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The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee

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

Epigraph: 

“I fought the law and the law won…”

— I Fought the Law, The Clash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: This piece begins a new series, The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control), which looks at extreme historical and contemporary figures whose behavior, movements, or belief systems veered dramatically beyond the bounds of ordinary reality. The tone is intentionally informal and impressionistic rather than academic, blending biography, cultural memory, and personal reaction. The goal is not exhaustive analysis but a clear read on just how outta control these figures became. This piece takes up the case of Keith Rainere.

Epigraph: 

“Out of control / You’re out of control…”

— Out of Control, The Rolling Stones

Keith Raniere began life in New York in 1960 and built his early identity around claims of extraordinary intelligence and unusual gifts. He cultivated a reputation as a prodigy, a polymath, and a moral philosopher, though many of these claims were exaggerated or unverifiable. In the 1990s he co-founded a multi-level marketing-style company that ran into legal trouble, then pivoted into what became NXIVM, a self-improvement organization marketed as executive success training. Participants attended workshops, advanced through ranks, and absorbed Raniere’s pseudo-philosophical teachings. He adopted the title “Vanguard,” cultivated an inner circle, and emphasized ethics, discipline, and personal growth. Wealthy backers, including Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman, funded the operation for years, allowing NXIVM to expand in upstate New York and attract professionals, actors, and seekers.

Behind the self-help veneer, however, the structure tightened. Raniere exercised increasing control over followers’ lives, and a secret subgroup known as DOS emerged, involving master–slave hierarchies, collateral-based coercion, and branding rituals incorporating his initials. Superman actress Allison Mack played a key role in recruiting members. Investigative reporting in 2017 exposed the group, leading to arrests. Raniere fled to Mexico, where he was found living in a villa with loyal followers, still holding late-night volleyball sessions and maintaining his guru persona. He was arrested in 2018, returned to the United States, convicted on multiple charges, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. The NXIVM empire collapsed, its mythology dissolving into court transcripts and testimony.

And yet what stands out most about Raniere is not grandeur but pettiness. The volleyball — endless, late-night volleyball as the center of spiritual life — already tells you everything you need to know. Important conversations at midnight on the court, guru hanging out in athletic shorts, disciples orbiting. It has strong George Santos energy: self-invented genius, weird rituals, faux casualness masking control. Then the egomania. The IQ mythology, the titles, the little cushion on stage so he’s physically higher than everyone else. It’s not even theatrical; it’s dreary. The branding scandal — initials burned into skin, coercion, sexual manipulation — pushed it fully into outta control territory. And all of it funded for years by the Bronfman money, which makes the whole thing feel even more surreal. Rich people with nothing better to do underwriting a volleyball cult.

What really kills it, though, is the atmosphere. It’s all so fucking boring. Endless seminars. Faux-ethical language. Guru perched slightly above the group. No charisma, no sweep, just control. I basically hate gurus, and Raniere is the worst kind: small, humorless, self-mythologizing. Even when he fled to Mexico, he didn’t become mythic — he just kept playing volleyball in a villa while the walls closed in. Outta control, yes, but also petty. Not a visionary gone wrong, just an egomaniac running a dreary self-help cult.

By contrast, Jim Jones has a sweeping, almost Shakespearean arc. He began as a Midwestern preacher in Indiana in the 1950s, preaching racial integration and social justice at a time when both were rare in American churches. His Peoples Temple grew steadily, and by the mid-1960s he relocated to Northern California, first to Ukiah and then to San Francisco, where he gained real political influence. The early movement was diverse, activist, and in some respects ahead of its time. But alongside the growth came drugs, paranoia, authoritarian theatrics, and increasing control. Facing scrutiny and defectors, Jones moved followers to an agricultural commune in Guyana — Jonestown — deep in the jungle. Life there deteriorated into long work hours, loudspeaker propaganda, and rehearsals for mass suicide. In November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived to investigate, accompanied, improbably, by Mark Lane, the JFK conspiracy lawyer hired by the Temple as a defender. After several members attempted to leave, Ryan and others were shot at a nearby airstrip, and Jones ordered the mass murder-suicide — cyanide-laced drink administered to more than 900 people. The trajectory is horrifying, but it has scale: idealism, power, paranoia, catastrophe. You can at least see how it built.

Marshall Applewhite is stranger still. A former music teacher who fell into an intense partnership with Bonnie Nettles, he constructed a theology blending Christianity, UFO lore, and apocalyptic expectation. After Nettles died, Applewhite grew more isolated and doctrinaire, leading the group known as Heaven’s Gate. Members lived communally, detached from ordinary life, waiting for a spacecraft they believed was trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp. In 1997, Applewhite convinced followers that they needed to leave their bodies to board it. Thirty-nine members died in a coordinated mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, wearing matching clothing and following a carefully staged sequence. The whole thing is eerie rather than theatrical — calm, methodical, and deeply surreal. Of the three, Applewhite may be the most bonkers, but also the most otherworldly, a teacher who wandered into cosmic delusion.

So the comparison is stark. Jones is tragic and terrifying, a charismatic reformer turned paranoid autocrat. Applewhite is cosmic and surreal, a gentle-seeming teacher convinced salvation lay behind a comet. Raniere, by contrast, is just small — petty control dressed up as philosophy, volleyball instead of vision, branding instead of belief. All three are outta control, but in different registers: tragic, cosmic, and contemptible.

The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee
The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)
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On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

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

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

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

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

Epigraph:

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

Clyde Bruckman, The X-Files

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

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

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

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

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

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

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

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

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

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

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

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

Three Essential Episodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Mythology Expanded

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

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

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

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

Why It Still Matters

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication

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

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

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation
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What Ever Happened to the ACLU?

Note: This essay reflects a personal memory of what the American civil libertarian tradition once represented to many people who came of age politically in the late twentieth century. Organizations evolve, and the American Civil Liberties Unionhas played an important role in many areas of constitutional law and civil rights over the past century.

The purpose of the piece is not to dismiss that legacy but to reflect on a perceived cultural shift in how civil liberties—particularly free speech—are understood within contemporary progressive politics. The older civil libertarian framework emphasized neutral principles that applied equally to all speakers, even those whose views were widely considered offensive or dangerous.

Whether that framework still holds the same cultural authority today is an open question. This essay is simply one observer’s reflection on how that shift has felt from the inside.

Epigraph:

F the CC

Steve Earle

When I was younger, the American Civil Liberties Union had a certain reputation among politically attentive Americans.

They had balls.

The ACLU was the organization that defended people nobody liked. Neo-Nazis marching in small Midwestern towns. Communists during the Cold War. Religious cranks, fringe activists, offensive speakers. The principle was simple and bracing: civil liberties matter most when they protect speech we find offensive.

I admired that. Many people did.

In the 1990s the ACLU seemed to embody a kind of austere civil libertarianism. The idea was that the Constitution protected everyone equally, and that civil liberties meant very little if they only applied to people we already agreed with.

And there were plenty of examples that made the point vividly.

The most famous was the controversy over whether a small group of neo-Nazis had the right to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the late 1970s.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie

Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors, which made the proposed march especially painful and inflammatory. But the ACLU nevertheless defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate, arguing that the First Amendment could not be applied selectively. Free speech, if it existed at all, had to apply even to people whose ideas were repellent.

That case became a kind of civic legend among civil libertarians.

There were many others.

During the Cold War the ACLU repeatedly defended the rights of individuals accused of Communist sympathies, arguing that political belief alone could not be grounds for government punishment. In later decades the organization defended the speech rights of controversial artists, religious minorities, and political extremists across the ideological spectrum.

Every once in a while a case would appear that tested the principle in uncomfortable ways. I remember reading about things like the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and the legal questions surrounding the government’s conduct toward Randy Weaver. Weaver himself was hardly a sympathetic figure to most Americans, but the civil liberties questions raised by the incident were serious enough that organizations committed to constitutional rights had to pay attention.

That, at least in my memory, was the ACLU’s zone of operation: defending civil liberties even when the individual involved was politically or culturally radioactive.

For a long time that seemed like the organization’s defining characteristic.

Then something began to feel different.

My moment of realization came around 2017 at a conference at Case Western Reserve University. The event was filled with what felt like an entire arena of fucking international liberals—academics, activists, policy types, the whole familiar ecosystem.

At one point a speaker took the stage and launched into a full-throated denunciation of Donald Trump.

Now, criticizing a president is of course perfectly legitimate speech. But as I sat there listening, something about the moment felt off.

The energy in the room was not about civil liberties. It was about political opposition. The speech had the tone of a campaign rally rather than a lecture about constitutional rights.

And I remember thinking very clearly: this is not the ACLU I admired in the 1990s.

Something about the mission had shifted.

To be fair, institutions rarely change because they suddenly become foolish. They change because the culture around them changes first.

The older civil libertarian tradition that shaped organizations like the ACLU grew out of a very specific intellectual climate. It emphasized neutral principles, distrust of government power, and a willingness to defend speech even when that speech was deeply unpopular.

The logic was austere but powerful: the moment we begin deciding which speech deserves protection, the principle itself begins to erode.

But the dominant strain of progressive politics today often approaches these questions differently. Instead of asking whether a principle applies equally to everyone, the question increasingly becomes whether a particular form of speech contributes to harm, inequality, or social injustice.

That shift in moral emphasis naturally changes how civil liberties are understood.

Speech that once would have been defended in the name of neutral principle may now be evaluated in terms of its social consequences. And organizations that operate inside a particular political culture tend to absorb the assumptions of that culture over time.

The ACLU did not necessarily set out to abandon its older civil libertarian posture. It may simply have followed the broader ideological current of the progressive world in which it operates.

Still, for those of us who grew up admiring the older model, the change can feel disorienting.

The ACLU once stood for the uncomfortable proposition that freedom of speech requires defending people whose views we might find offensive, foolish, or even dangerous.

It is not entirely clear whether the culture that once sustained that belief still exists.

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Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files:

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
Jungian Intimations: I
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On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.

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On George Santos (aka The Fabulous Kitara)

Note: This piece uses the figure of George Santos as a kind of cultural parable. The story of Santos—his improbable congressional run on Long Island, the famous unraveling of his résumé (including the legendary and totally outta control Baruch volleyball claim), the rapid collapse of political support from fellow New York Republicans, his eventual expulsion from Congress, and his strange second act as a Cameo celebrity—forms one of the more surreal public morality plays of recent American politics.

The apartment story that frames the essay is not meant as a literal equivalence. Kitara is not Santos, and roommates are not members of Congress. The comparison operates at the level of archetype: the charismatic figure who arrives full of sunshine, quickly becomes central to a small social world, and then—through one small but revealing detail—forces everyone around them to confront the uneasy coexistence of charm and opportunism.

The name “Kitara,” Santos’ drag name from back in Brazil where he if from (Santos is gay of course) is used here in the spirit of narrative shorthand rather than biography. Anyone who has lived with roommates long enough will recognize the basic situation. Shared apartments are small republics built on trust, improvisation, and the quiet hope that everyone involved is playing roughly the same game. Most of the time that hope is justified. Occasionally it is not.

If the tone of the piece drifts toward amusement, and even affection, rather than outrage, that is deliberate. Characters like Santos—and the occasional fabulous roommate—have a peculiar ability to provoke both exasperation and reluctant admiration. The performance can be infuriating. But it can also be oddly entertaining.

Such people rarely disappear completely. They simply move on to the next stage. Sometimes that stage is Congress. Sometimes it is Cameo (get that scratch Georgie baby!). And sometimes it is just the memory of a roommate who once seemed almost too good to be true.

Epigraph

“People seldom do what they believe in.
They just do what is convenient, then repent.”
— Bob Dylan

I. The Fabulous Roommate

Every apartment has its mythology.

The quiet one who never emerges from his room except to microwave things at strange hours. The earnest one who tries to establish chore charts that everyone pretends to follow for about ten days. The one who adopts pets with a confidence that suggests the rest of the household has already agreed to care for them.

And then, once in a while, there is the fabulous roommate. Kitara was that roommate.

She arrived with the sort of personality that immediately rearranges the emotional furniture of a place. Cheerful without being cloying. Social without being exhausting. Organized without being smug about it. She seemed to understand, instinctively, the delicate social contract of shared living: when to chat, when to disappear, when to clean something quietly so no one felt guilty.

Visitors loved her. Friends who came by would inevitably say some version of the same thing: “Your roommate is amazing.”

And she was. At least at first.

She was the sort of person who made the apartment feel like a small, cheerful republic. There were occasional dinners, occasional drinks, occasional pets that appeared temporarily in the orbit of the household. Nothing dramatic. Just the easy, slightly improvised domestic life that happens when a handful of semi-adults share a roof and try to keep the machinery of living running smoothly.

There are people who move through life like that—people who bring lightness with them. People who make small environments work better simply by being present. You think, when you meet someone like this: what a lucky break.

II. The Sunshine Personality

There is another category of person, however, that resembles the fabulous roommate from a distance. These people also arrive with sunshine. They are charming. They are energetic. They seem to know how to move through rooms with effortless confidence. They shake hands warmly. They remember names. They tell stories. They radiate the sort of friendliness that makes everyone feel briefly like a co-conspirator in something cheerful.

The difference is subtle, and it often takes time to notice. These are not merely charming people.

These are the performers. And, one of the most remarkable recent examples of this type in American public life was George Santos.

Santos appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the political ecosystem of Long Island. His run for Congress was, at least initially, improbable in the way that many modern political stories can be. The district had long been competitive, but his rise through the local Republican apparatus was unusually smooth. There was little serious opposition within the party. The campaign itself unfolded with the sort of confident momentum that often accompanies candidates who seem, at least on paper, to possess a compelling life story.

And what a life story it was.

Santos presented himself as the son of immigrants who had risen through the financial world, a man with an impressive résumé and a philanthropic sensibility. He spoke of professional success, cultural fluency, and various achievements that painted a portrait of upward mobility and cosmopolitan competence.

The voters of Long Island sent him to Congress. And then, almost immediately, the details began to unravel.

III. The Volleyball Player

The first cracks appeared through the ordinary mechanism of local journalism. Reporters from Long Island newspapers began to do what reporters traditionally do: verify things.

The résumé turned out to be an imaginative document. The professional history did not quite match reality. The educational claims were questionable. Various details that had seemed impressive during the campaign began to dissolve under scrutiny.

One of the most memorable revelations involved an oddly specific athletic claim. Santos had described himself as a standout volleyball player during his time at Baruch College. Not merely a participant, but something close to a star—someone whose record-setting performance had been part of his biography.

There was just one problem. Baruch College had no record of him playing volleyball. None at all. Outta control. The story collapsed on that small detail. It is often the small details that do that.

A résumé can contain many large claims, and those claims can hover in a kind of vague plausibility for a surprisingly long time. But one precise, checkable fact—the volleyball team roster, the game statistics, the athletic department archives—can puncture an entire narrative.

The reporters pulled the thread and the sweater unraveled.

IV. The Grifter Archetype

Once the unraveling began, it accelerated. Claims about employment at major financial firms proved dubious. Educational credentials evaporated. Personal history mutated in various directions depending on which previous statement one examined.

Soon the story had migrated from the political pages into the broader theater of American spectacle. Late-night comedians noticed. Cable news panels convened. Social media filled with the strange, almost baroque details of the saga. Members of his own party began to distance themselves.

Several Republican members of the New York congressional delegation—figures who had initially welcomed a new colleague—publicly called for him to resign as the scope of the fabrications became clear. The situation became untenable. The House of Representatives eventually voted to expel him, a rare and historically notable step.

It was a dramatic fall.

And yet even during the collapse, Santos retained something remarkable.

Charm.

He gave interviews. He sparred with reporters. He adopted, at times, an almost mischievous tone about the entire affair. There was a faint air of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the story had become a kind of performance art about the boundaries of credibility.

The grifter archetype has a peculiar resilience. Even when the illusion collapses, the performer often remains oddly entertaining.

V. The Apartment

Watching the Santos saga unfold, I found myself thinking more about Kitara.

Because the thing about grifters is not simply that they deceive.

It is that they charm.

They charm their way into rooms, into institutions, into social networks. They radiate warmth. They build small communities of goodwill around themselves. And for quite a while, everything feels perfectly normal.

Until one day something small happens. Something missing.

In the apartment it was GM’s silver. Not a vast treasure. Not an heirloom of historic significance. Just a small, familiar object that lived in a particular drawer and had always lived there.

One morning it was gone. The initial reaction in situations like this is always practical. Maybe you moved it. Maybe it fell behind something. Maybe someone borrowed it.

The mind runs through a series of benign explanations, each one slightly less convincing than the last.

And then a thought appears.

Quietly.

Oh shit.

VI. The Knowledge You Don’t Want

Roommate life operates on a fragile form of trust.

You share space. You share kitchens. Sometimes you share pets, groceries, furniture, phone bills, music, stories. The arrangement functions because everyone tacitly agrees not to test the boundaries of that trust too aggressively.

When something disappears, the entire structure trembles.

But there is another complication.

Sometimes you realize what probably happened. And you also realize that confirming it would destroy the social equilibrium of the apartment.

So you do a strange psychological maneuver.

You know. But you decide not to know.

Life continues.

The dishes are washed. Conversations occur. The roommate remains charming. The apartment continues to function as a small republic of semi-functional adults.

But a hairline crack now runs through the arrangement.

VII. The Fall

For Santos the crack widened into a canyon.

The congressional investigation intensified. Ethical questions multiplied. Party support evaporated. Eventually the House voted to expel him, ending one of the most surreal political tenures in recent memory.

Yet even after the fall, Santos demonstrated a familiar trait of the charismatic grifter.

He adapted. He appeared on podcasts. He commented on political scandals involving others. He expressed a certain moral indignation about the ethical lapses of fellow politicians—including members of his own party—sometimes with a tone that was almost hilariously sanctimonious given the circumstances.

The performer remained on stage. And then came the truly modern twist.

Santos joined Cameo. And he’s fucking great on it!

For a fee, he would record personalized video messages: birthday greetings, congratulations, small performances of his peculiar brand of post-scandal celebrity.

The internet, as it often does, embraced the absurdity.

VIII. The Cameo

At some point I watched a few of his videos.

There he was, smiling warmly into the camera, delivering a cheerful greeting to a stranger somewhere in America. The tone was friendly, relaxed, slightly mischievous.

And I laughed.

Because the performance was genuinely funny. The charm, infuriatingly, still worked. It reminded me of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog.

The scorpion asks for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates, noting that scorpions have a reputation for stinging frogs. The scorpion assures him that such a thing would be irrational; if he stung the frog mid-crossing, both of them would drown.

The frog agrees.

Halfway across the river the scorpion stings him.

“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.

“I can’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s my nature.”

The scorpion cannot help himself.

But every now and then the scorpion also sends someone a birthday message on Cameo, smiling warmly and wishing them a fantastic year ahead.

And you find yourself laughing anyway.

The truth about characters like Santos—and perhaps about certain roommates—is that their charm is not an illusion.

It’s real.

The trouble is that it coexists quite comfortably with everything else.

Dedication:

For Kitara. May you make a fucking mint on Cameo and look totally gorgeous while doing it.

Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other pieces about American grifters.

On The Dubious Anna Delvey
On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks V: Rod Blagojevich
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Why It Is So Hard to Get Breakfast in Japan (with a dream cameo from the Gemini Donald Trump)

New Note (2025): Since this piece was first published, Japanese Breakfast the band has gotten even bigger, Michelle Zauner wrote another book, and the cultural universe has shifted enough times that some aspects of this essay may be outdated. I’ve kept the original text intact because the dream-logic and breakfast-logic still stand.

I live in Kyoto, Japan, and after many years here I’ve traveled pretty widely—especially in the greater Tokyo area. Traveling in Japan is pretty easy as long as you can manage a little spoken Japanese and read a train map. The trains are famously efficient and connect most of the country, including every major city.

I haven’t driven a car here in more than fifteen years and don’t miss it at all. Trains and taxis get the job done just fine. Overall, I love traveling in Japan and I love exploring Tokyo, a city that contains worlds within worlds. I have almost no complaints about Japanese travel.

Except for one.

It is nearly impossible to get a good breakfast—or really any breakfast—when you’re on the road.

Now, it’s not that Japanese people don’t eat breakfast. They do. The archetypal morning meal—rice, miso soup, maybe a little fish—is as recognizable in its way as the “full English” of sausages and beans. But the Japanese breakfast is overwhelmingly a home operation. Once you’re traveling, the options narrow to two—two and a half, if we’re being generous.

I. The Hotel Breakfast

Mid-price and nicer hotels usually offer a breakfast buffet with “Japanese” (rice, miso, maybe grilled fish) and “Western” (toast, jam, and some ambivalent eggs) selections. Except at the truly top-tier hotels, these buffets manage to be both overpriced and bad. A traveler is lucky to escape for ¥1,500–¥1,800 (about fifteen dollars before the yen weakened), and more commonly pays north of ¥2,000 for a pretty uninspired spread.

Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.

In my experience, Japanese hotel breakfasts are among the weakest anywhere in the world. I take this as symptomatic of a broader truth: Japanese people simply don’t care about breakfast when they’re on the road—and maybe not all that much at home either.

II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast

When I have raised the issue of the lack of decent breakfast in Japan, Japanese people usually point me to the convenience store. And it’s true: you can purchase food and coffee at any of the ubiquitous combinis—Family Mart, 7/11, Daily, Lawson, and the rest. They’re open 24 hours, and they stock a range of items that theoretically qualify as breakfast. Hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, rice balls, steamed buns, fried chicken, sometimes bananas, and of course hot and cold coffee.

I’ve certainly been in situations where I had no choice but to fall back on the combini for breakfast while traveling. And this is…fine, to an extent. But most combinis have nowhere to actually sit and eat, and in any case you can’t really call a combini breakfast nice.

Most Japanese folks seem to regard a combini breakfast as perfectly acceptable—desirable even. And while one can admire the low expectations, or the cultural pragmatism behind them, it’s possible to admire those qualities and still wish for more.

III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop

Starbucks are fairly common in major cities and usually open at 7 a.m. (if you’re lucky) or, more commonly, 8 a.m. They should really open at 6. The food offerings are overpriced, and Starbucks has never truly figured out its food—which remains baffling. Still, one can grab a few combini items and smuggle them in, or settle for a four-dollar fragment of quiche with your Americano. I would not classify Starbucks as having breakfast, per se, but they are pleasant enough to sit in, and one can create a simulacrum of breakfast there.

Then there are the local coffee shops. These, fortunately, often open at 7 a.m. or even earlier, and serve strong coffee—often brewed by hand at the counter with a drip filter—and a breakfast that nearly always consists of a single piece of white toast and an egg. White toast, egg, and handmade coffee with old guys reading the paper around you is, I admit, at least an approximation of breakfast, and I have certainly relied on this setup while on the road.

But it’s still not quite what we are looking for if we want a hearty, balanced breakfast. There is no French toast, no fruit bowl, no omelette, and only very occasionally a strip of bacon. None of the staples one might reasonably expect from a decent, full breakfast.

And that’s more or less the list. You can also find 24-hour beef-bowl restaurants, but they are cheap as and not exactly the sort of thing you look forward to when greeting the day. Beyond that, most restaurants simply don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 for lunch. The concept of brunch—dicey even under ideal circumstances—barely exists outside the swankiest of upmarket hotels.

It is, put bluntly, really hard to find a proper breakfast in Japan unless you make it yourself. And that fact continues to puzzle me. I understand that most people here eat rice and miso at home, or grab something at the convenience store. Fine. But metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 30 million people. None of these 30 million want a real breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m.? Not even a few hundred thousand?

It seems incomprehensible. And yet, incomprehensible or not, this is simply the reality. There is no broad Japanese market for breakfast. I mean, I’m in the market—but apparently one man does not a demographic make.

Go figure.

Now, I’ve covered the issue of Japanese breakfast—its scarcity, its odd cultural positioning—to the best of my ability. But before we move on, I want to add a few details that may seem unrelated. Let’s see if we can get them to connect.

Because the truth is, I dream about getting breakfast in Japan. And in a surprising number of these dreams, the Trumpster shows up.

More precisely: the dreams focus on the fact that the Trumpster and I share a birthday (June 14th), which makes us both late Geminis. Late Geminis, I have good reason to believe, are uniquely dangerous and slippery. But in my dreams the Trumpster isn’t dangerous at all. He shows up as basically an empty suit.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:

I am at a breakfast buffet in Japan. This is at a hotel that I am not staying at, and I may indeed be attempting to crash the buffet while masquerading as a hotel guest. Trump is there with an entourage, and he sees me staking out the buffet. I make a comment to him that we are both late Gemini, and he nods, curtly but with some minimal consideration. He sees me trying to steal the breakfast, does not care, and would probably provide cover if it came to that. He and I are not aligned, but nor are we enemies.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:

I am outside in the morning, standing on a dock or something of that nature. I am looking for breakfast, and not finding it. There is a commotion above me to the east, and I realize that Trump is being rolled out, literally on like coaster wheels, for a speech. He is on some kind of sliding seat and when this seat hits the balcony he stands up and postures about like Mussolini. I am watching and he sees me watching, but continues with his Mussolini act. I realize quickly that this is a total act and that he doesn’t even want to be there. He is not dangerous in this moment or in this speech, just faintly ridiculous. Still, no breakfast.

=====

What do Trump and breakfast have to do with one another? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that Trump, although maligned by nearly everyone I know (I know a bunch of liberals), and apart from being an egotistical, mafia-adjacent, easily flattered, shape-shifting sociopath, is also pretty funny. Before I lose half of my readership, I’ll just nod to the comedian Shane Gillis, who made this point several months after Trump left office.

Has enough time passed that we can admit Trump was funny? Can we finally admit that he was funny? (…) He was funny (…) I saw it. I’d show my friends I’d say look at that. They’d be like “what?”

“It’s funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”

I don’t know, during Hurricane Dorian he was like “maybe we should nuke it” (…) Like that was a real suggestion from the President (…) “Hey we got a big storm coming, you want me to blow it up?”

They were like “no, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, I fuck around dude. It’s what I do.”

“I fuck around, it’s what I do,” is a great summary of Trump’s whole approach to governing. Now, is there anything funny about his terrible immigration policies, his attempted pressure of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 1800 votes, his total disregard of democratic norms? No, not really. But is there anything funny about his speculation that maybe a little light and a little bleach could cure COVID? Why yes, there is. Is there anything funny about his noting that Frederick Douglas is getting bigger and bigger these days? Yes indeed. Is the way he pronounces “huge” funny? It’s funny to me anyway. And in my dreams, the two above being part of a series of about four or five total Trump breakfast dreams, he always shows up as semi-defanged, basically neutered, and non-dangerous. I think this is because, as a fellow late Gemini, I kind of have Trump’s number. It takes a late Gemini to know one, and I know this guy. In fact, I see right through him, to the extent that I know he’s not even there.

One other salient piece of data, there is an indie rock band called Japanese Breakfast that is getting bigger and bigger these days (they tell me “sir, this Japanese Breakfast is getting bigger and bigger these days, and I say look at that, wow, this Japanese Breakfast is really getting huge”). I don’t know them that well, but they sound like the kind of band I would like. I do wonder though if their name is not an ironic nod to the fact that Japanese breakfast is not a thing. Is the band name self-effacing, or even self-erasing? Does Japanese Breakfast the band exist at all? Does Trump? There is a way in which the Trump presidential term has come to feel like a fever dream or collective delusion, a set of events that cannot really have occurred as we recall them. In this sense, the Trump presidency may in the future be subject to Phantom Time Hypothesis speculation. And he and his handlers have already played right into this speculation what with their first lady doubles, the totally unhinged press conferences with the ubiquitous helicopter waiting in the wings, and the classic Trumpism, “we’ll see what happens.”

Here is what I think. Japanese Breakfast as a band exists. The Trumpster exists, but his wife spent most of her time in the White House being doubled. Trump and I are dream doubles, and I have his number. Japanese people don’t care about breakfast. And I am always starving at around 9 AM when on the road in Japan. Someone should look into the matter. I hear the Trumpster is free these days, maybe he’s the guy for the job.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with American politics, albeit from a slightly different angle.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/on-the-federal-age-of-consent-a-reply-to-alan-dershowitz/

The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position