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In Defense of Conor Oberst

Note: This essay focuses on the songwriting of Conor Oberst and the broader arc of his work as a writer and performer. It does not attempt to settle every critical debate about his career or evaluate the many shifting narratives that have surrounded him over the years.

Instead, the argument here is simpler: when listeners return to the songs themselves — especially pieces like “Cape Canaveral,” “Easy/Lucky/Free,” and “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For” — the caricature of Oberst as merely an overwrought diarist becomes difficult to sustain. Whatever one thinks of the mythology around him, the writing continues to reward careful listening.

For more than twenty years now it has been fashionable to treat Conor Oberst as a kind of permanent adolescent: the patron saint of overwrought confession, the boy genius who mistook emotional intensity for wisdom and simply never grew out of it. Even listeners who admired the early records sometimes adopt a gentle condescension when talking about him now. Those songs were powerful, they say, but they belonged to a particular moment — a moment of youthful melodrama that serious listeners eventually leave behind.

The outline is familiar. Too many feelings. Too many words. Too much trembling urgency in the voice. Somewhere along the way Oberst became shorthand for the idea that emotional sincerity, taken too far, turns embarrassing.

But like many tidy cultural narratives, this one collapses as soon as you start listening carefully again.

The first thing worth remembering is that Oberst began writing and recording music at an age when most people are still learning how to articulate their own thoughts. The early Bright Eyes records captured something very specific: the internal weather of late adolescence and early adulthood. The confusion, the moral absolutism, the sudden swings between despair and hope. Critics often call this melodrama, but melodrama is sometimes just another word for emotional honesty before the world teaches you to disguise it.

What Oberst did during those years was document the process of becoming a person. The songs are full of doubt, self-contradiction, and grand declarations that may not survive contact with reality. But that is exactly how young consciousness works. It moves through extremes. It searches for certainty and then dismantles it. Listening to those records now is less like hearing a performance than like reading a diary written in real time while the author tries to understand himself.

The voice, which so many critics found grating, was central to that effect. Oberst sang as if the words were arriving at the exact moment he needed them. The wavering pitch, the occasional cracks, the sense of someone pushing language slightly faster than it could comfortably travel — all of that created the feeling of urgency. It sounded like a mind thinking out loud.

The strange thing about Oberst’s career is that this intensity became the very thing people later held against him. Emotional transparency, once celebrated as authenticity, gradually hardened into caricature. Listeners who had grown older began to treat the songs as artifacts from a younger self they preferred not to revisit. Oberst did not change enough for some critics, while for others he changed too much.

But the best way to understand his writing is to look closely at several songs that capture the full range of what he does. “Cape Canaveral,” from his 2008 solo record, is often cited by fans as one of his finest achievements, and for good reason. The song moves with a calm, reflective confidence, drifting through memory, regret, and travel before arriving at a quietly devastating insight: “Every time I try to pick up the pieces / Something shatters.” The writing has none of the frantic urgency critics associate with Oberst. Instead it feels mature, patient, almost philosophical — proof that his gift for emotional clarity did not disappear when he left his early twenties.

Another example arrives with “Easy/Lucky/Free,” one of the defining songs from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The track looks outward rather than inward, sketching a world where technology and surveillance gradually erode the illusion of personal freedom. The chorus lands with a mixture of dread and irony that feels more prophetic with every passing year. What might once have sounded like youthful paranoia now reads as a remarkably prescient meditation on the digital age.

And then there is “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For,” perhaps the most quietly devastating song of Oberst’s middle period. The track unfolds with almost conversational simplicity, recounting memories of youth, friendship, and the slow arrival of adult responsibility. By the time the final lines arrive — “You said that you hate my suffering / And you understood / And I said that I love you too” — the song has achieved something rare: a portrait of adulthood that feels honest without becoming cynical.

Taken together, these songs reveal the real architecture of Oberst’s songwriting. Beneath the reputation for emotional excess lies a writer deeply concerned with memory, time, and the fragile ways people try to make sense of their lives. His best work captures the moment when experience shifts from confusion into recognition — when a half-formed feeling finally finds the right words.

Another reason Oberst’s work continues to resonate is that he writes from inside experience rather than from a critical distance. Many songwriters polish their observations until the emotional edges disappear. Oberst tends to leave the edges intact. His songs preserve the awkwardness, the uncertainty, the half-formed thoughts that accompany real moments of reflection. The result is sometimes messy, occasionally excessive, but often uncannily recognizable.

This quality also explains why Oberst has remained so influential among younger songwriters. He helped create a space in indie music where vulnerability could coexist with literary ambition. The songs suggested that personal confession and careful craft were not mutually exclusive. For a generation of listeners trying to articulate their own emotional lives, that permission mattered.

None of this means that every Oberst record works equally well, or that every lyric survives scrutiny. A career built on openness will inevitably produce uneven moments. But the larger body of work tells a more interesting story than the caricature of a permanently anguished songwriter. It shows an artist who has spent decades documenting the slow evolution of a restless mind.

And perhaps that is the real reason Oberst continues to provoke such divided reactions. His songs refuse to adopt the protective distance that many listeners eventually develop toward their own past selves. Instead they remain exposed — still searching, still uncertain, still willing to ask questions that adulthood often teaches us to bury under routine.

In that sense the emotional intensity people once dismissed as youthful melodrama begins to look different. It becomes a record of someone refusing to abandon the difficult work of feeling deeply about the world. For listeners willing to meet him there, the songs offer something rare in modern music: the sound of a consciousness continuing to unfold, one uneasy thought at a time.

Note: This is the third piece in our series “In Defense Of.” Iy you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the one on Mark Kozelek. You can access it below.

In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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In Defense of Mark Kozelek

Note: This essay addresses the artistic approach of Mark Kozelek as a songwriter. It does not attempt to evaluate or adjudicate the various personal controversies that have circulated around him in recent years, many of which remain publicly disputed and complex.

The focus here is narrower: how Kozelek’s long-form, diaristic songwriting works as a musical method — particularly in songs like “Ali/Spinks II,” where ordinary details accumulate into something emotionally larger. Whatever one thinks of the artist as a person, the question of how the music itself functions remains worth examining on its own terms.

For several years now it has been fashionable to treat Mark Kozelek as something like an exhausted case: a brilliant songwriter who wandered too far into self-absorption, whose songs became too long, too diaristic, too willing to linger on the small debris of daily life. Even some longtime listeners have adopted the shorthand. Early records were masterpieces; later ones were indulgent. The verdict sounds tidy. But like most tidy verdicts in music, it collapses as soon as you start listening again.

The basic complaint about Kozelek’s later work is well known. The songs stretch past ten minutes. The lyrics catalog ordinary events: hotel rooms, meals, airports, old friends, television shows, half-remembered conversations. The narrator seems to be narrating his own day in real time, occasionally pausing to note a basketball score or a passing cloud of melancholy. To critics raised on the discipline of verse-chorus songwriting, this can sound like navel-gazing elevated to an art form.

But the strange thing about Kozelek’s music is that the minutiae are not actually the point. They are the atmosphere. His songs work less like traditional compositions and more like extended walks through consciousness. The grocery lists, the memories of old bands, the stray anecdotes about touring musicians — all of it forms the texture through which something else slowly emerges. A mood. A sense of time passing. The feeling of being a person moving through an ordinary day while carrying decades of memory.

The best way to understand this approach is to listen carefully to “Ali/Spinks II,” one of the central tracks from Benji. The song begins almost casually, recounting the death of Kozelek’s cousin and drifting through fragments of memory connected to that loss. There is no obvious structure, no chorus that arrives to organize the material. Instead the narrative moves the way memory moves: sideways, unpredictably, circling back on itself. The details accumulate slowly until the emotional core of the story becomes unavoidable. What begins as a series of seemingly unrelated observations eventually reveals itself as a meditation on grief, family history, and the strange ways tragedy ripples through ordinary life. The song is long, messy, and digressive — and it works precisely because of those qualities. “Ali/Spinks II” is not merely an example of Kozelek’s method; it is the test case. If the listener accepts the logic of that song, the entire later catalog suddenly makes sense.

This approach did not come out of nowhere. Kozelek has always been a writer drawn to the long arc of a song. Even in the early days of Red House Painters, the music moved at a patient pace, letting chords hang in the air while the lyrics circled around regret, nostalgia, and quiet observation. What changed later was not the impulse but the level of exposure. The lens moved closer. The songs stopped pretending to be about characters and admitted they were about the singer himself.

For some listeners that shift felt like a loss of mystery. But there is another way to hear it. Kozelek’s later records are essentially field recordings of a mind at work. They capture the strange mixture of memory, boredom, humor, irritation, and melancholy that makes up ordinary consciousness. Most songwriters edit this material down to the highlights. Kozelek leaves it mostly intact. The result is less like reading a poem and more like sitting beside someone during a long drive while they talk about whatever crosses their mind.

The famous outbursts that circulate online tend to obscure this. Kozelek has never been particularly careful about public performance of personality, and that roughness often dominates the narrative around him. When he released the song “War on Drugs: Suck My Dick,” a public feud with The War on Drugs instantly became the headline. The track was petty, funny, abrasive, and entirely unnecessary — which is to say it was perfectly consistent with the same impulsive candor that fuels his songwriting. Kozelek has never seemed particularly interested in polishing the public version of himself.

But the deeper argument about his music usually centers on the accusation of self-indulgence. Why should listeners care about the details of a songwriter’s daily routine? Why should a song wander through anecdotes about hotels, meals, or aging friends? Why should anyone sit through ten or twelve minutes of conversational narrative when a tight three-minute composition could deliver the emotional payload more efficiently?

Kozelek himself once answered that question in a line that perfectly captures his stubborn philosophy: he said he liked playing shows for “dudes in tennis shoes.” The phrase sounds casual, almost dismissive, but it carries a small manifesto inside it. He is not writing for critics parsing lyrical elegance or for industry tastemakers deciding what counts as proper songcraft. He is writing for ordinary listeners who recognize the shape of everyday life — the boredom, the odd digressions, the strange humor that creeps into conversation when people talk long enough.

In that sense Kozelek’s songs resemble a certain kind of late-night storytelling more than traditional music. Imagine someone sitting across the table recounting a memory that begins in one place, wanders through several unrelated details, circles back to a childhood story, and eventually lands somewhere unexpectedly moving. The emotional impact arrives not through compression but through accumulation. You spend time inside the story until its meaning quietly surfaces.

The length of the songs, which so many critics treat as evidence of indulgence, is actually central to the effect. Time itself becomes part of the composition. The listener settles into the rhythm of the narration. Small details begin to gather weight simply because they have been allowed to exist long enough. By the time the song ends, the ordinary events that seemed trivial at the beginning have become part of a larger emotional landscape.

This is not the only way to write songs, and it is certainly not the most efficient one. But efficiency has never been Kozelek’s artistic goal. His music belongs to a tradition of artists who treat the everyday as worthy of sustained attention. The diary becomes the canvas. The passing moment becomes the subject. Instead of distilling experience into a polished metaphor, the songwriter simply records the experience itself and trusts that meaning will accumulate over time.

If that approach sometimes borders on excess, it also produces moments that feel uncannily real. A stray observation about a friend can suddenly open into a meditation on aging. A casual mention of a hotel room can turn into a reflection on the strange loneliness of touring musicians. The emotional truth arrives sideways, hidden among the details of ordinary life.

Which brings us back to the central criticism: that the songs are too long, too detailed, too inward. All of that is true. But it may also be precisely why they matter. Kozelek’s music asks listeners to do something that modern culture rarely encourages anymore — to slow down, to sit with the flow of another person’s thoughts, to accept that meaning often appears gradually rather than in a neatly packaged chorus.

Not every listener will have patience for that. But for those willing to spend time inside the songs, the reward is a strangely intimate experience: the feeling of inhabiting someone else’s memory stream for a while. The tennis shoes crowd, in other words, may understand something that critics occasionally miss. Sometimes the most honest art does not arrive in the form of a perfectly shaped statement. Sometimes it arrives as a long conversation that refuses to end too quickly.

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In Defense of Ryan Adams

Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.

Epigraph:

“When the stars go blue.”
— Ryan Adams

For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?

Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.

When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.

That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.

But the songs remain.

Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.

None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.

What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.

And that distinction matters.

One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.

If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.

The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.

In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.

The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.

There is something oddly honest about that.

The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.

That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.

The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.

Dedication

For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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On the Cultural Field Around St.Georges School and Spokane, WA

Epigraph:

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, “Still a Cage”

I. — Launch vs. Escape

I didn’t understand Spokane’s sexual landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was secretly wild and not so secretly wild, a place where desire slipped between the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and everyone knew more than they admitted. St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving toward other things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s real wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. It was erotic energy humming under a conservative façade, the kind that starts as a pulse under the collar and ends in the kind of self-destruction people call “mistakes” years later. The city pretended to be a grid of churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, and Rotary breakfasts, but the truth lived in back booths, river pullouts, dim bars off Division, and the long shadows of marriages that weren’t working. People were hungry. Not for sin—Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that—but for escape, for intensity, for feeling anything sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a diet. And because the city couldn’t admit that hunger, it acted it out sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, private shame masked as judgment, the moral guardians always the ones who ran the hottest at night. And threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and then vanished for weeks, living with the kind of unashamed freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I only caught the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult investigator returning later, it became obvious: the cage wasn’t made of rules, it was made of denial. And denial is the most erotic fuel a city can generate.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it pretended to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge. I didn’t learn about Spokane from St. George’s; I learned about leaving from St. George’s. The city taught the rest. And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that used to feel like separate worlds, and I can see the seams of the place with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The old stories fall apart under scrutiny, but the architecture remains. The church parking lots. The dim bars. The hills where people walked off their secrets. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to investigate it. And once you see the truth of a place, you can’t unsee the way it shaped you—even after you’ve run as far as you can from the cage you didn’t know you were inside.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the big, cinematic pieces people imagine. It’s the little house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies — the kind of small domestic details that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t a fantasy; it was texture. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up. And those drives with my dad to Foothills — Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then it was still just Foothill Park — the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That’s the part that gets me now: how effortlessly belonging felt there. You didn’t have to explain yourself, or hide anything, or decode a system of silences. You just drove up into the hills and the world opened without consequence. Spokane had its wildness, but California had a kind of spaciousness that felt like permission. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. It’s not that I necessarily want to move back — it’s that a part of me never really left. California became the template for what openness feels like, the first geography that suggested freedom wasn’t an escape but a way of being.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college — me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, taking the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself. In the picture, Ian’s in front, already carrying that air of someone who had strong, fully-formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half-becoming himself. That version of me had no understanding of cages. He just assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line hits the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time — I heard it as geography. That’s Spokane for me: a place I ran from without realizing I was running, a system I slipped out of long before I understood the bars. It wasn’t trauma; it wasn’t exile. It was something quieter and stranger — a recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit. California taught me what openness felt like. Japan gave me the life I wanted. But Spokane shaped the part of me that investigates, the part that reads cities like case files, the part that knows desire and denial can live under the same roof for decades without ever breaking stride. When I hear “Still a Cage,” it’s not about being trapped. It’s about understanding, finally, the architecture of the place you outgrew — and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But the line only lands when you come back years later, driving those old streets like an investigator, realizing the cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you see the silence for what it was, the lock falls open, and you know for sure you’re never going back.

Epigraph

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, Still a Cage

I.

I didn’t understand Spokane’s emotional landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was a place where desire moved quietly through the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and where people knew more than they said aloud.

St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving towardother things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. Not theatrical or decadent, but quiet and unresolved, an erotic energy humming beneath a conservative façade. The city presented itself as orderly: churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, Rotary breakfasts. But the real emotional life lived in the margins—in dim bars off Division, in river pullouts, in the long shadows of marriages that had settled into routine.

People weren’t hungry for scandal. Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that. They were hungry for intensity, for escape, for moments that felt sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a daily diet. And because that hunger couldn’t be named directly, it surfaced sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, judgment masking private confusion, moral certainty coexisting with private longing.

Threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and vanished for weeks, living with a freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I caught only the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult returning later, the pattern became clearer: the cage wasn’t made of rules. It was made of denial. And denial, more than rebellion, is what gives a place its quiet erotic charge.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it seemed to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the broader ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge.

I didn’t learn Spokane from St. George’s; I learned leaving from St. George’s. The school offered direction without interpretation, preparation without excavation. The city supplied the rest.

And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that once felt like separate worlds, and the seams of the place become visible with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The stories shift, but the architecture remains. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to see it.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the cinematic version people imagine. It’s the small house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies—the quiet domestic textures that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t fantasy; it was atmosphere. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up.

And those drives with my dad to Foothills—Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then simply Foothill Park—the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That detail lands differently now: belonging there felt effortless. You didn’t have to decode silences or manage contradictions. You simply moved through the hills and the world opened without consequence.

Spokane had its wildness, but California offered spaciousness, a geography that suggested freedom didn’t need to be disguised. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. Not because I want to return permanently, but because a part of me never fully left. California became the first place that suggested openness wasn’t escape but orientation.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college—me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, riding the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself.

In the picture, Ian stands in front, already carrying that air of someone with strong, fully formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half becoming himself. That version of me had no concept of cages. He simply assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line lands the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time. I heard it as geography.

That’s Spokane for me: a place I left without fully understanding why, a system I slipped out of long before I could see its contours. It wasn’t trauma or exile. It was something quieter—the recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit.

California taught me openness. Japan gave me the life I wanted. Spokane shaped the investigator—the part of me that reads cities like case files, that sees how desire and denial can coexist for decades without ever openly colliding.

When I hear “Still a Cage,” it isn’t about entrapment. It’s about understanding the architecture of a place you outgrew and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But clarity arrives only later, when distance converts memory into interpretation.

The cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you recognize the silence for what it was, the lock falls open. Not with anger or triumph, but with quiet certainty. You understand that leaving was less an escape than a translation—and that some places shape you most profoundly precisely because you cannot return to them.

Dedication

For Brookie

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On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations

Note: This piece collects observations gathered across decades of nights out in Japan — moments that, taken individually, felt minor but over time revealed a coherent social pattern. The essay is not intended as a warning against nightlife, nor as an indictment of any particular place or person. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the subtle choreography that unfolds in urban night economies, where invitation, performance, and commerce intersect in ways that are rarely dramatic but often instructive.

The distinction between macro-touts and micro-touts emerged gradually. It reflects less a rigid taxonomy than a traveler’s growing sensitivity to atmosphere, tone, and the shifting boundaries between hospitality and transaction. Most encounters described here were neither dangerous nor traumatic; they were moments of mild disorientation that ultimately sharpened perception and deepened appreciation for the social intelligence required to navigate unfamiliar environments.

Japan remains one of the safest and most generous countries in the world to explore at night. The experiences recounted here are offered not as cautionary tales but as small pieces of ethnography — reminders that every city contains micro-economies of possibility, and that learning to read their signals is part of the quiet education that travel provides.

If there is a broader lesson, it is simply this: nightlife is built on invitations, and the skill of the traveler lies not in accepting or rejecting them categorically, but in recognizing the scripts they carry and choosing, with awareness, when to participate.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like “Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl.” You can find it here.

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Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. Umineko

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

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

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

II. ING

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Mafia Bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Stinboat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Concrete Bar

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

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

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

VI. Taxi → Home

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

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

Sleep followed naturally.

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

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

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On Transference in Artistic Collaboration

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
With the beat in now…
And your chest came out
’Cause you weren’t too scared.

Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”

There is transference.
There just is.

Matthew Thomas

I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal

It’s real because it’s grounded.
It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.

That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.

In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.

But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.

What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.

The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent.
It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive.
It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.

And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:

We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.

We remain in our own psyches.
We allow resonance without fusion.
We allow voltage without blur.
We allow openness without myth-making.

This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.

In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.

History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.

That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.

The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.

But the boundary holds.

Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.

Openness with form.
Exposure with spine.
Laid open, but not laid bare.

This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.

The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.

And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.

This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.

Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:

I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…

Openness is not the danger.
Losing oneself inside openness is.

This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:

Can I remain open without giving myself away?
Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny?
Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it?
Can I collaborate without collapsing?
Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?

The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.

Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.

Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.

The adult self leads.
The trio leads.
The work leads.

And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:

What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?

That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.

Dedication

For the collaborators:
the drifters,
the drop-ins,
the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.

You keep the corners loose
and the truth a little crooked.
My kind of people.

Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.

Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale
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On the Sarah Lawrence Kids: My Take

Contextual Note

This reflection is inspired by reporting on the case of Lawrence “Larry” Ray, whose actions at Sarah Lawrence College became the subject of extensive journalism and later criminal prosecution. Ray, the father of a student, embedded himself within a group of students and, over a period of years, exerted psychological and material control that culminated in multiple federal charges. In 2022, he was convicted in U.S. federal court on counts including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking, following testimony detailing patterns of manipulation, coercion, and abuse.

The essay above is not intended as investigative reporting or a comprehensive account of the case. Rather, it uses widely documented elements of the Sarah Lawrence story as a lens for examining broader dynamics of influence, consent, authority, and psychological boundary erosion. Readers interested in detailed factual accounts are encouraged to consult court records and major journalistic coverage of the case.

Epigraph
“I can’t force myself to say something
More than I can think of a thing to do
Any more than you can pull yourself out of nothing
When there is nothing forcing you to.”
— Bedhead, Extramundane

This isn’t really a story about sex, crime, or even a “cult” in the way headlines tend to frame it. It’s a story about how consent can be quietly eroded — not through force or spectacle, but through a gradual shift in tempo. An adult inserts himself into a group of bright, searching young people and begins, almost imperceptibly, to reorganize how they interpret their own experience. Nothing dramatic happens at first. There is conversation, attention, fluency in the language of care. The early moves feel supportive, even mentorship-like. And that is precisely why they work. By the time anything overtly troubling emerges, the conditions for real choice have already thinned out. The ground tilts before anyone recognizes that it’s moving.

The students drawn in aren’t naïve caricatures or damaged stereotypes. They’re thoughtful, introspective, and accustomed to treating their interior lives as material for reflection. That habit, usually a strength, becomes a vulnerability in the presence of someone adept at narrating other people’s feelings back to them. The dynamic isn’t driven primarily by charisma or intellectual brilliance. It’s driven by tempo. Boundaries aren’t crossed so much as softened. A late-night conversation becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a shared framework. A framework becomes dependency. And when harm finally appears, it doesn’t feel like a clear rupture between “yes” and “no.” It feels like a choice being made inside a structure already built.

There is often a moment when the room shifts, but it rarely looks like a turning point. Someone says they’re exhausted, and exhaustion is reframed as a signal with hidden meaning. Confusion becomes resistance. Ordinary hesitation becomes evidence of deeper moral or psychological blockage. Each reframing lands with the texture of insight rather than coercion. Over time, reactions are no longer treated as self-authorizing; they become data awaiting interpretation by the person occupying the role of guide. The students aren’t agreeing with an authority figure so much as agreeing with a version of themselves that figure has begun to narrate. When narrative voice drifts outward like that, autonomy doesn’t vanish dramatically. It diffuses.

The difficulty in describing situations like this lies in the absence of clear theatrical markers. There is no singular moment of surrender, no obvious villain/victim tableau. The participants often experience themselves not as surrendering but as collaborating. They believe they are doing the work, gaining insight, moving toward growth. Particularly for intellectually curious students, the promise of self-understanding is compelling. When directives are framed as pathways to clarity, resistance can feel like failure rather than protection. The structure tightens without ever announcing itself as such.

What emerges from observing cases like this is less outrage than a kind of double vision. On one level, the mechanics appear familiar: authority built through interpretive fluency, dependence fostered through narrative control, legitimacy derived from proximity to vulnerability. On another level, the situation remains unsettling precisely because the openings are so ordinary. The dynamic does not depend on extraordinary charisma or theatrical manipulation. It depends on recognizable human needs: attention, guidance, belonging, the desire to make sense of one’s own experience. Intelligence does not necessarily protect against these forces; in certain contexts, it can deepen engagement with them.

That recognition invites a measure of humility. The distance between observer and participant is not always as large as hindsight suggests. What protects one person in a given moment may be temperament, timing, or simple circumstance rather than superior discernment. The impulse to locate safety in personal invulnerability can obscure the broader lesson: susceptibility is situational, and the pathways into these dynamics are rarely marked by obvious warning signs. Often they look like ordinary conversations extended just a little too far.

If the Bedhead lyric offers a frame, it is through its quiet attention to inertia. The line does not describe dramatic coercion but a subtler erosion of agency — the sensation of trying to act from a place that has already been partially displaced. “You can’t pull yourself out of nothing when there is nothing forcing you to” captures the paradox at the center of this story: the absence of overt pressure can itself become constraining. Consent may appear intact even as its underlying architecture shifts. The drift is gradual, almost ambient, and therefore difficult to name in real time.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the ordinariness of the openings. The story is not about an extraordinary manipulator but about how easily authority can be constructed within familiar relational spaces, and how collaboration can feel indistinguishable from growth until perspective changes. The lesson, if there is one, is less about condemnation than awareness — a recognition of how narrative authority operates, how tempo shapes consent, and how autonomy can narrow without any single decisive moment marking its loss.

Dedication
For those who walked.
And for those who couldn’t.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy my other piece on educational institutions. You can read it here.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/on-my-seven-year-under-dr-charles-fox/
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On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part III: Aftermath

Note: This is the third of a three part series. Part I is here and Part II is here.

Epigraph I:

Oh my sentimental fool

Lloyd Cole

Epigraph II:

Was the risk I sent to you received?

Metric

Leaving Oxford / Returning to Japan

I walked the five minutes back to the hotel after the bus pulled away. My wife was going on to visit friends in Germany and I would have about five days alone in Kyoto after I got back to Japan. At the hotel I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I said a small prayer to the angels asking for grace to get through the day, showered, packed my things, and waited for the 8 AM car pickup.

I did not rush. Packing became a deliberate act, almost ritualistic in its pacing. I folded shirts one at a time, placed my notebook carefully into my bag, slipped the Tintin postcard between pages so it would not bend. Sue Tompkins went in next, followed by the charger, the toothbrush, the small practical objects that restore a sense of order after emotional disturbance. The room itself was modest — functional, forgettable in most respects — yet it felt oddly expanded, as if some invisible event had occurred there despite the absence of anything outwardly dramatic. Something had shifted in me, and the room seemed to hold the echo of that shift.

At the desk, I laid everything out for a moment, not to organize but simply to gather myself. The Mendoza Line was no longer playing, but the music had already done its work. The emotional charge it helped ignite remained present, circulating quietly beneath the surface. There was nothing to heighten or prolong; the effect was already internalized.

Around eight, the hire car arrived. The driver was polite, efficient, the kind of professional whose calm competence creates a reassuring neutrality. He helped with my bag, and we exchanged small talk as we pulled into traffic — London housing costs, wages, the persistent difficulty young people face in trying to establish themselves. On the radio, a news segment discussed the rising number of homeless families and children across the UK. Normally, such stories register as troubling but abstract statistics. That morning, however, the report landed differently. I found myself thinking about untethered lives, about how fragile the structures that hold people together can be, and how sometimes the tether itself is the only thing preventing a deeper psychological unraveling.

Traffic was light, and we arrived at the airport mid-morning. Inside, I purchased a simple breakfast — fruit, yogurt, coffee — and found a seat removed from the main flow of travelers. Airports are environments of constant movement, but solitude can still be carved out within them if one chooses carefully. I opened my Kindle and downloaded volumes four through six of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. It was not an act of escapism so much as orientation. I wanted narrative continuity, a long arc where identity unfolds gradually rather than collapsing under sudden pressure. Powell’s world offered lineage, structure, and a reassuring sense of temporal patience.

I texted Isobel. She responded almost immediately, and what followed was a long, bright thread of conversation carried across airport Wi-Fi. There was no sense of emotional comedown, no awkward reentry into ordinary distance — only continuation. The connection felt intact, natural, as if the meeting had established a channel that did not require reinforcement to remain open.

When boarding was called, the transition felt procedural rather than dramatic. The flight passed in a quiet blur of clouds, Molina songs, Powell’s prose, and intermittent thought. Beneath it all was a subtle ache under the ribs — not pain, not longing in any acute sense, but effect. A residual emotional state that did not demand resolution, only acknowledgment.

On the plane I read some Powell and listened to music. I remember playing “Two Suns in the Sunset” by Pink Floyd and being unexpectedly moved by it. I was in an emotional state — not overwhelmed, but open and exposed — and the flight passed quietly. I landed at Kansai Airport in the afternoon.

I landed in Japan first. My wife continued on to Germany to visit friends, and my son was in Australia on a school trip. I took the Haruka train back toward Kyoto. The wide seats and generous legroom made me feel welcomed back into my country of choice. Much as I had enjoyed England, I felt real relief in returning. There is a particular comfort in Japanese transit — the order, the space, the quiet efficiency — and my body recognized it immediately.

The house, when I entered it, was silent in a way that felt tangible. I carried that silence with unusual care, as if it were made of glass and might shatter if handled abruptly. Solitude is often restorative, but this solitude had an amplifying quality, heightening rather than settling internal experience.

That evening, I went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto. I ordered food and three craft beers and spoke casually with whoever happened to be nearby. Conversations were light, unstructured, yet I sensed an unusual responsiveness from people around me — as though I possessed a slightly elevated emotional voltage that others could detect without understanding its source. Even animals seemed to register it. Cats approached me with a familiarity that felt less coincidental than intuitive, as if some form of static had gathered on the soul.

I had no sense of impending crisis. No awareness that within three days I would walk into my principal’s office and offer my resignation

First Days Back

On my first full day back I did laundry and in the late afternoon went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto near Karasuma Oike. I don’t remember whether I texted or called Isobel that day, but I almost certainly did. At Takumiya I ordered sashimi and had a few craft beers from their rotating selection. I stayed longer than planned, talking lightly with whoever happened to be sitting nearby.

The next day was Tuesday and I went to work as scheduled. I checked the heat index readings as part of my summer administrative duties. Dr. Fox was on campus. Seeing him immediately shifted the emotional temperature of the day.

I have written elsewhere about my problems with Dr. Fox and I won’t revisit them in detail here. What matters for this story is that by that point I felt he had betrayed me and failed to show up when I most needed institutional support. Trust had already been damaged. Seeing him again after Oxford brought all of that to the surface at once.

We spoke briefly. Before I left, he asked me to come in the following day to help prepare a presentation he was scheduled to give to an alumni group. I had ghostwritten material for him many times before. Under normal circumstances I would have said yes without hesitation. This time I agreed anyway, even though I was already internally unstable and emotionally saturated.

It would not turn out well.

I returned to Takumiya each night that week. There was comfort in being present in public spaces while remaining largely anonymous. The balance allowed me to exist among others without the demands of deeper recognition. Meanwhile, at five in the evening Japan time — nine in the morning in London — Isobel and I spoke daily. The calls were not brief check-ins but sustained conversations lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Often she walked through a park while we spoke, and I imagined her surroundings as she described them, the geographical distance softened by conversational continuity.

During one of these calls, I told her that I wanted to write a book. Not about her specifically, but about the chain of experiences that led to meeting her and the clarity that encounter unexpectedly revealed. She understood immediately. More than that, she expressed a quiet appreciation for being part of that moment of ignition — not as subject matter but as catalyst.

At the same time, unresolved resentment toward Dr. Fox did not dissipate with distance. Instead, it sharpened. The baseball heatstroke issue lingered at the margins of thought, alongside a broader accumulation of professional frustrations: moments of perceived disrespect, ambiguous expectations, and a decade of service that increasingly felt like professionalism without true partnership. None of these tensions were new, but the emotional openness of the week amplified their weight. Background noise began to feel like pressure.

By Friday, when I walked into school, I was not consciously planning a decisive action, yet I sensed a degree of internal instability that made ordinary interactions feel precarious. When Dr. Fox called me into his office to request assistance with a presentation — a familiar pattern, a non-work day expectation framed as routine — the moment crystallized something that had been building long before Oxford. I resigned. The decision belonged to a larger narrative, but this story carries its immediate emotional context.

As the reality of resignation settled into my body, a quiet clarity followed. I knew I needed to speak with my wife. The conversation would not revolve around specifics — call durations, text counts, or the mechanics of connection — but around truth in its broader emotional sense.

She returned home Saturday night. With her presence, the house regained its weight: history, shared furniture, a past that possessed shape and gravity. We sat together without wine or any conversational buffer. The moment did not invite performance or gradual disclosure; it required directness.

“I quit,” I said. “And I met someone.”

She asked only one question.

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

She nodded, her response quiet and measured.

“Okay. Have fun on the phone.”

Nothing fractured dramatically in that moment. There was no raised voice, no immediate emotional rupture. Yet something subtle shifted — an alteration not of structure but of atmosphere. The past remained intact, but the future carried a slightly different texture. Nothing broke, but nothing stayed exactly the same.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday and Sunday arrived with a quietness that felt disproportionate to the events of the preceding week. For the first time in months, there was no alarm set for early administrative duties, no email requiring immediate response, no expectation of presence within the institutional rhythms that had long structured my days. I was off work — not merely for the weekend, but in a more consequential sense that I could not yet fully absorb. I would not return until 2022. The long-term ramifications of what had unfolded were already in motion, though at that moment they existed more as a distant horizon than as a lived reality whose contours could be clearly seen.

The weekend therefore carried a strange dual quality. On the surface, it resembled any other stretch of unstructured time: coffee in the morning, small household tasks, the slow pacing of hours unburdened by schedules. Beneath that surface, however, ran a persistent awareness that something fundamental had shifted. The scaffolding of daily life — work expectations, professional identity, habitual responsibilities — had loosened, and with its absence came both relief and a faint, almost disorienting spaciousness.

At five o’clock sharp Japan time, which was nine in the morning in the UK, I called Isobel. The timing became instinctive, a daily point of orientation that anchored the day before it fully began. She answered as she was waking, her voice carrying that soft mixture of sleep and recognition that collapses distance instantly. We picked up exactly where we had left off, as if conversation were a continuous thread rather than a sequence of separate exchanges. We talked and laughed easily, moving between subjects without effort — music, muses, love, the nature of intimacy, and the broader textures of life that surface when two people feel unexpectedly understood.

The calls possessed a quality that felt, at the time, almost transcendent. I experienced a heightened emotional state that bordered on euphoria, a sense of expansion difficult to articulate without risking exaggeration. There was an unmistakable feeling of being lifted beyond ordinary emotional gravity, as if the connection existed in a space slightly removed from daily constraint. For brief stretches, I felt powerful in a way that had little to do with control and everything to do with aliveness — the psychological equivalent of standing in clear light after months of muted color.

Yet even within that intensity, I carried a quiet awareness that such states are rarely sustainable. The experience felt too vivid, too precise in its timing, to belong to permanence. I understood, somewhere beneath the exhilaration, that what we were inhabiting was a moment granted rather than guaranteed. For the time being, however, there was a mutual permission to exist within that space without prematurely interrogating its future. We allowed the conversations to unfold fully, accepting their immediacy without insisting on outcome.

The rest of the weekend unfolded around those calls like a soft frame. I moved through ordinary activities — brief walks, small household routines, moments of shared quiet with my wife — with an undercurrent of emotional intensity that did not demand expression but remained unmistakably present. Silence felt less empty than suspended, as though the days themselves were pausing before the arrival of consequences not yet visible.

What remained most striking about that weekend was not any single event but the emotional totality it carried. The combination of resignation, solitude, reconnection, and emerging uncertainty produced a state that was both exhilarating and fragile. I was aware, even then, of the paradox inherent in the experience: the joy of discovery intertwined with the inevitability of complication, the brightness of connection shadowed by the knowledge of its precariousness.

That was the weekend. In its quiet span, I found myself inhabiting an emotional condition that was at once expansive and difficult, sustaining and destabilizing. I was, deeply and undeniably, in love — not in a settled or declarative sense, but in the raw, immediate way that accompanies sudden recognition. The feeling carried power and tenderness in equal measure, along with a subtle ache that suggested awareness of its limits even as it unfolded.

The Rest of September

The rest of September passed with a quality that is difficult to reconstruct in precise sequence. Days did not feel discrete or individually memorable; instead, they merged into a continuous emotional field in which time moved forward without the usual markers of routine. The absence of work removed one of the primary structures that normally segments experience, and without that scaffolding the month acquired a dreamlike texture. Moments were vivid while they occurred, yet quickly dissolved into the broader atmosphere of the period.

Isobel and I remained in frequent contact. We spoke most days and exchanged messages with a familiarity that no longer required initiation or explanation. The connection persisted, but the intensity that had defined the immediate aftermath of Oxford began, subtly, to dim. This was not a collapse or a dramatic withdrawal — rather, a gentle tapering, the natural adjustment that follows emotional peaks once they settle into the rhythm of distance and everyday life. The calls remained warm, often intimate, and still carried laughter and shared curiosity, but the sense of suspended transcendence that characterized the earlier weeks softened into something more ordinary.

My days were largely unstructured. Without professional obligations, I devoted time to my blog, experimenting with longer reflections and shorter fragments that attempted to capture the evolving emotional landscape. I also began broadcasting on Periscope, drawn to the immediacy of speaking into a space where audience and solitude coexist in curious balance. These activities did not replace work so much as fill the temporal vacuum it left behind, offering forms of expression that required presence without imposing rigid expectation.

Later in the month, I briefly reentered the professional sphere when I accompanied my senior students to a university fair at Canadian Academy. The experience felt almost surreal in its normalcy — a reminder of institutional rhythms that continued independently of my altered position within them. It was the only direct work engagement I undertook during that period, and its brevity reinforced the sense that September existed outside the usual professional narrative.

Toward the end of the month, I traveled for a significant assignment: serving as lead evaluator for the Diploma Programme at Western Academy of Beijing. The responsibility was substantial, and I approached it with an intention to perform at the level expected despite the internal shifts that characterized the preceding weeks. The visit, however, was complicated by dynamics within the evaluation team. The MYP leader’s preference for extended, often unfocused meetings created an atmosphere of fatigue, and Ashish, the Head from IB Singapore, lacked either the authority or inclination to redirect those discussions effectively. Evenings stretched late into the night. We ordered Indian food, reviewed documentation, and navigated the procedural demands of the evaluation with a professionalism that felt increasingly mechanical.

During one of those evenings, after the meetings had ended and the day’s formal responsibilities were complete, I called Isobel. We spoke at length, as had become our habit, but the conversation carried a different quality. She told me about a dream — one involving a fire and a cabin in the forest. In the dream, I was present. She mentioned that she had shared the dream with her therapist, a detail that suggested the experience held significance beyond casual narrative. Yet when I asked about it, she hesitated. She did not want to recount the dream in full. The partial disclosure introduced an ambiguity that I could not immediately interpret but nonetheless felt.

The moment did not register as conflict or withdrawal. There was no overt tension, no articulated concern. Yet something subtle shifted in the emotional atmosphere between us. The change was nearly imperceptible, detectable less through words than through absence — a slight alteration in tone, a new reticence where openness had previously been instinctive. It was not dramatic enough to prompt confrontation, but it carried the unmistakable sensation of movement beneath the surface.

As September drew to a close and October approached, our communication began to thin. Calls became less frequent, messages shorter, pauses between exchanges longer. The transition unfolded gradually, without a definitive turning point, but its trajectory felt clear. What had once been continuous conversation now required renewed initiation, and the ease that had defined our early exchanges gave way to a quieter, more tentative rhythm.

In retrospect, September stands as an interlude — a period suspended between ignition and resolution. The connection with Isobel remained meaningful and emotionally resonant, yet the conditions that had sustained its earlier intensity were shifting. October would bring both culmination and conclusion, the apex of the relationship’s emotional arc and, simultaneously, its quiet dissolution.

October

October arrived without ceremony, yet the emotional atmosphere surrounding it was markedly different from the suspended haze of September. I was not working at all during that month, and the absence of professional structure began to feel less like pause and more like rupture. Relations with my Principal, Dr. Fox, had deteriorated to an all-time low, and what had once been a strained but functional working relationship now carried open hostility.

We had two phone calls that month about university counseling, both of them angry and vitriolic. The topic itself — university advising — should have been procedural, collaborative, even routine. Instead, it became a flashpoint that exposed a deeper accumulation of mistrust and frustration. From my perspective, he was mishandling critical processes and creating unnecessary stress for students and staff alike, and I felt a growing sense of professional indignation that was difficult to contain. I shouted at him on the phone twice: once while walking along the river, my voice carrying across the water in a way that felt disproportionate to the setting, and once from a hotel bar in Osaka, where the contained intimacy of the space made the confrontation feel even more exposed. The bartenders glanced at me with a mixture of curiosity and quiet concern, clearly aware that they were witnessing a private eruption in a public place. Still, they allowed the moment to pass without interference, serving drinks and processing the bill with the practiced discretion that characterizes hospitality in Japan.

In mid-October, I traveled to Singapore for another IB training. This assignment positioned me as lead trainer for the Diploma Programme, with Duan Yorke serving as my deputy. Duan was excellent — steady, competent, and easy to work alongside — providing a professional counterbalance to the internal instability I carried with me. Yet despite the outward success of the training’s first day, something felt off internally. The emotional residue of the previous weeks, combined with the unresolved professional tensions, manifested as a quiet but unmistakable dissonance. On the second day, I found myself unable to maintain the expected level of engagement and withdrew temporarily to visit an esoteric healer. The visit itself belongs to another narrative thread, one that requires its own context, but its occurrence reflected the broader sense that I was searching for equilibrium in unconventional ways.

I returned and completed the training successfully, fulfilling my responsibilities with the professionalism the role demanded. Afterward, I remained in Singapore for an additional three days, using the time to decompress in a city that had long felt both familiar and emotionally neutral. The extended stay provided space for quiet reflection, casual wandering, and the gradual release of accumulated tension. Professionally, my obligations were minimal. I completed a handful of recommendation letters for early decision applicants — necessary work, given that our new counselor was struggling with the process — but beyond that, my professional identity remained largely suspended.

During this period, Isobel and I spoke only once. The call carried an unmistakable clarity: whatever had sustained the connection through September was no longer present. Whether the shift stemmed from the dream she had mentioned earlier, the simple realities of distance, or the natural fading that accompanies emotionally intense encounters, the result was the same. The spark had dissipated. What struck me most was the absence of dramatic heartbreak. I did not feel shattered or undone. Instead, I experienced a dull void — a quiet ache occupying the space where my love for her had briefly lived. It was less a wound than an absence, the emotional equivalent of a room that had been furnished and then emptied.

Singapore became the final location in which we spoke. After that call, the connection ended without formal closure, dissolving into silence rather than conflict.

When I returned to Japan, I settled back into writing and Periscoping with a renewed sense of creative urgency. Singapore itself had already played a role in that shift. In a billiards bar there, I drafted the first installment of The Thin Man, capturing fragments of narrative that would later expand into a larger project. The act of writing felt less like discipline and more like necessity — a way of metabolizing the preceding months and translating emotional experience into narrative form. Back in Japan, I continued this process through a series of essays that month, each exploring different facets of the transitional period.

October also introduced another unexpected connection. That month I met Mela, a woman from New York City in her thirties who was on medical leave from her work as a props assistant in film production. She was housesitting at the time and occupied her days in ways that mirrored my own state of suspended routine: scrolling Tinder, investigating potential matches with a mixture of curiosity and humor, and broadcasting extensively on Periscope. We connected easily, moving from initial interaction to Instagram texts and eventually long phone calls. Neither of us had pressing daily commitments, and the absence of structure created space for conversations that extended for hours — sometimes entire afternoons — ranging across music, film, personal history, and the broader philosophical questions that surface when time is abundant and emotional stakes feel low.

Months later, in December, I would meet her in person during a museum visit in Queens. The day unfolded quietly: exploring exhibits, browsing the bookstore, and sharing soup in the café. At one point, descending a staircase, she leaned into me in a way that felt intentional — a brief physical gesture that carried a hint of performative vulnerability. She said, “you saved me,” a remark delivered with ambiguity that allowed interpretation without demanding it. The moment marked the closest we came to flirtation, and even that remained understated, more symbolic than consequential.

Yet the defining emotional endpoint of October remained tied to Isobel. Singapore had been the final setting of our conversation, and with its conclusion, that chapter closed without spectacle. The month that began with professional conflict and emotional residue ended in creative ignition, quiet acceptance, and the emergence of new but less charged connections. October stood as both apex and dissolution — the culmination of an emotional arc that had begun in Oxford and the gentle fading that followed its brief, luminous peak.

Conclusion

Looking back on it now, the question that naturally arises is what, if anything, can be concluded from the experience. Memory has a way of smoothing edges while preserving emotional truths, and the passage of time introduces perspective without necessarily dissolving ambiguity. What remains is not a tidy narrative with a clear moral, but a series of impressions that continue to carry meaning long after the events themselves have receded.

Was I in love with Isobel? The answer, for me, is uncomplicated. Yes — absolutely. The feeling was immediate, powerful, and unmistakable in its emotional clarity. It was not rooted in fantasy or projection so much as in recognition: the sudden awareness that another person had seen and engaged parts of me that often remain peripheral or unarticulated. The connection possessed both intellectual and emotional intimacy, creating a sense of alignment that felt rare and therefore significant.

Whether she was in love with me is less certain. That question remains open, and perhaps necessarily so. Love does not always manifest symmetrically, nor does it require identical emotional timelines. What I do believe is that she was deeply drawn to me — enamored with qualities she named explicitly: my maturity, my openness, my willingness to explore symbolic and esoteric frameworks such as astrology, and what she described as my confirmed oddness. These were not superficial points of attraction but aspects of identity that shape how one moves through the world and forms connection. In response, she opened herself in ways that felt unprecedented in my experience with other women. The openness was emotional, conversational, and psychological, revealing vulnerabilities and reflections that suggested a level of trust both genuine and meaningful.

Yet that openness stopped short of the one dimension that often defines romantic relationships in conventional terms. Physical consummation never occurred. And still, I remain convinced that it might have — that the night of the red dress, that Wednesday evening suspended in quiet possibility, carried the potential for that final step had I not withdrawn. The decision to pull back was not rooted in lack of desire but in an instinctive recognition of complexity and consequence, a moment where restraint felt simultaneously protective and destabilizing.

At the beginning of this narrative, I wrote the line: “I did not sleep with her, so I had to quit my job.” On its surface, the statement reads as paradoxical or even absurd. Yet in a literal and emotional sense, it reflects the truth as I experienced it. Something that transpired between us disrupted my internal equilibrium in a way that extended far beyond the boundaries of romantic encounter. The experience did not create professional dissatisfaction where none existed; rather, it crystallized tensions that had long been present but insufficiently confronted. In the altered emotional state that followed Oxford, I could no longer compartmentalize or tolerate dynamics that had gradually eroded trust and professional fulfillment. The decision to resign emerged not as a reaction to Isobel but as a response made possible by the clarity her presence inadvertently catalyzed.

What, then, did Isobel have to do with that decision? It is a question without a definitive answer, and perhaps one that resists definitive resolution. Objectively, professional circumstances and romantic encounter belong to separate domains, each governed by distinct motivations and consequences. Yet subjective experience does not always honor such boundaries. In my mind and in my heart, the two remain inextricably linked. The emotional awakening precipitated by our connection illuminated aspects of my life that had grown untenable, accelerating a reckoning that might otherwise have unfolded more gradually.

In this sense, Isobel did not cause the decision but revealed the conditions that made it inevitable. The encounter functioned as catalyst rather than origin, exposing fractures already present and clarifying the need for change. The love I felt for her, whether reciprocated in equal measure or not, became intertwined with a broader transformation — one that encompassed identity, professional alignment, and creative direction.

Ultimately, the experience resists reduction to a singular meaning. It was neither tragedy nor triumph, neither mistake nor destiny. It was an encounter marked by intensity, ambiguity, and consequence, leaving behind a residue of insight rather than closure. If anything can be said with certainty, it is that the connection altered the trajectory of my life in subtle but enduring ways. The emotional truth of that alteration persists, even as the specifics of the relationship have receded into memory.

And perhaps that is the most accurate conclusion available: that some relationships are defined not by duration or outcome but by the clarity they introduce, the decisions they precipitate, and the self-recognition they make possible. In that sense, Isobel remains both part of my past and part of the internal landscape through which I continue to move — a presence whose significance lies less in what occurred than in what it revealed.

Coda

What remains, after the noise has faded and the chronology has settled into memory, is not regret but recognition. Isobel was never meant to be a permanent figure in my life; she was a moment of ignition, a flare that illuminated terrain I had been walking blindly for years. Loving her did not undo me — it clarified me. It revealed fault lines in my professional life, deepened my awareness of emotional possibility, and reminded me that connection can arrive without warning and depart without resolution while still altering everything that follows. Some encounters are not chapters but catalysts, and their power lies precisely in their brevity. I did not leave Oxford with a lover, but I left with a truth that could no longer be ignored, and that truth reshaped the decisions that defined the months and years ahead.

So the story does not end with loss but with transformation. The quiet house in Kyoto, the late-night calls across time zones, the resignation spoken into an office heavy with history, the essays written in the wake of confusion and clarity — all of it forms a single arc whose meaning resides not in permanence but in awakening. Isobel remains a presence not because of what we became, but because of what her existence made visible: that love, even when fleeting, carries the capacity to reorder a life. And in that sense, the experience stands complete. Not a tragedy, not a triumph, but a moment of rare and incandescent alignment — a brief crossing of paths that left behind warmth, ache, and an enduring knowledge that sometimes the most consequential relationships are the ones that arrive, burn bright, and quietly pass into memory while continuing to shape the person who remembers them.

Dedication:

For Isobel (aka Elodie). You completely changed my life. You are amazing. I will never forget you.

Note: If you linked this piece, you may also like my short story Simona below.

Simona
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On the Eventfulness of Pre-Eventified Incidents

Note: Today I’m revisiting a travel vignette about hierarchy, ritual, and the strange ways institutions manufacture “events.” It features a Big Man, a flawless flunky, Jung on surrealist art, and a ceremonial poster board signing that may or may not have meant anything at all. A quiet question lingered long after the ceremony ended. As always, judge for yourself.

If you enjoy this piece, you may enjoy my analysis of the underground rapper and crypto-hacker, Razzlekhan. You can find it here.

Yeah, I met Lou Reed and Patty Smith

It didn’t make me feel different

Conor Oberst

I visited China a number of years ago with a highly ranked member of my university structure and a flunky. My own participation was last-minute as I was filling in for someone else. I guess in a way I was a flunky too. Certainly it was the big man’s show from start to finish.

We visited a number of schools and also met with a business guy who was working very hard to transact with our group something so complex that I never even began to grasp the shape of it despite sitting in multiple meetings around the matter.

The trip was interesting for a number of reasons. The big man barely spoke to me for the first few days despite spending all day together. The schedule was brutal. I was reading Jung On Art on my phone as I was enrolled in on online course I never finished. Jung On Art is great and spends a lot of time on the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy. Finally the big man took a long look at me and said (in Japanese) “you read a lot, don’t you?” I confirmed this, and after that he spoke to me a little more.

The flunky was an archetype of the species. He handled the schedule, made the trains run on time. He did nothing else and deferred to the big man on absolutely every non-schedule related matter. My own strongest contribution to the proceedings was occupying the attention of a friend of the business man during an excruciatingly protracted whisky drinking session so that the business guy and the big man could talk turkey. I am not a great whisky drinker for some reason and making sensible small talk for three or four hours over whisky took a truly heroic effort.

The business guy had a kind of a house in a kind of a hotel, it was hard to say. A full staff was on hand to serve us a full course Chinese meal with white and red wine. This was before the whisky. It was a scene, all the way.

Anyway, all of that is context. I want to write about a specific incident that occurred when we visited one school. The principal who received us knew the big man and we were received by a group of about eight people. We got the school tour. Now, school tours are an occupational hazard in my line of work, and I have trained myself to be a durable recipient. But I don’t really like them. We went through the formalities, which predictably took forever. I daydreamed about Yves Tanguy and bed.

Toward the end of the tour we reached a wall with the school name or emblem on it. Here, the principal paused and asked the big man to write some Chinese characters on some poster board. This was to mark his visit, to consecrate it in a sense. The whole group fanned out into a kind of semi-circle and the big man went through a series of highly performative grimaces to index his deep thought. Or maybe he just didn’t know what to write. I certainly wouldn’t have. Finally he took the pen and with the pomposity of a South American dictator wrote a few characters. The message, to my recollection, was underwhelmingly anodyne. Basic. Or maybe it was gnomic and brilliant. In either case the audience made appropriately awed sounds. I murmured my own supposed appreciation–the role of the acolyte was there to be filled after all. The poster board was then displayed with a flourish on the wall.

At first blush I found the entire episode both deeply interesting and deeply narcissistic. However, the big man was invited to contribute some characters and he did so, so in that sense fair enough. Let’s zoom out a little before rushing to judgment.

You know how some restaurants and bars will have signed pictures of famous people that visited on their walls? Mickey Mantle, Bob Hope, Stallone, whatever. In these cases the visit of the celebrity was an event in the life of the establishment. It merited consecration across time. I understand this. But the big man was not a celebrity in any real sense. He was a university bureaucrat with a taste for acting like a big shot.

But maybe I’m seeing this all wrong. Because there was actually a hint of the classical in the occasion. A host had received an honored guest. The honored guest was asked to bestow words of wisdom and afforded space to do so. The whole performance was approached with apparent complete sincerity by all involved. I was probably the only one not acting in good faith. My feelings at the time were the same as they are now; on the one hand the whole thing was super pompous, on the other hand it had an old-world ceremony that I am not exactly against. An event should be eventful–my little motto–may at times create an unrealistically high bar for situations to rise to. Still, I have a nagging feeling that this visit was not of a sufficiently high caliber or general import to require consecration in kanji.

You know how in the old days a person would take a letter of introduction with them when visiting a new country and would receive an audience on the basis of this kind of letter? That’s probably an almost entirely lost art. When you presented someone with a letter of introduction, as I imagine it, you were then received. Your visit was authorized and elevated into a thing, an event. The eventification of aspects of life is important, even vital, however maybe we are going about the equation backwards. I go to see a lot of live music and at the end of the show the band will often gather at a table to sign merchandise and such. The opportunity to meet the band, if offered, is cool–I’m all behind it. However I myself often skip these lines, even if I love the band. This is because the chance to meet the band and have an experience of doing so is a built-in aspect of the entire evening and therefore pre-eventified so to speak. It’s still cool, but I’m not sure pre-eventified events are best positioned to be eventful. The true event takes place without being pre-planned. The true event emerges and cannot be structured. Most of the time when I see a supposed event transpire, an opening ceremony of some event for example that has been obviously rehearsed, I can barely suppress a yawn. In the immortal words of The Replacements, “color me impressed.”

The epigraph for this piece is from Conor Obrest’s 2016 song “Next of Kin.” It’s a jaded coda to a meeting that we might have supposed would have been eventful, and also a wry recognition that whatever happens to us we are always left with ourselves again. I saw a man sign a poster board. It didn’t make me feel different.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “On the Centrality of the No Helmet Law.” Available below.

On the Centrality of the No Helmet Law