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.
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.
So I called you a cab and they called you a hearse, and I knew what they were talking about. — The Mendoza Line, “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)”
Note: This piece pairs naturally with my recent essay On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl). Both pieces are about the small moments that hold us together when we are breaking apart. You can read that piece here.
By 2012 I finally understood what I had been circling back in 2008 without fully naming: the business hotel wasn’t just a neutral space — it was a controlled dissociation chamber. A place where my mind could flatten without collapsing. A room where the world muted itself into CNN-colored soft focus, where time thinned out, where nothing asked anything of me. I didn’t know it then, but all those mid-range rooms — the bland art, the sealed windows, the gentle hum of an air conditioner tuned to the exact frequency of psychic anesthesia — were teaching me a skill I would need later: how to disappear just long enough to come back intact.
So when the pressure finally broke, when I had been working thirty straight thirteen-hour days and felt myself sliding toward the edge of something unnamed, I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, checked into a business hotel, turned my phone off, and told the world — or most of it — to fuck off for thirty-six hours. And the shocking thing wasn’t that it worked. The shocking thing was realizing I had been preparing for it years earlier, in those identical rooms where the towels were always clean, the windows always closed, and 9-ball was always on.
So I ducked into the nearest konbini and bought a latte from the machine — the one small ritual that still made sense. The warm cup in my hand steadied me just enough to get through the turnstiles. Kyoto Station felt too bright, too full of intersecting lives and needs, the air full of other people’s urgency. I didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb anyone else’s story; I barely had enough for my own. All I knew was that the next Shinkansen to Tokyo was leaving in eleven minutes, and if I didn’t get on it, something in me would snap in a way I wouldn’t be able to walk back. The latte was cooling fast, my hands were shaking, and every part of my body was saying the same thing: Go. Now. Before you say yes to one more thing you don’t have the energy to carry.
Once the room was arranged — bag on the stand, shoes lined up by the door, Pocari Sweat sweating slightly on the desk next to the bottle of red — my whole system downshifted into something like relief. Not joy. Not peace. Just the quiet recognition that, for the next thirty-six hours, my time belonged to me and no one else. I didn’t have to speak. I didn’t have to answer. I didn’t have to hold anything together. All I needed to do was sit on the bed, take a long drink of Pocari, a short drink of wine, and let my body loosen by degrees. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was just freedom in the smallest, most essential sense: I get to be here, in this room, alone, and the world can wait.
After the first wave of relief, the question always arrived: Do I go out?
Tokyo was right there.
Akasaka-Mitsuke humming five floors beneath me, restaurants lit up like little stages, the crossing full of men in suits walking fast enough to convince you they knew exactly where they were going. I never did. So I’d sit on the bed and pull up the map — not to plan, but to orient. Izakaya here, ramen there, a bar tucked down some side street with red lanterns and a name I couldn’t pronounce. Nothing fancy. Nothing difficult. Just food, warmth, and maybe one drink that wasn’t red wine from a convenience store. I wasn’t looking for a night out. I was looking for simple movement, the kind that doesn’t require performance or decision-making. A walk, a meal, a seat at a counter. A single beer poured by someone who didn’t know my name and didn’t need to. That was the whole question every time: stay in the bubble, or slip into the Tokyo night just long enough to remember I was a person.
Stepping out into Akasaka-Mitsuke wasn’t lonely — it was liberating. The air felt different the second the sliding doors breathed me out into the crosswalk light. I wasn’t hiding from anyone. I wasn’t avoiding anything. I was simply off the clock in a way that almost never happened in my real life. No one knew where I was, and for the first time in weeks, that fact didn’t carry a threat or a stain of guilt. It felt clean. It felt earned. I wasn’t missing; I was saving my own damn life by giving it a night without responsibility. The freedom wasn’t dramatic. It was simply this: I could walk in any direction, and every direction was allowed.
Out in the Akasaka night, I felt like the version of myself that gets buried under work and obligation — the real me, the one who just wants to wander and see who’s out, what’s open, what energy the city is holding. I wasn’t searching for anything dramatic. I wasn’t looking for revelation or escape. I was just checking things out — the izakaya with the red lantern, the alley with the quiet bar, the group of people laughing too loud on the corner. Dabbling. Moving lightly. Letting Tokyo show me whatever it wanted to show, without needing to make a night out of it. It was the simplest, purest freedom: explore until something feels right, and stop when it doesn’t.
I walked the Akasaka backstreets the way I always do when I’m in this mode — cutting down alleys, taking long cuts and shortcuts that don’t make geographic sense but feel right in my body. Tokyo is a city you navigate by instinct, not logic. You follow energy. You drift. You take the turn that looks interesting, then the one that feels safe, then the one that’s pulsing with life. Sometimes I’d follow the Google map to the place I thought I wanted to eat, only to walk past it and keep going. Other times I’d catch a glimpse of something through a noren curtain — warm light, the sound of laughter, a chef moving with the right kind of ease — and that would be the signal. It was never about the spot itself. It was about finding the right spot, the one that matched the night’s frequency. And over the course of the evening, I usually did both: follow the algorithm, then abandon it; trust the map, then trust myself.
Eventually I found the place — an oyster bar tucked behind one of those half-lit alleys where Akasaka feels a little European and a little dreamlike. Warm light, wood counter, the soft clatter of shells, and a chef who moved with the kind of quiet competence that settles you the moment you sit down. This was exactly my jam: an oyster platter arranged like a small geography, cold and briny and perfect, a bowl of clam chowder steaming in front of me, and a carafe of white wine that I poured slowly, deliberately, one glass at a time. Spendy, sure — but in this mode spendy isn’t excess. Spendy is permission. Spendy is dignity. Spendy is saying to yourself: I get to take my time with this. I get to have a meal that cares for me back. And in that moment, slurping an oyster with the city humming outside, I could feel the night open around me in the cleanest way.
The white wine hit me in that way good pairings do — not as a buzz, but as a reminder of how people take care of themselves when they’re not drowning. White wine and oysters belong together; everyone knows that, and sitting there I felt myself re-enter that understanding. The pairing wasn’t fancy. It was human. It was the kind of small, civilized pleasure most people allow themselves without thinking, and I’d been so buried under work and obligation that I’d forgotten what that felt like. The red I’d had earlier had already warmed me, softened the hard edges, and now the white layered over it, sharpening the night just enough to make everything shimmer. I was slightly buzzed and buzzing — not out of control, not hiding, just finally aligned with myself again.
I left the oyster bar with that warm, gentle buzz humming through me — the kind that makes Tokyo feel lit from within — and walked until I found the sort of place I always look for on these nights. A spendy cocktail bar: dim lights, bottles arranged like small works of art, a bartender in a crisp vest moving with that Japanese mix of precision and grace that makes you feel taken care of without being noticed. I took a high seat at the counter and ordered something I never drink in real life — a proper cocktail, layered, balanced, spendy. Spendy was the point. Spendy meant: I am worth slowing down for. Spendy meant: no one is waiting, no one is watching, no one needs anything from me. I sipped slowly, letting the night stretch out in front of me like a long exhale, feeling myself settle into the version of me that only Tokyo brings out — curious, quiet, open, free.
The bar I ended up in wasn’t some sleek Tokyo cocktail temple — it was better. Two bartenders from Nepal were working the counter, the kind of guys who’ve lived ten different lives before landing in Japan, commuting in from way out because Akasaka rent is a joke. We talked the way travelers talk when no one is trying to impress anyone — about where they were from, how far they lived, what Kathmandu feels like in winter. I wasn’t performing, just listening, rapping with them in that easy drift that happens when you’re slightly buzzed and buzzing in a foreign city. I ordered red wine — not more cocktails — because that was the right shape for the night, and when I finished my glass one of them poured me another, full to the brim, “for the gentleman.” It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t special treatment. It was the small grace of the night saying: You came to the right place. You came at the right time. And you’re not carrying anyone else’s weight right now.
When I stepped back out into the night after the second glass of wine, the whole neighborhood felt like it belonged to me. Not in a macho way, not in a performative way — just in that rare, private way where the city’s pace matches your own and you fall into step with its pulse. Akasaka was quiet but lit, humming but not crowded, and for five or six blocks I felt like I owned a slice of it. My slice. The alleys, the crosswalk glow, the last trains whispering underneath the city — all of it moved around me without touching me. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t disappearing. I was just walking back to my faded little hotel in a state of clean, earned sovereignty, knowing the world wasn’t tracking me for once. And for those fifteen minutes, Tokyo wasn’t a megacity. It was mine — exactly the size of the person I was in that moment.
Back in the room — my little faded Akasaka hideout five or six blocks from the bar — I didn’t overthink a thing. I drank more red wine, chased it with Pocari, stripped down to my boxers, and let my body fall exactly where it wanted to fall. There was nothing left to hold, nothing left to manage, nothing left to translate. I slept like a baby — a full, unbroken twelve hours, eleven to eleven — the kind of sleep that only arrives when you’ve been carrying too much for too long and finally set it all down in a room no one else can enter. No dreams, no interruptions, no alarms. Just the deep, uncomplicated sleep of someone who gave himself thirty-six hours of mercy and actually took them.
When I woke up around eleven, I felt clear-eyed and ready for more of exactly what the night had been—a continuation of me time. No urgency, no guilt, no one waiting on anything. Just hunger in my stomach and calm in my body. I didn’t rush. I stayed in the room for hours, drifting between the bed and the window, drinking instant coffee, sipping a little more Pocari, scrolling nothing, letting the quiet stretch. I could go out or stay in—either was fine. The whole point was that the day was mine to waste or spend however I wanted. After twelve hours of baby-level sleep, I wasn’t reborn—I was simply functional again. Hungry, steady, grounded, and free.
The next day I was set to return to Kyoto. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go — and the Thin Man cleans up quick. I showered, shaved, packed my bag with the same neat ritual I’d used the night before, and stepped back out into Akasaka like someone who had never been tired in the first place. Before heading to the station I picked up omiyage — the small gesture that makes the return feel seamless — something for the office, something for home. It wasn’t guilt; it was continuity. A way of saying: I left for a day and a half, and now I’m back in the world with all the edges smoothed. By the time I boarded the Shinkansen back to Kyoto, I was already shifting into IB mode — the coordinator, the problem-solver, the guy who keeps the whole thing moving. But now the engine was clean again. The reset had worked. Thirty-six hours alone in a faded Tokyo hotel, oysters, wine, a long sleep, a morning that belonged only to me — and suddenly I could re-enter at full tilt. Not as a martyr. Not as a runaway. Just as myself, restored enough to carry everything again.
Dedication:
For Akasaka — whoever designed that little slice of urban order also re-ordered my mind in the best possible way. Thanks there, baby.
New Note (2025): Since this piece was first published, Japanese Breakfast the band has gotten even bigger, Michelle Zauner wrote another book, and the cultural universe has shifted enough times that some aspects of this essay may be outdated. I’ve kept the original text intact because the dream-logic and breakfast-logic still stand.
I live in Kyoto, Japan, and after many years here I’ve traveled pretty widely—especially in the greater Tokyo area. Traveling in Japan is pretty easy as long as you can manage a little spoken Japanese and read a train map. The trains are famously efficient and connect most of the country, including every major city.
I haven’t driven a car here in more than fifteen years and don’t miss it at all. Trains and taxis get the job done just fine. Overall, I love traveling in Japan and I love exploring Tokyo, a city that contains worlds within worlds. I have almost no complaints about Japanese travel.
Except for one.
It is nearly impossible to get a good breakfast—or really any breakfast—when you’re on the road.
Now, it’s not that Japanese people don’t eat breakfast. They do. The archetypal morning meal—rice, miso soup, maybe a little fish—is as recognizable in its way as the “full English” of sausages and beans. But the Japanese breakfast is overwhelmingly a home operation. Once you’re traveling, the options narrow to two—two and a half, if we’re being generous.
I. The Hotel Breakfast
Mid-price and nicer hotels usually offer a breakfast buffet with “Japanese” (rice, miso, maybe grilled fish) and “Western” (toast, jam, and some ambivalent eggs) selections. Except at the truly top-tier hotels, these buffets manage to be both overpriced and bad. A traveler is lucky to escape for ¥1,500–¥1,800 (about fifteen dollars before the yen weakened), and more commonly pays north of ¥2,000 for a pretty uninspired spread.
Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.
In my experience, Japanese hotel breakfasts are among the weakest anywhere in the world. I take this as symptomatic of a broader truth: Japanese people simply don’t care about breakfast when they’re on the road—and maybe not all that much at home either.
II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast
When I have raised the issue of the lack of decent breakfast in Japan, Japanese people usually point me to the convenience store. And it’s true: you can purchase food and coffee at any of the ubiquitous combinis—Family Mart, 7/11, Daily, Lawson, and the rest. They’re open 24 hours, and they stock a range of items that theoretically qualify as breakfast. Hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, rice balls, steamed buns, fried chicken, sometimes bananas, and of course hot and cold coffee.
I’ve certainly been in situations where I had no choice but to fall back on the combini for breakfast while traveling. And this is…fine, to an extent. But most combinis have nowhere to actually sit and eat, and in any case you can’t really call a combini breakfast nice.
Most Japanese folks seem to regard a combini breakfast as perfectly acceptable—desirable even. And while one can admire the low expectations, or the cultural pragmatism behind them, it’s possible to admire those qualities and still wish for more.
III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop
Starbucks are fairly common in major cities and usually open at 7 a.m. (if you’re lucky) or, more commonly, 8 a.m. They should really open at 6. The food offerings are overpriced, and Starbucks has never truly figured out its food—which remains baffling. Still, one can grab a few combini items and smuggle them in, or settle for a four-dollar fragment of quiche with your Americano. I would not classify Starbucks as having breakfast, per se, but they are pleasant enough to sit in, and one can create a simulacrum of breakfast there.
Then there are the local coffee shops. These, fortunately, often open at 7 a.m. or even earlier, and serve strong coffee—often brewed by hand at the counter with a drip filter—and a breakfast that nearly always consists of a single piece of white toast and an egg. White toast, egg, and handmade coffee with old guys reading the paper around you is, I admit, at least an approximation of breakfast, and I have certainly relied on this setup while on the road.
But it’s still not quite what we are looking for if we want a hearty, balanced breakfast. There is no French toast, no fruit bowl, no omelette, and only very occasionally a strip of bacon. None of the staples one might reasonably expect from a decent, full breakfast.
And that’s more or less the list. You can also find 24-hour beef-bowl restaurants, but they are cheap as and not exactly the sort of thing you look forward to when greeting the day. Beyond that, most restaurants simply don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 for lunch. The concept of brunch—dicey even under ideal circumstances—barely exists outside the swankiest of upmarket hotels.
It is, put bluntly, really hard to find a proper breakfast in Japan unless you make it yourself. And that fact continues to puzzle me. I understand that most people here eat rice and miso at home, or grab something at the convenience store. Fine. But metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 30 million people. None of these 30 million want a real breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m.? Not even a few hundred thousand?
It seems incomprehensible. And yet, incomprehensible or not, this is simply the reality. There is no broad Japanese market for breakfast. I mean, I’m in the market—but apparently one man does not a demographic make.
Go figure.
Now, I’ve covered the issue of Japanese breakfast—its scarcity, its odd cultural positioning—to the best of my ability. But before we move on, I want to add a few details that may seem unrelated. Let’s see if we can get them to connect.
Because the truth is, I dream about getting breakfast in Japan. And in a surprising number of these dreams, the Trumpster shows up.
More precisely: the dreams focus on the fact that the Trumpster and I share a birthday (June 14th), which makes us both late Geminis. Late Geminis, I have good reason to believe, are uniquely dangerous and slippery. But in my dreams the Trumpster isn’t dangerous at all. He shows up as basically an empty suit.
Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:
I am at a breakfast buffet in Japan. This is at a hotel that I am not staying at, and I may indeed be attempting to crash the buffet while masquerading as a hotel guest. Trump is there with an entourage, and he sees me staking out the buffet. I make a comment to him that we are both late Gemini, and he nods, curtly but with some minimal consideration. He sees me trying to steal the breakfast, does not care, and would probably provide cover if it came to that. He and I are not aligned, but nor are we enemies.
Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:
I am outside in the morning, standing on a dock or something of that nature. I am looking for breakfast, and not finding it. There is a commotion above me to the east, and I realize that Trump is being rolled out, literally on like coaster wheels, for a speech. He is on some kind of sliding seat and when this seat hits the balcony he stands up and postures about like Mussolini. I am watching and he sees me watching, but continues with his Mussolini act. I realize quickly that this is a total act and that he doesn’t even want to be there. He is not dangerous in this moment or in this speech, just faintly ridiculous. Still, no breakfast.
=====
What do Trump and breakfast have to do with one another? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that Trump, although maligned by nearly everyone I know (I know a bunch of liberals), and apart from being an egotistical, mafia-adjacent, easily flattered, shape-shifting sociopath, is also pretty funny. Before I lose half of my readership, I’ll just nod to the comedian Shane Gillis, who made this point several months after Trump left office.
Has enough time passed that we can admit Trump was funny? Can we finally admit that he was funny? (…) He was funny (…) I saw it. I’d show my friends I’d say look at that. They’d be like “what?”
“It’s funny.”
“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”
I don’t know, during Hurricane Dorian he was like “maybe we should nuke it” (…) Like that was a real suggestion from the President (…) “Hey we got a big storm coming, you want me to blow it up?”
They were like “no, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I fuck around, it’s what I do,” is a great summary of Trump’s whole approach to governing. Now, is there anything funny about his terrible immigration policies, his attempted pressure of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 1800 votes, his total disregard of democratic norms? No, not really. But is there anything funny about his speculation that maybe a little light and a little bleach could cure COVID? Why yes, there is. Is there anything funny about his noting that Frederick Douglas is getting bigger and bigger these days? Yes indeed. Is the way he pronounces “huge” funny? It’s funny to me anyway. And in my dreams, the two above being part of a series of about four or five total Trump breakfast dreams, he always shows up as semi-defanged, basically neutered, and non-dangerous. I think this is because, as a fellow late Gemini, I kind of have Trump’s number. It takes a late Gemini to know one, and I know this guy. In fact, I see right through him, to the extent that I know he’s not even there.
One other salient piece of data, there is an indie rock band called Japanese Breakfast that is getting bigger and bigger these days (they tell me “sir, this Japanese Breakfast is getting bigger and bigger these days, and I say look at that, wow, this Japanese Breakfast is really getting huge”). I don’t know them that well, but they sound like the kind of band I would like. I do wonder though if their name is not an ironic nod to the fact that Japanese breakfast is not a thing. Is the band name self-effacing, or even self-erasing? Does Japanese Breakfast the band exist at all? Does Trump? There is a way in which the Trump presidential term has come to feel like a fever dream or collective delusion, a set of events that cannot really have occurred as we recall them. In this sense, the Trump presidency may in the future be subject to Phantom Time Hypothesis speculation. And he and his handlers have already played right into this speculation what with their first lady doubles, the totally unhinged press conferences with the ubiquitous helicopter waiting in the wings, and the classic Trumpism, “we’ll see what happens.”
Here is what I think. Japanese Breakfast as a band exists. The Trumpster exists, but his wife spent most of her time in the White House being doubled. Trump and I are dream doubles, and I have his number. Japanese people don’t care about breakfast. And I am always starving at around 9 AM when on the road in Japan. Someone should look into the matter. I hear the Trumpster is free these days, maybe he’s the guy for the job.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with American politics, albeit from a slightly different angle.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 