience of staying in business hotels. Take for example Ballard on why Surrealism no longer obtains:

“Classical surrealism, beginning after the First World War, made a very clear distinction between the outer world of reality {…} and the inner world of imagination {…} But after the Second World War, particularly as the media landscape developed enormously–thanks to television, mass advertising and the whole consumer goods landscape–the distinction between our reality and inner fantasy began to break down {…} This means that it’s very difficult to maintain the dichotomy, that contrast that the Surrealists required {…} As I’ve said before, in the last 20 years if you stop somebody in the street and ask the time, you might look at a watch with Mickey Mouse on the dial {…} It cuts the ground from under classical Surrealism” (166).

When viewing CNN International at a business hotel, I realize, pace Ballard, that the world as reflected does have aspects of the surreal, especially in the consummately inoffensive manner in which it presents horrific international incidents interlaced with “the exquisitely paralyzing World Weather” and 9-ball tournaments from Bangkok replayed several times a day. This approach effectively colonizes my own imagination by rendering the unthreatening creepy and and the unbearable passe.

The oddest thing about CNN International is that the news itself is actually not all that bad. Real news about real, important, global events, comes across the airwaves, but it gets somehow stripped on much of its impact through the presentation. Ballard in 1991: “We get the Newzak all the time. It’s been homogenized, trivialized, and there’s too much filler added to smooth it down so that it comes out like paste from a tube” (178). It’s not that the news isn’t there, it’s just that, pace Ballard, there is no room for either surrealism or real impact. Ballard explains that the Dali/ Bunuel films (Un chien andalou and L’ Âge d’or), so shocking at the time, would not work today: “The sight of people dragging dead donkeys through a dining room would {seem to be} some sort of advertising stunt–a beer commercial” (166). Here is David Pringle on why Ballard is not a Marxist:

“Ballard, being a good Freudian, is much more interested in the individual’s–yours and mine–collusion with what’s going on, our secret wishes, that in the idea of conspiracy–that there are conspiratorial entities out there trying to ‘get us’ {…} Ballard asks, ‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?'” (226).

Ballard also writes “I accept the Surrealist formula: the need to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, to remake the world around us by the power of one’s imagination, which after all is all we’ve got. I mean, the central nervous system is faced with a world of Mariott hotels and ex-actors turned world leaders, dangerous medicines and you name it. The individual central nervous system can only attempt to make sense of this” (276).

Eventually, if she has even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, the business traveler comes face to face with Ballard’s question: “‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?’ This is because the enervating lassitudinal comfort of your standard Mariott is, in the worst possible sense, addictive. When you begin to run down the list of hotel features: airport pickup, bowing attendants, elevators, room service, air conditioning, permanently locked windows, security barrier, ubiquitous carpeting, fresh towels and soap, overpriced but almost appetizing meals, pool and hot tub, 9-ball on a loop, world weather, all these items add up to a simulacrum of a total existence that very quickly begins to edge out the rest of the world–there is no need to leave the compound and submission to the soft tyranny of over-priced conveniences sets in almost immediately.

At the same time, CNN International allows the illusion of connectedness while in fact only furthering one’s suspension in the high-rise ether of the business hotel complex. “One has the illusion you’ve seen a place in fact when you haven’t seen it at all. All you’ve seen are the airports and the hotels” (288). Ballard here hints at something I have long felt to be the case: all airports actually belong to a single country, and the vast majority of business hotels likewise sit uneasily within their supposed national confines; they are more like each other than they are like the buildings or community around them. The overpriced airport hotel in Tokyo resembles nothing so much as the overpriced airport hotel in Vancouver, which in turn is the kissing cousin of the airport hotel in Beijing, etc. Here again, local differences only seem to accentuate a basic central identicalness.

Ballard again: “People use mental formulas that they’ve learned from TV. Even in ordinary conversation, if you’re talking to the mechanic at the garage about whether you need new tires for your car, you and he probably talk in a way that his equivalent thirty years ago would never have done. You use–not catch phrases but verbal formulas. Suddenly you realize you’re hearing echoes of some public-information, accident-prevention commercial. It’s uncanny” (83).

(Ballard has the strange habit of ending thought after thought with “It’s bizarre;” “It’s strange;” “It’s uncanny”–this verbal tick serves as a running indicator of the way that Ballard sees the world and helps explain how, over the course of a novel, he can focus on a certain object, a tennis machine for example, or swimming pool, with such relentless obsessed focus that the formerly normal becomes invested with a kind of pathological creepiness that entirely transcends simplistic one-to-one correlative symbolism.)

Ballard’s central point here hints again at the colonizing power of certain ideas and turns of phrases which seep into our everyday speech, tempered only by feeble attempts to ironize. Thus, when in the course of normal conversation one refers to a storm as “an extreme climatological event,” to a sign as “singage,” or to a car crash as “a simultaenous intersection of vehicular components” the use of such terms, although masked with a patina of apparently self-knowing irony is still, in its own way, perfectly sincere. Here, submission to the linguistic idiocy of corporate non-speak marries submission to the blissful “non-ness” of the business hotel, a paradise of our own collective fantasy where the towels are always clean, the windows are always closed, and 9-ball is always on.

Dedication: For the APA chain. I know it’s kind of a cult, but man are they reasonable, conveniently located, and comfy.

Works Cited:

J.G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard: Conversations, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Emily Maloney, from an essay in an early-2000s political anthology (exact source lost to time)