It was summer 2013 in Portland as I recall. Hugh was nine. We stayed with my parents, and my grandmother Barbara was there too—eighty-eight at the time, lucid, funny as hell. All the relatives were around. It was that kind of week: people coming and going, meals stretching, the house absorbing it.
On the day of the rehearsal we took Hugh to the Science Museum—Sachie, Hugh, Claudia, and me—and we ran late because of it. That was the trade. By the time we got to the rehearsal dinner the mojitos were gone. This had been the big promise. Everyone laughed when we found out Barbara had had three of them. It wasn’t scandalous. It was just Barbara.
The rehearsal dinner was in a tall pink building downtown, or near it—one of those Portland landmarks that stays more as color than address in memory. The night had that soft, anticipatory feeling rehearsals sometimes do: no one tense yet, no one released either.
Junko was there. She was Sachie’s aunt on her mother’s side, and we had paid for her to come. Sachie wanted to repay her for years of quiet kindness. Junko was a nurse, like Sachie. At the time there was nothing remarkable about her being there, except that she was there, which later would come to matter more than anyone knew.
II
After the rehearsal dinner there was movement in different directions. Kate was around, her husband too. Later—after drinking somewhere else—he got into an actual fight. Not an argument, not raised voices: a fight. I don’t remember the details and don’t need to. Kate and Matt are divorced now. At the time it registered only as background noise, the kind you note and then step away from.
At the party Junko danced. She danced and danced, and people noticed. They commented on it, openly, approvingly. She was light on her feet, joyful, fully there. Jeff was dancing with her—this was when he was still with his second wife, Lisa—and everyone seemed pleased by the sight of it. It was one of those moments that didn’t announce itself as anything special, except that later it would become impossible not to remember.
That night back at the hotel, Mike and I went down to the bar with Pat. We ordered a bottle of champagne. I’d had a few drinks already at dinner, but Mike wanted it and I was up for one bottle. We drank it and immediately ordered another. I was less up for that, but I went along. When it came time to pay, Mike said, “No money until October. Peace out.” He was in a career transition, trying to get back to Seattle, broke. I picked up the bill.
It didn’t feel dramatic. Just one of those small, late-night imbalances you carry quietly and don’t do anything with.
III
In the morning Mike wanted to go running. He was hungover. I wanted coffee. We walked together for a while along the river, then I peeled off to find caffeine. Mike puked, rallied, and went running anyway. Classic Mike.
I was hungover too. The ceremony started around one. We went back to the hotel and got dressed. I was glad I wasn’t in the ceremony. Sarah had insisted on tuxes, which meant fittings and mild resistance and then compliance. It was fine.
We drove to the church and met some of Sarah’s brothers—she has a few. Everyone was nice. The ceremony itself was intensely Catholic. Very Catholic. All the rituals, all the structure. It didn’t alienate me or convert me. It just was. I don’t remember much beyond the density of it, the sense of time being held in place by repetition.
There’s a photo from that day that I still have. Mike and Pat and me, all in tuxes. I look impossibly thin. I look young. I was thirty-nine.
IV
We stayed a few more days. At some point Glenn and Barbara were at my parents’ house together. My parents have a big place, the kind that can absorb people overnight without strain. Barbara was leaving. Glenn—her only son—was staying the night.
She was saying goodbye, already halfway turned toward the door, when she stopped and looked at him.
“Glenn,” she said, “I love you, but hit the gym.”
She said it without malice and without hesitation. Love first, then truth. Glenn loves his food and drink. Everyone laughed. Barbara was eighty-eight. She was lucid. She was still very much herself.
That’s what I remember.
Dedication: For Pat and Sarah, and their three lovely girls. You still owe me a mojito, though.
“All we need is just a little patience.” — Guns N’ Roses
I. Leaving Anyway
The wedding was in June, which was just a little inconvenient for me. School was still in session, and I had to miss work to go. I remember wishing that it had been in August. But once I decided I was going, the resistance fell away. I locked it in, and then I was genuinely excited—mostly to see my family.
I hadn’t seen my mom, Mike, or Pat since January 2018, before COVID. I hadn’t seen my dad since October of that year. That mattered more to me than the logistics or the calendar. So my wife Sachie and I flew from Japan to Seattle, and my son Hugh flew in separately from New Zealand, via Auckland and Los Angeles.
We landed at Sea-Tac and cleared international arrivals quickly. We had a few hours before my parents arrived to pick us up. They had rented a van, partly because it was a three-day event and partly because they were making breakfast on the last morning, which required supplies. While we waited, Sachie and I sat in the only open area we could find outside arrivals. We both needed a cigarette, so we took turns—one of us watching the bags while the other smoked. We bought two Starbuckscoffees, which cost sixteen dollars. I ordered an extra shot in each, not realizing the Americanos already contained doubles.
While we were there, a man nearby was clearly overdosing—probably fentanyl, maybe heroin. He was nodding, drooling. The police came first, then EMTs. They all knew him by name. Sylvester. After about an hour, they took him away on a stretcher. No one around reacted much. It felt routine. I was just sad, thinking about how much damage fentanyl has done in the U.S.
I texted my mom. They were running late. Hugh arrived through domestic customs and joined us. When my parents finally came, they looked good—just older, of course. We hugged and walked back through the airport to the van. My dad had forgotten where he’d parked it, so that took a while too.
Once we got moving, things settled. Sachie, Hugh, and I loaded into the van and drove north to Anacortes, about two and a half hours. It was mid-afternoon. Hugh slept most of the way. Conversation came easily. It felt natural, like time hadn’t broken anything, just stretched it.
We had an early dinner at a restaurant on the water in Anacortes. Pat and Sarah drove up from Portland with their three girls and joined us. John Innes and Kristi had been invited but were tired from the drive and didn’t come. I had raw oysters, another seafood dish, and a margarita. My dad ordered one beer and then told the server, “Please bring another one in exactly twelve minutes.” He always does this. He usually has two beers this way; that day he had a third later. I find the whole thing very funny.
I ordered a second drink—a Negroni, which wasn’t on the menu. The waitress said she thought the bartender could figure it out. It arrived with no ice. I considered sending it back but she was busy, so I let it go.
It was sunny. I sat in the sun so Sachie could have the shade. After dinner, Pat, Hugh, the two older girls, and I walked down over some stones to the water for a while. Then we went to a supermarket for beer, wine, and light provisions. I wasn’t sure how I’d sleep—I don’t always sleep well when traveling—so I bought a bottle of wine just in case.
We drove to the lodge where we were staying. It was really nice. Sachie, Hugh, and I had our own apartment. I took a walk behind the lodge to sneak a cigarette. Sachie probably found somewhere to smoke too, but I’m not sure.
Later that evening, we went down to Pat’s room for beers. The girls played on the lawn outside, and Pat chased them around until they were breathless and laughing. Watching him with them, I was struck again by what a great dad he is. I drank wine instead of beer—I was still dealing with a lingering COVIDhangover and a newer gluten intolerance—and eventually drifted off and fell asleep on the couch.
That was the first night.
II. Crossing Over
In the morning, I woke first. No one else was up yet. Eventually my mom got up too, and we drove back to the supermarket for coffee. She bought me a pair of sunglasses—nothing fancy, just functional—and it was good to have time with her, talking at length. The coffee place sold Turkish coffee and tried to upsell me on baklava, which I regretted again not being able to eat because of gluten.
We all had breakfast later. It was underwhelming. I had yogurt. Around eleven, we drove out to the ferry terminal and got into a long line of cars. Sarah handed me one of those popular sparkling drinks in the U.S.—sweet, artificial—and I couldn’t finish it. The wrong kind of sweet.
On the ferry, I fell asleep. People were working on puzzles at tables. My parents stood outside because my mom has vertigo and gets dizzy. When we arrived at Friday Harbor, we went straight to the supermarket. There was no food at the camp except the rehearsal dinner and the wedding dinner, so I stocked up: hummus, corn chips—my mom handed me a huge bag of them—cheese, olives. I also had some soup at the market, which was excellent. I tried to get as much as I could because I knew options would be limited. I also bought wine.
The drive to the camp was supposed to be ten minutes, but the sign was tiny and we missed it. We overshot the turn and had to double back using Google Maps. We arrived mid-afternoon.
The camp was down a dirt road off the highway and much larger than I expected. There was a main lodge, a big lawn, a collection of cabins in different shapes and sizes, a barn where the wedding would be held, and a garden set up for the rehearsal dinner. We used metal push carts to haul our things from the parking lot to the cabins.
My parents were staying in the main lodge. Our cabin was about 150 meters away, next to Pat’s family. It was clean but very small: a tiny kitchen, a bedroom, a cramped closet you could barely move around in, a loft for Hugh, and a bathroom awkwardly placed between the kitchen and the bedroom. Kelly, his wife Courtney, and their kids Jacob and Ang were in another cabin. John and Kristi were nearby as well. Mason was staying in some kind of shared space. Between our cabin and Pat’s was a fire pit, and Sarah had already hung laundry over the chairs.
Smoking was allowed, but only at a few designated ashtrays—those tall black plastic ones on poles. The signs said that if you littered, the fine was one thousand dollars per cigarette butt.
I was a little concerned about whether the food I’d bought would last. I ate chips and hummus. Sachie went into the woods to smoke and put her cigarette butts on top of our garbage can. I told her about the rule and asked her to use the ashtray instead. She did.
Later, we gathered at the lodge. I brought wine. One of the camp staff asked if we wanted to hear the house rules. Mike said, “Lay them on us.” The rule was one open drink at a time in the lodge. It closed at ten, but we could use the nearby fire pits and deck afterward. I put my bottle of wine out of sight. Mike responded to the rule with a polite “Uh-huh, sure,” and I got the impression he had no intention of following it.
My dad, Hugh, and I drove back into town to pick up pizza for dinner. I ordered a cauliflower-crust pizza because of my gluten intolerance. We ordered too much—one pizza each plus one for my mom and Sachie—but that was fine. We ate, talked, and I drank wine. Mike, Colleen, and Felix were there. Colleen took Felix to bed. Later, Sachie asked me to go back to the cabin to get a bottle of white wine. I did, and we drank it. The rule wasn’t enforced. It was a relaxed evening.
That was also when I saw Eric Hillyard for the first time.
III. The FIRST NIGHT AND NEXT MORNING
Eric Hillyard is a character and a half. He’s one of Mike’s good friends from high school at Saint George’s, and one of only two people from that era who were there. The other was Dan Clarke—known as Jerry—who was officiating the wedding. Eric didn’t have a formal role. He didn’t need one.
I gave Eric a big hug when I saw him. I hadn’t seen him since high school. He razzes Mike like nobody else, but he was polite and warm with me and bowed to Sachie. He was drinking quite a bit. After ten, my parents went to bed, and Eric, Mike, and I gathered around the fire pit between the cabins.
Eric smoked a cigarette. I smoked two. We tossed them into the fire pit. Later, back at the cabin, it occurred to me that the cigarettes probably wouldn’t burn up completely. I was pretty cooked, but I walked back in the dark with my phone light, dug around in the ashes, found all three cigarette butts, and put them in the ashtray. I figured I’d just saved Mike and Colleen three thousand dollars.
Eric had told a joke that landed too close to home with Mike. Mike said it went too far. I got the impression this wasn’t the first time. It didn’t blow up, but it didn’t land well either.
I went to bed. Sachie and Hugh were already asleep. I slept fine.
The next morning I woke up first again. I ate more hummus and corn chips and went down to the lodge for coffee to see who was around. Free coffee was available. It was rehearsal day.
I don’t remember much of the day before the rehearsal itself. Earlier, when Hugh and I had gone into town on the pizza run, we’d stopped at a hardware store and bought a frisbee. Hugh played with the little kids—Colleen’s brother’s kids and others—on the lawn. I mostly hung around. Food was running low, and I was looking forward to dinner, which was scheduled for around five.
Before dinner there were family pictures, but before that something happened that I didn’t witness directly. Mike told me about it afterward.
They had hired a photographer, a makeup artist, and a band. All freelancers. The food was provided by the camp staff. Colleen was getting her makeup done and had asked for it to be light. Apparently it wasn’t. Mike saw it and said, “Babe, she pancaked you.” Colleen initially wanted to let it go, but they talked and then fired the makeup artist on the spot. Mike told me about it calmly and said that decision was kind of on him.
I didn’t judge it. What I found myself wondering was how much of her fee she got paid. I didn’t ask. I assumed she was paid for the day. The photographer had traveled a long way. I didn’t know whether the makeup artist was local. I hoped she was.
That evening, people gathered in the garden. Both sides of my family were there, along with Eric, Jerry, Mason, Kelly, John Innes, and others, as well as Colleen’s friends and family. The mood was good. But John was in bad shape.
By his own admission, John was pretty depressed. Both his parents had died, and something unresolved involving his father had happened before his death. He hadn’t been able to say goodbye properly. He’d had to have a few just to get ready to come to dinner and face people.
John and Kristi left early and Mason and I walked to the parking lot for a cigarette. There were ashtrays there, and I didn’t want to risk a fine. Colleen’s friends were smoking weed cigarettes back in the garden. Mason told me about a recent breakup that had been serious. He said he’d been immature for a long time and that the relationship and life had forced him to grow up. From his demeanor, it was clear that was true.
That night I also saw my Uncle Jeff’s third wife for the first time—she is from Mexico. Hugh talked with Jeff about his soccer influencer work. Jeff was impressed and invited Hugh to stay at his place in California anytime, for any length of time. Hugh was flattered and grateful.
Things wrapped up early. There was no repeat of the fire pit scene from the night before. I talked a lot with Amy, but mostly I was with Mason. Then we went back to the cabin and went to bed.
IV. DAN CLARKE/ BILL CLARKE DREAM
Wedding day morning felt like more of the same. I was low on cigarettes. I ate more corn chips and hummus from the seemingly endless bag and got coffee in the lodge and waited. Jerry was around. We talked. He’s had an interesting life—some wildness there—and I could see why Mike likes him so much.
Dan Clarke’s father is Bill Clarke, brother of Janet Mann and brother-in-law of Paul Mann. All Saint George’s power brokers. My dad and Bill Clarke were friendly once, but it went sideways. After that, my dad would complain about him endlessly in the car to my mom. Typical Ross behavior at the time, although I never understood the core issue
At some point that morning I thought about a dream I had years earlier, one that has stuck with me. I’m including it here as I wrote it at the time.
2/27/18:
Two intersecting and yet separate dreams about Bill Clark. These will take some unpacking.
I. I am with my father and someone else in a car on a rainy day. We are parked and Bill Clark is there. He looks like the real Bill Clark as I remember him, overweight and not too smooth. Bill Clark was an intermittent arch-enemy and then sometimes ally of my father at Saint George’s in the 90s. The encounter in the car is the culmination of several encounters with Bill in the dream and some of these have been just he and I. Bill is telling me through these encounters how much he admires our IB program and what I am doing with it. He stresses how important it is that I keep going. At the car, he does this again and looks a little desperate. Because he is so clearly sincere even my father who was his enemy gives him the space to say his piece. For my part, I am grateful for his kind words however the car kind of needs to get moving. I thank him from the window. I think he is about to get wet from the rain.
II. I am meeting with Bill Clark again, however a very different looking Bill Clark. Here he is trim with a wire grey beard cut short and a nice suit. He looks very distinguished and a little intimidating. This Bill Clark is also supportive however is much more firm with me. He tells me that I need to get on my hands and knees and beg and plead for resources. Somehow I get the image of a turtle on its back, open to the sky. This is the posture I need to adopt according to Bill. Nothing can be taken for granted and I have to beg. He is quite clear and I understand the wisdom in what he says.
Comment: This is a super interesting dream that bears unpacking. The two Bill Clarks are polar opposites and the second one is more regal and correct in every way. Why the former enemy of my father? This dream is so packed with symbolism.
Not long after that, it was time to shift gears and get ready for the ceremony.
V. The Ceremony
Before the ceremony began, I practiced rope-tying with Colleen’s brother and Pat. I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, but I had been enlisted to help tie Mike and Colleen’s hands together at the end of the ceremony. I was nervous. I had to go first, and as with the e. e. cummings poem years earlier at Mike’s first weeding, I had limited information. Mike told me it would be fine. Colleen’s brother Kevin and I made a joke of it together. Don’t fuck the whole wedding, bro. We got on well.
The rope was thin. There were several strands, intertwined.
Around four, people gathered again at the lodge. Only certain people had drinks. The rehearsal had gone smoothly. We had a clear walk-out order. My family walked out right after Mike and Colleen so I could be in the front row and step forward when it was my turn.
Everyone took their places. Jerry gave a classic, funny speech about being unprepared. Mike’s vows were sincere. Colleen received a huge round of applause when she walked out.
The ceremony was short. The moment came quickly. I stepped forward and did the tying. The ropes were longer than I expected and hung down toward the ground. I stumbled and nearly tripped over them, but I didn’t fall. Thank God.
The ceremony ended, and we moved directly into the barn for dinner.
VI. The WEDDING DINNER
Dinner started with oysters and a watermelon margarita, which I passed on. I drank red wine and hit it pretty hard. Dinner proper was pasta with sauce made by Colleen’s dad. I couldn’t eat it. I was hungry and ate oysters until there were literally none left. I got the last ones.
I spent some time standing outside with Kelly and his kids, Jacob and Ang. We talked. Inside, I sat with family. Hugh had the pasta and then went over to Colleen’s father to thank him for the sauce, which was a classy move.
After dinner, Kelly, Mason, Sachie, and I went out back for a cigarette. I was out and bummed one from Sachie, and it was the first time I’d ever seen Kelly smoke. I got to know Jacob, who was almost done with high school, and Ang, who was a couple of years younger.
I was wiped and left early. Sachie and Hugh came back later. Colleen’s dad gave a speech. My dad didn’t. Katie—my cousin through Amy—gave a great speech. Katie has Down syndrome, and everyone applauded.
That was the night.
VII. Dispersal
The next morning my parents were making breakfast, and the relatives who had stayed in town came back for it. My mom was prepping food. Amy brought gluten-free bagels. I had half a bagel, some fruit, and coffee and talked with people as they moved in and out. Breakfast was a performance, and it justified the van rental entirely.
We packed up and said goodbye to Mike, Colleen, and Felix. They were heading to a nearby island for a short honeymoon. From there, we drove first to the rental house where Pam and Steve were staying. I did laundry while everyone else went whale watching. I was keyed up about it—laundry had accumulated, and I don’t like traveling with dirty clothes. The door was left open, so I walked to the market for more soup and found my way back.
That evening we went back to the same pizza place. I had another cauliflower-crust pizza, a gluten-free beer that was just okay, and a glass of wine. I sat with Amy, her husband David, Sachie, Hugh, and Katie. I paid attention to Katie—she’s been developing early-onset dementia and I wanted to see how she was doing. My mom paid for dinner, which I appreciated.
We stayed at a hotel five minutes away that my parents had pre-booked. It was a large suite. Sachie and I took one room, my parents took the other, and Hugh slept on a cot in the living room. Hugh, my dad, and I played shuffleboard downstairs. I won. It was very relaxed. I had what was left of a small bottle of vodka, drank some, and poured the rest out.
The next morning we went to the ferry terminal. We ran into Jeff’s family again. My parents talked with them while Sachie, Hugh, and I got coffee and bought chocolates as omiyage. On the ferry back, a young naturalist gave a talk about whales. I listened and didn’t fall asleep this time.
Once we reached Anacortes, we drove the wrong way for about half an hour before my dad realized it. We turned around and headed toward Sea-Tac, staying near the airport. I was starving. We said goodbye to my parents. I cried a little. My mom did too.
At three in the afternoon we went straight to a steakhouse. I had steak, fries, and a Negroni. Hugh and Sachie ate as well. We sat in the regular dining section, not the bar, because Hugh was still twenty. We slept early.
The next morning we took a bus to the airport. Hugh left earlier, and Sachie went with him while I tried to sleep. At the airport, Sachie wanted to buy a specific bottle of whisky as a gift. The plane was already boarding. She ran off and made it back just in time. I was anxious, but she made it.
We flew back to Japan. I went back to work the next day and thanked everyone for covering for me while I was gone.
Dedication
For my family, with love and gratitude.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also take up the topic of weddings.
New Note: I am republishing this piece for two reasons: First it’s been three years since I wrote it and it is one of my all time favorites. Second, as the title shows the politician Rahm Emmanuel makes a cameo and there is at least a possibility that he will run for President in 2028. This is a funny piece and it totally speaks for itself. I hope you like it.
Note: This is a piece about a guy called Whit. Over the past little while I’ve run into this guy in a couple of craft beer pubs in North and Central Kyoto. In a sense, it’s faithful to the original intention of thekyotokibbitzer—to check stuff out around the local area. Naturally, “local” is a highly fungible term, which is what makes it so excellent, but it feels good to get back to basics.
Interested readers may also want to revisit my earlier piece about my North Kyoto run-in with musician Damon Krukowski—currently a prominent critic of Spotify’s business practices, but formerly a dick to my face.
I met this guy called Whit at a Kyoto pub we’ll call T’s. T’s is owned and operated, naturally enough, by T. It’s a pretty nice place, although not everyone thinks T is a nice guy. He and I, though, rub along fine. T likes to wear sandals. So do I.
T’s seats about twenty-odd and lets people stand around without a chair, so it can get crowded. On the night I met Whit, though, it wasn’t. There was just me at the L-shaped corner near the entrance, Whit and three male friends at a table, a lone woman mid-bar, and a few other strays.
Whit and his buddies were winding things down, and before they paid, Whit sidled up to the lone woman.
“Genki desu ka?” he asked.
To understand what’s happening here, you need a little context on the phrase. Literally it means “are you cheerful?” but in practice it’s “how are you?” — a totally standard, everyday greeting. It is also, however, a classic Japanese pick-up line. Both the pickup artist and the garden-variety sleazeball deliver their “genki desu ka” with a little extra—an undertone, a wink, a leer.
This guy called Whit, I could see immediately, was leaning heavily into the leer.
I have no idea of how this guy called Whit would have fared with his approach if it had been allowed to develop because T himself came flying around the bar and snapped at Whit (in Japanese) “don’t talk to her, get away from her.” As a mere observer to the developing situation this seemed excessive, especially because T’s is the kind of place where fairly easy conversational congress between the sexes is not only tolerated but actually encouraged. T and his crew will proactively introduce men to women and women to men on the regular. Later in the evening, all sorts of events may transpire at T’s. So this was out of character for sure.
This guy called Whit was taken aback, and soft-pleaded with T to let him join the woman, however T was firm. “If you don’t go back to your table you will have to leave. If she comes to talk to you you can talk to her. Not before.” Again, I cannot stress enough how out of character this is for T’s, so naturally I was curious. I am not normally nosy, however when curious I can be. Whit took the L and slunk back to his table. His friends didn’t seem to have noticed the action, but I did, so I said to him, “hey man, that was pretty crazy. What did you do?” “Nothing,” said Whit, “I just wanted to talk to the lady.” “Yeah,” I said, “I’ve never seen T react that way.” “He just doesn’t like me,” said Whit, “maybe I’ll never come back here.”
Whit and his crew left shortly after and I asked T what was going on. “Whit always hits on women,” he explained, “I don’t like it.” “What about Philip?” I asked (“Philip” here being someone T and I both know), “Philip is always hitting on women too.” “Case by case,” said T, “case by case.” Case by case arguments are very hard to rebut as they index in advance their non-adherence to norms of “fairness” or “consistency.” Also, I knew nothing about Whit and was in no way invested in manning his corner. T and Whit have a history, I supposed, and T would not kick a customer out just because. Such was my first meeting with this guy called Whit.
Not long after this first meeting I was with a friend at a pub we will call K’s, which is in Central Kyoto. K’s is smaller than T’s, seating only about 8-10 inside with some flexible outdoor space as well. Unlike T’s, at K’s there is not much flirting and the like as the space just doesn’t really allow for it. I was there with a buddy and who should come in but this guy called Whit. Now I didn’t mention that at T’s Whit had an American accent. (I later learned he is from Philadelphia by way of San Fransciso.) However he rolled into K’s rocking a full-on British accent, and not a bad one at that. He was standing right next to me, and I did a double take. “That’s that guy called Whit,” I thought, “but it can’t be, Whit’s American.” I looked again. Definitely Whit.
So I asked him, “hey guy called Whit, what’s with the British accent?” He slipped back to his American accent, “oh yeah mate, that’s just something I do sometimes.” OK. We chatted a bit and it was clear that he didn’t recognize me. I reminded him of our meeting at T’s, and he recalled the incident. But I could tell he wouldn’t remember my name next time. He left K‘s after one beer.
My buddy hadn’t met this guy called Whit before, however I had already told him the story of his getting shit-canned at T’s. “That was the guy,” I told him, “the guy called Whit.” “What was with the British accent?”my buddy asked. “I don’t know, some kind of affectation. Maybe he lays it on when he tries to pick up women.” Just a guess on my part, but a pretty good one considering later events.
A few weeks later I was at a pub we will call M’s, also in North Kyoto with another friend we shall call “Philippe” in order to easily differentiate him from “Philip.” It was just before seven in the evening, when who should walk in but the guy called Whit with none other than the newly appointed United States Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and his wife Ann. They just strolled on in and it was clear that Whit was somehow chaperoning them. I stared over at Rahm Emanuel for a bit and then said “hey there Mr. Rahm Emanuel.” Rahm Emanuel (or just Rahm, as I like to call him) acknowledged his identity and he and I started chatting. At the same time Ann was chatting with old Philippe there at the bar. Before I said hello to Rahm I wondered what on earth he was doing with Whit. And then I thought well, I know Whit doesn’t have a job, he seems to frequent pubs all the time, probably he has some money somewhere, tech money or something. Maybe he’s some kind of VC and the Rahmster has gone out of his way to meet him in Kyoto. Implausible as this scenario seemed, I didn’t know what another explanation for this threesome could be. However, I was off-base.
Had this guy called Whit in fact been a prominent VC it would have added layers to my understanding of him for certain. So I asked him, “hey there guy called Whit, how do you know Rahm Emanuel?” “I just met him,” he replied, “across the street at L’s. We got to talking and I brought him over here.” (L’s is a cocktail bar I have never been too, which is 15 feet from K’s.) It turned out that Rahm and Ann were in Kyoto en route to Hiroshima where they were to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum with none other than the Prime Minister of Japan. In the meantime here they were, hanging with Whit. Rahm explained the situation thusly: “here in Kyoto my minders let us off the leash so we can walk around freely. This would never happen in Tokyo, because we have security around us all the time.” He seemed genuinely happy to be minderless, and was as relaxed as could be at the bar. In no time he was dropping f-bombs, dapping up the waitresses, and asking me how to say things in Japanese. Rock and roll Rahm baby.
(As promised in the title, Rahm is only supposed to have a cameo in this story, however I have to recount our brief conversation about politics. After I introduced myself, Rahm asked me “are you on the team?” I understood him to mean was I a Democrat. I replied that I was basically on the team, but that I was kind of a left libertarian. “No such thing,” said Rahm. “Well then you’re looking at a unicorn baby,” said I.)
In any case, once I had gotten a bit of a feel for my new buddy Rahm I had to fill him in on something. “Hey Rahm, you know this guy called Whit likes to go into bars and put on a fake British accent?” Rahm didn’t miss a beat as he turned to Whit and, I swear, elbowed him in the ribs, saying “did that help you score buddy? Did you get across the finish line?” Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Obama, former Mayor of Chicago, and presently the honorable ambassador to Japan, had already grasped the essential nature of this guy called Whit. And he, for one anyway, had no issues with it.
“Wake me up before California Darling boy I’ve never known ya”
— Annie Hardy
1. Periscope (2018): Ambient Human Contact
In the fall of 2018, before TikTok Live and before Instagram learned how to professionalize everything, there was Periscope.
It was a live-video app owned by Twitter, but it never really felt like social media. It felt more like radio—with pictures. You could open it and see who was live anywhere in the world, zoom in on a city, drop into a stream, leave, move on. The scale was small enough that you could more or less take in the entire active population at any given moment. There was no sense of infinite scroll. The world was navigable.
It was also completely unpoliced. People streamed whole songs, movie clips, televisions playing in the background, themselves half-asleep or wandering around or doing nothing at all. No one cared. There were no warnings, no copyright bots, no friction. It was a free-for-all in the literal sense: free time, free speech, free form.
What Periscope allowed—what it uniquely allowed—was time. Long stretches of it. Silence. Repetition. Boredom. People would just sit there and talk, or not talk, or smoke on their porch and complain about their day. That kind of stream simply does not exist on Instagram Live. Instagram demands a reason. Periscope didn’t.
I loved it because it matched my temperament. I wasn’t looking to build anything. I wasn’t trying to grow an audience or perform a version of myself. I liked cursing around on the app, listening, occasionally speaking back. It was ambient human contact: voices moving through time, present but not demanding anything in return.
Most people didn’t want that. Periscope never offered a ladder—no clear path to recognition, no reliable virality, no payoff for effort. It didn’t protect users from themselves, and it didn’t compress experience into highlights. For most people, that felt pointless. For a few of us, it felt like oxygen.
I didn’t think of it as important while it was happening. It was just there, like a short-lived commons where people killed time together. Looking back, I’m amazed it existed at all.
2. Time, Leave, and the Split Feed
From September 2018 through February 2019, I was on leave from my school. The reasons sit elsewhere and don’t need explaining here. What mattered was that, for once, I had time—real time, not time carved out between obligations. I was based in Kyoto, and in October and November I spent long stretches staying in a hotel in Akasaka, moving back and forth between the two cities.
At the same moment Periscope entered my life, I started a new blog, The Kyoto Kibbitzer. The original idea was simple: walk around, notice things, write about bars, art, neighborhoods. Periscope became a sister project—not an escape from writing, but a parallel way of paying attention. One was private and slow; the other was live and provisional. They fed each other.
I quickly settled into two distinct kinds of streams.
During the day, I walked. Downtown Kyoto, north Kyoto, sometimes Tokyo. I talked, observed, played music, responded to comments. I never put my face on camera—not once. The camera always faced outward, toward streets, storefronts, light, movement. I got a simple phone holder so I could film without fuss. The stream wasn’t about me; it was about what I was seeing.
At night, I streamed from my desk in the upstairs room of my house. I usually stood, like a DJ or a lecturer, sitting only when I was reading something. The night streams were almost entirely art: music, films, writing. I’d play songs and talk about them, read long passages from essays or movie reviews, sometimes even play sections of films on my laptop and film the screen. It was all technically a grey area, but Periscope didn’t care, and neither did anyone watching.
Once I read an entire Roger Ebert essay on air—an interview he’d done with Lee Marvin—and laughed out loud the whole way through. “If I want to be an icon I’ll do it my own way, baby,” Marvin said. Mostly, that was the night feed: attention without urgency, commentary without stakes. Occasionally I’d take it back outside to a bar, or, early on, stay up all night wandering and streaming, the phone dying fast enough that I had to carry two battery packs. But those were exceptions. The form settled quickly.
The split mattered. Day feeds faced the world. Night feeds faced ideas. Both were ways of being present without self-display. Together, they created a rhythm that made Periscope feel less like a platform and more like a place of its own.
3. A Small World with Names
The audience was small, but it existed.
A few people watched consistently. My friend Andrew, who lives in Japan but not Kyoto, would sometimes tune in live or catch the replay later. John Innes watched as much as he could, and sometimes his wife, Kristi, would drop in too. When John commented, I’d usually stop whatever I was doing and talk with him at length. Conversation mattered because it was rare.
There were others who hovered at the edges. A French guitarist would sometimes watch silently for long stretches. Later, Mela would too, though I watched her far more than she watched me—mostly because she streamed for even longer than I did. And then there were the Periscope regulars: people who drifted in and out, stayed for a few minutes, disappeared, reappeared weeks later. That was the rhythm.
Periscope allowed replays, which changed the feel of everything. Not all attention was synchronous. A stream could be watched hours later, like a letter someone opened when they had time. It softened the sense of performance. You weren’t always talking to people; sometimes you were just sending something out into the day.
What mattered wasn’t numbers. Most streams—mine included—had only a handful of viewers at any given time. Even the people who seemed central to the platform often streamed to three or four names. The world was small enough that you could recognize it. You learned who was usually awake when you were. You noticed when someone stopped streaming altogether.
Because of that scale, recognition carried weight. When someone you knew appeared in the comments, it felt like a real arrival. The back-and-forth could stretch without interruption. There was no pressure to keep things moving, no sense that you were losing an audience if you paused to respond.
It didn’t feel lonely in the usual way. It felt communal in miniature. A village square that never got crowded enough to become anonymous.
4. Killing Time Together
I was somewhat lonely during that period, and looking for human companionship. Not intensity, not rescue—just being awake with other people. Periscope worked because it was like radio, only you could talk back. You could toggle around the world and find whatever level of interaction you wanted, then move on without consequence.
Some streams were playful and I would play along. There was a beautiful Russian woman who spoke mostly in Russian and replied to my comments in halting English. She’d do things like eat honey off a spoon, theatrically, and I’d type something juvenile and she’d play along too. It sounds silly, and it was, but it was also light. Once we talked longer and she told me she wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t afford it. I’d guess she was in her mid-to-late twenties. After that, I drifted away. The language barrier was real; the connection couldn’t sustain itself. That was normal.
There was a French guitarist I watched early on. He was very good—technically accomplished, friendly—and he seemed to have infinite time. He’d sit in my stream silently for long stretches, just there. Periscope people had time; that was one of the defining traits. After a few weeks I stopped watching him. Not because anything was wrong, but because it was all one thing. Skill without movement. No arc. Attention drifted, and that was allowed.
Other streams were even more minimal. I remember a woman in Oklahoma who would sit on her porch, rip bongs, and talk about her day. That was it. No premise, no performance. Just presence. That kind of stream doesn’t exist on Instagram Live. Periscope tolerated people doing nothing in public.
There was also Max, a trans woman from eastern Canada. She complained about her mother, about being broke. She usually had no viewers. Every time I came into her stream she lit up. Once I sent her fifty dollars for an art commission, and she reacted like she’d won the lottery. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being seen. On Periscope, small gestures carried disproportionate weight because the economy of attention was so thin.
People weren’t looking for transformation. They were killing time. Talking. Waiting. Passing hours together across time zones. The platform allowed that without apology. It was so free-form that it’s hard to explain now without it sounding unreal.
But that was the baseline. That was what “normal” looked like.
5. Mela: Process Recognizes Process
I didn’t find Mela right away. It wasn’t until mid-October that her stream appeared on my map. By then I already knew how Periscope worked—what it rewarded, what it ignored, what kinds of attention lasted.
The first stream I remember, she was just walking around New York City. Not driving. Walking. Taking stairs. Cutting through neighborhoods. Letting the city decide the route. Almost immediately I felt a shock of recognition: she’s me. Not biographically, not emotionally—procedurally. We were using the same method.
She would ask, “left or right?” I’d type “left,” and she’d take a left. That was it. No drama. No explanation. A shared orientation, moment to moment. I’d stay with her for hours, wandering the city together at walking speed.
People who showed up looking for something else—someone conventionally attractive to perform, flirt, deliver a payoff—would drift off. The stream filtered itself. What remained was patient, non-demanding attention. Process over outcome.
She was in her mid-to-late thirties and had worked in film props on sets around New York. At the time she was on sick leave after a back injury, which explained the free time. She streamed from her apartment, sometimes from a friend’s place she was house-sitting, and often from the streets and trains. The life context was legible. Nothing felt invented for the stream.
Eventually we connected on Instagram, but that’s not the story here. What mattered was simpler: real, undemanding, non-sexual attention feels good. In a micro-attention economy, it feels enormous.
Mela mattered because she showed that Periscope could sustain healthy, lateral connection—companionship without escalation, presence without claim. That mattered later, because it proved the platform itself wasn’t the problem. It was capable of holding something gentle and durable.
That made what came next easier to recognize as different.
6. Giant Drag (Came Late, Stayed Forever)
I came to Giant Drag late.
I first heard them sometime around 2015, years after their debut. The song was “Kevin Is Gay,” and I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. I remember stopping short. It sounded like shoegaze, but with attitude—guitars that rang and crunched at the same time, a voice that was sharp, funny, unsentimental. I thought: who on earth is this woman?
I bought the CD immediately. The record was Hearts and Unicorns. There was “This Isn’t It,” “Slayer,” and a sense that this wasn’t a novelty discovery. It didn’t feel like a phase. It felt like something I’d been missing and had finally caught up to. Ten years later, the music is still with me.
Learning afterward that the album came out in 2005 only clarified things. I hadn’t encountered Giant Drag as part of a moment or a scene. There was no social reinforcement, no sense of being early or late. The music arrived on its own terms and stayed because it deserved to. It became part of my listening life in a quiet, durable way.
That matters here, because when Annie Hardy later appeared on Periscope, she didn’t arrive as a stranger or as “a streamer.” Her voice was already familiar to me. Not biographically, not personally—but aesthetically. I knew the intelligence. I knew the precision. I knew the attitude. What I didn’t expect was where or how I’d encounter it again.
At the time, none of this felt connected. It only looks that way in retrospect. Back then, Giant Drag was just music I loved, and Periscope was just a place people killed time together. I had no reason to think those two tracks would ever overlap.
Then they did.
7. Band Car → Band House
Because the number of active streams was limited, as I have said, I spent a lot of time just cruising around the map. One night in September 2018, I landed on Annie Hardy without looking for her. The stream was called Band Car, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.
She was driving. Talking. Rapping. Singing into some kind of vocoder or effects chain. Swearing at other drivers. There was no Giant Drag material, no backstory, no explanation. She’d say, “Give me three words,” and then build a rap off whatever came in. I gave her words. Over and over. It never went stale. The language was filthy—relentlessly so—but also precise. The filth wasn’t sloppy; it landed because it was aimed.
I watched every day. She streamed every day. She had no job and very little money, and she drove for hours, talking, rapping, improvising, stopping occasionally to run into Home Depot or some other errand. I’d wait. Dead air didn’t bother me. This was how Periscope worked.
Sometimes she used gay slurs, and I balked internally. That wasn’t my thing at all. But the space itself was unfiltered by design, and she used every word under the sun. I didn’t intervene or moralize. I noted it and stayed. Admiration and discomfort existed side by side.
I talked about her on my own stream. I told people she was the best thing on Periscope. I couldn’t believe I had such unfettered, generous access to a high-level artist just living inside her process. There were others watching too, but not many. I was probably her biggest fan, or one of a few. In a micro-attention economy, that mattered.
One night, very late in Los Angeles, I’d been with her for hours. The audience thinned until it was just me. She parked the car, got out, and said, almost casually, “Do you want to do band house?” It was a first. I said of course.
She went into her garage, then into a music room. There was a piano. She asked, “What do you want to hear?” I said how about After the Gold Rush. She sat down without ceremony and played the entire song. No sheet music. No warm-up. She hit the high parts cleanly. Musicians have an astonishing memory for songs, and she had it in full.
It was the greatest musical moment of my life, bar none. The only thing that comes close is hearing Spencer Krug play “Julia with Blue Jeans On” at Urbanguild in Kyoto. This was different. This was private, unadvertised, unrepeatable. When she finished, she said, “Okay, that’s band house,” and wrapped it up.
No encore. No processing. Just the sound, then silence.
That was the miracle. And it was already complete.
8. Running Its Course
In December, I used Periscope again in New York and Boston, mostly with Mela. The rhythm was familiar by then—long stretches of time, nothing urgent, companionship without demands. One night in a Boston hotel room, where I was staying to see Phosphorescent and Jay Som, I streamed the entire film Michael Clayton from my laptop. It was a grey area, as everything on Periscope was. She watched the whole thing with me, commenting occasionally—“bad guy, ooh”—the way someone does when they’re present but not trying to perform being present. It was fun. That was enough.
After that, things ended. Not abruptly. Not painfully. Periscope had simply ran its course.
Mela moved to Oklahoma and stopped streaming. I stopped too. The app thinned out. People disappeared. The small world became smaller and then, effectively, gone. There was no sense of loss that needed narrating, no aftermath to dramatize. The conditions that made Periscope feel possible—time, openness, a tolerance for doing nothing in public—shifted. Life resumed its usual density.
Looking back, what remains isn’t a lesson or a warning. It’s a memory of a brief commons where attention wasn’t monetized and presence didn’t have to justify itself. A place where someone could play a song once, perfectly, for one person, and then stop. And that could be enough.
That was Periscope. And then it wasn’t.
Dedication:
For the micro-attention economy. I had a total blast. And for Annie and Mela. Babes I love you both is very much.
Note: This is the fifth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. Our fourth position is about what we consider the inequitable banning of clove cigarettes by President Obama in 2009.
I. Starting Point — Dignity, Not Debate
Trans people exist. This is not a trend or a modern invention. Gender variance appears across cultures and across history, long before the vocabulary we use today existed. Whatever complexities emerge in policy, youth development, or medicine, one thing is foundational:
Trans people are owed human dignity. No conditions, no asterisks. Just dignity.
Everything else follows from that moral floor.
II. Adults — Full Citizenship and Recognition
For adults, the ethical picture is straightforward. Trans adults should be able to live, work, love, and move through the world without harassment or discrimination. This includes:
The ability to legally transition through a fair, transparent process
Access to transition-related healthcare under informed consent
Workplace and housing protections that include gender identity and expression
Access to military service and civil participation under the same standards as any other adult
At the adult level, the question is not whether trans people exist or deserve rights — they do. The challenge is implementation, not justification.
III. Youth — Compassion and Caution, Not Panic
Young people need something slightly different from adults. They need care, patience. Youth — Listening First, Care Without Panic
Young people do not need slogans or pressure; they need adults who are willing to listen carefully and stay present over time. Before policy, before pathways, before decisions, there is a more basic responsibility: to take a young person’s experience seriously, without rushing to explain it away or lock it in.
For some youth, feelings about gender are clear, persistent, and deeply rooted. For others, gender exploration may be tentative, fluid, or intertwined with anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, social stress, or the ordinary turbulence of adolescence. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and none of them invalidate a young person’s distress or self-understanding.
A healthy response begins with attentive listening — not as a procedural step, but as an ethical practice in its own right. Children and adolescents deserve to be heard in their own words, at their own pace, without the expectation that every question must immediately produce an answer. Parents and caregivers are allowed to say, honestly and without shame, “I don’t know yet.” Uncertainty, when paired with care, is not neglect; it is often wisdom.
Exploration itself is not harm. Questioning gender assumptions, trying out names or pronouns, or experimenting with presentation can be a way for young people to understand themselves more clearly. When such exploration reduces distress and helps a young person feel safer or more coherent, it should not be treated as dangerous or pathological.
At the same time, adults have a responsibility to protect young people from both kinds of harm: the harm of being dismissed or unheard, and the harm of being rushed into irreversible decisions before they are ready. A balanced, compassionate approach includes:
Making space for reversible forms of social exploration when they ease distress
Offering non-judgmental counseling that supports understanding rather than steering toward predetermined outcomes
Thoughtful screening for co-occurring factors — such as anxiety, depression, trauma, or neurodivergence — without stigma or presumption
Treating medical interventions for minors as decisions that require time, persistence of dysphoria, multidisciplinary evaluation, and informed consent
The goal is harm reduction in both directions: reducing the risk of long-term, untreated dysphoria while also minimizing regret from irreversible interventions made too early. Compassion and caution are not opposites; they are partners.
Most importantly, young people should never feel that they must perform certainty in order to be taken seriously. Listening does not require immediate resolution. Care does not require panic. What children need most is the assurance that the adults around them are paying attention, taking them seriously, and willing to walk with them — even when the destination is not yet clear.
IV. Language and Pronouns — Respect Without Fear
Using someone’s chosen name and pronouns is simply respect — no different from honoring a nickname or a married name. It is not complicated on a human level.
Our stance:
Respect is the default
Mistakes are human and correctable without punishment
Deliberate misgendering is disrespect, but ordinary errors are not crimes
Institutions should model inclusive language, not create environments where people feel terrified to speak
Respect should enlarge conversation, not freeze it.
V. Sports — Inclusion and Fairness, Context by Context
Sports are not a single system — they exist on a spectrum with different purposes and stakes at each level. Because of that, one rule for everything doesn’t work.
At the youth or school level, sport is primarily about identity formation, belonging, and joy. Stakes are low, development is ongoing. In these settings, inclusion should be maximized and kids should generally be able to play on the teams aligned with their gender identity.
In adult amateur or recreational sport, flexibility should continue. Local leagues and organizations can experiment with mixed teams, open categories, or self-organizing solutions based on context and community. These spaces are more about health and community than lifetime opportunity.
However, college athletics, scholarship competition, and pathways into professional sport introduce real material consequences — scholarships, visibility, and career access. In these spaces, fairness and inclusion must be balanced, and physiological advantage has to be considered. Trans participation is possible within a framework that takes development, hormone levels, and evidence seriously.
At the professional, elite, and Olympic level, physiology cannot be ignored. These competitions involve prize money, legacy, and national representation. Rules here should be science-informed and sport-specific. In some cases that may mean time-based hormone requirements; in some cases, open categories or structural alternatives might emerge. The goal is not exclusion — the goal is competitive integrity that respects all athletes.
In summary: In everyday sport, inclusion is the natural priority. In elite sport, fairness and physiology matter more strongly. Different contexts call for different solutions.
VI. Women’s Spaces (Prisons, Shelters, Spas, Bathrooms) —
A Category We Are Listening To
Not every issue in the trans conversation is equally simple. Spaces involving privacy, trauma history, and safety — such as domestic-violence shelters, prisons, changing facilities, and spas — require deeper listening and care. Women’s vulnerability and trans women’s vulnerability both matter, and overlapping fears cannot be solved by declaration alone.
Rather than issue a premature stance, we hold this position:
We are listening. We are learning. We are not ready to speak in absolutes.
Refusing to claim certainty where uncertainty exists is not weakness — it is honesty.
VII. Our Tone Moving Forward
We choose nuance rather than slogan, discussion rather than trench warfare. We reject cruelty toward trans people and we also reject moral panic. We value evidence where policy is needed, care where identity is forming, and the courage to say “we’re not sure yet” where complexity remains.
In short:
Trans people deserve dignity. Where rights are clear, we affirm them. Where questions are hard, we move with care.
Note: This is the fourth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible.
Full disclosure: I love clove cigarettes. I’m not here to pretend tobacco is harmless, but I do smoke and I love cloves specifically — their sweetness, their bite, the way they announce themselves rather than slip by unnoticed. They’re not a casual habit. They’re not cheap. They’re not especially forgiving. They are, unmistakably, a specialty product for adults who already know what they’re doing. Which is precisely why their disappearance from the United States strikes me as so strange. If public policy is supposed to focus on scale, harm, and likelihood, cloves barely register. And yet they were eliminated cleanly and completely.
This isn’t a brief for Juul, bubblegum vapes, or any product designed to recruit new smokers as efficiently as possible. Those deserve scrutiny, regulation, and in some cases outright prohibition. Clove cigarettes are something else entirely. They were never poised to take over American high schools. They were never discreet, never mass-market, never engineered for easy uptake. They appealed to a narrow, adult audience — travelers, artists, longtime smokers with particular tastes. Their banning didn’t meaningfully change youth smoking behavior; it simply removed a minor, culturally specific option from the legal market. Which raises a quiet but important question: why was such a small thing targeted so decisively, while other flavored cigarettes were not?
The answer, of course, is the carve-out. In 2009, when the United States banned flavored cigarettes, it did so selectively. Clove cigarettes were prohibited outright. Menthol cigarettes were not. This distinction was never really about flavor chemistry or relative harm; it was about politics, constituencies, and consequence. Menthol had a large, organized user base and a long, fraught history tied to race, policing, and targeted marketing. Regulators understood that banning menthol would provoke backlash, raise enforcement concerns, and create secondary harms. So menthol survived. Cloves, by contrast, had no organized defenders, no obvious political cost, and no plausible narrative of collateral damage. They were small enough to remove without resistance.
We don’t object to the menthol carve-out. In fact, I understand it. Public policy often has to weigh downstream effects as much as stated intentions, and there were legitimate fears about what a menthol ban might unleash. But that logic cuts both ways. If menthol was spared because its removal would have caused disproportionate disruption, cloves deserved consideration for the opposite reason. Their user base was tiny. Their market footprint was negligible. Their elimination solved no urgent public-health problem and prevented no foreseeable epidemic. It simply demonstrated how regulation tends to work in practice: not by calibrating rules to scale and risk, but by acting most decisively where the fewest people are able—or willing—to object.
What the clove ban reveals, more than anything, is how regulation actually moves through the world. It does not flow evenly from evidence to outcome. It flows through constituencies. Products with organized users, sympathetic narratives, and visible secondary effects are handled with caution. Products without those protections are handled cleanly. Clove smokers were never numerous enough, loud enough, or legible enough to matter. There was no lobby. No advocacy group. No credible fear of backlash. As a result, cloves became an easy victory: a flavored cigarette could be banned, a public-health win could be declared, and no meaningful political cost would be incurred.
This is not corruption so much as gravity. Policymaking, especially in public health, often advances where resistance is lowest. That doesn’t make it malicious, but it does make it uneven. And unevenness matters. When regulation targets the smallest, quietest practices first—those least likely to produce harm at scale—it risks confusing symbolic action with effective policy. The clove ban didn’t fail because it was harsh; it failed because it was misaligned. It addressed a marginal behavior while leaving far larger, more consequential ones to be negotiated indefinitely.
One of the unspoken assumptions behind the flavored-cigarette ban was that flavor itself was the problem. But not all flavors function the same way. Some are engineered for mass adoption: sweet, smooth, cheap, discreet, and easy to inhale even for first-time users. Those products lower the barrier to entry and deserve aggressive scrutiny. Clove cigarettes operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. They are pungent, smoky, and unmistakable. They announce themselves immediately. They are harder on the throat, more expensive, and far less forgiving to the uninitiated. In other words, they are an acquired taste by design.
This distinction matters because public health should be attentive not just to ingredients, but to uptake dynamics. Products that spread rapidly among new users pose a different kind of risk than products that remain confined to a narrow, self-selecting adult audience. Cloves never behaved like a recruitment tool. They didn’t mask tobacco; they added complexity to it. They weren’t optimized for stealth or scale. Treating them as equivalent to mass-market flavored cigarettes collapses important differences and replaces targeted regulation with blunt prohibition. If the goal is to prevent widespread initiation, then precision matters—and cloves were never the right target.
There is also the question of adult autonomy, which is often treated gingerly in tobacco policy but can’t be avoided entirely. Smoking remains legal. That fact alone establishes a baseline assumption: adults are permitted to make choices that carry known risks. Within that framework, the question is not whether tobacco should be virtuous, but whether adults are trusted to exercise discernment among legal options. Choosing a clove cigarette is not an attempt to evade regulation or denial of harm; it is an aesthetic preference exercised within an already constrained and taxed marketplace.
This is where the phrase “following the muse” matters. It sounds indulgent until you realize how narrow the claim is. It is not a demand for limitless choice or novelty flavors designed to entice new users. It is a request for consistency. If adults are allowed to smoke, they should be allowed to choose among products that differ meaningfully in character, tradition, and appeal—especially when those products are demonstrably niche and non-expansionary. Removing cloves didn’t protect children. It simply narrowed adult choice in a way that feels arbitrary rather than principled.
It’s reasonable to ask why any of this matters. Clove cigarettes are not a public-health crisis. Their absence does not rank among the great injustices of modern regulation. But small decisions often reveal larger habits of mind. When policy treats scale, intent, and impact as interchangeable, it stops distinguishing between meaningful intervention and symbolic tidying. The clove ban solved a rhetorical problem more than a real one. It demonstrated action without demanding precision.
What’s left behind is an inconsistency that never quite resolves. A flavored cigarette with massive market share remains legal because its removal would be disruptive. A flavored cigarette with negligible market share was eliminated because its removal was easy. That asymmetry doesn’t undermine public health as a goal, but it does weaken confidence in how that goal is pursued. If regulation is to be trusted, it should align most tightly with where harm is greatest—not where resistance is lowest.
This is not a call to roll back tobacco regulation or to relitigate every compromise embedded in public-health law. It’s a narrower observation. When a system is willing to make exceptions for powerful constituencies while eliminating marginal practices without consideration, it reveals something about how decisions are actually made. Clove cigarettes weren’t banned because they were uniquely dangerous. They were banned because no one important would miss them.
Even so, positions don’t need mass movements to exist. Sometimes they begin as a splinter fraction: a small, clear objection to an unnecessary loss. If smoking is legal, and if nuance still matters, then there is room—at least in principle—for a carve-out that acknowledges scale, intent, and adult choice. Even if only two people think so, even if it’s just me and Annie, that’s enough to say it out loud.
Note: This essay makes several references to my time as a teacher, coordinator, and administrator at Ritsumeikan Uji in Kyoto, Japan. I have written about my time at Ritsumeikan prior in my piece about good and great talkers, and in my piece about hiding in a hotel room for 36 hours after being seriously overworked for months in 2012.
In case parts of the timeline referred to above are not clear, I began working at Rits Uji in 2002, started with the IB program at Rits in 2008, left my job temporarily in 2018, and rejoined after COVID was settling down in 2021. Also, if you like this essay you will like my longform analysis of the great Michael Knott’s album “A Rocket and a Bomb.”
Epigraph: “There’s real people in them big, big trucks…”
David Bazan
I’ve always experienced David Bazan (the Christian-adjacent singer songwriter with Pedro the Lion and later solo) not as a songwriter but as a kind of emotional barometer for whatever stage of adulthood I’m in. Every few years I realize he’s already written the song I need, long before I know I need it. He’s not confessional; he’s just brutally, unfussily truthful in a way that feels like being read by somebody who doesn’t care whether you agree with him.
This is a field report on five Bazan songs—what they meant, what they revealed, and how they secretly mapped the last twenty plus years of my interior life.
1. BIG TRUCKS
I first heard “Big Trucks” in my early Ritsumeikan Uji years—2003 or 2004 when I was digging deeply on the site eMusic. The song was first released in 1998 on Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard to Find a Friend on Made in Mexico records, and is track 3 of 12. There is also a single version which is track 6 on the 1999 EP The Only Reason I Feel Secure. I was into Pedro the Lion back when the air was still clean and my responsibilities hadn’t yet calcified into the adult structures that would come later. I was living in a rental apartment, and still had that sense that life was flexible: the rhythms of teaching, the long days, the long nights, all of it felt new and fresh.
The thing about “Big Trucks” is that it’s so effortlessly literal you almost miss the emotional charge. A child asking his father why he doesn’t respond when another driver flips him off. A parent trying to explain something unexplainable with reference to the humanity of truck drivers. The gap between innocence and knowledge opening in real time.
When I was 28, the resonance was simple: the world is bigger and harder than we think, and adulthood arrives the moment you realize you don’t get to choose the scale of the forces that hit you.
Even then, before IB coordination, before butting heads with my principal, before everything that happened in 2018 which led to me leaving my job, the line felt like a premonition. The big trucks are always coming after all.
2. BANDS WITH MANAGERS Bands with Managers is the lead off track on Pedro the Lion’s 2004 record Achilles Heel. I was already into the band as mentioned above by this time, and Achilles Heel would prove critical listening in the years that followed. By 2007 the IB tidal wave was approaching, and my days were already starting to feel compressed. I was “going places,” as Bazan mocks himself for saying, which is exactly the problem: I actually was going places. I was acquiring managers, and then heavier managers, and then the structural expectations that come with being the adult in the room.
That’s why I love this song so much—because it’s funny, cutting, self-aware, and self-disparaging all at once:
“Bands with managers are going places.”
He’s laughing at the absurdity of ambition, the ridiculousness of believing your ascent is meaningful, and at the same time he’s wincing, because he knows he’s been swept up in the same machinery.
By 2007, I felt that too. The joke was aimed at me, but gently.
The line I lived was this:
“I’m going places, apparently — and it’s funny, and it’s ridiculous, and I think I’m about to be crushed.”
Ambition and pressure make strange bedfellows. Bazan gets that. He names what most adults won’t: that sometimes “success” feels like being hauled upward by a crane you didn’t ask for.
3. FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS Foregone Conclusions is track two on Achilles Heel. This is one of his most devastating songs because of its simplicity. The line that gets me every time:
“I don’t wanna believe that all of the above is true.”
This is Bazan calling out doctrinaire Christianity and he’s not subtle about it. It’s almost embarrassingly plain. But middle-aged truth is often embarrassingly plain. For me the line hits in two places: first, in that long stretch where adulthood felt like a narrowing of options; and second, in the recognition of how many “beliefs” I’d inherited and carried long after they’d stopped serving me.
One idea that slowly died in me—over years, not months—was the belief that I could be happy in some uncomplicated, stable way. I don’t mean not depressed. I mean the fantasy that happiness arrives and then stays. By my early forties I knew better.
Happiness is local, flickering. It’s take what you can get. What lasts, perhaps, is meaning, purpose. Bazan already understood that twenty years ago. It took me a little longer.
4. YELLOW BIKE Yellow Bike is track 2 on Pedro the Lion’s 2019 record Phoenix. If there’s a perfect adult loneliness song, this is it.
“My kingdom for someone to ride with me.”
This line is not necessarily about wanting a partner or romantic longing, although it could be. It’s about pace—finding someone who can move at the same internal speed as you without distorting your life. After 2018, I didn’t trust the world to ride with me in a clean way. Not institutions. Not leadership structures. Not women. The only sane posture was self-containment.
And then came Mela. Mela was first my Periscope friend (Twitter’s discontinued video live-streaming platform), and then my text buddy and then phone buddy in late fall and early winter, 2018. This was not a romance, nothing really other than hours on the phone, day after day. Neither of us were working, and we covered every subject under the sun, including prominently the boys she was with, the boys she was chasing, and the boys that were chasing here.
Mela was the first person after 2018 who matched my internal rhythm without triggering anything. She didn’t need anything from me; she didn’t misread me; she didn’t overstep. She just rode beside me lightly for a window of about six weeks.
That’s what Bazan means by “someone to ride with me.” Not permanence—just pacing. Not dependence—just parallel motion. A few blocks of shared speed. Enough to remember you’re not built for solitude.
5. LITTLE HELP Little Help is track 3 on Pedro the Lion’s 2024 album Santa Cruz. This is the one that lands hardest in midlife.
“All I needed was a godsend/ All I needed was a little help from a friend.”
For me, that friend was Tommy. During COVID I was on sick leave, drifting, half-collapsed inside myself. Wine in bed, online chess all day, the sense of dissolving in slow motion. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was real. I wasn’t moving toward anything; I was sinking.
And it was Tommy who refused to let me disappear. Not gently. Not metaphorically. Literally. Texting. Calling. Telling me he’d drag me out of my house if he had to. Making me come out with him twice a week in Kyoto, even when I barely had a pulse.
One night we were in a tiny reggae club, drinking Red Stripe, and at around 10:30 p.m., in the restroom of all places, I felt happy for two seconds. Not enlightened. Not healed. Just briefly, unmistakably alive.
That moment didn’t save me. Tommy didn’t “fix” anything. But he interrupted the slide. He held me upright until I could stand on my own again. In the end, that’s what Bazan means. Not salvation. Not heroism. Just stubborn companionship. That moment when someone refuses to let you lose it. And that’s when the line stops being metaphor and becomes plain fact: All I needed was a little help from a friend.
6. CONCLUSION Overall, I really like Pedro the Lion/ David Bazan. Even more so than Michael Knott, he is a kind of black sheep of the Christian rock movement, and he may even be cancelled by some, I’m not sure, but I think other people, even some of faith, appreciate his relentless questioning, his searing honesty. I don’t know what the state of his faith is today, but it’s been a fascinating and fruitful experience following along the twists and turns of his art and career.
Dedication: For Tommy — I’ll knock down your door anytime.
Note: This is the third and for now final position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our final position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. We are entirely serious.
We affirm karaoke as one of the last remaining civic rituals in which strangers meet without preconditions and leave with fewer barriers than they arrived with. A microphone passed between an office worker, an American traveler, an Indian engineer, an older Japanese gentleman, a young woman finding her voice again — this is not entertainment alone. It is a brief suspension of hierarchy, suspicion, and self-protection. In these small rooms people remember how easy it is to be together.
Karaoke is not mandatory, nor do we idealize it. We simply encourage every citizen — once in a while, or for the first time — to step into a space where age, gender, profession, and political commitments dissolve for the length of a verse. It is a civic practice hiding in plain sight: a low-cost, low-risk release valve healthier than most vices and far more generous in its returns.
Society is fraying at the edges. But give people one Tom Petty track, one “What’s Up” howl, one chance to sing badly but sincerely, and cohesion begins again — not through policy, but through the ordinary bravery of shared song. The Splinter Fraction supports public encouragement and, where possible, public subsidy of these communal singing rooms, as engines of ease and democratic belonging.
Karaoke will not fix the world. But it will bring us back into easy congress with one another, which is more than most programs can claim.
I flew back to Japan in early December ’99, eleven months after Flagstaff, twenty six years ago today.
My girlfriend — soon to be my wife — met me in Kumamoto and before we went anywhere near a city office we took a bus tour of Kyushu. One of those packaged trips where the landscape is real but the schedule isn’t — temples, viewpoints, souvenir shops engineered into the route because somebody is getting a cut. I’ve never liked bus tours. Too passive. Too commercial. A landscape you watch instead of inhabit.
The first night in the hotel we were intimate for the first time in a year. It was good enough — tentative, self-conscious on my part, like we were remembering choreography rather than improvising. It would all come back pretty quickly.
After the tour we stayed with her parents in Uto City — small house, tatami floors, her childhood bedroom upstairs. We shared a single futon where she had slept alone as a girl. I remember the narrowness of it, two adults lying in a past built for one. The walls thin, the air still, her parents downstairs, in their own world.
.We went to the city office the first week of December and signed the papers — no ceremony, no white dress, no crowd, just bureaucracy, and permanence I suppose. A moment small in appearance and enormous in consequence. One pen stroke and we weren’t dating across continents anymore — we were married.
I flew back to Arizona before the semester resumed. I was a married man. Small ring. Big life. My cold room waiting.
That was the hinge — Japan in winter, Flagstaff in spring, and me between two homes that I didn’t yet know they would trade places for good.
NAU Year Two — Term One
I flew back to Spokane that winter the same way I had the year before — no plan except back to NAU and see what I could do. The red Toyota pickup was waiting for me, still running, still mine, connecting Washington and Arizona. I drove south again — long highways, cheap motels, maps instead of GPS, how I knew what I was doing I have no idea.
Flagstaff was colder that winter, or maybe I had just forgotten what dry cold felt like. I didn’t keep the old room near campus, and I didn’t want to. I spent two nights in a budget hotel, stretching my graduate-tutor income across meals and rent in my head. Still — I was back, and that is what mattered.
A classmate pointed me toward a woman named Bev who had a room for rent. She lived twelve minutes from campus. She has a big house — divorce settlement money, and a shoo downtown that sold wood furniture she built by hand. The furniture was bad, and she told had sold exactly zero pieces. That alone told me she was operating on a different financial zone than the rest of us.
I moved in. My own room, my own bathroom, access to the kitchen, $700 a month. Not luxury, not struggle — just workable. I drove to campus every day, which meant less drinking, more structure. Only once did I drive home drunk, and it scared me enough to make sure it stayed a single incident. Mostly, I left the truck downtown and taxied home, or I didn’t drink at all.
Academically, the rhythm was set — Said, Ray Huang’s 1587, Braudel, Portelli, more Bourdieu when I could manage it. The hardest class was Bob Baron’s Marx seminar. Everything else felt manageable, maybe even easy when I had momentum. My friendship with Mandiola deepened that semester — sharper, closer, more real — the two outsiders orbiting the same department.
That was also when I noticed Sonia. First as a presence — around campus, then behind the counter at the organic market I could barely afford. The book van outside sold $1 paperbacks, and I bought more of those than groceries. We exchanged looks — recognition, curiosity — but nothing more. Later I realized she was an undergrad in the Post-War German History class I lectured in. That alone helped keep the boundary clean.
By late fall the loneliness was real. I was married, but alone. She missed me. I missed her. She was thriving at work — promoted to Head Nurse at 24 — and still, distance was beginning to feel like erosion rather than opportunity. So we made a plan:
So in the Fall of 2000 my wife would come to Flagstaff and take part-time English classes. We would be in the same place again.
Around that same time the last of my Hamilton debt — $17,000 — was paid off by her or by her mother. I’m still not certain which. Either way, relief arrived quietly. I would repay it not as a transaction but by building a life — covering everything from 2002 onward.
And that was the first term of year two. Cold roads, heavy reading, a quiet spark at the edge of ethics, and the decision that distance had served its purpose.
I found Rocket and a Bomb the way you sometimes meet the most important things in your life: by accident, with no money, in a used bin on Division in Spokane, during a summer when nothing was happening and I had no idea who I was supposed to become.
It was 1994, the summer before junior year. I wasn’t working — not out of rebellion or laziness, but because I somehow never got pushed into getting a job. My parents were juggling one car between them, sometimes borrowing a second from St. George’s, and when that second car was free, I took it and drifted through Spokane.
I had a circuit — three places I visited almost every day, like a loop I barely knew I was running.
1. A random coffee shop off Division They knew me as the quiet kid who ordered the same thing, sat alone, and had a half-crush on the barista for reasons I couldn’t articulate even then. I wasn’t flirting. I was just alive in her direction. It gave the day a shape.
2. A used bookstore in North Spokane Le Carré, Christie, metaphysics, philosophy, sci-fi, old paperbacks with cracked spines. Books were two to five dollars, and the older woman behind the counter would chat with me as if I were a real adult. I was still in my 150-books-a-year phase. It felt like productivity disguised as escape — or maybe escape disguised as productivity.
3. A used CD store up Division All used, because I was broke. Rows of mid-’90s detritus: dozens of copies of August and Everything After, inexplicable imports, promo discs dumped by radio stations. I’d flip through crates like a prospector searching for gold in a river everyone else had given up on.
And one day I found something.
I pulled a CD I’d never heard of: Rocket and a Bomb by Michael Knott. The cover art — drawn by Knott — was strange and specific. The title was perfect. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, the whole thing felt special. Buried treasure. A private signal.
It was used. It was cheap. It felt like it had been waiting for me. I took it home, slid it into my boombox, and played it straight through. And something opened. Not revelation. Not identity. Not insight. Pure recognition.
The recognition that someone, somewhere, had lived inside a hallway-world that felt eerily close to my own. That someone understood the drift, the observation, the stasis, the human weirdness. This essay is about that record.
Jan the Weatherman
“Jan the Weatherman” was the first sign that Rocket and a Bomb wasn’t just another used-bin curiosity. The song opens with a portrait so sharp it bypasses metaphor entirely:
“Jan, Jan the weatherman Lives across the hall in an old beer can.”
It’s not symbolic. It’s not poetic. It’s literal. It’s Knott standing in a hallway in Hollywood, looking across at a neighbor, and writing down exactly what he sees. No interpretation. No commentary.
Then the details:
— A stick and a pan. — Sandwiches from questionable sources. — A kid sister who could use a tan. — Jan wanting to “join the band.”
Absurd and intimate at the same time.
I played the whole record constantly that Spokane summer. One afternoon, I was in the kitchen with my younger brother Pat, listening to “Jan the Weatherman” on the boombox. Pat — not a music obsessive — liked it immediately. At the same time, I was trying to get him to read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. In the first story, characters are named by colors: Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mrs. Blue.
While we were talking about that, the rotary phone rang.
One of us answered.
A man on the other end asked:
“May I speak to Mr. White?”
Pat froze, then fell backward onto the couch like he had been shot. It was uncanny. A Knott moment invading our Spokane kitchen. A micro-portrait becoming real.
John Barrymore Jr.
If Jan is the doorway, “John Barrymore Jr.” is the moment you step inside the building and realize what kind of place you’re in.
The title alone shocks you: Yes, it is that Barrymore — the son of the actor, the father of Drew, apparently. A man who once lived inside Hollywood mythology now wanders Knott’s hallway wearing golf shoes with the spikes still inside.
Knott gives the greatest couplet in the neighbor cosmos:
“John Barrymore, Jr. A weird guy Wearing golf shoes down the hall With the spikes still inside.”
It’s funny, and not funny at all. Funny because the image is ridiculous. Not funny because this is what happens when a life collapses out of frame. Knott doesn’t say “tragic,” or “fallen,” or “addict.” He doesn’t inflate or sanitize him.
Just:
“A weird guy.”
That’s compassion. That’s honesty. That’s Knott’s entire ethic. Barrymore isn’t elevated. He isn’t judged. He isn’t explained. He’s just a neighbor — one of the many ghosts drifting through the building.
Bubbles
“Bubbles” is where the neighbor songs turn dangerous.
Bubbles is a junkie. A rich man takes him into the hills in a limo. Bubbles gets beaten. He sleeps in the park. Knott reports the whole incident without emotion, elevation, or commentary. There is no moral, no sermon, no interpretation.
And the crucial detail — one of the most important on the album: Knott does not take Bubbles in.
No savior complex. No rescue fantasy. No sentimental lie.
His compassion is observational, not interventionist. He sees clearly, cares sincerely, and knows the limits of his own ability.
And then — astonishingly — the song becomes a banger. The ending is practically joyous. The dissonance is intentional.
Bubbles is still sleeping in the park. And the world keeps going. This is Knott’s ethics: attention without illusion.
Kitty
“Kitty” is the rumor song — the sharpest, most volatile one in the neighbor sequence. And it gives you almost nothing:
A pot. A missing husband. A whisper that Kitty cooked him.
That’s it.
Knott doesn’t shape the rumor. He doesn’t validate it. He doesn’t sanitize it. He doesn’t enlarge it. He repeats what people say in buildings like these when they shouldn’t be saying anything.
It’s uncomfortable because it’s overt. A little too cooked, literally and figuratively. But it belongs. Because every hallway has a rumor threshold.
Skinny Skins
“Skinny Skins” has always been my favorite neighbor portrait — the one that shows Knott’s true position in the ecosystem.
The sketch begins with flat humor:
“When he turns sideways, he disappears.”
A man thin enough to be mistaken for absence. The kind of description you only make about someone you see daily, someone who exists in your peripheral vision.
Then:
“When he beats that drum, it hurts my ears.”
It’s affectionate exasperation — the exhaustion of living near someone inconsistent but familiar.
Then the key line:
“A fifth of gin will let him win.”
Meaning: the only way he can function is by numbing himself.
And then the reveal:
“I owe him money.”
This is the moment the whole neighbor cosmos locks into place. Knott is not an observer. He is inside the system. He owes. He receives. He participates.
The cello underneath everything — bowed, heavy, grounding — prevents the song from tipping into caricature. It gives the portrait gravity. It insists this man is real.
Then the hammer:
“If that’s him knocking, don’t let him in. Let him in.”
That contradiction is the most human thing on the album.
You don’t want him in. You let him in. Because that’s what life is like in buildings full of people who can’t quite get it together but are still yours.
Skinny Skins is the final neighbor not because he is the strangest, but because he is the closest. He is the person Knott cannot shut out.
Jail
“Jail” is the first moment Knott points the camera inward. The entire song revolves around one line:
“I’m gonna meet the judge — She don’t care.”
That’s the whole spiritual and emotional architecture of the album in eight words. The world is indifferent. You are accountable anyway.
He follows it with:
“What am I supposed to learn? I haven’t learned it yet.”
Not rebellion. Not enlightenment.
Just the recognition that nothing about this system — legal, moral, spiritual — is designed to teach you anything.
And then there’s the public defender scratching a hundred-dollar bill with his ear — a line so strange and specific it has to be real. “Jail” is where the hallway turns into a mirror.
Serious
“Serious” used to be one of my favorites on the record, and it still holds a crucial position. It’s the first time Knott lets the internal crisis show without metaphor or disguise.
The plea:
“Someone get me a gun, someone get me a shotgun.”
Delivered not theatrically, but flatly — almost bored. Like someone reporting the content of a mind in disrepair.
But the real center is:
“I wanna end it if I can’t learn to supply.”
Not love. Not hope. Not purpose. Supply.
He’s afraid he cannot be counted on. That he cannot provide what others need. That he cannot hold up his end of any relational economy. This isn’t melodrama. It’s inadequacy.
“Serious” is the sound of someone realizing he may not be equipped for the life he’s in.
Make Me Feel Good
“Make Me Feel Good” is the quietest of the confession tracks, but one of the most psychologically precise.
“When you’re down No one wants you around.”
Not bitter. Not angry. Just a flat report of how people behave around the depressed or unstable. And then the devastating line:
“When you scream It’s easier to be seen But it’s harder to be missed.”
You get attention — but not presence. Visibility without care. Recognition without support. It’s the social physics of emotional collapse. This song is the exhale before the real reckoning.
Train
“Train” is the confession song that belonged to me long before I understood why.
Two lines define it:
“Maybe I won’t be on the list.” “Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve.”
“Maybe I won’t be on the list” isn’t a theological fear — it’s existential. It’s the fear of irrelevance, of invisibility, of not being counted. It’s the Spokane summer feeling I lived inside:
Not a crisis. Not ambition. Just suspension.
And “Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve” is the fallback — the low door one walks through when the higher door doesn’t feel real.
That was the emotional geometry of that Spokane summer:
No job. No movement. Late-night Law & Order. Random drives. A sense of being off any meaningful list. The quiet pull toward dissolution, but not enough recklessness to act on it.
“Train” didn’t teach me anything. It acknowledged something inside me long before I could name it.
The Summer in Spokane
It wasn’t a crisis summer. It was a suspended summer.
Days drifting through bookstores and CD crates. Nights washed in the glow of crime procedurals. A sense of time passing without accumulating.
My father shoved me once — the only time — out of frustration that I was doing nothing, going nowhere, stuck in an unlit room with reruns. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t trauma. It was pressure hitting stasis.
I told him never again. He never did, and we never talked about it.
Rocket and a Bomb became the shape of that summer. Not just a soundtrack. A mirror.
Rocket and a Bomb
Then comes the title track — the cathedral of the album. The central contradiction:
“A good job and some bus fare And a rocket and a bomb.”
He wants nothing. He wants everything. He wants stability. He wants detonation. This is one of the most honest lines in American songwriting.
And then the pivot that makes Knott impossible to classify:
“Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God? Could she help me find a job…?”
It’s not blasphemy. It’s not a joke. It’s bleak sincerity.
Knott said in an interview he “knows Jesus,” and that doesn’t make him good, bad, saved, or functional. It just means he recognizes the presence. It doesn’t help.
This is not Christian rock. This is hallway theology — the kind where god is less a deity than a neighbor, and maybe his wife is the one responsible for the job-search department.
Knott kept re-recording this song because it wasn’t a hit. It was his self-portrait. And for a drifting kid in Spokane, it was the first real articulation of the contradiction I didn’t know had a name:
I want a simple life. And I want to blow it up.
Closing: Buried Treasure
I found Rocket and a Bomb for five dollars in a used bin. I didn’t know the name. I didn’t know the scene. I didn’t know the man. But I knew the feeling before I knew the language.
What stayed with me all these years wasn’t the stories, or the craft, or the persona. It was the attention without illusion. The way Knott saw people in hallways — and the way I felt like I was in one myself.
This album didn’t guide me. It didn’t rescue me. It didn’t fix me. It recognized me.
It saw the drift, the fear, the contradiction, the waiting. It saw the life before the life. It saw the hallway I didn’t yet have a vocabulary for.
It was buried treasure — not because it was rare, but because I was.
Dedication
To Michael Knott, Libra sun — whose songs moved with the restless, twin-voiced brilliance of a Gemini mind, and whose hallway portraits taught me how to see without illusion.
From a Libra rising who recognized the air in your work — the balance forever chased, the contradiction forever held, the drift that becomes a doorway.
