Posted on by Matt Thomas

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
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?

What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.

The major episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.

In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery.

Epigraph:

“Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.”

Clyde Bruckman, The X-Files

The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.

That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.

To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.

Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.

The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been perfect. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.

At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” although that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully was more skeptical. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.

The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.

Hovering over them was their boss, the enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s greatest pleasures.

In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.

He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.

It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.

Three Essential Episodes

Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.

The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.

The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.

The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, written by the great Darius Morgan. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance. It is Bruckman who also delivers the immortal line that also gives us our epigraph: “Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.” Run roh. Take that belt off Fox baby.

What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.

His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.

When the Mythology Expanded

Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.

But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.

At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.

Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.

Why It Still Matters

And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.

The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.

It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.

For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.

The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there

Dedication

For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Other City

Note: This piece grew out of a long fascination of mine with what might be called the “night economy” — the network of bartenders, servers, managers, taxi drivers, and late-shift workers who keep a city alive after most people have gone home. If the daytime city is governed by office hours and commuter rhythms, the nighttime city runs on a different clock entirely.

The two figures mentioned here, Haku and Haru, are part of that world in Kyoto. Haku runs the bar at ING and seems to operate on a schedule that would puzzle most daylight citizens, opening in the evening and closing well into the small hours while somehow producing food, music, and atmosphere in a space not much larger than a good-sized living room. Haru manages a shisha lounge in eastern Gion and moves easily between the daytime and nighttime rhythms of that neighborhood, which has its own distinct ecosystem of bars, touts, and late-night wanderers.

The small bar Ishimaru Shoten, tucked down an alley off Pontocho in the Kiyamachi district, serves in the essay as a kind of neutral ground — one of those places where the various inhabitants of the nocturnal city briefly cross paths once their shifts end.

The central idea is simple enough: most cities contain two cities. The first is the one that tourists and office workers see during the day. The second comes into view only after midnight, when the people who keep the lights on, the drinks pouring, and the plates spinning begin their own quieter rounds.

Epigraph:

Last night, I told a stranger all about you
They smiled patiently with disbelief
I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried
And I know you did it all
In spite of me

Morphine, In Spite of Me

Most people believe a city goes to sleep around midnight. This is not true. Around that time a city simply changes populations.

The day city winds down: office workers, shopkeepers, commuters heading home, lights switching off floor by floor. But another population wakes up. The bartenders. The shisha managers. The taxi drivers. The people who work the strange hours when the streets are quieter but the human drama is often louder.

This is the other city.

If you spend enough nights wandering around it, you begin to recognize its citizens. They are the people who actually know how the place works after midnight.

One of them is Haku.

Haku runs the bar at ING. He opens around seven in the evening and closes somewhere between three and four in the morning. Prep starts around six. By the time the first customers wander in, the night has already begun for him.

He has long greying hair and rotates through a collection of Rolling Stones T-shirts, something like twenty-eight of them. I have never seen him wear anything else. He smokes constantly, drinks Sapporo if he is drinking at all, and otherwise survives on black coffee.

Somehow he produces a full menu in a kitchen that appears to consist primarily of a Bunsen burner and sheer stubbornness.

Haku’s bar has rules. No Japanese music is the main one. The other rule is that the bar itself is reserved for singles. Groups can sit elsewhere. The bar is for individuals who have come out into the night alone.

But Haku’s real gift is music. He reads the room the way a card player reads a table.

If the crowd is German he might throw on Rammstein. If Scandinavians wander in the speakers might suddenly fill with black metal. Australians get The Saints. If I’m there he might put on My Morning Jacket. The world rotates through the speakers depending on who happens to be occupying the stools that night.

Simply and totally the original man.

Another citizen of the other city is Haru.

Haru manages the shisha lounge in eastern Gion, a part of town where the nightlife becomes a little more ambiguous. The streets there are full of micro-touts, men and women both, gently trying to guide passersby into Thai or Japanese dancer clubs. Small space heaters glow outside doorways and mama-sans smile from behind them like patient spiders.

I never go into those places, though the invitations are often persuasive.

Haru opens the shisha lounge most days at noon sharp. If she is not there, someone named B. or a long-haired young guy handles things until she arrives. She tends the charcoal, mixes my Malibu Milk, and quietly extends the session when the official time runs out.

She knows my habits well enough by now that when I head up the stairs she doesn’t assume I am leaving. She knows I am just stepping outside to smoke.

For a long time she existed in my mind simply as the shisha girl, one of the many figures who keep the other city functioning. But then one night I ran into her somewhere unexpected.

The place was Ishimaru Shoten, a tiny late-night bar down an alley just west of Pontocho in the heart of Kiyamachi. Outside the entrance hang bright red, green, and blue lamps that glow like a small carnival in the dark.

I first discovered the place at four in the morning on a very long night. I was broke that evening, absolutely skint, and there was a very aggressive Japanese guy at the bar who clearly believed the entire establishment belonged to him.

The bar woman, who is about forty-five and still hot as blazes, was batting her eyes at me with what seemed like professional enthusiasm. Meanwhile I realized with growing clarity that I did not actually have the money to pay for the large bottle of beer I had just ordered.

But men are predictable creatures.

I understood immediately that if I played my cards right the territorial guy would buy the drink for me. So I joked with him, gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, made it clear I recognized him as the reigning emperor of the room. He razzed me a little but saw that I was no threat to his throne.

Sure enough, he covered the beer.

I stumbled home to the Royal Park Hotel on Sanjo Street as the sky was turning pale, crashing into bed around five-thirty in the morning.

Weeks later I returned to Ishimaru and found Haru sitting there.

I teased her gently about sometimes opening the shisha lounge five or ten minutes late when she bikes over from home. I suggested she must be hungover. She laughed, not the polite laugh people sometimes use for customers but a bright, real laugh.

She said she was happy to see me.

And that was when I learned her name. Haru.

We talked for a while. I drank a White Russian and ate dashi maki while she sipped something that might have been shochu or nihon-shu. I felt a strange rush of adrenaline the whole time, those goosebumps that run up both arms when the night suddenly opens into possibility.

Not necessarily romantic possibility. Just the larger sense that anything could happen.

Anything can come.

After twenty or thirty minutes she said goodnight and promised we would meet there again sometime. We did run into each other once more about a week and a half later, though the evening remained just as light and brief as the first.

But something had shifted.

She was no longer simply the shisha worker in my mental map of the city. She was Haru, a fellow traveler in the other city.

And that is the thing about the people who live their lives after midnight. They know parts of the city the rest of us never really see. They watch the celebrations and the arguments, the flirtations and the quiet breakdowns. They see who walks home alone and who finds someone to share the long dark streets.

Every city has two maps.

The one everyone uses during the day.

And the other one that only appears after midnight.

Dedication:

For the men and women of the night. Who keep the drinks coming and the plates spinning. It’s a rocky world, and you rock it baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the two essays below, which also feature Kyoto and Osaka nightlife in all it’s beautiful glory.

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl
The Night of Fucking Adam
Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Night of Fucking Adam

Note: This piece is part of an informal series of essays and stories about nights out in Japan that begin innocently enough and gradually drift into something closer to accidental anthropology. The settings vary—Kyoto bars, Osaka clubs, late-night taxis, shotengai corridors—but the structure is often the same: a few friends meet for drinks, the evening unfolds without much planning, and somewhere along the way the ordinary rules of social behavior begin to loosen.

The events described here took place during a long evening wandering through Osaka, eventually ending in the nightclub district of Shinsaibashi. Like many such nights, it contained a mixture of small cultural misunderstandings, unexpected friendships, minor chaos, and the strange solidarity that sometimes develops among strangers in bars after midnight.

The character known here as “Adam” was a young British traveler we met that evening and never saw again. The nickname “Fucking Adam” reflects the affectionate exasperation with which the phrase was used throughout the night rather than any serious judgment about the person himself. Anyone who has spent time traveling, drinking in unfamiliar cities, or navigating the unpredictable social ecosystems of late-night nightlife will likely recognize the type.

The intention of the piece is not to document a perfectly accurate timeline of events—after fifteen or so drinks spread across many hours, accuracy becomes a flexible concept—but rather to capture the texture of a particular kind of night: the slow drift from casual afternoon drinks into the surreal territory that sometimes appears around two or three in the morning when strangers collide and small incidents escalate into memorable stories.

In that sense, Adam becomes less an individual than a type. Every city has them. Every traveler eventually meets one. Occasionally, if the night runs long enough, we become one ourselves.

Epigraph:

“A ruinous eyesore, oh what is a mind for?
Just a knife in a lake, just an arrow in space.”
—The Swans

We met around four in the afternoon near Osaka Station, the three of us: Philip, Jack, and me. The plan, such as it was, was simple—have a few drinks and see where the night took us. Osaka is good for that. The city doesn’t require much in the way of planning. If you just start walking and follow the lights, something eventually happens.

Our first stop was a subterranean craft beer joint somewhere beneath the station complex. One of those places down a set of anonymous stairs where the ceiling is low, the taps are numerous, and everyone looks faintly conspiratorial, like they’ve all agreed to drink underground together.

We had a couple rounds there and then drifted through the shotengai behind the Hilton. Early evening shoppers were moving through with that unhurried Osaka pace. Nothing felt like the beginning of a legendary night. It just felt like a pleasant afternoon.

From there we crossed over to a classic American hamburger joint opposite the station. Vinyl booths, neon beer signs, and a bartender who had tattoos running down both forearms like vines. American rock played softly in the background. It felt like a movie set version of America dropped into central Osaka.

We ate burgers, drank more beer, and talked about absolutely nothing of consequence.

At some point Philip announced that what he really wanted that night was to go to a middle-aged club. To be clear, Philip was not shy about his intentions. He was, as he put it, “looking for MILFs.”

So we took a taxi down to Shinsaibashi.

The middle-aged club, unfortunately, was closed. It was only about eight and apparently the MILF scene doesn’t really get going until later.

So we did what you do in that situation: we wandered.

For the next four and a half hours we drifted around Shinsaibashi, moving from bar to bar in that loose, happy way nights sometimes unfold. By midnight we had covered a lot of territory. Between the three of us we had consumed something like fifteen drinks over thirteen hours. And yet only Philip seemed even remotely affected by them.

Around 1:30 we arrived at Sam and Dave’s, a legendary dive of a nightclub tucked into the chaos of Shinsaibashi. The security guy at the door looked us over and shrugged.

“Maybe dead now,” he said. “But gets good later.”

Inside it was a haze of smoke and terrible techno beats pounding from the speakers. The crowd was an odd mixture of people who were extremely drunk and people who appeared to be completely sober and studying the situation with curiosity. It was cooking by one-thirty.

Somewhere along the way we met a jovial twenty-year-old British guy named Adam.

Adam and Jack bonded almost immediately. They were trading insults in that cheerful British way—“you tosser,” “you old wanker,” that sort of thing—and it seemed harmless enough.

Meanwhile a group of Filipino girls had arrived, one of whom—Beverly—was extremely drunk and getting progressively more chaotic. Her friends were trying, without much success, to keep things under control.

At this moment Philip stepped in.

Philip has a well-developed instinct for white-knighting in situations where white-knighting is absolutely not required. He began talking to Beverly, which quickly escalated into something resembling a full-scale courtship right there on the dance floor.

Meanwhile Jack and Adam had begun dancing.

The problem was that they gradually migrated off the dance floor and onto a small raised stage that contained a drum kit and various musical equipment.

Within seconds drums were tipping over. Tables were sliding. A cymbal crashed onto the floor.

Security arrived immediately.

They pushed Jack aside and dragged Adam feet-first off the stage and into what appeared to be a small holding room behind the bar where, judging by the noises coming out of it, Adam was receiving a fairly vigorous beating.

Things deteriorated quickly after that.

Philip decided to treat everyone to Irish car bombs. Unfortunately the bartender had no idea how to make one, so Philip instructed him. The Guinness component somehow disappeared from the process and we ended up with small glasses of Baileys and Jameson.

Adam drank one.

At this point Adam completely lost his mind. He began loudly explaining how terrible the UK was, how he wanted to die, how the American guy earlier had stolen the chesty nurse he loved, and a variety of other philosophical positions.

Security eventually threw us out with minimal ceremony.

Outside the situation became even stranger.

Philip was pouring champagne into Beverly’s mouth near the elevator while her increasingly frantic friends asked me if he was a good person. Jack was trying to figure out where Adam was staying so he could get him into a taxi.

Adam responded by pushing Jack into a decorative pond.

Then he began throwing a water bottle at him like he was Bob Gibson pitching in the World Series.

At this point it was around five in the morning.

Philip abruptly announced he was leaving to meet some Brazilians. Adam remained in the pond shouting curses about our mothers. Jack climbed out, soaking wet.

We left.

Mackenzie took a taxi back to his hotel by the river. I caught the first train home from Shinsaibashi as the sun was coming up, completely exhausted.

And that was the night of Fucking Adam.

We never saw him again.

Dedication:

For Fucking Adams everywhere.
Long may you burn.

Note: if you like this essay, you may also like the essay below. It covers a similar slice of nightlife, this time in Kyoto.

On a Guy Called Whit (with a Cameo from Ambassador Rahm Emanuel)
Posted on by Matt Thomas

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.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks III: Amy Winehouse

Note: This short piece reflects on the strange artistic tension that defined the career of Amy Winehouse: the way her extraordinary authenticity as a singer seemed inseparable from the personal instability that surrounded her life.

Winehouse’s music—especially the songs on Back to Black—felt at once timeless and painfully immediate. The sound drew deeply from earlier traditions of soul and rhythm and blues, yet the emotional directness of the lyrics was unmistakably modern. Few artists have managed to sound so rooted in musical history while simultaneously feeling so exposed to the present moment.

The song Rehab stands as the clearest example of this tension. Its humor, defiance, and vulnerability all exist in the same breath, making it one of the most distinctive pop recordings of the twenty-first century.

Like many listeners, I remember the late-2000s period—particularly around the Glastonbury era—when Winehouse was both an enormous star and visibly struggling. Watching those performances could feel uneasy, yet the brilliance of the voice was undeniable. The same intensity that made the music so compelling also made her career difficult to sustain.

This piece is simply an attempt to think about that paradox: how authenticity and self-destruction can sometimes become intertwined in the lives of great artists.

There are many great singers, but very few voices that feel instantly definitional—voices that seem to arrive already carrying an entire world inside them.

Amy Winehouse was one of those voices.

By the time her second album, Back to Black, exploded in the mid-2000s, it already felt as though she had stepped fully formed out of some earlier musical era. The sound was unmistakably rooted in Motown and 1960s soul, yet the lyrics were brutally modern—messy, confessional, sometimes almost painfully direct.

Winehouse didn’t just sing about heartbreak and addiction. She sang about them as if the audience had wandered into the middle of a private argument she was having with herself.

That tension—between authentic confession and visible self-destruction—became the defining element of her career.

You could hear it most clearly in Rehab, which remains one of the most distinctive pop songs of the twenty-first century. The song is catchy, almost playful on the surface, driven by a swinging brass section that feels lifted from a lost Stax session.

But the lyrics are something else entirely.

They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no, no, no.

It’s funny. It’s defiant. It’s also deeply unsettling, because the listener quickly realizes that the singer is not playing a character. The refusal at the center of the song is real.

In that sense “Rehab” became more than a hit single. It became a kind of thesis statement for the strange artistic space Winehouse occupied. The same vulnerability that gave her music its emotional power also exposed the raw nerves of her life to public view.

You could feel that tension during the years when she was both at the height of her fame and visibly unraveling.

The Glastonbury era captured this perfectly. Winehouse had become a massive international star, yet her stage presence could swing wildly from moment to moment. One minute she would be commanding the crowd with that huge, smoky voice; the next she might appear distracted, fragile, or physically unsteady.

Watching those performances could be oddly uncomfortable. The audience was witnessing genuine brilliance, but it often felt as though the brilliance was emerging from a life that was spinning out of control.

And yet the authenticity of the music was inseparable from that volatility.

Winehouse sang as if every lyric had been torn directly out of lived experience. There was no polite distance between the artist and the material. When she sang about jealousy, addiction, or heartbreak, it sounded less like performance and more like confession.

That quality made her music electrifying. It also made her career precarious.

Pop music has always had a complicated relationship with self-destructive artists. Audiences are drawn to performers who seem emotionally transparent, but the same intensity that produces great art can also be difficult to sustain under the glare of fame.

Winehouse lived inside that contradiction.

The tabloids followed her relentlessly. Every public misstep, every argument, every sign of physical decline became part of a growing media narrative. The spectacle sometimes threatened to overwhelm the music itself.

Yet when she stepped to the microphone and began to sing, the spectacle vanished.

What remained was that extraordinary voice: raw, soulful, and oddly timeless, as if it had traveled forward from another musical generation. In a pop landscape often dominated by carefully engineered personas, Winehouse sounded startlingly real.

That authenticity is why her work still resonates long after her death in 2011.

Many talented singers release successful albums. Only a handful manage to create songs that feel permanently etched into the culture. “Rehab” is one of those songs. The moment those opening horns start, the listener knows exactly what world they are entering.

It is the world of Amy Winehouse: funny, defiant, wounded, brilliant.

A place where honesty and self-destruction were never quite separable—and where the truth of the music was powerful enough to survive them both.

Note:

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl

Note: A Tuesday crawl in Kyoto carries a different texture from the weekend version: looser expectations, smaller crowds, conversations that wander rather than perform. The city feels slightly off-schedule, which is exactly what makes it fertile ground for observation, connection, and the quiet serendipity that defines third-place culture.

These midweek circuits are less about excess and more about continuity — checking in with familiar rooms, familiar faces, and the evolving micro-narratives that accumulate across bars, balconies, and late-night sidewalks. The crawl becomes a moving vantage point on the city’s emotional topography: moments of laughter, fragments of confession, the soft choreography of strangers becoming temporary companions.

In that sense, the Tuesday crawl isn’t a deviation from routine but a ritual of perspective. It reminds the wanderer that urban nightlife is not only spectacle but ecology — a network of spaces where stories intersect briefly before dissolving back into the Kyoto night.

For the crawler, the goal is simple: move lightly, notice everything, and leave each room exactly as it was found, carrying only the residue of atmosphere and the promise of return.

Epigraph
“Is there room enough for two / if I don’t have a point of view?”
— Tommy Stinson

Dedication
For the people who made a night by simply being themselves.

I. Umineko

Early evening began without urgency, the way a proper crawl should. Umineko held the kind of atmosphere that makes arrival feel less like an event and more like a gradual settling — low light, gentle conversation, bodies occupying space without demanding attention. Nothing theatrical, nothing curated for spectacle. Just people existing alongside one another, sharing a small pocket of warmth before the night found its pace.

I took a seat and allowed the room to reveal itself slowly. Watching first, speaking later. Listening without the pressure to respond. The posture was closer to observation than participation, not out of distance but out of respect for rhythm. A crawl does not begin with energy; it begins with calibration. I was not collecting stories yet, not assigning meaning or searching for narrative threads. I was tuning my frequency, aligning with the environment until the subtle shift in atmosphere signaled readiness.

When the bar moved from fullness toward thinning, the message was clear without needing articulation. Crawls are not forced forward by intention; they move according to instinct and current. I stepped back into the night air, carrying nothing but presence, following momentum without destination.

II. ING

ING felt like stepping into a room anchored by a still point. Haku stood behind the bar wearing a Rolling Stones shirt, perfectly unconcerned with audience or approval. His presence created an equilibrium that defined the space more than any décor or playlist could. I took the center seat — ideal angle, clear sound, good conversational acoustics — and ordered a Negroni, marking the transition from arrival into engagement.

A White Russian followed, not out of necessity but out of curiosity. Choice itself becomes part of the method on nights like these. Drinks are less about intoxication and more about pacing, punctuation marks in a narrative unfolding in real time.

Haku mentioned, almost casually, that Jimmy Cliff was not Rasta. The comment carried no agenda, only observation. I responded in kind. He played Cliff anyway, and the neutrality of the exchange underscored something important: truth in these spaces does not require resolution. Dead or alive, category or contradiction, the music persists independent of classification.

Later, Haku slipped into what could only be described as algorithm mode. The Grateful Dead followed Joy Division, which then dissolved into Blink-182. The sequence was unpredictable yet internally coherent, a playlist guided by instinct rather than performance. Bars like ING do not curate for approval; they curate for honesty. The expectation is not participation but presence.

Some bars ask for energy.
ING asks only that one remain authentic within its walls.

After a time, movement arrived not through boredom but through instinct. I finished my drink, nodded to Haku, and stepped back into the night once more.

III. Mafia Bar

The entrance to Mafia Bar announced itself through indifference: narrow doorway, plastic sheeting, a quiet DGAF energy that discouraged pretense. Inside, the dynamic was already established — Master, sub-bartender, and Satsuki forming a triangle of familiarity that neither required nor excluded me.

I ordered a gin and tonic, lit a clove cigarette, and allowed proximity to substitute for conversation. Master smoked and drank with the ease of long habit, while Satsuki vaped and scrolled through photos on his phone, their heads occasionally leaning close in shared amusement. The intimacy belonged to them; my role was to witness without intrusion.

A brief choreography unfolded when the sub-bartender excused himself for the bathroom. Another stepped in seamlessly, maintaining rhythm until the first returned moments later, laughing about his inability to hold it and wiping his hand absentmindedly on Satsuki’s jacket. Her gentle scolding carried affection rather than irritation. The moment passed as ordinary within their ecosystem, a reminder that interpretation is often unnecessary.

Three London men arrived — Dan, Joe, and another Joe — consultants and a commercial artist navigating unfamiliar territory. I recommended Concrete, a suggestion offered lightly but accepted gratefully. Participation, not intervention. Guidance without ownership.

I remained roughly thirty-five minutes, absorbing both atmosphere and lore. The story circulated quietly: the owner had once taken the fall for a crime he did not commit, serving twenty years in silence before emerging to receive this bar as recompense from the underworld that owed him. Whether factual or mythic mattered little. Stories gain legitimacy through repetition, and truth is often secondary to resonance.

I left on foot, crossing the river with the sense that each stop was less a destination than a waypoint.

IV. Stinboat

Arrival at 9:02 p.m., two minutes after opening, placed me inside a room still forming its identity for the night. Rickey stood behind the bar alongside the evening’s performer, both moving through preparatory gestures that transform an empty space into a living environment.

I asked about glasses I had left behind on Saturday. Rickey produced a pair, though not mine. The exchange felt inconsequential yet oddly grounding, a reminder that memory and objects rarely align perfectly.

A Negroni in hand, I settled into observation as the room awakened. A visitor from Kuwait approached with curiosity, asking whether a bunny show would occur. He mistook me for staff, and I redirected him gently toward Rickey. Ambiguity satisfied him enough to remain.

At 9:20, the room shifted from potential to presence. Nine guests entered — among them an older man with a younger girlfriend and a cluster of Japanese patrons whose arrival created density without chaos. I took the microphone early, choosing Common People as an opening statement. The performance landed not as a home run but as a solid triple, establishing footing without overreach. I became part of the environment rather than an observer at its edge.

The performer navigated the bar through a series of micro-interactions, brief pockets of attention resembling miniature dates, popcorn intimacy distributed evenly across the room. I followed with Honky Tonk Women, drawing visible delight from the older man and his partner.

Preparation for Tiny Dancer involved a brief retreat with headphones — aligning tempo, breath, and emotional landing. As I sang, activity continued around me, including a staged whipping performance in the back that unfolded without disrupting the song’s internal narrative. Presence required maintaining focus amid spectacle, allowing parallel realities to coexist without competition.

The evening progressed through pole performance, enthusiastic audience participation, and ritualized tipping. I followed established protocol, understanding that the moment belonged to the performer’s choreography rather than personal interpretation.

Later, I Fought the Law brought collaborative energy: the older man on drums, eye contact establishing tempo and trust, his girlfriend filming with increasing engagement. Rickey eventually joined on drums, a younger guitarist delivered a brief but intense solo, and a spontaneous vocalist in his mid-fifties erupted into a single song before departing. Applause and hoots carried communal warmth rather than performance judgment.

As the crowd thinned, what remained was intimacy without spectacle: Rickey, the performer, the older man and girlfriend, Sari, a couple, and myself. Fairytale of New York unfolded with Sari joining briefly before drifting into her own narrative with the older man. I continued singing, neutral observer and participant simultaneously.

The set concluded with Miley Cyrus, We Will Rock You, and finally Take It Easy — a closing song chosen less for nostalgia than for resolution. Afterward, physical exhaustion arrived cleanly, the kind that follows completion rather than depletion. Brief hugs, a playful belly rub offered as pure joy, and a ¥4500 bill that felt symbolically insufficient to measure the night’s experiential value.

Stinboat held the evening’s center of gravity, and I left without loose emotional threads.

V. Concrete Bar

The walk back across the river lasted roughly eight minutes, a transitional corridor between intensity and closure. Concrete greeted me with understated calm, a space designed less for spectacle and more for lingering conversation.

Leon from Wales occupied a stool, unfamiliar with the phrase “detox and retox.” I bought him a Cocalero anyway, and we spoke in the gentle cadence of end-of-night strangers — exchanging warmth rather than biography, presence rather than personal history. These conversations carry their own authenticity precisely because they resist permanence.

I sensed no need for additional experiences. The crawl had delivered what it intended.

VI. Taxi → Home

At 1:30 a.m., a taxi waited at the stand as if anticipating completion. There was no negotiation, no wandering, no hesitation. Just entry, transit, and the quiet satisfaction of closure.

Back home, I read half of Zach’s new piece in bed and texted immediate feedback. He prefers responses unfiltered and alive, preserving the energy of first impression before reflection cools interpretation.

Sleep followed naturally.

A crawl complete — not dramatic, not moralized, not engineered for narrative payoff. Simply observed, recorded, and experienced through presence. I did not judge the night, and the night did not demand judgment. I entered it, and in its quiet generosity, it allowed me to belong within it for a few hours before releasing me back into ordinary time.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like “On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations.” You can find it here.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part I

Subtitle: I didn’t sleep with her so I had to quit my job.

Mistakes were made tonight

The Mendoza Line

Note: This piece is about a single week in my life that reordered things for good. At a minimum it’s an interesting story; at maximum it is the hinge between two versions of myself. I do not pretend to be the hero of it, and I take full responsibility for everything contained here.

It begins with a dream I had in Bali at the very end of July 2018. I was the lead trainer for the IB Asia Pacific workshop leader and school visitor training — my first time in that role after five years of apprenticeship. At the same time I was working at Ritsumeikan Uji as shukan, a kind of junior administrator. By mid-2018 I was burnt out: long days, multiple roles stacked on top of one another, and, most of all, a boss I no longer trusted. I was scheduled to go to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) at Exeter College, Oxford at the end of August, and in the meantime I would attend John Innes’s wedding to his fiancee Kristi. All this occurred, and here is that dream.

PROLOGUE: DREAM I

7/29/2018:

The dream starts with an image of a large whisky bottle. The bottle is very fat and also ceremic. So in fact it looks nothing like a normal whisky bottle.  It is perhaps of Suntory brand. I know before I know that a story of some kind will unfold inside the bottle. I am reminded somehow of a ship inside a bottle.  Suddenly I am inside the bottle itself. There is a whole word here and all sorts of people in a cityscape. I come to understand that everyone lives in relative fear of a species or group of overlords. 

The overlords are both omni-present and also very distant. They rule by fear and have the power to rub out anyone at any time. Sort of. When a person is marked for removal their status is updated. Their status is displayed on a kind of glowing chip in their shoulder.  There are basically three types of statuses. First is “needing to have the life wrung out of them.”  There are marked people and their time is limited. Apparently they are political criminals, thought criminals. Oddly, even when marked these people continue to circulate and take part in oppositional activity. I never actually see one of them removed, although their actions do take on a greater sense of urgency. 

The second category is another worded status. This one is more ellitipcal and I forget the wording. Though safer than the  first, this is still a status to be avoided if possible. 

Third is a number.  A voice tells the city that statuses will be updated and that anything under 40000 is a safe score. I check my update with bated breath, fearing the dreaded worded status. My number is 49500.  Not bad I think—although not under 40000 this is perhaps for young people. 49500 seems reasonable for my age. 

Suddenly the view shifts and I can see into the bottle from the outside.  All of the people and various creatures and scrambling for the mouth of the body. The bottle begins to approach a wall into which is will soon merge. Here, the entrance to the bottle will be sealed. The I character in the dream is also scrambling for the exit although he doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance.  Creatures spill over one another and one baby creature somewhere between a human baby and a little mouse slips through the mouth of the bottle to the other side of the wall. The bottle snaps closed and I am once again staring at the large ceremony bottle from the beginning of the dream. I feel a sense of relief that the perfect creature has escaped. End of dream. 

This dream is about reincarnation. 

(The me on the treadmill does not survive. Dream group says whisky is a spirit which takes 50 years to mature.  That gives me a book deadline I guess-49.5 the book and the end of the provisional personality.)

PART I — Sunday → Wednesday

Sunday, late August 2018

I flew into London from Osaka and took a pre-arranged bus to Oxford, then walked to Exeter College. Check-in, dorm keys, linens. The halls smelled like old plaster and a little like soap — an old building. I carried my bag upstairs, opened the door to the room that would be mine for the week, and sat on the bed for a moment to locate myself. New country, new rhythm, no context yet.

I walked the campus — stone walls, grass cut low, shaded paths. The quad had that contained feeling of a place that already had its stories. I didn’t know I was about to enter one.

I went to dinner at a taco place just outside campus and had a beer or two. Back in the room I read a little astrology to warm up for the week and listened to the band The Mendoza Line. Little did I know they would end up playing a surprisingly large role in what followed.

Around 10 PM the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the building stumbled outside in pajamas and stood around talking for a few minutes. Odd, but fitting — a small communal disturbance to start the week off.

Monday

I woke up, showered and dressed and grabbed my notebook for the astrology sessions. At this time I was fully committed to attending sessions and making the most of them. Breakfast opened early and I liked that — fruit, eggs, strong coffee. The hall had a low hum, people still new to each other. I walked to the first seminar which was given by Ms. Claire Martin. Claire was in her 70s, and a very comforting presence. She’d been doing astrology forever and has a couple of books which are helpful. The seminar was on the first floor, window onto one of the gardens. The air had that mild, hopeful tone of a first session.

Claire spoke on the 1890s — fields of meaning, ectoplasm, etc. I offered something Jung-coded because that’s where my mind goes when the border between psyche and symbol starts to move. I didn’t know she was in the room yet, Isobel (not her real name), though she already was.

At one point Claire mentioned an Aries Moon. I said, simply, “I’m an Aries Moon.” Nothing loaded, nothing aimed. Lecture ended, chairs moved, and she came to me from the back of the room.

“I am an Aries Moon too.”

We walked to the next session together. That was it — no delay, no drift. We sat side-by-side for the rest of the day. Chatting between sessions, coffee break close but not touching, her chart in her bag. She showed me her own chart print-outs — hers and her fiancé’s — and we compared placements. Similarities everywhere.

Lunch in the dining hall. More sessions in the afternoon. Light talk, no electricity announced but already there. Monday night we ate with a group — tutors, a few new friends. We were beside each other the whole time, not hiding it. Later we drifted to the courtyard bar, opened wine bottles, and someone lit a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked more than a dozen cigarettes in sixteen years, but I took one with her, and then another. Not ceremony, more like instinct, more like inevitable.

We ended the night late. I walked back to the dorm alone and put on The Mendoza Line again. I already knew I was in trouble so in addition to “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)” I was listening over and over again to “Mistakes Were Made” from which the epigraph comes. Sometimes you just know.

Tuesday

We had planned to have breakfast together, not at Exeter but at Pret, about an eight minute walk away. We both ate and she helped me pick my breakfast. We were acting like a couple already. We attended the morning sessions, seated right next to each other and then the day started to open. In the afternoon we did not attend sessions, instead we spent the time in one of the beautiful gardens. We sat close on the bench by the open window, listening to the session through the gap. I talked about muses and how I work best with one. She talked about photography, stalled career energy, her family, and Swiss-Russian split. Russian women, I reflected not for the first time, are a problem, and I knew deep down I was already in trouble.

Tuesday night the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus was scheduled to play Oxford, and I had a ticket, but she canceled. Instead we went out for dinner, just the two of us, at an Indian restaurant near campus. We were already deep into our relationship, and everything came easy; I could feel it inside ten minutes. This was one of the best meals I have ever had for reasons bigger than taste. I told her about my two epiphanies, one when I was four years old and one when I was seventeen. The whole evening felt like a third epiphany.

Back at campus everyone was drinking in the courtyard again. There was Mystery and her daughter, tutors, people rotating. We stayed late, drank wine, smoked, and flirted like teenagers. I went to my room around 1:30 AM, playing The Mendoza Line over my headphones again. I was seeking their counsel, essentially, and they are a great band.

Wednesday

I woke up and this day we had breakfast at the dining hall. By this time, people were noticing us. Comments here and there, sideways smiles. Morning and lunch blurred into one long conversation — the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We were finishing each other’s thoughts, and I was in deeper than I had ever been. We didn’t attend much of anything. Afternoon break she went to change. I went back to my room and put on Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She came back later and said, without shame, that she’d pleasured herself during the break — just stated it directly. This was a complication.

For dinner that night she changed again — a red dress, short but not careless. Stunning. Whispering at the table, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knew by then. After dinner was wine again, talking with the tutors, including the lovely Rod Chang and Mystery the long courtyard. I met Darby Costello in person for the first time. Darby is my astrologer and we had already had a number of phone consultations by this point. She was fully alive drinking wine, and talking like someone who knows how to hold a room. I was so happy that she was my astrologer. Isobel and I stayed late once more, and cleared the courtyard. Around two in the morning we parted, cheeks touched, no bedroom, no act.

Back in my room, lights low, I lay on the narrow bed with Mendoza Line in my ears. I knew exactly where I was standing:

I would keep going. I would see where this led. But I would not sleep with her. I couldn’t.

That was the shape. That was the decision. Wednesday ended on that line.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On My Brother’s Mike’s Second Wedding

Epigraph

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

I. Leaving Anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the first night.

II. Crossing Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The FIRST NIGHT AND NEXT MORNING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. DAN CLARKE/ BILL CLARKE DREAM

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

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

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

2/27/18:

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

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

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

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

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

V. The Ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. The WEDDING DINNER

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

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

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

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

That was the night.

VII. Dispersal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication

For my family, with love and gratitude.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: On Why Clove Cigarettes Should Be Legal in the US

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

Full disclosure: I love clove cigarettes. I’m not here to pretend tobacco is harmless, but I do smoke and I love cloves specifically — their sweetness, their bite, the way they announce themselves rather than slip by unnoticed. They’re not a casual habit. They’re not cheap. They’re not especially forgiving. They are, unmistakably, a specialty product for adults who already know what they’re doing. Which is precisely why their disappearance from the United States strikes me as so strange. If public policy is supposed to focus on scale, harm, and likelihood, cloves barely register. And yet they were eliminated cleanly and completely.

This isn’t a brief for Juul, bubblegum vapes, or any product designed to recruit new smokers as efficiently as possible. Those deserve scrutiny, regulation, and in some cases outright prohibition. Clove cigarettes are something else entirely. They were never poised to take over American high schools. They were never discreet, never mass-market, never engineered for easy uptake. They appealed to a narrow, adult audience — travelers, artists, longtime smokers with particular tastes. Their banning didn’t meaningfully change youth smoking behavior; it simply removed a minor, culturally specific option from the legal market. Which raises a quiet but important question: why was such a small thing targeted so decisively, while other flavored cigarettes were not?

The answer, of course, is the carve-out. In 2009, when the United States banned flavored cigarettes, it did so selectively. Clove cigarettes were prohibited outright. Menthol cigarettes were not. This distinction was never really about flavor chemistry or relative harm; it was about politics, constituencies, and consequence. Menthol had a large, organized user base and a long, fraught history tied to race, policing, and targeted marketing. Regulators understood that banning menthol would provoke backlash, raise enforcement concerns, and create secondary harms. So menthol survived. Cloves, by contrast, had no organized defenders, no obvious political cost, and no plausible narrative of collateral damage. They were small enough to remove without resistance.

We don’t object to the menthol carve-out. In fact, I understand it. Public policy often has to weigh downstream effects as much as stated intentions, and there were legitimate fears about what a menthol ban might unleash. But that logic cuts both ways. If menthol was spared because its removal would have caused disproportionate disruption, cloves deserved consideration for the opposite reason. Their user base was tiny. Their market footprint was negligible. Their elimination solved no urgent public-health problem and prevented no foreseeable epidemic. It simply demonstrated how regulation tends to work in practice: not by calibrating rules to scale and risk, but by acting most decisively where the fewest people are able—or willing—to object.

What the clove ban reveals, more than anything, is how regulation actually moves through the world. It does not flow evenly from evidence to outcome. It flows through constituencies. Products with organized users, sympathetic narratives, and visible secondary effects are handled with caution. Products without those protections are handled cleanly. Clove smokers were never numerous enough, loud enough, or legible enough to matter. There was no lobby. No advocacy group. No credible fear of backlash. As a result, cloves became an easy victory: a flavored cigarette could be banned, a public-health win could be declared, and no meaningful political cost would be incurred.

This is not corruption so much as gravity. Policymaking, especially in public health, often advances where resistance is lowest. That doesn’t make it malicious, but it does make it uneven. And unevenness matters. When regulation targets the smallest, quietest practices first—those least likely to produce harm at scale—it risks confusing symbolic action with effective policy. The clove ban didn’t fail because it was harsh; it failed because it was misaligned. It addressed a marginal behavior while leaving far larger, more consequential ones to be negotiated indefinitely.

One of the unspoken assumptions behind the flavored-cigarette ban was that flavor itself was the problem. But not all flavors function the same way. Some are engineered for mass adoption: sweet, smooth, cheap, discreet, and easy to inhale even for first-time users. Those products lower the barrier to entry and deserve aggressive scrutiny. Clove cigarettes operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. They are pungent, smoky, and unmistakable. They announce themselves immediately. They are harder on the throat, more expensive, and far less forgiving to the uninitiated. In other words, they are an acquired taste by design.


This distinction matters because public health should be attentive not just to ingredients, but to uptake dynamics. Products that spread rapidly among new users pose a different kind of risk than products that remain confined to a narrow, self-selecting adult audience. Cloves never behaved like a recruitment tool. They didn’t mask tobacco; they added complexity to it. They weren’t optimized for stealth or scale. Treating them as equivalent to mass-market flavored cigarettes collapses important differences and replaces targeted regulation with blunt prohibition. If the goal is to prevent widespread initiation, then precision matters—and cloves were never the right target.

There is also the question of adult autonomy, which is often treated gingerly in tobacco policy but can’t be avoided entirely. Smoking remains legal. That fact alone establishes a baseline assumption: adults are permitted to make choices that carry known risks. Within that framework, the question is not whether tobacco should be virtuous, but whether adults are trusted to exercise discernment among legal options. Choosing a clove cigarette is not an attempt to evade regulation or denial of harm; it is an aesthetic preference exercised within an already constrained and taxed marketplace.

This is where the phrase “following the muse” matters. It sounds indulgent until you realize how narrow the claim is. It is not a demand for limitless choice or novelty flavors designed to entice new users. It is a request for consistency. If adults are allowed to smoke, they should be allowed to choose among products that differ meaningfully in character, tradition, and appeal—especially when those products are demonstrably niche and non-expansionary. Removing cloves didn’t protect children. It simply narrowed adult choice in a way that feels arbitrary rather than principled.

It’s reasonable to ask why any of this matters. Clove cigarettes are not a public-health crisis. Their absence does not rank among the great injustices of modern regulation. But small decisions often reveal larger habits of mind. When policy treats scale, intent, and impact as interchangeable, it stops distinguishing between meaningful intervention and symbolic tidying. The clove ban solved a rhetorical problem more than a real one. It demonstrated action without demanding precision.

What’s left behind is an inconsistency that never quite resolves. A flavored cigarette with massive market share remains legal because its removal would be disruptive. A flavored cigarette with negligible market share was eliminated because its removal was easy. That asymmetry doesn’t undermine public health as a goal, but it does weaken confidence in how that goal is pursued. If regulation is to be trusted, it should align most tightly with where harm is greatest—not where resistance is lowest.

This is not a call to roll back tobacco regulation or to relitigate every compromise embedded in public-health law. It’s a narrower observation. When a system is willing to make exceptions for powerful constituencies while eliminating marginal practices without consideration, it reveals something about how decisions are actually made. Clove cigarettes weren’t banned because they were uniquely dangerous. They were banned because no one important would miss them.


Even so, positions don’t need mass movements to exist. Sometimes they begin as a splinter fraction: a small, clear objection to an unnecessary loss. If smoking is legal, and if nuance still matters, then there is room—at least in principle—for a carve-out that acknowledges scale, intent, and adult choice. Even if only two people think so, even if it’s just me and Annie, that’s enough to say it out loud.