Posted on by Matt Thomas

For Elodie, My Baby: A Love Poem

Note: I spent about a week with Elodie eight years ago. I fell madly, historically in love. Obviously. She is absolutely stunning and took my breath away. I was beyond gaga and remain so to this day.

She is my one and only baby. Naturally. My darling, my sweetheart, my lover, my queen. My baby. I will never forget anything from that week. I remember the yellow she wore when we met. I remember Pret in the morning, wine before dinner, cigarettes, the park, the bridge, the chapel, the airport, the songs we sent each other, and a great many things that I could just as easily have forgotten.

As if I could ever forget.

Since the years since I met her I have written six essays and a play about her. I know dude, it’s a lot, So what? I am crazy in love with her and always will be. I will soon turn all of my Elodie material into a book. It will be good and I hope you like it. I know I will.

So in anticipation of that about I wrote her a love poem. Here it is:

Epigraphs:

“I didn’t know what I was in for when I set out for that run.”
— Better Oblivion Community Center

“Two suns in the sunset/ Didn’t know my race was run.”
— Pink Floyd, “Two Suns in the Sunset”

“Don’t stand so close to me.”
— The Police

Elodie, baby, I’m massively in love with you
I always have been, and I always will be.

I arrived on a Sunday. We met on Monday
You were wearing yellow, I recall
You touched my arm and said, “I’m an Aries moon too”
And that began my fall.

We walked lightly to the next session
I had no idea what I was in for
We compared charts and we matched
And I knew I was a goner before we even reached the door.

We sat side by side at the table
Elbows and hands touching tight
When your fingers clasped mine, I almost passed out
You were absolutely stunning, a total knockout.

At dusk we went to dinner
It was inside the main hall
There was turkey, there was gravy,
There was cranberry and all.

Before dinner, we drank wine
Red and white as you please
I bought a bottle with some money
I probably pulled out of my sleeve.

You may have been impressed that I had money
But you probably didn’t care
All I could think was, oh my god, this girl—
Look at her hair.

It was colored chestnut brown
And stretched halfway down her back
It was right about this moment
That I had a heart attack.

After dinner you broke out cigarettes
I’d had a dozen in sixteen years
I caved immediately, of course
I was the victim of all fears.

I feared a future without you
That was something I could not stand
When I got back to my room
I knew I’d have to take matters in my hand.

I played “Mistakes Were Made” by the Mendoza Line
I had to call a spade a spade
The title sounded like some kind of sign
I wanted desperately to wank
There, I said it. Bank.

At the time I had only one thought
Running around my brain
I’m massively in love with this girl
And I cannot stop this train.

I wanted to move to London
Would I? We would see
It probably wasn’t the best idea
But baby, you know me.

Tuesday morning we went to Pret
It was just a ten-minute walk
On the way there all we did
Was talk and talk and talk.

We split the cost of Pret
And walked back to the quad
We sat down in the back garden
I was feeling rather odd.

You had a hearty breakfast
You was at her eating peak
After that you mostly stopped
And I became a little worried
You were looking rather weak.

We never went to another session.

I’d been thinking about muses
And I cast you in the role
When you went along with this
I knew I was in a hole.

She talked about her career
She was a photographer, you see
You was good at what you did
But weren’t making enough green.

You’d had a gig in Italy
With some famous movie stars
But your career was on the downslide
You weren’t getting very far.

You had a job photographing hands
You didn’t like it much at all
You had to do it for the money
Through it all my girl stood tall.

Before dinner you said something
That changed the course of the week
“You’re super charming like my father.”
I knew then I was in deep.

I couldn’t have sex with her. Why?
I just couldn’t say
It had to do with what she’d said about her dad
I didn’t fully understand it; I just knew it was bad.

You told me your dark secret
I had one of my own
As I child I’d been abused
Now one helped; I was alone

As a result of my abuse
As a teen I thought I might be gay
But I didn’t really think so
Things turned out another way.

I was crazy about women
Madly in love with girls
But your story changed the conversation
We were in a whole new world.

Four years earlier I’d written an essay for my blog
Called “Reflections: On Coming Through”
Its epigraph came from Dylan
“This one goes out to someone watching out there tonight.
She knows who she is.”

I wanted something like that with you
I wanted you to be my twin
As it happens, I’m a Gemini.
I was ready to put a little skin

In the game
And see what might take place.

I didn’t know where things were going
I just knew I wanted to run the race
To come in first, to break the tape
To be the champion, set the pace.

I turned on back to Elodie
Tried to think of something to say.

I wanted to say, “Baby, let’s get married”
But there was very little chance
So I put the thought to bed
And kept it in my pants.

After dinner we talked like before
Very, very close
After dinner we had wine
Like every night before.

I got a little drunk
So I counted up the score
I thought I was down on the card
By just a point or two.

It was kind of hard to tell.
Everything was just brand new.

I was head over heels for my baby
And when she said she’d leave her guy
My heart went through the ceiling
And flew on way up high.

Friday came without announcement
We walked on back to Pret
After that we went to a park
It was real nice, I bet.

We’d fallen into a pattern
I was not I
She was not she

We were a we.

There was a little bridge in the park
And she walked up to the top
She said, “Baby, this is my bridge”
I said, “Baby, you’re the boss.”

Then she started crying
Just sitting in the sun
I got a little worried
I said, “Babe, what’s up, hon?”

She said, “I’m so confused
I don’t know what to do
I love my fiancé
And I love you too.”

I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Then I said, “Look, honey, here’s the deal
I live a million miles away
I want to be with you forever
That’s all I’m gonna say.”

“But darling I live in Japan and you are here
Maybe go back to your fiancé
And see how things go, my dear.”

She said, “Well, yeah, I’ll think about it.
I’ll stay in a hotel tonight.”

I said, “Where?”

She said, “London.”

I said, “That sounds about right.”

And then she said a line
I’ve never forgotten to this day:

“Baby, don’t sit so close to me.”

I said, “Just how far away?”

She said, “Just about an inch.”

I said, “Babes, that’s not too far.”

She said, “Well, that’s all I can handle.
I need you where you are.”

Then she fell into my arms.

The ambulances were blaring
Like a city under attack
I was getting pretty tired
And I half carried her back.

We walked back to the campus
She said she had to talk to Claire Martin
One of the tutors on the course.

I went down to the bookstore
There was a dude there, of course.

I browsed around and played Dylan on my phone,
“Red River Shore”
We sat there all alone.

He did a moment chart
Which I thought was pretty funny.

Melanie Reinhart was sitting nearby
I went and sat beside her
I’m not really sure why.

I picked up a book on musical astrology
It was about famous musicians’ charts
I thought it looked pretty cool.

She said, “Don’t buy that one, baby.
Don’t be a silly fool.”

So I bought another book
And then we both stood up.

Melanie had to move out
So we went up to her room
She had a couple heavy suitcases
So dragged them out of there soon

Then I went to say goodbye to Elodie
And we walked into the chapel
I told her I wanted to know her
When she was an old woman.

She said I was sweet
This made me smile.

I said, “Baby, you can’t be beat.”

And we sat there for a while.

Then we kissed goodbye
And I stepped out of the gate
I had to get some lunch
I was running rather late.

As I walked to my hotel
I was feeling pretty weird
I only had a little stubble
But I had to itch my beard.

At the restaurant I got bouillabaisse
And a lovely beer as well.
I texted Elodie Jason Molina’s “Leave the City.”

And she cried.

I said, “Baby, what the hell
Are we gonna do about our relationship?
Who are we gonna be?”

She said, “Baby, I have no idea
We’ll just have to wait and see.”

I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s right
There’s nothing we can do
I’ll see you when I see you, baby
I love you. I do.”

She said, “I love you too.”

I sent a couple more songs
And I’m happy to report
That after the conference
We still got along.

After lunch I was super tired
So I went to get some sleep
I knew once my head hit the pillow
I would sleep real deep.

I woke up the next morning
Around four-thirty or so
My wife had to catch a bus
England isn’t the safest, you know.

So we stood there on the corner
And she climbed onto the bus
In a different kind of way
I didn’t know what we’d do about us.

Then I hugged her quickly
And we said our goodbyes
I took the short walk home
Under the English sky.

I jumped into the shower
I was glad I was alone
I had a cab coming at eight
Pretty soon I’d be going home.

I packed up my things
I didn’t know what the day might bring
In the cab the driver played the radio
I could barely hear a thing.

There was a story about the poor
And how there was very little housing
But I couldn’t really dwell on it
That was somebody else’s deal.

I had to get to the airport
To make my final appeal.

On the plane I played Pink Floyd’s
“Two Suns in the Sunset”
And then I cried a bit.

I thought about my son, of course
I swallowed
Took the hit.

I read Anthony Powell on my Kindle
And he kind of messed me up.
So I asked for peanuts and some wine
In a little paper cup.

I had the wine and then another.
And I started to relax.
I understood then for sure
That I’d have to pay a heavy tax.

I knew my marriage was over
And my career probably as well
It was only a matter of time
Time will always tell.

I landed in Osaka
Got a room across the street
It was too far to Kyoto
Sometimes nearness can’t be beat.

I texted Elodie from the hotel, of course
It was just around nine her time
She said she was working in the park
On someone else’s dime.

I said, “Baby, that sounds awesome.
I wish I was there with you.”

She said, “Me too, baby,
But there’s nothing we can do.”

For the next few weeks
We texted, and called most every day
Then she had a dream and talked to her therapist
And she mostly went away.

The dream took place in the woods
There was a fire of some kind
She said that I was there with her
I began to fall behind.

She said “My therapist says I can’t talk to you.”
I said “Baby don’t say it’s true”
She said “Yeah, I don’t yet know”
I said “Babe it’s up to you.”

After that we sent some letters
And some texts just to chat
I wrote her in March 2019
And that was pretty much that.

I was the last one to write
That was about seven years ago
I figured the door was still open
So I emailed her three weeks ago.

And whether or not she’s read it,
So far it hasn’t been a no.

Email doesn’t have read receipts,
So I don’t know if she saw it.
I’m betting that she did.
So I’ll just have to wait a bit.

She’ll answer or she won’t.
It’s pretty much all the same to me.
Our relationship was years ago.
It’s all history, you see.

But I know I’ll always love her.
That’ll always be a fact.
And I still think sometimes
About going back.

Going back to London
Trying to find her one fine day.
And if I actually found her,
I don’t know what I would say.

I guess I’d say, “Hey, baby,
Do you wanna get some pancakes,
Some coffee,
And hang out?”

She’d say yes or she’d say no.
At least I would find out.

Then I’d go back to Kyoto,
Or maybe Thailand just for kicks.
Maybe move on down to Thailand,
Hit the beach, seek some bliss.

Thinking about Elodie
Has brought up old memories,
And I really need to chill.

Smoke some weed and drink some rum
Or I’m gonna get a little ill.

And sure, I’m ill
I’ve been lovesick for Elodie
Since the first day I ran saw her
In a seminar room on Monday.

I spent about a week with her
And I’ll never forget a thing
That we said or did together
I still want her to wear my ring.

I know that’s kinda doubtful,
But a guy can dream a dream,
And God knows that I have to,
After all the things I’ve seen.

Elodie, baby, give me a call.
Honey, baby, don’t forget me.

I’ll never forget you at all.

Dedication:

For Elodie, my baby. I cannot describe how much I love you, baby. I miss you so much. Baby.

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 2 Comments

On Sacha Baron Cohen, the Big Hypocrite

Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man / His enemies say he’s on their land.
— Bob Dylan, “Neighborhood Bully”

Shut the fuck up Sacha.
— Me

Let me get something out of the way first: Sacha Baron Cohen is incredibly fucking funny. He also needs to shut the fuck up.

The Borat movies are two of the funniest movies ever made. The first one is better than the second one, but the second one is also amazing. The Rudy Giuliani scene alone is almost impossible to believe. Maria Bakalova, who plays Borat’s daughter Tutar in Borat II, is fearless. Borat himself remains an extraordinary comic creation. “Throw the Jew Down the Well” is funny. The running antisemitism is funny. The grotesque sex jokes are funny. Ali G is hysterical. Cohen has done things on camera that almost nobody else would have the nerve, discipline, or sheer audacity to attempt.

I still don’t like him.

These are not contradictory positions.

I don’t hate Sacha Baron Cohen. I don’t detest him. I don’t want him canceled. I certainly don’t want his movies removed from circulation. I hope he keeps making comedy. But I don’t like the guy, and the biggest reason is that I think he is one of the great hypocrites of all time

Here’s why.

Not because he’s offensive per se. Rather because he seems to believe that Sacha Baron Cohen should be allowed to offend anybody he wants, while other people have walk on egg shells when the subject gets anywhere close to Sacha Baron Cohen or anything he actually cares about.

And what he cares about is Israel. Sacha is Jewish. So what. The Pope is Catholic and shits in the woods. Obviously. So does the bear. Naturally. And the bear is also Catholic because when he and the Pope were out ripping heaters together in the woods discussing last night’s Mets game for whatever reason the Pope laid the guilt trip of all guilt trips on our friend Mr. Bear and Bear caved. The Pope is one hell of an orator. This much is clear.

The Rules of the Game

I have a fairly simple rule about comedy:

A comedian can joke about anything. Anything.

Hitler. The Holocaust. Genocide. Dead babies. Disability. Race. Sex. Religion. Cancer. AIDS. September 11. Your mother. My mother. Whatever.

Anthony Jeselnik has built his entire career around constructing jokes whose premises make the audience think, surely this motherfucker isn’t going there, immediately before he goes there. Gilbert Gottfried made incredibly offensive jokes sometimes the offensiveness seemed to be the joke. Joan Rivers would joke about disabled people and then when she was lightly booed tell the audience to shut the fuck up cause her daughter was disabled. Whatever Joan. Get a grip. But yeah Joan is super fucking funny too. She just is.

Fine. Tell the joke.

And I retain the right to think your joke sucks.

That’s the bargain.

There is another old rule of comedy that matters here: punch up rather than down. I don’t regard this as an inviolable either. Sometimes you can punch down. But if you’re going to punch down, the most elegant ways to do it is to turn the fucking gun around and shoot yourself before anybody has time to complain.

Shane Gillis understands this beautifully.

Gillis has a routine about Downs syndrome in his family. As he approached the joke you can feel the audience tense because they know exactly where Shane is heading. And then comes the turn: Downs syndrome, he says, “took a shot at me and missed.”

Pause.

“But it nicked me.”

There it is.

Mic drop.

The joke suddenly isn’t look at these people. The joke is Shane Gillis. He has placed himself inside the blast radius.

That’s how you fucking do it.

Take notes, Sacha.

Kazakhstan

The central problem with Borat isn’t that the character is a monster.

The character is supposed to be a monster.

He’s misogynistic. He’s antisemitic. He’s ignorant. He talks about women as property. He says unspeakable things about his family. The comedy depends upon his being so extravagantly horrible that the Americans around him sometimes reveal things about themselves while trying to accommodate him.

Cohen has explained this himself. After the first movie provoked outrage in Kazakhstan, he said he was surprised because he assumed audiences would understand that the Kazakhstan of Borat was effectively fictional. More revealingly, he explained why he had chosen Kazakhstan in the first place: it was somewhere his intended audience knew so little about that he could exploit whatever vague stereotypes they possessed about an obscure former Soviet republic.

Read that again.

He chose Kazakhstan because people didn’t know much about Kazakhstan.

That’s my entire objection.

Kazakhstan wasn’t powerful enough in the Western imagination to fight back against the joke. It was a blank space. Cohen could write whatever he wanted onto it.

And what did he write?

Incest. Prostitution. Sex slavery. Antisemitism. Primitive stupidity. Misogyny. General barbarism.

The real Kazakhstan is hardly a liberal-democratic paradise. Its government has an ugly record on political and religious freedom, including restrictions on religious groups and expression. But the United States State Department describes a secular constitutional system containing multiple religious communities—not the insane antisemitic hellscape Cohen invented.

Cohen’s answer was essentially: guys, you’re missing the joke.

He said Borat’s antisemitism was designed to expose the antisemitism of others. He trusted intelligent viewers to understand that the character’s beliefs were delusional. Indeed, Borat’s supposedly Kazakh language is largely Hebrew, an enormous inside joke aimed directly at Jewish and Israeli audiences.

I understand the joke. I even laugh at the joke. I just think Kazakhstan is entitled to say: Why the fuck did you have to make it us?

Make up a country.

Boratistan.

There. Done. Same jokes. Same movie. Same character. Same America. Same satirical mechanism. Nobody loses anything.

Instead Cohen picked an actual country precisely because his audience knew almost nothing about it, filled the vacuum with the most grotesque shit imaginable, and then informed the people who actually lived there that sophisticated viewers would understand.

That’s punching down.

It’s also pretty fucking convenient.

The Sacha Baron Cohen Exception

Here is where Cohen really begins to bother me.

Because Sacha Baron Cohen understands context better than almost anybody alive when Sacha Baron Cohen needs context.

Don’t take Borat literally. Understand the character. Understand the satire. Understand the intention. Understand the irony.

Understand that saying something antisemitic can actually be a means of attacking antisemitism. Understand that an offensive representation of a group isn’t necessarily an attack upon that group.

I agree with every word of that.

But Cohen has also become a prominent advocate for restricting the amplification of hateful speech online. In his celebrated 2019 Anti-Defamation League speech, he attacked social-media companies for spreading antisemitism and other forms of hate and argued, in the formulation subsequently popularized by the ADL, that freedom of speech does not entail “freedom of reach.

There is a serious argument there. Facebook is not the First Amendment. TikTok doesn’t have a constitutional obligation to recommend Nazi propaganda to fifteen million teenagers.

Fine.

But notice how dramatically the moral vocabulary changes.

Suddenly representation has consequences.

Suddenly words can hurt actual populations. Suddenly the intentions of the speaker aren’t everything. Suddenly the distribution mechanism matters. Suddenly we have to consider what stupid people might believe after encountering offensive material.

Where the fuck was this standard when Kazakhstan was telling you that millions of people who knew nothing about their country were learning about it from Borat?

That doesn’t mean Cohen is wrong about online antisemitism.

It means the principle has to travel.

“The Biggest Antisemitic Movement Since the Nazis”

Then, after October 7, Cohen went considerably further.

During a 2023 meeting with TikTok executives, he accused the platform of creating “the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.” People participating in the meeting cited genuinely vile material directed at Jews—comments praising Hitler and invoking Anne Frank—and Cohen told TikTok executives, “Shame on you.”

Let’s be very clear.

“Hitler was right” is antisemitism. Threatening Jews is antisemitism. Celebrating the murder of Jews because they’re Jews is antisemitism.

There is no difficulty here whatsoever. Fuck those people.

But Israel is not Judaism. The Israeli government is not the Jewish people. Benjamin Netanyahu is not the Jewish people. The IDF is not the Jewish people.

And criticism of the conduct of the Israeli state is not inherently antisemitic any more than criticism of Saudi Arabia is inherently anti-Muslim or criticism of Kazakhstan is inherently anti-Kazakh.

That distinction matters enormously, particularly during a time in which people are arguing simultaneously about terrorism, civilian deaths, occupation, hostages, settlements, military proportionality, national self-determination and the conduct of one of the most powerful armed forces in the region.

Israel can defend itself.

Literally.

It is a nuclear-armed state by widespread assessment, possesses an extraordinarily sophisticated military, and has enjoyed immense diplomatic, military and financial backing from the United States for decades.

Israel is not Borat’s Kazakhstan.

And it certainly isn’t Borat.

Bob Dylan once called Israel the “Neighborhood Bully.” What exactly Dylan meant in that bizarre song on Infidels is between Bob Dylan and whatever collection of ghosts, Biblical figures and card players happened to be occupying Bob Dylan’s skull in 1983. Good luck getting a straight answer.

But the phrase is useful.

A neighborhood bully can still get attacked. A neighborhood bully can still have legitimate fears. A neighborhood bully can even sometimes be right. He’s still the neighborhood bully.

Power matters.

The Borat Test

So here is the test I would apply to Cohen.

I call it the Borat Test. Whenever somebody says something provocative about Israel, Zionism or Jewish political power, ask whether Cohen is willing to grant that speaker the same interpretive tools Cohen demands for himself.

What’s the context? Who is actually being attacked? Is this literal or rhetorical? Is the speaker criticizing Jews or criticizing Israel?

Could an ugly formulation nevertheless be attempting to expose a legitimate problem? Should an entire argument be reduced to its most offensive sentence? Does intention matter? Does irony matter? Does satire matter?

Does the intelligence of the audience matter?

These aren’t tricks. They’re Sacha Baron Cohen’s own defenses.

If those principles are good enough to explain why a Jewish comedian can stand in an Arizona bar singing an antisemitic song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” then they’re good enough to use before declaring somebody an antisemite because he said something nasty about Israel.

Same rules. That’s all I’m asking.

Same fucking rules.

Sacha Being Jewish Doesn’t Change This

Cohen is Jewish. He’s proud of being Jewish. He speaks Hebrew. His mother was born in Israel. He spent time on a kibbutz. His Jewish identity clearly matters enormously to him.

Good. None of that bothers me.

It explains why antisemitism gets under his skin. If anything, it makes his concern more understandable.

But everybody has a thing that gets under his skin. Everybody has a sacred cow.

The real test of a comedian’s commitment to transgression isn’t what happens when he transgresses somebody else’s sacred boundary.

It’s what happens when somebody transgresses his. That’s the test Cohen keeps failing for me.

He wants Kazakhs to understand. He wants gay people to understand Brüno. He wants religious people to understand. He wants women to understand. He wants Americans humiliated by Borat to understand. He wants everybody to understand that outrageous speech can have another layer underneath it.

OK

Dave Chappelle Has the Same Problem

Dave Chappelle occasionally irritates me for a related reason.

Not because he jokes about trans people. Joke about trans people.

I don’t give a fuck.

But when a hugely wealthy, hugely famous comedian spends years repeatedly returning to a tiny and comparatively vulnerable minority, eventually “I’m allowed to make these jokes” stops answering the criticism.

Of course you’re allowed. Nobody asked.

The question is whether you’re punching down.

And telling us afterward that you had a trans friend doesn’t magically resolve the question. Chappelle’s story about his friendship with the late trans comedian Daphne Dorman may be sincere and moving. It still doesn’t operate as a universal permission slip for everything else he says.

Again: tell the jokes. And everybody else gets to tell you whether they suck.

That’s comedy too.

Don’t Cancel Him

I don’t want Sacha Baron Cohen canceled. I don’t want Chappelle canceled.

I thought Shane Gillis getting fired from Saturday Night Live over a podcast barely anybody listened to was ridiculous. The subsequent trajectory of Gillis’s career suggests that cancellation wasn’t exactly fatal anyway.

Good for him.

Let everybody work. Let everybody talk. Let everybody offend everybody.

Then let everybody else answer.

This is the part of contemporary culture I increasingly can’t stand: everybody wants free speech for his own side and a fucking tribunal for the other guy.

No.

Sacha gets Borat. Kazakhstan gets to say Sacha is an asshole. Chappelle gets his trans jokes. Trans people get to say Chappelle is full of shit. Shane Gillis gets his jokes. People offended by Shane Gillis get their boos. Israel gets its defenders. Palestinians get theirs. Jews get to identify antisemitism.

Everybody else gets to tell them when they think criticism of Israel is being incorrectly conflated with antisemitism.

That’s the game.

Is Sacha Baron Cohen an Asshole?

Apparently I’m not the only person who has asked his.

Rebel Wilson devoted a chapter of her memoir Rebel Rising to Cohen and publicly called him a “massive asshole.” She alleged that her experience working with him on The Brothers Grimsby left her feeling bullied and humiliated and described disputes over sexual material she says he wanted her to perform.

Cohen has categorically denied her allegations. His representatives called them “demonstrably false” and said they were contradicted by documents, footage and witnesses. Portions of Wilson’s account were subsequently redacted from British editions of the memoir for legal reasons.

I wasn’t there. I don’t know.

I’m not convicting Sacha Baron Cohen of anything on Rebel Wilson’s testimony. I merely note that she doesn’t appear to have enjoyed the experience.

Neither, apparently, did Kazakhstan.

The Big Hypocrite

And so we return to the charge.

Sacha Baron Cohen is not a hypocrite because he’s Jewish. He’s not a hypocrite because he worries about antisemitism. He’s not a hypocrite because he defends Israel. He’s not a hypocrite because he’s offended by something.

He’s a hypocrite because, in my view: he demands a degree of interpretive generosity for his own provocations that he does not consistently extend to everybody else’s.

That’s the fuckin’ thing.

You cannot spend twenty years telling people to understand the sophisticated mechanism underneath offensive speech and then suddenly become Officer Sensitive when the offending speech approaches your own house.

You cannot tell Kazakhstan that everyone understands your Kazakhstan isn’t really Kazakhstan when you specifically chose Kazakhstan because nobody knew anything about Kazakhstan.

You cannot build one of the greatest comedy careers of the century by exploiting ambiguity, disguise, deception, grotesque stereotypes and deliberately offensive speech and then behave as though context becomes secondary when the subject matters personally to you.

Or, rather, you can.

You’re Sacha Baron Cohen. Do whatever the fuck you want.

And I’ll do what I want. I’ll call you on it.

That’s the other half of free expression.

Because the comedian has the right to joke about absolutely anything. And the audience has the right not to laugh.

The target has the right to be pissed off. The critic has the right to say the comedian is punching down.

And if you’ve spent your career demanding that everybody else take the joke, you had better be prepared, every once in a while, to take the fucking joke yourself.

Bob Dylan called Israel the neighborhood bully.

Maybe Dylan meant it. Maybe he didn’t. It’s Dylan baby. Who the fuck knows.

But even the neighborhood bully gets made fun of.

Settle down, Sacha. Shut the fuck up.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Did My Grandfather Tom Thomas Kill a Man in Japan in 1941?

Note: This essay is based on a story my grandfather told me when I was thirteen years old, my surviving memories of that story thirty-eight years later, and the limited historical context I have so far been able to establish. Throughout, I have tried to distinguish between what I know, what I remember, what I merely suspect, and what may simply have become family legend.

That distinction matters. Earlier today I acquired Tom’s complete Naval records, which have filled in a number of gaps in the chronology.

In addition, when I called my mother she said that she thought the biology of TomThomas that I wrote in 1988 was still in a box somewhere. The original cassette tapes are almost certainly gone.

If the biography does surface, we will know more and I will update this piece.

Epigraphs:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

It’s been a long time, mama, since I heard you call my name
Ah, been a long time since I heard you call my name
I got to see my Colorado girl again
—Townes Van Zandt, “Colorado Girl”

I. Introduction

My grandfather Tom Thomas once told me that he killed a man in Japan just before World War II.

I was thirteen years old when he told me this. I believed him. Thirty-eight years later, I am no longer entirely sure. I have been wanting to write this story for many years. The story has remained lodged somewhere between family history, childhood memory, and legend: an extraordinary story told to a boy by his grandfather and preserved, imperfectly, across nearly four decades.

Today I would like to know what actually happened.

II. The Family Autobiography

In the spring of 1988, when I was in eighth grade at St. George’s School outside Spokane, Washington, my social studies teacher, Laura Pierce, assigned us a family autobiography project.

Laura was a nice woman and a good social studies teacher. I was friends with her son Ben, who was a year or two older than I was. The Pierces lived in a modest suburban home about twelve minutes north of St. George’s. My parents, my brothers, and I lived a little farther north in Wayside, Washington, which in those days was far out in the country.

When my brothers and I were younger, we sometimes went to the Pierces’ neighborhood for Halloween. This was in the early to mid 1980s, and it was the era of panic about tainted candy on Halloween. My feeling today is that this panic was largely, if not entirely, overblown. Nevertheless, we checked our candy haul for razors carefully. We never found any.

Wayside was not much good for trick-or-treating unless you were prepared to hike half a mile between houses. The Pierces had neighbors.

These are some memories of my time. I mention them here because I am trying to establish what I know, what I remember, and what I merely think I remember.

I believe Laura assigned the autobiography project sometime around March 1988. I cannot today establish this date with any degree of certainty. The project took some time, and we finished eighth grade in early June. Four years later, twenty-eight of us graduated from St. George’s together, so I guess my eighth-grade class would have been roughly the same size.

For my project, I chose to interview my paternal grandfather, Tom Thomas. I sent him a list of questions, and he kindly sent back about half a dozen tapes. On the tapes he talked about his whole life, with a focus on his time in World War II. Tom was a career Navy man who also served in the Korean War. I believe he served valiantly, and he told me that he shot in the leg on one of the islands off of Guam; I believe in 1944. He leg healed and he went on to a successful real estate career in Healdsberg CA, just outside of Napa Valley. I believe that he did quite well for himself, and by the time I was little he was already retired. Gin was a lifelong housewife. I was born in 1974, so my first memories of him and his wife Virginia (Gin) would have been around 1977.

My parents Ross and Claudia and my younger brother Mike visited Tom and Gin almost every summer until the late 1980s. We called them Moo Grandpa and Moo Nana because they owned cows. My mother’s parents Bill and Barbara were Regular Grandpa and Regular Nana as they lived in the city of Santa Clara.

We would usually start just three or four days with Tom and Gin, and often a week or two with Bill and Barbara. At this remove, I am not exactly sure why this was, however it may have been the fact that Tom was not, at least of the time, the nicest man. Tom died in 2001 and Gin in 1996, so RIP to two real ones. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that Tom had a bit of a mean streak.

Looking back today, I fully understand why this was. He grew up in rural Colorado in the early part of the 20th century. He was born in 1916 to a homesteader family, and he told me for the biography that his own father was a drinker and had a mean streak too. I believed this and still do. Tom and Gin liked to drink too, and I remember every evening at 5 PM sharp that would make martinis in what I then saw as a pretty swank cocktail set.

Tom would have maybe two martinis before dinner as I recall, while Gin would usually have just one. He probably had a few more drinks with dinner. I don’t ever remember him drinking beer or wine, so my guess is he stuck with martinis. I myself have inherited a taste for alcohol, and today I would describe myself as a managed drinker. I have also had periods of my life where I drank more, however that is a subject for another day.

In addition to having a bit of a mean streak, Tom could also be very generous. My parents bought a house in the country somewhere north of Spokane, WA in I believe 1980 or 1981 and it turned out to be a bit of a con job as the house had no water. This was a problem because everyone needs water, and also because my parents had zero money at the time. My dad was just starting his teacher career at St. George’s School in Spokane, one of the two most prestigious private school in the city. Prestigious though it may have been, it did not pay well/ Spokane only had about a quarter of million people at that time. It probably has more today, but I am note sure as I have not been back for 25 years. I never really cared for Spokane, however I do have fond memories overall of growing up there.

In any case, my folks needed to get out of the house with no water pronto and Tom kindly paid the entire down payment on a new house, in Wayside. Wayside was also north of Spokane, however it was much closer to school, just about a 17 minute drive. I can state this with certainly because we made the drive every school day for the 13 years I attended St. George’s.

III. The Yokohama Incident

As mentioned above, Tom Thomas served in the United States Navy for about 20 years. At one point in the late 1930s, he said, he was a military policeman. At this juncture I am not going to convert rather vague memories into historical fact just to make the story cohere. What follows is the story as I remember Tom telling it to me.

He told me that he was stationed in Japan sometime in the very 1930’s and perhaps into the early 1940’s. As I will go into in more detail below, when I ran this story by my good friend Sergio Mandiola a few weeks ago he said a US Navy man would absolutely not have been stationed in Japan in 1941 at all. I in addition he said that it was also quite unlikely to have happened in 1940. He went on to say that if indeed such a took place, it may have occurred in 1938 or 1939 when US Japan relations were still at least on reasonably good terms.

My present recollection places him in Yokohama, although I do not want to claim more precision than the available evidence permits. For many years I have remembered the incident as occurring in 1941—more specifically around October 1941.

This date may be wrong. It is almost certainly is.

The location may be wrong, although I am confident that Tom did tell me that he stationed in Yokohama at some point.

In any case, Tom told me was that he was off duty one night and drinking in a bar with some of his fellow servicemen somewhere in Yokohama. A Japanese man came into the establishment extremely drunk and began causing trouble.

Tom intervened, and the man left the bar, only to come back several hours later with a knife. By this point, Tom said, it was very late, and we can assume that everybody had been drinking. As Tom exited the bar, the man came at him with the knife and Tom defended himself. Tom was not a tall man, however he was quite well built. Things went his way, and he tossed the man off a small cliff his death.

Again, I want to be careful here. I don’t remember whether Tom said that his position as a military policeman formally obligated him to intervene, whether he simply felt some responsibility for maintaining order, or whether he was a young sailor who decided that somebody needed to throw a drunk out of a bar and that somebody was going to be him.

I want to make this distinction clear because thirty-eight years is a long time and memory has a habit of polishing its own edges.

I do not merely remember Tom inferring that the man died. I remember my he telling me that he did.

IV. Aftermath

According to Tom, this was not the end of the matter.

He told me that the killing caused some degree of difficulty between the United States and Japan. This is understandable, as the two countries were, at the time, on anything but good terms. My recollection is that he said the whole thing became a minor diplomatic incident.

I also remember Tom telling me that he was imprisoned afterward, and my recollection was that he spent several months in a Navy prison or brig in Japan.

That is one of the details I now strongly suspect to be wrong.

Perhaps Tom said he was imprisoned somewhere else. Perhaps thirteen-year-old me misunderstood. Perhaps I have unconsciously moved the prison back to Japan in order to make the story narratively tidy.

And this is where my friend Mandiola enters the story.

V. Mandiola Objects

As mentioned above, when I told Mandiola the story some he told me “dude no way.”

He didn’t buy the date.

Mandiola is one of the smartest people I know and knows more history than anyone I have ever met. When I told him that my recollection placed Tom in Yokohama in October 1941, his reaction was immediate.

No way in hell.

Mandiola did not necessarily doubt that some version of the incident could have happened. His objection was to my chronology and to some of the surrounding circumstances. He thought an earlier date—perhaps 1938 or 1939—was considerably more plausible.

I agreed.

After all, it would be foolish of me to regard a date remembered from a recording in 1988 as incontrovertible evidence. But I also don’t want to correct the record before I have investigated it fully. For now, therefore, I am leaving 1941 on the board.

VI. Why the Date Matters

The relationship between the United States and Japan changed significantly during the years immediately preceding the Pacific War.

Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo the following year. Full-scale war between Japan and China erupted in 1937. The United States and other Western powers increasingly objected to Japanese expansion in China, and Washington gradually moved from diplomatic opposition toward economic pressure.

The confrontation intensified considerably in 1940 and 1941.

Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The United States began to restrict exports of strategically important materials to Japan while increasing support for China. Japanese expansion into French Indochina further worsened relations. In July 1941, after Japan moved into southern French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japanese assets in the United States. In practice, the resulting restrictions threatened Japan’s access to the imported oil upon which both its economy and military depended. Japan consequently faced a severe strategic problem.

However it would be misleading to reduce the road to Pearl Harbor to a simple story in which the United States surrounded an innocent Japan and cut off its oil, leaving Japan no alternative but war. The economic pressure did not emerge from nowhere. It developed in response to years of Japanese military expansion in Asia. Japanese leaders nevertheless increasingly perceived themselves as being strategically contained and economically strangled.

Negotiations between Washington and Tokyo continued through 1941 even as both sides prepared for the possibility of war.

Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

This is why the date in my grandfather’s story matters so much.

1938 is not 1941. Neither is 1939.

An altercation involving an American serviceman and a Japanese civilian would have existed within a substantially different political environment depending on in which year it occurred. so the question becomes:

Was Tom Thomas actually in Japan when he said this happened?

This ought to be knowable.

VII. Opening the Case

Mandiola suggested that if I really wanted to investigate the story, I should look for American records from the time.

He mentioned the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Having looked into the matter further, I suspect the National Archives and military records will be more useful.

This is where the story stops being merely a family anecdote and becomes an investigation. First, I would to get my hands on Tom’s Navy service record.

I want to know when he enlisted, where he was stationed, his rank in the Navy, the ships or shore posts to which he was assigned, and—most importantly—where he was during the years immediately before Pearl Harbor.

If Tom was sitting in San Diego throughout 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941, we then have a problem.

If, on the other hand, he appears in naval records connected to Japan or Yokohama during this period, we have something considerably more interesting.

Then there is the alleged imprisonment.

If in fact Tom killed a Japanese civilian, was arrested or detained, and spent some time in military confinement, I would expect at least the possibility of a documentary trail. There may be disciplinary records. There may be court-martial material. There may be official correspondence of some kind. And with luck I may be able to track it down.

And then there are the Japanese records.

I have a distinct recollection that Tom told me the incident made the Japanese papers. I am less certain of this memory than I am of the killing itself. However if a Japanese newspaper did report the death of a Japanese man following an altercation with an American sailor, this would, at a minimum, have been news.

It is even possible that the still exists to be diplomatic correspondence if Tom is right that the affair caused some degree of friction between the two countries.

Or there could be no records of any kind.

This would tell us something too.

VIII. Memory Is Not an Archive

Here are the facts that I want to establish:

i) What actually happened in Japan nearly ninety years ago?

ii) How accurate is Tom’s version of events?

iii) In turn, how accurate are my own recollections of what he told in 1988?

Memory does not operate like a filing cabinet. We lose things. We combine them. We unconsciously embellish chronology. Details that once carried periods eventually acquire question marks.

Sometimes families do this collectively. An event becomes an anecdote. An anecdote becomes a story. The story gets told often enough that eventually nobody remembers which pieces belonged to the event and which pieces belonged to the telling.

Maybe Tom killed a man. Maybe he fought a man who survived and the story grew in telling over the years. Maybe the basic event happened but I have misremembered some of the facts. Maybe my grandfather was bullshitting his grandson with a magnificent sailor’s yarn.

At thirteen, none of these possibilities occurred to me. My grandfather told me something. I wrote it down.

At fifty-two, I simply want more evidence.

IX. Why Now?

This raises the question: Why am I doing this now?

I originally went to graduate school to study history. In January 1999, I enrolled at Northern Arizona University (NAU) intending to complete a master’s degree in Asian history within two years.

I almost made it.

I wrote approximately twenty-five pages of the first chapter of my thesis, which I still have in print form, and accumulated perhaps another hundred pages of notes in various stages of usefulness. For somewhat complex reasons that I have discussed elsewhere, I never finished the thesis.

I left NAU in August of 2001.

Within two months, I was back in my wife’s hometown of Kumamoto, Japan, teaching English to preschoolers. Not long afterward I joined Ritsumeikan Uji Senior High School in South Kyoto. I have now worked there for twenty-four years.

Teaching is a good profession. It has been my profession for a very long time however, and I am past ready to do something else.

I have written blogs with varying degrees of regularity since 2008, and now write almost daily for my current blog the Kyoto Kibbitzer. I think I am a good writer. At a minimum, I have considerable range. And I am trying, with more seriousness than before, to professionalize my writing.

Writing is, unfortunately, a challenging way to make a living.

J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown have made fortunes from it. Although I consider myself a better writer than both of these people, I have zero expectation of reaching anything remotely resembling their fame or fortune.

I would settle for quite a bit less.

If I can patch together a modest living through writing, online tutoring, and perhaps another job or two here and there, I can imagine selling my house and moving somewhere cheaper. Perhaps downtown Kyoto. Perhaps Osaka.

Increasingly, however, I find myself thinking about Thailand.

Bangkok is too large, crowded, and noisy for me. Pattaya, on the other hand, attracts me, and I am hoping to visit there soon if my financial circumstances cooperate. If I do manage to get there this summer, I will assess its suitability as a place to live.

All of this may seem some ways away from a Japanese bar in the years just prior to World War II.

To me it isn’t.

I am trying to decide what kind of writer I want to be during the next part of my life. I write about music. I write fiction. I am working on my memoirs. I write about education, sex, dreams, politics, bars, cities, relationships, and whatever else happens to interest me on a particular day.

I would also like to return to history, at to least modest extent.

And if I am serious about becoming a little of an historian again, then I owe this story more than the version I have been carrying around since I was thirteen.

I owe Tom more than that too.

X. The Open Case

I am going to try to find out what happened in 1941, or whenever it happened, if anything happened at all.

This mother I asked my mother if she still has the family biography. She said she thought in was a box somewhere, and she would try to find it soon.

Then, when I have the time, I will send an email to the National Archives.

If I can establish Tom’s military assignments, I can establish whether his story is even plausible. If I can establish this, I can begin narrowing down the dates. If I can pin point the date and location with reasonably accuracy, I may be able to consult Japanese newspaper archives from the time. If Tom really was imprisoned in Japan, which I now regard as unlikely, there may also a disciplinary record somewhere.

And perhaps, somewhere deep in an archive in Japan or the United States, there is another man’s name.

This possibility changes the story.

For nearly forty years the man Tom said he killed that night in Yokohama has existed in my mind only a legend

If he existed, he was more than that.

He had a name. He probably had a family. He had a life that began long before he allegedly walked into a bar drunk one night and encountered a young American sailor named Tom Thomas.

I would like to know who he was.

Maybe the records will vindicate my grandfather’s story.

Maybe they won’t.

My suspicion is that the truth will be more interesting. That perhaps somewhere beneath eighty-five years of history, forty years of storytelling, and thirty-eight years of my own imperfect memory, there is an actual event that gradually became the story I know of today.

But that’s only my suspicion.

For now, all I have is a deceased grandfather, an eighth-grade autobiography for 1988 that I hope to acquire soon, and an imperfect memory. And in any case, I have one hell of a family story.

That is enough to begin with.

Nearly ninety years after whatever happened happened, I am now determined to get to the bottom of it.

Stay tuned.

Dedication:

For my grandfather, Tom Thomas. Although we had our ups and downs over the years, I still love you very much grandpa.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Craig Finn Inspired Song “Problematic to the Max”

Note: Craig Finn is my favorite songwriter, and this song is directly inspired by him. This is my first time to write a Finn style song and I have done my best. I am not trying to imitate Finn exactly, or pretend that I can write exactly as he does. What I have tried to borrow from him is something more essential: his attention to people on the edges of the night, his gift for compressed narrative, his affection for damaged characters, his understanding that bars and diners contain entire moral universes, and above all his ability to make a song feel simultaneously funny, sad, dangerous, and deeply humane. If this song is any good it is because of Mr. Finn.

She came stepping out the club in her heels
She was problematic to the max
She had someone else’s cigarettes
And someone else’s jacket on her back
She said, “Don’t start asking questions
You ain’t gonna like the facts”
Then she laughed and checked her lipstick
In the window of a Cadillac

There were boys outside the pizza place
Trying hard to look relaxed
There were girls discussing exes
And all the ways they’d get them back
There was someone crying by the cash machine
Someone calling for a cab
She said, “Everyone wants forgiveness
No one wants to give it back”

And I said:

Baby, we can leave right now
Let’s just stop playing games
There’s a place that pours till morning
And the barkeep knows my name

We’ll stumble out at sunrise
See the bums shaking their cans
With the smoke still in our eyes
And the popo in their vans

She said she’d recently been seeing
A guy who worked in stocks
At first it felt quite freeing
But she was looking at the clock
He kept talking ’bout the markets
While she stared into her drink
She said, “A man can make a million
And still not know a fuckin’ thing”

We walked east along the river
Past the churches and the cranes
She said everybody loves you
Til they learn your middle name
Then she took my hand and said
Like she’d suddenly recalled
Though we were very good in bed
We weren’t having fun at all

And she said:

Honey, don’t get sentimental
That’s how everyone gets hurt
First you say you understand me
Then you start discussing worth

I’ve been good and I’ve been awful
Mostly somewhere in between
And I’m sick of getting judged
By the folks behind their screens

At four we found a diner
With the chairs turned upside down
The waitress poured us coffee
While I tried not to check her out
She said, “You two look exhausted”
We said, “That’s probably correct”
Then my friend began explaining
Why exhaustion gets respect

She said:


No one trusts in happy people
They assume they’ve missed a trick
Everything was going fine
Til she said “baby you’re a prick”

So I keep a couple bruises
And some stories in the back
Just in case somebody doubts me
When I say it’s been like that

The morning started leaking
Through the alleys by the tracks
She had kicked away her heels
And slipped into her slingbacks
There were punters there were pigeons
There were handbills in the street
There were people dreading Sunday
There were people starting weeks

At the corner she got quiet
Then she kissed me on the cheek
Said, “Don’t make this into something
When it’s barely been a week”
Then she climbed into a taxi
And she never once looked back

She came stepping out the club in her heels.
She was problematic to the max

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Cheating at Golf (featuring cameos by my grandfather Bill Kolb and my Aunt’s Second Husband Jerry)

New Note:

At lot of people play golf. Most of them cheat. In this piece we will take a look at several varieties of golf cheating, taking as examples my maternal grandfather Bill Kolb and my aunt’s second husband Jerry.

My grandfather played golf for the entire time I knew him. Besides his family, golf was probably his passion. Bill was a so-so golfer at best. He could hit the ball pretty straight but never more than about 150 yards. His short game was better than his long game, and he liked to say “I just need to get it on the dance floor” (by which he meant the green.) Bill’s lack of distance played into an incident once where we were backed up behind a slower group who was messing about around the green. We were about 230 yards out, and I was planning on hitting a 5 wood approach. Bill told me to go ahead and hit, and I said I needed to wait because I might “get it there.” Bill said there was no way, and if I did he’d buy me a new pair of golf shoes. So I took out my 5 wood and smashed it right up into the group. Bill, to his credit, said “I’ll be darned,” and sure enough bought me a brand new pair of white golf shoes the next day that I kept for years. Bill’s power, naturally, receded even more as he got older, however his overall game stayed about the same. I’d guess that on your average U.S. public course his actual score would have been in the low 100s, give or take.

Now any golfer knows that a score in the low 100s, while certainly not great, is where a lot of golfers will land if they were to play every shot clean. However, very few golfers play every shot clean. Here is a non-comprehensive list of how golfers trim strokes off their total score. Some of these methods are outright cheating, while others may be agreed upon among the players before hand.

1. “Improving one’s lie.” This is a very common method of cheating that involves subtly, or not so subtly, adjusting the ball to a better lie (position) on the ground. This may include shifting the ball from wet grass to drier grass, nudging the ball out from behind a tree, moving the ball a few feet from an out-of-bounds position to an in-bounds one, pulling the ball out of shallow water onto dry land, and many other moves. In golf, a lie adjustment of just a few inches can sometimes make a huge difference, and can often be accomplished without another player seeing.

2. Flat out shaving strokes off your reported score. This rather brazen method is also quite common and simply involves lying about how many shots you hit. Players basically never do this when they played a good hole, for example a player will almost never claim to have scored a 4 on a par 4 when they actually scored a 5. This is because a 5, for an amateur player, is still a fine score. However, when a player scores let’s say an 8 (“a snowman”), or a 10 or 11 (“sticks”), the reported score may drop a few. Group mates usually know or suspect that cheating is happening, however if another player took 11 strokes this means they hit a bunch of grounders or something and it can be hard to keep track of everyone’s shots. In my experience, a cheating player may be asked “really, you scored a 7 there huh?” and may come back with “yeah 7 for me,” or the classic “oh yeah, I forgot one. It was an 8.” Basically everyone knows the cheating player is BSing, and sometimes a fellow player will call him or her on it. “That wasn’t a 7, come on dude.” But most of the time, especially if the game is not for money, people will let a few strokes here or there slide.

3. Shaving strokes by pretending certain swings were “practice.” This is most commonly seen when a player has landed in a sand trap (or “bunker”) and has taken 3 or 4 strokes to get out of there. Sand traps are great for cheating because many of them are sunk several feet into the ground, and it is often difficult for other players to tell what’s going on down there. Therefore, a player who hits a few balls into the wall of the sand trap in front of him can just fall back on the “those were just practice swings” move. If another player saw the swings, well the ball didn’t really move and it can be hard to tell. This move only really works in sand traps through because otherwise it becomes too overt.

4. Hitting the ball back in bounds from out of bounds. This is a move that I myself have pulled off many a time. I don’t respect out of bounds markers. Now, I understand that it’s not great to be crossing a busy road to get to a wayward drive and then hitting the ball back across said road. However, such thoroughfares aside I feel like a golfer should be able to chose to play any ball she can find. Nonetheless, although it is morally acceptable, this move is also technically cheating as you are supposed to take a penalty stroke or two.

5. Dropping a new ball on the ground when unable to find a lost ball. This is another very common move famously depicted in the James Bond movie Goldfinger and also I think a favorite of the Trumpster. In fact, that Trump probably stole this move from Goldfinger. A player pulls out this move when her drive or long iron has gone into the long grass or trees and after poking around, cannot be found. Here, the player will have a ball at the ready in a pocket and just casually drop the ball in a decent lie while calling out “I found it.” This move works well, and I recommend it to the golf cheater who wants to build a little subtlety into their repertoire.

6. Taking a “gimme.” A “gimme” is a shortish putt that instead of putting out the player just picks up and “counts.” Now I think this is actually against the spirit of golf in many ways because any golfer knows short putts are far from easy. In fact, short putts are fucking difficult. A two or three foot putt that a lot of players may take as gimmies are anything but, and can be extremely nerve-racking. A gimme player may shave 3–6 strokes easy over the course of a round from gimmes along. Gimme players suck, but they are everywhere, and many foursomes will just allow gimme play in the interest of speeding up the game and lowering scores. If a group is going to be a gimme group, they should really establish what this means. For example, a lot of putters have a leather grip of between one to two feet or so, and some people will play “gimmes inside the leather.” Putts inside the leather are still totally missable, however at least this is a standard. There is nothing worse than some dude looking at a 5 foot putt and just saying “I’m taking that.” Yeah, you’re taking it cause you’re missing it brother.

7. Taking a mulligan. This is only borderline cheating because it can only really be done by mutual agreement. A mulligan is when a golfer drives the ball into the water or the woods and just takes a do over. Some groups will give every player one mulligan per nine holes. I don’t really mind mulligan play, although it can reduce a total score by about 5. Mulligans are cheating, but they are civilized cheating.

8. Playing to one’s “handicap.” This is the most bizarre method of cheating, which I will explain a little later through the lens of my aunt’s second husband Jerry.

So my grandfather Bill Kolb, as you will already have ascertained, cheated at golf. He cheated at golf so religiously in fact that it was mentioned in his eulogy. Bill favored method #2 above. He might have taken a gimmie here and there, and maybe improved his lie a bit, but his go-to was just to cap his score on any given hole at 7. So if he scored a 7, he’d report a 7. If he scored a snowman, that’d be a 7 too. Sticks? Another 7. For a so-so player, capping scores at 7 is not a bad play, however it sometimes looks ridiculous. The 8>7 move is one thing, but if a player takes double digits to get the ball in the cup, his group mates are going to be aware. Bill’s devotion to the 7 cap though was tough to crack because he was absolutely consistent with it and it happened so often that one’s ability to resist was worn down and wilted. Through his 7 cap and a few other measures, Bill would usually be able to shave several strokes off his score and report in the 90s, a much more respectable outcome than low 100s. Everyone knew this, but no one could or wanted to do anything about it. He was the patriarch, he was beloved, and his cheating at golf over time became part of the reason people loved him.

My aunt’s second husband Jerry though is another matter. He favored cheating method #8, which is the most egregious and infuriating by a long shot. The dude would “play to his handicap” by playing every shot straight and scoring what he scored on each hole. Then, let’s say he made a 95 overall, we would say “hey there Jerry, 95 today?” and he’d say, “nope, 84. I played to my handicap.” What did this mean? It meant that he had recorded somewhere in a database or something that his handicap, or average score, was 84. This handicap was the purported result of an aggregated average of his rounds from some earlier point in time. Now, everyone on earth understands that just because you shot an once 84 five years ago you are not guaranteed to shoot an 84 today, or ever again actually. Dr. J used to be able to soar in the air and pull off 360 dunks, and today he can barely edge the ball over the rim. Time is a bitch, and in any case you can’t just claim an 84 because of some number in a database. It’s completely absurd. However, this was his move, every time.

I would play with Jerry and my dad and bothers, and because I have a big mouth sometimes, I would push back on his 84. “Hey man, you didn’t actually take an 84 though, you took a 95. So how is it that you got an 84.” “That’s my handicap,” he’d say, “I can’t score over my handicap.” What? Can’t score over my handicap? Yeah buddy, that’s like saying I can’t weigh over 164 pounds because I weighed that once. That’s absurd. But it didn’t matter. Dude was taking the 84 regardless. After all, he made one once.

The “play to my handicap” move bears no resemblance to how professional golfers deal with their handicap of course, nor does it track with any other sport in the world to my knowledge. No basketball player after a tough loss says, “now actually we didn’t lose because although the final score had us down by 6 my scoring average is 32 and although I only scored 17 tonight, I get +15 because it’s my average so we win by 9.” That player would rightly be seen as insane. No figure skater says, “well I fell twice tonight, but I usually don’t fall, so my score goes up by 1.2” or whatever. Golfers are full of it, I guess, and can get away with this kind of nonsense around their handicap.

Looking back, although I found both methods of cheating, the 7 cap and the play to my handicap move, annoying at the time the first remains far more forgivable than the second. The 7 cap is relatable — no one wants to see those high numbers on their card, and when done with a little joie de vivre comes across as very human. The handicap move is still pretty aggravating though. It’s like the handicap player is playing some kind of intellectual game, like they think they are smarter than you or something. Jerry is not a bad golfer per se, but he’s a 95 not an 84, and just needs to deal with it.

Dedication: For Bill Kolb, a great man but a mediocre golfer.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s, Part V. 7/27/25-8/3/25. Eight Transition Days: Money, Women, My House Fails To Sell, and I Wave My Dick All Around Japan, Apparently.

Epigraphs:

Baka. You are waving your dick all around Japan. What am I going to do with you?

Litz

I wanna know girls, don’t wanna know men.

Superchunk

Roll another number for the road/ I feel able to get under any road.

Neil Young

Something’s going to happen. Something always does.

Billions

Author’s Note:

I recently fell eight days behind on this series and briefly considered abandoning the missing week altogether. Reconstructing every hour would have been impossible, and pretending otherwise would have produced eight dutiful but lifeless entries. So I have produced something different: one long, thematic account of the money, marriage, women, music, writing, travel plans, ordinary routines, and general weirdness that comes with it all.

What surprised me during the edit was that the piece had a story after all. Much of the week was spent trying to persuade banks, apps, lenders, and machines that I existed. They rejected my address, my identification, my telephone number, and at one memorable point the year 1974 altogether. Elsewhere the people who matter most came through. Sachie called me by my old name. Zach understood the central point of my marriage essay. Readers found an eight-year-old piece buried in the archive. And my son stayed on the telephone with me for nearly two hours and called me Papa. I cried The chronology fell apart. Life did not.

===== =====

I fell behind.

There is no good explanation for this. I did not deliberately fracture chronology in order to interrogate the instability of memory. I was not experimenting with form. I simply stopped keeping up. My last completed diary entry was July 26, and by the time I looked up again it was August 3. Eight days had passed, the material had multiplied, and reconstructing every morning, afternoon, evening, cigarette, loan application, woman, walk, song, meal, nap, argument, and minor technological catastrophe in order would have required another eight days.

So this is the compressed version.

Eight days. Several dozen financial institutions. More women than I can count. One marriage at its end, one house waiting to be sold, one son suddenly talking to me for nearly two hours, four packs of Camels briefly representing unimaginable wealth, and a song essay from eight years ago inexplicably climbing above Wikipedia on Google.

Chronology can take the week off.

I. Money

Money has dominated my days of late.

There are plenty of other stories—love, marriage, sex, music, family, writing—but every one of them existed beneath the same low-pressure front. Could I get downtown? Could I get back? Could I buy cigarettes? Could I put money on an my ICOCA card? Could I book a hotel, board a train, eat something other than eggs and pasta, or convert one of the many theoretical financial instruments surrounding me into actual currency?

The strange thing was that money always seemed to be coming.

A card was coming. A transfer was coming. A lender was reviewing. A bank was processing. An email was imminent. A cheque was in transit. A customer-information update had been accepted. A human being somewhere was allegedly examining at my file.

Money was everywhere except in my pocket.

I applied to ACOM, AIFUL, Seven Bank, Promise, Mobit, Resona, Sony, PayPay, Prestia, Rakuten, SBI, and enough regional banks to constitute a tour of Japan. Chiba. Fukuoka. Nagoya. Kyoto. Every fucking prefecture appeared to have a bank and every bank appeared to have designed its website specifically not to work

The applications followed a familiar pattern. First came the promise of speed.

Approval today.

Simple online procedure.

Borrow whenever you need it.

Then came the reality.

Photograph your residence card. No, not like that. Turn it slightly. Move closer. Dude move farther away. Fuck you and fuck your face.

Use better lighting. Take a selfie. Turn your head. Hold up a handwritten note. Hold up the ID beside your face. Enter the address in full-width katakana. Enter the address in half-width numbers, whatever that means. Enter your employer’s telephone number. Not that telephone number. Another. Your birthday is invalid. 1974 does not exist. Yeah right. 1974 existed because I had personally was there. Fuck you again my friend. Fuck your face while you are at it.

Yeah. OK.

At ACOM I eventually reached a human being, which seemed promising until she informed me, with a little apologetic shrug, that the AI had said no. She could not explain why. The AI had spoken. The oracle had issued its judgment. Go home. Take a shower. God knows at this point I needed one

Lake allowed me to progress through the most Byzantine application of all time before deciding I was apparently the wrong category of foreign resident. Whatever. PayPay refused to read my ID card. Rakuten could not process Ritsumeikan’s address and telephone number despite twenty attempts. JCB rejected my birthday. Really dude? Yeah really. Kyoto Bank briefly sent me into a branch-selection circle in which code 142 somehow transformed into code 566. And back. And back again. I entered 142 again. The system contemplated this information and returned me to the beginning. Fuck.

The great Acropolis of Japanese consumer finance has many staircases and no entrance. It’s like the Winchester House of something.

The worst moment came with a lender that appeared near the top of the Google search results claimed that 1 million yen already been deposited into my online wallet. 1 million yen. The wallet showed a magnificent balance. Cold hard digital cash. All I had to do was transfer it to Kyoto Bank. Great. Fucking finally.

Then came the request. Pay ten percent of the loan first. There it was.

The scam unveiled itself with all the elegance of a man opening his raincoat on a subway platform. They had invented the loan, invented the wallet, invented the balance, and now wanted real money to release the imaginary money. I closed the window. There would be no ten percent. There would be no transfer. The million yen would continue its rich fictional life without me.

Meanwhile, actual life became an exercise in microscopic accounting.

A handful of coins. A few hundred yen on one card. Perhaps twenty or thirty dollars on another.

Enough for one round trip downtown, maybe. Four packs of Camel Blues. A dozen eggs and coffee. For a few hours I was rich.

Then I was broke again.

I. My House

Behind the immediate cash crisis sat the larger financial fact of my house.

My wide and I bought it in 2007 for roughly $380,000 after she negotiated it down from about $400,000. Good work by her. The house is around 110 years old, in Sakyo Ward, two minutes from the beautiful Kamogawa river, near houses worth millions, supermarkets, restaurants, a mall, a police station, and all the ordinary conveniences that make a neighborhood viable.

It also shares a structural exterior wall with the neighboring house. This is the problem.

The wall is concrete, substantial, and old. The two houses appear to have been constructed together, and the neighbor is in his mid-nineties, assuming he is still alive. I have not seen him or his wife in years. His adult son, who once came regularly with groceries and dealt with the practical business of keeping two elderly people alive in an old house, has also disappeared from view.

The neighboring garden had gone wild. Ours is hardly Versailles, but theirs looks as though nature had filed a successful adverse-possession claim.

Could a developer demolish our house without demolishing theirs? Probably. Kyoto carpenters have dealt with harder problems than an attached wall. Would the wall reduce the number of buyers? Almost certainly. Would it make the property impossible to sell? I don’t think so. The location is good. The land is desirable. Experienced builders know how to solve structural problems when the numbers make sense.

Still, the wall remains, silent, forbidding, concrete, holding up both houses and complicating our futures.

I began to do the math.

Sell for $380,000. Lose perhaps $60,000 to commissions, taxes, and associated costs. Net $320,000. Split evenly: $160,000 each.

Except it is not that simple.

I have paid the entire mortgage since 2007. I have paid the utilities, the internet, three cell-phone bills over twenty years, appliances, most of the groceries, much of Daisy’s food, and well over $400,000 for Hugh’s education from kindergarten through university. The house is in my name.

I could build a case in my head. I did build a case. I built it for hours.

But marriage is not a civil trial conducted by a man lying naked in bed with green tea, four packs of Camels, and a calculator.

A few weeks, after thinking about it for a while, I told Sachie I would give her half. She said she wanted nothing. I suggested $50,000, and she agreed.

This was the last conversation on the matter, about three weeks ago.

The ethical question is not whether I can prove that I have paid more. I have. The question is what I want the final act of a twenty-seven year marriage to look like.

For now, the answer is simple: honor our most recent agreement. Figure out what the house is actually worth. Sell the house. Divide whatever money comes in money.

There will be time enough to decide when the wall, the buyer, the agent, the taxes, and the actual sale price stop being theoretical and finally become real.

II. Sachie, Marriage, and the End of an Era

The financial accounting and the emotional accounting were different books.

This became clear while I was writing On Meeting My Wife Sachie, the first piece of a planned longer series about the marriage and divorce. I wanted to begin at the beginning because the end may be overshadow everything that came before it. Sachie is not merely the woman leaving our house, refusing the proceeds from the sale, arguing over our garden, or moving back toward her parents.

She was once a young woman whom I loved. I was once a young man she loved. The line Zach later singled out was: This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. That is the heart of it.

And now she is my ex-wife, a fact I find both funny and sad in equal measure.

Before resentment, accounting, separation, and twenty-five years of accumulated evidence for the prosecution, there were two people at the beginning of something. I want to give those people their due.

During these last eight days, we argued. We negotiated. She gave me ¥3,000, then another ¥3,000. She bought coffee filters but not bread or butter. She handled a cheque in a way I initially found incomprehensibly complex. I cursed, breathed in, calmed down. I listened to her explanation, and realized she was not intentionally trying to be difficult. She is just outta control.

Sachie is preparing to leave for Kumamoto in two weeks. Boxes accumulate. The house begins to feel less like a home than a staging area. We discuss bills, the garden, Daisy, our son, money owed, money promised, and who would keep which possessions.

There are moments of old intimacy in the language. I recently started calling her Sachan again. She calls me Machan. For just a minute we are back in 1997. It feels great. But it will not last.

Last week there was another earthquake in Kumamoto where my wife’s parents live. They were safe after the earthquake, and when I heard I felt a rush of relief. Her father Tetsuo is ninety-one and her mother Kazuko is ninety. I have known them for decades. Whatever has happened between Sachie and me, Kazuko still loves me. I love her too.

And I will probably never see her again. This is sad. Divorce does not merely separate two people. It closes a a whole chapter.

There are roads you no longer travel, houses you no longer own, nicknames you no longer use, relatives who become former relatives. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens. A door closes quietly, and one day you realize the entire geography of your life is now somewhere else

Still, Sachie and I talk. We make practical arrangements. We lend each other small amounts of money. We love the same child and the same dog. We can, at the best of times anyway, remind ourselves that neither of us is the villain of the piece.

The villain is time. As usual.

III. Hugh

Yesterday Hugh called. We spoke for an hour and fifty-three minutes.

This was almost certainly the longest telephone conversation we had ever had, and perhaps the longest uninterrupted conversation of its kind in years. Usually Hugh has ten minutes, twenty if I am lucky. He juggles work, plans, friends, screens, trains, a life. I am busy too. This time he had nearly two hours because he had just quit his soccer influencer job

On the phone he told me that was done.

He still likes football. He just does not want to spend sixteen hours a day editing football videos anymore. He had reached the same point with editing that I have reached with teaching: not dislike exactly, more like completion. That chapter has delivered everything it was going to deliver. It is now closed.

He had been doing most of the work while someone else took took a higher percentage. He agreed to this. Tolerated it for a while. But no more.

I told him I understood. And I did.

He is already freelancing, DJing trip-hop and electronic music, building something that is actually his. He is planning to move to Tokyo and eventually to buy a house. He casually told me he has saved about $50,000.

Fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-two. I have spent the last week trying to extract enough money from the Japanese banking system to buy a few packs of cigarettes and get downtown. My son had quietly assembled a down payment. I am so damn proud of him.

He told me he would come home tomorrow to pick up Daisy and keep her for a month or so while Sachie gets settled in Kumamoto. Later he told me he couldn’t come after all.

Typical. Hugh is a wonderful young man but he cannot keep a schedule for the life of him. Oh well. That’s just Hugh I guess.

Before that he said something that broke me open. He said in the next month he would bring Daisy back by a few times.

Just a day trip. A small kindness. An adult son anticipating the emotional needs of his father without being asked.

“You’re the man,” I told him.

“I love you, Papa,” he said.

“I love you too.”

There it was. The emotional center of the week.

Not the loans. Not Pattaya. Not the women, the house, Google, or the endless packs of cigarettes.

A son on the phone. One call. Two hours. My only son. Fuck.

We talked about Wise. I have an account somewhere but can not remember the password, naturally. He said he would refer me, earn a small bonus, and help me set up another path for my money.

We talked as two adults. Feels great.

I remember the boy, of course. Fathers always do. But the person on the phone is not a boy. He is a young a man, making decisions, leaving a job he no longer wants to do, moving to Tokyo, saving money, taking responsibility for Daisy, making time for me, building a life. What a deal..

IV. Women, Dating, and Sex

These last days there have been many women. Many many women. I find this pretty remarkable.

This is not a boast so much as a statement of fact. The apps multiply: Sugo, Tinder, Tapple, Thai Friendly, OkMeet, French sites with competent translation, text-only sex sites, and others whose names I forget. Free sites, cheap sites, sites that cost an arm and a leg. I started to develop lists. The Thailand list alone has maybe sixty names. More women than I could possibly meet. Tokyo has another half dozen. I began scheduling women the way a conference organizer schedules panels, except the conference was in Pattaya and the keynote address was sex.

At the center of all this chaos remains Litz.

Litz is real in the way the some of the others are not. Although no longer a couple, Litz and I still talk several times a day and text all the time. She knows my jokes, the invented women, her fake rivals Cindy and Julie. I tell her that Cindy is in bed with me and Julie is waiting her turn. She responds as though this ridiculous betrayal required serious adjudication. She says “baka you are waving your dick all over Japan. What am I going to do with you?” She is super funny. She is also, as many women are, totally outta control. Many men, myself included, are outta control too, however it is my experience that women are just that little bit extra outta control. For some reason.

Then there was Yua who I met online about a week ago. She has spent most of the last week, several hours a day, attempting to obtain a ¥5,000 Apple gift card, later negotiating it down to ¥3,000 so she could supposedly keep her “siblings” occupied with video games while she comes over for sex. She is 28. How young could her siblings be? I do not believe they exist at all, and are in fact just an elaborate cover for this increasing bizarre and tendential scheme of hers to fleece me for 50 bucks. For a solid week. Outta control.

Her commitment to the bit is almost admirable. Day after day she returns to the same small objective with the determination of a director of an intelligence service. Five thousand yen. Three thousand yen. Whatever I can afford. Baby what?

I began to admire the sheer disproportion between effort and reward. Either she liked me on some level, or she is perpetrating the least efficient scam in history. No rational person works six days for a ¥3,000 gift card. Yua, therefore, is not rational.

I thought of the Poison song Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Over time I have found this to be true. In this case, I reflected, every Yua has its thorn. And she is a thorny one that’s for sure. And yet I still talk to her. Go figure. I guess I am just weak this way.

Clara said she would come over from Osaka She got dressed. Maybe. She prepared. Perhaps. She vanished. Maybe she is real. Maybe she is not. Maybe she is a ghost. Maybe somewhere in Kyoto a beautiful woman is wandering around looking for me. God speed baby.

The two Lisas occupy separate jurisdictions.

One is the Yubari melon chick from Tokyo, beautiful enough that I continue to entertain her somewhat extravagant request for two extraordinarily expensive melons. I find this almost respectable compared with Yua’s ridiculous Apple gift cards. She is also extremely cute with her melons and all. At least Yubari melon exist.

Two melons for love. There are worse dowries.

The other Lisa lives in Amsterdam and floats somewhere in the broader international cloud of flirtation and scheduling.

Masha is my little Turkish bird. She communicates in stickers, goddesses, magic, feathers, and strange little fantasies. She asked for relatively small digital gifts and remains charming enough that I kept allowing for her many eccentricities. She is, of course, totally outta control. She could be an AI, a woman using AI, a woman pretending to be a bird, or an actual bird with excellent English. She could be anything really.

Then there are the many “UN nurses” imporbably stationed in combat zones. Three in five days. Donbas. Yemen. The Ukraine. Refugees. Humanitarian missions. Canadian surgeons wearing scrubs. Major Aaron. Whatever baby. You are a scammer and I don’t believe a single word you say. Oh well. Just one of the hazards of modern online dating I guess. Seen it all before. Bin.

Meanwhile Good Old Mr. Wank (oh yeah baby you know exactly who I mean) has remained the most dependable member of the cast.

He requires no gift cards, no airfare, no melons, no hotels, no flirtation, and never fails to appear when summoned. Mr. Wank rules.

Underneath this baroque carnival lies deep loneliness. I sometimes feel that sex is barely the point anymore. All I really want is to lie beside a woman, kiss her goodnight, and hold her until she falls asleep. Eventually I will sleep. If I’m lucky. That’s just the way things go as a lifelong night owl.

I love women.

V. My Writing

My writing this last week has been interesting.

My new daily series has begun to find readers. The first entry remains the leader among the new pieces. The essays on Litz and Sachie are about tied. My bisexuality piece is trailing a bit, which surprises me. Can’t always predict these things I guess.

Then my Dylan Thomas essay exploded.

The essay is eight years old, and I had redated and reposted it in 2024. For years the reliable traffic leaders at Kyoto Kibbitzer have been my Kris Kristofferson essay, Trump Gemini Dream, and my Razzlekhan essay.

Then, about six weeks earlier, On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Rhyme began climbing. And climbing.

No campaign on my part. No new angle. No obvious news hook. It simply rose beyond all expectations.

In thirty days it received hundreds of views, blowing past every other piece on my site. I searched the eassy title and found it above Genius.com, radio stations, videos, and—amazingly—Wikipedia. Amazing. Dude what is going on? Something.

The piece still holds up. It examins the song’s clever AABCCB rhyme scheme, its near-rhymes, and its general alternation between political anxiety and private hedonism. “Corset” and “Corvette.” The general and the king. Dylan Thomas dying on the barroom floor. A shower at the Bates Motel. The world collapsing while the narrators search for another drink. It is a great song and I am happy the essay is doing so well.

The success of Dylan Thomas sent me back into the archive. I reposted My Brother Mike’s Bad Book, the Mariners story in which Mike, drunk and rowdy but morally precise, heard someone defending a man shouting gay slurs and replied with four perfect words:

“That’s a bad book.”

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

The Razzlekhan essay disappeared from Word Press recently. I have no idea why. Something. I found a copy on Medium where I used to cross-post many of my pieces. I copied it into Word Press and republished it. Thank god.

Zach sent me a thoughtful note about my essay about meeting my wife. He understood piece immediately, especially the line about two young people on the cusp of life. He invited me to English Mass and told me he had begun a new essay called A Summer Day. I would be traveling, so I declined the Mass, but I am glad he is writing again. He is an excellent writer,

The archive was not dead. It had merely been in hibernation.

VI. Summer

Summer currently exists in the future tense.

Tokyo. Bangkok Pattaya. Hydra. Athens. The Czech Republic. Busan. New York, briefly, before its hotel prices restored sanity. Yeah right. I wish.

Every destination seems possible. None are booked.

I will go to Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hydra as soon as my money kicks in.

Get high as blazes. drink Pina Coladas on the beach, wear my sunnies, try to avoid a sunburn, rail women for days, spend too much money, get laid. Thank god. What a life man. What a life.

Pattaya is going to be outta control. Lovely Harmony for three nights. Matteneee for another. Jenny on my last night in town. Jenny and Matteneee are both escorts. I asked them both if we could have anal sex and if they were on birth control so I could cum inside them. They both said yes. Condoms are a necessarily evil but do suck. Hard.

Bar girls, freelancers, the beach, weed, fruity drinks with umbrellas, swimming pools. All the metier of a recently divorced middle aged man going through a soft mid-life crisis. I make absolutely no apologies for any of this. It is what it is. Life goes on.

VII. Music

Music did not sit beneath the week. It carried it.

The Grateful Dead on my long walk into town: Catfish John, Must Have Been the Roses, and Black Muddy River. Jerry rules like no other. God does he rule.

Neil Young arrived.

Unknown Legend, Crime in the City, Cortez the Killer, Thrasher, Albuquerque with the great Mark Kozelek cover, Roll Another Number for the road. Songs became routes through the day, places to stand while everything else moved.

David Lowery’s Fathers, Sons and Brothers showed up and kicked ass, predictably. He rules too. He rules beyond all things. God I love David.

Then came the Drive-By Truckers/ Jason Isbell Patterson Hood song draft with my friend chat. I love to draft with chat, although he is and remains a big fat nabber. Oh well. It is still great fun.

We left Cover Me Up off the board, which was either courageous or simply malpractice.

Our list included “Dress Blues,” “Relatively Easy,” “Outfit,” “Birthday Boy,” “Speed Trap Town,” “The Day John Henry Died,” “Goddamn Lonely Love,” “Elephant,” “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “The Righteous Path,” “Buford Stick,” “Decoration Day,” “Children of Children,” “Alabama Pines,” “Codeine,” and “Super 8.”

“Super 8” nearly broke the whole draft open:

Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well.

COME ON dude. Jesus Jason. Easy buddy.

Their combined catalog is not merely Southern rock. It is a curriculum in adulthood: fathers, sons, dead friends, drinking, divorce, work, small towns, the left behind, bad decisions, dignity, memory, hope, and the impossible notion of getting another chance after you have already used several.

Patterson Hood writes the people history forgets. Jason Isbell writes the ones who survive themselves. Mike Cooley walks in every third song, drops a perfect line, and checks out to hit the bar. The band simply rules. They all do.

I reflected on minor musical questions. Is Lucinda Willaims’ cover of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents better than the original. It’s tough but I think so. I listened several times to The Pixies absolutely shredding on Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On.” I put on Phosphorescent’s glorious cover of Corpus Christi Bay. Seam covering Breaking Circus’ Driving the Dynamite Truck. Nobody remembers Breaking Circus today. Nobody. Their version of Dynamite is marred by typical crappy 80s production which the Seam version cleans up. Whoever happened to these guys? No one knows. They are simply lost to the sounds of time, as we all will be one day.

The Mountain Goats have a new album coming out in just two days. Ryan Adams has a new one too that I am getting into.

Music is the best, and the world remained blessedly worth living in because of it.

VIII. Ordinary Days

Between the financial drama, romantic sub plots, and musical drafts, and my increasingly outta control mother my days slid by as usual.

Coffee. Green tea. Cigarettes on the balcony. Lying naked in bed half the day my PC propped up on my knees, writing. My buggy AC. Two fans on high. Porn. Phone calls. Existential angst. Sleep.

The second floor landing off the stairs remains a death trap. I toss laundry and dishes there and don’t dare step on the wooden boards lest I fall to my death. I am not remotely joking. From an actuarial perspective, the landing remains the most likely way for me to meet my final demise. I should take out insurance.

The area beside the bed improved. I removed most of the chocolate wrappers, cigarette packs, bottles, and general archaeological evidence of recent life. Beneath this material my residence card remained missing. Fuck.

A dozen voice-recording apps failed in different ways. I rely on text-to-speech apps for my writing and most of them suck. Of course. I finally found one that works well enough. They want $11.99 per year. No brainer.

I sleep in short blocks: an hour, two, four max. I woke, drank water, urinate off the balcony, smoke and do it all over again. It is, as the Feelies say, only life after all.

My body complains. Knees. Back. Ribs. Balls. My eyeballs burn from the cigarette smoke.

Sunburn across my stomach and shoulders after my five-mile walk beside the river in the sun. I look like a lobster. Oh well. It will pass,

I take several painkillers a day, trying to stay on dose, Why? No reason really. Just everything fucking hurts. I’m 52. What are you gonna do?

I’ve been slowly sipping a bottle of Napoleon Brandy for two weeks. It is too warm and I keep forgetting to get ice for it. Of course. I am just out it these days I guess.

My bicycle still scares me a little half a year after my winter crash. The roads are dry now, the heat intense, no ice to be seen, but my body remembered the crash. I remain skittish.

IX. Comedy

Life, among other things. is invariably funny.

Rainbolt, the GeoGuessr madman, who sees one sepia utility pole for half aa second along wth a patch of Polish grass, and calmly and corrently announces that we are twenty-two and a half miles west of Kraków. Make it make sense.You cannot. Rainbolt is just outta control. He’s some kind of savant I guess.

I want to re-watch the Joan Rivers documentary “Piece of Work” but I keep putting it off. Joan is hysterical. RIP to a real one.

Randy Quaid remains generally Randy Quaid. Obviously. He is insane. He just is. Dude the CIA gets up to some shit sure, but they are not in fact bugging your mind from an implant somehow magically implanted in your tooth.This is not a thing my friend. It is just not. Get a life. You’re outta control.

I remember Will Smith fucking slapping the shit outta Chris Rock at the Oscars over a totally tame G.I. Jane joke and then returning to his seat as though live global television had briefly become his living room. What a bizarre more. Will what are you doing my friend? Unbelievable.

Christian Dreyer sent a minimalist cartoon of two people in a car approaching an enormous fork lying across the road.

“It’s lunchtime!”

Totally bizarre. Dreyer is weird. No notes.

My mind drifted for some reason to the 70’s. TV shows like The Newlywed Game, The Love Boat, and The Dating Game, where an actual serial killer once appeared as a contestant, won the date, and was rejected afterward because the woman found him creepy. I was too young to watch these shows, however I am aware of them through the zeitgeist. Outta control.

The JonBenét Ramsey ransom note remains one of the strangest documents in American criminal history. The parents ate guilt as sin. They just are. It is a fact.

The alleged Trump Moscow hotel pee tape on the other hand remains unproven, although a remarkably well put together fake video circulated a few years ago because someone, somewhere, for some unknown reason, invested real time and effort into manufacturing the world’s most notorious and probably nonexistent pee video. Why? Reasons of their own. We will never know.

I began an essay called Was Donald Trump Peed On in Moscow? The likely conclusion: I do not know. Neither do you. That is the point, This does not prevent anyone from having absolute confidence one way or the other. Whatever dude. It was years ago. It’s just a little pee. So what? Let’s move on.

===== =====

Overall it has been a funny week. Then there was the Japanese loan interface informing me that 1974 never existed. Yeah right guy. Get a grip.

Then the three “UN nurses” purportedly in combat zones. Come on lady. You are a big fat clip-jointer. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Get over yourself. Get.a real job lady. Sit this one out.

Yua’s six-day campaign for ¥3,000.

The price of two Yubari melons standing between me and love.

The phrase “crap on a cross,” followed by the reasonable question of how the crap actually got up there.

This was life, basically.

Outta control.

X. Eight Transition Days

This last week did not really resolve. That is the fact.

No big loan arrived. The house did not sell. Sachie had not yet moved out. Thailand is somewhere down the line. Greece too. I cannot wait to hit the road again. I love to travel. I just do.

But something has shifted.

The archive woke up. The Sachie and Litz essays are doing well. The dailies are off to a good start. My son called. It is too hot. My AC doesn’t work. Damn.

That was the week.

Everything else—the lenders, women, cards, trains, cigarettes, apps, travel sites, melons, war-zone nurses, Greek islands, shared walls, Google rankings, impossible birthdays, all the rest—spin around this fact.

Something’s gonna happen.

It always does.

Dedication:

For Litz. You can take this D anytime you like baby.

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The Genius Razzlekhan and the Phony Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I went home with the waitress/ the way I always do/ how was I to know/ she was with the Russians too.

Warren Zevon

Author’s Note:

Some essays begin with a thesis. This one began with me laughing so hard I nearly fell out of my chair.

When Heather Morgan—better known as Razzlekhan—was accused of participating in what was then described as the largest cryptocurrency heist in history, nearly every media outlet converged on the same joke: look how terrible her rap videos are. I saw something different. Behind all the memes was someone making deeply strange, completely sincere outsider art. Whether you think it’s brilliant, awful, or somehow both at once, there is no mistaking its originality. I have always had a soft spot for artists who refuse to color inside the lines.

The surprise, though, was Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He wandered into the story for reasons best known to himself and, in my opinion, emerged looking far sillier than the alleged crypto queen ever did. Years later I still think the real story wasn’t the memes. It was how quickly the internet decided who deserved ridicule—and how often it picked the wrong target. Razzlekhan may have been the weirdest person in the room, but weird has never bothered me. Poseurs always have. This is their story.

===== =====

This is the saga of the queen of crypto hacking Heather Morgan, aka Razzlekhan, and the shameless tail chaser and phony public intellectual (is there any other kind) Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Just so we are clear about who is who here, Taleb, the bestselling author “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile” is the villain, and Morgan, who along with her husband is accused of pulling off the largest heist in human history ($4.5 billion dollars) is the heroine. Morgan was briefly a Twitter star in late February 2022 when her alleged crimes were revealed; however her stardom was not based on her hacking prowess, but rather on what was perceived (incorrectly) to be her world-historically awful rap videos, including, but not limited, her banger “Versace Bedouin,” in which, among other things, she names herself “the crocodile of Wall Street.” Here is a taste of her work (note that the real Heather Morgan appears to be in her early 30’s, and is certainly not a grandmother. Also, the video depicts Morgan rapping around the Wall Street district of New York City with three women “dancing” behind her, one wearing large green gardening gloves and carrying a flag with a design we are unable to clearly see for the entire video):

Razzlekhan’s the name/ the hot grandma you really wanna bang/ always run the gilf game/ ever since I was fif-taneee

I’m many things/ a rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO/ and a dirty dirty dirty dirty ho

Better than most writers/ creepier than most girls/ weirder than most rappers/ but I still rock pearls.

Alert listeners will note the apparent Liz Phair reference to Razz’s sexual maneuvering in her teens, suggesting that there may be at least a little guile to her lyrics. But what impresses me (and I’ll just state this right out-I think Razzlekhan is a misunderstood genius) is the straight ahead sincerity of the lyrics. I mean Versace Bedouin was released before Morgan was implicated in the crypto hack and here is her dedication at the top of the song:

Never forget, weirdest is the most original/ this song is for the entrepreneurs and hackers/ all the misfits and smart slackers.

The really hardcore music fan may pick up a possible Drugstore reference from “Say Hello”:

I say hello/ to all the junkies/ the sinners and the creeps/ I say hello to all the people in this place/ I say hello /to all the drug heads/ the prostitutes and freaks/ I say hello/ to all the people in the world!

But even I don’t think Morgan is a Drugstore fan, so the resemblance is most likely coincidental. What I love about Razz’s work here is that Versace Bedouin is a simple and totally sincere statement of intent. She tells the listener exactly who she is and what she’s about. She’s a weirdo and misfit, a hacker, a probable criminal, a business owner, and a dirty ho, and she is just letting the world know. She is, as the kids say, putting the motherfucking world on blast. Razzlekhan is coming for your bitcoin, baby, lock that shit down.

And the media loved it. The Guardian wrote a long (and pretty helpful) article on Morgan with the lead “Is this the new face of organized crime? Decoding Razzlekhan, the rapping bitcoin fraudster.”

“Who is this Bitcoin crime queen” they write breathlessly “and what does she tell us about the future of organized crime?” Well Mr. Guardian, that’s a good question that maybe I can shed some light on. Morgan and her husband (who, like the rest of the uncaring world didn’t care for her rap career-Heather I’m here for you man, just reach out) stole the money, allegedly, from the platform Bitfinix but were unable to convert much of into cash or liquid assets and had to settle for Walmart gift cards instead. So that might tell you something-I’m not sure how organized the pair was.

Mr. Guardian again:

“It is hard to articulate how it feels to be alive in an age of massive wealth disparity and multiple deregulatory lines of questionable crypto minting, but I think watching an alleged Bitcoin embezzler struggle through painful rap bars in a flat-billed cap that reads ‘0FCKS’ is a good summation of the overwhelming confusion.”

But it really isn’t hard to articulate at all-it feels great, because while Heather Morgan the journalist, CEO, and dirty ho may be facing a little legal trouble, Razzlekhan the artist, in my opinion, stands unbloodied and unbowed atop the pinnacle of outsider art along with Daniel Johnston, Mayo Thompson, and the handful of other transcendent geniuses so far ahead of their time they were subject to as much ridicule as they were celebration.

(My favorite piece of music criticism ever comes from a Pitchfork review which doesn’t seem to be online anymore of The Red Krayola’s 1989 album malefactor, ade-it must have been a re-release because Pitchfork wasn’t around in ’89 of course-where the critic accuses Mayo Thompson of “playing the guitar badly, on purpose.” And it’s pretty true. The Red Krayola is out there.)

Razz herself embraces the outsider role and speaks directly to her artistic origins and sensibilities in her artistic biography:

Razzlekhan is like Genghis Khan, but with more pizzazz… No one knows for sure where this rapper’s from — could be the North African desert, the jungles of Vietnam, or another universe. All that matters is she’s here to stick up for misfits and underdogs everywhere (…) Because Razz has synesthesia, her art often resembles something in between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare. Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended, Razz likes to push the limits of what people are comfortable with. Her style has often been described as “sexy horror-comedy,” because of her fondness for combining dark and disturbing concepts with dirty jokes and gestures. Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.

To my knowledge, no major media outlet even gave Razzlekhan a fighting chance; however I invite you to read the above self-description again with care. She is not in the least bit joking around. She identifies variously as a Bedouin, Turkish, a nomad, and an alien. Later in the same piece she identifies her influences as: Die Antwoord, Tierra Whack, Mickey Avalon, Salvador Dali, Diane Arbus, Hunter S. Thompson, Roald Dahl, and Charles Bukowski. This is a consistent, real, list of artists that a true outsider might well identify with. At the Razzlekhan level, the distance between greatness and awfulness is razor thin, artistic merit being, like everything else really, a circle not a line. In any case, judge for yourself — pull up a Razzlekhan video on You Tube (they are still there) and see what you think.

But what does any of this have to do with the author Nicholas Nassim Taleb? Well, it would have had nothing to do with him if our boy hadn’t chosen, with exquisitely poor judgment, to interject himself into the Heather Morgan/ Razzlekhan drama. Within hours of the heist news breaking, Mr. Taleb posted the following:

I have several things to say about this nonsense:

I. Check his use of “Attention” and the scare word “vulnerability.” Taleb thinks this message is super important and even urgent. He’s got to get it out there RIGHT NOW.

II. The story is obviously total BS. Taleb seems to have no sense of how Twitter works, and his narrative is so bizarre that he is basically begging us to roast him, which users in the hundreds did, of course.

III. Taleb gives no insight into why Morgan was DMing him. What did she want? Well, users, myself included, had a theory as to what might actually have occurred here. Occam’s Razor would suggest that at some point Morgan and Taleb began exchanging DMs, possibly on her initiative, as she was writing extensively for Business Insider and Forbes I believe, and maybe she wanted to ask Taleb something about one of his books. Taleb then pivoted into a bit of tail chasing, or, as one Twitter denizen put it slightly less crudely, he was looking for a little “bobs and vagine.” When Morgan was arrested, Taleb got spooked that somehow their DMs would leak, so he concocted a ridiculous cover story almost (but not quite) as stupid and unbelievable as Joy Reid’s claim that her fifteen year old blog with homophobic jokes and comments was hacked by Russians.

IV. The use of “some more recently” is a pure “tell.” Taleb’s bobs and vagineing has been going on for some time, it seems. But why in the world would Taleb think that the messages would leak just because Morgan was arrested (she was later released and her husband was held in custody, and I haven’t been able to get a status update on where she is today)? I mean there are really only two options: i) that the messages would be released by the FBI or something as pertinent to the case, in which case Taleb and Morgan would have been discussing her hacking. This seems highly unlikely; ii) Morgan would choose to release them herself in an effort to incriminate Taleb. But Nicholas baby, this is just not going to be a priority for Morgan after her arrest. I mean, she is accused of stealing 4.5 billion, and she’s got her rap career, and her husband is in prison. She has got stuff going on man; your DMs are way down the list.

All and all, this message shows that Taleb is an idiot and a complete joke. And people took note, including Edward Snowden, piping up from Russia. Check this out:

Snowden comes in with the savage take down here, and Taleb punches back with an offer to debate, what exactly? It’s not clear if this the debate challenge was issued prior by Taleb nor is it clear, at least to me, what is to be debated. Are they supposed to talk medical issues? Mental health? Hacking? Bobs and vagine? Taleb continues to make no sense, and Snowden let’s him know with another zinger:

Main Character Syndrome indeed. I would add Major Asshat Syndrome and Big Phony Fraud and Fragile Loser Syndrome as well. Because this is the guy who wrote Antifragile! Which is supposed to be about things that thrive during chaos, or in other words, things which are resilient. And nothing says resilient like faking a hacking narrative to cover your tail chasing, issuing an incomprehensible debate challenge to someone way out of your league, and tripling down with blocking random twitter users who question you. And I would know, because after I liked the bobs and vagine comment and added something like “Methinks Mr. Taleb doth protest too much,” the fucker blocked me too! Sadly that Twitter account is history so I can’t post a screenshot, however it was obvious that this huge baby was scrolling chats and mass blocking to distract from his disastrous piece of public relations. Honestly, the whole thing was super funny and Taleb showed his ass in the worst possible way.

Taleb obviously thinks he is hotshit. Check out his Twitter bio.

What a poser. A flaneur is a French term for someone who walks the streets taking things in, and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about the flaneur in his epic, and epically unfinished “Arcades Project.” Actually, a flaneur is a lot like a kibitzer. I am the Kyotokibbitzer (two b’s baby), and I love Benjamin’s work, including the Arcades Project. I bet Taleb is aware of Benjamin and fancies himself a fan. But he doesn’t know the first thing about Benjamin, because Benjamin was a humble guy who did great work and Taleb is a braggart, a tail chaser, and a bum. Deadlifts and dead languages my ass. Text is dead there Nicholas, at least your texts are, because you made a complete fool of yourself and you suck. Taleb exemplifies precisely why I dislike anyone who calls themselves a public intellectual or an expert. He is a poser and I’ll bet you 10 to 1 his ideas are stolen just like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s, another total loser who piggybacks on people who know something to pump up his image. (A sure sign of a loser is a “public intellectual” who insists on using three names. What’s wrong with Nicholas Taleb or Neil Tyson? The only people who need three names are serial killers; I mean even public intellectual number one Malcolm Gladwell only uses two names. Gladwell is known to pilfer ideas as well, but The Tipping Point is a pretty good read and the dude genuinely knows a tremendous amount about the sport of running. And he doesn’t call himself “Malcolm Julius Gladwell” or whatever. This is because he’s just a writer and knows that using his middle name would make him a prat.) Anyway, it’s totally fine to fake it ’til you make it, and most of us do to a greater or lesser degree, but you can’t fake your way into being an expert. Never trust “experts,” full stop.

So that’s the story of Razzlehan, the misunderstood genius, and Nicholas Taleb, the big phony. And in case you are asking, yes I did ask Razz to get in touch with me above. I’d say “I can fix her,” but she needs no fixing. She can DM me all she wants, and she doesn’t even have to get the Russians involved.

Dedication:

For Razz. You rule baby. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days of Nights of My 50s, 7/26/26: A Minor Day

I: Morning

I woke just after 6:40 this morning with the pleasant emptiness that follows a good night’s sleep and, occasionally, good sex. The room was quiet. My head was clear. Osaka was already stirring.

I brewed a coffee in my room, then wandered downstairs for another one from Lawson, bought a bag of crisps, and smoked a few heaters.

Travel logistics, I’ve have come to realize, occupies only a fraction of my days these days. The rest is spent trying to make sense of what happened yesterday.

I opened my essay draft from last night.

“She looked like her picture…but not quite.”

Good.

“She joined me in the shower.”

Fine.

“She began to stroke my dick.”

I stared at the sentence. Technically accurate. But could I do better? Try again. The morning became less about memory than rhythm. Every sentence asked a question.

Too much? Not enough? Funny? Honest? Self-indulgent? I changed “dick” to “cock.” Then changed it to “dick” again. I have no logical explanation for this. It just felt right.

Then there was the kissing. I looked at the sentence “her tongue had been just a little aggressive.” True. Funny. Fair. It stayed.

Other things didn’t. I caught myself trying to make everything dramatic. I deleted entire paragraphs. I was making progress. Outside my window Osaka continued existing without the slightest interest in whether one sentence sounded better than another.

Inside my room, however, the fate of Western literature seemed to depend upon whether I’d written “I checked Google Maps again” or “I checked Google Maps for the tenth time.” The latter had to go. It was writerly inflation. Get it outta here.

II: Early Afternoon

Whenever I edit, my brain begins making improbable associations. One sentence reminds me of a song. The song reminds me of a film. The film reminds me of another book.

Then suddenly I’m Googling Moneyball pictures because I need a photograph of Brad Pitt smiling for my essay cover.

I put on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Dirty Water with that one immortal line.

“Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you/ ain’t what that were supposed to do?”

Perfect, I thought. There’s your epigraph.

By mid-morning I’d spent three hours changing words that most readers would never notice. Dick. Cock. Looked. Seemed. Perhaps. Another cigarette. More editing.

There are days when writing feels like building a cathedral. There are other days when it feels like repeatedly moving the same chair around the living room in search of the perfect angle.

=====

After lunch I finally leaned back. The piece wasn’t perfect, but it was alive.

Yesterday had begun as a train ride, become a date, drifted into sex, wandered through a convenience store at half past midnight, detoured into Zero Dark Thirty, and somehow wrapped at six thousand words.

That’s the strange alchemy of memoir. You don’t write life. You live it first. Then you spend the next morning discovering what it was actually about.

III: Late Afternoon

Whether you know it or not—if you’re even halfway interesting—you eventually become Larry King.

“Morning folks…maybe Hong Kong… maybe the weather… coffee…”

Dot dot dot. The famous Larry King ellipsis. God, I loved that.

“Mets win…”

Always the Mets.

“Mets win… rain tomorrow… baby dies… RIP… gonna take a shit… Larry out…”

Everything separated by ellipses like every thought had exactly the same emotional weight. That’s genius. USA Today probably paid him a million bucks for two tiny paragraphs. Larry transcended journalism. It was its own literary form.

Speaking of old media guys, I think this has been reported, so I’m not talking out of school. Mandiola said Larry was up against it money wise when he died. Eight marriages. Eight divorces. Totally outta control.

After sixty-five years at the pinnacle of broadcasting, CNN, the huge interviews, all of that… supposedly there wasn’t much left. You assume people who sit on top of the mountain for half a century just become permanently rich.

Apparently not.

=====

Hong Kong still sounds attractive to me. Not just because of the escorts. Honestly, I can get dumplings anywhere. But there’s something about Hong Kong. South Korea too, though prostitution isn’t really an option there. That’s okay. I’ll get on the apps when I feel like dating.

I don’t actually want another marriage. I thought I did with Litz six weeks ago. Turns out I was just rushing in and being dumb.

Ian texts nd says a bunch of those Scott Walker songs on YouTube are probably AI. Sure dude. Doesn’t bother me. Fine brother, fine.

IV: An Early Night

I don’t have a lot to say about last night. I didn’t get an escort. I didn’t even browse the escort sites. Mostly, I slept—twice more—and finished editing and publishing my essay He Gets on Base. Other than that, I didn’t do much of anything.

Cape Canaveral remained the soundtrack of the evening. I don’t even remember whether I talked to Litz. I had the tempura soba for dinner from the store, and that’s about all I can confidently remember.

Around five o’clock, I realized I’d slept very little over the past week. As I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t really slept well since I was fourteen, with very few exceptions. A week of minimal sleep isn’t unusual for me. After several days, though, it inevitably catches up with me. This was one of those times.

Earlier in the day, I’d finished a somewhat difficult edit of my journal entry, Am I Bisexual? After publishing that, I turned to the previous day’s essay, He Gets on Base, which was also running a bit behind. I thought I could get it edited and published before going to sleep, and, thankfully, I was right.

A couple of hours later, I took a short nap. When I woke up, I washed up, drank some water, put on some fresh music, and went back to work. I don’t remember thinking about much besides finishing the essay. That was the goal, and I wanted it out the door.

I finally fell asleep for the second time around 10:00 p.m. and woke up around 3:30 a.m.—a perfectly normal night by my standards.

Overall, it was a good day. I didn’t accomplish much in terms of sightseeing or adventure, but I did get two overdue essays edited and published. I caught up on some badly needed sleep, felt productive again, and, in the end, that was good enough.

This will probably be one of the shortest entries in The Days and Nights of My 50s, but not every day needs to be an epic. Sometimes getting the work done and getting some sleep is story enough.

Dedication:

For sleep. Thank god.

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[The Days and Nights of the 50s, 7/25/26. He Gets on Base.

zmust be eighty meterswith planters all the way down , with planters all the way down it.

Some benches have backs.

Some don’t.

Obviously I’m taking the deluxe seating.

No plans today.

That’s the plan.

Maybe extend another night.

No reason to move.

Red Roof got cancelled.

Waiting on the Sony card.

Probably head back Tuesday unless Hugh suddenly decides otherwise.

I doubt it.

He said “maybe.”

That’s already twenty percent.

Then he didn’t text back.

That’s another twenty percent.

I just don’t think it’s happening.

If he calls, maybe Kobe.

I’m not cold-opening Kobe.

Women?

Sure.

Friends?

Different rules.

Bought Camels.

Pure economics.

American Spirits are ¥440.

Marble Blacks are ¥660.

Camels were something like ¥480 for twenty.

The math wins.

Star liked my pieces.

There’s something going on there.

I know there is.

She texted back fast enough.

Not saying anything dramatic.

Just…

I have a read on these things.

Music.

Nothing beats side two.

“Rock & Roll.”

Then “Sweet Jane.”

Come on.

Lou Reed was absolutely on one.

People always talk about “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Fine.

It’s good.

But Street Hassle…

Different universe.

He played twenty-plus minutes of it live when I saw him in 2003.

Incredible.

Rosie’s in Thailand.

Pink hair now.

Twenty-three? Twenty-four?

Typical Thailand.

III: Late Afternoon

arly Afternoon

Dude, whether you know it or not—if you’re even halfway interesting—you eventually become Larry King.

“Maybe Hong Kong… maybe the weather… coffee…”

Dot dot dot.

The famous Larry King ellipsis.

God, I loved that.

“Mets win…”

Always the Mets.

“Mets win… rain tomorrow… baby dies… RIP… gonna take a shit… Larry out…”

Everything separated by ellipses like every thought had exactly the same emotional weight. That’s genius. USA Today probably paid him a million bucks for two tiny paragraphs. Larry transcended journalism. It was its own literary form.

Speaking of old media guys…

I think this has been reported, so I’m not talking out of school. Manuel said Larry was almost broke when he died. I don’t know the numbers—I think Manuel threw out something like a million dollars in debt—but the point wasn’t the number. The point was that after sixty-five years at the absolute top of broadcasting, CNN, the huge interviews, all of that… supposedly there wasn’t much left.

Again, that’s Manuel’s story, not mine.

If true, it’s fascinating.

You assume people who sit on top of the mountain for half a century just become permanently rich.

Apparently not.

Hong Kong still sounds attractive.

Not because of escorts.

Honestly, I can get dumplings anywhere.

But there’s something about Hong Kong…

South Korea too, though prostitution isn’t really an option there. That’s okay. I’ll get on the apps if I feel like dating.

I don’t actually want another marriage.

I thought I did with Liz.

Turns out I was just being dumb.

No regrets.

Seriously.

I forgive myself completely.

Starter still hasn’t gotten back to me.

Hugh either, but it’s only six in the morning, so he’s asleep.

Ian says a bunch of those Scott Walker songs on YouTube are probably AI.

Could be.

Doesn’t bother me.

I barely know what he’s talking about half the time anyway.

Green gum.

Always green gum.

The black stuff is basically gone in three chews.

Do people actually chew gum for half an hour?

I don’t.

Three chews.

Done.

This bench is better.

The hotel has this long strip outside—must be eighty metres—with planters all the way down it.

Some benches have backs.

Some don’t.

Obviously I’m taking the deluxe seating.

No plans today.

That’s the plan.

Maybe extend another night.

No reason to move.

Red Roof got cancelled.

Waiting on the Sony card.

Probably head back Tuesday unless Hugh suddenly decides otherwise.

I doubt it.

He said “maybe.”

That’s already twenty percent.

Then he didn’t text back.

That’s another twenty percent.

I just don’t think it’s happening.

If he calls, maybe Kobe.

I’m not cold-opening Kobe.

Women?

Sure.

Friends?

Different rules.

Bought Camels.

Pure economics.

American Spirits are ¥440.

Marble Blacks are ¥660.

Camels were something like ¥480 for twenty.

The math wins.

Star liked my pieces.

There’s something going on there.

I know there is.

She texted back fast enough.

Not saying anything dramatic.

Just…

I have a read on these things.

Music.

Nothing beats side two.

“Rock & Roll.”

Then “Sweet Jane.”

Come on.

Lou Reed was absolutely on one.

People always talk about “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Fine.

It’s good.

But Street Hassle…

Different universe.

He played twenty-plus minutes of it live when I saw him in 2003.

Incredible.

Rosie’s in Thailand.

Pink hair now.

Twenty-three? Twenty-four?

Typical Thailand.

Then out of nowhere…

An old girlfriend pops up.

Haven’t talked in thirty-four years.

Barely thought about her except when the algorithm reminded me she still exists.

Now she wants me to call.

Why not?

Thirty-four years.

What’s the worst that can happen?

I’ll give her a ring.

We’ll see what happens.

Duder out.

=====

Then there was the kissing.

I liked writing that her tongue had been “just a little aggressive.”

Whenever I edit, my brain begins making impossible associations.

One sentence reminds me of a song.

The song reminds me of a film.

The film reminds me of another book.

Then suddenly I’m reading Moneyball captions because I need a photograph of Brad Pitt smiling.

Why?

No idea.

It simply feels right.

Then Kevin Drew enters the room.

“Good sex never makes you feel hollow.”

Perfect.

That’s the epigraph.

Sorry, Bukowski.

You’ve just been replaced.

By now I’d drifted into The Sopranos.

I’ve watched the entire series twice.

One of my favourite moments comes near the end, when Carmela asks Meadow whether she’s really leaving.

Meadow says yes.

Carmela asks, “So you wanna get out?”

Meadow nods.

Carmela smiles sadly.

“Let me draw you a map.”

I’ve always loved that line.

It’s funny.

Protective.

A little manipulative.

Entirely maternal.

Like so much of The Sopranos, it’s simultaneously warm and faintly menacing.

Good dialogue almost always carries two emotions at once.

That’s something I’ve stolen shamelessly.

By mid-morning I’d spent three hours changing words that most readers would never notice.

Dick.

Cock.

Looked.

Seemed.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

Delete.

Undo.

Delete again.

Smoke.

Coffee.

Another cigarette.

More editing.

There are days when writing feels like building a cathedral.

There are other days when it feels like repeatedly moving the same chair around the living room in search of the perfect angle.

This was definitely a chair-moving day.

Around lunchtime I finally leaned back.

The piece wasn’t perfect.

It never would be.

But it was alive.

Yesterday had begun as a train ride, become a date, drifted into sex, wandered through a convenience store at half past midnight, detoured into Zero Dark Thirty, and somehow ended as six thousand words.

That’s the strange alchemy of memoir.

You don’t write life.

You live it first.

Then you spend the next morning discovering what it was actually about.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Night of My 50s IV, 7/24/26: Am I Bisexual?

The locus of action is always in motion.

— Erving Goffman

This one goes to out to somebody watching tonight. She knows who she is.

— Bob Dylan

“Come on, baby, let’s rock and roll.”
— Michael Knott

Rock and roll motherfucking rules.

It just does.

Music in general rules. Live music rules even harder. I love almost every kind of music there is, from Appalachian folk to Georgian polyphony, from Miles Davis to Papa M, although admittedly not always in equal measure. Music has been one of the great organizing forces of my life for as long as I can remember. It has rescued bad days, elevated good ones, carried me through grief, celebrated victories, and made long train rides, lonely hotel rooms, and empty apartments feel just a little less empty. If today’s essay seems to wander off in musical directions more often than usual, that’s because today belongs to music.

The last couple of days have been filled with minor crises, accumulated errands, and one rather difficult conversation with my mother that I’ll briefly update readers on in a moment. None of these problems were especially serious in isolation. Collectively, however, they had begun to clutter the landscape of my mind. I woke up this morning with an unusually simple goal: clear away the small stuff, stay close to the hotel, listen to music, write, and otherwise leave myself alone.

There were still a handful of practical matters that needed attention. I’d been meaning to buy a new pair of headphones for several days. My hair was beginning to reach the point where even I had to admit it probably needed cutting. More importantly, ever since returning to Japan six weeks ago, my phone’s SIM card had been behaving erratically. The hotel Wi-Fi had been excellent, as Japanese hotel Wi-Fi almost always is, but every time I stepped outside I was reminded that “mostly functional” isn’t really functional at all. Since I’m planning to leave Japan again later this summer, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. Today I had a two o’clock appointment at the nearby SoftBank store, barely a three-minute walk from the hotel. The haircut could wait. The headphones could wait. The SIM card could not.

Readers of yesterday’s essay may be wondering about my mother and me. After our rather tense exchange yesterday morning, we exchanged messages later in the day. We still see a number of things differently, particularly regarding my writing and my dating life, and I doubt those differences will disappear anytime soon. On the other hand, we also love each other very much, and hopefully neither of us has any interest in staying angry for long. Families have disagreements. Good families keep talking anyway. I suspect that’s where we’re headed.

The same goes for Litz and me.

After nearly a month of trying to coordinate our schedules, we’re still trying. Unfortunately, her work situation remains remarkably unpredictable. She’s effectively working under a zero-hour arrangement, which totally sucks, which means an off day that appears available for her to travel one day can disappear the next. We’d hoped to meet in Takamatsu, roughly halfway between Kochi and Kyoto, but another last-minute change at work forced us to postpone yet again. We were both disappointed, but neither of us blamed the other. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. We’ll keep talking, keep laughing, and eventually the calendars will line up. If they don’t before I leave for Thailand and then Spokane later this summer, we’ll simply keep doing what we’ve been doing remarkably well for months now: staying close despite the distance.

Once those thoughts were out of the way, the day became pleasantly ordinary.

II: Afternoon

I left the hotel a little before two carrying both my residence card and my My Number card, even though SoftBank had only asked me to bring one. Years of dealing with paperwork have taught me that bringing too much identification is infinitely preferable to bringing too little.

The walk to the station took only a couple of minutes. As usual, I finished a cigarette on the way, tossed it before entering, and descended into the cool underground passage. Every Japanese station seems to have its own invisible weather system. Long before you see the platform, you feel the wind. Part of it comes from the enormous ventilation system. Part of it comes from the trains themselves, which push columns of air through the tunnels like giant pistons every time they arrive. Whatever the engineering explanation, it always feels faintly magical. Before you hear the train, before you see another passenger, the station announces itself with moving air.

The appointment itself took exactly eight minutes.

The young SoftBank employee helping me wore a SoftBank Hawks baseball jersey instead of an office shirt, complete with a day’s worth of black stubble. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the whole thing struck me as perfectly Japanese. Professional without being overly formal. Efficient without pretending to be important. He checked my identification, installed the new SIM, and, naturally, it didn’t work right away. We both stared at the screen for a few seconds before I restarted the phone. It restarted almost instantly, found the network, and returned to life.

Problem solved. It’s funny how satisfying it is to cross one genuinely useful task off your list.

Afterwards I wandered no farther than the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. I stopped by a drugstore and a Lawson to purchase provisions. By the time I walked back through the hotel doors, less than forty minutes had passed since I’d left. The room was cool. The new SIM card worked. The refrigerator was full. The errands were finished. For the first time in several days, there was nothing left to do except what I’d wanted to do all along. Listen to music. Write my essays. Do my job.

Every now and then, simply sit there and enjoy the fact that not every thought requires action, not every errand deserves urgency, and not every day has to become an adventure. Sometimes crossing three small things off the list is more than enough. From there, all that’s left is to press play.

There were still a couple of unanswered questions hanging over the afternoon. My son might text. If he did, we’d decide whether to meet in Kyoto tomorrow evening before I returned to what has unexpectedly become my little base camp here in Osaka.

Litz was still trying to untangle her work schedule. We’ve become surprisingly good at living with uncertainty, talking several times a day while waiting for circumstances to cooperate. By Sunday evening I should have a much clearer idea whether we’ll finally meet before I leave Japan again or whether Thailand will arrive first.

I sat down to today’s journal. As I’ve mentioned before, this daily series is still brand new, but I’m working harder on it than almost anything I’ve written in quite a while. The response so far has been encouraging. Whether it eventually approaches the readership of my St. George’s series remains to be seen, but I’m quietly hopeful.

The St. George’s essays continue to surprise me. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, that series gradually climbed Google’s rankings until searches for “St. George’s Spokane History” began returning my essays near the very top of the page, sometimes directly beneath Wikipedia and occasionally even ahead of the school’s own website.

I find this oddly gratifying.

For the first several years of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, I cross-posted almost everything to Medium with very little success. I did almost no search-engine optimization, almost no promotion, and almost all of my readership came through Facebook and WordPress. Then, almost without warning, the St. George’s pieces found an audience.

I’d like to think that somewhere along the way some perspective parents trying to learn about the history of the school may have stumbled across my recollections instead. If this is true, it makes me smile.

The series is affectionate. It’s nostalgic. But it’s also honest. I attended St. George’s from 1980 until 1992, and schools in the 1980s operated according to a very different set of expectations than schools today. Discipline was different. Student life was different. The relationships between students and teachers were different. Sexual mores were different. My only goal was to reflect those years as accurately and fairly as I could.

Whether readers agreed with every conclusion hardly mattered. They read the stories. For that, I’ll always be grateful. As soon as I began thinking about today’s essay, I knew I was going to start with music.

Music has been one of the central joys of my life for as long as I can remember.

As a young boy I wanted to learn the piano. I asked my mother several times if I could take lessons, however she replied that she could not afford them at the time. A few years later my parents’ financial situation improved enough that my younger brother Mike was able to study the cello for several years. He eventually became an excellent young player before other interests gradually took over. I was genuinely happy for him, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that I’d missed my chance.

Over time I got over it, however in the back of my mind I always to learn to play.

After a major change in my work circumstances in 2018, I finally bought myself an inexpensive electronic keyboard and decided that, instead of taking formal lessons, I’d simply see how much I could teach myself. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than a chord-finder app and an unreasonable amount of free time, I slowly made a little progress, and was able to read and play several simple pieces.

I only performed publicly once—if “publicly” is the right word. A friend named Mela, whom I’d met through the wonderful and sadly now defunct Periscope app, eventually persuaded me to play two songs over the phone. I stumbled my way through “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers and then attempted Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain.” As I’ve written elsewhere, I didn’t exactly dominate Ocean Rain. But it was at least passable. Mela applauded politely, and for one brief afternoon I felt like I’d accomplished something I’d wanted to do since childhood.

After playing for Mela, I began lose interest in the keyboard. I was never going to be good to play in public, and playing for Mela was a lot of fun. I decided to go out on a high note. Sometimes achieving a childhood dream doesn’t require becoming great at it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to discover that the dream itself was real.

III. A Lifetime of Listening

I have listened to music everyday for 38 years since 1988. Music is simply part of the furniture of my life. Like everyone else, there are genres I return to almost every day and genres I will never listen to again. Even so, with remarkably few exceptions, I can usually find at least one artist in almost every style that I genuinely admire. There are even bands—Genesis immediately comes to mind—that I respect enormously while almost never choosing to play them. Great musicianship and personal taste are not always the same thing, and I’ve become more comfortable with that distinction as I’ve gotten older.

Perhaps because I never learned to play an instrument as a child, I became obsessed with listening to music instead. By the time I was fourteen, I was spending every spare dollar I could scrape together on cassettes, and then, almost overnight, CDs when they replaced cassettes as the dominant medium. Looking back, I probably should have tried to some of my money. Instead, I spent virtually all of it on music.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Music became my education. It taught me geography, history, politics, religion, literature, relationships, heartbreak, humor, and more than a little philosophy. Long before streaming services provided almost every song ever recorded, discovering a great new band required effort. Somebody recommended them. You took a chance. You saved your money. You bought the record. If you loved it, it became part of your life.

Some artists from my teenage years have stayed with me. Others have not. This is OK with me.

The first cassette I ever bought with my own money was Martika’s self-titled debut. I haven’t listened to it in decades, but I don’t regret buying it for a second. It was the beginning of a lifetime spent chasing songs.

Soon enough my classmates introduced me to bands like R.E.M., the Violent Femmes and Fine Young Cannibals. Before long I discovered Bob Dylan and the Replacements on my own, and after that there was no turning back.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton College in the fall of 1992, I was already spending almost every extra dollar on music. That habit has never really gone away. Today my Spotify library contains thousands of liked songs spanning almost every genre imaginable.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton music had become a major part of my life. I was into artists such as Bob Dylan, the Replacements, The Pogues, Dire Straits, R.E.M, the Violent Femmes, and several others. Many of my favorite bands would soon come to be described as alternative or indie rock. Looking back, I was only beginning to scratch the surface.

One of roommates freshman year, Jake, loved music almost as much as I did, although his tastes tended to run in a more traditional direction. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were his touchstones, and before long they became mine as well. We spent countless hours listening to records in our quad, arguing over songs, recommending albums to one another, and gradually building the sort of musical vocabulary that only develops when people live together and have far too much free time.

Next door lived Ian Murphy. Ian remains one of my closest friends to this day, and he is the only person I have ever met who knows more about music than I do.

That is not a sentence I write lightly. I’ve spent most of my adult life buying and listening to records, reading about records, ranking records, writing about records, and generally annoying other people by going on and on about. Over the years I’ve accumulated many thousands of CDs and listened to what must be hundreds of thousands of songs. Music has never really been a hobby for me. It’s simply part of the way I move through the world.

Ian somehow manages to go even further. When we first met, he introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, many of whom I may not have discovered on my own. Luna immediately became one of my favorite bands of all time. He also pointed me toward the Auteurs, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Ride, and dozens of other artists, particularly from Britain’s remarkable alternative scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of those bands became lifelong companions. Others I admired without ever fully embracing. All of them expanded my musical horizons.

What impressed me most, however, wasn’t simply the breadth of Ian’s knowledge. It was his curiosity.

Ian has always approached music the way an historian approaches a historical period or a scientist approaches a research question. He doesn’t merely listen to an artist. He disappears into them. If Nick Cave captures his imagination, he’ll spend months tracing every album, every collaboration, every side project, every live recording, and every obscure appearance he can find. More recently he’s done the same thing with classic country artists such as Merle Haggard and Steve Earle—a development that amuses me slightly, since I can still remember him gently teasing me about my own love of country back in college.

We continue to recommend records to each other today. I honestly can’t imagine what my musical life would look like if I’d never met him.

IV: Musical Genres I Like I Folk/ Americana

My favorite musical genre, without question, is folk music and its close cousin, Americana. Looking back, I suspect I know why.

When I was about six years old I discovered my parents’ tiny record collection. For reasons I still can’t explain, I pulled out an old folk compilation with the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” on it. I played it over and over again in our living room. Not long afterwards I also found a Joan Baez record, and fell hopelessly in love with “Sweet Sunny South.” I had no idea what the lyrics meant. I just knew I wanted to hear the song again.


By about 2010, like many people as they begin to age, my ability to keep up with new bands began to wane somewhat. I did my best to keep up with the bands that I already knew and loved, however I found myself becoming less omnivorous in my listening. In the last couple of years, with the help of Spotify, I have endeavored to change this, and I’ve discovered dozens and dozens of new artists and bands that I really like.

Among my favourite folk and Americana artists are, in no particular order, Phosphorescent, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo and Conor Oberst.

I’ve only seen Phosphorescent and Wilco live. Whiskeytown no longer exists, Ryan Adams still tours, and Uncle Tupelo eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt. These days I probably listen to Son Volt more than I once did, but Wilco remains my favourite of the two.

I’ll never stop listening.

V: Musical Genres I Like II Indie

Alternative and indie rock became the soundtrack of my teenage years.

As I mentioned earlier, I inherited my classmates’ love of bands like R.E.M. and Violent Femmes. I discovered The Replacements on my own, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time.

Some of my favourite indie artists today include Happiness, Daddy Issues, Giant Drag, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Afghan Whigs, Luna, Car Seat Headrest, Yo La Tengo, Seam and many others.

Like folk music, indie has been a constant companion for almost forty years. I can’t imagine that changing.

I also love jazz and ambient music, but those are enormous subjects that deserve essays of their own.

VI: Musical Genres I Do Not Like

Then there are the genres I do not like. Mainstream hard rock has never really appealed to me. Bon Jovi and Van Halen simply aren’t my thing. Grunge is more complicated. I admired what bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are trying to doing, but I just don’t like him.


I don’t especially like heavy metal, although I do like several glam metal bands, probably because glam metal becoming popular, right when I was an early teenager and really listening to music for the first time. My favorite of these are Cinderella and Poison and I still have a soft spot Skid Row.

Then there is Progressive Rock or Prog. Prog and I have simply never gotten along.

Yes leaves me cold. Kansas does absolutely nothing for me. Toto has me running for the hills. And Genesis deserves special mention.

Many years ago I wrote what I thought was an entirely harmless one-star Amazon review of the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I assumed perhaps three people would read it. Apparently every Genesis fan on Earth was one of those three people.

The abuse began almost immediately. It turned out that among the hundreds of glowing reviews of the record, mine was the lone dissenting voice. For weeks strangers explained, in increasingly colorful language, exactly why I was an idiot. Eventually I deleted the review, not because I had changed my mind, but because I was just sick of the whole thing. I still don’t like the album.

VII. Evening: My Evolving Sexuality

Between about 7 and 10 PM I spent nearly three hours staring at what might have been the worst website ever designed.

It was supposedly the best escort aggregator in Osaka. It certainly aggregated everything. Hundreds of women. Dozens of agencies. Flashing banners. Pop-ups. Prices that changed the moment you clicked through. Every page had to be translated, and every time I went back it reverted to Japanese and I had to translate it again. After a while I wasn’t browsing anymore. I was wrestling with the website.

Eventually I admitted defeat.

The practical lesson was simple enough. If I wanted reasonable prices, I was probably going to have to get over my preference for outcalls and start looking at incalls instead. Fair enough. That was useful information. Three hours for one sentence.

Then, just as I was about to give up entirely, two completely unrelated things happened.

The first was my friend Doug in China. He messaged to say he’d finally finished my recently published novel The Adventures of The Thin Man and Andrea.

His note was everything a novelist hopes to hear. He hadn’t read it as “Matt playing the Thin Man.” He’d read it as a fully realized novel that happened to contain pieces of me. That was probably the single nicest compliment anyone could have paid me. I had been wandering around wondering whether the evening had been wasted, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. Doug had already given me something far better.

=====

When I was six and seven years old I was badly abused by my aunt’s first husband. I detail these experiences here. Childhood sexual abuse is the worst, and this fucking guy is simply the biggest dick imaginable. Fuck off.

It has taken me more than forty years to overcome some the effects of the abuse. This may seem like a long time ago, however this is just how CSA works. It sucks. So hard. One of the major effects was my eventual questioning of my sexuality. Around the time I hit puberty at 14 to the ago of 16 I wondered if I was gay. I was deeply attracted to girls, however the gay idea was never far from my mind.

By the time I was sixteen I had begun dating girls, however awkwardly, and my thoughts that I might be gay gradually faded into the background.

Throughout my marriage, two affairs, and a few other relationships, I remained consistently attracted to women. I never seriously thought of myself as gay. Even so, the question never disappeared entirely. It simply became quieter.

A few years ago I found myself occasionally turning to pornography featuring trans women. My favorite actress is Daisy Taylor, who is so gorgeous and whose picture leads this essay. It isn’t perhaps my favorite genre, but I kept returning to it often enough that I eventually stopped dismissing it as a curiosity.

Eventually mere curiosity became practical curiosity. Over the past six weeks I have booked four escorts here in Osaka, all biological women. Tonight, I found myself browsing agencies that advertised trans women.

The first woman that caught my eye was Mio. She was purely feminine in appearance and was absolutely stunning. Sadly however, she was working in a different city and not available in Osaka tonight.

Then I saw Takane. She was also very beautiful, and looked like a women, however perhaps ever so slightly androgynous. Three years earlier I probably would have clicked away without another thought. This time I found myself thinking, why not?

Then I remembered the great John McAfee, the software pioneer who is totally outta control. Years ago, while happily disappearing down one of my periodic McAfee rabbit holes, I came across an interview—I think it was an interview, although it may have been buried somewhere in the fragments of the autobiography he never finished.

The interviewer asked him about dating trans women in Thailand. Were they actually woman, the interviewer asked?

McAfee shrugged it off.

“Dude,” he said, “trust me. They’re all woman.” Hilarious.

Whether you agree with him or not isn’t really the point. For some reason, trying to book a trans escort in my hotel room years later, that line floated back into my head.

So I rolled the dice, as I sometimes do, and called her agency. Not because I had reached some grand philosophical conclusion. Because curiosity had quietly outrun hesitation. I was ready to spend more than I’d planned and just see what happened. The guy from the agency quoted me the real outcall price. Thirty-three thousand yen. That ended the experiment rather quickly. I thanked him and said I would call him another if I changed my mind.

VII. Am I Bisexual?

Today, I think I may simply be naturally bisexual. Whether my abuse obscured this truth, complicated my understanding of it, or is largely unrelated, I cannot honestly say.

What I can say is, my sexuality seems to be evolving rather quickly. I really have no idea where this attraction to trans woman is coming, however I do know that I will need to do something sometime soon.

Dedication:

For Takane. And for John McAfee. Baby, you are totally outta control. But man are you funny. Dude, you rock. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 1 Comment

The Days and Nights of My 50s III: Look, If I Want to Develop an Image I’ll Do It My Own Fucking Way.

STFU
—Everybody

Yo. Can you make that reverb pop a little bit for me?

—Conor Obrest

Everyone’s a critic.
—Slacker

I. Early Morning

Since my wife and I decided to get divorced about three months ago, I have noticed something curious. Almost everyone around me seems suddenly seems to have an opinion about how I should be conducting my life.

My family has opinions. My friends have opinions. Women I have dated have opinions. Women I have not yet dated have opinions. Complete strangers even seem to have opinions. Apparently becoming a fifty-two-year-old divorced man means acquiring an advisory board whether you requested one or not.

I am open to friendly advice from time to time. Good advice is one of life’s gifts. I have received plenty of it, and I have occasionally even followed some. But I am now fifty-two years old. I am newly divorced and dating for the first time in nearly thirty years. I am working hard to turn a thirty-year teaching career into a full-time writing career within the next ten months. I have finances to sort out, health problems to manage, a young adult son I love very much and need to keep showing up for, and a romantic life that presently resembles an international airport during a weather emergency.

I feel as though I have five full-time jobs. And everybody has a goddamn opinion.

My mother has opinions about my dating life despite not having dated since the Nixon administration. My on-again, off-again girlfriend Litz has various opinions about my daily habits. Men operating small medical clinics have opinions about where I should sit while smoking outside in the sun with my shirt off. Apps have opinions about which of my messages should be permitted to survive for more than twenty-four hours. Google Maps has various opinions, almost all of them wrong, about where I am, where I am going, how long it will take me to get there, and whether I should abandon the journey altogether.

Even the microwave in my hotel room had an opinion this morning. Its opinion was that it should be positioned ten feet from the nearest electrical outlet.

The day began around 3:30 AM after approximately four hours of sleep. This may not sound ideal. It was not unusual either. I have slept poorly since I was 14 years old, and I rarely get more than about 5 hours of sleep throughout the day.

I was staying at the Purple Eye hotel in Osaka, a wonderfully strange hotel with Art Deco ambitions that was once a love hotel, a large television, a karaoke microphone, a projector I had no intention of learning how to operate, and enough buttons beside the bed to launch a small spacecraft.

The room also has a flickering light behind my head that I cannot seem to turn off, and a water dispenser I can not operate without either burning my hand or extracting approximately a quarter-cup of cold water after several minutes of negotiation.

Both are out of control.

The phrase “out of control” has become increasingly important to me. Google Maps is out of control. Hotel appliances are out of control. Dating apps are out of control. My mother was especially out of control just this morning. Litz is often out of control, although in a different and generally more charming manner. I am frequently out of control myself, which is perhaps the point.

As the epigraph above says, everyone is a critic. Nobody perhaps is more committed to criticism than the man publicly documenting the behavior of everyone around him. I got dressed and walked to a nearby Lawson for a latte and some breakfast. I badly needed both.

The store was small and packed tightly enough to qualify as sushi-zume, a useful Japanese expression meaning crammed together like sushi in a box. The man behind the counter asked whether I wanted sugar in my latte, then prepared it himself behind the register. This felt like old Japan to me: the Japan of small courtesies, personal service, and coffee assembled by an actual human being rather than surrendered by a machine.

He mixed in the sugar. He handed me the cup. Perfect. Goldie Goldie baby.

Outside, the cicadas were screaming. Cicadas are called semi in Japanese, which I find funny because they are just about as loud as semi-trucks. They roared from every tree with the confidence of creatures who had waited underground for years and intended to make the most of their brief public career.

I sat on the stoop in front of what looked to be a deserted apartment block, right next to a small medical clinic. I drank my latte, smoked, and talked into my phone. A man arrived at the clinic pushing a woman in a wheelchair and asked me to move.

Technically, I was not on his property. It was none of his business. Spiritually, I was, apparently, obstructing the entire Japanese healthcare system. I ignored him and he went inside the clinic. This is the kind of thing that happens when everybody has an opinion. The opinion may be entirely reasonable. You may even comply with it. But you still resent its existence.

A few minutes later, another man approached me. He did not speak to me in either Japanese or English. He simply tapped me on the shoulder and crossed his forearms into a large X.

This was a far more efficient method of instruction. No explanation. No appeal. No philosophical argument. Just an X delivered by a masked man outside a clinic shortly after eight in the morning.

I put on my shirt, left it open, tucked a cigarette behind my ear, and returned to Lawson for two beers.

On the way back to the hotel, I considered the shape of the day. Pizza around eleven. A shower. Shisha at Shinsaibashi. Black wired headphones, because white Apple headphones look ridiculous and Bose headphones contain enough bass to flatten a small neighborhood. A haircut. Perhaps an early dinner. Perhaps a bar. Perhaps a date. Perhaps an escort. Perhaps not.

A great deal of my life presently exists in the word perhaps. The only definite plan was to call Litz.

The night before, she had told me that she wanted to marry me next year if I changed two habits. I was, let’s just say, quite surprised. This was a pretty big shift from her attitude just a day or two ago.

The first habit is my eating in bed.

This may sound more serious than it is. I do not generally eat full meals beneath the blankets. I am not lying there with a plate of Fettuccine Alfredo balanced on my chest. I eat crackers, Oreos, an occasional Snickers, perhaps a slice of pizza. Small foods. Bed-compatible foods. Foods requiring little more equipment than a hand and a functioning mouth.

Still, I could stop. I could eat at the kitchen counter. I could eat on the couch. I could even eat at the table like a civilized human. She eats in bed too, but whatever.

The second condition was that I listen to her more. This was also reasonable and yet considerably more difficult.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Litz wants me to listen to her. My mother wants me to listen to her. My friends want me to listen to them. I listen to my son. Even Google Maps wants me to listen, although Google Maps has forfeited that privilege through repeated incompetence.

I probably should listen more. I should also probably talk less. This became increasingly clear as I walked back to my room carrying two beers, breakfast, wine, Pocari Sweat, gum, cigarettes, and enough miscellaneous provisions to survive a modest siege.

Back in my room, I attempted to heat the breakfast wrap. The microwave would not start. I pushed buttons. I turned dials. I stared at Japanese instructions. I questioned the fundamental competence of the hotel in general.

Then I noticed that the microwave was not plugged in. The nearest outlet was, oddly, across the room. I had to lift the microwave from its shelf, carry it several feet, unplug something else, place the microwave on the floor, and stretch its cord across the carpet like a tripwire intended to kill me before lunch. The wrap heated beautifully. It was also hot enough to burn my mouth.

I thought back over the morning. Everybody seemed to have an opinion about what I should be doing this morning. My mother. Litz. The clinic men. The microwave. The cicadas. The apps. The hotel. The entire accumulated machinery of modern life.

And of course I had opinions about all of them. This is the complication.

I would like everyone else to shut the fuck up, but I am writing four thousand words about them and shipping the out on main for the whole world to read.

I may need to shut the fuck up most of all. Not yet, though. It is only nine in the morning.

II. Late Morning

Back in my room, I did what writers have always done after experiencing life for approximately six hours.

I immediately started writing it down.

The first draft is just to get things down. It exists in order to facilitate the second draft. Since today’s theme appeared to be criticism in all its various forms, I decided it would be hypocritical not to begin with my own.

“Conducting my life” was better than “living my life.”

“Nixon administration” was funnier than “Carter administration.”

Google Maps no longer merely had an opinion. It had forfeited its right to an opinion through repeated incompetence.

One sentence at a time, the morning crawled forward.

This is one of the stranger aspects of writing a journal. You do not simply remember your day. You improve your memory of it. You compress it. You rearrange it. You remove three dull conversations and keep the one line that somehow explained the entire day. The truth remains, and it becomes a better story.

As I edited, I put on Camper Van Beethoven. Their singer David Lowery has a way of making profound observations while sounding as though he is simply amused by the absurdity of being alive. That has always appealed to me.

Half the time I think life is a tragedy.

The other half I think it’s a government experiment, and we’re driving like hell.

=====

It was just about noon by this point.

Although I’d managed to check several small errands off my list the previous day—as described in A Day of Minor Annoyances—a few still remained. I needed a new SIM card, a pair of wired headphones, and a haircut. I also still wanted to smoke some shisha. I’d planned to do it the day before but never quite got around to it.

The afternoon, at least on paper, looked straightforward enough. I’d take the short train ride from Uehonmachi to Namba, wander through Shinsaibashi, pick up the things I needed, find somewhere for dinner, and take it from there.

As it turned out, almost none of this happened.

The one genuine success came when I stopped into a nearby SoftBank shop. The staff told me I could reserve a new SIM card and, even better, that it would be free. This was a bonus. With this small victory secured, I headed back toward the hotel to continue editing.

III. Afternoon

The afternoon was beginning to surrender to the evening. I began editing my morning’s work. The essay was already getting pretty long and.the spine was there. The Lee Marvin quote was there. The rest would come later. I wasn’t trying to finish it at this point. I was trying to make it better.

Editing has become one of my favorite parts of writing. Maybe even more than writing itself some days. A first draft is discovery. An edit is where you quietly remove everything that was standing in the way of the story all along.

Music took over after that.

Steve Earle first. I found myself arguing, as I always do, with my own rankings. The Week of Living Dangerously still sits at the top for me, though Guitar Town, Goodbye, Copperhead Road and What’s a Simple Man to Do? all make convincing cases depending on the day. That’s the pleasure of living with music for decades. The rankings never stay still. The songs don’t change. You do.

Then came the band Happyness.

I put on my favorite song by them Montreal Rock Band Somewhere, and within seconds I remembered why it keeps finding its way into every conversation I have about favorite songs. Some records don’t ask for your attention. They simply drift into the room and improve the atmosphere. Happyness have always felt like that to me. Quiet confidence. Great guitars. No unnecessary drama. Just songs that seem happier to reveal themselves over the tenth listen than the first.

The playlist wandered the way my brain usually does: Whiskeytown, Pulp, Cracker, Sonic Youth, Mary Gauthier. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was just following instinct. That’s still my favorite way to listen to music. One song reminds you of another, one artist opens a door to someone else, and before long you’ve traveled thirty years without ever leaving the bed.

By then I knew the afternoon was over. The shower could wait another few minutes. Osaka would still be there when I finally walked outside. One more song, I told myself. It’s a promise I’ve broken happily for most of my adult life.

IV. Dinner and Shisha at Shinsaibashi

Toward the end of my edit I dialed up Whiskeytown’s version Hey There Little Girl’s Don’t You Wanna Smoke Some Crack With Me, and for the hundredth time I found myself wondering whether a two-minute throwaway recorded at a concert nearly thirty years ago deserved a place among my twenty favorite songs of all time. The sensible answer is probably no. The honest answer is that it just might. Music has never cared much about running time or reputation. Every now and then a song simply grabs hold of you and refuses to let go. That one still does.

One of the pleasures of getting older is giving yourself permission to stop defending your taste. Twenty-five years ago I probably would have felt obligated to explain why a forgotten live recording deserved to stand alongside acknowledged classics. Now I don’t care. If a song moves me, it moves me. If it makes me want to walk a little slower through Osaka with a cigarette in one hand and nowhere in particular to be, that’s enough. Rankings are fun. I like them.

I headed north toward Shinsaibashi Station with no real plan beyond finding dinner and eventually making my way to Bar Nayuta. The streets were beginning to fill as the evening settled in. Restaurants were spilling light onto the pavement, smokers drifted in and out of doorways, security officers leaned on impossibly long wooden staffs as though they had all the time in the world, and every block offered another invitation to turn left instead of right. Osaka is one of those cities that rewards wandering. Even when you’re lost, you’re usually only a few minutes from somewhere worth finding.

V. Old Ghosts and Dinner

As often happens, I procrastinated leaving the hotel.

The afternoon disappeared into writing, music, a little wine, and the sort of gentle procrastination that always feels oddly productive when you’re a writer. Around six o’clock I finally got organized, walked over to Uehonmachi Station, boarded the short train to Namba, and wandered into Shinsaibashi looking for dinner.

On the way I noticed several policemen carrying long wooden batons tucked upright against their chests. They all carried radios clipped to their breastbone. They occasionally tapped the batons against the pavement as they walked.

Japan has remarkably little street crime. Shinsaibashi has even less. I still found myself instinctively straightening my posture and tensing up as I walked past them.

Some habits just persist that way.

Several years earlier I had a five month affair with a woman named Vicki. I met her at an upstairs open mic just a few minutes from Shinsaibashi Station. We spent five months together. I liked her very much. She eventually fell in love with me. Although I did like her, I was not in love with her, and in early 2019, as my life was becoming increasingly complicated, I ended the relationship.

I have not seen her since.

Recently I even looked into hiring a private investigator to try to find her again. The irony was that although I remembered her vividly, I somehow possessed remarkably little practical information that might actually help the PI locate her. The investigator’s fee wasn’t unreasonable, so the problem wasn’t the money. The problem was that memory doesn’t leave a forwarding address.

I still remembered where the old open mic was held, so I walked over and took the elevator upstairs, hoping against hope that she might be there. I glanced inside, saw there was nothing going on, and left. Some places deserve a brief visit simply because they remind you who you used to be.

I wandered around for a few more minutes looking for a restaurant I liked the look of. The streets were beginning to fill as the evening settled in. Restaurants were spilling light onto the pavement, smokers drifted in and out of doorways, security officers leaned on impossibly long wooden staffs as though they had all the time in the world, and every block offered another invitation to turn left instead of right. Osaka is one of those cities that rewards wandering. Even when you’re lost, you’re usually only a few minutes from somewhere worth finding.

Dinner itself was uncomplicated. I chose Café Bohemia because it is attached to what used to be the Hotel Unizo, where Vicki and I spent our second night together. The hotel has changed names since then, and is now a little more expensive than I care to pay, however Café Bohemia remains.

I ordered a Heartland beer, a plate of Bolognese, and some shisha. The pasta was smaller than expected but still excellent. The shisha was exactly as I remembered it—pleasant enough, but with an annoyingly weak draw that made every puff feel like work. After twenty minutes I’d had enough.

VI. Back At My Hotel

Walking back toward Namba Station, I found myself browsing escort websites again. I’d only been doing this for a little over a month, so I still knew very little about the industry. What fascinated me, oddly enough, wasn’t the women at first.

It was the pricing.

I have taught high school business for about 15 years, and I couldn’t stop wondering how the enormous price differences could possibly make economic sense. Some women charged modestly. Others charged sums that looked more like mortgage payments than hourly rates. All of them seemed equally attractive to me. For a while I found myself studying the market itself more carefully than the people in it.

Eventually I settled on a handful of women I was into it. By the time I reached the hotel, though, I had changed my mind.

There were essays waiting to be edited. Songs waiting to be ranked. A bottle of wine waiting for me. Suddenly, that sounded like the better evening.

From there the night settled into the familiar rhythm that has slowly become my profession: writing, rewriting, choosing photographs, adjusting SEO tags, publishing essays, and beginning the next one before the previous one had quite finished echoing.

The best nights rarely end with fireworks. They end with keys in the door, the familiar click of the lock, and the peculiar satisfaction of returning to a room that has slowly become your own. Home sweet home, even if home happens to be a small hotel room in Osaka. Two fresh packs of heaters hit the table beside a small mountain of convenience-store provisions: Pocari Sweat, a can of Ebisu beer, a bottle of wine, and a couple of small bottles of umeshu.

The room greeted me exactly as I had left it: clothes draped over chairs, chargers snaking across the floor, books stacked beside the bed, and the faint smell of tobacco that no amount of cracked windows can ever completely erase.

Before anything else came the little rituals. Plug in the phone. Hang the shirt that was almost dry and decide if my clothes from the day needed to be washed or not. Empty my pockets. Open the fridge. Take an inventory.

Somewhere in there I caught my reflection in the mirror and laughed. Another evening survived, another little expedition completed.

Outside, Osaka was still humming, but inside the room everything slowed to my preferred tempo. I checked the refrigerator. A Yona Yona Ale and some neglected soba that was quickly approaching its expiration date. I put the Pocari in to chill. I would drink the Ebisu first. Tomorrow’s problems could wait until tomorrow; tonight’s responsibilities extended no further than hydration, cigarettes, and deciding whether to eat the soba.

As the room settled into silence, music drifted from the laptop. A Michael… no, a Mark Kozelek song. His unmistakable voice. All of the sudden I found myself thinking about the movie Bound, still one of my favorite films from the Wachowskis. I have always preferred it to The Matrix. It’s tighter, stranger, funnier, and somehow more human. I especially love the line when the dude walks into a dark rom and says “It’s fucking dark in here” and then immediately gets capped. As I like to say, it’s funny to me. Great art has a way of sneaking back into your head when you’re doing the most ordinary things—sorting laundry, putting beers in the fridge, or brushing ash from the bedspread before company arrives.

By then the excitement of the night had largely given way to contentment. The room was as tidy as it was ever going to be. The bedspread had been rescued from a fresh snowfall of cigarette ash. My bladder, after several enthusiastic victories, had finally declared a ceasefire. The phone was charging. The drinks were cold. Whatever happened next would happen at its own pace.

It wasn’t one of those nights that changes your life. Most aren’t. It was simply another Osaka evening added to the ledger: a little wandering, a little music, a little planning, a little anticipation, and the quiet pleasure of returning to a place that, for now at least, felt enough like home.

VII. Late-Night Music Session

With what remained of my night, I meant to edit my most recent piece.

That was the whole plan. I drifted off to sleep for about half an hour around 3 AM, woke up, opened my draft, looked at it for all of thirty seconds, and then Conor Oberst showed up and threw a wrench in my plans.

It all started with his song Cape Canaveral. I had had it at number seven on my all time greatest song list for a while. I thought that this would still be about right, however when I played it again I suddenly realized that it was even better than I remembered. I played it two or three times, and came to the conclusion that it had, believe or not, jumped over Emmylou Harris’ Tulsa Queen, which has been my number song for the past decade. Just like that. After all these years, and all these arguments with myself, Cape Canaveral had somehow climbed to number one. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t force it. The song simply refused to lose,

I was listening to a version of the song on You Tube, and on this one Conor gives a short spoken introduction. He says:

“Yo… can you make that reverb pop a little bit more for me?”

It kills me every time. It’s such a small moment, a throwaway really, but somehow it makes the whole performance feel human. I laughed out loud every single time I rewound it. Little moments like these are why I love live recordings. They remind you there were actual people in the room making something instead of perfection arriving fully formed.

From there my night completely unraveled in the best possible way. Steve Earle. Ryan Adams. Sonic Youth, The Replacements. Moonface. Tindersticks. Lou Reed. The Church. Strand of Oaks. Craig Finn, naturally. Every time I thought I was done with my new ranking, another song would throw itself back into the fight. Easy Lucky Free jumped thirty places. Week of Living Dangerously reminded me just how much Steve Earle rules. Then Guitar Town barged back into the conversation like it had every right to be there. Which it does.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I realized I hadn’t edited a single paragraph. I had taken a short nap, and taken care of another very ordinary biological need that I had passed in when I decided not to order the escort.. I drank another beer and stared out the hotel window into the night. I had spent nearly two hours arguing with myself over songs that have been following me around for half my life.

Honestly? Time well spent.

By six in the morning I made an executive decision. My days don’t end at midnight these days. They end when I finally decide to get some sleep. Six o’clock felt like a better border than midnight. So yesterday officially ended at 6:00 a.m. and Thursday began. I turned the music off, and made my way back to the Lawson for get some breakfast. The rankings, at least for now, were settled.

Conor was sitting at number one.

Tomorrow he’ll have to defend the title.

VIII. I Call My Mom

The last thing I had to do before breakfast was call my mother, Claudia, about a text I had sent her several hours earlier.

I stepped outside my hotel, sat down on the concrete stoop outside what appeared to be an empty apartment building, lit a cigarette, and dialed her number.

My mother and I have been engaged in a serious disagreement about my writing for over four years now.

She does not like that I sometimes use real names, real initials, and real events in my essays. I have tried to explain that many of the pieces she objects to recount events that took place thirty or even forty years ago. I have also pointed out that she and my father have long admired Gerald Durrell, whose autobiographical books affectionately—and yet often pointedly—make fun of his own family. I occasionally do the same. Every family piece I have ever written has been written with affection.

Until recently, our disagreements centered primarily around my essays about St. George’s School in Spokane, Washington, which I attended from first grade through graduation between 1980 and 1992.

From my perspective, this is all ancient history.

Most of the stories involve harmless episodes: a student pulling a fire alarm as a prank, a teacher dumping a garbage can over a student’s head, classmates getting into ridiculous situations that seemed important at the time and funny decades later. Many of the people involved probably do not even remember me, much less read my writing. A surprising number, however, do. I find this deeply gratifying.

I have been fortunate enough to accumulate many hundreds of readers for those essays, and several of my music and popular culture pieces have reached into the thousands. These are hardly world-beating numbers, however I enjoy checking my statistics almost every day to see how my pieces are doing.

Recently, however, our disagreement has taken a far more serious turn.

As mentioned earlier, my wife and I mutually decided to divorce a few months ago, and shortly afterward we filed our paperwork with Kyoto City Hall. We have agreed to divide our assets equally. She will return to her hometown of Kumamoto to help care for her aging parents. For the time being I will remain in Kyoto, continue teaching, and look for a modest apartment somewhere near downtown.

At the same time, I have become increasingly committed to making the transition from teacher to full-time writer as soon as possible, hopefully sometime next spring. I expect that transition to be challenging. Every day I find myself trying not only to become a better writer, but also to learn the countless small logistical tasks that accompany trying to make a living from writing.

My mother knows all of this.

Unfortunately, she does not seem to care.

Not long after the divorce, I joined several dating apps. Some have worked better than others. Some have proved to be too expensive. Most days these days I find myself talking to dozens of women online. Most of those conversations amount to little more than discussing our day, exchanging light flirtation, and making tentative plans that will probably never happen. A handful have developed into genuine friendships, and one has become a meaningful relationship, my on-again, off-again girlfriend, Litz.

Several hours before calling my mother, I had sent her another unusually direct text asking her, once again, to stop criticizing my writing, my dating life, and my romantic decisions.

When I called, it was around six o’clock in the morning in Japan and early afternoon on the American West Coast.

She told me she only had about ten minutes. That suited me fine.

I told her I wanted to say a few things, then I would gladly hear whatever she wanted to say in return. I explained that we had now been having exactly the same argument for four years.

I told her that my writing was none of her fucking business. If she disliked what I wrote, she did not have to read it.

Likewise, she was certainly entitled to whatever opinions she wished to hold about my dating life, my romantic life, or my sex life. What I was no longer willing to do was listen to those opinions every single time we spoke. Or at all.

For the past eight months I have been dealing with somewhat significant health problems. I have seen multiple doctors, am taking various medications, and have gradually begun improving. During that time I have often called my mother for ten or twenty minutes simply because I wanted a sympathetic ear.

Inevitably, those conversations have drifted toward my writing and personal life.

While she has been consistently compassionate about my health, she becomes intensely—and, from my perspective, relentlessly—critical the moment the subject changes.

I find this utterly exhausting.

I am generally a laid-back kind of guy. I dislike conflict. I dislike unnecessary stress about little things even more. Over and over again I had explained that these are my stories, my relationships, and my decisions. Over and over again she has repeated the same criticisms.

By this point, I am completely over it.

I told her she still treats me like an infant rather than a fifty-two-year-old man living three thousand miles away, trying to build a second life after the collapse of a nearly thirty-year marriage.

Eventually I lost my temper.

I had never spoken to my mother this way before.

I said, “Mom, I know you don’t like profanity, and I’m only going to say this once.

Shut the fuck up.

Butt the fuck out of my writing.

I don’t ever want to hear another opinion from you about my writing, my dating life, my romantic life, or my sex life. Ever.”

I reminded her that she would almost certainly never meet any of these women. On the unlikely chance that I eventually settled down with one of them, she might meet her at the wedding and perhaps once or twice afterward.

Beyond that, they simply were not part of her life and none of her business.

She met my dad in 1969. They built a stable marriage that has lasted more than half a century. Like every marriage, I’m sure it has had its ups and downs, but I have always admired—and, if I’m honest, occasionally envied—the stability they created together.

My own marriage had just ended. That meant I was trying to figure out what the second half of my life might look like.

Not hers.

Mine.

After I finished speaking, I told her I was ready to hear whatever she wanted to say.

She paused.

Finally she said there really wasn’t anything she could add. She would send me a short text later.

I told her I was absolutely serious. If she could not respect this boundary—if she could not stop treating my writing and my private life as subjects she was entitled to supervise—I would never talk to her again. No son or daughter ever wants to have to say this to a parent, and I certainly did not today. However, I felt like she had backed into a corner and I could see no other out of it.

I wished her a good day. Then I hung up.

As of this writing, it is about four hours after our call. It is the middle of the day West Coast Time, and she has not reopened. I guess she is considering her response, and I suppose I would the same in her situation. I am fine to wait, because as I her told on the phone, I will not her call her for a few weeks, or even a month. If she wants to talk to me, she can call me anytime, and I will pick up. This is where we currently stand.

VI. Final Reflection

Overall, today was a pretty good day. The conversation with my mother was tough, however I do feel better haven gotten things off of chest, and essentially issues her an ultimatum. How she choses to respond, I have no idea. I truly hope that she takes the all time she needs to think it over and lets me know that she is willing to meet me half way. If she does so, I will meet her halfway as well. If she does not, all bets are off. We shall see.

Looking back over the day, I realize that my long running argument with my mother isn’t really about my writing at all. Writing is simply the latest battlefield. The real disagreement is much older than that. It is about autonomy.

I am fifty-two years old. I am a grown man. I have lived in Japan for nearly three decades. In this time, I have juggled three careers, been married and divorced, raised a wonderful son, taught thousands of students, written hundreds of essays, and somehow we were still arguing over whether I am allowed to tell my own stories.

I am simply no longer prepared to continue this conversation at all.

As I was starting this essay, I borrowed one of Lee Marvin’s great lines for the title. By the end of the day it no longer feels like a joke. In an interview with Roger Ebert from the early 1970’s, Marvin says:

“Look, if I want to develop an image, I’ll do it my own fucking way.”

I had spent much of the day getting lost, arguing with Google Maps, editing essays, thinking about old girlfriends, listening to Connor Oberst until dawn, eating convenience-store fried chicken, smoking and drinking wine, and having a very difficult conversation with my mother. And somehow all of it had become one story.

Nobody else could have written it exactly this way. That’s the point.

My mother doesn’t have to like what I write. Readers don’t have to like what I write. But the stories are mine, and so are the decisions about how to tell them.

Lee Marvin was right.

Nobody else gets to develop my image.

Nobody else gets to tell my stories.

That’s my job.

And, goddamn it—

I’ll do it my own fucking way.

Dedication:

For Lee. You sure make an image baby. You did your own fucking way, and you are my inspiration. You are my hero you glorious motherfucker.