Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.
The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”
The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.
The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.
Epigraph
There are aliens in our midst.
Wussy
The Jung Problem
At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.
Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.
In other words, the sky fills with things.
Medieval Precedents
This pattern is not entirely new.
During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.
Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.
Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.
The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.
Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.
One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.
Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.
But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.
Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.
She might have reported a craft.
The Cold War Sky
By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.
The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.
The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.
Weather balloons.
Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.
Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.
The Mulder Doctrine
By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.
The X-Files:
In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.
The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.
Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.
His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.
Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.
A Modern Lens
Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.
Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.
Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.
Which brings us back to Mike.
So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?
It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.
From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.
This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.
Provisional Conclusions
My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.
Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.
Mike has simply moved the story offshore.
The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.
If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.
But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.
In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.
Footnote: The Ocean Logic
It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.
From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.
Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.
POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony
Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.
According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.
When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.
These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.
Mike considers them decisive.
A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.
In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.
According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.
At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.
Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.
Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.
Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.
Epigraph:
“When the stars go blue.” — Ryan Adams
For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?
Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.
When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.
That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.
But the songs remain.
Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.
None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.
What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.
And that distinction matters.
One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.
If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.
The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.
In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.
The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.
There is something oddly honest about that.
The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.
That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.
The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.
And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.
Dedication
For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.
Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.
Note: A Tuesday crawl in Kyoto carries a different texture from the weekend version: looser expectations, smaller crowds, conversations that wander rather than perform. The city feels slightly off-schedule, which is exactly what makes it fertile ground for observation, connection, and the quiet serendipity that defines third-place culture.
These midweek circuits are less about excess and more about continuity — checking in with familiar rooms, familiar faces, and the evolving micro-narratives that accumulate across bars, balconies, and late-night sidewalks. The crawl becomes a moving vantage point on the city’s emotional topography: moments of laughter, fragments of confession, the soft choreography of strangers becoming temporary companions.
In that sense, the Tuesday crawl isn’t a deviation from routine but a ritual of perspective. It reminds the wanderer that urban nightlife is not only spectacle but ecology — a network of spaces where stories intersect briefly before dissolving back into the Kyoto night.
For the crawler, the goal is simple: move lightly, notice everything, and leave each room exactly as it was found, carrying only the residue of atmosphere and the promise of return.
Epigraph “Is there room enough for two / if I don’t have a point of view?” — Tommy Stinson
Dedication For the people who made a night by simply being themselves.
I. Umineko
Early evening began without urgency, the way a proper crawl should. Umineko held the kind of atmosphere that makes arrival feel less like an event and more like a gradual settling — low light, gentle conversation, bodies occupying space without demanding attention. Nothing theatrical, nothing curated for spectacle. Just people existing alongside one another, sharing a small pocket of warmth before the night found its pace.
I took a seat and allowed the room to reveal itself slowly. Watching first, speaking later. Listening without the pressure to respond. The posture was closer to observation than participation, not out of distance but out of respect for rhythm. A crawl does not begin with energy; it begins with calibration. I was not collecting stories yet, not assigning meaning or searching for narrative threads. I was tuning my frequency, aligning with the environment until the subtle shift in atmosphere signaled readiness.
When the bar moved from fullness toward thinning, the message was clear without needing articulation. Crawls are not forced forward by intention; they move according to instinct and current. I stepped back into the night air, carrying nothing but presence, following momentum without destination.
II. ING
ING felt like stepping into a room anchored by a still point. Haku stood behind the bar wearing a Rolling Stones shirt, perfectly unconcerned with audience or approval. His presence created an equilibrium that defined the space more than any décor or playlist could. I took the center seat — ideal angle, clear sound, good conversational acoustics — and ordered a Negroni, marking the transition from arrival into engagement.
A White Russian followed, not out of necessity but out of curiosity. Choice itself becomes part of the method on nights like these. Drinks are less about intoxication and more about pacing, punctuation marks in a narrative unfolding in real time.
Haku mentioned, almost casually, that Jimmy Cliff was not Rasta. The comment carried no agenda, only observation. I responded in kind. He played Cliff anyway, and the neutrality of the exchange underscored something important: truth in these spaces does not require resolution. Dead or alive, category or contradiction, the music persists independent of classification.
Later, Haku slipped into what could only be described as algorithm mode. The Grateful Dead followed Joy Division, which then dissolved into Blink-182. The sequence was unpredictable yet internally coherent, a playlist guided by instinct rather than performance. Bars like ING do not curate for approval; they curate for honesty. The expectation is not participation but presence.
Some bars ask for energy. ING asks only that one remain authentic within its walls.
After a time, movement arrived not through boredom but through instinct. I finished my drink, nodded to Haku, and stepped back into the night once more.
III. Mafia Bar
The entrance to Mafia Bar announced itself through indifference: narrow doorway, plastic sheeting, a quiet DGAF energy that discouraged pretense. Inside, the dynamic was already established — Master, sub-bartender, and Satsuki forming a triangle of familiarity that neither required nor excluded me.
I ordered a gin and tonic, lit a clove cigarette, and allowed proximity to substitute for conversation. Master smoked and drank with the ease of long habit, while Satsuki vaped and scrolled through photos on his phone, their heads occasionally leaning close in shared amusement. The intimacy belonged to them; my role was to witness without intrusion.
A brief choreography unfolded when the sub-bartender excused himself for the bathroom. Another stepped in seamlessly, maintaining rhythm until the first returned moments later, laughing about his inability to hold it and wiping his hand absentmindedly on Satsuki’s jacket. Her gentle scolding carried affection rather than irritation. The moment passed as ordinary within their ecosystem, a reminder that interpretation is often unnecessary.
Three London men arrived — Dan, Joe, and another Joe — consultants and a commercial artist navigating unfamiliar territory. I recommended Concrete, a suggestion offered lightly but accepted gratefully. Participation, not intervention. Guidance without ownership.
I remained roughly thirty-five minutes, absorbing both atmosphere and lore. The story circulated quietly: the owner had once taken the fall for a crime he did not commit, serving twenty years in silence before emerging to receive this bar as recompense from the underworld that owed him. Whether factual or mythic mattered little. Stories gain legitimacy through repetition, and truth is often secondary to resonance.
I left on foot, crossing the river with the sense that each stop was less a destination than a waypoint.
IV. Stinboat
Arrival at 9:02 p.m., two minutes after opening, placed me inside a room still forming its identity for the night. Rickey stood behind the bar alongside the evening’s performer, both moving through preparatory gestures that transform an empty space into a living environment.
I asked about glasses I had left behind on Saturday. Rickey produced a pair, though not mine. The exchange felt inconsequential yet oddly grounding, a reminder that memory and objects rarely align perfectly.
A Negroni in hand, I settled into observation as the room awakened. A visitor from Kuwait approached with curiosity, asking whether a bunny show would occur. He mistook me for staff, and I redirected him gently toward Rickey. Ambiguity satisfied him enough to remain.
At 9:20, the room shifted from potential to presence. Nine guests entered — among them an older man with a younger girlfriend and a cluster of Japanese patrons whose arrival created density without chaos. I took the microphone early, choosing Common People as an opening statement. The performance landed not as a home run but as a solid triple, establishing footing without overreach. I became part of the environment rather than an observer at its edge.
The performer navigated the bar through a series of micro-interactions, brief pockets of attention resembling miniature dates, popcorn intimacy distributed evenly across the room. I followed with Honky Tonk Women, drawing visible delight from the older man and his partner.
Preparation for Tiny Dancer involved a brief retreat with headphones — aligning tempo, breath, and emotional landing. As I sang, activity continued around me, including a staged whipping performance in the back that unfolded without disrupting the song’s internal narrative. Presence required maintaining focus amid spectacle, allowing parallel realities to coexist without competition.
The evening progressed through pole performance, enthusiastic audience participation, and ritualized tipping. I followed established protocol, understanding that the moment belonged to the performer’s choreography rather than personal interpretation.
Later, I Fought the Law brought collaborative energy: the older man on drums, eye contact establishing tempo and trust, his girlfriend filming with increasing engagement. Rickey eventually joined on drums, a younger guitarist delivered a brief but intense solo, and a spontaneous vocalist in his mid-fifties erupted into a single song before departing. Applause and hoots carried communal warmth rather than performance judgment.
As the crowd thinned, what remained was intimacy without spectacle: Rickey, the performer, the older man and girlfriend, Sari, a couple, and myself. Fairytale of New York unfolded with Sari joining briefly before drifting into her own narrative with the older man. I continued singing, neutral observer and participant simultaneously.
The set concluded with Miley Cyrus, We Will Rock You, and finally Take It Easy — a closing song chosen less for nostalgia than for resolution. Afterward, physical exhaustion arrived cleanly, the kind that follows completion rather than depletion. Brief hugs, a playful belly rub offered as pure joy, and a ¥4500 bill that felt symbolically insufficient to measure the night’s experiential value.
Stinboat held the evening’s center of gravity, and I left without loose emotional threads.
V. Concrete Bar
The walk back across the river lasted roughly eight minutes, a transitional corridor between intensity and closure. Concrete greeted me with understated calm, a space designed less for spectacle and more for lingering conversation.
Leon from Wales occupied a stool, unfamiliar with the phrase “detox and retox.” I bought him a Cocalero anyway, and we spoke in the gentle cadence of end-of-night strangers — exchanging warmth rather than biography, presence rather than personal history. These conversations carry their own authenticity precisely because they resist permanence.
I sensed no need for additional experiences. The crawl had delivered what it intended.
VI. Taxi → Home
At 1:30 a.m., a taxi waited at the stand as if anticipating completion. There was no negotiation, no wandering, no hesitation. Just entry, transit, and the quiet satisfaction of closure.
Back home, I read half of Zach’s new piece in bed and texted immediate feedback. He prefers responses unfiltered and alive, preserving the energy of first impression before reflection cools interpretation.
Sleep followed naturally.
A crawl complete — not dramatic, not moralized, not engineered for narrative payoff. Simply observed, recorded, and experienced through presence. I did not judge the night, and the night did not demand judgment. I entered it, and in its quiet generosity, it allowed me to belong within it for a few hours before releasing me back into ordinary time.
Note: If you like this essay, you may also like “On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations.” You can find it here.
I will lay laid open… I do it ’cause I’m a family man… With the beat in now… And your chest came out ’Cause you weren’t too scared.
Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”
There is transference. There just is.
Matthew Thomas
I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal
It’s real because it’s grounded. It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.
That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.
In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.
But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.
What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.
The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent. It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive. It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.
And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:
We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.
We remain in our own psyches. We allow resonance without fusion. We allow voltage without blur. We allow openness without myth-making.
This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.
In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.
History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.
That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.
The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.
But the boundary holds.
Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.
Openness with form. Exposure with spine. Laid open, but not laid bare.
This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.
The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.
And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.
This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.
Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:
I will lay laid open… I do it ’cause I’m a family man… And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…
Openness is not the danger. Losing oneself inside openness is.
This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:
Can I remain open without giving myself away? Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny? Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it? Can I collaborate without collapsing? Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?
The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.
Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.
Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.
The adult self leads. The trio leads. The work leads.
And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:
What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?
That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.
Dedication
For the collaborators: the drifters, the drop-ins, the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.
You keep the corners loose and the truth a little crooked. My kind of people.
Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.
This reflection is inspired by reporting on the case of Lawrence “Larry” Ray, whose actions at Sarah Lawrence College became the subject of extensive journalism and later criminal prosecution. Ray, the father of a student, embedded himself within a group of students and, over a period of years, exerted psychological and material control that culminated in multiple federal charges. In 2022, he was convicted in U.S. federal court on counts including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking, following testimony detailing patterns of manipulation, coercion, and abuse.
The essay above is not intended as investigative reporting or a comprehensive account of the case. Rather, it uses widely documented elements of the Sarah Lawrence story as a lens for examining broader dynamics of influence, consent, authority, and psychological boundary erosion. Readers interested in detailed factual accounts are encouraged to consult court records and major journalistic coverage of the case.
Epigraph “I can’t force myself to say something More than I can think of a thing to do Any more than you can pull yourself out of nothing When there is nothing forcing you to.” — Bedhead, Extramundane
This isn’t really a story about sex, crime, or even a “cult” in the way headlines tend to frame it. It’s a story about how consent can be quietly eroded — not through force or spectacle, but through a gradual shift in tempo. An adult inserts himself into a group of bright, searching young people and begins, almost imperceptibly, to reorganize how they interpret their own experience. Nothing dramatic happens at first. There is conversation, attention, fluency in the language of care. The early moves feel supportive, even mentorship-like. And that is precisely why they work. By the time anything overtly troubling emerges, the conditions for real choice have already thinned out. The ground tilts before anyone recognizes that it’s moving.
The students drawn in aren’t naïve caricatures or damaged stereotypes. They’re thoughtful, introspective, and accustomed to treating their interior lives as material for reflection. That habit, usually a strength, becomes a vulnerability in the presence of someone adept at narrating other people’s feelings back to them. The dynamic isn’t driven primarily by charisma or intellectual brilliance. It’s driven by tempo. Boundaries aren’t crossed so much as softened. A late-night conversation becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a shared framework. A framework becomes dependency. And when harm finally appears, it doesn’t feel like a clear rupture between “yes” and “no.” It feels like a choice being made inside a structure already built.
There is often a moment when the room shifts, but it rarely looks like a turning point. Someone says they’re exhausted, and exhaustion is reframed as a signal with hidden meaning. Confusion becomes resistance. Ordinary hesitation becomes evidence of deeper moral or psychological blockage. Each reframing lands with the texture of insight rather than coercion. Over time, reactions are no longer treated as self-authorizing; they become data awaiting interpretation by the person occupying the role of guide. The students aren’t agreeing with an authority figure so much as agreeing with a version of themselves that figure has begun to narrate. When narrative voice drifts outward like that, autonomy doesn’t vanish dramatically. It diffuses.
The difficulty in describing situations like this lies in the absence of clear theatrical markers. There is no singular moment of surrender, no obvious villain/victim tableau. The participants often experience themselves not as surrendering but as collaborating. They believe they are doing the work, gaining insight, moving toward growth. Particularly for intellectually curious students, the promise of self-understanding is compelling. When directives are framed as pathways to clarity, resistance can feel like failure rather than protection. The structure tightens without ever announcing itself as such.
What emerges from observing cases like this is less outrage than a kind of double vision. On one level, the mechanics appear familiar: authority built through interpretive fluency, dependence fostered through narrative control, legitimacy derived from proximity to vulnerability. On another level, the situation remains unsettling precisely because the openings are so ordinary. The dynamic does not depend on extraordinary charisma or theatrical manipulation. It depends on recognizable human needs: attention, guidance, belonging, the desire to make sense of one’s own experience. Intelligence does not necessarily protect against these forces; in certain contexts, it can deepen engagement with them.
That recognition invites a measure of humility. The distance between observer and participant is not always as large as hindsight suggests. What protects one person in a given moment may be temperament, timing, or simple circumstance rather than superior discernment. The impulse to locate safety in personal invulnerability can obscure the broader lesson: susceptibility is situational, and the pathways into these dynamics are rarely marked by obvious warning signs. Often they look like ordinary conversations extended just a little too far.
If the Bedhead lyric offers a frame, it is through its quiet attention to inertia. The line does not describe dramatic coercion but a subtler erosion of agency — the sensation of trying to act from a place that has already been partially displaced. “You can’t pull yourself out of nothing when there is nothing forcing you to” captures the paradox at the center of this story: the absence of overt pressure can itself become constraining. Consent may appear intact even as its underlying architecture shifts. The drift is gradual, almost ambient, and therefore difficult to name in real time.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the ordinariness of the openings. The story is not about an extraordinary manipulator but about how easily authority can be constructed within familiar relational spaces, and how collaboration can feel indistinguishable from growth until perspective changes. The lesson, if there is one, is less about condemnation than awareness — a recognition of how narrative authority operates, how tempo shapes consent, and how autonomy can narrow without any single decisive moment marking its loss.
Dedication For those who walked. And for those who couldn’t.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy my other piece on educational institutions. You can read it here.
Note: This is the third of a three part series. Part I is here and Part II is here.
Epigraph I:
Oh my sentimental fool
Lloyd Cole
Epigraph II:
Was the risk I sent to you received?
Metric
Leaving Oxford / Returning to Japan
I walked the five minutes back to the hotel after the bus pulled away. My wife was going on to visit friends in Germany and I would have about five days alone in Kyoto after I got back to Japan. At the hotel I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I said a small prayer to the angels asking for grace to get through the day, showered, packed my things, and waited for the 8 AM car pickup.
I did not rush. Packing became a deliberate act, almost ritualistic in its pacing. I folded shirts one at a time, placed my notebook carefully into my bag, slipped the Tintin postcard between pages so it would not bend. Sue Tompkins went in next, followed by the charger, the toothbrush, the small practical objects that restore a sense of order after emotional disturbance. The room itself was modest — functional, forgettable in most respects — yet it felt oddly expanded, as if some invisible event had occurred there despite the absence of anything outwardly dramatic. Something had shifted in me, and the room seemed to hold the echo of that shift.
At the desk, I laid everything out for a moment, not to organize but simply to gather myself. The Mendoza Line was no longer playing, but the music had already done its work. The emotional charge it helped ignite remained present, circulating quietly beneath the surface. There was nothing to heighten or prolong; the effect was already internalized.
Around eight, the hire car arrived. The driver was polite, efficient, the kind of professional whose calm competence creates a reassuring neutrality. He helped with my bag, and we exchanged small talk as we pulled into traffic — London housing costs, wages, the persistent difficulty young people face in trying to establish themselves. On the radio, a news segment discussed the rising number of homeless families and children across the UK. Normally, such stories register as troubling but abstract statistics. That morning, however, the report landed differently. I found myself thinking about untethered lives, about how fragile the structures that hold people together can be, and how sometimes the tether itself is the only thing preventing a deeper psychological unraveling.
Traffic was light, and we arrived at the airport mid-morning. Inside, I purchased a simple breakfast — fruit, yogurt, coffee — and found a seat removed from the main flow of travelers. Airports are environments of constant movement, but solitude can still be carved out within them if one chooses carefully. I opened my Kindle and downloaded volumes four through six of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. It was not an act of escapism so much as orientation. I wanted narrative continuity, a long arc where identity unfolds gradually rather than collapsing under sudden pressure. Powell’s world offered lineage, structure, and a reassuring sense of temporal patience.
I texted Isobel. She responded almost immediately, and what followed was a long, bright thread of conversation carried across airport Wi-Fi. There was no sense of emotional comedown, no awkward reentry into ordinary distance — only continuation. The connection felt intact, natural, as if the meeting had established a channel that did not require reinforcement to remain open.
When boarding was called, the transition felt procedural rather than dramatic. The flight passed in a quiet blur of clouds, Molina songs, Powell’s prose, and intermittent thought. Beneath it all was a subtle ache under the ribs — not pain, not longing in any acute sense, but effect. A residual emotional state that did not demand resolution, only acknowledgment.
On the plane I read some Powell and listened to music. I remember playing “Two Suns in the Sunset” by Pink Floyd and being unexpectedly moved by it. I was in an emotional state — not overwhelmed, but open and exposed — and the flight passed quietly. I landed at Kansai Airport in the afternoon.
I landed in Japan first. My wife continued on to Germany to visit friends, and my son was in Australia on a school trip. I took the Haruka train back toward Kyoto. The wide seats and generous legroom made me feel welcomed back into my country of choice. Much as I had enjoyed England, I felt real relief in returning. There is a particular comfort in Japanese transit — the order, the space, the quiet efficiency — and my body recognized it immediately.
The house, when I entered it, was silent in a way that felt tangible. I carried that silence with unusual care, as if it were made of glass and might shatter if handled abruptly. Solitude is often restorative, but this solitude had an amplifying quality, heightening rather than settling internal experience.
That evening, I went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto. I ordered food and three craft beers and spoke casually with whoever happened to be nearby. Conversations were light, unstructured, yet I sensed an unusual responsiveness from people around me — as though I possessed a slightly elevated emotional voltage that others could detect without understanding its source. Even animals seemed to register it. Cats approached me with a familiarity that felt less coincidental than intuitive, as if some form of static had gathered on the soul.
I had no sense of impending crisis. No awareness that within three days I would walk into my principal’s office and offer my resignation
First Days Back
On my first full day back I did laundry and in the late afternoon went to Takumiya, a pub in north central Kyoto near Karasuma Oike. I don’t remember whether I texted or called Isobel that day, but I almost certainly did. At Takumiya I ordered sashimi and had a few craft beers from their rotating selection. I stayed longer than planned, talking lightly with whoever happened to be sitting nearby.
The next day was Tuesday and I went to work as scheduled. I checked the heat index readings as part of my summer administrative duties. Dr. Fox was on campus. Seeing him immediately shifted the emotional temperature of the day.
I have written elsewhere about my problems with Dr. Fox and I won’t revisit them in detail here. What matters for this story is that by that point I felt he had betrayed me and failed to show up when I most needed institutional support. Trust had already been damaged. Seeing him again after Oxford brought all of that to the surface at once.
We spoke briefly. Before I left, he asked me to come in the following day to help prepare a presentation he was scheduled to give to an alumni group. I had ghostwritten material for him many times before. Under normal circumstances I would have said yes without hesitation. This time I agreed anyway, even though I was already internally unstable and emotionally saturated.
It would not turn out well.
I returned to Takumiya each night that week. There was comfort in being present in public spaces while remaining largely anonymous. The balance allowed me to exist among others without the demands of deeper recognition. Meanwhile, at five in the evening Japan time — nine in the morning in London — Isobel and I spoke daily. The calls were not brief check-ins but sustained conversations lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Often she walked through a park while we spoke, and I imagined her surroundings as she described them, the geographical distance softened by conversational continuity.
During one of these calls, I told her that I wanted to write a book. Not about her specifically, but about the chain of experiences that led to meeting her and the clarity that encounter unexpectedly revealed. She understood immediately. More than that, she expressed a quiet appreciation for being part of that moment of ignition — not as subject matter but as catalyst.
At the same time, unresolved resentment toward Dr. Fox did not dissipate with distance. Instead, it sharpened. The baseball heatstroke issue lingered at the margins of thought, alongside a broader accumulation of professional frustrations: moments of perceived disrespect, ambiguous expectations, and a decade of service that increasingly felt like professionalism without true partnership. None of these tensions were new, but the emotional openness of the week amplified their weight. Background noise began to feel like pressure.
By Friday, when I walked into school, I was not consciously planning a decisive action, yet I sensed a degree of internal instability that made ordinary interactions feel precarious. When Dr. Fox called me into his office to request assistance with a presentation — a familiar pattern, a non-work day expectation framed as routine — the moment crystallized something that had been building long before Oxford. I resigned. The decision belonged to a larger narrative, but this story carries its immediate emotional context.
As the reality of resignation settled into my body, a quiet clarity followed. I knew I needed to speak with my wife. The conversation would not revolve around specifics — call durations, text counts, or the mechanics of connection — but around truth in its broader emotional sense.
She returned home Saturday night. With her presence, the house regained its weight: history, shared furniture, a past that possessed shape and gravity. We sat together without wine or any conversational buffer. The moment did not invite performance or gradual disclosure; it required directness.
“I quit,” I said. “And I met someone.”
She asked only one question.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
She nodded, her response quiet and measured.
“Okay. Have fun on the phone.”
Nothing fractured dramatically in that moment. There was no raised voice, no immediate emotional rupture. Yet something subtle shifted — an alteration not of structure but of atmosphere. The past remained intact, but the future carried a slightly different texture. Nothing broke, but nothing stayed exactly the same.
Saturday and Sunday
Saturday and Sunday arrived with a quietness that felt disproportionate to the events of the preceding week. For the first time in months, there was no alarm set for early administrative duties, no email requiring immediate response, no expectation of presence within the institutional rhythms that had long structured my days. I was off work — not merely for the weekend, but in a more consequential sense that I could not yet fully absorb. I would not return until 2022. The long-term ramifications of what had unfolded were already in motion, though at that moment they existed more as a distant horizon than as a lived reality whose contours could be clearly seen.
The weekend therefore carried a strange dual quality. On the surface, it resembled any other stretch of unstructured time: coffee in the morning, small household tasks, the slow pacing of hours unburdened by schedules. Beneath that surface, however, ran a persistent awareness that something fundamental had shifted. The scaffolding of daily life — work expectations, professional identity, habitual responsibilities — had loosened, and with its absence came both relief and a faint, almost disorienting spaciousness.
At five o’clock sharp Japan time, which was nine in the morning in the UK, I called Isobel. The timing became instinctive, a daily point of orientation that anchored the day before it fully began. She answered as she was waking, her voice carrying that soft mixture of sleep and recognition that collapses distance instantly. We picked up exactly where we had left off, as if conversation were a continuous thread rather than a sequence of separate exchanges. We talked and laughed easily, moving between subjects without effort — music, muses, love, the nature of intimacy, and the broader textures of life that surface when two people feel unexpectedly understood.
The calls possessed a quality that felt, at the time, almost transcendent. I experienced a heightened emotional state that bordered on euphoria, a sense of expansion difficult to articulate without risking exaggeration. There was an unmistakable feeling of being lifted beyond ordinary emotional gravity, as if the connection existed in a space slightly removed from daily constraint. For brief stretches, I felt powerful in a way that had little to do with control and everything to do with aliveness — the psychological equivalent of standing in clear light after months of muted color.
Yet even within that intensity, I carried a quiet awareness that such states are rarely sustainable. The experience felt too vivid, too precise in its timing, to belong to permanence. I understood, somewhere beneath the exhilaration, that what we were inhabiting was a moment granted rather than guaranteed. For the time being, however, there was a mutual permission to exist within that space without prematurely interrogating its future. We allowed the conversations to unfold fully, accepting their immediacy without insisting on outcome.
The rest of the weekend unfolded around those calls like a soft frame. I moved through ordinary activities — brief walks, small household routines, moments of shared quiet with my wife — with an undercurrent of emotional intensity that did not demand expression but remained unmistakably present. Silence felt less empty than suspended, as though the days themselves were pausing before the arrival of consequences not yet visible.
What remained most striking about that weekend was not any single event but the emotional totality it carried. The combination of resignation, solitude, reconnection, and emerging uncertainty produced a state that was both exhilarating and fragile. I was aware, even then, of the paradox inherent in the experience: the joy of discovery intertwined with the inevitability of complication, the brightness of connection shadowed by the knowledge of its precariousness.
That was the weekend. In its quiet span, I found myself inhabiting an emotional condition that was at once expansive and difficult, sustaining and destabilizing. I was, deeply and undeniably, in love — not in a settled or declarative sense, but in the raw, immediate way that accompanies sudden recognition. The feeling carried power and tenderness in equal measure, along with a subtle ache that suggested awareness of its limits even as it unfolded.
The Rest of September
The rest of September passed with a quality that is difficult to reconstruct in precise sequence. Days did not feel discrete or individually memorable; instead, they merged into a continuous emotional field in which time moved forward without the usual markers of routine. The absence of work removed one of the primary structures that normally segments experience, and without that scaffolding the month acquired a dreamlike texture. Moments were vivid while they occurred, yet quickly dissolved into the broader atmosphere of the period.
Isobel and I remained in frequent contact. We spoke most days and exchanged messages with a familiarity that no longer required initiation or explanation. The connection persisted, but the intensity that had defined the immediate aftermath of Oxford began, subtly, to dim. This was not a collapse or a dramatic withdrawal — rather, a gentle tapering, the natural adjustment that follows emotional peaks once they settle into the rhythm of distance and everyday life. The calls remained warm, often intimate, and still carried laughter and shared curiosity, but the sense of suspended transcendence that characterized the earlier weeks softened into something more ordinary.
My days were largely unstructured. Without professional obligations, I devoted time to my blog, experimenting with longer reflections and shorter fragments that attempted to capture the evolving emotional landscape. I also began broadcasting on Periscope, drawn to the immediacy of speaking into a space where audience and solitude coexist in curious balance. These activities did not replace work so much as fill the temporal vacuum it left behind, offering forms of expression that required presence without imposing rigid expectation.
Later in the month, I briefly reentered the professional sphere when I accompanied my senior students to a university fair at Canadian Academy. The experience felt almost surreal in its normalcy — a reminder of institutional rhythms that continued independently of my altered position within them. It was the only direct work engagement I undertook during that period, and its brevity reinforced the sense that September existed outside the usual professional narrative.
Toward the end of the month, I traveled for a significant assignment: serving as lead evaluator for the Diploma Programme at Western Academy of Beijing. The responsibility was substantial, and I approached it with an intention to perform at the level expected despite the internal shifts that characterized the preceding weeks. The visit, however, was complicated by dynamics within the evaluation team. The MYP leader’s preference for extended, often unfocused meetings created an atmosphere of fatigue, and Ashish, the Head from IB Singapore, lacked either the authority or inclination to redirect those discussions effectively. Evenings stretched late into the night. We ordered Indian food, reviewed documentation, and navigated the procedural demands of the evaluation with a professionalism that felt increasingly mechanical.
During one of those evenings, after the meetings had ended and the day’s formal responsibilities were complete, I called Isobel. We spoke at length, as had become our habit, but the conversation carried a different quality. She told me about a dream — one involving a fire and a cabin in the forest. In the dream, I was present. She mentioned that she had shared the dream with her therapist, a detail that suggested the experience held significance beyond casual narrative. Yet when I asked about it, she hesitated. She did not want to recount the dream in full. The partial disclosure introduced an ambiguity that I could not immediately interpret but nonetheless felt.
The moment did not register as conflict or withdrawal. There was no overt tension, no articulated concern. Yet something subtle shifted in the emotional atmosphere between us. The change was nearly imperceptible, detectable less through words than through absence — a slight alteration in tone, a new reticence where openness had previously been instinctive. It was not dramatic enough to prompt confrontation, but it carried the unmistakable sensation of movement beneath the surface.
As September drew to a close and October approached, our communication began to thin. Calls became less frequent, messages shorter, pauses between exchanges longer. The transition unfolded gradually, without a definitive turning point, but its trajectory felt clear. What had once been continuous conversation now required renewed initiation, and the ease that had defined our early exchanges gave way to a quieter, more tentative rhythm.
In retrospect, September stands as an interlude — a period suspended between ignition and resolution. The connection with Isobel remained meaningful and emotionally resonant, yet the conditions that had sustained its earlier intensity were shifting. October would bring both culmination and conclusion, the apex of the relationship’s emotional arc and, simultaneously, its quiet dissolution.
October
October arrived without ceremony, yet the emotional atmosphere surrounding it was markedly different from the suspended haze of September. I was not working at all during that month, and the absence of professional structure began to feel less like pause and more like rupture. Relations with my Principal, Dr. Fox, had deteriorated to an all-time low, and what had once been a strained but functional working relationship now carried open hostility.
We had two phone calls that month about university counseling, both of them angry and vitriolic. The topic itself — university advising — should have been procedural, collaborative, even routine. Instead, it became a flashpoint that exposed a deeper accumulation of mistrust and frustration. From my perspective, he was mishandling critical processes and creating unnecessary stress for students and staff alike, and I felt a growing sense of professional indignation that was difficult to contain. I shouted at him on the phone twice: once while walking along the river, my voice carrying across the water in a way that felt disproportionate to the setting, and once from a hotel bar in Osaka, where the contained intimacy of the space made the confrontation feel even more exposed. The bartenders glanced at me with a mixture of curiosity and quiet concern, clearly aware that they were witnessing a private eruption in a public place. Still, they allowed the moment to pass without interference, serving drinks and processing the bill with the practiced discretion that characterizes hospitality in Japan.
In mid-October, I traveled to Singapore for another IB training. This assignment positioned me as lead trainer for the Diploma Programme, with Duan Yorke serving as my deputy. Duan was excellent — steady, competent, and easy to work alongside — providing a professional counterbalance to the internal instability I carried with me. Yet despite the outward success of the training’s first day, something felt off internally. The emotional residue of the previous weeks, combined with the unresolved professional tensions, manifested as a quiet but unmistakable dissonance. On the second day, I found myself unable to maintain the expected level of engagement and withdrew temporarily to visit an esoteric healer. The visit itself belongs to another narrative thread, one that requires its own context, but its occurrence reflected the broader sense that I was searching for equilibrium in unconventional ways.
I returned and completed the training successfully, fulfilling my responsibilities with the professionalism the role demanded. Afterward, I remained in Singapore for an additional three days, using the time to decompress in a city that had long felt both familiar and emotionally neutral. The extended stay provided space for quiet reflection, casual wandering, and the gradual release of accumulated tension. Professionally, my obligations were minimal. I completed a handful of recommendation letters for early decision applicants — necessary work, given that our new counselor was struggling with the process — but beyond that, my professional identity remained largely suspended.
During this period, Isobel and I spoke only once. The call carried an unmistakable clarity: whatever had sustained the connection through September was no longer present. Whether the shift stemmed from the dream she had mentioned earlier, the simple realities of distance, or the natural fading that accompanies emotionally intense encounters, the result was the same. The spark had dissipated. What struck me most was the absence of dramatic heartbreak. I did not feel shattered or undone. Instead, I experienced a dull void — a quiet ache occupying the space where my love for her had briefly lived. It was less a wound than an absence, the emotional equivalent of a room that had been furnished and then emptied.
Singapore became the final location in which we spoke. After that call, the connection ended without formal closure, dissolving into silence rather than conflict.
When I returned to Japan, I settled back into writing and Periscoping with a renewed sense of creative urgency. Singapore itself had already played a role in that shift. In a billiards bar there, I drafted the first installment of The Thin Man, capturing fragments of narrative that would later expand into a larger project. The act of writing felt less like discipline and more like necessity — a way of metabolizing the preceding months and translating emotional experience into narrative form. Back in Japan, I continued this process through a series of essays that month, each exploring different facets of the transitional period.
October also introduced another unexpected connection. That month I met Mela, a woman from New York City in her thirties who was on medical leave from her work as a props assistant in film production. She was housesitting at the time and occupied her days in ways that mirrored my own state of suspended routine: scrolling Tinder, investigating potential matches with a mixture of curiosity and humor, and broadcasting extensively on Periscope. We connected easily, moving from initial interaction to Instagram texts and eventually long phone calls. Neither of us had pressing daily commitments, and the absence of structure created space for conversations that extended for hours — sometimes entire afternoons — ranging across music, film, personal history, and the broader philosophical questions that surface when time is abundant and emotional stakes feel low.
Months later, in December, I would meet her in person during a museum visit in Queens. The day unfolded quietly: exploring exhibits, browsing the bookstore, and sharing soup in the café. At one point, descending a staircase, she leaned into me in a way that felt intentional — a brief physical gesture that carried a hint of performative vulnerability. She said, “you saved me,” a remark delivered with ambiguity that allowed interpretation without demanding it. The moment marked the closest we came to flirtation, and even that remained understated, more symbolic than consequential.
Yet the defining emotional endpoint of October remained tied to Isobel. Singapore had been the final setting of our conversation, and with its conclusion, that chapter closed without spectacle. The month that began with professional conflict and emotional residue ended in creative ignition, quiet acceptance, and the emergence of new but less charged connections. October stood as both apex and dissolution — the culmination of an emotional arc that had begun in Oxford and the gentle fading that followed its brief, luminous peak.
Conclusion
Looking back on it now, the question that naturally arises is what, if anything, can be concluded from the experience. Memory has a way of smoothing edges while preserving emotional truths, and the passage of time introduces perspective without necessarily dissolving ambiguity. What remains is not a tidy narrative with a clear moral, but a series of impressions that continue to carry meaning long after the events themselves have receded.
Was I in love with Isobel? The answer, for me, is uncomplicated. Yes — absolutely. The feeling was immediate, powerful, and unmistakable in its emotional clarity. It was not rooted in fantasy or projection so much as in recognition: the sudden awareness that another person had seen and engaged parts of me that often remain peripheral or unarticulated. The connection possessed both intellectual and emotional intimacy, creating a sense of alignment that felt rare and therefore significant.
Whether she was in love with me is less certain. That question remains open, and perhaps necessarily so. Love does not always manifest symmetrically, nor does it require identical emotional timelines. What I do believe is that she was deeply drawn to me — enamored with qualities she named explicitly: my maturity, my openness, my willingness to explore symbolic and esoteric frameworks such as astrology, and what she described as my confirmed oddness. These were not superficial points of attraction but aspects of identity that shape how one moves through the world and forms connection. In response, she opened herself in ways that felt unprecedented in my experience with other women. The openness was emotional, conversational, and psychological, revealing vulnerabilities and reflections that suggested a level of trust both genuine and meaningful.
Yet that openness stopped short of the one dimension that often defines romantic relationships in conventional terms. Physical consummation never occurred. And still, I remain convinced that it might have — that the night of the red dress, that Wednesday evening suspended in quiet possibility, carried the potential for that final step had I not withdrawn. The decision to pull back was not rooted in lack of desire but in an instinctive recognition of complexity and consequence, a moment where restraint felt simultaneously protective and destabilizing.
At the beginning of this narrative, I wrote the line: “I did not sleep with her, so I had to quit my job.” On its surface, the statement reads as paradoxical or even absurd. Yet in a literal and emotional sense, it reflects the truth as I experienced it. Something that transpired between us disrupted my internal equilibrium in a way that extended far beyond the boundaries of romantic encounter. The experience did not create professional dissatisfaction where none existed; rather, it crystallized tensions that had long been present but insufficiently confronted. In the altered emotional state that followed Oxford, I could no longer compartmentalize or tolerate dynamics that had gradually eroded trust and professional fulfillment. The decision to resign emerged not as a reaction to Isobel but as a response made possible by the clarity her presence inadvertently catalyzed.
What, then, did Isobel have to do with that decision? It is a question without a definitive answer, and perhaps one that resists definitive resolution. Objectively, professional circumstances and romantic encounter belong to separate domains, each governed by distinct motivations and consequences. Yet subjective experience does not always honor such boundaries. In my mind and in my heart, the two remain inextricably linked. The emotional awakening precipitated by our connection illuminated aspects of my life that had grown untenable, accelerating a reckoning that might otherwise have unfolded more gradually.
In this sense, Isobel did not cause the decision but revealed the conditions that made it inevitable. The encounter functioned as catalyst rather than origin, exposing fractures already present and clarifying the need for change. The love I felt for her, whether reciprocated in equal measure or not, became intertwined with a broader transformation — one that encompassed identity, professional alignment, and creative direction.
Ultimately, the experience resists reduction to a singular meaning. It was neither tragedy nor triumph, neither mistake nor destiny. It was an encounter marked by intensity, ambiguity, and consequence, leaving behind a residue of insight rather than closure. If anything can be said with certainty, it is that the connection altered the trajectory of my life in subtle but enduring ways. The emotional truth of that alteration persists, even as the specifics of the relationship have receded into memory.
And perhaps that is the most accurate conclusion available: that some relationships are defined not by duration or outcome but by the clarity they introduce, the decisions they precipitate, and the self-recognition they make possible. In that sense, Isobel remains both part of my past and part of the internal landscape through which I continue to move — a presence whose significance lies less in what occurred than in what it revealed.
Coda
What remains, after the noise has faded and the chronology has settled into memory, is not regret but recognition. Isobel was never meant to be a permanent figure in my life; she was a moment of ignition, a flare that illuminated terrain I had been walking blindly for years. Loving her did not undo me — it clarified me. It revealed fault lines in my professional life, deepened my awareness of emotional possibility, and reminded me that connection can arrive without warning and depart without resolution while still altering everything that follows. Some encounters are not chapters but catalysts, and their power lies precisely in their brevity. I did not leave Oxford with a lover, but I left with a truth that could no longer be ignored, and that truth reshaped the decisions that defined the months and years ahead.
So the story does not end with loss but with transformation. The quiet house in Kyoto, the late-night calls across time zones, the resignation spoken into an office heavy with history, the essays written in the wake of confusion and clarity — all of it forms a single arc whose meaning resides not in permanence but in awakening. Isobel remains a presence not because of what we became, but because of what her existence made visible: that love, even when fleeting, carries the capacity to reorder a life. And in that sense, the experience stands complete. Not a tragedy, not a triumph, but a moment of rare and incandescent alignment — a brief crossing of paths that left behind warmth, ache, and an enduring knowledge that sometimes the most consequential relationships are the ones that arrive, burn bright, and quietly pass into memory while continuing to shape the person who remembers them.
Note: If you linked this piece, you may also like my short story Simona below.
New Note: This is a small, wandering piece built on a simple premise: sometimes the things that stay with us are not the major events, but the minor curiosities that resist tidy explanation. A fragment of stage patter at a concert, a puzzling culinary difference between similar cuisines, the myth and reality of hostel life, the vastly different speeds at which people work, the improvisational courage required to make friends quickly, and the strange cultural persistence of the San Diego Chicken — none of these form a grand thesis, yet each carries its own quiet fascination. On Some Things I Find Interesting is less an argument than a map of attention, a record of the small anomalies and unresolved moments that continue to hover in memory precisely because they never fully resolve themselves.
Note: This is our second “list” piece, following our minor piece on airports. I happen to like “minor” pieces in general, and this piece is dedicated to a reader who said her our airport piece was her “sneaky favorite.” Here, we will simply list a few things I find interesting. There is no particular connection between these items, other than that I am interested in them.
I. Bradford Cox’s Stage Patter at a Deerhunter Concert in Osaka
A few years ago I went to see the band Deerhunter play live in Osaka. The original show I had tickets to was canceled and I didn’t get a notification, so I trekked all the way into Osaka only to find this out. This worked out ok though because I took a picture of some girls in fairy costumes on the trip. Anyway, the show was rescheduled for a few months later and the tickets were still valid.
The frontman for Deerhunter is called Bradford Cox. His side project is called Atlas Sound. Deerhunter is not one of my very favorite bands, but they are pretty awesome. I had seen Deerhunter before at a weekend long event called “Hostess Club Weekender” in Tokyo, which sounds a little edgy but was really just a series of Saturday and Sunday events featuring a bunch of bands. (I also saw the band Mogwai at Hostess Club, a band I thought I liked, but the show was boring and they were kind of bad.) My favorite Deerhunter song is “T.H.M.” from 2013’s Monomania, however my favorite Cox song by far is “The Shakes” from his side project called Atlas Sound. The Shakes opens thusly:
Found money and fame/ but I found them really late
Uh huh. “The Shakes” is more than a sneaky favorite; it contains multitudes. In any case, the re-scheduled Deerhunter show was in January or something and I was excited to see them. They were the headliner, however unfortunately they had an inordinate number of opening bands and by the time Deerhunter took the stage they had like only 45 minutes until the venue had to close. Brief as the show may have been, Cox managed to build in quite a bit of between songs patter. I am a big fan of between songs patter, and wrote about this topic at length here and here.
The one piece of patter I remember from this show was when Cox addressed the issue of Japanese toilets. Now, without getting too graphic, most Japanese toilets these days have a built-in “washlet” which, true to its description, washes your sensitive areas with water after your business is done. Here is Cox on the subject (as I recall, more or less):
“I love your toilets here. In our hotel the toilet has a stream of water which cleans you up after you use it. As a gay man I have to say this is a great feature.”
Now, what was so interesting to me about this patter was not the content per se, which was fairly straightforward and only just a little risqué. What fascinated me was that Cox in various interviews in the American press had referred to himself as asexual. Cox suffers from a serious skin condition, as well as maybe some kind of eating disorder, is super thin and generally has a lot going on. He has been pretty open about all of this, including his supposed asexuality. However here he was in Japan, where maybe only a quarter or so of the audience understood enough English to fully understand what he was saying, identifying as a gay man.
Of course I was and am aware that people’s self-identification, sexual or otherwise, can fluctuate, however I don’t think this is what was going on. Rather, it is my supposition, unproven albeit, that Cox preferred to index his supposed asexuality in the American media for reasons of his own, however in Japan allowed himself to speak his truth as a gay man. Perhaps, as I like to imagine, he thought that no one in the crowd would notice this little slight of hand. In the immortal words of the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files, however, “someone is always paying attention, Mr. Mulder.” In this instance, I was paying attention. And I was interested.
II: The Difference Between North Indian Food and Nepalese Food
In Japan, at least, there are a good number of both North Indian and Nepalese restaurants. The North Indian restaurants, for my money, are, without exception, way better. This is because of one simple reason, Nepalese food, as prepared in Japan, is full of sugar.
There is nothing I want less at lunch than a bunch of fucking sugar. I understand of course that carbohydrates in general are full of sugar and all the rest, so I guess my position is that food already has more than enough sugar without adding more. However, Nepalese restaurants put excess sugar in the curry, and super extra sugar in the nan bread. Sugar is everywhere, and it leaves me feeling bloated and bad. North Indian restaurants do not seem to have this problem. These also feature nans and curries, however they are un-sugared and basically delicious.
Now, I do not wish to demean all Nepalese restaurants, nor indeed Nepali food culture in general as I have never been there. For all I know, Nepali restaurants in Japan just happen to add a bunch of sugar for some reason. But I doubt it. I suppose that somewhere on the North Indian plain there as you move north toward Nepal sugar factors more and more into the cuisine. To each their own, but I don’t like it. This whole matter is of interest to me.
Postscript: As I am now totally gluten-free, I won’t be eating any more nan bread, sugared or un-sugared. Bye bye nan baby.
III: Hostels
Hostels are interesting. I have only really stayed at a hostel once, on the South Island of New Zealand when I was checking out the New Zealand Alps. I don’t remember much about this trip, however the basic features of hostel stays were all in place: the shared room and concomitant lack of a private bathroom and shower, the slight anxiety about getting one’s stuff stolen, and the opposite sense of excitement that one might meet, say, a chick.
A few years ago my buddy Paul (he is actually Tall Paul, but there was already another Tall Paul in Kyoto who kind of owns the nickname) came to town and asked me to catch up. I said yes, and met him at his hostel near downtown. When I got there, he introduced me to two gorgeous and sophisticated Indian-American woman from California. They were his “hostel friends.” (Tall) Paul is a very good looking guy, and this incident confirmed for me what I already suspected, that hostel life could be exciting, even action packed. Me and Paul and the ladies went out on the town and had a great time. My takeaway was that hostels rock.
On the other hand, my buddy Doug checked out of his life and into some Russian hostel action for about six months or so a while back. His plan, as I first heard it, sounded quite romantic, however when he returned from this sojourn he informed me that hostel life was not all it was cracked up to be. Hostel life in Russia, it turns out, was pretty dreary. I had no difficulty believing this, and arrived at a more balanced picture of hostels as a result.
All in all, hostels are interesting, however I don’t think hostel life is for me.
IV: People’s Working Speeds
I have noticed that folks tend to work at very different speeds. I am a teacher, and these days the job of a teacher is basically split between i) teaching in the classroom; ii) working on the computer; iii) taking breaks. Teachers, generally speaking, have a lot of flexibility with break taking, which is nice. And classroom teaching is bounded by the bell, so that’s settled. Which leaves computer work.
Some teachers rip through their computer work in a matter of minutes and are able to move on to other pursuits, such as Wordle. The top-end version of this type of teacher are marvels of efficiency and manage to go home on time every day. Other teachers are super slow, and pick at stuff for days, weeks even. While I respect the fact that everyone has their own process, this is not my style at all. Then there are the teachers in the middle, including myself. These folks are neither hyper-efficient nor super-slow. Rather, they tend to procrastinate around for a bit before settling in to serious work, after which they crunch and get things done.
As an ambivert myself, I like to gather just enough information, Goldilocks style, to be dangerous before I do my computer work. I neither need nor want all the information, however I function best when I have a general “feel” for the landscape. This is just how I work—like I said, everyone’s different.
V: Making Friends Quickly
When I was in university I was trying to hang around some artsy chicks, and was lucky enough to know a few. One day I was hanging out with them and a few girls I didn’t know came over. One of them was called Nadine. These new girls were super cool, and Nadine in particular was so cool as to be a little intimidating. She was from Eastern Europe. I definitely wanted to hang out with Nadine, and sure enough she invited me, right away, to accompany them all somewhere. I hesitated, for some reason. Maybe I didn’t know the first rule of improvisational theater, which is “yes and…” Yes and means, basically, follow the person that goes before you. I would have followed Nadine pretty much anywhere, however I said “I don’t really know you guys,” I said. “Well,” she replied, “this is how you get to know us.”
(The Nadine incident confirms one aspect of my social relations. I’m a Gemini sun with Mars in Leo in my 10th house. I am, basically speaking, not afraid of people. At the same time, I must admit that there is a certain class of beautiful women whom were I to meet them it might take me a second or two to find my tounge. This would include Brit Marling, actress and creator of The OA, Emily Haines, lead singer of Metric, and Kristin Stewart, actress in Personal Shopper. Nadine was not quite in this stratosphere, however she was pretty close.)
Nadine was right of course; I just wasn’t used to making friends quite so quickly. I came to my senses and went with Nadine and the crew. That was a good move.
I find Nadine’s approach to new people fantastic. It can be a little risky to apply it all the time, but in general it’s a good starting point. Love ya Nadine baby.
VI: The San Diego Chicken
Americans of a certain age may remember the San Diego Chicken. The San Diego Chicken was everywhere. As I recall, the San Diego Chicken was originally a mascot for the San Diego Padres baseball team that would run and jump around on the dugout and stuff. What the connection between the Padres (named after the Catholic priests that ran missions into California back in the day) and the chicken was, I have no idea. Nonetheless, the chicken, over time, somehow transcended the role of mere baseball mascot and became an all- purpose mascot for all types of situations. The chicken, in fact, became the uber-mascot, the mascot of mascots if you will.
I have an exact image in my head of the chicken; essentially the chicken was just a dude with a bunch of yellow feathers and a chicken-esque head. The resemblance to a real chicken was decent, however as mentioned the San Diego Chicken was super yellow. Also, the San Diego Chicken was ugly. Like seriously. Nonetheless, the chicken was huge, and became a meme before anyone even knew what a meme was. Therefore, the chicken must have had something going on. The chicken had his own baseball cards; the chicken was everywhere. At the time I didn’t get the chicken at all, and basically still don’t. But as with a lot of topics, there may be something I’m missing. That’s why I find the chicken interesting to this day.
Dedication: For AC, who likes lists, even though this barely is one.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also use the list format.
Note: This is the first chapter of my upcoming novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea. You can read a later chapter about the Thin Man’s romance with Vivian in Rome here:
It’s predicted to rain on landing/ I predict we’ll have a drink
Paul Westerberg
Dateline Singapore: Late October
This little country, such an unlikely success story, such a strange winding of forces. The thin man has been on land for five weeks after his latest gig on the cruise ship, and though his stomach is still in limbo his sea legs have mostly subsided.
Now there is nothing more that the thin man wanted after washing up here earlier in the season then a long weekend. Say, five years. Five years in the hammock, five years frolicing with the lovely ladies at the bar. The occasional speedboat ride, a flyer or two over in Macau. Five years out of the swim of modern capitalism, if you can even call it that. Five years clean. That was the dream. Five weeks on land though and the thin man is looking for work, the money gone in a haze of long days and longer nights. Wine, women, song, and a speedboat ride or two will add up quick. C’est la vie partner. That’s what comes from burning holes up to heaven.
Still, the thin man has a few dollars in his pocket as he walks into a bar just outside of Chinatown. Halloween is approaching, and the proverbial Spooky Lady’s Sideshow is in full effect. The barmaids are Eyes and Baby, or is she Baby Blue? In any case, the thin man and Eyes make eyes, in an innocent way, so the story is told.
The thin man orders a Cognac and ambles over to the pool table where the nine ball is always on. Eyes sizes him up quick, guesses he can play a bit. A game is proposed, a game for two players.
But of course no game is really ever between two players alone. Baby’s watching—tough to tell her rooting interest. And, after Eyes breaks and a few balls fall, the bar as a whole starts tuning in to the frequencies of the game as the regulars make small talk and the travelers weak-tea passes at the local girls. Local girls are no push-over; sometimes folks get the wrong idea on that end. The thin man always did like the locals; heck, it’s part of the travelers’ creed. After all, everybody is a local somewhere. Certainly Eyes and Baby could take care of themselves.
Eyes missed and the thin man was able to sink a few easy balls before Eyes surged back, she’d been around more than she looked. She was an expert at drinking what the punter was drinking. That’s a key part of the art of the barmaid, an underrated profession at the best of times.
The game is nine ball, what else? Eight ball is for rookies, a southerners game. The thin man hails from the north; he knows a thing or two about sequencing. You see, the thin man had had a bit of a specialized role onboard the cruise ship where he had worked as a dealer in the casino. As a result, he also possesses some of the skills of a card shark, a mechanic. Sequencing goes with the territory of a mechanic, after all.
Mid-game and the thin man is beginning to fade a bit–the combination of Eyes’ eyes, and a cheeky Cognac or three is taking its toll. Eyes sinks the 8 and only the 9 ball is left. It’s a touch and go situation. The skeletons muse over the action with as much interest as they can muster from beyond the great blue veil. The couple on the rail stops sniffing whatever they are sniffing, and ask the thin man to join them for a round. No time for that. Cheeky Cognacs and beady cat eyes aside, a game is a game.
A couple of desultory shots bounce about as the players size each other up. Baby leans in; the skeletons whisper sweet somethings, even the bartender sneaks a peek. Everyone is getting paid, except the thin man. He is just there for the action.
Eyes edges the nine right up to the pocket, leaving the thin man a clean shot. He leans in from the left and drops it, silky smooth like. Baby claps and Eyes bats. Game over, though the thin man knows that Eyes could have had him the whole time. She was just being hospitable. A good host for a weary traveler.
The game over, the thin man’s thoughts turned to more practical considerations. He needs a place to stay, and though the nine ball had brought them all together, he didn’t think Eyes or Baby would necessarily take him in. He’d probably need to establish himself as a bit of a regular first before having a shot at any of that action. But the thin man is a gamer, constitutionally unable to categorize situations as problems. No problemo senor, no worries mate. He does, however, have a few issues, the first being he is unemployed and pretty much out of cash. So, he’s asked around, kept his ear to the wind. A fellow traveler there on the ship had turned him onto a broker of services of sorts, the kind of individual who specializes in assisting upstanding institutions with their shining mission statements and their CSR campaigns navigate the grey areas of competition and market position. He has the number for this broker in his pocket, and asks to use the bar phone to give him a call.
The broker picks up right away, saying “yeah, your buddy mentioned you might be looking for a little work. I think I can put something together.”
“That’s good,” says the thin man. “Any chance of a hotel for the night in the meantime?”
“Sure, said the broker. Head over to the 1887 in Chinatown. They’ll have a room in your name. What is it, by the way?”
“Let’s go with ‘Jack Bishop.'”
“That’ll work. I’ll meet you at breakfast at 8.”
The 1887 sounds incredible, thinks the thin man. Rock n’ roll.
New Note: I am republishing this piece for two reasons: First it’s been three years since I wrote it and it is one of my all time favorites. Second, as the title shows the politician Rahm Emmanuel makes a cameo and there is at least a possibility that he will run for President in 2028. This is a funny piece and it totally speaks for itself. I hope you like it.
Note: This is a piece about a guy called Whit. Over the past little while I’ve run into this guy in a couple of craft beer pubs in North and Central Kyoto. In a sense, it’s faithful to the original intention of thekyotokibbitzer—to check stuff out around the local area. Naturally, “local” is a highly fungible term, which is what makes it so excellent, but it feels good to get back to basics.
Interested readers may also want to revisit my earlier piece about my North Kyoto run-in with musician Damon Krukowski—currently a prominent critic of Spotify’s business practices, but formerly a dick to my face.
I met this guy called Whit at a Kyoto pub we’ll call T’s. T’s is owned and operated, naturally enough, by T. It’s a pretty nice place, although not everyone thinks T is a nice guy. He and I, though, rub along fine. T likes to wear sandals. So do I.
T’s seats about twenty-odd and lets people stand around without a chair, so it can get crowded. On the night I met Whit, though, it wasn’t. There was just me at the L-shaped corner near the entrance, Whit and three male friends at a table, a lone woman mid-bar, and a few other strays.
Whit and his buddies were winding things down, and before they paid, Whit sidled up to the lone woman.
“Genki desu ka?” he asked.
To understand what’s happening here, you need a little context on the phrase. Literally it means “are you cheerful?” but in practice it’s “how are you?” — a totally standard, everyday greeting. It is also, however, a classic Japanese pick-up line. Both the pickup artist and the garden-variety sleazeball deliver their “genki desu ka” with a little extra—an undertone, a wink, a leer.
This guy called Whit, I could see immediately, was leaning heavily into the leer.
I have no idea of how this guy called Whit would have fared with his approach if it had been allowed to develop because T himself came flying around the bar and snapped at Whit (in Japanese) “don’t talk to her, get away from her.” As a mere observer to the developing situation this seemed excessive, especially because T’s is the kind of place where fairly easy conversational congress between the sexes is not only tolerated but actually encouraged. T and his crew will proactively introduce men to women and women to men on the regular. Later in the evening, all sorts of events may transpire at T’s. So this was out of character for sure.
This guy called Whit was taken aback, and soft-pleaded with T to let him join the woman, however T was firm. “If you don’t go back to your table you will have to leave. If she comes to talk to you you can talk to her. Not before.” Again, I cannot stress enough how out of character this is for T’s, so naturally I was curious. I am not normally nosy, however when curious I can be. Whit took the L and slunk back to his table. His friends didn’t seem to have noticed the action, but I did, so I said to him, “hey man, that was pretty crazy. What did you do?” “Nothing,” said Whit, “I just wanted to talk to the lady.” “Yeah,” I said, “I’ve never seen T react that way.” “He just doesn’t like me,” said Whit, “maybe I’ll never come back here.”
Whit and his crew left shortly after and I asked T what was going on. “Whit always hits on women,” he explained, “I don’t like it.” “What about Philip?” I asked (“Philip” here being someone T and I both know), “Philip is always hitting on women too.” “Case by case,” said T, “case by case.” Case by case arguments are very hard to rebut as they index in advance their non-adherence to norms of “fairness” or “consistency.” Also, I knew nothing about Whit and was in no way invested in manning his corner. T and Whit have a history, I supposed, and T would not kick a customer out just because. Such was my first meeting with this guy called Whit.
Not long after this first meeting I was with a friend at a pub we will call K’s, which is in Central Kyoto. K’s is smaller than T’s, seating only about 8-10 inside with some flexible outdoor space as well. Unlike T’s, at K’s there is not much flirting and the like as the space just doesn’t really allow for it. I was there with a buddy and who should come in but this guy called Whit. Now I didn’t mention that at T’s Whit had an American accent. (I later learned he is from Philadelphia by way of San Fransciso.) However he rolled into K’s rocking a full-on British accent, and not a bad one at that. He was standing right next to me, and I did a double take. “That’s that guy called Whit,” I thought, “but it can’t be, Whit’s American.” I looked again. Definitely Whit.
So I asked him, “hey guy called Whit, what’s with the British accent?” He slipped back to his American accent, “oh yeah mate, that’s just something I do sometimes.” OK. We chatted a bit and it was clear that he didn’t recognize me. I reminded him of our meeting at T’s, and he recalled the incident. But I could tell he wouldn’t remember my name next time. He left K‘s after one beer.
My buddy hadn’t met this guy called Whit before, however I had already told him the story of his getting shit-canned at T’s. “That was the guy,” I told him, “the guy called Whit.” “What was with the British accent?”my buddy asked. “I don’t know, some kind of affectation. Maybe he lays it on when he tries to pick up women.” Just a guess on my part, but a pretty good one considering later events.
A few weeks later I was at a pub we will call M’s, also in North Kyoto with another friend we shall call “Philippe” in order to easily differentiate him from “Philip.” It was just before seven in the evening, when who should walk in but the guy called Whit with none other than the newly appointed United States Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and his wife Ann. They just strolled on in and it was clear that Whit was somehow chaperoning them. I stared over at Rahm Emanuel for a bit and then said “hey there Mr. Rahm Emanuel.” Rahm Emanuel (or just Rahm, as I like to call him) acknowledged his identity and he and I started chatting. At the same time Ann was chatting with old Philippe there at the bar. Before I said hello to Rahm I wondered what on earth he was doing with Whit. And then I thought well, I know Whit doesn’t have a job, he seems to frequent pubs all the time, probably he has some money somewhere, tech money or something. Maybe he’s some kind of VC and the Rahmster has gone out of his way to meet him in Kyoto. Implausible as this scenario seemed, I didn’t know what another explanation for this threesome could be. However, I was off-base.
Had this guy called Whit in fact been a prominent VC it would have added layers to my understanding of him for certain. So I asked him, “hey there guy called Whit, how do you know Rahm Emanuel?” “I just met him,” he replied, “across the street at L’s. We got to talking and I brought him over here.” (L’s is a cocktail bar I have never been too, which is 15 feet from K’s.) It turned out that Rahm and Ann were in Kyoto en route to Hiroshima where they were to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum with none other than the Prime Minister of Japan. In the meantime here they were, hanging with Whit. Rahm explained the situation thusly: “here in Kyoto my minders let us off the leash so we can walk around freely. This would never happen in Tokyo, because we have security around us all the time.” He seemed genuinely happy to be minderless, and was as relaxed as could be at the bar. In no time he was dropping f-bombs, dapping up the waitresses, and asking me how to say things in Japanese. Rock and roll Rahm baby.
(As promised in the title, Rahm is only supposed to have a cameo in this story, however I have to recount our brief conversation about politics. After I introduced myself, Rahm asked me “are you on the team?” I understood him to mean was I a Democrat. I replied that I was basically on the team, but that I was kind of a left libertarian. “No such thing,” said Rahm. “Well then you’re looking at a unicorn baby,” said I.)
In any case, once I had gotten a bit of a feel for my new buddy Rahm I had to fill him in on something. “Hey Rahm, you know this guy called Whit likes to go into bars and put on a fake British accent?” Rahm didn’t miss a beat as he turned to Whit and, I swear, elbowed him in the ribs, saying “did that help you score buddy? Did you get across the finish line?” Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Obama, former Mayor of Chicago, and presently the honorable ambassador to Japan, had already grasped the essential nature of this guy called Whit. And he, for one anyway, had no issues with it.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 