Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Death of the Second Life

Subtitle: Why Nobody Can Disappear Anymore

There’s a one in a billion chance we’re in base reality.

—Elon Musk

You’re a quick study, aren’t you?

—Freddie Miles, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I fought the law and the law won.

—Sonny Curtis

On Disappearing

It used to be possible to disappear. Not easy, exactly, and rarely clean. You needed nerve, mobility, a little money, a plausible story, perhaps a talent for accents, and the good sense not to return to the same bar every Thursday. You needed to understand that most identity was local. A man was the person his neighbors recognized, his employer paid, his landlord tolerated and the woman across the street remembered seeing come home. If he crossed an ocean, a mountain range or sometimes merely a state line, he passed through an interval in which nobody knew him well enough to contradict him. That interval was the birthplace of the second life.

The interval has nearly closed. A person may still abandon a marriage, occupation, city or circle of friends. He may stop answering the telephone and go silent on social media. The difficulty begins when he wants an apartment, salary, bank account, prescription, airline ticket or hotel room. The machinery that enables ordinary existence is now the machinery that identifies us. Every convenience asks the same question in a different form: are you still the person you were yesterday? The modern fugitive may escape a room, but eventually he needs an ATM.

This is not merely a criminal fantasy for me. Years ago I invented the Thin Man, the central figure in The Thin Man and Andrea, as an alter ego and doppelgänger. He is Niko, although the first book withholds even that. He carries an ambiguous face and an American-seeming education acquired elsewhere. He moves through the world of corporate espionage, which is partly a MacGuffin and partly an excuse to put him aboard a cruise ship, in hotel bars, and within striking distance of Andrea, Jessica, Maya, Desiree and women who sense that his absence of a past is also a kind of invitation. The submarine in the earliest version became a cruise ship because a cruise ship can plausibly contain a temporary world: flags, ports, false intimacies, a cabin to abandon and another country waiting in the morning.

The Thin Man was never fundamentally an alien or a figure composed of negative space, although traces of those early ideas remain. The governing fantasy was simpler. He was me without social, professional or familial responsibility. He could love somebody without joining her calendar. He could enter a city without owing the city an explanation. The plot offered him passports, handlers and invented business, but his real superpower was exemption. He lived without the claims that make an ordinary person locatable.

I now possess fewer of those claims than I once did. My professional responsibilities have diminished. My marriage has ended. My son is grown. In some respects I am living the Thin Man dream, although with less espionage and considerably more concern about hotel credits. The discovery is predictable but still worth making: relief from responsibility does not make a man somebody else. It simply leaves him alone with a clearer version of the same man.

Daniel Defoe understood the mechanical version of the fantasy three centuries ago. When I was fifteen, several friends and I discussed burning or drowning Moll Flanders. We meant the physical book, naturally, not Moll herself. The novel seemed interminable. Moll acquired another name, husband, lover, crime, punishment, jurisdiction and source of money; then the process began again. At fifteen this felt less like structure than clerical error. At fifty-two I can see that the repetition is the structure. “Moll Flanders” announces that the name is not her own. Her identity consists of whatever biography can survive the next room.

Moll is born in Newgate Prison, passes through households and marriages, becomes a thief, evades execution through transportation, returns to Virginia and eventually obtains prosperity and something resembling repentance. She can repeatedly become another woman because identity in her world is portable. It is held in clothing, speech, manners, money and the testimony of the few people nearby. A past can be defeated by distance.

John McAfee tried to perform the same operation in a world that already made it ridiculous. Wanted for questioning in Belize after the 2012 murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull, McAfee hid, fled and simultaneously turned his flight into a media production. He claimed that he buried himself in sand for hours with a cardboard box over his head. He dyed his hair repeatedly and stuffed chewing gum beneath his upper lip as a disguise. The founder of an antivirus company attempted to defeat recognition by making his mouth slightly lumpier.

McAfee possessed money, technical knowledge, mobility, paranoia and an almost supernatural resistance to embarrassment. He nevertheless contacted journalists, issued updates and supplied the public with a running commentary on his disappearance. A photograph posted by the Vice reporters accompanying him contained location metadata pointing toward Guatemala. McAfee wanted to vanish and receive credit for vanishing. That contradiction will return. For now it is enough to say that Moll Flanders could escape because nobody in Virginia had read the London file. McAfee carried the file with him, broadcasting all the way.

The Portable Self

The literature of disappearance flourished before the administrative state completed its map. Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, published in 1904, supplies the cleanest philosophical version. Mattia, trapped in an unhappy life, discovers that a corpse has been mistaken for his own. The world has accidentally released him. He takes another name and attempts to enjoy the freedom of a man officially dead.

But a man without a past possesses no enforceable future. Mattia’s second identity cannot securely marry, own, complain to the police or participate in the institutions through which personality becomes social fact. He has escaped the first life without acquiring the legal substance required for a second. Pirandello arrives at the modern paradox before biometrics: identity is a burden until one needs its protection.

Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantès offer opposing French solutions. Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeleine through moral action. He builds an industry, employs a town, practices generosity and becomes mayor. He changes so completely that the humane judgment is to regard him as a different man. Javert refuses. For Javert, the file is the man, and goodness performed under an alias is merely a fugitive’s more sophisticated disguise. Les Misérables places grace in conflict with administrative continuity.

Dantès, in The Count of Monte Cristo, builds identity through theater and money. Wealth buys clothes, servants, property, introductions, silence and the assumption of prior importance. Nobody asks the Count for a childhood photograph because aristocratic confidence authenticates itself. Dantès does not erase his first life so much as return with a second one powerful enough to prosecute it.

James Gatz performs the American variation. He becomes Jay Gatsby not primarily to evade the law but to escape poverty, embarrassment and the intolerable smallness of his assigned place. Gatsby manufactures manner, history and spectacle. His tragedy is not that the new identity convinces nobody. It convinces almost everybody. Daisy remains dangerous because she knew him before the costume was complete. The person who remembers the original name possesses veto power over the second life.

These stories depend upon a portable self: an identity capable of crossing a boundary and being accepted on the strength of performance. Sometimes the transformation is moral, sometimes theatrical and sometimes criminal. Each assumes that a society contains blank spaces. The traveler enters one and begins supplying information before contradictory information arrives.

You’re a Quick Study, Aren’t You?

Tom Ripley is the great student of the portable self. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, Tom begins as a watcher. He studies wealth before he attempts to inhabit it. He studies jazz, handwriting, clothes, gestures, voices and the particular freedom enjoyed by people whose money causes strangers to complete their stories for them. Dickie Greenleaf possesses everything Tom lacks: beauty, ease, inheritance and the right to become bored with other people.

Tom’s desire is not reducible to robbery. He wants proximity to Dickie, then recognition from Dickie, then the life of Dickie. When those desires become incompatible, murder provides the transition. Tom can imitate Dickie because he has watched with the concentration of the excluded. The peeping is apprenticeship.

Freddie Miles recognizes the dangerous speed of Tom’s education. Visiting Dickie’s Roman apartment, he notices that Tom suddenly understands the geography, furnishings and habits of a life in which he supposedly remains a guest. “You’re a quick study, aren’t you?” Freddie asks. It is a brilliant accusation because it identifies the one part of imitation that cannot be disguised: the curve of improvement. Yesterday Tom did not know where anything was. Today he gives directions.

Seconds later, Tom kills him with the stone head of Hadrian. A Roman emperor becomes the instrument by which the social climber removes a witness. The joke is almost too exact. Freddie does not possess fingerprints or facial-recognition software. He possesses memory, class instinct and contempt. He knows what Tom looked like before Tom learned the role.

Tom’s impersonation is fraudulent, but it is also emotionally sincere. Being Dickie feels more authentic to him than remaining Tom. That is why Ripley endures beyond the machinery of the thriller. He embodies the suspicion that our socially verified identity may be less true than the person we could convincingly perform if nobody interrupted us. He also demonstrates the price. Each new witness becomes a threat because the second life demands the permanent editing of the first.

The criminal achievement eventually becomes less impressive than the psychological imprisonment. Tom escapes particular investigations, but he cannot stop monitoring the room. He must hear every hesitation in his adopted name and see every glance toward the piano, ring or signature. A successful second life is not freedom. It is a part one can never stop playing.

Dick Whitman and Don Draper

Dick Whitman performs the most durable modern transformation in American television. During the Korean War, an explosion kills Lieutenant Donald Draper beside him. Dick exchanges identification tags with the dead officer, survives under Draper’s name and returns to the United States inside a clerical conclusion. War supplies the confusion, body and paperwork. The dead man exits; the living man acquires his place.

Unlike Ripley, Don does not live permanently at the edge of exposure. The new identity accumulates institutional weight. Don works, pays taxes, marries, buys property, fathers children and builds a career. Time itself begins authenticating him. After enough years, the invented man possesses more documentary substance than the abandoned one.

Advertising is the ideal profession because Don’s labor reproduces his own transformation. He takes an ordinary product, suppresses its manufacturing history and gives it a story people prefer. He does the same with himself. The handsome executive, suburban husband and creative genius are not wholly false. They are real accomplishments attached to stolen paperwork.

Yet Mad Men understands that the administrative victory cannot settle the psychological case. Dick is not chiefly afraid that a camera will recognize him. He is afraid that intimacy will. Every person who approaches Don closely eventually reaches the locked room containing Dick Whitman: his poverty, family, desertion, shame and the knowledge that another man’s death financed his ascent.

The Thin Man fantasy and the Don Draper fantasy meet here. Remove the obligations, choose the wardrobe, enter the next room with a name nobody questions. What remains is the person who performed the removal. The Eagles’ old line is unavoidable: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” One may leave a home, spouse, profession and nation. The ghosts keep the original booking.

The Missing and the Dead

Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico in 1913 and disappeared. That is nearly everything we know about this paritcular case. He may have joined Pancho Villa’s forces, reached Chihuahua and died quickly. He may have been executed, killed himself, succumbed to illness or continued traveling. The absence of evidence has generated a century of endings because disappearance makes authors of the people left behind.

Bierce had already written one of literature’s cruelest imaginary escapes. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar falls from a bridge with a rope around his neck, escapes into the water, runs home and approaches his wife—only for the narrative to reveal that the journey occurred inside the final instant before his broken body swings beneath the bridge. The mind creates a second life because the body has no exit. Bierce’s own disappearance feels uncannily like an extension of the story, although we should resist converting formal elegance into evidence. He probably did not begin again. He probably died where the map became uncertain.

John List demonstrates how recently a complete second life remained possible. After murdering his wife, mother and three children in New Jersey in 1971, he traveled west and became Robert Peter Clark. He found accounting work, joined a Lutheran church, remarried and lived within ordinary society for nearly eighteen years. List was not sleeping in a cave. He was commuting, filing returns and participating in carpools. The jurisdictions containing John List and Robert Clark did not effectively speak to one another.

Television finally forced the conversation. America’s Most Wantedaired the case in 1989 using an age-progressed sculpture whose resemblance to List was extraordinary. A former neighbor recognized him. Fingerprints from his military records completed the identification. List stands at the border between eras: he constructed the second life through disconnected paper systems and lost it when mass media connected a face to the buried name.

John Darwin attempted the comic British variation in 2002. He paddled into the North Sea, staged his death and allowed his wife to collect insurance and pension payments while he secretly lived nearby. The plan expanded toward Panama. It collapsed when an online photograph showed the supposedly dead man beside his wife. A basic image search linked John, Anne and Panama. The second life had appeared on the first page of the internet.

Robert Hoagland achieved something quieter. He vanished from Connecticut in 2013 and lived in New York as Richard King until his death in 2022. The new life appears to have been modest rather than operatic. That may be the surviving modern model: abandon grandeur, remain geographically ordinary, ask institutions for as little as possible and hope nobody searches the correct connection. His identity was established after death.

Ryan Borgwardt showed in 2024 how poorly the romantic disappearance now survives contact with the contemporary record. He staged a kayaking death in Wisconsin and left the country. Investigators found evidence of preparation, travel and financial activity, contacted him abroad and persuaded him to return. In 2025 a judge sentenced him to eighty-nine days in jail, matching the period during which he had actively misled authorities, and ordered restitution toward the costly search. The symmetry of the sentence was better than the plan.

These cases are morally different. Bierce may simply have died. Hoagland appears to have abandoned a family without committing the crimes of List or Darwin. List was a murderer. The point is not to place them in one ethical category. It is to watch the available space contract. List could build an ordinary life for eighteen years. Borgwardt’s itinerary began becoming evidence before his family had finished grieving.

You Could Call It the End of the World

Money is the most practical border. A person can sleep outdoors without identification. The moment he wants a hotel, apartment, salary, international ticket or functioning bank account, somebody asks for the name behind the money. A friend of mine treats $9,999 as the largest sum one may carry into the United States. The actual rule is subtler: more than $10,000 may be transported legally, but it must be declared. Japan similarly requires declaration above one million yen. The threshold is not a wall. It is a checkpoint at which money becomes narrative. Where did it come from? Why are you carrying it? Who are you?

The old fugitive relied on fragmentation. A birth certificate sat in one office, fingerprints in another, employment history in a filing cabinet, border entries in ledgers and newspaper photographs in local archives. None of these systems was necessarily weak. They simply did not consult one another quickly. The fugitive’s skill lay in remaining inside the delay.

The decisive modern development is linkage. Passports became machine-readable and biometric. Banking systems identify customers and flag patterns. Phones create location and relationship histories. Cameras no longer merely preserve images; increasingly, software compares faces. Search engines connect photographs with names and places. DNA can identify a person who never submitted a sample because a distant relative did. Public records, commercial databases and social media supply continuity from childhood to the present.

Every system contains errors. Facial recognition misidentifies people. Records conflict. Databases leak. Names are misspelled. The second life does not die because any single machine knows everything. It dies because machines ask one another. The old fugitive needed to prevent one sheriff from telephoning another. The modern fugitive must prevent every machine from recognizing every other machine.

Josef Rusnak’s largely forgotten 1999 science-fiction film The Thirteenth Floor supplies the finest image of this condition. Douglas Hall, a computer scientist in Los Angeles, discovers that the simulated version of 1937 Los Angeles created by his company contains conscious inhabitants. More disturbingly, he learns that his own Los Angeles is another simulation. Following instructions left by his murdered mentor, Hall drives toward Tucson, ignores the road signs and barricades, and eventually reaches the boundary of his universe. The desert stops. The mountains dissolve. Beyond them stands an unfinished green wireframe—the scaffolding of a world nobody expected its inhabitants to inspect. Hall has not merely failed to escape Los Angeles. He has reached the place where Los Angeles runs out.

“You could call it the end of the world,” he says. The line is quiet because terror has already done the shouting. Moll Flanders could leave one town and supply the next with another name. Valjean could cross into another jurisdiction. Dick Whitman could exchange identification tags with a dead officer. Hall cannot accomplish even the preliminary act of departure because the road, desert and destination belong to the same system.

There is no countryside beyond surveillance and no unindexed territory in which to begin again; there is only the end of the program. Our world has not yet become Hall’s wireframe desert, but it increasingly resembles it. Every road leads toward another camera, account, border record or machine asking the traveler to confirm that he remains the person who departed.

The inhabitants of the film’s simulated 1937 discover that their world was created for users elsewhere. Hall then discovers that his apparently real 1999 is also one among thousands of simulations. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” he is told. The sentence might serve as the motto of every identity system. The structure works best when the contained person mistakes its limitations for the natural shape of reality.

Elon Musk’s claim that there is only a one-in-billions chance of our inhabiting “base reality” is not a scientific calculation. It is a swaggering compression of the simulation argument: if advanced civilizations produce enormous numbers of conscious simulated worlds, a randomly situated observer is more likely to occupy one of those than the single original reality beneath them. Whether or not Musk is right, The Thirteenth Floor understands the emotional consequence. The final disappearance is not concealment within the map. It is the impossible search for a place outside it.

The Last Fugitive

John McAfee deserves the title because he possessed nearly every advantage. He had money, international mobility, technical knowledge, familiarity with surveillance, political connections, access to boats and aircraft, and the willingness to behave in ways a normal investigator might not predict. He also possessed a cardboard box.

I have long suspected that McAfee knew more about Gregory Faull’s murder than he admitted, perhaps much more. That is an opinion, not a proven fact. Belizean authorities sought McAfee for questioning, but he was not convicted or charged in connection with the killing. Suspicion does not become evidence merely because its subject is spectacularly strange.

I nevertheless wanted McAfee to remain in circulation. I wanted him alive, ranting online, threatening to parachute into Fukuoka, appearing without warning at a Kyoto bar and ordering a strip steak while explaining that income tax was metaphysically invalid. This is not a defense of anything he may have done. It is an admission that fugitives provide a form of entertainment respectable citizens cannot. McAfee turned the ordinary police question—where is this man?—into theater.

His technical competence makes the comedy sharper. He knew that networks retain traces. He warned endlessly about surveillance. He promoted cryptocurrency and privacy as routes around state control. Yet his own need for audience continually defeated his wish for concealment. He contacted reporters while hiding, traveled with a film crew, cultivated disguises elaborate enough to become stories and generated the publicity through which strangers could follow him.

The Vice metadata incident is almost too perfect. A technology journalist accompanying the antivirus pioneer posted a photograph containing geographical information. The machine did not need to recognize McAfee’s altered face or chewing-gum lip. It merely reported where the photograph had been made. McAfee’s legend and location traveled inside the same file.

This is why he is the last fugitive rather than the greatest one. A true second life requires anonymity. McAfee could tolerate danger, accusation, ridicule and legal jeopardy. He could not tolerate being unknown. He wanted to disappear and narrate the disappearance, to escape the state while retaining the crowd. The modern fugitive may finally be defeated less by the camera than by his inability to live without looking into it.

That appetite is not confined to eccentrics. We announce departures, document privacy, turn reinvention into a new profile and carry our old audiences toward the new life. The desire to become somebody else competes with the desire to have everyone recognize the transformation. Moll Flanders supplies the next town with a story. McAfee supplies the whole planet with updates.

Coda

Is the death of the second life good or bad? Neither. It is a historical development with benefits, cruelties and unforeseen emotional costs. Connected systems catch murderers, fraudsters and people attempting to abandon obligations. They also make escape more difficult for abused spouses, political dissidents, debtors, refugees and ordinary human beings whose worst mistake has become permanently searchable. Accountability and mercy do not rise together automatically.

There remains an important distinction between disappearance and reinvention. An adult can legally change a name, move, choose another occupation, close public accounts and refuse contact. The state does not require everyone to preserve the social life into which he happened to arrive. But legal reinvention preserves continuity. Debts, convictions, parenthood and court orders belong to the person through the change. The first life is not erased. It is amended.

The Thin Man occupies the fantasy beyond amendment. He moves without the drag of continuity. He may enter Andrea’s life, Jessica’s cabin or another city under circumstances that do not require him to explain the previous scene. I invented him because I wanted the freedom of a man nobody could summon. Yet even he carries Niko beneath the working identity. Georgia remains inside him. Education, language, childhood, loss and desire cross every border without documentation.

That is the final limitation, older than passports and more reliable than facial recognition. You cannot outrun your ghosts. A person may defeat the file and still remain the person described by everything the file omitted. Tom Ripley acquires Dickie’s signatures but retains Tom’s hunger. Don Draper obtains Don’s career but brings Dick’s shame into every marriage. McAfee crosses borders with the cardboard box and John McAfee climbs out from beneath it.

At fifteen, I thought Moll Flanders was shapeless because Moll repeatedly acquired another husband, name, occupation, crime, punishment and jurisdiction. Now the repetition looks like the record of a vanished human possibility. Moll continually finds another exit. We inhabit a world of fewer exits, better records and longer memories.

Perhaps this is why stories of disappearance retain their force. They promise that one life need not be final. Somewhere beyond the jurisdiction, ocean, desert or wireframe mountain waits a place where nobody knows what we have done and no machine asks us to confirm it. We know better. The map follows us, and even if it did not, we would arrive carrying ourselves.

Moll Flanders could become another woman. We can only become ourselves somewhere else.

Sources

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and Encyclopedia Virginia’s account of the novel’s transportation plot.

Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904).

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Anthony Minghella’s screenplay for the 1999 film.

AMC, Mad Men: the Dick Whitman/Don Draper identity narrative.

Project Gutenberg and the Ambrose Bierce Project, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and biographical materials.

FBI historical materials on John List and the America’s Most Wanted identification.

Contemporary reporting on John Darwin, Robert Hoagland and Ryan Borgwardt.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Japan Customs guidance on cross-border currency declarations.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, biometric identification materials.

Josef Rusnak, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3.

Code Conference 2016, Elon Musk’s discussion of simulation and “base reality.”

Contemporary Wired, Guardian and Vice reporting on John McAfee’s flight from Belize.

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My Favorite Songs of All Time: 1-20 With Commentary

Music motherfucking rules

Me

I hear the aged footsteps
Like a motion on the sea
Sometimes I turn there’s someone there
Other times it’s only me

Bob Dylan

They say that victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

Conor Obrest

Note: This list speaks for itself, it is simply my 20 favorite songs of all time that include lyrics. For this list I have included extended commentary on each song. When I first published this list it was 110 songs long, and I will publish a full 250 this time in several installments. With the first publication, several people let me know that they had discovered new songs from it, and honestly that is the best outcomes I could have hoped for. This list does not include ambient music or jazz, two genres I also love. The list is a product of nearly 40 years of intensive music listening, so it is, at a minimum, highly curated. Thank you for reading, and may you find a new favorite somewhere here.

1. Cape Canaveral — Conor Oberst

For the first time since I began making versions of this list, I have a new number one. Conor Obrest’s Cape Canaveral has slowly, almost imperceptibly, worked its way past every other song I love. I didn’t exactly wake up one morning and decide that it was the greatest song ever. I simply noticed that I had already begun treating it that way. I return to it constantly, and it still gives me full-body chills and moves me to tears almost every time I hear it. After nearly forty years of obsessive music listening, Cape is as good of a number that I can come up with.

Conor is my number five artist of all time, and the fact that Cape Canaveral has become the song above all others that explains why. Number one. There it is. Man oh man. I didn’t see this one coming.

I have loved Cope for about eight years since I first heard it shorty after the release of the record it is on, Conor’s solo self titled debut from 2008. It is in my opinion his most beautiful and moving song. Conor also wrote my number 13 favorite song, Easy/Lucky/Free, which I write about below. Cape Canaveral uses the space program—those televised launches from decades ago, the spectacle of rockets lifting off into the unknown—as a proxy for growing up in America in the latter part of the 20th century. It’s about distance, aspiration, and the strange way in which memory reshapes people and moments over time.

It is one of the most gorgeous American songs ever written. “I watched your face age backwards / changing shape in my memory / you told me victory’s sweet / even deep in the cheap seats.” This is one of the loveliest passages ever set to music. Oberst is doing something subtle and devastating here—he’s taking the language of triumph and reframing it from the margins. Victory’s sweet even deep in the cheap seats is not a grand statement, however it is oddly triumphant. It’s about making meaning over time, with partial access, and moving from watching to participating.

That’s what the whole song feels like: an attempt to construct something lasting out of fragments—TV images, half-remembered conversations, the emotional residue of growing up. The rockets go up, but the song stays grounded in what it felt like to watch them, to want something more without knowing exactly what that “more” was. Full body chills every time. Conor is my number three artist of all time, and Cape Canaveral is exactly why.

2. Leaving LA — Father John Misty 

As of recently, “Leaving L.A.” is my second favorite song of all time. I first heard it when Father John Misty released Pure Comedy in 2017, and I can remember almost exactly where I was. I was walking after work, headphones on, going down the stairs at a train station on my way to a Starbucks. I have had exactly two genuine musical epiphanies in my life. The first came in the summer of 1991, when I heard Bob Dylan’s acoustic “Every Grain of Sand”—the famous barking-dog version—on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. The second came walking down those stairs listening to “Leaving L.A.” The song absolutely fucking flooded me.

And it is a motherfucker of a song. Thirteen minutes long, mostly acoustic, essentially one enormous unfolding narrative, and utterly unconcerned with whether you have the patience to follow it. Misty moves through his accelerating fame and his profound ambivalence about the same; Los Angeles and the absurdity of being a successful singer-songwriter there; marriage; self-mythology; artistic pretension; mortality; and his own suspicion that perhaps writing a thirteen-minute acoustic song about all of this is itself ridiculous. He even takes a drive-by at Amy Grant and contemporary Christian music along the way. Nobody is safe, least of all Father John Misty.

One of the song’s funniest passages is his description of music that sounds like “dollar signs and Amy Grant,” part of a larger assault on commercially manufactured profundity. But the jokes never exist merely as jokes. Misty keeps using comedy to approach things he cannot quite approach straight on. The strangest and best example is his childhood story about nearly choking to death on watermelon candy while shopping with his mother. An apparently ridiculous memory suddenly opens onto mortality: the adult artist looking backward at the child who could simply have ceased to exist right there, before any of the fame, records, marriage, drinking, jokes, or bullshit ever happened.

That movement—from comic digression into something unexpectedly frightening or tender—is the song’s great trick. “Leaving L.A.” keeps wandering away from its subject only to reveal that the wandering is its subject. This is a song about the stories we construct around ourselves, and about the increasingly absurd position of a man becoming famous for constructing stories about himself while simultaneously distrusting the entire enterprise.

And then the song closes movingly by bringing all that sprawl back down to two people and the possibility of another life: he could quit drinking; she could write her script. Yeah, right. As of this writing, I have no real clue whether Father John Misty has quit drinking, and no idea whether his best girl ever wrote that script. I hope so. What matters inside the song is that for a moment another version of their lives becomes imaginable—less spectacular, perhaps, but also less ridiculous. After thirteen minutes spent exploding his own mythology, Misty ends with something remarkably small and human.

I keep this one beside me at all times. It is one of the handful of songs I love falling asleep to, partly because its length and pace allow me simply to disappear inside it. Sometimes I make it to the end and sometimes I don’t. It hardly matters. I love this song and every line in it.

“Leaving L.A.” is the towering centerpiece of Pure Comedy, and it is by some distance my favorite Father John Misty song. There are plenty of others I greatly enjoy—“I’m Writing a Novel,” “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.,” “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins),” “Mr. Tillman,” and “Nancy From Now On” among them—but none has ever hit me remotely like this one.

Thirteen-minute acoustic songs are not generally how one goes about acquiring casual listeners. Fine. If you are a literate music fan with any tolerance at all for the long, digressive, dirge-like form, give it thirteen minutes and let the bastard work on you. It has been working on me since the first time I heard it walking down those train-station stairs.

Number two. Father John Misty fucking rules.

3. Cruiser — Red House Painters

“Cruiser” is my third favorite song of all time. It narrowly nudges out Whiskeytown’s glorious “Houses on the Hill” and Craig Finn’s absolutely amazing “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.” Right now I have it placed just behind “Leaving L.A.,” but damn, is it close. Full-body goosebumps. Tears. The whole fucking thing.

Like “Leaving L.A.,” “Cruiser” is a long song, and it has absolutely no interest in hurrying. It seems to be about the singer’s love for, or fascination with, a Japanese woman living in Los Angeles. According to the song, she possesses the “biggest smile from Tokyo,” and she came out to Los Angeles five years earlier. So there we are: Kozelek, a recent Japanese transplant, Los Angeles, and a car. That is more than enough to build a world.

The song meanders and takes its time. Along the way we get a tour of Los Angeles as it existed when Kozelek wrote it: driving around, streets and neighborhoods passing by, the city experienced not as a collection of landmarks but from inside a moving car. That matters. “Cruiser” really does cruise. It has the strange floating quality of driving around a city with nowhere particularly urgent to be, when the person beside you and whatever is coming through the speakers become more important than the destination.

And naturally, music is part of the landscape. One of the things I have always loved about artists like Kozelek is that beneath all the songwriting, mythology, and accumulated weirdness, they remain genuine music fans. Kozelek has spent his entire career listening, absorbing, interpreting, and arguing with other people’s songs. He has covered AC/DC, Modest Mouse, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Paul McCartney, and many others, often transforming the source material so completely that the cover becomes a Kozelek song.

I especially love his version of AC/DC’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer.” The original is a little too goofy for me; Kozelek strips away the attempted humor and plays the thing completely straight. Under the Red House Painters name, he recorded an acoustic version, and later, under his Sun Kil Moon moniker, he returned to it electrically. Suddenly what had been a cocky young rock song becomes something closer to a statement of purpose: this is what I wanted to become, and this is what I became. His cover of Modest Mouse’s “Never Ending Math Equation” is similarly amazing. Kozelek is an incredible singer, but he is also an extraordinary interpreter of the rock-and-roll canon.

And that musical consciousness matters in “Cruiser,” because the song feels partly like Kozelek constructing his own little canon in real time: the woman, the car, Los Angeles, whatever is playing, memory already forming while the experience itself is still happening. The city becomes inseparable from the music, and the music becomes inseparable from the person sitting beside him.

There are many Kozelek songs I love, and several more will appear below. “Have You Forgotten,” “Michigan,” “Japanese to English,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer,” and others all have legitimate claims on me. But “Cruiser,” for my money, stands head and shoulders above the rest.

It is romantic without being sentimental, sprawling without becoming shapeless, and beautiful without seeming to work particularly hard at being beautiful. It just rolls along until somehow you realize it has completely fucking destroyed you.

Number three. My man.

4 (t). Houses on the Hill

“Houses on the Hill” appears on Whiskeytown’s 1997 masterpiece Strangers Almanac. Until about a month ago, I was convinced that Strangers Almanac was by far Whiskeytown’s best record. Their final album, Pneumonia, is great too, of course, and contains “Jacksonville Skyline” as well as the absolutely glorious and unbelievably beautiful ballad “My Hometown.” But recently I’ve been getting deep into their 1995 debut, Faithless Street, and today I consider it every bit as good as Strangers Almanac. Songs such as the title track, “Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountain Angel,” and “Mining Town” stand out, along with many others.

However, it is “Houses on the Hill” that remains my very favorite Whiskeytown song.

The lyric is simply wonderful. The song reaches backward into another generation and constructs an entire vanished life out of photographs, letters, houses, war, and memory. My favorite moment comes when the narrator describes a young man being sent off to World War II. He leaves behind the woman he loves and carries her picture with him when he goes ashore. That tiny sequence absolutely destroys me. Ryan Adams can toss off an image like that almost casually and suddenly an entire life—love, separation, war, mortality—is sitting there inside a couple of lines.

Motherfucking full-body goosebumps. Full-body tears.

A lot of songs make me cry, and “Houses on the Hill” is right near the top of the list. Part of its power is how little it insists upon itself. There is no giant emotional announcement. Adams and Caitlin Cary, who co-wrote the song, simply let these remnants of somebody else’s life accumulate until the emotional weight becomes almost unbearable. It is a song about what survives people: houses, photographs, letters, stories—and the people who come afterward trying to reconstruct what those objects once meant.

I especially love the live-in-the-studio version included with the deluxe Strangers Almanac. The studio version is great. I love the studio versions of virtually all my favorite songs, obviously. But for whatever reason, I tend to love live versions even more, and this one is no exception. The performance was recorded for KCRW in September 1997, and it opens the song up beautifully; even the instrumental ending seems to let some additional air into the story. 

Ryan Adams has gone on to have an almost absurdly prolific career. His official discography already runs to dozens of releases, beginning with his solo debut Heartbreaker in 2000 and continuing right through new music in 2026. Heartbreaker contains “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” another of my favorite Adams songs and one that appears later in this list. There are many, many others.

But for now, “Houses on the Hill” remains my favorite Whiskeytown/Ryan Adams song by a little ways.

It simply fucking rules. Stay tuned.

4 (t). It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

5. Tulsa Queen — Emmylou Harris.

For years, “Tulsa Queen” was my answer to the question “what is the greatest song ever.” It was number one I thought. Don’t bother asking me again. And then, eventually, Cape Canaveral by Conor Obrest slipped past it. Barely. This isn’t really a demotion so much as the smallest possible movement inside the topmost tier: Tulsa Queen remains one of the most overwhelming pieces of music I have ever heard, and Emmylou Harris remains, for my money, the greatest vocalist who ever lived.

Then straight into:

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear it…

The existing conclusion needs the corresponding tiny adjustment. Instead of “The GOAT. Pure legend. Full stop,” which contradicts #2, I’d go:

For a very long time, Tulsa Queen was the GOAT. Now it is number five. Nothing about the song has changed. I did. It is still absolutely legendary. Always will be.

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear Tulsa Queen. Emmylou is the greatest vocalist of all time by far, and Tulsa presents the clearest evidence—not because it’s flashy or showy, but because it is so perfectly, devastatingly controlled. She doesn’t overpower the song; she becomes it. The song starts—“I saw the train/ in the Tulsa night/ calling out my name/ looking for a fight”—and it’s just pure magic. Just unbelievable. The phrasing, the restraint, the sense that the story is already in motion before you’ve even arrived—there is nothing like it. You’re not being introduced to a narrative; you’re being dropped into the middle of one that already feels lived-in and already carries weight.

What makes Tulsa Queen so overwhelming is that it distills everything that makes Emmylou Harris who she is as an artist across her entire career: the fusion of country, folk, and rock sensibilities; the emotional clarity; the ability to inhabit a character without ever losing the self; the sense that every line has been earned. From her earliest work through her later records, she has always been able to locate the emotional center of a song with uncanny precision, but here she doesn’t just locate it—she holds it, perfectly, for the entire duration. It exists in the same emotional universe as something like “Boulder to Birmingham”—another wonderful, better-known masterpiece—but Tulsa Queen goes deeper.

Where “Boulder” is open grief, expansive and communal, Tulsa Queen is interior, private, almost dangerous in how close it lets you get to the narrator’s unrest. It feels less like a performance and more like a confession you were never meant to overhear. There are no words in any language to fully describe the feeling of listening to Tulsa Queen. That’s not hyperbole; it’s recognition. The song operates at a level that bypasses explanation and goes straight to the nervous system. It doesn’t ask to be analyzed—it insists on being felt. Emmylou baby you remain the GOAT.

6. Faded — Afghan Whigs.

The Afghan Whigs’ lead singer Greg Dulli does something remarkable of Faded, which is blend swagger, menace, mystery, bravado, and also deep insecurity in one package. Seeing the Whigs play this as the encore at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 2017 was one of the highlights of my life. It lands as an encore because it has to—it’s the only place a song like this can go. It doesn’t just end a set; it empties it out. Faded closes Black Love, which is not just an album but a fully realized world—cinematic, shadowy, saturated with urban crime, bad decisions, and the kind of late-night moral drift that never quite resolves.

Across the record, songs like Going to Town and Honky’s Ladder are all forward motion and attitude, pure swagger on the surface. But that swagger always feels a little overextended, like it’s covering something fragile underneath. By the time you get to Faded, the cover is gone. What’s been hinted at all along—doubt, damage, a kind of spiritual exhaustion—comes fully into view. There is no mystery as to why this has been the encore for every Whigs show for 30 years.

When Dulli asks to be lifted out of the night, to have someone look down and see the mess he’s in, it doesn’t feel performative. It feels exposed. The bravado is still there, but it’s cracked open, and what comes through is something far more human and far more dangerous. Not only is this the best Afghan Whigs song, Black Love is their best album by a mile. Everything they do well converges there—the mood, the storytelling, the tension between control and collapse—and Faded is the final, perfect release of that tension. He is a genius and the motherfucking man, and Faded is the best of many great Whigs songs. A worthy inclusion at number seven.

7. My Life Is Sweet — Simon Joyner.

“Met the drinker for a drink/ back when I was drinking everything but the kitchen sink”—and sure enough this song is about drinking, and drunks. Joyner’s friend is an alcoholic, and at the time of writing so is Joyner. They go to a bar and sit together, talking a little, mostly not, letting the night pass in that particular way that only two people who know each other well can manage.

Ultimately, this song is about male companionship, and how a quiet drink with a quiet friend can be life-saving when you really need it. Joyner takes a taxi home—drunk, or hungover, or somewhere in between—and collapses on the floor. And then the song ends with that extraordinary sequence where the city drops away, becomes something almost beautiful from a distance, and he arrives at that fragile, hard-won conclusion: my life is sweet. Anyone who is, or has been, a drinker will immediately recognize what Joyner is doing here—he is rationalizing the unrationalizable, but at the same time he’s not lying about it.

Is drinking so, so sweet? Yes and no, of course—and that tension is the point of this truly magnificent song. Part of what makes Joyner so compelling is how deeply rooted he is in the Omaha scene that would later produce Conor Oberst. Joyner is the elder figure there—born in 1971, a few years ahead of Oberst, who came up in the early ’80s generation—and his influence on Conor is both documented and unmistakable. Oberst has cited Joyner as a major influence, and you can hear it: the diaristic honesty, the willingness to let a song feel unfinished, the comfort with contradiction.

Joyner was mapping that terrain before it had a name, and before it had an audience beyond the local. He’s also massively underrated. He has other great songs—Fearful Man, One for the Catholic Girls—but My Life Is Sweet feels like the purest distillation of what he does best. There’s no artifice, no attempt to resolve the contradictions he’s living inside. Just a voice, a night, a friend, and the uneasy grace of getting through it. Anyone who’s been there knows: that’s more than enough.

8 (T). Never Aim to Please — Bash and Pop

Tommy Stinson, the bassist from The Replacements—went on to have, in my opinion, an even better solo career than the band’s lead singer Paul Westerberg. And considering that Westerberg is a genius and an absolute legend, this is saying something.

Stinson was barely out of childhood when the Replacements were at their peak—a teenager holding down the low end in one of the most chaotic, brilliant bands of their era. That early immersion shows up everywhere in his later work: the instinct for melody, the looseness, the sense that a song should feel lived-in rather than perfected. But what’s striking about his post-Replacements career—through Bash & Pop and his solo records—is how much he refines that instinct. The pure thrash and glorious sloppiness of early Replacements material gives way to something sweeter, more polished, but never sanitized. The edges are still there; they’re just better framed.

Never Aim to Please comes from Bash & Pop’s first record, Friday Night Is Killing Me, and Stinson has alternated between Bash & Pop releases and solo records over the 35 years since the Replacements broke up. In the first verse, Stinson sings about the absence of a point of view, and that marvelous line always reminds me of Westerberg’s writing on “Someone Take the Wheel”—that same sense of dislocation, of trying to find footing in a world that keeps shifting under you. There’s a great anecdote from Westerberg that early on, the Replacements pretended to hate The Rolling Stones—it was part of the pose, the punk posture. But it was just that: a pose. They actually loved the Stones.

And you can hear that lineage clearly in Stinson’s work. For all of his originality, he’s very much working in that classic rock tradition—songcraft, groove, emotional directness—but he does it in the best possible way, without nostalgia or mimicry. It feels inherited, not borrowed. Stinson may not claim to have a point of view in this song, but he’s been a remarkable curator and keeper of the Replacements’ legacy, especially as Westerberg has retreated from the music scene over the last decade. There’s a quiet authority in that, a sense of continuity that runs through his work. And the song itself? It just fucking kicks. It hits me in all the feels every time, and it is a worthy number nine.

9. A Bathtub in the Kitchen — Craig Finn.

My favorite of many possible Finn contenders. Bathtub is about friendship, guilt, redemption, betrayal, and mostly about thankfulness. It’s the greatest song ever written about New York City and also about moving to a big city in general. Finn compresses an entire early chapter of a life into a few lines—the arrival, the uncertainty, the desperation to be claimed by the city, and the friend who makes that possible by opening his door. That friend—Francis—is the emotional center of the song. Twenty years earlier, he’s the one who shows the narrator the ropes, lets him crash on the couch, gives him a foothold when he doesn’t have one. He is, in a very real sense, the reason the narrator makes it at all. And now, in the present of the song, Francis is down and out, struggling, a diminished version of the figure who once seemed stable and generous.

What makes the song hit so hard is the narrator’s response to that reversal. There’s hesitation, even avoidance. He tries, briefly, to pass the responsibility off—to suggest that someone else, someone more put-together, might be in a better position to help. It’s a small moment, almost throwaway, but it reveals everything: the discomfort, the guilt, the instinct to deflect when confronted with a debt that can’t really be repaid. Because that’s the truth the song circles around—some debts can’t be repaid. Not cleanly, not proportionally.

In the end, the narrator does give Francis money—two hundred bucks—but it lands with a kind of quiet insufficiency. It’s something, but it’s not enough, and it never could be. You can’t square that kind of ledger. You can only acknowledge it. And that’s where the thankfulness comes in. Not as a resolution, not as a way of tying things up neatly, but as a recognition that what was given mattered, even if what is returned will always fall short. Finn doesn’t offer redemption in the traditional sense. He offers something more honest: awareness, discomfort, and the attempt—however partial—to do right by someone who once did right by you. It’s a stunning, stunning song and an absolutely worthy number nine.

10. Dreadful — The Violet Burning

“Dreadful” by The Violet Burning fucking slaps. That’s really all there is to it. It just slaps. So damn hard.

The song is only two minutes and twenty-eight seconds long, and it is just totally dialed in. There’s no wasted motion, no long setup, no attempt to turn itself into something grander than it needs to be. It comes in, kicks ass, and gets out. I spend a lot of time in hotels and if “Dreadful” is playing when I leave the room, I usually leave it playing as loud as I can for, as I like to say, my good angels. Angels rule. Why not?

The Violet Burning are a criminally underrated band. Basically nobody today knows who they are, but I do, and I have loved them for years. The band began around 1990 in Orange County, California, and from the beginning the central figure has been singer, guitarist, and songwriter Michael Pritzl. The musicians around him have changed repeatedly over the decades, but Pritzl has remained the constant—the voice, songwriter, guitarist, and creative mainspring of the whole enterprise. 

And what an enterprise it has been. Pritzl has made more than twenty albums, EPs, and live recordings under The Violet Burning and related names, toured relentlessly through the United States and Europe, and somehow maintained a fiercely loyal audience while remaining almost completely outside the mainstream. Their early sound drew from post-punk and alternative rock—The Cure, U2, Echo & the Bunnymen—and over time expanded into the huge, atmospheric guitar music that has over time became unmistakably theirs. 

The Violet Burning came out of the Christian alternative-rock world, although Pritzl has never exactly fit comfortably inside that box. That puts him in the same broad lineage as people like Larry Norman, Gene Eugene, and Michael Knott: artists for whom faith was part of the work but never sufficient to explain the work. The music is too strange, too wounded, too beautiful, and often simply too fucking loud for that. Pritzl himself has always seemed interested in the collision between devotion and doubt, beauty and damage, transcendence and straight-up rock and roll.

R.I.P. Gene Eugene, the man. And R.I.P. Michael Knott, the motherfucking badass of all badasses.

In addition to being hugely underrated, parts of The Violet Burning catalog remain frustratingly difficult to find on the major streaming services. That is a real shame, because this is precisely the sort of band that should be continually rediscovered. They built an enormous body of work without ever becoming remotely as famous as the quality of that work deserved. Even at their commercial peak they were essentially an independent proposition, building their audience through touring and word of mouth rather than anything resembling mainstream success. 

I wish more people knew The Violet Burning. I wish more people heard these songs.

My number two Violet Burning song is “Gorgeous,” which we’ll get to a little later. That song is enormous, emotional, and glorious in an entirely different way. But for now, “Dreadful” is the one.

Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Nothing wasted.

Number ten.

This bad boy fucking slaps.

11. The Traitor — Leonard Cohen

Cohen’s early career began not as a songwriter but as a poet and novelist—already established in literary circles before he ever stepped into popular music. When he moved into song, it wasn’t a reinvention so much as a translation. Early breakthroughs like Suzanne and later Bird on the Wire introduced a voice that felt unlike anything in contemporary pop: formally literary, emotionally restrained, but spiritually enormous.

Across a career that stretches from that early poetic minimalism to late-period gravity, Cohen repeatedly returned to the same emotional territory in different registers. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy carries quiet tragedy without spectacle. Death of a Ladies’ Man leans into chaos and contradiction. Alexandra Leaving and That Don’t Make It Junk show a late-career clarity—less ornament, more acceptance. And then, right at the end, The Night of Santiago from Thank You for the Dance—completed after his death by his son Adam—feels like a final echo rather than a conclusion, as if the voice is still resolving even after it has stopped.

But it is this passage that sits at the center of everything: “I told my mother, mother I must leave you / preserve my room and do not shed a tear / should rumor of a shabby ending reach you / it was half my fault and half the atmosphere.” Quite possibly the greatest verse ever set to paper.

There is something almost unbearable in its tenderness—the attempt to leave without destroying what you came from, to depart without turning departure into permanent damage. “Preserve my room” is not a realistic request; it is a desire for time to stop, for memory to remain untouched while the self moves forward into uncertainty, drift, and likely failure.

Cohen does something very few writers ever manage: he distributes responsibility without dissolving it. “Half my fault and half the atmosphere” is not an excuse—it is an ethics of existence. The self is accountable, but so is the world that formed it. There is guilt here, but no self-pity. There is clarity, but no absolution. He is naming the condition of being human with a precision that feels almost too large to hold. And what makes the song extraordinary is that it refuses resolution. Cohen never tries to solve the tension he has introduced. Instead, he inhabits it fully.

Across his work—from the early poetic breakthrough to the late songs of acceptance and erosion—he speaks to the quester, the striver, the poet, and the mystic in each of us. Not by offering answers, but by dignifying the act of searching itself. Leaving, longing, failing, seeking—these are not problems to resolve, but conditions to endure with awareness. His voice carries all of it: resignation, yearning, and a kind of quiet, unbreakable grace.

His best by a mile. Simply marvelous.

12. Gorgeous (live)— The Violet Burning

“Gorgeous” is gorgeous. It is gorgeous, as indicated by the title, and probably one of the most gorgeous songs ever recorded. This is my number two favorite Violet Burning song, as indicated in my discussion of “Dreadful” above. The Violet Burning is a criminally underrated band. I will never understand how they don’t have a bigger footprint. They deserve to be widely recognized and appreciated.

While Dreadful is almost certainly the slappiest song of all time, if that is a thing, Gorgeous is absolutely one of the sweetest. It starts with Michael Pritzl, the band’s lead singer and creative center, singing, “I swear it was the Fourth of July.” Oh yeah, Michael? Are you sure? Okay, baby, whatever you say. So yeah, it’s the Fourth of July: patriotism, mom and pop, apple pie, fireworks—the whole nine. But Pritzl immediately turns all of that American iconography into the language of romantic awe. The fireworks aren’t really the point. The person he is looking at is.

And then the song eventually delivers its payoff: baby, you’re so gorgeous.

Motherfucker.

Of course.

Gorgeous originally appeared on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic, released in 2001, one of the strangest and more adventurous records in The Violet Burning catalog. The album moves between glam, alternative rock, electronics, enormous guitars, and quieter atmospheric material, with Gorgeous arriving towards the end. It is a perfect example of what makes Michael Pritzl such an unusual songwriter: underneath all the sonic experimentation is a deeply sincere romantic. He can build a wall of noise around a feeling, but he never seems embarrassed by the feeling itself.

Pritzl has described honesty and vulnerability—including honest conversations about God and ordinary human life—as central to what the band does. He specifically included Gorgeous among the songs on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic that embody that impulse. That combination—spiritual yearning, romantic yearning, distortion, beauty—is basically the Violet Burning universe in miniature.

And Gorgeous has endured. It remained important enough to the band to appear late in sets and sometimes close them many years after its release. I particularly love the live versions because Pritzl can stretch the song outward until what begins as a simple declaration of attraction becomes something much larger. The sweetness survives the volume. If anything, the volume makes it sweeter.

That is also why I can put Dreadful and Gorgeous this high on the same list without feeling remotely repetitive. They represent opposite poles of what I love about this band. Dreadful fucking slaps. Gorgeous fucking glows. One makes me want to turn the stereo up until the walls shake; the other reminds me that sometimes the most effective thing a songwriter can do is look at another human being and say the simplest possible thing: you are gorgeous.

And Michael Pritzl makes me believe him every goddamn time.

13. Albuquerque — Mark Kozelek (Neil Young Cover)

Well, they say that Santa Fe
Is less than ninety miles away
And I got time to roll another number and rent a car
Oh, Albuquerque.

Oh my God, Neil. What are you doing to me? Neil, baby, you’re breaking my heart. Neil, shut the fuck up.

“Albuquerque” appears on the back end of Neil Young’s 1975 record Tonight’s the Night, immediately before “New Mama.” “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” with which I constantly confuse it for reasons that will shortly become obvious, appears a few songs earlier. Tonight’s the Night, as many readers will remember, is Neil’s record most haunted by death. It was largely recorded in 1973 but held back until 1975, and the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten and Young’s roadie Bruce Berry hang over the entire thing.

Berry is famously eulogized in the two versions of “Tonight’s the Night” that bookend the record: “Bruce Berry was a working man / He used to load that Econoline van.” Neil, my man.

Obviously Neil Young loved Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. He basically wrote an entire record out of the grief that followed their deaths. Tonight’s the Night is consequently a strange, ragged, drunken, grief-stricken motherfucker of a record. It sounds at times as though everybody involved is barely holding the thing together, which is exactly why it works.

Tonight’s the Night also includes one of the first Neil Young songs I ever heard, “Tired Eyes,” with the stone-cold classic opening: “Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And he left them lying in an open field / Full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors.”

Neil. Bullet holes in the mirrors? Really, baby? Again: oh my.

In any case, I often get “Albuquerque” and “Roll Another Number” confused, simply because “Albuquerque” itself contains the line, “So I’ll roll another number for the road / I feel able to get under any load.” Obviously Mr. Young was rolling his own during this period.

Probably other periods too.

But my favorite lines from “Albuquerque” are these: “So I’ll stop when I can / Find some fried eggs and country ham / I’ll find somewhere where they don’t care who I am.”

Motherfucker.

By 1975, Neil Young was already a global superstar. He was massive in his native Canada, massive in the United States, and increasingly massive around the world. In his wonderful song “Don’t Be Denied,” Young writes about reaching that point—record executives suddenly all over him and the band when all he really wanted to do was play rock and roll. Neil, fucking do it.

And that context is part of what makes “Albuquerque” so moving. This is a famous man singing about wanting to disappear. He doesn’t want the record company, the expectations, the mythology, or apparently anybody asking where the hell Neil Young is. He wants to get into a car, roll another number, eat some fried eggs and country ham, and go somewhere where nobody cares who he is. It is an almost comically modest fantasy of escape, which is precisely why it works.

And then there is Mark Kozelek. I love Neil Young’s original, obviously, but it is Kozelek’s cover that gets the spot on this list. Kozelek has always been a magnificent interpreter of other people’s songs—AC/DC, John Denver, Modest Mouse, Paul McCartney, Kris Kristofferson, and many others—and he understands exactly what makes “Albuquerque” work. He doesn’t try to improve Neil Young. He slows everything down, opens up the spaces between the words, and lets the loneliness that was already buried in the song come completely to the surface.

That is what the best covers do. They don’t replace the original; they reveal something that was already there. Neil Young wrote a great song about escape. Mark Kozelek heard the loneliness inside the escape and made it almost unbearably beautiful.

Fried eggs. Country ham. Nobody caring who you are. Sometimes that is the whole fucking dream.

Neil, my man. My god what an amazing song.

14. Oh My Sweet Carolina — Ryan Adams

One of the most beautiful and sad songs in modern American songwriting. The record Heartbreaker—Adams’ solo debut after his run fronting Whiskeytown—remains his peak for many listeners. It’s also the album where everything still feels unforced: the writing, the pacing, the emotional exposure. Later records like Gold brought wider recognition, and something like Chris gets close in flashes, but Heartbreaker has a coherence of mood that he never quite replicated.

What defines Oh My Sweet Carolina is its dual perspective. On the surface, it’s a travel song—young man on the road, drifting through cities like Cleveland, accumulating damage, spending energy and money with a kind of reckless momentum that feels both chosen and inevitable. But underneath that motion is something much older: a pull backward, toward origin, toward a place that isn’t just geographic but emotional. North Carolina isn’t just home—it’s coherence.

The Cleveland passages (“So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane/ I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance/ And I was spending money like the way it likes to rain/ Man, I ended up with pockets full of cane”) carry that classic Ryan Adams contradiction: charm and collapse in the same breath. The narrator moves through instability with the confidence of someone still convinced that motion equals meaning, even as that belief is starting to fail him. It’s the sound of someone learning, mid-stream, that movement alone doesn’t resolve anything. And then the emotional center of the song reveals itself: (Oh mw sweet Carolina/ what compels me to go/ oh, my sweet disposition/ may you one day carry me home), the longing not just to return, but to be returned in one piece. Not improved, not transformed—just intact.

This is where the collaboration with Emmylou Harris matters. Her voice doesn’t decorate the song; it stabilizes it. It sounds like witness. Adams has written other songs that brush this same emotional territory—English Girls Approximately, Oh My God, Whatever, Etc., Still a Cage, Birmingham—but none of them quite hold the same balance of youth and exhaustion, romance and reckoning. Oh My Sweet Carolina feels like a hinge between those states: a young man already speaking like he understands what the older version of himself will miss. It’s a debut record moment that feels strangely final. A song about going forward that only makes sense when you understand what it costs to leave things behind. A truly majestic entry—and a worthy entry here at fifteen.

15. (T) Montreal Rock Band Somewhere — Happyness

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” is totally out of control. Of course it is. What else can you say about a song that contains the lyric, “I’m wearing Win Butler’s hair / There’s a scalpless singer of a Montreal rock band somewhere”? Win Butler is, of course, the lead singer of Arcade Fire, who suck.

They suck.

Arcade Fire hit the big time with Funeral, released in 2004. I like Funeral okay, but I haven’t listened to it in more than a decade, and I probably never will again. It just isn’t my speed. It sounds to me like a concept record: operatic, overblown, and the production lets it down at every turn.

So yeah, I don’t like Arcade Fire.

However, Happyness is massively underrated. Other than The Violet Burning and maybe Daddy Issues, Happyness is, to my mind, the most underrated band of all time. And that is saying something.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” runs 5:04, and it is a sprawling guitar workout that somehow feels much bigger than its running time. The Happyness boys can really fucking play. That sometimes gets obscured by how funny they are, and by the deliberately tossed-off quality of the whole operation. The songs can sound as though three guys wandered into a room, made each other laugh, picked up their instruments, and accidentally recorded something brilliant. But listen underneath the jokes: these guys know exactly what they are doing.

There is also some weird history surrounding the song’s placement. Weird Little Birthday was originally released in the UK in 2014 as a 13-song record without “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere.” The expanded 2015 release added four bonus songs, with “Montreal” coming immediately after what had originally been the album closer, “Monkey in the City.” That expanded record also contains “Orange Luz” and the wonderfully titled “Refrigerate Her,” but those were already part of the original album. 

I am fascinated by song order on records, and I spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking and writing about it. “Janie Jones” goes first. “Rocks Off” goes first. Some songs simply announce themselves as openers or closers. “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” feels to me like a closer: sprawling, funny, strange, guitar-heavy, and just unresolved enough to leave the record hanging in the air after it ends.

There are plenty of other great songs on Weird Little Birthday, including the title track and “Leave the Party.” In “Leave the Party,” for example, the narrator proposes killing everyone at the party and then heading home.

Really, baby? You’re going to murder the whole party and just jet like that? Settle down. Take a shower. Think things through. Not the best move perhaps.

They followed the debut with Write In in 2017 and eventually Floatr in 2020, a much slower, denser, stranger record. I like Floatr, but it is not an easy record to get into. The immediacy and wiseass humor of Weird Little Birthday are still there in places, but everything feels more submerged. It is the sort of record that asks you to come toward it rather than coming toward you.

And maybe that helps explain why Happyness never really broke through. They were always slightly sideways to whatever might have made them commercially successful. They can write hooks, they can make enormous guitar noise, the songs are genuinely beautiful, and they are extremely funny. However for some reason they never seemed particularly interested in making things easy for their audience. Even their best songs tend to wander around, stop somewhere unexpected, make a joke, get sad, and then suddenly fucking explode.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” contains almost the entire Happyness proposition in five minutes. It is funny without being a novelty song, melancholy without announcing itself as melancholy, and loose without actually being sloppy. Beneath the Win Butler joke is a genuinely beautiful piece of guitar music made by a band that understood exactly how much room a song sometimes needs.

They never became Arcade Fire. Good. I’ll take Happyness every day of the week.

15. (T) Crushed Out — Bad Moves

17. Caribbean Wind — Bob Dylan

18. (T) Center of Asia — Paul Pena 

19. (T) Rocket and a Bomb — Michael Knott

This is Knott’s best-known—and, for many people, only known—song. It’s the one that traveled beyond the small, fractured world he spent his career navigating, the one that people who don’t know the rest of his catalog can still recognize. And that’s fitting, because it captures almost everything that made him singular. Knott never fit comfortably inside the Christian rock community that was supposed to be his home. He clashed with labels, bounced from one situation to another, tried repeatedly to start his own imprints just to maintain control of his work, and spent much of his career existing in the margins of an already marginal scene. There were too many expectations, too many rules about what a “Christian artist” was supposed to sound like, what he was supposed to say, how cleanly he was supposed to resolve things. Knott refused all of it.

You can hear the lineage—artists like Larry Norman laid some of the groundwork—but Knott is no inheritor in the traditional sense. He’s a total original. Where Norman and others often leaned toward proclamation, Knott leaned into contradiction, mess, unresolved tension. He wasn’t interested in presenting faith as an answer; he was interested in showing what it felt like to live inside it when the answers didn’t come.

His career reflects that restlessness. From the early chaos of Popsicle and Popsavers, through the darker, more aggressive phases of L.S. Underground and LSU, into his solo work and projects like Aunt Betty’s, Knott kept shifting forms, refusing to settle into anything that could be easily categorized. The sound changed, the bands changed, the labels changed—but the core impulse didn’t: tell the truth as he experienced it, even if it didn’t line up with what anyone wanted to hear. Rocket and a Bomb distills all of that into something deceptively simple. There’s humor in it, almost absurdity—“Mr. God, is there a Ms. God? Can she help me find a job?”—but it lands because it’s so nakedly real. This is a man of Christ who is also a man of the world, standing in the gap between those identities, not reconciling them but living them both at once. He’s not asking for salvation in the abstract; he’s asking for something immediate, practical, human. He just needs a goddam job.

That tension runs through everything he ever said and did. His line—“I know Christ. It doesn’t make me good; it doesn’t make me bad; it doesn’t make me anything. It just means I know Christ.”—might be the clearest articulation of his entire ethos. Faith is not a moral upgrade, not a solution, not a transformation you can point to and quantify. It’s a relationship, and relationships are messy. So what is a rocket and a bomb? They’re things most people don’t get to touch. Power, transcendence, impact—forces that exist beyond the everyday. The narrator wants a job, something stable, something achievable. But he also wants more. He wants access to something larger, something explosive, something that breaks the limits of an ordinary life. Knott lived that contradiction. He lived fast, pushed hard, refused to smooth out the edges that made him difficult to categorize or contain. He burned through systems that couldn’t hold him, left behind a body of work that feels both deeply personal and strangely universal. He had to.

20. There Must Be More Than Blood — Car Seat Headrest.

This is a tricky one, because it forces us to deal with a shift—not just in a song, but in an artist. My thesis is that this is Will Toledo going into a kind of relative hiding, and the song reads like a document of that transition in real time. His early work—from Beach Life-in-Death through Nervous Young Man to Sleeping with Strangers—was as direct, as exposed, as heart-on-the-sleeve as anything in the last decade of rock music. He wasn’t just confessional; he was incapable of not being confessional. He was the heart on his sleeve songwriter of his generation. You didn’t have to work to understand him—you just had to be willing to feel what he was feeling.

And then you put that next to someone like John Darnielle—super prolific, deeply lofi in his early approach, but always a little more mediated, a little more constructed. Darnielle throws his material against the wall and lets it accumulate into narrative. Toledo, at his best, just bleeds. So when Making a Door Less Open arrives, even the title signals a shift. Something is closing. Something is being sealed off. The masks—first the normal face coverings, then the Trait mask, then the gas mask—aren’t just stagecraft. They’re statements. The question isn’t “what is he hiding?” but “why does he suddenly feel the need to hide at all?” There Must Be More Than Blood sits right in the middle of that tension. You get these images of dislocation—of a life that used to feel rooted and now doesn’t. The delta, the shoreline, the houses stripped away—it doesn’t read like a literal disaster so much as an internal one. The sense of ground disappearing. Of structures—family, identity, whatever “home” used to mean—losing their coherence. He talks about wasting time, but you know that’s not true. He’s one of the most prolific songwriters around. What he’s really describing is a shift in how that time feels from the inside.

And then there’s the second movement—the red-eye flight, the self-recognition that barely qualifies as recognition at all. He sees himself, but only as an outline, a set of lines without substance. That’s the real break from the early work. The old Toledo was hyper-present, almost overwhelmingly so. This Toledo is thinning out, becoming harder even for himself to locate. So what do you do when you can’t see yourself clearly anymore? You disappear further. You become, in a sense, the Invisible Man. That’s what the masks start to feel like—not affectation, but adaptation. A way of dealing with a self that no longer feels stable enough to present directly. And if you follow that thread forward, you get to The Scholars—The Scholars—his most recent record. It’s even more oblique than Door. There are great songs there—Stay With Me (I Don’t Want to Be Alone), Equals—but they’re harder to parse, less immediately accessible. The emotional core is still there, but it’s buried deeper, refracted through more layers.

Part of that may simply be life catching up with him. Toledo dealt with serious health issues in the lead-up to that record—long COVID, histamine intolerance—and the process became more collaborative, less singularly driven. That alone changes the texture of the work. The lone voice becomes one voice among several. The signal diffuses.So There Must Be More Than Blood starts to feel like a hinge point. The moment where the old mode—pure exposure, pure immediacy—begins to give way to something more guarded, more fragmented, more difficult to access. But the core hasn’t disappeared. It’s just harder to reach. And that’s why the song matters. It captures an artist in the act of losing something essential—or at least transforming it into something less direct, less available, maybe even less comforting. Will Toledo is a mysterious guy. Deep, fragile, a little haunted, clearly carrying more than he lets on. He’s dealt with some tough stuff, and you can feel it in the way the work shifts over time. And for anyone still saying “rock is dead”—they can fuck off. There is still The Hold Steady and Car Seat Headrest making records that matter, records that wrestle with something real. You just have to be willing to meet them where they are now, not where they used to be.

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The Genius Razzlekhan and the Phony Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I went home with the waitress/ the way I always do/ how was I to know/ she was with the Russians too.

Warren Zevon

Author’s Note:

Some essays begin with a thesis. This one began with me laughing so hard I nearly fell out of my chair.

When Heather Morgan—better known as Razzlekhan—was accused of participating in what was then described as the largest cryptocurrency heist in history, nearly every media outlet converged on the same joke: look how terrible her rap videos are. I saw something different. Behind all the memes was someone making deeply strange, completely sincere outsider art. Whether you think it’s brilliant, awful, or somehow both at once, there is no mistaking its originality. I have always had a soft spot for artists who refuse to color inside the lines.

The surprise, though, was Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He wandered into the story for reasons best known to himself and, in my opinion, emerged looking far sillier than the alleged crypto queen ever did. Years later I still think the real story wasn’t the memes. It was how quickly the internet decided who deserved ridicule—and how often it picked the wrong target. Razzlekhan may have been the weirdest person in the room, but weird has never bothered me. Poseurs always have. This is their story.

===== =====

This is the saga of the queen of crypto hacking Heather Morgan, aka Razzlekhan, and the shameless tail chaser and phony public intellectual (is there any other kind) Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Just so we are clear about who is who here, Taleb, the bestselling author “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile” is the villain, and Morgan, who along with her husband is accused of pulling off the largest heist in human history ($4.5 billion dollars) is the heroine. Morgan was briefly a Twitter star in late February 2022 when her alleged crimes were revealed; however her stardom was not based on her hacking prowess, but rather on what was perceived (incorrectly) to be her world-historically awful rap videos, including, but not limited, her banger “Versace Bedouin,” in which, among other things, she names herself “the crocodile of Wall Street.” Here is a taste of her work (note that the real Heather Morgan appears to be in her early 30’s, and is certainly not a grandmother. Also, the video depicts Morgan rapping around the Wall Street district of New York City with three women “dancing” behind her, one wearing large green gardening gloves and carrying a flag with a design we are unable to clearly see for the entire video):

Razzlekhan’s the name/ the hot grandma you really wanna bang/ always run the gilf game/ ever since I was fif-taneee

I’m many things/ a rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO/ and a dirty dirty dirty dirty ho

Better than most writers/ creepier than most girls/ weirder than most rappers/ but I still rock pearls.

Alert listeners will note the apparent Liz Phair reference to Razz’s sexual maneuvering in her teens, suggesting that there may be at least a little guile to her lyrics. But what impresses me (and I’ll just state this right out-I think Razzlekhan is a misunderstood genius) is the straight ahead sincerity of the lyrics. I mean Versace Bedouin was released before Morgan was implicated in the crypto hack and here is her dedication at the top of the song:

Never forget, weirdest is the most original/ this song is for the entrepreneurs and hackers/ all the misfits and smart slackers.

The really hardcore music fan may pick up a possible Drugstore reference from “Say Hello”:

I say hello/ to all the junkies/ the sinners and the creeps/ I say hello to all the people in this place/ I say hello /to all the drug heads/ the prostitutes and freaks/ I say hello/ to all the people in the world!

But even I don’t think Morgan is a Drugstore fan, so the resemblance is most likely coincidental. What I love about Razz’s work here is that Versace Bedouin is a simple and totally sincere statement of intent. She tells the listener exactly who she is and what she’s about. She’s a weirdo and misfit, a hacker, a probable criminal, a business owner, and a dirty ho, and she is just letting the world know. She is, as the kids say, putting the motherfucking world on blast. Razzlekhan is coming for your bitcoin, baby, lock that shit down.

And the media loved it. The Guardian wrote a long (and pretty helpful) article on Morgan with the lead “Is this the new face of organized crime? Decoding Razzlekhan, the rapping bitcoin fraudster.”

“Who is this Bitcoin crime queen” they write breathlessly “and what does she tell us about the future of organized crime?” Well Mr. Guardian, that’s a good question that maybe I can shed some light on. Morgan and her husband (who, like the rest of the uncaring world didn’t care for her rap career-Heather I’m here for you man, just reach out) stole the money, allegedly, from the platform Bitfinix but were unable to convert much of into cash or liquid assets and had to settle for Walmart gift cards instead. So that might tell you something-I’m not sure how organized the pair was.

Mr. Guardian again:

“It is hard to articulate how it feels to be alive in an age of massive wealth disparity and multiple deregulatory lines of questionable crypto minting, but I think watching an alleged Bitcoin embezzler struggle through painful rap bars in a flat-billed cap that reads ‘0FCKS’ is a good summation of the overwhelming confusion.”

But it really isn’t hard to articulate at all-it feels great, because while Heather Morgan the journalist, CEO, and dirty ho may be facing a little legal trouble, Razzlekhan the artist, in my opinion, stands unbloodied and unbowed atop the pinnacle of outsider art along with Daniel Johnston, Mayo Thompson, and the handful of other transcendent geniuses so far ahead of their time they were subject to as much ridicule as they were celebration.

(My favorite piece of music criticism ever comes from a Pitchfork review which doesn’t seem to be online anymore of The Red Krayola’s 1989 album malefactor, ade-it must have been a re-release because Pitchfork wasn’t around in ’89 of course-where the critic accuses Mayo Thompson of “playing the guitar badly, on purpose.” And it’s pretty true. The Red Krayola is out there.)

Razz herself embraces the outsider role and speaks directly to her artistic origins and sensibilities in her artistic biography:

Razzlekhan is like Genghis Khan, but with more pizzazz… No one knows for sure where this rapper’s from — could be the North African desert, the jungles of Vietnam, or another universe. All that matters is she’s here to stick up for misfits and underdogs everywhere (…) Because Razz has synesthesia, her art often resembles something in between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare. Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended, Razz likes to push the limits of what people are comfortable with. Her style has often been described as “sexy horror-comedy,” because of her fondness for combining dark and disturbing concepts with dirty jokes and gestures. Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.

To my knowledge, no major media outlet even gave Razzlekhan a fighting chance; however I invite you to read the above self-description again with care. She is not in the least bit joking around. She identifies variously as a Bedouin, Turkish, a nomad, and an alien. Later in the same piece she identifies her influences as: Die Antwoord, Tierra Whack, Mickey Avalon, Salvador Dali, Diane Arbus, Hunter S. Thompson, Roald Dahl, and Charles Bukowski. This is a consistent, real, list of artists that a true outsider might well identify with. At the Razzlekhan level, the distance between greatness and awfulness is razor thin, artistic merit being, like everything else really, a circle not a line. In any case, judge for yourself — pull up a Razzlekhan video on You Tube (they are still there) and see what you think.

But what does any of this have to do with the author Nicholas Nassim Taleb? Well, it would have had nothing to do with him if our boy hadn’t chosen, with exquisitely poor judgment, to interject himself into the Heather Morgan/ Razzlekhan drama. Within hours of the heist news breaking, Mr. Taleb posted the following:

I have several things to say about this nonsense:

I. Check his use of “Attention” and the scare word “vulnerability.” Taleb thinks this message is super important and even urgent. He’s got to get it out there RIGHT NOW.

II. The story is obviously total BS. Taleb seems to have no sense of how Twitter works, and his narrative is so bizarre that he is basically begging us to roast him, which users in the hundreds did, of course.

III. Taleb gives no insight into why Morgan was DMing him. What did she want? Well, users, myself included, had a theory as to what might actually have occurred here. Occam’s Razor would suggest that at some point Morgan and Taleb began exchanging DMs, possibly on her initiative, as she was writing extensively for Business Insider and Forbes I believe, and maybe she wanted to ask Taleb something about one of his books. Taleb then pivoted into a bit of tail chasing, or, as one Twitter denizen put it slightly less crudely, he was looking for a little “bobs and vagine.” When Morgan was arrested, Taleb got spooked that somehow their DMs would leak, so he concocted a ridiculous cover story almost (but not quite) as stupid and unbelievable as Joy Reid’s claim that her fifteen year old blog with homophobic jokes and comments was hacked by Russians.

IV. The use of “some more recently” is a pure “tell.” Taleb’s bobs and vagineing has been going on for some time, it seems. But why in the world would Taleb think that the messages would leak just because Morgan was arrested (she was later released and her husband was held in custody, and I haven’t been able to get a status update on where she is today)? I mean there are really only two options: i) that the messages would be released by the FBI or something as pertinent to the case, in which case Taleb and Morgan would have been discussing her hacking. This seems highly unlikely; ii) Morgan would choose to release them herself in an effort to incriminate Taleb. But Nicholas baby, this is just not going to be a priority for Morgan after her arrest. I mean, she is accused of stealing 4.5 billion, and she’s got her rap career, and her husband is in prison. She has got stuff going on man; your DMs are way down the list.

All and all, this message shows that Taleb is an idiot and a complete joke. And people took note, including Edward Snowden, piping up from Russia. Check this out:

Snowden comes in with the savage take down here, and Taleb punches back with an offer to debate, what exactly? It’s not clear if this the debate challenge was issued prior by Taleb nor is it clear, at least to me, what is to be debated. Are they supposed to talk medical issues? Mental health? Hacking? Bobs and vagine? Taleb continues to make no sense, and Snowden let’s him know with another zinger:

Main Character Syndrome indeed. I would add Major Asshat Syndrome and Big Phony Fraud and Fragile Loser Syndrome as well. Because this is the guy who wrote Antifragile! Which is supposed to be about things that thrive during chaos, or in other words, things which are resilient. And nothing says resilient like faking a hacking narrative to cover your tail chasing, issuing an incomprehensible debate challenge to someone way out of your league, and tripling down with blocking random twitter users who question you. And I would know, because after I liked the bobs and vagine comment and added something like “Methinks Mr. Taleb doth protest too much,” the fucker blocked me too! Sadly that Twitter account is history so I can’t post a screenshot, however it was obvious that this huge baby was scrolling chats and mass blocking to distract from his disastrous piece of public relations. Honestly, the whole thing was super funny and Taleb showed his ass in the worst possible way.

Taleb obviously thinks he is hotshit. Check out his Twitter bio.

What a poser. A flaneur is a French term for someone who walks the streets taking things in, and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about the flaneur in his epic, and epically unfinished “Arcades Project.” Actually, a flaneur is a lot like a kibitzer. I am the Kyotokibbitzer (two b’s baby), and I love Benjamin’s work, including the Arcades Project. I bet Taleb is aware of Benjamin and fancies himself a fan. But he doesn’t know the first thing about Benjamin, because Benjamin was a humble guy who did great work and Taleb is a braggart, a tail chaser, and a bum. Deadlifts and dead languages my ass. Text is dead there Nicholas, at least your texts are, because you made a complete fool of yourself and you suck. Taleb exemplifies precisely why I dislike anyone who calls themselves a public intellectual or an expert. He is a poser and I’ll bet you 10 to 1 his ideas are stolen just like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s, another total loser who piggybacks on people who know something to pump up his image. (A sure sign of a loser is a “public intellectual” who insists on using three names. What’s wrong with Nicholas Taleb or Neil Tyson? The only people who need three names are serial killers; I mean even public intellectual number one Malcolm Gladwell only uses two names. Gladwell is known to pilfer ideas as well, but The Tipping Point is a pretty good read and the dude genuinely knows a tremendous amount about the sport of running. And he doesn’t call himself “Malcolm Julius Gladwell” or whatever. This is because he’s just a writer and knows that using his middle name would make him a prat.) Anyway, it’s totally fine to fake it ’til you make it, and most of us do to a greater or lesser degree, but you can’t fake your way into being an expert. Never trust “experts,” full stop.

So that’s the story of Razzlehan, the misunderstood genius, and Nicholas Taleb, the big phony. And in case you are asking, yes I did ask Razz to get in touch with me above. I’d say “I can fix her,” but she needs no fixing. She can DM me all she wants, and she doesn’t even have to get the Russians involved.

Dedication:

For Razz. You rule baby. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s I: 7/20/26, the Unwritten Libretto.

Author’s Note:

Five days ago, I made what may prove to be the most important professional decision of my life.

For months—years really—I had been thinking about giving up my teaching career and becoming a full-time writer. I have talked to many of my family and friends about this and taken several small steps in this direction. I recently published a novel, have written and published hundreds of essays, and written almost every day for eighteen years. I have hundreds of pages of dream records, journals and letters, some sent and some only in draft form. I am hard at work on the sequel to my first novel, and am currently working on five books with many more in the making.

Over this time I have also become very good at making excuses. School is too busy. Life is complicated. The timing isn’t quite right. Next month. Next term. Next year. One day. It was all true, and yet it barely matters. A few days ago, I finally admitted what had been staring me in the face for a long time: if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to stop waiting for someone else to make that decision for me. Whether I eventually succeed or fail is almost beside the point. The decision itself changed something in me. I stopped thinking about the life I wished I had and started taking responsibility for the one I actually have.

Today wasn’t the happiest day of my life, nor the saddest. It wasn’t the day I got married, the day my son was born, the day I published my first book, or the day I realized my marriage was ending. Objectively speaking, it was an ordinary Monday in Osaka. I listened to music. I wandered the city. I shared dinner and my bed with a woman whose path happened to cross mine for a couple of hours before diverging forever. By tomorrow morning she would be somewhere else, and so would I. Yet somewhere between checking into a modest hotel, thinking about my future, and sitting alone quietly after she left, something finally clicked. My teaching career is rapidly coming to a close. The marriage that defined most of my adult life is over. The books I dream about haven’t been written yet. The cities I may someday call home are still only possibilities. The people who will matter most over the next twenty years are, at this moment, complete strangers.

For the first time since I was a young man, there is no obvious script. That realization is exhilarating. It is also terrifying. Most of all, it is deeply liberating.

So this seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

Epigraph:

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.

Anonymous

Anything could happen.

Bash and Pop

I: My General Situation As of Today

For the better part of thirty years, my life had possessed a remarkable amount of structure. I graduated from college. I moved to Japan. I found a teaching career almost by accident and stuck with it for a quarter of a century. I got married, and my wife and I bought a house together in Kyoto. We raised a wonderful son together who we both love more than words can say. We have paid bills, argued over groceries, worried about our dear dog Daisy, taken vacations when we could afford to, and slowly accumulated the ordinary rituals that eventually become a life. There were wonderful years and there were difficult ones, but there was almost always a next step waiting patiently in front of me. Whether I liked the script or not, there was a some kind of a script.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, it disappeared.

My marriage ended not with a single dramatic explosion but with the gradual realization that two decent people could simply reach the end of the road together. My teaching career, once the defining feature of my adult identity, began to quietly recede into the background. Friends scattered across countries and continents. My parents grew older. I turned fifty-two without feeling especially old, but with the unmistakable sense that I had entered the second half of whatever story remained.

It is a peculiar thing to discover that freedom and uncertainty are twins. For years I imagined freedom as something uncomplicated. Finish work. Write books. Travel. Meet interesting people. Drink coffee in strange cities. Listen to music until two in the morning. Wake up whenever I pleased. Answer to no one.

There is truth in that fantasy. There is another truth as well.

Freedom also means that no one hands you tomorrow. No institution is waiting to promote you. No family obligation automatically determines your next decision. No invisible current carries you downstream. Every meaningful choice becomes your responsibility. Every success belongs to you. Every failure belongs to you too.

That realization can feel less like opening a door than standing on the edge of a cliff. You can step forward. Or you can spend the rest of your life admiring the view. Five days before the evening you’re about to read about, I decided I was done standing still.

I wasn’t retiring, not yet anyway. I wasn’t exactly reinventing myself. I wasn’t chasing some impossible dream. I was simply acknowledging something that had probably been true for twenty years. I am a writer. I feel like I was born to be one. Whether anyone else eventually agrees is, in many ways, beside the point. The work itself has become the destination. Everything else—the cities, the books, the women, the music, the bars, the victories, the humiliations, the friendships, the failures—is simply material for my work.

This series is an attempt to pay attention to the contours of my daily life, in whatever form the may take. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, to trust that the story doesn’t need an outline before it begins.

II: Osaka

Osaka has always felt different to me than Kyoto.

Kyoto is the city where I built my adult life. It is where I have worked, and lived for more than twenty years with my life and son. It is where the mortgage was paid and our dog was walked, where ordinary afternoons quietly accumulated slowly into decades. I know its rhythms inside and out. I know which coffee shops open early, which bridges are worth crossing at sunset, and where to stand beside the Kamogawa when I need to remember that almost everything eventually passes.

Osaka has always been to me something else entirely.

It has never asked me to be responsible. When I come here, I feel somehow lighter. Less like a teacher. Less like a husband. Less like the man who spent twenty-four years inside the same corporate institution. Osaka has always given me permission to become, if only for a day or two, a slightly different version of myself. Not a better man or a worse one. Just someone with fewer expectations resting on his shoulders.

Perhaps every city we visit has a role to play in our lives. Kyoto has been my home. Tokyo has often been a dream. Singapore has long been my favorite escape. Osaka, though, has become my intermission. A place where I can step off the stage for a little while before the next act begins. A place to just get away.

This Monday afternoon I checked into a small APA Hotel not far from Shinsaibashi Station, which I affectionally call Mr. Shin. Like most APA hotels, it is clean, efficient, and just a little too compact. The room isn’t exactly designed for lingering. It is designed for sleeping, showering, and moving on. My suitcase for neatly against one wall. The desk is barely large enough for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The large television in front of my bed I will barely use. It suits my current mood perfectly.

I took a taxi to the hotel from Shin-Osaka Station and arrived around 7:30 PM. I dropped my overnight bag on the floor, drew the curtains apart, and looked out over another slice of Osaka. Nothing spectacular. Just traffic, apartment buildings, and the quiet machinery of a city getting on with its day.

I remember thinking how strange it felt to have absolutely nowhere I needed to be. No lesson to prepare. No meeting to attend. No papers to grade. No one waiting for me at all.

That realization no longer frightened me the way it once might have. It felt… spacious. There are moments in life when freedom announces itself with fireworks. This wasn’t one of them. It arrived almost silently. Like an empty afternoon. Like a city that has never asked me to explain myself. My hotel room is simple. It is what I can afford.

Outside, Osaka continued exactly as it always had. Inside, almost without me realizing it, the next stage of my life had already begun.

III: Meeting Yuki

I should flash back briefly here to introduce my date for the evening. There are evenings that require months of planning. This was not one of them.

The plan, such as it was, consisted of very little. Conversation. Sex. Cigarettes. Dinner. That was enough. As I stepped out of the taxi, I saw her standing quietly on the street.

She was slightly built, dressed in a simple black skirt, and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone accustomed to meeting complete strangers. There was no dramatic meeting, no cinematic slow motion, no instant thunderbolt. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and within a minute or two were walking side by side into the hotel through the warm Osaka evening as though we had agreed to meet as old friends rather than someone we had never laid eyes on before.

Her name was Yuki.

We went up to my room and made the sort of awkward conversation that strangers always make at first. Where are you from? Where do you live today? Had I been to Osaka often? Was I enjoying the summer?

Nothing remarkable. Which, in retrospect, was itself remarkable. There is something deeply comforting about ordinary conversation. For a little while, neither of us had to be anything more than two people just getting to know each other.

Eventually, because pretending otherwise would have been absurd, the reason we had met entered the conversation. She is thirty-six and works as an escort. I had hired her for the evening.

There is no point dressing those facts up in prettier language. They are neither the whole story nor something I feel any particular need to defend. They simply belong to it. Human lives are untidy. We make decisions for reasons that are sometimes noble, sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes impossible even to explain to ourselves. This was one of mine.

I went into the bathroom to wash up, took my clothes off, and hung them neatly on the hangers on the wall. By the time I came out of the bathroom she was naked too. That was what we were there for. I put on one of my favorite bands Whiskeytown, lay back on the bed for a few minutes, listened hard, and let the sweet sweet sounds of Ryan Adams’ voice wash over me. I was, briefly, in heaven.

Then, inevitably, we began to kiss. She is a smoker and tasted like stale tobacco and faintly like green peas. I am a smoker too so I am sure I tasted the same. She unwrapped one of the condoms that I had bought earlier for occasions just like this and began to pleasure me with her mouth. While I do enjoy oral sex to some extent, it is far from my favorite sexual act and I have never been able to cum this way. Not for lack of trying, I simply find that the women who have performed the act on me can never sufficiently been able to get their teeth out of the way. It is not their fault at all, but it is just that simple.

Soon enough, I asked her to climb on top of me. My penis was already erect and she was slick as well, and I entered her cleanly and easily. After a little while, we flipped around and began to engage in the missionary position. I was on the urge of cumming when I pulled out, turned over on my back, and finished my self off with two hands. Nine times out of ten I finish this way if I finish at all. After all, I know my own equipment better than else, so to speak. Before we began to have sex I put on some porn. I chose very quickly as we were on the clock. I selected some perfectly nun priest porn, totally chalk. Of course we both barely watched it as our eyes were mostly closed. The moment I came I toweled off, shut off the porn, and immediately pressed play on the Whiskeytown video I had paused before sex.

Then a funny thing happened. During sex she had repeatedly asked me to turn down the porn and to shush in general. She said we were at a business hotel and that we were bothering the other guests. Although I love to be babied. I do not like to mothered at all. It is just not my thing, and I have written about this at some length here. I already knew that I would not book Yuki again, and this moment helped crystalize my decision. She is sweet and cool, and I am glad I met her for one night, however she is just not my jam. And also, nobody shushes my boy.

Anyway, she asked me to turn my music down. I just laughed and cranked it. Then she laughed too and the mood lifted and passed. Neither of us was yet in the mood for a shower, mostly because we were on the clock and by this point only had about 40 minutes left in our appointment. I did not feel like a round two, so I suggested we head down to the street to smoke for a smoke and then get a little dinner. Although we had less than an hour left and the hotel restaurant was a little busy, she agreed to have dinner with me.

We finished our cigarette and entered the first floor hotel restaurant. We sat down and briefly consulted the menu. The restaurant specializes in pasta, so I ordered tomato pasta with eggplant and she ordered the zucchini linguine. The food took a while to arrive, so halfway through the meal she asked for a doggie bag. I quickly finished my meal and we went upstairs so she could pack her bag.

The evening had never pretended to be anything it wasn’t. Neither of us confused it with romance. Neither of us imagined it was the beginning of some extraordinary love story. It was simply two lives crossing for a few hours before continuing in different directions. There is something quietly beautiful about that too.

Outside, Osaka was still very much alive. Trains rattled somewhere in the distance. Traffic rolled steadily beneath the hotel windows. Thousands of strangers were beginning nights that had nothing to do with ours. Ours, quietly and without complaint, was coming to an end.

I told her I was going to wash up for a minute. She said through the door that she had to leave. I said goodbye babes and she replied in the same fashion. When I came back out, she was already gone.

And I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.

IV: Coda

For most of my adult life, my future had always arrived with an outline. There was always another semester to teach. Another report to write. Another mortgage payment to make. Another family holiday to plan. Another school year waiting just over the horizon. Even when life became difficult, I almost always had a sense of what would come next. The details may change, but the broad shape of the story had already been sketched.

And now it hadn’t.

As I write this the marriage that defined nearly half my life has come to an end. My teaching career, after almost thirty years, is slowly coming to an end. My son is a grown man, trying his best making his own way in the world and earning his own money. My wife and I are immensely proud of him as well we should be. Our house of 19 years will soon belong to someone else. My life is rapidly becoming quite different and everything that had once seemed permanent has become part of the past.

This all may sound just a bit sad. Some of it may be, sure. It also happens to be exhilarating. Tomorrow I might wake up in Kyoto. Next month I might find myself in Singapore. A year from now I may be living in Osaka. Anything could happen.

Perhaps I’ll write ten more books. Perhaps no one will read them. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Perhaps I won’t. There will be close friends I haven’t made yet. There are cities I have not yet wandered. There are songs I haven’t fallen in love with, thank god.

There are mistakes waiting patiently for me. There are joys I cannot yet possibly imagine. For the first time since I was in my early twenties, the next chapter of my life has not yet been written.

As I stood there in that little Osaka hotel room, listening to Whiskeytown waft through the room, I finally understood what life had trying to tell me for days.

My life hadn’t fallen apart. It had, in fact, opened up. And somewhere beyond everything I thought I knew, waiting patiently for me, was the unfinished libretto.

Dedication:

For Yuki. Thanks for a lovely evening. I’ll never see you again, babe. Go with God.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea II: The Thin Man’s Son. CHAPTER 3: The Thin Man in Costa Rica

Matt texts the Thin Man before he has even fully decided to.

There is a kind of threshold in sending a message like that, where intention arrives slightly after action. The screen shows the name and then the words appear as if they were always going to exist.

Found her.

There is no immediate reply.

Matt goes to the hotel rooftop pool instead, because the body refuses to remain still when the mind is doing work it cannot complete. The city below is a port city, functional rather than beautiful, ships moving like punctuation marks across water that does not care about narrative.

He swims slowly. Not exercise. Just repetition. Something to keep him inside himself.

The Thin Man arrives without announcement.

Matt sees him later in the lobby, as if he has always been there and only now decided to become visible. There is nothing theatrical about his movement. He is dressed simply, unremarkable in a way that only becomes noticeable after you have already started paying attention.

They do not greet each other like friends. They never have. They greet each other like continuity.

Matt watches him cross the space and feels, not for the first time, that proximity to him changes the temperature of events.

LUCÍANA

The café is near the port, where the air carries salt and fuel in equal measure. Luciana arrives slightly early, not because she is nervous, but because she is efficient. She chooses a table where she can see the entrance without appearing to be watching it.

When Niko arrives, she recognizes him immediately, though recognition does not translate into welcome. Time has done what time does, which is soften edges without removing structure. He is older now, but not unfamiliar in the way she expects him to be unfamiliar.

They sit.

For a long moment, neither of them performs memory. When they finally speak, it is careful, almost formal. He asks about her life. She answers without inviting him into it. There is warmth in her tone, but it is bounded. Controlled.

She tells him about their son. He listens without interrupting.

“He is in Dubai,” she says after a time. “He is working in media. Content. Travel. He is doing well for himself.”

Niko nods once. No visible reaction beyond that. But something in the air shifts slightly, as if a long thread has been acknowledged without being pulled.

Luciana continues. She has a daughter now. A marriage. A life that has moved forward without apology. When Niko asks nothing more, and she is briefly grateful. Then she tells him, clearly and without cruelty, that this is not something she wants reopened.

He understands. He does not argue. He never argues with time.

MATT THOMAS AT THE HOTEL

I am still at the hotel when he returns. He does not look like a man who has just been refused something. He looks like a man who has confirmed a hypothesis and chosen not to act on it. There is a difference, and I am beginning to understand it.

I ask him if he saw her. He says yes.

I ask what she said. He does not answer immediately. Then he tells me about Dubai, about the son, about the fact that life has continued in a direction that does not require his permission.

I wait for more. There is no more.

That is when I realize how little I actually know about him, even now. Later that night, I finally ask the question I have been circling since Tokyo.

“What is your real name?”

He does not look surprised.

He never looks surprised.

He says he is from Georgia. That his name is Niko. That he was born in 1977.

Nothing more.

And somehow that is enough to change the entire shape of what I thought I was holding.

CODA — MATT THOMAS IN KOYTO

I am back in Kyoto, but I am not fully back in anything that resembles ordinary life. The school still exists. I still teach. I still perform the version of myself that can explain narrative voice to students who are mostly thinking about lunch. I have had readings now—one in Kyoto, one in Tokyo—and people are starting to treat me as if I might become something recognizable.

It does not go to my head. But the Thin Man does. He’s always there.

We talk on Signal in fragments. Nothing structured. No schedule. Just interruptions in time that feel more real than the rest of the day. I sit in shisha places after work and try to write, but what I am actually doing is waiting for the next message.

Book II is already taking shape in my head.

I am just not sure yet whether I am writing it is writing me.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine (Craig Finn’s Miniature Masterpiece)

Epigraph:

Jessamine must have had some dreams/ but she never really said what they were.

Craig Finn

Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Part I and Part II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: A Bathtub in a Kitchen and It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.

Jessamine is track 8 off of A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight 3 minutes and 25 seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived. 

Jessamine tells the story of a three week relationship between the narrator, who we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs, the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and Jessamine. I would love to write about The Year We Fell Behind as well, however Jessamine falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough. 

Jessamine is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song that it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. “The party ended suddenly, suddenly it’s over/ That left me and Esther all alone and getting older/ All alone and getting older smoking in the street/ Now everything is Esther and it’s been that way all week.”

Jessamine opens thusly:

I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill

Her dress all done in daffodils

The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”

And yeah, it probably did just what it said

Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The first verse foreshadows her ultimate fate. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was junior year of college with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my Art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.

Verse II adds a little more context.

I only knew her for like three weeks straight

And the whole time we were wide awake

You know “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?”

She had it spray-painted over her bed

It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valance from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded saying “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.

The wording “three weeks straight” implies that C. and Jessamine were, temporarily, inseparable, sleep deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard of the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.

Verses III and IV introduce Jessamine’s death obsession, and to me anyway suggest that she is what I would call a kind of a goth.

We used to hang around her room

Getting off on all the gloom and the doom

Watching cavemen in the cartoons

Playing xylophones made out of bones

She was sexy, but still death-obsessed

She said the bloodshed makes such a mess

But you really don’t even have to market it

Yeah, it pretty much sells itself

Now I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, like Jessamine, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.

Jessamine has a number of semi-chourses, and the first one goes like this: 

I should’ve asked her before she departed

How did all these wars get started?

Why do rival crews show up to the same parties

If they hate each other so much?

It’s like they’re secretly in love

Again, we foresee Jessamine’s demise up front. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure, however the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling. However, it is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.

Verse V and Chorus II go like this:

She said, “Suspicion isn’t wisdom

And the drones look just like doves”

And there was something laying siege to her kingdom

But she never really said what it was

While the incense turned to ashes

And the sunrise was unsure

Jessamine musta had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine musta had some dreams/ But she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams; instead this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.

The next verse and chorus show that Jessamine in the end, and probably in the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship.

We kinda ended how we began

With Jessamine meeting a man

And liking that man just a little bit more

Than the boy she had before

I hadn’t even seen her since

I guess this new guy was some kind of prince

I guess his castle was a front for some fence

And then the whole damn city got warm

And they were trying to ride out that storm

Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature, Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make, her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent (so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world), and the whole damn city mirrors Jessamine’s flightiness. The crush is over; C. is dumped and he never sees her again. That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships–while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on and the moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.

The next verse points toward C. getting over Jessamine, and alludes to the idea that what may seem for a time to be a storm will pass; a crush, with all its power, is also somewhat illusory.

‘Cause the rain is inconsistent

And the thunder is insincere

‘Cause it makes a big commotion

But eventually it clears

The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.

I went out to San Francisco

And some sailor stole my shirt

I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi

The first time that I heard

That she was probably speeding

And no one else was hurt

Jessamine must’ve had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.

Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.

I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.

Dedication:

For goth girls everywhere.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”
On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

WAYFARER: A PLAY

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

Mark Kozelek — Have You Forgotten

ACT I — THE WAYFARER

Scene 1 — Registration Desk (Threshold)

Lights: institutional white. Gradual warm shift beneath it, as if memory is already leaking into the space.

Sound: distant conference murmur. A faint, unresolved piano note.

A desk. A GATEKEEPER. A lanyard laid out like an object of passage.

MATT enters. Slightly lost. He has clearly been walking longer than intended.

GATEKEEPER
Name?

MATT hesitates. Reaches for something that is not yet ready.

MATT
Here. I think.

He presents credentials.

Stamp sound. Too loud for the space.

The badge is handed back.

CHORUS (from off, soft, not fully placed in space)
Arrival.
Conference.
Inn.
Story begins again.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside, not heard by others)
I thought I came to learn.

The badge feels heavier than it should.

Lights soften.

Scene 2 — Inn Common Room

Warm, slightly unreal hospitality lighting.

Tables. Cups. A space that feels both public and private but refuses to decide which.

ELODIE is present as if she has always been there.

MATT notices her immediately.

NARRATOR-MATT
Voltage.

ELODIE
Tea?

MATT
Yes. Thank you.

Beat. Nothing rushed.

CHORUS (slightly brighter, almost encouraging)
House lady.
Innkeeper.
Muse—

(a correction, quieter)
No. Person.

ELODIE does not acknowledge the Chorus.

Scene 3 — “Sing for Your Supper”

Sound: faint guitar motif. The room subtly shifts into performance space without fully becoming one.

CHORUS subtly rearranges space like memory editing.

MATT sings quietly:

MATT (singing fragment — The Clientele, “The Violet Hour”)
so that summer came and went
and I became cold
yeah I became cold

ELODIE listens. No visible transformation.

NARRATOR-MATT
Hospitality is not destiny.

The room remains unchanged.

Blackout.

ACT II — THE HOT ZONE

Scene 1 — The Casino

Green felt lighting. Rotating overhead spot.

CROUPIER replaces Gatekeeper.

CROUPIER
Place your bet.

MATT
Meaning.

CHORUS
Luck.
Chance.
Myth begins when odds are misread.

MATT places chip.

Sound: chip hits felt—final, sharp.

Scene 2 — Triptych (Three Trips)

Lighting pulses three times. Distinct beats.

MATT (low, repeating)
Three trips.
No more trips.

CHORUS fractures into three figures: GENIE / GHOST / MESSENGER.

NARRATOR-MATT
Inspiration gone.

GENIE (brief, playful)
First.

GHOST (slow, distant)
Memory.

MESSENGER (clear, neutral)
Transmission.

All fade.

Scene 3 — Jungle Confrontation

Green light. Reduced set. No realism.

MATT
Her.
Leave everything.
Frontman.
Practice.

ELODIE
No.

MATT
What is this?

ELODIE
Not your exorcism.

CHORUS
Brink.

Blackout.

ACT III — NAMING THE PATTERN

Scene 1 — Needy Boys

Two chairs. Neutral white light.

ELODIE
Don’t narrate me.

MATT pauses. This lands fully.

NARRATOR-MATT
I was writing her.

Silence.

Scene 2 — Chapel

Stillness. Breath-level sound only.

CHORUS (barely present)
Meaning.
Destiny.
Story.

NARRATOR-MATT
Room, not revelation.

Silence holds.

Scene 3 — Pattern Recognition

Lighting: subtle timeline shifts—memory flickers, not time travel.

NARRATOR-MATT
Senior year.
Again.

ELODIE
Your pattern is yours.

MATT
I see it.

CHORUS
First choice.

Blackout.

ACT IV — RELEASE

Scene 1 — The Offer

Dusk light.

MATT
Part-time.
Scout.
Not jungle.

ELODIE
Boundaries are kindness.

Scene 2 — The Pivot

Warm domestic light replaces earlier symbolic tones.

MATT
Family.
Music.
Life.

CHORUS
Myth.
Escape.
Hero.

MATT
No.

Silence holds. No response from Chorus.

Scene 3 — Chorus Dissolves

Lighting: references dim one by one.

CHORUS removes masks.

NARRATOR-MATT
The story stayed.
The spell lifted.

Blackout.

ACT V — OXFORD CODE

Scene 1 — Gesture

Morning Oxford grey. Minimal space.

ELODIE
Take care.

MATT
You too.

Beat.

No escalation. No closure ritual.

Scene 2 — Benediction (Chapel Revisited)

Same chapel. Quieter now.

Sound: Arvo Pärt piano. Sparse. Non-declarative.

NARRATOR-MATT
Gratitude.

Silence. Breath.

MATT listens without narrating.

Scene 3 — Train

Sound: distant platform announcement. Train readiness.

Gatekeeper becomes CONDUCTOR.

CONDUCTOR
All aboard.

CHORUS
Run back.
Declare.
Confess.

MATT
No.

MATT boards train.

NARRATOR-MATT
The jungle is real.
The girl is real.
The story remains.

Beat.

NARRATOR-MATT (softer)
You think you’ve finished it. Then it comes back different.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside)
She knew more than I could say.

Train departs.

Lights fade with motion, not blackout.

FIN

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Note: This piece argues that male circumcision should be strictly outlawed for non-consenting minors. It approaches the topic from a strict bodily autonomy framework regarding non-consensual, non-therapeutic interventions on minors, and treats irreversible bodily alteration without consent as the central ethical issue. It is not addressing medically necessary or emergency procedures, nor situations where an intervention is required to prevent serious immediate harm, which are outside its scope. The argument also focuses on principle rather than comparative cultural practice, and is intended as a normative claim about legal consistency in liberal systems rather than a commentary on individual intent, belief, or identity.

Epigraph:

Jesus don’t touch my baby.

Ryan Adams

Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Male circumcision of non-consenting minors should be outlawed globally, with legal penalties applied to those who perform or facilitate it, and civil penalties imposed on parents who authorise it. I was circumcised in infancy in a Catholic family in 1974. The issue is not medical ambiguity or cultural discomfort but a basic question of bodily autonomy: whether irreversible, non-therapeutic alteration of a child’s body can ever be justified without consent. In a liberal legal system that claims to prioritise individual rights, the answer should be consistent and categorical. Anything less relies on inherited exemptions—religious, medical, or cultural—that do not withstand ethical scrutiny once the principle is stated plainly.

The core objection is simple: irreversible bodily modification without consent is impermissible when it is not medically necessary. A child cannot consent, and parental authority is not unlimited; it is a delegated responsibility bounded by the child’s future autonomy. Circumcision is not an emergency intervention. It is not a life-saving procedure in the vast majority of cases. It is the removal of healthy tissue from an individual who will live the entirety of their life with that alteration imposed before they had any capacity to participate in the decision.

This is where liberal societies already reveal a partial but incomplete consistency. We accept that consent is not static across childhood. We do not allow children to make binding decisions about sexual activity, because we recognise developmental thresholds of agency and understanding. That is why age of consent laws exist at all, and why they sit at or near adulthood in most jurisdictions. But the same logic applies more fundamentally to irreversible bodily alteration. If we accept that certain domains require maturity before consent is meaningful, then permanent physical modification must fall under the same principle. The difference is not moral category; it is legal lag.

The counter-case is not weak in structure, even if it fails ethically. It rests on four main claims: parental rights, medical justification, religious freedom, and social normalisation. Parents are routinely empowered to make medical decisions on behalf of children under a “best interests” standard. Circumcision is often placed within this framework as a preventive health measure. Some studies are cited to suggest reduced risks of urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections later in life, and complication rates in clinical settings are presented as low. On this basis, it is framed not as cosmetic alteration but as permissible preventive medicine.

Religion provides a second pillar. In Judaism, circumcision is a covenantal rite central to religious identity. In Islam, it is widely practiced as a tradition of purification and belonging. Liberal states are deeply reluctant to interfere with such practices, treating them as protected expressions of religious freedom. On this view, banning circumcision would represent not neutrality but intrusion into foundational religious life.

The third pillar is cultural and social integration. In societies where circumcision is widespread, particularly where it is near-universal within certain populations, deviation can create stigma or perceived abnormality. The argument follows that enforcing prohibition could impose social harm on children by marking them as different within their communities. Finally, legal systems distinguish male circumcision from female genital cutting on the basis of severity, medical context, and institutionalisation within healthcare systems, arguing that harm is not equivalent and therefore regulation need not be symmetrical.

Taken together, these arguments form a sort of a defense of permissibility under existing liberal frameworks: parental discretion within medical norms, protected religious practice, and harm-based legal classification.

But each of these pillars collapses under a stricter application of bodily autonomy.

Parental authority is real, but it is not sovereign. It exists only insofar as it serves the future autonomy and welfare of the child. It does not extend to irreversible, non-therapeutic bodily alteration where no immediate necessity exists. The “best interests of the child” standard is not a blank cheque; it is a constraint. We already recognise this in other domains where the state intervenes against parental choice when irreversible harm or violation of fundamental rights is at stake. The question is whether we apply that constraint consistently.

Medical justification also fails the threshold test when examined carefully. Even if certain population-level benefits exist, they are statistical, not essential. They can be achieved through far less invasive means—hygiene, education, barrier protection—without permanently altering the body of an individual who has not consented. Preventive possibility is not sufficient justification for irreversible intervention. Medicine does not normally operate on the principle that minor statistical risk reduction permits non-consensual surgery on healthy individuals.

Religious justification is where liberal systems most visibly reveal their tension. Freedom of religion is a foundational principle, but it is not absolute. It has never been interpreted as permitting unlimited parental action upon a child’s body. The critical distinction is between belief and irreversible physical imposition. Religious freedom protects the right to believe, to practice, and to transmit culture—but it cannot logically extend to authorising permanent bodily modification of an individual who has not consented to participate in that covenant. A child is born into a tradition, not owned by it.

The social integration argument similarly confuses descriptive normativity with ethical justification. That a practice is common within a group does not mean deviation is harmful in a way that justifies irreversible intervention. Social discomfort is not equivalent to bodily violation. Otherwise, any culturally dominant practice could immunise itself from ethical scrutiny simply by achieving prevalence.

The legal distinction between male circumcision and female genital cutting is often defended on the basis of harm severity and medical framing. But this distinction, while operationally convenient, becomes unstable when the underlying principle is examined. If the governing value is bodily integrity and consent, then sex-based differences do not determine permissibility. The relevant question is not comparative severity alone, but whether irreversible non-consensual alteration is being authorised at all. Harm thresholds may differ in degree, but the structural violation—altering a child’s body without consent—remains.

Once these counter-arguments are reduced to their core, what remains is not a justification but a set of accommodations: to tradition, to institutional history, to religious continuity, and to cultural inertia. None of these constitute a moral defence of the act itself; they constitute reasons why it persists.

This is why enforcement matters. A principle without enforcement is not a principle in practice. If bodily autonomy is to mean anything in a liberal legal system, it must be protected even when the practice is culturally embedded or religiously significant. That requires prohibition of the act itself, accountability for those who perform it in violation of the rule, and civil liability for those who authorise it on behalf of non-consenting minors. The aim is not punishment for its own sake, but alignment of law with the ethical principle it already claims to uphold in other domains of bodily autonomy.

What makes this issue more than historical critique is that it persists into the present as a live inconsistency. It is 2026. Liberal legal systems already recognise that bodily autonomy is foundational in adulthood. They already recognise that consent has developmental thresholds. They already prohibit non-consensual genital alteration in other contexts. The remaining question is whether they are prepared to apply the same principle consistently when tradition, religion, and medical normalisation converge.

A system that protects bodily autonomy only after adulthood has not resolved the ethical question; it has merely deferred it. The principle either applies universally to the body of the individual, or it does not. If it does, then non-therapeutic circumcision of minors cannot stand as an exception. 1 million percent.

Note: This piece is part of the Splinter Fraction series of political positions that the two-person Trans-Pacific political party has taken. You can find some of the others below.

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz
The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position
The Splinter Fraction: On Protected Medical Access for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
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 Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

Note: This is Part VI of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV and Part V are available.

Epigraph:

They all come and peep through a hole in the wall
Keep the bastards guessing
He likes to take the long way home,
It’s another fine decision

Peter Jefferies

I spent a full academic year, the second semester of my junior year and the first of my senior year, at The University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago is a pretty good university, but Dunedin is pretty small and kind of country. Overall, it was a good experience, but I was flat broke and not on a meal plan due to an oversight by I guess myself and my parents. More on that later.

After I landed, I spent one night at a hotel and bought a bottle of wine, for the first time in my life. I was of legal drinking age in New Zealand. I drank about three-quarters of it and was a little hungover the next day. At Hamilton people did not drink wine.

The first few days I was on a homestay in the country with a sheep farming family. The father spent the day watching cricket, and then would rouse and take the sheep out and move them around, with sheepdogs and all. I remember going to a local pub with two of his sons and their friends and we had five or six beers and they drove home. On the drive home they tried to run over rabbits on the road, and roared with delight when they got close. That was a scene.

Then, I went back to Dunedin, and met my roommates who were all in graduate school studying to be teachers. These were Tim, Ho (who was of Maori descent), Sharlene, and Donna. Tim was a musician and there was a large piano in his room. The roommates were good folks, however I think I disappointed them a little because they asked for an American roommate and were apparently expecting someone really flamboyant and loud. I was not that, and kept to myself much of the year. One time though that I lived up to their expectations was when Tim once again said “you’re from Washington D.C.” and I said “I’m not from fucking Washington D.C., I told you before I’m from Washington State!” Tim said to the roommates, “I told you rooming with an American would be fun.”

There were a number of other exchange students from the U.S. there and I got to know some of them a bit at first, but for some reason I was a little standoffish, and we didn’t hang out much after the first week or so. I was back into running, not smoking and barely drinking, although I did go out once with Ho and his Maori friends and got blasted. I would run 8-10 miles a day, sometimes more, and was in training for a marathon.

As I mentioned, my food situation was bad. We had neglected to put me on a meal plan, and I think my parents didn’t even know this, and at first I chipped in what I could to the communal roommate shopping. However, they ate very poor quality mutton all the time and I just couldn’t hack it. Mutton is pretty bad at the best of times, and cheap mutton is awful. So I went off the roommate plan and ate mostly trail mix for dinner. Trail mix, it turns out, is among the best value for money food around. I would buy raisins, peanuts, and carob chips and that’s what I ate at the flat. For lunch I would eat one apricot yoghurt bar and a cup of coffee, costing around $3.50 NZD. I would eat super slowly, taking about 45 minutes to finish the apricot bar and somehow this made me feel like I’d had a meal. I was living on about $7 NZD a day and was hungry all the time. With this and the running, I was also super thin.

At Otago I studied some more literature, and also a lot of Indian History, with a focus on Ghandi. I learned a great deal about Gandhi this year, and found him interesting. One incident I recall was in one class on Buddhism the professor assigned a paper on Zen. I had the bright idea to turn in an empty paper, which I thought would be symbolic, but the professor was a step ahead of me. “Don’t try and turn in an empty paper for this,” he said, “I’ve seen that move before.”

One more interesting thing that happened was when I was invited to the faculty club for drinks by my Australian literature professor. He was in his 60’s and was an Otago lifer. At first I was kind of flattered to be invited, however on arrival it was clear he had other motives. He started hitting on me in a most egregious manner, and it was obvious he had done this many, many times. I had two drinks and politely removed myself. To his credit this had no impact on how he treated me in class, and things went on as normal. I guess it was all par for the course.

The Otago campus was on the north side of town, and the south side was said to be pretty rough. “Don’t go down there,” I was told more than once, “it’s dangerous.” But I thought it couldn’t be that dangerous, so one day I walked down there by myself to check it out. There were a lot of industrial areas and such, and it was a little run-down, but I got home safe just fine. I suspected that “dangerous” in a New Zealand context might mean something a little different than in a U.S. context.

My roommate Sharlene had a friend who just had a breakup and Sharlene wanted us to get together. She invited us both to a party, and sure enough we started making out, under a table as I recall. It just lasted that one night, but Sharlene thought it was hilarious. “They were pashing,” she cried, “pashing away.” Pashing is apparently Kiwi slang for kissing, or maybe it was a Sharlene original.

Sharlene had a stepfather and I visited his house once. He had a nice car and complained on and on about how many tickets he would get from traffic cameras. Traffic cameras were on the scene in 1995. This appeared to be his only topic. He should have driven more carefully.

After the pashing incident, there was another girl who was interested in me. I forget her name, but it started with an M. M. was really into me, maybe because I read a lot and so did she. There was a kind of club place for students with TVs (I remember watching the O.J. Simpson car chase there), and I would hang out there. M. would come in and lob a snickers bar from over my shoulder for me and buy me a coke. This was really nice and super helpful because I needed all the calories I could get. M. wanted to get together, but I wasn’t into it. We did spend a fair amount of time together, at the club and going to the bookstore with another friend of hers.

As I mentioned, I was in good running shape this year and actually went out for a marathon. I was doing great through the first half, but started to fade really bad around the 20 mile mark. I had terrible blisters and pulled my groin and couldn’t imagine doing another 6 miles, so I pulled up. I asked a couple with a car for a ride to the finish line where there were buses, and they gave it to me but made it clear they were not impressed with me packing it in. I wasn’t impressed with myself either, but marathons hurt like hell.

In addition to running, and starving, I also went out for Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and I was already well on my way to my Asian Studies minor and was getting into all things Asian. Aikido was taught by a white couple, and this was their life. They were ok teachers, but the atmosphere was just a little culty. Despite my father’s fears, I have never been amenable to cults-like scenes. I stuck with it for a number of months however, and managed to get my first belt.

I don’t remember listening to a lot of music that year because I don’t think I had a stereo in my room, however, one day on the radio I did hear a song I immediately fell in love with. This was “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” by a Dunedin artist called Peter Jefferies. It was spooky and weird and totally captivating. Cat Power would later cover it, and lines from this song serve as the epigraph for this piece.

One more thing that happened this year was that Jenny from Hamilton visited. I don’t think she came specifically to see me, but I’m not sure. I was traveling, with god knows what money, in the New Zealand Alps which are on the South Island there and are really lovely. Jenny and I stayed at a hostel, and hung out which was really cool. That’s the same trip when I went for a walk in deep snow and almost died when the snow suddenly came up to my neck. Deep snow is almost as dangerous as the ocean, it turns out.

Those are my memories of New Zealand. Despite being so broke I had to eat a 45 minute apricot bar, it was a good year and I got really good grades. My academic focus would fall off, however, when I got back to Hamilton, but that’s a story for the next post.

Dedication:

For apricot bars and trail mix. You literally saved my life.