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

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

Interlude — Return to Japan, Winter 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NAU Year Two — Term One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My wife would come next term.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Michael Knott’s Record “A Rocket and a Bomb”: A Full Analysis

“Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?

Michael Knott

Origin Story

I found Rocket and a Bomb the way you sometimes meet the most important things in your life: by accident, with no money, in a used bin on Division in Spokane, during a summer when nothing was happening and I had no idea who I was supposed to become.

It was 1994, the summer before junior year. I wasn’t working — not out of rebellion or laziness, but because I somehow never got pushed into getting a job. My parents were juggling one car between them, sometimes borrowing a second from St. George’s, and when that second car was free, I took it and drifted through Spokane.

I had a circuit — three places I visited almost every day, like a loop I barely knew I was running.

1. A random coffee shop off Division
They knew me as the quiet kid who ordered the same thing, sat alone, and had a half-crush on the barista for reasons I couldn’t articulate even then. I wasn’t flirting. I was just alive in her direction. It gave the day a shape.

2. A used bookstore in North Spokane
Le Carré, Christie, metaphysics, philosophy, sci-fi, old paperbacks with cracked spines. Books were two to five dollars, and the older woman behind the counter would chat with me as if I were a real adult. I was still in my 150-books-a-year phase. It felt like productivity disguised as escape — or maybe escape disguised as productivity.

3. A used CD store up Division
All used, because I was broke. Rows of mid-’90s detritus: dozens of copies of August and Everything After, inexplicable imports, promo discs dumped by radio stations. I’d flip through crates like a prospector searching for gold in a river everyone else had given up on.

And one day I found something.

I pulled a CD I’d never heard of: Rocket and a Bomb by Michael Knott. The cover art — drawn by Knott — was strange and specific. The title was perfect. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, the whole thing felt special. Buried treasure. A private signal.

It was used. It was cheap. It felt like it had been waiting for me. I took it home, slid it into my boombox, and played it straight through. And something opened. Not revelation. Not identity. Not insight. Pure recognition.

The recognition that someone, somewhere, had lived inside a hallway-world that felt eerily close to my own. That someone understood the drift, the observation, the stasis, the human weirdness. This essay is about that record.

Jan the Weatherman

“Jan the Weatherman” was the first sign that Rocket and a Bomb wasn’t just another used-bin curiosity. The song opens with a portrait so sharp it bypasses metaphor entirely:

“Jan, Jan the weatherman
Lives across the hall in an old beer can.”

It’s not symbolic. It’s not poetic. It’s literal. It’s Knott standing in a hallway in Hollywood, looking across at a neighbor, and writing down exactly what he sees. No interpretation. No commentary.

Then the details:

— A stick and a pan.
— Sandwiches from questionable sources.
— A kid sister who could use a tan.
— Jan wanting to “join the band.”

Absurd and intimate at the same time.

I played the whole record constantly that Spokane summer. One afternoon, I was in the kitchen with my younger brother Pat, listening to “Jan the Weatherman” on the boombox. Pat — not a music obsessive — liked it immediately. At the same time, I was trying to get him to read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. In the first story, characters are named by colors: Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mrs. Blue.

While we were talking about that, the rotary phone rang.

One of us answered.

A man on the other end asked:

“May I speak to Mr. White?”

Pat froze, then fell backward onto the couch like he had been shot. It was uncanny. A Knott moment invading our Spokane kitchen. A micro-portrait becoming real.

John Barrymore Jr.

If Jan is the doorway, “John Barrymore Jr.” is the moment you step inside the building and realize what kind of place you’re in.

The title alone shocks you:
Yes, it is that Barrymore — the son of the actor, the father of Drew, apparently. A man who once lived inside Hollywood mythology now wanders Knott’s hallway wearing golf shoes with the spikes still inside.

Knott gives the greatest couplet in the neighbor cosmos:

“John Barrymore, Jr.
A weird guy
Wearing golf shoes down the hall
With the spikes still inside.”

It’s funny, and not funny at all. Funny because the image is ridiculous. Not funny because this is what happens when a life collapses out of frame. Knott doesn’t say “tragic,” or “fallen,” or “addict.” He doesn’t inflate or sanitize him.

Just:

“A weird guy.”

That’s compassion. That’s honesty. That’s Knott’s entire ethic. Barrymore isn’t elevated. He isn’t judged. He isn’t explained. He’s just a neighbor — one of the many ghosts drifting through the building.

Bubbles

“Bubbles” is where the neighbor songs turn dangerous.

Bubbles is a junkie. A rich man takes him into the hills in a limo. Bubbles gets beaten. He sleeps in the park. Knott reports the whole incident without emotion, elevation, or commentary. There is no moral, no sermon, no interpretation.

And the crucial detail — one of the most important on the album: Knott does not take Bubbles in.

No savior complex.
No rescue fantasy.
No sentimental lie.

His compassion is observational, not interventionist. He sees clearly, cares sincerely, and knows the limits of his own ability.

And then — astonishingly — the song becomes a banger. The ending is practically joyous. The dissonance is intentional.

Bubbles is still sleeping in the park. And the world keeps going. This is Knott’s ethics:
attention without illusion.

Kitty

“Kitty” is the rumor song — the sharpest, most volatile one in the neighbor sequence. And it gives you almost nothing:

A pot. A missing husband. A whisper that Kitty cooked him.

That’s it.

Knott doesn’t shape the rumor. He doesn’t validate it. He doesn’t sanitize it. He doesn’t enlarge it. He repeats what people say in buildings like these when they shouldn’t be saying anything.

It’s uncomfortable because it’s overt. A little too cooked, literally and figuratively. But it belongs. Because every hallway has a rumor threshold.

Skinny Skins

“Skinny Skins” has always been my favorite neighbor portrait — the one that shows Knott’s true position in the ecosystem.

The sketch begins with flat humor:

“When he turns sideways, he disappears.”

A man thin enough to be mistaken for absence. The kind of description you only make about someone you see daily, someone who exists in your peripheral vision.

Then:

“When he beats that drum, it hurts my ears.”

It’s affectionate exasperation — the exhaustion of living near someone inconsistent but familiar.

Then the key line:

“A fifth of gin will let him win.”

Meaning: the only way he can function is by numbing himself.

And then the reveal:

“I owe him money.”

This is the moment the whole neighbor cosmos locks into place. Knott is not an observer. He is inside the system. He owes. He receives. He participates.

The cello underneath everything — bowed, heavy, grounding — prevents the song from tipping into caricature. It gives the portrait gravity. It insists this man is real.

Then the hammer:

“If that’s him knocking, don’t let him in.
Let him in.”

That contradiction is the most human thing on the album.

You don’t want him in. You let him in. Because that’s what life is like in buildings full of people who can’t quite get it together but are still yours.

Skinny Skins is the final neighbor not because he is the strangest, but because he is the closest. He is the person Knott cannot shut out.

Jail

“Jail” is the first moment Knott points the camera inward. The entire song revolves around one line:

“I’m gonna meet the judge —
She don’t care.”

That’s the whole spiritual and emotional architecture of the album in eight words. The world is indifferent. You are accountable anyway.

He follows it with:

“What am I supposed to learn?
I haven’t learned it yet.”

Not rebellion. Not enlightenment.

Just the recognition that nothing about this system — legal, moral, spiritual — is designed to teach you anything.

And then there’s the public defender scratching a hundred-dollar bill with his ear — a line so strange and specific it has to be real. “Jail” is where the hallway turns into a mirror.

Serious

“Serious” used to be one of my favorites on the record, and it still holds a crucial position. It’s the first time Knott lets the internal crisis show without metaphor or disguise.

The plea:

“Someone get me a gun,
someone get me a shotgun.”

Delivered not theatrically, but flatly — almost bored. Like someone reporting the content of a mind in disrepair.

But the real center is:

“I wanna end it if I can’t learn to supply.”

Not love. Not hope. Not purpose. Supply.

He’s afraid he cannot be counted on. That he cannot provide what others need. That he cannot hold up his end of any relational economy. This isn’t melodrama. It’s inadequacy.

“Serious” is the sound of someone realizing he may not be equipped for the life he’s in.

Make Me Feel Good

“Make Me Feel Good” is the quietest of the confession tracks, but one of the most psychologically precise.

“When you’re down
No one wants you around.”

Not bitter. Not angry. Just a flat report of how people behave around the depressed or unstable. And then the devastating line:

“When you scream
It’s easier to be seen
But it’s harder to be missed.”

You get attention — but not presence. Visibility without care. Recognition without support. It’s the social physics of emotional collapse. This song is the exhale before the real reckoning.

Train

“Train” is the confession song that belonged to me long before I understood why.

Two lines define it:

“Maybe I won’t be on the list.”
“Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve.”

Separate, they’re sharp. Together, they’re devastating.

“Maybe I won’t be on the list” isn’t a theological fear — it’s existential. It’s the fear of irrelevance, of invisibility, of not being counted. It’s the Spokane summer feeling I lived inside:

Not a crisis. Not ambition. Just suspension.

And “Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve” is the fallback — the low door one walks through when the higher door doesn’t feel real.

That was the emotional geometry of that Spokane summer:

No job. No movement. Late-night Law & Order. Random drives. A sense of being off any meaningful list. The quiet pull toward dissolution, but not enough recklessness to act on it.

“Train” didn’t teach me anything. It acknowledged something inside me long before I could name it.

The Summer in Spokane

It wasn’t a crisis summer. It was a suspended summer.

Days drifting through bookstores and CD crates. Nights washed in the glow of crime procedurals. A sense of time passing without accumulating.

My father shoved me once — the only time — out of frustration that I was doing nothing, going nowhere, stuck in an unlit room with reruns. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t trauma. It was pressure hitting stasis.

I told him never again. He never did, and we never talked about it.

Rocket and a Bomb became the shape of that summer. Not just a soundtrack.
A mirror.

Rocket and a Bomb

Then comes the title track — the cathedral of the album. The central contradiction:

“A good job and some bus fare
And a rocket and a bomb.”

He wants nothing. He wants everything. He wants stability. He wants detonation. This is one of the most honest lines in American songwriting.

And then the pivot that makes Knott impossible to classify:

“Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?
Could she help me find a job…?”

It’s not blasphemy. It’s not a joke. It’s bleak sincerity.

Knott said in an interview he “knows Jesus,” and that doesn’t make him good, bad, saved, or functional. It just means he recognizes the presence. It doesn’t help.

This is not Christian rock. This is hallway theology — the kind where god is less a deity than a neighbor, and maybe his wife is the one responsible for the job-search department.

Knott kept re-recording this song because it wasn’t a hit. It was his self-portrait. And for a drifting kid in Spokane, it was the first real articulation of the contradiction I didn’t know had a name:

I want a simple life. And I want to blow it up.

Closing: Buried Treasure

I found Rocket and a Bomb for five dollars in a used bin. I didn’t know the name. I didn’t know the scene. I didn’t know the man. But I knew the feeling before I knew the language.

What stayed with me all these years wasn’t the stories, or the craft, or the persona. It was the attention without illusion. The way Knott saw people in hallways — and the way I felt like I was in one myself.

This album didn’t guide me. It didn’t rescue me. It didn’t fix me. It recognized me.

It saw the drift, the fear, the contradiction, the waiting. It saw the life before the life. It saw the hallway I didn’t yet have a vocabulary for.

It was buried treasure — not because it was rare, but because I was.

Dedication

To Michael Knott, Libra sun —
whose songs moved with the restless, twin-voiced brilliance of a Gemini mind, and whose hallway portraits taught me how to see without illusion.

From a Libra rising who recognized the air in your work — the balance forever chased, the contradiction forever held, the drift that becomes a doorway.



Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl)

Epigraph: “Heather, remind me how this ends…” — Dolorean

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

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

She and I ended up in the hallway.

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

Her name was Blythe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from St. George’s VIII: On the Passing of Dyche Alsaker

Say hello to Mr. Midnight
tell him he’s still got that same old shine
Tall, dark, walking wounded
heart as lonesome as mine

Paul Westerberg, refracted

Note: I thought I was done with the Scenes from St. Georges series, however circumstances have arisen such that I am compelled to write one final entry. I recently learned that my high school classmate and friend, Dyche Alsaker, passed away in September of this year. This is a tremendously sad circumstance, and my heart goes out to Dyche’s family and all of those, and there were many, who loved him. In addition, I wish here to write a kind of second coda to my last piece in the St. George’s series, which can be found here. In that piece I wrote about my friendship with Dyche, mostly during senior year and the summer after, as well as a regrettable conflict that arose between our respective fathers several years after we graduated. I won’t reprise all of that here, however suffice it to say that, in a set of events that had really nothing to do with Dyche and myself, Dyche’s father was part of the board of directors of the school when my father left after challenging the then principal, and I guess by extension the board. Here is the second coda.

I wrote seven pieces in my series from St. George’s over a few years, and the first six were easy. These were mostly cheerful and sometimes humorous reminiscences about my time there and some of the characters, students and teachers, that populated the school. The seventh piece, on the other hand, took a while. This was because of its somewhat difficult content and because the structure and tone needed to be a little different, however mostly this was because I wanted Dyche’s permission, essentially, to publish it. Readers of that piece may recall that it dealt with the end of my father’s time at St. George’s, which stretched over two decades. The way that time ended was, I believe, deeply painful to both my father and my mother, and as a result, I guess, they have never really talked to me about it in any detail. As I wrote in the prior piece, I had to sort of piece things together from bits and pieces I heard over time. Because Dyche’s father was also a central player in that drama, and because I hadn’t talked to Dyche since that time when I was working on the series, I didn’t know how he felt about that whole time, and what he might think about the piece which would end up being dedicated to him.

The St. George’s series had a number of readers, mostly I suppose because over time people become increasingly nostalgic and some folks probably re-lived their own years at the school though my memories, which was really gratifying. Dyche was one of my best readers, and he commented on a number of the pieces, and helped shape one of them as well. Therefore, when it came to the last piece, I actually wanted to talk to him and get him to vet what I was working on, so to speak. So I contacted him through Facebook and told him what I was planning and that I wanted to connect. At first he said that he had to think about it, and then he got back to me and said he would like to talk. I called him, sometime in late 2022 as I recall, from the street here in Kyoto, and we talked for about an hour. He told me some of the things that were going on in his life, mentioned how much he enjoyed the series, talked about The Replacements, and then we talked about the conflict that led to my father leaving St. George’s. Dyche mentioned that his own father, much like mine, seemed to avoid the whole topic, and that what he himself knew of the events were also pieced together from reports of other of our classmates. We discussed how odd it was that the topic was essentially verboten in both of our households, and he gave me his blessing to write the piece. We parted on good terms, and I was very grateful to him for his time and his kindness. Then, I sat on the piece for more than a year because I just couldn’t find the tone.

Finally, in early 2024, I re-engaged with the piece and was able to get my head around a structure. The first half of the piece was an easy-going and upbeat account of my memories of hanging out with Dyche for a few months between high school and college in 1992, and the second half was a kind of reconstruction of what I understood to have occurred between our fathers and the school board in the early part of this century. I was happy with what I came up with, but still felt the need to run it by Dyche before I hit publish. So I sent him a draft by email, and he said he had a lot going on but he’d get back to me soon. About a week later he wrote back saying he thought I had written fairly and congratulated me on the whole series. He also said something kind of funny, which was that he was thinking of asking me for an update on the piece but didn’t want to seem egotistical. I was once again moved and grateful to him; I made some edits and published the piece. Maybe because of its content, or perhaps because it had been a while since I had updated the series, the piece got somewhat less feedback than the earlier ones, however a number of people read and reacted to the piece. I was done with St. George’s and moved on to writing about the songwriter Craig Finn.

I am not sure about this, and people who were closer to Dyche in his later years than I would know, but I wonder if he was already sick when he wrote to me in 2024. If he was, he didn’t mention it. When we communicated that year he alluded to some challenges in his life, but I’m not sure.

Before I close, I want to mention one memory I have of Dyche that I left out of the earlier piece. I recall him saying once that “if someone asks you to do something, do it really badly. That way they’ll never ask you again.” Now Dyche did many things very well, so I think he was just being sarcastic, but I always found this comment funny, and it stuck with me.

Overall, as I wrote prior, Dyche was a big influence on my life in terms of the depth of his music fandom. And, I really liked him. He was funny, generous, and had a huge heart. Everyone impacts someone I guess, but Dyche impacted so many people in a positive way. He will be greatly missed.

Dedication: As piece VII was already dedicated to Dyche, I guess this one will be for Spokane. The picture in the header is of the Spokane River, not the one that passed by the St. George’s campus, but the larger one. I never really loved Spokane to be honest, and haven’t been back since 2001, but I know a lot of people do. I understand this–it’s where we grew up after all.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)

I used to be free/ I used to be seventeen

Sharon Van Etten

Never said a word, I never had to/ it was my attitude/ that you thought was rude

The Replacements

Long may you run

Neil Young

Note: This is the last in our series about Saint George’s, the school I attended from Grade 1 through Grade 12. You can find the other parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Thank you to everyone who read this series.

Senior Year II, and After:

It’s time to wrap up the Scenes from St. George’s series, as I’ve said most of what I want to say about that time and place. Before I finish, I want to write a bit about the very end of senior year and the summer after graduation as well as the first winter vacation back from college, and add a short coda.

After a number of us seniors got busted for drinking on our senior trip, things were pretty much winding down. Because we were a smallish class, everyone pretty much got along and there weren’t many cliques, however it is true that the two or three-season athletes, myself included, lived in a slightly different world than those students who mostly didn’t play sports. After baseball season of senior year whatever remaining barriers between classmates crumbled, and sometime around here I finally got a driver’s license. As a result, I spent a bit of time out at Dyche Alsaker’s house. Dyche and I were not all that close, but I liked him for a couple of reasons. One was, although his family certainly had more money than mine, and a bigger house, he never acted like some kind of alpha, which was cool. He just seemed happy to have people over (his parents never seemed to be home) and to go with the flow. I was as well. Dyche’s house was in “the valley” (do all towns have a valley?), which was really just the open space between Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. Most of the real rich folks at St. George’s lived on the South Hill, so maybe there was something about the Valley that was a little more “beta” than the South Hill. At that point in time, as now, I was more than happy to hang with some beta-males, or at least in a circumstance where such ridiculous distinctions no longer obtained.

Dyche loved the band the Replacements and their lead singer Paul Westerberg, and I caught onto his passion for this band. Actually, I may have discovered them on my own first, as their single “Merry Go Round” played a lot on VH1 and at that time I was a regular viewer of their music video program. “Merry Go Round” is the lead off track on the band’s final record All Shook Down, which was released in 1990 and is still by far my favorite “Mats” album. I bought the record and played it over and over in my room as “rock music” was kind of verboten in the main part of the house for reasons passing understanding. I remember one specific day where we drove out to a lake, probably in Idaho, and Dyche boated us around while drinking and listening to Westerberg’s first solo record 14 Songs. 14 Songs is pretty good and has a catchy single “Knocking’ on Mine,” but it’s no All Shook Down. As for drunk boating, while not advisable, it is somewhat preferable to drunk driving because there is simply more space, and Westerberg made the perfect companion for such an outing.

Although I was already into a lot of music at the time, including Dylan, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and Dire Straits (this list holds up pretty well actually), I was impressed with Dyche’s deeper level of fandom and aspired to know more about my favorite bands. By the time I got to university I had a better idea of what it meant to be a music fan, and this was in no small part because of Dyche. Out at Dyche’s house, there was a predictable amount of drinking and hooking up; the first interested me a little, the second more, although I was still having a bit of a tough time getting anything going in that area. Drinking was easier. One night I drank most of a bottle of whiskey in the hot tub there, and people came to think I had a high tolerance, which wasn’t really true. I also remember commandeering a bed at his house one night when a classmate came in with a girl I did not know. Can we have the bed, they asked–we are stuck on the trampoline. This was not my problem I felt, however they persisted and I gave way. I suppose they needed it more than I did.

As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be much parental presence at Dyche’s house, which was a positive, but things never got too crazy. People came over, enjoyed the trampoline and the hot tub, and stayed the night instead of driving impaired. It was, all in all, a reasonably healthy developmental zone. This action lasted for a few weeks after graduation, and then kicked off again during the first winter after we went off to college. During that break there was a party at another classmate’s house–similar vibe, no parents, booze, and hooking up. I attended, and the next morning found myself with a girlfriend of sorts. This was a positive. What I recall about that night was, I watched the film The Graduate, walked away with a girlfriend, and smoked a cigar. Decent action, good action, bad action. Two out of three ain’t bad, baby.

Like all scenes of this sort, it didn’t last, nor did my girlfriend. I didn’t really know how to have a girlfriend, so to speak, and although we wrote letters from our respective colleges that spring the relationship had faded by summer. Nonetheless, the whole period, bisected by a few semesters of college, stands out as a crucial, if brief, interlude between high school and “real life.”

Coda:

Disclaimer: This section is pieced together from things I know and things I think probably happened. This is not meant to serve as a strict historical record of events that, for whatever reason, my parents have barely shared with me–and even if they had, this would only be one side of the story. Thus, in historical terms, this is kind of a reconstruction, so take it for what it’s worth.

St. George’s at this point should have been in the rear view mirror, and it mostly was. I came back as an alum, hung around a little, and moved on to the next thing, which turned out to be Japan. However, it was not entirely behind me because my parents still worked there, and my father, after I left, got sucked deeper and deeper into school politics. I wish to tread lightly here because there is so much about this murky period that I still don’t totally understand, however the basic facts as I know them are as follows:

i) After George Swope, who had a cameo in Part VI of this series, St. George’s had a new principal called Jonathan Slater. My father had wanted the job, and didn’t get it.

ii) At first, my father and Slater were fast friends, but I think this was a mutually cynical political relationship in a sense. My father was the head teacher and a power in the school, and Slater would have come in knowing this. They bonded under the auspices that Slater would give way at some point to my father, but this was never going to happen. I knew this, even if my parents did not. At first Slater would invite my family to Thanksgiving and such, and my father praised him to the skies. That changed however, and the two men became bitter enemies. This enmity led eventually to my father leaving the school.

Now St. George’s was an interesting place, and it was pretty much run by the rich folks that sent their kids there. There was some kind of board that pushed the principals around, and this was mostly made up of folks from the South Hill, who tended to be a little on the stuck up side–not terribly in most instances, but somewhat for sure. Also, by the time in question here Dyche’s father was on it, as I understand. I guess Dyche’s dad was the token Vallyer on the basically South Hill board, but then the school got a big donation from the Gates Foundation and I think Bill Gates’ sister came onto the board, or at least into the zone. In essence this was Western Washington doing a little light colonization of Eastern Washington, the red-headed stepchild of that state. Eastern and Western Washington are divided by the Cascades mountains, where Twin Peaks is set. Twin Peaks is in this piece.

Now I don’t know much about Bill Gates, but I suspect he’s not a great guy. In fact, I think he’s pedophile-adjacent. But I know that Bill Gates is not a force for good in the world for a different reason, which has to do with my struggles with my Skype password a few years back. Back before Zoom came along and ate Skype’s lunch six ways to Sunday, I used the service and had a password for it which worked fine. Then Microsoft took it over or something and all the sudden I had to provide a Microsoft password to “get through” to Skype for some reason. This was terrible, because I try to avoid Microsoft at all costs and I didn’t even know if I had a Microsoft password. Certainly I didn’t want one.

But for weeks I could not get anywhere near Skype because of this password issue, and it was driving me nuts. I needed Skype for work and it just wasn’t coming through. In marketing terms, this is a “process” issue. Process is one of the 7 Ps of the marketing mix in business, and basically it refers to how easy, or hard, it is for the customer to access your good or service. Amazon’s one-click check-out is an example of good process. Microsoft’s multi-step, super frustrating, password labyrinth is the opposite. I got so fed up with this whole situation, and by extension Gates, that I even ranted about it and him on the short lived, but awesome, Periscope platform–which Twitter later bought and then killed.

So like I say, Microsoft sucks, Periscope rocks, Skype sucks and deserves its fate, and Bill Gates, in my opinion, also sucks. I don’t know anything about his sister, but her arrival was, I think, the catalyst for my father’s removal.

(By the way, the Skype password issue reminds me of the soft-water issue. When I was a teenager I would frequently see soft-water trucks driving around, and I wondered what in the world soft-water was. I am basically a huge fan of the prefix “soft” and wrote about it here. The only soft-prefixed phrase I don’t like is soft-water. That’s because, trucks and aggressive marketing aside, soft-water is terrible. It’s marketed as some kind of improvement over “hard-water,” which I guess is supposed to be full of minerals or something. However, soft-water is completely terrible. The absence of minerals means that it is totally ineffective at getting soap off your skin, so after a soft-water shower you walk around all day with a patina of soap residue stuck to you. Soft-water is awful and a total scam, just like orthodontists. There is no real connection between Microsoft passwords and soft-water, except both totally suck. I bet you Bill Gates is a big soft-water guy–he does look a little soapy.)

In any case, my father was friendly with the rich folks on the South Hill, and as a result we spent a lot of time at their various big houses. I was less enamored with the South Hill crowd as a whole, as I have made clear, although I did have friends who lived there, however my father was political so he kind of had to suck up a bit. But I don’t think he really loved this sort of hobnobbing–he never seemed really at home in these settings. My overall sense is that at St. George’s my father was mostly on the right side of history, but his shortcomings as a politician were his Achilles Heel.

So, the relationship with Slater was going south for a while, and then the principal’s little predilections started to become basically public knowledge. I don’t know if Slater is still alive–if he is he’d be pretty old, but I think it is a matter of record that if George Edwards liked him some beach babes, Jonathan Slater there was more interested in babes in the cradle, so to speak. Again, just something I’ve heard, but I’ve been hearing it more and more these days. The rumor was that Slater would spend time in, I guess they were, basically sex clubs in downtown Spokane, and his tastes ran as young as possible, staying, perhaps, just this side of legal. Spokane is not that big of a city, and with something of that nature, well word does get around.

So let’s use a little Occam’s Razor on this situation. Just looking at it, here’s what I guess happened. This dude Jonathan Slater was principal for a while and was good at raising money. He was also, like Bill Gates, pedophile-adjacent and Spokane is a small town. While his money raising skills gave him space to engage in some borderline bad action there in downtown Spokane and to cover for a few bad actor friends of his on campus for a while, over time tongues talked and whispers became louder and Slater had to go. My father (who is named Ross) ran point on this effort from within in terms of rallying the teachers to oppose Slater, and at the same time Ross was perhaps positioning himself to get nominated as principal, but I’m not really sure. However, the board didn’t want Ross to be principal because they recognized that he would be a “teacher’s principal” (like a player’s coach in a sense). Board opposition to Ross probably had a few aspects, some more flattering to the board, some less.

One aspect was probably that the board as a whole (I don’t mean any one board member individually, but as a collective over time) had covered for Slater a bit even when his little peccadillos were, or should have been, becoming apparent, and when they came to the conclusion finally that he had to go they wanted to do it quietly. Ross’ involvement was making that difficult. This aspect of the situation is not in the board’s favor. A second aspect is perhaps that the board realized that not only did Slater have to go but the school as a whole, the teaching staff and the administration, needed more accountability and standards, and having a teacher’s principal in place would, in their view, not advance this goal. This is more in the board’s favor.

I am not suggesting that Ross was anti-standards, quite the opposite in many respects, however it is true, in my view, that he was very much driven by personal relationships and by who was on his team. In this sense he approached school administration like he did coaching. And while there are positive aspects to this approach to administration, there are also drawbacks, which the board must have been aware of. Another factor here is that for someone who had serious political aspirations within education for several decades, Ross was in many ways still a limited politician. Although he associated with the wealthy class that ran the school, attended their parties, ate their food, and, at times, flattered them, he was, as I mentioned, at heart not comfortable in these spaces and indexed this in multiple ways. His other weakness, in my opinion, was a tendency to vilification, which as I say started with Slater a while before all the action came to a head. In this case though, I think the vilification was justified. All in all, in the immortal words of The Mendoza Line, mistakes were made.

Somehow the Gates sister got deep in the mix, and the board summarily fired Ross’ best-friend and right hand man. Ostensibly this was, I believe, for not updating his teaching credential, and/or for being habitually late for work (which he was), but in actuality this was a shot at Ross, whom they felt they could not fire. Ross did not take the firing well, and started to raise holy hell, using the Slater business as leverage. There was some kind of teacher revolt that was shut down, and then Ross was pushed out–fired, or left, I’m still not quite sure. Then, Ross sued the school (again, I heard this but my parents never really told me about any of it, but I believe they did eventually get some money), and the Slater business may have made the papers. The Spokane papers don’t have great archives (unlike the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), so I don’t know this for sure, but the basic narrative is along these lines, I believe.

With Slater and Ross both gone, the school moved on and probably the Gates sister installed her own puppet, and that was that for my family’s association with the school. Ross’ relationship with the South Hillers was pretty much shattered, and for some reason he took special issue with the role of Dyche’s dad (who he never had had a relationship with). I didn’t really know Dyche’s dad much, and when I did meet him he seemed pretty chill, so I’m guessing there might have been a bit of projection there. In any case, all those doors closed.

Years later however, one of the rich families who Ross used to be close with must have thought that having Ross back in the fold would be a good idea, and they decided to use me in a roundabout way to try and re-open the door. I was already pretty well along in my IB career here in Asia, and St. George’s was in the process of, or had become, an IB school as well. I got a message asking me if I wanted to come and consult with the school, and although I could totally handle a little consulting, this was a bit odd because I was based in Asia and surely they could get someone more local to give advice. I got the feeling that what was really going on though was the consulting gig was being dangled as a way get to Ross, but maybe it was in good faith, in which case cool. I told my parents about the offer and my mother was horrified that I would even consider it. That’s how bad matters were left with the school. But consider it I did, because if someone wants to fly me somewhere and pay me for my time, I’m probably gonna take it.

The offer fell through though, I’m guessing because the powers-that-were figured out that whatever they were angling for Ross to do wasn’t going to happen and they never really wanted me to consult anyway. I felt a little used, but not really–it was just politics.

Ross moved on to become principal of a Catholic school in Oregon, and was able to implement his team-based approach there and I think he did a great job. He is, I believe, a retired principal in good standing there, and he was widely liked, except by those that he let go. My father is a good man, and a moral one, but he was also a little tough and if he didn’t like the way things were going with a staff member he’d cut the cord. I understand this, and sometimes you gotta do it, but myself take a little longer term view of trying to get people to pull their weight. People are different.

The epigraph for this piece is from the Replacements, of course, from the song “Attitude” off All Shook Down. My two favorite songs on the record are “Someone Take the Wheel” (“I see we’re fighting again/ in some fucking land/ aw throw in another tape man,”) and “Attitude.” All in all I think I’m an alright fellow much of the time, but some people have said I have a little attitude myself. Well, if so I probably picked it up from the Mats.

And Mr. St. George’s, if your IB program is dragging a little or if you are looking for a little consultation in pretty much any area, hit me up. I’ll be there and it won’t even cost you that much. After all, I’ve always been a cheap date.

Dedication: For Dyche. Getting to know you was way more interesting than any subsequent politics. Thanks for the Mats. And for my father. Long may you run.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from St. George’s, Part VI: Teacher Quality/ Senior Year I

Don’t get sued.

My Readers

Note: This is Part VI of Scenes From St. George’s. You can find the earlier parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. I want to make just a few comments here about the direction of this series. I had originally planned to do only five of these pieces, and this is already number six. This is mostly because of the positive reception the pieces have gotten, which has been great, and I have been prompted by the many pieces of feedback I have gotten from readers to expand the scope of the series slightly. Nonetheless, the narrative arc of this series is nearing a close, and I don’t expect to write more than one or two more of these.

High School Chinese History Class, High School Computer Class

In this series I have already talked a bit about teacher quality at St. George’s, as well as suggesting that student quality, for lack of a better term, is also related to the perception of teacher effectiveness. For example, I wrote that E.T. was a “mediocre” science teacher, however he was in fact a good science teacher for students who wanted to learn Physics. He just wasn’t the best at controlling a large science lab where only 20% or so of the class had an interest in learning on a given day. In contrast, I wrote that C.F. was a good teacher for 5th graders despite being somewhat lazy. I’m not sure the lazy part of this is fair or not actually–all in all he managed to control what I’m sure was a pretty unruly classroom and left me with some memorable learning points, so maybe he was actually a good teacher until he peaced out. In any case, teacher quality is often pretty subjective. However I think I can state unequivocally that Betty Barber was a good teacher, and that this guy called J.G. was a bad one. Both Betty and J.G. taught me in high school; Betty taught Chinese History as a senior elective and J.G. taught English mainly I think, but I had him for computer class. Overall, Betty’s Chinese History class was the most important I ever took and was central to establishing my life course, and J.G.’s computer class was an unmitigated disaster.

Let’s start with the bad. J.G. was a pretty young guy, bearded, who had a serious hippie vibe. He came to school as part of a “teaching couple” with a woman called V., however I don’t believe that arrangement lasted very long. A lot of schools like to hire teaching couples; my own experience leads me to suggest giving them a miss, by and large. J.G. told us he had walked through Japan on foot with next to no money staying with people he met all along the way, and overall he seemed like an alright dude. However, his computer class was terrible.

What I recall was, we had basically one assignment all term which was to make a white ball that was sitting at the bottom of the screen move and bounce off the other sides of the screen. It was like we were re-making the game Pong or something. In order to make the ball move, we were supposed to do some coding, I guess. And this might have been possible, however J.G. gave us no instructions, no hints, no information or data of any kind about how to move the freaking ball. This was around 1990, so it wasn’t like we could cruise over to You Tube and figure it out. So we would ask J.G. “hey there J.G. dude, could you give us some pointers on where to start with this here ball movement?” And J.G. would answer “no. That’s the whole idea of learning something. You have to figure it out for yourself.”

Now I don’t know a lot about learning theory, but I know a little bit, and I don’t think this is really right. The learning theory that makes the most general sense to me is called “The Zone of Proximal Development.” If you are in education, or even if you are not, you might be familiar with the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD for short. In this theory, there is stuff the learner can already do, stuff they can do with help (that’s the zone of proximal development itself), and stuff they currently are not going to be able to do (stuff that is developmentally non-proximal so to speak). So in computer class in 1990 stuff we students could already do might include: turn on the computer and open an application, or whatever passed for an application in 1990; play a video game; and probably compose an essay or report on a writing program. For me, in any case, stuff I could handle most certainly did not include coding a white ball to bounce around. I had literally no idea where to start, not even the hint of a “coding language” or anything from J.G. there.

So, if a student such as myself is bouncing-white-ball-challenged, ZPD theory says they need to be shown the way toward acquiring the new skill through scaffolding. Scaffolding is just what it sounds like; it is giving the student sufficient steps to be able to get to a point where they can expand their ZPD like a balloon and incorporate the new skill in their repertoire. For the bouncing white ball, in my estimation, this would at an absolute minimum have required showing us how to access the coding section of the computer or program or whatever we were supposed to be doing, giving us some information about what kind of code we needed to write, and giving us some of the elements of the coding language. At a minimum. I mean as a freshman in university I took Latin, and my first semester Latin teacher had us reading Cicero by October, which was ambitious, but at least he gave us six weeks of verbs first. I can’t speak for others, but I needed six weeks, or at least six days, of coding language to begin to move the ball. But we didn’t get it, so after about 30 minutes of messing around with the computer the boys started to do other things such as compose dirty limericks and make jokes about other people’s mothers. The girls, I am sure, were more productive. I mean, what else were we supposed to do in the face of such incompetent instruction? Here is one little ditty I composed at the time–I apologize in advance, but it does contain some American History knowledge:

A pious reformer named Mather

Was frequently known to blather

About the great judgement hour

But the word from the shower

Was that Mather knew his way around lather

This should not be in print. In any case, eventually, some student figured out how to move the ball and told everyone else, and J.G. just sat there and watched, and we all passed the assignment. Was this the point? Was this all some elaborate exercise in collaboration? Here are the possibilities as I see them, from most generous to least generous to J.G.:

i) J.G. was giving us a lesson in working together when faced with a hard problem and the class went just like he intended.

ii) J.G. actually gave us a little more information than I am recalling, and it was enough for the better computer students to work things out and we all learned by osmosis. Sort of a ib) actually.

iii) J.G. believed in the learning method he stated–namely that the point of learning is to do everything yourself. Although I believe this to be an ineffective learning theory most of the time, it is at least a theory.

iv) J.G. had no idea how to code the ball to move either and was just hoping a student could solve it. In the meantime, he knew the challenge would take a while, and was killing class time so he didn’t have to teach any more computer.

v) J.G. resented having to teach computer class, which, as a penniless hippie, he knew nothing about, and intentionally sabotaged the class.

All and all I’m guessing a combination of iii) and iv) that was in play here, with maybe just a bit of ii). But I legit do not remember him teaching us a single thing or me learning a single thing in a whole term of class. So I’d have to say, he was a pretty bad teacher.

Betty Barber, on the other hand, was a great Chinese History teacher. Prior to taking this as a senior elective as I mentioned, I had taken World History from Betty as a sophomore or junior. I did pretty well in this class, but my maturity level was still only slightly higher than that of Mason Anderson, so Mason and I would take turns trying to steal each other’s wallets from the pocket of our letter jackets for much of the class. Pick-pocketing, I am sure, is one of the world’s oldest professions, and I’m sure my skills in this arena exceeded my computer skills, but still I didn’t exactly distinguish myself. In Chinese History, things were different. Betty had taken student groups to China in the very early 1980’s, just after the country opened up for tourists after the death of Mao and the Gang of Four era, and had a deep knowledge of the topic. Most of our high school teachers, I would say, were competent enough in their subject, with the notable exception of J.G., however Betty was really an expert in Chinese History, and I don’t use that term lightly.

Part of what made her a good Chinese History teacher for me and the class a good class was undoubtedly that it was an elective. In other words, I was there by choice. The second thing was, she knew the subject in great detail and relished sharing it with us. And third, as I mentioned above, she had been to China at an absolutely critical time in history in the early Deng Xiaoping era and had a view of events informed by real life knowledge and experience. She told us that she expected us to take the class seriously. We read a range of challenging texts, delved deeply into pre and post-WWII Chinese politics, and I personally was finally mature enough by this time to grasp and respect the depth of Betty’s knowledge and passion. As a result, and for the first time in my life, I worked my ass off. I wrote a super long, properly researched, if rose-colored glasses influenced, paper on The Long March, and developed a desire to visit China and Tibet (I eventually made it to China, though have yet to get to Tibet, which is just a little more challenging even though I have ample Yeti theory all ready to go). When it came time to chose classes at university, although I was an English Literature major, I gravitated to classes in Asian Art, Asian History, and Asian Politics, and ended up with the much coveted (or at least somewhat unusual) Asian Studies minor. And within ten months of graduating university I was living in Asia. There is no way any of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for senior year Chinese History.

So Betty was a good teacher because she just was, but also because I was a good student. Was J.G. a good teacher to someone who just happened to crush the Pong reboot? If you dear reader are that student, please do get in touch. But I seriously doubt it. I think J.G. sucked. (Don’t get sued Matty baby.) One way to look at the matter is, how would the respective teaching strategies hold up today? Well, the white ball issue would be solved in 10 minutes on someone’s phone, while Betty could teach the exact same class and it would still be excellent.

I could say a lot more about teachers, good bad and in-between, however I have probably commented more than enough on the professional skills, or lack thereof, of people who may be in my extended Facebook audience, so I will desist. And Betty if you happen to see this, thank you dude. You rock.

The School Credit System and My Senior Year Part I:

One odd feature of SGS in the early 90’s was its very generous credit system. Private schools generally have less oversight on their credit system, less oversight in general much of the time, and either no administrator there chose to focus on the credit system or something had just slipped through the cracks, because my senior year classes, in their totality, included: English Class, Chinese History, Knowledge Bowl. That was it. I also took statistics at night a few times a week with K.R. and J.S. at a local college for college credit.

(K.R. and J.S. and I had been in the advanced Math class since 7th grade with one other student, and we had had John Nord as our teacher from 8th grade through junior year of high school. How I was placed into advanced math, I have no idea because although I could hack the algebra alright, I was a poor geometry student and an even worse calculus student. I passed junior year calculus only because K.R. gave me her, beautiful, notes (thanks K.R.), and I just faked it on the basis of these notes. Anyway, I got a 1 on the Calculus A.P.–the worst score–yet this was still good enough for Mr. Nord to vote for me for student of the year, based on the fact that I read Catch 22 in my spare time. As much as I appreciated the confidence, Joseph Heller didn’t help me a whit with derivatives.)

The odd thing is, I think my senior year class load was only slightly lighter than my classmates, as some of them still had in-school math to complete. As a result, we had tons of time to mess around, play street hockey, skip school because of trick knees, regional basketball games, or any other excuse, etc. The credit system was really bizarre, and I wonder why.

I’ll tell one story here that probably happened senior year because my friends all had drivers’ licenses already, and which I incorporated in my essay on good and great talkers. When I was in high school my friend Kelly Rudd and I were both big fans of Larry King’s radio show. For those who don’t remember, King had a late night radio show for years before, and briefly concurrent with, his TV show on CNN. I liked Larry’s CNN show, however the radio show was way better. There were a couple of features of the show that I especially liked. The first was that King famously did no preparation for his guests. He knew a huge amount about the world of course, however he never read the guests’ book ahead of time or anything like that.

Now, this might sound lazy, but King explained that it was because he wanted to come in totally open. He’d say “if my guest is a firefighter, my first question will be ‘so what’s it like to be a firefighter?’” This was his style—open-ended and non-directive. King was perhaps a “lazy” interviewer, but in the best possible sense. By making the guest do almost all the work, King got himself out of the way, and as a result guests might go in any direction and the show became “eventful.” Another thing I loved was, after the main guest left King would take questions on absolutely anything. Most of the time he would give full, generous answers to his listeners, however sometimes a caller would be really weird or inappropriate. In these cases, King would fall back on a singular phrase. He’d cut off the conversation by saying “cold compress ma’am” or “cold compress sir.” Basically, he was telling them to lie down and ice their head. Which is hysterical.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry, and Kelly even lent me Larry’s books, which were, predictably, about talking. King’s show was broadcast in Spokane from around 9 PM Pacific time and then re-run immediately after, and I would listen to him before falling asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night with the re-run playing. (Like many male teenagers, I had trouble sleeping, and still do). And then, all of the sudden, King’s show was dropped from the AM radio station in town. Now, you might think this was something we had no ability to do anything about, however Kelly didn’t see it that way. He proposed we drive down to the radio station and stage a protest. This seemed to me just bizarre enough to be exciting, so I said sure, let’s go. So Kelly and me and another friend piled into Kelly’s car, skipping out of school mid-morning, and drove the 45 minutes or so to the station. We had no appointment, and were just three high school kids with no leverage of any kind. When we got to the front door it was locked and there was a kind of intercom. Kelly, naturally, nominated himself to do the talking, and started to explain over the intercom why we had come.

“Do you have an appointment?” they asked?

“No.”

“Who are you?”

“We are high school students and we are Larry King fans. We think it’s outrageous that your station recently cancelled his show and we want to talk to someone about it.”

Kelly’s approach was pretty brazen, and at first it didn’t get the job done. We remained shut out of the station. However he kept going, and going, and sooner or later the person on the other end caved. “OK,” she said, “we’ll send someone down.” Sure enough, the station manager himself came down and let us into the hallway. Kelly pleaded his case, and I backed him up to the best of my ability. The station manager, to his great credit, heard us out. “I understand you guys were big fans, and I’m sorry about the cancellation. We love Larry too, and we’d like to bring him back.” And so on. The station manager was BSing us, of course, and we knew it, however it was nice to get a hearing. We left after a while, knowing we hadn’t changed policy but that we had, at least, given it our best shot. Then we drove back to school.

By the time we got back to school it was after lunch and we were late for English class. The teacher eyed us as we walked and said something like “there’d better be a story.” And Kelly said, “why yes there is,” and proceeded to recount the whole incident in his patented comic manner. This was obviously more than enough for the teacher who laughed and folded us into the class. King never came back on the Spokane airwaves, and his radio show gave way to TV pretty soon after in any case, however I learned from Kelly that day. What I learned was, social “rules” are often pretty fungible with the right amount of conversational lubricant. As I understood it, Kelly was essentially creating his own reality by “re-framing” the Larry King situation. We kids had no standing to protest the show’s cancellation, however his insistence that we were passionate fans and therefore deserved a hearing carried the day. Likewise, although we were late for class, Kelly delivered a funny story that won over the teacher and gave us a little grace.

The Larry King incident was just one in a senior year full of off-the-clock shenanigans and foolishness. I would drive out with friends to the dog tracks in Idaho, possibly during school time, with the idea that I could use my hard-won statistics knowledge to “beat the track.” Yeah right. Dog track odds are stacked against you, just in case you hadn’t guessed. But I never would have figured that out if the school hadn’t given me so much time to undertake an independent study in dog racing, so I guess I owe SGS a thank you there. Thanks dude. You rock. Ish.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 4 Comments

Scenes from St. George’s, Part V: Free Range Culture

St. George’s Free Range Culture:

Thus far in this series I have alluded a number of times to what my high school classmate Dyche Alsaker has referred to as the “free range” nature of St. George’s in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Free range is exactly the right phrase here, and a number of factors contributed to the free range, sometimes free-for-all, nature of the times. In no particular order, here are five incidents or examples which I feel exemplify something of this culture. I wonder if readers who didn’t attend SGS will find these strange or more or less normal given the time period.

The Smoking Shack:

When I was first in the lower school around 1981-83, there was a smoking shack for high school seniors just behind the high school building. Seniors, and perhaps juniors, essentially earned the right to smoke on campus by virtue of age, and the smoking shack was deemed official, ordained even, by the school itself. The smoking shack was not just an area, it was a physical structure as indicated by the name, potentially purpose-built for students to smoke in.

Even as a small child, I found this interesting, because by the 1980’s smoking was not as common among adults, at least on a regular basis, as it seems to have been 20 or 30 years earlier, a fact I somehow intuited. The smoking shack was torn down shortly after this time, probably in the mid ’80s, and smoking on campus was no longer allowed (although students would still smoke cigarettes, and other items, in some of the more discrete and far-flung areas of the campus environs). By the time my classmates and myself became high school seniors, we too had a senior lounge, a smallish two-room shack also behind the high school that I believe was once the headmaster’s office. We didn’t smoke there; instead we played mammoth games of Risk and Diplomacy, watched Seinfeld, and played street hockey against Mason Anderson who would do his best Ron Hextall impression. It amazes me to this day that smoking seniors were not only tolerated, but actively encouraged, during my time at SGS.

The Janitor Hangs J.T. and I Up by Our Necks

Way before sugar cubes, pithing needles, or any other of this sort of action, J.T. and I set out to bedevil the middle school janitor. As I mentioned above, both of our fathers coached sports, and therefore we were at school until 6 or 7 PM most days throughout the year. This left ample time for us to get into trouble, which first involved stealing the bucket and mop of the janitor (a tallish bearded dude as I recall) and hiding it, thereby preventing him from doing his job. Naturally we thought this was hysterical. He disagreed, and would curse us, with semi-good humor, as he located and re-secured his equipment. This was when we were in second or third grade I would guess.

One day, after weeks of bucket hide and seek, the janitor had seen enough. He decided to take drastic action. The boys bathroom of the middle school had a set of coat hangers about six feet off the ground, and these must have been pretty sturdy because this dude hung both of us up by the backs of our sweatshirts and left us hanging there as he completed his cleaning rounds. This, as I recall, was pretty unpleasant, and also worrisome–how long did he intend to keep us there? To my recollection this only happened once, and we hung for 15 minutes or so before he let us down. I went home and complained to my parents–the janitor hung us up on the coat hangers! Well, my parents said, did you do something to him? We just hid his bucket like always, I replied. That seems like fair treatment then, said my parents, maybe next time don’t hide his bucket.

Even at the time I actually felt this was a reasonable response on the part of my parents. I mean, we knew we were looking for trouble, we knew we were inconveniencing the dude–getting a reaction was the whole point. So, mission accomplished, although I think we did back off the janitor after this incident. He had made his point, and established himself as a worthy adversary. Respect my dude, respect. It is a little hard to imagine the hanging of children just flying under the radar like this today, but at free range St. George’s in 1983 it was simply par for the course.

The Phone Room:

When my classmates and I were in fifth grade we had a homeroom teacher called C.F. At the time, I thought he was a great teacher. Looking back, I reckon he was probably just super lazy, but also just a little creative in his laziness, a pretty good combination for 11 year olds. Whole lessons would be given over to thought experiments like “imagine you are stranded on a cliff with a sheer drop on either side with one friend. How do you get off the cliff?” Every suggestion was met with dismissal by C.F.–nothing would work. We would go on and on to no conclusion, and then class would end. Or, he would just play the Beatles for the whole class. Stuff like that.

C.F. was pretty even-tempered most of the time, but from time to time he would get mad at a student. This was usually not me, although on a few occasions it was. When he would get mad, he would put the offending student in the “phone room.” The phone room was just what it sounds like–a very small room with a phone that dialed off-campus. This was in the mid ’80s, and cell phones were not yet a thing. The phone room had a single chair, the titular phone, and various phone books. I have no idea if the phone room was ever used by a teacher–certainly I never saw this. Instead, it seemed to exist solely for the purposes of punishment.

C.F. would stick students in the phone room for the length of a class sometimes, but other times he would leave them there all morning or longer. A really bad student might spend 4-5 hours chilling in the phone room. Now today, I believe, this is considered really bad practice. Just locking a student up for hours on end for supposed recalcitrance is not a recommended method for student discipline and rehabilitation. But again, this was the ’80s and things, as I hope I have made clear to my younger readers, were just different back then.

However, the funny thing about the phone room punishment was that off-campus calls from the phone room’s phone were free, and there were phone books. So naturally students with nothing to do and hours at their disposal would make prank call after prank call, calling pizza delivery, other businesses, and, in a precursor to E.P.’s dirty calls to mothers, parents of classmates. I don’t know if C.F. or the other teachers knew about these calls, but all the students did, and some may even have looked forward to a stint in the phone room to operate the phone and raise a little hell.

C.F. ended up having an affair with another teacher and checking all the way out of his job a few years later, before leaving the school and moving to Idaho. Before this, however, we graduated from the lower school to the middle school, and one day I bumped into him and said hello. He said something to the effect of “I won’t talk to you anymore because you and your classmates are bluebirds who have flown away.” What he meant was, I guess, he had done his job and we were someone else’s job/ problem/ business now. Fair enough, perhaps, but still a little odd. All in all, C.F. was a good teacher because he was different and took chances, although his methods would not even begin to stand the scrutiny of a modern school, at least I wouldn’t think. And I never did figure out how to get off that f*** cliff.

Pithing Needles in the Biology Room:

In high school we had two main science teachers. The first was J.T.’s dad E.T. who taught Physics. E.T. was also the assistant baseball and girl’s basketball coach for my father, who was the head coach. E.T. passed away recently, so rest in peace to a mediocre science teacher, an excellent first base coach, and an awesome right hand man.

The second was our Biology teacher, an older woman who had taught, perhaps right there at SGS, as far back as the 1960’s. She would tell us stories of how in the 60’s she would tell the class “any of you who are on acid, just take the class off and go outside,” so she’d seen it all I guess. Nonetheless, we managed, sans hallucinogens, to vex her on a regular basis, and when mad she would cross her arms, stare at the ceiling, and repeat the phrase “bad words, bad words, bad words,” a reasonably inventive way to avoid telling her students what they could do with themselves.

Now, she was probably a perfectly competent Biology teacher, but we were not, as 10th graders, a very receptive group. To be honest, Biology was boring. But one thing the biology room had that held potential were the pithing needles. Pithing needles, for those who don’t know, are thin, very sharp, needles about three inches in length which are attached to a wooden handle. They are, I believe, intended for use in dissections, however J.T., Kelly, and myself found other uses for them. We would sneak back into the Biology room after school and, holding the needles by the handle, fling them up at the ceiling, which was made from soft plaster board or some such material. With the right touch we could stick the needles in the ceiling, and although I only remember doing one dissection (the fabled frog dissection) in biology class, there were copious needles to throw. After a couple hundred attempts, we would manage to stick fifteen or twenty needles in the ceiling, which was quite high up, maybe 20 feet or so. The next day in Biology class the teacher would point out the needles, say her bad words, and threaten us with retribution if we were found to have been involved. What we were really waiting for was if a needle would get loose and fall down during Biology class, which would have been a bonus. (We were not bad kids; Biology was just super boring–what can I say?)

In any case, after weeks of needle flinging the pithing needle supply was pretty much exhausted and the teacher, possibly with some other adult backup, singled the three of us out (she would have known the responsible parties all along of course).

“Alright boys, you are going to climb up and get those down.”

“How are we expected to do that? They are way up there.” No protestations of innocence, just practical objections to the task at hand.

“I don’t care,” she said, “you put them there, you get them down.” One way or another, perhaps with a borrowed ladder, perhaps with a long broom or something, we managed to clear the ceiling of the deadly needles. All in all, sure we stole sugar cubes and ammonia packets, broke and entered into the headmaster’s house, and filled the biology lab’s ceiling with deadly projectiles, but at least we were sober. So, we had that going for us.

We Graduate with Blank Diplomas and Miss Prom:

Like many schools, SGS sent us seniors on a senior trip just weeks before graduation. Senior trips, through normal enough, are invariably a bad idea because students will, nearly without exception, attempt to drink on the trip. And so did we, however our experience was a little different as our drinking was directly facilitated by one of the three adult chaperones on the trip. And yes, we got punished, losing prom and graduating with blank diplomas, which might have been fair in some circumstances but hardly in these specific ones.

I won’t enumerate the exact circumstances of the alcoholic consumption on the trip because I don’t wish to engage in any under the bus throwing, even at this remove, however suffice it to say liquor was provided through a large legal purchase by said chaperone. Another chaperone discovered the drinking after some of my classmates were, let’s say, less effectively clandestine than myself and my own little group (we were trained in spy craft from way back), and the matter was reported to the then headmaster who was called George Swope. George Swope was no George Edwards, despite the shared first name, and was in fact pretty ineffectual in all areas. He called us all into a room with another administrator as backup and lectured us about drinking.

“What I think is fair is we take prom away for all of those who have admitted to drinking, and also you will graduate with blank diplomas. You will have to work off your debt to the school after graduating as well.”

Now really, this was some bullshit. The prom ban was fair enough, but the idea of working off some supposed “debt” after graduation was ridiculous, and I, with my big mouth, said as much in the Swopester’s little meeting.

“We accept (I began with the royal we, because why not) the prom situation, but you can’t take our diplomas away from us. And anyway, the booze was supplied by a teacher, as you well know.”

It didn’t matter. Some of us graduated with blanks, and I looked through the rolled up paper dramatically on receiving it, just to be a dick. Our valedictorian, Matt Carpenter, who always claimed never to study, which I think was also B.S. (although he was super smart so who knows), was under strict orders not to mention the incident in his graduation speech. As I recall, he did a perfect job of alluding to it without saying anything provably related. I was proud of him.

Why would a teacher supply booze to students? Well, because he wanted to be liked. It’s not that complex. Again, if this happened today I imagine the parents of the students in question would raise holy hell, and the teacher would be terminated. None of this happened; his involvement was swept under the rug, and life moved on. J.T. and I did expunge the “debt”, which, karmically, I guess was pretty fair given our earlier transgressions, by clearing a bunch of logs from the river while I played Dylan on a boombox with an extension cord (not the same boombox or extension cord my brother Mike played Richard Marx on). Some of the richer students (I’m just going to call it like it was, and almost everyone there was richer than J.T. and I) dodged log clearing duty to no consequence. That’s the class system–fuck that, by the way.

=====

OK. That’s all I have. There are many, many more examples of free range culture at St. George’s, however my memory and creative vein are tapped out for the time being. If you attended SGS back in these days I hope these reminiscences bring back memories, on the whole happy ones. If you are reading and didn’t attend SGS, does all this sound pretty out of control, or pretty much normal? Leave a comment either way–I’d love to hear from you.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from St. George’s, Part IV: Mason Anderson’s Seven-Step Method for Picking Up Women

Note: This is installment four of our scenes from Saint George’s (SGS). Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here.

Mason Anderson Fails to Pick Up Chicks

Classes at Saint George’s were not so large; I think our class graduated around 28 or so. The school is a private school, and relatively expensive for Eastern Washington, but I don’t believe it was that expensive, so I wonder what the school’s budget was like. I bet it was tight. There were a handful of students, including J.T., Kelly, our friend S.C., his younger brother Ben, L.W., and a few others, who were there from lower school all the way through high school. Others, tragically including N.C., left, while others still joined later on.

One student who joined I think in 9th grade was Mason Anderson. Mason’s had a younger brother named Mark whom Mason called “Marky J. Muffin” for some reason. Mason and Marky J.’s parents were divorced and they lived with their mother who Mason called Robbie A. (A for Anderson.) My sense is that Robbie A. was working pretty hard to keep everything organized on the financial front. Mason’s dad was a big churcher, and I don’t think Mason saw him all that much. Sometimes Mason would report that his dad had given him some money, but overall I think his dad was too busy churching to provide much oversight. As a result of all of this, Mason was pretty much left to his own devices most of the time. Also, whatever the family situation, Mason didn’t do much to keep things together because although he’s a great guy and totally hysterical, he was, and still is, chronically lazy.

Lazy as he may have been, Mason actually had a job at a sports cards shop called Chalmer’s. I guess Chalmer’s was owned by some guy called Chalmer, and this dude thought it would be a good move to just leave the shop in Mason’s hand for extended periods of time so he could enjoy the sweet life of a successful businessman. This, however, was not a good move at all, because Mason stole all his baseball cards and all his money and Chalmer’s had to go out of business. Mason never stole from his classmates as far as I know, but he felt Chalmer was fair game.

As I mentioned, our class was pretty small and John Innes, who joined in middle school, and I got to know Mason pretty quickly. High school life can be a little repetitive and it’s good to break things up with a little humor. Mason may have been a lazy thief (or perhaps more charitably an indolent appropriator) but in the humor department he was a solid addition to the school. Mason had a particular way of speaking where he would add emphasis to certain words to make them funny, and he also loved the words “total” and “totally.” My own speech and writing has been totally influenced by this habit of Mason, an influence apparent on this blog. Mason also liked to abbreviate noun phrases.

All these quirks came together in Mason’s favorite term, which was “total babe,” or more commonly, “TB.” He would use this appellation dozens of times a day to describe various girls in our class and the classes above and below us. Although SGS classes were small, there were definitely some TBs running around, and some regular old Bs as well. My own tastes in this area were less for the TBs and more for the SBs (“sneaky babes”). I like sneaky anything, sneaky babes, sneaky favorites, sneaky staircases, the whole deal. Probably my theory was that TBs were already out of my league, and SBs were just more on my level. Also, I just thought SBs were cuter than TBs. I still think I’m right about this, but Mason disagreed. He was into the TBs, the totaller the better. Now one thing about TBs, obviously, is they can be super selective. Craig Finn says “boys go for looks/ and girls go for status.” I’ve found this to be pretty true, and TBs also like money as well as, I think, funny guys (or gals depending on a given TB’s particular orientation). Although he played on the baseball team, Mason was not exactly “high status,” whatever that consisted of back then, and although he had the Chalmer’s money he certainly wasn’t loaded. He was very funny, and should have leaned into this with the TBs, but for some reason his method for TB intriguing didn’t quite see him leaning into his strengths.

Mason’s interest in TBs was not limited to mere expressions of appreciation; instead he would work out elaborate TB seduction campaigns in his head, which he would describe to John Innes and me at great length. Mason was, for some unknown reason, a huge fan of the professional hockey team the Philadelphia Flyers and their goalie Ron Hextall, and he had one, or maybe several, Philadelphia Flyers pins that he would wear on the outside of his jacket. His TB pick-up plans always revolved around the Flyers’ pin and associated Flyers paraphernalia. I am not going to be able to do justice to the complexity of Mason’ campaign plans, however they would have gone something like this (I don’t believe he has taken the time to patent this method so I think this is fair use):

Step 1: Select a TB to approach.

As mentioned, Mason would choose one of the biggest TBs, a girl who was obviously completely out of his league, and start putting together a sequence of moves.

Step 2: Name the campaign.

Mason’s campaigns would be named after the first initial of the TB’s first name; thus if the TB was called “B…” the B campaign would just be “Plan B.”

Step 3: Pick a location to approach the TB.

Mason would specify a certain spot where he planned to initiate his campaign, say at the TB’s locker, while waiting for the bus before a basketball game, or when she first came in the door of the school in the morning.

(As a side note, John Innes also employed the locker move when in 9th grade he offered me 10 dollars to switch lockers with him so he could have the locker next to a certain TB called S. I agreed, but John Innes didn’t really have any money because his father had spent it all on his political aspirations, and I don’t think he ever paid me. That was a bad deal on my part; I should have stuck with the locker.)

Step 4: Lead with the Flyers’ pin.

Mason would design the first actual contact with the TB to center on the Flyers’ pin, as noted above. In John Innes’ and my opinion, this is where the plan started to wobble. Mason would specify exactly what he would say to the TB as an opening salvo. This would be something like:

“Hey there B, I couldn’t help but see you hanging out by your locker here. I wonder if you’ve seen my new Philadelphia Flyers pin?“

Now I don’t know a huge amount about hitting on women, but I know a little bit, and I’m just not sure this is the right first move. Guys who are really good at picking up women (I’m not referring to the super sus subculture of PUAs, but to individual guys who just happen to have a lot of game) usually start with something a little more open-ended, and also maybe focussed on some aspect of the girl, not one of their own accessories. I mean I don’t know, maybe this can work—can you picture a guy at a bar approaching a woman and saying something like:

“Hey there, I don’t know you but I just wanted to let you know I bought this new scarf today. Isn’t it something?”

The more I look at it the more I lean no. The Flyers’ pin opener was not, however, the biggest issue with Mason’s approach. The biggest issue was that he expected the TB to come back with a very specific, indeed exact, reply.

Step 5: Elicit a specific TB response.

After Mason had asked the TB to check out his Flyers’ pin, she was supposed to come back with the right answer, which is this case would be something like:

“Wow there Mason Anderson. I didn’t know you had a new Flyers pin. That’s a pretty sexy pin you got there.”

Now I respect the effort that Mason put into his plans, but I’m sorry, this is just all wrong. First of all, this is a pretty unlikely answer for a TB. I mean, something like this is theoretically possible; however there are a lot of other possibilities that Mason was not accounting for. You see, he needed the TB to stick pretty much exactly to the script in order to get to his next move. But the problem was, the TB didn’t have the script in advance. I mean imagine you’re a TB and some medium dorky guy comes up to you and flashes his new Flyers’ pin. I think you might respond in one of the following ways, ranging from more to less promising:

i) “I haven’t seen your pin. Where did you get it?”

ii) “Who are the Philadelphia Flyers?”

iii) “Why are you showing me this?”

iv) “What are you talking about?”

v) “You’re weird. Go away.”

My theory is that Mason really needed to be prepared for all of these possible responses, and many others. He needed, in other words, to build a little flexibility into his plan. And John Innes and I would tell him this.

“I don’t know Mason, I mean the Flyers’ pin is great and all, but I don’t think you can count on her telling you it’s sexy. She might come back with something else you know.”

“No,” Mason would reply. “She’ll come back with what I have planned. It’ll work.”

But she wasn’t going to come back with what he had planned. She just wasn’t. John Innes and I knew this, but there was no talking Mason out of it. Plan B was full steam ahead.

Step 6: Get to the end game.

After the TB came back with the right Flyer’s pin response, the next two items in the plan would be designed to get Mason to the close. This would go like something like this:

Mason: This is a sexy pin. But it’s not as sexy as you are.

TB: Oh my god, you’re so charming and funny.

Now, the dialogue is approximate, however the idea remained the same—the conversation had to go exactly this way. In military circles there is a saying that goes something like “no battle plan survives the first shot fired” or whatever. The point being, once a campaign kicks off there is no telling what the actual sequence of events is going to be. A good plan, in war, with TBs, or just in life in general, needs to be adjustable. Or, in NLP terms, the planner needs to understand that the map is not the territory. Mason had the map, but his map was not going to get him safely though the territory.

In any case, by this point Plan B would be pretty far advanced. It was time to seal the deal.

Step 7: Close.

This stage, obviously, was where Mason would throw down his final zinger and the TB would be won. The last part of Plan B would have Mason saying something like:

“I know I’m charming and funny. I guess I just can’t help it. Hey I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you and me get together and call ourselves an institute?”

And the TB would swoon into his arms.

=====

Now, we have already identified a number of holes in Mason Anderson’s Seven-Step Method for Picking Up Women. And these holes are significant. But the biggest hole in Plan B, or Plan C, and any of his other plans is that he never tried to implement any of them even once. All of this, the casual approach, the Flyers’ pin, the elaborate conversational sequencing, was entirely theoretical. Mason would talk about Plan B incessantly, workshop it with us, and generally refine and tinker with it, but he would never actually put in to the test. I don’t know why this was. Was it because Mason knew the TBs were out of his league and just enjoyed fantasizing about his campaigns? Or did he actually intend to put Plan B into practice sometime and just never had the nerve to try it? Or, perhaps, the plan was never totally good enough in his own eyes and just needed that last little tweak to get it perfect? I don’t know, but man were Plan B and Plan C entertaining.

Today Mason lives in the tri cities area of Washington State where he messes around with nuclear energy or something, believe it or not. In his free time he makes a lot of pizza and instagrams about it. I believe he has also had some success on the Tinder there—John Innes told me he was mixed up with at least one women of that ilk a few years back. I’ve never met any of Mason’s Tinder connections, and I don’t know if they are TBs or not, but I know one thing. Deep down Mason still wants to lead with that Flyer’s pin.

to be continued…

Dedication: For Mason, you totally rock baby.

Postscript: It turns out that Mason Anderson will be cooking pizza for my brother Mike’s wedding this coming summer. Weddings are a good place to score, so I do hope he is working on a plan. Pizza might just be a better hook than the Flyers…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…