Note: This essay began with a memory from an IB Global Conference in Singapore sometime in the mid-2010s, when I first began to notice that large professional gatherings possess a kind of unofficial geography. The official conference—the keynote halls, breakout rooms, and printed program—forms only one map of the event. Running alongside it is a second map composed of bars, lobby couches, dinner tables, and long conversations that drift well past the scheduled sessions.
Years earlier I had written a short reflection on what I called unconferencing, the quiet relocation of intellectual “action” from the formal program to these improvised spaces around it. The present essay grows out of that earlier observation but shifts attention from theory to terrain. Rather than asking why unconferencing occurs, it asks where it tends to happen and how participants gradually learn to navigate those unofficial zones.
Readers interested in the conceptual background may wish to consult the earlier essay on unconferencing, which explores the phenomenon through the lens of Erving Goffman and the broader question of how individuals negotiate the locus of action within institutional environments.
As with many pieces on the Kibbitzer, the goal here is less to offer a definitive theory than to describe a pattern that, once noticed, becomes difficult to unsee. Conferences, like many human systems, operate simultaneously on two levels: the one announced in the program and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.
“The locus of action is always in motion.” — Erving Goffman
I arrived a day late to the conference.
This was in Singapore sometime around 2014 or 2015, at one of the IB Global Conferences for the Asia–Pacific region. The event was being held in a large glass hotel near the river, not far from Chinatown and just south of Raffles Place if memory serves. The keynote room alone seated something like eleven or twelve hundred people. The conference program was thick with panels, workshops, and presentations that began early in the morning and ran straight through the afternoon.
My suitcase had arrived before I had. I had been in China the day before running another IBEN training, and while the conference itself was already underway, I was still in transit. By the time I checked in and made my way downstairs, the official proceedings were well established: keynote speakers, crowded sessions, conference badges swinging from lanyards, the whole apparatus of professional gathering fully in motion.
At the time I was only about a year into my work with IBEN. My regional manager was Avi Nanda, who was excellent in many respects but not especially hard-charging as a networker. Gill Pressland, who later became a formidable presence in the region, was not yet in the picture. I knew a few people, most importantly Steve Keegan in Australia, who had become a kind of mentor to me. I also knew Ed Lawless, who had previously overseen a great deal of the professional development work in the region.
Ed had once joked to me, only half joking, that his job had become little more than “wedding planning.” Conferences, workshops, schedules, logistics—endless coordination. Eventually he burned out on it entirely and moved on, first to Pamoja, the online curriculum company, and later into a somewhat undefined role at an IB school in Tokyo that seemed to blend management, marketing, and development. Such trajectories are not uncommon in the IB ecosystem. People drift through roles that are part educational, part organizational, part entrepreneurial.
In any case, arriving late to the Singapore conference had the curious effect of placing me immediately at its margins rather than at its center. The keynote sessions were already underway, but instead of rushing directly into the large ballroom where most of the attendees were gathered, I began encountering people in the spaces just outside it: the lobby, the cafés, and eventually the hotel bars.
One of the first people I reconnected with was Darlene Fischer from Australia. Darlene was in her early sixties at the time and something of a force of nature. She had the sort of presence that made conversations reorganize themselves around her. Through Darlene I soon met two others who would become central figures in what I later came to think of as the conference’s unofficial inner circle: Sue Richards and Gerald Conlin.
Gerald was in his mid-sixties then, a slight man with white hair and an almost theatrical grin. His professional life consisted largely of consulting work connected to education programs, particularly the wave of hybrid master’s degrees in education that universities around the world had begun launching. Institutions like Tsukuba in Japan and Bath in the UK were building these programs, often with cohorts of twenty or so students, and Gerald had carved out a niche as the person who could authorize and evaluate them. He was also constantly presenting, constantly researching, constantly moving through the conference circuit.
Within about five minutes of meeting me he decided that I would make the perfect number two for his MA authorization work. It was flattering, though I suspected there might be additional motives behind his enthusiasm. Gerald was an openly and exuberantly gay man, and his warmth toward me carried a certain theatrical flair. He had a habit of calling me “my boy,” delegating tasks such as selecting restaurants or ordering drinks, and occasionally resting a hand on my upper thigh while speaking with great intensity about some educational development or other. None of this particularly disturbed me; conferences are full of strong personalities, and I was by then quite capable of navigating such dynamics.
Sue Richards, meanwhile, functioned as Gerald’s counterpart and amplifier. Where Gerald was slightly reserved and professorial, Sue was outgoing, energetic, and socially strategic. She worked directly for the IB at the time and moved easily through the conference environment, introducing Gerald before presentations, praising his work with extravagant enthusiasm, and generally acting as a kind of corner person for his professional persona. If Gerald was the fighter in the ring, Sue was the one shouting encouragement from the ropes.
The two of them formed a kind of traveling intellectual unit, and through them I began spending more time not in the conference sessions themselves but in the hotel’s bars and restaurants.
There were perhaps four or five of us in total who fell into this pattern. What struck me fairly quickly was that these individuals rarely attended the conference sessions unless they were running them. The keynote speeches, the panels, the carefully scheduled workshops—these seemed largely directed at newcomers or first-time attendees. The veterans, by contrast, moved through the conference in a completely different way.
They ran the unconference.
By this I mean something slightly more specific than simply skipping sessions. Years ago I wrote an essay about what I called “unconferencing,” referring to the parallel conference that emerges quietly around the official one. What interests me here is less the theory of unconferencing than its geography: the physical spaces through which these unofficial conversations travel.
At the Singapore conference, that geography quickly became clear.
There was the large ballroom where the official keynote addresses were delivered to more than a thousand people. But there were also the bars—two of them in particular—where smaller groups gathered throughout the afternoon and evening. There were the restaurant tables where dinner conversations stretched for hours. There were the lobby seating areas where people drifted in and out between sessions.
And there were the walks.
Within a day or two I began to see that the conference operated according to two distinct maps. The first map was the one printed in the program: rooms, times, speakers, sessions. The second map was entirely informal, emerging through patterns of conversation and social gravity.
The keynotes were for the newbies.
The action was at the bar and at dinner.
I was somewhat ambitious at that stage in my career, eager to establish myself in the region and become a respected trainer. Because of this ambition I paid close attention to where energy seemed to accumulate. It did not take long to realize that the most consequential conversations were happening far from the podium.
In the bars and restaurants people spoke more candidly about the IB, about institutional politics, about emerging programs, about who was doing interesting work and who was not. Opportunities were floated, collaborations proposed, rumors exchanged. Careers, in small ways, were advanced.
The official conference continued to run its scheduled course upstairs, but the real motion of the event—the circulation of ideas, alliances, and opportunities—took place elsewhere.
Seen in this light, conferences begin to resemble temporary cities with two overlapping infrastructures. The official infrastructure is highly visible: lecture halls, keynote rooms, printed programs, registration desks. The unofficial infrastructure is quieter and more fluid: bars, café tables, hallways, and late-night dinners.
Participants gradually learn to navigate both maps.
Some remain primarily within the official one, moving dutifully from session to session. Others develop an instinct for the second map, drifting toward the places where conversation gathers and where the boundaries between formal roles begin to loosen.
It is in these spaces that the unconference unfolds.
The term itself is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the phenomenon is real. Once a small group of experienced participants begins congregating in a particular location—usually a bar or restaurant—others start to appear. Conversations splinter and recombine. Someone joins for twenty minutes before leaving for dinner. Someone else arrives with news from another corner of the conference.
Over time the group becomes a kind of floating node within the larger event, a place where information circulates rapidly and where participants feel unusually free to explore ideas that might never make their way into a formal presentation.
In retrospect, what struck me most about that Singapore conference was not any particular keynote or panel discussion but the realization that conferences possess a strange and dynamic geography. Action is rarely confined to the places where organizers expect it to occur. Instead it migrates across the built environment of the event, settling temporarily wherever people feel the oxygen is richest.
The ballroom may host the official performance, but the bar hosts the conversation about what the performance actually means.
And so the conference proceeds along two parallel tracks: the one announced in the program, and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.
The unconferencers simply learn to follow the latter.
Dedication:
For all those who know how to find the action.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essays linked below, all of which also take up the fascinating theme of professional conferences.
Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?
What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.
The major episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.
In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery.
Epigraph:
“Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.”
Clyde Bruckman, The X-Files
The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.
That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.
To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.
Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.
The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.
Discovering the Show
I was an early adopter.
The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been perfect. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.
At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.
The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” although that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully was more skeptical. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.
The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.
Hovering over them was their boss, the enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s greatest pleasures.
In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.
The Smoking Man
Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.
The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.
He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.
It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.
Three Essential Episodes
Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.
The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.
The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.
The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, written by the great Darius Morgan. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance. It is Bruckman who also delivers the immortal line that also gives us our epigraph: “Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.” Run roh. Take that belt off Fox baby.
What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.
His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.
When the Mythology Expanded
Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.
But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.
At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.
Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.
Why It Still Matters
And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.
The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.
It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.
For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.
The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there
Dedication
For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.
Note: This essay gathers together several different periods of my life when money was tight and the margin for error was thin. Some of these moments go back many years, including a year abroad in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the University of Otago when a bureaucratic oversight left me without a meal plan for most of the academic year and forced me into a very basic daily routine of trail mix, apricot bars, and coffee. Others come from later phases of adulthood: early teaching years in Kumamoto, young family life in Kyoto’s Mukaijima district, the strange suspended months of COVID, and the present day.
I include these episodes not as a complaint but as a recognition of how common this experience actually is. Living paycheck to paycheck is often imagined as the result of bad choices or personal irresponsibility, yet in reality it is frequently the ordinary condition of people who are working hard, raising families, paying tuition bills, navigating institutional decisions, and simply trying to keep their lives moving forward.
The story of my friend Sergio Mandiola, included here with his blessing, illustrates another version of the same pattern. A long career in education, a series of institutional shifts, and one administrative decision were enough to push a once-stable life into years of financial improvisation before things slowly stabilized again.
What these experiences have taught me is less about money than about perspective. Hunger sharpens the mind, small kindnesses matter enormously, and the distance between stability and struggle is often much smaller than we imagine. For that reason, the real lesson of living paycheck to paycheck is not resentment but compassion.
Epigraph
Money won’t save your soul. — Tim Burgess
A lot of people talk about living paycheck to paycheck as if it were a kind of personal failure. A budgeting problem. A lack of discipline. A mistake someone somewhere made.
In reality it is something far more ordinary than that. It is simply the condition in which millions of people live their lives. Often quietly, often competently, and often without anyone around them quite realizing how narrow the margin really is.
I first learned that margin in Dunedin.
I was on exchange at the University of Otago and through a small bureaucratic mix-up I was not on the meal plan. I had no work visa and no savings. My parents sent twenty dollars here and there, but it took months before anyone realized the full situation.
So for nearly the entire academic year I developed a system.
Breakfast and dinner came from a large white bucket in my room: trail mix, carob chips, raisins, peanuts. Lunch every day was the same: one yoghurt-covered apricot bar and one black coffee at the campus canteen. NZ $3.50.
Day after day after day.
My roommates didn’t know. They just thought I hated the mutton they cooked every night. And to be fair, I did hate the mutton.
Every once in a while a friend named Maren would buy me a Snickers and a Coke at the student club and we would sit there watching the O.J. Simpson chase and the trial coverage on television. Those snacks felt like luxury.
After Dunedin, life improved but the margins never entirely disappeared.
In Kumamoto in 1997 I was earning about ¥250,000 a month teaching English at NOVA. It wasn’t a fortune but it was enough. I could go to the izakaya, drink Asahi, play pool, and date the woman who would later become my wife. It wasn’t abundance, but it was livable.
A few years later, from 2002 to 2004, my wife and I were living in a subsidized apartment in Mukaijima on the Kintetsu Line outside Kyoto. I was working part-time as a social studies teacher and earning roughly the same ¥230,000–250,000 a month. Our rent was only ¥40,000 thanks to her hospital job in Uji, Kyoto. The apartment had three large rooms, a kitchen, a genkan, and it was surprisingly well insulated.
Our son Hugh had just been born and wasn’t yet in daycare. My wife worked night shifts and often made more money than I did. We weren’t rich, but we made it work. And we were happy.
Then years later came another version of the same story. During COVID I took leave from work and drifted into a strange suspended routine. I spent most of my time in my room playing chess online, watching chess streamers, and talking on the phone. My peak rating reached about 1200, which I was absurdly proud of.
My expenses were minimal because my life had contracted. I only went out drinking with a friend named Philip maybe three times a month, usually to places like Takimiya’s, Stones, or Rub-a-Dub.
Things were precarious, but manageable. Barely. And then there is the present.
In January of 2024 I had roughly $60,000 in savings and no debt. My wife and I also had about $20,000 in gold and platinum and a couple of retirement plans. It looked, on paper at least, like stability.
But the final years of my son’s schooling at the University of Auckland slowly drained those savings. As I write this in March of 2026, at age fifty-one going on fifty-two, I have about $3,000 in the bank and another $3,000 on a Kyoto Bank credit card. My ANA card covers most day-to-day expenses, but that line of credit has been cut before and could disappear again at any time.
I am a professional educator with thirty-five years of experience. I am gainfully employed and reasonably skilled at what I do.
And yet the margin remains thin. But my story is hardly unique.
My friend Mandiola is sixty-three years old and has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He knows that city better than almost anyone I have ever met. His first job after high school was delivering maps for a map store, which meant driving all over the city and learning it street by street. Later he earned a degree from a University of California campus and became a high school teacher in the Beverly Hills public school system.
For a while things were stable. Then life intervened. Divorces, relocations, graduate school that never finished, and years of improvisation eventually brought him back to Los Angeles where he landed what he considered a dream job in an independent study program. He taught the children of show-business families and even got to know people like Larry King through the students he worked with.
He loved the work. He was his own boss and taught every subject except music. After school he played board games with the kids. He was, in his words, in hog heaven. Then a new administration arrived. He calls them the Chicago mafia. They decided he was too expensive and too independent. He was replaced, after years of conflict and legal battles, by what he describes as three bureaucratic drones. A $60,000 settlement kept him afloat for a while, but the money vanished quickly.
When I visited him in Los Angeles in March of 2024 he was essentially broke. He struggled to cover his mortgage, his association fees, his car insurance, and groceries at Trader Joe’s. He borrowed money from friends, from his mother, from anyone willing to help.
Eventually he pieced together work again through substitute teaching and tutoring. Today he earns about $4,100 a month and is just months away from retirement eligibility. Even now he occasionally borrows money. Not because he is irresponsible, but because life sometimes simply runs that way.
And that, in the end, is the point. Living paycheck to paycheck is not a moral failure. It is a structural reality for a huge portion of the population. Careers falter. Administrators make decisions. Tuition bills arrive. Children grow up. Systems fail. Life shifts. Hard times can strike almost anyone.
What those years taught me — from Dunedin to Kumamoto to Mukaijima to the strange suspended months of COVID and the present day — is how little we actually need to survive, how hunger sharpens the mind, and how enormously small acts of kindness can matter.
But most of all they taught me how close to the edge so many people really are. Which is why compassion is not optional. It is necessary. Now more than ever.
Dedication
For the middle and lower classes. For now and eternity.
Note: This essay is a reflection on the ideas of Julian Jaynes and his remarkable 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes’ theory—that human beings once experienced divine voices guiding their actions before the emergence of modern introspective consciousness—remains controversial and widely debated. The purpose of this essay is not to prove or disprove Jaynes’ neurological model but to explore the enduring power of the questions he raised.
In particular, I am interested in two aspects of Jaynes’ work that remain deeply suggestive: his interpretation of early literature such as the Iliad, where modern psychological interiority appears strangely absent, and his observations about how mobility—travelers, shepherds, merchants, and wanderers moving between cultures—may have destabilized older systems of divine authority. These figures, operating in uncertain cultural terrain, may have been among the first people forced into the improvisational reasoning that resembles modern consciousness.
The essay also touches on institutions like the Oracle of Delphi and on the persistence of voice phenomena in modern contexts, ranging from hypnagogic states and exhaustion to more troubling historical cases such as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan. These examples are not presented as proof of Jaynes’ theory but as reminders that the boundary between internal thought and perceived external command may be more complex than we sometimes assume.
Finally, the brief personal anecdote involving an MRI scan is included not as evidence but as illustration: a small modern echo of the ambiguous mental territory Jaynes explored. Moments in which voices seem to arise from somewhere between the inner and outer mind remain part of human experience.
Whether Jaynes was ultimately correct in his sweeping historical claims is still an open question. But his work continues to provoke a fascinating possibility: that consciousness itself has a history, and that the modern reflective self emerged gradually out of older forms of human experience.
If nothing else, Jaynes reminds us that the human mind is not a finished structure. It is something still unfolding—shaped by culture, language, movement, and time.
“She keeps coming closer saying I can feel it in my bones Schizophrenia is taking me home.” — Sonic Youth
There are certain books that never quite disappear. They do not settle comfortably into the academic canon, nor are they fully dismissed. They linger. They circulate quietly among curious readers, occasionally resurfacing in conversation decades after publication, as if waiting for another generation to discover them.
One such book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Its author, Julian Jaynes, was a psychologist who spent much of his career outside the central institutions of modern neuroscience. When the book appeared in 1976 it created an immediate sensation. Reviewers alternately described it as brilliant, bizarre, visionary, or simply impossible. The theory it proposed was breathtaking in scope. Jaynes suggested that the subjective, introspective consciousness modern people take for granted—the inner sense of “I,” the reflective voice narrating our own thoughts—was not an ancient human constant. It had emerged, he argued, only a few thousand years ago.
According to Jaynes, the minds of early civilizations functioned differently. People did not experience themselves as the authors of their own decisions. Instead they heard the voices of gods.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Commands issued in auditory form—voices that appeared to come from outside the self—guided action. These voices, Jaynes argued, were generated by one hemisphere of the brain and experienced by the other as divine instruction. He called this earlier mentality the bicameral mind.
The theory has never been accepted in its full neurological form. Archaeologists, classicists, and neuroscientists have raised serious objections. And yet the book continues to circulate, discussed by philosophers, psychologists, historians of religion, and the occasional curious reader who stumbles across it in a used bookstore or late-night internet search.
Why?
Part of the answer is simple: Jaynes was asking a question that remains deeply unsettling.
What if human consciousness has a history?
What if the inner voice we experience as our own—our private mental narrator—was not always there?
I first encountered Jaynes sometime around 2012 or 2013, during a period when I was reading deeply in the work of Carl Jung and writing a small series of reflections that I called Jungian Intimations. Like many readers drawn to Jung, I was interested in symbolism, archetypes, and the strange persistence of mythic imagery in the modern psyche. I briefly considered enrolling in an online course with the Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, though in the end I took a class from his wife, Nancy Qualls-Corbett, on Jung and visual art. Around that time I read the slim but remarkable volume Jung on Art, which argues that artistic creation often emerges when archetypal material pushes through the individual psyche into symbolic form.
Jaynes appeared in my reading not long afterward. At first glance he seemed to be asking a related but far more radical question. Jung had treated mythic figures as symbolic expressions of the psyche. Jaynes suggested that the gods of ancient literature might once have been experienced as genuine voices—psychological events interpreted as divine command.
Whether or not one ultimately accepts his neurological model, Jaynes assembled a body of evidence that continues to provoke thought. In particular, he pointed to a striking feature of early literature. Characters in ancient texts often act without the kind of introspective self-reflection modern readers expect. Decisions appear suddenly, attributed not to inner deliberation but to divine intervention.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the world of the Iliad. When Achilles restrains himself from killing Agamemnon, it is not because he pauses to analyze his emotions. Athena appears beside him and tells him what to do. The boundary between divine command and human action is porous.
Jaynes argued that such passages were not merely literary conventions but traces of an earlier mentality.
Yet perhaps the most fascinating part of his theory lies elsewhere—in the margins of ancient societies, among the people least anchored to a single cultural world.
The wanderers.
Ancient civilizations were more mobile than we sometimes imagine. Even in the Bronze Age there were shepherds drifting across borderlands, merchants following caravan routes between cities, sailors moving from port to port across the Mediterranean and Near East. These figures lived at the edges of cultural systems that otherwise depended on stability and hierarchy.
For Jaynes, such wanderers may have played an unexpected role in the transformation of the human mind.
The bicameral system, as he described it, functioned best within tightly structured societies. Authority flowed downward through clear hierarchies: gods to kings, kings to priests, priests to ordinary people. Ritual, language, and shared myth reinforced the system. The divine voices guiding behavior were embedded within a familiar cultural environment.
But travelers moved beyond those environments.
A shepherd leaving his village might cross into territory where different gods were worshipped. A merchant arriving in a foreign city encountered unfamiliar laws, languages, and customs. A sailor might spend months among people whose rituals and social expectations bore little resemblance to those of home.
In such situations the guiding voices of one’s own culture could become unreliable.
If a divine command urged action in a place where the surrounding society operated under entirely different assumptions, the voice might cease to function as a stable guide. The traveler found himself in a new psychological situation—cut loose from the authority structures that had previously organized experience.
This was not a comfortable position.
To survive, wanderers had to develop different skills. They had to negotiate, observe, and interpret. They had to learn foreign languages and read unfamiliar social signals. They had to improvise.
In other words, they had to think.
Jaynes speculated that these mobile figures—shepherds, traders, sailors—may have been among the first people forced into something like modern reflective consciousness. The birthplaces of that consciousness may not have been temples or palaces but the messy contact zones of ancient trade: caravan routes crossing deserts, harbor towns where languages mingled, frontier markets where strangers bargained with one another under uncertain rules.
If the bicameral system required cultural enclosure to function, then mobility threatened its stability.
And the ancient world was becoming increasingly mobile.
Even as this transformation unfolded, remnants of the earlier mentality persisted in institutional form.
One of the most famous examples was the Oracle of Delphi. For centuries Greek leaders traveled to Delphi seeking divine guidance on matters of war, colonization, and political decision-making. The oracle’s pronouncements—often delivered in trance-like states by the Pythia—were treated as authoritative messages from the god Apollo.
From a Jaynesian perspective, institutions like Delphi may represent cultural technologies designed to preserve the authority of divine voices even as the underlying psychological system weakened. Kings and city-states continued to seek guidance from gods because the tradition of divine command remained embedded in social life.
Gradually, however, new forms of decision-making emerged.
Written law codes appeared. Philosophical reflection developed. Greek drama explored the tensions between divine authority and human responsibility. The shift was not sudden or uniform, but over time a new psychological landscape became visible—one in which individuals increasingly experienced themselves as authors of their own thoughts.
This transition was not simply intellectual. It may have been neurological, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once.
Jaynes placed the decisive phase of the transformation during the turmoil of the late Bronze Age collapse, roughly between 1200 and 800 BCE—a period when many ancient societies experienced widespread disruption. Cities were destroyed, trade networks collapsed, and populations migrated. In the midst of this upheaval, older forms of authority may have faltered, forcing new modes of self-organization to emerge.
Whether or not Jaynes correctly identified the precise mechanism, he was surely right about one thing: consciousness as we experience it today may not be a timeless given.
It may be an achievement—fragile, historically contingent, and still evolving.
Yet if the bicameral mind truly vanished, one might expect the phenomenon of hearing commanding voices to disappear entirely from modern experience.
It has not.
Under certain conditions, people still report experiences remarkably similar to those Jaynes described. In states of extreme exhaustion, during moments of sensory deprivation, or in the liminal territory between waking and sleep, voices sometimes appear that are difficult to classify as either internal or external.
I had an experience of this kind several years ago while undergoing an MRI scan in a hospital.
Anyone who has had an MRI knows the strange psychological environment it creates. You lie alone inside a narrow tube, immobilized, while the machine produces a sequence of loud mechanical pulses and vibrations. The noise is rhythmic and relentless. There is little sensory input beyond the sound and the awareness of one’s own breathing.
Somewhere in the midst of that experience, a voice appeared.
It was not loud or dramatic. It was simply there—a calm male voice with the unmistakable tone of a father speaking to a child. The message itself was simple, almost reassuring. But what struck me most was the ambiguity of the experience. The voice did not feel exactly like a thought, yet it did not feel entirely external either. It occupied a strange borderland between inner and outer perception.
The moment passed quickly, but the memory lingered.
Experiences of this sort are not uncommon. Psychologists studying hypnagogic states—the transitional zone between waking and sleep—have documented similar phenomena. Auditory hallucinations appear in certain psychiatric conditions, most famously schizophrenia. Hypnotic suggestion can also produce experiences in which subjects perceive commands or messages that seem to originate outside their conscious control.
Jaynes believed such phenomena represented vestiges of the older bicameral mentality.
The voices of the gods, in his view, had not entirely vanished. They had simply retreated to the margins of modern consciousness.
Occasionally these phenomena intersect with darker episodes of modern history.
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan remains one of the most disturbing cases often discussed in connection with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness. Some researchers have argued that Sirhan may have been unusually susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, raising unsettling questions about the relationship between external influence and voluntary action.
It would be irresponsible to claim that Jaynes’ theory explains such events. Human behavior is far too complex for any single model to capture fully. Yet cases like Sirhan’s remind us that the boundary between autonomous decision and externally shaped impulse is not always as clear as modern assumptions suggest.
The mind remains a mysterious territory.
Half a century after its publication, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind continues to provoke debate not because it solved the problem of consciousness but because it reframed it. Jaynes forced readers to confront the possibility that the human mind has undergone profound historical transformations.
Even if the details of his neurological model prove incorrect, the broader insight may endure. Literature, religion, and psychology all suggest that the experience of selfhood has changed over time. The ancient world did not necessarily perceive the mind in the same way we do.
Something was gained in the transition to modern consciousness.
We gained introspection, philosophical reflection, and the capacity to examine our own motives. We gained the intellectual freedom that made science, democracy, and modern literature possible.
But something may also have been lost.
In the world Jaynes described, human beings lived in a landscape animated by voices of divine authority. Decisions arrived not through anxious deliberation but through commands experienced as sacred guidance. That world may have been more constrained, but it may also have felt more certain.
Modern consciousness offers freedom, but it also brings doubt and solitude. The voices of the gods have largely fallen silent, replaced by the quieter and often less confident voice we call our own.
Perhaps the most we can say is that consciousness, like culture itself, continues to evolve. The wanderers of ancient caravan routes helped shape the first emergence of reflective thought. Today we inhabit a global world of constant movement, translation, and negotiation—a world not entirely unlike those early contact zones where cultures once collided.
We are all wanderers now.
And somewhere, perhaps, the faint echoes of older voices still remain.
Dedication:
For dreamers and wanderers everywhere.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like the pieces below, which take up somewhat similar themes.
Note: This essay reflects on the character of Stringer Bell from The Wire, one of the most carefully written figures in modern television drama. Like many viewers, I first experienced the show simply as a gripping crime story. Only later did I begin to appreciate how deeply it is really about institutions—how they work, how they resist reform, and how the people inside them often misunderstand the systems they inhabit.
The reflections here are not meant as a definitive interpretation of the series, but rather as one viewer’s attempt to think through what makes Stringer Bell such a haunting figure. His intelligence, ambition, and curiosity make him unusually sympathetic for a character who is also capable of ruthless decisions. That tension is part of what makes his story linger long after the episode ends.
If this essay encourages even a few readers who have never seen The Wire to give it a try, it will have done its job.
Epigraph
“Problems go away because someone does something about them.” — Peter Drucker
“Are you taking notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy?” — Stringer Bell
When people first enter the world of The Wire, the Barksdale organization appears to be run by two men. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell. But the first time the audience—and the Baltimore Police Department—really sees the organization up close, it is not Avon who appears.
It is Stringer.
Early in the first season, Detective Jimmy McNulty begins digging into the Barksdale crew after the murder trial of D’Angelo Barksdale. The courtroom scene is deceptively quiet. The defense attorneys maneuver. Witnesses crumble. The case falls apart.
And sitting calmly in the courtroom, overseeing the entire operation, is Stringer Bell. Avon Barksdale is nowhere to be seen.
It takes McNulty, Kima Greggs, Lester Freamon and the rest of the detail several episodes just to figure out who Avon even is. The name circulates through the investigation like a rumor. The man himself remains hidden.
That arrangement is not accidental. Avon’s power depends on distance. He is the sovereign, and sovereigns are not meant to be easily found. Stringer, meanwhile, is everywhere.
He attends the meetings. He coordinates the lawyers. He moves through the organization like a senior executive walking the floor of a factory.
To the police, Stringer looks like the boss.
To the young dealers on the corner, Stringer looks like the boss.
But he is not.
Inside the Barksdale organization, Avon Barksdale is the sovereign.
Stringer Bell is the middle manager.
The Face of the Organization
One of the most fascinating dynamics in the early seasons of The Wire is the way the younger dealers perceive Stringer.
For Bodie Broadus, Poot Carr, and Wallace—the kids working the Pit—Stringer Bell is a kind of mythic figure.
When the SUVs pull up and Stringer steps out in dark glasses, the reaction is immediate. The security guys spread out. The conversations stop. Bodie and Poot straighten up.
It is like watching a celebrity arrive.
Stringer has the clothes, the posture, the quiet authority. He moves through the neighborhood with a calm confidence that suggests total control.
Avon inspires fear.
Stringer inspires admiration.
That difference matters.
Because for the people actually living inside the organization, Stringer looks like the boss.
But the real power structure tells a different story.
Avon is the sovereign.
Stringer is the administrator.
He handles the money. He organizes the meetings. He manages the supply lines. He solves the problems.
Stringer Bell, in other words, is the middle manager of a criminal enterprise.
And for a long time, the arrangement works perfectly.
The Wallace Problem
One of the earliest hints of Stringer’s managerial mindset appears in the tragedy of Wallace.
Wallace is young, sensitive, and increasingly disturbed by the violence surrounding the drug trade. After the brutal murder of Brandon, Wallace begins unraveling. He disappears from the Pit. When he eventually returns, he is clearly not the same person.
Stringer recognizes the problem immediately.
Wallace is unstable.
In a normal organization, instability might mean poor performance reviews or termination.
In the Barksdale organization, instability means something else entirely.
Wallace becomes a liability.
And liabilities are removed.
The decision that follows—Bodie and Poot carrying out Wallace’s execution—is one of the most haunting moments in the series. Wallace is not a rival. He is not a traitor. He is simply a young man who cannot psychologically survive inside the system.
Stringer sees the weakness clearly.
And acts accordingly.
It is a brutally rational decision.
It is also a glimpse of the darker side of managerial thinking: the moment when people begin to look like components in a machine.
The D’Angelo Decision
If Wallace’s death hints at Stringer’s managerial instincts, the fate of D’Angelo Barksdale reveals them in full.
D’Angelo is not just another soldier in the organization. He is Avon’s nephew. His position inside the crew is both familial and political.
But prison changes him.
Separated from the streets and increasingly disillusioned with the life he has been living, D’Angelo begins questioning the entire system. He reads books. He reflects. He talks openly about the violence and the futility of the drug trade.
From Stringer’s perspective, this creates an intolerable risk.
D’Angelo might talk.
D’Angelo might cooperate.
D’Angelo might bring the entire organization crashing down.
So Stringer makes a decision.
D’Angelo must be removed.
The murder in the prison library—staged as a suicide—is one of the most chilling scenes in the show. It is also the moment where Stringer Bell fully commits himself to the logic of the organization he hopes one day to escape.
D’Angelo becomes a problem.
And problems, as Peter Drucker might say, go away because someone does something about them.
Stringer does something.
The consequences will follow him for the rest of the series.
The Education of Stringer Bell
One of the most extraordinary details in The Wire is Stringer’s quiet pursuit of education.
While running one of the most powerful drug organizations in Baltimore, Stringer enrolls in community college economics courses.
The image borders on the surreal.
By day, he sits in a classroom discussing supply and demand curves.
By night, he oversees one of the city’s most lucrative heroin distribution networks.
But Stringer takes the lessons seriously.
He studies the language of markets. He begins speaking about product elasticity and supply chains. He becomes fascinated with the idea that organizations can be structured rationally—that chaos can be replaced with systems.
At one point he attempts to introduce Robert’s Rules of Order to a meeting of drug dealers.
The result is both comic and strangely admirable.
Stringer genuinely believes the world can be organized.
Violence is inefficient.
War disrupts business.
Stability produces profit.
These ideas will shape everything he attempts to build in the seasons that follow.
The Co-Op
By the third season, Stringer has begun putting his theories into practice.
Working with Proposition Joe, the careful and pragmatic East Baltimore kingpin, he helps create a cooperative arrangement among several drug organizations.
The goal is simple: stabilize the market.
Under the Co-Op system, competing crews share access to high-quality product and reduce unnecessary warfare. Prices stabilize. Territories become less important. Profits increase.
From a managerial perspective, it is a brilliant solution.
The Co-Op is essentially a cartel.
And it represents the closest Stringer Bell ever comes to successfully rationalizing the drug trade.
But the Co-Op also reveals the limits of Stringer’s power.
Because while Stringer is busy building alliances and managing markets, Avon is thinking about something else entirely.
Reputation.
Territory.
War.
Avon Returns
When Avon is released from prison, the delicate balance between sovereign and minister begins to collapse.
Avon quickly realizes that Stringer has been running the organization.
More troublingly, he has been running it according to rules Avon does not fully respect.
Negotiation instead of dominance.
Cooperation instead of conquest.
To Avon, this looks dangerously close to weakness.
The emergence of Marlo Stanfield only sharpens the conflict.
Marlo represents the future of the street—pure sovereignty, stripped of managerial compromise. His only concern is power and reputation.
Stringer sees Marlo as a business problem.
Avon sees Marlo as a challenge.
The difference is fatal.
Clay Davis
While this conflict is unfolding on the street, Stringer begins pursuing what he believes will be his final transition: legitimacy.
Through Proposition Joe, he enters the orbit of Baltimore politics and real-estate development. The meetings take place in offices rather than abandoned row houses. The language shifts from territory and product to zoning permits and development projects.
For Stringer, this looks like the next step.
The doorway out.
But the world he is entering operates according to rules he does not yet understand.
State Senator Clay Davis greets Stringer warmly. He speaks the language of political access and investment opportunities. He promises permits, influence, connections.
And Stringer believes him.
The moment of realization arrives slowly and then all at once.
The money is gone.
The development deals are illusions.
And Clay Davis responds to Stringer’s anger with one of the most surreal pieces of advice ever delivered in the series.
If Stringer wants to find the money, the senator explains, he should get himself some running shoes.
Because the faucet has already been turned on.
And the money has already flowed away.
The respectable world Stringer hoped to enter turns out not to be more rational than the drug trade.
It is simply corrupt in a different vocabulary.
A Small Recognition
Watching Stringer struggle with these systems, I sometimes feel a small flicker of recognition.
At one point in my own professional life I became deeply interested in the development of strong child protection policies in schools. From my perspective the issue seemed straightforward: the risks involved were serious, the international standards were clear, and the responsible course of action was to align institutional practice with those standards.
So I did what people like Stringer Bell often do when they encounter complicated systems.
I went looking for expertise.
I attended conferences and studied international best practices in child protection. One particularly influential experience was a conference at the Western Academy of Beijing, where I met the child protection expert Jim Hulbert.
I came away convinced that the issue was both urgent and solvable.
My assumption—naive, as it turned out—was that if I could simply demonstrate the seriousness of the issue and show how other institutions were addressing it through clear policies and professional standards, the system would naturally move in that direction.
That was not what happened.
Large organizations, like criminal enterprises, develop internal logics of their own. And once those logics become embedded in everyday practice, they can be remarkably resistant to rational reform.
Stringer Bell is discovering the same lesson, only under far more dangerous circumstances.
The Final Exchanges
By the end of the third season, the web of betrayals has fully formed.
Stringer gives up Avon’s location to Major Bunny Colvin, hoping the police will remove the sovereign whose instincts threaten the stability of the organization.
Avon, in turn, quietly provides Omar Little and Brother Mouzone with Stringer’s location.
And somewhere above them all, Clay Davis continues collecting money and smiling.
The systems Stringer tried to manage—street power, political corruption, organizational loyalty—close in around him.
The End of the Manager
In the final scene, Stringer stands alone in a half-constructed building.
Omar Little and Brother Mouzone walk slowly toward him.
For three seasons Stringer Bell tried to manage the world he lived in.
He studied economics.
He built alliances.
He created the Co-Op.
He tried to rationalize both the corners of West Baltimore and the offices of Baltimore politics.
But the systems he moved through were never built for management.
They were built for sovereigns.
And by the time Stringer Bell finally understands that lesson, the meeting is already over.
The middle manager has finally run out of problems he can solve.
Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.
The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”
The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.
The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.
Epigraph
There are aliens in our midst.
Wussy
The Jung Problem
At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.
Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.
In other words, the sky fills with things.
Medieval Precedents
This pattern is not entirely new.
During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.
Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.
Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.
The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.
Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.
One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.
Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.
But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.
Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.
She might have reported a craft.
The Cold War Sky
By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.
The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.
The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.
Weather balloons.
Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.
Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.
The Mulder Doctrine
By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.
The X-Files:
In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.
The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.
Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.
His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.
Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.
A Modern Lens
Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.
Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.
Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.
Which brings us back to Mike.
So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?
It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.
From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.
This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.
Provisional Conclusions
My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.
Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.
Mike has simply moved the story offshore.
The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.
If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.
But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.
In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.
Footnote: The Ocean Logic
It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.
From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.
Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.
POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony
Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.
According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.
When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.
These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.
Mike considers them decisive.
A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.
In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.
According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.
At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.
Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.
Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.
Note: This essay concludes the small series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces explored several very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan, the sly tactical persistence of Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks, the tragic artistic authenticity of Amy Winehouse, and the mythic public legend surrounding Muhammad Ali.
The story of Rod Blagojevich introduces a different category altogether: the shameless comeback.
Unlike the other figures in the series, Blagojevich’s return to public life does not depend on moral vindication, heroic persistence, or cultural myth. Instead it illustrates something more peculiar about contemporary politics and media. In an age of fragmented audiences and constant attention cycles, a disgraced figure may sometimes reappear simply by refusing to leave the stage.
Whether one sees Blagojevich’s re-emergence as comic, absurd, or oddly instructive, it provides a fitting final example for the series. Not every comeback is admirable, but each one reveals something about the strange ways public life allows stories to continue.
Not all comebacks are noble.
Some are heroic, like the moral vindication of Kofi Annan. Some are tactical, like the sly fourth-quarter returns engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks. Some exist somewhere between tragedy and authenticity, like the brief blazing career of Amy Winehouse. And some, like the legend of Muhammad Ali, grow into something close to myth.
But there is another type of comeback altogether.
The shameless comeback.
For that, it is difficult to find a more perfect case than Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois whose political career once appeared to have ended in spectacular disgrace.
The original scandal is by now familiar. In 2008 federal investigators revealed that Blagojevich had been recorded on FBI wiretaps discussing how he might profit from appointing a replacement to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The recordings were devastating. In one of the most memorable lines in modern American political scandal, Blagojevich described the Senate seat as something valuable that he was reluctant to give away for nothing.
The fallout was swift. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature. Later he was convicted on multiple corruption charges and sentenced to federal prison. For most politicians, this sequence would represent the end of the story.
Disgrace. Prison. Silence.
But American public life has always contained another possibility: the comeback powered not by redemption but by spectacle.
Even before his imprisonment, Blagojevich seemed instinctively drawn toward the theatrical dimension of his situation. He appeared on television talk shows, launched media interviews, and treated the unfolding scandal almost as if it were a strange kind of reality program in which he remained the central character.
His appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Donald Trump, felt less like an attempt to restore dignity than a recognition that modern politics and entertainment had already merged.
Then came the commutation.
In 2020 Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence, releasing him after several years behind bars. The decision itself was controversial, but the effect was unmistakable: the stage was suddenly open again.
And Blagojevich, to his credit—or perhaps to his creditlessness—walked right back onto it.
The most striking feature of his post-prison public life has been the absence of embarrassment. Many disgraced politicians attempt some form of contrition when they re-enter the public conversation. Apologies are issued. Lessons are discussed. A tone of humility is adopted.
Blagojevich chose a different path.
Instead he embraced a kind of shameless persistence, appearing in conservative media outlets, repositioning himself politically, and speaking about his case with the tone of someone who believes the whole episode was misunderstood or exaggerated. The ideological shift from Democrat to Republican was particularly striking, not because party changes are unheard of but because in Blagojevich’s case it seemed less like a conversion than a strategic recalibration.
It was, in other words, a comeback powered by the modern media ecosystem.
In an earlier era, a corruption scandal of this magnitude might have consigned a politician to permanent obscurity. But the fragmented media landscape of the twenty-first century offers a different possibility. There is always another audience somewhere, another platform, another narrative waiting to be constructed.
Blagojevich appears to understand this instinctively.
Which is why his story belongs in a series about comebacks, even if the comeback itself is of a peculiar variety. Unlike the moral return of Annan or the mythic return of Ali, Blagojevich’s version depends less on redemption than on endurance.
The secret of the shameless comeback is simple.
You refuse to leave the stage.
You keep talking. You keep appearing. You keep telling your version of the story until, slowly but inevitably, the scandal itself begins to blur into just another chapter in the larger spectacle of American politics.
In that sense Rod Blagojevich may represent a distinctly modern form of comeback: not heroic, not tragic, but theatrical.
And in the strange carnival of contemporary public life, theatrical persistence can sometimes be enough.
Note: This piece begins a small series I’m calling “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” Political and public life are full of attempted returns. Leaders lose elections, wars, or moral arguments and then try to reclaim the stage. Most of these efforts fail. The moment has passed, the audience has moved on, and what once felt urgent has dissolved into what might be called moral fatigue. Yet every so often a different pattern appears. Occasionally someone loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for history itself to shift. When that happens, what first looked like defeat begins to resemble something closer to a delayed victory. Kofi Annan provides a particularly interesting case. His opposition to the Iraq War did not stop the invasion, and at the time it appeared that the argument had been decisively lost. Yet as the years passed and the consequences of the war became clearer, the moral judgment he articulated gained increasing weight. In that sense, the story of Annan’s career suggests a useful distinction: some comebacks succeed not because the player reclaims the moment, but because the argument itself eventually catches up with history. Future pieces in this series will look at other figures—some who managed remarkable returns, and others whose comebacks never quite arrived.
Political life especially produces them in abundance. A leader loses a battle—an election, a war, a moral argument—and disappears into the quiet margins where yesterday’s figures slowly fade. The public moves on. The moral urgency of the moment dissolves into what might be called moral fatigue. Outrage that once seemed unstoppable becomes background noise. A new crisis appears, and the world’s attention shifts.
Once this fatigue sets in, comebacks are difficult. The audience that once cared has already drifted elsewhere. The stage has changed. Most players who attempt to return find that the moment that once belonged to them has passed.
Yet every so often a different pattern appears.
Occasionally a figure loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for the moral tide itself to turn. When that happens, what looked like defeat begins to resemble something else entirely.
Kofi Annan offers one of the most intriguing examples of this phenomenon.
In 2003 the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. The invasion was justified by a mixture of strategic arguments, intelligence claims, and moral rhetoric about tyranny and liberation. In Washington and London the momentum of the moment was overwhelming. The war was framed as both necessary and inevitable.
The United Nations, by contrast, found itself sidelined. Annan, then serving as Secretary-General, watched as the institution he led was bypassed by the coalition preparing for war. The moment belonged to the advocates of intervention—particularly the group of American policy thinkers who had spent years arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
At the time, it was not at all clear who would ultimately win the argument. What was clear was that the United Nations had lost the immediate struggle for influence. The invasion proceeded without explicit UN authorization, and the diplomatic machinery that Annan represented appeared powerless to prevent it.
The moral emergency that had animated the debate quickly hardened into geopolitical reality.
Then, in September 2004, Annan said something remarkable. In a BBC interview he stated plainly that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law.
It was an extraordinary declaration. Rarely does a sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations describe the actions of the world’s most powerful government in such blunt terms. Yet the statement did not produce the dramatic reversal one might imagine. The war continued. Washington and London dismissed the criticism. The machinery of global politics moved forward largely unchanged.
In the short term, Annan had lost the battle.
And the personal toll of that moment appears to have been considerable. In his biography there is a striking image from this period: Annan alone in his darkened living room, unable for a time to rise from the floor. The room itself reportedly kept in near darkness. It was not exactly depression, at least not in the clinical sense, but something close to exhaustion after a prolonged moral struggle that had failed to alter events.
It is a haunting scene. One of the most powerful diplomats in the world sitting on the floor of a dark room, confronting the limits of his influence.
At that moment, the story of Kofi Annan could easily have ended as the story of a failed comeback. A leader who tried to reassert the moral authority of international law and found that the world had already moved on.
But history has a way of rearranging the meaning of certain moments.
As the years passed, the Iraq War came to be widely regarded as a profound strategic and humanitarian mistake. The claims that had justified the invasion collapsed. The war itself destabilized the region and reshaped global politics in ways that few of its original advocates had anticipated.
Gradually, the moral argument that Annan had made—quietly but firmly—became the prevailing historical judgment.
After leaving the United Nations, Annan did not retreat entirely from public life. Instead he reappeared in a different role as a member of The Elders, a group of former statesmen attempting to exert moral influence outside formal political structures.
It was a curious transformation. No longer the head of the UN, Annan had less formal power than he once possessed. Yet his voice now carried a different kind of authority—the authority of someone who had remained in the arena long enough for events to vindicate his judgment.
By the end of his life, the moral verdict on the Iraq War had shifted decisively. Few serious observers still defended the intervention with the confidence that characterized the early years of the conflict. The consensus had moved, slowly but unmistakably, toward the position Annan had articulated when it mattered least.
In this sense, his career offers an unusual example in the history of comebacks.
He lost the battle. But he may have won the argument.
That distinction matters.
Most political figures attempt comebacks by trying to reclaim the exact moment they once dominated. They want the same stage, the same audience, the same authority. When the moment has passed, the comeback fails.
Annan’s story suggests a different possibility. Sometimes the moral argument itself continues moving through history long after the political battle appears settled. If a leader remains present long enough, the tide may eventually turn.
Which leads to a simple but revealing observation about great players in any arena.
A truly great player is never entirely out of the game.
The moment may pass. The audience may drift away. But if the underlying argument proves sound, history itself has a way of reopening the field.
And when it does, the comeback is already underway.
Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.
Epigraph:
“When the stars go blue.” — Ryan Adams
For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?
Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.
When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.
That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.
But the songs remain.
Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.
None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.
What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.
And that distinction matters.
One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.
If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.
The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.
In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.
The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.
There is something oddly honest about that.
The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.
That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.
The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.
And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.
Dedication
For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.
Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.
Note: This is the third of a three part series. Part I is here and Part II is here.
Epigraph I:
Oh my sentimental fool
Lloyd Cole
Epigraph II:
Was the risk I sent to you received?
Metric
Leaving Oxford / Returning to Japan
I walked the five minutes back to the hotel after the bus pulled away. My wife was going on to visit friends in Germany and I would have about five days alone in Kyoto after I got back to Japan. At the hotel I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I said a small prayer to the angels asking for grace to get through the day, showered, packed my things, and waited for the 8 AM car pickup.
I did not rush. Packing became a deliberate act, almost ritualistic in its pacing. I folded shirts one at a time, placed my notebook carefully into my bag, slipped the Tintin postcard between pages so it would not bend. Sue Tompkins went in next, followed by the charger, the toothbrush, the small practical objects that restore a sense of order after emotional disturbance. The room itself was modest — functional, forgettable in most respects — yet it felt oddly expanded, as if some invisible event had occurred there despite the absence of anything outwardly dramatic. Something had shifted in me, and the room seemed to hold the echo of that shift.
At the desk, I laid everything out for a moment, not to organize but simply to gather myself. The Mendoza Line was no longer playing, but the music had already done its work. The emotional charge it helped ignite remained present, circulating quietly beneath the surface. There was nothing to heighten or prolong; the effect was already internalized.
Around eight, the hire car arrived. The driver was polite, efficient, the kind of professional whose calm competence creates a reassuring neutrality. He helped with my bag, and we exchanged small talk as we pulled into traffic — London housing costs, wages, the persistent difficulty young people face in trying to establish themselves. On the radio, a news segment discussed the rising number of homeless families and children across the UK. Normally, such stories register as troubling but abstract statistics. That morning, however, the report landed differently. I found myself thinking about untethered lives, about how fragile the structures that hold people together can be, and how sometimes the tether itself is the only thing preventing a deeper psychological unraveling.
Traffic was light, and we arrived at the airport mid-morning. Inside, I purchased a simple breakfast — fruit, yogurt, coffee — and found a seat removed from the main flow of travelers. Airports are environments of constant movement, but solitude can still be carved out within them if one chooses carefully. I opened my Kindle and downloaded volumes four through six of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. It was not an act of escapism so much as orientation. I wanted narrative continuity, a long arc where identity unfolds gradually rather than collapsing under sudden pressure. Powell’s world offered lineage, structure, and a reassuring sense of temporal patience.
I texted Isobel. She responded almost immediately, and what followed was a long, bright thread of conversation carried across airport Wi-Fi. There was no sense of emotional comedown, no awkward reentry into ordinary distance — only continuation. The connection felt intact, natural, as if the meeting had established a channel that did not require reinforcement to remain open.
When boarding was called, the transition felt procedural rather than dramatic. The flight passed in a quiet blur of clouds, Molina songs, Powell’s prose, and intermittent thought. Beneath it all was a subtle ache under the ribs — not pain, not longing in any acute sense, but effect. A residual emotional state that did not demand resolution, only acknowledgment.
On the plane I read some Powell and listened to music. I remember playing “Two Suns in the Sunset” by Pink Floyd and being unexpectedly moved by it. I was in an emotional state — not overwhelmed, but open and exposed — and the flight passed quietly. I landed at Kansai Airport in the afternoon.
I landed in Japan first. My wife continued on to Germany to visit friends, and my son was in Australia on a school trip. I took the Haruka train back toward Kyoto. The wide seats and generous legroom made me feel welcomed back into my country of choice. Much as I had enjoyed England, I felt real relief in returning. There is a particular comfort in Japanese transit — the order, the space, the quiet efficiency — and my body recognized it immediately.
The house, when I entered it, was silent in a way that felt tangible. I carried that silence with unusual care, as if it were made of glass and might shatter if handled abruptly. Solitude is often restorative, but this solitude had an amplifying quality, heightening rather than settling internal experience.
That evening, I went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto. I ordered food and three craft beers and spoke casually with whoever happened to be nearby. Conversations were light, unstructured, yet I sensed an unusual responsiveness from people around me — as though I possessed a slightly elevated emotional voltage that others could detect without understanding its source. Even animals seemed to register it. Cats approached me with a familiarity that felt less coincidental than intuitive, as if some form of static had gathered on the soul.
I had no sense of impending crisis. No awareness that within three days I would walk into my principal’s office and offer my resignation
First Days Back
On my first full day back I did laundry and in the late afternoon went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto near Karasuma Oike. I don’t remember whether I texted or called Isobel that day, but I almost certainly did. At Takumiya I ordered sashimi and had a few craft beers from their rotating selection. I stayed longer than planned, talking lightly with whoever happened to be sitting nearby.
The next day was Tuesday and I went to work as scheduled. I checked the heat index readings as part of my summer administrative duties. Dr. Fox was on campus. Seeing him immediately shifted the emotional temperature of the day.
I have written elsewhere about my problems with Dr. Fox and I won’t revisit them in detail here. What matters for this story is that by that point I felt he had betrayed me and failed to show up when I most needed institutional support. Trust had already been damaged. Seeing him again after Oxford brought all of that to the surface at once.
We spoke briefly. Before I left, he asked me to come in the following day to help prepare a presentation he was scheduled to give to an alumni group. I had ghostwritten material for him many times before. Under normal circumstances I would have said yes without hesitation. This time I agreed anyway, even though I was already internally unstable and emotionally saturated.
It would not turn out well.
I returned to Takumiya each night that week. There was comfort in being present in public spaces while remaining largely anonymous. The balance allowed me to exist among others without the demands of deeper recognition. Meanwhile, at five in the evening Japan time — nine in the morning in London — Isobel and I spoke daily. The calls were not brief check-ins but sustained conversations lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Often she walked through a park while we spoke, and I imagined her surroundings as she described them, the geographical distance softened by conversational continuity.
During one of these calls, I told her that I wanted to write a book. Not about her specifically, but about the chain of experiences that led to meeting her and the clarity that encounter unexpectedly revealed. She understood immediately. More than that, she expressed a quiet appreciation for being part of that moment of ignition — not as subject matter but as catalyst.
At the same time, unresolved resentment toward Dr. Fox did not dissipate with distance. Instead, it sharpened. The baseball heatstroke issue lingered at the margins of thought, alongside a broader accumulation of professional frustrations: moments of perceived disrespect, ambiguous expectations, and a decade of service that increasingly felt like professionalism without true partnership. None of these tensions were new, but the emotional openness of the week amplified their weight. Background noise began to feel like pressure.
By Friday, when I walked into school, I was not consciously planning a decisive action, yet I sensed a degree of internal instability that made ordinary interactions feel precarious. When Dr. Fox called me into his office to request assistance with a presentation — a familiar pattern, a non-work day expectation framed as routine — the moment crystallized something that had been building long before Oxford. I resigned. The decision belonged to a larger narrative, but this story carries its immediate emotional context.
As the reality of resignation settled into my body, a quiet clarity followed. I knew I needed to speak with my wife. The conversation would not revolve around specifics — call durations, text counts, or the mechanics of connection — but around truth in its broader emotional sense.
She returned home Saturday night. With her presence, the house regained its weight: history, shared furniture, a past that possessed shape and gravity. We sat together without wine or any conversational buffer. The moment did not invite performance or gradual disclosure; it required directness.
“I quit,” I said. “And I met someone.”
She asked only one question.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
She nodded, her response quiet and measured.
“Okay. Have fun on the phone.”
Nothing fractured dramatically in that moment. There was no raised voice, no immediate emotional rupture. Yet something subtle shifted — an alteration not of structure but of atmosphere. The past remained intact, but the future carried a slightly different texture. Nothing broke, but nothing stayed exactly the same.
Saturday and Sunday
Saturday and Sunday arrived with a quietness that felt disproportionate to the events of the preceding week. For the first time in months, there was no alarm set for early administrative duties, no email requiring immediate response, no expectation of presence within the institutional rhythms that had long structured my days. I was off work — not merely for the weekend, but in a more consequential sense that I could not yet fully absorb. I would not return until 2022. The long-term ramifications of what had unfolded were already in motion, though at that moment they existed more as a distant horizon than as a lived reality whose contours could be clearly seen.
The weekend therefore carried a strange dual quality. On the surface, it resembled any other stretch of unstructured time: coffee in the morning, small household tasks, the slow pacing of hours unburdened by schedules. Beneath that surface, however, ran a persistent awareness that something fundamental had shifted. The scaffolding of daily life — work expectations, professional identity, habitual responsibilities — had loosened, and with its absence came both relief and a faint, almost disorienting spaciousness.
At five o’clock sharp Japan time, which was nine in the morning in the UK, I called Isobel. The timing became instinctive, a daily point of orientation that anchored the day before it fully began. She answered as she was waking, her voice carrying that soft mixture of sleep and recognition that collapses distance instantly. We picked up exactly where we had left off, as if conversation were a continuous thread rather than a sequence of separate exchanges. We talked and laughed easily, moving between subjects without effort — music, muses, love, the nature of intimacy, and the broader textures of life that surface when two people feel unexpectedly understood.
The calls possessed a quality that felt, at the time, almost transcendent. I experienced a heightened emotional state that bordered on euphoria, a sense of expansion difficult to articulate without risking exaggeration. There was an unmistakable feeling of being lifted beyond ordinary emotional gravity, as if the connection existed in a space slightly removed from daily constraint. For brief stretches, I felt powerful in a way that had little to do with control and everything to do with aliveness — the psychological equivalent of standing in clear light after months of muted color.
Yet even within that intensity, I carried a quiet awareness that such states are rarely sustainable. The experience felt too vivid, too precise in its timing, to belong to permanence. I understood, somewhere beneath the exhilaration, that what we were inhabiting was a moment granted rather than guaranteed. For the time being, however, there was a mutual permission to exist within that space without prematurely interrogating its future. We allowed the conversations to unfold fully, accepting their immediacy without insisting on outcome.
The rest of the weekend unfolded around those calls like a soft frame. I moved through ordinary activities — brief walks, small household routines, moments of shared quiet with my wife — with an undercurrent of emotional intensity that did not demand expression but remained unmistakably present. Silence felt less empty than suspended, as though the days themselves were pausing before the arrival of consequences not yet visible.
What remained most striking about that weekend was not any single event but the emotional totality it carried. The combination of resignation, solitude, reconnection, and emerging uncertainty produced a state that was both exhilarating and fragile. I was aware, even then, of the paradox inherent in the experience: the joy of discovery intertwined with the inevitability of complication, the brightness of connection shadowed by the knowledge of its precariousness.
That was the weekend. In its quiet span, I found myself inhabiting an emotional condition that was at once expansive and difficult, sustaining and destabilizing. I was, deeply and undeniably, in love — not in a settled or declarative sense, but in the raw, immediate way that accompanies sudden recognition. The feeling carried power and tenderness in equal measure, along with a subtle ache that suggested awareness of its limits even as it unfolded.
The Rest of September
The rest of September passed with a quality that is difficult to reconstruct in precise sequence. Days did not feel discrete or individually memorable; instead, they merged into a continuous emotional field in which time moved forward without the usual markers of routine. The absence of work removed one of the primary structures that normally segments experience, and without that scaffolding the month acquired a dreamlike texture. Moments were vivid while they occurred, yet quickly dissolved into the broader atmosphere of the period.
Isobel and I remained in frequent contact. We spoke most days and exchanged messages with a familiarity that no longer required initiation or explanation. The connection persisted, but the intensity that had defined the immediate aftermath of Oxford began, subtly, to dim. This was not a collapse or a dramatic withdrawal — rather, a gentle tapering, the natural adjustment that follows emotional peaks once they settle into the rhythm of distance and everyday life. The calls remained warm, often intimate, and still carried laughter and shared curiosity, but the sense of suspended transcendence that characterized the earlier weeks softened into something more ordinary.
My days were largely unstructured. Without professional obligations, I devoted time to my blog, experimenting with longer reflections and shorter fragments that attempted to capture the evolving emotional landscape. I also began broadcasting on Periscope, drawn to the immediacy of speaking into a space where audience and solitude coexist in curious balance. These activities did not replace work so much as fill the temporal vacuum it left behind, offering forms of expression that required presence without imposing rigid expectation.
Later in the month, I briefly reentered the professional sphere when I accompanied my senior students to a university fair at Canadian Academy. The experience felt almost surreal in its normalcy — a reminder of institutional rhythms that continued independently of my altered position within them. It was the only direct work engagement I undertook during that period, and its brevity reinforced the sense that September existed outside the usual professional narrative.
Toward the end of the month, I traveled for a significant assignment: serving as lead evaluator for the Diploma Programme at Western Academy of Beijing. The responsibility was substantial, and I approached it with an intention to perform at the level expected despite the internal shifts that characterized the preceding weeks. The visit, however, was complicated by dynamics within the evaluation team. The MYP leader’s preference for extended, often unfocused meetings created an atmosphere of fatigue, and Ashish, the Head from IB Singapore, lacked either the authority or inclination to redirect those discussions effectively. Evenings stretched late into the night. We ordered Indian food, reviewed documentation, and navigated the procedural demands of the evaluation with a professionalism that felt increasingly mechanical.
During one of those evenings, after the meetings had ended and the day’s formal responsibilities were complete, I called Isobel. We spoke at length, as had become our habit, but the conversation carried a different quality. She told me about a dream — one involving a fire and a cabin in the forest. In the dream, I was present. She mentioned that she had shared the dream with her therapist, a detail that suggested the experience held significance beyond casual narrative. Yet when I asked about it, she hesitated. She did not want to recount the dream in full. The partial disclosure introduced an ambiguity that I could not immediately interpret but nonetheless felt.
The moment did not register as conflict or withdrawal. There was no overt tension, no articulated concern. Yet something subtle shifted in the emotional atmosphere between us. The change was nearly imperceptible, detectable less through words than through absence — a slight alteration in tone, a new reticence where openness had previously been instinctive. It was not dramatic enough to prompt confrontation, but it carried the unmistakable sensation of movement beneath the surface.
As September drew to a close and October approached, our communication began to thin. Calls became less frequent, messages shorter, pauses between exchanges longer. The transition unfolded gradually, without a definitive turning point, but its trajectory felt clear. What had once been continuous conversation now required renewed initiation, and the ease that had defined our early exchanges gave way to a quieter, more tentative rhythm.
In retrospect, September stands as an interlude — a period suspended between ignition and resolution. The connection with Isobel remained meaningful and emotionally resonant, yet the conditions that had sustained its earlier intensity were shifting. October would bring both culmination and conclusion, the apex of the relationship’s emotional arc and, simultaneously, its quiet dissolution.
October
October arrived without ceremony, yet the emotional atmosphere surrounding it was markedly different from the suspended haze of September. I was not working at all during that month, and the absence of professional structure began to feel less like pause and more like rupture. Relations with my Principal, Dr. Fox, had deteriorated to an all-time low, and what had once been a strained but functional working relationship now carried open hostility.
We had two phone calls that month about university counseling, both of them angry and vitriolic. The topic itself — university advising — should have been procedural, collaborative, even routine. Instead, it became a flashpoint that exposed a deeper accumulation of mistrust and frustration. From my perspective, he was mishandling critical processes and creating unnecessary stress for students and staff alike, and I felt a growing sense of professional indignation that was difficult to contain. I shouted at him on the phone twice: once while walking along the river, my voice carrying across the water in a way that felt disproportionate to the setting, and once from a hotel bar in Osaka, where the contained intimacy of the space made the confrontation feel even more exposed. The bartenders glanced at me with a mixture of curiosity and quiet concern, clearly aware that they were witnessing a private eruption in a public place. Still, they allowed the moment to pass without interference, serving drinks and processing the bill with the practiced discretion that characterizes hospitality in Japan.
In mid-October, I traveled to Singapore for another IB training. This assignment positioned me as lead trainer for the Diploma Programme, with Duan Yorke serving as my deputy. Duan was excellent — steady, competent, and easy to work alongside — providing a professional counterbalance to the internal instability I carried with me. Yet despite the outward success of the training’s first day, something felt off internally. The emotional residue of the previous weeks, combined with the unresolved professional tensions, manifested as a quiet but unmistakable dissonance. On the second day, I found myself unable to maintain the expected level of engagement and withdrew temporarily to visit an esoteric healer. The visit itself belongs to another narrative thread, one that requires its own context, but its occurrence reflected the broader sense that I was searching for equilibrium in unconventional ways.
I returned and completed the training successfully, fulfilling my responsibilities with the professionalism the role demanded. Afterward, I remained in Singapore for an additional three days, using the time to decompress in a city that had long felt both familiar and emotionally neutral. The extended stay provided space for quiet reflection, casual wandering, and the gradual release of accumulated tension. Professionally, my obligations were minimal. I completed a handful of recommendation letters for early decision applicants — necessary work, given that our new counselor was struggling with the process — but beyond that, my professional identity remained largely suspended.
During this period, Isobel and I spoke only once. The call carried an unmistakable clarity: whatever had sustained the connection through September was no longer present. Whether the shift stemmed from the dream she had mentioned earlier, the simple realities of distance, or the natural fading that accompanies emotionally intense encounters, the result was the same. The spark had dissipated. What struck me most was the absence of dramatic heartbreak. I did not feel shattered or undone. Instead, I experienced a dull void — a quiet ache occupying the space where my love for her had briefly lived. It was less a wound than an absence, the emotional equivalent of a room that had been furnished and then emptied.
Singapore became the final location in which we spoke. After that call, the connection ended without formal closure, dissolving into silence rather than conflict.
When I returned to Japan, I settled back into writing and Periscoping with a renewed sense of creative urgency. Singapore itself had already played a role in that shift. In a billiards bar there, I drafted the first installment of The Thin Man, capturing fragments of narrative that would later expand into a larger project. The act of writing felt less like discipline and more like necessity — a way of metabolizing the preceding months and translating emotional experience into narrative form. Back in Japan, I continued this process through a series of essays that month, each exploring different facets of the transitional period.
October also introduced another unexpected connection. That month I met Mela, a woman from New York City in her thirties who was on medical leave from her work as a props assistant in film production. She was housesitting at the time and occupied her days in ways that mirrored my own state of suspended routine: scrolling Tinder, investigating potential matches with a mixture of curiosity and humor, and broadcasting extensively on Periscope. We connected easily, moving from initial interaction to Instagram texts and eventually long phone calls. Neither of us had pressing daily commitments, and the absence of structure created space for conversations that extended for hours — sometimes entire afternoons — ranging across music, film, personal history, and the broader philosophical questions that surface when time is abundant and emotional stakes feel low.
Months later, in December, I would meet her in person during a museum visit in Queens. The day unfolded quietly: exploring exhibits, browsing the bookstore, and sharing soup in the café. At one point, descending a staircase, she leaned into me in a way that felt intentional — a brief physical gesture that carried a hint of performative vulnerability. She said, “you saved me,” a remark delivered with ambiguity that allowed interpretation without demanding it. The moment marked the closest we came to flirtation, and even that remained understated, more symbolic than consequential.
Yet the defining emotional endpoint of October remained tied to Isobel. Singapore had been the final setting of our conversation, and with its conclusion, that chapter closed without spectacle. The month that began with professional conflict and emotional residue ended in creative ignition, quiet acceptance, and the emergence of new but less charged connections. October stood as both apex and dissolution — the culmination of an emotional arc that had begun in Oxford and the gentle fading that followed its brief, luminous peak.
Conclusion
Looking back on it now, the question that naturally arises is what, if anything, can be concluded from the experience. Memory has a way of smoothing edges while preserving emotional truths, and the passage of time introduces perspective without necessarily dissolving ambiguity. What remains is not a tidy narrative with a clear moral, but a series of impressions that continue to carry meaning long after the events themselves have receded.
Was I in love with Isobel? The answer, for me, is uncomplicated. Yes — absolutely. The feeling was immediate, powerful, and unmistakable in its emotional clarity. It was not rooted in fantasy or projection so much as in recognition: the sudden awareness that another person had seen and engaged parts of me that often remain peripheral or unarticulated. The connection possessed both intellectual and emotional intimacy, creating a sense of alignment that felt rare and therefore significant.
Whether she was in love with me is less certain. That question remains open, and perhaps necessarily so. Love does not always manifest symmetrically, nor does it require identical emotional timelines. What I do believe is that she was deeply drawn to me — enamored with qualities she named explicitly: my maturity, my openness, my willingness to explore symbolic and esoteric frameworks such as astrology, and what she described as my confirmed oddness. These were not superficial points of attraction but aspects of identity that shape how one moves through the world and forms connection. In response, she opened herself in ways that felt unprecedented in my experience with other women. The openness was emotional, conversational, and psychological, revealing vulnerabilities and reflections that suggested a level of trust both genuine and meaningful.
Yet that openness stopped short of the one dimension that often defines romantic relationships in conventional terms. Physical consummation never occurred. And still, I remain convinced that it might have — that the night of the red dress, that Wednesday evening suspended in quiet possibility, carried the potential for that final step had I not withdrawn. The decision to pull back was not rooted in lack of desire but in an instinctive recognition of complexity and consequence, a moment where restraint felt simultaneously protective and destabilizing.
At the beginning of this narrative, I wrote the line: “I did not sleep with her, so I had to quit my job.” On its surface, the statement reads as paradoxical or even absurd. Yet in a literal and emotional sense, it reflects the truth as I experienced it. Something that transpired between us disrupted my internal equilibrium in a way that extended far beyond the boundaries of romantic encounter. The experience did not create professional dissatisfaction where none existed; rather, it crystallized tensions that had long been present but insufficiently confronted. In the altered emotional state that followed Oxford, I could no longer compartmentalize or tolerate dynamics that had gradually eroded trust and professional fulfillment. The decision to resign emerged not as a reaction to Isobel but as a response made possible by the clarity her presence inadvertently catalyzed.
What, then, did Isobel have to do with that decision? It is a question without a definitive answer, and perhaps one that resists definitive resolution. Objectively, professional circumstances and romantic encounter belong to separate domains, each governed by distinct motivations and consequences. Yet subjective experience does not always honor such boundaries. In my mind and in my heart, the two remain inextricably linked. The emotional awakening precipitated by our connection illuminated aspects of my life that had grown untenable, accelerating a reckoning that might otherwise have unfolded more gradually.
In this sense, Isobel did not cause the decision but revealed the conditions that made it inevitable. The encounter functioned as catalyst rather than origin, exposing fractures already present and clarifying the need for change. The love I felt for her, whether reciprocated in equal measure or not, became intertwined with a broader transformation — one that encompassed identity, professional alignment, and creative direction.
Ultimately, the experience resists reduction to a singular meaning. It was neither tragedy nor triumph, neither mistake nor destiny. It was an encounter marked by intensity, ambiguity, and consequence, leaving behind a residue of insight rather than closure. If anything can be said with certainty, it is that the connection altered the trajectory of my life in subtle but enduring ways. The emotional truth of that alteration persists, even as the specifics of the relationship have receded into memory.
And perhaps that is the most accurate conclusion available: that some relationships are defined not by duration or outcome but by the clarity they introduce, the decisions they precipitate, and the self-recognition they make possible. In that sense, Isobel remains both part of my past and part of the internal landscape through which I continue to move — a presence whose significance lies less in what occurred than in what it revealed.
Coda
What remains, after the noise has faded and the chronology has settled into memory, is not regret but recognition. Isobel was never meant to be a permanent figure in my life; she was a moment of ignition, a flare that illuminated terrain I had been walking blindly for years. Loving her did not undo me — it clarified me. It revealed fault lines in my professional life, deepened my awareness of emotional possibility, and reminded me that connection can arrive without warning and depart without resolution while still altering everything that follows. Some encounters are not chapters but catalysts, and their power lies precisely in their brevity. I did not leave Oxford with a lover, but I left with a truth that could no longer be ignored, and that truth reshaped the decisions that defined the months and years ahead.
So the story does not end with loss but with transformation. The quiet house in Kyoto, the late-night calls across time zones, the resignation spoken into an office heavy with history, the essays written in the wake of confusion and clarity — all of it forms a single arc whose meaning resides not in permanence but in awakening. Isobel remains a presence not because of what we became, but because of what her existence made visible: that love, even when fleeting, carries the capacity to reorder a life. And in that sense, the experience stands complete. Not a tragedy, not a triumph, but a moment of rare and incandescent alignment — a brief crossing of paths that left behind warmth, ache, and an enduring knowledge that sometimes the most consequential relationships are the ones that arrive, burn bright, and quietly pass into memory while continuing to shape the person who remembers them.
Note: If you linked this piece, you may also like my short story Simona below.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 