Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Time At Northern Arizona University Interlude and Part V: Return to Japan and Year II Term I

Interlude — Return to Japan, Winter 1999

I flew back to Japan in early December ’99, eleven months after Flagstaff, twenty six years ago today.

My girlfriend — soon to be my wife — met me in Kumamoto and before we went anywhere near a city office we took a bus tour of Kyushu. One of those packaged trips where the landscape is real but the schedule isn’t — temples, viewpoints, souvenir shops engineered into the route because somebody is getting a cut. I’ve never liked bus tours. Too passive. Too commercial. A landscape you watch instead of inhabit.

The first night in the hotel we were intimate for the first time in a year. It was good enough — tentative, self-conscious on my part, like we were remembering choreography rather than improvising. It would all come back pretty quickly.

After the tour we stayed with her parents in Uto City — small house, tatami floors, her childhood bedroom upstairs. We shared a single futon where she had slept alone as a girl. I remember the narrowness of it, two adults lying in a past built for one. The walls thin, the air still, her parents downstairs, in their own world.

.We went to the city office the first week of December and signed the papers — no ceremony, no white dress, no crowd, just bureaucracy, and permanence I suppose. A moment small in appearance and enormous in consequence. One pen stroke and we weren’t dating across continents anymore — we were married.

I flew back to Arizona before the semester resumed. I was a married man. Small ring. Big life. My cold room waiting.

That was the hinge — Japan in winter, Flagstaff in spring, and me between two homes that I didn’t yet know they would trade places for good.

NAU Year Two — Term One

I flew back to Spokane that winter the same way I had the year before — no plan except back to NAU and see what I could do. The red Toyota pickup was waiting for me, still running, still mine, connecting Washington and Arizona. I drove south again — long highways, cheap motels, maps instead of GPS, how I knew what I was doing I have no idea.

Flagstaff was colder that winter, or maybe I had just forgotten what dry cold felt like. I didn’t keep the old room near campus, and I didn’t want to. I spent two nights in a budget hotel, stretching my graduate-tutor income across meals and rent in my head. Still — I was back, and that is what mattered.

A classmate pointed me toward a woman named Bev who had a room for rent. She lived twelve minutes from campus. She has a big house — divorce settlement money, and a shoo downtown that sold wood furniture she built by hand. The furniture was bad, and she told had sold exactly zero pieces. That alone told me she was operating on a different financial zone than the rest of us.

I moved in. My own room, my own bathroom, access to the kitchen, $700 a month. Not luxury, not struggle — just workable. I drove to campus every day, which meant less drinking, more structure. Only once did I drive home drunk, and it scared me enough to make sure it stayed a single incident. Mostly, I left the truck downtown and taxied home, or I didn’t drink at all.

Academically, the rhythm was set — Said, Ray Huang’s 1587, Braudel, Portelli, more Bourdieu when I could manage it. The hardest class was Bob Baron’s Marx seminar. Everything else felt manageable, maybe even easy when I had momentum. My friendship with Mandiola deepened that semester — sharper, closer, more real — the two outsiders orbiting the same department.

That was also when I noticed Sonia. First as a presence — around campus, then behind the counter at the organic market I could barely afford. The book van outside sold $1 paperbacks, and I bought more of those than groceries. We exchanged looks — recognition, curiosity — but nothing more. Later I realized she was an undergrad in the Post-War German History class I lectured in. That alone helped keep the boundary clean.

By late fall the loneliness was real. I was married, but alone. She missed me. I missed her. She was thriving at work — promoted to Head Nurse at 24 — and still, distance was beginning to feel like erosion rather than opportunity. So we made a plan:

So in the Fall of 2000 my wife would come to Flagstaff and take part-time English classes. We would be in the same place again.

Around that same time the last of my Hamilton debt — $17,000 — was paid off by her or by her mother. I’m still not certain which. Either way, relief arrived quietly. I would repay it not as a transaction but by building a life — covering everything from 2002 onward.

And that was the first term of year two. Cold roads, heavy reading, a quiet spark at the edge of ethics, and the decision that distance had served its purpose.

My wife would come next term.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

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

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

NAU — The Graduate Students

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

Cindy

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

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

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

Lance and Gretchen

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

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

Dave Diamond, Patrick, and Gary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Fritz

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

Mandiola

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

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

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

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

Me

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

Summary

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

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

Posted on by Matt Thomas

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.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

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

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 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.

“I wanna do right / but not right now” isn’t a moral confession — it’s a declaration of timing. Gillian Welch writes characters who understand the weight of responsibility but are still human enough to step sideways for a moment.

What makes the line powerful is its casual honesty. There’s no melodrama, no self-flagellation, no apology. Just a person acknowledging:

  • I know what I should do.
  • I know what the world expects.
  • But I’m not there yet.
“April the 14th (Part I)” — Micro-Anthropology of American Drift

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
  • 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 you 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 not 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 events would eventually 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 day to begin.

With time to kill, I headed to Starbucks. Small-town Starbucks 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 guy 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 family fabric, 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 do so.

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, our 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 be.

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. 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.

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.