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

On the Concept of “Role Drift” in Laud Humphrey’s The Tearoom Trade and the US Military and Paul the Apostle

Note: This piece is a wide-ranging meditation on Laud Humphreys’ notion of “role drift” in his book The Tearoom Trade, drawn outward into unexpected but structurally suggestive parallels with the historical conversion the Apostle Paul and lived military hierarchy through an interview with an ex-US solider. Beginning from Humphreys’ account of observational immersion and the tendency for participants and observers alike to “go over” through sustained proximity, the piece tracks how identity can be reshaped by exposure to institutional logics and repeated social frames. A military anecdote from the First Gulf War anchors the theory in lived experience, while the figure of Paul becomes an extreme historical case of allegiance reversal that tests the limits of the model. The result is a speculative sociology of affiliation and transformation, where roles are not merely performed but slowly internalized until the boundary between observer and participant, or “they” and “we,” begins to dissolve.

Epigraph:

I believe in this/ and it’s been tested by research/ that he who fucks nuns/ will later join the church.

The Clash

This post takes up that sexiest of subjects, “role-drift.”  In this post I will connect Laud Humphreys’ investigation of “the Tearoom Trade,” that is, casual homosexual encounters in public toilets, the initiation process in the United States military, and the conversion of Paul the Apostle.  Those easily offended by sociological explanations of religion, of sexual preference, or of the comradeship among soldiers should cease reading immediately.

Recently, I finished reading a book–which, as my next post will detail, is a somewhat rare occurrence.  The book was Laud Humphreys’ “The Tearoom Trade,” published in 1970.  It concerns men hooking up with other men, usually strangers, in the public restroom facilities in St. Louis, and it is an eye-opening read.  The blurb on the book jacket pretty much tells the story: “Many American men seek impersonal sex in public restrooms.  Called ‘tearooms’ in the argot of the homosexual subculture, these restrooms are accessible to and easily recognized by those who wish to engage in anonymous sexual encounters {…} By passing as deviant, the author was able to engage in systematic observations of homosexual acts in public settings.  Methodologists will be interested {…} in this unusual application of participant-observation strategies.”  Indeed, methodologists everywhere, I can say without hesitation, were and are all ears.  But the odd thing is that Humphreys, married and purportedly straight when he conducted his research, later divorced his wife and came out as gay.

Now, it may not be considered particularly odd that someone, sociologist or no, who spends several months or years in public toilets observing “insertors” and “insertees” would himself come out eventually, and Humphreys’ persistent use of “us” and “we” to refer to the denizens of the restrooms of St. Louis appears, in retrospect, to be something of a “tell.”  Consider, for instance, sentences such as the following: “when a group of us were locked in a restroom and attacked by several youths, we spoke in defense and out of fear {…} This event ruptured the reserve among us and resulted in a series of conversations among those who shared this adventure for several days afterward” (12), and several other similar uses of plural pronouns.  (It may be of interest here that Humphreys and his study of tearooms enjoyed a brief week in the sun a few years ago when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested in an airport bathroom stall for foot-tapping–Humphreys covered this topic as well, making clear that foot-tapping was, in 1970, a well-established method of making contact from stall to stall, and already in use by police decoys so many decades ago (20, 87).)

Indeed, the whole study is fascinating, and peppered with wonderfully matter-of-fact passages such as: “There is a great deal of difference in the volumes of homosexual activity that these accommodations shelter.  In some, one might wait for months before observing a deviant act.  In others, the volume approaches orgiastic dimensions.  One summer afternoon, for instance, I witnessed twenty acts of fellatio is the course of an hour while waiting out a thunderstorm in a tearoom.  For one who wishes to participate in (or study) such activity, the primary consideration is one of finding where the action is” (6) (alert readers will recognize the influence of Erving Goffman here; Goffman’s study of gambling establishments is titled “Where the Action Is”).  But the passage which really caught my attention deals with what Humphreys calls “role instability” or “role drift.”  He makes two major points; i) those who start out pitching tend to end up catching; “It appears that, during the career of any one participant, the role of insertor tends to be transposed into that of insertee” (55) (Humphreys attributes this tendency to “the aging crisis” common to tearoom participants); ii) “If {straights} remain exposed ‘too long’ to the action, they cease to operate as straights” (56).  Humphreys here is not referring to men who one day, by accident, may wander into an operational tearoom, but rather to members of the parks department or vice squad who, over time, may be exposed to a wider swath of tearoom activity.  Here is the key passage:

“When some communication continues to exist, parents tend to be ‘turned on’ by their pot-smoking offspring.  Spectators tend to be drawn into mob action, and kibitzers into card games.  Even police may adopt the roles they are assigned to eliminate:

‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at  any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance’” (Here, Humphreys is quoting from Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner from 1967.  My emphasis).

It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad they begin to ‘go over’. The moment I read this, having known of Humphreys’ own history before I read his book, I immediately recognized either a brilliant justification for future defection or an alternative, sociologically-based, theory for how sexual preference is formed.  After all, Humphreys himself spent several years researching and writing “The Tearoom Trade,” over which time he subjected himself to sufficient “action” to push him into shifting his primary allegiance, and to “go over.”  This theory, it goes without saying, flies in the face of the idea that sexual preference is genetic or established in the womb–and just as obviously it cannot explain all instances of same-sex attraction.  But, as a sociologically fascinating explanation for Humphreys own conversion, it remained in the back of my mind.

Several weeks later I was reading Robert Wright’s Atlantic article “One World, Under God,” about the relationship between religion and globalization.  Much of the article deals with the Apostle Paul, and I read something I had long known but never fully processed–Paul persecuted Christians right up until his conversion.  Here’s Wright: “The ‘Apostle Paul’ wasn’t one of Jesus’ 12 apostles.  Quite the opposite: after the Crucifixion he seems to have persecuted followers of Jesus.  According to the book of Acts, he was ‘ravaging the church by entering house after house: dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.’  But then, while on his way to treat Syrian followers of Jesus in this fashion, he underwent his ‘road to Damascus’ conversion.  He was blinded by the light and heard the voice of Jesus” (40).  The rest is history, of course, as Paul went on to establish ministries across the Near East, and, according to Wright, recast Jesus’ message as one of love and peace.  There are a couple of classic explanations for Paul’s conversion–first, as Wright says, that he heard the voice of Jesus or God and converted–simple enough.  Second, that Paul was epileptic and had a seizure in which he imagined he heard Jesus.  The first explanation is religious or mystical; the second medical.  But when I read this paragraph, the first thing I thought of was Humphreys–‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance.’” Had Paul spent too much time on the vice-squad exposed to this rogue new faith and fallen prone to “role-drift”?  This post is not a polemic, and I would not want to rule out religious, medical, or genetic explanations of human behavior–but the unifying thread excited me.

The general topic of role-drift has, in one form or another, been on my mind for several years, and I recently posted an extract of a conversation I had with my editor Dean Williams several years ago.  The narrow topic is how men in the military adapt to the culture–the wider topic is social adaptation and investment in an ideology over time.

===== =====

In the interview below “MT” is the author Matt Thomas and DW is Dean Williams, my editor, who served in the US military in the early 1990s during the First Gulf War.

MT: We’re here with U.S. army lieutenant Dean Williams, and he’s going to tell us a story from his military career. Dean, set the scene for us.

DW: OK, so I was a lieutenant back in the 19–early 90′s in Germany and there was an officer party. And a group of lieutenants, with me among them, we’re sitting next to a very famous general, his name was General Michael Kelly. And he was famous because he had become a one star general in a faster time than any other general in the signal corps. So we were very honored to be sitting there, and having a drink or two, with this kind of military celebrity.

MT: So you’d never talked to a one star general before in such a close setting?

DW: Yes, right, not a nice close setting. Not at a kind of a party where–he was being very open and honest with us, and we really got the sense that he had taken off his, kind of, stars, you know his general stars, he felt like more of a human being than is normally the case. And then I just, I felt this honesty and I felt it was a chance to tell him something that I had always felt in the last few years of being an officer and that was that you really got the sense that there was this vast, you know, impersonal, very powerful “they” that was above you; you had to do things, but “they” were up there controlling things, watching you, sometimes praising you, sometimes yelling at you, but they were there and you were here and there really wasn’t, there wasn’t much of a connection. And yet here was this general, he was part of the “they,” but here he was sitting right in front of us having a beer. And I said that to him; I said “so I really feel this gap between us so this is a good, you know, interesting chance,” and then I’ll never forget, he sat back and he put–he was smoking a cigar, by the way he was a very small man, like a lot of generals are…

MT: Were you smoking a cigar?

DW: No, I was not smoking a cigar ’cause I would have gotten sick, but he was a very small, but very dynamic and powerful guy, with piercing blue eyes, drinking his beer and just very animated and dynamic and energetic, and he leaned back and he actually put his cigar down, and he said “young lieutenant, let me tell you something,” he said “I’ve been in the army around thirty years, and I know exactly what you mean.” But he said, “and I went through as a lieutenant, in Vietnam, and did many many things, and I’ve done many field problems and solved many problems, and yelled and gotten yelled at, and in all my long career, as I went through, at some point, that “they” you speak of became a “we.” And now I feel that I am that “we.” And we were all very impressed with that, and I’ve never–I’ve forgotten many things from that evening; I’ve forgotten many things from the military…

MT: But not that? Not that moment?

DW: Yeah. It seems to me the most powerful statement of what it’s like to be part of an organization and to feel either powerless or have power…

MT: So what he meant is that over time, that you too would become part of that thing that you described as a “they,” you’d be part of it?

DW: Yeah…

MT: You would become it.

DW: You would, and as you spend time and invest in an organization, and as the organization gives you more power, more money, more reasons to stay, it doesn’t become–it gets nearer and nearer–it’s almost like some alien force but then it finally goes into you and you are part of it, actually, which is a very…at that time it was very positive. Now I’m more, I’m thinking was it positive or negative? For all of us.

===== =====

The vice-squad officer “goes over”

the straight becomes queer

the jailer of the faithful becomes an apostle of the faith

the hipster sells out

“every cheap hood makes a bargain with the world and ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”

the would-be uncommitted passive intellectual confronts the realization that action is ideology and the personal is political

the they becomes a we

the world turns, stays pretty much the same.

Dedication:

For Puritano

Note; If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also deal with my editor, the Souther Man and one and only Motherfucking Dean Williams.

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!
On Trying (and Failing) to Learn Go
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song Prince Hal’s Dirge: Confidence, Reformation, and the Politics of Self-Making

Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.

Epigraph:

Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Loudon Wainwright

This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.

In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And again:

So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better that my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.

Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.

Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.

The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:

Give me a capon
And some roguish companion,
A wench and a bottle of sack.
Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.

But Wainwright then pivots:

My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing
that I won’t amount to much.
But he’s not aware of my secret weapon.
I can count on myself in the clutch.

This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.

This continues in the song’s martial register:

Show me a breach,
I’ll once more unto it.
I’ll be ready for action any day.
I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous.
In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray.
I can drink you under twenty-five tables,
Fight and be a ladies man.
But all this will change,
When I’m good and ready,
To become the king of this land.

The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.

What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.

And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.

Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.

That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.

Dedication:

For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.

On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)
On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

WAYFARER: A PLAY

Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.

A Five-Act Play

EPIGRAPH

I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me
Sat back in a chair
Like a princess from a faraway place
Nobody’s nice
When you’re older your heart turns to ice

Mark Kozelek — Have You Forgotten

ACT I — THE WAYFARER

Scene 1 — Registration Desk (Threshold)

Lights: institutional white. Gradual warm shift beneath it, as if memory is already leaking into the space.

Sound: distant conference murmur. A faint, unresolved piano note.

A desk. A GATEKEEPER. A lanyard laid out like an object of passage.

MATT enters. Slightly lost. He has clearly been walking longer than intended.

GATEKEEPER
Name?

MATT hesitates. Reaches for something that is not yet ready.

MATT
Here. I think.

He presents credentials.

Stamp sound. Too loud for the space.

The badge is handed back.

CHORUS (from off, soft, not fully placed in space)
Arrival.
Conference.
Inn.
Story begins again.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside, not heard by others)
I thought I came to learn.

The badge feels heavier than it should.

Lights soften.

Scene 2 — Inn Common Room

Warm, slightly unreal hospitality lighting.

Tables. Cups. A space that feels both public and private but refuses to decide which.

ELODIE is present as if she has always been there.

MATT notices her immediately.

NARRATOR-MATT
Voltage.

ELODIE
Tea?

MATT
Yes. Thank you.

Beat. Nothing rushed.

CHORUS (slightly brighter, almost encouraging)
House lady.
Innkeeper.
Muse—

(a correction, quieter)
No. Person.

ELODIE does not acknowledge the Chorus.

Scene 3 — “Sing for Your Supper”

Sound: faint guitar motif. The room subtly shifts into performance space without fully becoming one.

CHORUS subtly rearranges space like memory editing.

MATT sings quietly:

MATT (singing fragment — The Clientele, “The Violet Hour”)
so that summer came and went
and I became cold
yeah I became cold

ELODIE listens. No visible transformation.

NARRATOR-MATT
Hospitality is not destiny.

The room remains unchanged.

Blackout.

ACT II — THE HOT ZONE

Scene 1 — The Casino

Green felt lighting. Rotating overhead spot.

CROUPIER replaces Gatekeeper.

CROUPIER
Place your bet.

MATT
Meaning.

CHORUS
Luck.
Chance.
Myth begins when odds are misread.

MATT places chip.

Sound: chip hits felt—final, sharp.

Scene 2 — Triptych (Three Trips)

Lighting pulses three times. Distinct beats.

MATT (low, repeating)
Three trips.
No more trips.

CHORUS fractures into three figures: GENIE / GHOST / MESSENGER.

NARRATOR-MATT
Inspiration gone.

GENIE (brief, playful)
First.

GHOST (slow, distant)
Memory.

MESSENGER (clear, neutral)
Transmission.

All fade.

Scene 3 — Jungle Confrontation

Green light. Reduced set. No realism.

MATT
Her.
Leave everything.
Frontman.
Practice.

ELODIE
No.

MATT
What is this?

ELODIE
Not your exorcism.

CHORUS
Brink.

Blackout.

ACT III — NAMING THE PATTERN

Scene 1 — Needy Boys

Two chairs. Neutral white light.

ELODIE
Don’t narrate me.

MATT pauses. This lands fully.

NARRATOR-MATT
I was writing her.

Silence.

Scene 2 — Chapel

Stillness. Breath-level sound only.

CHORUS (barely present)
Meaning.
Destiny.
Story.

NARRATOR-MATT
Room, not revelation.

Silence holds.

Scene 3 — Pattern Recognition

Lighting: subtle timeline shifts—memory flickers, not time travel.

NARRATOR-MATT
Senior year.
Again.

ELODIE
Your pattern is yours.

MATT
I see it.

CHORUS
First choice.

Blackout.

ACT IV — RELEASE

Scene 1 — The Offer

Dusk light.

MATT
Part-time.
Scout.
Not jungle.

ELODIE
Boundaries are kindness.

Scene 2 — The Pivot

Warm domestic light replaces earlier symbolic tones.

MATT
Family.
Music.
Life.

CHORUS
Myth.
Escape.
Hero.

MATT
No.

Silence holds. No response from Chorus.

Scene 3 — Chorus Dissolves

Lighting: references dim one by one.

CHORUS removes masks.

NARRATOR-MATT
The story stayed.
The spell lifted.

Blackout.

ACT V — OXFORD CODE

Scene 1 — Gesture

Morning Oxford grey. Minimal space.

ELODIE
Take care.

MATT
You too.

Beat.

No escalation. No closure ritual.

Scene 2 — Benediction (Chapel Revisited)

Same chapel. Quieter now.

Sound: Arvo Pärt piano. Sparse. Non-declarative.

NARRATOR-MATT
Gratitude.

Silence. Breath.

MATT listens without narrating.

Scene 3 — Train

Sound: distant platform announcement. Train readiness.

Gatekeeper becomes CONDUCTOR.

CONDUCTOR
All aboard.

CHORUS
Run back.
Declare.
Confess.

MATT
No.

MATT boards train.

NARRATOR-MATT
The jungle is real.
The girl is real.
The story remains.

Beat.

NARRATOR-MATT (softer)
You think you’ve finished it. Then it comes back different.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside)
She knew more than I could say.

Train departs.

Lights fade with motion, not blackout.

FIN

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Scenes from Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

Note: This is Part VI of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV and Part V are available.

Epigraph:

They all come and peep through a hole in the wall
Keep the bastards guessing
He likes to take the long way home,
It’s another fine decision

Peter Jefferies

I spent a full academic year, the second semester of my junior year and the first of my senior year, at The University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago is a pretty good university, but Dunedin is pretty small and kind of country. Overall, it was a good experience, but I was flat broke and not on a meal plan due to an oversight by I guess myself and my parents. More on that later.

After I landed, I spent one night at a hotel and bought a bottle of wine, for the first time in my life. I was of legal drinking age in New Zealand. I drank about three-quarters of it and was a little hungover the next day. At Hamilton people did not drink wine.

The first few days I was on a homestay in the country with a sheep farming family. The father spent the day watching cricket, and then would rouse and take the sheep out and move them around, with sheepdogs and all. I remember going to a local pub with two of his sons and their friends and we had five or six beers and they drove home. On the drive home they tried to run over rabbits on the road, and roared with delight when they got close. That was a scene.

Then, I went back to Dunedin, and met my roommates who were all in graduate school studying to be teachers. These were Tim, Ho (who was of Maori descent), Sharlene, and Donna. Tim was a musician and there was a large piano in his room. The roommates were good folks, however I think I disappointed them a little because they asked for an American roommate and were apparently expecting someone really flamboyant and loud. I was not that, and kept to myself much of the year. One time though that I lived up to their expectations was when Tim once again said “you’re from Washington D.C.” and I said “I’m not from fucking Washington D.C., I told you before I’m from Washington State!” Tim said to the roommates, “I told you rooming with an American would be fun.”

There were a number of other exchange students from the U.S. there and I got to know some of them a bit at first, but for some reason I was a little standoffish, and we didn’t hang out much after the first week or so. I was back into running, not smoking and barely drinking, although I did go out once with Ho and his Maori friends and got blasted. I would run 8-10 miles a day, sometimes more, and was in training for a marathon.

As I mentioned, my food situation was bad. We had neglected to put me on a meal plan, and I think my parents didn’t even know this, and at first I chipped in what I could to the communal roommate shopping. However, they ate very poor quality mutton all the time and I just couldn’t hack it. Mutton is pretty bad at the best of times, and cheap mutton is awful. So I went off the roommate plan and ate mostly trail mix for dinner. Trail mix, it turns out, is among the best value for money food around. I would buy raisins, peanuts, and carob chips and that’s what I ate at the flat. For lunch I would eat one apricot yoghurt bar and a cup of coffee, costing around $3.50 NZD. I would eat super slowly, taking about 45 minutes to finish the apricot bar and somehow this made me feel like I’d had a meal. I was living on about $7 NZD a day and was hungry all the time. With this and the running, I was also super thin.

At Otago I studied some more literature, and also a lot of Indian History, with a focus on Ghandi. I learned a great deal about Gandhi this year, and found him interesting. One incident I recall was in one class on Buddhism the professor assigned a paper on Zen. I had the bright idea to turn in an empty paper, which I thought would be symbolic, but the professor was a step ahead of me. “Don’t try and turn in an empty paper for this,” he said, “I’ve seen that move before.”

One more interesting thing that happened was when I was invited to the faculty club for drinks by my Australian literature professor. He was in his 60’s and was an Otago lifer. At first I was kind of flattered to be invited, however on arrival it was clear he had other motives. He started hitting on me in a most egregious manner, and it was obvious he had done this many, many times. I had two drinks and politely removed myself. To his credit this had no impact on how he treated me in class, and things went on as normal. I guess it was all par for the course.

The Otago campus was on the north side of town, and the south side was said to be pretty rough. “Don’t go down there,” I was told more than once, “it’s dangerous.” But I thought it couldn’t be that dangerous, so one day I walked down there by myself to check it out. There were a lot of industrial areas and such, and it was a little run-down, but I got home safe just fine. I suspected that “dangerous” in a New Zealand context might mean something a little different than in a U.S. context.

My roommate Sharlene had a friend who just had a breakup and Sharlene wanted us to get together. She invited us both to a party, and sure enough we started making out, under a table as I recall. It just lasted that one night, but Sharlene thought it was hilarious. “They were pashing,” she cried, “pashing away.” Pashing is apparently Kiwi slang for kissing, or maybe it was a Sharlene original.

Sharlene had a stepfather and I visited his house once. He had a nice car and complained on and on about how many tickets he would get from traffic cameras. Traffic cameras were on the scene in 1995. This appeared to be his only topic. He should have driven more carefully.

After the pashing incident, there was another girl who was interested in me. I forget her name, but it started with an M. M. was really into me, maybe because I read a lot and so did she. There was a kind of club place for students with TVs (I remember watching the O.J. Simpson car chase there), and I would hang out there. M. would come in and lob a snickers bar from over my shoulder for me and buy me a coke. This was really nice and super helpful because I needed all the calories I could get. M. wanted to get together, but I wasn’t into it. We did spend a fair amount of time together, at the club and going to the bookstore with another friend of hers.

As I mentioned, I was in good running shape this year and actually went out for a marathon. I was doing great through the first half, but started to fade really bad around the 20 mile mark. I had terrible blisters and pulled my groin and couldn’t imagine doing another 6 miles, so I pulled up. I asked a couple with a car for a ride to the finish line where there were buses, and they gave it to me but made it clear they were not impressed with me packing it in. I wasn’t impressed with myself either, but marathons hurt like hell.

In addition to running, and starving, I also went out for Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and I was already well on my way to my Asian Studies minor and was getting into all things Asian. Aikido was taught by a white couple, and this was their life. They were ok teachers, but the atmosphere was just a little culty. Despite my father’s fears, I have never been amenable to cults-like scenes. I stuck with it for a number of months however, and managed to get my first belt.

I don’t remember listening to a lot of music that year because I don’t think I had a stereo in my room, however, one day on the radio I did hear a song I immediately fell in love with. This was “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” by a Dunedin artist called Peter Jefferies. It was spooky and weird and totally captivating. Cat Power would later cover it, and lines from this song serve as the epigraph for this piece.

One more thing that happened this year was that Jenny from Hamilton visited. I don’t think she came specifically to see me, but I’m not sure. I was traveling, with god knows what money, in the New Zealand Alps which are on the South Island there and are really lovely. Jenny and I stayed at a hostel, and hung out which was really cool. That’s the same trip when I went for a walk in deep snow and almost died when the snow suddenly came up to my neck. Deep snow is almost as dangerous as the ocean, it turns out.

Those are my memories of New Zealand. Despite being so broke I had to eat a 45 minute apricot bar, it was a good year and I got really good grades. My academic focus would fall off, however, when I got back to Hamilton, but that’s a story for the next post.

Dedication:

For apricot bars and trail mix. You literally saved my life.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from Hamilton College IV: Sophomore Year II: The Sports Show, Ann, Getting Fired

Note: This is Part IV of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II and Part III are available. This post will take up my friendship with Ann, the Sports Show John Innes and friends had, and losing my job at the print short.

I was living in the delta
Wasting most of my time

Car Seat Headrest

I mentioned in Part III that I was on a sports talk show on the college radio station, WHCL. This was called Sports Corner. John Innes was the leader; it was his show. A friend of ours called Jeff Kingsley was on the show, as well as myself. Kingsley was a huge Buffalo Bills fan, and he stayed on top of the sports news, especially the NFL. Innes was always super prepared, and taped the shows which he would later play for his dad when we got back to Washington State. I sort of kept up with the sports scene, but I was mostly there for comic relief. I would crack jokes and make fun of stuff, but was definitely the third banana on the show.

The radio station didn’t have a lot of bandwidth so the listeners were mostly on campus and Clinton locals, but I recall Sports Corner having a number of regular listeners who would call in. From my point of view, the callers were the best part of the show. We treasured our listeners and gave them plenty of airtime. I never told any of them to “cold compress ma’am.” I was a regular as a sophomore and the first half of junior year until I went abroad to New Zealand. When I came back as a senior I think I just guested. I remember one show where Innes asked me what kind of sports were big in New Zealand. I said “marbles, marbles are really big.” I was just fucking around, but it was pretty funny. Although I was only marginally prepared, Sports Corner was a blast and Innes was a great host. He totally could have done it professionally.

I also talked in Part III about Ann. Ann was Ian’s girlfriend sophomore year, and I got to know her pretty well. Ann sort of took over where Rochelle left off in the mothering department, but she was really different from Rochelle. More intense. Ann didn’t like smoking and she tried to stop me from doing so, to no effect. I remember once, I think it was junior year actually, where at a dorm party she grabbed my cigarette from me and threw it out the window. I just shrugged and lit another one.

If Ann was intense, she thought I was. Innes and Ann and I were hanging out once and Innes said “M.A. (that was my nickname at college) is the chillest guy I know,” and Ann replied “I think he is the most intense.” Well, someone will maybe eventually get to the bottom of that one. One day I dropped by Ann’s room and there was a big jigsaw puzzle partially done. I started picking at it, and she stopped me. “That’s for me and Ian,” she said. Must have been some puzzle. Another time I went to Ann’s house with Ian and she tried, I guess, to pair me up with one of her friends. This wasn’t going to take, but we all did sleep, clothed, in the same bed that night. I don’t think I got a lot of sleep.

While some friends came and went at Hamilton, Ann I was close to sophomore, junior and senior year. After graduation she moved to the U.K. for a bit. I wrote about this elsewhere and will reprint it here.

“My friend Ann from Hamilton College went to England after graduation and she and I exchanged a few letters, back when people still wrote letters. She wrote me that she was drinking some, so I wrote a poem about my image of her over there. The original poem had two or three more verses, but they were terrible. Then a little while back I reconnected with Ann, which was great, and re-worked the poem, which wasn’t. It might have been a little better, but it was still bad. These two stanzas, on the other hand, are awesome, and maybe that’s all there ever needs to be said about Ann in England, you know?” Here is that poem fragment:

Ann belle princess of the isles
the orbs whisper your name even if you’ve gotten piles
or if you’re on the game

Buxom barmaid or bellicose barfly
begs the inevitable question
booze improves the poet’s eye. but ruins her digestion

I still like it.

Ann has read some of this blog, and even contributed a piece as a guest writer, which is not currently live.

The other big event sophomore year was when Deb fired me. I mentioned that as a freshman I skipped work some, and the next year this pattern was exacerbated. I still had no money, however work was becoming really tough. This was not Deb and Sally’s fault at all–I just couldn’t hack walking all the way up the hill just to collate. Instead, I spent time in the woods jumping off little cliffs and messing around in the late afternoon. No hard feelings; looking back I should have done things differently. I don’t remember exactly when I was fired, but I think it was about two thirds of the way through the year.

That’s it–this is a short one. There are a bunch of other things that may have happened this year or the next, so I’ll cover some of these in my upcoming junior year pieces.

Dedication: For Ann, the belle princess.

to be continued…

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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…

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On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

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

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

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

Matt

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On it, Pete

Note: Some stories get better in the telling. This one doesn’t need to. It arrives fully formed—one line, perfectly placed—and has stayed that way ever since. I’ve told it for years and it still lands exactly the same. No embellishment required.

It’s September, 1989.

Two new teachers had just arrived at St. George’s School in Spokane, WA. These are Paul Hogan and Pete Aiken. Paul would go on to have a long and distinguished career, eventually becoming Principal of Jesuit High School in Portland—a major job, the kind that makes a life. I have no idea where Pete is today.

That night, my dad Ross invited them over to the house for dinner. It was one of those late-summer evenings that still carried a little warmth but hinted at the coming turn. Ross was out back at the grill, working over the barbecue with a beer in hand. The adults clustered nearby, talking, drinking, getting to know the new arrivals. There was that particular tone of adult conversation—half-professional, half-social, everyone just slightly aware of roles and impressions.

Out in the yard, it was just the three of us: Pat, Mike, and me. We were playing catch with a tennis ball. Nothing serious. Just throwing it around, loose, casual, the way kids do when the game isn’t really the point. At some point, either Mike or I made a bad throw. It sailed wide of Pat—too far, too high—and rolled past him.

A completely ordinary moment. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times in a backyard, in a summer, in a childhood.

Pat was six. He didn’t chase the ball. He didn’t complain. He didn’t turn to us. Instead, he turned—calmly, deliberately—and looked over at Pete Aiken, one of the brand-new teachers, a guest in our home, a man he had just met. And in a tone of quiet assurance, as if assigning responsibility in a meeting, he just said:

“On it, Pete.”

That was it. No smile. No wink. No awareness of what had just happened. The ball was recovered. The game went on. The adults kept talking. The evening continued. But something had shifted, just slightly, just enough.

Because in that moment, a six-year-old child had somehow crossed the boundary between worlds—between kids and adults, between play and work—and issued a line that did not belong to him, but fit him perfectly.

I don’t remember what happened next. I only remember that line. And I remember that we have been laughing about it ever since.

The On It Pete Blues (Pete’s POV)

I was new to the city, new shirt, new street,

Standing in a backyard trying hard to be discreet,

Ross on the grill and the talk running deep,

Just another first night—then I heard, “On it, Pete.”

I hadn’t been briefed, hadn’t learned the terrain,

Didn’t know the house or the shape of the game,

Just a beer in my hand, trying not to overreach,

Then a six-year-old turned and delegated to Pete.

Now I’ve worked in schools, I’ve handled my share,

Rooms full of noise, moments needing repair,

But nothing quite like that clean little feat—

Being calmly assigned by a kid in bare feet.

No panic, no pause, no doubt in his beat,

Just a glance and a nod—“On it, Pete.”

And the ball got found, and the night rolled on,

But I knew right then something strange had gone on—

In a yard full of voices, one line cut through the heat:

I wasn’t just visiting.

I was on it.

Pete.

Dedication:

For my brother Pat. And for Pete. Just get on it already baby.

Note: If you liked this story you may also like the stories below, which also cover my time at St. George’s High School.

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