March 2018

I stared at the white board in my gym open 24 hours: a boutique strength gym called Silo Strength. It was in a seedy part of Central San Jose that was two doors down from a building with a whorehouse upstairs. Still, $60 a month to have 24/7 access to elite strength and conditioning equipment all to myself was worth every penny.

The white board was full of whiskey cocktail recipes and different types of American whiskies with their respective mash bills, origins, and flavor profiles.

Two weeks prior, I had the privilege of seeing one of my original Five Points managers at the bar’s staff party. Marilyn Lau was a petite Taiwanese woman with a level of precision and adoration for craft cocktails that was awe-inspiring. She didn’t need to be in this world, but she chose this world. As a graduate from UCSD in marketing with a cushy Silicon Valley marketing job, only true love for the industry and craft would be able to lure her to the cocktail world. Marilyn was happy to see me be a fully fledged craft cocktail bartender, and Christiana let her know my ambitions of moving to San Francisco to work and train.

Atsushi, the General Manager of Five Points had announced he’d be moving to San Diego in July, and I knew Sid would likely leave with him. I also knew that without the two of them, the place would go to hell hence my plans to move to San Francisco to work in bars and take BART down to Dublin to train at Combat Sports Academy.

My interview with Marilyn made me level up mentally, thinking on my feet for answers I never knew I had, and she recognized that I, a twenty-one year old freshly coming into the industry needed to be hazed in order to make it as a barback. My trial shift called a “stage” in the industry was impressive, but my first couple shifts with her left a lot to be desired which she subtly made known. But as time went on, she had an almost maternal instinct kick in that in truth, I always appreciated. It’s always nice when someone’s looking out for you, and despite her no longer being my boss, she was kind enough to refer me to a contact of her’s in San Francisco who had an opening for a part time bartending position at an American whiskey bar on the water in the Embarcadero.

Hard Water had close to 500 American whiskeys on the back bar, and in order to ensure my success in the interview that I received on somewhat short notice, I decided to pull an all-nighter to cram an upgrade in whiskey knowledge.

It would be a nasty transition going back and forward between San Jose and San Francisco for work without a car, but if I could get my foot in the door in San Francisco, it would only be a matter of time until I found second bartending job in the city and was finally out of San Jose’s clutches.

San Francisco is the city that raised me. Everything that I am is because of San Francisco.

I could list 25 different American whiskey cocktails, but the mash bill percentages were admittedly stumping me. There was too much to cover in my original bartending training, so mash bills were a very recent concept for me. Drinking with Atsushi off the clock two days prior gave me a decent head start.

I decided to take a break from studying and walked over to a folding chair to sit and clear my mind.

The same song played in my mind in a constant heavy swing much like its weighted riff.

I had gotten the text two days prior. Screenshots of a conversation between Celine’s boyfriend, Jason and some girl he met at a bar.

I checked Instagram and saw her posting an image of herself dressed in black with vindictive expression and angry tears in her eyes. She took it down almost immediately. That’s her modus operandi: unabashed lashing out followed by a sensible self-censoring and retraction. Few courses of action are more British.

She was so distraught when I texted her, so hurt and so appalled that he would dare cheat on her. In all honesty, she had a point. He wasn’t very handsome or in shape, but he had that kind of British “lad” charisma that led many a drunken girl into bad decisions with him. Few tactics are more British.

This woman who had my heart was heartbroken, and I couldn’t stop listening to the same song over and over again: “Lose Yourself,” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, my latest and greatest musical obsession.

The song is eight minutes of oddly comforting sad singing and weighted, slow guitar that leaves one with an addictive reprieve.

“My love, you’re in pain so far from where I can comfort you. I love you dearly, but I’ve moved on from the need for romantic love and companionship. I pray to walk closer and closer to God to reconcile my own mortality and every word, deed, and thought. To stare death in the face and not flinch. But goodness, my love, I hate to see you in this kind of pain,” my heart beckoned out.

I had caught myself after my morning Orthodox prayer rule praying to God to enlighten Celine’s mind and heart to believe, not out of any romantic desire but out of genuine care for someone I loved. But impulse gave me the vision of “but what if?”

I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to fix her pain, and I didn’t know what to say to her anymore. I just had to move on.

I checked the time after playing the song a couple more times and saw it was seven in the morning. I needed to get a move on. I needed to work out to jolt myself fully awake, shower, and grab an Uber to the Caltrain headed to the city in order to make it on time for my interview at Hard Water at Noon.

I sprinted, lifted, jumped, and shadowboxed before I showered, caffeinated, dressed, and departed.

I caught the Northbound train to San Francisco just in time from Santa Clara Station and mastered my mash bill memorization before the train rolled up to the city on 4th and King, just a couple blocks from the Willie Mays statue.

I was overwhelmed with joy. To be in the city again, to be in my home was enough to make me wholeheartedly euphoric. To inhale the salty sea air and feel the breeze grace my face before going forth into this masterpiece of seven miles by seven miles was a gift. I triumphantly marched up the Embarcadero being blessed with views of the Bay, all the way to the Ferry Building that housed Hard Water.

“Hi, welcome in. How can we help?”

“Hi, I have an interview with Eric Adams?”

“Okay! Let’s see here…are you Arthur?”

“Yes, yes I am.”

“Great! If you just want to have seat at the bar, he’ll be right with you when it’s time.”

“Great, thanks!”

Hard Water was a very tall space that made it seem much larger than it actually was. The walls were bright white with large windows granting a wealth of natural light. The floor was made of dark gray concrete, and the horseshoe-shaped bar that dominated the center of the space was topped with white marble. Bar stools were attached to the ground and topped with wood, and the back bar was the star of the space, towering over every patron while housing the main attraction: absurd amounts of whiskey.

The bartender whose well was facing me was a pale but vaguely middle eastern-looking girl with long black hair, intense eyes, and a meticulous yet frantic way of working the lunch rush. She looked up at me and made a pause before her expression softened into one of curiosity.

“Hey, sorry, are you Arthur?”

“Yeah! Am I interviewing with you instead?”

“Oh! No, no my name is Jessie, I uh, well I know Marilyn.”

“Oh! You’re Marilyn’s girlfriend I heard about!”

“Oh, well no. I mean, we’re not official yet, but yeah, hopefully soon,” Jessie replied while looking off to the side, grinning, and blushing.

“Wow, you seem to really like her.”

“I mean, yeah, yeah I do, she’s uh, she’s amazing.”

“Yeah, she really is. I really enjoyed working with her.”

“Yeah! That’s right! You got to train under her!”

“Well, I never got to formally train under Marilyn cause she was gone before I got the promotion, but I naturally still learned a lot from her while I barbacked for her.”

“Yeah she’s just a wealth of knowledge isn’t she?”

“She really is.”

“Hi, uh, Arthur?” said a voice to my right.

I turned and saw a tall, bald white man roughly in his mid 40s with immensely positive energy and an open assuredness that is hard to come by in then modern era.

“Yeah, hi, are you Eric?”

“Yes! Welcome to Hard Water. Are you ready to get going?”

“Absolutely.”

I turned back to Jessie and said “it was great to meet you Jessie, I hope to see you again soon!”

“Yeah you too! Good luck! It would be great to work with you!”

“Thank you! And yeah, you too!”

“Alright Arthur, welcome to Hard Water. How are you doing today?”

“I’m great, how are you?”

“I’m doing well, thanks. So you’re coming to us recommend by Marilyn Lau is that right?”

“Yeah, that’s correct.”

“And how do you know Marilyn?”

“Marilyn was one of the original managers who hired me at Five Points down in San Jose.”

“Ah, I see, and what kind of place if Five Points?”

“It’s a high volume craft cocktail bar near the SAP Center.”

“So let me guess, you’re making rounds of both Jack and cokes and boulevardiers all night long.”

“Basically, yeah.”

“And how do you like it over there?”

“Honestly, I love it.”

“Then what makes you want to come work here?”

“Well, if I’m being honest, my long term ambitions are in competitive fighting, and those ambitions would be better served in the city, hence my seeking employment up here.”

“I see. What kind of fighting?”

“Muay Thai and kickboxing.”

“I see, very cool. It makes sense now that I get a good look at you, you’re a pretty big guy. So tell me why you got into this industry in the first place.”

“Well, I was working in a Silicon Valley startup, and I realized that life wasn’t for me. So I started looking for work that would allow me the schedule to train during the day and work at night. I started as a bouncer at a night club next door to Five Points, and I eventually worked my way up to being a bartender.”

“I see. So what do you actually like about this job? I mean, assuming you actually do like anything about this job.”

“Fighting is a very selfish, solitary life. It’s me, me, me, and me. I have to eat these foods, and lift these weights, and do these combinations, but when I’m behind this bar, it’s my job to worry about the well-being of everyone else which is liberating. And even greater than this, it’s a profession that’s an amalgamation of a bunch of different interests of mine ranging from history to ergonomics to etiquette, so I couldn’t ask for a better job to pay the bills.”

“That’s very interesting. Say more about that.”

“Which part?”

“That last bit there about history, ergonomics, and etiquette.”

“Well, my dad raised me as a history buff from a young age, so to literally be making these cocktails that all have stories behind them is to serve people living, breathing recollections of moments frozen in time. As far as ergonomics go, using the same footwork for kickboxing has made me a better bartender, while being in a profession that requires precision with fine motor skills and good speed of decision trains the same part of the brain as martial arts. As far as etiquette goes, I feel like we’re in a time that’s increasingly devoid of ritual and custom, but the bar world is full of customs and small rituals that are alive and well that bind people together so to speak. Sorry, that’s a really long answer, but it’s the God’s honest truth.”

“It’s also a very good answer. So much of what we do with food and beverage is what binds us as people. That’s why this all more than just pouring drinks.”

“Absolutely.”

“So let’s get into nuts and bolts shall we?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Tell me what you know about whiskey.”

“I imagine you’re asking specifically about American whiskey?”

“Yeah, well actually, how about this, why don’t you tell me about your favorite whiskeys and why they’re your favorite whiskeys.”

“Okay, well my favorite all time is a bit stereotypical, but it’s still Lagavulin 16.”

“Ah, an Islay Scotch guy. So you like all the smoke then?”

“Yeah, but specifically Lagavulin and maybe Caol Ila have the proper full-bodies to it that captures the smoke and makes it more approachable compared to something like Laphroaig.”

“That’s a great way of putting it. Yeah, myself personally, Laphroaig is a bit too much for me.”

“Yeah, it tastes like smoke, smoke, and more smoke. I mean it can be great for mixing in some shaken cocktails, but it’s definitely not my go-to for sipping.”

“Me neither. Now tell me about your American whiskey preferences.”

“Honestly, the more I drink American whiskey, the less of a bourbon guy I am.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“As a default setting, I don’t like the sweetness of the corn in the mash bill as much as I like the spice of rye. It’s almost as if I enjoy having something to contend with when I drink.”

“Very interesting. What was the rye that made you realize that?”

“We have Rittenhouse 100 proof in the well at Five Points, and I could shoot that, sip that, and have it in an Old Fashioned over and over and over again.”

“If you had to describe what it is about Rittenhouse that does that for you, what would it be?”

“It just has this prominent black pepper note from beginning to end that you don’t actually find in any other rye. Templeton is more rooted in cinnamon notes, and Overholt has that higher corn percentage in the mash bill that reminds me too much of bourbon.”

“If you had to pick a bourbon to drink, what would it be?”

“Johnny Drum.”

“Why?”

“The texture is a bit glossier, and for whatever reason, within the context of my own palette, that negates the sweetness that comes with it being such a high corn bourbon.”

“Very good. Give me your go to Old Fashioned spec.”

“Two and a half ounce Rittenhouse, half ounce Demerara syrup, four dash angostura bitters, grapefruit peel garnish.”

“Very nice. I like the grapefruit choice. Vieux Carre.”

“Three quarter cognac, three quarter bourbon, three quarter sweet vermouth, one quarter Benedictine, two dash angostura, two dash peychaud, maraschino cherry garnish.”

“Perfect. Favorite whiskey cocktail lately?”

“A Stargazer.”

“Oh wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard that one. What do you like about it?”

“It settles so well over time. Something about it makes me want to sit and write for a while.”

“You write?”

“On occasion.”

“I see, very interesting. You know what, one last wild card for you. Pegu Club.”

“Two ounce gin, three quarter lime juice, three quarter dry curaçao, two dash orange, one dash angostura, lime wheel garnish.”

“Wow, that is juicy, but I’ll take it. Well done, most people don’t get that one.”

“Thank you.”

“Well young man, we have two shifts here that are opening up, one on Sunday and one ln Thursday, how does that sound?”

“That sounds great.”

“Excellent, so I’ll be in touch with you via email about next steps. Do you have any other questions?”

“Not that I can think of, no.”

“Well in that case, Arthur, it was great to meet you, and I look forward to having you aboard.”

“Thank you so much, I’m very much looking forward to being on the team.”

“Excellent, have a good one now, I’ll see you soon.”

“You too, speak soon.”

After Eric left the building, I got a grin from Jesse.

“Sounds like you crushed it bro!”

“Honestly, I think so. I don’t want to celebrate before officially being hired, but it looks like you and I are going to be working together.”

“Yes! I’m really looking forward to it, Marilyn spoke really highly of you.”

“Did she actually?”

“Of course.”

“Gosh, that’s really nice to know. I always felt these high expectations from her I felt I was never meeting.”

“Oh you were definitely meeting them.”

“Wow. Thanks for telling me that, I genuinely had no idea. Anyway, I won’t keep you cause it looks like you’re getting busier back there, but I’ll see you soon!”

“Yeah you too, great to meet you!”

Leaving that place and stepping out into the buzzing Embarcadero with many a working professional strolling during their lunch, taking in the Spring San Franciscan sun, I was on cloud nine. I was finally coming home.

“To finally claw long enough to make it back here, to actually forge a life worth living. It’s been so long, I almost didn’t think it was possible. I’ll be here, working, training, praying, living. I’ll be in the praxis I was meant to be in. It will be intense. It will be brutal. It will be precise. It will be true. God. Thank God. Thank you God for this. For the opportunity to live and die by the sword,” I thought to myself in racing, barraging fashion.

I couldn’t go back to San Jose just yet. I couldn’t reach this high in this Northernmost tip of the peninsula just to immediately fall all the way back down the bay to the hellhole.

No. I had to stay and make a day of it. I had to be with my city again.

I walked without a plan, as I had done many times there. I walked up the Embarcadero until I stumbled upon a tapas restaurant on the water I had been to four years prior with my father. He was outraged by the prices and portions and stormed out to drive us to his more “bang for your buck” tapas bar in the Mission District. I didn’t make a habit of splurging, but on this day, I felt so inclined.

I walked in and went straight to the bar top, surrounded by glass with a view of the water. A shorter, charming Asian woman with glasses roughly in her late 30s greeted me.

“Hi welcome in.”

“Hey, thanks.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Im in the city looking for bar jobs and am making a day out of it now.”

“Wait you’re looking to work here at Coquetta?”

“I mean, if you’re hiring, yeah.”

“We’re fully staffed in the bar right now.”

“Then I’m that case I’m just drinking.”

“Are you dining too?”

“Yeah, I should probably eat.”

“Okay, then here’s a lunch menu for you. Can I get you something to drink to start? Sangria maybe?”

“Sangria would be immense, thank you.”

“You got it.”

“Gosh, you can’t beat this view can you?”

“No, you really can’t. I literally never get tired of coming into work because of it.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“Can I put in any food orders for you?”

“Oh, yeah. Let me get the calamari, the manchego, and the Iberico please.”

“You got it. Here’s your sangria.”

“Thank you so much.”

“So how’d you find this place?”

“Well, truth be told, I came here with my dad four years ago. He’s a Spaniard, so naturally he gravitated to this place.”

“I see. So what brings you here now?”

“I just interviewed for a bartending gig up here.”

“Where at?”

“I’d rather not say before it’s finalized. I get a bit superstitious about this kind of thing.”

“All good, I totally get you. Are you bartending somewhere else in the Bay right now?”

“Yeah, downtown San Jose.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s a bit rougher for sure.”

“Have you applied anywhere else in the city?”

“Not yet, but I might stick around until 15 Romolo opens.”

“Gosh. I love Romolo. I haven’t been in ages though.”

“Yeah, I’ve actually never been before.”

“Oh really? Gosh, that’s like the bar for the bartenders of San Francisco. That’s like everyone’s home.”

“That’s what I hear. It looks amazing.”

“It really is.”

“Could I get the Barça gin and tonic please?”

“Sure.”

“Also, do you mind if I ask you something a bit out of left field?”

“Sure.”

“Do you believe in the concept of a soulmate?”

“Like ‘the one?’”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Like there being one person out there for you who is THE person for you?”

“Yeah.”

“I used to.”

“Why only used to?”

“Because the one I thought was the one died on me in a car crash.”

“Oh my gosh.”

“Yeah…”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks. I mean it’s fine now, that was like six years ago now. I’m married, I’ve got kids, so you know, rest in peace, but it’s fine.”

“But if you don’t mind me asking, your husband now, do you feel like he’s the one?”

“I mean I love my husband with my entire heart so yeah, but it’s hard for me to get behind there being a one when the one I thought was the one was taken from me.”

“I see. Yeah. Fuck, I guess that makes sense.”

“Girl on your mind?”

“Kind of. I wouldn’t say completely, but uh. Well, let’s just say it’s a strange dynamic.”

“Strange how?”

“Well this happened a while ago, over in England, and we only broke up cause I had to leave England.”

“I see. What’s stopping you from being together now?”

“Well, I mean, nothing in actuality. But I think I’ve just moved past the need for this kind of romantic love at this point.”

“How do you figure that?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

“Well. I’ve noticed that I’m honestly just better…I’m at my best when I’m single. I’m able to keep all of my own problems away from people and am able to better help others solve their own problems. When I’m in a relationship, it’s almost like I just can’t hack it. I’m always more interested in work and ideas that I can’t really be there.”

“But you still love this British girl.”

“Yeah. I probably always will.”

“And you’re okay with that just being the case for good?”

“I’m going to have to be.”

“Damn man, that’s grim.”

“It is what it is.”

“Do you think it will die?”

“At this point, I hope so. Cause if it doesn’t it’ll all be so distracting you know?”

“I guess so. What was your name?”

“Arthur.”

“Good to meet you Arthur, I’m Stacy.”

“Good to meet you too Stacy.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“I’ll close out when you get a chance.”

“You got it, I gotta say, you really gave me something to chew on just now.”

“What’s that?”

“The fact that you’re in heartache and made peace with it.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m in heartache.”

“Oh you’re in heartache, hence why you asked me about ‘the one’ in the first place.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“You want to take a shot with me for the road?”

“Sure, what are we shooting?”

“Mezcal?”

“Sure.”

I rocked back the shot, signed my check, and threw down a generous tip in cash before getting up from my bar stool.

“Well thanks for everything Stacy.”

“Of course. Thanks for coming in, and good luck on your job search.”

“Thanks a ton.”

I walked out of the restaurant and back out into the open under seagulls and sun rays. It was three o clock, and I had two hours until 15 Romolo opened. I turned to my right and saw Coit Tower in the distance atop Telegraph Hill and decided to head in its direction with my time to kill.

Coit Tower glistened in the distance like a fabled castle turret on a Holy hill.

Something invited me to the ether above the material city itself.

But I fell into the fold of North Beach, oh beautiful North Beach: the place I had visited many times as a child with my mother to eat salt water taffy, Italian seafood, and cannoli. To embrace our Italian heritage in this little Italy that is indeed Italian and not some distorted wintery form of Italians that are greasier than those in the homeland. To walk North along Columbus is to walk down a path into Heaven’s gate just before Fisherman’s Warf. It is settled and grounded, yet fiery and dazzling.

My lack of sleep caught up with me, and I began to wander without orientation rendering me far more impressionable than usual. Every last espresso den, every last restaurant, and every last niche, artisanal shop engulfed my psyche with awe and wonder. I felt blessed. I felt blessed to be granted entry into this heavenly realm I felt barred from for so long.

“You see, here is where the world floats just above the fray.”

“Here is heaven in plain sight for those who are attuned.”

“Here, you are nestled away from all the noise and one with your city in every one of its years in the past, present, and future..”

Time was irrelevant until time imposed itself upon me again.

I checked my phone to see it was 4:56.

I had lost complete awareness, and this was so clearly integral to my state of bliss that was indeed a rarity.

I had to keep walking down Columbus towards Broadway in order to make it in time for 15 Romolo’s opening at 5pm. I only had so much time. I had to make to downtown San Jose to clock in for work at 8pm. I had to return to my rushed, furious ways once again.

I marched down Columbus turning a hard left on Broadway and stopped just before the Beat Museum. I turned around to see The City Lights Bookshop and “Vesuvios” the old stomping grounds of Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. I was standing on a golden corner of true San Franciscan heritage.

I turned back around to see the alleyway to my left, an alleyway on a steep slope that would remind one of Montmatre on the way to Sacré Coures. San Francisco always strived to be the Paris of the fabled coast.

I walked up this hill briefly to see the sign, “15 Romolo,” not yet lit with neon lights that lose a duel to the hard sun above, sticking out to subtly make itself known. I grinned a an undeniable grin, slowing my pace as if I were coming across a lost artifact or a holy alter. As I grew closer to this entrance, in my view emerged a wooden sign flat on the wall stating “The Basque Hotel” with a Lauburu symbol, the ancient pre-Christian symbol of the sun. I stood before it in shock before growing restless in anticipation and crossing the rubicon, putting one foot in front of the other up the steps and into my living room, my black boots cutting the wood floors to make themselves known.

I walked in the reverent pace once again, soaking every last inch, every last ancient sound wave, and every last feeling in the ether.

I couldn’t tell why this place meant so much to me, but it instantly meant everything to me. I adored with every beat of my battered heart.

“Nono, you see, this right here, this, this is the room, this is my room. This is where I’m supposed to be. These walls could have only been crafted by a Basque. So graceful, so elegant, yet so brutal and harsh. Dark, dark wood, aged and knocked. The Basque impulse to be fortified and beyond the age of safety, in the expanse of the oceans in search of our origin allegedly long since sunken. This is the room that is beyond time and space I’ve searched for, not of Holy Orthodoxy, but of my heritage. Basque. Italian. Spanish. San Franciscan: this heritage I’d die for and die for every time I taste it.

It is in 1898 and I just leaned a pickaxe against the wall and walking through its doors opened for the first time. It is 1918, and I’m still in uniform having just returned from the Argonne to be called one of “San Francisco’s own.” It’s 1998, and I’m the last man to smoke a cigar in this room. It’s 2018, and I’m here in this homecoming now.”

I walked slowly into the foyer, passed the jukebox to see an L-shaped bar ahead with a tall and slender man donning a denim apron. Each step was slow. I stopped in the center of the room and turned to face the windows radiating with rays of light I had only seen two other times in my life.

“Timeless rays of light,” I thought.

I turned back around to see the crowds of bottles on the back bar and to take in the space with the most satisfied grin.

“Basques came to this city and stayed in hotels such as this one. Lodging for tribal, hardworking explorers with a rare fusion of intensity and curiosity and their feet still firmly grounded by the company of their own blood and the expression of their cuisine that always demanded the highest of standards. Sherry, Picón punch, pintxos, and tobacco: The Basque diet in a nutshell. I’m here to drink with you all now, even as I stand here as the only man in the material. I drink with the memories of all of you here, my blood brothers,” I thought to myself.

“This, this is our home away from home that was dreamed up long ago and grew to be greater than the dream itself, this fabled coast on the edge of the world, this paradise island, this Golden Gate, this California. It is more home than our home was so long ago.”

To never smell that rot.

Can only come from one way:

To take the mind and body to a drowning hell

In the dark hours before dawn.

Ready to punch and kick and slash and shoot

The scoundrels who would dare sink so low,

These highwaymen the world has the displeasure to know.

How else may we be men of war in this peace time?

To leave a cataclysm slightly scathed.

Is to know God’s hand in shielding the finishing blow.

Is to know one must drown to rise.

You will reap what you sow.

Mass interconnectivity is worth nothing without an equal or greater degree of separation and/or isolation.

A subculture, a truly organic subculture tied to the material world yet characterized by the immaterial, is a subculture that can be fully processed by mankind.

The fascination with the foreign through peaceful means of respectful exchange of customs and sentiments is what cultivates a fully processed new set of variables to either be adopted or discarded.

This is the opposite of a monolith “culture of everything” that inevitably becomes nothing.

Some minds have the capacity to take the newly possible infinite supply of information and effectively process, categorize, distill, and deploy it effectively without compromising one’s self through the subtle droning transformation into a member of the new unseen hive mind provided for us originally and allegedly in the name of efficiency.

But unfortunately, for the majority of people who participate in this new synthetic ether above, they will not become the categorizers and manipulators of fungible tokens but become fungible tokens themselves.

When this majority detaches from the “great unifier,” more than it interacts with it, they will be capable of providing new variables of sentiment and preference once again.

They will once again be fulfilled within themselves as creations made in the image of God and in their capacity to contribute to this discussion with the entirety of their fellow man.

The final Faustian frontier will be found in the mind of the individual Faustian and the collective soul of them all.

Fully cultivated individuals in complete unity reaching the final destiny of completion and cataclysm.

Reaching infinity, dying with it, being reborn apart from it, and manipulating the synthetic ether not as identity, but as duty of Western men in the Post-Western world.

I promise you, I’m on something else entirely.

I promise you, most of you still don’t get it.

I promise you, most of you will take decades to get it.

I promise you, some of you think you get it, but you don’t.

I promise you, those of you who do truly get it, don’t want to admit it.

I promise you, those of you who have admitted it have no idea how to put it into practice.

I promise you, neither do I.

March 2020

“So Celine is with your mom right now?” asked Jane while sipping mezcal on the other side of the bar.

“Yeah, they’re in the city right now.”

“That’s wild. How’s it going?”

“It looks like they’re having cocktails somewhere. They seem to be getting along great.”

“Damn, I love that.”

“Yeah, my mom has never really liked anyone I’ve dated.”

“I could see that.”

This may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but it also wasn’t far from the truth. My mother had used the words “silly and unserious” to describe many of my girlfriends save a couple who highlighted different issues. My main high school girlfriend was slightly insane, but my mother was sympathetic to her because of her loyalty and resourcefulness. In relation to myself, the first girl I dated in college was just an amplified version of my longest high school girlfriend. I had reached a point where I knew what my mom thought of a girl before I even asked. I texted her a picture of her to my mother during our first date, to which she replied, “she seems nice.” I responded with laughing emojis. That girl wound up nearly running me over with car when I tried to break up with her.

But I knew things with Celine would be different. I remember Celine once tauntingly telling me, “we all marry our mothers don’t we babes?” But truth be told, Celine and my mother are a lot alike. They’re both poised, high-masking, intense, and covertly aloof.

My mother sent me a picture of the two of them holding coupe glasses with genuine bright-eyed, toothy smiles to which I showed Jane and said “my girls.”

Jane genuinely smiled at the photo, and I took a second look almost in disbelief. I wasn’t used to things going well in life.

First Edition was always slower on Mondays, but I had built a base of regular customers from scratch that kept the day lucrative and enjoyable. The bar game is one of all out war on weekends and steady conversations on weekdays. I had mastered both at this point. I was approaching a kind of stability I l never had before.

A message from Celine lit up my phone saying they were on their way to Oakland in preparation for me closing the bar. I had been given the green light to close early at 10pm, and I started double timing running closing procedures while serving customers at 9pm.

“Do you think Celine will stay here with you now?”

“No, she has to go back to England.”

“Why?”

“Well, we’re not quite ready for that yet.”

“You’re not or she’s not?”

“Well. I suppose I’m not just yet. I need to take these next two years to make a name for myself fighting and build a copywriting business to support us cause I sure as hell can’t do this forever.”

“It’s not enough money?”

“Well, after getting the Sobre Mesa job it is, but this isn’t a sustainable life for a married man.”

“And she’s willing to wait?”

“Apparently so. I mean, we’ve waited six years, what’s another two?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“You two must really love each other.”

“…yeah.”

Jane cleared out before Celine and my mother showed up. I always found that timing odd.

They showed up with an array of shopping bags from various San Franciscan shopping destinations, bouncy demeanors, and gleeful expressions.

“Hey babes,” I said to Celine giving her a peck over the bar, as she set down her bags under the bartop.

“Hi baby!” she exclaimed

“We had the best time the two of us today,” declared my mother.

“Oh yeah? Where’s you two go?”

“Oh gosh, we were all over the place weren’t we?” asked my mother turning to Celine with a smile.

“Yes! Gosh all that walking babes, it really wore me out,” Celine replied turning her face to me, lamenting her leisurely labors.

“We did North Beach, Union Square, Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill…”

My mother droned on for a while with Celine and her bright eyed and all smiles. They took turns chiming in about their time together, as I wiped down the bar top and put away various vermouths and syrups.

Something unnerved me about all of this. I always wanted to defy my mother in her opinions about people I dated because no man likes to be handed premature forecasts of failure on new beginnings. Every time I knew she was right even if I didn’t want her to be.

There was something strange about this allegedly final judgement of a woman in my life. Once upon a time, two years prior, she told me “that torch still burns brightly,” in reference to my love for Celine despite having supposedly moved on. I was shocked by the statement, as it was the shear opposite of pragmatic. I looked at her almost in anger with an expression that said, “how can you say this to me after all that’s happened and after that all that I’m currently working and struggling towards?” In that moment, I wish she hadn’t said that, and as I stated at the two of them chirping away, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of uncanny valley effect at play.

I was beginning to reassess my criteria.

As much as I desired the peace of finality in this meeting of my mother and wife to be, finality was nowhere to be found.

What is the is the most impactful civilization of all time?

A civilization can only be measured against its epoch and respective context.

So I had ChatGPT rank top 10 civilizations in the following categories:

1. Outright Max Capacity for Land Warfare

2. Outright Max Capacity for Maritime Warfare

3. Logistical Capacity during Wartime.

4. Logistical Capacity during Peace Time.

5. Spenglerian Impact (Impact of lasting cultural soul)

6. Technical Innovation

7. Philosophical impact

8. Political Advancement

9. Artistic Advancement

10. Scientific Advancement

My general idea going into this was it would come down to Rome vs Britain, but I greatly underestimated Classical Greece.

Here are the rankings:

Outright Max Effort Land War Capacity

1. Mongol Empire

2. Roman Empire

3. Soviet Union (1943-1945)

4. Alexander’s Macedon

5. Spanish Empire

6. France (1648-1815)

7. Nazi Germany

8. Prussia/Second Reich Germany

9. Russian Empire

10. United States

No real surprises here. The Mongol Empire swiftly built the largest contiguous state in human history through terrifying and jaw-dropping dominance on land via horseback. Spain’s achievements in the Reconquista, the New World, and the capacity to usher in the first global system while fighting in multiple fronts for 100 years grants them a score as close to perfect as one can get without absolute outright domination of Europe. Some might be surprised to see the United States so low, but I imagine the peak of American military being achieved in a world with air support has a lot to do with this ranking.

Outright Max Effort Maritime Warfare Capacity:

1. British Empire

2. United States

3. Athenian Empire

4. Dutch Republic/VOC

5. Imperial Japan

6. Spanish Empire

7. Portuguese Empire

8. Roman Empire

9. Ottoman Empire

10. Soviet Union

No surprises here either. The British Empire dominated the seas for centuries and completely ruled them for close to 100 years. Bretton Woods saw a globalist system dominated by the United States, but not exclusively managed by them unlike the British grip on the seas. Peak Naval capacity at war however, is The United States in World War Two. Many also forget that the Seventeenth Century was as much the Dutch Century as it was the French Century.

War Time Logistical Capacity:

1. Roman Empire

2. British Empire

3. United States

4. Soviet Union

5. Han-Tang China

6. Spanish Empire

7. Mongol Empire

8. Napoleonic France

9. Prussia/Second Reich Germany

10. Achaemenid Persia

I expected the United States to take the top spot in these rankings, but when I remember the length of time that Rome dominated the Mediterranean region with their logistical capacity, this ranking made far more sense. Napoleonic France’s logistics were a direct result of Napoleon’s conception of combat, but the “living off the land” strategy that worked for his campaigns in Central Europe became disastrous on the Russian steppe likely diminishing his ranking here.

Peace Time Logistical Capacity:

1. Roman Empire

2. Qin-Han China

3. British Empire

4. United States

5. Abbasid Caliphate

6. Dutch Republic

7. Song China

8. Achaemenid Persia

9. Ottoman Empire

10. Modern European Union

One could argue that this is the crowning achievement of the Roman Empire: to bring civilization itself to the majority of Europe that wasn’t surpassed by its successors in Europe for centuries. Britain’s rankings here is likely rooted in Pax Britannica and stems from a bi-directional relationship with its technical innovation dominance at the time.

Spenglerian Impact:

1. Greeks

2. Germans

3. Romans

4. Chinese

5. Spaniards

6. Arabs

7. Egyptians

8. French

9. Persians

10. English

I had the rankings done by ethnicity for this criteria due mainly due to Spenglerian high cultures having more than one ethnicity that facilitated its respective impacts. Apollonian high culture was facilitated by both the Greeks and the Romans, and the West was facilitated by multiple Germanic peoples.

The Germans provided the spark for the West by the will of Charlemagne and a German Pope during the schism as well as its greatest philosophers in the time of crisis. I’d argue that despite Greek impact being across multiple Spenglerian high cultures, the Germans may have the greatest depth of soul on this list. Spain is also an initial surprise until one remembers that Spengler declared it the most successful empire of the Age of Exploration for its lasting impact of soul upon Latin America.

Innovation/Technics

1. Song China

2. British Empire

3. United States

4. Classical Greece

5. Abbasid Caliphate

6. Roman Empire

7. Qin-Han China

8. Germany

9. Achaemenid Persia

10. France

At this point I have to admit being out of my depth and slightly embarrassed in not having even a baseline knowledge of Chinese history. I can’t dispute the top ranking in either direction here. Victorian Britain and 20th Century United States have always lived in my psyche as the titans of technical innovation which is certainly true for their respective epochs. I expected Germany to be higher in this list, but I speculate the continent’s relatively open society during its prime decades of innovation may have something to due with this ranking.

Philosophical Impact:

1. Greece

2. India (Proto-Indo-Iranian)

3. China

4. Abbasid Caliphate

5. Germany

6. Rome

7. France

8. Persia

9. Britain

10. United States

This is an interesting one to meditate on, as it presents itself as a war between East and West. Greece is the foundation of all Western philosophy, and China is the foundation of all Far Eastern philosophy. But Greek philosophy being adopted by all of Europe meant it being adopted by the majority of the world due to European takeover of the majority of the world. One can argue Roman and Western exportation of Greek philosophy is inflating its impact, but the direct nature of Greek philosophy is why it was adopted and used as an engine for advancement in the first place. I should also note that the India listed here was a civilization of a different race of people from the race of people who dwell there now.

Political Advancement

1. Roman Empire

2. Qin-Han China

3. Ancient Egypt

4. Abbasid Caliphate

5. Song China

6. British Empire

7. Achaemenid Persia

8. France

9. Ottoman Empire

10. United States

I’m once again embarrassed to say I can’t speak on four of the top five in this list. However, Roman politics facilitated a standard of civilization that Europeans were desperate to “retvrn” to for 1200 years. To dispute there being a greater milestone in politics almost sees foolish. Ancient Egypt’s appearances have stuck out to me on these rankings due to the fact that they’re so isolated in the grand scheme of history. That being said, even Roman Emperors revered Egypt as a model to strive for with Caligula desiring a retirement plan of moving to Egypt to “become a sun god.”

Artistic Advancement:

1. Classical Greece

2. Renaissance Italy

3. France

4. Tang-Song China

5. Germany/Austria

6. Islamic World

7. Ancient Egypt

8. Japan

9. Persia

10. Spain

What sticks out to me here is the Latin soul reasserting itself within a high culture genesis that is overwhelmingly Germanic. Renaissance Italy, France, and Spain’s primary artistic expression of art is Latin, and it can make an argument for Rome deserving to be ranked on this list. However, the way Rome decided to express itself was Greek. Germany is likely characterized today by their lack of art due to Germany being dominated by the Prussian worldview since 1871, but Alpine Germans provided the foundations of what many consider today to be the most iconic expression of Western art in classical music and opera.

Scientific Advancement:

1. Classical Greece

2. Abbasid Caliphate

3. Germany (1st Reich-Present)

4. United States

5. Song China

6. Qin-Han China

7. Rome

8. India (Proto-Indo-Iranian)

9. France

10. Japan

The more I go through these rankings the more I find Greece to be an absurd case of shear, original creative energy and respective willpower. The Thirty Years War continues to handicap Germany in these rankings.

With their population scattered to the four winds, much of American achievement comes from ethnic Germans including scientific advancement. China having more than one dynasty in multiple lists speaks to a longevity that is unparalleled.

FINAL OVERALL RANKINGS:

1. Roman Empire

Rome was the main standout of execution and concentration of will to exert their soul and conception of war, politics, civilization, art and philosophy. Much of the core of Roman mode of being is essentially Greek, as the Greeks were the seed for Apollonian High Culture and the seed of what it means to be European in the second notch of the hierarchy below being Christian. But the Romans further developed this Apollonian way of being, reset the clock on the cycles of civilization, added what is inherently Latin and their own, applied it in all aspects of life on both a micro and macro scale, and perfectly balanced both what is brutal and what is elegant and the idealistic with the pragmatic. Europe is a story of before and after Rome. When one thinks of shear willpower fully enhanced and not handicapped by a high capacity for systems, the first civilization that comes to mind is Rome.

2. China

China is a behemoth of a civilization that is unique in its current situation. It is the only group of people to stay in the same land after their Spenglerian cycle has fully completed and was able to thrive live long after the final collapse. Its foundation of Eastern philosophy makes it difficult to understand the motivations of the Chinese nation and Chinese soul to this day. The Chinese and Japanese alike have both never been fully conquered for European powers, and while Japan has carved a conception of the world for itself that is revered by many across all continents, it is still descended from this original Chinese high culture genesis. It is the product of a parent ethnic group of people, the East Asians that are the highest iq peoples on this planet. Its impact is undeniable, and it still can’t be fully grasped by any man who hasn’t set foot on the soil of this ancient society.

3. Classical Greece

Classical Greece is a case of self-determination that benefited both the self and the tribe that was pointed predominantly inward as opposed to outward. The inquisitive nature of its people saw them ask questions that stretched the psyche unlike any other civilization, the fruits of which were noticeable in the immediate term and still are see as central and vital to this day. The fostering of the individual as a driving force of studies, epochs, and civilizations was always pointed towards benefiting the people as a whole until the crisis of The Peloponnesian War made way for minds like Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle to provide crowning achievements of philosophy and for the greatest military mind of all time, Alexander the Great to exert a singular will that has not been paralleled since. To this day, civilizations are trying to find the perfect balance between individual will and collective benefit, all because Classical Greece set the standard.

4. British Empire

“The Sun never sets on the British Empire.” There’s an arrogance that British people internalized that frankly has a legitimate material backing for that lasted close to 150 years. Britain was an insular nation that provided and environment for the highest level of abstract thought due to it being devoid of natural predators after roughly the year 700. Its foundational minds like William Shakespeare, the greatest writer to ever write all lived in the 16th Century, a time when Britain was a relative backwater fighting for its life to not be a colony of the Spanish Empire. At the English Channel, an outward-facing maritime superpower was born. No race of people can ever claim to come close to the maritime capacity of the Anglo-Saxon, and this skill ushered the only true total dominance of the world’s oceans that fueled the exportation of Western law and innovation worldwide.

After Waterloo, Britain was unopposed for a Century, and if it had played its cards right during World War One in 1916, it would likely still be the premier Empire of the seas and maybe still be the premier Empire of the world.

5. United States

The United States is a bizarre anomaly. Everything about it says it shouldn’t be possible. The Anglo-Saxon is characterized by infinite space provided by the seas, and this characterization applied to land resulted in the United States. To create a country from nothing on the edge of the world with a ruthlessness to not intermix with indigenous natives but completely displace them eventually achieving the size of Europe itself. Add the best of the immigrant wave Germans, Scotch/Irish muscle, and remnant Dutchmen, and you have a Northwestern European all star team with nearly unlimited resources. It shouldn’t be able to exist, and yet it does. It’s founding and 19th century immigrant stock made a far more robust race of people that terrified the likes of Adolf Hitler who believed an outwardly facing America could conquer Europe and usher in a global empire the world had never before seen. He was right.

6. Abbasid Caliphate

Zeal accomplishes many things, and when a desert race of people hardened by centuries of weathering the harsh elements have a collective zeal backed by a newfound, warlike religious fervor, you have a swift and terrifying destruction of the previous Middle-Eastern and North-African world. If Pelayo and the Asturians/Basques hadn’t surrendered, this zeal could have gone much further into Europe. What separates the Abbasid Caliphate from the Mongol Empire was a cultural operating system from the Magian high culture and willingness to absorb different conceptions of science, art, and philosophy into its methods of governance as opposed to general deference. It can therefore not be written off as just another martial uprising turned empire. The reach of this Caliphate’s influence resulted in Muslims being found in Bosnia all the way to Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country.

7. Germany

What we know today as “The West,” began with what is present day Germany. After the fall of Western Rome, a new psyche was brewing, a psyche that saw the Roman example but did not undergo a Latinization or internalize an Apollonian conception of the world. A group of low culture barbarians began to ascend into a new over arching, metaphysical genesis that was punctuated by Charlemagne’s crowning in 800 and the Great Schism of 1054. The Germanic tribes ruled the majority of Europe, and as a martial first people, it came with a brand brutal pragmatism that has never been so alluring. Mechanistic, organized, cold, calculated, and furious yet it provided structure surrounding a biological soul that is the equivalent of a dark water with seemingly no depth. The birth of Spain as we know it, the martial and organizational force of France, the Viking hordes of Scandinavia, the Dutch ingenuity, and the true dominant animating force of Britain, all started in Germany. And if the Germanic tribes ever achieved a unity that the Latins possessed with Germany itself as its core as opposed to an impulse for fracturing, there is a possibility that this would be the most impactful civilization of all time. Still. Music, physics, arts, trade, technology, philosophy, all have rich traditions to be found in this heart of Europe.

8. France

History has not been kind to France. The Age of Exploration has seen a debate of true victory be between Spain and England. But from Westphalia until Waterloo, the core of Europe transferred from Germany to France, and the premier power in the Age of Exploration was France all the same. Despite modern humor about French military prowess stemming from World War Two and the Vietnam War, France was the home of the premier army on the continent for 150 years, and this dominance granted them a cultural flourishing that many view, myself included, as the greatest expression of art across all mediums.

Even in the aftermath of its greatest tragedy and loss of its aristocracy in the French Revolution, it still took Russia, Prussia, Britain, Austria, and rebellions of all other nations across Europe to stop France from total conquest of the continent and then the world.

9. Spanish Empire

Many have forgotten the anomalous Spanish Empire. A borderland race of remnant Neolithic, Celtic, Germanic, and Latin admixture that forged itself in 800 years of war and Christian zeal to drive out the Muslim invaders once and for all and cultivate a willpower that has never been matched. That will pointed outward ushered in the first global system, the prime of the first unifying system of Europe in Christendom, the cultivation of the first overseas empire in the New World by the hand of a fighting force outnumbered 100-1, a Christianization of South and Central America, a military fighting force that fought on multiple European fronts for over a century, and a philosophical foundation for the Westphalian Peace that would influence the configuration of Europe an the works to this day.

10. Persia

The Persians are the forgotten force of the Middle East after being overshadowed by the rise of Islamic Caliphates and the horrors of the Ottoman Empire. But Persia set the standard for all civilizations in the Middle East and was the rival Greece sharpened itself against. Rather than ruling purely through coercion, it integrated many different populations via standardized administration, satrapal governance, taxation systems, imperial roads, and legal pluralism that respected local religions and customs. This fusion of centralized authority with tolerance enabled economic integration across Afro-Eurasia and set enduring precedents for statecraft later adopted by Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic empires, making Persia a foundational architect of how complex civilizations are governed.

I can’t say I’ll be able to fully defend this list or refute this list due to not having a grasp on Chinese, Persian, or Islamic history, and I likely will never have a concrete enough grasp of any of these histories due to limited time and a recent decision to focus on Iberian and Slavic history for the foreseeable future.

It’s hard for me not conceive of Britain not being in the top three, but the algorithm did essentially have Britain level with Classical Greece. It’s also hard for me to fully grasp Chinese impact due to being a Westerner, but the scale of Asia itself is enough to make most learned European men transform into orientalists.

“Europe is a molehill.” -Napoleon Bonaparte ahead of his infamous Egyptian Campaign.

Being Iberian, I was glad to see Spain get recognition for its achievements in land warfare, Spenglerian impact, and it being the first to establish a global system. Iberians are extreme people when fully awakened, and we often only care about the extremes. God, gold, and glory is a straightforward call to action, but it lacked a staying power in the age of mercantile order that disintegrated European continuity of proper hierarchy of importance.

The Apollonian High Culture genesis producing two of the top three civilizations in this list is borderline absurd, and it’s no wonder despite the phenomenal achievements of the Faustian nations, Europe longed for a return to the level of cultural gravitas and the worldview that was alive and present in both Greece and Rome. The life force provided by the Mediterranean can’t be overstated. There’s something to say for a warmer climate granting a high culture that is rejuvenating and consolidating versus a cold weather high culture genesis in cold weather that is inherently combative and fractured from the very beginning in the case of the Faustian nations.

If I had to choose a favorite from each of these top 10:

Land Warfare: Spanish Empire

Maritime Warfare: United States

Logistics at War: Roman Empire

Logistics in Peace: United States

Spenglerian: Romans

Innovation: British Empire

Philosophical Impact: Germany

Political Advancement: Roman Empire

Artistic Advancement: France

Scientific Advancement: Germany

If I were to create an ideal country for myself to live including nations and people’s outside this list based on the conceptions of each particular field weighted against respective epochs:

Land Warfare: Spanish Empire/Soviet Union

Maritime Warfare: United States

Logistics at War: Roman Empire

Logistics in Peace: United States

Spenglerian soul: Russian/Iberian

Innovation: British/Soviet

Philosophical Conception: Russian/German

Political Advancement: Roman Empire

Artistic Advancement: French/Japanese

Scientific Advancement: Germany

The thought experiment further presents a need for me to explain a recent idea I’ve been toying with in a future article: The “Russo-Iberian” Mindset. It involves individual variance of cultural soul in individuals.

In the end, I believe the correct civilization was placed at the top spot. All roads lead to Rome, and either through transitive property or in direct fashion, every empire since has strived to be Rome.

San Jose, California

My phone buzzed next to my face causing me to rise from my unintended slumber. I rose from my yoga mat I slept on to see the overhead light in my room very much still turned on. The smaller light read “Red Ninja,” the name I had for Jason since high school.

“Yeah what’s up man.”

“Are you bartending tonight?”

“Yeah, I start at eight.”

“Do you need a ride buddy?”

“Yeah, a ride would be great actually. I’d really appreciate that.”

“Then let me in buddy boy.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I’m right outside.”

“Oh, okay.”

I left my room to go to my front door and let Jason pop in, and when I opened the door, I saw him in a particularly intense mood.

“Hey buddy boy thanks for letting me in!”

“…”

“You look like you could use some caffeine, could you use some caffeine?”

“Yeah, I could use some caffeine.”

“Good thing I got you a bang,” said Jason. tossing a “blue razz” bang energy at me.

“Uh, thanks man, I really appreciate it.”

“Well come on man, let’s go!”

“Oh, shit, yeah, let me just ready really fast.”

“Okay, I’ll come with you.”

“Why are you hyphy all of the sudden?” I asked while changing into a maroon pair of jeans and a lavender button up shirt.

“I had three bangs today, I feel amazing.”

“Yeah, you’re like at a 10, and you’re going to need to give me a second to get on your level.”

“Yeah okay, for sure for sure.”

“Did you work out today?”

“Yeah I pulled 365 today.”

“Oh fuck yeah, why didn’t you call me?”

“I was just kind of on one you know?.”

“Yeah, I do honestly. Practice this week was an onslaught.”

“Yeah man, you look fried.”

“Yeah, Jerome is beating my ass. Dude just works me to death every time.”

“Why aren’t you wearing black for work?”

“Cause I’m not supposed to anymore remember?”

“Oh that’s right, you’re Mr. fancy bartender now. Moving up in the world.”

“Yeah jackass, I still feel broke as fuck.”

“Come one man, let’s go, you’re going to be late.”

“Alright, yeah, just let me grab my hat and my boots, and we’re square.”

The two of us ran out the door and jumped into Jason’s black Honda Civic before speeding off from Willow Glen to Downtown San Jose.

Downtown San Jose is a hellhole. The big wigs of the city like the McHenry family have done much to improve its material facades and communal gatherings, but they can’t seem to blot out the dark principality that looms over that place. There’s a shadow that follows your every step when you walk there, and if you’re spiritually aware, you’re on your toes the entire time because of it. Let your guard down once, and you’re damned. I can promise you this.

“You know Turnstile dropped a new track today?” I asked Jason.

“Oh yeah?! Well you better play it buddy boy!”

“Jason, please.”

“Okay, okay, okay, you right, you right, you right.”

“Also, I can’t put it on, I can’t access the aux.”

“Oh right, what’s it called?”

“Moon.”

“Oh, sick.”

The sonic waves emanated from Jason’s stereo, and we heard a signing voice different from the band’s frontman leading us to question who this mystery man was. But the deeper vocals, long drawn out soothsayer-like notes, and manic guitar riffs all came together to create a track that warned of an impending cataclysm just beyond the horizon.

“That was fucking sick,” claimed Jason.

“Yeah, that was something,” I replied.

“Hey, by the way, did Celine really come out of the woodwork again?”

“Yeah, she has a habit of that.”

“Is she still with that one guy?”

“Yeah, apparently. But she keeps messaging me for whatever reason. She’s on some continental tour with some play she’s doing.”

“How many times has she come out of the wood work?”

“Since I left England? More times than I can count. Within the past year? Like at least once a month.”

“And you’re not down to go back to her?”

“No, of course not.”

“When’s the last time you actually saw her?”

“Almost three years ago now, in San Francisco that one day.”

“Oh right before you started dating Felicia?”

“Yeah, don’t remind me.”

“I’m not sure what’s a darker timeline, you getting Felicia pregnant or you getting Celine pregnant.

“Definitely Felicia. I at least loved Celine at one point.”

“Yeah Felicia is a pretty big head case for a Christian girl.”

“Yeah, I’ll say.”

Jason pulled up on Santa Clara street before turning left on the corner of the block my bar was on.

“Thanks man, I really appreciate it.”

“Oh no no, I’m coming in for a drink. You owe me tons of drinks for being your soccer mom, driving you around and making sure you’ve eaten enough food.”

“Uh, okay. Yeah, I’ll see you in there.”

I walked up to the dark wood, “New York style” cocktail bar called Five Points, a place where up until very recently, I was a perpetually drowning barback. There were 500+ bottles on the back bar, five total wells, and a cocktail menu the size of Texas. Barbacking shifts there were harder than some of my kickboxing sessions, although recent training was giving those shifts a run for their money.

I clocked in behind the bar for Will, a more seasoned bartender to tell me that I’m on the third well, with only three open in the main bar and one open in the back room speakeasy called “The Bowery Room.” Will is about a half inch taller than me with a slightly wider frame, black hair like Clark Kent, and glasses to match. He is half white and half Mexican, with a combination of features that sometimes had him mistake for being East Asian. Will was supposed to start as a barback like me, but being 32 years old, an ex-marine who we combat in Iraq, and a former executive at Tesla, Sid, the guy who gave me my job thought it would be best to put Will through the bartending training gauntlet up front. Every Tuesday was me, Sid, and Will. It was a slow burn of us all getting to know each other, but to this day, I don’t think anyone besides Jason knows me better. They know the best of me and the worst of me, and both Sid and Will are the big brothers I never had.

I walked past well one and well two where Christiana was posted up. Christiana was a seasoned bartending veteran who joined the staff at Five Points a couple months after Will and I joined the team. She had been working for Apple for a year before realizing she wasn’t made for the desk job in big tech, and she was instantly everyone’s favorite. She’s a very pretty girl who is the same age as Will, roughly 5’8 with a curvy, athletic build, dark brown hair, a great smile, warm and friendly energy, and a fun-loving brand of hospitality. There was an odd dynamic between her and myself, as on paper she would have been the epitome of my type, but at this point in my life, I was on a sworn oath of chastity that was going on four years strong that evolved into intentions of becoming a monastic after what would hopefully be a long fighting career.

Something in my brain shifted with this decision. The majority of the time saw me delete this aspect of life from my brain. Things grew narrower in my mind, quieter, and more grounded. I was able for much of the time to see women beyond any kind of primordial need to procreate, and it was genuinely liberating. Will was confused about how I preferred going to the gym over chasing women, and after pondering the question, I told him it was due to no longer reliant on an external, highly variable stimulus but leaning on a praxis that was solely beneficial and self-contained.

But truth be told, I liked Christiana as a person a lot. I enjoyed working with her and hanging out with her, despite a good half dozen of her drunken advances including her groping me behind the bar. No one has sympathy for me in this incident. But provided she was sober and respectful, we were going to keep getting along great.

“Hi friend,” said Christiana.

“Oh hi friend,” I responded.

“How was your day?”

“Practice fucking murdered me, but I’m good, I’ve got sparring tomorrow.”

“Sparring tomorrow and Church on Sunday?”

“Always. How was your week?”

“It was good, I did a lot of yoga and went on a bit of a bender last night.”

“I heard, where did you go?”

“All over the city. I could totally see you working up there.”

“Well, if Sid and Soosh, I’m making a b line straight there. I’m not sticking around after they’re gone.”

“You’re going to have to drop your little chastity act if you start bartending in the city dude. Way too many pretty girls up there are going to be trying to get at you.”

“It’ll only make me tighten the grip on the discipline.”

“Naw you’re gonna cave dude, part of me would even cave for these girls.”

“Well, I’m definitely not going to cave, but I’d be super down to work at Trick Dog or 15 Romolo.”

“I could totally see you working at 15 Romolo.”

“Fingers crossed. San Francisco living in six months. What’s Will’s deal by the way?”

“Oh you know, he’s doing that thing where he’s insisting on taking the service well and then acting like a grumpy martyr because of it.”

“Oh yeah, so the usual.”

“Hey buddy boy!” yelled Jason, slapping his hands down on the bar in front of my well.

“Jason, please.”

“Naw bitch, you owe me some drinks!”

“Hi Jason!” said Christiana.

“Hi Christiana!”

“How are you?”

“Oh you know, I’m goooood, I had a good shift at Whole Foods today and had a good workout, now I’m here to get drinks from this beefcake.”

“Okay cool, I’m going to go back to my well, bye friend!”

“Honestly man, she’s so hot.”

“Yeah, says you and everybody else.”

“Oh come on, even you know it.”

“I can’t confirm nor deny.”

“Dude, Christiana is hot.”

“Jason, you know me. I’ve crossed

into a different kind of life.”

“Yeah yeah whatever, make me a drink biiiiiitch.”

“What spirit do you want?”

“Tequila.”

“Oh boy.”

I made Jason a drink that I made on the fly a couple weeks prior:

Phoenix Durango:

1.5oz Rye

1.5oz Reposado Tequila

.75oz Cherry Heering

2 dash orange bitters

1 dah aromatic bitters

Served up

Garnish: Orange peel

“Here you go man.”

“What’s the name of this one?”

“A Phoenix Durango.”

“Oh fuck off.”

“Look man, I have to name all the new cocktails I make. If you got a better name, you let me know.”

“Holy shit, this is actually really good.”

“Yeah, it’s just a spin on a recipe Soosh showed me.”

“I see I see.”

Jason downed the rest of the drink in one go.

“Let me get another one.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah bro, I’m having a ten out of ten time. Pour me another, I’ll go slower this time.”

“Alright, just drink this glass of water first.”

Jason kept his word and nursed his drink for about an hour before finishing the job. When he finished his second stirred cocktail, he asked for something shaken. I poured him a take on a Paloma with elderflower liqueur and some other extras I can’t recall when a tall and very voluptuous woman with short blonde hair, a low cut top, tattoos and nose piercing came and sat down next to Jason.

“Hey welcome to Five Points, here’s a menus for you, let me know if you have any questions.”

“What’s this he’s drinking right now?” she asked.

“Oh this is just something special he made for me since I’m his best friend and soccer mom,” said Jason.

“What do you mean you’re his soccer mom?”

“Well my buddy here, my best friend is a broke fighter, so he makes me custom cocktails in exchange for me giving him rides to practice and making sure he’s had enough food.”

“Well Mr. fighter man, I’ll have what he’s having.”

“You got it.”

“So tell me, what’s your name? I feel like I’ve seen you here before,” she asked Jason.

“Oh my name? Yeah my name’s Jason. I think I saw you at Whole Foods a couple times.”

“Oh that’s right, you’re the cute cashier who rings up my groceries.”

“I didn’t realize cute was in my job description.”

“Well I think they should update your name tag then.”

“What would your name tag say?”

“My name’s Katie,” she said while seductively shaking Jason’s hand and staring into his soul.

“Well, it’s good to meet you Katie.”

“We’re going to need another round Mr. Bartender,” Katie said to me without leaving Jason’s gaze having just downed her drink.

“Uh. Sure.” I replied.

Three rounds for Jason in an hour and two for Katie inside thirty minutes begot more rounds and more flirtations. Flirtations begot kissing, and kissing begot groping. They reached a velocity that was animalistic and unspeakably erotic.

An hour passed without any signs of slowing down despite the Friday night crowd forming around them. In the first lull, Christiana came up to me nearly pissing herself laughing.

“Are you seeing this dude?”

“Well yeah. I didn’t realize how hard it is to not look directly in front of you for an hour straight.”

“They’re really going at it.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of insane. She’s saying some intense shit.”

“What’s he saying?”

“Christiana, I damn near fucked up a whole round of drinks from my shock at how smooth he’s being.”

“Damn dude, I didn’t know he had it in him.”

“Honestly, me neither.”

“He wasn’t like this in high school?”

“No, I can’t say he was.”

“That’s wild bro.”

Will walked over to my well facing the back bar having no clue what was transpiring behind him.

“Hey Will, how uh, how’s your night going?” I asked in a bouncy manner.

“Peachy. Hey, do you have any Picón over here?”

“No, I’m out. Uh Will, have you not noticed anything?” I asked in a teasing tone.”

“Yeah, why the fuck are you so chipper all of the sudden?!”

“Dude, turn around.”

Will reluctantly turned around and witnessed the outrageous display and cracked a grin and chuckle.

“Okay, that is actually very funny.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like that.”

“Okay, I need to get back to the fucking tickets.”

Katie and Jason reached a fever pitch where I couldn’t see either party’s hands anymore. Both pairs of hands were both below the bartop, and I saw Jason’s entire body jerk in surprise multiple times before Katie went to the bathroom. Jason threw his arms on to the bar with his head in his hands while staring at me in a telegraphed expression of drunken and absolute shock.

“Uh, you good man?!”

“She’s saying some nasty shit Arthur.”

“Yeah, I can hear it all man. What’s the plan here man?”

“I keep trying to take her somewhere, and then she tells me she’s doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do. But then she grabs my crotch, and I’m just so confused man.”

“Look alive, she’s coming back.”

They went at it for another thirty minutes before he finally asked for the bill. I could only comp two of the nine total cocktails he had, so I had to slip him a bill of over $100 to which I felt guilty and responsible for. Jason frantically signed before calling an uber and making an exit from the bar with Katie.

With my view in front of me finally unobstructed, I saw three of our old high school classmates sitting in a booth on the other side of the short length of the establishment. The three of them sprung up and walked right towards my well.

“Arthur is that you?” asked James, the filmmaking prodigy I graduated with.

“Yeah man, it’s me.”

“Holy shit man, you’re fucking jacked.”

“Thanks man.”

“When the fuck did that happen?!”

“When I was in drama school, I started training Muay Thai, so I dropped out and now I’m working towards making a career out of it.”

“Dude that’s fucking wild, hey was that Jason Rhodes?!”

“Yeah man, that was him.”

“With that fucking bombshell chick?!”

“Yeah man, that was him.”

“No fucking way.”

Jason came back to the bar briefly to grab the wallet he left on the bar top to be greeted by James.

“Jason!” yelled James.

“What’s up man! I’m really drunk!” replied Jason before running out the door.

“Holy shit that really was him!”

“Yeah man, the very same. Are you still making movies?”

“Oh yeah man, I finally went to NYU, and now I’m moving down to LA.”

“Thats sick man, congratulations. I always enjoyed your work.”

“Thank you man, I always enjoyed yours! Are you really not acting anymore?”

“Yeah, that whole world wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the process, but the industry itself was not worth starving for in my book.”

“That’s fair man. So you’re just fighting now instead?”

“Yeah man.”

“And that’s worth grinding for?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wow, that’s some cool shit man. Wow, you’re so different now. Well we gotta get going, but it was great to see you man!”

“Yeah you too, Ihope to see you around.”

The rest of the night was dull in comparison, and I raced through closing procedures to be finished by 3am due to sparring practice being at 10am, a practice that would last for two hours. Will was kind enough to drive me home, allowing me to be asleep by 3:30 and up by 9am. However, I did not wake up at 9am.

An hour before my alarm, I felt a buzz near my head once again, and once again, my phone read “Red Ninja.” My mind went into a racing sequence that remembered that name meant it was Jason calling and that the last time I saw Jason, was when he was running off with a bimbo from the bar.

“Hello?”

“You fucking asshole why would you serve me all those drinks???!!!”

“AHH. Jason?! What happened?!”

“I don’t know uh. I went to the Fairmont, and I think I paid $200 for the room.”

“Why would you go to the Fairmont?”

“It’s the only hotel I know!!”

“Wait what actually happened?”

“Uh, so we went to the hotel room, and uh, we had sex for like an hour, and I couldn’t finish. So then she was worn out and went to sleep. Then we woke up in the middle of the night and had sex again, but I came inside her cause I didn’t have a condom. Then I was freaking out this morning cause she wanted to go back to my place, but I live with my parents. So I just got out of there even though she wanted a ride, and fuck, I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what to do?”

“What are you doing right now? I really need my best friend right now.”

“I mean, I have sparring practice in two hours.”

“Can we go to Denny’s, and I’ll drive you to practice after?”

“Uh yeah, sure man.”

Jason pulled up to my house ten minutes later and I hopped back into the Honda Civic seeing a completely different man from the night before. He was distraught, disheveled, and depressed. I could see the alcohol and regret dripping off of his face.

“Are you good man?” I asked stupidly.

“I’m. I don’t know man. I just. I don’t know.”

We rode in silence for ten minutes to Denny’s before sitting in our usual booth. Denny’s had been a thing for us since high school.

After ordering his usual, Jason sunk into the booth with his head in the corner and a thousand yard stare.

“Jason, what is it you’re actually worried about?”

“What if I got her pregnant? What if she had an std?”

“Well, if we’re being honest here Jason, she doesn’t strike me as the type of girl who’s only done this once. She’s likely on birth control, and if she isn’t, I would imagine she’s reaching for the morning after pill.”

“But what if she isn’t on birth control, and what if she doesn’t get the morning after pill?”

“Well, then there’s a much grimmer scenario at play.”

“What? Her keeping it?!”

“No, she’d probably get an abortion.”

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”

“Honestly man, I don’t think it will come to that, but you should definitely get tested.”

“What are you doing today besides sparring?”

“Just another bartending shift at 8pm.”

“Can we hang out the whole day after practice and leading up to your shift? I just. I just really need my best friend right now.”

“Yeah, of course man. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know, get some food and watch anime?”

“I have no way of watching anime on the tv at my house.”

“We can go get an Amazon fire stick to watch Netflix on from Best Buy.”

“Alright for sure, we can do that man. No problem. Wait, hang on. Jason, was this your first time?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been a virgin all this time?”

“Yeah.”

“Jason. Fuck. Fuck man. I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“You didn’t want your first time to be something a bit more special than this?”

“Maybe when I was younger, but as time went on, I guess I just stopped caring about that.”

“Are you sure man?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Staring at Jeremy eat in the most depressed manner possible made me realize my grave error. I was supposed to be an Orthodox Christian, or at least an inquirer, and here I was compartmentalizing and detaching to such an extent that I was encouraging and helping facilitate fornication. I had a hand in a dimming of my best friend’s soul. This was undeniable. If I was a real friend, I would have tried to keep him sober no matter how awkward that may have been. It was in this instance I realized how much of a tightrope this profession was. I had to be nearly perfect to not compromise myself as a Christian and to not in any way assist in the compromising of others. It was in this moment that I began my slow but sure hatred of this profession.

We finished our somber breakfast and rode to the Alameda district of San Jose, just West of downtown. Rixavox Martial Arts was on Race street in a strange, lime green wooden building, but it was the home of Heavyweight World Champion kickboxer, Jerome Turcan. Jerome, a 6’2 Frenchman of clear farmer’s stock from Provence had fought in the precursor era to the golden era of K1 Kickboxing: the electric ruleset of punches, kicks, and knees with no elbows and no clinching always within three rounds of three minutes. It was always an electric sprint of a fight. He made it to the final of a legendary heavyweight tournament in the 90s, where he lost to the greatest kickboxer of all time, Rob Kaman. But Jerome didn’t lose before knocking him down. The logo for Rixavox was a silhouette of Jerome’s pose after knocking down the storied Dutchman. He later moved to America and became the head striking coach of the American Kickboxing Academy, a gym that has perhaps created the most successful MMA team in the history of the UFC. Turcan had a falling out with Head Coach, Javier Mendez, and many I knew from AKA told me that the golden era of that gym was when Turcan was still there. And now, he was my coach.

Jason and I walked into the narrow, padded space with a floor ring and heavy bags at the very back, and I was greeted with the same “larger than life” gregariousness as always.

“Arthur! It’s about time!!!”

“Coach, I’m literally early.”

“I’m waiting on you my friend!! Early is on time!! One push up, run, one squat, run, one burpee, run, and repeat and go up all the way to twelve!! We’re going to work hard today!!”

“Oh yeah Coach, real quick, this is my friend Jason. He’s just going to sit and hang out until we’re done.”

Jerome standing tall and wide with his hands on his hips, jolly grin, and mess of grey French curls extended his hand for a handshake with an unstoppable “Joie de vivre.”

“Ah! Good to meet you Jason, welcome to Rixavox!”

“Good to meet you,” said Jason before grabbing a seat on a plastic chair by the window leaving Jerome slightly confused by his flat energy before bouncing back and jumping on the mats to start the session.

The whole class went through warmups and into shadowboxing reps in front of the mirror before Jerome came up to me and asked me if Jason wanted to join in to which I tried deterring him from asking. Not reading my body language and cues, Jerome walked over to Jason and asked, “hey man do you have any workout clothes? You want to work out with us?”

I tried getting Jason’s attention to find a way and signal to him to say no, but Jason didn’t put two and two together and nervously said, “well, I do have some shorts in my car.”

“Great man! Go get them and come join us!”

Jason threw punches and kicks while sweating alcohol and staring at me with the greatest degree of utter discontent. “Hung over”did not even begin to describe. He was collapsing on himself in what must have felt like a marathon to him. This wasn’t a Zumba class. This wasn’t orange theory. This was torture.

I wrapped up my sparring, and we managed to get out of the gym to grab Chipotle for lunch and then go straight to Best Buy to pick up the firestick and head back to my house.

“Sorry you got wrapped up in practice.”

“You’re all good man.”

“I mean, I did try to warn you.”

“Yeah, that was my bad, I shouldn’t have said I had shorts.”

“Yeah, Jerome is kind of like that.”

“Yeah, I feel like they were throwing too much at me. Like, maybe I should just learn how to jab first man, instead of like, throwing a headkick after a knee or whatever.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

I felt as if guilt himself was a third passenger in the car.

“So uh. So it’s your day man. What do you want to watch?”

“You still haven’t seen Cowboy Bebop yet right?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yeah, we’re watching Cowboy Bebop.”

“Dude, come on.”

“Nonono, it’s my day. You’re finally going to learn that Cowboy Bebop is better than Outlaw Star.”

Suddenly, we were both sixteen again.

“It is not better than Outlaw Star.”

“How the fuck would you know man?”

“Cause it’s not some weird jazz space anime.”

“Cowboy Bebop isn’t actually about jazz.”

“I don’t know man, it just looks like kind of stupid.”

“Arthur, it’s my day, so we’re going to watch Cowboy Bebop.”

“Alright, alright, you’re right, you’re right.”

“Thank you.”

The first four episodes of the series were anthological but introduced characters that were integral to the story, and I was beginning to see the subtle brilliance that Jason had tried to convince me of for years.

“The fifth episode is one of the main story episodes.”

“There’s a main story?”

“Yeah, and it’s amazing. Do you like the show so far?”

I was happy to see the Jason I knew and loved coming back to life.

“Yeah honestly, it’s pretty incredible.”

“I told you you’d like it. Are you ready to admit it’s better than Outlaw Star?”

“I mean.”

“Come on.”

“I mean, yeah, I guess it is. It just has an underlying depth that Outlaw Star didn’t have as much of.”

“You know you’re a lot like Spike right?”

“In what way?”

“Aloof. Elusive. Cryptic. Brooding. Martial Artist. Good taste in alcohol. Sometimes kinda reckless.”

“Yeah, I guess the shoe fits.”

“Are you ready for the next episode?”

“Yeah for sure. Do you want a drink? Oh. Wait, sorry man, that’s probably a bad idea. My bad.”

“You’re good man.”

I sipped a neat pour of Power’s Irish whiskey out of a mug I got at a Kills concert a year prior. It was highly uncharacteristic of me to be voluntarily drinking outside of work.

I watched beautifully drawn violence and discord unfold on my television for twenty minutes until I saw the first showdown between Spike and his darker half, Vicious.

On the balcony of a Gothic Cathedral, Vicious crouched over Spike with a katana pointed at his chest while Spike held a pistol to Vicious’s heart.

“You should see yourself. Do you have any idea what you look like right at this moment, Spike?”

“What?”

“A ravenous beast. The same blood runs through both of us. The blood of a beast who wanders, hunting for the blood of others.”

“I’ve bled all that kind of blood away.”

“THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?!”

Vicious grabbed Spike by the face and threw him at the stained glass window causing to free fall staring at the sky with somber, melancholic expression, as a flashback engulfed his eye and psyche:

Rain.

A view of a woman in a window. A blonde in a long skirt and white apron, with a drape and its shadow covering her eyes.

An empty kitchen with French wooden chairs.

Gunfire.

Gothic spires.

A black rose in a puddle of rain.

A cross.

A bar.

A pool table.

A slender silhouette purely dressed in black leather with cascading blonde hair turning her head to show a cold, razor-like expression.

A red rose in a puddle of rain.

Spike and Vicious back to back, grinning to each other in a gunfight.

The blonde woman tearing rose pedals apart, letting them fall out of a third story window.

Vicious grimacing with a gun to the blonde woman’s head.

A blurry point of view, stumbling on a blackstone, Gothic street in the rain. A door opening up the block with the blonde woman exiting from it.

A shocked expression on her face before the point of view collapsing on the ground and a frame of Spike face down on the street.

Spike’s vision re-emerging.

The blonde woman with her back turned and singing softly.

Spike rustling in bandages in bed, trying to see his caregiver.

The blonde hearing his rustling and turning to show her eternal, all-knowing face.

Her leaning over his bed looking over him with stoic, inquisitive concern.

His finally loving eyes.

Her mythologized smile breaking across her face and radiating a warmth that was only ever rumored to be real.

The kind of smile worth fighting to see.

I stared at the screen immobilized, frozen.

This was too familiar. This was far too familiar.

This was the thing that tore my life in half. That only had my life become something that happened before and after this Heaven and Hell.

This Gothic England.

This city of blood and soot and smoke and stone and steel and rain.

This unlikely love that no one saw coming and never stood a chance.

This intoxicating, fatal tragedy.

This assassination of the heart and worship of this death locked in frozen repetition for eternity.

This love that I measured all love by that made everything else pale in comparison that made everything else feel like monotonous, soul-sucking trash and dirt.

I was bleeding out in my living room something I could never stop bleeding out.

It found a way to take material form, this entity in the ether that would never let me escape.

“Arthur.”

“Arthur.”

“Arthur, are you okay?” Jason asked.

“No. No, I am not okay.”

_______

March 2020

Dublin, California

The same scene flashed on my screen with that blonde woman beyond time and space wrapped in my arms and buried in my chest.

She was real.

As I swore she was.

The screen cut to black.

She lifted her head from my arms to show me her face. Her cold face breaking into humanity. Tears streamed down her porcelain skin from her haunting, hazel eyes.

“Is that what made you hold on all these years?” asked Celine.

“Yeah. It did. Not just this. Everything. Everything did. Everything that ever cut to my bones reminded me of you. I could never escape you. I could never leave you behind.”

March 2020

“Just get the trainers babes,” said Celine.

“They’re sneakers in America Celine,” I replied.

“Get the fucking sneakers then, you need a set of sneakers babes.”

“I’m not really much of a sneaker guy. I just wear boots.”

“Yeah but you need to branch out a bit, you don’t need to be serious all the time.”

“I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“I’m going to try on some more, just get those.”

“I’m just going to get this zippo lighter.”

“You smoke now?!”

“No, no it’s for garnishes at work.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You can tell me if you’re smoking babes, it’s okay.”

“I would if there was anything to tell.”

“It would be kind of hot if you smoked, but I’d also be very upset.”

“Well it’s a good thing I’m not smoking then.”

“I don’t know babes, you can do what you want, it’s okay.”

“This has been eye opening. I’m going to get the lighter, go try on your trainers.”

“Okay babes.”

Celine had dragged me into some hype beast streetwear shop, and I was decidedly out of my element. Living in South London had changed her tastes a bit from when we first met. When we were in drama school together, she had a very alluring taste in everything that presented itself as the feminine counterpart to all of my tastes. She was vintage 30s dresses, tasteful scarves, and artsy turtlenecks. I was vintage boots, tweed pants, and oxford shirts. It was as picturesque as it could be within our budgets. We had drifted since then. I was in rougher environments, so flannels and hoodies were king. Black jeans, black boots, and fight t-shirts were staples for me. Celine had become far more insecure trying to keep up with the trendiest up and coming actresses of London, so she could be one of them. I remember seeing through her facade, first encountering it in London back in 2018 after nearly four years apart. Truth be told, these insecure tirades lashed out in every direction were beginning to wear on me. You’re a posh girl from a rich neighborhood wedged in a hellhole. Stop pretending you’re from the hellhole.

“Are you ready to go babes?”

“Yeah, I’m ready. Are you getting the trainers?”

“Yes, yes I am. Can’t leave without these.”

“Well alright then, I’ll be outside.”

I stepped out into the legendary Valencia Street, and it was as vibrant as ever. If you want to feel the gravitas and the nearly Faustian weight of the city, you go to Valencia Street. For a second there, it was nicer to be in the company of my city than it was to be in the company of Celine. I couldn’t tell if it was because I’m naturally a solitary individual, that I’m genuinely misanthropic, or I was actually getting tired of Celine. I was more okay with the first or third option than the second option. It’s not a good feeling to genuinely detest people as a default setting.

Celine bounced out of the shop with a big smile. Maybe there’s something to retail therapy after all.

“So where to now babes?”

“Where the fuck was this energy when we were retracing our steps yesterday?” I questioned within the safest confines of my psyche.

“Well, that depends, are you hungry yet?” I asked.

“No, I think I’m still full from those burgers we had.”

“Alright, well, we could stay in the city or go to Oakland. Are you feeling staying out here in the thick of it or seeing the town more?”

“Well what would we do in the town? Oh would you take me to the pictures?! I’d love to see a film with you. Oh wait, no no, let’s go bowling, I feel like that’s the really romantic American couple thing to do.”

I laughed to myself a bit. I hadn’t seen her this excitable in a long time. Maybe the cynicism could wash away after all.

“Well, there’s a big bowling alley over in Jack London Square we could go to.”

“Where’s Jack London Square?”

“It’s just Southwest of downtown.”

“Is it safe over there babes?”

That was the burning question of Oakland at the time. It was a matter of how much gentrification had set in, and truth be told, I had only had two prior experiences in that area before this point. I spent one Saturday morning having a full Irish breakfast and Guinness at the now defunct Irish pub, Slainte, and the only aggressive part about that experience was a guy damn near elbowing me in the face trying to get to the bathroom before throwing up. The other time was admittedly more unhinged. I had dragged Jeremy out on a random Wednesday night to close down First Editon together that put us on a late night search for food. We walked from 19th to 3rd to our first experience at “Nation’s Hamburgers and Great Pies.” After inhaling burgers and fries, we stepped outside and witnessed two homeless guys quarreling over one of them scavenging from the other’s favorite dumpster. The former started to chase the latter who hid behind both of us causing a circular chase around us and me saying, “hey can you guys do this somewhere else,” and then politely obliging.

Despite this comical flashback in my mind I said, “yeah, baby it’s safe, don’t worry.”

“Okay baby.”

So Celine and I embarked on another journey across the bay by finding out way to the BART station at 16th and Mission en route to Downtown Oakland.

Upon finding our seats on the BART car, Celine stared and smiled at me.

“What’s your deal?” I asked.

“You know Arthur, I’d like to be one of those girls for you.”

I let out a soft chuckle and asked, “what kind of girls?”

“You know, the girls in that music video you played this morning. Sentimental girls.”

“Well you’ve always been a sentimental girl Celine.”

“Have I now?”

“Yeah, you have. Despite your best efforts in trying to tell me otherwise.”

“Well, I suppose I am baby. But I want to do this sweetheart thing with you, American romance in jeans and t-shirt’s and suits and pin-up like in that music video.”

“I think that would suit us well babe.”

“Twenty minutes ago on Valencia Street she was the London hypebeast type, and now, by the time our train got to Embarcadero Station, she’s decided that she’s back to her vintage self. Now if I could only get her to stay put and not go off the deep end again,” I thought to myself.

“I can’t believe the BART goes under the water like the Chunnel in England. It’s scary babes.”

“It doesn’t seem to scare you when you go to Paris.”

“Yeah it does babes, you’re just never there with me to comfort me.”

“I guess I wouldn’t know huh?”

“No, I suppose not. I’d like to go to Paris with YOU.”

“Yeah, I’d like that babes.”

Our train car pulled up to 12th Street Station in Downtown Oakland, and we started making our way down Broadway to Jack London Square.

Jack London was a true early product of Californian and Bay Area culture. He was a man born in San Francisco who lived through the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. was self-educated in a time when self-education was not a common practice, was a sailer and pirate all over the Pacific Ocean as far as Japan, was a gold rusher in the Yukon Territory, and police officer, and a legendary writer. He was a vagabond and a pillar of society. He was a chronicler and a groundbreaker. He was salt of the earth and cutting edge. He was everything it means to be a classical San Franciscan: seeming the highest intellectual highs through rugged, frontier hells. But funnily enough, he got his square named in Oakland due to his self-study at a legendary pub called “Heinold’s First and Last Chance,” the last pub you can drink at in Oakland before you hit Alameda Island. Imagine being seventeen years old and studying in a sailor’s pub.

I had meant to make it down there more, especially to go to “Yoshi’s” one of the country’s most historic jazz venues. My father swore we would go together, but we both never seemed to have our schedules line up. So I was in most ways unfamiliar with Jack London Square before I crossed its border with Celine under the large, overhead signage.

We checked in with the hostess at “Plank,” the large indoor/outdoor gaming venue filled with arcade, bacci ball, and bowling that was blasting a mix of 2000s pop and alternative music that made Celine jump up and down like a giddy little girl. When they gave us our bowling shoes and showed us to our lane, Celine erupted in joy.

“Oh my gosh babes I can’t believe I’m here with you! I’ve always wanted to go bowling with you!”

“Have you actually?”

“Yes baby, I have.”

“Well that’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

“Well you make it hard to dream about these things sometimes.”

“And how is it that I do that?”

“Oh it doesn’t matter now babes. You’re my big strong American boyfriend with your big chest and your flannel shirt and your jeans. It’s a dream come true baby.”

“You know all those years ago Celine, when I got in your car and ‘American boy’ came on the radio making you sing along? I never forgot about that. My British girl wanting her American boy.”

“I still do want my American boy.”

“And I still want my British girl.”

“Well I’m here babes aren’t I? Come on, I want to see you bowl.”

I bowled maybe a handful of times in my life at this point, so the name of the game was brute force. I just seemed to be able to launch the ball with a bit of an arc that created just enough force to get a strike.

Celine erupted in laughter.

“Oh my gosh babes, that’s not how you bowl babe, you have to have a bit of technique. You have to bowl like this you see…”

Celine started with the bowling ball held with both hands in front of her face and did a graceful wind up before releasing the ball flawlessly. This picturesque display only got her four pins.

“I don’t know babe, I think I like my way better.”

“Okay then mister big shot, let’s see you do that again.”

I got a second strike and received an annoyed scowl.

“The way you’re just throwing the ball about looks ridiculous Arthur.”

Part of me enjoyed seeing Celine get so flustered with her know it all nature be under siege. The waiter came by to deliver our drink orders of a gin and tonic for Celine and rye neat for myself.

“This man right here is practically throwing the ball at the pins,” said Celine to the waiter.

“Well, it looks like it’s working,” he replied, pointing at the two strikes in the board before walking off.

“Well, I suppose if it works it works. There we are then,” said Celine grinning at me with reluctance.

Celine tried to lock in on bowling insisting on how her father taught her how to bowl. In hindsight, it may have meant a great deal to her due to her strained relationship with her father. She learned of her father’s infidelity when she was five years of age. Despite her lessons and her focus, it wasn’t working out for her. And after all her attempts at precision and my nonchalance in throwing the ball, she threw her hands up in the air and decided to be a sweetheart again.

“Come here, you big brute of a man,” she said wrapping her arms around my neck to hang from it and kiss me.

“Wow, I love the taste of whiskey in your breath you big lumberjack.”

“So it’s sexy when I drink?”

“Yes it is babes. I’d like to be tipsy with you someday, have a few more than we should so I can be all giggly and sexy.”

“You don’t need alcohol for that Celine.”

“Oh stop it you big charmer.”

“You want to keep at it for another game, or do you want to go home?”

“I want to go home and cuddle with my big, strong man. Maybe finally watch Cowboy Bebop?”

“I’ll call us an Uber.”

Maybe there was hope for us yet. I had held on for so long, up to the challenge of dealing with the onslaught of Celine’s past that came after our past. I was willing to deal with scraping off all the muck to find that diamond again: the diamond that was the two of us falling in love in Birmingham six years ago. And there was a medium that captured that vestige in a spectacularly unlikely place that helped me hold on.

For the Zillennial, the in-between generation that lies between Millennial and Generation Z, this musical act was Nirvana. Raw, authentic, and tragic, influencing all rock music that came after it, yet permanently trapped in the past due to Kurt Cobain’s death.

For the Zoomer, that musical act is not an act that is known through reverence of legendary performances and reputation but an act that has quietly reverberated in the background world and made its way into the very real and zeitgeist-defining medium that is short-form edits found on TikTok and Instagram. That act is Crystal Castles.

Whether their music is found in a playlist at a hippie UC Berkeley student’s party or in a right-wing bodybuilding mosaic, no band seems to have a greater hold on the Zoomer psyche through such elusive means.

An act that first fully emerged with a lineup of producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass in 2008 with their cult, self-titled first album, Crystal Castles debuted with a sound that was predominantly “alternative 8-bit,” with tracks like “Alice Practice” and “Love and Caring,” but what was found in a smaller number of tracks was a noticeable search for divinity or transcendence in songs like “Vanished” and “Magic Spells.”

However, this search for transcendence would rise to become the main overarching tone of their next two albums in aggressive tracks like “Baptism” and “Wrath of God,” as well as more ethereal tracks like “Violent Dreams” and “Telepath.

But this noticeable search was overshadowed by an increasingly tempestuous relationship between Kath and Glass that colored nearly all of their tracks with an unsettling turmoil. What was more disturbing than this was a tradition of the final track in each album being drastically different from the rest of the album, with two of those tracks having horrifying titles: “Tell Me What to Swallow” and “Child I Will Hurt You.” The remaining final track’s title was less harrowing: “I Am Made of Chalk,” but that track could be properly described as “an alien life form drowning to death.”

The working relationship between Kath and Glass reached a breaking point in 2014 when Alice Glass left the group on a permanent basis without any explanation as to why.

But in 2016, Crystal Castles returned with a new singer, a far more angelic singer by the name of Edith Frances, and their new sound seemed to be one devoid of the anguish that Alice’s relationship with Ethan perpetuated. Their album titled “Amnesty (I)” began with a track with choral structure titled “Femen,” before hitting the listener with blunt-force trauma through the track “Fleece.” The bulk of the album continues with the same kind of hard-hitting tracks, although they were paradoxically more ethereal than previous aggressive pieces performed by the original lineup of Kath and Glass. Whatever anguish was present in the previous creative relationship was nowhere to be found in the new album, and the new lineup proved to be capable of intensity without suffering.

The final act of aggression was titled “Concrete,” and it was received by the fan base as the “latest and greatest,” proving that Crystal Castles could move on without Glass and proving that Kath was the true core of the sound.

A pressure release came in the form of a fluttering, feminine track titled “Ornament” before the finale that showed the true face of Crystal Castles’s greatest longing.

“Their Kindness Is Charade” is filled with lyrics that reflect a resignation of one’s self to a fallen world—untrusting, cynical, and lamenting. But the tone of this song displays a finality and a leap into a cosmic and heavenly unknown, as if these lyrics more so reflect a cross to bear as opposed to bitter affliction.

During the new rise of Crystal Castles’s successful new lineup was a 2015 single from Alice Glass in her new solo career, “Stillbirth,” that ended in the repetitive chanting lyrics, “I want to start again.” Two years later, in the midst of Crystal Castles’s newly rejuvenated popularity, Alice Glass released another single, “Without Love.” Alice Glass repeated the lyrics, “Don’t tell me what to swallow,” as a clear message to Ethan Kath regarding her newfound freedom, and while the production for Alice’s songs was proficient, many Crystal Castles fans begrudgingly noted the lack of creative depth in her work without Kath.

In the spring of that same year, Crystal Castles had completed a set of North American tour dates that were to be repeated in a fall tour. Alice Glass, however, found solace in the new feminist movement born in the backlash to the sexual misconduct of Harvey Weinstein. On this day, eight years ago, the “Me Too” movement prompted Alice Glass to speak up about her alleged sexual, physical, and mental abuse she endured during her partnership with Ethan Kath.

The allegations forced Crystal Castles to cancel their remaining tour dates due to the backlash from the new allegations from Alice Glass, marking Crystal Castles’s last-ever performance at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on October 21, 2017. The first year of the Trump administration had provided an opposite reaction in the form of stoking the flames of the general feminist movement, and every allegation in “Me Too” was taken at face value.

The allegations made by Alice Glass were as follows:

Exploitation of a minor, aged 15.

Sexual assault and blackmail: citing he’d kick her out of the band if she didn’t comply.

Physical abuse: alleging Kath threw her onto concrete at one point.

Psychological control and forced isolation: alleging Kath controlled her phone, credit card, where she went, who she saw, what she wore, and what she ate.

These rumors surfaced on this date in 2017 before making them official two days later, on October 24, 2017. The rumors were enough to cancel their show at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on October 23, 2017, and all tour dates thereafter.

The formal allegations publicly stated by Alice Glass on her website on the 24th were enough for all touring personnel and Edith Frances to cut ties with Ethan Kath and the name “Crystal Castles” due to Kath’s sole ownership of the name.

A briefly surfacing batch of screenshots on Instagram between an unknown user and a user alleged to be Alice Glass’s sister, Paige Osborn, claimed that it would not be out of the realm of possibilities that Alice was fabricating the majority of these allegations for attention, stating that Alice did everything for attention, including running away from home. Any validity surrounding this claim would coincide with her solo work lacking praise and needing a new method to garner attention for her and her solo work.

However, these screenshots are now nowhere to be found on the internet, and Paige Osborn has made no such statements in any kind of official capacity.

Ethan Kath, who is legally named Claudio Palmieri, denied all allegations on October 25, 2017, and filed a defamation lawsuit in November of 2017 that was dismissed in February of 2018, awarding Glass (Osborn) a little over $21,000.

However, to this day, Ethan Kath (Claudio Palmieri) has not been convicted of any of the crimes he has been accused of.

This doesn’t necessarily make Kath innocent, and it would not be far-fetched to believe that Kath exhibited a certain percentage of the alleged behavior. Any man in his 20s associating so closely with a teenage girl, regardless of her circumstances, can range from concerning to grotesque. Combined with creating tracks with titles like “Violent Youth” and “Child, I Will Hurt You,” this doesn’t exactly paint the picture of innocence.

Despite these circumstances, Crystal Castles has become more popular than ever.

In 2016, I began a fever-pitch obsession with the band that lasted two years, primarily due to the mental stimulus and otherworldly atmosphere the music provided for training.

Despite my usage of fast-paced punk rock songs in conditioning workout playlists from groups both vintage like Black Flag and contemporary like Turnstile, Crystal Castles had an extra layer of stimulus that was intangible. It possessed, for me, a quality that was both therapeutic and threatening. As training became more ritualistic, training to this music felt as if I was bleeding out anything repressed while being provided a necessary atmosphere of intensity and anguish that facilitated similar embodiments and mindsets found in ringed combat.

It appeared to me that I was the only person who saw the similarities in the visceral expression of martial arts/strongman training and the visceral expression of typical arts, whether visual or in the written word.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

However, to my surprise—to my downright shock—in 2021, I began to see a mainstream usage of Crystal Castles and other “witch house” artists in TikTok edits that was not only found in videos pertaining to strange subject matter but for right-wing bodybuilding and “Retvrn to Evropa” edits. What I had noticed, what I had received viscerally five years prior, was being received by the new generation en masse.

The Zillennial and Zoomer alike have been brought up in the simultaneous “high noon” of American power when the United States was the first and only unipolar superpower and the swift and sudden disintegration of cultural legitimacy and social capital that came with the Soviet stressor upon the United States. What was, and still is, being communicated as the “standard route” to both success and peaceful living in this country is noticeably out of line with material and metaphysical realities—enough to be skeptical of but not enough to be completely renounced.

The high school-to-college-to-steady “9-to-5” had been presented as a fulfilling path that the majority of Westerners could rely upon not only for monetary stability but social stability. Some would go as far as to say there was fulfillment in this path, but as this path became less and less certain, the Zillennial grew more skeptical of it and began to seek meaning elsewhere without knowing where to find it. Meaning became less about structured ideas and more about stripping down every person, place, or thing to the bare bones, core essence to understand whether or not it facilitates an unshakable reaction from the soul. Visceral reactions were what was desired, not rational ideas. Rationality had become decidedly irrational.

What was desired was not a way to present one’s self formally in professional and social settings, but a way to find one’s self viscerally and have that newfound self outwardly radiate and color all external interactions, whether social or solitary.

This same visceral expression, albeit in a very specific way, was found in the creation of “witch house,” as well as adjacent genres like “electro punk” and “synth pop.”

The first known witch house group was an outfit from Michigan called “Salem” that emerged in 2006. Critics defined this sound as follows: chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, dark synth textures, industrial noise, and ethereal vocals.

There was something occult surrounding the sound, whether it was real or implied—the same sort of not fully declared but ever-present dynamic of black magic in the works of Led Zeppelin.

Far earlier than the rise of witch house was the progenitor of electro punk, an artist far ahead of its time that had a direct influence on a wide range of acclaimed artists such as Daft Punk and Nine Inch Nails. Late 1970s synth outfit, heavily influenced by punk rock artists like The Stooges, Suicide rocked the world of the New York music scene by creating a sound of raw vocals, violent synthesizers, and repetitive drum beats.

However, the clear, primary electro-punk influence on Crystal Castles that has many songs mistaken for Crystal Castles is French duo Kap Bambino, who first entered the music scene in 2003, with pace, sass, and aggression being first and foremost in their music formula.

These two core influences in Salem and Kap Bambino combined initially with 8-bit and later more old-school “dark wave” and “synth pop” sounds created the core sound of Crystal Castles. This convergence of these genres by Kath and company’s hand has popularized all of these genres to a far greater extent than they popularized themselves.

The disgruntled generations seem to adore all of these abrupt and haunting sounds because, in an increasingly fake world, they are finding things that can be acknowledged as truly real, whether they’re good, bad, or ugly.

There is an anguish to express, a confusion to make known, and a knowing that they are the blank-slate generation to declare.

There have been several post–Crystal Castles artists of the genres the aforementioned group made popular.

The most notable of these are Sidewalks and Skeletons, who co-wrote the lyrics of Crystal Castles’s final song; Snow Strippers, who have been labeled by some to be the inheritors of Crystal Castles; as well as Pastel Ghost, the solo witch house artist whose pinnacle track “Dark Beach” seems to hold the psyche of even the most “roided” Zoomer bodybuilders.

But these artists of visceral expression coming back into fashion are indicative of a greater phenomenon at play than the mass recognizing of the death of a 20th-century system, but a recognizing of a lack of depth in the forces and sentiments that founded such a system in the first place.

The system put into place at Nuremberg was built on a rejection of all things traditional, nationalistic, and Christian. The initial lashing out against the status quo bore artistic expressions of authenticity in the form of practical circumstances as well as abstract, ethereal sentiments. But these expressions chased after things that are as unshakable as the blood in one’s veins and the source of every man’s existence.

And suddenly, anarchist-leftist witch house music is synonymous with the spirit of the blood and soil of Europe.

And suddenly, anarchist-leftist witch house music is used as a backdrop in edits that have brought many to the Orthodox Christian faith.

I don’t know if Ethan Kath is guilty or not, and I don’t know if Crystal Castles will ever play another song again. But what I do know is that every great artist, regardless of political orientation, is seeking transcendence, and the source of that transcendence is our God.

Crystal Castles started out with anguish, but it finished with a successful expression of their understanding of transcendence. I don’t know if it’s enough to have them find God, but the desperation for peace was there. May they find peace and find God because their music in a long, roundabout, and mysterious way has helped many actually find Him.

March 2020

“Can we go to Mission now Arthur?” asked Celine.

“No, we’re almost at there,” I replied.

“But I want to go see the Mission now Arthur.”

“Celine, we said we were going to retrace our steps, so let’s retrace our steps.”

We had started our day in turmoil after waking up in Dublin. I thought we were having a good morning until Celine came out of the shower and stared at me with piercing eyes demanding a justice that had no grounds.

“I’m not stupid Arthur! I want you to know I’m not stupid!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I know there’s other girls Arthur. I KNOW.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? There are no other girls!!”

She had an episode like this once a week, but it was the first time in a long time that I felt its full force in person. This kind of thing had been taking place over text and the occasional phone call for so long that it almost felt unnatural to be shouting face to face.

“I saw long black hair in the shower, and I KNOW THERES OTHER GIRLS.”

“Celine, I have long black hair.”

It didn’t matter what I said for the first twenty minutes of arguing, as she violently put on her clothes while scowling and screaming before we walked to the BART station. Every stoplight saw a new stage of the argument before she finally calmed down halfway through the BART journey from West Dublin/Pleasanton to Embarcadero Station in San Francisco.

It had been almost five years since I rejected her in this place, five years since I pretended to not be in love with her. It had been five years since we had long, drawn out conversation of subtext and clashing worlds. Despite this cataclysmic event in our story, we were still hanging on somehow.  We still couldn’t stay away from each other for some reason. When 2016 arrived she was still periodically messaging me on Facebook, and when 2017 rolled around, she cut to my bones in her severity of speech that signaled to me that core of our union was still alive and well. When I went to England to get her back in 2018, she was noticeably different however. She was off. It was as if she was one signal off in her frequency that made me feel as if I was speaking to Celine and someone else simultaneously. But we were still here, and we were about to retrace our steps.

When I went to England in 2018 she lamented the fact that I rejected her in San Francisco and how she never recovered from it. In truth, part of me was shocked that the pure side of her had conquered the vapid side of her for a time. I always acted as if she’d betray me, and I was distraught to find she hadn’t betrayed me in this time, that I had made a miscalculation.

But I promised we’d retrace every step of that walk together and kiss on every street corner, so we could finally move on as one.

Not AT&T Park anymore, but Oracle Park. Willie Mays Statue. No ball games for another month. Far less fanfare. No crowd to set a stage.

“Well, here we are then aren’t we?” posited Celine.

“Yeah, here we are,” I responded.

“We should take a picture.”

“Yeah, yeah we should.”

It was strange seeing her snap a picture of us after all this time. It hadn’t been very long in the true measurement of time passed, but my soul had an eternity that wore on it. My eyes reflected this, this age of soul. My face showed no wrinkles, and my jaw was sharp as ever. But I felt like a man who had endured divorce and reconciliation. I had a brave face despite my wear and tear.

Celine had a skeptical canvas for a face that showed a willing smile, a smile willing to be surprised. A smile willing to be the same girl in drama school she was to me six year prior: giddy, enamored, and ethereal.

The photo itself seemed to be one of those snapshots that immortalized itself immediately, separated itself from the natural flow of time. As if we belonged to a world that was elsewhere, ripping through the fabric of the real world every once in a while.

We both took a pause and stared at each other.

“We look like a proper Jon Hamm and January Jones don’t we?” asked Celine with a blissful resolve.

“Yeah, I suppose we do,” I replied.

“Shall we start walking then?”

“Yeah, let’s start walking.”

We were supposed to kiss on every street corner to right the wrongs of the past.

Reality is often disappointing.

With every block passed, there was a neurotic snapshot of San Francisco’s many glorious angles. Most people I wouldn’t blame for having such an impulse, but this camino was supposed to be something else entirely than a tourist’s jaunt.

On every street corner was a more detached Celine and a more anxious Arthur. I hated it. I hated seeing this woman sink deeper and deeper into a pensive, worrisome mess.

We finally arrived at the pinnacle of Nob Hill, the Cathedral I wanted to bring her to five years ago in hopes of her feeling something that would inspire a belief in God. I was incredibly naive. Five years later, I was not a Christian, and yet, I still gravitated towards Grace Cathedral all the same.

“Am I going to get to see Grace Cathedral with you finally?” asked Celine.

“You want to go in?”

“Yeah, why not? I think it would be quite nice.”

“Well alright, if you’re sure.”

We entered through the doors in the left, as the gargantuan central doors are only ever opened on major holidays. The Gothic interior encapsulated a distinctly English somber atmosphere. The Celtic, six leaf clover prayer labyrinth on the ground before us. I had spent many visits to Grace Cathedral walking this prayer labyrinth in hopes of bargaining with God. I did not feel this kind of optimism this time.

There was no time for this kind of routine, no temperament conducive to intentional silences with God. No time to sit and stare at a stained glass window with a four pointed star.

No, there was an antsy, erratic energy emanating from Celine’s being with every step she took. I felt as if I had to manage her, contain her like she was some bull in a China shop. She stormed, inspected, and dismissed with the fewest expressions she could spare. I was not enjoying this visit.

We did not explore much of the Cathedral, we barely made it through its lefthand side before Celine doubled back with an increased pace and tilted neck that signaled as if she was looking for something. She turned a corner to the West Wing seeing the shop was closed and that there was nowhere to further explore in this time twenty minutes removed from closing. Celine grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the space between a pillar and the central gate, that had just enough separation and seclusion to be slightly private. She turned around and put her own back against the wall and grabbed my hands to place on her breasts. I immediately pulled away.

“Take me,” she said.

“What?!”

“Take me Arthur,” she said while reaching for my hands again.

“No, are you insane?!”

“What, are you all Christian again now Arthur?”

“No, but this is still a place of worship. This is still a Holy place.”

“What, so you won’t fuck me then?”

“No, not in here. Not in a church.”

Her eyes pierced at me in defiance, and a grimace emerged on the right side of her mouth before attempting to grab my hands again. I thrashed them away in response once again and stood before with aggressive resolve.

She stared at me with detestation and fury. I had seen her mad before, but this was something else entirely. This was a taunting from something within her I hadn’t yet encountered. This was a hatred that hated without discrimination. This was that half step deviation in frequency making itself fully known. The one I didn’t want to accept.

“Let’s go,” I demanded.

Celine’s mouth made an angry pout while her eyes still taunted. I stepped out of the way and motioned for her to walk. She stormed out of the Cathedral and down the steps before pretending nothing had ever happened. She was world class at pretending.

South Beach, SOMA, Nob Hill, and Pacific Heights were all passed by until we found ourselves in Fort Mason again after all these years. Five years since that year that refused to be a year, 2015. We reached the gorgeous green in front of Fort Mason before the steps that lead many an awestruck man down to the old Naval Base turned shops, restaurants, and theater. The greatest snapshot she grabbed was of the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance, Northwest of us: pink sunset overhead, windswept eucalyptus trees below. Few things look more Californian, more San Franciscan. My heritage, my gorgeous heritage in a snapshot. Celine appeared to reach a kind of resolve from her madness in that moment.

But then we descended from the vista point of the green, down the storied steps, and she stopped and stared at me with all-knowing, all-seeing eyes and told me something that cut to my bones.

“You’re going to marry someone else Arthur. I just know it.”

A vague image of a lovely brunette woman flashed through my psyche.

I flinched.

I gripped my stubbornness with rehearsed, robotic zeal.

“Celine, stop saying things like this. I’m not going to marry someone else.”

Celine softly smiled, grinning to herself looking down at her feet for a moment before looking back with that all-knowing gaze.

“Yes you will Arthur. I know. I just know.”

“You don’t know anything, stop this nonsense. I’m not going to marry someone else. I’m going to marry you.”

“I don’t know Arthur…”

“But I know,” I protested, walking up to her and embracing her, hoping to smother her latest protest that was far more real than a prior manic episode.

“Should we keep walking to the Marina?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I’m getting quite cold. I’d like to have dinner now.”

I had no strength in me left to walk down this dead road. To go back to a restaurant where we shared nothing but an appetizer and a sad conversation.

Dear Readers,

It’s been some time. The following article is intended equal parts cultural, technical and personal. It comments on the cultural and environmental details of a far away land, the nitty gritty of a fight sport that changed my life in its land of origin, and the personal impact both of these forces had on my development as a martial artist, Christian, and man. For the fighters reading, take the more ethereal aspects in stride, and for the general readers of Blood & Rain, stick around and learn a humble crash course in details of a fight sport that can change your life for the better.

Enjoy.

The beginning of this year marks my first of many pilgrimages to the motherland of Muay Thai.

After close to a year in Krakow, Poland, a city that began to feel like home,

My wife and I embarked on a journey to the Northernmost major city of Thailand: Chiang Mai. Major city might be a generous description, as every city outside of Bangkok more resembles overgrown small towns.

The Muay Thai experience there was straightforward. I was visiting a friend and fellow Anti-Fragile Athlete based in Chiang Mai, Shane Deacon, who has since moved on to fight in Cambodia. I trained with him and another Anti-Fragile Athlete, David Currie, at what was described to me—both in conversation and by reputation—as the best Muay Thai gym in Chiang Mai proper: Manasak Muay Thai.

A caveat to this claim would be the two great gyms on the outskirts of the city that can rightly be mentioned in the same breath as Manasak: Santai and Lanna.

Manasak is coached by its head coach: Manasak Pinsinchai, one of many legends to come out of the Pinsinchai coaching tree in Bangkok. Manasak is a very brutal Muay Femur and a shrewd negotiator when it comes to his insisting on a certain set of details in executing his “Muay Femur” style. For those of you who are not familiar, a “Muay Femur” style is a technical style of Muay Thai, not favoring one weapon too much more than the other, although Manasak’s kicks appear to be his favorite weapon.

After two sessions of pad work with one his assistants, the stout low kicker name Chiang like Chiang Mai itself, Manasak took me aside and instructed me in movement. Admittedly, I found it difficult to understand him at first, but wheat I did understand is that he did not like my movement as a fighter when applied to Muay Thai. “We not do the kickboxing here, we do the Muay Thai. You big guy, you need to learn Muay Thai.”

It was a humbling experience to say the least, and my time in Chiang Mai was marred by two weeks out of training either some form of Thai flu and one week due to stomach flu. But towards the end, of my seven weeks in Chiang Mai, my health began to rebound in time for the arrival of a new instructors at Manasak’s gym: Ex “Extra” Pinsinchai.

Despite Ex also coming from the Pinsinchai coaching tree, Ex possessed a different style of Muay Thai: a hybrid between the “Muay Mat” and “Muay Khao” fight styles or the “heavy puncher/pressure fighter style” and the “clinch and knee strike” fight style.

When I first transitioned from my background in European style kickboxing I developed both in England and the United States into Muay Thai, it was my goal to become a Muay Femur which essentially means an elusive fighter, but my coach in San Francisco told me it would be more sound for me to become a Muay Mat due to a natural ability for closing the distance he noticed in drilling. In one of our solo pad sessions he also identified my knee strikes as my most natural strikes.

This introduction to Extra made for a more natural fit, and his demeanor that some could characterize as a “wild man” that was paradoxically balanced with a complete lack of vices sans caffeine and quiet, assassin’s mindset despite his absurdist outbursts and fanfare.

After his arrival, nearly every pad session within group classes of mine was with Ex on top of two private coaching sessions I had with him where we mainly drilled left body kicks, boxing, and clinching transitions.

Manasak’s instruction is clearly very sound, but in truth, I wasn’t ready for it due to it pertaining to aspects of my game I was already comfortable with but in a different stance and effort, particularly with my style of roundhouse being Dutch style as opposed to the Pinsichai variation of the Thai roundhouse. Ex was a perfect fit for me as a coach for the following reasons:

• I recently came to a conclusion that I have ADHD which is a learning curve Im still partaking in. One of the markers of ADHD is lower baseline dopamine levels, so a higher intensity of training releases higher amounts of dopamine which helps facilitate a greater capacity for hyper-focus.

• Pressure fighting and clinching is the perfect combination for negating the height difference I often experience as someone who sits in the range to compete at 95kg/209 lbs while standing at 6’1

• Something about Ex’s demeanor deeply resonated. It’s as if he engages in outbursts and fanfare to shock people into focus before being quiet and precise. It’s a unique ethos that I could interface with.

The entire coaching staff is wholeheartedly sound and welcoming. Manasak is an excellent leader for both the aforementioned staff and all students whether competitors who live at the gym or foreigners visiting for a short time. The sparring was always technical, and the daily clinch rounds provided the necessary frequency and intensity to grow.

I’ll also note that Chiang Mai itself is a gem of a city. My wife and I frequently engage in a discussion that attempts to nail down what about Chiang Mai made it exceedingly charming. The streets are objectively gritty and chaotic, and yet, they make you feel warm and alive. It is a very safe city for anyone traveling with loved ones, and the food and coffee are amongst the best I’ve had in the world, with “the Roastery” making the best cup of coffee I’ve had in my lifetime.

As an Orthodox Christian, the church there is a hidden gem within the gem of Chiang Mai. Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Church is the only Orthodox Christian Church in the city that sits under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. The architectural style is both traditionally Russian with its domes characteristic of most Orthodox churches, but the color choice of the church itself reflected the color palette and ethos of Thailand itself. The Priest, Father Paul is not Russian but Thai, and the Liturgy is predominantly served in English with homilies done in both English and Thai and the creed being done in English, Thai, and Russian. I do not say lightly however that Father Paul strikes me as a hidden Saint in the making. His humility is unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed, and naturally, like any Saint-like individual, he would probably laugh at such a claim.

My wife and I both deeply enjoyed Chiang Mai, and if it weren’t for the burning season where the farmers surrounding the city burn left over crops that occurs every March, we would have stayed in Chiang Mai for the entirety of our stay in Thailand. The gym was nearly perfect. The food, prices, and coffee were excellent. Everything we partook in was located within a fifteen minute radius at most, and the excursions outside of that scope were all worth the trip via moped.

But this burning season would not have been good for training or my wife’s health, so we booked a ticket to head South to the largest island in Thailand, the place frequently labeled a tourist trap known as Phuket. Before leaving Chiang Mai, many teammates at Manasak warned me that was more expensive and less charming, but the prospect of having a beach for grounding, selenium, sunlight exposure, and other health benefits negated any of these warnings in my mind.

The tricky aspect of heading to Phuket was logistical, as I didn’t know which gym I’d be settling at which would determine where my wife and I would book our airbnb. We settled on an airbnb in Karon Beach which we would later find is possibly the most boring part of Phuket. Nestled between the storied beaches of Patong and Kata on Phuket’s West Coast, Karon seemed to be lacking in distinct character. It would take a 17-20 minute moped ride to the storied “fitness street” in Chalong on Phuket’s East Coast to try the first of many Muay Thai gyms I’d visit during my seven weeks in Phuket.

I’ll say respectfully, that my friend Alexander De Wilde’s recent article on the pitfalls of Muay Thai in Phuket are predominantly accurate. Many are overpriced and overly commercial that are owned by foreigners, run by retired Thais, both of whom are catering to tourists passing through, people more into Muay Thai for fitness as opposed to fighting, and if you’re lucky, MMA fighters looking to level up their striking and overcharging compared to traditional Muay Thai camps. This is the case for most of the gyms on the “SOI” or “fitness street” and most of the gyms in Phuket. I’ll now begin chronicling all of the gyms I visited starting with the three I visited on this fitness street.

I’ll also rate the gyms from 1-10 on the following criteria:

• Instruction

• Class Structure

• Atmosphere

• Equipment

• Pad Work

• Clinching

• Drilling

• Bodies in General

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters

FIRST WEEK ON THE SOI:

Rattachai Muay Thai:

My first chosen gym on Phuket that I thought would be my permanent choice was Rattachai, a storied gym that’s been around since 2015 founded by three-time Lumpinee Stadium Champion, Kru Nai Rattachai. Found on a side street off the SOI, is an ethereal gym that is strangely reminiscent of Hawaiian aesthetics from the mid 2000s. The warmup consisted of ten minutes of an option of running or jumping rope to which I chose jumping rope. What followed was a short stretch, bag work, and pad work. My main grievance with Rattachai were bags that lacked weight to them. While this isn’t make or break, if I want to prepare for fighting men my size, it’s better to have some bags for accuracy and some bags for power development or technique being properly stress-proofed against said weight. The padwork at Rattachai was a very fast-paced variation of Muay Femur ways of striking that was very enjoyable, and upon looking around at instructors holding pads during my bag work, it was clear that no instructor spared a single detail. Once bag work and pad work concluded, class went into drilling where we drilled temps into left kicks with a partner. This gym has an overwhelmingly positive atmosphere, ands it has the rare quality of stopping time that only a handful of places in this world has. While this is an excellent gym for most, I felt this gym wasn’t quite the right fit due to style of Muay Thai as well as lack of equipment for larger fighters. It is an excellent gym for fighters in traditional Thai weight classes however.

Final Scores for Rattachai:

• Instruction: 7

• Class Structure:

• Atmosphere: 7

• Equipment: 4

• Pad Work: 7

• Clinching: N/A

• Drilling: 7

• Bodies in General: 7

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters: 7

Apollo Gym:

While in Chiang Mai, I was scrolling fight pages on Instagram, and I stumbled upon a Soviet boxing page that was doing Soviet-style boxing drilling in Phuket. This gym is none other than Apollo Gym on the Soi, a gym that offers CrossFit, Muay Thai, and boxing with their boxing program headed up by a Russian and Uzbek staff, which combined with the vaguely middle-eastern grapplers I was seeing at my favorite coffee shop, quickly explained why there’s an Uzbek restaurant on the Soi. My original gameplan was to train Muay Thai at Rattachai and Boxing at Apollo, but after some complications with my airbnb, it no longer made logistical sense. However, I wanted to make it over there for at least one class to be coached in the Soviet boxing I had been drilling myself for close to six months. The warmup consisted of ten minutes of jumprope, ten minutes of running, and fast-paced footwork drills involving the pendulum step. While I had been drilling the pendulum step for in out movement on 1,2s and 2,1s, they had a drill for 1,2,3 with a pendulum step on each strike, (step 1, step 2, step 3). Each session at Apollo however, has a pre-set emphasis that can be seen on their schedule, and this session was dedicated to pressure fighting. Drills included pairing up handicap pressure with each man’s partner focussed on defense, quarter turns, and counter striking. I was paired with a “Tysonesque” London Italian who was not pulling his shots, making the defensive reactions that much more vital. The final drill was body shot sparring with each man having one leg inside a tire. It’s interesting to see the slightly different effort in punching between Russian and Uzbek boxers with Russians being slightly more relaxed and Uzbeks being slightly more “muscled.” This was a great experience for me personally, as it had been the first time in a long time I feel like a true beginner in striking. I was very sad to not regularly attend this gym, but I’m hoping my time in Thailand in the future will be a different story. This is an excellent camp with excellent coaches and resources I have nothing but good things to say about.

Final Scores for Apollo Gym:

• Instruction: 8

• Class Structure:

• Atmosphere: 6

• Equipment: 9

• Pad Work: N/A

• Clinching: N/A

• Drilling: 8

• Bodies in General: 8

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters: 8

Yak Yai:

Located on the far side of the SOI is a well maintained American-owned but Thai-run gym called Yak Yai, a completely indoor space with excellent facilities, full strength conditioning apparatus, every type of bag you can think of, mythically pristine showers, and a contemplative atmosphere. More reminiscent of an East Asian dojo, Yak Yai began slowly making a name for itself by snagging much of the coaching staff from the successful but recently defunct, Phuket Top Team. After my first group session in Phuket at Rattachi, I had a private coaching with Kru Nat at Yak Yai, their resident Muy Sok and former Kru at Phuket Singha. The warmup consisted of running, jumprope, and shadowboxing before Thai padwork predominantly focussed on elbow setups. Kru Nat then walked be through a kind of central control for off-balancing opponents from the clinch. The bulk of what turned out to be three private lessons with Kru Nat turned out to be primarily attempting to master one method of off-balancing as opposed to having me fumble learning three different ways in such a short period of time. I came back to Yak Yai for a group class, and after the five minutes of running laps, all of the students were put into stations for circuit training which I admittedly took far too seriously. After going balls to the wall with circuit training, I gloved up for pad work, and what is unique about Yak Yai is getting to do pads for round with every coach as opposed to five rounds with the same coach. When doing pads with Kru Nat for a round, we were able to work in transitions for off-balancing opponents into power shots, and the rest of the pad work rounds were more standard. The session finished with sparring and clinching, and after several rounds, the coaches paired me with themselves for clinching to which I received an absolute clinic in arm locking in the clinch. Yak Yai is a very interesting gym that I suspect will grow into a a very successful gym in the coming years. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the circuit training, but that has more to do with the fact that I do my own type 2 muscle fiber conditioning. So for beginners who are looking to build a solid foundation in a very disciplined atmosphere that will press you for taking your time in transitions, this is a great place to immerse yourself in a militaristic environment for Muay Thai.

Final Scores for Yak Yai:

• Instruction: 7

• Class Structure: 8

• Atmosphere: 8

• Equipment: 10

• Pad Work: 8

• Clinching: 8

• Drilling: N/A

• Bodies in General: 6

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters: 3

SETTLING ON SINBI MUAY THAI

After spending some time scanning Muay Thai forms, the gym whose names came up the most as the top gyms in Phuket were Singpatong (recently moved to a new location with a new name, Petchnumnoi) located in Patong and Sinbi located in Rawai.

Petchnumnoi has a reputation as a gym that “goes hard all the time” which for a shorter time frame like mine in Phuket was an attractive prospect. Before its recent restructuring and relocation, it had the reputation of being the most “old school gym” not only in its aforementioned training style but its roots in traditional Muay Thai unaffected by MMA’s inevitable watering down of striking instruction with the exception of a few excellent cases.

From what I could tell from their instagram account as well, they had a sizable amount of larger fighters and a solid arsenal of equipment. However, the two times I went to Patong for visa reasons, I was stopped by the same police checkpoint and fined 1000 Baht (the equivalent of about $30) for not having a Thai or International driver’s license. While I had the opportunity to test for a Thai license, this would have cost me a total of 10000 Baht (the equivalent of about $300), and despite racking up tickets in Thailand over the course of three months, they only totaled in 4000 Baht. So take this note as an advisement to get an international driver’s license before heading to Thailand and getting around via moped.

This dynamic unfortunately ruled out Petchnumnoi/Singpatong, as going to Patong twice a day would have resulted in $60 in fines per day or $360 in fines per week. It’s also worth nothing that Patong is frankly, a disgusting place. The reputation that Thailand has particularly and Bangkok and most of all, Pattaya for being a seedy source of sex tourism is harder to find in places like Chiang Mai and Phuket, however Patong appears to be Phuket’s in-house Pattaya for sex tourism and general shifty behavior. For example, the second time I was stopped in Patong, I did the customary song and dance of the cop saying I could no longer drive in Thailand without a Thai or international license before he took the shadier of option of asking for 1000 Baht for himself instead of it going to the police station and through it’s official process of ticketing. It was after I shook his hand with a 1000 Baht note in my hand like a character from “The Wire” when he grabbed onto my prayer rope that was around my neck and slyly asked “for me?” This particular prayer rope resembled a Buddhist prayer rope due to it being made of beads. But I showed him the small wooden cross at the bottom of it before he said “Oh, it’s Christian. Okay, carry on, have a good day.” It’s the only place in Thailand where I was shaken down for more than just cash.

This run in with Patong left Sinbi, a storied gym not only in Phuket but all of Thailand located in the Southernmost province of Phuket, Rawai. I was initially apprehensive of Sinbi, due to my apprehension of large gyms, and Sinbi is a behemoth of a gym. With 25-30 coaches servicing 50-90 people every morning and evening class, you’d think detailed instruction would fall through the cracks. I first went to Sinbi on a Saturday afternoon after making the drive from Karon Beach, and I drove up a hill from the main drag before parking in front of a ramp that took me to the open air, bottom floor of the gym containing its shop. I purchased a day pass before walking up the staircase into what I would begin to call a fortress. It’s a fortress made of black metal, housing a massive floor of mats, three rings, and three rows of fourteen heavy bags of various size not including a separate warm up area overlooking a view of the ocean. It was the greatest atmosphere of any gym I’ve ever been to.

The class consisted first of a ten minute run, jumprope, or tire jump followed by stretching, rounds of bag work or pad work with one of the squadron of instructors, an instruction in technique with a partner and then on the bag, rounds of sparring, rounds of clinching, a regimen of calisthenics, closed by a series of stretches. The bulk of the Krus at Sinbi were either Muay Femurs (technicians) and Muay Khaos (knee fighters), and the first Kru I had pads with at Sinbi was an older Muay Femur who did not hold pads in the standard way of blitzing requests for jab, cross, rear roundhouse, quarter turn, rear round house and other Thai standards mindlessly over and over again but began drilling specific situations while adapting them to my stand closer to kickboxer as opposed a Nak Muay. My rounds of sparring were against two K1 Kickboxers from Amsterdam who were closer to my size as well as a larger Nak Muay from Australia. Sinbi is also home to its own boxing stadium where they put on shows weekly, and that night there was a show three hours after class concluded. The first experience there is one I’ll never forget both in actuality and in feeling. After this experience I committed the remainder of my time in Phuket to Sinbi.

The first private coaching I did at Sinbi was with the only Muay Mat in the entire coaching staff with him being a Muay Mat/Muay Khao hybrid. My first round of pads with him was a pressure fighting variation of traditional Thai standards, and while holding, he exclaimed “Ohh very good! Pro level! You fight next Saturday!” This had to immediately be taken with a grain of salt due to there always being a speculation of using anyone who can remotely strike as a fighter to fill slots at shows to keep good relationships with promoters. I was apprehensive about full rules Muay Thai without elbow pads due to not having enough reps for transitions in and out of clinch while using and defending elbows. Despite my excitement at this prospect, I declined due to wanting all fights to go on my record, and fighting in Thailand on my record would automatically revoke my amateur status in the Western World. Or so I thought. I later found out I could have counted these as amateur fights in the United States, and this is my greatest regret about my first pilgrimage. The rest of the pad work sessions were mixed with one round entirely being purely boxing emphasizing “in out” movement and slipping punches, as Kru Rak also competed in Western boxing. Rak also held pads for me in a pure elbow round due to my elbows being my weakest strikes and one round purely based on the aforementioned clinch transitions.

I received pad work from over a dozen different coaches at Sinbi Muay Thai. Some were hellbent on having me stand in a Thai stance and working Thai fundamentals. Some adapted to me having heavy hands and worked setups for finishing overhands or finishing up elbows. Some were keen on jumping right into defensive maneuvers into counters such as catching teeps into spinning elbows. And like at Manasak’s gym, the craziest trainer and I built a bit of a rapport. One day I was paired with Kru Bas who introduced himself as the “crazy trainer.” Bas touched pads to gloves for the first round with a devious smile before attempting to smack my face full blast with a boxing mitt where my guard was thankfully present. The remainder of my rounds at Sinbi were done with Bas to help me get into the mindset for upcoming fights.

Sinbi in truth, is the Muay Thai gym I’ve dreamed of both figuratively and literally.

Final Scores for Sinbi:

• Instruction 9

• Class Structure 10

• Atmosphere 10

• Equipment 10

• Pad Work 9

• Clinching 10

• Drilling 8

• Bodies in General 10

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters 8

EXPLORING THE REST OF THE ISLAND:

There were multiple instances after committing to Sinbi in which I tried out other gyms for either private session or a group sessions either to get different looks or for the sake of logistics with my work schedule. While Sinbi is the best baseline I could have asked for, details I learned at other gyms turned out to be force multipliers in my understanding the nuances of Muay Thai and in my application of Thai rhythms and sequences in my style that was still evidently European as a default setting.

Sor Dejdamrong:

In my original research regarding Phuket Muay Thai, the two original gyms I was deciding between were Rattachai and Sor Dejdamrong. I had to have some semblance of a choice before making it to the island, as I had sort out accommodation for my wife and myself ahead of time with that locale being contingent on proximity to training. I initially decided on Rattachai due to its proximity to the “Son” and the water, but some insider information I had come across stated that Sor Dejdamrong is the up an coming Muay Thai camp in Phuket, hellbent on creating the next generation of Nak Muay. Nestled in the hear of the island, in the valley between the mountains, lies the house of a storied Kru Rong, a three time Lumpinee Stadium Champion and Thailand’s first ever MMA champion who had spent his most recent decade serving as the head striking coach for Evolve MMA in Singapore. The atmosphere is closer to a temple than a commercial Muay Thai gym despite its classical combat sports aesthetic. I arrived just in time for their morning Muay Thai session that consisted of a warmup of ten minutes of running and ten minutes of jumprope. When I stood in front of the mirror for shadowboxing, Kru Rong shuddered at the sight of my Soviet style hook and instructed me to throw the Thai “slap hook” instead. As opposed to explaining the technique behind the Soviet hook, I opted to obey and drill the weapon of closer range. The thing that struck me most about Kru Rong was a genuine care you could see in his eyes for the strangers who entered his gym for the first time. While many Krus naturally instruct foreigners with joy, there is typically a more shallow acquaintance in the encounters, as many fighters move around gyms in Thailand. But despite his years of coaching, Kru Rong displayed a depth that is rare for combat sports, and it is clear that it is his desire to build fighters from day one Nak Muay into champions. Before the training session began individual padwork, Kru Rong demonstrated a drill for the class to partake in involving crosses into quarter turns into left kicks. The pad work that soon followed was closer to a Muay Mat style of spadework, that saw the largest Kru work me to complete and total depletion. We closed the session with sparring, where I got to spar multiple fighters and multiple Krus, and I took a great deal of details from this lone group session at this gem of a gym tucked away in the mountain pass.

Final Scores for Sor Dejdamrong:

• Instruction 9

• Class Structure 10

• Atmosphere 10

• Equipment 10

• Pad Work 9

• Clinching 10

• Drilling 8

• Bodies in General 10

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters 6

Cookie Muay Thai:

Once upon a time, a man who was considered by many to be Sinbi’s best coach went by the name of “Cookie,” and he opened up his own gym four minutes away from Sinbi in Rawai. There has apparently been no bad blood caused by this move and what the actual result was a much smaller gym with a very chilled atmosphere but very detailed instruction. The warmup was standard with ten minutes of cardio followed by an extensive stretching routine. What came after was the standard rounds of bag and pad work, where I linked up with a new friend of mine I had made at Manasak in Chiang Mai. The padwork I received called for the highest volume of kicking I’ve ever engaged in with the pads being held by a Kru weighing less than fifty percent of my weight. Despite being smaller in stature and visibly wincing form holding pads , he called for harder kicks. There’s a thumos to this gym that’s hard to ignore, and it seems to possess the perfect balance of relaxation and intensity. I had the opportunity to drill with a “Muay Thaigram” influencer from Poland “muay_thai_tom” who stands at 6’5 fighting heavyweight and roundhouses with a deceiving level of speed. The drills were progressive and reactionary, and they worked seamlessly into the beginning of sparring. Once sparring concluded, there was five rounds of clinching, where I had the opportunity to clinch spar with a Canadian/German fighter roughly my size with over fifty fights. Cookie and the rest of the coaching staff have the right amount of detail-orientated nature and right amount of intensity when it comes to pushing their in-house fighters, and with the gym still being in its infancy, serious Nak Muay are bound to receive a great deal of attention.

Final Scores for Cookie Muay Thai:

• Instruction 9

• Class Structure 10

• Atmosphere 10

• Equipment 10

• Pad Work 9

• Clinching 10

• Drilling 8

• Bodies in General 10

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters 8

Yotharak Muay Thai:

On the north end of the island, close to Bangtao Beach and the Phuket airport lies an old school gym that most would miss, as it’s tucked away in a side street of a residential neighborhood. I came across this gym in a video from “Isaac_Nak_Muay” on instagram that talked about a sort of authenticity test for Muay Thai gyms that consists of three markers: a car parked in the gym, chickens roaming in the general vicinity, and uncles watching old school Muay Thai. Yotharak checks all three boxes, and another detail worth noting is it being a Muslim Muay Thai gym. There is list of rules posted on the wall, one of which prohibits pork on the premises which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been to Bangtao, a predominantly Muslim part of Phuket. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the geography, just South of Thailand lies the Muslim Malay Peninsula and the respective gateway to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. With Phuket being close to the southernmost end of Thailand, there is a significant Thai Muslim population that colors the application and temperament of Muay Thai. I opted to do a private lesson with an emphasis in clinching, and after an hour moped ride to the other side of the island, my lesson began with ten minutes of jumprope and five minutes of weighted jumprope before shadowboxing for five minutes. After shadowboxing, I was brought front and center in of with head coach for pad work on Thai pads emphasizing cornering an opponent for headkicks. After five rounds, we went into the ring to begin drilling clinching methods I couldn’t have previously conceived of, one of which that off-balanced opponents via a low position with knees, one that served as an arm lock from which to anchor and throw knees from the flank of the opponent, and the last her that was for getting a dominant position in scrambles to finish opponents via knee to the head. After instruction concluded, I clinched with for five rounds and sparred for five rounds. It was the first and only private lesson where I full sparred the coach, and blending timing from Eurokickboxing and Muay Thai made for some of the best sparring rounds I’ve ever had. Yotharak was a gym I had a hunch would be well worth making the journey to visit, and it far exceeded my expectations. I came to Thailand for many reasons, but from a brass tacks technical standpoints, that reason was to begin entering proficiency in the clinch. Yotharak was vital for my development.

Final Scores for Yotharak:

• Instruction 9

• Class Structure 10

• Atmosphere 10

• Equipment 10

• Pad Work 9

• Clinching 10

• Drilling 8

• Bodies in General 10

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters 8

Mystery Gatekept Gym:

Some places I like to keep to myself because I fear they’ll be overrun and changed. The gym I’m about to speak of one of those places. One afternoon, I wasn’t able to make the second practice at Sinbi, so I looked for the closest gym to my airbnb and found one just a one minute drive away tucked away in a secluded neighborhood. Upon arriving, I was greeted by a knowing face and smile that any man would associate with the ideal nature of a grandfather. It was a small, humble gym wedged between a house and lush gully filled with palm trees, and I was apparently arriving an hour after the conclusion of their second practice. I then agreed to do a private lesson where I had my hands wrapped in the most peculiar way by the Kru before he h held his bare hands out as pads to work on placement before doing full pad work. He was particularly savvy with elbows, having me line up standard elbows, up elbows, hammer elbows, and spinning elbows. After this part of the session, he had me do three rounds on the bag to which I opted to practice Dutch fundamentals on their long bag to have me fully warm up before getting in the ring for Thai pad work. The padwork was some of the best padwork I’ve ever received with perfect placement for straight punches allowing me to fully extend like a boxer which is unfortunately rare in Thai padwork, higher placement for round kicks allowing me to work on head kick height, and sequences for setting up spinning elbows. He then took my gloves off to work on clinching into elbow and knee strikes off of clinching transitions before having me clinch one of his fighters for three rounds. The final drill he coached was front kicking with one leg and immediately round housing with the other which is a sequence that I rarely considered throwing in fights prior to this private lesson. This lesson warmed my heart more than any other lesson. There is something timeless about this place. It’s as if nothing else in the world matters, and the smile and guidance from this Kru tell you of any boundless potentials you’ve never considered. This is folkish, agrarian, humble, and beautiful Muay Thai. This the soul of Muay Thai found in a microcosm. I pray that the majority of Muay Thai gyms in small villages all over Thailand, maintain this same idealized essence that leaves me starry-eyed and grateful.

Final Scores for Mystery Gym:

• Instruction 10

• Class Structure N/A

• Atmosphere 10

• Equipment 5

• Pad Work 9

• Clinching 9

• Drilling 10

• Bodies in General 7

• Bodies for Bigger Fighters 5

PHUKET, THE ISLAND:

Phuket has been called a lot of things by a lot of people, and they’re probably all true. Phuket is an island the size of a large city, but much of it is thankfully not overdeveloped, so the distance between key centers is greater than most cities. The most built-up parts of Phuket are Old Town and Chalong, the province that houses the famous SOI, and it was here where I spent much of my time due to stumbling upon a 24 coffee shop called “The Oasis.” In truth, it’s actually a weed shop that also happens to sell protein shakes, protein waffles, coffee, and nicotine pouches. Due to regularly partaking in four out of five of their offerings, I decided to make this place my office on the island, and it was here where I got the bulk of my work for Anti-Fragile Fitness done.

Old Town is one of the few places in Thailand where you can find European influence due to Portuguese contact made with the island during the “Age of Exploration,” and my wife and I had the chance to explore it’s shops and enjoy its restaurants during a weekly street festival there. Truth be told, that would be our only time spent in Old Town due to our staying on the other side of the island.

As I mentioned earlier, Karon Beach is the most boring part of Phuket, and despite frequently swimming there, I attempted to spend most of my time outside of Karon for both pragmatic and scenic reasons. A summary of the beaches can be as follows:

Kamala Beach is small, secluded, and devoted to the high end resort customer

Kata Beach is a smaller, more festive beach that is noticeably home to most of the Latin-American tourists I saw.

Patong Beach is a seedy cesspool.

Bangtao Beach is a family-oriented beach with predominantly Muslim tourists.

Rawai Beach is a skinny beach that is more for boating folk than general beach-goers.

Nai Harn and Ya Nut Beaches are the gems of Phuket.

Far to the North is the most secluded part of Phuket, inland from the airport and Bangtao Beach. Forests, farms, and small villages can be found here, as well as the only Orthodox Church on the island, Holy Trinity, a large estate across the street from a farm that houses a thriving Russian Orthodox community with happy families keeping both good health and pious Faith. In a rare case of culture shock, my wife and I witnessed a young Russian boy speaking Thai to his Thai nanny. Culture shock is a beautiful thing, as it lets you know you’re truly far from home and truly elsewhere, outside the wire of globalism. Liturgies at this church were done strictly in Church Slavonic, and we had a 40-55 minute commute by moped each way. But the journey was worth it every time.

My favorite of all of these parts of the island however, was Rawai. I am a homesick Californian who hasn’t been home in three years for a multitude of reasons, and when I jumped on a moped to head to Sinbi for the first time, blasting Jimmy Eat World in my headphones, and looking over the water, I took in the closest thing resembling California I had seen in a very long time. It’s as if I was in Santa Cruz’s long lost Thai cousin of a town, that made me feel like a teenager all over again. White houses, shops that look like bungalows, and a Bohemian aura untouched by commercialism despite many foreign efforts all made for something as real as the blood in my veins that I’ll forever be thankful for.

24 HOURS IN BANGKOK:

Pinsinchai Muay Thai:

Our journey back to the United States was originally going to consist of a day in Chengdu, China, but after tickets sold out, we opted to do a long layover in Bangkok for 24 hours that would allow us to catch a cheap flight back to Chicago through Taipei. I would only have time for one private lesson and one group class, and it was decided long before that if I ever made it to Bangkok, I would be headed to my aforementioned friend, Alexander Wilde’s home gym, Pinsinchai Muay Thai, the legendary coaching tree that produced both Kru Manasak and Kru Extra. I booked in advance asking for one last clinch lesson this time emphasizing clinching taller fighters. Pinsinchai is the most technical Muay Thai gym I’ve ever been to, and the instruction was case in point. Concepts that seemed complex to me were clarified in potent haikus of directions that removed any question marks of navigating fights against taller opponents, and after three months in Thailand, the Thai rhythm and balance finally clicked: slow, steady, relaxed, agile, and Faithful. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The smoother I got, the faster I got.

Bangkok itself is a behemoth. In its core, I found a place with the scale and density of New York City with a fraction of the trash and a Thai spirit still in tact.

The next morning my wife and I raced to the larger of the two Bangkok airports and jumped on a plane to Taipei for another bittersweet goodbye. I was growing tired of bittersweet goodbyes, and this one was more bittersweet than the last. I came here to get something back that I had lost, and I indeed found it again. The will to fight, the joy of Muay Thai, and the bolstering of my Faith through practicing it. I had lived the agendas of others that had made me depressed, and I reacted as opposed to being a first mover. It was in coming to Thailand that I found all of these things again.

I am a man who has been shaped by communal space of intensity. Churches and gyms have shaped my conception of life. These are both houses of Faith in their own right. In one you place your trust for Salvation in its hands, and in the other you place your life in its hands. Whether or not you will continue on and whether or not your survive are determined by these houses, and if I were to judge Thailand by its Churches and its gyms, I would tell you I have found paradise.

Muay Thai is Thailand, and Thailand is Muay Thai. It is as normal for an Italian man to enjoy an espresso at 8am, as it is for a Thai to kick pads at 8am. You can find Muay Thai on every street corner, and in every village. It is the last martial culture that is fully alive and entrenched in the national psyche, and any fighter who witnesses it will never be the same again.

To fill the void, I spent time in silence with God more often than usual either after Muay Thai sessions or while riding around on a moped throughout the island to write daily meditations on the many dogmatic and practical aspects of the Orthodox Christian Faith.

These thirty meditations were originally released on instagram, and I’ve decided to take five standout meditations and place them into this article in preparation for the conclusion of Pascha punctuated by Ascension this Thursday.

The reason I chose to do so is a yearly noticeable, creeping lack of focus on the spiritual disciplines in the aftermath of the time of celebration that often leads to a spiritual slump in the return to “normalcy.”

I hope these are of some help.

ON MARTYRDOM:

The context of seeing one’s life purely in the view of this life is to truly send one’s self towards eternal damnation.

The greatest importance is then placed upon worldly things, as one flounders, chasing the highest peaks of vital experience and the euphoria of greatest victories before the fleeting feelings send a man crashing down wanting more in a perpetual state of emptiness.

In many cases, our lives are blessed by God not only in spiritual ways but in material ways when we are obedient to His will.

However, if one hasn’t read the book of Job and/or still knowingly or unknowingly views this world as the the only experience despite professing the Christian Faith, he will view negative experiences in the material as a condemnation from God.

The greatest extreme of this dynamic would be found in perpetually mourning martyrdom in the name of our Faith.

The Saint, Tsar Nicholas II comes most to mind. Saint Nicholas inherited a mess of a Russian Empire that was dragged into World War and Revolution in the aftermath of a struggling Industrial Revolution and total military loss and embarrassment by the hands of the rising Japanese Empire aided by British intelligence.

He and his family were forced to accept their material fate with dignity amidst regicide and the massacre of the majority of the royal family which would be viewed as an irreparable tragedy resulting in the Soviet Union.

However, his family were honored by God through Salvation and canonization in the case of Saint Nicholas. And after decades of Godless rule, Russia has experienced a resurgence in its Orthodox Faith.

Martyrdom is the greatest reward from God not only to one’s soul but to those in the body of the Church who engage in the struggle of Theosis as one, inspired by the martyr’s Holy example.

ON HUMILITY:

You might be surprised to see me posting a picture of a Buddhist monk for a Lenten post, but allow me to explain.

I’ve been living in Thailand for two months now, and I’ve had the privilege of partaking in a society where respect and humility is abundant. This stems from being a Buddhist country, and while Buddhism is not centered around Christ, there is a whole host of virtues practiced in Buddhism very much in alignment with Christianity.

Now, this is not a bid for a kind of Eastern Ecumenism, but I had an even greater privilege meeting a Priest in Chiang Mai who might be the Holiest man I’ve ever met. He had explained to me that his conversion to Orthodoxy felt quite seamless due to so many virtues and practices, even confession being prevalent in Buddhism.

The most remarkable thing to me however, the aspect of him that made me feel as if I was in the company of a hidden Saint was a boundless humility that bled through in every sentence and action that came from him.

Humility is the only quality we can exceed the Devil in, as he has no humility. He is smarter than all of us, stronger, more cunning, etc, but humility is the virtue from which all virtues and spiritual disciplines begin that he is incapable of.

A truly humble person does not mind going unnoticed, and often times, because of this, there are many hidden, non-canonized Saints.

The most recently canonized Saint, Matushka Olga of Alaska could have very well been one of those hidden Saints if not for her canonization.

But what stuck out to me most about Father Paul in Chiang Mai and Matushka Olga as described in the recent film, “Sacred Alaska,” was the fact that they both are/were not partaking in extraordinary adventurous lives like that of Saint Anthony the Great or Saint John Maximovitch.

They simply had/have their lot in life, had/have their duties, and they partook/partake in them with such discipline, love, grace, and humility that they achieved a Holiness that was and is revered by many.

There is the life of a Saint for all of us if we look right in front of us. May we proceed with Humility.

TO BE AN AESTHETE:

Aesthete: a person who has or affects to have a special appreciation of art and beauty.

Arthur Dayne, [May 27, 2025 at 6:30:47 AM (May 27, 2025 at 5:41:37 PM)]:

God loves all things that are beautiful, but I’ve often struggled with this sphere’s emphasis on beauty as an end goal in itself. Far too many times we’ve witnessed the capacity for beautiful aesthetics to be internally corrupted. It is rare for the core to match the outward appearance.

Physiognomy is a worthy tool at times, but we often overlook the signs on one’s face that display whether or not they’re a scoundrel if they possess a certain degree of beauty.

I have also said in the past that if I can’t live in a beautiful place, I’d prefer to live in a harsh place. I prefer to know where I stand at all times.

Living in harsh places has often see me grow apprehensive with ONLY being surrounded by beauty.

It wasn’t until a trip to Prague with one of my closest friends, Jan Radliński that I was able to fully find the balance of being in an Orthodox Christian mindset and being an aesthete mostly due to his example.

As a side note, while I believe Paris to be the most beautiful city on Earth despite its current decay, Prague is a Gothic marvel of a tapestry with influences from all three of Europe’s major ethnic groups in the Latins due to its Catholic history, the Germanics due to its placement in the HRE, and the Slavs due to its placement on Slavic soil. While Paris is indeed the most beautiful, Prague has a male spirit of brooding, intensity, elegance, and ferocity. It is a city I think about daily, and it is most likely my favorite of Europe.

Despite Czechia being the only majority Atheist country, one wouldn’t know it by walking into its storied Orthodox Church of Saint Cyril and Methodius, the fathers of Slavic Orthodoxy. We were packed in like sardines, and there was an intense but elegant strain of Orthodoxy that remains my favorite to this day.

It was in this example and the example of Jan’s interaction with Prague’s unrivaled aesthetics that I was able to finally understand the line between the appreciation for beauty without slipping into lapse decadence that preys on us all.

There is beauty in the struggle towards salvation, and the aesthetics of this dynamic can present themselves both as the struggle itself or the beauty of that struggle.

The internal war is equal parts spiritual and mental. While many have denounced psychotherapy in the Orthodox world, there are a good number of Orthodox psychotherapists who work in tandem with Orthodox Priests who together determine whether an internal issue with an individual is spiritual or mental.

This displays legitimacy to the wars of the mind themselves as having enough of a distinction to be understood as something tangible although not entirely detached from spiritual warfare.

Frances Parker Yockey stated that the internal life of a man is far more important than the external life, as the internal determines the external.

The opposite end of the spectrum is the recent self-improvement culture found in this sphere of social media that declares that action is the only way to lift one’s self out a poor mental state.

But if there’s anything that the past five years has taught me, it’s that these factions presenting mono-directional solutions are almost always part of a bi-directional dynamic.

If one only zeroes in on action, the actions themselves could lead a man down a path he didn’t originally intend to walk. Actions often beget actions, and if we are not aware of internal orientation, we reach a destination that is unfavorable at best and damnation at worst.

If one is to purely focus on one’s internal life, then he’ll find himself with an internal peace that is not reflective of his output and contribution to the world both in material terms and in deeds reflecting one’s Faith.

There is no Faith without Deeds.

When one takes an action as a catalyst, he opens up different angles to see the war in his mind to determine what was an illusion, what is a real mental roadblock, and what is an intrusive thought stemming from spiritual warfare.

When one prays and then sits with his thoughts determining what is of God and what is not, he will find which further actions reflect these internal victories.

IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU DON’T HAVE PROBLEMS:

I drove down the wrong road in Phuket today, and I finally found where the Thais actually live here. There’s abject poverty despite the numerous Thai smiles zipping by my gaze from my moped.

It reminded me of a time when i had poverty in sight every single day living in West Oakland and working in San Francisco.

Even more than this, it reminded me of a time when my page was reborn in my struggle of overnight security during Covid that saw me malnourished, sleep-deprived, and well below the poverty line. It took a great toll on my health, and I was perpetually exhausted while being in an almost constant state of delirium.

However, any time I wanted to feel bad for myself on the two hour commute or when I had to do burpees to wake myself up behind the security desk, I told myself I didn’t have problems. I thought of parents burying their children in Syria and how they’d be thrilled to have my “problems” I “endured” while reading sports science texts from the comfort of a desk while keeping an eye on some cameras.

If you have a smartphone in your hand, chances are you don’t have those kinds of real problems.

But this isn’t about a “who has it the worst?” contest, this is about perspective.

We objectively have a path laid out before us by God tbh at has tangible “problems,” but these problems from a material standpoint are no kind of problems at all in the grand scheme of things.

To complain is to slap God in the face having been given an opportunity to live in material prosperity while attempting Theosis and Salvation as opposed to being placed in a situation where seeking Theosis and Salvation is the only way to survive.

__________

May your road to Salvation beyond Pascha be fruitful and successful.

The podcast’s first episode itself was raw and intentionally raw to clarify. It was Old Calendar Christmas, (January 7th, 2021), and I was half way through a year below the poverty line averaging four hours of sleep thanks to overnight security work. While the circumstances themselves forced gritty behavior patterns, the solitude of lockdown and quiet nights behind a security desk lent themselves to a spectacularly contemplative existence. This was an existence that suited me well.

I don’t like half measures, and I don’t like being one-dimensional, so to have a stressor that develops toughness and an environment that develops thoughts was what I still consider to be perfection. Six months after this crucible, I was Christian once again.

I look back on this time, the first half of 2021 fondly. I met many great friends, and I’ve lost a fair few along the way. God prunes trees accordingly. I also wrote with an intensity and creativity that was unlike my peers whose writing I enjoyed and still enjoy very much. I don’t say this in regards as a hierarchical assessment but rather an understanding and classification. Many artists will introduce stressors or external substances to induce creative thought and expression, and I had a set of stressors in this case that was unique. These stressors greatly influenced my writing and recording, as some expressions were brutal, violent, and erratic due to my compromised state with others being viewpoints that could only be granted by extended periods of solitary contemplation.

After this period, the writing and recording fundamentally changed, as I shifted towards a return to combat sports due to gyms in California being open once again. I walked into a Muay Thai gym in San Francisco and had my greatest evolution as a martial artist to date. This was the case until I was forced out of San Francisco due to my occupation requiring me to check vaccination records. This saw me leave the Bay Area briefly for Austin in February of 2022 before driving up to Chicago for Valentine’s Day to meet a woman who would become my wife.

When I stayed in Chicago, the walls began to close in so-to-speak. I was thrust into a situation I wasn't entirely prepared for, and I both grew and suffered because of it. After two weeks of staying in Chicago meeting my wife in person for the first time, it became clear to me that I needed to stay in Chicago indefinitely. Two weeks later, she was bedridden and would need to be supported by myself through working a job with an arborist and soil scientist while founding an online strength and conditioning coaching business. It was also at this time that my wife and I began the road to Orthodox baptism.

During this period of time, my own training was greatly reduced as well as my creative output. The given circumstances I possessed not only granted me less time to think in solitude or engage with enriching stressors through martial arts, but I had to engage in a withdrawal from creative expression for the sake of catechism. “May I decrease, so God may increase.” This period of time from February to July of 2022 was my least active time creatively with most of my content being centered around Orthodox Christianity.

Running parallel to these circumstances began a personal interest of mine in political theory, cyclical history, and geopolitics having begun listening to the likes of Thomas777, Academic Agent, and J Burden, making me realize that much of the dynamics that make up our current world are ones that I had next to no education in. A caveat to this was reconciling the Orthodox Christian worldview with said dynamics. In listening to hours upon hours of the aforementioned creators’ content before engaging with their primary sources of reading, I had to discern what aspects of this world were purely Western in nature and what aspects were rooted in metaphysical dynamics that are essentially allowed by God to be threads that make up the cycles of our world until the eighth day.

From July 2022 until the conclusion of 2024, the bulk of my content was rooted in “noticings” and theories of geopolitical, metaphysical, and historical subject matter all from a very academic standpoint. This spanned my time in Chicago, England, and Poland having moved to England in October of 2023 and Poland in March of 2024. I knew a lot of people who were still writing on instagram who were making calls about subject matter they didn’t know much about strictly by “vibes,” and it showed the gaping hole in their education regarding the subject matter to make such calls. I looked back on many calls I had made with far less knowledge and quietly cringed. We can always learn more and understand better.

However, an education will indeed be rooted in an excellent base of history, science, mathematics, logic, and rhetoric, but oddly enough, that education rarely teaches them to synthesize logic with “receiving.” To see things viscerally: to look through things to see their rawest form, their most rudimentary core is to therefore receive what something is in actuality as opposed to what it is presenting itself as. What is paradoxical about this however, is many are not calibrated to receive on matters they have no education in, yet many somehow get the core of discernment right depending on the individual.

Equipped with a certain level of education and a steady practice of seeing through things, one can begin to see an electric world of metaphysics unfold. One can walk through a city and receive what it is at its core and receive the forces and circumstances that have made it. One can see a people and see what has moulded their features and their biospirit. One can differentiate martial capacity from malicious intent. One can see into himself and see whether or not there is a spiritual struggle perpetuating from his being or a reaching for worldly weaknesses. One can begin to understand where it is he belongs.

It is vital to understand the environments that we come into contact with from a metaphysical standpoint, so we understand what is quietly moulding us whether we resist these forces or embrace them. It is vital to understand the environments that have moulded us in the past to understand what it is we are whether through blood, upbringing, cycles of time, choice through action, or choice by opting into an environment. It is even more important to then understand what it is that God has placed in our lives as constants, what He’s placed as variables, what has deviated from His plan (life decisions made in sin), and the identity of a Saint that He has placed on every soul.

When it comes to identity, there is what has been, what is, and what can be. When it comes to identity, there is what is in alignment with God’s understanding of one’s self, what is against that understanding, and what is neutral.

There are facts about ourselves we have no say in such as our lineage, our raised culture, and our upbringing that cannot be refuted. To refute these things is like fighting the sun. There are facts about ourselves that we have moulded by choice such as profession or personal praxis of some kind, but even these choices can stem from sentiments that are originally environmental. There are also the decisions in the future that will mould us into something different or something more in the future.

To use myself as an example, I am European blood with Basque/Iberian on one side and Italian and Basque/Iberian on the other side. I am culturally American, more specifically, Californian, more specifically, San Franciscan. I was raised as an only child in a nuclear family isolated away from any extended family members. I was raised in a private schooling system that was predominantly East Asian until I went to a Catholic high school that was comprised of rich old stock Anglo, Italian, and Irish trust fund types followed by an Evangelical high school that was comprised of simpler, nouveau riche peoples of the same stock.

What has this made me? This has made me a man prone to seeking intense and poetic things in the case of the blood, a man seeking freedom in the case of American culture, a man of detached contemplation due to Californian culture, a man who seeks the highest capacity for theory and innovation in all things due to the San Franciscan culture, a loner as a default setting due to being an isolated child, a man who was deeply influenced by the East Asian outlook on life from his early schooling, a streak for being a spiteful vagabond from my first high school, and a man who understands he is easily bored from his second high school.

None of these things are anything I can refute. They are not worth resisting.

It is difficult to understand what decisions were made in alignment with God’s will for anything that has occurred before baptism. These understandings are as murky as the understandings of a foreshadowed savior being spoken of in pre-Christian European storytelling traditions. There are certainly clues, but to understand God’s will in these times is far less clear.

However, when it comes to a time after one’s baptism, one can understand what decisions were in alignment with God’s will as well as what decisions were not and how they were redeemed. The remaining choices have shaped every baptized Christian from a neutral standpoint that can later be used by God down the line. You can take two Orthodox Christians who go to the same church, follow the path of potential Sainthood in all of their decisions, and not only can these decisions have a great degree of variance, but the remaining decisions can have a great degree of variance in regards to moulding their identities. One man can choose to spend his time after work in an intensive study of a craft like sculpting while the other can spend his time after work learning a new language. The former will likely have a more grounded understanding of patience and a greater capacity for presence, and the latter will see life through a different lens crafted by the elements that made up that language itself. These neutral decisions have also shifted identity.

Decisions for the future for Christians however, have a hierarchy. The first is a decision of whether something is or is not God’s will. This can only be understood through prayer, patience, and self-denial. The second stage of decision-making is the remaining choice of what one wants to be in addition to this identity as told by God. These decisions are ones of action, thought, consumption, company, and environment. This becomes more complex when one is married with children.

I pray daily to determine where God’s place for myself and my future family lies. San Francisco, Chicago, Poland, and Spain are all candidates, all for different reasons. If there is one place God truly wants us in, we will be there. If it is left up to us, then my wife and myself have to ask what we want our children to be. San Francisco and Chicago would make them culturally American with a great degree of cultural variance between those two cities. Poland and Spain would see the American culture in our bloodlines disappear through our children, opting for an increased alignment with their ancestral homelands.

Things that are a bit clearer with what I want my children to be outside of locale. I want my children in a strong Orthodox Christian community, going to an Orthodox classical school, speaking the languages of their heritage, as healthy as possible, with a high proficiency for martial arts and physical culture. Beyond this, what will emerge is their respective identities in Christ and their own neutral preferences that can be bolstered if my wife and I are properly paying attention to them. We’re praying the decision of locale is up to God, but we certainly have our hopes regarding the matter.

In the interim until then, I'm reaching a homeostasis I’ve desired for a long time. Traveling has been very enriching and inspiring over the course of the past fourteen months. We had the privilege of seeing Paris and Rouen for our honeymoon, Cornwall, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford, and Nottingham while we lived in England, and Serbia, Bosnia, and Czechia while living in Poland. I also had the privilege of seeing Malaysia and the Netherlands due to having the honor of being a groomsman in a wedding involving a dear friend of mine and getting to see my co-writer, Mercatores in a long layover on the way back. But all of this travel has prevented the roots for legitimate growth I’ve been seeking. I’ll be living in Thailand for three months with life once again finally revolving around martial arts before a quick trip to Japan and an ultimate settling in Chicago until further notice.

While travel has been a joy, it has prevented the roots and stability required to further develop as a young Christian, as a martial artist, and as a writer. A nomadic life is not a life for the Orthodox novice.

However, when it comes to writing and creation, it’s clear that a full circle to visceral expression while increasingly self-educating is the only legitimate road forward.

In regards to environment, I’m approaching the previous conditions that produced previous leaps in creative work and capacity as a martial artist. So I can only imagine there will be a return to the previous influences on content with an increased knowledge of subject matter. A strong Church community, minimal lost time, a space to think, and sparring partners to sharpen myself against are what grant an existence that suits me best. Travel should be in smaller doses for the perfect amount of “stressor” conducive to creative inspiration and decompression.

What matters for most however, is to see with more than just your eyes.

Pray to God to enlighten your understanding, and see through all things.

From there, you’ll know your identity in Christ with increasing intensity, and you’ll better understand what decisions you have make to be moulded into what God intends to be and you want to be in that order.

-Arthur Constantine

I’ve come to realize I work best in making time for reading 50 pages of recreational text leaving the rest of my reading time for scripture and text pertaining to my work.

Left over from this year’s reading list, I plan on completing all of Knut Hamsun’s works, the remaining texts being the following:

• The Ring is Closed

• On Overgrown Paths

• Chapter the Last

• The August Trilogy

The other writer whose works I plan on completing is F. Scott Fitzgerald, with his last two novels being the ones I haven’t had the privilege of reading, finding themselves on this list:

• Tender is the Night

• The Last Tycoon (Unfinished)

Beyond completing these authors’s respective complete works, I hope to begin a long road of completing the entirety of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works, the order of which I’ll tackle this year is as follows:

• Notes from the Underground

• Crime & Punishment

• The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky has been called the greatest writer of all time by many men whom I greatly respect, so I look forward to finally diving into his works.

Other works left over from last year’s list that I plan to tackle in 2025 are as follows:

• “Vanity Fair” by William Thackeray

• “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad

• “Don Quixote” by Miguel Cervantes

• “My Life in Christ” by St. John of Kronstadt

• “My Inventions” by Nikola Tesla

In addition to these leftovers from last year and pursuits of reading complete works by select great writers, the two writers I’ve been recommended most by people who know me well enough are Yukio Mishima and Ernst Jünger. With that, I’ll be reading:

• “Sun & Steel”

• “The Storm of Steel”

German writers are writers I find myself gravitating towards, so I plan on reading the following German texts next year:

• “Atlantis” by Gerhart Hauptmann (Some cross over with my ongoing Nobel Prize reading challenge)

• “Fascism in its Epoch” by Ernst Nolte

• “Beyond Good & Evil” by Friedrich Nietzsche

• “A History of Rome” by Theodor Mommsen

• “The Meaning and Value of Life” by Rudolf Eucken

• “Faust” by Wolfgang von Goethe

• “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann

I came across Gerhart Hauptmann in my Nobel Prize reading challenge, as Hauptmann won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1912. He has been thrown into complete obscurity like many other Nobel Prize Laureates such as Sinclair Lewis and Henrik Pontoppidan. I read ten pages of “Atlantis” on my phone while waiting for a flight earlier in the year, and the text drew me in before I had to return to reading a gargantuan sports science text. Friedrich Nietzsche is the most polarizing man in dissident right wing culture. The Christians in the sphere renounce him, and the vitalists champion him. His original intentions appear to be oddly noble, but Nietzsche was interfacing with an entity that was all too real. His conduit status for this entity threw Europe into chaos. Theodor Mommsen was the second recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1902 for chronicling Rome’s history better than any other man, allegedly including Gibbon, despite Mommsen’s text being far shorter. “The Meaning and Value of Life” is an odd case of rationalism in advocating for placing a greater importance on one’s inner life as opposed to externals in a Germany that had its intentions growing increasingly outward. “Faust” is a classic that needs no introduction, full stop. “The Magic Mountain” is regarded as the most influential German fiction of the past century, and like many works and sentiments surrounding World War One, it has been overshadowed by works in favor of the post-World War Two consensus.

The most important books I’ll read next year are those that pertain to Orthodox Christianity. Aside from Saint John of Kronstadt’s “My Life in Christ,” they are as follows:

• “On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit” by Saint Seraphim of Sarov

• “Concerning our Duties to God” by Apostolos Makrakis

• “Orthodox Christians of North America 1794-1994” by Mark Stokoe and the Archpriest Leonid Kishkovsky

• “Arab Orthodox Christians under the Ottomans 1516 - 1831” by Constantin Panchenko

• “Testament of a Memory: a Siberian Life” by Mikhail Chevalkov

• “Life after Death According to the Orthodox Tradition” by Jean-Claude Larchet

• “Road to Emmaus No. 77: A Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture” by Jorge Luque Martin

• “Touching Heaven” by John Oliver

Saint Seraphim of Sarov is a fabled Saint of Orthodoxy who is perhaps most famous for having a pet bear, and his grasp of the Holy Spirit was revered by Orthodox Christians both in Russia and abroad. Apostolos Makrakis was a controversial figure in post-Ottoman Greece, who was often chastised for borderline heretical views on the Trinity, but his meditations on Matthew and criticisms of masonry are deeply inspired. Understanding the history of Orthodox minorities both in America and behind enemy lines in the Ottoman Empire grants a better grasp of how to operate as a religious minority in one’s homeland, hence the texts on the histories of both of these peoples. The world of Siberia is one of the last frontiers on Earth, and the world “beyond the Volga” has always held weight as a fertile land of Orthodox asceticism for figures like Saint Sergius. I’d like to know this land and its effect on Orthodox Christians more before eventually traveling there one day. “Life after Death According to the Orthodox Tradition” is a text I’m hoping will cure my ignorance regarding the exact theology surrounding the afterlife, as I know next to nothing aside from statements regarding toll houses. “Road to Emmaus No. 77: A Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture” is a journal chronicling the events of an Orthodox Christian walking the “Camino de Santiago” in my native Iberia and is the only text I was able to find with a link between Orthodoxy and my beloved peninsula. Once upon a time, I planned to become a monk at Valaam Monastery in Karelia once turning 40, and to read firsthand accounts of the “Athos of the North” will likely make the miracles and hidden Saints found there all the more real in my psyche.

It’s a very conservative list for next year, as I expect to have a busy schedule. The total page count divided by 50 page makes for 220 days of reading which gives me a great deal of wiggle room I’ll likely need. Anything read beyond this will likely be done in rare events of spontaneity.

Happy reading.

Four years later was a stark contrast to this experience, as I refreshed my browser at 3am to see the steal of a Presidential election while working an overnight security shift in the thick of the Covid-19 debacle. There was a sentiment I harbored that told me four years of Joe Biden would make America beg for Trump to come back. Yesterday, I was vindicated in harboring that belief. Watching the hoard march down Broadway in downtown Oakland for the summer of Floyd told me that they’d run out of steam after four years, and maybe I was trying to cope with the insanity of the situation despite a grounding that paired with this sentiment.

In those four years, a dissident movement emerged in the dark corners of Instagram, Substack, Twitter, and YouTube that I was proud to be a part of. Despite being surrounded by the woke mind virus in the heart of enemy territory in the Bay Area I adore, despite living in a neighborhood of shootings, stabbings, theft, and murder in West Oakland, despite being told I was a bad person for harboring my beliefs about God, economics, civility, politics, culture, and health, I was enthralled to be writing and conversing with likeminded individuals all over the world.

It seemed stupid at the time: showing up to bartending shifts with a dozen eggs, a gallon of raw milk, and a jar of raw honey to make a “thumotic egg slonk shake” in my cocktail shakers while bar guests told me how there wasn’t enough “intersectionality” in America. It seemed stupid to be reading Spengler, Carlyle, and Hobbes while listening to content creators who blew my mind like Thomas777 and Academic Agent explain the full historical scope of what constitutes the regime since 1913/1933 all while not being able to talk about any of it with the majority of the people I was immediately surrounded by. What never seemed “stupid” however, was deepening devotion to Christ and dedication to physical training and entrepreneurship. But for all the aforementioned “niche” ideas and pursuits that fall well below the hierarchy of importance, they were ones that so many of us adopted with increasing intensity and certainty. If you refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine and were willing to relocate to follow through with this refusal then all of these stupid ideas seemed painless to fully commit to.

Yet these ideas we were all internalizing and sharing were slowly but surely making their way up the pipeline to individuals who could form a legitimate vanguard to displace a regime that seemed singular, all-powerful, and inevitable with their 2030 Agenda. Robert Kennedy went nuclear on the subjects of the vaccine and Anthony Fauci, and Elon Musk bought the primary platform for sharing information in bite sized pieces conducive to 21st Century attention spans. Then the cracks of the regime began to emerge, while Donald Trump clawed his way back from the badlands of being deemed “to abrasive” to keep the “sensible” Ron DeSantis from being the Republican nominee. It was in this period of time that it became clear that there was a way out of this “doom” that many nihilists within the West accepted as inescapable.

As it stands, the United States dictates policy to the Western world, and the victory of November 5th is undeniable, yet many within the ranks of the “dissident right” or the “sensible center” are falling into the trap of purity-spiraling.

While the “DR” is a predominantly Christian movement, the division of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox has each of long for slight variations of our most desired outcomes in regards to the fate of both the United States and Europe. Being in the Orthodox camp, many of my brothers in the Orthodox Church unintentionally or intentionally signal that they would accept no victory other than an Orthodox monarch of the United States who would swiftly ban abortion, no fault divorce, and pornography. This of course, is not only absurd but a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be Orthodox and participating in citizenship accordingly. Orthodox citizens do not dig their heads in the sand in fear until God presents them the “ideal” circumstances of Byzantium superimposed over North America. Orthodox men not only accept the given circumstances God has placed them in but work in perfect order of operations to deepen their Faith, increase their capacity as protectors and providers for their respective families and communities, and work to improve the situations they find themselves in collectively. I’m sure our Catholic and Protestant cousins would agree.

Now take a second and breathe in order to understand what has just occurred. Elon Musk bought Twitter to unlock free speech in the United States and reinstate Donald Trump, which began the campaign for this stunning victory. The regime has lost their capacity to exert both hard and soft power. Donald Trump is going to be in office with the backing of American finance and “rogue tech,” a Republican Congress, and Elon Musk assisting in slashing 90% of government. His platform consists of not only an end to illegal immigration, but a beginning mass deportations as well as a banning of seed oils and a return to tariffs just in time for the greatest transfer of wealth in human history due to the passing of the Boomer generation. This is the path to our fears of never being able to afford a house ceasing to exist.

This of course is happening all while the mainstream media has exposed themselves as no longer capable of forcing false narratives into the minds of the American majority, and more importantly, while the hold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt over the psyche of the nation comes to and end.

FDR was the mastermind behind the “deep state,” the “Global American Empire,” and the modus operandi of American politics that was based on shattering old norms. This modus operandi intensified under Johnson and reached its breaking point under both Obama and Biden, as there are no norms left to shatter, leaving individuals who were once firmly leftist yearning for some semblance of normalcy. What is left of the regime can try to contain the situation as much as they’d like, but the direction with which they can apply said containment is an open question they currently possess no answer for.

It’s my prediction that this will mark the beginning of another 90-100 year cycle of American politics that combines the “America-first” default setting of the past with the technological advancement of present day. What this will look is an open question all of us should be excited to answer. As for Christendom, the original form of Christendom was established through the Holy Spirit visiting Saint Constantine before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. While Saint Constantine cannot be compared to Donald Trump, the Grace of God was granted to him in sparing his life amidst an assassination attempt that we all witnessed. This is a Grace not only for Trump himself, but for all of us, as Kamala Harris is the leader we all deserved.

The future will be moulded the same way we reached this victory: through prayer to our God and relentless action carrying out His wishes. This work will not end during our lifetimes. But you will remember this day as the catalyst that allowed this work to continue.

So enjoy the day, don’t rain on the victory parade, give thanks to God, and return to work tomorrow.

God Speed,

Arthur Constantine

I hate that I see your struggles and see my own. I don’t have issues of substance abuse or rationalized alcoholism, but I share with you a desire to escape into darkness alone with my thoughts amidst an alienation despite my own efforts of separation.

There is something ethereal about living ever so separate from everyone else. I can be amongst others in undeniable material realities but still be completely alone. This is paradoxically both involuntary and of my own volition.

I didn’t come from an alcoholic father, an unknown mother, a whorehouse for a setting of a tortured adolescence, or a stolen identity, but somehow, I internalized a sentiment that if anyone ever knew me entirely, I’d lose everything. This sentiment lasted a long time until I finally let someone know me fully, and it didn’t seem to have the desired effect. This part you and I share in common. A best friend from high school and a pair of bartenders I had the privilege of working with all didn’t see the big deal. Perhaps it’s an odd strain of narcissism we share that prompted our surprise at the lack of reaction, or perhaps we just found kindred spirits who had touched the void one too many times. I know for you it was a bit different with the wife of your stolen identity, a wife that was never truly for you, and your third wife whom you loved but didn’t know how to hold. The most recent person to truly know me is my wife, and while this may be callous to say, seeing the marriage you wanted disintegrate through both your actions and your lack of action has had me look into the mirror of my shadow and understand what not to do.

I don’t profess that women could be my undoing or alcoholism for that matter, but the raw through line of the two is something that you and I both benefit and suffer from. “Escapism” is both our gold and our poison.

“Leave me alone, I’m having an interesting thought” is the statement either spoken or unspoken that explains our actions that most would deem erratic. The facilitation of an idea that is not forced comes through means that are never quantifiable. You can go for a walk til you’re blue in the face and can sit alone in a bar, staring at the remains of a glass of rye, but you can never replicate the same source of an idea. They come at the most inconvenient times when you’re surrounded by the others. They want you to be present. They want you to be joyful and engaged, but you’ve been called elsewhere to dwell in a realm where no one else seems to go. You let the ideas themselves color the life in front of you, and it seems far more grim and far more euphoric than anyone else typically understands. Neither of us seem to be sure if we want them to understand regardless.

But there’s an override of our lives that we can’t allow, and I’m sorry that it has caused so much chaos in your life thus far. I know people characterize you as someone who only likes the ideas of things as opposed to their material realities, but it’s clear that you simply lack the tools to materialize these particular ideas in reality: marriage, fatherhood, and stability. You don’t want to feel alienated from your wife and children, but that same switch that turns off the ideas to color the world every once in a while grants you relief for a time before monotony becomes unbearable. Then when the ideas turn back on you’re relieved, but you’re no longer acting.

There are typically two kinds of men on this Earth. There are the men who are rooted in action, and there are men who are rooted in seeking the deepest depths of thought imaginable. Great men of the past were able to master both: to first go further in thought than any men before and surround themselves to then build systems to materialize these ideas into reality. Truth be told, I think you have an advance on that when it comes to your work. Sure you walk out of meetings unannounced. Sure you go on ill-advised benders. But you seem to always find a way to turn those ideas of yours into piercing, hard copy reinforced by the visual arts. It is in your personal life where you don’t seem to be capable of transferring this skillset.

Perhaps it’s because you’re not Don Draper. Perhaps it’s because you’re Dick Whitman. Im not so sure this is the case however. While you may have switched dog tags with your lieutenant in a foxhole in Korea, the question, “Who is Don Draper?” is one you’ve answered whether you’ve realized it or not. You’ve embodied this identity with authenticity despite the fact it functions and feels like a mask. This identity belonged to the late husband of the woman who fully knew you in peace. And Bert Cooper rightfully declared, “a man is whatever room he is in, and I assure you Don Draper is in this room.”

The fact that you are the mask you wear may be a difficult pill to swallow. But the mask you wear is one of who you wanted to be all this time. This desire for this identity and the work you put in to embody it eventually granted this mask permanence. When you look back and see the young Dick Whitman, this is likely who he wanted to be as well, far away from the life you left and created from nothing to something in a Manhattan office with a view.

You are Don Draper. Not just in name, but in will to power. Suggesting this to you may be dangerous, but it’s worth noting you’re not as powerless as you may seem to think.

The action that you and I both need to take sometimes feels fatal: to let some ideas go for the greater good, to not let the ideas rule the self all the time. To balance what is seemingly an infinite space of mind and world beyond is an ironclad rule for time. It will bee uncomfortable being present with people who do not understand, even if they are the closest ones to us. But this unlimited wealth of ideas can be used in these times our loved ones are leaning us to grant them the stability they so desire. If an ounce of your creativity was used in finding ways to connect with your children and your wife of the future, I promise you, you would beokay. I am not a model of perfection in terms of embodying this suggestion, but I can promise these steps often appear grueling.

The discomfort however, after a short bit of time, I promise you, will fade. You once said advertising is telling people that what they’re doing is okay, and instead of internalizing a foil to this notion in doing the opposite of what you know to be okay, you could find what will reinforce what is indeed okay.

The will to engage with the mundane aspects of life and the will to action not solely flashes of brilliance, but in the counterbalance to these flashes, it is in this where we will find peace. It is in this where our ideas will not only be supported but indeed found.

And then, maybe, our loved ones won’t suffer any longer. And then, maybe, we can be known fully. And then, maybe, we can live up to their expectations without feeling like we’re losing and betraying ourselves, as living reinforces writing while writing reinforces living in gorgeous symbiosis. And then, maybe, the ideas and the actions can be one and the same, coloring life with a stability and enduring strength we have never known.

I hope unlike most things, we take this to heart.

Sincerely,

Arthur Constantine

“Are you headed there now?” asked my father on the phone.

“Yeah, I’m meeting her by the stadium.” I replied.

“Okay, well, do you still think this is a good idea?”

“Yeah, I think it will be fine.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very convincing. Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I promised I’d show her around, and it’s just going to be that.”

“Okay. Tell me when you’e on your way back.”

“Will do, thanks Pops, love you.”

“Love you too son.”

It was a cloudless day of weather that many would consider to be perfect. San Francisco has the one slice of Mediterranean weather in the United States with its trademark sun and ocean breeze coming in from the Pacific.

“I just got to the stadium Arthur,” read a text from Celine.

My heart sank. It had been close to a year since I had seen her, but it felt like it had been four. June 30th, 2014: I’ll always remember that date, the day I flew out of Heathrow, leaving a false dream behind. My parents looked at me with grave concern on their faces when I arrived at SFO. My mother remarked how my soul was still over there. She wasn’t wrong. I was willingly engaging with being haunted. It’s an intoxicating feeling to be haunted. I walked around the Bay Area with one eye in the present and one eye playing reels of the past. I was never the same after moving to England both for better and for worse. Jeremy didn’t see me all summer cause in his words “you were just weird man.”

I was holding onto a life that wasn’t working anymore for more reasons than just being 5000 miles away. After fights with my father, I walked into the Marine Corps recruiting office close to his apartment to inquire about career opportunities. Something told me not to sign up, and my father retracted a previous demand to get out of the house for good. I held onto living there for Celine’s sake, to work in Silicon Valley and get her to America for us to be married. This was the plan until January when I cracked and told her, “I can’t give you what you want,” triggering our breakup. She didn’t seem to take no for an answer, chatting me on Facebook almost every day with me obliging in return. This all culminated into this moment, her coming out to Los Angeles to see friends from her class in drama school with a quick trip up to San Francisco to see me. I’d have to face her and tell her I don’t love her anymore, even if it isn’t exactly true. I had come to Christ, and I swore wouldn't slip into an old life with a woman I knew would cost me. There was love there, but it was murky. Our defenses were always high, yet the outpouring was seemingly unstoppable at times.

“Meet me by the Willie Mays statue,” I replied.

“Okay.”

I grew up adoring the San Francisco Giants. My first baseball game was at what was then “Pacific-Bell Park,” four rows behind home plate for a game against the Atlanta Braves in 2000, the first year of the stadium’s glorious recent history. Other stadiums are Americana like those in Detroit, Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, but San Francisco’s jewel of a ballpark is distinctly West Coast both in a classical sense and a modern sense. It’s burnt orange brick and moss green steel beams screamed to me an understanding of a frontier culture needing a city to be a fabled Paris beyond the Mississippi on the edge of the world. The sailors, gold rushers, and frontiersman made this city so far removed from the well-developed East. The plains and Rockies between us and them made our culture something else entirely, and it showed even in a stadium for what many would deem a “silly little game.”

When Tim Lincecum led the Giants to their first World Series win in 2010, my high school got a day off to go celebrate. It was my first sense of hometown pride, and it was an electric time to be a San Franciscan. In 2012, I received another joy during my gap year between high school and drama school, working the closing shift at Urban Outfitters for $8.75 an hour, hearing the news that the Giants swept the Tigers. Most recently, I was in awe of the most clutch performance in sports history, watching Madison Bumgarner pitch as close to perfect as one could ever fathom to kill the Kansas City Royals’s dreams, solidifying a dynasty out West. I loved this team, and I love it still. Out of all American sports, baseball is the only one that simultaneously breaks your heart and tells you everything is going to be okay.

Just a year ago, I went home for spring break away from drama school. I picked up a black Giants baseball cap to put on Celine’s dainty, blonde head. In 2014, it seemed like anything I did just made her melt, and this occasion was no different. I wanted to place something that kept me at ease on something that bore so much erraticism.

And at this point, I stood waiting next to San Francisco’s golden boy, immortalized in stone in front of our house of glory and pleasant contentment, waiting for the woman who dreamed of San Francisco, claiming she would visit here one day in her diary, the same week I auditioned for the drama school where we first met. It was all so star-crossed until it wasn’t.

“I’m next to the statue Arthur,” read a text from Celine.

“No you’re not, I’m next to statue and don’t see you,” I replied.

“Yes I am,” she replied.

“Is the statue by the water?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yeah, that’s not Willie Mays, that’s Willie McCovey.”

“Okay, so where do I go then?”

“Walk to the street, then swing right, towards the front. The Willie Mays statue is on a street corner.”

I didn’t receive a reply. I thought she was maybe marveling at the water, the stadium, or the San Franciscan skyline. I felt myself putting my guard up, my shielded demeanor, my mask of unbothered expression. What else was I to do with all these unresolved stories and sentiments in my being?

I checked my phone once more when I heard from a voice swiftly approaching from my right, “this place is amazing babes.”

I looked up from my phone and saw Celine in a baby blue Jean jacket, white fitted t-shirt, classic blue jeans, and designer Nikes, donning a black purse, hoop earrings, and pink lipstick she swore not to wear. Her hair was shorter then, not as short as the time I met her in drama school, but still short enough to shape her piercing face that was softened with still loving eyes and beaming smile that seemed like she was giving every last inch of herself to keep our story alive.

I froze for a second seeing my life in England personified ripping a whole in my false world born back home. It seemed that the only person who knew who I really was at the time was telegraphing to the world that I was engaging in charade.

It was a dream I put away coming to fruition four months too late.

My being responded initially as if I was still there with her in England, in Greco-Roman cocktail bar, in corner Waitrose market, and in Edwardian house not quite remembering I was where the previous 19 years held their bedrock foundations.

My will kicked in, my will to hold my oath, and I stood up a bit straighter and switched my softened, shocked longing into an all-knowing half smile that I wore many times in attempts to outsmart her and keep her old games at bay.

“Hi Celine.”

“Hi Arthur.”

We both stuttered before hugging each other hesitantly. At the moment it felt like it could have been held for a long time, I broke away.

“I can’t believe I’m here.”

“Neither can I.”

We locked eyes fully for several seconds before we both looked at the ground. We both looked up again and then in the opposite direction of Willie Mays.

“Well, are you going to show me around now?” asked Celine.

“Yeah, I will. I promised I would,” I replied

“Well…where are we going then?”

“Right, well, we should probably make our way up third street, so you can see Union Square first.”

“Okay well, you lead the way.”

We crossed over from fourth street to third street in order to get a straight shot to Union Square, seeing Britex fabrics in the distance many blocks away.

“So how’s the place you’re staying at?”

“It’s alright, the owner of the airbnb is a bit weird, I think he likes me.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

“He’s such a Cali bro, he has his UCLA gear everywhere, he’s a bit of a ball ache.”

“I’m sure he’s at least handsome.”

“In a beach-blonde, surfer boy type way, but he’s nothing compared to you.”

It didn’t take long for her to go on the offensive. I didn’t think I was looking any kind of special, and I made sure of that. I was wearing a baggy grey quarter zip sweater that goes all the way up a turtleneck collar, baggy moss green chinos, CrossFit shoes from “Inov8,” and and a blue and yellow Golden State Warriors skullcap. Yet here she was throwing me compliments that I grew so accustomed to in England.

“Well, I certainly doubt that.”

“What neighborhood is this Arthur?”

“This is SOMA, short for ‘South of Market,’ it’s a neighborhood full of tech bros who hike up the rent to unimaginable heights.”

“It does feel quite techie doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s a bit much for my taste, but it’s still a part of home.”

“How’s your dad, how’s Frank doing, Mr. New York?”

“He’s doing well, I think he’s taking to the single life. Man is so social, far more social than I’ve ever been.”

“You got the anti-social part from your mom didn’t you babes?”

“Yeah, I suppose I did. I don’t know what it is, most people don’t have something to say that I’d actually like to hear, and I’d just rather enjoy my own company than slave over pleasantries.”

My speech patterns returned to the core of myself I had recently abandoned. I’d tell people that this was a facade, but this in all honesty was as real as I could be. I was trying to tell everyone and even myself that I could be a typical Cali-boy, enamored with life all the time, excited over sports to an unhealthy degree that most deemed healthy, and content with having beers on the beach with friends on the weekends. I had tried to be that simple, but I just wasn’t. I was somehow so American and so opposite to American all at once. Celine was making it all come crashing down in a matter of minutes.

“Well you always were Mr. mysterious weren’t you?”

“I think everyone thought I was mysterious in drama school cause I refused to lay may cards on the table to people who thought they wanted to understand.”

“I think people really did want to understand you Arthur, you just didn’t want them to understand.”

“I can’t really see why.”

"I don’t think that’s true. You know people looked up to you Arthur.”

“Well that ‘looking up’ always came out more like resentment.”

“Only at the end of it all when you decided you didn’t want to be an actor anymore. Before that, you know for a fact people looked up to you, but they were scared to try to get to know you.”

“I suppose I did do that on purpose.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s a combination of things. I didn't think a lot of them really had the depth to understand what was in my head, so I’d just try to hide behind subtle politeness and a stoic demeanor that was so acceptable over there.”

“Well, the part about the depth is probably true. It felt like we were surrounded by idiots sometimes.”

“That’s cause we were surrounded by idiots a lot of the time.”

“Yeah, but Otis was nice wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, but Otis is literally autistic.”

“I think I’m a bit autistic to be fair.”

“Celine, for the last time, you are not autistic.”

“I think I am babes.”

“Just because you played an autistic character that you took to easily, doesn’t make you autistic.”

“I think it doooooes babes,” trying to ramp up the flirtatious undertone I tried to ignore.

“No, it doesn't. You’re just quirky.”

“And do you like my quirks?”

“…you know I did.”

She lost a beat.

“Well, I wouldn't have been able to tell Mr. stoic. If it was hard for me to read, I can only imagine how hard it was for everyone else.”

“Well, they don’t matter now do they?”

“No, I suppose not. What’s this place babes?”

“That’s Britex fabrics, my mom comes here a lot for fabric to sew with.”

“Oh, I see. That’s cool babes.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice building. We’re going to swing left here to wrap around to Union Square.”

“Gosh, this city is beautiful.”

“It really is. I never grow tired of it.”

“I can see why.”

“So how’s Clara and all of them down in Los Angeles?”

“Honestly, it was really boring down there.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Yeah, I mean it’s cool going to Venice and all that, but besides that, they just hang out in their shitty little living room and ask me what I want to do. I’m like I don’t know what I want to do, you’re the ones who fucking live here, why don’t you just show me around?”

“Yeah, that kinda sounds like the same way they were in England.”

“Yeah, cause they’re fucking boring Arthur.”

“Then why are you friends with them?”

“Oh, I don’t know babes. They’re good friends to me, I just need to stop being so harsh. I should be better to them really.”

“Well, it’s good that you know that, so this right here is Union Square.”

“Gosh, wow.”

We walked across the street into the center of the square through the small park to look at its pillar monument reminiscent of Trafalgar Square, surrounded by the gargantuan department stores of Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Neiman Marcus.

“So this monument is dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, the man responsible for the victory at Manila Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, securing the Philippines for the United States.”

“Oh really? I didn’t know the United States had the Philippines.”

“Yeah, we had it for roughly 48 years before they were granted full independence after eleven years of self-governance starting in 1935.”

“You’re such a nerd aren’t you babes?” poking at me flirtatiously.

“The correct term is history buff Celine.”

“Suuuure it is,” doubled down Celine.

“You’re a nerd too Celine, that’s why we were able to get along.”

“I suppose you’re right…have to have something between the ears babes. What’s that on top of the pillar? That doesn’t look like a George Dewey.”

“That’s the Goddess of Victory.”

“I see, now that is cool babes.”

Pointing to the Southeast corner of Union Square I said, “that over there is Neiman Marcus, a department store that originated in Texas. My mom and I go to the restaurant at the top there every year around Christmas time called “La Rotunda.” The Christmas tree they have goes up the five stories in the middle of the store and the restaurant. We’ve been going since I was nine years old.”

“Awww, that’s so sweet babes.”

“Yeah, a lot of fond memories up there.”

“Well what now?”

“Well, I suppose it’s a good time to go to Chinatown now.”

“Chinatown! Going into Chinatown,” said Celine slyly referencing the classic film of the same name with a faint Jack Nicholson impression.

“I still haven’t seen that movie. Did you go to the one in LA?”

“Of course not, I told you they didn’t take me anywhere.”

“Well, we’ll go to this one then.”

“You always love a Chinatown don’t you babes?”

“Yeah, well, I told you I grew up in an all Asian school for the first ten years of my life. I wasn’t raised very American at home with my parents being so Euro, and I had all these Asian friends at school. So when I got to England, I’d go to Chinatown whenever I’d feel homesick.”

“You were trying to get away from school though babes, with your little Muay Thai gym upstairs.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I knew I wouldn’t bump into anyone there, and I liked that boba tea shop there.”

“I liked it when you used to bring me back the mochi from there. Mum and I ate that whole box that one time, and we felt like we gained a stone.”

“They did have the best mochi.”

“Are you still doing Muay Thai? You were obsessed when we were…still together you know.”

“Not right now unfortunately. I don’t have a car, and I can’t really afford the time or money to get over there with Ubers or buses.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit depressing to be honest, but I do have a weights gym.”

“I was going to say, you do look bigger. You were already a tank when I first knew you, and now you’re even bigger. Crazy babes.”

“Yeah, I’m doing alright. I’m not as big as I want to be, but I’ll get there.”

“Christ, if you get any bigger, you’re going to look too scary.”

“Maybe I like looking scary.”

“Why, so less people would approach you? You know that’s just going to make girls like you even more.”

“Maybe. A lot of girls here like the more Californian, slimmer type here.”

“Oh come on babes, I KNOW girls stare at you. I’ve already seen a bunch of girls staring at you while we’ve been walking all this way.”

“Well that makes one of us.”

“Arthur, I know you know you’re attractive, just admit it.”

“I try not to think about it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to go down into old habits.”

“What old habits?”

“I was too fucking arrogant in drama school Celine, you know that.”

“Yeah maybe. I guess I found it attractive didn’t I.”

“Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“What, so I was the wrong kind of attention?” questioned Celine with a spark of an annoyed tone.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to,” said Celine as she started to walk faster.

“I was very deliberately seeking your attention Celine.”

“Yeah I suppose you were. I never should have went with you to that bar that night.”

“Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t have.”

“Well that’s just great Arthur.”

“Look, I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t have. I clearly wanted to do, and so did you.”

“You know I did.”

“Well there it is then.”

“Yeah, there it is then as you say.”

“So this is the Dragon’s Gate,” I said pointing to the gate of three moss green pagoda roofs with two limestone dragons on each side.

“Wow.”

“The legend is you can’t enter and leave on the same side, or you’ll have bad luck.”

“I forget you’re all superstitious.”

“I’m not superstitious, I’m Christian. I don’t really believe in this dragon thing.”

“Yes of course, you’re a good Christian boy now all of the sudden.”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Sure you are.”

“Yes, I am. Speaking of which, do you want to see Grace Cathedral?”

“I already went to Grace Cathedral Arthur.”

“What, you did?”

“Yeah of course I did, I wasn’t going to wait for you. Waiting for you is like waiting for bloody Christmas.”

“I see.”

“Where are you taking me now anyway?”

“Well, I was going to swing left at some point to go to Grace Cathedral, but since you’ve already seen it, we can see something else.”

“Well at least Chinatown here is pretty cool.”

“Biggest Chinatown in the world.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, bigger than both New York’s and London’s.”

"I see.”

I didn’t expect her to grow hostile. It was a very rare occurrence then, but I suppose women can only handle both subtle and outright rejection for so long. I didn’t expect her to genuinely want me to make an advance on her after breaking up four months prior. It was very clear that in her mind, that’s what was meant to be, but God had other plans. These plans were contingent on my devotion, and I wasn’t going to let my will break. There’s two ways to alienate a woman who is into you, disarming her flirtatious nature. You either act like an old man or act like a child. She’s older than me, so I opted for the latter, beginning to bounce around like an aimless fool.

“Wait Celine hang on, you have to try a lotus pancake.”

“What the fuck is a lotus pancake Arthur?”

“It’s like this gooey pastry, here I’ll show you.”

“Alright, fine.”

We ran into a small bakery with a narrow hall wedged between a jewelry shop and a dim sum restaurant, and I ordered two of the San Franciscan Chinese pastries, one for each of us.

“Here you go,” I said to Celine, handing her the pastry.

“What’s all this then?”

“It’s a lotus pancake.”

“Right, so you said,” she said before pausing to take a bite. She moved her mouth around with laborious chewing before looking up at me and cracking a slight smile and saying, “that’s really good babes mmm.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah it is,” said Celine before looking down and putting her mask back of discontent back on.

“Right, I’m going to need some proper food though Arthur, this isn’t going to cut it,” said Celine in an annoyed tone.

“Yeah okay, uh, there’s some god restaurants in the Marina, why don’t we go there?”

“Yeah, sure, fine.”

“Alright.”

We walked passed the Transamerica pyramid that she didn’t seem present enough to witness before swinging left down Columbus street. I didn’t feel a need to point out the Beat Museum or City Light’s Book Shop despite her love for Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg. Bringing it up would make her too hopeful again for some shot at reviving our former passions, and me having to shut it down would upset here even further.

The Northwest direction of Columbus carried us through a side of Russian Hill before I decided to swing directly West to Fort Mason, the former Naval Base that now houses a theater often used for the opera, restaurants, and art shops. I figured it would be a welcome distraction.

“This place is incredible babes,” remarked Celine. “Everything in this city is.”

“She’s a hard mistress to leave.”

“I’ll say. I don’t know how you left this for bloody England.”

“I needed a change of pace. My parents were getting divorced and selling the house. I didn’t want to have to see that every day.”

“So you only went to avoid that?”

“No, not exactly. I can’t say I wanted to be an actor fully, but it was all I really had. My parents cornered me in between my junior and senior year of high school saying I wasn’t really showing any interest in anything else. Then when they weren’t convinced about my dedication to it, I grabbed the vase in the middle of the kitchen table and threw it onto the ground. My dad took it as me waking up, and in a way I was. I just didn’t wake up as much as I wanted to.”

“What the hell does that have to do with your parents’ divorce?”

“Oh. Well, yeah, I guess the only shot I had at being worth a damn was in acting cause I was good at it. And that would distract me from the divorce as well.”

“You were very good at it.”

“Thank you, so are you.”

“If you weren’t so scared of your parents’s divorce, you’d have been able to properly try out again for RADA and gotten in.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You’re the exact type of guy RADA takes, not a LAMDA guy or a Guildhall guy.”

“I’m definitely not a LAMDA guy, they like their teddy boys too much.”

“Yeah babes, you’re too much of a man for them. Too Intense. Too dark.”

Statements like these always made me forget Celine is five and a half years older than me. When we were in drama school together talking about our pasts with one another, it would sometimes startle us. In 2008, I was wrapping up middle school  obsessing over Nine Inch Nails, while Celine was a freshman in college and going to the Pharrell concert.

“Yeah well, I didn’t like them either,” I said.

“I’m just saying you could have really had a proper go at being an actor if you went to RADA. You could have gotten an agent and everything.”

“If I did that, you and I never never would have met.”

“I don’t think that’s true babes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I like to think we still would have met babes. It would have been fate.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll never forget my diary entry declaring that I’d go to San Francisco the same week you auditioned for drama school here.”

“Yeah, that was quite a bit of fate.”

“Yeah, it was.”

I didn’t want to go further down this road. I didn’t want to take the natural course of conversation that we had been down many times. I didn’t want to discuss our future in London that never was. I didn’t want our former dream life as successful actors on the London stage to be killed in its cradle once more. I had to cut the tension again.

“While you’re here you have to try a Phil’z Coffee,” I exclaimed while speeding up my pace and pointing at the coffee cart on the Marina Green.

“Oh, right okay.”

“Yeah, hi. Let me get a mint mojito please, medium.”

“You got it,” said the coffee cart barista.

“Are you not getting anything?” asked Celine.

“No, I’m okay.”

“Oh, right.”

“One medium mint mojito!” announced the coffee cart barista.

“Thanks,” I said, handing the brown paper coffee cup to Celine.

“Gee thanks babes,” said Celine sarcastically.

“You know it’s rare for this spot of San Francisco to be sunny this time of year,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, usually in May, the Northwest corner of the city has a fog, but not today.”

“When does it go away?”

“Usually around September surprisingly.”

“What? September?”

“Yeah, San Francisco has an Indian summer. July and August have fog, and September and October have sun.”

“Here, you can have this,” said Celine handing me her nearly full coffee like a dead animal.

“Do you not like it?”

“No, it’s fine, I just don’t drink coffee all that much.”

“Oh, okay, uh thanks,” I said while taking the coffee.

We had come to the water after walking for a good four miles. The pelicans were making a gentle ruckus while parading and dancing near the water. I stood on the pavement right before a wall that stood in between us and the drop into the beach down below. Celine seemed to go into a trance while gazing upon the Bay. It was I as if she was taking a mental snapshot with her piercing hazel eyes I could see the edges of when I briefly turned to look at her. She seemed to be defeated, heartbroken, and embittered, yet this newfound heartbreak seemed to have granted her a sort of cathartic release she saw as inevitable. It was as if holding onto hope exhausted her, and she could finally unburden herself on this edge of the world. Pensiveness was liberating at first, but then I saw the real descent into sorrow begin to exude from her being, causing me to leap into offensive non-sequitur.

“So this is the Marina proper, with everyone’s boats and all. You can see that boat has all the flags you need to know here, the San Francisco 49ers football team, the San Francisco Giants baseball team, the San Jose Sharks hockey team, and the Golden State Warriors basketball team.”

“It would have been nice to go to the baseball game with you today Arthur. You always said you’d take me.”

“Well, I couldn’t afford the tickets really, and it would have taken up most of the day.”

This was a bold faced lie. I could get six dollar tickets, but I didn’t want to sit in one place with her so close together.

“Oh, I see, right.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted our time here to just be a baseball game.”

“You know I’m here more than one day Arthur.”

“Yeah, but I have church on Sundays and have work on Monday.”

“Yes, of course you do.”

“I mean, I could probably come back tomorrow. Church is only in the morning, I could come back in the afternoon.”

“Would you?”

“I’d have to see honestly, I just need to make sure I’m ready for work on Monday. Probably not, but I could try.”

“Are we finally going to get some proper food Arthur?”

“Yeah, I know a restaurant a couple blocks away.”

So we gathered our thoughts and sentiments, and we made our way to Chestnut street, the main drag of the Marina District where techies and trust fund girls go to find each other. We settled on an Italian restaurant the name of which I can’t remember and is surely long gone now.

“Here’s some menus for you both, and here’s a wine list,” said our server of red hair and freckles, not more than 23 years old with petite build and “cool girl” demeanor.

“Thank you,” I responded.

“Yes, thank you,” said Celine.

“Gosh, she’s pretty isn’t she,” said Celine.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Sure you did Arthur, you can admit it now.”

“No, I didn’t, she must have not been very noticeable.”

“I could never nail down your type Arthur.”

“You know you’re my type.”

“I don’t think that’s true, I think your type was Natasha all along.”

“Natasha didn’t hold a candle to you.”

“I don’t believe you Arthur, you rejected me the first time I asked you out.”

“Yeah, cause I already asked out Natasha.”

“Then why didn’t you ask me out?”

“I was 19, and you were 24. In my mind you were this woman who had far more life experience than me who I couldn’t just walk up to an ask out.”

“It didn’t stop you when I made it obvious I liked you the second time.”

“Yeah well, don’t take shots you can’t make.”

“What the Hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I knew Natasha liked me when I asked her out, and I knew you liked me when I asked you to go to the Lost Library.”

“So you don’t like the chase?”

“What chase? I still chased you.”

“No I chased you, and you chased back. You don’t like doing the first chase.”

“It’s a waste of my time.”

“Oh is it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Why is that?”

“Why would I waste my time chasing a girl who didn’t want to be caught, when there are one’s who are signaling that they want me to catch them?”

“Some girls like to have their minds changed Arthur, in fact most girls do. We like to be pleasantly surprised.”

“Well good for you all.”

“Hi, are we all set to order?” asked the waitress swooping by.

“Yeah thanks, I’ll have a lemonade and a Margherita pizza please,” said Celine.

“And you?” asked the waitress.

“I’ll just have a sparking water and bruschetta please,” I responded.

“Great, coming right up,” said the waitress.

“Thanks,” said Celine and myself in unison.

“Why are you just getting an appetizer Arthur?" asked Celine.

“I have to stick to my diet pretty religiously, and that’s the order that does the least amount of damage.

“Oh for fuck sake, you and your bloody diet.”

“Yes, my bloody diet.”

“Just have a fucking pizza babes.”

“I’m alright.”

“I still know you think that waitress is pretty.”

“Why do you do this?”

“You what?”

“Why do you do this? You would do this every time we were out. You would insist that I thought some other girl is pretty.”

“Well you did think Olivia Swan was pretty.”

“Olivia Swan and I had literally one lunch, and then I realized she has a wet blanket personality and didn’t pursue her further.”

“Or maybe you just settled for me Arthur.”

“No, I didn’t. If you remember, the night I got you to leave with me to go the Lost Library, Olivia was actually waitressing at the Old Stock House, and she gave me a wink while holding a tray before seeing I was with you. I had every opportunity to pursue her, and I chose you.”

“Well, I suppose you did. She always gave me dirty looks after that. She thought she could have any man she wants.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“I still really don’t think I’m your type babes, I think Natasha is your type.”

“So you think Natasha a half Greek half German girl, Olivia a purely British girl with blonde hair, and this fucking redhead waitress are all my type apparently. You think everyone but you is my type.”

“Well, the redhead IS pretty Arthur.”

“Yes, she’s pretty objectively. It doesn't mean I’m into her.”

“You’re supposed to say I’m prettier than her Arthur!”

“Okay, what the hell is this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Celine, I chose you out of many girls who I had the opportunity to pursue. Yes a lot of these other girls were pretty, but I couldn’t stand to be around them for more than five minutes. I don’t even know how I could stand dating Natasha for two months. You are a very, very beautiful woman with striking features who I fell for. We broke up cause it couldn’t work, and I’m a Christian now. You said you could never be Christian, so here we are.”

“You really thought I was pretty?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m sorry Arthur, I don’t know what I expected from all of this.”

“It’s alright.”

Celine looked down slightly to her left in melancholic sadness. She seemed desperate for me to put her out of her misery: to lean across the table to kiss her and restore our dying union. In many ways, I wanted to. I had just been put face to face with a reality four months prior that I was not the man who I pretended to be with her in England. I was using my student loan money like it was a salary I had earned, and when Silicon Valley wasn’t making enough money for me to move her out to California, the dream wrapped in an act died. I felt like a young boy who lost his shot at being a man early on. Here she was wishing for a man, and all I could be was a late stage adolescent. Christianity aside, this all felt unspeakably cruel.

We finished our meal in relative silence and made our way out of the restaurant to walk down a Chestnut street increasingly bathed in the twilight of a setting sun. Celine insisted in walking into a Starbucks to grab a tea while I waited outside and looked through the storied street of the Marina District. There are remnant dive bars from the old sailing roots of this district stuck between the staples of suburban white women like “soulcycle” and “Lululemon.” I had walked through here four months earlier the day after we broke up, listening to the same lyrics on repeat “you were there for me when I was in trouble.” It was all such a blur, our time in England. At times it felt like I was the one manipulating, and other times, it felt like she was manipulating me. Sometimes she was the only cure for a loneliness that I often never wanted a cure for in the first place, and at other times I was the one consoling her through distorted origins and alienation. Maybe we were both malicious, or maybe we were both defending ourselves. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I couldn’t tell if we fell in love because of shared suffering or fell in love in spite of it. Maybe we were two actors who didn’t know when to take the masks off. Give a man a mask, and he’ll show you who he is. But if you keep the mask off, that identity is thrown into the flux of an in between state that eventually becomes permanent. Neither of us had the answers anymore.

“It’s getting late, I have to get going,” I said to Celine who was exiting the Starbucks with tea in hand.

“Oh, well, okay.”

“Maybe we should head back to Union Square first?”

“Okay, yeah, I’ll get us an Uber.”

I didn’t look at her for the entire ride. If there was one thing I was avoiding this entire time, it was eye contact without speech, and I had nothing left to say. We got off at Union Square and walked down a couple blocks to third street before telling her I wasn’t far from the train station.

“Well, thanks for seeing me and showing me around,” said Celine.

“Yeah, it was my pleasure,” I responded.

Celine gazed at me intently with the first true eye contact we had all day and said, “so that’s it then?”

“Yeah. That’s it. You must be excited to get back to your friends in Los Angeles.”

“I didn’t come all the way out here for them, I came all the way out here for you Arthur.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I did. You know I did.”

She had said out loud what I knew all along but wanted to deny. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, before grabbing her shoulders, looking into her hazel eyes and saying “some day, someone is going to want to love you wholeheartedly. You have to let him okay?”

She looked stunned and confused and angry all while conceding defeat and nodding her head while saying “okay.”

“Goodbye Celine.”

“Goodbye.”

I let go of her before backing up a step while looking into her eyes on the verge of tears to finally break eye contact and power walk down the road. I turned a corner and sprinted to make my train I was late for after our encounter. I called my father once I caught my breath and my bearings.

“I’m headed home.”

“Hang on, how did it go?”

“It went well.”

“Nono, hang on, what happened?”

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“Okay…and?”

“I just showed her around like I promised, and nothing happened. I kept the oath.”

“Okay, well great! How do you feel?”

“I feel alright, good for the most part.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it was hard to tell her no, but I know it was ultimately the right thing to do.”

“Well okay son, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“Thanks Pops.”

“When are you home?”

“In about thirty minutes.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

“Love you Pops.”

“Love you too son.”

When I hung up the phone I looked out the window to see the now lit up Bay Area seemingly washed in its waters as much on land as in the Bay itself. There was always a notion I had when seeing the Bay at night that I could almost become one with the waters themselves. It struck me as equal parts silly new age and powerfully primordial.

I looked at my lit up phone screen on the train seat next to me with words from Celine:

“I left my heart in San Francisco.”

The Japanese always struck me as a people who understood this best with a close second being the Russians.

The famous Jiro sushi and its subsequent documentary, “Jiro dreams of sushi,” displays a modern example of what is alive and well in Japanese culture in the metaphoric of blacksmithing the greatest swords in the world. Jiro was seeking mastery far passed his clear greatest of all time status as a sushi chef. He talks of not having a devoted practice of a skill towards mastery being a waste of a man’s life. I couldn’t agree more.

If one were to watch Japanese acting, it is so simple yet so strikingly powerful. The Honored Priest is a perfect example of this.

Miyamoto Musashi is the greatest single combatant of all time, and his writings on the metaphysics of combat in the Book of Five Rings come from “the void” in understanding that despite his mastery, the perfection of swordplay is beyond his understanding in the void.

This is an understanding by Japanese masters that the simplest movements, the smallest adjustments are the most vital. It is the fine folding of steel, packing it tighter and tighter in pursuit of a blade that can split atoms. To have an eye that can see someone cut fish, swing a sword, speak a line, or craft a sword and be enraged by its flaws that the common man would be dumbfounded in attempting to understand.

This is the only real way to exist.

Our life of prayer is no different. To believe that we have mastered prayer is to fall into despondency and a worldly death.

How tightly can you pray? How much can you focus on the thought of bowing before Christ and asking for mercy? How tightly can you grip on the Faith to never lose awareness and sight of the narrow path at hand? How vigilant can you be in detaching from the self, to die to yourself?

The Japanese have a small Orthodox community I wish to see. The nexus of this culture and the Faith must be a marvel to witness in praxis.

The Nuremberg consensus has dictated to not only European powers, but nations worldwide a status quo policy deeming it illegal to be right wing. This is enforced by the United States that is currently controlled by what many call the “deep state” which is one portion overgrown, managerialist behemoth, financially draining the country and another portion of stateless parasites both Middle Eastern and European that use the United States to enforce the aforementioned consensus.

The United States in many ways is prevented from falling due to it being too valuable a prize to squander whether it’s controlled by the vanguard elite emerging of Trump, American finance, the PayPal Mafia, and even one faction of our favorite country in the Middle East on one side, or the other faction of that Middle Eastern country, the Davos crowd, and the aforementioned deep state on the other side.

Much of what is written above, if not all, is a distillation of many talking points of great revisionists and commentators, like Paul Fahrenheidt, Pete Quiñones, “Cat Girl Kulak,” and most notably, Thomas777 that I’ve had the privilege of listening and reading.

But what struck me as more fascinating than the Nuremberg consensus is the consensus that it replaced, originating in Westphalia in 1648, crafted by “the miracle of Holland,” as dubbed by Henry IV, the great Hugo Grotius.

The Thirty Years War was World War One close to 300 years before World War One, lasting from 1618 to 1648, taking place in four phases, the Bohemian phase, the Danish phase, the Swedish phase, and the French phase. The conflict began over the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II wishing to enforce Catholic policies on the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire which went both against the Treaty of Augsburg of 1555 granting religious allowances for Lutheran states within the Holy Roman Empire. The rise of Calvinism added an additional inflammatory question, as multiple Northern German states opted for the new strain of Protestantism emerging from Jean Calvin in Geneva. But what ensued was a round robin struggle for power, with Catholic victories alarming Nordic Protestant powers of a strengthened Catholic, Habsburg neighbor as well as Catholic opportunists seeking power in the case of France.

What was clear was to European soldiers and statesmen alike, was that the bloodletting that killed 52% of the German people needed to cease in order for Europe to survive. However, with the religious grounds of the conflict, the source of peace was sought outside of the Christian Faith in the “naturalism” of Greco-Roman morality that pre-dated the rise of Christianity in Europe.

Grotius had brought peace to Europe, but that peace came at a cost that eventually gave grounds to Nietzsche’s most infamous and misunderstood quote of, “God is Dead,” with God all but removed from top down policy, opting for mercantilism holding the highest spot on the hierarchy of importance. While monarchy was technically alive in every country in Europe sans Portugal, France, and Switzerland leading up to World War One, the Great War simply removed the veil of the true status quo that was diluting the power of monarchies, with non-royal heads of state in Franco, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler all filling the void down the line.

What finished the job close to thirty years later was Nuremberg, but the events that brought Europe to this point, began with the Westphalian consensus. These events are many, and my new co-host on the Blood & Rain Podcast for all things political theory, Mercatores and I decided to chronicle these events in both podcast form and written form.

The series will take place in nine parts as follows:

1. The Origins and Works of Hugo Grotius

2. The Thirty Years War and The Peace of Westphalia

3. The French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and Congress of Vienna

4. The “wilderness period'“ between Waterloo and World War One, specifically, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, The Meiji Restoration, The Russo-Japanese War, and the Boer War

5. World War One

6. The Treaty of Versailles & The Inter-War Period

7. World War Two

8. The Nuremberg Consensus

9. Is secular peace a worthy goal?

The working question of the series running parallel with the chronicling of the butterfly effect of Hugo Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia is the question posed and potentially answered in the final episode is whether or not a secular peace is worthy of pursuing. While it alleviated Europe of further bloodshed in the immediate term, one can make the argument that it culminated in far worse horrors in the World Wars, Communism, and the atomization of mankind.

The podcast series is already four episodes in with episode five set to release next week, but the articles will provide further depth and different angles that are better provided in the medium of the written word.

Part one will be released next Saturday, with all articles eventually concluding in lock step with its counterpart podcast series.

“I can’t believe I’m here, this is so surreal,” said Celine.

“Yeah, after all this time,” I replied.

“Gosh, we should have done this years ago, but you just had to reject me in San Francisco.”

“How many times are you going to bring that up?”

“Just a few more times baby. I just need to feel like it’s healed properly.”

“You can bring it up twice more, and not a single time after we retrace our steps.”

“Okay babes, fine.”

We were seated in the patio of Inklings Coffee in downtown Pleasanton. Pleasanton unlike Dublin was a real place. It’s one of the old Western towns I came to adore after a deepening of the love of my state’s heritage. It has a quaint downtown with overpriced shops that bored housewives spend money in when the economy is on the up. It has American gazebos, Protestant Bible churches, and 19th century homes littered throughout its premises. It’s one of the few places in the Bay Area that is openly right wing, which was always a nice reprieve from my hours in Marxist Oakland.

The town has two bars that moonlight as clubs at night full of girls who never worked on a farm a day in their life donning cowboy hats and glittered jeans I had seen on girls at my second high school. It is however, the last town before Livermore, the true gateway to the real rednecks that populate the majority of the state’s counties throughout the Central Valley and anywhere that isn’t The Bay Area, Los Angeles, or San Diego. People seem to forget that California was once the true red stronghold. Trump MAGA signs were all over this town at the time, and I suspect they are still there today and will be there long after he’s passed away. The leftover Reagan signs from the 80s make my bet safe.

Inklings itself is slightly left of the rest of the town. It has a dark academia aesthetic, but its clientele is “quirkier,” comprising of hipster adjacents and the type of girls who’ve read “The Perks of being a Wallflower” one too many times. The overemphasis on Harry Potter is also never a good sign.

“Why aren’t you paying attention to me Arthur, you should be kissing me babes,” questioned and declared Celine.

“Babe, I told you, I have to finish studying this new menu for the opening party tonight. I just need another twenty minutes, and I should have it down,” I replied.

“I see, okay, right I'm going to run to the toilet then babes,” said Celine before giving me a quick peck.

Celine spoke with a hybrid accent of sorts. She had been raised North of Birmingham in the lone, remaining nice neighborhood in Walsall. Walsall was once a trendy town in England that was the place to be in the West Midlands. It was home to unique shops, bistros, and farmer’s markets back in the 1970s. The 70s were kind to Birmingham by way of football, with Aston Villa securing their one and only European Championship that set the town fire with jovial and fanatical joy. But Walsall had since become a downtrodden neighborhood of Pakistani and Jamaican gang violence aside from its lonely island neighborhood where Celine grew up. She was raised on the highest end of middle class affluence and decidedly spoke as “posh” as she could which resulted in an accent somewhere between the dreaded Birmingham accent and an accent that is described by the British acting and radio world as “received pronunciation.”

With the founding of the BBC Radio, there needed to be an accent that could be understood by men as for North as Newcastle and as far South as Cornwall, and an accent that is watered down, lazy offshoot of the historic “heightened Received pronunciation of the Royal family was what fit the bill. When she was happy, fluttery, and feminine, she spoke more with received pronunciation. When she was upset, as she was the day prior, she spoke more with her native Birmingham accent. It was never more than a 70/30 ratio when it came to each extreme, unless she was trying to fit into a new crowd when she attempted to speak completely in received pronunciation.

I was studying quite a complex menu for the opening of Sobre Mesa, and the bar team of Alex Maynard and Susan Eggett put together a superb and cutting edge list of cocktails typically well above five ingredients that required many steps of prep and half steps in between full steps. Their mojito for example was not going to be a dive bar’s slothful effort at tossing sugar, lime juice, four wilted mint leaves, and white rum into a shaker for than ten seconds followed by an abysmal presentation. They were opting the original method of creation in Havana via directly building in the glass, with granulated Demerara sugar as opposed to pre-made syrup, eight crisp mint leaves, aged rum, and fresh-squeezed lime juice, put together with an old school, long, “dipping stir” with a bar spoon, before garnishing with a pristine mint sprig.

Day one of my bar career taught me how to prep mint properly, and any time a barback messed up the mint, one of the bartenders would take the drooping display out of the glass, raise it up in the air, and say “who made this shitty, fucking mint?!” before throwing it on the ground and berating the culprit.

I was impressed by this menu with a tiki-centric take on afro-latino culinary and cocktail culture, but more importantly, this would hit the Oakland demographic across the face with fascination and obsession. I would be making far more money than my previous fine dining job in San Francisco that was failing to attract customers, and this would mean financial stability by Bay Area standards to fund my training as a fighter while allowing me enough time both to train properly and to begin establishing a practice as a freelance copywriter. It was the final piece of the puzzle I needed, and I couldn’t squander it. I had worked for a year to position myself for this shot at a life I wanted, and with it, Celine and I would have a shot at making it. I’d be able to fly her to San Francisco every other month or even take time off to visit her in London. All was coming into place, and I only needed one more first impression to secure the shifts I wanted. You only need one dazzling performance in the very beginning to get a bar manager to think of you as an “a team” bartender. As soon as they get that impression from three or four bartenders, they relax, and they let you have whatever shifts you want.

“Babyyy, are you done? I want to walk with you!” begged Celine.

“Five more minutes,” I replied.

“But I want to walk in this sun with you, this beautiful sun. Come on babes.”

“Fine, three more minutes.”

“Okay babes.”

I looked through the menu one last time, but I remembered I’d have another half hour to review the menu in the Uber ride to Oakland, so I shut my binder closed after one more glance at the “Hotel Creole” cocktail before standing up, putting on my black demin jacket, and saying “let’s go baby.”

“Yay!” chirped Celine.

We walked up the road from Inklings before a European import supermarket caught Celine’s eye and subsequent begging to cross the street and go inside. She jumped for joy seeing the wares of chorizo and prosciutto that she found behind a glass deli case. After purchasing them with dark Ghirardelli chocolate, we made our way down the remainder of downtown Pleasanton while she gleefully spotted shop after shop.

We walked into one of the shops most frequented by bored Pleasanton housewives that sold various useless knickknacks that one could never fully remember, and they played a record that peaked my interest.

“This is really good. Who is this?” I asked.

“It’s the latest Tame Impala album,” said a petite Filipino store clerk folding a sweater that was one of roughly six clothing items in a sea of nonsense.

“Oh okay. Yeah, I’m not typically the biggest fan of them, but this isn’t bad. I’ll have to give it a listen.”

“Yeah, it’s really good. I’m going to go see them at the Chase Center.”

“Nice. Yeah, a close friend of mine and I are going to go see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction over in Cleveland in May. We’re both big Nine Inch Nails fans, and we were stoked to see them get the nod.”

“That’s really cool! Do you go to concerts a lot?”

“Not as much as I’d like, but I’m planning to change that this year. I’ll hopefully see Rage Against the Machine in May at the Coliseum, and I’m going to try to go see Krewella pretty soon.”

“Nice! I’m going to try to go to Outside Lands this summer.”

“Yeah, I heard it’s going to be a good show this year. Well, we gotta get going. Have a good day.”

“Thanks, you too!”

Celine and I exited the store through its green, wooden doorframe and swung right to go to a corner to catch an Uber to Oakland.

“What the hell was that Arthur?” questioned Celine.

“What was what?” I inquired.

“You were just flirting with that girl in the store just now.”

“No, I wasn’t, I was literally just asking about the record.”

“Yeah, but you didn't need to tell her your bloody life story now did you?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah Arthur, I am serious. You didn’t say anything about me, you didn’t introduce me, nothing.”

“She’s literally someone I’m never going to see again, why would I introduce you?”

“So she doesn’t get any fucking ideas Arthur, that’s why!”

“Are you actually serious right now? I literally just asked her about an album, and she said she was going to a concert. So I just said I’m going to some shows too. I didn't ask her for her number, I didn’t ogle her, I didn’t flirt with her, I literally just made conversation.”

“You could have just asked her about the album and said thanks when she told you and had that be that. I seriously can’t believe you just flirted with that girl in front of me, this is just so typical of you Arthur. You know you’re flirting, and you just play dumb. Every man flirts and plays dumb.”

The truth was, I was not a part of a cast of characters that made up the general idea of what men do and don’t do in these scenarios. I was simply a man who returned to an old flame after she had been cheated on. I’ll never forget the day I received that text from her. I was working in a bar in San Jose as a receiver and assistant operations manager in the mornings both at a craft cocktail bar and their sister Irish pub. She had come out of the woodwork multiple times since our time together in England when we first met. From 2015 to 2016 to early 2017, I shut her down each time. But when I reached a form of homeostasis in June of 2017, the memories all began to process, and suddenly I was a bit more open to her reaching out.

From the time of 2016 until 2018, she had dated another actor in London who was originally from Manchester. Harry Lyndon was a typical “Mancy boy” who had a bit of talent and leveraged it enough to get into a top five drama school in the UK. He had pale skin, spiky black hair, seedy green eyes, and a slimy grimace you can’t help but notice. He was an “ah, it’s me bird” type of guy when Celine showed up to the bar after he ghosted her for a couple days, as if he wasn’t aware she’d texted him. If he had any growth as an actor, it wasn’t noticeable. Some people get to a certain level in the industry and just begin to coast off of the slight dopamine hits from the some odd plays and film scenes while being a hit with the lads at the pub. I never understood being so wasteful with these kinds of things.

Celine had sent me a screenshot of him texting his side girl, and the typical actress response ensued. She posted a picture on instagram with a mean, enticing look on her face with eyes slightly red from tears, while wearing a black blazer to give her an extra bit of edge in her appearance. She could never quite shake Lady Macbeth’s influence on her psyche. She then deleted her instagram and started another one a day later.

This all came as a bit of a surprise to me. She was on tour for a play across the European continent while I was in the Bay Area throwing kicks by day and slinging drinks by night. It had seemed all but over between the two, yet she seemed in and out of distress. Had she done the breaking up like she wanted to, she would have been relieved. But the cheating was a personal note that struck at her core and pressed the buttons of her origins. Those months in 2018 were more erratic than any I had ever experienced in my life. It was all so bizarre.

When I saw her again, I saw the damage of the man, the man who openly called for Satan in woods of England, Germany, and Pennsylvania. He had sung in death metal bands, and I saw a video of him prancing around the woods calling for Satan like an imbecile. He spoke with an off brand, “Loki” trickster wannabe voice in doing so, but on a visceral level, there was something real that he was interacting with. And whatever that entity was had noticeably rubbed off on Celine. She was more bitter, more suspicious, and far more scathing, a quality I only saw once before in England when she had truly been wronged.

I hadn't sought to get her back, but I found that in 2018, my prayers as an Orthodox Christian inquirer included a somber prayer for her to convert by some miracle of God’s grace. After these prayers commenced, I found her advances coming out of the woodwork with increasing frequency. But when I did get her back, I didn’t get the same girl.

“She’s not going to get any ideas cause she saw I’m with you, and I’m literally never going to see her again,” I told Celine.

“Fine, whatever Arthur, deny all you want. I’m just not that stupid, and you need to know that.” replied Celine.

Our Uber picked us up from the corner of a side street, and I spent the ride to Oakland going over the menu for the opening once more.

Celine didn’t say a word the entire car ride whole glued to her phone with the exception of periodically taking in views of the East Bay.

When we arrived on 17th and Franklin, I pulled Celine by the hand out of the car while thanking the Uber driver.

“Celine, I wasn’t flirting with that girl. Maybe it’s a cultural difference. In California that doesn’t mean anything. I literally just wanted to know the album okay?”

“Okay baby.”

“Great, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Well, welcome to Oakland baby.”

“Gosh, I’m really here.”

“I’m really happy you’re here cause I’ve really grown to love this place.”

“It looks really cool babes.”

“Yeah, we’ll take a walk when the opening is over.”

Celine and I walked into the lush greenery that lined the hall into Sobre Mesa, Oakland’s then latest and greatest.

The interior of Sobre Mesa’s primary color is forest green, with the bulk of the walls and the base of the bar donning this hue with the walls of the back bar and the bar top being made of black tile and black marble respectively. There are spherical, pink paper lanterns hung from the ceiling to illuminate a room full of tropical colors and touches of wood and gold both at tables and on the finishes found on the bartop. The art was of tropical foliage, making it all see you were entering some form of festive, tropical oasis.

If one is to walk to the back of the room and into the hall, they’ll find a wall to pose in front of for social media photoshoots with a pink neon sign saying “came sober, left sober.” Chef Nel knows Oakland well enough to know Sobre Mesa would be a smash hit, and everyone would want to post the receipts on their social media profiles. It was smart business and smart marketing.

I walked Celine over to Susan and said hello before saying, “Susan, this is my fiancé, Celine, is it alright if she stays put before the opening while we set up?”

“Well hello there Celine, it’s so good to finally meet you! Of course she can stay. Can we get you anything?” replied and asked Susan.

Susan was a 5’4 petite, Caucasian woman in her late 30s whose brunette bangs framed a sweet face that gave off the aura of somewhere between an approachable aunt and a kind grandmother. There was joy in everything she did, and you could tell she cared for every last one of her staff members in her illustrious bar career by San Franciscan standards.

“Hi! it’s so good to meet you, you know what, I think I could really use something fruity if Arthur could make it for me?” inquired Celine.

“Sure! Arthur, why don’t you get back there and make your lady a drink before we really get going. We’re having you on the center well, and there should already be some ice in it,” stated Susan.

“Sounds like a plan,” I responded before briefly pecking Celine and pacing around the bar top to clock in.

Alex Maynard, Susan’s partner in management was already behind the bar helping some of the other staff members. Alex was a slim, light skinned black man standing roughly 5’10 with a chilled demeanor that paradoxically gave a striking presence. His father was the editor in chief of the Oakland Tribune, and after briefly seeing a picture of him with a linebacker’s build, strong mid-sized afro, and infectious smile, I could see where Alex got his presence and his business savvy from. Alex took Starline Social Club to the moon in Oakland before handing it off to his protege and moving into consulting. He was born in Oakland, was raised by one of Oakland’s VIPs, grew up idolizing Rickey Henderson at the Coliseum, and he created an essential part of Oakland’s fabric. He is a true son of Oakland.

“How’s it going Arthur?” asked Alex as we engaged in the “Oakland handshake” of a “dap up” into a handshake.

“Im good man, how are you doing?” I replied.

“Good man, good. I’m happy we’re finally doing this”

“What do you need from me?”

“Clock in, and then help David fill the rest of the wells with ice. I have the barbacks on other jobs while we gear up to do a test run for some of these menu items.”

“Copy that.”

I took my denim jacket off and thew it into a cubby of my well and then went over to shake hands with David Harlins, a dark-skinned black man with glasses and a sunny disposition who lived all over the world, spending a significant time in Italy to become fluent in the language due to formerly being married to an Italian woman. His list of skillsets was impressive, and after conversations we had in the weeks prior, I was excited to work with him for his brief last hurrah in bartending before committing to real estate full time and flying.

“David, how’s it going man?”

“I’m good man! It’s good to see you!” replied David as he returned my handshake with a firm grip.

“It’s good to see you too man! I see you already have the ice buckets, do you want me to go with you to get ice, or do you need something else?” I asked.

“I think we’ll only need these three buckets to finish off the three wells, but if you want to, you can set up the tools?”

“You got it man. I’m just going to make a drink for my fiancé real quick if that’s cool?”

“Oh for sure man, go for it.”

I grabbed some watermelon juice and some lime juice and double poured them over ice in a collins glass before swinging the bottles back into their spots on the stainless steel rack of the well before taking some Hendricks gin and pouring an ounce and a half directly into the glass while pouring a half ounce of brown sugar syrup into a jigger. I tossed the brown sugar syrup directly into the glass before long stirring the drink for ten seconds and garnishing it with an orchid.

“Hey Susan, can you give this to Celine?” I echoed to Susan who was not far from the bar top and much closer than Celine who was seated in a secluded front corner of the bar surrounded by foliage.

“Sure!” replied Susan gleefully before grabbing the drink and asking, “what is this exactly?”

“Oh, it’s just Hendricks with watermelon, lime, and brown sugar. The cucumber notes in Hendricks play nicely with the watermelon juice, and the brown sugar gives it a bit more body.”

“Sounds great, I’m sure she’ll love it!”

Susan took the cocktail away and walked to the corner Celine was seated, while I went to the cubbies and found the remaining golden cocktail shakers, strainers, and jiggers, distributing them evenly between all three wells. Every well had a set of three of each tool in under a couple minutes.

My theory of bartending was that fast hands weren’t enough to be the fastest bartender. Fast feet conquered all, and the only way I could have fast feet to carry over to martial arts was to wear a second pair of boxing shoes behind the bar to mimic the same footwork from the mats. I came to Sobre Mesa with them already on, and I felt I had missed out on a comforting ritual to prepare for work. I wanted my life to be increasingly ritualistic, although the base for such rituals appeared to be lacking in the past two years.

“Hey Alex, David is getting the ice, and I’m all done with the tools. Do you want me to start distributing the vermouths and the cheater bottles?”

“For sure man. Here’s the breakdown of the setup,” replied Alex while handing me the laminated bottle map.

I took the bottle map dipped down to the low refrigerators behind the bar to grab the fifteen cheater bottles of various liqueurs and syrups needed for the extensive cocktail menu along with a dry and sweet vermouth, completing one well before David came back with the ice to fill each well fully.

“What’s up Arthur, what do you need?” asked David.

“I’ve got the right well fully stocked, so can you work fully stock the left well, while I take the one in the center?” I requested.”

“For sure man.”

As we finished setting up the bar, our third bartender for the shift, Sade came behind the bar and clocked in. Sade was a larger black woman from Baltimore with dreadlocks and a shy but sweet demeanor.

“Hey, you’re Arthur right?” asked Sade.

“Yeah, you’re Sade right?” I replied.

“Yeah! You remembered!”

“And so did you, it’s good to see you again Sade.”

“You too!”

David, Sade, and I completed the bar setup before Susan brought the barbacks who doubled as servers behind the bar while Alex made his way in front of the bar.

“Alright guys, this is the first of three soft opening parties. We’re opening doors in twenty-five minutes, and we’re only going for three hours. David, you get to leave first, since you were the first opener, then Arthur, then Sade.”

“Actually Alex, Arthur and I agreed he could go before me since his lady is in town,” replied David.

“Actually, sorry about that Alex, I should have asked first, is that alright?” I inquired.

“Oh yeah, for sure man, you guys can mix and match as you like it, as long as you don’t go over 40 hours in the week,” stated Alex.

“Okay great, thanks again David, I appreciate you,” I said.

“Anytime brother, I know you have my back,” replied David.

“Alright y’all, let’s get to it,” decreed Alex.

Sade, David, and myself took our respective wells and moved around our tools as we saw fit for our respective ergonomics.

The fray of the shift came as quickly as it went, and after the first hour, everyone was satiated. Sade seemed to get a giggle about how fast I was moving behind the bar even signaling a bit of a startled fright at times, thinking I was going to run into her.

“Stick and move, stick and move,” joked Alex.

“For real though!” said Sade, chiming in.

“Sorry about that, don’t worry, I won’t bump into you,” I promised.

“Oh no, don’t you apologize now, I like your motor. We need that behind this bar,” stated Alex. “You keep doing you.”

“You got it, I can do that,” I replied.

I noticed that Sade and David were referring to the recipe cheat sheets more often than I was, slowing down their otherwise fast bartending skills. In between rounds, I made sure to help wash their tools that were in their respective bar sinks to help them reset faster. After about the fifth time I washed David’s tools, David said, “man I gotta help you too bro!”

“Don’t worry man, you will one of these days when I’m slow as hell after a bad sparring practice,” I joked.

David laughed and said, “alright man you got it, I’ll be on the lookout for that.”

The bar shift was a success, and a few boomerang instagram stories were taken of myself and my fellow bartender behind the stick. After an hour and a half, Susan came up to me and said, “Arthur, it looks like we’re on a pretty solid cruise control, and we had some guests not show up for the event. Do you want to clock out now to go spend time with your lady?” she asked.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course! You’ve been great! And she is lovely by the way. My fiancé and I have been having the most wonderful conversation with her. Do you want to bring some shots over for all of us?”

“Sure, what are we shooting?”

“Lets do the Mosswood rum.”

“Can I actually go ask what Celine wants? I think the Mosswood would knock her out.”

“Yeah, go ahead!”

I made my way around the onyx bar top, and walked over to Celine who had been nursing the drink I had made for her, with a quarter of it remaining.

“Yayyy!” exclaimed Celine as she motioned for a hug while I walked over to her.

She put her drink down and caressed by face with both hands and kissed me twice before asking, “do I finally have you all to myself?”

“Yeah, just about baby, but we’re going to do a shot with Susan and here fiancé before we go. What do you want?”

“Oh gosh babes, I think a shot would kill me when I’m this jet lagged. Maybe a half a shot of the gin baby?”

“Okay baby, I’ll be right back.”

I made my way over to my well again, saying the obligatory “behind” when walking behind David making drinks at his well before reaching mine.

I grabbed four shot glasses to pour three whole shoots of Mosswood and a half shot of Hendricks.

Alex came over and put a hand on my shoulder saying, “hey man, great job today. I love your motor, your mechanics, and your rapport with the customers. Really happy to have you be a part of this team.”

“Thank you so much man, I’m really happy to be here. I can’t wait for the real thing next week.”

“It’s gonna be lit my guy,” said Alex before one more Oakland handshake and walking off.

I stopped for a second to collect myself and briefly reflect. I finally made it. I likely had the shifts I wanted, and I had the money and schedule I needed. Three years in the bar world finally granted me the coveted perfect setup for a fighter, and I had the means to finally fulfill my destiny with Celine that seemed bleak and beyond repair in so many instances. I bet on an iron will, and I made it through.

I looked up and saw Celine eyeing me from across the room, smiling and pointing at me before a sensual “come here” motion while dancing to the latin trap music blasting in the background.

"But you didn’t cultivate an iron will,” said a voice from elsewhere.

“You sleepwalked through every action for the last two years with no sentience at all.”

“You were a zombie, a husk.”

“You think you have this perfect setup?

“What good is your little setup, when your will was broken?”

“No, you’re not ready to bleed, and you need to be ready to bleed again. If you don’t find that again, you’ll have nothing, and you’ll be gone forever.”

“No, this is all a house of cards, and it will all come crashing down.”

“Because all men must bleed.”

“And that’s why you need to bleed.”