Note: These four poems come from an early era of my writing life—where satire, associative logic, and linguistic mischief are all still operating at full voltage and without much concern for genre stability. They move freely between cultural detritus, private irritation, and comic metaphysics, as if trying to test how far language can bend before it either collapses into nonsense or reveals a hidden structure underneath it. What holds them together is less any single theme than a consistent tone of alert instability: a mind watching itself generate connections in real time, amused by its own excesses but also half-suspicious of what they might mean. Read together, they sit somewhere between parody, dream-logic, and cognitive overproduction—early signals of a style that treats thought not as expression of meaning, but as an event that happens in language.
Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.
Epigraph:
Take me to the ale house Take me to the whorehouse. If I vomit, keep me off of my back.
Loudon Wainwright
This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.
In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
And again:
So when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better that my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will.
Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.
Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.
Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.
The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:
Give me a capon And some roguish companion, A wench and a bottle of sack. Take me to the ale house Take me to the whorehouse. If I vomit, keep me off of my back.
Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.
But Wainwright then pivots:
My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing that I won’t amount to much. But he’s not aware of my secret weapon. I can count on myself in the clutch.
This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.
This continues in the song’s martial register:
Show me a breach, I’ll once more unto it. I’ll be ready for action any day. I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous. In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray. I can drink you under twenty-five tables, Fight and be a ladies man. But all this will change, When I’m good and ready, To become the king of this land.
The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.
What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.
And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.
Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.
That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.
Dedication:
For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.
Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.
Note: We don’t do a lot of film reviews here, but Code 46 earns the exception—partly because Michael Winterbottom is one of my very favorite directors, and still wildly underrated, and partly because this film quietly seeps into you in a way that feels unshakable; set in a world that is clearly not ours but just similar enough to be discomforting—real Shanghai that isn’t quite real, deserts that feel earned, a system of “cover” and genetic law that replaces freedom without ever announcing itself—the film follows William, a kind of intuitive investigator who lives more than feels, and Maria, who works in a bureaucratic “fate factory” and senses, before she knows, that something is already off; their connection unfolds in fragments—interrogation as flirtation, impulse as rebellion, intimacy as violation—until the central truth emerges: in a world where memory can be edited and biology legislated, even love itself can be illegal; the genius of the film is its restraint.
Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton don’t overwhelm you with chemistry, which actually makes the relationship feel more provisional, more real, more doomed—and by the time the system reasserts itself (memory erased, lives restored, Maria exiled with the burden of remembering), you realize the film hasn’t been building to a climax so much as a quiet erasure; it’s less than 90 minutes, barely announces its futurism beyond small details (languages blending, empathy viruses, low-fi surveillance), and yet it lingers in a way much louder films don’t; it also clearly fed into the DNA of the Thin Man—this idea of movement through controlled spaces, of intuition over evidence, of relationships that feel both fated and structurally impossible—and in that sense it’s not just a film I admire, it’s one that got under the skin and stayed there.
Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is less a conventional sci-fi film than a drifting, half-lucid meditation on love, control, and memory. It runs under 90 minutes, but it feels strangely elongated—like a dream you keep slipping back into.
The hero, William (Tim Robbins), isn’t exactly living—he’s existing. A kind of insurance investigator, a “driver” moving through a world defined by pollution, restriction, and bureaucratic control. This isn’t the neon overload of something like Blade Runner—Shanghai here feels real, but off. The deserts outside the cities are harsh and empty; if people can’t get “cover” to move, there’s a reason. The world is closed, stratified, quietly oppressive.
William is established early as compassionate—at a checkpoint, he shows a kind of human softness that marks him apart. But he’s also slippery. He bluffs and charms his way through situations, his “cunning” explicitly noted as one of his professional tools. He doesn’t rely on evidence so much as intuition: “It’s intuition you’re paying for.”
Maria (Samantha Morton) narrates parts of the film, grounding it in something more intimate and unstable. Her sense of time is fractured—lucid dreaming, recurring visions, a sense that something is about to happen. “Every year I have this dream… is this the night I wake?” There’s a constant feeling that fate is closing in. She works in what is essentially a “fate factory,” issuing the cover documents that determine where people can go and what they can do. In this world, fate substitutes for freedom.
When William meets Maria, there’s an immediate sense of déjà vu—she feels she’s met him before. Their early interactions blend interrogation and flirtation. The dynamic is unusual: older man, younger woman, but the aesthetic—her shaved head, the stripped-down environments—blunts the cliché. Their connection feels tentative, exploratory. She tests him; he reads her. There’s attraction, but it’s not fully trusted on either side.
Their relationship develops in fragments: subway encounters, shared meals, small rule-breaking gestures. William knows she’s impulsive—she admits it. The film introduces the idea of engineered “viruses” that alter human ability—perfect pitch, empathy. It’s a strange, understated sci-fi touch that reinforces how mediated everything is, even emotion.
There’s a looseness to their chemistry. Robbins and Morton don’t generate overwhelming heat, but that actually works. The relationship feels uncertain, provisional—two people circling something they don’t fully understand. Their intimacy is uneven, sometimes tentative, sometimes urgent. Maria seems to need William more than he needs her, or at least she feels the stakes more sharply.
The world around them continues to intrude. There are hints of smuggling, of bureaucratic corruption, of quiet desperation. Maria has lived “outside” for ten years—without cover, presumably—which raises questions the film never fully answers. William’s moral stance, when it emerges, feels weak, almost performative.
When he returns home, he tries to reassert control—rejecting Maria, then calling her back. But the narrative destabilizes. A colleague dies; William is sent back to investigate. The technology—video links, surveillance—feels oddly low-fi, as if the future never quite fully arrived.
As William digs deeper, the film’s central taboo emerges. Maria has violated Code 46—a genetic restriction law. Through fragments of dialogue and investigation, William pieces together the truth: they are biologically too similar. A “50% match.” Worse, her mother was a clone—one of many. The implications are quietly devastating.
Maria’s past is altered—an illegal pregnancy erased, along with the associated “memory cluster.” Identity itself becomes unstable. Memory, love, and experience can all be edited, removed, rewritten.
Their attempts to escape—to flee together, to build something outside the system—feel almost doomed from the start. The idea of Jebel Ali, drawn from her father’s stories, becomes a kind of imagined refuge. But the system closes in. A car crash. Memory erasure. Reintegration.
In the end, William is returned home, restored to his life, his wife, his routine. Covered for. Maria, by contrast, is exiled—sent out into the desert with her memories intact. She becomes the one who remembers, who carries the weight of what happened.
The final note is pure loss. Lost love, stripped of even the possibility of reunion. Maria staring out into the distance, holding onto something the world has decided should not exist.
Code 46 is not a perfect film. It’s uneven, sometimes opaque, and emotionally muted in ways that can frustrate. But its ideas linger. It captures something rare: a future where control is soft but absolute, where love is possible but prohibited, and where memory itself becomes the final battleground.
I wrote all night Like the fire of my words could burn a hole up to heaven I don’t write all night burning holes up to heaven no more
Phosphorescent
Note:These reflections were written in March 2019, in the immediate aftermath of a personal experience that destabilized me more than anything I had previously encountered. They were never intended for publication and have not been revised.I’m sharing them now as a record of that moment—not as a finished account, but as a document of what it felt like to be inside it: heightened, contradictory, and often unclear even to myself.
I have written at length about my experiences with the woman I am calling Isobel. You can find the narrative series here, here, and here. You can also find the play I wrote about this time here.
3/28/19:
I went too far. I cannot tell if I went too far on purpose; certainly I pushed and pushed until I came to the end of the line. Like an explorer bent on reaching the furthest possible point, I pushed my mind and body until they could take no more. Now, the wind has gone out of my sails, for how long I cannot say. Perhaps for a long time. Yet I am not at peace, not yet, not now. “I came so far for beauty/ I left so much behind.”
Why was it that I had to roam so far out? What was I running from? Why did I lock my heart up so tightly that it had to explode in order to feel? Was there a point at which I could have taken another turn, or was it all slated to occur just as it did? You can ask why forever and get nowhere. This I know.
So I met a woman and this shook me up. She shook me up. She wasn’t trying to, but she did. My carefully balanced psyche, assembled and jury-rigged over decades, came apart in a matter of days. Anything could have happened, and by the grace of god I was able to retain some kind of governing function, however weak, which helped me stay safe. Over seven weeks everything that could be thrown at me was. I was under massive physical and psychological strain and only my years of amateur study of consciousness and the unconsciousness saved me from succumbing entirely. If I could do it over again (a terrifying notion), I would do almost nothing the same. However, I understand why I made the choices I did. There is little point, really, in interrogating the choices that we made in the light of the circumstances that were in place. Things were, and I reacted to them as I did. There is no getting around this.
Still, I made every mistake in the book. A classic mid-life crisis. Stereo-fucking-typical, scripted to the t. The funny thing is, I knew all about the blueprint and it still happened. “My Dinner with Andre” was a foundation text. I’d read Jung and James Hollis on midlife, extensively. Paradoxically perhaps, the very knowledge of the blueprint may have helped bring the symptoms into being. Or not, maybe I was semi-consciously gathering resources with the implicit foreknowledge that one day they would be needed. Either way, advance information about the terrain only allowed me to stay on my feet—it did not allow me to change course.
I was a Gemini warrior on a private quest, one unseeable from the outside and barely even discernible to myself. So many windmills, so much striving for the grail. To what end? A window seat—a temporary sinacure—and a chance to draw breath at sea level. That’s about it. Can I learn to live as it seems others do, with a little less metaphysical strum und drang, present in the world of the senses, just living? I don’t know what it is like not to live in my head and don’t remember when I started living this way. What I know now though it, it’s a trap. A mire. An maze with no exit. A road to nowhere.
In five years time will this all seem to have been necessary—just part of the process of being a human? God I hope so. That’s what the literature says—the final stage is acceptance. How I am doing with that? I accept that what happened happened. I accept that I made choices that made sense in the moment. I accept that that my personality was in large part a construct and that I am better off without a lot of it. And, I accept the possibility of a silver lining somewhere down the line. The magnitude of the experience and its ripple effects, these are things I am still coming to terms with.
I have seen some things that many will never see. Beautiful and fantastic things, awful things. As a result, I am shaken and somewhat unsteady. That’ll happen when you stray too close to the light. But those things are not mine—they do not belong to me. They have their own location, their own zone, at the edges of the known. I was granted, or gained, access to a sliver of another realm, yet I do not know how deep or how wide that realm is. Right now it is enough to know that it is there, more than enough. Both climbers and divers may feel sick when returning to sea level. I don’t know if I have been climbing or diving or, somehow, both, and in the end it does not matter. Leonard Cohen’s ladies man dies again and again throughout the ages. “It’s like a visit to the moon or to that other star/ I guess you’d go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far.” I didn’t want to go that far, not really, but I did anyway.
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3/29/19:
Why did I give up on my job? Because let’s face it, I gave up. Let’s get some things out in the open. I managed my energy very poorly for a long time. I was using shortcuts and papering over energetic issues to keep going at the pace I was working. For the last three or four years I was also withdrawing bit by bit—taking more half days off, shrugging more off, and putting off longer term planning that was necessary for the program. I was basically exhausted on an energetic level and this led to taking more time for myself and spending too much money just to get a space to reset—to feel something.
What was it that was so exhausting? As I’ve spoken about to many, the constant pushing of the stone uphill, the constant battle to get needs listened to, was certainly tiring. The feeling that it was really just me, a middle man, at the top of a huge operation and I didn’t have the tools or the power to do the things I needed to. The feeling that there were so many program areas that were not as good as they could be. The growing gap in my marriage which allowed me to seek feeling connections recklessly and a little randomly.
After a while, my psyche was being held together by string, by a thread. I was carrying deep wounds from the past which I hardly knew existed, had hardly ever looked at. I was an unitegrated personality in many ways and have no real root here in Japan. The sense of being included in an extended family that existed when I met my wife was long gone. My dream life was giving me warnings and maybe I could have done something with them. I was primed for a crack-up.
What was it about Elodie that enraptured me so entirely? I think it was the combination and sexuality and motherliness, her openness, her painful past which she was so open about, and some kind of deep inherent similarity that we both felt, and proceeded to blow out of all proportion. And she wanted to spend every minute with me! I was around the bend about her within a day. There are funny parts to the story—man I knew I was in trouble. That’s why I was listening to the Mendoza Line non-stop. “Mistakes were made tonight” indeed. I recognized that I was right on the edge and programmed myself not to step over it on the conference. And then I got on the plane and proceeded to step right off the cliff in another way. Long term, I guess it was a better cliff but how I thought I was in the right frame of mind to make that kind of decision, I’ll never understand. The correct move I made was to put people around me to keep me safe. The mistake I made was to recruit them into my plan to leave my job when I should have sought advice and depended on them to guide my decisions.
I feel like I want to say this—school leadership was poor. My decision to leave was not a direct result of the lack of leadership; it was a result of a massive energy change/ charge that took my system by storm and caused me to lose all perspective. However, the energy issues were in many ways a result of stress and repression of anger and frustration over how things were being handled, both over the short and the longer term. The issues were deep—still today my body is not right. I’m fragile, I’m weak, I’m a shell of my former self.
“This is the new not normal”—I’m listening to the new Lambchop album. It’s good of course, but kind of all sounds the same. That’s OK though. How can I get used to this new not normal at this office? There is nothing to do. Maybe that will change, and maybe I can make it change. Right now I am the definition of a clock-watcher. I know I put myself in this position and I’ll endure, but at what cost? Something needs to change, but I know I can’t push myself back into a bunch of old patterns even if I could. Maybe I was acting like an INTP—maybe feeling was the most buried function of all. This is probable.
My damage is deep, generational. If I am right in imagining that for some bizarre reason I had a role to play in clearing up or shouldering this burden and sort of resolving it, well that’s something I did. I certainly felt this way last fall, and that sense, that notion is still present. And now what? I am not special just because I have begun to own up to my damage. The best thing I can do now is to pass on as little as I can to my son—to be as present as I can with him as often as I can.
I also need to extend my working lifespan. This is a priority, and I need to be realistic about this. However, I’ve been stressing myself out to figure this out like today and that I can’t do. My priorities have to be: i) to minimize spending and pay the bills; ii) to cut way back on drinking; iii) to network and think positively about the future little by little. Anything can come. Tell yourself, anything can come. Anything can come.
FIN
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3/30/19:
There is no point in trying to write well right now. I am writing just to pass the time and continue to process my guilt and my heartache. The sense that somehow I was wired wrong is persistent, despite people who care about me trying to tell me otherwise. I mean, I have not been practical, have not made ordered decisions about securing my life and that of my family. I have made ordered decisions in so many other areas, not this one. How could that even be? I have no real answer to this—magical thinking, arrogance, the feeling that I could somehow tread water forever. I don’t know.
Ann wrote that I might have a form of PTSD from the collision with Elodie. This rings true. Meeting her shook up my mind and body at a core level. The ideas of animating archetypes are not just ideas. They are real. When Elodie and I fell into one another, I lost all sense of self. I wanted to give everything and anything to her, falling over myself to do so, to explain, to unburden myself. She was attracted and fascinated by some of this, but was also overwhelmed by the extent and speed of it all. On my end, I was overwhelmed too, overwhelmed by the depth of the attraction and how far I fell into her. We talked, and I could not figure out was this an ascent or a descent. So strange that it could be both. It was more a trip into the infinite. A trip for sure. I exited London and I was undone. I was terrified and thought I was bulletproof at the same time. I should have leaned more into the terror—I should have slowed down and assessed. This I did not do.
Calling Lynn and getting the idea of the kundalini was helpful. This was another juncture I could have turned for the better—tried to get grounded in a more appropriate way. Like the runner I once was, I just thought I could run the energy to ground. In the end I did, too late and with too much cost. So here I sit in a purgatory of my own making, bereft. Is this what I was destined to have to deal with—the emptiness, the total lack of self without the worldly tasks that were set me? I am having new thoughts—thoughts about the break up of extended families and that this is one of the core problems in modern life, perhaps the core one. Loneliness is probably an epidemic, almost certainly.
For a moment there was music, there was dance and movement, there was sexual confidence, there was bravodo. No longer. Why can’t those feelings, those urges, be regulated and controlled? I suppose they can, with practice. Apply myself, that’s something I’ve always had difficulty doing toward a skill. Variety seeking—always on the lookout to change direction. How boring.
I know I need to focus on my health, but how can I do that with these days stretching in front of me like this? I am in a tough situation. This is a fact. I can’t write my way out of this. What am I supposed to be learning? What is it even possible to learn here? Patience, humility? Patience for what, for reinstatement to the culture that pushed me over the edge? I read about principles under stress in Australia and no one wanting the job. I can understand why. I never wanted to be that high up either—really didn’t. I only accepted it because I was apparently the best person. What could have been different? I did all I could to delegate, well, I tried. I felt guilt over my classes being below-par, could not stop working on the weekend, got worn down.
There has to be a silver lining. Well, one is the conference lifestyle is over. That had to end, and an end was forced on me. That’s a net positive. I may be able to address my habits. This is going to be super hard because of the sleep and because I gain pleasure from the pub. Can I keep the pub and drop the rest? That has to be the goal.
Dedication:
For Elodie. I love you.
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Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up the difficulties of modern romance.
Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.
A Five-Act Play
EPIGRAPH
I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me Sat back in a chair Like a princess from a faraway place Nobody’s nice When you’re older your heart turns to ice
Note: This piece takes up the 2008 record The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats as a tightly structured emotional sequence rather than a loose collection of autobiographical songs, tracing how John Darnielle moves from childhood survival through adolescent endurance, imagined justice, outward identification with others’ suffering, and finally a grounded, unsettling encounter with memory and partial reconciliation.
Epigraph:
I leaned my head in close to the little record player on the floor
So this is what the volume knob’s for.
Released in 2005, The Sunset Tree is widely regarded as the defining record by The Mountain Goats and the most directly autobiographical work by John Darnielle. The album centers on his childhood and adolescence under an abusive stepfather, and the long, uneven emotional project of trying—never quite succeeding—to understand or forgive that past. It has become the band’s best-known record, both for its clarity and its force, with songs like This Year and “No Children” forming its core identity in the wider culture.
Dance Music
“Dance Music” opens in a small, specific place—Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo—and immediately establishes the strange clarity of childhood memory: precise details without full understanding. A television hums with the Watergate hearings, a child senses that something is wrong but cannot name it, and a record player becomes an unlikely refuge. From that point, the song moves with quiet precision between moments of violence, escape, and interior unraveling, compressing years of experience into just over two minutes.
What strikes me is how firmly he anchors the song in space and time: Johnson Avenue, San Luis Obispo, five or six years old, Watergate hearings on TV. It’s precise enough to feel real, but not over-described. This isn’t abstraction—it’s memory with edges.
The child doesn’t understand what’s happening, but senses it. That “spidy sense” of something wrong is exactly right. The record player becomes a kind of accidental sanctuary. And then the line about the volume knob—discovering control for the first time—still hits hard. It’s a moment of agency inside chaos.
Cut forward, and nothing has resolved. The same house, the same structure, but now adolescence, relationships, internal damage. The “secret sickness” feels like a slow internalisation of everything that could not be processed earlier. The movement language—twisting roads, cul-de-sacs—suggests trying to find exits that don’t exist, or lead back into themselves.
And then the final image: police, dance music still playing. No resolution, just continuation under pressure. The refusal to close is part of the point.
This Year
If “Dance Music” shows how survival begins, “This Year” shows how it is sustained. Still rooted in the same autobiographical terrain of John Darnielle’s adolescence, the song shifts from memory to immediacy. It is one of the most recognizable songs by The Mountain Goats, defined by urgency, repetition, and forward motion.
This song is about survival and grit. The details—an older car, struggling engine, movement through space—create a physical sense of instability. You can feel the effort of motion.
The repetition is not optimism—it’s insistence. Saying something until it becomes structurally real. “Manifest” is the right word. This is survival being constructed in real time.
The narrative sections imply violence without naming it. Everything is loaded, but never fully articulated. That restraint is what makes it powerful.
And the ending—moving toward a distant, almost mythic place like Jerusalem—carries the sense of escape not as fantasy, but as direction.
Up the Wolves
Placed mid-record, “Up the Wolves” becomes the pivot between endurance and imagination. Where This Year insists on survival and Song for Dennis Brown expands suffering outward, this song introduces the possibility of emotional reordering—of imagining forgiveness, escape, and restructured power.
The key idea here is that damage is not escapable—it follows you. But alongside that is the introduction of imagined relief. The more aggressive imagery is not literal—it’s emotional escalation, the mind testing what justice might feel like if it were unconstrained.
The Roman myth framing matters: origin stories built from violence and absence. It lifts the personal into something archetypal. This is the first time the album seriously considers not just survival, but transformation of structure.
Song for Dennis Brown
At first glance, this appears to be a departure—a tribute song placed late in a deeply personal record. But it functions instead as expansion. The focus shifts from autobiography to shared human conditions of mortality, damage, and endurance.
Dennis Brown died in 1999, widely associated with Rastafari culture and a life shaped by both musical legacy and personal struggle.
This is not just about Dennis Brown—it is identification. The song places him and the speaker inside the same pattern of fragility and consequence.
The world is not paused by death. It continues. That’s the structural point. The imagery of decay alongside innocence creates dissonance—life continuing in spite of damage.
The violent reworking of natural imagery reinforces that nothing remains untouched. This is the album’s outward turn. Not introspection, but scale.
Pale Green Things
As the final track, this returns to specificity. The stepfather is no longer a looming figure of power but a weakened, aging man after a heart attack, still performing small routines at the racetrack. The focus is observational rather than symbolic.
We are grounded in physical detail: racetrack, stopwatch, Racing Form. A man reduced but still engaged with structure The “pale green things” recur as quiet markers of life continuing—small growth, persistence, indifference.
The shift is subtle but crucial: the speaker is now present with him in this space. Not outside it. Memory returns not to violence but to observation. That is the emotional pivot. What remains is not resolution, but recognition. The mind returns to this moment rather than others.
Closing reflection
Across these five songs, The Sunset Tree traces a coherent emotional progression: from childhood survival in “Dance Music,” to adolescent insistence in This Year, to imagined restructuring in Up the Wolves, to outward identification in Song for Dennis Brown, and finally to direct, grounded confrontation in Pale Green Things.
What makes the record so enduring is not that it resolves the question of abuse or forgiveness, but that it refuses to simplify it. Survival is shown as repetition, will, imagination, projection, and finally memory itself. Forgiveness appears not as an endpoint, but as something unstable, partial, and deeply contested.
It is also worth noting—without collapsing interpretation into autobiography—that these questions are not abstract. Many listeners carry their own histories of harm and difficulty in forgiving those histories fully. I would include myself in that broader human category. What makes this record remarkable is not that it answers forgiveness, but that it shows how seriously it must be attempted, even when it remains unresolved.
That is why The Sunset Tree endures: it treats survival and forgiveness not as conclusions, but as ongoing acts of attention.
Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.
Epigraph:
Kim You Bore Me to Death
—Grandaddy
I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.
What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.
Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.
NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.
By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.
We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.
At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.
By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.
There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.
Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.
He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.
By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.
“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”
¥4000 was a lot for me then.
“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”
She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.
“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”
“For not buying a T-shirt?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”
And that was it. Never went back.
Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.
“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”
I never heard that expression before or since.
John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.
When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.
“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.
Didn’t matter. It kept happening.
One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”
“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
At least he asked.
John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.
He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.
John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.
Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.
He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.
He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.
We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.
The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.
I didn’t.
A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.
There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.
“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”
“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”
There were a few good reasons for that.
One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.
Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.
So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.
On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”
Didn’t really translate.
By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.
I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.
Out step Paul and Yoko.
Ruh roh.
Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.
Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.
Paul shrugged it off.
“Easy come, easy go.”
We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.
He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.
That’s when I started to believe him.
Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.
It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.
Dedication:
For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.
Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.
Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara
Note: This piece was written for the Psiber Dreaming Conference offered by IASD in September 2018, under a strict word limit that forced a level of compression I don’t always allow myself. It draws on a series of lucid dreaming experiences to explore how we determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and why those determinations so often fail under pressure. Looking back, I’m less interested in the specific techniques of lucidity than in the broader question the paper circles: what happens when our usual markers of reality—stability, plausibility, even self-awareness—prove unreliable? The result is less a theory of dreaming than a compact record of trying to think clearly inside a system that continually revises its own ground.
Epigraph I:
The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent. That is my peculiarity.
—Carl Jung
Epigraph II:
The conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless. They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random {…} Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgement.
—Chuck Klosterman
Dream I: I awake in a warehouse. The bed is against one wall–on the other is a thirty-foot mountain of cantaloupes. I realize I am dreaming. I get up and run my hands over the cantaloupes. They feel absolutely real—as tangible as in life. I remember that tangibility is not a viable reality test—I’ve made that mistake before. Now fully lucid, I decide to levitate. The room dissolves, and I float suspended somewhere in dense, colourless space. Eventually, I feel the need to come back to earth but cannot locate it. I feel something beneath me. This is my bed, and I awake back in the warehouse, relieved yet exhilarated. The cantaloupes are still there, however I don’t question them. I just happen to live in a room full of fruit. Moments later I awake again, this time in diurnal “reality.”
The most common dream experience is of waking from a dream we take to be real, only to understand that it was “just a dream.” However, a subset of dreamers, probably more than we generally imagine, have experienced lucid dreams, dreams in which, to some degree, they are aware they are dreaming. Lucid dreamers may also experience “false awakenings”[1]— the sensation of waking progressively through dream “levels.” False awakenings can be disorienting (Robert Waggoner writes that after seven successive false awakenings he “would accept {…} any reality {…} as long as it stayed put”[2]), or sought after (Daniel Love and Keith Hearne have independently developed techniques to induce false awakenings[3]). Regardless of the desirability of the experience, the existence of dream levels, far from a simple oddity, provides a potential window into massive metaphysical questions.
First, we need to understand how dreamers use evidence to establish whether they are dreaming or awake.
II:I am in a dreaming contest with another dreamer. The contest begins and slimy amphibians begin to appear. Some resemble frogs;others are in shapes that don’t exist in nature. Their size varies from that of a pinky to that of a fist and they are verycolourful.I am nottryingto dream them, rather they are spilling everywhere around my feet. I sense this is a dream and check on the other dreamer. He is standing to my right in empty space. He looks just like me and hasn’t begun his dream.
This dream is non-lucid at first and becomes lucid because of the bright color and absurd number of the amphibians. An awareness beyond the dream senses a non-natural situation.
III: I am picking out fruit at a fruit stand. There are some huge avocados, almost too good looking. I wonder if I am in a dream, and touch an avocado to check. The one I choose is ripe and soft—I squeeze it a little. There is no doubt that I am having a tactile experience, and I conclude I am not dreaming. Of course, I am.
Two dreams, two types of evidence. In Dream II, I correctly identify the amphibians as anomalous, and become lucid. In Dream III, my attempt to test the lifelikeness of the avocado as an indicator fails. Simply put, realistic sensation is not sufficiently indicative of reality. Love agrees: “we are not looking for a qualitative difference in how realistic the experience feels {…} we are {…} on the lookout for issues with stability and plausibility.”[4] In Dream I, at first the huge pile of melons in my bedroom appears implausible and triggers lucidity; after moving up a dream level, my mind overrides the implausibility by “justifying”[5] the anomaly.
Because we awake from sleep and dreams every morning, we are very familiar with the experience of awakening. It is therefore unsurprising that when we wake inside a dream we accept the new reality as the waking world, even if it contains anomalous elements.
IV: I am in a huge house where a large group of families on motorcycles arrive. The families are making noise all night. I realize I am dreaming and levitate over to the families. Later I decide to wake up. I ease myself out of bed, bumping my nose into an ironing board. The room looks and feels exactly like my room. I don’t recall theironingboard being there, but whatever. Moments later I awake again—the situation is identical, only, the ironing board is gone. I feel a pit in my stomach, wondering what is ultimately real.
Dream IV is a good example of how dream levels can become increasingly realistic as we move through them. An ironing board in front of the bed is (for me) more plausible than a house full of bikers. Dreams such as this beg the question of how we can ever be sure we are awake. I have dreamt of getting up, walking to the front door, opening it, and emerging into the sunshine in my neighbourhood. At every point, this dream felt entirely realistic with no anomalies. After experiences like this, is it wholly unrealistic that we could dream an entire morning? An entire day?
There are different ways to approach this kind of question. The first is to use rigorous reality tests.[6] Using reality tests after each fresh awakening can help us filter anomalies in what may be an increasingly realistic dream state. The second is to open ourselves to a wider set of questions. Although space limitations make full exploration of these questions impossible, modern dreamers would do well to recall that throughout recorded history people have speculated on the meaning of the dream state and what it can tell us about space, time, life after death, and the nature of reality.
As dreamers, we know that dreamtime behaves very differently than waking time. Robert Moss distinguishes between Chronos (“linear time”) and Kairos (the “spacious now.”) He writes that when Kairos operates in waking life, “ordinary time is {…} suspended or elastic,” and that the world can “quiver or shimmer.”[7] Moss’ Kairos time sounds a great deal like dreamtime. Jung in his memoir writes “our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity,”[8] and “there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.”[9] Jung makes multiple connections between dreams and life after death, suggesting that our waking world,
in which we are “conscious,” may in fact be a projection of a more “real” and permanent, even timeless, unconscious.[10]
In the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, the yogi prepares for death through dreams and meditation, entering death consciously by releasing the bodily energy in such a way that the body partially or entirely dissolves into pure light. This “rainbow body” is well-documented in Tibet and China, and cases of this phenomenon have been reported across multiple religious traditions.[11] Finally, Moss connects dreams with the much discussed Many Worlds theory, as does, in popular culture, Richard Linklater. [12]
V:I am among a large group ofpeople on the top floor of a building. We lie down on our backs and formbundles. The molecular structure of these bundles begins to dissolve, webecome lighter, thentotally empty. This process is dictated by a power outside of us which doesn’t speak. Once empty, we have the choice to become anything we want. I choose to become white light. Suddenly I am transported through space in a burst of pure white light, my old body left entirely behind. This is the most peaceful and thrilling feeling in the world. Then, I am back into a new bundle, trying again to become empty. I make progress, but it is hard and I am over-concentrating. Progress ceases; I wake up.
Although I have thought at length about dreams, I am a normal person with a normal job, dreaming anonymously night after night. I don’t belong to a spiritual tradition, am not a yogi or a meditating hermit. As a lucid dreamer, like many of us, I am self-taught. While we anonymous dreamers are wise to suspend judgement about the particularities of a theory as mind-boggling as dreams as an interface to infinite parallel universes, it is perhaps not by chance that my dreams of ascending to a state of pure white light bear close resemblance to innumerable near-death experiences or the reported manifestations of a lifetime of dream yoga. Although admittedly outside of our normal rational mode of apprehension, the experience of journeying through multiple dream levels, and the energy and amazement which often accompany these experiences, may point the way toward worlds far above, below, or beyond our own.
Who are we in our trek through life? Are we the maker, or the made? The writer, or the page? The actor, or the stage? The happening, or the happened to? Perhaps, our ability to exercise agency in the vastness of forever depends in part on learning to navigate levels of “reality,” however we encounter them. Or, perhaps, journeying to the far side of the dream can bring us face to face with that which is actually dreaming us.
Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.
Epigraph:
I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade He said some things are really best left unspoken But I prefer it all to be out in the open
Billy Bragg
I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.
Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.
So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.
I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.
My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.
One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.
Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.
I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.
I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.
One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.
As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”
Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.
I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”
Electrical banana Is gonna be a sudden craze
(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).
Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great Englishteachers and mentors.
That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’sOh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.
Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.
Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.
The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.
As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.
Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.
Epigraph
“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.” — Uncle Tupelo
I. Return
On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.
The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.
I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.
I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.
I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.
In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.
It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.
II. Suzaku
My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.
There were no students.
Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.
It was, in a word, dreary.
I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.
Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.
By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.
III. Drift
If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?
Mostly at home.
During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.
I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.
When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.
Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.
In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.
IV. Before 9
Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.
The bartender most nights was Miyuki.
Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.
She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.
During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.
That was the culture for several years.
V. Leave
In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.
Oddly, I felt relieved.
VI. The World Changes
Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.
The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.
Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.
VII. Return
In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.
Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.
So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.
The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.
In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.
The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.
VIII. Administrative Comedy
During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.
The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.
Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.
I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.
IX. Reinstatement
Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.
My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.
After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.
The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.
