Epigraphs:

Baka. You are waving your dick all around Japan. What am I going to do with you?

Litz

I wanna know girls, don’t wanna know men.

Superchunk

Roll another number for the road/ I feel able to get under any road.

Neil Young

Something’s going to happen. Something always does.

Billions

Author’s Note:

I recently fell eight days behind on this series and briefly considered abandoning the missing week altogether. Reconstructing every hour would have been impossible, and pretending otherwise would have produced eight dutiful but lifeless entries. So I have produced something different: one long, thematic account of the money, marriage, women, music, writing, travel plans, ordinary routines, and general weirdness that comes with it all.

What surprised me during the edit was that the piece had a story after all. Much of the week was spent trying to persuade banks, apps, lenders, and machines that I existed. They rejected my address, my identification, my telephone number, and at one memorable point the year 1974 altogether. Elsewhere the people who matter most came through. Sachie called me by my old name. Zach understood the central point of my marriage essay. Readers found an eight-year-old piece buried in the archive. And my son stayed on the telephone with me for nearly two hours and called me Papa. I cried The chronology fell apart. Life did not.

===== =====

I fell behind.

There is no good explanation for this. I did not deliberately fracture chronology in order to interrogate the instability of memory. I was not experimenting with form. I simply stopped keeping up. My last completed diary entry was July 26, and by the time I looked up again it was August 3. Eight days had passed, the material had multiplied, and reconstructing every morning, afternoon, evening, cigarette, loan application, woman, walk, song, meal, nap, argument, and minor technological catastrophe in order would have required another eight days.

So this is the compressed version.

Eight days. Several dozen financial institutions. More women than I can count. One marriage at its end, one house waiting to be sold, one son suddenly talking to me for nearly two hours, four packs of Camels briefly representing unimaginable wealth, and a song essay from eight years ago inexplicably climbing above Wikipedia on Google.

Chronology can take the week off.

I. Money

Money has dominated my days of late.

There are plenty of other stories—love, marriage, sex, music, family, writing—but every one of them existed beneath the same low-pressure front. Could I get downtown? Could I get back? Could I buy cigarettes? Could I put money on an my ICOCA card? Could I book a hotel, board a train, eat something other than eggs and pasta, or convert one of the many theoretical financial instruments surrounding me into actual currency?

The strange thing was that money always seemed to be coming.

A card was coming. A transfer was coming. A lender was reviewing. A bank was processing. An email was imminent. A cheque was in transit. A customer-information update had been accepted. A human being somewhere was allegedly examining at my file.

Money was everywhere except in my pocket.

I applied to ACOM, AIFUL, Seven Bank, Promise, Mobit, Resona, Sony, PayPay, Prestia, Rakuten, SBI, and enough regional banks to constitute a tour of Japan. Chiba. Fukuoka. Nagoya. Kyoto. Every fucking prefecture appeared to have a bank and every bank appeared to have designed its website specifically not to work

The applications followed a familiar pattern. First came the promise of speed.

Approval today.

Simple online procedure.

Borrow whenever you need it.

Then came the reality.

Photograph your residence card. No, not like that. Turn it slightly. Move closer. Dude move farther away. Fuck you and fuck your face.

Use better lighting. Take a selfie. Turn your head. Hold up a handwritten note. Hold up the ID beside your face. Enter the address in full-width katakana. Enter the address in half-width numbers, whatever that means. Enter your employer’s telephone number. Not that telephone number. Another. Your birthday is invalid. 1974 does not exist. Yeah right. 1974 existed because I had personally was there. Fuck you again my friend. Fuck your face while you are at it.

Yeah. OK.

At ACOM I eventually reached a human being, which seemed promising until she informed me, with a little apologetic shrug, that the AI had said no. She could not explain why. The AI had spoken. The oracle had issued its judgment. Go home. Take a shower. God knows at this point I needed one

Lake allowed me to progress through the most Byzantine application of all time before deciding I was apparently the wrong category of foreign resident. Whatever. PayPay refused to read my ID card. Rakuten could not process Ritsumeikan’s address and telephone number despite twenty attempts. JCB rejected my birthday. Really dude? Yeah really. Kyoto Bank briefly sent me into a branch-selection circle in which code 142 somehow transformed into code 566. And back. And back again. I entered 142 again. The system contemplated this information and returned me to the beginning. Fuck.

The great Acropolis of Japanese consumer finance has many staircases and no entrance. It’s like the Winchester House of something.

The worst moment came with a lender that appeared near the top of the Google search results claimed that 1 million yen already been deposited into my online wallet. 1 million yen. The wallet showed a magnificent balance. Cold hard digital cash. All I had to do was transfer it to Kyoto Bank. Great. Fucking finally.

Then came the request. Pay ten percent of the loan first. There it was.

The scam unveiled itself with all the elegance of a man opening his raincoat on a subway platform. They had invented the loan, invented the wallet, invented the balance, and now wanted real money to release the imaginary money. I closed the window. There would be no ten percent. There would be no transfer. The million yen would continue its rich fictional life without me.

Meanwhile, actual life became an exercise in microscopic accounting.

A handful of coins. A few hundred yen on one card. Perhaps twenty or thirty dollars on another.

Enough for one round trip downtown, maybe. Four packs of Camel Blues. A dozen eggs and coffee. For a few hours I was rich.

Then I was broke again.

I. My House

Behind the immediate cash crisis sat the larger financial fact of my house.

My wide and I bought it in 2007 for roughly $380,000 after she negotiated it down from about $400,000. Good work by her. The house is around 110 years old, in Sakyo Ward, two minutes from the beautiful Kamogawa river, near houses worth millions, supermarkets, restaurants, a mall, a police station, and all the ordinary conveniences that make a neighborhood viable.

It also shares a structural exterior wall with the neighboring house. This is the problem.

The wall is concrete, substantial, and old. The two houses appear to have been constructed together, and the neighbor is in his mid-nineties, assuming he is still alive. I have not seen him or his wife in years. His adult son, who once came regularly with groceries and dealt with the practical business of keeping two elderly people alive in an old house, has also disappeared from view.

The neighboring garden had gone wild. Ours is hardly Versailles, but theirs looks as though nature had filed a successful adverse-possession claim.

Could a developer demolish our house without demolishing theirs? Probably. Kyoto carpenters have dealt with harder problems than an attached wall. Would the wall reduce the number of buyers? Almost certainly. Would it make the property impossible to sell? I don’t think so. The location is good. The land is desirable. Experienced builders know how to solve structural problems when the numbers make sense.

Still, the wall remains, silent, forbidding, concrete, holding up both houses and complicating our futures.

I began to do the math.

Sell for $380,000. Lose perhaps $60,000 to commissions, taxes, and associated costs. Net $320,000. Split evenly: $160,000 each.

Except it is not that simple.

I have paid the entire mortgage since 2007. I have paid the utilities, the internet, three cell-phone bills over twenty years, appliances, most of the groceries, much of Daisy’s food, and well over $400,000 for Hugh’s education from kindergarten through university. The house is in my name.

I could build a case in my head. I did build a case. I built it for hours.

But marriage is not a civil trial conducted by a man lying naked in bed with green tea, four packs of Camels, and a calculator.

A few weeks, after thinking about it for a while, I told Sachie I would give her half. She said she wanted nothing. I suggested $50,000, and she agreed.

This was the last conversation on the matter, about three weeks ago.

The ethical question is not whether I can prove that I have paid more. I have. The question is what I want the final act of a twenty-seven year marriage to look like.

For now, the answer is simple: honor our most recent agreement. Figure out what the house is actually worth. Sell the house. Divide whatever money comes in money.

There will be time enough to decide when the wall, the buyer, the agent, the taxes, and the actual sale price stop being theoretical and finally become real.

II. Sachie, Marriage, and the End of an Era

The financial accounting and the emotional accounting were different books.

This became clear while I was writing On Meeting My Wife Sachie, the first piece of a planned longer series about the marriage and divorce. I wanted to begin at the beginning because the end may be overshadow everything that came before it. Sachie is not merely the woman leaving our house, refusing the proceeds from the sale, arguing over our garden, or moving back toward her parents.

She was once a young woman whom I loved. I was once a young man she loved. The line Zach later singled out was: This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. That is the heart of it.

And now she is my ex-wife, a fact I find both funny and sad in equal measure.

Before resentment, accounting, separation, and twenty-five years of accumulated evidence for the prosecution, there were two people at the beginning of something. I want to give those people their due.

During these last eight days, we argued. We negotiated. She gave me ¥3,000, then another ¥3,000. She bought coffee filters but not bread or butter. She handled a cheque in a way I initially found incomprehensibly complex. I cursed, breathed in, calmed down. I listened to her explanation, and realized she was not intentionally trying to be difficult. She is just outta control.

Sachie is preparing to leave for Kumamoto in two weeks. Boxes accumulate. The house begins to feel less like a home than a staging area. We discuss bills, the garden, Daisy, our son, money owed, money promised, and who would keep which possessions.

There are moments of old intimacy in the language. I recently started calling her Sachan again. She calls me Machan. For just a minute we are back in 1997. It feels great. But it will not last.

Last week there was another earthquake in Kumamoto where my wife’s parents live. They were safe after the earthquake, and when I heard I felt a rush of relief. Her father Tetsuo is ninety-one and her mother Kazuko is ninety. I have known them for decades. Whatever has happened between Sachie and me, Kazuko still loves me. I love her too.

And I will probably never see her again. This is sad. Divorce does not merely separate two people. It closes a a whole chapter.

There are roads you no longer travel, houses you no longer own, nicknames you no longer use, relatives who become former relatives. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens. A door closes quietly, and one day you realize the entire geography of your life is now somewhere else

Still, Sachie and I talk. We make practical arrangements. We lend each other small amounts of money. We love the same child and the same dog. We can, at the best of times anyway, remind ourselves that neither of us is the villain of the piece.

The villain is time. As usual.

III. Hugh

Yesterday Hugh called. We spoke for an hour and fifty-three minutes.

This was almost certainly the longest telephone conversation we had ever had, and perhaps the longest uninterrupted conversation of its kind in years. Usually Hugh has ten minutes, twenty if I am lucky. He juggles work, plans, friends, screens, trains, a life. I am busy too. This time he had nearly two hours because he had just quit his soccer influencer job

On the phone he told me that was done.

He still likes football. He just does not want to spend sixteen hours a day editing football videos anymore. He had reached the same point with editing that I have reached with teaching: not dislike exactly, more like completion. That chapter has delivered everything it was going to deliver. It is now closed.

He had been doing most of the work while someone else took took a higher percentage. He agreed to this. Tolerated it for a while. But no more.

I told him I understood. And I did.

He is already freelancing, DJing trip-hop and electronic music, building something that is actually his. He is planning to move to Tokyo and eventually to buy a house. He casually told me he has saved about $50,000.

Fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-two. I have spent the last week trying to extract enough money from the Japanese banking system to buy a few packs of cigarettes and get downtown. My son had quietly assembled a down payment. I am so damn proud of him.

He told me he would come home tomorrow to pick up Daisy and keep her for a month or so while Sachie gets settled in Kumamoto. Later he told me he couldn’t come after all.

Typical. Hugh is a wonderful young man but he cannot keep a schedule for the life of him. Oh well. That’s just Hugh I guess.

Before that he said something that broke me open. He said in the next month he would bring Daisy back by a few times.

Just a day trip. A small kindness. An adult son anticipating the emotional needs of his father without being asked.

“You’re the man,” I told him.

“I love you, Papa,” he said.

“I love you too.”

There it was. The emotional center of the week.

Not the loans. Not Pattaya. Not the women, the house, Google, or the endless packs of cigarettes.

A son on the phone. One call. Two hours. My only son. Fuck.

We talked about Wise. I have an account somewhere but can not remember the password, naturally. He said he would refer me, earn a small bonus, and help me set up another path for my money.

We talked as two adults. Feels great.

I remember the boy, of course. Fathers always do. But the person on the phone is not a boy. He is a young a man, making decisions, leaving a job he no longer wants to do, moving to Tokyo, saving money, taking responsibility for Daisy, making time for me, building a life. What a deal..

IV. Women, Dating, and Sex

These last days there have been many women. Many many women. I find this pretty remarkable.

This is not a boast so much as a statement of fact. The apps multiply: Sugo, Tinder, Tapple, Thai Friendly, OkMeet, French sites with competent translation, text-only sex sites, and others whose names I forget. Free sites, cheap sites, sites that cost an arm and a leg. I started to develop lists. The Thailand list alone has maybe sixty names. More women than I could possibly meet. Tokyo has another half dozen. I began scheduling women the way a conference organizer schedules panels, except the conference was in Pattaya and the keynote address was sex.

At the center of all this chaos remains Litz.

Litz is real in the way the some of the others are not. Although no longer a couple, Litz and I still talk several times a day and text all the time. She knows my jokes, the invented women, her fake rivals Cindy and Julie. I tell her that Cindy is in bed with me and Julie is waiting her turn. She responds as though this ridiculous betrayal required serious adjudication. She says “baka you are waving your dick all over Japan. What am I going to do with you?” She is super funny. She is also, as many women are, totally outta control. Many men, myself included, are outta control too, however it is my experience that women are just that little bit extra outta control. For some reason.

Then there was Yua who I met online about a week ago. She has spent most of the last week, several hours a day, attempting to obtain a ¥5,000 Apple gift card, later negotiating it down to ¥3,000 so she could supposedly keep her “siblings” occupied with video games while she comes over for sex. She is 28. How young could her siblings be? I do not believe they exist at all, and are in fact just an elaborate cover for this increasing bizarre and tendential scheme of hers to fleece me for 50 bucks. For a solid week. Outta control.

Her commitment to the bit is almost admirable. Day after day she returns to the same small objective with the determination of a director of an intelligence service. Five thousand yen. Three thousand yen. Whatever I can afford. Baby what?

I began to admire the sheer disproportion between effort and reward. Either she liked me on some level, or she is perpetrating the least efficient scam in history. No rational person works six days for a ¥3,000 gift card. Yua, therefore, is not rational.

I thought of the Poison song Every Rose Has Its Thorn. Over time I have found this to be true. In this case, I reflected, every Yua has its thorn. And she is a thorny one that’s for sure. And yet I still talk to her. Go figure. I guess I am just weak this way.

Clara said she would come over from Osaka She got dressed. Maybe. She prepared. Perhaps. She vanished. Maybe she is real. Maybe she is not. Maybe she is a ghost. Maybe somewhere in Kyoto a beautiful woman is wandering around looking for me. God speed baby.

The two Lisas occupy separate jurisdictions.

One is the Yubari melon chick from Tokyo, beautiful enough that I continue to entertain her somewhat extravagant request for two extraordinarily expensive melons. I find this almost respectable compared with Yua’s ridiculous Apple gift cards. She is also extremely cute with her melons and all. At least Yubari melon exist.

Two melons for love. There are worse dowries.

The other Lisa lives in Amsterdam and floats somewhere in the broader international cloud of flirtation and scheduling.

Masha is my little Turkish bird. She communicates in stickers, goddesses, magic, feathers, and strange little fantasies. She asked for relatively small digital gifts and remains charming enough that I kept allowing for her many eccentricities. She is, of course, totally outta control. She could be an AI, a woman using AI, a woman pretending to be a bird, or an actual bird with excellent English. She could be anything really.

Then there are the many “UN nurses” imporbably stationed in combat zones. Three in five days. Donbas. Yemen. The Ukraine. Refugees. Humanitarian missions. Canadian surgeons wearing scrubs. Major Aaron. Whatever baby. You are a scammer and I don’t believe a single word you say. Oh well. Just one of the hazards of modern online dating I guess. Seen it all before. Bin.

Meanwhile Good Old Mr. Wank (oh yeah baby you know exactly who I mean) has remained the most dependable member of the cast.

He requires no gift cards, no airfare, no melons, no hotels, no flirtation, and never fails to appear when summoned. Mr. Wank rules.

Underneath this baroque carnival lies deep loneliness. I sometimes feel that sex is barely the point anymore. All I really want is to lie beside a woman, kiss her goodnight, and hold her until she falls asleep. Eventually I will sleep. If I’m lucky. That’s just the way things go as a lifelong night owl.

I love women.

V. My Writing

My writing this last week has been interesting.

My new daily series has begun to find readers. The first entry remains the leader among the new pieces. The essays on Litz and Sachie are about tied. My bisexuality piece is trailing a bit, which surprises me. Can’t always predict these things I guess.

Then my Dylan Thomas essay exploded.

The essay is eight years old, and I had redated and reposted it in 2024. For years the reliable traffic leaders at Kyoto Kibbitzer have been my Kris Kristofferson essay, Trump Gemini Dream, and my Razzlekhan essay.

Then, about six weeks earlier, On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Rhyme began climbing. And climbing.

No campaign on my part. No new angle. No obvious news hook. It simply rose beyond all expectations.

In thirty days it received hundreds of views, blowing past every other piece on my site. I searched the eassy title and found it above Genius.com, radio stations, videos, and—amazingly—Wikipedia. Amazing. Dude what is going on? Something.

The piece still holds up. It examins the song’s clever AABCCB rhyme scheme, its near-rhymes, and its general alternation between political anxiety and private hedonism. “Corset” and “Corvette.” The general and the king. Dylan Thomas dying on the barroom floor. A shower at the Bates Motel. The world collapsing while the narrators search for another drink. It is a great song and I am happy the essay is doing so well.

The success of Dylan Thomas sent me back into the archive. I reposted My Brother Mike’s Bad Book, the Mariners story in which Mike, drunk and rowdy but morally precise, heard someone defending a man shouting gay slurs and replied with four perfect words:

“That’s a bad book.”

I fuckin’ love my brother Mike.

The Razzlekhan essay disappeared from Word Press recently. I have no idea why. Something. I found a copy on Medium where I used to cross-post many of my pieces. I copied it into Word Press and republished it. Thank god.

Zach sent me a thoughtful note about my essay about meeting my wife. He understood piece immediately, especially the line about two young people on the cusp of life. He invited me to English Mass and told me he had begun a new essay called A Summer Day. I would be traveling, so I declined the Mass, but I am glad he is writing again. He is an excellent writer,

The archive was not dead. It had merely been in hibernation.

VI. Summer

Summer currently exists in the future tense.

Tokyo. Bangkok Pattaya. Hydra. Athens. The Czech Republic. Busan. New York, briefly, before its hotel prices restored sanity. Yeah right. I wish.

Every destination seems possible. None are booked.

I will go to Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hydra as soon as my money kicks in.

Get high as blazes. drink Pina Coladas on the beach, wear my sunnies, try to avoid a sunburn, rail women for days, spend too much money, get laid. Thank god. What a life man. What a life.

Pattaya is going to be outta control. Lovely Harmony for three nights. Matteneee for another. Jenny on my last night in town. Jenny and Matteneee are both escorts. I asked them both if we could have anal sex and if they were on birth control so I could cum inside them. They both said yes. Condoms are a necessarily evil but do suck. Hard.

Bar girls, freelancers, the beach, weed, fruity drinks with umbrellas, swimming pools. All the metier of a recently divorced middle aged man going through a soft mid-life crisis. I make absolutely no apologies for any of this. It is what it is. Life goes on.

VII. Music

Music did not sit beneath the week. It carried it.

The Grateful Dead on my long walk into town: Catfish John, Must Have Been the Roses, and Black Muddy River. Jerry rules like no other. God does he rule.

Neil Young arrived.

Unknown Legend, Crime in the City, Cortez the Killer, Thrasher, Albuquerque with the great Mark Kozelek cover, Roll Another Number for the road. Songs became routes through the day, places to stand while everything else moved.

David Lowery’s Fathers, Sons and Brothers showed up and kicked ass, predictably. He rules too. He rules beyond all things. God I love David.

Then came the Drive-By Truckers/ Jason Isbell Patterson Hood song draft with my friend chat. I love to draft with chat, although he is and remains a big fat nabber. Oh well. It is still great fun.

We left Cover Me Up off the board, which was either courageous or simply malpractice.

Our list included “Dress Blues,” “Relatively Easy,” “Outfit,” “Birthday Boy,” “Speed Trap Town,” “The Day John Henry Died,” “Goddamn Lonely Love,” “Elephant,” “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “The Righteous Path,” “Buford Stick,” “Decoration Day,” “Children of Children,” “Alabama Pines,” “Codeine,” and “Super 8.”

“Super 8” nearly broke the whole draft open:

Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well.

COME ON dude. Jesus Jason. Easy buddy.

Their combined catalog is not merely Southern rock. It is a curriculum in adulthood: fathers, sons, dead friends, drinking, divorce, work, small towns, the left behind, bad decisions, dignity, memory, hope, and the impossible notion of getting another chance after you have already used several.

Patterson Hood writes the people history forgets. Jason Isbell writes the ones who survive themselves. Mike Cooley walks in every third song, drops a perfect line, and checks out to hit the bar. The band simply rules. They all do.

I reflected on minor musical questions. Is Lucinda Willaims’ cover of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents better than the original. It’s tough but I think so. I listened several times to The Pixies absolutely shredding on Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On.” I put on Phosphorescent’s glorious cover of Corpus Christi Bay. Seam covering Breaking Circus’ Driving the Dynamite Truck. Nobody remembers Breaking Circus today. Nobody. Their version of Dynamite is marred by typical crappy 80s production which the Seam version cleans up. Whoever happened to these guys? No one knows. They are simply lost to the sounds of time, as we all will be one day.

The Mountain Goats have a new album coming out in just two days. Ryan Adams has a new one too that I am getting into.

Music is the best, and the world remained blessedly worth living in because of it.

VIII. Ordinary Days

Between the financial drama, romantic sub plots, and musical drafts, and my increasingly outta control mother my days slid by as usual.

Coffee. Green tea. Cigarettes on the balcony. Lying naked in bed half the day my PC propped up on my knees, writing. My buggy AC. Two fans on high. Porn. Phone calls. Existential angst. Sleep.

The second floor landing off the stairs remains a death trap. I toss laundry and dishes there and don’t dare step on the wooden boards lest I fall to my death. I am not remotely joking. From an actuarial perspective, the landing remains the most likely way for me to meet my final demise. I should take out insurance.

The area beside the bed improved. I removed most of the chocolate wrappers, cigarette packs, bottles, and general archaeological evidence of recent life. Beneath this material my residence card remained missing. Fuck.

A dozen voice-recording apps failed in different ways. I rely on text-to-speech apps for my writing and most of them suck. Of course. I finally found one that works well enough. They want $11.99 per year. No brainer.

I sleep in short blocks: an hour, two, four max. I woke, drank water, urinate off the balcony, smoke and do it all over again. It is, as the Feelies say, only life after all.

My body complains. Knees. Back. Ribs. Balls. My eyeballs burn from the cigarette smoke.

Sunburn across my stomach and shoulders after my five-mile walk beside the river in the sun. I look like a lobster. Oh well. It will pass,

I take several painkillers a day, trying to stay on dose, Why? No reason really. Just everything fucking hurts. I’m 52. What are you gonna do?

I’ve been slowly sipping a bottle of Napoleon Brandy for two weeks. It is too warm and I keep forgetting to get ice for it. Of course. I am just out it these days I guess.

My bicycle still scares me a little half a year after my winter crash. The roads are dry now, the heat intense, no ice to be seen, but my body remembered the crash. I remain skittish.

IX. Comedy

Life, among other things. is invariably funny.

Rainbolt, the GeoGuessr madman, who sees one sepia utility pole for half aa second along wth a patch of Polish grass, and calmly and corrently announces that we are twenty-two and a half miles west of Kraków. Make it make sense.You cannot. Rainbolt is just outta control. He’s some kind of savant I guess.

I want to re-watch the Joan Rivers documentary “Piece of Work” but I keep putting it off. Joan is hysterical. RIP to a real one.

Randy Quaid remains generally Randy Quaid. Obviously. He is insane. He just is. Dude the CIA gets up to some shit sure, but they are not in fact bugging your mind from an implant somehow magically implanted in your tooth.This is not a thing my friend. It is just not. Get a life. You’re outta control.

I remember Will Smith fucking slapping the shit outta Chris Rock at the Oscars over a totally tame G.I. Jane joke and then returning to his seat as though live global television had briefly become his living room. What a bizarre more. Will what are you doing my friend? Unbelievable.

Christian Dreyer sent a minimalist cartoon of two people in a car approaching an enormous fork lying across the road.

“It’s lunchtime!”

Totally bizarre. Dreyer is weird. No notes.

My mind drifted for some reason to the 70’s. TV shows like The Newlywed Game, The Love Boat, and The Dating Game, where an actual serial killer once appeared as a contestant, won the date, and was rejected afterward because the woman found him creepy. I was too young to watch these shows, however I am aware of them through the zeitgeist. Outta control.

The JonBenét Ramsey ransom note remains one of the strangest documents in American criminal history. The parents ate guilt as sin. They just are. It is a fact.

The alleged Trump Moscow hotel pee tape on the other hand remains unproven, although a remarkably well put together fake video circulated a few years ago because someone, somewhere, for some unknown reason, invested real time and effort into manufacturing the world’s most notorious and probably nonexistent pee video. Why? Reasons of their own. We will never know.

I began an essay called Was Donald Trump Peed On in Moscow? The likely conclusion: I do not know. Neither do you. That is the point, This does not prevent anyone from having absolute confidence one way or the other. Whatever dude. It was years ago. It’s just a little pee. So what? Let’s move on.

===== =====

Overall it has been a funny week. Then there was the Japanese loan interface informing me that 1974 never existed. Yeah right guy. Get a grip.

Then the three “UN nurses” purportedly in combat zones. Come on lady. You are a big fat clip-jointer. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Get over yourself. Get.a real job lady. Sit this one out.

Yua’s six-day campaign for ¥3,000.

The price of two Yubari melons standing between me and love.

The phrase “crap on a cross,” followed by the reasonable question of how the crap actually got up there.

This was life, basically.

Outta control.

X. Eight Transition Days

This last week did not really resolve. That is the fact.

No big loan arrived. The house did not sell. Sachie had not yet moved out. Thailand is somewhere down the line. Greece too. I cannot wait to hit the road again. I love to travel. I just do.

But something has shifted.

The archive woke up. The Sachie and Litz essays are doing well. The dailies are off to a good start. My son called. It is too hot. My AC doesn’t work. Damn.

That was the week.

Everything else—the lenders, women, cards, trains, cigarettes, apps, travel sites, melons, war-zone nurses, Greek islands, shared walls, Google rankings, impossible birthdays, all the rest—spin around this fact.

Something’s gonna happen.

It always does.

Dedication:

For Litz. You can take this D anytime you like baby.

Epigraph:

Some people claim there’s a woman to blame but I know it’s my own damn fault.
—Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville”

I. Meeting Litz Online

I met Litz on Tinder right around the end of April 2026, just about two and a half months ago today. Relationships often begin before either person realizes that anything has begun. Two strangers exchange a few messages, one of them sends a photograph or a joke, and suddenly an event that seemed inconsequential at the time becomes the first scene in a story.

Within a few days, Tinder suspended my account after yet another unsuccessful attempt to satisfy its increasingly byzantine photographic-identification system. I had failed this test many times before. The platform’s technology remained unable to determine that the large, slightly tired-looking man holding the phone was the same large, slightly tired-looking man depicted in the photographs directly beneath him. I found this highly frustrating, although by then it hardly mattered. Litz and I had already begun speaking elsewhere.

The first thing she sent me was a voice message. It lasted only a few seconds. I believe she simply introduced herself. What I remember best is her voice: low, warm, and unexpectedly musical. Litz had once been a professional singer. In her early twenties, she had received a recording contract in South Korea despite speaking little or no Korean at the time. I still do not entirely understand how that arrangement came about, but after hearing her speak I understood why someone might have wanted to record her.

Her voice reminded me slightly of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies—not because they sounded identical, but because both possessed a quality that is difficult to manufacture: intimacy without effort and deeply sensual. To be frank, her voice turned me on immediately, and almost as quickly she did too. Litz could make a routine greeting sound private. Even when she was discussing work, groceries, family obligations, or the weather in Kochi City, I sometimes had the feeling that she was singing under her breath.

I told her how much I loved her voice. She later told me that she had fallen for me almost immediately. I cannot honestly say that I proceeded with greater caution.

Over the next six weeks, we talked almost every day, usually several times a day. Some calls lasted twenty minutes. Others lasted an hour, two hours, or longer. There were mornings when we spoke shortly after waking, afternoons when one of us called while walking somewhere, and nights when we continued talking long after both of us had run out of any practical reason to remain awake. By the time we met in person, we had accumulated hundreds of hours of conversation.

We discussed our families, our marriages, our children, our work, our financial worries, our health, our failures, and our hopes for whatever remained of the future. I have one adult son; she has two adult children. We spoke about the different paths that had carried us into our early fifties and about the lives we might still construct from there. We talked about music, food, travel, friendship, jealousy, loneliness, and sex. We also talked about nothing at all, which may be the greater test of intimacy. It is relatively easy to tell another person the dramatic events of one’s life. It is harder to remain interested while that person describes a difficult customer, a delayed train, an irritating piece of paperwork, or what she intends to eat for dinner.

With Litz, those ordinary conversations rarely felt ordinary.

At the time, I was emerging from a marriage that had lasted twenty-nine years. My wife and I had mutually decided to divorce earlier that spring, although the practical and emotional consequences of that decision were still unfolding. I had not lived as a single man since my early twenties. I had almost no recent experience of dating and even less understanding of how quickly two people could create a private world through their phones.

My mother and several other people cautioned me that Litz and I might be moving too fast. They were not hostile to her, nor were they trying to discourage me from beginning a new life. They had simply lived long enough to recognize acceleration when they saw it.

In retrospect, they were right.

At the time, however, the speed felt less like recklessness than recognition. After so many years inside one relationship, I mistook the intensity of discovery for certainty. Litz and I had not yet confronted the thousand small realities that distinguish knowing someone from imagining that one knows her. We knew one another’s histories, preferences, fears, and fantasies. We knew how to make each other laugh. We knew when the other person sounded tired or distracted. We knew which subjects produced excitement and which could quietly darken the mood.

That felt like knowledge. Some of it was. Some of it was projection. We also became virtually intimate before meeting in person. We had phone sex only twice, although the number is less important than what the experiences represented. Both of us had been lonely, and the intimacy provided a necessary outlet and a sense of closeness across a considerable distance.

At other times, when her work schedule or my obligations made a longer encounter impossible, we exchanged photographs or allowed each other brief intimate glimpses through the phone.

I do not include this information to be provocative. It matters because the relationship did not begin as a cautious friendship that slowly became romantic after a series of conventional dates. Emotionally and sexually, we had already moved far beyond introduction before we occupied the same room. By the time I traveled to Kochi, we had created expectations that neither of us fully understood.

For most of those six weeks, we had almost no disagreements. Litz sometimes expressed concern about whether I brushed my teeth frequently enough, an impressive question given that she was hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and had never stood close enough to inspect them. I assured her that I did. She remained unconvinced. This should perhaps have told us something.

Mostly, though, we were happy. We called each other baby. We spoke openly about becoming engaged and, eventually, getting married. We discussed travel plans and imagined a shared domestic future with the confidence available only to people who have not yet attempted to share a bathroom, a schedule, a kitchen, or a narrow futon.

I knew we were rushing. I rushed anyway.

I returned to Japan on June 12, two days before my fifty-second birthday. Almost immediately, I began arranging the trip to Kochi. Traveling there from Kyoto or Osaka is neither impossible nor particularly convenient. The round trip cost roughly ¥25,000, and the journey consumed much of a day. At fifty-two, a man should perhaps think carefully before spending that amount of time and money to meet someone he knows primarily as a voice emerging from a small electronic device. I went nonetheless.

By the time I reached Kochi Station, it was close to eleven at night. The late arrival eliminated any possibility of a proper birthday dinner. We bought snacks and wine instead and carried them back to a hotel near the station, where we did our best to turn convenience-store provisions into a meal.

There was an unavoidable strangeness in seeing her at full human scale. For six weeks she had existed inside photographs and rectangles, her face appearing or disappearing according to the strength of the connection. Now she was standing beside me, very small and entirely real. Litz is only four feet eleven inches tall. I am six feet three. The physical contrast between us was nearly comic, although neither of us seemed troubled by it.

We talked, drank wine, ate our improvised dinner, and gradually adjusted to the fact that the person we had imagined was now close enough to touch. The transition was easier than it might have been. Her voice was the same voice. Her humor survived the journey out of the phone. The affection between us did not vanish under the brighter and less forgiving light of an actual room.

We slept together that night and again the following morning. The sex was very good, but what mattered more was the sense of confirmation surrounding it. Whatever else we had misunderstood, the attraction was real. We were comfortable enough to laugh, to pause, and to begin again. Nothing felt forced. The night seemed to promise that the emotional and virtual intimacy of the previous six weeks could become an ordinary physical life.

Had the visit ended the following morning, I might have returned home convinced that we had been right about everything.

But eight hours together seemed inadequate after six weeks of anticipation and a ¥25,000 journey. Litz had an apartment in Kochi City, and I asked whether I might stay with her for a few days. She kindly agreed and began rearranging her work schedule so that we could spend more time together. I was, and remain, deeply grateful for that generosity. Inviting someone into a small home is an act of trust. Inviting a new boyfriend who is more than a foot taller than you and has arrived carrying the accumulated habits of twenty-nine years of marriage may be an act of courage.

I expected to remain for several days.

I stayed for ten.

For the first time, Litz and I would no longer be two people describing our daily lives from a distance. We would have a daily life together. We would wake in the same room, eat the same food, negotiate the same space, and discover whether the ease of our conversations could survive the pressures of proximity.

For the first few days, it did.

II. On Learning Someone in Person

By the end of my stay, I had remained in Kochi for about ten days.

Those ten days contained enough happiness to convince me that our relationship had real promise. They also contained enough friction to suggest that promise alone would not be enough.

Very quickly we settled into something resembling a small domestic partnership. Litz would go to work, though she had generously arranged her schedule so we could spend much more time together than originally planned. I cooked when I could, helped with the laundry, cleaned the apartment, ran errands, and generally tried to make myself useful. In the evenings we wandered around Kochi, stopped for drinks, browsed little shops, cooked simple meals together, and continued discovering one another in the quiet rhythm of ordinary life.

Those ordinary moments are, after all, where real relationships actually live. The first few days were wonderful. Then, almost imperceptibly, small tensions began to appear. The first involved something so minor that I still find it difficult to believe it became an issue at all.

I am a smoker. Rather than smoke inside Litz’s apartment, I stepped onto her small balcony several times a day. While smoking I would occasionally call my family or a close friend back in Kyoto. I was speaking quietly, during the daytime, on private property. To me it seemed entirely unremarkable.

Apparently one of Litz’s elderly neighbors felt otherwise.

The neighbor contacted the building management company and complained that the foreign guest next door was smoking and talking on the balcony. The management company called Litz and politely asked if her guest could simply take phone calls inside the apartment instead. That was all.

There was no threat of eviction. There was no confrontation. Nobody came to the apartment. No police appeared. No lease violations were mentioned. It was, from everything I could tell, a routine request that could have been solved in approximately thirty seconds.

I would gladly have stopped taking calls on the balcony. Instead, something else happened. Litz panicked.

When she told me about the call she was visibly shaken. She was close to tears. She repeatedly told me she might lose the apartment she had worked so hard to obtain. She imagined herself forced to leave. She imagined financial disaster. She imagined the worst possible outcome almost immediately.

I asked her a simple question.

“Baby, did the management company actually say you were going to be evicted?”

“No.”

“What did they say?”

“They asked that you talk on the phone inside.”

“I can absolutely do that.”

For me, the problem was already solved. For her, it had barely begun.

Looking back now, I understand that this was not really about balconies, cigarettes, or phone calls. It was anxiety. Real anxiety.Not theatrical anxiety. Not attention-seeking anxiety. Genuine anxiety that transformed relatively ordinary inconveniences into looming catastrophes.

I had not fully understood the depth of that tendency while we were talking online because online relationships naturally allow each person to present a calmer, more edited version of themselves. Daily life removes that luxury.

Unfortunately, her anxiety had an unfortunate side effect. It triggered my own. There are many unpleasant emotions in life, but few I dislike more than chronic stress. I can handle sadness. I can handle disappointment. I can even handle uncertainty reasonably well. Constant anxiety, however, is simply not good for me.

As Litz became more anxious, I found myself becoming more anxious in return. Neither of us wanted that. Neither of us knew quite what to do about it.

Other small disagreements gradually appeared. From my perspective they were simply the kinds of adjustments every new couple eventually faces. From her perspective they often carried greater emotional weight than I expected.

For example, she became increasingly interested in my daily routines.

How many times was I brushing my teeth? Why had I skipped shaving that morning? Was I taking proper care of myself?

These were perfectly reasonable questions in another context. Had we been married for twenty years, they might have seemed almost affectionate. But we were not married. We were not engaged. We had only recently met in person after knowing one another online.

I was fifty-two years old. She was in her fifties as well. I thought that certain decisions about my grooming, my appearance, and my daily habits still belonged primarily to me. I tried to explain this as gently as I could, just as she tried to explain why these matters genuinely concerned her.

Neither of us was entirely wrong. We were simply beginning to discover the practical differences between two people who had fallen in love through conversation and two people attempting to share everyday life. The gap continued to grow.

Reflecting on our first six weeks together, I am increasingly struck by something that I already knew to some extent. There is, in fact, a tremendous difference between getting to know somebody online and getting to know them in person. This may seem obvious. However, my time with Litz underscored that truth in ways I genuinely did not expect.

By the time I finally left Kochi, we were still together. We were still affectionate. We were still physically intimate. We still considered ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. But beneath the surface, the first fault lines had begun to appear.

III. One Day at a Time

When people hear that a relationship has ended, they almost always want a simple explanation. Someone must have been the villain. Someone must have made the cheated. Someone must have loved less, cared less, tried less, or failed more spectacularly than the other. Real life rarely works that way in my experience.

Litz is one of the kindest people I have ever met. She is generous with her time, devoted to her children, remarkably hardworking, and capable of great tenderness. She also struggles with anxiety in ways that sometimes make ordinary life much harder than it needs to be. I, meanwhile, have my own collection of flaws. I rush into things. I value independence almost to a fault. I can be stubborn, dismissive of worries that seem obvious to others, and too quick to believe that every problem has a quick solution. These qualities have served me well in some areas of my life. In this relationship they sometimes made matters worse.

Neither of us was trying to hurt the other. We were simply carrying different histories into the same room. And perhaps that is what every relationship really is: two biographies attempting to occupy the same present tense. Sometimes they fit together naturally. Sometimes they require patience neither person yet possesses. Sometimes they arrive at exactly the wrong moment, even when the feelings themselves are genuine.

I do not regret meeting Litz. I do not regret falling in love with her. I certainly do not regret the laughter, the conversations that lasted until sunrise, the train rides, her little apartment in Kochi, or the quiet mornings when, for a little while at least, building a future together felt entirely possible. Those moments were real. They remain real.

Today, Litz and I are no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. We are, however, still good friends. We continue to care about one another and talk on the phone, and we both hope that time will provide perspective where emotion sometimes could not. We are discussing the possibility of traveling abroad together later this year. If this happens it happens and if it does not it does not. In either case, we will travel as friends, not as a couple.

The challenges in our relationship were the product of two imperfect people, each bringing old habits, old fears, old hopes, and old wounds into something new. That is not failure. It is simply the complicated business of being human.

So I will keep trying. To become a better man. A better friend. And, if circumstances ever allow, a better boyfriend. I hope Litz finds the same peace she has always wished for me.

Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame. But I know it’s my own damn fault. Perhaps.

Dedication:

For my friend Litz. Let’s just take things one day at a time, baby.

Note: Interested readers may also wish to read the love poem I wrote for Litz during the early part of our relationship. This poem is linked below.