Posted on by

Scenes from St. George’s, Part IV: Mason Anderson’s Seven-Step Method for Picking Up Women

Note: This is installment four of our scenes from Saint George’s (SGS). Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here.

Mason Anderson Fails to Pick Up Chicks

Classes at Saint George’s were not so large; I think our class graduated around 28 or so. The school is a private school, and relatively expensive for Eastern Washington, but I don’t believe it was that expensive, so I wonder what the school’s budget was like. I bet it was tight. There were a handful of students, including J.T., Kelly, our friend S.C., his younger brother Ben, L.W., and a few others, who were there from lower school all the way through high school. Others, tragically including N.C., left, while others still joined later on.

One student who joined I think in 9th grade was Mason Anderson. Mason’s had a younger brother named Mark whom Mason called “Marky J. Muffin” for some reason. Mason and Marky J.’s parents were divorced and they lived with their mother who Mason called Robbie A. (A for Anderson.) My sense is that Robbie A. was working pretty hard to keep everything organized on the financial front. Mason’s dad was a big churcher, and I don’t think Mason saw him all that much. Sometimes Mason would report that his dad had given him some money, but overall I think his dad was too busy churching to provide much oversight. As a result of all of this, Mason was pretty much left to his own devices most of the time. Also, whatever the family situation, Mason didn’t do much to keep things together because although he’s a great guy and totally hysterical, he was, and still is, chronically lazy.

Lazy as he may have been, Mason actually had a job at a sports cards shop called Chalmer’s. I guess Chalmer’s was owned by some guy called Chalmer, and this dude thought it would be a good move to just leave the shop in Mason’s hand for extended periods of time so he could enjoy the sweet life of a successful businessman. This, however, was not a good move at all, because Mason stole all his baseball cards and all his money and Chalmer’s had to go out of business. Mason never stole from his classmates as far as I know, but he felt Chalmer was fair game.

As I mentioned, our class was pretty small and John Innes, who joined in middle school, and I got to know Mason pretty quickly. High school life can be a little repetitive and it’s good to break things up with a little humor. Mason may have been a lazy thief (or perhaps more charitably an indolent appropriator) but in the humor department he was a solid addition to the school. Mason had a particular way of speaking where he would add emphasis to certain words to make them funny, and he also loved the words “total” and “totally.” My own speech and writing has been totally influenced by this habit of Mason, an influence apparent on this blog. Mason also liked to abbreviate noun phrases.

All these quirks came together in Mason’s favorite term, which was “total babe,” or more commonly, “TB.” He would use this appellation dozens of times a day to describe various girls in our class and the classes above and below us. Although SGS classes were small, there were definitely some TBs running around, and some regular old Bs as well. My own tastes in this area were less for the TBs and more for the SBs (“sneaky babes”). I like sneaky anything, sneaky babes, sneaky favorites, sneaky staircases, the whole deal. Probably my theory was that TBs were already out of my league, and SBs were just more on my level. Also, I just thought SBs were cuter than TBs. I still think I’m right about this, but Mason disagreed. He was into the TBs, the totaller the better. Now one thing about TBs, obviously, is they can be super selective. Craig Finn says “boys go for looks/ and girls go for status.” I’ve found this to be pretty true, and TBs also like money as well as, I think, funny guys (or gals depending on a given TB’s particular orientation). Although he played on the baseball team, Mason was not exactly “high status,” whatever that consisted of back then, and although he had the Chalmer’s money he certainly wasn’t loaded. He was very funny, and should have leaned into this with the TBs, but for some reason his method for TB intriguing didn’t quite see him leaning into his strengths.

Mason’s interest in TBs was not limited to mere expressions of appreciation; instead he would work out elaborate TB seduction campaigns in his head, which he would describe to John Innes and me at great length. Mason was, for some unknown reason, a huge fan of the professional hockey team the Philadelphia Flyers and their goalie Ron Hextall, and he had one, or maybe several, Philadelphia Flyers pins that he would wear on the outside of his jacket. His TB pick-up plans always revolved around the Flyers’ pin and associated Flyers paraphernalia. I am not going to be able to do justice to the complexity of Mason’ campaign plans, however they would have gone something like this (I don’t believe he has taken the time to patent this method so I think this is fair use):

Step 1: Select a TB to approach.

As mentioned, Mason would choose one of the biggest TBs, a girl who was obviously completely out of his league, and start putting together a sequence of moves.

Step 2: Name the campaign.

Mason’s campaigns would be named after the first initial of the TB’s first name; thus if the TB was called “B…” the B campaign would just be “Plan B.”

Step 3: Pick a location to approach the TB.

Mason would specify a certain spot where he planned to initiate his campaign, say at the TB’s locker, while waiting for the bus before a basketball game, or when she first came in the door of the school in the morning.

(As a side note, John Innes also employed the locker move when in 9th grade he offered me 10 dollars to switch lockers with him so he could have the locker next to a certain TB called S. I agreed, but John Innes didn’t really have any money because his father had spent it all on his political aspirations, and I don’t think he ever paid me. That was a bad deal on my part; I should have stuck with the locker.)

Step 4: Lead with the Flyers’ pin.

Mason would design the first actual contact with the TB to center on the Flyers’ pin, as noted above. In John Innes’ and my opinion, this is where the plan started to wobble. Mason would specify exactly what he would say to the TB as an opening salvo. This would be something like:

“Hey there B, I couldn’t help but see you hanging out by your locker here. I wonder if you’ve seen my new Philadelphia Flyers pin?“

Now I don’t know a huge amount about hitting on women, but I know a little bit, and I’m just not sure this is the right first move. Guys who are really good at picking up women (I’m not referring to the super sus subculture of PUAs, but to individual guys who just happen to have a lot of game) usually start with something a little more open-ended, and also maybe focussed on some aspect of the girl, not one of their own accessories. I mean I don’t know, maybe this can work—can you picture a guy at a bar approaching a woman and saying something like:

“Hey there, I don’t know you but I just wanted to let you know I bought this new scarf today. Isn’t it something?”

The more I look at it the more I lean no. The Flyers’ pin opener was not, however, the biggest issue with Mason’s approach. The biggest issue was that he expected the TB to come back with a very specific, indeed exact, reply.

Step 5: Elicit a specific TB response.

After Mason had asked the TB to check out his Flyers’ pin, she was supposed to come back with the right answer, which is this case would be something like:

“Wow there Mason Anderson. I didn’t know you had a new Flyers pin. That’s a pretty sexy pin you got there.”

Now I respect the effort that Mason put into his plans, but I’m sorry, this is just all wrong. First of all, this is a pretty unlikely answer for a TB. I mean, something like this is theoretically possible; however there are a lot of other possibilities that Mason was not accounting for. You see, he needed the TB to stick pretty much exactly to the script in order to get to his next move. But the problem was, the TB didn’t have the script in advance. I mean imagine you’re a TB and some medium dorky guy comes up to you and flashes his new Flyers’ pin. I think you might respond in one of the following ways, ranging from more to less promising:

i) “I haven’t seen your pin. Where did you get it?”

ii) “Who are the Philadelphia Flyers?”

iii) “Why are you showing me this?”

iv) “What are you talking about?”

v) “You’re weird. Go away.”

My theory is that Mason really needed to be prepared for all of these possible responses, and many others. He needed, in other words, to build a little flexibility into his plan. And John Innes and I would tell him this.

“I don’t know Mason, I mean the Flyers’ pin is great and all, but I don’t think you can count on her telling you it’s sexy. She might come back with something else you know.”

“No,” Mason would reply. “She’ll come back with what I have planned. It’ll work.”

But she wasn’t going to come back with what he had planned. She just wasn’t. John Innes and I knew this, but there was no talking Mason out of it. Plan B was full steam ahead.

Step 6: Get to the end game.

After the TB came back with the right Flyer’s pin response, the next two items in the plan would be designed to get Mason to the close. This would go like something like this:

Mason: This is a sexy pin. But it’s not as sexy as you are.

TB: Oh my god, you’re so charming and funny.

Now, the dialogue is approximate, however the idea remained the same—the conversation had to go exactly this way. In military circles there is a saying that goes something like “no battle plan survives the first shot fired” or whatever. The point being, once a campaign kicks off there is no telling what the actual sequence of events is going to be. A good plan, in war, with TBs, or just in life in general, needs to be adjustable. Or, in NLP terms, the planner needs to understand that the map is not the territory. Mason had the map, but his map was not going to get him safely though the territory.

In any case, by this point Plan B would be pretty far advanced. It was time to seal the deal.

Step 7: Close.

This stage, obviously, was where Mason would throw down his final zinger and the TB would be won. The last part of Plan B would have Mason saying something like:

“I know I’m charming and funny. I guess I just can’t help it. Hey I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you and me get together and call ourselves an institute?”

And the TB would swoon into his arms.

=====

Now, we have already identified a number of holes in Mason Anderson’s Seven-Step Method for Picking Up Women. And these holes are significant. But the biggest hole in Plan B, or Plan C, and any of his other plans is that he never tried to implement any of them even once. All of this, the casual approach, the Flyers’ pin, the elaborate conversational sequencing, was entirely theoretical. Mason would talk about Plan B incessantly, workshop it with us, and generally refine and tinker with it, but he would never actually put in to the test. I don’t know why this was. Was it because Mason knew the TBs were out of his league and just enjoyed fantasizing about his campaigns? Or did he actually intend to put Plan B into practice sometime and just never had the nerve to try it? Or, perhaps, the plan was never totally good enough in his own eyes and just needed that last little tweak to get it perfect? I don’t know, but man were Plan B and Plan C entertaining.

Today Mason lives in the tri cities area of Washington State where he messes around with nuclear energy or something, believe it or not. In his free time he makes a lot of pizza and instagrams about it. I believe he has also had some success on the Tinder there—John Innes told me he was mixed up with at least one women of that ilk a few years back. I’ve never met any of Mason’s Tinder connections, and I don’t know if they are TBs or not, but I know one thing. Deep down Mason still wants to lead with that Flyer’s pin.

to be continued…

Dedication: For Mason, you totally rock baby.

Postscript: It turns out that Mason Anderson will be cooking pizza for my brother Mike’s wedding this coming summer. Weddings are a good place to score, so I do hope he is working on a plan. Pizza might just be a better hook than the Flyers…

Posted on by

Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…

Posted on by

Scenes from St. George’s, Part II: Scorekeeping, the Sandhills, and a Would Be Yearbook Heart

Note: This is the second installment of scenes from St. George’s. The first installment contains a little more context about this series. Joan Dideon says that a writer is always selling somebody out. I’m not sure I agree with this exactly, but I have taken the liberty of using some real names and some realish initials. These scenes are written with love more or less, however if I do seem to be selling anyone out I guess I feel like the statute of limitations has pretty much expired.

Gary Leinhart and My Father Forget How to Count

Gary Leinhart was another one of our middle school teachers and he also coached boys basketball for a time. He was no Mr. Dreyer, however he was a decent teacher and pretty well liked. He was not a great basketball coach, but he did like to play a little himself. I guess Gary was in his early to mid-thirties around this time but I’m not really sure.

A few miscellaneous things about Gary:

i) he was minus a finger, I think a pinky, from an accident with a saw one time, but you never really noticed it. I guess you don’t really need your pinkies all that much.

ii) he once made a citizens arrest with his friend who was also a teacher at Saint George’s.

iii) After Saint George’s I believe he moved to Alaska.

Now when Gary first came to the school he and my father (who I think was still teaching in the middle school at that time) seemed to get along fine. In fact, my father and I played in Gary’s fantasy baseball league where I was assigned to be the commissioner. Fantasy baseball is impossible at the best of times, and pre-internet it was super impossible, so the league was short-lived. Nonetheless, things were fine there for a while.

As I mentioned above, Gary was the high school boys basketball coach, and my father coached the girls. At some point there must have been some issues, because Gary and my father started to seriously dislike each other. I don’t know what was going on actually, but I’m guessing it was basketball related. Like I said, Gary was a good, if easy-going, teacher, maybe just a bit lazy. My classmate L.W. recently reminded me of some story involving Gary, an air raid siren, and J.T., but I don’t really remember this. The point is, Gary seemed to me be a pretty good guy, except on the basketball floor where he became hyper-competitive.

Around this time I was the lead scorekeeper for the high school basketball games. This involved running the game clock and the shot clocks and keeping the game score correct on the score board. It was a pretty involved job, and I loved it. I threw myself into being every day and in every way the best scorekeeper I could be, and it was a pretty big responsibility for a young fellow. J.T. was my assistant; I think he did the shot clocks. Our school played in a league with schools from all over Eastern Washington, and there were a few schools up near the Canadian border that were a bit rough. Their fans, parents of players mostly and some others, would drive down. There was a visitor section and a home section, as with most gyms. One day some dude from up north must have come to the game a little lit, or a lot lit, and after the game (which SGS won at the last second) he came charging over to the scorers’ table from the visitor’s section. He started accusing me of cheating by giving the home team extra seconds at the end of the game (e.g. not starting the clock when the ball was inbounded). I had done no such thing; and he was drunk, which I helpfully pointed out to him. I think he wanted to punch my lights out, and probably some adults had to intervene.

In any case, I was a good scorekeeper and one day my father and Gary Leinhart were playing basketball against each other with mixed teams of other teachers and students. They had chosen teams I guess and the teams were pretty balanced. My father has never been a great basketball player, but once upon a time he could play a little, and Gary was also decent. The students were all on the basketball team so the game should have been close. And it was. I should know because I was keeping score. However for what was essentially an intramural game we were not using the scoreboard, and I think I was just using a piece of paper or keeping score in my head. The game began, and both teams started scoring. As I recall, the score was 14-12 in favor of my father’s team when the trouble started. Gary’s team scored a basket and he took it on himself to try and usurp my position.

“12-0 us,” he called.

Now this was completely ridiculous because it was a two point lead for my father’s team, not a 12 point lead for Gary Leinhart’s. Before I could correct the score, my father yelled back:

“It’s not 12-0. It’s 15-2 us!”

This was equally ridiculous. As I have made clear, the score was 14-12. As any pick-up basketball player will know, it’s totally possible to lose track of the score of a game as you are playing and miss a basket here and there. This is why, as a matter of fact, there are scorekeepers to begin with. So I did my best:

“Hey guys,” I called, “the score is 14-12 red team.”

“There’s no way they have 14,” said Gary.

“There’s no way we are only up by two,” said my father.

“Yeah, the score is 14-12.”

But unfortunately my efforts to settle the matter were for naught. Gary and my father started screaming at each other and fighting about the score like little children. This was awkward and after a bit people just sort of checked out of the game space and the game ground to a halt, never to be re-started. I guess there was no way to bridge the collective 25 point gap in score perception.

Looking back at this incident, it still boggles my mind. I’ve played quite a bit of pick-up, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I wonder what the core issue was.

The Sandhill and Points West

Back in the day Saint George’s had something called “the Sandhill.” There were actually two Sandhills, which were predictably called “the Little Sandhill” and “the Big Sandhill.” These were conjoint, and located behind the baseball field at the back end of the school property.

The Sandhills, especially the big one, were super tough to climb, but they were both great for jumping off. With a running start, one could fly twenty or thirty feet in the air off the Little Sandhill and land safely near the bottom. When I was first at the school the Big Sandhill actually had a rope swing attached to a tree at the top, and you could run, grab the rope swing, and fly way out in the air. This was a much larger fall than jumping off the Little Sandhill, but it was basically safe. It was also a blast.

In addition to the Sandhill swing, the school had another swing which swung over the Little Spokane river. This is the river that the fabulist John Innes claims I used to throw people in. In any case, the river swing survived longer than the Sandhill swing, because a few years after I first got there the school took the Sandhill swing down. Too dangerous. This was basically a terrible decision and was probably made by someone who had never been on a swing in their life. School bureaucracy sucks sometimes.

So although many of my future classmates at the school never got to experience the glories of the Sandhill swing, there was plenty more to explore back in the woods up behind the Sandhill to the west. Several hundred meters back there was a set of rocks which had little climbing routes naturally built into them. These were not hardcore rock climbs by any means, but they were sufficiently testing for us students and generally pretty good action. Our school had a cross-country team, and the cross-country course turned around just before these rocks. One day a female student who was a few years my senior was running the course by herself and came across a guy on a bicycle completely nude just chilling by the rocks. She came back and reported the situation. What did you do, she was asked? I just turned around and kept running, she replied. Smart move.

There was all kinds of action, both good and bad, up in those hills. My friend J.T. and others whom I will not name would go up into the hills and start fires. Now I understand that young boys like to start fires—it’s an age old pastime—but I was not that into fires. First, they seemed dangerous, and second, and more importantly, they just seemed unnecessary. I was in the minority on this point though; fires were set.

One day I went climbing on the rocks with my friend Kelly and his half-brother who was a few years older. Kelly’s father is Art Rudd, and he had had two children with his first wife over in Seattle or something before moving out and coming to Spokane. Kelly’s older brother was interesting and I got the feeling like he had already seen a lot in his life. Art Rudd was a dentist, and was in fact my dentist. Art Rudd was a garrulous individual and also tried to talk to you when you were in the dentist chair as if you could just chat right back. Overall, Art Rudd was an OK dentist I guess, but I also think he was running a scam. And this scam is not, I think, unique to Art Rudd. I think this scam is widespread, insidious, and bad.

I didn’t have serious dental issues, but I did seem to go to the dentist a lot, which may have been its own scam, however when I was twelve or thirteen Art Rudd suddenly started talking my mother into the concept of me getting braces. Now braces may be important for some certain people with teeth that are like seriously out of alignment, I don’t know, but that was not the case with me. My teeth were totally fine. Nonetheless, the braces conversation was initiated, and kept up, until my mother caved and I was referred to an “orthodontist” friend of Art Rudd’s. “Orthodontists,” I believe, are all basically scammers, and I am totally sure that Art Rudd was getting kick backs there from this “orthodontist.”

I went to see the “orthodontist,” who was a portly and cheerful fellow (he ought to be with all his braces money), and he said sure enough looks like you need some braces. Now I was attuned enough to BS even then to know that this dude was full of it. But I was stuck on a train I couldn’t get off of. I ended up getting braces, which did nothing, and then they came off. Scam, all the way.

Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is, the Sandhills were awesome and whoever took down that swing is an asshole.

I Fail to Draw a Heart in R.s Yearbook

I wrote in the second scene of this series about drawing a solid sun for N.C. when I was in the lower school. What I didn’t mention is that there were actually two lower schools—the one up on the hill for Grades 1-3 and another one down by the river for Grades 4-6. When I was attending the second lower school a new girl joined our class. She was called R. Now I didn’t have a crush on R. of anything like the intensity of my crush on N.C., however I did kind of like her, and at the end of 6th grade when students were writing in each other’s yearbooks, I resolved to make my big move. I would sign her yearbook, I thought, and draw a nice little heart as well. My successful sun drawing was in the books and everything, and I thought the heart would be easy.

Sure enough, R. asked me to write something in her yearbook, so I wrote something anodyne, and then went in for the heart move. I had practiced this in my head several times, because when you get nervous sometimes you mess stuff up and I didn’t want to choke and draw a bad heart. So I took a deep breath, and went for it. And I couldn’t get close. What came out looked nothing like a heart, nothing like a sun, it looked in fact like some kind of undefinable blob. This was bad, and I had precious little time to salvage the situation. In fact, I had no time, because R. must have seen the heart coming, and she asked “what’s that?” in a fake innocent voice that made it clear to me that she knew exactly what was going on.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Just drawing something.”

I tried to improve the heart to no avail, and then scratched it out and tried again. No luck. If anything the second heart was worse than the first. I had no idea how to draw a heart, had no idea at all what one was even supposed to look like. Suddenly, I was the Steve Sax of heart rendering.

“Never mind,” I said finally. “Just read my message.” My message was not the point though—it was the heart that tied the whole presentation together. And I had blown it, badly.

Thinking back on it, it was probably inevitable that I would choke on the heart for R. I mean, this was the last day of lower school and here I was attempting a heart for a girl other than N.C. I was a faithless individual, a turncoat, and the heart was never going to materialize as my own heart was still back up on the hill with N.C. in Science class. And, come to think of it, it still is.

to be continued…

Posted on by · 2 Comments

Scenes from St. George’s, Part I: Erosions, First Love, Headmasters

Sometimes you wanna put the past in the past/ but every generation gets bit in the ass

Portastatic

Note: This is a series of “scenes” from Saint George’s, the school in Spokane, Washington I attended back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although this was all a while ago and I forget all kinds of stuff, I remember a few things. Saint George’s was a good school in many ways, but it was also a pretty loose environment. I’m sure it’s changed now, but back in the day a lot of pretty wild stuff happened. These pieces will collect a few incidents as I recall them; the scenes at best loosely connected; most are funny—a few are maybe a little serious. I plan do a few installments in this series, so if you like this one stay tuned.

Also I make no claim to my memories being authoritative in any sense. As with all memories, these have been colored, and eroded, by time. However, I will try to write only about things I witnessed first hand, or things that I have on what I believe to be pretty good authority.

My Brother Mike Looks for Erosions

When I was in the lower school (elementary school) at Saint George’s I had a teacher we will call L.K. In the lower school each grade had a main teacher, what you might call a homeroom teacher, and students also had classes with other specialist-type teacher such as Science or Music. L.K. was an OK homeroom teacher for me, not very memorable, but not terrible either. However a few years later when she was serving as the homeroom teacher for my brother Mike, things changed.

By the time Mike was in her class, L.K. was apparently in a little entanglement with the headmaster at the time called George Edwards, whom I believe was separated, or separating, from his wife. The headmaster of Saint George’s always lived on campus in a fancy house called The Davenport House, and I guess the action between himself and L.K.’s was pretty widely known. It must have been if even I, as like a fifth grader, was aware of it. I think this relationship, whatever it consisted of, must have been on the rocks though by this time, and there may have been some bad action. In any case, L.K. was totally checked out from her job. Now teachers sometimes totally check out, and this can go unnoticed for weeks or even months. Teaching is an important job, but it’s not like flying a plane or something; a checked out teacher generally doesn’t put students’ lives on the line.

Note: Since I published this piece, none other than the one and only George Oglethorpe Edwards, my former Principal, has responded at some length in a comment for this piece. He states that the rumored affair described above did not take place, and that L. was dismissed and subsequently sued the school. I have left the original text intact as a reflection of how events were understood at the time, but readers should be aware of his account.

Anyway, L.K. was way checked out. Saint George’s was, and presumably still is, situated on a very large piece of property down there by the Little Spokane river and was surrounded by wilds that were not Saint George’s property, but that students could explore. The lower school in particular was set up against a hill that went for a mile or so up above the school building. So there was a lot of space. However, there was also a basically bounded playground and lower school students would also play on the large lawn of the Davenport House, so there was no need for them to be foraging way up on the hill. Except in L.K.’s class though, because she developed a kind of genius strategy to do no teaching at all for my brother’s class. What she would do was, at the start her assigned homeroom teacher block, let’s say it was three periods in the morning, just tell her students to “go look for erosions.” The students must have learned about erosions in Science class or something, because Mike knew the word as like a second grader. The students would go up on the hill on their own and scout around for erosions, of which there were many, all morning and come back for lunch.

Now, a day of looking for erosions would have been one thing— a little erosion location could easily be justified as a Science class extension, ideally supervised—however L.K. didn’t just pull out this move once. In fact she pulled it out day after day for, I believe, a matter of weeks. Everyday Mike would come home and my mother would ask “what did you do today?” Mike would reply “went looking for erosions.” Like most parents, mine probably didn’t pay super careful attention to the ins and out of what was going on with our schooling, however after some weeks of this my mother started to find all this erosion action a bit strange.

“You went looking for erosions again?”

“Yup,” said my brother. “More erosions.” I think Mike was totally fine looking for erosions all day, as I would have been, however my mother had heard enough.

“That’s too much looking for erosions. It’s been weeks and you’re still looking for erosions. I’m going to talk to somebody.”

I believe my mother did talk to somebody, because L.K. changed up her all-erosion-all-the-time strategy. I think she was still checked out, but maybe made an effort to disguise it a little better. She left the school at the end of that year as I recall and I don’t know what happened to her after that.

That’s the funny thing about teachers—they are often remembered by students for the strangest thing they did. I don’t remember a single thing from L.K.’s class or anything else about her really, but I do remember that she loved her some erosions.

Drawing a Sun for N.C.

As I mentioned, Saint George’s had the Davenport House, which was right across from the lower school, and one of the rooms of the Davenport House was used as a classroom when I was there. We had Science class in this room for a while. One day, the teacher asked us to draw the solar system or something like that, and I started by drawing the sun. Now I had always seen the sun depicted with like pointy rays of light coming out of it—you know, the sun looks kind of angular most of the time. So that’s how I drew it.

There was a girl in my class we’ll call N.C. I don’t know if anyone else from Saint George’s back then remembers her because she wasn’t there for too long, but I do and I had a huge crush on her. In fact, I thought about her all the time. We would play tag games on the lawn on the Davenport House, “freeze tag,” and “television tag,” (I don’t remember the rules) and I would always try to tag N.C. just to be close to her. Anyway, N.C. was in Science class with me, and I showed her my sun, which I thought was pretty solid. Then, another classmate, a boy whose name I forget but who was a bad seed, interrupted my little chat with N.C.

“That’s not what the sun looks like. The sun doesn’t really have rays like that. It’s actually just round. Look at my paper, I have it the right way.”

Sure enough, this little brat had drawn the sun like a big red circle. Now I suspected at the time that on some level this guy was probably right, and that the sun as an actual mass or whatever didn’t have physical rays. But his sun looked super ugly, and also he was putting my drawing down in front of N.C. and just basically being terrible. So I turned to N.C.

“What do you think N.C. Which sun do you like better?”

And N.C. just smiled at me and said “I like your sun better.”

That was all I needed to hear. N.C. was on my team, and the little brat could stick his sun where…well you know. I was elated by N.C.’s appreciation; my sun had carried the day. I was totally in love with her, more than ever, after this sun incident.

A while back I tried looking N.C. up online, and although her name is not super common, I found four or five people who could have been her. I was hoping to send her the sun story and say thanks, but I didn’t want to just fire this anecdote over to a bunch of random N.C.’s, so I held back. If you do know who I’m talking about and you know where she’s at, let me know. Maybe she remembers my pretty solid sun.

More George Edwards Action (with a cameo from the Manimal, Kenneth Faried)

I mentioned above that when he was headmaster of Saint George’s George Edwards was entangled up with L.K. And this is true. He was headmaster for a while though, so he also did some other stuff.

All in all I would say George Edwards was a mediocre headmaster. He looked more or less the part, wore a mustache that was less Frenchy than my middle school French teacher Mr. Dreyer’s, and generally didn’t intervene too much in school matters, which was a positive. He was a decent public speaker, and put on a good showing at the annual auction and things of that nature. On the other hand, he was not especially inspiring, and as we’ve seen, had some stuff going on in his personal life which distracted him. He was from Texas originally and when he first came to the school his wife came with him, but I think this was just for show because she was out of there pretty soon after. Like I said, he was at the school for a while and I actually took a class from him in high school. More on that in a second.

I was at the school a lot because my father taught there and also coached basketball and stuff into the evenings, and myself and my friend J.T., whose father also taught at the school, kind of had the run of the place. J.T. somehow got copies of the master keys to the middle school and upper school made and gave me a set, and we would just open up the buildings whenever we wanted and go wherever. J.T. and I would sneak into the faculty lounge in the high school and pinch sugar cubes from the teacher’s coffee area, and later on we snuck into the science room to appropriate some ammonia packs from the first aid kits. I think someone eventually noticed that the first aid kits were always running out of ammonia. Yeah, that was us. George Edwards was gone a lot, and we would also go on into the Davenport House, which somehow was just open, and poke around. We probably even did this a few times when George Edwards was staying there, which is admittedly a little bizarre. The Davenport House had a kind of servants’ area as I recall, and a back set of stairs which was really cool.

Anyway, because I was always around, George Edwards asked me one time to babysit his daughter when he was off doing something. I was probably in middle school at this time, and his daughter was about 8 or 9. His daughter is probably a lovely person today, but at the time she was known to be a bit of a handful. In addition to the L.K. factor, George Edwards was, in my recollection perpetually, going through a divorce and things may have been a little tense on the Edwards family front. I didn’t know his daughter too well, but I said sure, I’ll babysit. Good he said, you can do whatever you want but just don’t let her dance on the roof.

This seemed like a very specific instruction, and I wondered what he meant. Was he just giving me a general example of a bad idea, or was she an inveterate roof dancer and I’d somehow have to try to control this tendency? It turned out to be the latter. The babysitting was going fine for a while, until she said:

“I’m going to go dance on the roof.”

“Uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Your dad told me not to let you do that.”

“Yeah, I’m going to go dance on the roof. Are you coming?”

Now I was bigger than her, and a guy, but still it’s not exactly easy to corral an 8 year old girl hellbent on roof dancing, and I clearly wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it. So, I thought, the best thing to do was to go with her and keep an eye on things. The “roof” was actually not the roof of the house exactly, more like an open patio area that a window on the second floor opened on to. It didn’t really have any railings or anything around it, and all in all it was not the safest spot for dancing. However, it was medium big and looked kind of OK. Also she was clearly a veteran roof dancer, so I figured she had it under control.

She danced for a while and I watched, and then we went back inside. I had a pretty nice day with her as she was actually pretty cool, and then George Edwards came home.

“How’d it go,” he asked. “She didn’t dance on the roof did she?”

“No sir, nothing like that at all. We just stayed inside mostly and read books and talked.”

“Good job. She does like to dance on that roof. I’m glad you handled her today.”

I told George Edwards a fib, it’s true, but I felt like I earned my money you know. Roof dancing had occurred, but it has also been contained. You’re welcome there George Edwards.

One day during the George Edwards era, when I was poking around the Davenport House for reasons passing understanding, I came across a soft-core videotape in the TV room on the second floor. There was a picture on the box of some frolicking beach babes and it had some kind of suggestive title. Interesting, I thought, George Edwards likes himself some beach babes. More interesting than that though was the fact that he just left this lying around. Maybe George Edwards needed a couple of lessons in headmaster trade craft. Or perhaps he didn’t expect that J.T. and I would just be cruising around his house uninvited. In any case, I would get a different kind of glimpse into the person behind the role via a story my classmates related to me which happened one day when I was staying home with my trick knee.

What is a trick knee? Well, the trick knee was the patented move of a Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman called Joe Nash back in the day. Basically Nash, and sometimes his teammates, would fake an injury (thus the “trick knee”) to stop the clock late in the game. In American Football it is super important to stop the clock in late game situations; this is why you always see players trying to get out of bounds in these spots. Joe Nash and the Seahawks found a loophole in the rules, which at the time didn’t prohibit the fake injury move. I believe the rules have now been adjusted.

I found an article from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel by one Sharon Robb from 1989 that talks about this. (The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has some super organized archives by the way.) Robb is talking about the 1988 AFC title game between the Seahawks and the Cincinnati Bengals. “Clarke” here is Ken Clarke, Nash’s fellow defensive lineman.

Seven times Nash (five) and Clarke (two) took turns faking injuries on third-down situations to enable the Seahawks’ nickel defense to get onto the field. After the third time Nash went down, the crowd of 58,560 caught on and started booing. Cincinnati coach Sam Wyche and his players were livid, complaining to whatever official was within earshot. The fourth time, Nash went down and feigned injury without ever getting hit, and walked off the field under his own power.

I remember watching this game and marveling at Nash’s trick knee move. To me this was an example of exactly the kind of player I liked. Nash was probably not the best lineman in the league, but he did what he had to to try and help the Seahawks win. I played basketball for a while at Saint George’s and later on as well. As a basketball player I had strengths and weaknesses, but was never going to be the go to scorer. So I developed other skills, especially offensive rebounding. This was my specialty, and my favorite NBA player of all time is the Manimal Kenneth Faried. Like me, Faried wasn’t a great scorer, but he made up for it with his dominating offensive rebounding. He stuck around the league for a while because of just this one skill.

When I was in graduate school in Arizona in my 20s I played a lot of pick-up at the gym there. Pick-up is interesting because players mostly don’t know each other and just have to kind of fit together on the fly. This process is pretty hit or miss; however I was a good pick-up teammate because I could score if need be, but was just as happy to try and dominate the glass on both ends, especially the offensive glass. Most pick-up players don’t rebound all that hard, so by just going all out in that aspect of the game I could pretty much control things a lot of the time. One day I was matched up against a slightly older guy and I was kicking his ass on the glass. I was pulling out all my moves, and he basically had no chance. He started getting mad and began pushing me in the small of the back when I was going for a rebound. In basketball a little pushing and elbowing is acceptable but pushing your opponent in the small of the back is bad form. I let him know his play was out of line and told him:

“Hey dude, you can push me all you want and I’m still going to eat your lunch on the boards.” This was the last straw and my guy said something I’ll never forget:

“You aren’t a real basketball player. You’re just a fucking garbage man.”

What he meant was I was just picking up all the rebounds and loose balls like a garbage man picks up trash. He intended it as an insult, but I took it as a huge compliment. I am absolutely a garbage man, me and the Manimal both.

Anyway, I loved Joe Nash so I copied his trick knee move. Not on the football field though, my trick knee would flare up on days when I didn’t feel like going to school. “My knee hurts,” I’d tell my mother, and she’d let me stay home. I didn’t pull this move out much because I basically liked going to school, but once and a while my chronic knee condition got the best of me. One day in what must have been 1990 (just a bit after Joe Nash’s epic playoff performance) I was trick-kneeing it and missed George Edward’s class, which I recall was some kind of government class or something. The fabulist and video game loser John Innes will remember.

The reason that I know this happened in 1990 is because this was when the First Gulf War was kicking off. It turned out that George Edwards had once upon a time been in the military, or more precisely I think he was at the time in the military reserves. The gulf action must have made him feel nostalgic or something, because the next day after my knee had healed I went back to school and my classmates told me something extraordinary had happened in government class. What was that? I asked. George Edwards had us go outside and march, they told me. March? What kind of marching? Military marching, they told me. He had us do military marches and gave this big talk about the military and he was actually crying.

Now this all sounded pretty odd, and I felt like my trick knee had worsened on just the right day because I sure wasn’t up for any marching.

“What was going on with him?” I asked.

“We don’t know. He was just getting super emotional and he made us march on the road all class.”

Although I was glad to have missed it, I found this story interesting. To be fair, this was not an L.K.-like move where George Edwards just didn’t feel like teaching that day. He was out leading the marching, apparently. He wasn’t a great government teacher, however after I heard about the marching I liked him better. This incident, I felt, provided a little window into the real guy, the Texas native who liked beach babes, didn’t want his daughter falling off the roof, and felt a deep connection to the military reserves.

One thing I wonder about is if any other teacher at the school was aware that all this marching was going on. I think they must have been because it apparently took place right on the road in front of the school. I wrote in my Mr. Dreyer piece about how back in the day teachers would just do questionable stuff and nothing happened. George Edwards was the principal, so he probably had carte blanche on the marching front in any case, but did no one ask him, “hey there George Edwards, everything OK out there today? Maybe we should chill a bit on all the marching” or anything? It can be really tough to tell principals what to do, although I’ve gotten pretty good it in my own career. Anyway, I wonder.

George Edwards moved to Seattle later on and got another head of school job. My brother Mike ran into him over there and says he’s a really good guy. As for his daughter, I hope she’s still out there, dancing her little heart out.

Dedication: For N.C., wherever you are.

to be continued…

Posted on by · 2 Comments

On John Innes, the Fabulist (with cameos from Bruce Innes and Hunter S. Thompson)

John Innes is a high school English teacher in Oregon. He works at a Catholic School there where he also coaches basketball, and probably does some other stuff. His players call him “Coach Innes,” and I think they respect him. And this is reasonable enough. Innes is a good coach, and good teacher, and most of the time a pretty good guy. He used to be a good golfer, but I think he lost it. Too much water on the elbow, can’t control the slice. But teachers show one side of themselves in the classroom and another outside of it. What John Innes has kept hidden from his students and players is that he is big old fabulist.

I know this because Innes, probably to fill the time when his lesson plans peter out or something, is known to tell stories to his students about the days when he and I were in high school and university together. And these stories are all completely bonkers. Innes will tell his students a story about me throwing people into the Little Spokane river back in high school. But I would never do that. I mean the Little Spokane is cold, and what kind of person would toss a fellow student into a cold river just because? Also, to get to the Little Spokane, which ran by our school, you had to cross a super long bridge. I’m not dragging some chick or dude across a super long bridge just to get them wet. Doesn’t make sense. I don’t know where Innes gets this stuff. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is big old fabulist.

In another of his little “stories,” Innes claims that during university at Hamilton College I snuck into the chapel there on campus and climbed up into the bell tower. Now, there might have been a chapel at Hamilton, sure. There might have been a lot of things. Hamilton has some pretty old buildings, and it’s not impossible that a chapel would have some kind of bells in it. But I’m not gonna go climbing up there. Innes fancies himself a “literature” teacher, and maybe he’s mixing in some part of a Dorothy Sayers plot or something. Also, Innes may be extrapolating from the notion that I generally may attempt to access certain spaces that might seem “off limits.” That’s possible. I mean, if I see a “Members Only” sign on the door of a club, I’m gonna think “hey there pal, I’m a member. In fact, I’m a permanent member baby” and I’m gonna go right on in. I have also noticed that in buildings where there may be some public spaces and some private or closed spaces, if you are dressed nicely, as I can, and are pretty tall, as I am, you can sometimes just wander wherever and people will, by and large, just let you, especially if you wear some kind of lanyard around your neck. But this doesn’t mean I’m going to go poking around a bunch of bells. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is a big fabulist, and he needs to get over it.

Innes tells another story about me graduating from university in linen. What’s he even talking about? I mean, I did graduate and have a piece of paper somewhere I think, but linen? What a bizarre thing to say. And for that matter, what if I did? Linen is a cloth, clothes are made from cloth, I was presumably clothed at graduation. So what? I think what may be going on here is that the water from his elbow is migrating up to his brain. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and what I do recall is that I wore a little purple flower in my hair at graduation and some dude from the newspaper took a picture of me and this ran somewhere. Innes may have remembered the flower thing and then imagined a whole bunch of other nonsense around it. Linen. It’s totally ridiculous. His fables are just getting out of control.

So Innes apparently thinks it’s funny to spin a bunch of nonsense about me. I don’t know exactly why he does this, but he may come by his mendacity honestly, so to speak. Innes has a father called Bruce Innes. Bruce Innes is a Canadian, and a pretty interesting guy. He used to be in a band called The Original Caste, and they had a hit called “One Tin Soldier.” The song is still pretty well known to a certain generation, which is cool. That band split and Bruce Innes must have drifted around blowing his money for a while, cause he ended up in Spokane in the late 80s, which is when I met the fabulist John Innes. I went to Bruce Innes’ house sometimes in order to crush John Innes at a video game called “R.B.I. Baseball.” I don’t play a lot of video games, but it doesn’t matter. I crushed John Innes at Sega Hockey a few years later as well and he whined about it for weeks. Guy has water on the elbow from way back.

Anyway, Bruce Innes’ Spokane house was pretty large and had a fully soundproofed music studio in the basement. I’d never seen anything like this and assumed that he must have some serious cash. But I don’t think this was actually the case. Like I said, I think Bruce Innes had spent most of his money from his music heyday by this time. My brother Mike, who remembers some stuff and forgets other stuff, told me recently that Bruce Innes made his living around this time by writing jingles for an audio and video store in town called Huppins. I don’t remember anything about this, but it’s too specific not to be at least a little bit true. It can’t all have been Huppins though, right? He must have done other stuff. Bruce Innes ended up leaving Spokane and moving to Sun Valley where he became the go to guy to play music sets at rich people’s parties. Then he moved to Oregon. I don’t know where he lives now. So yeah, he’s had an interesting life.

Back in the days when Bruce Innes was high on the hog with his music royalties he ran around with some famous folks. He met Leonard Cohen, and told me one time that Cohen was a total dick. Leonard Cohen is a legend of course, and is now remembered best as a genial older statesman, but this doesn’t preclude the possibility that back in the 70’s he may have been a dick. Doesn’t preclude it at all. Mr. Google says that Bruce Innes also knew Joni Mitchell. More well known though is Bruce Innes’ association with the writer Hunter S. Thompson. Most people of a certain age will remember Thompson, the “gonzo” inheritor of Hemingway and a pretty major figure in American literary history. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he relates a funny anecdote of bonding over college football with President Richard Nixon in the back of a car sometime, despite the fact that Thompson hated Nixon. Thompson also wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I also have read. This is the book that the Terry Gilliam movie is based on, the one where Benicio DelToro plays Thompson’s sidekick and always advises him “as your lawyer…,” a phrase that has entered popular culture and is still widely used.

This is also the book that features Bruce Innes and some story about a monkey. I’m not sure if this next part is in Las Vegas or not, and in fact I think it isn’t, but another story is that Thompson and Bruce Innes were hanging out in Colorado somewhere and decided they would run for political office on the same ticket. Thompson would run for sheriff and Bruce Innes would run for something else. Now, Thompson’s run for sheriff is a well known piece of his mythos, and he did actually have a platform under the umbrella of “Freak Power,” but I imagine that whatever this run really entailed, Thompson exaggerated it pretty dramatically in later telling. I’ve heard Bruce Innes talk about this as well, and he makes it sound like the two of them were actually aspiring politicians for a time. But I don’t believe it. I’ll bet you what happened was these two guys were hanging out and getting stoned, and thought it would be funny if they “ran” for office. They probably got a poster or two made and hung them up around town, told all their friends about it as a lark, and talked a bunch of BS for a while. Bruce Innes is a great guy, but I think he and Thompson are kind of full of it. So like I say, John Innes probably comes by it honestly.

Whatever the source of John Innes’ struggles with the truth, one time after he had told some of his usual whoppers about me, one of his students found these stories interesting and wrote me a request for more information. He actually wrote it in verse, which was pretty creative, so I wrote him back in the same style on a flight out of Adelaide. The poem basically attempts to correct the record that the fabulist John Innes so regularly distorts. It also touches on some of the lowlights of my college career, including my fondness for writing excuses for students who needed extensions, the fact that I sported a tan trench coat for much of my first year, and my inability to get a steady girlfriend. John Innes, the fabulist, is referred to as “J.I.” in the poem. In the interest of having some of my “b-sides” back in print, I am re-posting this guy in its original form. It’s called “An Open Book,” and I gotta say, it’s still pretty good.

“An Open Book”

Not really in the mood
but you’ll think me quite rude
if I don’t make a reply
around me on the plane
folks eat, are entertained
no one’s writing save I

So I’ll take a look back
to days at the dog track
where I ended up by mistake
thought we could beat the odds
just silly teenage sods
there was no money to make

I know not if J.I.
has spun a pack of lies
concerning my personhood
Yes, I wrote poems for girls
who told me they were pearls
ah–but they weren’t any good

About a cold river,
and the rest of his quiver
of myths and exaggerations
well if someone was shoved
it was done out of love
or congratulations

So to upstate New York
in a trench coat–what a dork
but the world took pity
the life there was fine
but naught was on the line
should have gone to the city

I did two things quite well,
needing something to sell
I wrote brilliant excuses
‘bout ridiculous capers,
couldn’t finish my papers
I claimed aces, held deuces

My second great skill
is one I hold still
I fell for crazy ladies
locals, Russians, and Turks
they all drove me berserk
with a boatload of maybes

Four years in the dorms
and countless reforms
led to little of note
I left sans a sob
a plan or a job
and without my trench coat

Dedication: For John Innes, the fabulist. You know I won that Sega game, but I confess I may have tried to get up in that bell tower. So let’s call it a tie there baby.

Postscript: Since this piece was first published, Bruce Innes has sadly passed away, I believe in Vermont. As I said in the piece, Bruce had a fascinating life, and he was also a genuinely sweet guy. I really liked him. RIP Bruce, maybe you can win an election or two up there in heaven.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “An Open Book,” also about the character known as John Innes. You can find that here.

Posted on by

On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”

Raymond Carver is not one of my very favorite writers, but his work is full of resonant nuggets that linger long after one puts him down. Fires contains four essays, a number of poems and half a dozen or so stories. Carver has useful things to say about using common language in writing, although he arguably makes a fetish of it. The best things in the book are a handful of poems, and the standout seems to be “The Baker.” Other excellent poems include: “Iowa Summer,” “For Serma with Martial Vigor,” “Looking for Work,” and “Cheers.” Fires also includes a lengthy poem on Bukowski where Carver appears to be recounting an evening’s worth of Bukowski’s conversation. Good stuff, but not of overwhelming interest except to Bukowski fanatics.

The essays, on his father, on writing, are very sharp. Carver’s prose, as he himself admits, tends to be lean, approaching flat, but accumulates force on that account: “If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some reason-if the words are in any way blurred-the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved” (“On Writing”). This is fundamentally true and great—and I would add if the words are just right the reader’s eyes will stick, and even come back to them for a second look.

Little things register. From the title story: “On the other end of the line was the voice of a man who was obviously a black man, someone asking for a party named Nelson. It was the wrong number and I said so and hung up.” Here, decisiveness of language (“and I said so”) fused with perfect choice of noun phrase “a party named Nelson” achieve a remarkable force.

Carver’s paragraphs tend to close where other writer’s would just be beginning: (his motto: “Don’t explain. Don’t complain.”): “I really don’t feel that anything happened in my life until I was twenty and married and had the kids. Then things started to happen.” That’s it. What does he mean? does he mean happen, like, “that’s really happening man,” or just happen, as in, flatly events transpired. We are left to guess; the paragraph ends.

Here is “The Baker”:

Then Pancho Villa come to town,

hanged the mayor

and summoned the old and infirm Count Vronsky to supper.

Pancho introduced his new girl friend, along with her husband in his white apron,

showed Vronsky his pistol,

then asked the Count to tell him about his unhappy exile in Mexico.

Later, the talk was of women and horses. Both were experts.

The girl friend giggles and fussed with the pearl button on Pancho’s shirt until, promptly at midnight, Pancho went to sleep with his head on the table.

The husband crossed himself and left the house holding his boots without so much as a sign to his wife or Vronsky.

That anonymous husband, barefooted, humiliated, trying to save his life, he is the hero of this poem.

A great poem, I think, nearly perfect. The one line that may have been implicit is “both were experts.” Cut it, and see how it reads. Also, the “promptly” is questionable. The action verbs, “hanged,” “summoned,” “showed” establish Pancho beautifully. “Showed Vronsky his pistol”-does Carver mean he showed it off, or showed it to him as a threat? The line works both ways. He doesn’t let the husband off the hook either; the “humiliated,” at once celebrates his pragmatism and signals his cowardice. Finally, in the second to last line, the additional, grammatically unnecessary, “he” cements the husband as a man, even if a emasculated one.

The poem ends unresolved; the husband is “trying” to save his life. We don’t know whether he succeeds. Carver doesn’t explain.

Posted on by

On Zone Defense

Once upon a time I played basketball. I also played a lot of schoolyard American Football. Both of these sports have different possible defensive approaches. One of these is zone defense.

As a basketball player I had strengths and weaknesses. I was good around the basket, played hard, could throw an elbow, and rebounded the hell out of the ball. I was also a poor outside shooter and didn’t have enough quickness to get my own shot outside of about four feet. But the thing I was best at was zone defense. I was very good at zone defense.

As a football player I was a decent quarterback and a good what be called the “possession receiver” role. If I had played competitively I would have been able to catch the ball reliably and pick up a few yards after the catch. But the thing I was best at was zone defense. I was very good at zone defense.

As I understand them, the fundamental skills associated with zone defense are, the ability to read the entire field or court, the ability to pre-perceive the likely movement of the ball, the flexibility to break out of any assigned appointment and react to information as it changes on a micro-second basis, and the ability to take a risk to potentially get an interception. In football, a single interception can swing a whole game. In basketball an interception and dunk or lay in on the other end can be a catalyst for swinging the momentum to your team and change the trajectory of a game or quarter. When I was young I liked the cornerback Everson Walls. This was because he led the league in interceptions. I liked interceptions. I still do.

One time my friend from New Zealand asked to join his touch rugby club team for a game. So I did. He explained the rules and I told him I would get an interception and run it back for a “try.” Kiwis call touchdowns “tries” for some reason. He told me there was no way, interception tries were too hard and it was my first ever game. I scored two tries on interceptions. This was not because I was a good touch rugby player. This was because the above zone defense principles applied perfectly to rugby as well. I didn’t even know the rules really, but I could play zone defense. It was automatic.

Zone defense is one of two main types of defense. The other is man-to-man defense. I do not like man-to-man defense. I’m kind of bad at it. Man-to-man defense requires you to stick to an exact task, for example staying in front of your opponent, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Man-to-man defense is boring. It lacks creativity, it lacks pizzazz, it lacks excitement. Man-to-man defenders are great at what they do, however they are specialists. Zone defenders are generalists. I’m a generalist.

One more thing that zone defenders rely on is their teammates. A zone defender is responsible for a certain area rather than a certain person, however that area can be pretty vaguely defined in practice. So other zone defenders need to be attuned to the shifting boundaries of the “areas” of the field or court. There is no such thing as a fixed area. Areas, it turns out, are relative.

I believe that the principles of zone defense are widely applicable to life, work, and other pursuits. I identify as a zone defender.

Dedication: For Marcelo, my kindred spirit in zone defense.

Posted on by · 3 Comments

Why It Is So Hard to Get Breakfast in Japan (with a dream cameo from the Gemini Donald Trump)

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

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

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

Except for one.

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

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

I. The Hotel Breakfast

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

Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.

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

II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast

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

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

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

III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

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

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

Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:

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

Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:

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

=====

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

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

“It’s funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position
Posted on by

Andrea Travels, Part III: A Little Mix-Up During Cocktail Hour

Dateline Seoul: The Lotte Hotel, Sunday, 10:17

As Andrea luxuriates on the 17th floor of the Lotte, the opening banalities of the industry conference waft through the hotel. The organizers have gotten at cross-purposes with talent, one Lord Duncan, some kind of a minor royal somebody or something, who had been promised a major speaking slot at the conference opening. This was rescinded at the last minute on account of his financial ties to one of the sponsors. Someone saw a conflict of interest, and the Lord’s press agent is seriously pissed. He’s been relegated to a couple of introductions, reduced to a laugh line. No less than three conference people have tried to explain the situation to the agent, three poor souls, three different stories. The agent is chewing her nails, chewing her nicorette. The Lord is putting a brave face on things, puffing and posing, Lord this and Lord that. Blah blah blah. Andrea’s in bed.

There are a number of other people from her firm at the conference, and a name list, so she’s going to have to put in an appearance at some point. She decides to roll down about 40 minutes before lunch. This way she can drop into a session, stroll the floor for a bit, beat the lunch line, and eat some SOUP.

“Area man’s plan to stay home all weekend and play video games goes off without a hitch.” Like the area man, Andrea’s plan is foolproof in its simplicity. Before leaving her room she tucks the key in her valise, just in case.

Andrea puts on a black dress, tasteful but not demure, and black heels. Dressed to kill and ready for soup, she takes the elevator.

Dateline The Lotte Hotel: Sunday, Late Morning

The soup was pumpkin, of course. Pumpkin soup is the staple of international hotels everywhere. Most pumpkin soup is so-so; today’s was at least decent. Her hunger is sated, but that’s about the only thing about her that is. She’s bowed and scraped to a dozen industry veterans and talked trade with the guys from her firm. She’s been seen.

Today’s closing remarks are underway and the conference, 1100 strong, is packed into the main ballroom. Andrea circles to the back to the sound and light booth. This is the nerve center of the room and the man with his finger on the buttons is Mouse. Mouse is a known quantity–he is sound man to the world and works events just like this one 280 days a year around the world. He used to work full time for Bausch and Lomb before going freelance. A total pro, but he has a weakness. A weakness for Andrea.

She slides her arm under his; it’s a hello.

“How’s it going Mouse?”

“Same old same old. Drinks at 16:30. We’ll see how we are in a few hours.”

Were you dear reader in the medical tubing industry you’d want to tie one on as well. In tumult lies opportunity, thought Andrea.

Andrea hangs with Mouse for half an hour or so, asking various questions about the boards. She’s a quick study, obviously; she’s got the hang of things.

Bathroom break and Andrea bumps into the press agent. “They stitched us up, the bastards,” she rails to Andrea as they stand at the mirror. It could be anybody. Andrea makes sympathetic murmurs.

“How much were you paid?”

“17,000 pounds, bloody hell. And all he gets are two lousy introductions. It’s a total embarrassment.”

Good work if you can get it thinks Andrea. A couple more murmurs and she exits.

Dateline The Lotte Hotel, Sunday, 17:10

White wine, red wine, crab cakes, an item on a Saltine. Conference drink hours are designed for maximum intoxication with minimum calories. Andrea takes two whites back to Mouse.

“Baby I can’t drink on duty.”

“Sure you can–everything’s under control right?”

Mouse looks around, a tic. A tip for you Mouse my man, no one cares. I’m straight up telling you brother. People don’t give a shit.

He takes a couple sips and turns to Andrea. “Bingo is next–I gotta go up front and set the mic up.” Andrea smiles, “I got ya” she says, “I’ll watch the boards.” Famous last words. Mouse heads off and Andrea puts her game face on.

10 minutes later and we are bingoing. A bingo master has been trotted out, and it’s… Lord Duncan. He lets rip with a call of “let’s biiiiiiiingo” and the first number is called. There is nothing quite as captivating for a mixed audience as bingo. Bingo works baby.

Character Analysis: What do we think? I mean Andrea is a gainfully employed professional. She has a rep. And she’s not, normally, an anarchist. But there’s something in the air, some combination of boredom, stasis, and jet leg that adds up. Press that button/ your ass gonna go.

The tension mounts; the room can feel that first bingo coming. Big time action. Mouse is still up front; Lord Duncan is ripping and running. Andrea takes a deep breath and hits the light switch. The room is plunged into darkness. The conference giggles. Titters before tatters. Phase two, Andrea activates the spotlight and turns it full force on Lord Duncan. He does a little pirouette, making the most of the moment. “Lights please” he calls. Not so fast. He steps back out the spotlight and Andrea follows him. “And the next number is…” he jokes, gamely. Spotlight off. Spotlight on. His head is on a swivel, beads of sweat turning to rivults. Andrea leans into the microphone and in her deepest and sultriest voice intones: “in the event of an emergency, the nearest exit may be behind you.” Then she throws the light back on and takes three lateral steps to her right. Grabs a white from the sideboard and surges into the conference space, sidling up right next to Duncan’s press agent.

“When it rains it pours eh?” she asks?

“Jesus Christ what next?” replies the agent.

Mouse is back at the booth, wondering what in the world happened. But on some level he knows. Andrea’s a handful. He’ll cover for her–has no choice. It’s Day 1 and all will be forgotten. Ces’t La Vie partner. Price of doing business.

The bingo has been short-circuited after the disruption. Lord Duncan is guzzling wine with the agent. Andrea approaches.

“Are you some kind of somebody?” she asks.

“I’m the jester at this here party,” says the Lord, “apparently.”

“Are you in the tubing industry,” she asks, innocently.

“Good god no, I give speeches for a living.”

“Speeches about what?”

“Well, about being me dear. I talk about being me.”

“He’s the best in the business, and they treat him like this,” says the agent. “It’s intolerable.”

“Ginny is a little bent out of shape,” says the Lord, “there was a mix-up.”

“A mix-up or a muddle-up?” asks Andrea.

“Bit of both,” says the Lord. “Bit of both.”

to be continued…

Dedication: For all the Andrea’s out there who make life a little more interesting.

Posted on by

Andrea’s Travels, Part II: The Street Guy

Never ever been a blue calm sea/ I have always been a storm

Stevie Nicks

Dateline Seoul: Saturday Afternoon

Andrea gets off the second leg of the flight to Seoul around 14:30. She has quasi-slept, faded somewhere into her subconscious anyway, for an hour and a bit. Andrea is not a heavy explorer of her subconscious, more like she knows where it is. On the flight, up there under an ocean of ozone, black window spiders jousted with a velvet gloved countess and bunches of green grapes for supremacy of the space. That was all fine, she was essentially sober, Mr. Brown had been rendered comatose by hour one, and as she rolls into customs she feels, if not exactly happy, at least ready. Ready for the industry conference and its banalities, ready for the Lotte Hotel downtown with its wall of kimchi options at breakfast, ready, even, for a puleun or two. Maybe. We’ll just have to see.

The conference “event” is set to kick off at 8 Wednesday morning, and Andrea has no intention of being on time. Events, by and large, are well planned and poorly designed. They are programmed to run and be completed, and the narrative arc conception is, well, often bad. The Seoul event would be no different. “An event should be eventful,” someone once told her, and Andrea has held on to that guy like a tailsman. Also, sometimes when an event lacks eventfulness, well, you gotta inject a little of that yourself. She giggles at the thought; the possibilities were many. She got game, our girl. Watch the fuck out boys.

Dateline Seoul: Saturday, 22:47

Andrea is on the STREET. Can’t learn it in the office, gotta learn it on the STREET. Monsieur Puleun 1 is strolling with a feathered friend on the boulavard. Site of a protest from earlier in the day that Andrea missed. Another peanut tantrum? Korean scandels are unrivaled in their bizarre and byzantine nature. And, the assassin chick of the brother of the NK head dude wore an LOL shirt. So 2017. Check the video. Check the record/ check the guy’s track record. (Le) homo sapien sapiens, them’s bizarre. Puleun 1 sees Andrea; she sees him. Opportunity presents itself–Andrea, she needs a token, a takeaway, a reminder that she was here at all.  At the “event” site no doubt volunteers are cross-stressing before cross-dressing. She couldn’t care less—that’s all paid for by the company. Event spaces are super permeable. So is the puleun. Andrea swings into action.

“My friend, do you know how to get to Sungnyemun?”

“Yes I do. Go with me?”

Andrea pondered. On the one hand, well, you know. Street guy? Seriously? And on the other, well, she is on vacation. A. B, she has her needs. Not what you are thinking brother. Andrea’s needs are a little more, well, esoteric.

“For a little while. Let’s walk.” Andrea slips her arm under his and feels him thrill to her touch. Hooking, hooking is easy. She’s a natural, it’s pretty clear.

Sungnyemun is a no. Sungnyemun can wait. Andrea steers P1 toward the Lotte, before having second thoughts. That’s not the move girl, too predictable. Someone is always watching Mr. Mulder. She needs to re-frame.

“Let’s get a room,” says Andrea. Yes, it’s a high-level cliche, up there with “what’s your number,” and “baby, what’s your sign.” Cliched, therefore effective. The effect on P1 is immediate. Where, he asks? Right here, she says, pointing to a boutique environ that looms over the couple. An art hotel. Sure.

P1 pays with a card as the desk clerk smirks. I didn’t have to come to Maui, but then neither did you. Fast feel, he feels her material. Matters progress, fast. Bloodrush, bloodbuzz, and she is not immune. And yet, Andrea is playing a deeper game, the most dangerous one perhaps. Room ingress and second base. Time for her to make a move.

“Baby, I have to use the bathroom. Freshen up.” The meta-historical language of the female has a beauty all its own. Le floraison is off for our young suitor. Sorry pal. Hit the bricks.

But it’s not that simple. Andrea’s needs have been stimulated, not met. She emerges from the bathroom, face washed, mask of determination.

“Baby,” she says, “I need to go to the shop.”

“Room service will provide.”

“Room service is asleep at the wheel; I’ll be right back.”

Famous last words. Andrea carries a a tote bag–the remainder of her belongings are back at the Lotte. In the bag rests a white robe from the art hotel as well as a sampler of cosmetics from the bathroom. Not because she needs any of these items, more like, well, she wants them. She blows P-san an air kiss, the least she could do, a good trade. P1 collapses on the bed with a sigh. You get what you get P1; we won’t be seeing you again. With her would-be down for the count, Andrea takes a final, critical, step. She pockets the key, an actual metal object (!?!), and slides out the door. Now, remember the room is in his name. The robe, the robe is gone. As is the key. These are with Andrea. And Andrea is back at the Lotte in her PJs. Someone’s always paying for that banter baby.

Dedication: For the Street Guy. Sorry about that buddy.

to be continued…