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Scenes from Hamilton College I: Meeting Ian and Jake

New Note: It’s been a while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back here as a republication. “Hamilton I” remains one of my favorite entries on the Kyoto Kibbitzer—an early chapter built around friendship, music, and the strange, formative textures of freshman year, especially the central presence of my good friends Ian and Jake, who shaped so much of that time. It’s also one of the more widely read pieces on the site, which I appreciate. Re-reading it now, I’m struck by how much of what came later was already there in embryo: the scenes, the sounds, the late nights, and the people who mattered. As always, thanks for reading.

And I recall the moment
More distant than it seems
When five green queens
On a black bin bag
Meant all the world to me

The Pogues

I attended Hamilton College, and managed to graduate–possibly in linen. At Hamilton I was an English major, and intended to be from when I enrolled. This was a decent choice; however both Hamilton and English were kind of my father’s choices. I also managed to cobble together an Asian Studies minor through the good auspices of my advisor who checked out my credits and told me I could put that together. This was a good call on his part, and even though I kind of stumbled into it, The Asian Studies minor was my choice.

I was pretty unprepared for college. Before going I was asked to fill out a kind of questionnaire to help the college place me with roommates. One of the questions was, are you clean, messy, or in the middle. I chose in the middle, which was sort of a mistake because it turns out men are pigs, and I was cleaner than most. At the same time though it wasn’t a mistake because if I had selected clean I may not have met Ian and Jake. Jake was my roommate, and we lived in a quad. The other two roommates were Brian and Geoff, and although I had a relationship of a sort with both of them freshman year, we were not really on the same page. Jake and I were. Ian was our next door neighbor, and he roomed with Marc Campbell, and two other people. Ian, Jake, and Marc are still in my life.

My parents came with me to upstate New York, and before I moved into the dorm we stayed for a few days in a hotel near campus. I was kind of apprehensive, and spent the days listening to The Pogues and quietly stressing. But when I moved into the quad things were fine. This was mostly because of Jake.

Jake was a bit of a wild character. He was from either New York or Connecticut as I recall, and I think he came from decent money. When I visited his house later that year it was very patrician, for lack of a better word. His father seemed like a super old-school WASP patriarch, and his mother didn’t work I don’t believe. His younger brother held right-wing political views at the time, while Jake was a lefty. This was a point of serious disagreement between the brothers, but other than that the family seemed pretty solid. I believe that his brother has since switched his political views.

I didn’t meet Jake’s family until Thanksgiving however, and got to know him first in the context of the quad. We lived in a dorm called North, on the first floor right by the door. (My buddy John Innes, who joined me at Hamilton from our high school lived in the neighboring dorm Kirkland, and next to that was South.) The door to North would be locked at night, and other dorm folks would regularly misplace their key and crawl through our always open window. Jake and I rarely slept, and I got in the habit of staying up until about five AM. After that I would get a little sleep before first period English class. Then I would attend Geology class, which satisfied some kind of Science graduation credit. For English class I was alert and on top of it, although I was still hand-writing my papers, which changed once I got in the habit of using the computers in the library. English class was small, maybe 12-15 people, whereas Geology was huge and held in a lecture hall. I would go lay down in the back in the aisle and try and sleep. I ended up getting As in almost all my English classes, and a C- in Geology, which was deserved to an extent because of the sleeping. However, the main question on the final was brutal and pretty unfair, which was to draw a seismograph. Literally, draw one, which we had never studied and I did cram for the final. Brutal action. Somehow I still made the honor roll that year, and every year, because of my performance in the humanities.

Jake was an English major as well as far as I recall, I kind of forget, but he knew a lot of the teachers I knew. In any case, we did not bond primarily in the classroom, but in the dorm and then at “Sig,” the frat he was associated with and later pledged. Sig was the alternative frat. I hung out there a bit, but when pledge season started they kind of cracked down on non-pledges attending parties. For Halloween, Jake snuck me in early, and although that night I got a few looks I was good with Jake’s blessing. That night I wore all black with a turtleneck and a paper sign on my back saying “No future for you.” As in the Sex Pistols. I was talking with an older guy, an alum (there were always some alums that hung at the frat parties at Sig) at the party and he said something to the effect of “I like you, but I don’t like your shirt.” OK dude.

That was the same night I believe that inspired the following little ditty I later shared with Jake:

I pissed in the toilet

He pissed in the sink

He said I haven’t got a god above

I haven’t got a drink

Jake later took umbrage with the lines, not the sink part, which was and remains credible, but the god part. I think he is, or was, a believer. In any case, he’s my friend and won’t sue.

I appreciated Jake showing me the ropes at Sig and elsewhere. In the dorm we would play his music–he was into the classics, Beatles and Stones, Kinks, Bowie. We would sing “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and “Come Together,” mostly the former over and over, no doubt to the annoyance of our roommates. Jake also liked The Pogues, and this made me think even more highly of him.

Jake smoked, Marlboro Reds, and I soon started smoking too, the same brand. This was not out of a desire to be a smoker, but rather as a way to keep my hands occupied and look busy at parties, where I had some difficulty mixing. I picked up, or invented, a little trick where I would fold up the flaps of a cigarette pack so they looked like a paper airplane, and then lob the cigs around the room, usually to any girl that wanted one. This got me some attention and some affection, and I kind of became known for the move. It didn’t get me laid, but at least it was something. Jake and I were fast friends, and hung out a lot in the early part of the year, before he began to branch out. Once he started pledging Sig though I saw less of him, naturally enough I guess.

By the time Jake started pledging, and even before, I was spending more time with Ian. Ian was from Boston and his father was a medical doctor. He lived in a nice house in the suburbs–both Jake and Ian had quite a bit more money than I, a common feature at Hamilton where pretty much everyone had money expect me. I was on a pretty decent scholarship, despite my not so impressive high school record, and could not have afforded the school without the scholarship. I visited Ian once or twice I believe in college, and then stayed with his family for a few months in the fall after college, but that’s a story for a future post.

Ian had a massive record collection in his quad, next door to mine as I have said. I liked Jake’s music, especially “Rebel Rebel,” “Come Dancing,” and The Stones, however his selection was somewhat limited. Ian’s was capacious. He was into bands like The Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Ride, and a bunch of other British bands I didn’t know at the time. But he was really into everything. I spent hours in Ian’s room soaking up his music, and my association with him kind of took over where Dyche Alsaker’s left off. I think it was Ian who also introduced me to Luna, who was coming up at the time and is still one of my favorite bands to this day. Later, in senior year I think, Ian and I had a radio show together and one night we got to play records all night long when a few other people canceled suddenly. I would play The Replacements and the Pogues, and Ian would play his music, but I was also getting deep into the 4AD label and bands like Big Star, This Mortal Coil, and a little known band called The Binsey Poplars (who I’m not sure were even on 4AD), named after a Hopkins poem. But my favorite around that time was Nick Drake, who was on Rykodisc.

Drake is now pretty well known, mostly on the back of his song “Pink Moon,” which was featured on a Volkswagen commercial, but back then he was not well known outside serious music circles. I loved his song “Rider on the Wheel,” and was an evangelist for him, telling all and sundry to listen. Most people didn’t, of course, but the whole move was just odd enough to get a little attention, which I was definitely seeking. (Another friend from that time John mentioned to me a few years ago that I would sit on the front steps of his frat in my trench coat and read a book. I don’t really remember this, but if it’s true it was for sure for attention.) I remember one evening Ian had a kind of band that was playing and I “opened” for them. My act was simply talking about Nick Drake, painting him as a forgotten genius, which he was, and pleading with the crowd to listen. It went over pretty well, like I said probably just because it was different.

Later on, mostly the next year I think, Ian and I went to a few shows in Boston, including The Red House Painters, The Fall, and Love Spit Love. Ian would drive, and blast The Pogues with the window down to stay awake on the way home. Before one of these shows we managed to source a little green, which was enjoyable. We would park, illegally, in some lot Ian knew. In the lot, there were rats.

Jake and I were sort of on the same level–both semi-degenerate English majors–but Ian I looked up to. He was definitely the leader in the friendship, although he must have seen something in me because we hung out a fair bit. Ian was also friends with Marc, but he was perhaps closer to another group of guys who lived in two adjacent quads on the third floor. This included John and a guy called Will. I would go up there too, and Will would ask “what Dead do you want to listen to?” I always went with Reckoning because I liked the country-folk sound and the song “It Must Have Been the Roses.” I liked the third floor guys too, especially John.

Next door to Jake and my quad was Adam and Basmo. Adam and Basmo (a nickname) were seniors who for some reason decided to stay in what was basically a freshman dorm. Adam was cool, but pretty grown up. Basmo was still a kid, and loved to get high. Loved to get high. Early on in the year he would come over and ask “anyone want to get stoned and session?” A session, it turned out, was you would smoke, put on The Beatles, and watch Bugs Bunny or something with the sound down. The idea was the music would synch up with the cartoon and it would be hysterical. It totally worked, although I just liked to listen to music and bullshit rather than session. Real heads will remember the session. (Jake told me that sadly Basmo later took his own life as a result of the worsening effects of ef. That was really too bad because Basmo was just a pure open-hearted soul.) So basically we would get stoned when we could, smoke Reds, and stay up all night and listen to music, which was a pretty decent life all in all. Jake and Ian took me in, and made the first part of freshman year so much better in all ways than it would have been if I hadn’t known them.

Dedication: For Ian and Jake, for seeing something in me, and helping make me a little somebody.

to be continued…

Note: If you liked this piece, you may other like the other pieces below in the Hamilton series.

Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)
Scenes from Hamilton College IV: Sophomore Year II: The Sports Show, Ann, Getting Fired

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The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)

Epigraph: 

“This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius…”

— Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, The 5th Dimension

Elizabeth Holmes emerges in Silicon Valley with the full prodigy package: Stanford dropout, world-changing ambition, and a carefully constructed persona. She leans hard into the comparison with Steve Jobs — black turtlenecks, minimalist language, intense seriousness — and presents herself as the young visionary who will revolutionize medicine. The pitch behind Theranos is irresistible: hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger prick. Investors, politicians, and media figures line up. The board fills with heavyweight names including George Shultz, and the company’s valuation soars to roughly $9 billion. Holmes becomes, on paper, the youngest self-made female billionaire. It’s classic Silicon Valley moonshot energy — bold claims, secrecy, and belief outrunning reality.

The problem, as insiders begin to realize, is that the technology doesn’t work at all. Engineers and lab staff struggle to produce reliable results, while Holmes and her partner Ramesh Balwani continue presenting the system as revolutionary. The company begins quietly using conventional lab equipment while maintaining the illusion. Whistleblowers emerge, including Shultz’s own grandson, who raises concerns at significant personal cost. The leadership circles the wagons. Meanwhile, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal begins investigating, encountering secrecy, evasive answers, and mounting contradictions. His reporting — later expanded into the book Bad Blood — becomes the turning point. The narrative collapses, regulators move in, partnerships evaporate, and the once-mythic startup implodes.

Legal consequences follow. Holmes and Balwani are charged with fraud, and after a long, high-profile trial she is convicted on multiple counts. She delays reporting to prison after becoming pregnant, later giving birth with partner Billy Evans. Eventually she begins serving her sentence in a minimum-security federal facility. Even there, the mythology lingers — supporters, critics, and observers debating whether she was a calculating fraud, a true believer, or some combination of both. The arc is striking: Stanford prodigy, Jobs imitation, $9 billion valuation, total collapse, and prison. Less chaotic than John McAfee, less creepy than Keith Raniere, but still unmistakably outta control — a billion-dollar story built on belief, performance, and a technology that never worked.

Steve Jobs represents the template Elizabeth Holmes tried to emulate. Jobs cultivated a minimalist aesthetic, black turtlenecks, product mystique, and a “reality distortion field” that persuaded investors, employees, and customers to believe in things before they fully existed. But the crucial difference is that Jobs ultimately delivered. From the original Macintosh launch in 1984 to the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007, Apple shipped real, transformative products. Jobs bent reality rhetorically, not technically; Holmes attempted to bend reality where physics and chemistry refused. The comparison highlights both the ambition and the failure — she borrowed the style, but not the substance.

Bernie Madoff represents the classic institutional fraud parallel. A former NASDAQ chairman, Madoff operated a decades-long Ponzi scheme through Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, promising steady returns that attracted elite clients, charities, and feeder funds. By the mid-2000s, billions were under management, including investments tied to major institutions and wealthy families. In December 2008, amid the financial crisis, Madoff confessed to his sons, was arrested, and the scheme collapsed, revealing losses estimated at roughly $65 billion in paper value. The deception persisted largely through reputation and trust — investors assumed competence because of his stature. Holmes operated similarly: prestigious board members, high-profile endorsements, and a narrative of inevitability masked a system that didn’t work. Like Madoff, she benefited from credibility cascading downward — once enough influential people believed, the illusion sustained itself.

Sam Bankman-Fried provides the modern startup-era comparison. Bankman-Fried founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019, and within a few years it was valued at around $32 billion. He cultivated a quirky, disheveled persona and promoted “effective altruism,” pledging to donate vast sums to global causes. FTX attracted major investors including venture firms and high-profile endorsements, while its sister trading firm Alameda Research operated closely behind the scenes. In November 2022, liquidity concerns triggered a rapid collapse, revealing commingled funds and massive shortfalls. Bankman-Fried was arrested in December 2022 and later convicted in 2023 on fraud and conspiracy charges. The arc mirrors Holmes: meteoric rise, media fascination, complexity masking weakness, and sudden implosion once scrutiny arrived. Where Jobs built something real and Madoff ran a traditional financial fraud, Bankman-Fried and Holmes sit in the same modern category — startup mythology outrunning reality.

In the end, the most astonishing thing about Elizabeth Holmes is not just the scale of the deception but the audacity of it. How, exactly, did she think she was going to get away with it? Blood testing is not social media. It’s not software. It’s chemistry, biology, physics — things that eventually either work or don’t. Yet she and Ramesh Balwani kept pushing forward, covering, deflecting, and doubling down as the gap between claim and reality widened. That’s the outta-control element: the belief that charisma, secrecy, and prestige could override science indefinitely. At some point, the story had to collapse. But like many figures in this series, Holmes seems to have inhabited a gray zone between calculation and belief — part fraud, part self-hypnosis — which made the whole thing both more dangerous and more surreal.

Then there’s the broader cultural context, including the willingness of powerful people to buy in. Even Barack Obama publicly embraced the Theranos narrative early on, holding Holmes up as a symbol of innovation and entrepreneurial promise. Chump. In retrospect, it’s striking how easily the image worked: the black turtleneck, the calm intensity, the world-changing pitch. Smart people — very smart people — saw what they wanted to see. It’s a reminder that charisma plus narrative can override skepticism, especially when wrapped in Silicon Valley optimism. The episode becomes a cautionary tale: will future founders learn from this, or will the same hubris reappear in new forms? The myth of the visionary is powerful, and the temptation to believe in it hasn’t gone away.

The quiet hero of the story, meanwhile, remains the Theranos whistleblower — George Shultz’s grandson — who raised concerns when doing so meant alienating family, risking his career, and standing against a multibillion-dollar narrative. He saw that the technology didn’t work, said so, and held his ground. In a story dominated by hype, status, and belief, that kind of stubborn insistence on reality stands out. Holmes’s rise is outta control, her fall inevitable, but the ending belongs to the people who refused to play along.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the other ones in out “You’re Outta Control” series.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/on-the-most-outta-control-people-in-history-aka-youre-outta-control-1-keith-rainere/
https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/the-most-insane-people-of-all-time-aka-youre-outta-control-2-john-mcafee/
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The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee

Note: This second installment in The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control) looks at John McAfee, tracing his evolution from software pioneer to global fugitive, crypto evangelist, and online cult figure. The piece emphasizes the improvisational chaos of his later life and contrasts it with more conventional tech figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, arguing that McAfee’s volatility places him in a category of his own. The tone is impressionistic, comparative, and intentionally informal.

Epigraph: 

“I fought the law and the law won…”

— I Fought the Law, The Clash

John McAfee starts in relatively conventional fashion: brilliant programmer, eccentric personality, builds the first widely adopted consumer antivirus software in the late 1980s, and becomes extremely wealthy when McAfee Associates takes off. But even in the early years there’s instability, and a foreshadowing of things to come — drug use, paranoia, erratic business decisions, and a growing anti-authority streak. He sells his stake, drifts through various ventures, and by the late 2000s relocates to Central America, eventually settling in Belize. There he buys beachfront property, hires armed guards, collects dogs, experiments with quasi-scientific projects, and begins acting like a semi-autonomous local strongman. It’s the first fully “outta control” phase: money, isolation, guns, and a man already well inclined toward paranoia.

Then comes the neighbor incident. In 2012, McAfee’s American neighbor, Gregory Faull, is found murdered. McAfee is named a person of interest — never charged — and instead of lying low, he goes fully theatrical. He claims the authorities are targeting him, allegedly evades police by hiding, disguising himself, and moving between safe houses, all while giving interviews and live-tweeting the saga. With girlfriend (later wife) Janice McAfee and various associates in tow, he flees Belize, surfaces in Guatemala, is detained, then ultimately allowed back to the United States. The whole episode is surreal: a tech millionaire allegedly on the run for murder, narrating the chase in real time on social media. It’s not just outta control — it’s performance art.

Back in the U.S., McAfee briefly lands in Florida but quickly re-enters chaos. He promotes cryptocurrencies, launches bizarre tokens, courts publicity, and cultivates a global cult following. He posts paranoid threads about surveillance, claims he lives inside Faraday cages, talks about government plots, and offers wild schemes — including promises to evade arrest by sea, air, or even paragliding into New Mexico to meet with fans! He pops up in unexpected places, from Caribbean boats to European cities, always accompanied by Janice and a rotating cast of loyalists. At one point he tattoos crypto branding onto himself, predicts conspiracies, and positions himself as both fugitive and prophet. The line between performance and belief dissolves completely.

Eventually, legal trouble catches up. U.S. authorities charge him with tax evasion and crypto-related fraud, and he’s arrested in Spain in 2020. From prison he continues tweeting through intermediaries, hinting at conspiracies and insisting he’ll never kill himself. In June 2021, shortly after a Spanish court approves extradition to the United States, McAfee is found dead in his cell — ruled a suicide. His supporters, including Janice, immediately dispute the finding, pointing to earlier posts and tattoos as supposed foreshadowing. The ending is as chaotic as the life: software pioneer turned fugitive, Twitter antihero, crypto evangelist, paranoid showman, and finally a death that only deepened the mythology. Outta control doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Compared to John McAfee, figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates still look almost conventional — even when they drift into odd territory. Musk’s public persona is chaotic in a very modern way: late-night posting, impulsive announcements, awkward humor, and personal-life theatrics. The relationship with Grimes, the bizarre naming of children, and the infamous weekend when Azealia Banks claimed she was stranded at Musk’s house amid talk of LSD and general weirdness all add to the sense of volatility. Then there are the dad-joke moments — hauling a sink into Twitter headquarters and posting “let that sink in,” which is either performance art or just terrible humor. It’s eccentric, sometimes cringe, occasionally outta control — but the companies still run, rockets still launch, and the chaos never fully escapes the bounds of reality.

Gates, by contrast, is a more old-school eccentric. Bill Gates has the reputation of a hyper-competitive young executive who mellowed into a philanthropic technocrat, but the quirks linger. The awkward dancing, the slightly rumpled appearance, the perennial jokes about dandruff — he has always projected a kind of brilliant-but-uncool energy. The later-life turbulence — divorce from Melinda after decades, scrutiny over his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, and the general aura of a private billionaire navigating public controversy — adds complexity but not chaos. Gates remains structured, Musk volatile, but both operate within functioning systems. McAfee, meanwhile, is something else entirely: not just eccentric but improvisationally unstable, a man who turned paranoia, fugitivity, and spectacle into a lifestyle. Musk may be chaotic, Gates may be awkward, but McAfee is outta control in a different register altogether.

In the end, John McAfee feels more outta control than Keith Raniere, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates — and that’s saying something. Raniere was creepy and manipulative but small; Musk is chaotic but still tethered to real-world outcomes; Gates is eccentric but fundamentally structured. McAfee, by contrast, seemed to live entirely outside normal constraints. Guns, boats, dogs, girlfriends, crypto tokens, Faraday cages, live-tweeting alleged manhunts, promising wild escapes, drifting between countries — the whole thing reads less like a biography and more like a fever dream. He wasn’t just eccentric; he appeared to improvise his life day by day, escalating the spectacle each time. That kind of volatility is rare. It’s also why he became a cult hero: he embodied a fantasy of total freedom, however reckless, however unsustainable.

Years after his death, the mythology hasn’t faded. Supporters still debate the circumstances, quote his tweets, and treat him as a kind of outlaw technologist who refused to play by the rules. Whether you see him as mad genius, performance artist, or cautionary tale, the scale of the chaos is undeniable. There may have been more dangerous figures, more powerful figures, even more tragic figures — but few as consistently, flamboyantly outta control. That’s what makes McAfee a legend. Not admirable, not necessarily likable, but unforgettable. And like all true originals, there probably won’t be another. So RIP, prayers up, and pour one out for a real one, John Motherfucking McAfee.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the other ones in out “You’re Outta Control” series.

On the Most Outta Control People in History (aka You’re Outta Control!): #1 Keith Rainere
The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)
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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.

If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Matt

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On the Pre-Game (aka A Response to Neil Strauss’ The Game)

Note: This piece overlaps my three essays on my week with Isobel series (I–III), though it approaches that week from a different direction. Where those pieces follow the arc, this one lingers on the moment before it resolves—the pre-game, as I’ve come to understand it. It is also a direct response to the book The Game, by Neil Strauss. In what follows I don’t intend to rebut Strauss so much as correct what I see as a fundamental weakness in the subculture he dissects. The reader will judge whether I succeed.

Epigraph

“No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me.”

— Bob Dylan, Up to Me

Part I: Ippei

I’m at Zaza, the club on Kiyamachi in Kyoto. It’s around 11 PM and just getting going. Zaza is a late night place. It doesn’t peak until well past midnight, and at this hour it’s still stretching, still finding its rhythm.

I’m there by myself, drinking a White Russian.

A Japanese guy comes up to me. He’s about fifty-five. No preamble, no easing into it. He introduces himself—let’s call him Ippei—and within seconds it’s on.

“See those two ladies over by the window,” he says. “Wanna help me pick them up?”

I’m intrigued. Not because I’m especially interested in the outcome, but because I’m a curious guy and I want to see what he’s doing.

“Ok,” I say. “What’s the play?”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“You’re my old friend from California. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. I just ran into you by chance here. Take it from there.”

That’s it. That’s the entire setup. Handed to me fully formed.

I ask him, just to check, “Is this going to work?”

He smiles, completely unbothered.

“Yeah,” he says. “I do this every night. Had a threesome last night.”

Well alright then.

We walk over. He starts talking immediately, in Japanese, smooth, fast, confident. “This is Matt, my best friend from California. Would you believe I just found him here?”

I met him five minutes ago.

It doesn’t matter.

In no time the two women are completely engaged. Smiling, leaning in, laughing. The story has landed. The reality has been accepted. They’re not being approached. They’ve been included.

And I’m there, but I’m not really there. I’m not trying to win anything. I’m not trying to escalate. I’m watching. Taking it in. The nightlife anthropologist, just observing the field.

After a while I step out to the balcony to smoke.

Twenty minutes pass.

When I come back down, he’s still there. Still going strong. Still inside the same story.

That’s when it clicks.

He didn’t need me.

He needed the role I filled.

He needed a premise.

Part II: Neil Strauss

Neil Strauss’ The game

That night at Zaza stuck with me, not because of what happened, but because of what it revealed.

There is a whole body of writing—call it a subculture, call it a system—that attempts to explain and formalize moments like that. The most famous version of it is The Game, by Neil Strauss, which I’ve read twice.

I want to be clear about something before I go any further.

I’m not anti–Neil Strauss. In fact, I respect him. He’s an elite investigator of subcultures, and I love subcultures. He embedded himself in a world, learned its language, mapped its hierarchies, and reported it out with real precision. That’s not easy to do. It’s a serious piece of work.

What follows is not a dismissal of Strauss.

It’s a response to what the game represents.

Because once you move from observing a system to adopting it, something changes.

At its core, the game assumes that attraction can be engineered. That with the right language, the right sequence, the right calibrated signals, you can break down a woman’s resistance and get to the desired outcome, which is of course bed.

It’s a kind of a linguistic technology and NLP at its worst. A system designed to move someone from one state to another.

And for me, that’s where I part ways.

For me The Game is a massive turnoff, because it flattens everything and kills any chance at romance.

It scripts what should be alive. It reduces seduction to a manual and turns something unpredictable into something repeatable. And in doing so, it drains it of the very thing that makes it worth pursuing in the first place.

There’s no space for real connection. No space for the unexpected. No space for the moment where something happens that neither person could have predicted. No space for the kind of encounter that might actually change your life.

And beyond that, it produces a life that I don’t want.

The guys in The Game end up living together in this kind of shared house—Mystery, Strauss, Courtney Love—surrounded by other guys, talking about women, thinking about women, analyzing women. It’s a sausage fest. And it’s not cool.

The Gamers think they’re players. I prefer to think of them as incel-adjacent. They’ve optimized the system, but they’ve lost the thing itself. They’ve mastered the game and stepped outside of life.

Part III: On Action

I’ve had a handful of sexual partners that I’ve gone all the way with. The precise number is under an NDA. I’ve made out with more. But I haven’t been especially active, at least not in the way the game would define it.

What I have done is, flirt with, connect with, and have crushes on dozens of women.

And the truth is, I enjoy it.

I actively enjoy the pre-game.

I enjoy getting close. The moment before something becomes something else. The tension. The ambiguity. The recognition that something might be there, and neither of you has named it yet.

The thrill of newness and the possibility of a spark. If it burns, great. If it flickers, that’s also good. For most men, the pre-game is a means to an end. For me, it’s the end.

And that’s the difference.

This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in action. I am. Very much so. In fact, I’m something of an action junkie. But I’m a highly specific kind of action junkie. Like Wittgenstein, who was said to have manufactured his own oxygen, I manufacture my own action.

I don’t chase it blindly. I don’t optimize for it. I don’t try to force it into existence through systems or scripts. I generate it. Selectively. Intentionally. And in moments where it actually means something.

Part III: Luna

I’m at Umineko with a friend—call him Mr. Editor. It’s early, maybe six in the evening. We’re mid-bar, having a beer, when I notice a woman sitting off to the side.

She’s stunning. And I HAVE to go talk to her. Not because I expect anything to happen. Not because I’ve calculated the odds. But because the moment demands it.

I tell Mr. Editor what I’m about to do. He nods. “Go for it,” he says. “I’ll watch.” I walk over and ask her name. She smiles. “Call me Luna.”

We speak in Japanese. The conversation flows. I bring everything I have to the moment—attention, presence, curiosity—and it lands. There’s a spark. Not forced. Not engineered. Just there.

We talk for a while. Long enough for the room to shift slightly around us. Eventually I ask for her Instagram. She gives it to me. I walk back to the bar and sit down next to Mr. Editor. I’m on Cloud 9. The next day, in the late afternoon, carefully timed, I send her a message but she doesn’t reply.

Failure? Not for the pre-gamer. Because the pre-gamer already got what he came for. The moment. The spark. The approach. The brief, electric possibility that something might happen. That was the action. That was the point. For the Strauss guys, the night ends when the text goes unanswered. For me, the night ended at the bar.

Up to this point, the pre-game is contained. Safe, even. A space where things can happen or not happen without consequence.

But sometimes it doesn’t stay that way.

Isobel Revisited:

I have written about my week with Isobel extensively elsewhere, however part of that story is relevant to what we are discussing here. I met her at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, held at Exter College, Oxford, in late August 2018. We spent the week together and I fell in love. But I didn’t sleep with her. My choice. What follows is a light re-write from my essay “On My Week with Isobel: Part II”:

Wednesday.

I wake up early and we have breakfast together in the dining hall. By this point, people are noticing us. Comments here and there, snickers, sideways smiles.

Morning and lunch blur into one long conversation—the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We’re finishing each other’s thoughts. I’m in deeper than I’ve ever been.

We don’t attend much of anything.

In the afternoon break she goes to change. I go back to my room and put on The Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She comes back after and tells me, without shame, that she had pleasured herself during the break. Just fucking states it.

This is a complication.

That night she changes again. A red dress. Short, but not careless. Stunning. We sit at dinner whispering, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knows by now.

After dinner there’s wine again, talking with the tutors, the long courtyard. I meet Darby Costello in person for the first time. She’s fully alive, drinking wine, holding the room effortlessly. I’m so happy she’s my astrologer. But I’m elsewhere.

We stay late. Clear the courtyard. Around two in the morning we part. Cheeks touched. No bedroom. No act. No close. Back in my room, lights low, Mendoza Line still in my ears, I lie on the narrow bed and I know exactly where I am standing.

I will keep going. I will see where this leads. But I will not sleep with her. I can’t.

It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. Totally and much more. But I can see it. The complications. For her, for me. The chain of events that would follow. I’m old enough to see it coming. And I know, standing there in the courtyard, with the last of the wine and a cigarette burning down, that it’s on me.

I have to be the one to say no. That’s the shape. That’s the decision.

=====

Up to this point, the pre-game has been something I could enter and exit at will. A space I could step into, generate action, feel the spark, and leave intact.

With Ippei, the action was scripted. With Strauss, it was systematized. With Luna, it was self-contained.

But there’s another version of the pre-game, and it’s the one that matters most. The one where the moment doesn’t stay light. The one where it deepens. Where the spark doesn’t just flicker—it starts to take shape. And at that point, something shifts. Because now it’s not just about whether something will happen. It’s about whether it should.

This is where the line from Dylan starts to carry real weight. No one else could play that tune. There’s no system here. No script. No borrowed language. No Ippei handing you a premise. There is only the moment as it actually exists, and your ability to see it clearly.

And then the second part. It was up to me. Not to escalate. Not to optimize. But to decide. The game ends when something happens. The pre-game ends when you decide it should.

Dedication

For pre-gamers everywhere. May you get a little action tonight baby.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the following pieces that also take up the themes of romance and seduction.

On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part III: Aftermath
Simona
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On My Early Years in the IB, 2008–2010

Note: This piece belongs to a loose series of reflections on my years working with the International Baccalaureate at Ritsumeikan Uji.

Over the years I have written about various moments and characters from that period — the improbable dinner conversations, the bureaucratic skirmishes, the strange coalition of personalities that somehow managed to build something durable inside a large Japanese school system. Pieces such as On the Eventification of Pre-Identified Incidents, Dr. Fox, and On Good and Great Talkers circle around that same institutional landscape from different angles.

This essay goes further back than those. It describes the early years when the program existed mostly on paper, when the staff could still fit around a single table, and when the whole project balanced uneasily between optimism and administrative chaos.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is not the difficulty of the work itself but the sheer improbability of the outcome. Programs like this often fail quietly long before authorization. The fact that ours did not is largely due to a small group of people who were willing, for a time, to push far harder than their job descriptions required.

This piece is my attempt to record that moment before memory smooths it into something simpler than it really was.

Epigraph

It’s like a visit to the moon

or to that other star

I guess you’ll go for nothing

if you really want to go that far.

— Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies’ Man

I. The Call-Up

In February 2008 I was called down to the principal’s office at Ritsumeikan Uji.

At that point I had been at the school for several years already. I had started part-time in 2002–03, moved to full-time shortly after, and by 2007 had landed on what I later called “the man under the bridge contract.” The bridge in question was a middleman arrangement run through a broker named Masaki Yasumoto, a classic education-world intermediary. These figures flourish in private school systems: part fixer, part recruiter, part relationship broker.

Masaki was a funny guy. We were friendly in those days. He invited me to his Christmas parties—cheap hotel buffet affairs—and occasionally took me out for yakiniku. I later fell out with him, but that belongs to another story. At the time we were on good terms.

Through Masaki’s bridge contract the school kept me on staff while avoiding a full tenured appointment.

So in February 2008 I was teaching SEL under Mary Walters and a handful of social studies classes. Business Management was still in my future. That morning Principal Kitamura and Vice-Principal Terada called me in. We sat on the little sofa chairs in the office. They pitched me the role of IB Diploma Programme Coordinator. At the time I knew almost nothing about the International Baccalaureate.

My entire knowledge base consisted of one fact: a school called Katoh Gakuen near Numazu had introduced IB in 1999. That information had come secondhand from Mr. Ogawa, our Head of High School. That was it. No workshops. No training. No background. Just the idea.

When they asked if I would take the job, I said yes—on one condition. I needed a sennin appointment when the bridge contract ended. Kitamura said we could revisit the matter in a year. Good enough. I went home and discussed it with my wife. The next day I accepted. I was 34 years old and this felt like my big break.

I was determined to make the most of it.

II. The Principals

When I first arrived at Ritsumeikan Uji in 2002 the principal was Kawasaki. I barely knew him.

He made speeches at opening ceremonies and graduations but I never interacted with him personally. The gossip around the school was that he was a major power broker in the wider Ritsumeikan system. The other rumor—less flattering—was that he hired office staff based largely on the attractiveness of their legs. Whether true or not, the administrative office at the time did indeed contain several strikingly good-looking employees.

In 2008 Kawasaki left the school and moved to a senior role at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. Later he attempted to become Chancellor of the entire university system. That campaign became a minor drama inside the organization. My immediate boss at the time, Dr. Fox, supported him, as did another senior administrator, Higashitani.

At one point Kawasaki’s campaign team came to Uji to gather support. In the meeting room one of the Suzaku representatives looked at me—sitting there in a suit—and said:“Dr. Fox, we are so happy to have your support.” Fox was about 65 years old at the time. I was 39. But apparently one foreigner looked like another. It was harmless and genuinely funny.

Kawasaki ultimately lost the election by a handful of votes and eventually left the Ritsumeikan system.

III. The Placeholder

Kawasaki’s successor at Uji was Kitamura. This appointment shocked everyone. Kitamura had been Head of the Junior High School and had relatively little senior administrative experience. Overnight he jumped several levels and became principal.

Only later did I learn the reason. Kitamura was essentially a placeholder. The real plan was for Shiozaki, a senior administrator who had been on extended medical leave, to return once his health recovered. Shiozaki was nearing retirement age and the system wanted him back in charge before he finished his career. Kitamura’s job was simply to keep the seat warm. It was brutal, but that’s the old Keichimeikan way. And to his credit, he did exactly that. He also gave me my big break.

Years later I saw him again at the Kyoto girls’ Ekiden race on Christmas Eve. He was wearing a worn sweater and looked slightly down on his luck. I didn’t exactly admire him as a leader. But I always felt compassion for him.

After all, he took the bullet for the squad.

IV. Hashizume

Another key figure in the early IB story was Hashizume. Hashizume occupied a strange position. Officially he was an office administrator. In practice he was the number two power in the building. All major financial decisions flowed through him. Every yen connected to the IB project passed through his hands.

His real passion, however, was American football. He coached the boys’ football team and took the job extremely seriously. Years later he left Uji entirely after being recruited by a major university program in Tokyo.

Dr. Higashitani, who despised him, called the hiring university “idiots and imbeciles” when he heard the news.

Hashizume was also a prodigious drinker. We went out drinking together exactly once. It started at ING, the little rock bar in Kiyamachi. Then we moved to several other bars. Then it was 3 AM. Then Hashizume started calling friends who owned additional bars and asking them to stay open. They agreed. By the time I finally staggered home it was about 4:30 in the morning.

The next day I was violently hungover. Pocari Sweat. Miso soup. Saltines. Nothing stayed down. By noon I was in the hospital on an IV. Hashizume, meanwhile, seemed perfectly fine.

V. VP Terada

The most important administrator in the entire early IB story was Vice-Principal Terada. Terada had spent fifteen years in the school as a homeroom teacher and grade leader before moving into administration. When the IB project began he became my direct ally.

Every Tuesday afternoon the school held the Steering Committee meeting. This was the arena where every IB proposal had to be approved.

My memos would go to Terada first. He rewrote them in polished Ritsumeikan bureaucratic Japanese and presented them to the committee. I usually stayed silent while Terada handled the negotiations.

One day I noticed something interesting. Whenever someone opposed one of our proposals—especially Ms. Ono, my great nemesis—Terada would cover his mouth with his hand and say something like: “That is a very good point. We will have to think about that.”

At first I believed him. Then one day after a meeting I confronted him in a small side room. He laughed. “No,” he said. “We are not thinking about it at all.”

He was simply letting the opposition save face. That was when I realized I could trust him completely.

VI. Pre-Authorization

Our pre-authorization visit came in May 2009. The visiting team included Steve Keegan from the IB regional office and Peter MacKenzie, principal of Hiroshima International School.

At that point we barely had a staff. It was essentially just me and Tim Chanecka, who was helping temporarily until we could hire more teachers. I had written almost all of the program policies myself—language policy, assessment policy, academic honesty—working largely alone.

The visit went reasonably well. At one point Keegan left the room and accidentally left his notebook open. I glanced down. The only thing written on the page was: “Stress in the school.”

Fair enough.

We passed pre-authorization.

VII. The Staff

By the time the authorization visit in May 2010 arrived we had assembled an actual team.

The core group looked like this:

  • Me — DPC, CAS, TOK, Business Management, and History
  • Scott Sim — English A and future homeroom teacher
  • Mike Gurnick— Mathematics, assessment, and scheduling
  • Tomoko Wano — Japanese A and translation powerhouse
  • Nick Sutton — Physics (part-time)
  • Oliver Manlick — Chemistry curriculum design
  • Ayako Kurokawa — Visual Arts

Ms. Wano in particular was indispensable. She attended every senior meeting, translated every document, and essentially kept the program alive during its early phase.

Without her we would not have survived.

VIII. The Dinners

During the authorization visit we hosted the visiting team for two dinners. The first night I chose a small izakaya near Kyoto Station. Mary Walters had warned me that it was “kind of a greasy spoon.” But when we arrived Peter MacKenzie looked around happily and said: “This is great. People usually take us to the fanciest restaurant in town to try and impress us.”

Score one for the hokke and the frosty mugs of beer.

The second dinner took place at Suzaku. Five of us attended: Shiozaki, Keegan, MacKenzie, a sharply dressed Suzaku administrator with a goatee, and me. At one point MacKenzie’s wine glass ran empty. There was no waiter nearby. So I stood up, walked around the table, and refilled his glass. When I sat down the Suzaku administrator gave me a small approving nod.

Another quiet point scored.

IX. The August Scare

The visit ended. Then we waited. Weeks passed. By mid-August there was still no decision. At the time I was in Oregon, visiting my family with Sachie and Hugh. Instead of relaxing I spent the vacation checking email obsessively.

Finally I contacted Keegan. A few days later he replied. There was a problem. Several of our teachers—including me—did not possess formal teaching licenses in our home countries.

I reminded him that we had discussed this already during the visit. The Kyoto Board of Education did not require Western-style teaching licenses. They evaluated subject knowledge based on transcripts and TESL credentials.

Keegan agreed. But Peter MacKenzie was raising objections.

So I pushed back. Politely—but firmly. The IB operates in over 120 countries. Mandatory teaching licenses are not a universal requirement.

Then I gathered examples from elite IB schools in the United States whose hiring requirements explicitly did not require teaching licenses. After that the objection disappeared.

Two weeks later the decision arrived. Ritsumeikan Uji was officially granted IB World School status. The certificate—signed by IB Director General Jeffrey Beard—was hung in the principal’s office.

After months of uncertainty, we finally exhaled.

X. Exhaustion

In truth, by that point I was completely spent.

That summer I had also attended the OACAC conference at Babson College as the school’s overseas college counselor. I had traveled, networked, presented, and worked almost nonstop. By the time authorization finally arrived I felt less triumphant than drained.

Not depressed. Just cooked.

The exhaustion lasted until about November 2010. After that I rallied. Because the next great milestone was coming. In April 2011 we would begin our first actual IB teaching.

But that is another story.

Dedication

For the whole team that carried our little IB program through authorization.

A million thank-yous.

And especially for Vice-Principal Terada. You’re the motherfucking GOAT baby!

Note: If you liked this piece you may like the pieces below which also discuss my time with the IB.

On Why I Told the World to Fuck Off for 36 Hours
On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)
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On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)

Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.

The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.

As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.

Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.

Epigraph

“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.”
— Uncle Tupelo

I. Return

On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.

The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.

I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.

I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.

I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.

In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.

It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.

II. Suzaku

My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.

There were no students.

Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.

It was, in a word, dreary.

I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.

Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.

By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.

III. Drift

If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?

Mostly at home.

During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.

I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.

When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.

Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.

In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.

IV. Before 9

Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.

The bartender most nights was Miyuki.

Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.

She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.

During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.

That was the culture for several years.

V. Leave

In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.

Oddly, I felt relieved.

VI. The World Changes

Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.

The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.

Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.

VII. Return

In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.

Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.

So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.

The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.

In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.

The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.

VIII. Administrative Comedy

During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.

The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.

Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.

I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.

IX. Reinstatement

Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.

My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.

After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.

The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.

The long cut had taken its time.

But eventually it brought me home.

Dedication

For Karin.
With deep appreciation.

Note:

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On the Strange Geography of Conferences

Note: This essay began with a memory from an IB Global Conference in Singapore sometime in the mid-2010s, when I first began to notice that large professional gatherings possess a kind of unofficial geography. The official conference—the keynote halls, breakout rooms, and printed program—forms only one map of the event. Running alongside it is a second map composed of bars, lobby couches, dinner tables, and long conversations that drift well past the scheduled sessions.

Years earlier I had written a short reflection on what I called unconferencing, the quiet relocation of intellectual “action” from the formal program to these improvised spaces around it. The present essay grows out of that earlier observation but shifts attention from theory to terrain. Rather than asking why unconferencing occurs, it asks where it tends to happen and how participants gradually learn to navigate those unofficial zones.

Readers interested in the conceptual background may wish to consult the earlier essay on unconferencing, which explores the phenomenon through the lens of Erving Goffman and the broader question of how individuals negotiate the locus of action within institutional environments.

As with many pieces on the Kibbitzer, the goal here is less to offer a definitive theory than to describe a pattern that, once noticed, becomes difficult to unsee. Conferences, like many human systems, operate simultaneously on two levels: the one announced in the program and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

“The locus of action is always in motion.”
— Erving Goffman

I arrived a day late to the conference.

This was in Singapore sometime around 2014 or 2015, at one of the IB Global Conferences for the Asia–Pacific region. The event was being held in a large glass hotel near the river, not far from Chinatown and just south of Raffles Place if memory serves. The keynote room alone seated something like eleven or twelve hundred people. The conference program was thick with panels, workshops, and presentations that began early in the morning and ran straight through the afternoon.

My suitcase had arrived before I had. I had been in China the day before running another IBEN training, and while the conference itself was already underway, I was still in transit. By the time I checked in and made my way downstairs, the official proceedings were well established: keynote speakers, crowded sessions, conference badges swinging from lanyards, the whole apparatus of professional gathering fully in motion.

At the time I was only about a year into my work with IBEN. My regional manager was Avi Nanda, who was excellent in many respects but not especially hard-charging as a networker. Gill Pressland, who later became a formidable presence in the region, was not yet in the picture. I knew a few people, most importantly Steve Keegan in Australia, who had become a kind of mentor to me. I also knew Ed Lawless, who had previously overseen a great deal of the professional development work in the region.

Ed had once joked to me, only half joking, that his job had become little more than “wedding planning.” Conferences, workshops, schedules, logistics—endless coordination. Eventually he burned out on it entirely and moved on, first to Pamoja, the online curriculum company, and later into a somewhat undefined role at an IB school in Tokyo that seemed to blend management, marketing, and development. Such trajectories are not uncommon in the IB ecosystem. People drift through roles that are part educational, part organizational, part entrepreneurial.

In any case, arriving late to the Singapore conference had the curious effect of placing me immediately at its margins rather than at its center. The keynote sessions were already underway, but instead of rushing directly into the large ballroom where most of the attendees were gathered, I began encountering people in the spaces just outside it: the lobby, the cafés, and eventually the hotel bars.

One of the first people I reconnected with was Darlene Fischer from Australia. Darlene was in her early sixties at the time and something of a force of nature. She had the sort of presence that made conversations reorganize themselves around her. Through Darlene I soon met two others who would become central figures in what I later came to think of as the conference’s unofficial inner circle: Sue Richards and Gerald Conlin.

Gerald was in his mid-sixties then, a slight man with white hair and an almost theatrical grin. His professional life consisted largely of consulting work connected to education programs, particularly the wave of hybrid master’s degrees in education that universities around the world had begun launching. Institutions like Tsukuba in Japan and Bath in the UK were building these programs, often with cohorts of twenty or so students, and Gerald had carved out a niche as the person who could authorize and evaluate them. He was also constantly presenting, constantly researching, constantly moving through the conference circuit.

Within about five minutes of meeting me he decided that I would make the perfect number two for his MA authorization work. It was flattering, though I suspected there might be additional motives behind his enthusiasm. Gerald was an openly and exuberantly gay man, and his warmth toward me carried a certain theatrical flair. He had a habit of calling me “my boy,” delegating tasks such as selecting restaurants or ordering drinks, and occasionally resting a hand on my upper thigh while speaking with great intensity about some educational development or other. None of this particularly disturbed me; conferences are full of strong personalities, and I was by then quite capable of navigating such dynamics.

Sue Richards, meanwhile, functioned as Gerald’s counterpart and amplifier. Where Gerald was slightly reserved and professorial, Sue was outgoing, energetic, and socially strategic. She worked directly for the IB at the time and moved easily through the conference environment, introducing Gerald before presentations, praising his work with extravagant enthusiasm, and generally acting as a kind of corner person for his professional persona. If Gerald was the fighter in the ring, Sue was the one shouting encouragement from the ropes.

The two of them formed a kind of traveling intellectual unit, and through them I began spending more time not in the conference sessions themselves but in the hotel’s bars and restaurants.

There were perhaps four or five of us in total who fell into this pattern. What struck me fairly quickly was that these individuals rarely attended the conference sessions unless they were running them. The keynote speeches, the panels, the carefully scheduled workshops—these seemed largely directed at newcomers or first-time attendees. The veterans, by contrast, moved through the conference in a completely different way.

They ran the unconference.

By this I mean something slightly more specific than simply skipping sessions. Years ago I wrote an essay about what I called “unconferencing,” referring to the parallel conference that emerges quietly around the official one. What interests me here is less the theory of unconferencing than its geography: the physical spaces through which these unofficial conversations travel.

At the Singapore conference, that geography quickly became clear.

There was the large ballroom where the official keynote addresses were delivered to more than a thousand people. But there were also the bars—two of them in particular—where smaller groups gathered throughout the afternoon and evening. There were the restaurant tables where dinner conversations stretched for hours. There were the lobby seating areas where people drifted in and out between sessions.

And there were the walks.

Within a day or two I began to see that the conference operated according to two distinct maps. The first map was the one printed in the program: rooms, times, speakers, sessions. The second map was entirely informal, emerging through patterns of conversation and social gravity.

The keynotes were for the newbies.

The action was at the bar and at dinner.

I was somewhat ambitious at that stage in my career, eager to establish myself in the region and become a respected trainer. Because of this ambition I paid close attention to where energy seemed to accumulate. It did not take long to realize that the most consequential conversations were happening far from the podium.

In the bars and restaurants people spoke more candidly about the IB, about institutional politics, about emerging programs, about who was doing interesting work and who was not. Opportunities were floated, collaborations proposed, rumors exchanged. Careers, in small ways, were advanced.

The official conference continued to run its scheduled course upstairs, but the real motion of the event—the circulation of ideas, alliances, and opportunities—took place elsewhere.

Seen in this light, conferences begin to resemble temporary cities with two overlapping infrastructures. The official infrastructure is highly visible: lecture halls, keynote rooms, printed programs, registration desks. The unofficial infrastructure is quieter and more fluid: bars, café tables, hallways, and late-night dinners.

Participants gradually learn to navigate both maps.

Some remain primarily within the official one, moving dutifully from session to session. Others develop an instinct for the second map, drifting toward the places where conversation gathers and where the boundaries between formal roles begin to loosen.

It is in these spaces that the unconference unfolds.

The term itself is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the phenomenon is real. Once a small group of experienced participants begins congregating in a particular location—usually a bar or restaurant—others start to appear. Conversations splinter and recombine. Someone joins for twenty minutes before leaving for dinner. Someone else arrives with news from another corner of the conference.

Over time the group becomes a kind of floating node within the larger event, a place where information circulates rapidly and where participants feel unusually free to explore ideas that might never make their way into a formal presentation.

In retrospect, what struck me most about that Singapore conference was not any particular keynote or panel discussion but the realization that conferences possess a strange and dynamic geography. Action is rarely confined to the places where organizers expect it to occur. Instead it migrates across the built environment of the event, settling temporarily wherever people feel the oxygen is richest.

The ballroom may host the official performance, but the bar hosts the conversation about what the performance actually means.

And so the conference proceeds along two parallel tracks: the one announced in the program, and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

The unconferencers simply learn to follow the latter.

Dedication:

For all those who know how to find the action.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essays linked below, all of which also take up the fascinating theme of professional conferences.

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On Living Paycheck to Paycheck

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

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

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

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

Epigraph

Money won’t save your soul.
— Tim Burgess

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

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

I first learned that margin in Dunedin.

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

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

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

Day after day after day.

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

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

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

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

A few years later, from 2002 to 2004, my wife and I were living in a subsidized apartment in Mukaijima on the Kintetsu Line outside Kyoto. I was working part-time as a social studies teacher and earning roughly the same ¥230,000–250,000 a month. Our rent was only ¥40,000 thanks to her hospital job in Uji, Kyoto. The apartment had three large rooms, a kitchen, a genkan, and it was surprisingly well insulated.

Our son Hugh had just been born and wasn’t yet in daycare. My wife worked night shifts and often made more money than I did. We weren’t rich, but we made it work. And we were happy.

Then years later came another version of the same story. During COVID I took leave from work and drifted into a strange suspended routine. I spent most of my time in my room playing chess online, watching chess streamers, and talking on the phone. My peak rating reached about 1200, which I was absurdly proud of.

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

Things were precarious, but manageable. Barely. And then there is the present.

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

But the final years of my son’s schooling at the University of Auckland slowly drained those savings. As I write this in March of 2026, at age fifty-one going on fifty-two, I have about $3,000 in the bank and another $3,000 on a Kyoto Bank credit card. My ANA card covers most day-to-day expenses, but that line of credit has been cut before and could disappear again at any time.

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

And yet the margin remains thin. But my story is hardly unique.

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

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

He loved the work. He was his own boss and taught every subject except music. After school he played board games with the kids. He was, in his words, in hog heaven. Then a new administration arrived. He calls them the Chicago mafia. They decided he was too expensive and too independent. He was replaced, after years of conflict and legal battles, by what he describes as three bureaucratic drones. A $60,000 settlement kept him afloat for a while, but the money vanished quickly.

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

Eventually he pieced together work again through substitute teaching and tutoring. Today he earns about $4,100 a month and is just months away from retirement eligibility. Even now he occasionally borrows money. Not because he is irresponsible, but because life sometimes simply runs that way.

And that, in the end, is the point. Living paycheck to paycheck is not a moral failure. It is a structural reality for a huge portion of the population. Careers falter. Administrators make decisions. Tuition bills arrive. Children grow up. Systems fail. Life shifts. Hard times can strike almost anyone.

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

But most of all they taught me how close to the edge so many people really are. Which is why compassion is not optional. It is necessary. Now more than ever.

Dedication

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

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Stringer Bell: Middle Manager

Note: This essay reflects on the character of Stringer Bell from The Wire, one of the most carefully written figures in modern television drama. Like many viewers, I first experienced the show simply as a gripping crime story. Only later did I begin to appreciate how deeply it is really about institutions—how they work, how they resist reform, and how the people inside them often misunderstand the systems they inhabit.

The reflections here are not meant as a definitive interpretation of the series, but rather as one viewer’s attempt to think through what makes Stringer Bell such a haunting figure. His intelligence, ambition, and curiosity make him unusually sympathetic for a character who is also capable of ruthless decisions. That tension is part of what makes his story linger long after the episode ends.

If this essay encourages even a few readers who have never seen The Wire to give it a try, it will have done its job.

Epigraph

“Problems go away because someone does something about them.”
— Peter Drucker

“Are you taking notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy?”
— Stringer Bell

When people first enter the world of The Wire, the Barksdale organization appears to be run by two men.

Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell.

But the first time the audience—and the Baltimore Police Department—really sees the organization up close, it is not Avon who appears.

It is Stringer.

Early in the first season, Detective Jimmy McNulty begins digging into the Barksdale crew after the murder trial of D’Angelo Barksdale. The courtroom scene is deceptively quiet. The defense attorneys maneuver. Witnesses crumble. The case falls apart.

And sitting calmly in the courtroom, overseeing the entire operation, is Stringer Bell.

Avon Barksdale is nowhere to be seen.

It takes McNulty, Kima Greggs, Lester Freamon and the rest of the detail several episodes just to figure out who Avon even is. The name circulates through the investigation like a rumor. The man himself remains hidden.

That arrangement is not accidental.

Avon’s power depends on distance. He is the sovereign, and sovereigns are not meant to be easily found.

Stringer, meanwhile, is everywhere.

He attends the meetings. He coordinates the lawyers. He moves through the organization like a senior executive walking the floor of a factory.

To the police, Stringer looks like the boss.

To the young dealers on the corner, Stringer looks like the boss.

But he is not.

Inside the Barksdale organization, Avon Barksdale is the sovereign.

Stringer Bell is the middle manager.

The Face of the Organization

One of the most fascinating dynamics in the early seasons of The Wire is the way the younger dealers perceive Stringer.

For Bodie Broadus, Poot Carr, and Wallace—the kids working the Pit—Stringer Bell is a kind of mythic figure.

When the SUVs pull up and Stringer steps out in dark glasses, the reaction is immediate. The security guys spread out. The conversations stop. Bodie and Poot straighten up.

It is like watching a celebrity arrive.

Stringer has the clothes, the posture, the quiet authority. He moves through the neighborhood with a calm confidence that suggests total control.

Avon inspires fear.

Stringer inspires admiration.

That difference matters.

Because for the people actually living inside the organization, Stringer looks like the boss.

But the real power structure tells a different story.

Avon is the sovereign.

Stringer is the administrator.

He handles the money. He organizes the meetings. He manages the supply lines. He solves the problems.

Stringer Bell, in other words, is the middle manager of a criminal enterprise.

And for a long time, the arrangement works perfectly.

The Wallace Problem

One of the earliest hints of Stringer’s managerial mindset appears in the tragedy of Wallace.

Wallace is young, sensitive, and increasingly disturbed by the violence surrounding the drug trade. After the brutal murder of Brandon, Wallace begins unraveling. He disappears from the Pit. When he eventually returns, he is clearly not the same person.

Stringer recognizes the problem immediately.

Wallace is unstable.

In a normal organization, instability might mean poor performance reviews or termination.

In the Barksdale organization, instability means something else entirely.

Wallace becomes a liability.

And liabilities are removed.

The decision that follows—Bodie and Poot carrying out Wallace’s execution—is one of the most haunting moments in the series. Wallace is not a rival. He is not a traitor. He is simply a young man who cannot psychologically survive inside the system.

Stringer sees the weakness clearly.

And acts accordingly.

It is a brutally rational decision.

It is also a glimpse of the darker side of managerial thinking: the moment when people begin to look like components in a machine.

The D’Angelo Decision

If Wallace’s death hints at Stringer’s managerial instincts, the fate of D’Angelo Barksdale reveals them in full.

D’Angelo is not just another soldier in the organization. He is Avon’s nephew. His position inside the crew is both familial and political.

But prison changes him.

Separated from the streets and increasingly disillusioned with the life he has been living, D’Angelo begins questioning the entire system. He reads books. He reflects. He talks openly about the violence and the futility of the drug trade.

From Stringer’s perspective, this creates an intolerable risk.

D’Angelo might talk.

D’Angelo might cooperate.

D’Angelo might bring the entire organization crashing down.

So Stringer makes a decision.

D’Angelo must be removed.

The murder in the prison library—staged as a suicide—is one of the most chilling scenes in the show. It is also the moment where Stringer Bell fully commits himself to the logic of the organization he hopes one day to escape.

D’Angelo becomes a problem.

And problems, as Peter Drucker might say, go away because someone does something about them.

Stringer does something.

The consequences will follow him for the rest of the series.

The Education of Stringer Bell

One of the most extraordinary details in The Wire is Stringer’s quiet pursuit of education.

While running one of the most powerful drug organizations in Baltimore, Stringer enrolls in community college economics courses.

The image borders on the surreal.

By day, he sits in a classroom discussing supply and demand curves.

By night, he oversees one of the city’s most lucrative heroin distribution networks.

But Stringer takes the lessons seriously.

He studies the language of markets. He begins speaking about product elasticity and supply chains. He becomes fascinated with the idea that organizations can be structured rationally—that chaos can be replaced with systems.

At one point he attempts to introduce Robert’s Rules of Order to a meeting of drug dealers.

The result is both comic and strangely admirable.

Stringer genuinely believes the world can be organized.

Violence is inefficient.

War disrupts business.

Stability produces profit.

These ideas will shape everything he attempts to build in the seasons that follow.

The Co-Op

By the third season, Stringer has begun putting his theories into practice.

Working with Proposition Joe, the careful and pragmatic East Baltimore kingpin, he helps create a cooperative arrangement among several drug organizations.

The goal is simple: stabilize the market.

Under the Co-Op system, competing crews share access to high-quality product and reduce unnecessary warfare. Prices stabilize. Territories become less important. Profits increase.

From a managerial perspective, it is a brilliant solution.

The Co-Op is essentially a cartel.

And it represents the closest Stringer Bell ever comes to successfully rationalizing the drug trade.

But the Co-Op also reveals the limits of Stringer’s power.

Because while Stringer is busy building alliances and managing markets, Avon is thinking about something else entirely.

Reputation.

Territory.

War.

Avon Returns

When Avon is released from prison, the delicate balance between sovereign and minister begins to collapse.

Avon quickly realizes that Stringer has been running the organization.

More troublingly, he has been running it according to rules Avon does not fully respect.

Negotiation instead of dominance.

Cooperation instead of conquest.

To Avon, this looks dangerously close to weakness.

The emergence of Marlo Stanfield only sharpens the conflict.

Marlo represents the future of the street—pure sovereignty, stripped of managerial compromise. His only concern is power and reputation.

Stringer sees Marlo as a business problem.

Avon sees Marlo as a challenge.

The difference is fatal.

Clay Davis

While this conflict is unfolding on the street, Stringer begins pursuing what he believes will be his final transition: legitimacy.

Through Proposition Joe, he enters the orbit of Baltimore politics and real-estate development. The meetings take place in offices rather than abandoned row houses. The language shifts from territory and product to zoning permits and development projects.

For Stringer, this looks like the next step.

The doorway out.

But the world he is entering operates according to rules he does not yet understand.

State Senator Clay Davis greets Stringer warmly. He speaks the language of political access and investment opportunities. He promises permits, influence, connections.

And Stringer believes him.

The moment of realization arrives slowly and then all at once.

The money is gone.

The development deals are illusions.

And Clay Davis responds to Stringer’s anger with one of the most surreal pieces of advice ever delivered in the series.

If Stringer wants to find the money, the senator explains, he should get himself some running shoes.

Because the faucet has already been turned on.

And the money has already flowed away.

The respectable world Stringer hoped to enter turns out not to be more rational than the drug trade.

It is simply corrupt in a different vocabulary.

A Small Recognition

Watching Stringer struggle with these systems, I sometimes feel a small flicker of recognition.

At one point in my own professional life I became deeply interested in the development of strong child protection policies in schools. From my perspective the issue seemed straightforward: the risks involved were serious, the international standards were clear, and the responsible course of action was to align institutional practice with those standards.

So I did what people like Stringer Bell often do when they encounter complicated systems.

I went looking for expertise.

I attended conferences and studied international best practices in child protection. One particularly influential experience was a conference at the Western Academy of Beijing, where I met the child protection expert Jim Hulbert.

I came away convinced that the issue was both urgent and solvable.

My assumption—naive, as it turned out—was that if I could simply demonstrate the seriousness of the issue and show how other institutions were addressing it through clear policies and professional standards, the system would naturally move in that direction.

That was not what happened.

Large organizations, like criminal enterprises, develop internal logics of their own. And once those logics become embedded in everyday practice, they can be remarkably resistant to rational reform.

Stringer Bell is discovering the same lesson, only under far more dangerous circumstances.

The Final Exchanges

By the end of the third season, the web of betrayals has fully formed.

Stringer gives up Avon’s location to Major Bunny Colvin, hoping the police will remove the sovereign whose instincts threaten the stability of the organization.

Avon, in turn, quietly provides Omar Little and Brother Mouzone with Stringer’s location.

And somewhere above them all, Clay Davis continues collecting money and smiling.

The systems Stringer tried to manage—street power, political corruption, organizational loyalty—close in around him.

The End of the Manager

In the final scene, Stringer stands alone in a half-constructed building.

Omar Little and Brother Mouzone walk slowly toward him.

For three seasons Stringer Bell tried to manage the world he lived in.

He studied economics.

He built alliances.

He created the Co-Op.

He tried to rationalize both the corners of West Baltimore and the offices of Baltimore politics.

But the systems he moved through were never built for management.

They were built for sovereigns.

And by the time Stringer Bell finally understands that lesson, the meeting is already over.

The middle manager has finally run out of problems he can solve.