The locus of action is always in motion.

— Erving Goffman

This one goes to out to somebody watching tonight. She knows who she is.

— Bob Dylan

“Come on, baby, let’s rock and roll.”
— Michael Knott

Rock and roll motherfucking rules.

It just does.

Music in general rules. Live music rules even harder. I love almost every kind of music there is, from Appalachian folk to Georgian polyphony, from Miles Davis to Papa M, although admittedly not always in equal measure. Music has been one of the great organizing forces of my life for as long as I can remember. It has rescued bad days, elevated good ones, carried me through grief, celebrated victories, and made long train rides, lonely hotel rooms, and empty apartments feel just a little less empty. If today’s essay seems to wander off in musical directions more often than usual, that’s because today belongs to music.

The last couple of days have been filled with minor crises, accumulated errands, and one rather difficult conversation with my mother that I’ll briefly update readers on in a moment. None of these problems were especially serious in isolation. Collectively, however, they had begun to clutter the landscape of my mind. I woke up this morning with an unusually simple goal: clear away the small stuff, stay close to the hotel, listen to music, write, and otherwise leave myself alone.

There were still a handful of practical matters that needed attention. I’d been meaning to buy a new pair of headphones for several days. My hair was beginning to reach the point where even I had to admit it probably needed cutting. More importantly, ever since returning to Japan six weeks ago, my phone’s SIM card had been behaving erratically. The hotel Wi-Fi had been excellent, as Japanese hotel Wi-Fi almost always is, but every time I stepped outside I was reminded that “mostly functional” isn’t really functional at all. Since I’m planning to leave Japan again later this summer, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. Today I had a two o’clock appointment at the nearby SoftBank store, barely a three-minute walk from the hotel. The haircut could wait. The headphones could wait. The SIM card could not.

Readers of yesterday’s essay may be wondering about my mother and me. After our rather tense exchange yesterday morning, we exchanged messages later in the day. We still see a number of things differently, particularly regarding my writing and my dating life, and I doubt those differences will disappear anytime soon. On the other hand, we also love each other very much, and hopefully neither of us has any interest in staying angry for long. Families have disagreements. Good families keep talking anyway. I suspect that’s where we’re headed.

The same goes for Litz and me.

After nearly a month of trying to coordinate our schedules, we’re still trying. Unfortunately, her work situation remains remarkably unpredictable. She’s effectively working under a zero-hour arrangement, which totally sucks, which means an off day that appears available for her to travel one day can disappear the next. We’d hoped to meet in Takamatsu, roughly halfway between Kochi and Kyoto, but another last-minute change at work forced us to postpone yet again. We were both disappointed, but neither of us blamed the other. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. We’ll keep talking, keep laughing, and eventually the calendars will line up. If they don’t before I leave for Thailand and then Spokane later this summer, we’ll simply keep doing what we’ve been doing remarkably well for months now: staying close despite the distance.

Once those thoughts were out of the way, the day became pleasantly ordinary.

II: Afternoon

I left the hotel a little before two carrying both my residence card and my My Number card, even though SoftBank had only asked me to bring one. Years of dealing with paperwork have taught me that bringing too much identification is infinitely preferable to bringing too little.

The walk to the station took only a couple of minutes. As usual, I finished a cigarette on the way, tossed it before entering, and descended into the cool underground passage. Every Japanese station seems to have its own invisible weather system. Long before you see the platform, you feel the wind. Part of it comes from the enormous ventilation system. Part of it comes from the trains themselves, which push columns of air through the tunnels like giant pistons every time they arrive. Whatever the engineering explanation, it always feels faintly magical. Before you hear the train, before you see another passenger, the station announces itself with moving air.

The appointment itself took exactly eight minutes.

The young SoftBank employee helping me wore a SoftBank Hawks baseball jersey instead of an office shirt, complete with a day’s worth of black stubble. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the whole thing struck me as perfectly Japanese. Professional without being overly formal. Efficient without pretending to be important. He checked my identification, installed the new SIM, and, naturally, it didn’t work right away. We both stared at the screen for a few seconds before I restarted the phone. It restarted almost instantly, found the network, and returned to life.

Problem solved. It’s funny how satisfying it is to cross one genuinely useful task off your list.

Afterwards I wandered no farther than the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. I stopped by a drugstore and a Lawson to purchase provisions. By the time I walked back through the hotel doors, less than forty minutes had passed since I’d left. The room was cool. The new SIM card worked. The refrigerator was full. The errands were finished. For the first time in several days, there was nothing left to do except what I’d wanted to do all along. Listen to music. Write my essays. Do my job.

Every now and then, simply sit there and enjoy the fact that not every thought requires action, not every errand deserves urgency, and not every day has to become an adventure. Sometimes crossing three small things off the list is more than enough. From there, all that’s left is to press play.

There were still a couple of unanswered questions hanging over the afternoon. My son might text. If he did, we’d decide whether to meet in Kyoto tomorrow evening before I returned to what has unexpectedly become my little base camp here in Osaka.

Litz was still trying to untangle her work schedule. We’ve become surprisingly good at living with uncertainty, talking several times a day while waiting for circumstances to cooperate. By Sunday evening I should have a much clearer idea whether we’ll finally meet before I leave Japan again or whether Thailand will arrive first.

I sat down to today’s journal. As I’ve mentioned before, this daily series is still brand new, but I’m working harder on it than almost anything I’ve written in quite a while. The response so far has been encouraging. Whether it eventually approaches the readership of my St. George’s series remains to be seen, but I’m quietly hopeful.

The St. George’s essays continue to surprise me. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, that series gradually climbed Google’s rankings until searches for “St. George’s Spokane History” began returning my essays near the very top of the page, sometimes directly beneath Wikipedia and occasionally even ahead of the school’s own website.

I find this oddly gratifying.

For the first several years of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, I cross-posted almost everything to Medium with very little success. I did almost no search-engine optimization, almost no promotion, and almost all of my readership came through Facebook and WordPress. Then, almost without warning, the St. George’s pieces found an audience.

I’d like to think that somewhere along the way some perspective parents trying to learn about the history of the school may have stumbled across my recollections instead. If this is true, it makes me smile.

The series is affectionate. It’s nostalgic. But it’s also honest. I attended St. George’s from 1980 until 1992, and schools in the 1980s operated according to a very different set of expectations than schools today. Discipline was different. Student life was different. The relationships between students and teachers were different. Sexual mores were different. My only goal was to reflect those years as accurately and fairly as I could.

Whether readers agreed with every conclusion hardly mattered. They read the stories. For that, I’ll always be grateful. As soon as I began thinking about today’s essay, I knew I was going to start with music.

Music has been one of the central joys of my life for as long as I can remember.

As a young boy I wanted to learn the piano. I asked my mother several times if I could take lessons, however she replied that she could not afford them at the time. A few years later my parents’ financial situation improved enough that my younger brother Mike was able to study the cello for several years. He eventually became an excellent young player before other interests gradually took over. I was genuinely happy for him, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that I’d missed my chance.

Over time I got over it, however in the back of my mind I always to learn to play.

After a major change in my work circumstances in 2018, I finally bought myself an inexpensive electronic keyboard and decided that, instead of taking formal lessons, I’d simply see how much I could teach myself. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than a chord-finder app and an unreasonable amount of free time, I slowly made a little progress, and was able to read and play several simple pieces.

I only performed publicly once—if “publicly” is the right word. A friend named Mela, whom I’d met through the wonderful and sadly now defunct Periscope app, eventually persuaded me to play two songs over the phone. I stumbled my way through “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers and then attempted Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain.” As I’ve written elsewhere, I didn’t exactly dominate Ocean Rain. But it was at least passable. Mela applauded politely, and for one brief afternoon I felt like I’d accomplished something I’d wanted to do since childhood.

After playing for Mela, I began lose interest in the keyboard. I was never going to be good to play in public, and playing for Mela was a lot of fun. I decided to go out on a high note. Sometimes achieving a childhood dream doesn’t require becoming great at it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to discover that the dream itself was real.

III. A Lifetime of Listening

I have listened to music everyday for 38 years since 1988. Music is simply part of the furniture of my life. Like everyone else, there are genres I return to almost every day and genres I will never listen to again. Even so, with remarkably few exceptions, I can usually find at least one artist in almost every style that I genuinely admire. There are even bands—Genesis immediately comes to mind—that I respect enormously while almost never choosing to play them. Great musicianship and personal taste are not always the same thing, and I’ve become more comfortable with that distinction as I’ve gotten older.

Perhaps because I never learned to play an instrument as a child, I became obsessed with listening to music instead. By the time I was fourteen, I was spending every spare dollar I could scrape together on cassettes, and then, almost overnight, CDs when they replaced cassettes as the dominant medium. Looking back, I probably should have tried to some of my money. Instead, I spent virtually all of it on music.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Music became my education. It taught me geography, history, politics, religion, literature, relationships, heartbreak, humor, and more than a little philosophy. Long before streaming services provided almost every song ever recorded, discovering a great new band required effort. Somebody recommended them. You took a chance. You saved your money. You bought the record. If you loved it, it became part of your life.

Some artists from my teenage years have stayed with me. Others have not. This is OK with me.

The first cassette I ever bought with my own money was Martika’s self-titled debut. I haven’t listened to it in decades, but I don’t regret buying it for a second. It was the beginning of a lifetime spent chasing songs.

Soon enough my classmates introduced me to bands like R.E.M., the Violent Femmes and Fine Young Cannibals. Before long I discovered Bob Dylan and the Replacements on my own, and after that there was no turning back.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton College in the fall of 1992, I was already spending almost every extra dollar on music. That habit has never really gone away. Today my Spotify library contains thousands of liked songs spanning almost every genre imaginable.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton music had become a major part of my life. I was into artists such as Bob Dylan, the Replacements, The Pogues, Dire Straits, R.E.M, the Violent Femmes, and several others. Many of my favorite bands would soon come to be described as alternative or indie rock. Looking back, I was only beginning to scratch the surface.

One of roommates freshman year, Jake, loved music almost as much as I did, although his tastes tended to run in a more traditional direction. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were his touchstones, and before long they became mine as well. We spent countless hours listening to records in our quad, arguing over songs, recommending albums to one another, and gradually building the sort of musical vocabulary that only develops when people live together and have far too much free time.

Next door lived Ian Murphy. Ian remains one of my closest friends to this day, and he is the only person I have ever met who knows more about music than I do.

That is not a sentence I write lightly. I’ve spent most of my adult life buying and listening to records, reading about records, ranking records, writing about records, and generally annoying other people by going on and on about. Over the years I’ve accumulated many thousands of CDs and listened to what must be hundreds of thousands of songs. Music has never really been a hobby for me. It’s simply part of the way I move through the world.

Ian somehow manages to go even further. When we first met, he introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, many of whom I may not have discovered on my own. Luna immediately became one of my favorite bands of all time. He also pointed me toward the Auteurs, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Ride, and dozens of other artists, particularly from Britain’s remarkable alternative scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of those bands became lifelong companions. Others I admired without ever fully embracing. All of them expanded my musical horizons.

What impressed me most, however, wasn’t simply the breadth of Ian’s knowledge. It was his curiosity.

Ian has always approached music the way an historian approaches a historical period or a scientist approaches a research question. He doesn’t merely listen to an artist. He disappears into them. If Nick Cave captures his imagination, he’ll spend months tracing every album, every collaboration, every side project, every live recording, and every obscure appearance he can find. More recently he’s done the same thing with classic country artists such as Merle Haggard and Steve Earle—a development that amuses me slightly, since I can still remember him gently teasing me about my own love of country back in college.

We continue to recommend records to each other today. I honestly can’t imagine what my musical life would look like if I’d never met him.

IV: Musical Genres I Like I Folk/ Americana

My favorite musical genre, without question, is folk music and its close cousin, Americana. Looking back, I suspect I know why.

When I was about six years old I discovered my parents’ tiny record collection. For reasons I still can’t explain, I pulled out an old folk compilation with the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” on it. I played it over and over again in our living room. Not long afterwards I also found a Joan Baez record, and fell hopelessly in love with “Sweet Sunny South.” I had no idea what the lyrics meant. I just knew I wanted to hear the song again.


By about 2010, like many people as they begin to age, my ability to keep up with new bands began to wane somewhat. I did my best to keep up with the bands that I already knew and loved, however I found myself becoming less omnivorous in my listening. In the last couple of years, with the help of Spotify, I have endeavored to change this, and I’ve discovered dozens and dozens of new artists and bands that I really like.

Among my favourite folk and Americana artists are, in no particular order, Phosphorescent, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo and Conor Oberst.

I’ve only seen Phosphorescent and Wilco live. Whiskeytown no longer exists, Ryan Adams still tours, and Uncle Tupelo eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt. These days I probably listen to Son Volt more than I once did, but Wilco remains my favourite of the two.

I’ll never stop listening.

V: Musical Genres I Like II Indie

Alternative and indie rock became the soundtrack of my teenage years.

As I mentioned earlier, I inherited my classmates’ love of bands like R.E.M. and Violent Femmes. I discovered The Replacements on my own, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time.

Some of my favourite indie artists today include Happiness, Daddy Issues, Giant Drag, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Afghan Whigs, Luna, Car Seat Headrest, Yo La Tengo, Seam and many others.

Like folk music, indie has been a constant companion for almost forty years. I can’t imagine that changing.

I also love jazz and ambient music, but those are enormous subjects that deserve essays of their own.

VI: Musical Genres I Do Not Like

Then there are the genres I do not like. Mainstream hard rock has never really appealed to me. Bon Jovi and Van Halen simply aren’t my thing. Grunge is more complicated. I admired what bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are trying to doing, but I just don’t like him.


I don’t especially like heavy metal, although I do like several glam metal bands, probably because glam metal becoming popular, right when I was an early teenager and really listening to music for the first time. My favorite of these are Cinderella and Poison and I still have a soft spot Skid Row.

Then there is Progressive Rock or Prog. Prog and I have simply never gotten along.

Yes leaves me cold. Kansas does absolutely nothing for me. Toto has me running for the hills. And Genesis deserves special mention.

Many years ago I wrote what I thought was an entirely harmless one-star Amazon review of the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I assumed perhaps three people would read it. Apparently every Genesis fan on Earth was one of those three people.

The abuse began almost immediately. It turned out that among the hundreds of glowing reviews of the record, mine was the lone dissenting voice. For weeks strangers explained, in increasingly colorful language, exactly why I was an idiot. Eventually I deleted the review, not because I had changed my mind, but because I was just sick of the whole thing. I still don’t like the album.

VII. Evening: My Evolving Sexuality

Between about 7 and 10 PM I spent nearly three hours staring at what might have been the worst website ever designed.

It was supposedly the best escort aggregator in Osaka. It certainly aggregated everything. Hundreds of women. Dozens of agencies. Flashing banners. Pop-ups. Prices that changed the moment you clicked through. Every page had to be translated, and every time I went back it reverted to Japanese and I had to translate it again. After a while I wasn’t browsing anymore. I was wrestling with the website.

Eventually I admitted defeat.

The practical lesson was simple enough. If I wanted reasonable prices, I was probably going to have to get over my preference for outcalls and start looking at incalls instead. Fair enough. That was useful information. Three hours for one sentence.

Then, just as I was about to give up entirely, two completely unrelated things happened.

The first was my friend Doug in China. He messaged to say he’d finally finished my recently published novel The Adventures of The Thin Man and Andrea.

His note was everything a novelist hopes to hear. He hadn’t read it as “Matt playing the Thin Man.” He’d read it as a fully realized novel that happened to contain pieces of me. That was probably the single nicest compliment anyone could have paid me. I had been wandering around wondering whether the evening had been wasted, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. Doug had already given me something far better.

=====

When I was six and seven years old I was badly abused by my aunt’s first husband. I detail these experiences here. Childhood sexual abuse is the worst, and this fucking guy is simply the biggest dick imaginable. Fuck off.

It has taken me more than forty years to overcome some the effects of the abuse. This may seem like a long time ago, however this is just how CSA works. It sucks. So hard. One of the major effects was my eventual questioning of my sexuality. Around the time I hit puberty at 14 to the ago of 16 I wondered if I was gay. I was deeply attracted to girls, however the gay idea was never far from my mind.

By the time I was sixteen I had begun dating girls, however awkwardly, and my thoughts that I might be gay gradually faded into the background.

Throughout my marriage, two affairs, and a few other relationships, I remained consistently attracted to women. I never seriously thought of myself as gay. Even so, the question never disappeared entirely. It simply became quieter.

A few years ago I found myself occasionally turning to pornography featuring trans women. My favorite actress is Daisy Taylor, who is so gorgeous and whose picture leads this essay. It isn’t perhaps my favorite genre, but I kept returning to it often enough that I eventually stopped dismissing it as a curiosity.

Eventually mere curiosity became practical curiosity. Over the past six weeks I have booked four escorts here in Osaka, all biological women. Tonight, I found myself browsing agencies that advertised trans women.

The first woman that caught my eye was Mio. She was purely feminine in appearance and was absolutely stunning. Sadly however, she was working in a different city and not available in Osaka tonight.

Then I saw Takane. She was also very beautiful, and looked like a women, however perhaps ever so slightly androgynous. Three years earlier I probably would have clicked away without another thought. This time I found myself thinking, why not?

Then I remembered the great John McAfee, the software pioneer who is totally outta control. Years ago, while happily disappearing down one of my periodic McAfee rabbit holes, I came across an interview—I think it was an interview, although it may have been buried somewhere in the fragments of the autobiography he never finished.

The interviewer asked him about dating trans women in Thailand. Were they actually woman, the interviewer asked?

McAfee shrugged it off.

“Dude,” he said, “trust me. They’re all woman.” Hilarious.

Whether you agree with him or not isn’t really the point. For some reason, trying to book a trans escort in my hotel room years later, that line floated back into my head.

So I rolled the dice, as I sometimes do, and called her agency. Not because I had reached some grand philosophical conclusion. Because curiosity had quietly outrun hesitation. I was ready to spend more than I’d planned and just see what happened. The guy from the agency quoted me the real outcall price. Thirty-three thousand yen. That ended the experiment rather quickly. I thanked him and said I would call him another if I changed my mind.

VII. Am I Bisexual?

Today, I think I may simply be naturally bisexual. Whether my abuse obscured this truth, complicated my understanding of it, or is largely unrelated, I cannot honestly say.

What I can say is, my sexuality seems to be evolving rather quickly. I really have no idea where this attraction to trans woman is coming, however I do know that I will need to do something sometime soon.

Dedication:

For Takane. And for John McAfee. Baby, you are totally outta control. But man are you funny. Dude, you rock. So damn hard.