Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Of Montreal’s The Past is a Grotesque Animal

Note: A reflective piece on an Of Montreal track and a cluster of other listening moments where music stopped being background and became something closer to intervention. Starting in a cramped, overheated apartment in Furano, Hokkaido, on New Year’s Day 2006, the essay moves through a snowbound walk soundtracked by Kevin Barnes’ The Past is a Grotesque Animal, then branches outward to two other formative listening experiences—Bob Dylan on a half-awake AM radio morning, and Father John Misty in mid-career exhaustion on a city commute. It is less about music as taste than music as rupture: the way certain songs bypass interpretation and reorganize the inner self in real time, leaving the listener briefly unarmoured, and then altered.

Furano, New Year’s Day, 2006.

Outside, Hokkaido is doing what it does in winter when it stops pretending to be habitable: the air is an exposed blade, the snow hard-packed and granular underfoot, everything outside reduced to distance, glare, and breath. Inside Ken and Eri’s small apartment it is the opposite problem—heat pushed to excess, a sealed, overcompensating warmth that turns the room into a kind of shared pressure chamber. We are all in it together: Ken, serving in the Japanese army and posted up here in Furano; Eri, quietly and expertly holding the domestic center; their son Shinya, one year younger than our son Hugh; and the four of us effectively folded into one cramped sleeping arrangement that collapses night into proximity. It is kind, it is hospitable, it is also inescapably too much. The bed feels like it belongs to no one and everyone at once.

I remember wanting, with a clarity that felt almost physical, to go home. Not anywhere abstract—Kyoto specifically. My own bed. My own thermostat. The ability to set the heater somewhere between restraint and comfort rather than Arctic evacuation or sauna collapse. Kyoto’s winter is mild enough to forgive you for being human. Furano’s winter is not.

It is late afternoon on New Year’s Day. The holiday has that particular suspended quality: nothing is open, nothing is moving, and even time seems to have adopted local weather conditions. I have just discovered I have lost my wallet—ID, credit cards, the small administrative skeleton of a life—and I am trying not to let it tip everything further off balance. Eri will later find it, of course, lodged under the couch cushions, and post it back as if this is just another minor adjustment to the day’s equilibrium. At the time, though, it feels like the world tightening a little further around me.

So I go for a walk.

It is not a decision so much as a pressure release. I put on headphones, step out into the cold, and immediately the winter reasserts itself with total authority. No negotiation. Just air, snow, and the sound of my shoes biting into frozen ground. I am wearing sneakers instead of boots, which already feels like a small error in judgment that will have consequences.

And then I press play.

The Past is a Grotesque Animal arrives like a system taking over the system. Of Montreal, Kevin Barnes—whatever name you want to use for the person or force behind it—unfolding a twelve-minute architecture of confession, excess, fragmentation, and emotional overexposure that does not so much accompany the walk as overwrite it.

I do not listen once.

I walk for an hour in circles, or near-circles, or something that becomes circular by repetition. The song loops again and again—four times, maybe more—and each return feels less like repetition and more like deepening. The cold sharpens, the snow crunches, my breathing becomes part of the rhythm. At some point I am no longer fully tracking direction. I am just in motion inside the sound.

And I am crying.

Not the polite kind of emotional leakage you can disguise as weather or fatigue, but something closer to surrender. Barnes is doing something too exposed, too unguarded, too structurally unstable to defend against. It is not just lyrics—it is tone, duration, refusal of containment. The line lands like a fracture: you know things could be different / but they’re not.

That is the moment. Not because it is the most complex line, but because it is the simplest possible articulation of something I am already carrying without knowing it.

Ken and Eri are not the problem. In-laws are not the problem. Furano is not the problem. The problem is the accumulation: ambition just starting to harden into structure (new full-time role at Rits Uji after years of part-time teaching), the sense of trajectory toward IB, the pressure of becoming legible professionally, and underneath it all the quieter, more persistent anxiety about language, about my son’s future English, about whether proximity is enough when communication is not yet guaranteed.

Hugh is three. He doesn’t yet speak English in any sustained way. He will, later—Kyoto International School, gradual unfolding—but at this moment it feels like a future I am trying to pre-pay emotionally, as if worry could accelerate outcome.

And so the walk becomes something else entirely: a cold, repetitive loop through snow and sound, a private weather system synchronized to a song that refuses to stay at a safe emotional distance. I am half-lost in it, half-anchored by it. At some point I stop thinking in sentences.

When I finally turn back, the house is still there, still too warm, still intact. The ordinary world resumes its shape as if nothing has happened. Dinner will happen, conversation will happen, the night will pass.

But something has already been displaced.

That walk, that loop, that song—those remain as a fixed point. Not resolution, not transformation exactly. More like an encounter with a register of feeling I did not previously have language for, but which now exists and cannot be removed.

Barnes did not explain anything.

He just got through.

Kevin Barnes, the lead singer of Of Montreal, is one of those contemporary indie figures who refuses the clean categories people like to file musicians into. What’s known, in fairly plain terms, is that Barnes has moved over time into an openly fluid understanding of gender and sexuality—identifying in recent years as non-binary and queer, using multiple pronouns, and explicitly framing earlier work (including the Georgie Fruit persona) as something they now see as a problematic, overextended act of identification and performance. That matters because it retroactively clarifies what was already visible in the live persona you’re describing: drag-inflected glamour, exaggerated femininity/masculinity, theatrical self-invention as method rather than costume.

The deeper pattern is that Barnes’ sexuality and identity have never been “announced” in a single stable form so much as continuously staged—worked through performance, breakdown, and reinvention. The turbulence people sometimes read as “issues” (depression, relationship collapse, manic productivity, alter-egos like Georgie Fruit) sits less in the register of scandal than in the register of aesthetic method: self as unstable material. Albums like Hissing Fauna… are basically internal monologues set on fire, where romantic relationships, identity, and chemical imbalance are all entangled rather than separated into neat clinical categories. 

Barnes sits in a lineage of glam and art-pop performers (Bowie is the obvious shadow) where gender play is not commentary on identity but the medium through which identity is continuously rewritten. The result is that the work feels emotionally confessional even when the persona is highly stylised: the sincerity and the artifice are not opposites; they are fused, sometimes uncomfortably so.

In short: Barns does not have a fixed sexuality, and lives t a life in which sexuality, gender, and performance are permanently entangled, and where his “issues” are inseparable from the creative engine itself.

Grotesque Animal arrives less like a track than like a prolonged exposure to someone thinking out loud with no filter, no editing instinct, and no interest in letting the listener rest. The Past is a Grotesque Animal begins with a kind of conceptual detonation: the past is no longer memory or narrative continuity, but something bodily and misbegotten, an organism that looks back at you with the capacity to reveal not just error, but total epistemic miscalibration. The emotional register is already unusual here—this is not nostalgia, but retrospective humiliation at the fact of having ever thought you were right about anything.

From there the song folds into a second movement that is almost aggressively self-conscious: desire framed through embarrassment, attraction filtered through cultural overreach, intimacy mediated by theory. The encounter with a “cute girl” is not allowed to remain simple; it immediately drags in philosophical reference points, as if feeling itself requires justification through external intellectual scaffolding. What should be direct becomes over-determined, and the over-determination is precisely the point: the narrator cannot experience attraction without simultaneously watching himself experience it. Even love becomes something like a performance being observed in real time.

Then comes the pivot where the track sharpens into something more brutal. The language shifts from reflection to collapse—academic failure, emotional disintegration, the recognition of being “gone” while simultaneously narrating that disappearance. The crucial gesture here is not despair but authorship: the insistence that even breakdown is self-produced. That phrase—“authoring disaster”—is doing a great deal of work. It removes the possibility of passive suffering and replaces it with something more modern and more punishing: agency inside collapse. One is not simply breaking; one is composing the form of one’s breaking as it happens.

By the time the song reaches its midsection, it has abandoned restraint entirely. What had been psychological becomes infrastructural. The fantasy of tearing things apart—houses, bodies, structures of containment—is not really about violence in a literal sense, but about the release from moderation. It is a desire for total unbinding, for a condition in which limits no longer apply and intensity can proceed without correction. It feels adolescent in energy but philosophically adult in implication: if order is already failing, why not accelerate the collapse and inhabit it consciously? “Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart.” Indeed.

What prevents the song from becoming mere excess is its final register shift into intimacy as circuitry rather than refuge. The closing idea is not reconciliation but connection as transmission—human relation imagined as something like hidden wiring beneath visible separation. Two people are not joined by resolution or understanding, but by something involuntary and continuous, an electrical sympathy that persists even when emotional coherence has dissolved. Love here is not stabilising; it is conductive. It carries instability rather than resolving it.

That is what makes the piece so unusual over its length. It does not progress toward clarity or resolution; it deepens a single proposition through repetition and escalation: that consciousness is unstable, self-authored, and perpetually aware of its own failure to stabilise. And yet, paradoxically, that awareness itself becomes the form of continuity. The song does not resolve the grotesque past—it learns to live inside its ongoing presence.

I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them, and the distinction has mostly to do with form rather than intent. A lot of the catalogue is deliberately baroque—dense production, shifting textures, long runtimes that feel less like songs than elaborately staged environments you’re expected to inhabit rather than enter. There’s a kind of aesthetic overgrowth to it: too many surfaces, too many internal modulations, too much happening at once for easy emotional access. It’s not background music, and it doesn’t really want to be. The cost of that ambition, for me, is that it can be hard to get inside the songs in a way that feels immediate or bodily. You end up listening at them more than through them.

Which is why The Past is a Grotesque Animal feels so different. It breaks the pattern entirely. It is still maximal, still structurally excessive, still willing to stretch time, but it has a strange internal clarity that most of the other material doesn’t. There’s no sense of ornamental distraction or sonic clutter for its own sake. Instead, everything feels metabolised into a single forward-moving emotional logic. It doesn’t feel like it’s demonstrating complexity; it feels like it’s trapped inside it.

And crucially, it has no filler energy whatsoever. Even at length, it maintains pressure. It doesn’t meander—it accumulates. Each section feels necessary to the psychological arc it is tracing, even when the content is volatile or self-cancelling. That’s the paradox: it is expansive but not indulgent, long but not diffuse. It behaves less like a composition and more like a sustained state of consciousness that refuses to close.

That’s why it stands apart. In a catalogue where density sometimes becomes opacity, this one remains piercingly legible. It is maximal, but it is also focused. It doesn’t just add material—it tightens around an emotional core until it becomes unavoidable.

The final movement of this piece is really about how certain songs don’t just soundtrack life, they puncture it and then rearrange the internal furniture. I don’t have many of these, but I have a few, and they tend to arrive at moments when I am not exactly looking for them.

One is Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” heard half-awake at around 6:30 in the morning on AM radio, sometime in my late teens. I hadn’t slept properly in years—there was a long adolescent stretch where nights just bled into mornings—and the room was that grey-blue pre-dawn wash where nothing feels fully solid. I remember lying there with the radio still on from the night before, drifting through news bulletins, late-night voices, static, and then this song arriving like a kind of moral weather system. It doesn’t announce itself so much as settle in. Something in it made the world feel both unbearable and forgiven at the same time. I stayed in bed longer than I intended, not because I was tired, but because getting up felt like leaving something important unfinished.

Another is much later, in 2017, walking down the steps toward a Starbucks after work, head full of obligations, deadlines, the general low-grade administrative pressure of being a functioning adult in motion. On comes Father John Misty’s “Leaving LA” from Pure Comedy, and I just stop. Not dramatically—no cinematic pause—but enough that I find myself going up and down the steps again, as if I’ve temporarily forgotten what the destination was supposed to be. The song is slow, almost patient with its own despair, and it carries that peculiar tone of someone who has both succeeded and slightly lost the plot in the process. There’s a line of thinking in it about authorship, irony, and being turned into something by other people’s projections—about how the self becomes a kind of public object. And it landed at exactly the wrong/right time, which is to say: it landed perfectly.

And then there is the Of Montreal experience, specifically Kevin Barnes’ “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them in general. The songs are often too baroque, too long, too densely wired to immediately enter; they resist casual listening in a way that can feel like work. But this one is different. It is not just long, it is internally necessary. It moves through regret, desire, self-destruction, erotic confusion, intellectual posturing, collapse, and a kind of exhausted self-awareness that never quite resolves. The refrain—“things could be different, but they’re not”—is almost banal on paper, but in the context of the song it becomes something closer to a philosophical statement about adulthood itself. There is no exit ramp offered. Only repetition, escalation, and admission.

What ties these three moments together is not genre or mood, but exposure. Each of them removes a layer of insulation. Dylan makes meaning feel too large to comfortably contain. Misty makes authorship feel slightly embarrassing, slightly external, as if the self has already been narrated elsewhere. Barnes, in the Of Montreal track, does something more aggressive: he refuses to simplify anything at all, and in doing so forces the listener into a kind of emotional honesty that is hard to sustain.

These are not “favourite songs” in any simple sense. They are more like points of contact where life briefly becomes too legible, and then continues anyway.

Dedication:

For Kevin. I know you’ve been through it baby. I’ve been through it too and I can hear it dude. 100%. You rock baby.

Note: If you ilke this piece you may also like the pieces about music below.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Ryan Adams
In Defense of Mark Kozelek
Posted on by Matt Thomas

Don’t Pump Me Man!

Note: Spokane, early 1983: minor league baseball, cheap seats, and kids living in the gaps between innings. This piece recalls Spokane Indians games, chasing balls during batting practice, and a strange collision of childhood mischief and adult volatility at the edge of the outfield fence. Sandy Alomar Jr.—then a local catcher on his way to a long MLB career—signs a baseball in handwriting so precise it feels like a signature on a future already underway, while a moment of chaos involving thrown persimmons and a furious adult named Mike Trowbridge becomes the kind of story that sticks far longer than the season itself.

Epigraph:

Do you know who you’re fucking with?/ You’re fucking with a stallion mange.

Ween

It was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go. We played Little League baseball in uniforms that never quite fit right, and then on weekends we graduated to something bigger and looser and more important: Spokane Indians games at the old stadium, Single A ball, where the dreams were real and still close enough to touch.

The Spokane Indians were a kind of civic promise back then. It was a small town, and in the early 1980s there wasn’t always a lot going on. The Indians were not quite big league, but not quite nothing. Just enough baseball to make you believe that something important was always one bus ride away. The seats were cheap, the beer cheaper, and the fences closer than they should have been. The whole place had that slightly improvised feel—like the city had built it thinking, this will do for now.

We didn’t go to games like spectators. We went like we belonged.

Behind the outfield wall during batting practice, kids gathered like scavengers. We chased homers, argued over balls, sprinted through patches of grass worn down by repetition. Sometimes we were the only ones back there. Sometimes there were older kids, or dads, or random locals who knew the angles better than we did. It was a loose territory. Not quite policed. Not quite ours. Something in between.

That summer, the Indians had a catcher everyone knew. Local kid. Quiet confidence. Clean mechanics. The kind of player adults already talked about like he had a future attached to him.

Sandy Alomar Jr. was that guy even then—before the long MLB career, before the All-Star years, before anyone outside Spokane would know the name properly. He was already different. You could see it in the way he stood when he wasn’t moving, like he was always half a second ahead of the next pitch.

I got his autograph once. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a moment after BP, when he signed a ball for a cluster of kids leaning too far over a rail. His handwriting was unexpectedly beautiful—controlled, deliberate, almost elegant in a way that didn’t match the dirt and sweat of the field. I remember thinking even then: this is what someone looks like when they’re going somewhere.

I kept that ball for years.

Because baseball wasn’t just baseball. It was a hierarchy you could see. You had the guys who were going to make it, the guys who might make it, and the rest of us orbiting the idea that proximity alone might transfer something.

Most of them wouldn’t go anywhere. That was obvious even then, though nobody said it out loud. But that day, none of that mattered yet. What mattered was the fence.

Our party was up high in the stands on the first base side, just beyond where the stadium fence met a thin strip of wild space. A tree had grown there—some kind of fruit tree, nobody was ever fully sure what it was. Persimmons, maybe. Something orange-red and heavy-looking, the kind of fruit that doesn’t look like it should be thrown but absolutely is.

Some kids started throwing them. Just kids, just fucking around. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with. Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you.

The fruit flew. Not carefully. Not aimlessly either. More like experimentation. Testing distance. Testing reactions. Some of them were aiming at fans, others just launching them over the fence because it felt like something you could do if no one stopped you.

It was mildly funny at first. Then mildly annoying. Then mildly dangerous in a way that nobody fully acknowledged.

Because persimmons, if that’s what they were, aren’t soft. They hit like small decisions.

I remember one bouncing near a row of seats and rolling under a foot. Someone laughed. Someone else shouted. But nobody moved with urgency yet. It was still in the category of “kids being kids.”

Until Mike Trowbridge noticed.

Mike T was there with his kids—David Trowbridge and his sister Dawn. David had been a teammate of mine in Little League, a few years younger, outfield guy, quiet in the way younger kids sometimes are when they’re still deciding how loud they’re allowed to be. Dawn was just there in the background of everything, observing.

Their dad, Mike, was not background.

He was one of those adults you noticed before you understood why. Volatile energy. Tight posture. Goatee, black tank top, gold chains around his neck. A bit of a greaser; drove a Harley. Always slightly too close to losing his temper. He wasn’t a bad guy exactly—he could laugh, he could talk—but you always felt like there was a second version of him sitting just under the surface.

He saw the fruit being thrown. And something in him snapped into motion. He walked straight to the fence line, fast enough that it changed the temperature of the moment.

“Knock that shit off right now,” he yelled.

The kids paused. Not because they were scared exactly, but because the voice had weight.

Then one of them—small kid, maybe ten, sunburned confidence, the kind of kid who doesn’t fully understand consequences yet—looked up and said:

“Don’t pump me, man.”

It was such a strange sentence. Too casual for the situation. Too confident for the speaker. Like he had borrowed it from somewhere older and wasn’t sure how it fit yet.

There was a beat of silence where the entire stadium noise seemed to pull back slightly.

Mike T looked at him.

“Don’t pump me?” he said.

Then his voice shifted.

“You want me to pump you? I’ll pump you.”

And in that moment—this is the part that still feels unreal even now—he climbed the fence. Not slowly. Not theatrically. Just decisively. Like the boundary wasn’t a boundary at all.

Everything changed at once.

Me, David, Dawn—everyone nearby—we all froze in that wide-eyed way kids do when they realize the rules might not hold. It wasn’t comedy anymore. It wasn’t baseball anymore.

It was just: Mikey baby don’t kill that kid.

That’s what it felt like in my head. Not words were spoken, just panic translated into something almost verbal.

The kids scattered instantly. Full sprint. No hesitation. The fruit stopped mid-air and dropped forgotten. The stadium behind us suddenly felt far away, like it belonged to a different scene entirely.

Mike T took a step forward, still inside the fenced edge of this improvised battlefield, breathing hard, still locked in that strange overlap between anger and disbelief.

And then—somehow—it was over. No actual violence. No contact. Just the threat of it, large enough to erase the mischief that had caused it.

The kids were gone. The fruit stopped flying. The tree stood there like nothing had happened. Afterwards, the stadium noise came back slowly, like a system rebooting.

My dad, Ross, had seen the whole thing. He was laughing, hard. Not the kind of polite laugh adults do when they think they’re supposed to. This was involuntary. Almost helpless. The kind of laugh that tries to stay respectful but can’t quite hold the line.

Because it was funny. In that terrible, chaotic way childhood sometimes is when it brushes up against adult intensity and survives without breaking.

Ross would tell that story for years after. The kid. The fence. The persimmons. The line: don’t pump me man. He never stopped laughing at that part.

Neither did I.

But at the time, I just stood there thinking about Sandy Alomar Jr. somewhere on that field, already on his way to something else entirely, signing baseballs in beautiful handwriting, while right behind the stadium wall the rest of us were learning the difference between games and consequences in real time.

Most of us wouldn’t make it to the Bigs. But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go.

But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.

Dedication:

For Mike T. And for the kid. You got balls young man, I’ll say that.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Final Reflections on My Time With Isobel

Epigraph:

I wrote all night
Like the fire of my words could burn a hole up to heaven
I don’t write all night burning holes up to heaven no more

Phosphorescent

Note:These reflections were written in March 2019, in the immediate aftermath of a personal experience that destabilized me more than anything I had previously encountered. They were never intended for publication and have not been revised.I’m sharing them now as a record of that moment—not as a finished account, but as a document of what it felt like to be inside it: heightened, contradictory, and often unclear even to myself.

I have written at length about my experiences with the woman I am calling Isobel. You can find the narrative series here, here, and here. You can also find the play I wrote about this time here.

3/28/19:

I went too far.  I cannot tell if I went too far on purpose; certainly I pushed and pushed until I came to the end of the line.  Like an explorer bent on reaching the furthest possible point, I pushed my mind and body until they could take no more.  Now, the wind has gone out of my sails, for how long I cannot say.  Perhaps for a long time.  Yet I am not at peace, not yet, not now.  “I came so far for beauty/ I left so much behind.”  

Why was it that I had to roam so far out?  What was I running from?  Why did I lock my heart up so tightly that it had to explode in order to feel?  Was there a point at which I could have taken another turn, or was it all slated to occur just as it did?  You can ask why forever and get nowhere.  This I know.

So I met a woman and this shook me up.  She shook me up.  She wasn’t trying to, but she did.  My carefully balanced psyche, assembled and jury-rigged over decades, came apart in a matter of days.  Anything could have happened, and by the grace of god I was able to retain some kind of governing function, however weak, which helped me stay safe.  Over seven weeks everything that could be thrown at me was.  I was under massive physical and psychological strain and only my years of amateur study of consciousness and the unconsciousness saved me from succumbing entirely.  If I could do it over again (a terrifying notion), I would do almost nothing the same.  However, I understand why I made the choices I did.  There is little point, really, in interrogating the choices that we made in the light of the circumstances that were in place.  Things were, and I reacted to them as I did.  There is no getting around this.  

Still, I made every mistake in the book.  A classic mid-life crisis.  Stereo-fucking-typical, scripted to the t.  The funny thing is, I knew all about the blueprint and it still happened.  “My Dinner with Andre” was a foundation text.  I’d read Jung and James Hollis on midlife, extensively.  Paradoxically perhaps, the very knowledge of the blueprint may have helped bring the symptoms into being.  Or not, maybe I was semi-consciously gathering resources with the implicit foreknowledge that one day they would be needed.  Either way, advance information about the terrain only allowed me to stay on my feet—it did not allow me to change course.  

I was a Gemini warrior on a private quest, one unseeable from the outside and barely even discernible to myself.  So many windmills, so much striving for the grail.  To what end?  A window seat—a temporary sinacure—and a chance to draw breath at sea level.  That’s about it.  Can I learn to live as it seems others do, with a little less metaphysical strum und drang, present in the world of the senses, just living?  I don’t know what it is like not to live in my head and don’t remember when I started living this way.  What I know now though it, it’s a trap.  A mire.  An maze with no exit.  A road to nowhere.

In five years time will this all seem to have been necessary—just part of the process of being a human?  God I hope so.  That’s what the literature says—the final stage is acceptance.  How I am doing with that?  I accept that what happened happened.  I accept that I made choices that made sense in the moment.  I accept that that my personality was in large part a construct and that I am better off without a lot of it.  And, I accept the possibility of a silver lining somewhere down the line.  The magnitude of the experience and its ripple effects, these are things I am still coming to terms with.

I have seen some things that many will never see.  Beautiful and fantastic things, awful things.  As a result, I am shaken and somewhat unsteady.  That’ll happen when you stray too close to the light.  But those things are not mine—they do not belong to me.  They have their own location, their own zone, at the edges of the known.  I was granted, or gained, access to a sliver of another realm, yet I do not know how deep or how wide that realm is.  Right now it is enough to know that it is there, more than enough.  Both climbers and divers may feel sick when returning to sea level.  I don’t know if I have been climbing or diving or, somehow, both, and in the end it does not matter.  Leonard Cohen’s ladies man dies again and again throughout the ages.  “It’s like a visit to the moon or to that other star/ I guess you’d go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far.”  I didn’t want to go that far, not really, but I did anyway.  

===== =====

3/29/19:

Why did I give up on my job?  Because let’s face it, I gave up.  Let’s get some things out in the open.  I managed my energy very poorly for a long time.  I was using shortcuts and papering over energetic issues to keep going at the pace I was working.  For the last three or four years I was also withdrawing bit by bit—taking more half days off, shrugging more off, and putting off longer term planning that was necessary for the program.  I was basically exhausted on an energetic level and this led to taking more time for myself and spending too much money just to get a space to reset—to feel something.  

What was it that was so exhausting?  As I’ve spoken about to many, the constant pushing of the stone uphill, the constant battle to get needs listened to, was certainly tiring.  The feeling that it was really just me, a middle man, at the top of a huge operation and I didn’t have the tools or the power to do the things I needed to.  The feeling that there were so many program areas that were not as good as they could be.  The growing gap in my marriage which allowed me to seek feeling connections recklessly and a little randomly.  

After a while, my psyche was being held together by string, by a thread.  I was carrying deep wounds from the past which I hardly knew existed, had hardly ever looked at.  I was an unitegrated personality in many ways and have no real root here in Japan.  The sense of being included in an extended family that existed when I met my wife was long gone.  My dream life was giving me warnings and maybe I could have done something with them.  I was primed for a crack-up.  

What was it about Elodie that enraptured me so entirely?  I think it was the combination and sexuality and motherliness, her openness, her painful past which she was so open about, and some kind of deep inherent similarity that we both felt, and proceeded to blow out of all proportion.  And she wanted to spend every minute with me!  I was around the bend about her within a day.  There are funny parts to the story—man I knew I was in trouble.  That’s why I was listening to the Mendoza Line non-stop.  “Mistakes were made tonight” indeed.  I recognized that I was right on the edge and programmed myself not to step over it on the conference.  And then I got on the plane and proceeded to step right off the cliff in another way.  Long term, I guess it was a better cliff but how I thought I was in the right frame of mind to make that kind of decision, I’ll never understand.  The correct move I made was to put people around me to keep me safe.  The mistake I made was to recruit them into my plan to leave my job when I should have sought advice and depended on them to guide my decisions.

I feel like I want to say this—school leadership was poor.  My decision to leave was not a direct result of the lack of leadership; it was a result of a massive energy change/ charge that took my system by storm and caused me to lose all perspective.  However, the energy issues were in many ways a result of stress and repression of anger and frustration over how things were being handled, both over the short and the longer term.  The issues were deep—still today my body is not right.  I’m fragile, I’m weak, I’m a shell of my former self.  

“This is the new not normal”—I’m listening to the new Lambchop album.  It’s good of course, but kind of all sounds the same.  That’s OK though.  How can I get used to this new not normal at this office?  There is nothing to do.  Maybe that will change, and maybe I can make it change.  Right now I am the definition of a clock-watcher.  I know I put myself in this position and I’ll endure, but at what cost?  Something needs to change, but I know I can’t push myself back into a bunch of old patterns even if I could.  Maybe I was acting like an INTP—maybe feeling was the most buried function of all.  This is probable.  

My damage is deep, generational.  If I am right in imagining that for some bizarre reason I had a role to play in clearing up or shouldering this burden and sort of resolving it, well that’s something I did.  I certainly felt this way last fall, and that sense, that notion is still present.  And now what?  I am not special just because I have begun to own up to my damage.  The best thing I can do now is to pass on as little as I can to my son—to be as present as I can with him as often as I can.  

I also need to extend my working lifespan.  This is a priority, and I need to be realistic about this.  However, I’ve been stressing myself out to figure this out like today and that I can’t do.  My priorities have to be: i) to minimize spending and pay the bills; ii) to cut way back on drinking; iii) to network and think positively about the future little by little.  Anything can come.  Tell yourself, anything can come.  Anything can come.  

FIN        

===== =====

3/30/19:

There is no point in trying to write well right now.  I am writing just to pass the time and continue to process my guilt and my heartache.  The sense that somehow I was wired wrong is persistent, despite people who care about me trying to tell me otherwise.  I mean, I have not been practical, have not made ordered decisions about securing my life and that of my family.  I have made ordered decisions in so many other areas, not this one.  How could that even be?  I have no real answer to this—magical thinking, arrogance, the feeling that I could somehow tread water forever. I don’t know.

Ann wrote that I might have a form of PTSD from the collision with Elodie.  This rings true.  Meeting her shook up my mind and body at a core level.  The ideas of animating archetypes are not just ideas.  They are real.  When Elodie and I fell into one another, I lost all sense of self.  I wanted to give everything and anything to her, falling over myself to do so, to explain, to unburden myself.  She was attracted and fascinated by some of this, but was also overwhelmed by the extent and speed of it all.  On my end, I was overwhelmed too, overwhelmed by the depth of the attraction and how far I fell into her.  We talked, and I could not figure out was this an ascent or a descent.  So strange that it could be both.  It was more a trip into the infinite.  A trip for sure.  I exited London and I was undone.  I was terrified and thought I was bulletproof at the same time.  I should have leaned more into the terror—I should have slowed down and assessed.  This I did not do.

Calling Lynn and getting the idea of the kundalini was helpful.  This was another juncture I could have turned for the better—tried to get grounded in a more appropriate way.  Like the runner I once was, I just thought I could run the energy to ground.  In the end I did, too late and with too much cost.  So here I sit in a purgatory of my own making, bereft.  Is this what I was destined to have to deal with—the emptiness, the total lack of self without the worldly tasks that were set me?  I am having new thoughts—thoughts about the break up of extended families and that this is one of the core problems in modern life, perhaps the core one.  Loneliness is probably an epidemic, almost certainly.  

For a moment there was music, there was dance and movement, there was sexual confidence, there was bravodo.  No longer.  Why can’t those feelings, those urges, be regulated and controlled?  I suppose they can, with practice.  Apply myself, that’s something I’ve always had difficulty doing toward a skill.  Variety seeking—always on the lookout to change direction.  How boring.  

I know I need to focus on my health, but how can I do that with these days stretching in front of me like this?  I am in a tough situation.  This is a fact.  I can’t write my way out of this.  What am I supposed to be learning?  What is it even possible to learn here?  Patience, humility?  Patience for what, for reinstatement to the culture that pushed me over the edge?  I read about principles under stress in Australia and no one wanting the job.  I can understand why.  I never wanted to be that high up either—really didn’t.  I only accepted it because I was apparently the best person.  What could have been different?  I did all I could to delegate, well, I tried.  I felt guilt over my classes being below-par, could not stop working on the weekend, got worn down.  

There has to be a silver lining.  Well, one is the conference lifestyle is over.  That had to end, and an end was forced on me.  That’s a net positive.  I may be able to address my habits.  This is going to be super hard because of the sleep and because I gain pleasure from the pub.  Can I keep the pub and drop the rest?  That has to be the goal.  

Dedication:

For Elodie. I love you.

=====

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up the difficulties of modern romance.

Simona
Mariko
Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Time in Kumamoto Japan I: NOVA and Meeting Sachie

Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.

Epigraph:

Kim You Bore Me to Death

—Grandaddy

I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.

What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.

Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.

NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.

By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.

We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.

At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.

By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.

There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.

Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.

He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.

By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.

“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”

¥4000 was a lot for me then.

“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”

She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.

“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”

“For not buying a T-shirt?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”

And that was it. Never went back.

Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.

“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”

I never heard that expression before or since.

John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.

When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.

“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.

Didn’t matter. It kept happening.

One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”

“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At least he asked.

John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.

He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.

John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.

Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.

He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.

He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.

We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.

The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.

I didn’t.

A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.

There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.

“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”

“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”

There were a few good reasons for that.

One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.

Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.

So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.

On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”

Didn’t really translate.

By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.

I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.

Out step Paul and Yoko.

Ruh roh.

Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.

Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.

Paul shrugged it off.

“Easy come, easy go.”

We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.

He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.

That’s when I started to believe him.

Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.

It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.

Dedication:

For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.

Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.

My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival
On My Interlude Between Hamilton College and Japan, 1996 and early 1997.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Levels of Lucidity in Dreams: A Close Reading

Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara

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

Epigraph I:

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

—Carl Jung

Epigraph II:

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

—Chuck Klosterman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Waggoner, 61

[2] ibid., 63

[3] Love, 131

[4] Love, 71

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

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

[7] Moss, 49

[8] Jung, 300

[9] ibid., 304

[10] ibid., 324

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

[12] Moss, 74-74; Linklater

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Scenes from St. George’s, Part VI: Teacher Quality/ Senior Year I

Don’t get sued.

My Readers

Note: This is Part VI of Scenes From St. George’s. You can find the earlier parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. I want to make just a few comments here about the direction of this series. I had originally planned to do only five of these pieces, and this is already number six. This is mostly because of the positive reception the pieces have gotten, which has been great, and I have been prompted by the many pieces of feedback I have gotten from readers to expand the scope of the series slightly. Nonetheless, the narrative arc of this series is nearing a close, and I don’t expect to write more than one or two more of these.

High School Chinese History Class, High School Computer Class

In this series I have already talked a bit about teacher quality at St. George’s, as well as suggesting that student quality, for lack of a better term, is also related to the perception of teacher effectiveness. For example, I wrote that E.T. was a “mediocre” science teacher, however he was in fact a good science teacher for students who wanted to learn Physics. He just wasn’t the best at controlling a large science lab where only 20% or so of the class had an interest in learning on a given day. In contrast, I wrote that C.F. was a good teacher for 5th graders despite being somewhat lazy. I’m not sure the lazy part of this is fair or not actually–all in all he managed to control what I’m sure was a pretty unruly classroom and left me with some memorable learning points, so maybe he was actually a good teacher until he peaced out. In any case, teacher quality is often pretty subjective. However I think I can state unequivocally that Betty Barber was a good teacher, and that this guy called J.G. was a bad one. Both Betty and J.G. taught me in high school; Betty taught Chinese History as a senior elective and J.G. taught English mainly I think, but I had him for computer class. Overall, Betty’s Chinese History class was the most important I ever took and was central to establishing my life course, and J.G.’s computer class was an unmitigated disaster.

Let’s start with the bad. J.G. was a pretty young guy, bearded, who had a serious hippie vibe. He came to school as part of a “teaching couple” with a woman called V., however I don’t believe that arrangement lasted very long. A lot of schools like to hire teaching couples; my own experience leads me to suggest giving them a miss, by and large. J.G. told us he had walked through Japan on foot with next to no money staying with people he met all along the way, and overall he seemed like an alright dude. However, his computer class was terrible.

What I recall was, we had basically one assignment all term which was to make a white ball that was sitting at the bottom of the screen move and bounce off the other sides of the screen. It was like we were re-making the game Pong or something. In order to make the ball move, we were supposed to do some coding, I guess. And this might have been possible, however J.G. gave us no instructions, no hints, no information or data of any kind about how to move the freaking ball. This was around 1990, so it wasn’t like we could cruise over to You Tube and figure it out. So we would ask J.G. “hey there J.G. dude, could you give us some pointers on where to start with this here ball movement?” And J.G. would answer “no. That’s the whole idea of learning something. You have to figure it out for yourself.”

Now I don’t know a lot about learning theory, but I know a little bit, and I don’t think this is really right. The learning theory that makes the most general sense to me is called “The Zone of Proximal Development.” If you are in education, or even if you are not, you might be familiar with the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD for short. In this theory, there is stuff the learner can already do, stuff they can do with help (that’s the zone of proximal development itself), and stuff they currently are not going to be able to do (stuff that is developmentally non-proximal so to speak). So in computer class in 1990 stuff we students could already do might include: turn on the computer and open an application, or whatever passed for an application in 1990; play a video game; and probably compose an essay or report on a writing program. For me, in any case, stuff I could handle most certainly did not include coding a white ball to bounce around. I had literally no idea where to start, not even the hint of a “coding language” or anything from J.G. there.

So, if a student such as myself is bouncing-white-ball-challenged, ZPD theory says they need to be shown the way toward acquiring the new skill through scaffolding. Scaffolding is just what it sounds like; it is giving the student sufficient steps to be able to get to a point where they can expand their ZPD like a balloon and incorporate the new skill in their repertoire. For the bouncing white ball, in my estimation, this would at an absolute minimum have required showing us how to access the coding section of the computer or program or whatever we were supposed to be doing, giving us some information about what kind of code we needed to write, and giving us some of the elements of the coding language. At a minimum. I mean as a freshman in university I took Latin, and my first semester Latin teacher had us reading Cicero by October, which was ambitious, but at least he gave us six weeks of verbs first. I can’t speak for others, but I needed six weeks, or at least six days, of coding language to begin to move the ball. But we didn’t get it, so after about 30 minutes of messing around with the computer the boys started to do other things such as compose dirty limericks and make jokes about other people’s mothers. The girls, I am sure, were more productive. I mean, what else were we supposed to do in the face of such incompetent instruction? Here is one little ditty I composed at the time–I apologize in advance, but it does contain some American History knowledge:

A pious reformer named Mather

Was frequently known to blather

About the great judgement hour

But the word from the shower

Was that Mather knew his way around lather

This should not be in print. In any case, eventually, some student figured out how to move the ball and told everyone else, and J.G. just sat there and watched, and we all passed the assignment. Was this the point? Was this all some elaborate exercise in collaboration? Here are the possibilities as I see them, from most generous to least generous to J.G.:

i) J.G. was giving us a lesson in working together when faced with a hard problem and the class went just like he intended.

ii) J.G. actually gave us a little more information than I am recalling, and it was enough for the better computer students to work things out and we all learned by osmosis. Sort of a ib) actually.

iii) J.G. believed in the learning method he stated–namely that the point of learning is to do everything yourself. Although I believe this to be an ineffective learning theory most of the time, it is at least a theory.

iv) J.G. had no idea how to code the ball to move either and was just hoping a student could solve it. In the meantime, he knew the challenge would take a while, and was killing class time so he didn’t have to teach any more computer.

v) J.G. resented having to teach computer class, which, as a penniless hippie, he knew nothing about, and intentionally sabotaged the class.

All and all I’m guessing a combination of iii) and iv) that was in play here, with maybe just a bit of ii). But I legit do not remember him teaching us a single thing or me learning a single thing in a whole term of class. So I’d have to say, he was a pretty bad teacher.

Betty Barber, on the other hand, was a great Chinese History teacher. Prior to taking this as a senior elective as I mentioned, I had taken World History from Betty as a sophomore or junior. I did pretty well in this class, but my maturity level was still only slightly higher than that of Mason Anderson, so Mason and I would take turns trying to steal each other’s wallets from the pocket of our letter jackets for much of the class. Pick-pocketing, I am sure, is one of the world’s oldest professions, and I’m sure my skills in this arena exceeded my computer skills, but still I didn’t exactly distinguish myself. In Chinese History, things were different. Betty had taken student groups to China in the very early 1980’s, just after the country opened up for tourists after the death of Mao and the Gang of Four era, and had a deep knowledge of the topic. Most of our high school teachers, I would say, were competent enough in their subject, with the notable exception of J.G., however Betty was really an expert in Chinese History, and I don’t use that term lightly.

Part of what made her a good Chinese History teacher for me and the class a good class was undoubtedly that it was an elective. In other words, I was there by choice. The second thing was, she knew the subject in great detail and relished sharing it with us. And third, as I mentioned above, she had been to China at an absolutely critical time in history in the early Deng Xiaoping era and had a view of events informed by real life knowledge and experience. She told us that she expected us to take the class seriously. We read a range of challenging texts, delved deeply into pre and post-WWII Chinese politics, and I personally was finally mature enough by this time to grasp and respect the depth of Betty’s knowledge and passion. As a result, and for the first time in my life, I worked my ass off. I wrote a super long, properly researched, if rose-colored glasses influenced, paper on The Long March, and developed a desire to visit China and Tibet (I eventually made it to China, though have yet to get to Tibet, which is just a little more challenging even though I have ample Yeti theory all ready to go). When it came time to chose classes at university, although I was an English Literature major, I gravitated to classes in Asian Art, Asian History, and Asian Politics, and ended up with the much coveted (or at least somewhat unusual) Asian Studies minor. And within ten months of graduating university I was living in Asia. There is no way any of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for senior year Chinese History.

So Betty was a good teacher because she just was, but also because I was a good student. Was J.G. a good teacher to someone who just happened to crush the Pong reboot? If you dear reader are that student, please do get in touch. But I seriously doubt it. I think J.G. sucked. (Don’t get sued Matty baby.) One way to look at the matter is, how would the respective teaching strategies hold up today? Well, the white ball issue would be solved in 10 minutes on someone’s phone, while Betty could teach the exact same class and it would still be excellent.

I could say a lot more about teachers, good bad and in-between, however I have probably commented more than enough on the professional skills, or lack thereof, of people who may be in my extended Facebook audience, so I will desist. And Betty if you happen to see this, thank you dude. You rock.

The School Credit System and My Senior Year Part I:

One odd feature of SGS in the early 90’s was its very generous credit system. Private schools generally have less oversight on their credit system, less oversight in general much of the time, and either no administrator there chose to focus on the credit system or something had just slipped through the cracks, because my senior year classes, in their totality, included: English Class, Chinese History, Knowledge Bowl. That was it. I also took statistics at night a few times a week with K.R. and J.S. at a local college for college credit.

(K.R. and J.S. and I had been in the advanced Math class since 7th grade with one other student, and we had had John Nord as our teacher from 8th grade through junior year of high school. How I was placed into advanced math, I have no idea because although I could hack the algebra alright, I was a poor geometry student and an even worse calculus student. I passed junior year calculus only because K.R. gave me her, beautiful, notes (thanks K.R.), and I just faked it on the basis of these notes. Anyway, I got a 1 on the Calculus A.P.–the worst score–yet this was still good enough for Mr. Nord to vote for me for student of the year, based on the fact that I read Catch 22 in my spare time. As much as I appreciated the confidence, Joseph Heller didn’t help me a whit with derivatives.)

The odd thing is, I think my senior year class load was only slightly lighter than my classmates, as some of them still had in-school math to complete. As a result, we had tons of time to mess around, play street hockey, skip school because of trick knees, regional basketball games, or any other excuse, etc. The credit system was really bizarre, and I wonder why.

I’ll tell one story here that probably happened senior year because my friends all had drivers’ licenses already, and which I incorporated in my essay on good and great talkers. When I was in high school my friend Kelly Rudd and I were both big fans of Larry King’s radio show. For those who don’t remember, King had a late night radio show for years before, and briefly concurrent with, his TV show on CNN. I liked Larry’s CNN show, however the radio show was way better. There were a couple of features of the show that I especially liked. The first was that King famously did no preparation for his guests. He knew a huge amount about the world of course, however he never read the guests’ book ahead of time or anything like that.

Now, this might sound lazy, but King explained that it was because he wanted to come in totally open. He’d say “if my guest is a firefighter, my first question will be ‘so what’s it like to be a firefighter?’” This was his style—open-ended and non-directive. King was perhaps a “lazy” interviewer, but in the best possible sense. By making the guest do almost all the work, King got himself out of the way, and as a result guests might go in any direction and the show became “eventful.” Another thing I loved was, after the main guest left King would take questions on absolutely anything. Most of the time he would give full, generous answers to his listeners, however sometimes a caller would be really weird or inappropriate. In these cases, King would fall back on a singular phrase. He’d cut off the conversation by saying “cold compress ma’am” or “cold compress sir.” Basically, he was telling them to lie down and ice their head. Which is hysterical.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry, and Kelly even lent me Larry’s books, which were, predictably, about talking. King’s show was broadcast in Spokane from around 9 PM Pacific time and then re-run immediately after, and I would listen to him before falling asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night with the re-run playing. (Like many male teenagers, I had trouble sleeping, and still do). And then, all of the sudden, King’s show was dropped from the AM radio station in town. Now, you might think this was something we had no ability to do anything about, however Kelly didn’t see it that way. He proposed we drive down to the radio station and stage a protest. This seemed to me just bizarre enough to be exciting, so I said sure, let’s go. So Kelly and me and another friend piled into Kelly’s car, skipping out of school mid-morning, and drove the 45 minutes or so to the station. We had no appointment, and were just three high school kids with no leverage of any kind. When we got to the front door it was locked and there was a kind of intercom. Kelly, naturally, nominated himself to do the talking, and started to explain over the intercom why we had come.

“Do you have an appointment?” they asked?

“No.”

“Who are you?”

“We are high school students and we are Larry King fans. We think it’s outrageous that your station recently cancelled his show and we want to talk to someone about it.”

Kelly’s approach was pretty brazen, and at first it didn’t get the job done. We remained shut out of the station. However he kept going, and going, and sooner or later the person on the other end caved. “OK,” she said, “we’ll send someone down.” Sure enough, the station manager himself came down and let us into the hallway. Kelly pleaded his case, and I backed him up to the best of my ability. The station manager, to his great credit, heard us out. “I understand you guys were big fans, and I’m sorry about the cancellation. We love Larry too, and we’d like to bring him back.” And so on. The station manager was BSing us, of course, and we knew it, however it was nice to get a hearing. We left after a while, knowing we hadn’t changed policy but that we had, at least, given it our best shot. Then we drove back to school.

By the time we got back to school it was after lunch and we were late for English class. The teacher eyed us as we walked and said something like “there’d better be a story.” And Kelly said, “why yes there is,” and proceeded to recount the whole incident in his patented comic manner. This was obviously more than enough for the teacher who laughed and folded us into the class. King never came back on the Spokane airwaves, and his radio show gave way to TV pretty soon after in any case, however I learned from Kelly that day. What I learned was, social “rules” are often pretty fungible with the right amount of conversational lubricant. As I understood it, Kelly was essentially creating his own reality by “re-framing” the Larry King situation. We kids had no standing to protest the show’s cancellation, however his insistence that we were passionate fans and therefore deserved a hearing carried the day. Likewise, although we were late for class, Kelly delivered a funny story that won over the teacher and gave us a little grace.

The Larry King incident was just one in a senior year full of off-the-clock shenanigans and foolishness. I would drive out with friends to the dog tracks in Idaho, possibly during school time, with the idea that I could use my hard-won statistics knowledge to “beat the track.” Yeah right. Dog track odds are stacked against you, just in case you hadn’t guessed. But I never would have figured that out if the school hadn’t given me so much time to undertake an independent study in dog racing, so I guess I owe SGS a thank you there. Thanks dude. You rock. Ish.

to be continued…