Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.
A Five-Act Play
EPIGRAPH
I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me Sat back in a chair Like a princess from a faraway place Nobody’s nice When you’re older your heart turns to ice
Note: This piece overlaps my three essays on my week with Isobel series (I–III), though it approaches that week from a different direction. Where those pieces follow the arc, this one lingers on the moment before it resolves—the pre-game, as I’ve come to understand it. It is also a direct response to the book The Game, by Neil Strauss. In what follows I don’t intend to rebut Strauss so much as correct what I see as a fundamental weakness in the subculture he dissects. The reader will judge whether I succeed.
Epigraph
“No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me.”
— Bob Dylan, Up to Me
Part I: Ippei
I’m at Zaza, the club on Kiyamachi in Kyoto. It’s around 11 PM and just getting going. Zaza is a late night place. It doesn’t peak until well past midnight, and at this hour it’s still stretching, still finding its rhythm.
I’m there by myself, drinking a White Russian.
A Japanese guy comes up to me. He’s about fifty-five. No preamble, no easing into it. He introduces himself—let’s call him Ippei—and within seconds it’s on.
“See those two ladies over by the window,” he says. “Wanna help me pick them up?”
I’m intrigued. Not because I’m especially interested in the outcome, but because I’m a curious guy and I want to see what he’s doing.
“Ok,” I say. “What’s the play?”
He doesn’t hesitate.
“You’re my old friend from California. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. I just ran into you by chance here. Take it from there.”
That’s it. That’s the entire setup. Handed to me fully formed.
I ask him, just to check, “Is this going to work?”
He smiles, completely unbothered.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do this every night. Had a threesome last night.”
Well alright then.
We walk over. He starts talking immediately, in Japanese, smooth, fast, confident. “This is Matt, my best friend from California. Would you believe I just found him here?”
I met him five minutes ago.
It doesn’t matter.
In no time the two women are completely engaged. Smiling, leaning in, laughing. The story has landed. The reality has been accepted. They’re not being approached. They’ve been included.
And I’m there, but I’m not really there. I’m not trying to win anything. I’m not trying to escalate. I’m watching. Taking it in. The nightlife anthropologist, just observing the field.
After a while I step out to the balcony to smoke.
Twenty minutes pass.
When I come back down, he’s still there. Still going strong. Still inside the same story.
That’s when it clicks.
He didn’t need me.
He needed the role I filled.
He needed a premise.
Part II: Neil Strauss
Neil Strauss’ The game
That night at Zaza stuck with me, not because of what happened, but because of what it revealed.
There is a whole body of writing—call it a subculture, call it a system—that attempts to explain and formalize moments like that. The most famous version of it is The Game, by Neil Strauss, which I’ve read twice.
I want to be clear about something before I go any further.
I’m not anti–Neil Strauss. In fact, I respect him. He’s an elite investigator of subcultures, and I love subcultures. He embedded himself in a world, learned its language, mapped its hierarchies, and reported it out with real precision. That’s not easy to do. It’s a serious piece of work.
What follows is not a dismissal of Strauss.
It’s a response to what the game represents.
Because once you move from observing a system to adopting it, something changes.
At its core, the game assumes that attraction can be engineered. That with the right language, the right sequence, the right calibrated signals, you can break down a woman’s resistance and get to the desired outcome, which is of course bed.
It’s a kind of a linguistic technology and NLP at its worst. A system designed to move someone from one state to another.
And for me, that’s where I part ways.
For me The Game is a massive turnoff, because it flattens everything and kills any chance at romance.
It scripts what should be alive. It reduces seduction to a manual and turns something unpredictable into something repeatable. And in doing so, it drains it of the very thing that makes it worth pursuing in the first place.
There’s no space for real connection. No space for the unexpected. No space for the moment where something happens that neither person could have predicted. No space for the kind of encounter that might actually change your life.
And beyond that, it produces a life that I don’t want.
The guys in The Game end up living together in this kind of shared house—Mystery, Strauss, Courtney Love—surrounded by other guys, talking about women, thinking about women, analyzing women. It’s a sausage fest. And it’s not cool.
The Gamers think they’re players. I prefer to think of them as incel-adjacent. They’ve optimized the system, but they’ve lost the thing itself. They’ve mastered the game and stepped outside of life.
Part III: On Action
I’ve had a handful of sexual partners that I’ve gone all the way with. The precise number is under an NDA. I’ve made out with more. But I haven’t been especially active, at least not in the way the game would define it.
What I have done is, flirt with, connect with, and have crushes on dozens of women.
And the truth is, I enjoy it.
I actively enjoy the pre-game.
I enjoy getting close. The moment before something becomes something else. The tension. The ambiguity. The recognition that something might be there, and neither of you has named it yet.
The thrill of newness and the possibility of a spark. If it burns, great. If it flickers, that’s also good. For most men, the pre-game is a means to an end. For me, it’s the end.
And that’s the difference.
This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in action. I am. Very much so. In fact, I’m something of an action junkie. But I’m a highly specific kind of action junkie. Like Wittgenstein, who was said to have manufactured his own oxygen, I manufacture my own action.
I don’t chase it blindly. I don’t optimize for it. I don’t try to force it into existence through systems or scripts. I generate it. Selectively. Intentionally. And in moments where it actually means something.
Part III: Luna
I’m at Umineko with a friend—call him Mr. Editor. It’s early, maybe six in the evening. We’re mid-bar, having a beer, when I notice a woman sitting off to the side.
She’s stunning. And I HAVE to go talk to her. Not because I expect anything to happen. Not because I’ve calculated the odds. But because the moment demands it.
I tell Mr. Editor what I’m about to do. He nods. “Go for it,” he says. “I’ll watch.” I walk over and ask her name. She smiles. “Call me Luna.”
We speak in Japanese. The conversation flows. I bring everything I have to the moment—attention, presence, curiosity—and it lands. There’s a spark. Not forced. Not engineered. Just there.
We talk for a while. Long enough for the room to shift slightly around us. Eventually I ask for her Instagram. She gives it to me. I walk back to the bar and sit down next to Mr. Editor. I’m on Cloud 9. The next day, in the late afternoon, carefully timed, I send her a message but she doesn’t reply.
Failure? Not for the pre-gamer. Because the pre-gamer already got what he came for. The moment. The spark. The approach. The brief, electric possibility that something might happen. That was the action. That was the point. For the Strauss guys, the night ends when the text goes unanswered. For me, the night ended at the bar.
Up to this point, the pre-game is contained. Safe, even. A space where things can happen or not happen without consequence.
But sometimes it doesn’t stay that way.
Isobel Revisited:
I have written about my week with Isobel extensively elsewhere, however part of that story is relevant to what we are discussing here. I met her at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, held at Exter College, Oxford, in late August 2018. We spent the week together and I fell in love. But I didn’t sleep with her. My choice. What follows is a light re-write from my essay “On My Week with Isobel: Part II”:
Wednesday.
I wake up early and we have breakfast together in the dining hall. By this point, people are noticing us. Comments here and there, snickers, sideways smiles.
Morning and lunch blur into one long conversation—the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We’re finishing each other’s thoughts. I’m in deeper than I’ve ever been.
We don’t attend much of anything.
In the afternoon break she goes to change. I go back to my room and put on The Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She comes back after and tells me, without shame, that she had pleasured herself during the break. Just fucking states it.
This is a complication.
That night she changes again. A red dress. Short, but not careless. Stunning. We sit at dinner whispering, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knows by now.
After dinner there’s wine again, talking with the tutors, the long courtyard. I meet Darby Costello in person for the first time. She’s fully alive, drinking wine, holding the room effortlessly. I’m so happy she’s my astrologer. But I’m elsewhere.
We stay late. Clear the courtyard. Around two in the morning we part. Cheeks touched. No bedroom. No act. No close. Back in my room, lights low, Mendoza Line still in my ears, I lie on the narrow bed and I know exactly where I am standing.
I will keep going. I will see where this leads. But I will not sleep with her. I can’t.
It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. Totally and much more. But I can see it. The complications. For her, for me. The chain of events that would follow. I’m old enough to see it coming. And I know, standing there in the courtyard, with the last of the wine and a cigarette burning down, that it’s on me.
I have to be the one to say no. That’s the shape. That’s the decision.
=====
Up to this point, the pre-game has been something I could enter and exit at will. A space I could step into, generate action, feel the spark, and leave intact.
With Ippei, the action was scripted. With Strauss, it was systematized. With Luna, it was self-contained.
But there’s another version of the pre-game, and it’s the one that matters most. The one where the moment doesn’t stay light. The one where it deepens. Where the spark doesn’t just flicker—it starts to take shape. And at that point, something shifts. Because now it’s not just about whether something will happen. It’s about whether it should.
This is where the line from Dylan starts to carry real weight. No one else could play that tune. There’s no system here. No script. No borrowed language. No Ippei handing you a premise. There is only the moment as it actually exists, and your ability to see it clearly.
And then the second part. It was up to me. Not to escalate. Not to optimize. But to decide. The game ends when something happens. The pre-game ends when you decide it should.
Dedication
For pre-gamers everywhere. May you get a little action tonight baby.
Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the following pieces that also take up the themes of romance and seduction.
Note: The examples in this piece are drawn from moments in my own life where the structure I call a catalyzed emergency appeared in miniature.
What these moments share is not their subject matter but their pattern. A system—whether emotional, institutional, or social—exists in a temporary equilibrium. Then a relatively small catalyst activates tensions that were already present beneath the surface. Once activated, the situation accelerates and decisions that previously seemed distant are suddenly made in real time.
In each case, the catalytic moment itself was small: a candid remark during a conference break, a humorous but revealing line in a professional meeting, or a single sentence spoken in a social situation. Yet in each instance the effect was immediate. The atmosphere shifted, ambiguity collapsed, and the underlying structure of the situation suddenly became visible.
The personal examples described here are therefore not offered as dramatic events in themselves. Their significance lies in the way they illustrate, at the scale of everyday life, the same structural pattern that appears in larger historical crises.
Catalyzed emergencies, it turns out, are not rare occurrences reserved for moments of world history. They happen quietly and frequently in ordinary human experience.
Once you begin thinking about catalyzed emergencies, it becomes difficult not to see them everywhere.
Most of life proceeds in a kind of provisional calm. Conversations unfold along familiar paths. Institutions conduct their meetings, relationships drift through their usual rhythms, and the tensions that exist beneath the surface remain politely contained. Decisions are postponed. Conflicts are softened by habit. The system holds together because nothing has yet forced it to reveal its deeper structure.
Then something small happens.
A sentence is spoken a little too plainly. A truth appears unexpectedly in the middle of a casual conversation. Someone says something in a meeting that suddenly exposes the machinery of the institution.
The catalyst itself is often tiny compared to the shift that follows. Yet once it occurs, the atmosphere changes almost immediately. Decisions that once felt distant suddenly move into the present. The underlying structure—emotional, institutional, or relational—becomes visible.
Once you start noticing these moments, you realize they are everywhere.
I remember one such moment during a conference break with the young woman I call Isobel. We were talking in that loose, slightly intimate way people sometimes do between sessions, when the formal structure of the day has momentarily dissolved. The conversation drifted into unexpectedly personal territory, and at one point she mentioned something about her private life that was startlingly candid.
The remark itself was quiet and almost offhand. Nothing in the hallway changed. People were still pouring coffee, drifting between rooms, checking their schedules. The conference continued exactly as it had a few minutes before.
Yet internally something shifted very quickly.
A boundary that had previously existed only as an assumption was suddenly visible. The emotional geometry of the situation rearranged itself in an instant. It was one of those moments when the surface calm of an interaction suddenly reveals the deeper structure beneath it.
Looking back, it was a perfect example of a small catalyzed emergency. The remark itself did not create the tension that followed. It simply activated something that had already been present but unspoken.
Institutional life produces similar moments, though usually in a different register.
Years ago I attended a meeting where Steve Keegan, then responsible for development at the International Baccalaureate, delivered one of the most unintentionally perfect lines I have ever heard in a professional setting. Attempting to strike a tone of humility, he reassured the room that the organization should not think too highly of itself.
“We are not special,” he said.
Then, after a brief pause that only improved the effect, he added:
“Of course we are unique and special in many ways.”
The room erupted in laughter, not because anyone intended to mock him but because the remark revealed something everyone recognized instantly. Institutions often survive on carefully balanced narratives about themselves—humble yet exceptional, ordinary yet distinctive. When those narratives momentarily contradict themselves in public, the entire room suddenly becomes aware of the structure holding the organization together.
Again, the catalyst was small: a single sentence.
But in that moment the underlying psychology of the institution briefly revealed itself. Everyone in the room could see the gears turning.
The same pattern appears in more personal moments as well, sometimes with surprisingly decisive consequences.
I remember a night when a man was attempting to pick up Mariko. It was the sort of situation that unfolds quietly in bars and restaurants all over the world—nothing dramatic, just two people talking while someone else tries to determine what role they themselves are supposed to play in the unfolding scene.
For a while the equilibrium held. The conversation drifted, the man continued his efforts, and I watched the situation with the vague uncertainty that sometimes accompanies these moments. Was I a bystander? A friend? Something else?
Eventually I said something very simple.
“We’re together.”
That was it. A single sentence. A declaration that had not existed in explicit form until the moment it was spoken.
But the effect was immediate.
The conversation stopped. The geometry of the room rearranged itself instantly. What had previously been ambiguous became clear. The situation resolved itself within seconds.
Looking back, it was another catalyzed emergency. The sentence itself did not create the underlying possibility. That possibility had already been present in the emotional structure of the evening. What the sentence did was activate it, collapsing uncertainty into decision.
The remarkable thing about these moments is how small they often appear at the time. They do not arrive with the dramatic clarity of historical turning points. They slip quietly into the flow of ordinary life—a conversation during a break, a remark in a meeting, a sentence spoken in a bar.
Only later does the pattern become visible.
Most of life feels gradual while we are living it. Days follow one another in a steady rhythm. Institutions maintain their procedures. Relationships drift along familiar channels. The tensions that shape events accumulate quietly beneath the surface, rarely forcing themselves into view.
Then something small happens.
A remark. A confession. A declaration.
And suddenly the structure reveals itself.
The catalyst may be nothing more than a sentence spoken at exactly the right moment. But once the reaction begins, the system rarely returns to its previous state unchanged.
Note: This is Part III is our series on the concept of the “Catalyzed Emergency.” You can read the other two essays below.
Subtitle: I didn’t sleep with her so I had to quit my job.
Mistakes were made tonight
The Mendoza Line
Note: This piece is about a single week in my life that reordered things for good. At a minimum it’s an interesting story; at maximum it is the hinge between two versions of myself. I do not pretend to be the hero of it, and I take full responsibility for everything contained here.
It begins with a dream I had in Bali at the very end of July 2018. I was the lead trainer for the IB Asia Pacific workshop leader and school visitor training — my first time in that role after five years of apprenticeship. At the same time I was working at Ritsumeikan Uji as shukan, a kind of junior administrator. By mid-2018 I was burnt out: long days, multiple roles stacked on top of one another, and, most of all, a boss I no longer trusted.I was scheduled to go to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) at Exeter College, Oxford at the end of August, and in the meantime I would attend John Innes’s wedding to his fiancee Kristi. All this occurred, and here is that dream.
PROLOGUE: DREAM I
7/29/2018:
The dream starts with an image of a large whisky bottle. The bottle is very fat and also ceremic. So in fact it looks nothing like a normal whisky bottle. It is perhaps of Suntory brand. I know before I know that a story of some kind will unfold inside the bottle. I am reminded somehow of a ship inside a bottle. Suddenly I am inside the bottle itself. There is a whole word here and all sorts of people in a cityscape. I come to understand that everyone lives in relative fear of a species or group of overlords.
The overlords are both omni-present and also very distant. They rule by fear and have the power to rub out anyone at any time. Sort of. When a person is marked for removal their status is updated. Their status is displayed on a kind of glowing chip in their shoulder. There are basically three types of statuses. First is “needing to have the life wrung out of them.” There are marked people and their time is limited. Apparently they are political criminals, thought criminals. Oddly, even when marked these people continue to circulate and take part in oppositional activity. I never actually see one of them removed, although their actions do take on a greater sense of urgency.
The second category is another worded status. This one is more ellitipcal and I forget the wording. Though safer than the first, this is still a status to be avoided if possible.
Third is a number. A voice tells the city that statuses will be updated and that anything under 40000 is a safe score. I check my update with bated breath, fearing the dreaded worded status. My number is 49500. Not bad I think—although not under 40000 this is perhaps for young people. 49500 seems reasonable for my age.
Suddenly the view shifts and I can see into the bottle from the outside. All of the people and various creatures and scrambling for the mouth of the body. The bottle begins to approach a wall into which is will soon merge. Here, the entrance to the bottle will be sealed. The I character in the dream is also scrambling for the exit although he doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance. Creatures spill over one another and one baby creature somewhere between a human baby and a little mouse slips through the mouth of the bottle to the other side of the wall. The bottle snaps closed and I am once again staring at the large ceremony bottle from the beginning of the dream. I feel a sense of relief that the perfect creature has escaped. End of dream.
This dream is about reincarnation.
(The me on the treadmill does not survive. Dream group says whisky is a spirit which takes 50 years to mature. That gives me a book deadline I guess-49.5 the book and the end of the provisional personality.)
PART I — Sunday → Wednesday
Sunday, late August 2018
I flew into London from Osaka and took a pre-arranged bus to Oxford, then walked to Exeter College. Check-in, dorm keys, linens. The halls smelled like old plaster and a little like soap — an old building. I carried my bag upstairs, opened the door to the room that would be mine for the week, and sat on the bed for a moment to locate myself. New country, new rhythm, no context yet.
I walked the campus — stone walls, grass cut low, shaded paths. The quad had that contained feeling of a place that already had its stories. I didn’t know I was about to enter one.
I went to dinner at a taco place just outside campus and had a beer or two. Back in the room I read a little astrology to warm up for the week and listened to the band The Mendoza Line. Little did I know they would end up playing a surprisingly large role in what followed.
Around 10 PM the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the building stumbled outside in pajamas and stood around talking for a few minutes. Odd, but fitting — a small communal disturbance to start the week off.
Monday
I woke up, showered and dressed and grabbed my notebook for the astrology sessions. At this time I was fully committed to attending sessions and making the most of them. Breakfast opened early and I liked that — fruit, eggs, strong coffee. The hall had a low hum, people still new to each other. I walked to the first seminar which was given by Ms. Claire Martin. Claire was in her 70s, and a very comforting presence. She’d been doing astrology forever and has a couple of books which are helpful. The seminar was on the first floor, window onto one of the gardens. The air had that mild, hopeful tone of a first session.
Claire spoke on the 1890s — fields of meaning, ectoplasm, etc. I offered something Jung-coded because that’s where my mind goes when the border between psyche and symbol starts to move. I didn’t know she was in the room yet, Isobel (not her real name), though she already was.
At one point Claire mentioned an Aries Moon. I said, simply, “I’m an Aries Moon.” Nothing loaded, nothing aimed. Lecture ended, chairs moved, and she came to me from the back of the room.
“I am an Aries Moon too.”
We walked to the next session together. That was it — no delay, no drift. We sat side-by-side for the rest of the day. Chatting between sessions, coffee break close but not touching, her chart in her bag. She showed me her own chart print-outs — hers and her fiancé’s — and we compared placements. Similarities everywhere.
Lunch in the dining hall. More sessions in the afternoon. Light talk, no electricity announced but already there. Monday night we ate with a group — tutors, a few new friends. We were beside each other the whole time, not hiding it. Later we drifted to the courtyard bar, opened wine bottles, and someone lit a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked more than a dozen cigarettes in sixteen years, but I took one with her, and then another. Not ceremony, more like instinct, more like inevitable.
We ended the night late. I walked back to the dorm alone and put on The Mendoza Line again. I already knew I was in trouble so in addition to “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)” I was listening over and over again to “Mistakes Were Made” from which the epigraph comes. Sometimes you just know.
Tuesday
We had planned to have breakfast together, not at Exeter but at Pret, about an eight minute walk away. We both ate and she helped me pick my breakfast. We were acting like a couple already. We attended the morning sessions, seated right next to each other and then the day started to open. In the afternoon we did not attend sessions, instead we spent the time in one of the beautiful gardens. We sat close on the bench by the open window, listening to the session through the gap. I talked about muses and how I work best with one. She talked about photography, stalled career energy, her family, and Swiss-Russian split. Russian women, I reflected not for the first time, are a problem, and I knew deep down I was already in trouble.
Tuesday night the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus was scheduled to play Oxford, and I had a ticket, but she canceled. Instead we went out for dinner, just the two of us, at an Indian restaurant near campus. We were already deep into our relationship, and everything came easy; I could feel it inside ten minutes. This was one of the best meals I have ever had for reasons bigger than taste. I told her about my two epiphanies, one when I was four years old and one when I was seventeen. The whole evening felt like a third epiphany.
Back at campus everyone was drinking in the courtyard again. There was Mystery and her daughter, tutors, people rotating. We stayed late, drank wine, smoked, and flirted like teenagers. I went to my room around 1:30 AM, playing The Mendoza Line over my headphones again. I was seeking their counsel, essentially, and they are a great band.
Wednesday
I woke up and this day we had breakfast at the dining hall. By this time, people were noticing us. Comments here and there, sideways smiles. Morning and lunch blurred into one long conversation — the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We were finishing each other’s thoughts, and I was in deeper than I had ever been. We didn’t attend much of anything. Afternoon break she went to change. I went back to my room and put on Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She came back later and said, without shame, that she’d pleasured herself during the break — just stated it directly. This was a complication.
For dinner that night she changed again — a red dress, short but not careless. Stunning. Whispering at the table, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knew by then. After dinner was wine again, talking with the tutors, including the lovely Rod Chang and Mystery the long courtyard. I met Darby Costello in person for the first time. Darby is my astrologer and we had already had a number of phone consultations by this point. She was fully alive drinking wine, and talking like someone who knows how to hold a room. I was so happy that she was my astrologer. Isobel and I stayed late once more, and cleared the courtyard. Around two in the morning we parted, cheeks touched, no bedroom, no act.
Back in my room, lights low, I lay on the narrow bed with Mendoza Line in my ears. I knew exactly where I was standing:
I would keep going. I would see where this led. But I would not sleep with her. I couldn’t.
That was the shape. That was the decision. Wednesday ended on that line.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 