Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Larry King, the Radio GOAT

Epigraph:

“I listened to the radio / I waited all night long…”
— Radio Radio, Elvis Costello

Note: This piece reflects my personal memories of listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with later impressions from television appearances, interviews, and conversations with people who knew him. It is written in the spirit of appreciation and nostalgia rather than media criticism, and emphasizes the uniquely loose, humane, and unpredictable quality of King’s radio work, which for me remains the defining core of his legacy.

I grew up listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show between roughly 1988 and 1992, and in my opinion — which happens to be correct — the radio show was much better than the television version that later made him famous. The TV show was good, even great at times, but radio was longer, looser, freer, and far more unpredictable. It had weird guests, weirder callers, and the feeling that anything might happen at two in the morning. That’s where Larry really lived.

I would listen in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Spokane, Washington, the volume turned low, the house quiet, insomnia hovering. The Spokane AM station — KGA 1510 — carried the show from around 9 PM Pacific time, and then, wonderfully, they would run it again. So I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, wake at two or three, and hear the same segment again in a half-dream. The effect was surreal. Didn’t I just hear that caller? Didn’t Larry just say that? It created a strange loop of late-night déjà vu that only made the whole thing more atmospheric. The show felt less like programming and more like a continuous nocturnal conversation.

My friend Kelly Rudd loved Larry too. When we were in high school we were both big fans of the radio show, and we talked about it constantly. There were a couple of things that we especially liked. The first was that Larry famously did no preparation. He knew a huge amount about the world, of course, but he didn’t read guests’ books ahead of time. He wanted to come in cold. If his guest was a firefighter, he’d ask, “So what’s it like to be a firefighter?” It sounds lazy, but it was brilliant. By staying open and getting out of the way, he let the conversation go anywhere. This way the show became eventful.

Another thing we loved was what happened after the guest left. Larry would open the lines and take questions about absolutely anything. Most of the time he was generous and patient, but when callers went off the rails he had a signature phrase. He’d cut them off gently: “Cold compress, ma’am,” or “Cold compress, sir.” Basically: lie down, ice your head, regroup. It was hysterical, especially because he used it sparingly. When “cold compress” dropped, you knew things had gotten weird.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry so much that when the station suddenly dropped the show, Kelly proposed we drive to the radio station and protest. So we skipped school, drove across town, and rang the intercom demanding to speak to someone about the cancellation. The station manager eventually came down and heard us out. We knew we weren’t changing anything, but it felt right to try. Larry never came back to Spokane radio, and the show faded not long after, but the whole episode captured what the show meant to us. It wasn’t just background noise. It felt alive.

Larry’s on-air style was the key. He was unbelievably relaxed. By the late ’80s you could tell he had done thousands of hours. Nothing fazed him. Weird guests, drunk callers, eccentrics — all the same to Larry. He absorbed everything. He had pet phrases — “cold compress” chief among them — and he deployed them like a veteran reliever, only when needed. He famously did no prep, and he leaned into naïve questions. He’d ask something simple and let the guest do the work. The effect was disarming. People opened up. He also had real humanity. He listened. He didn’t mock callers. He didn’t rush them. There was compassion there, and I think that’s what I loved most.

And the show could get wonderfully out of control. In one story Larry told from his old Miami days, an adult actress he was interviewing suggested they just have sex during the commercial break. Larry, amused, asked the producers to clear out — but there wasn’t enough time. That kind of anecdote captures the looseness of late-night radio. It wasn’t polished. It was alive.

Larry left the overnight Mutual Radio show in 1994 to focus on television. By then I had already drifted away, but I still caught Larry King Live on CNN over the years. I remember watching during the O. J. Simpson trial while at Otago University in New Zealand, when the show became part of the nightly noise. Later there were the Vladimir Putin interviews — classic Larry, conversational and oddly disarming. And of course there were the great comic moments, like the interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Larry suggested the show had been canceled and Seinfeld snapped back in disbelief, and the Norm Macdonald appearance where Norm kept repeating, “I’m a deeply closeted homosexual,” and Larry tried earnestly to parse it. “So that means you’re gay?” “No, Larry,” Norm replied, “it means I’m deeply closeted.” Pure Larry: sincere confusion meeting absurdist comedy.

Larry’s personal life was famously complicated. He married eight times, had several children — including sons Chance and Cannon later in life — and lived in a kind of perpetual romantic improvisation. The marriages came and went. The last ended painfully and publicly. He once joked he’d never leave his wife unless Angie Dickinson came along — and when she did, he married her. That was Larry: impulsive, affectionate, slightly chaotic. Despite decades of success, he didn’t leave the kind of massive fortune people assumed. The money came and went, as did the marriages. It was a life lived in motion.

My friend Sergio Mandiola actually knew Larry in his later years in Los Angeles. Sergio was running an independent studies program at Beverly Hills High School, and Larry’s sons Cannon and Chance, and he taught his sons for three years. Larry would come by for open nights or just to chat.

Sergio Mandiola: “Larry would come in from time to time and we would talk. He was lovely and open. He talked about his family and his career. One time he told me, ‘Sergio, you should totally have a radio show!’ I was flattered. One thing about Larry is his politics were more to the left than he let on on air. He had strong views and wasn’t afraid to share them in person. Larry was a true mensch and I’m glad I got to spend time with him. I miss him.”

In the end, I’ll say it plainly: for me, Larry King is the radio GOAT. There was no one like him, and there probably never will be. It wasn’t just longevity. It was the curiosity, the looseness, the humanity, the love of people, politics, baseball, and life. He trusted the conversation. He let the night unfold.

And then there was that absurd, wonderful USA Today column, which read like a diary gone completely outta control. Mets lose 6–4…Rain in Baltimore…Clinton flies to Ireland…You’d read it and think, Larry, baby, WTF is this? And also, Mr. USA Today, WTAF are you doing paying for this? But somehow it worked. It was pure Larry — fragmentary, observational, intimate.

And that’s how I remember him most clearly: late nights in high school, the radio turned low, insomnia hanging in the room, Spokane quiet outside.. Sometimes I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, then wake again to the rerun, half-dreaming, half-aware, caught in that strange déjà vu — didn’t I just hear this? — while Larry kept talking, calm as ever, taking calls from truckers and insomniacs and eccentrics. My listening years were brief, but they stuck. And when I think of Larry now, that’s where I go back to: the low hum of AM radio, the half-fade, and the sweet sounds of his voice in my ear.

Dedication:

For the one and only GOAT, Larry Motherfucking King. RIP baby.

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On Being Early to Shows

Note: Getting to shows early, I realized, isn’t really about beating the crowd but about entering the space before it hardens into an event—when the room is still provisional, the bartender relaxed, the band half-mythical figures moving casually through soundcheck, and the whole night feels less like a performance and more like something forming in real time; you notice the lighting before it matters, the empty floor that will later surge, the stray conversations, the merch table still untouched, and sometimes—if you’re lucky—the musicians themselves, unguarded and human, which subtly rewires the experience so that when the set finally begins you’re not just watching a show but inhabiting a continuum that started hours earlier, a private prelude that rewards patience, sharpens memory, and turns what could have been just another concert into a small, self-contained narrative of anticipation, proximity, and the quiet pleasure of being there before everything becomes official.

Epigraph
“There’s a thin line between a guy with a backstage pass /
and a guy walking around with his gut hanging out like a jackass.”
— Sun Kil Moon, “Ben’s My Friend”

I’ve always been fascinated by the green room. First of all, why green? They can’t all be green. Second, there’s the whole rider situation. The rider is where things get really interesting. I think it was Van Halen who had in their rider that all the brown M&Ms had to be removed from a bowl. This sounds totally bizarre, but the point was attention to detail. If the venue screws up the M&Ms, they might screw up something much more important, like stage rigging or pyrotechnics. The M&Ms were just a test.

Other riders go in different directions. Iggy Pop reportedly asked for things like a Bob Hope impersonator and other surreal odds and ends, more like performance art than hospitality. Meanwhile Beyoncé is famous for highly controlled riders: temperature, lighting, water, environment, everything calibrated. One approach is chaos, the other total control. Both happen in the green room, which most of us never see.

My first concert was Dire Straits in Pullman, Washington, in a big arena. I was nowhere near the green room, of course. Most of us aren’t. So the real question becomes: what happens before the show, if you’re not backstage?

One answer came when I saw They Might Be Giants in Spokane with my friend Kelly Rudd. Kelly told me his cousin was in the opening band. They got paid twenty bucks for the show. The whole band. Twenty dollars. Totally unbelievable. Outta fucking control. TMBG were already a pretty big indie band, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” had been a hit, and I liked “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” quite a bit. But after hearing that story I never quite looked at them the same way. The green room fantasy took a hit. Backstage wasn’t glamorous. It was twenty bucks and a handshake.

Another time I went to see Cat Power at the old Club Quattro in Osaka. I got there early, of course, and there was an opener dressed like a fairy with fuzzy, messed-up hair who sat down at the piano and proceeded to play dirge after dirge for what felt like an hour. Solo piano can be great, but this was brutal. I honestly thought I might have to cap myself. At some point I checked my ticket just to make sure this wasn’t actually Chan Marshall. It wasn’t. Thank god.

Then Chan came on and instead of playing from the stage like other artists do, she wandered through the crowd with a wireless mic, half-rapping, half-singing, talking, improvising. It wasn’t really a concert. It was more like some kind of performance art happening. Totally outta control. If I’d come late I would have missed the whole bizarre prelude. Being early meant enduring the dirges but also getting the full weirdness of the night.

Another early-arriver adventure came when I saw Deerhunter at the Hostess Club Weekender. These shows started early and stacked openers all day long. I once saw Mogwai at one of these and had to leave after fifteen minutes because I was hungry, tired, faded, and they were boring the living shit out of me. It happens.

The Deerhunter show in Osaka was even more outta control. The headliner was scheduled for 7 PM, but there were something like six openers. One of them was Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD, a legendary figure, but he droned on so long that by the time Deerhunter came on they only had about forty minutes. Bradford Cox introduced him with dripping sarcasm, emphasizing “LABEL BOSS,” clearly taking the piss because the band’s time had been cut. I ended up having to see them again months later in Nagoya to get the full set. That’s the risk of being early: sometimes the openers eat the show.

The flip side came when I saw The Hold Steady at the Brooklyn Bowl in December 2018. I arrived two hours early, ate a hamburger, and smoked up outside. That’s where I met Austin, a total Steadyhead. He knew everything: lineups, labels, deep cuts, all of it. We talked music, smoked, and waited. When doors opened we grabbed territory near the stage with the other early-arrivers, a semi-cliquey group of diehards.

Later, when Austin wanted to get back to the front for the encore, he told me to follow him. He moved through the crowd at a half jog and the people parted in front of him like he was Barry Sanders hitting holes. Seconds later we were hugging the stage. I knew then I was in the presence of greatness. I also knew he was my friend. I didn’t get the VIP meet and greet, but getting there early gave me something better.

My one true VIP experience came when I saw The Afghan Whigs in Amsterdam in 2017 at the Paradiso Amsterdam, a beautiful converted church. I arrived three hours early, met Greg Dulli and the band, took photos, bought merch, and watched soundcheck with maybe fifteen people. They played “Going to Town” acoustically, which was a revelation. Later they crushed the full electric set, ending with “Faded.” I paid fifty bucks for that meet and greet and it was completely worth it. Being early paid off directly.

Getting to shows early, then, is not really about the green room at all. The green room is a kind of fantasy—green walls, bowls of M&Ms, riders with impossible demands. Most of us never see it, and even when we do, it turns out to be smaller and more ordinary than imagined. And probably not even green. The real action happens in that strange in-between space before the show: the smoking area, the empty floor, the long wait while the openers drift on and off.

If you arrive early, you get all of it. You get the terrible fairy-piano dirges and the label boss who drones on too long. You get the moment of doubt when you check your ticket and wonder if this could possibly be the headliner. You get the rail territory battles and the cliquey early crew. You get the conversations with strangers who turn into temporary friends, like Austin, who parts the crowd like a halfback and gets you back to the stage in seconds. You get the soundcheck if you’re lucky, the acoustic revelation, the quiet before the storm.

Most of all, you get time. And time at a show is a funny thing. Once the lights go down, everything compresses. The band plays, the songs blur together, and before you know it the encore hits and everyone spills out into the night. But if you were there early, the show feels bigger. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You saw the room empty and then full. You watched the night assemble itself.

So while some people drift in late, grab a drink, and wait for the headliner, I’ve always preferred the long route. Get there early. Kill time. Smoke a cigarette. Talk to whoever’s around. Endure the openers, good or bad. Maybe you meet someone. Maybe you don’t. Maybe the band walks through the room. Maybe nothing happens at all. But every once in a while, if you’re lucky, something does. And that, in the end, is why I like to be early to shows.

Dedication:

For music lovers everywhere. You are my tribe baby.

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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.

If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Matt

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On the Pre-Game (aka A Response to Neil Strauss’ The Game)

Note: This piece overlaps my three essays on my week with Isobel series (I–III), though it approaches that week from a different direction. Where those pieces follow the arc, this one lingers on the moment before it resolves—the pre-game, as I’ve come to understand it. It is also a direct response to the book The Game, by Neil Strauss. In what follows I don’t intend to rebut Strauss so much as correct what I see as a fundamental weakness in the subculture he dissects. The reader will judge whether I succeed.

Epigraph

“No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me.”

— Bob Dylan, Up to Me

Part I: Ippei

I’m at Zaza, the club on Kiyamachi in Kyoto. It’s around 11 PM and just getting going. Zaza is a late night place. It doesn’t peak until well past midnight, and at this hour it’s still stretching, still finding its rhythm.

I’m there by myself, drinking a White Russian.

A Japanese guy comes up to me. He’s about fifty-five. No preamble, no easing into it. He introduces himself—let’s call him Ippei—and within seconds it’s on.

“See those two ladies over by the window,” he says. “Wanna help me pick them up?”

I’m intrigued. Not because I’m especially interested in the outcome, but because I’m a curious guy and I want to see what he’s doing.

“Ok,” I say. “What’s the play?”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“You’re my old friend from California. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. I just ran into you by chance here. Take it from there.”

That’s it. That’s the entire setup. Handed to me fully formed.

I ask him, just to check, “Is this going to work?”

He smiles, completely unbothered.

“Yeah,” he says. “I do this every night. Had a threesome last night.”

Well alright then.

We walk over. He starts talking immediately, in Japanese, smooth, fast, confident. “This is Matt, my best friend from California. Would you believe I just found him here?”

I met him five minutes ago.

It doesn’t matter.

In no time the two women are completely engaged. Smiling, leaning in, laughing. The story has landed. The reality has been accepted. They’re not being approached. They’ve been included.

And I’m there, but I’m not really there. I’m not trying to win anything. I’m not trying to escalate. I’m watching. Taking it in. The nightlife anthropologist, just observing the field.

After a while I step out to the balcony to smoke.

Twenty minutes pass.

When I come back down, he’s still there. Still going strong. Still inside the same story.

That’s when it clicks.

He didn’t need me.

He needed the role I filled.

He needed a premise.

Part II: Neil Strauss

Neil Strauss’ The game

That night at Zaza stuck with me, not because of what happened, but because of what it revealed.

There is a whole body of writing—call it a subculture, call it a system—that attempts to explain and formalize moments like that. The most famous version of it is The Game, by Neil Strauss, which I’ve read twice.

I want to be clear about something before I go any further.

I’m not anti–Neil Strauss. In fact, I respect him. He’s an elite investigator of subcultures, and I love subcultures. He embedded himself in a world, learned its language, mapped its hierarchies, and reported it out with real precision. That’s not easy to do. It’s a serious piece of work.

What follows is not a dismissal of Strauss.

It’s a response to what the game represents.

Because once you move from observing a system to adopting it, something changes.

At its core, the game assumes that attraction can be engineered. That with the right language, the right sequence, the right calibrated signals, you can break down a woman’s resistance and get to the desired outcome, which is of course bed.

It’s a kind of a linguistic technology and NLP at its worst. A system designed to move someone from one state to another.

And for me, that’s where I part ways.

For me The Game is a massive turnoff, because it flattens everything and kills any chance at romance.

It scripts what should be alive. It reduces seduction to a manual and turns something unpredictable into something repeatable. And in doing so, it drains it of the very thing that makes it worth pursuing in the first place.

There’s no space for real connection. No space for the unexpected. No space for the moment where something happens that neither person could have predicted. No space for the kind of encounter that might actually change your life.

And beyond that, it produces a life that I don’t want.

The guys in The Game end up living together in this kind of shared house—Mystery, Strauss, Courtney Love—surrounded by other guys, talking about women, thinking about women, analyzing women. It’s a sausage fest. And it’s not cool.

The Gamers think they’re players. I prefer to think of them as incel-adjacent. They’ve optimized the system, but they’ve lost the thing itself. They’ve mastered the game and stepped outside of life.

Part III: On Action

I’ve had a handful of sexual partners that I’ve gone all the way with. The precise number is under an NDA. I’ve made out with more. But I haven’t been especially active, at least not in the way the game would define it.

What I have done is, flirt with, connect with, and have crushes on dozens of women.

And the truth is, I enjoy it.

I actively enjoy the pre-game.

I enjoy getting close. The moment before something becomes something else. The tension. The ambiguity. The recognition that something might be there, and neither of you has named it yet.

The thrill of newness and the possibility of a spark. If it burns, great. If it flickers, that’s also good. For most men, the pre-game is a means to an end. For me, it’s the end.

And that’s the difference.

This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in action. I am. Very much so. In fact, I’m something of an action junkie. But I’m a highly specific kind of action junkie. Like Wittgenstein, who was said to have manufactured his own oxygen, I manufacture my own action.

I don’t chase it blindly. I don’t optimize for it. I don’t try to force it into existence through systems or scripts. I generate it. Selectively. Intentionally. And in moments where it actually means something.

Part III: Luna

I’m at Umineko with a friend—call him Mr. Editor. It’s early, maybe six in the evening. We’re mid-bar, having a beer, when I notice a woman sitting off to the side.

She’s stunning. And I HAVE to go talk to her. Not because I expect anything to happen. Not because I’ve calculated the odds. But because the moment demands it.

I tell Mr. Editor what I’m about to do. He nods. “Go for it,” he says. “I’ll watch.” I walk over and ask her name. She smiles. “Call me Luna.”

We speak in Japanese. The conversation flows. I bring everything I have to the moment—attention, presence, curiosity—and it lands. There’s a spark. Not forced. Not engineered. Just there.

We talk for a while. Long enough for the room to shift slightly around us. Eventually I ask for her Instagram. She gives it to me. I walk back to the bar and sit down next to Mr. Editor. I’m on Cloud 9. The next day, in the late afternoon, carefully timed, I send her a message but she doesn’t reply.

Failure? Not for the pre-gamer. Because the pre-gamer already got what he came for. The moment. The spark. The approach. The brief, electric possibility that something might happen. That was the action. That was the point. For the Strauss guys, the night ends when the text goes unanswered. For me, the night ended at the bar.

Up to this point, the pre-game is contained. Safe, even. A space where things can happen or not happen without consequence.

But sometimes it doesn’t stay that way.

Isobel Revisited:

I have written about my week with Isobel extensively elsewhere, however part of that story is relevant to what we are discussing here. I met her at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, held at Exter College, Oxford, in late August 2018. We spent the week together and I fell in love. But I didn’t sleep with her. My choice. What follows is a light re-write from my essay “On My Week with Isobel: Part II”:

Wednesday.

I wake up early and we have breakfast together in the dining hall. By this point, people are noticing us. Comments here and there, snickers, sideways smiles.

Morning and lunch blur into one long conversation—the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We’re finishing each other’s thoughts. I’m in deeper than I’ve ever been.

We don’t attend much of anything.

In the afternoon break she goes to change. I go back to my room and put on The Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She comes back after and tells me, without shame, that she had pleasured herself during the break. Just fucking states it.

This is a complication.

That night she changes again. A red dress. Short, but not careless. Stunning. We sit at dinner whispering, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knows by now.

After dinner there’s wine again, talking with the tutors, the long courtyard. I meet Darby Costello in person for the first time. She’s fully alive, drinking wine, holding the room effortlessly. I’m so happy she’s my astrologer. But I’m elsewhere.

We stay late. Clear the courtyard. Around two in the morning we part. Cheeks touched. No bedroom. No act. No close. Back in my room, lights low, Mendoza Line still in my ears, I lie on the narrow bed and I know exactly where I am standing.

I will keep going. I will see where this leads. But I will not sleep with her. I can’t.

It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. Totally and much more. But I can see it. The complications. For her, for me. The chain of events that would follow. I’m old enough to see it coming. And I know, standing there in the courtyard, with the last of the wine and a cigarette burning down, that it’s on me.

I have to be the one to say no. That’s the shape. That’s the decision.

=====

Up to this point, the pre-game has been something I could enter and exit at will. A space I could step into, generate action, feel the spark, and leave intact.

With Ippei, the action was scripted. With Strauss, it was systematized. With Luna, it was self-contained.

But there’s another version of the pre-game, and it’s the one that matters most. The one where the moment doesn’t stay light. The one where it deepens. Where the spark doesn’t just flicker—it starts to take shape. And at that point, something shifts. Because now it’s not just about whether something will happen. It’s about whether it should.

This is where the line from Dylan starts to carry real weight. No one else could play that tune. There’s no system here. No script. No borrowed language. No Ippei handing you a premise. There is only the moment as it actually exists, and your ability to see it clearly.

And then the second part. It was up to me. Not to escalate. Not to optimize. But to decide. The game ends when something happens. The pre-game ends when you decide it should.

Dedication

For pre-gamers everywhere. May you get a little action tonight baby.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the following pieces that also take up the themes of romance and seduction.

On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part III: Aftermath
Simona
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On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)

Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.

The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.

As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.

Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.

Epigraph

“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.”
— Uncle Tupelo

I. Return

On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.

The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.

I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.

I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.

I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.

In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.

It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.

II. Suzaku

My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.

There were no students.

Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.

It was, in a word, dreary.

I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.

Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.

By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.

III. Drift

If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?

Mostly at home.

During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.

I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.

When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.

Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.

In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.

IV. Before 9

Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.

The bartender most nights was Miyuki.

Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.

She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.

During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.

That was the culture for several years.

V. Leave

In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.

Oddly, I felt relieved.

VI. The World Changes

Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.

The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.

Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.

VII. Return

In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.

Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.

So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.

The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.

In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.

The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.

VIII. Administrative Comedy

During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.

The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.

Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.

I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.

IX. Reinstatement

Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.

My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.

After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.

The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.

The long cut had taken its time.

But eventually it brought me home.

Dedication

For Karin.
With deep appreciation.

Note:

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: Sixers

Note: This short reflection began simply as a reaction to hearing “Sixers” from The Price of Progress by The Hold Steady. Over time, however, it became clear that the song belongs to a larger lineage in Craig Finn’s writing: the quiet, observant songs about adult relationships that never quite come together.

Listeners familiar with Finn’s work will recognize echoes of earlier pieces such as “Spinners,” “Tangletown,” “Esther,” and especially “Jessamine,” where a brief encounter carries emotional weight far beyond its duration. What interests me most about these songs is not romance itself but the fragile moment where two people briefly imagine a connection that may or may not exist.

“Sixers” captures that moment with remarkable economy. Like many of Finn’s best narratives, the drama unfolds not through big revelations but through small gestures, passing observations, and the social physics of an evening that slowly runs out of momentum.

The song feels unmistakably rooted in the atmosphere of the pandemic and its aftermath—a period when many people were cautiously trying to reconnect with the world after long stretches of isolation. In that sense the characters in “Sixers” are not unusual figures but recognizable ones: two lonely people improvising a small pocket of companionship inside a quiet apartment building.

That the connection ultimately proves fleeting is not really the point. The attempt itself—the knock on the door, the drinks, the conversation—is what gives the evening its meaning.

I came to The Hold Steady a little late. Around 2016 I first heard “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis” from the 2008 album Stay Positive—probably through the Spotify algorithm, which occasionally earns its keep. That was the gateway. Even though I had missed the band’s original wave of excitement, I quickly made up for lost time and worked my way through the entire catalog.

A couple years later I went deeper and began listening seriously to the solo records by Craig Finn. That opened another rabbit hole. My early favorite was “Three Drinks,” but over time songs like “A Bathtub in the Kitchen” and “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” began to feel like the real center of gravity in Finn’s songwriting. The solo records are quieter and more novelistic than the Hold Steady albums, and in some ways I’ve come to think they are even stronger.

Around that same time a music-obsessed friend I met at two Hold Steady shows at Brooklyn Bowl told me that if I really wanted to understand Finn’s writing I needed to go back further, to his earlier band Lifter Puller. He was right. Lifter Puller turned out to be a wilder and more manic version of the same storytelling instinct. The songs move faster, the rhymes pile up in breathless clusters, and the characters—people like Nightclub Dwight—feel sketchier and stranger than the ones who would later populate Hold Steady songs about figures like Charlemagne. Tracks like “Nice Nice” and the closing songs on Fiasco are still some of the most exhilarating music Finn ever made.

All of which is to say that Craig Finn has gradually become, for me, the greatest living songwriter—even if I still concede that the all-time crown belongs to Bob Dylan.

What makes Finn particularly fascinating is the emotional terrain he covers. Early Hold Steady songs often dealt with youthful chaos—parties, drugs, Catholic guilt, and the reckless mythology of young adulthood. But over time he has developed another genre that may be even more compelling: songs about messy adult relationships.

These songs usually revolve around people chasing the thrill of a connection even when they suspect, somewhere deep down, that the connection will probably be short-lived. The crush, the fling, the brief dalliance—these impulses are deeply wired into human psychology and deeply embedded in the culture and art we consume. Finn understands that instinct perfectly. His characters repeatedly pursue moments of intimacy that are intense, fleeting, and often slightly ill-advised.

You can hear that theme in songs like Spinners, Tangletown, Esther, and perhaps most perfectly Jessamine. What distinguishes Finn’s writing is the concision with which he captures these emotional situations. Few songwriters are better at compressing an entire relationship dynamic into a handful of lines. In that respect “Jessamine” may be his masterpiece: a small, perfectly observed sketch of longing, timing, and missed possibility.

It is within that lineage that the song “Sixers,” from the 2023 album The Price of Progress, finds its place.

The Price of Progress feels unmistakably like The Hold Steady’s COVID-era record. Finn has described the album as a set of narrative songs about people trying to survive modern life—navigating isolation, economic pressure, technological dependence, and the strange psychological residue of the pandemic years. While the previous album Open Door Policyhad largely been completed before the lockdowns, The Price of Progress was written in the wake of that disrupted period when people were cautiously trying to rebuild their social lives.

“Sixers” captures that atmosphere perfectly.

The entire story unfolds inside an apartment building where two strangers live stacked one above the other. Both are alone. Both are restless. Both are coping with their evenings through small chemical adjustments—beer, pills, and cocktails.

The woman downstairs begins the night with a six-pack from the store down the street and a prescription meant to help her focus her attention. The man upstairs has just returned from another steakhouse dinner with coworkers in asset management, a job that is, as Finn notes dryly, “as thrilling as you’d think.” The two have seen each other before at the mailbox, one of those semi-public urban spaces where strangers develop a faint familiarity without ever truly knowing each other.

The encounter begins with a pretext. She knocks on his door and tells him she thought she heard footsteps upstairs.

The truth, of course, is that she is simply lonely.

Like many Finn songs, the story unfolds in the semi-public spaces of urban life—apartment hallways, mailboxes, shared walls—places where strangers gradually become aware of each other without ever becoming fully connected. Finn has always had the instincts of an urban anthropologist, observing the small rituals and awkward encounters that define city living.

For a while the evening works. They talk about work and school. They discuss how the city has changed. They make drinks in the kitchen—he measures gin while she crushes pills on the counter. At one point he is “muddling the mint,” a beautifully precise detail that captures the strange domestic intimacy that can arise between two people who barely know each other. Soon they are dancing, sending out for takeout, and even sharing inside jokes.

For a few hours the night begins to resemble a small, improvised relationship.

And then comes the hinge of the entire song.

Sunrise into sundown, sending out for takeout, sharing inside jokes now
He finally tries to kiss her and she says that it’s not like that.

With that single line the entire evening collapses.

Everything that seemed like romantic chemistry turns out to have been a misread signal. The connection was real enough to sustain conversation, drinks, dancing, and jokes, but not the kind of connection he thought it was.

One of Finn’s recurring themes is the almost-relationship—encounters where two people briefly imagine a connection that never quite materializes. Songs like Jessamine, Spinners, and Tangletown inhabit that fragile territory. “Sixers” belongs squarely in that tradition.

Finn doesn’t dramatize the moment with an argument or confession. Instead he shows the social physics of awkwardness taking over: everything slows, the conversation falters, and the energy drains from the room.

The next gesture is even more telling.

She cleans off the countertop and says she should probably go.

It is a tiny domestic act, but it carries enormous emotional weight. Cleaning the counter becomes a way of resetting the scene, erasing the traces of the evening before leaving.

Like many Finn songs, “Sixers” tells its story through objects as much as through dialogue. The room fills with small details: the six-pack from the corner store, the pill bottle in the cupboard, the carefully mixed drinks, Sinatra on the stereo, and one quietly devastating observation about the apartment’s décor.

At one point she notices a Nagel poster hanging on the wall in a silver frame and thinks it looks kind of lame.

It’s a perfect Finn detail. In a single line we learn something about the guy’s taste, his slightly square professional aesthetic, and the quiet judgment forming in her mind even while the evening unfolds.

Months later she sees him again in the hallway. This time he is standing with his fiancée, whose name she can’t quite remember—Kelly or Katie.

The moment closes the loop of the story. Whatever possibility once existed between them has long since evaporated. The evening that once felt full of potential turns out to have been only a brief improvisation between two lonely people passing through the same building.

The song ends where it began, with footsteps.

But this time the sound isn’t real.

She thinks she hears footsteps
But now they’re not really there.

The knock on the door that began the story was an attempt at connection. The footsteps at the end are only the ghost of that attempt, echoing in the quiet of her apartment.

Like many of Finn’s best songs about adult relationships, “Sixers” isn’t about catastrophe. Nothing explodes. No one storms out. The drama is smaller and more recognizable than that.

It is simply about lonely people improvising connection in a time of trouble.

And sometimes getting it slightly wrong.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the essays below which also deal with the singer-songwriter Craig Finn and his band The Hold Steady.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine
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On the Strange Geography of Conferences

Note: This essay began with a memory from an IB Global Conference in Singapore sometime in the mid-2010s, when I first began to notice that large professional gatherings possess a kind of unofficial geography. The official conference—the keynote halls, breakout rooms, and printed program—forms only one map of the event. Running alongside it is a second map composed of bars, lobby couches, dinner tables, and long conversations that drift well past the scheduled sessions.

Years earlier I had written a short reflection on what I called unconferencing, the quiet relocation of intellectual “action” from the formal program to these improvised spaces around it. The present essay grows out of that earlier observation but shifts attention from theory to terrain. Rather than asking why unconferencing occurs, it asks where it tends to happen and how participants gradually learn to navigate those unofficial zones.

Readers interested in the conceptual background may wish to consult the earlier essay on unconferencing, which explores the phenomenon through the lens of Erving Goffman and the broader question of how individuals negotiate the locus of action within institutional environments.

As with many pieces on the Kibbitzer, the goal here is less to offer a definitive theory than to describe a pattern that, once noticed, becomes difficult to unsee. Conferences, like many human systems, operate simultaneously on two levels: the one announced in the program and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

“The locus of action is always in motion.”
— Erving Goffman

I arrived a day late to the conference.

This was in Singapore sometime around 2014 or 2015, at one of the IB Global Conferences for the Asia–Pacific region. The event was being held in a large glass hotel near the river, not far from Chinatown and just south of Raffles Place if memory serves. The keynote room alone seated something like eleven or twelve hundred people. The conference program was thick with panels, workshops, and presentations that began early in the morning and ran straight through the afternoon.

My suitcase had arrived before I had. I had been in China the day before running another IBEN training, and while the conference itself was already underway, I was still in transit. By the time I checked in and made my way downstairs, the official proceedings were well established: keynote speakers, crowded sessions, conference badges swinging from lanyards, the whole apparatus of professional gathering fully in motion.

At the time I was only about a year into my work with IBEN. My regional manager was Avi Nanda, who was excellent in many respects but not especially hard-charging as a networker. Gill Pressland, who later became a formidable presence in the region, was not yet in the picture. I knew a few people, most importantly Steve Keegan in Australia, who had become a kind of mentor to me. I also knew Ed Lawless, who had previously overseen a great deal of the professional development work in the region.

Ed had once joked to me, only half joking, that his job had become little more than “wedding planning.” Conferences, workshops, schedules, logistics—endless coordination. Eventually he burned out on it entirely and moved on, first to Pamoja, the online curriculum company, and later into a somewhat undefined role at an IB school in Tokyo that seemed to blend management, marketing, and development. Such trajectories are not uncommon in the IB ecosystem. People drift through roles that are part educational, part organizational, part entrepreneurial.

In any case, arriving late to the Singapore conference had the curious effect of placing me immediately at its margins rather than at its center. The keynote sessions were already underway, but instead of rushing directly into the large ballroom where most of the attendees were gathered, I began encountering people in the spaces just outside it: the lobby, the cafés, and eventually the hotel bars.

One of the first people I reconnected with was Darlene Fischer from Australia. Darlene was in her early sixties at the time and something of a force of nature. She had the sort of presence that made conversations reorganize themselves around her. Through Darlene I soon met two others who would become central figures in what I later came to think of as the conference’s unofficial inner circle: Sue Richards and Gerald Conlin.

Gerald was in his mid-sixties then, a slight man with white hair and an almost theatrical grin. His professional life consisted largely of consulting work connected to education programs, particularly the wave of hybrid master’s degrees in education that universities around the world had begun launching. Institutions like Tsukuba in Japan and Bath in the UK were building these programs, often with cohorts of twenty or so students, and Gerald had carved out a niche as the person who could authorize and evaluate them. He was also constantly presenting, constantly researching, constantly moving through the conference circuit.

Within about five minutes of meeting me he decided that I would make the perfect number two for his MA authorization work. It was flattering, though I suspected there might be additional motives behind his enthusiasm. Gerald was an openly and exuberantly gay man, and his warmth toward me carried a certain theatrical flair. He had a habit of calling me “my boy,” delegating tasks such as selecting restaurants or ordering drinks, and occasionally resting a hand on my upper thigh while speaking with great intensity about some educational development or other. None of this particularly disturbed me; conferences are full of strong personalities, and I was by then quite capable of navigating such dynamics.

Sue Richards, meanwhile, functioned as Gerald’s counterpart and amplifier. Where Gerald was slightly reserved and professorial, Sue was outgoing, energetic, and socially strategic. She worked directly for the IB at the time and moved easily through the conference environment, introducing Gerald before presentations, praising his work with extravagant enthusiasm, and generally acting as a kind of corner person for his professional persona. If Gerald was the fighter in the ring, Sue was the one shouting encouragement from the ropes.

The two of them formed a kind of traveling intellectual unit, and through them I began spending more time not in the conference sessions themselves but in the hotel’s bars and restaurants.

There were perhaps four or five of us in total who fell into this pattern. What struck me fairly quickly was that these individuals rarely attended the conference sessions unless they were running them. The keynote speeches, the panels, the carefully scheduled workshops—these seemed largely directed at newcomers or first-time attendees. The veterans, by contrast, moved through the conference in a completely different way.

They ran the unconference.

By this I mean something slightly more specific than simply skipping sessions. Years ago I wrote an essay about what I called “unconferencing,” referring to the parallel conference that emerges quietly around the official one. What interests me here is less the theory of unconferencing than its geography: the physical spaces through which these unofficial conversations travel.

At the Singapore conference, that geography quickly became clear.

There was the large ballroom where the official keynote addresses were delivered to more than a thousand people. But there were also the bars—two of them in particular—where smaller groups gathered throughout the afternoon and evening. There were the restaurant tables where dinner conversations stretched for hours. There were the lobby seating areas where people drifted in and out between sessions.

And there were the walks.

Within a day or two I began to see that the conference operated according to two distinct maps. The first map was the one printed in the program: rooms, times, speakers, sessions. The second map was entirely informal, emerging through patterns of conversation and social gravity.

The keynotes were for the newbies.

The action was at the bar and at dinner.

I was somewhat ambitious at that stage in my career, eager to establish myself in the region and become a respected trainer. Because of this ambition I paid close attention to where energy seemed to accumulate. It did not take long to realize that the most consequential conversations were happening far from the podium.

In the bars and restaurants people spoke more candidly about the IB, about institutional politics, about emerging programs, about who was doing interesting work and who was not. Opportunities were floated, collaborations proposed, rumors exchanged. Careers, in small ways, were advanced.

The official conference continued to run its scheduled course upstairs, but the real motion of the event—the circulation of ideas, alliances, and opportunities—took place elsewhere.

Seen in this light, conferences begin to resemble temporary cities with two overlapping infrastructures. The official infrastructure is highly visible: lecture halls, keynote rooms, printed programs, registration desks. The unofficial infrastructure is quieter and more fluid: bars, café tables, hallways, and late-night dinners.

Participants gradually learn to navigate both maps.

Some remain primarily within the official one, moving dutifully from session to session. Others develop an instinct for the second map, drifting toward the places where conversation gathers and where the boundaries between formal roles begin to loosen.

It is in these spaces that the unconference unfolds.

The term itself is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the phenomenon is real. Once a small group of experienced participants begins congregating in a particular location—usually a bar or restaurant—others start to appear. Conversations splinter and recombine. Someone joins for twenty minutes before leaving for dinner. Someone else arrives with news from another corner of the conference.

Over time the group becomes a kind of floating node within the larger event, a place where information circulates rapidly and where participants feel unusually free to explore ideas that might never make their way into a formal presentation.

In retrospect, what struck me most about that Singapore conference was not any particular keynote or panel discussion but the realization that conferences possess a strange and dynamic geography. Action is rarely confined to the places where organizers expect it to occur. Instead it migrates across the built environment of the event, settling temporarily wherever people feel the oxygen is richest.

The ballroom may host the official performance, but the bar hosts the conversation about what the performance actually means.

And so the conference proceeds along two parallel tracks: the one announced in the program, and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

The unconferencers simply learn to follow the latter.

Dedication:

For all those who know how to find the action.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essays linked below, all of which also take up the fascinating theme of professional conferences.

Keeganisms in the Wild: An Exploration
Investigating Action Part I: On Unconferencing
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On One Evening in Adelaide

Note: This recollection dates to June 2010, when I traveled to Adelaide, Australia for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop. At the time our school’s governing body, officially Ritsumeikan, but semi-affectionately known around town as “Keichimeikan,” (the cheap school) had begun investing heavily in International Baccalaureate training, and for a brief but memorable stretch I found myself traveling widely across the Asia-Pacific region attending workshops and conferences. Adelaide happened to be the first stop on that circuit.

The encounter described here took place midway through that week. Like many moments that occur while traveling, it was both ordinary and oddly memorable — a short conversation, a near-comic personal embarrassment narrowly avoided, and then a small gap in memory that I still cannot fully explain.

For privacy I refer to the person involved simply as “M.”, and a few identifying details have been softened. The strange behavior of my phone afterward — messages arriving out of sequence and the device occasionally insisting it was in Adelaide or Nagoya — was quite real, though I have never had a satisfying explanation for it.

In Japanese there is a phrase that captures the mood of such moments perfectly: cho fushigi — very mysterious.

Epigraph

Half hours on earth

What are they worth?

I don’t know.

David Berman

I. Adelaide

I was in Adelaide for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop, sometime around June of 2010. In those years our principal had suddenly decided that IB travel was a worthwhile investment, and so for a brief and glorious period I was dispatched all over the Asia-Pacific region like a slightly rumpled educational attaché. Workshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and, in this case, Adelaide.

The school hosting the workshop was one of those extremely well-appointed Australian private schools — immaculate rugby grounds, manicured lawns, a cafeteria that would have put many universities to shame. The workshop itself was perfectly pleasant. TOK people tend to be reflective types and reasonably good company, though after two days of epistemology everyone is usually ready for a drink.

Which is how, on the second evening, a small group of us ended up at a bar a few minutes from the hotel.

II. M.

At some point the table thinned out until it was just the two of us talking. She was from San Francisco. Let’s call her M.

We were sitting close, leaning in the way people do in bars when the music is slightly too loud and the conversation slightly too interesting to abandon. I told her about my small blog, Classical Sympathies, which at the time was still young and full of ambition. She told me she wrote long travel essays and posted them on Facebook where, she said with a shrug, they had gathered a modest but loyal readership.

Like a complete peon, I offered to host them on my site.

She smiled politely and said she’d probably keep them where they were for now.

Which was entirely reasonable.

The conversation moved on. We started talking about family — fathers, specifically — and the strange emotional weather that tends to gather around that subject. It was one of those unexpectedly intimate bar conversations that sometimes appear between near-strangers and then vanish again.

III. A Minor Emergency

There was, however, a complication.

Let us say that during the course of this conversation Young Mr. Johnson began to make his presence known.

Nothing dramatic. But enough that standing up suddenly would have created a situation. So I employed the classic defensive maneuver familiar to men everywhere: crossed legs, careful posture, strategic angles.

A small but significant crisis was unfolding beneath the table.

Eventually the situation resolved itself through patience and good fortune. When the moment seemed safe, I made my exit with what I hoped was dignity intact. We exchanged Facebook information, said our goodbyes, and I stepped out into the alley behind the bar on the way back to the hotel.

At that moment I felt something close to relief.

By the grace of God, I had narrowly avoided making a spectacular fool of myself.

IV. The Missing Ten Minutes

And then something strange happened.

I remember stepping into the alley.

The next thing I remember is being back in my hotel room.

Fully clothed. Completely sober. The evening still early — maybe ten-thirty, eleven at the latest.

What I did not remember was the ten minutes in between.

No walk back to the hotel. No elevator ride. No keycard in the door.

Just a small, clean gap in the record.

V. The Phone

The truly odd part came later.

For the next year and a half my phone behaved as though it had lost its grip on reality.

Texts appeared months after they had supposedly been sent. Messages from April surfaced in October. Time stamps were wrong. Location data wandered.

Sometimes the phone seemed to believe it was still in Adelaide.

More often it insisted it was in Nagoya, a city I had visited only once for a consulting visit to a school in the hills.

It was never anything dramatic — just enough small glitches to make me raise an eyebrow every now and then.

VI. Cho Fushigi

I never saw M. again.

We remained distant Facebook acquaintances for a while. She became, I believe, an English teacher back in San Francisco. Her essays continued to appear occasionally in the feed, and then eventually they stopped.

The phone eventually sorted itself out as well.

Technology, like memory, tends to repair its own small fractures over time.

Still, every once in a while I think about that short walk down the Adelaide alley and the ten missing minutes afterward.

And the only phrase that really fits is the one the Japanese use for such things.

Cho fushigi.

Very mysterious

Dedication:

For Molly. Thanks for the half hour baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may enjoy the two essays linked below, both of which take up similar themes or charged, fleeting, and romantic encounters.

Simona
Mariko
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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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On the Other City

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

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

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

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

Epigraph:

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

Morphine, In Spite of Me

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

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

This is the other city.

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

One of them is Haku.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simply and totally the original man.

Another citizen of the other city is Haru.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But men are predictable creatures.

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

Sure enough, he covered the beer.

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

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

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

She said she was happy to see me.

And that was when I learned her name. Haru.

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

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

Anything can come.

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

But something had shifted.

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

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

Every city has two maps.

The one everyone uses during the day.

And the other one that only appears after midnight.

Dedication:

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

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

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl
The Night of Fucking Adam