Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s I: 7/20/26, the Unwritten Libretto.

Author’s Note:

Five days ago, I made what may prove to be the most important professional decision of my life.

For months—years really—I had been thinking about giving up my teaching career and becoming a full-time writer. I have talked to many of my family and friends about this and taken several small steps in this direction. I recently published a novel, have written and published hundreds of essays, and written almost every day for eighteen years. I have hundreds of pages of dream records, journals and letters, some sent and some only in draft form. I am hard at work on the sequel to my first novel, and am currently working on five books with many more in the making.

Over this time I have also become very good at making excuses. School is too busy. Life is complicated. The timing isn’t quite right. Next month. Next term. Next year. One day. It was all true, and yet it barely matters. A few days ago, I finally admitted what had been staring me in the face for a long time: if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to stop waiting for someone else to make that decision for me. Whether I eventually succeed or fail is almost beside the point. The decision itself changed something in me. I stopped thinking about the life I wished I had and started taking responsibility for the one I actually have.

Today wasn’t the happiest day of my life, nor the saddest. It wasn’t the day I got married, the day my son was born, the day I published my first book, or the day I realized my marriage was ending. Objectively speaking, it was an ordinary Monday in Osaka. I listened to music. I wandered the city. I shared dinner and my bed with a woman whose path happened to cross mine for a couple of hours before diverging forever. By tomorrow morning she would be somewhere else, and so would I. Yet somewhere between checking into a modest hotel, thinking about my future, and sitting alone quietly after she left, something finally clicked. My teaching career is rapidly coming to a close. The marriage that defined most of my adult life is over. The books I dream about haven’t been written yet. The cities I may someday call home are still only possibilities. The people who will matter most over the next twenty years are, at this moment, complete strangers.

For the first time since I was a young man, there is no obvious script. That realization is exhilarating. It is also terrifying. Most of all, it is deeply liberating.

So this seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

Epigraph:

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.

Anonymous

Anything could happen.

Bash and Pop

I: My General Situation As of Today

For the better part of thirty years, my life had possessed a remarkable amount of structure. I graduated from college. I moved to Japan. I found a teaching career almost by accident and stuck with it for a quarter of a century. I got married, and my wife and I bought a house together in Kyoto. We raised a wonderful son together who we both love more than words can say. We have paid bills, argued over groceries, worried about our dear dog Daisy, taken vacations when we could afford to, and slowly accumulated the ordinary rituals that eventually become a life. There were wonderful years and there were difficult ones, but there was almost always a next step waiting patiently in front of me. Whether I liked the script or not, there was a some kind of a script.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, it disappeared.

My marriage ended not with a single dramatic explosion but with the gradual realization that two decent people could simply reach the end of the road together. My teaching career, once the defining feature of my adult identity, began to quietly recede into the background. Friends scattered across countries and continents. My parents grew older. I turned fifty-two without feeling especially old, but with the unmistakable sense that I had entered the second half of whatever story remained.

It is a peculiar thing to discover that freedom and uncertainty are twins. For years I imagined freedom as something uncomplicated. Finish work. Write books. Travel. Meet interesting people. Drink coffee in strange cities. Listen to music until two in the morning. Wake up whenever I pleased. Answer to no one.

There is truth in that fantasy. There is another truth as well.

Freedom also means that no one hands you tomorrow. No institution is waiting to promote you. No family obligation automatically determines your next decision. No invisible current carries you downstream. Every meaningful choice becomes your responsibility. Every success belongs to you. Every failure belongs to you too.

That realization can feel less like opening a door than standing on the edge of a cliff. You can step forward. Or you can spend the rest of your life admiring the view. Five days before the evening you’re about to read about, I decided I was done standing still.

I wasn’t retiring, not yet anyway. I wasn’t exactly reinventing myself. I wasn’t chasing some impossible dream. I was simply acknowledging something that had probably been true for twenty years. I am a writer. I feel like I was born to be one. Whether anyone else eventually agrees is, in many ways, beside the point. The work itself has become the destination. Everything else—the cities, the books, the women, the music, the bars, the victories, the humiliations, the friendships, the failures—is simply material for my work.

This series is an attempt to pay attention to the contours of my daily life, in whatever form the may take. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, to trust that the story doesn’t need an outline before it begins.

II: Osaka

Osaka has always felt different to me than Kyoto.

Kyoto is the city where I built my adult life. It is where I have worked, and lived for more than twenty years with my life and son. It is where the mortgage was paid and our dog was walked, where ordinary afternoons quietly accumulated slowly into decades. I know its rhythms inside and out. I know which coffee shops open early, which bridges are worth crossing at sunset, and where to stand beside the Kamogawa when I need to remember that almost everything eventually passes.

Osaka has always been to me something else entirely.

It has never asked me to be responsible. When I come here, I feel somehow lighter. Less like a teacher. Less like a husband. Less like the man who spent twenty-four years inside the same corporate institution. Osaka has always given me permission to become, if only for a day or two, a slightly different version of myself. Not a better man or a worse one. Just someone with fewer expectations resting on his shoulders.

Perhaps every city we visit has a role to play in our lives. Kyoto has been my home. Tokyo has often been a dream. Singapore has long been my favorite escape. Osaka, though, has become my intermission. A place where I can step off the stage for a little while before the next act begins. A place to just get away.

This Monday afternoon I checked into a small APA Hotel not far from Shinsaibashi Station, which I affectionally call Mr. Shin. Like most APA hotels, it is clean, efficient, and just a little too compact. The room isn’t exactly designed for lingering. It is designed for sleeping, showering, and moving on. My suitcase for neatly against one wall. The desk is barely large enough for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The large television in front of my bed I will barely use. It suits my current mood perfectly.

I took a taxi to the hotel from Shin-Osaka Station and arrived around 7:30 PM. I dropped my overnight bag on the floor, drew the curtains apart, and looked out over another slice of Osaka. Nothing spectacular. Just traffic, apartment buildings, and the quiet machinery of a city getting on with its day.

I remember thinking how strange it felt to have absolutely nowhere I needed to be. No lesson to prepare. No meeting to attend. No papers to grade. No one waiting for me at all.

That realization no longer frightened me the way it once might have. It felt… spacious. There are moments in life when freedom announces itself with fireworks. This wasn’t one of them. It arrived almost silently. Like an empty afternoon. Like a city that has never asked me to explain myself. My hotel room is simple. It is what I can afford.

Outside, Osaka continued exactly as it always had. Inside, almost without me realizing it, the next stage of my life had already begun.

III: Meeting Yuki

I should flash back briefly here to introduce my date for the evening. There are evenings that require months of planning. This was not one of them.

The plan, such as it was, consisted of very little. Conversation. Sex. Cigarettes. Dinner. That was enough. As I stepped out of the taxi, I saw her standing quietly on the street.

She was slightly built, dressed in a simple black skirt, and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone accustomed to meeting complete strangers. There was no dramatic meeting, no cinematic slow motion, no instant thunderbolt. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and within a minute or two were walking side by side into the hotel through the warm Osaka evening as though we had agreed to meet as old friends rather than someone we had never laid eyes on before.

Her name was Yuki.

We went up to my room and made the sort of awkward conversation that strangers always make at first. Where are you from? Where do you live today? Had I been to Osaka often? Was I enjoying the summer?

Nothing remarkable. Which, in retrospect, was itself remarkable. There is something deeply comforting about ordinary conversation. For a little while, neither of us had to be anything more than two people just getting to know each other.

Eventually, because pretending otherwise would have been absurd, the reason we had met entered the conversation. She is thirty-six and works as an escort. I had hired her for the evening.

There is no point dressing those facts up in prettier language. They are neither the whole story nor something I feel any particular need to defend. They simply belong to it. Human lives are untidy. We make decisions for reasons that are sometimes noble, sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes impossible even to explain to ourselves. This was one of mine.

I went into the bathroom to wash up, took my clothes off, and hung them neatly on the hangers on the wall. By the time I came out of the bathroom she was naked too. That was what we were there for. I put on one of my favorite bands Whiskeytown, lay back on the bed for a few minutes, listened hard, and let the sweet sweet sounds of Ryan Adams’ voice wash over me. I was, briefly, in heaven.

Then, inevitably, we began to kiss. She is a smoker and tasted like stale tobacco and faintly like green peas. I am a smoker too so I am sure I tasted the same. She unwrapped one of the condoms that I had bought earlier for occasions just like this and began to pleasure me with her mouth. While I do enjoy oral sex to some extent, it is far from my favorite sexual act and I have never been able to cum this way. Not for lack of trying, I simply find that the women who have performed the act on me can never sufficiently been able to get their teeth out of the way. It is not their fault at all, but it is just that simple.

Soon enough, I asked her to climb on top of me. My penis was already erect and she was slick as well, and I entered her cleanly and easily. After a little while, we flipped around and began to engage in the missionary position. I was on the urge of cumming when I pulled out, turned over on my back, and finished my self off with two hands. Nine times out of ten I finish this way if I finish at all. After all, I know my own equipment better than else, so to speak. Before we began to have sex I put on some porn. I chose very quickly as we were on the clock. I selected some perfectly nun priest porn, totally chalk. Of course we both barely watched it as our eyes were mostly closed. The moment I came I toweled off, shut off the porn, and immediately pressed play on the Whiskeytown video I had paused before sex.

Then a funny thing happened. During sex she had repeatedly asked me to turn down the porn and to shush in general. She said we were at a business hotel and that we were bothering the other guests. Although I love to be babied. I do not like to mothered at all. It is just not my thing, and I have written about this at some length here. I already knew that I would not book Yuki again, and this moment helped crystalize my decision. She is sweet and cool, and I am glad I met her for one night, however she is just not my jam. And also, nobody shushes my boy.

Anyway, she asked me to turn my music down. I just laughed and cranked it. Then she laughed too and the mood lifted and passed. Neither of us was yet in the mood for a shower, mostly because we were on the clock and by this point only had about 40 minutes left in our appointment. I did not feel like a round two, so I suggested we head down to the street to smoke for a smoke and then get a little dinner. Although we had less than an hour left and the hotel restaurant was a little busy, she agreed to have dinner with me.

We finished our cigarette and entered the first floor hotel restaurant. We sat down and briefly consulted the menu. The restaurant specializes in pasta, so I ordered tomato pasta with eggplant and she ordered the zucchini linguine. The food took a while to arrive, so halfway through the meal she asked for a doggie bag. I quickly finished my meal and we went upstairs so she could pack her bag.

The evening had never pretended to be anything it wasn’t. Neither of us confused it with romance. Neither of us imagined it was the beginning of some extraordinary love story. It was simply two lives crossing for a few hours before continuing in different directions. There is something quietly beautiful about that too.

Outside, Osaka was still very much alive. Trains rattled somewhere in the distance. Traffic rolled steadily beneath the hotel windows. Thousands of strangers were beginning nights that had nothing to do with ours. Ours, quietly and without complaint, was coming to an end.

I told her I was going to wash up for a minute. She said through the door that she had to leave. I said goodbye babes and she replied in the same fashion. When I came back out, she was already gone.

And I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.

IV: Coda

For most of my adult life, my future had always arrived with an outline. There was always another semester to teach. Another report to write. Another mortgage payment to make. Another family holiday to plan. Another school year waiting just over the horizon. Even when life became difficult, I almost always had a sense of what would come next. The details may change, but the broad shape of the story had already been sketched.

And now it hadn’t.

As I write this the marriage that defined nearly half my life has come to an end. My teaching career, after almost thirty years, is slowly coming to an end. My son is a grown man, trying his best making his own way in the world and earning his own money. My wife and I are immensely proud of him as well we should be. Our house of 19 years will soon belong to someone else. My life is rapidly becoming quite different and everything that had once seemed permanent has become part of the past.

This all may sound just a bit sad. Some of it may be, sure. It also happens to be exhilarating. Tomorrow I might wake up in Kyoto. Next month I might find myself in Singapore. A year from now I may be living in Osaka. Anything could happen.

Perhaps I’ll write ten more books. Perhaps no one will read them. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Perhaps I won’t. There will be close friends I haven’t made yet. There are cities I have not yet wandered. There are songs I haven’t fallen in love with, thank god.

There are mistakes waiting patiently for me. There are joys I cannot yet possibly imagine. For the first time since I was in my early twenties, the next chapter of my life has not yet been written.

As I stood there in that little Osaka hotel room, listening to Whiskeytown waft through the room, I finally understood what life had trying to tell me for days.

My life hadn’t fallen apart. It had, in fact, opened up. And somewhere beyond everything I thought I knew, waiting patiently for me, was the unfinished libretto.

Dedication:

For Yuki. Thanks for a lovely evening. I’ll never see you again, babe. Go with God.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea II: The Thin Man’s Son. CHAPTER 3: The Thin Man in Costa Rica

Matt texts the Thin Man before he has even fully decided to.

There is a kind of threshold in sending a message like that, where intention arrives slightly after action. The screen shows the name and then the words appear as if they were always going to exist.

Found her.

There is no immediate reply.

Matt goes to the hotel rooftop pool instead, because the body refuses to remain still when the mind is doing work it cannot complete. The city below is a port city, functional rather than beautiful, ships moving like punctuation marks across water that does not care about narrative.

He swims slowly. Not exercise. Just repetition. Something to keep him inside himself.

The Thin Man arrives without announcement.

Matt sees him later in the lobby, as if he has always been there and only now decided to become visible. There is nothing theatrical about his movement. He is dressed simply, unremarkable in a way that only becomes noticeable after you have already started paying attention.

They do not greet each other like friends. They never have. They greet each other like continuity.

Matt watches him cross the space and feels, not for the first time, that proximity to him changes the temperature of events.

LUCÍANA

The café is near the port, where the air carries salt and fuel in equal measure. Luciana arrives slightly early, not because she is nervous, but because she is efficient. She chooses a table where she can see the entrance without appearing to be watching it.

When Niko arrives, she recognizes him immediately, though recognition does not translate into welcome. Time has done what time does, which is soften edges without removing structure. He is older now, but not unfamiliar in the way she expects him to be unfamiliar.

They sit.

For a long moment, neither of them performs memory. When they finally speak, it is careful, almost formal. He asks about her life. She answers without inviting him into it. There is warmth in her tone, but it is bounded. Controlled.

She tells him about their son. He listens without interrupting.

“He is in Dubai,” she says after a time. “He is working in media. Content. Travel. He is doing well for himself.”

Niko nods once. No visible reaction beyond that. But something in the air shifts slightly, as if a long thread has been acknowledged without being pulled.

Luciana continues. She has a daughter now. A marriage. A life that has moved forward without apology. When Niko asks nothing more, and she is briefly grateful. Then she tells him, clearly and without cruelty, that this is not something she wants reopened.

He understands. He does not argue. He never argues with time.

MATT THOMAS AT THE HOTEL

I am still at the hotel when he returns. He does not look like a man who has just been refused something. He looks like a man who has confirmed a hypothesis and chosen not to act on it. There is a difference, and I am beginning to understand it.

I ask him if he saw her. He says yes.

I ask what she said. He does not answer immediately. Then he tells me about Dubai, about the son, about the fact that life has continued in a direction that does not require his permission.

I wait for more. There is no more.

That is when I realize how little I actually know about him, even now. Later that night, I finally ask the question I have been circling since Tokyo.

“What is your real name?”

He does not look surprised.

He never looks surprised.

He says he is from Georgia. That his name is Niko. That he was born in 1977.

Nothing more.

And somehow that is enough to change the entire shape of what I thought I was holding.

CODA — MATT THOMAS IN KOYTO

I am back in Kyoto, but I am not fully back in anything that resembles ordinary life. The school still exists. I still teach. I still perform the version of myself that can explain narrative voice to students who are mostly thinking about lunch. I have had readings now—one in Kyoto, one in Tokyo—and people are starting to treat me as if I might become something recognizable.

It does not go to my head. But the Thin Man does. He’s always there.

We talk on Signal in fragments. Nothing structured. No schedule. Just interruptions in time that feel more real than the rest of the day. I sit in shisha places after work and try to write, but what I am actually doing is waiting for the next message.

Book II is already taking shape in my head.

I am just not sure yet whether I am writing it is writing me.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Levels of Lucidity in Dreams: A Close Reading

Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara

Note: This piece was written for the Psiber Dreaming Conference offered by IASD in September 2018, under a strict word limit that forced a level of compression I don’t always allow myself. It draws on a series of lucid dreaming experiences to explore how we determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and why those determinations so often fail under pressure. Looking back, I’m less interested in the specific techniques of lucidity than in the broader question the paper circles: what happens when our usual markers of reality—stability, plausibility, even self-awareness—prove unreliable? The result is less a theory of dreaming than a compact record of trying to think clearly inside a system that continually revises its own ground.

Epigraph I:

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent.  That is my peculiarity.

—Carl Jung

Epigraph II:

The conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless. They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random {…} Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgement.

—Chuck Klosterman

Dream I: I awake in a warehouse.  The bed is against one wall–on the other is a thirty-foot mountain of cantaloupes.  I realize I am dreaming.  I get up and run my hands over the cantaloupes.  They feel absolutely real—as tangible as in life.  I remember that tangibility is not a viable reality test—I’ve made that mistake before.  Now fully lucid, I decide to levitate.  The room dissolves, and I float suspended somewhere in dense, colourless space.  Eventually, I feel the need to come back to earth but cannot locate it.  I feel something beneath me.  This is my bed, and I awake back in the warehouse, relieved yet exhilarated.  The cantaloupes are still there, however I don’t question them.  I just happen to live in a room full of fruit.  Moments later I awake again, this time in diurnal “reality.”

The most common dream experience is of waking from a dream we take to be real, only to understand that it was “just a dream.”  However, a subset of dreamers, probably more than we generally imagine, have experienced lucid dreams, dreams in which, to some degree, they are aware they are dreaming.  Lucid dreamers may also experience “false awakenings”[1]— the sensation of waking progressively through dream “levels.”  False awakenings can be disorienting (Robert Waggoner writes that after seven successive false awakenings he “would accept {…} any reality {…} as long as it stayed put”[2]), or sought after (Daniel Love and Keith Hearne have independently developed techniques to induce false awakenings[3]).  Regardless of the desirability of the experience, the existence of dream levels, far from a simple oddity, provides a potential window into massive metaphysical questions.   

First, we need to understand how dreamers use evidence to establish whether they are dreaming or awake.  

II: I am in a dreaming contest with another dreamer.  The contest begins and slimy amphibians begin to appear.  Some resemble frogs; others are in shapes that don’t exist in nature.  Their size varies from that of a pinky to that of a fist and they are very colourful.  I am not trying to dream them, rather they are spilling everywhere around my feet.  I sense this is a dream and check on the other dreamer.  He is standing to my right in empty space.  He looks just like me and hasn’t begun his dream. 

This dream is non-lucid at first and becomes lucid because of the bright color and absurd number of the amphibians.  An awareness beyond the dream senses a non-natural situation.  

III: I am picking out fruit at a fruit stand.  There are some huge avocados, almost too good looking.  I wonder if I am in a dream, and touch an avocado to check.  The one I choose is ripe and soft—I squeeze it a little.  There is no doubt that I am having a tactile experience, and I conclude I am not dreaming.  Of course, I am. 

Two dreams, two types of evidence.  In Dream II, I correctly identify the amphibians as anomalous, and become lucid.  In Dream III, my attempt to test the lifelikeness of the avocado as an indicator fails.  Simply put, realistic sensation is not sufficiently indicative of reality.  Love agrees: “we are not looking for a qualitative difference in how realistic the experience feels {…} we are {…} on the lookout for issues with stability and plausibility.”[4]  In Dream I, at first the huge pile of melons in my bedroom appears implausible and triggers lucidity; after moving up a dream level, my mind overrides the implausibility by “justifying”[5] the anomaly.  

Because we awake from sleep and dreams every morning, we are very familiar with the experience of awakening.  It is therefore unsurprising that when we wake inside a dream we accept the new reality as the waking world, even if it contains anomalous elements.  

IV: I am in a huge house where a large group of families on motorcycles arrive.  The families are making noise all night.  I realize I am dreaming and levitate over to the families.  Later I decide to wake up.  I ease myself out of bed, bumping my nose into an ironing board.  The room looks and feels exactly like my room.  I don’t recall the ironing board being there, but whatever.  Moments later I awake again—the situation is identical, only, the ironing board is gone.  I feel a pit in my stomach, wondering what is ultimately real.

Dream IV is a good example of how dream levels can become increasingly realistic as we move through them.  An ironing board in front of the bed is (for me) more plausible than a house full of bikers.  Dreams such as this beg the question of how we can ever be sure we are awake.  I have dreamt of getting up, walking to the front door, opening it, and emerging into the sunshine in my neighbourhood.  At every point, this dream felt entirely realistic with no anomalies.  After experiences like this, is it wholly unrealistic that we could dream an entire morning?  An entire day?

There are different ways to approach this kind of question.  The first is to use rigorous reality tests.[6]  Using reality tests after each fresh awakening can help us filter anomalies in what may be an increasingly realistic dream state. The second is to open ourselves to a wider set of questions.  Although space limitations make full exploration of these questions impossible, modern dreamers would do well to recall that throughout recorded history people have speculated on the meaning of the dream state and what it can tell us about space, time, life after death, and the nature of reality. 

As dreamers, we know that dreamtime behaves very differently than waking time.  Robert Moss distinguishes between Chronos (“linear time”) and Kairos (the “spacious now.”)  He writes that when Kairos operates in waking life, “ordinary time is {…} suspended or elastic,” and that the world can “quiver or shimmer.”[7]  Moss’ Kairos time sounds a great deal like dreamtime.  Jung in his memoir writes “our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity,”[8]  and “there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.”[9]  Jung makes multiple connections between dreams and life after death, suggesting that our waking world,

in which we are “conscious,” may in fact be a projection of a more “real” and permanent, even timeless, unconscious.[10] 

In the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, the yogi prepares for death through dreams and meditation, entering death consciously by releasing the bodily energy in such a way that the body partially or entirely dissolves into pure light.  This “rainbow body” is well-documented in Tibet and China, and cases of this phenomenon have been reported across multiple religious traditions.[11]  Finally, Moss connects dreams with the much discussed Many Worlds theory, as does, in popular culture, Richard Linklater. [12]

V:  I am among a large group of people on the top floor of a building.  We lie down on our backs and form bundles.  The molecular structure of these bundles begins to dissolve, we become lighter, then totally empty.  This process is dictated by a power outside of us which doesn’t speak.  Once empty, we have the choice to become anything we want.  I choose to become white light.  Suddenly I am transported through space in a burst of pure white light, my old body left entirely behind.  This is the most peaceful and thrilling feeling in the world.  Then, I am back into a new bundle, trying again to become empty.  I make progress, but it is hard and I am over-concentrating.  Progress ceases; I wake up. 

Although I have thought at length about dreams, I am a normal person with a normal job, dreaming anonymously night after night.  I don’t belong to a spiritual tradition, am not a yogi or a meditating hermit.  As a lucid dreamer, like many of us, I am self-taught.  While we anonymous dreamers are wise to suspend judgement about the particularities of a theory as mind-boggling as dreams as an interface to infinite parallel universes, it is perhaps not by chance that my dreams of ascending to a state of pure white light bear close resemblance to innumerable near-death experiences or the reported manifestations of a lifetime of dream yoga.  Although admittedly outside of our normal rational mode of apprehension, the experience of journeying through multiple dream levels, and the energy and amazement which often accompany these experiences, may point the way toward worlds far above, below, or beyond our own.  

Who are we in our trek through life?  Are we the maker, or the made?  The writer, or the page?  The actor, or the stage?  The happening, or the happened to?  Perhaps, our ability to exercise agency in the vastness of forever depends in part on learning to navigate levels of “reality,” however we encounter them.  Or, perhaps, journeying to the far side of the dream can bring us face to face with that which is actually dreaming us.

Bibliography

Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books, 1989.

Linklater, Richard, director. Slacker. Orion Classics, 1990.

Love, Daniel. Are you Dreaming? Enchanted Loom Publishing, 2013.

Moss, Robert. Sidewalk Oracles. New World Library, 2015.

Rinpoche, Gyalwai Nyugu.  “About Rainbow Body.” http://www.gyalwai-nyugu.com/about-rainbow-body/.  Accessed 24 July 2018.

Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Snow Lion Publications, 1998.

Thomas, Matthew.  “On Coming Through”: A New Meditation on Intention. https://craftfollowsconcept.com/2013/05/13/on-coming-through-statement-of-intent-on-the-approach-of-my-39th-birthday/#more-11. Accessed 24 July 2018.

Waggoner, Robert. Lucid Dreaming. Moment Point Press, 2009.

[1] Waggoner, 61

[2] ibid., 63

[3] Love, 131

[4] Love, 71

[5] Love cites “poor reasoning skills” as one common reason for failing to recognize dream signs and achieve lucidity.  Love, 73.

[6] Love, 78-79; Waggoner, 259.  (Wagonner uses the term “reality check” instead of “reality test.”)

[7] Moss, 49

[8] Jung, 300

[9] ibid., 304

[10] ibid., 324

[11] Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, 314; Gyalwai Nyugu Rinpoche

[12] Moss, 74-74; Linklater

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On Some Things I Find Interesting

New Note: This is a small, wandering piece built on a simple premise: sometimes the things that stay with us are not the major events, but the minor curiosities that resist tidy explanation. A fragment of stage patter at a concert, a puzzling culinary difference between similar cuisines, the myth and reality of hostel life, the vastly different speeds at which people work, the improvisational courage required to make friends quickly, and the strange cultural persistence of the San Diego Chicken — none of these form a grand thesis, yet each carries its own quiet fascination. On Some Things I Find Interesting is less an argument than a map of attention, a record of the small anomalies and unresolved moments that continue to hover in memory precisely because they never fully resolve themselves.

Note: This is our second “list” piece, following our minor piece on airports. I happen to like “minor” pieces in general, and this piece is dedicated to a reader who said her our airport piece was her “sneaky favorite.” Here, we will simply list a few things I find interesting. There is no particular connection between these items, other than that I am interested in them.

I. Bradford Cox’s Stage Patter at a Deerhunter Concert in Osaka

A few years ago I went to see the band Deerhunter play live in Osaka. The original show I had tickets to was canceled and I didn’t get a notification, so I trekked all the way into Osaka only to find this out. This worked out ok though because I took a picture of some girls in fairy costumes on the trip. Anyway, the show was rescheduled for a few months later and the tickets were still valid.

The frontman for Deerhunter is called Bradford Cox. His side project is called Atlas Sound. Deerhunter is not one of my very favorite bands, but they are pretty awesome. I had seen Deerhunter before at a weekend long event called “Hostess Club Weekender” in Tokyo, which sounds a little edgy but was really just a series of Saturday and Sunday events featuring a bunch of bands. (I also saw the band Mogwai at Hostess Club, a band I thought I liked, but the show was boring and they were kind of bad.) My favorite Deerhunter song is “T.H.M.” from 2013’s Monomania, however my favorite Cox song by far is “The Shakes” from his side project called Atlas Sound. The Shakes opens thusly:

Found money and fame/ but I found them really late

Uh huh. “The Shakes” is more than a sneaky favorite; it contains multitudes. In any case, the re-scheduled Deerhunter show was in January or something and I was excited to see them. They were the headliner, however unfortunately they had an inordinate number of opening bands and by the time Deerhunter took the stage they had like only 45 minutes until the venue had to close. Brief as the show may have been, Cox managed to build in quite a bit of between songs patter. I am a big fan of between songs patter, and wrote about this topic at length here and here.

The one piece of patter I remember from this show was when Cox addressed the issue of Japanese toilets. Now, without getting too graphic, most Japanese toilets these days have a built-in “washlet” which, true to its description, washes your sensitive areas with water after your business is done. Here is Cox on the subject (as I recall, more or less):

“I love your toilets here. In our hotel the toilet has a stream of water which cleans you up after you use it. As a gay man I have to say this is a great feature.”

Now, what was so interesting to me about this patter was not the content per se, which was fairly straightforward and only just a little risqué. What fascinated me was that Cox in various interviews in the American press had referred to himself as asexual. Cox suffers from a serious skin condition, as well as maybe some kind of eating disorder, is super thin and generally has a lot going on. He has been pretty open about all of this, including his supposed asexuality. However here he was in Japan, where maybe only a quarter or so of the audience understood enough English to fully understand what he was saying, identifying as a gay man.

Of course I was and am aware that people’s self-identification, sexual or otherwise, can fluctuate, however I don’t think this is what was going on. Rather, it is my supposition, unproven albeit, that Cox preferred to index his supposed asexuality in the American media for reasons of his own, however in Japan allowed himself to speak his truth as a gay man. Perhaps, as I like to imagine, he thought that no one in the crowd would notice this little slight of hand. In the immortal words of the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files, however, “someone is always paying attention, Mr. Mulder.” In this instance, I was paying attention. And I was interested.

II: The Difference Between North Indian Food and Nepalese Food

In Japan, at least, there are a good number of both North Indian and Nepalese restaurants. The North Indian restaurants, for my money, are, without exception, way better. This is because of one simple reason, Nepalese food, as prepared in Japan, is full of sugar.

There is nothing I want less at lunch than a bunch of fucking sugar. I understand of course that carbohydrates in general are full of sugar and all the rest, so I guess my position is that food already has more than enough sugar without adding more. However, Nepalese restaurants put excess sugar in the curry, and super extra sugar in the nan bread. Sugar is everywhere, and it leaves me feeling bloated and bad. North Indian restaurants do not seem to have this problem. These also feature nans and curries, however they are un-sugared and basically delicious.

Now, I do not wish to demean all Nepalese restaurants, nor indeed Nepali food culture in general as I have never been there. For all I know, Nepali restaurants in Japan just happen to add a bunch of sugar for some reason. But I doubt it. I suppose that somewhere on the North Indian plain there as you move north toward Nepal sugar factors more and more into the cuisine. To each their own, but I don’t like it. This whole matter is of interest to me.

Postscript: As I am now totally gluten-free, I won’t be eating any more nan bread, sugared or un-sugared. Bye bye nan baby.

III: Hostels

Hostels are interesting. I have only really stayed at a hostel once, on the South Island of New Zealand when I was checking out the New Zealand Alps. I don’t remember much about this trip, however the basic features of hostel stays were all in place: the shared room and concomitant lack of a private bathroom and shower, the slight anxiety about getting one’s stuff stolen, and the opposite sense of excitement that one might meet, say, a chick.

A few years ago my buddy Paul (he is actually Tall Paul, but there was already another Tall Paul in Kyoto who kind of owns the nickname) came to town and asked me to catch up. I said yes, and met him at his hostel near downtown. When I got there, he introduced me to two gorgeous and sophisticated Indian-American woman from California. They were his “hostel friends.” (Tall) Paul is a very good looking guy, and this incident confirmed for me what I already suspected, that hostel life could be exciting, even action packed. Me and Paul and the ladies went out on the town and had a great time. My takeaway was that hostels rock.

On the other hand, my buddy Doug checked out of his life and into some Russian hostel action for about six months or so a while back. His plan, as I first heard it, sounded quite romantic, however when he returned from this sojourn he informed me that hostel life was not all it was cracked up to be. Hostel life in Russia, it turns out, was pretty dreary. I had no difficulty believing this, and arrived at a more balanced picture of hostels as a result.

All in all, hostels are interesting, however I don’t think hostel life is for me.

IV: People’s Working Speeds

I have noticed that folks tend to work at very different speeds. I am a teacher, and these days the job of a teacher is basically split between i) teaching in the classroom; ii) working on the computer; iii) taking breaks. Teachers, generally speaking, have a lot of flexibility with break taking, which is nice. And classroom teaching is bounded by the bell, so that’s settled. Which leaves computer work.

Some teachers rip through their computer work in a matter of minutes and are able to move on to other pursuits, such as Wordle. The top-end version of this type of teacher are marvels of efficiency and manage to go home on time every day. Other teachers are super slow, and pick at stuff for days, weeks even. While I respect the fact that everyone has their own process, this is not my style at all. Then there are the teachers in the middle, including myself. These folks are neither hyper-efficient nor super-slow. Rather, they tend to procrastinate around for a bit before settling in to serious work, after which they crunch and get things done.

As an ambivert myself, I like to gather just enough information, Goldilocks style, to be dangerous before I do my computer work. I neither need nor want all the information, however I function best when I have a general “feel” for the landscape. This is just how I work—like I said, everyone’s different.

V: Making Friends Quickly

When I was in university I was trying to hang around some artsy chicks, and was lucky enough to know a few. One day I was hanging out with them and a few girls I didn’t know came over. One of them was called Nadine. These new girls were super cool, and Nadine in particular was so cool as to be a little intimidating. She was from Eastern Europe. I definitely wanted to hang out with Nadine, and sure enough she invited me, right away, to accompany them all somewhere. I hesitated, for some reason. Maybe I didn’t know the first rule of improvisational theater, which is “yes and…” Yes and means, basically, follow the person that goes before you. I would have followed Nadine pretty much anywhere, however I said “I don’t really know you guys,” I said. “Well,” she replied, “this is how you get to know us.”

(The Nadine incident confirms one aspect of my social relations. I’m a Gemini sun with Mars in Leo in my 10th house. I am, basically speaking, not afraid of people. At the same time, I must admit that there is a certain class of beautiful women whom were I to meet them it might take me a second or two to find my tounge. This would include Brit Marling, actress and creator of The OA, Emily Haines, lead singer of Metric, and Kristin Stewart, actress in Personal Shopper. Nadine was not quite in this stratosphere, however she was pretty close.)

Nadine was right of course; I just wasn’t used to making friends quite so quickly. I came to my senses and went with Nadine and the crew. That was a good move.

I find Nadine’s approach to new people fantastic. It can be a little risky to apply it all the time, but in general it’s a good starting point. Love ya Nadine baby.

VI: The San Diego Chicken

Americans of a certain age may remember the San Diego Chicken. The San Diego Chicken was everywhere. As I recall, the San Diego Chicken was originally a mascot for the San Diego Padres baseball team that would run and jump around on the dugout and stuff. What the connection between the Padres (named after the Catholic priests that ran missions into California back in the day) and the chicken was, I have no idea. Nonetheless, the chicken, over time, somehow transcended the role of mere baseball mascot and became an all- purpose mascot for all types of situations. The chicken, in fact, became the uber-mascot, the mascot of mascots if you will.

I have an exact image in my head of the chicken; essentially the chicken was just a dude with a bunch of yellow feathers and a chicken-esque head. The resemblance to a real chicken was decent, however as mentioned the San Diego Chicken was super yellow. Also, the San Diego Chicken was ugly. Like seriously. Nonetheless, the chicken was huge, and became a meme before anyone even knew what a meme was. Therefore, the chicken must have had something going on. The chicken had his own baseball cards; the chicken was everywhere. At the time I didn’t get the chicken at all, and basically still don’t. But as with a lot of topics, there may be something I’m missing. That’s why I find the chicken interesting to this day.

Dedication: For AC, who likes lists, even though this barely is one.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also use the list format.

On Some Airports
People and Things That Suck: A List