Seven
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In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

I know this is unnecessarily long, so if you are not in the mood for reading, I understand. But I would greatly appreciate anyone who would take the time to read my story that is probably TMI and badly in need of some editing. I just really need some advice from people whose heads are less cloudy than mine.
My fiancé M/42 and I F41 have been together for about 4 years and have known each other since high school. I knew he was a recovering addict when I got together with him but I fell head over heels in love and didn’t see the relapse on the horizon that would occur shortly after the honeymoon phase and would eventually almost kill me - I took a swipe of some mystery powder and touched it to my tongue (fentanyl) thinking it would help me get through the most stressful day of my life as i was ceaning out his place while I was packing him up for detox. It was a total freak accident, I’m not an addict, never done anything like that in my life, I’m a single mom and a kindergarten teacher, but I loved him so much I just followed him down the rabbit hole and honestly just became so disoriented in this world I (naively) didn’t understand or even realize I had signed up for.
Anyway, He literally saved my life, and said I also saved his, because that day is what motivated him to get and stay clean for good despite being an active heroin addict for the majority of his life.
He worked an incredibly thorough program, and he gained more friends, money, and more overall success in 2 years than I’ve been able to scrounge up in an entire lifetime. And it’s no surprise honestly. He’s a special person. Absolutely brilliant, charismatic, driven, and has a heart of gold.
Within a year of getting sober, he moved me and my daughters into a gorgeous home adjacent to a golf course, bought luxury vehicles for both me and him, convinced me to quit my teaching job which was making me miserable, so I could finally be fully present for my girls, and then put a giant diamond ring on my left hand. He completely spoils us. We went from having nothing to having every tangible thing, we could possibly need.
The stability that he provided for us meant the world to a single mom who was barely making ends meet, but it was always just the icing on the cake for me. He’s my best friend in the world, he makes me laugh so hard my mouth hurts from smiling, he show me that he loves even the parts of myself that I don’t find lovable. I found my soulmate.
His program started slipping after 2 1/2 years (last November). He was already struggling in his role of being a stepfather, and we were fighting a lot about parenting stuff. He has a lot to learn, has little patience, and seems to have very unrealistic expectations of my kids. He wanted Parenting to be this effortless thing, and he just doesn’t get that it’s not. And that kids are not always going to behave themselves and that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them. so we were fighting a lot.
In December, he started complaining about his chronic back pain again (a real issue for him as he’s had five back surgeries due to a snowboarding accident in his early 20s-this was during that height of Purdue Pharma and what got him hooked on pain meds)
While I know he was legitimately in pain, it was also a red flag because pain was the culprit for his last relapse. He decided to go in for a sixth surgery and was told he would have to wait three months. He found a surgeon who has made a lot of profit off of him over the years (as he’s a PI attorney) and was willing to prescribe him generous amounts of pain pills to get him through the three months of increasing pain that he was experiencing. He spent the next three months in bed, depressed, checking out, taking pills depressed, checking out- as I became increasingly suspicious that his behavior was much too loopy for the amount of medication he was being prescribed. I fell into the role of his nurse, and his babysitter. Making sure he didn’t text to nonsense to clients, making sure he didn’t fall and make his back worse, making sure he wasn’t interacting with the kids, etc
I knew he wasn’t being honest with me, but he just kept gaslighting me. It honestly felt like he was psychologically tormenting me, treating me as though I was totally paranoid, heartless and out of line. I thought after the surgery, it would finally get better. I made a promise that I would be there for him because he had never had anyone there for him for the previous surgeries and it had been a really traumatic experience for him in the past. I really stepped up and tried so hard to his rock. The hospital experience was horrific, mainly because no amount of diloted was relieving him of the pain. None of the nurses understood why he needed so much more than everyone else, but I think his tolerance had just become so high.
After that nightmare was finally over I was really counting on things getting better, as the plan was for him to taper off the meds, live pain-free, and get back to normal. It didn’t go that way. It just kept getting worse and no matter how many times I told him that I didn’t trust him he just had an excuse for an explanation for everything. He is a master manipulator and I listened to him do it to everyone, doctors, the pharmacist he formed a “friendship” with, literally everyone.
On Mother’s Day, it got to a point where he couldn’t hide it anymore. He disappeared for the day, Ended up, passing out at a gas station and was unreachable for hours, when he finally came home, the car was all fucked up and he claims it was someone else’s fault. He went straight to his home office and I didn’t see the rest of the night until I walked in on him smoking crushed up pills. After that, he confessed everything to me, including the time that he told me not to check the mail because he had a special surprise for me to thank me for all the love and support I gave him To help him through his surgery. it turned out he had drug dealers sending him drugs in the mail. Needless to say there was no surprise for me me. Just heartbreak and betrayal. I felt like a fool.
I was still processing this the next day when , after insisting on taking a photo of me in these designer sunglasses he purchased for me out of guilt. I asked him not to take my photo, because I had tears in my eyes, but he insisted. He was napping next to me and I opened his phone to erase the photo. we’ve always had each other’s passwords, and have looked through each others photos before for various reasons, sharing photos, etc. I cannot emphasize enough how much I trust his loyalty to me when it comes to anything other than drugs.
But for some reason, all of my photos, the ones I was taking on my phone were showing up in his feed. I was so confused, so I started scrolling through deleting unflattering double chin pictures of myself when I came across that menu photos organized based on face recognition. One of them was his ex. I remember him telling me he deleted all of his photos of her the first time he told me he loved me.
I opened it and scrolled through hundreds of pictures of their happy life together. The pictures got more and more sexual, one of her with her legs spread, another another of them in the bathtub together, her kissing him while he had his hands around her neck, another screenshot of her naked in the shower with a thumbnail shot of him in the corner obviously jerking off to her on FaceTime. Because I’m a masochist I decided to take it one step further and look in his video folder. I found a There I found a thumbnail shot if a close-up of him penetrating her. I watched it and it just completely crushed whatever was left of me.
I’m normally a really passive person, and I just completely lost my mind. I reacted as though I had caught him cheating on me. I just couldn’t handle the physical evidence of such a close up shot of him being inside another woman. It’s stupid because I know, like me, he has a past. Obviously he’s been with other women. Obviously he’s been attracted to them. But it just scarred my brain, I literally haven’t even been able to eat since because I’ve been so nauseous. I know it’s ridiculous, because this is a reality I was well aware existed, but seeing it with my own eyes… I don’t know what to say. Other than that I need a lobotomy.
He says he erased all of those videos and photos from his phone, and something weird happened where all of his photos from the cloud just re-uploaded when he got a new phone. He’s not a technical person and I actually believe him because, aside from being a complete liar when it comes to drugs, he has always show me the upmost, integrity, love and loyalty. So it’s not that I don’t believe him. I just can’t get that image out of my head.
I can’t tell if this intense emotional reaction I’m having would be the same reaction anyone would have if they saw what I saw, or if I’m combining the feelings of betrayal over the gaslighting and the relapse…, the last four months of feeling completely invisible, hopeless, and like he was choosing drugs over me. My mind is like mush and I seriously can’t differentiate between these two very separate issues. I’m so confused, but that’s what gaslighting does to you. It makes you question your reality.
He said that he’s finally willing to go into detox, so at this point, I have waited this long, it would be silly not to stick around and see if he’s finally going to put an end to this. What’s getting me is that he’s still making excuses, still not seeming very remorseful, and is still so deep in self-pity that he doesn’t seem to have any awareness of how badly I’m hurting because of him. It feels like he just doesn’t care. anyone who’s ever loved an addict knows that feeling well.
I’m in Al-anon, and I’m well aware of all of the things I should be doing, focusing on myself, etc. but I’m just not doing well, and I can’t seem to find my way out of this dark hole. Anyone who has made it this far deserves some sort of a Reddit badge of honor. This was more of an autobiography than a simple question. I just wanna hear some outside input because I don’t trust my own mind right now. I’m willing to take your criticism, just please be kind. I know I’ve made mistakes, I’m just hurting so badly. I can’t seem to sort through this. Thank you so much if you took the time to read all of this and still want to respond. You have no idea how much it means to me.

I haven’t seen it talked about on Reddit yet, so if you didn’t know a proshot is releasing this summer! There aren’t enough pro shots out there. B&C was one of the first few musicals I got into since Jeremy Jordan’s voice acting was my gateway into musicals, and it got me reading a bunch of autobiographies from people who knew Bonnie and Clyde irl, and I’ve even seen Bonnie and Clyde’s car they died in in a museum as well as Jeremy himself in concert. Can’t wait :)

Looking for a comfortable luxury SUV that can handle some off-roading and inclement winter weather. Emphasis on luxury and comfort, but would also favor reliability (only in comparison of these vehicles, I realize luxury SUVs have poor reputations).
I haven’t owned either, so would love to hear any thoughts from those who have. I’d also value any thoughts on the SE vs Autobiography.
Male (adding this as I’ve heard the G-Wagon is considered a housewife car), mid-30s, coming from a RS 7 Performance for more space (growing family) and the ability to handle midwestern winters without any stress.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Where the fuck do you even begin when you don't ever open up? Especially on a public sounding board to complete strangers?
Uh, before you read this, just be aware it may not be the most chronological piece of autobiography in existence: I have a bad habit of jumping around. But... by the end of it, I do really hope that you'll be able to understand where I'm coming from, and maybe, just maybe, have some advice to share. I do appreicate whomever takes the time to read it... It will be kinda long.
... Right, so, I've just... always had anger problems. Ever since I was a little kid, I would be happy in one moment and then one tiny little thing would go wrong (from my perspective, anyhow) and I would fly off the handle, screaming and throwing things. I went thorugh elementary, middle, and high school as one of the weird kids; though, to be perfectly honest, this never really bothered me all that much. I am weird, someone that doesn't fit into the fold, and I accepted that. But what it meant was that most of the kids through school either avoided me entirely or just made fun of me (which, this also doesn't bother me all that much. I was so off in my own world at that age that it never registered as something I was being made fun of, and I would often just agree and laugh with them or ignore it entirely because I felt it didn't apply.)
That being said, I've also always had a violent streak when my rage starts to boil over. Take for instance this one time in middle school art class when the only kid that would sit with me (who just so happened to be one of the most annoying kids in our grade) takes one of those wooden rulers with the metal straightedge imbedded into it and wacks the metal off the back of my hand when I'm just absorbed in whatever art project we were working on. I stopped, looked up at him, and said, "Please don't do that again." figuring that it was the end of it. Not even 5 seconds later he wacks the damn thing against the back of my hand again, with this huge shit-eating grin on his face. I say, "Don't do that again." and resume my drawing. It had to be like five minutes that went by at this point, because at first I was expecting him to just wap me again within 10 seconds. When he didn't, I just kinda forgot about it and once again got all hyper focused into whatever I was drawing, but yet again he raps that damn metal straightedge against my hand, the hardest yet. I fucking snapped. Completely fucking silently, I stood up and walked around the desk. He also stands up with that inane shiteating grin wrapped ear to ear, laughing it off as if I hadn't just told him twice to knock it the fuck off. He starts backing up away from me and I can just feel this darkness leaking into my body, my fists clenched and my face screwed up into a grimace. I have no idea how many people stopped to watch at this point. The two of us always sat as close to the door as we could and the other kids quite literally as far away form us as they could, so there was plenty of time as I was walking him backwards for them to stop and watch. I have no idea what he was saying, my ears were just ringing with pure fucking rage. Maybe something to the effect of, "C'mon, man it was just a joke, I won't do it again." But I was not in control of my full faculties. Eventually, we walked all the way to the teachers desk and he stopped walking just before he touched the wall of the classroom. Fists still clenched, brows still furrowed, heart pounding harder than it ever had in my life, I reached my right hand out and wrapped it around his throat, and I actually fuck you not I lifted him straight over my head with one arm (at the time, we were roughly the same height and weight, which was aroound 5'6" and 165 lbs). I stared at him above me for a couple seconds as he faffed about trying to take my hand off his throat, and I considered what I would do. Standing so close to the teacher's desk, I took one look at it and it was sealed in my mind: I slammed the back of the bastard's head into the edge of the teacher's desk. The classroom fell silent. The teacher, usually very well composed shakily told me through tears to go to the principal's office. I took one look down at this dude's limp body and shrugged, and started storming out of the classroom. My heart still pounding, my head still spinning, my body still wanting to fucking tear this faggot ass bastard to fucking pieces, I turned at the door and started screaming bloody goddamn murder at the entire fucking classroom, of which the words are lost to my memory. Definitely something to the effect of how I hated each and every single person in that classroom. Surprisingly, the kid lived. I honest to God sometimes wish he hadn't; the rage is still beating in my heart years later. And we're on good terms now! Years later, I asked him for clarification if I had grabbed him by the throat or the shirt, and he told me it was the shirt; but I so distinctly remembered it being the throat I just dismissed him. After all, if I had him by the shirt, how could I possibly have slammed the back of his head into the desk? Well, years after that when I started working at the local McDonald's, I was telling the story to one of the coworkers and from the other side of the sandwich line one of the girls piped up that she remembered that moment very well, too: That it was by the throat that i had him, and that she had been terrified of me ever since. Understandable, I suppose.
But, middle school doesn't last forever. Life moves on, and you grow older in it (even if you aren't growing up.) Through high school, I honestly thought I had calmed down one hell of a lot, as violent outbursts didn't happen. There may have been once that kids were making fun of me in volleyball for not being able to play it very well (they always put me on the teams with the athletic kids...) so I started to just play like a complete and total dipshit, and was actually playing better than if I had been locked in. They told me to stop playing like a dumbass and I flew off the handle at them like, "Which is it? Play the fucking game or play like a fucking dumbass?" and stormed off to the principal's office because I knew I was in trouble.
At this same McDonald's, there was a time when I was closing, right? The teenagers that were supposed to be closing with us were faffing about on their fuckin phones all night, and usually that's kinda okay because it was slow as fuck towards the end of the night. However, this day there was a significant uptick in orders all of a sudden and there was fucking nobody back in the kitchen with me; they were all just fucking around on their phones in the front of the store. I hollered from the bun toaster, "Yo, where is my kitchen?!" loud enough for every employee in the store to hear me and the manager kinda just goes, "That was uncalled for!!" This made me go fucking insane. Fucking excuse me, bitch? Your fucking employees are fucking around on their phones when we have 8 fucking orders on screen with more people in the drive thru waiting to order? What the flying fuck are your employees doing when I'm the only fucking person working? set your fucking employees right! (Bear in mind, I'm screaming this shit at the top of my lungs now, guarunteed to be heard by just about every car in that drive thru. I am very loud when I get mad.) She's screaming something back at me this entire time that kinda just flies completely under my radar because I'm in the right and I know I am (from my perspective) and she ends up screaming just go the fuck home and don't even clock out. Everyone in the store is staring at this fight unfold and when we fell silent after that, all you could hear was the beep of the fryer letting you know to pull up the fries. Storming through, I pulled them out of the fryer (because no-one else was touching it) and she screamed "DON'T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT" so I dropped the burning basket of fries right back in to the fryer and stormed out. The next shift I was scheduled to work, I came in and not one single person said a word about that explosion. Not the GM, not the manager I screamed at, not a single one of the employees working that night. But everyone was in their place where they were supposed to be now, doing their fucking job.
And really, there just have been moments like that my entire life. Usually I'm pretty quiet, hold my words and listen to people before making any sort of direct like... statements on anything. If someone asks me a question, I try my darndest to answer to the best of my ability. But like I say, there are just times when I lose it. I could actually go on about one more rage fit story at that restaurant, but to be perfectly honest, I don't really think I need to at this point. Basically, I got fired from that McD for another rage fit I threw over some slightly bullshit reason and I started flinging shit everywhere in the breakroom. Little did I know, the owner of the store was in the next fucking room having a district meeting. They heard everything. The GM comes down the stairs screaming, "What the hell is going on down here?!" and when she saw that I was too fucking pissed to talk straight she sent me home and told me do not come back until we call. I called about a week later and she said that even though she wanted to keep me because I did a damn good job, the owner said that they can't have a loose cannon in the store. Which is completely understandable.
But now, I'm 23. I've been in a 2 year long relationship with the love of my life, and we have a beautiful son who's already a year old (I know, it went kinda fast lol). We moved state to be closer to her family and because our son will have better opportunities in this state. But I still have problems. She has her own anxieties and traumas. Sometimes, we just disagree on things, and with my insane desire to be right all the time, we butt heads a lot. I've snapped more times than I care to count, more often than not over things that if I just stepped down off my fuckin high horse, would be smoothed over with literally no fuckin problems. But then, I would have to get into the fact that she's just as argumentative as I can be sometimes, and more often than not I'm simply not able to disengage and calm down before I fly off the handle. Sometimes if I try to walk out the door, I'm threatened to be kicked out for good (this is a defense mechanism she uses, and she doesn't really even know why) and I find myself unable to fuckin move or speak lest I burst and she just continues to push. I blow up and start screaming bloody murder at her, just wanting to calm down or be heard or left alone or SOMETHING besides arguing like we do. After we both calm down, we have a heartfelt talk about it and our perspectives and what led to the emotions, and I personally believe that we have become so much better at communication with each other. But even so, there are still times when we just get... Grrrrr with each other. I don't want this nasty shit in my heart any more. It's a deep, dark well of rage and it threatens to burst more and more every day. I find myself getting shorter and shorter fused with people. We've lived in this state for a little over a year now, and when we moved here this fucking place we moved to wouldn't allow you to make more than a certain amount of income amongst the household so I was without a job for a year because we had nowhere else to go if we were kicked out. And I had landed a damn good job at the time I had to quit it. So we moved houses in this town, and I find myself once again working at McD. The other week, a similar situation happened like what with the former one, where someone I was supposed to be working with started doing something completely different when we had orders flooding in. I started getting all in a huff and I turned to my manager, who asked me, "Where's your cabinet person?" and I shrugged and said, "This is the exact kind of bullshit that made me explode at the former McDonald's." So I just kept my head down and kept assembling sandwiches until I couldn't stand it anymore and I screamed the poor kid's name. He comes around the corner like, "What?" with a stupid look on his face and I just shake my head and put down more patties for burgers and more chicken nuggets and more McChicken patties, put in my buns for the sandwiches. He comes over and slowly gets his gloves on, slowly walks over and kinda just grabs a nugget box. He asks, "How many more do I need?" and I just kinda grumpily mumble, "Look at the fucking screen, dumbass." I keep whipping together sandwich after sandwich and this fuckin idiot takes his sweet ass time putting ~60 nuggets together, to the point where I finsih my sandwiches and push him out of th way and quickly finish up the nugget boxes. He says, "Okay, man, jeez, just calm down." I take one fucking look at him, and say, "I swear to fucking God, do not fucking start with me. Get the fuck out of my face, and fucking leave." He turns to manager and asks if he can go home, to which she just sort of weakly nods. The night finsihed relatively fine after that.
And just this last Thursday, my girlfriend takes a trip to McDon for the lil' man a happy meal. She texts me out of nowhere and says that one of my coworkers told her that I was flirting with one of the other employees. I never have flirted with these dumb bitches, I do not want to, I do not like them; I HAVE an AMAZING girlfriend that supports me more than anyone every has and who daily tells me to improve myself and who daily seeks to help me with my anger problems. These other fish can go take a fucking hike to Hell and back for all I care. So instantly, I get this image in mind of a particular person who might do something like that and I almost fucking lost it. My girlfriend still hasn't told me, because I've had some fantasies about seriously fucking this kid up for trying to break us apart. AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO IT WAS! I've just been thinking on confronting and being all like, "Don't you ever, EVER talk to my family again. If you so much as take her fucking order I will fucking murder you." But because I don't know who it is, I just... haven't said a word to anyone except my lady about it. (.... and now, everyone that reads this far into a TL;DR.)
And I just... don't know what the hell to do about it. I walk everywhere I go, so with the move to this state and the move of houses, trying to find the time to get over to the therapy place I'm looking at that not only accepts my insurance but also has great reviews, especially for anger management and the like, has been difficult: They require an in-person, walk-in visit before you can even start regular appoinments with them. And even though my girlfriend does the most she can to help me, there are times when enough is enough, even for her. I don't want to lose my family. I don't want to hurt them if I fly off the handle for some stupid batshit insane reason. I don't want to alienate them; I want them to know I love them. It's not like they don't know, it's just that I can be scary sometimes. And I hate it. Even so, that being said, we have been taking steps as a couple to mitigate our misunderstandings of each other, and to more quickly discuss what it is that went wrong and how to better handle it the next time something similar comes up. It's been a slow process to get to this point, and I don't know if that's normal. Sometimes she acts like I should already be a hell of a lot better... but then, I'll explain my side of the story and the insecurities I was feeling that led me to burst out, and she's a little more understanding. Though it's always the case that I need to dial my reaction back from 11 to about like 1.
.... This is definitely rambly. If.. you can make any sense of this, as jumpy as it is, thank you for understanding, sincerely from the absolute bottom of my soul. Please, i just... want to be a better person.

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Hi there,
My dad bought an Avenger Tiger Mk1 (Sundance Yellow) back in 1972/3 and I'm trying to find out if it is still one of the 25 in existence.
I'm writing my autobiography and would love to include an image of it, and an image of (at least) his name in the logbook or original receipt. (Full credit to the current owner, of course, for use of images).
Dad's name was H. Turner and we lived in Hartlepool at the time (I can provide the full name and address to current owner to verify).
Unfortunately, I don't remember the reg number, however I have trawled images on Google and checked on the DVLA website. One of the reg numbers seems to ring a bell with me, though. I've found 21 so far, and according to DVLA, 16 are taxed, one hasn't been taxed since July 1987 and 4 no longer seem to exist/reg number not recognised.
There is a great story attached to the car, hence its inclusion in the book.
Thanks in advance
Susan

Purchase a 2024 autobiography two months ago. The car has less than 2000 total miles. About four weeks ago we started having electrical problems that the battery was low and the warning light to start the car to charge the battery came on. The RR went back to the dealership where they say, they updated the modules and that the battery was fine. The battery died the next day after it was dropped off at my house. Sent the car back to the dealership again. Below are the two text messages they sent me telling me that my car was “fixed” and could be sent back to the customer:
From the Range Rover engineers :
There were no faults in the charging system or with the battery. Engineering has states the the usage of the vehicle is causing the low battery message. A lowe battery message is prompting that the vehicle must be driven at least 30 minutes a day at speeds of 60-65 mph to stay adequately charged .
Notes from tech "stored. Also wanted to make sure Driver Assistance Domain Controller (DADC), Transmission control Module (TCM), Remote function Actuator (RFA) and Electric Power Inverter Converter Control Module (EPIC) are all up to date with software as well. Updated all listed modules. During updated Topix cloud crashed multiple time with red error message of "Can not connect to Cloud Element" after multiple re-attempts and starting new sessions was able to update the requested module. Ran Network Integrity test. Fault U201B-54 set in the Body Control Module (BCM). Recalibrated the steering column and cleared fault. Submitted PCM data collect and session back to TA for review. Instructed to turn off walk up and walk away locking/unlocking. Let vehicle sit at 80% state of charge with vehicle locked with keys 20 meters away from vehicle. After letting vehicle sit. Rechecked SOC. Charge percentage fell to 51%. Performed multiple draw test per TA's request. Determined that there was no signs of a draw. Vehicle has started with out a warning message, since being dropped off. TA states "The message is just a warning to start the car so the battery can charge" and that "At this point it looks like the customers usage may be the cause of this issue". TA was that they have had some issues with the KVM looking for keys when it shouldn't be causing vehicle to wake up. Could not absolutely confirm that is what is happening at this moment though. With current state of the vehicle it is okay to release back to the customer."
Any advice on how to help remedy this situation would be appreciated.

"Trump looked to actually be in close to deep REM sleep... He's taking full-on, bona fide naps." - Reporter Ben Meiselas relaying vital source notes from the Trump hush money trial
Editor’s note: Some bittersweet personal news: today is my last day writing the What A Day newsletter. I won’t be going far—I’ll still be writing here at Crooked, and you’ll even continue to see some of my horrid little jokes in this very newsletter. Our News Editor Greg Walters will be taking the helm in the meantime, so fear not! WAD will remain in your inbox five nights a week.
Thanks for riding with me these past two years. It wasn’t always easy, but we sure did manage to call Mitch McConnell “a little bitch” a lot, and that’s what truly matters in my one wild and precious life. Take care.
- Julia
P.S. In a hilarious turn of events, today's digest did not save in the server and yesterday's was reprinted. So here's the correction. I always knew I would go out on top.

Litmus Protest

As we head into the weekend, campus antiwar protests have not abated, they’ve expanded further across the country.

• There have been antiwar and Palestinian solidarity protests at some 75 college campuses across the United States in the past week, according to The Intercept’s Prem Thakkar. Student protesters have continued, undeterred and determined to push their universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel or who profit from its war with Hamas. At the University of Pennsylvania, the administration diverged from its peer institutions—choosing not to involve Philadelphia police—and instead said they would not intervene so long as the protests remained peaceful and did not violate University policy.
  
• At Emory University, the scene turned violent—but only when police were called to the campus. Along with dozens of student arrests, two professors were detained by police on Thursday. One was Philosophy Department Chair Noëlle McAfee, and the other was economics professor Carolina Fohlin, who was captured on video being violently thrown to the ground by police and then restrained by multiple officers, one of whom shoved her head into the concrete. Fohlin was jailed for 11 hours and charged with—get this—battery against a police officer, but was released on bond with the rest of the arrested protesters. In a vote that passed with overwhelming support on Friday afternoon, the Emory Faculty Senate of the University’s College of Arts and Sciences called for a college-wide no-confidence vote in University President Gregory Fenves for unleashing police on students and faculty.
  
• Disgraced former president Donald Trump took a break from his courtroom shellacking on Friday to again weigh in on the ongoing campus protests, and again he chose to simultaneously minimize the infamous 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA. “Charlottesville was a little peanut and was nothing,” he said, “and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate you have here. This is tremendous hate.” To recap: the former president is saying that the rally where white nationalists marched through the streets with tiki torches shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and “Blood and soil,” in which those white supremacists ran over and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer with a car, is “nothing” and less hateful than the overwhelmingly peaceful antiwar protests happening now. Subtle! I wonder which of his supporters he’s catering to with that messaging!
  
• This rhetoric takes its most extreme form in right-wing officials like Trump and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, but varying degrees of the central argument—that these antiwapro-Palestinian protests are inherently antisemitic (despite the significant presence of antiwar Jewish protesters)—seem to have found a receptive audience on both sides of the aisle. Pro-Israel Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Lawler (R-NY)—neither of whom is Jewish—are introducing legislation called “The Columbia Act” that would allow the Department of Education to send a “third-party antisemitism monitor” to any college receiving federal funding. Torres recently left the Congressional Progressive Caucus over the caucus’s criticism of Israel and pro-ceasefire stance in the Israel-Hamas war, and his top campaign contributor is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
  

Nationwide antiwar campus protests are being met with police brutality, the Republican presidential candidate is a power-hungry fascist, AND the DNC is in Chicago? Damn, the "Make it 1968 again" lobby has finally gotten its way.

Look No Further Than Crooked Media

If you’ve ever dreamed of following a podcast around like the Grateful Dead, this is your year! Pod Save America has a ton of great shows coming up on their Democracy or Else tour, headed to Brooklyn, Boston, Madison, Phoenix, Philly, and Ann Arbor. They will also be at the LA Times festival of books on April 21st with appearances by Dan Pfeiffer, Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, and Hysteria’s own Erin Ryan! To get tickets, head to https://crooked.com/events now.

Under The Radar

It was, apparently, another blustery day in the Manhattan courtroom holding Donald Trump’s hush money trial. (He kept complaining that the court room was “freezing.”) Emil Bove, one of Trump’s innumerable lawyers, cross-examined former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker in his third day of testimony. Pecker gave the prosecution exactly what it was looking for on Thursday and Friday when he offered jurors a vivid explanation of two “catch and kill” arrangements he made with Trump about unflattering stories: one with former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed she had a yearlong relationship with Trump, and the other now infamously related to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Pecker also detailed Trump’s personal involvement in getting the two women to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from going public with their stories during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump even hosted a “thank you” dinner for Pecker at the White House in 2017. Pecker admitted to having approved a forward-facing corporate lie—denying the existence of the agreements when the Wall Street Journal investigated—to “protect” his company, he said.
A campaign watchdog group filed a formal complaint to the Federal Elections Commission on Wednesday accusing Trump’s presidential reelection campaign and its related PACS of concealing payment of Trump’s legal fees using campaign funds. The organizations paid $7.2 million for Trump’s legal fees covertly through an unrelated shell company, according to the filing. Neither the Trump campaign nor the company used as a conduit, Red Curve, responded to requests for comment from the New York Times.

What Else?

Trust in the Supreme Court dropped to an historic low in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022. Two years later, the Court hasn’t been able to rebuild trust, with the majority of Americans no longer having faith in the institution, and a plurality of those polled feeling that it is “too conservative.” That’s so weird… I wonder what could have given them that impression?
The Alabama state House approved legislation that could lead to the prosecution of librarians under state obscenity laws for providing minors with materials the conservative legislature deems “harmful,” as part of a larger nationwide crusade to ban books. The bill now moves to the state Senate.
In other terrifying news from red states, Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) announced on Thursday that he plans to sign a bill passed in the state legislature that would allow K-12 educators and staff members to carry concealed handguns on school grounds.
In her new autobiography, Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD)—said to be on Trump’s short list for VP—detailed killing her own family dog…almost proudly(?) as some sort of bizarre conservative “I do what it takes,” bullshit narrative. This woman shot a 14-month-old puppy, and was so pleased with the job she did, that she then killed a goat she didn’t like on the family farm! And she volunteered all of this information!
Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has asked a Texas federal judge to block the National Labor Relations Board from pursuing claims that the rocket maker required workers to sign illegal severance agreements. “On what grounds?” you may ask. Well, Elon teamed up with a bunch of other evil billionaires like Jeff Bezos in February and launched a legal campaign questioning the constitutionality of the NLRB. The group of corporate super villains asked the courts to effectively dismantle the New Deal-era agency in an effort to even further tip the scales away from workers and towards corporations. If any of them could grow facial hair I’m sure they would all be twisting their mustaches maniacally.
Britain’s King Charles will return to public duties next week for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer. Buckingham Palace said on Friday that he is making encouraging progress with his treatment. [raising a plate of beans on toast] Cheers to his good health.

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Light At The End Of The Email

A staggering 53 individuals who aided in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have now been criminally charged. Gotta catch em all!
President Biden appeared on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show, where he said he would “be happy to” debate disgraced former president Donald Trump. Mercifully, Biden bucked guest tradition and did not end up telling Stern any weird octogenarian sex stories.

Enjoy

Wiffleball on Twitter: "Melania,if you’re out there, HBD from my sex trial"

Dear YOU,
When you leave this Earth, do you want the whole world to see your death? Most people don’t because it might cause others pain.
That is how I feel about love. It is sacred. It is shared. A sacred secret between two souls.
If you don’t preserve the private, then everyone will have a say in unwinding what they feel is a ball of yarn, but you know (you both know) secretly it’s more like barbed wire and difficult to untangle. I learned that from a very lovely and refined, some may say even a bit “royal” group of people I enjoy researching from time to time.
I haven’t looked because you didn’t want me to know. That is how much I honor you and your wisdom and words. I would rather hear it from you, your pictures, your stories, this is why I love history, memoirs, and autobiographies. No one can capture every moment like the one who has lived it. That’s how I want to learn because this was the essence of why I became a teacher. I wanted to bring alive as best I could and moment in time that defined an individual, a couple, a group of people who had passion, determination, I wanted to inspire…aren’t we the same? Or, am I really off-base?
My ancestors were rebels, determined, with loud mouths…and said it like it was. You can polish a lady and put her in a dress, but I guarantee this lady has her knife strapped to her inner thigh at all times. A woman comes prepared and it’s because of my kids and fighting for them, that I won’t shut my mouth anymore.
My son asked me before he walked out to live his life, to please live mine and I am doing that…even though the order of things has been strange and odd, my gut tells me to choose love…and I did…and I have…and that’s never left my heart. I came to you when I believed it was just you and me…I had no idea anyone else saw or knew. In my world, it was just you and me.
The lights fade over time…interests come and go…fashions fade…but legends don’t. Legendary love never fades. It’s those stories that keep us dreaming. You can’t fake true love. Even the best of Hollywood cannot convince me two people are in love, when they aren’t. It’s an energy between two people not easily captured.
When love is in a room, it immediately takes all the attention. It’s magnetic, it makes you flush, and as much as you want to be angry at your “other”, you break out in a smile with that “one look” they give you. MO/BO….M&JS…it is a rare love and very few have been given the opportunity. I’m sure there’s many more couples I could think of, but that’s not the point.
I need to experience the middle of this book because, somehow, my dog chewed on some pages and I think I may have skipped a couple pages here and there. When I keep going back to the beginning, though, there he is. The man who cared so deeply for my pain, but wouldn’t allow me an inch to see his own.
I talk often to conscious masters, but I even asked them not to tell me your tale. You were adamant and I already knew at that point that you were very special to me, even if I wasn’t to you. I was willing to let things be your way, just to spend time in an energy I knew was warm and loving. I knew each time I asked how you were, you would get mad at me and I’d get a lecture. I couldn’t help it, though, I had to make sure YOU were okay. I already cared so much because there was such a spiritual flow between us.
I hate telling you this, bc the thought of hurting you, hurts me…but, every single time you made a point to tell me I would never know you or anything about your life, it crushed me to my core. I couldn’t even admit that to myself for so long.
My psychological training and logic took over each time, verbal reprimands were consistent in my head, every single time, saying this eclectic soul has not been in the field very long, but damn…he’s talented. I wanted to be extra sensitive to your needs bc I have seen the mental health outcomes of insensitivity on my own children. Now, this whole process has shown me my own insensitivities and need for positive change.
The one constant that I keep going back to again and again with all the confusion and mayhem and muck being thrown in my direction is the love I have for you. That’s the coolest damn thing about love is that no one can take it away from you when you feel it. I will never regret confessing to you my feelings.
It was so freeing and I’m now living my truth no matter the labels people want to place on me. Until I see and hear it from your voice via phone or spoken from your lips, it isn’t true. I am a researcher, a historian, and I rely on evidence and science. The words you share are beautiful, but without evidence I don’t know 100% they are yours.
My story has a beginning, a very sporadic and confusing middle, and somehow everyone else has all the pages? Then, it’s all going to somehow end and I’m going to be thrown many more curve balls and will be expected to just pick up all the pieces in seconds, sit with everything that’s been said and done, and never get a say in something I considered very private, and yet somehow everyone knows more about it than me?
I think I may have seen my brother today. There was a reference to my old last name. This means he drove for quite some time away from his four babies and gorgeous wife that he adores to tell me I may be safe to go there. I feel so torn, right now.
My family would tell me that if I was in love, to fight for love. My older brother found his love half a world away from us and lives there now. My sister loves her spouse bc when I see them together, they still crack each other up after so many years. My mom lost her great love a couple years ago and my heart is still crushed for her. My family raised me to believe in love and maybe they weren’t the best at saying it or showing it, we were raised on music and danced to music that spoke the words we needed to say to each other.
I’ve seen some social media that talks about being habitually sad or depressed, whatever. I cry because I feel so strongly. My younger brother got cancer a couple years ago and somehow, he made it. He fucking made it! My mom beat breast cancer and polio. Don’t ever take on my sister with anything, you will lose. My brother has traveled the world and met everyone. This is what I came from. We are teachers, we are storytellers, we are musicians, we love theater, and so much more.
I know what I want from this whole thing, but a relationship cannot be one-sided and I need for love to be on both people’s terms. I cannot make that mistake twice. It nearly cost me the whole rest of my life. I want to share my life with someone who is a passionate creative like I am. I need to know where you stand bc I’m packed and ready to begin. Will I restart all over back in Minnesota? Will you finally come to me with truth so I can live again from whatever direction that means?
I am the one that knows best for me how to heal. I am the one who has had to make all the moves in my own life. I don’t give a flying fuck what other people think of my choices bc they are mine, not theirs. One of my favorite movies has a quote and I’m totally going to screw it up, but basically either we’ve got to get busy living or get busy dying. (Shawshank?)
I have made my decision and as there are two people involved, I am awaiting his private reply via phone/visit and then my car will be headed home to MN or figuring out a future that may be confusing for awhile. My ancestors were warriors and when we couldn’t escape a labyrinthine or maze, we just blew the mother fucker up! That’s love.
Forever and Always, K

I would have read this book in the early 2000s, but I suspect it was published well before that. I think it's an autobiography of true events, but it could be fiction in the style of an autobiography. I read the book in English. I don't know whether that's the original language or it was a translation.
Initially the writer is an apprentice mechanic in Germany I think. He is apprenticed under a very strict teacher, and he recalls his hands being so covered in black oil that they never seem clean.
I think he ends up eventually being in or around China during the war, where he is interned as a foreign agent even though he doesn't particularly want to have anything to do with the war.
Don't know what happens next, but eventually he's then doing a roadtrip, I think in a Land Rover possibly with a girl. The car occasionally breaks down, but he is able ti fix it. Or this could have happened before the war.
Towards the end of the book he moves to the USA.
Along the way he starts developing improvements for jet engines, and at the end of the book he remarks that he helped design variable pitch engines.
I vaguely recall the book has a catchy or funny title.
My own searches for this have lead me to the life of Hans von Ohain, and although his wikipedia page has some overlap with what I'm thinking about, I can't find a matching autobiography.

Dear Friends,
I love you. I have seen, heard, and felt the word of God and feel compelled to write this. It is with both fear and joy that I write to you. I pray that in the telling of my journey, some of you will find use in my testimony. I know that most will disregard this and that your ears are not ready to truly listen. In truth, I myself have ignored this message for most of my life. I'm aware of the stigmas and how most of you will view this. Some will likely think less of me in telling this story. Because of the gravity of seeing the truth, I am prepared to subject myself to losing standing with all of you if it means that just one will be strengthened in Christ.
I know your pain. I know that deep down each of you have a chasm cut deep through your souls that longs to heal. We spend our lives trying to find something to fill the chasm to take away the pain, to give us hope for tomorrow, or to make us feel like there is purpose to our existence. Unfortunately, none of these are a cure. Sure, they can really feel helpful in that there is temporary distraction or relief in focusing our energy to these worldly salves, but they are unhealthy to your soul and will fail. If you need proof of what I've said, open your eyes. See that there are people out there with the "things" you wish you had, the job you wish you had, the house you wish you had, the popularity, power, influence, and you will notice a common thread among them, they are all unfulfilled and continuing to search for that secret salve. You might be one who understands that money doesn't buy happiness already, and you have found other things like family and friends to fill this chasm. But even those things are unable to heal you. Open your eyes to the people you know that have friends, family, and even children that they adore and ask if they are truly fulfilled. You might say that they seem pretty happy in the lives they've created, but what will happen when their children, friends, and family die, change, or when their life takes them further away from us? You, who have defined your happiness through such things will be left empty again. Depending on how long your life was defined by such things, the sharper the loss will feel when they're gone.
It is only in a deeper belief in the everlasting that can actually heal this wound. To be more direct, it is love for all. When you are filled with love for each person, that can never be destroyed and does not have a shelf life. From this love you can derive purpose, fulfillment, relief, forgiveness, and a true state of life that will bring you joy and happiness. The secret quite simply is love and that God is love (1 John 4:8). If you fill your lives with true love toward each other, you fill yourselves with God.
I know the urge to turn now and say, "There are many religions out there that preach love, and there are many ways I can live outside of religion altogether and still dedicate myself to the idea of love." But this isn't true. I'm not going to spend time pointing to why all of the other religions of the world fall short, but suffice it to say, this is something that I have researched deeply. If you're of the mindset of thinking that these other religions are similar, I would simply challenge you to put that belief to the test and prove me wrong. Find an answer that teaches love and forgiveness toward everyone. Find an answer that doesn't believe we will be held to the scales of justice forcing us to fight to outweigh the wrongs we've done in life. Find an answer that has historicity, that answers the question "why?", and that demonstrates God's desire to connect with every person who has ever lived. Do the work yourself and you will find yourselves at the same answer I have found and your belief will be solidified through the trust you put in your own research. If you're one who is self righteous and believes they can be a "good person" without religion, I can relate to you. I walked that path for decades. Take measure of the life you lived and honestly ask yourself the questions - Am I or have I been driven by lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride? Which of those are a part of your life regularly? If you've come to the honest conclusion that we're all guilty of having these weaved throughout every decision we've made in life and still feel self righteous. Then ask yourself the questions - what has my self righteousness led me to? Are you fulfilled, filled with righteous purpose, and driven by love to help everyone around you? Does your existence and the path you're on lead to more or less love existing in the world?
If you're thinking that God is someone/something we will never understand and that there is no purpose to life, I can relate to you as well. You who are agnostic or deists have a tough road to walk. You've never felt a miracle in your life that is unexplainable? You've never asked "why" or "to what end"? In truth, I pity you because I was you. I know how hard it is to really put in time and energy thinking about things of this nature. For you it is probably going to take something catastrophic within your own lives to break the foundation of this thinking, as was the case with my story. I wish I had the right words to put on paper to stir within you what was stirred within myself, but I do not. All I have to give you is telling my story in hopes that when and if you're ever blessed with having that view shattered, you will in your emptiness remember that you're not alone, you are loved, and your life is more precious than you know. That not only is God active and alive in humanity, he has been with you every step of the way with arms outstretched waiting for you to take him in embrace.
My heart breaks for you all because Godless life is hard. I know that you either are or will be hurt, alone, and empty. I would give all that I have for you to feel what I do, to know what I know, and to believe what I believe. The crushing truth is that most of you will not be changed. Most of you will forget having ever read this or will simply say "good for you". Some will even mean it. I weep for you. Would that I could stir you to action by force, but no amount of pressure would change your soul. Because each of us in life has the freedom to choose your own destiny. It is up to each of us to decide how we spend that life and who we choose to serve. Make no mistake, we all make that decision and dedicate our lives accordingly. Whether you're driven to please yourself or others, or if you set sights on worldly goals, spiritual, or religious views, you decide. In doing so, you affect the world and everyone around you.
So with a somber mind, I give you the only thing I can, testimony of my walk and path. All of the warts, failings, and shortcomings for you to do with it what you will. This isn't meant to be an autobiography or showing of how great I've become, but to the contrary, show you how I fell short, was redeemed, and rededicated to Christ. Please understand that I write this to you with no ambition but love and hope.
I had an upbringing that some would call advantageous and others would call unfortunate. For me, I consider it all integral to who I've become and can see how each pain, trauma, and blessing, helped form me as a person and lead me to exactly where I am today.
Both of my parents were very young when I was born and neither was ready for the challenge of raising children. My mother succumbed to this pressure and left me when I was 5 years old to pursue a life without the burden of being a mother. I won't spend time writing what it's like for a young person to not have a parent. You can all either relate or imagine your own lives in this context. My father did all he could to provide for his children, but that often required long hours of being away working, and nights spent just trying to recover. As a young man he sacrificed his time and energy just to provide life's necessities. I was blessed with a grandmother that was able to provide me with the attention and love that all children need. I took comfort in her and my large extended family. When I was 7, my father left us to go to a trade school and was gone for a large part of the year. While away, he met his second wife and married again. With this new unification, he came back to retrieve my brother and me from our grandmother to bring us to a new life, 500 miles away. This was massively traumatic to me. I cannot express to you how close to my grandmother I was by this point, other than to say that she had become my mother I never had. On moving day, I saw her and she gave me a bible with instructions to read and memorize the 23rd Psalm. With tears in our eyes, I took on the task. I didn't understand why she wanted me to do it, because she only said that it would bring me comfort. I'm sure that my unwillingness to leave really hurt my father, who had sacrificed so much, but young people are rarely compassionate to such sensitivities.
I resented my stepmother for being the reason I was pulled from home. To some degree, I think she also resented my brother and me who served as constant reminders of his past marriage. It was around this time that I became aware that I was different from the other kids I grew up around and went to school with. My birth mother is Asian, which was really pronounced in my physical appearance as a child. In all of the neighborhoods I lived, most were predominantly white. I remember feeling out of place at holiday gatherings with my step mother's family. I remember going to dinners with my family, self conscious, always looking for someone who looked like me, and always feeling like onlookers would see me and think that I was adopted. This self consciousness turned to self loathing. I began to hate myself for being different.
During this time, I began to feel disconnected from my family. I was struggling to find an outlet for the depression and felt as though I had no one to help me. My father always had a passion for baseball and pushed me to the sport as well. It never really resonated with me on any level, but I did it because I thought it would bring me closer to him. I can remember one very distinct memory, playing on my first little league team, the coach's child had bad asthma. Coach would always comfort his son and was very conscious of his breathing to the point that he would stop games, run to the mound just to give his child a hug and a dose of his inhaler. I was so lonely that I wished for months that I had asthma so that I could feel that kind of love. On one day when my pain was at its greatest, crying harder than I ever had, I picked up the bible my grandmother gave me and prayed. I wasn't sure how to pray, but I asked God that he would send me my grandmother, who was the only person in the world that I felt I could talk to. No sooner had the prayer been finished, I got a knock on the door and she was there. Now, my grandmother is not the traveling type. In my entire life, I've only known her to leave her hometown a handful of times. The fact that she had travelled across states for a visit, at that moment when I was at my lowest, was nothing short of a miracle. I recited the 23rd psalm for her from memory, hoping that she would be proud, and I distinctly remember her saying "good job." with a level of apathy that struck me as cold at the time. I don't think she ever realized, or remembered her instruction to me when I last saw her years before. I had really worked hard to recite it, memorize it, and looked forward to showing her that I put in the effort. For me, it was so meaningful that I was able to complete the task. I was dumbfounded that she didn't have the same sense of it that I had. I now understand, 31 years later, that she was simply trying to comfort someone she loved and gave me the task with hopes that I would find comfort in Christ, but at the time it only added to my hurt.
My uncle visited once and hooked our house up with free cable. This included access to premium channels. It took me little time to discover the late night content and I started an addiction to pornography and an unhealthy burgeoning view that women were objects to be desired. I had unfettered access and watched nearly every night. I also became jealous of my older step brother, who had cooler toys and the newest game systems. I coveted these things and began to really resent the fact that he had not only access to his mother and my father, but also to his birth father who would send him these cool gifts. I didn't see the pain he was in until I was much older. My coveting became so great that I started to steal. I stole things from stores and family. I lied when confronted and saw how easy it was for me to be convincing.
My father's new career was short-lived. He suffered a catastrophic injury to his back that forced the family to once again relocate by the time I was 10 years old. One the one hand, I was thrilled to be within close proximity of my grandmother and extended family, but on the other hand, we were faced with some very difficult financial issues and my father fell into a deep depression that would take him years to come out of. My step mother worked very hard all throughout my childhood on a small wage just to provide the bare necessities for our family. We stayed with relatives for a time and ultimately ended up moving to an adjacent town where my parents were able to purchase a vacant wooded lot. The combined income of her grinding non stop and my father's disability checks, left our family in a position that we all had to pull together, fishing, hunting, thrift shopping, growing our own food, and doing all we could just to help ease the financial stress. The labor required from all of us was nothing short of exhausting. We cut down trees for heat, planted, sowed, and maintained the property by hand. When that evolved to having and maintaining farm animals, the labor intensified. I have memories from the time I was 12 throughout all of my teenage years waking up early before school to do 45 minutes of farm chores, going to class all day, coming home and helping with something that needed done on the property (spreading stone, bailing hay because we were paid with hay for our animals, weed whacking, mowing, digging ditches, maintaining pastors, and many other tasks) and finishing the day with more barn chores.
The year I entered 6th grade, I still felt like an outcast. I did not have any real friends and once again, that loneliness really took hold. It wasn't until I became a bully in school, did I learn that I could go from not existing in the eyes of my peers, to being someone the kids wanted to associate with. There was one girl who was very heavy in my class who received most of my ridicule. I bullied her everyday, at times to the point she would cry. My heart breaks to this day for her. I can't even remember her name, but I carry that shame and regret. At the time, I saw her as a means to an end and felt great in the new popularity I had. It lead to my first girlfriend, first kiss, and made me the guy other kids wanted to hang around. By 8th grade, my second year of junior high (the first time in my life I had gone to the same school in consecutive years), the script had flipped. I became the one that was bullied. The other kids gave me the same medicine I was doling out, for the same reasons I had done it. Because I looked Asian, I was called chink and gook everyday. I shrank back down and once again felt completely small and broken.
I was heavily bullied all the way up to 10th grade. I had tried over the course of the previous few years to bully back, but I was one against many and that failed. I had zero self esteem because of my look and crooked teeth. I regularly wore the same clothes and that became another thing the kids at school would mock me over. I had horrible allergies that kept me congested and sneezing year round, which again, was another source of ridicule. I started working regular jobs to buy the "cool" clothes, to pay for allergy shots, and eventually to get braces to fix my teeth. The grind was exhausting because I was still doing regular farm chores. It was around this time that I had hit rock bottom. I was filled with lust for girls and had been since I was young, but nobody at school would associate with the kid that got picked on. I imagined my life being rich, having a nice car, being the popular kid, and dating the most attractive girl at school. Nothing I was doing was helping to bring me closer to that so I gave up. I wrote letters to each of my family members to say goodbye. I had decided that I no longer wanted to live. Over the course of the week, I wrote and got myself to a mental place of being able to actually do it. When the letters were finished, I loaded my shotgun and held it in my mouth for what felt like hours. I remember trying to come up with one reason to not do it and the only one I could find was that I did not want to go to hell. At this time I wasn't Christian. I had gone to church a few times over the course of my adolescence and was baptized because it made my grandmother happy, but wasn't connected to God in any way. No matter how hard I tried to pull the trigger, I couldn't get the idea of hell out of my head. After crying until it started to hurt, I put the gun away and burned the letters. I decided that I would give God a try and began to regularly go to church.
Almost immediately, I found healing with God. I had purpose and began to see my life in a new light. I started making new friends that were Christian, some of whom were the "cool" kids at school. My social situation improved drastically the last two years of high school because I received some popularity by proxy. By the time I graduated, I was feeling a strong calling to go into ministry. Unfortunately, I had become intoxicated by popularity, my own vanity, and materialism. One thing that I would share here is that I spent most of my life up to this point poor. Being poor and materialistic, I measured my self worth by how much I was making. I saw my wages as something that would measure whether or not I was successful. So naturally, I sought out higher paying jobs and always gave all of my energy to not just doing my job, but with sights set on being promoted and climbing. All of the aforementioned closed the door to ministry in my mind and I committed my future to those earthly pursuits.
I ended up going to a Lutheran college to study history and political science. My faith was instantly under attack. Like most have experienced or can imagine, religion is widely looked down on as intellectually lazy or a view that is held in ignorance of science. Evolution, geology, cosmology, physics, history - all of the sciences are taught from the lense of refusing to allow God to be a part of their reasoning and conclusions. I drank up everything that I was taught and allowed myself to view the Bible as allegorical and not literal. This is something that remained in me for two decades. I studied conventional science, followed all new breaking research and discoveries, all the while trying to understand the age old question of "why". I won't profess to be an expert in any field, but I will say that I've got a very wide view of conventional secular science, and can at least have an intelligent conversation on most topics.
During my 20's and 30's everything for me came up aces. I met my wonderful wife and married in 2011 and had two amazing children. My career went tremendously well, I quickly found myself making more than I could have ever imagined. My body had come into its prime. I was spending two hours every day working out and ended up achieving the way I wanted to look. All of this only fed my vanity as I was now attracting the attention of many women. It fed my pride, as I felt I was living a better life than most of my peers. It fed my materialism, as I could show off my success by having the biggest and the best. But more important than any one of those individually, it filled me with a sense of purpose. There is always someone with a better job making more money, there was always someone more attractive or muscular, and always some new technology that I didn't have and "needed".
For two decades I was very self-righteous. By this time I considered myself an intellectual agnostic. Sure, I had done some things in my past that were evil - I stole from stores, my school, and people around me - I lied all the time to people around me - but none of those things were hurting other people. I thought that I was doing way more good in the world by my deeds, treating people with respect, and being a happy and positive influence. I rejected any God that could reject me because I truly thought that my scales of justice leaned more to the side of good.
By the time I hit my mid 30's my life started to change. I began having muscle pains and fatigue that would last weeks and come every few months. Over about a 5 year span, they became more frequent, more painful, and the life that I created started to crumble. Because my professional pursuits always pushed me to make more money, I found myself in bigger roles which brought longer working hours and tremendous stress and pressure. My body would no longer let me work out and I fell massively out of shape. Naturally, I became depressed. None of my materialistic purchases helped kill the depression. In my depression, I started again with my self-loathing. I pushed all of my friends and most of my family away because I was embarrassed by how heavy I had gotten. Covid made my seclusion easier because I had a built in excuse to keep everyone at arm's length. By 2023, I hit rock bottom. My body was in constant pain. Some days I had trouble walking and needed to use a cane. I was constantly wearing different braces at home for my neck and back, taking all different kinds of medicine just to get through the day. I put full faith in my doctors since the onset of my illness and to this day have been to something like 30 different specialists. None of them have been able to diagnose or help me.
Once again, the idea of suicide came to the forefront of my mind. It is so easy a thing to rationalize if you don't have God in your life. Anyone who knew me would ultimately understand why I would do such a thing as they all knew the pain I was in everyday. I had access to an easy means of doing it and could rationally think through the process enough that the trauma felt to my kids and close loved ones could be mitigated. My family had more than enough money to go on. It was all worked out in my head to the point of execution. In an act of complete desperation, I prayed. Now for years, being agnostic, I still prayed most nights. But my prayers were the same every night and done more out of superstition than actual belief. I would ask God to protect my loved ones. This prayer was different. It was the first time I really opened up to God. I told him that I couldn't carry this anymore, that I needed help, and completely let him have it. Almost immediately, I was filled with regret. Not for myself, but for my kids. I remembered my first touch with suicide and knew that it was faith that saved me. I felt an obligation as a parent to at least expose my children to church, so that if I were gone, they could have something in them to get through the trauma and save them from what I was saved from as a kid. Up to this point, I had taken my kids to church maybe twice and never did anything to introduce them to God. Over the next two months I took my kids every Sunday. I asked both of my kids to promise me they would keep going to church if anything happened to me.
My faith had not returned yet, but I did feel like many of the sermons were spoken directly to me. I had a very negative view of the Bible going in. For the previous decades, I had fully bought into the secular talking points on all of the "flaws" mostly found in the Old Testament. I knew all of the arguments against Christianity, but decided to give Jesus a try. I told myself that I was going to focus on just the things that he said and started reading the Gospels. I read a little bit every day, took my time, and really tried to approach it looking for flaws. A fairly large part of me was hoping for an "Aha" moment, where my intellect and reasoning would be proven right, and the view I had of God for the prior two decades would be reinforced. However, the more I read, the more his teachings resonated with me.
By the time I finished the Gospels, I knew in my heart that every word was true. I felt a physical manifestation within myself of the Holy Spirit. I can't quite describe it, but I knew that something was different. I was overwhelmed with shame. Up to this point, I lived life for myself. When I truly took measure of the things I had done, I realized that I had done very little good in the world. I was so blessed with means and opportunity, but used most of it in idolization of my pride, vanity, and selfishness. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flaunting my wealth and maybe donated a few hundred dollars over the years. For 2 months, I went through a season of contrition. I was brought to tears multiple times a day remembering everyone that I had hurt, all of the opportunities to help people who were going through pain and suffering that I ignored, the friends I had manipulated, and the evil that I produced in the world. I am an adulterer (Matthew 5:28 anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart). I am a thief. I worshiped myself, materialism, and my career. I am a blasphemer. I am guilty of coveting. I am guilty of hating others. I felt like there was no way that I could ever be forgiven.
I was also struck with a very difficult fact. Jesus believed the Old Testament as the Word of God. This really challenged my intellectual view of the books as allegorical and not meant to be taken literally. I thought that I would never be able to fully commit to following him unless I could deal with everything I learned in the sciences. Now in my first walk with Christ, anytime I had doubt creep into my thoughts, I would push it away as sinful. I believe this is why my faith didn't stick. This time, I found myself addressing my doubts head on. I spent weeks exploring christian science - something I had previously dismissed as nonsense. One by one, all of my doubts evaporated.
Having now a strong foundation, I began to really try to eradicate sin from my life. I came to understand the effect that the things I consumed was having on my soul. All of the things that don't feed my soul with Love had to go - music, tv, movies, certain websites, following politics, gossip, sin, certain video games, and unhealthy relationships with friends. I am trying to feed Love and starve pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, lust, and gluttony. I am also working every day to activate my faith. I'm limited physically, but I can type. I can make phone calls. I can be generous. I can offer insight to people stuck in their walk with Christ. I can Love.
Today, this disease has forced me to go on disability. My body is in constant pain. I am always fatigued and have very little energy. I have headaches, lightheadedness, dizzy spells, numbness in half my face, something going on with my heart, and the medication I'm on has side effects that also add to my physical problems. I believe that I am dying. All of this, and I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER. I feel filled with love and purpose. Where there was once fear, depression, and pain - there is now only Jesus. Regardless of whether or not my life will last just one more day or 40 more years, I am giving everyday to God.
I give you this message with Love. If there is any take away from my story, I hope it's this - no matter how hard life gets, the answer is just a prayer away. Matthew 7:7 - knock and the door will be opened to you. I wish with everything I have that you will feel what I feel. I pray that you will break free of the world, let go of your pain, and embrace peace and love. God Bless You

I woke up one morning to find that Taylor Swift announced the tracklist for The Tortured Poets Department on Instagram. Now, just days away from the album’s release, the writing credits for each song have been released. Track 10 is titled “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and it is completely self-written by Taylor Swift.
Of course, I was curious. The song title led me to a play called Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which led me to a full-length YouTube video with the film adaptation starring none other than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. (Are you Ready For It…?)
I took notes as if I were being graded in a film history class, drawing diagrams and jotting down song titles with lyrics that bore similarity to the plotlines in the film. I’m excited to share some of this with you all in anticipation of the album release. I hope you enjoy this little essay/rabbit hole!

George & Martha seem eerily like a couple we know

George and Martha entered a relationship on the pretense that both of them could have what they wanted in their future. Martha assumed she would have a successful husband who her father both approved of and was impressed by, and she hoped to have a baby, something she ultimately could not achieve. George hoped for career success through his partnership with Martha in access to her father, to become a writer instead of being relegated to the history department for the rest of his career. Both George and Martha failed, and they lived in resentment and delusion until the very end of their relationship to avoid their harsh reality.
Martha taunts George constantly about his unsuccessful career, telling him that his success should have been “inevitable” given he married the daughter of the school president. (Is it sounding familiar yet?) It is insinuated that Martha’s father soured on George after he read George’s autobiography that George wanted help publishing—one that told the truth about his childhood and accidentally killing his parents on two separate occasions. Martha’s father refused to publish the book, concerned for George’s and his daughter’s reputations. Martha mocks George for what he said the moment her father rejected him: “But Daddy!”
(Yes, in a moment of vulnerability, rejection, and deep hurt, George says the words that are featured in a song title from Tortured Poets. You cannot make this up.)
Despite George working in the history department, he is a writer! He wrote an autobiography! And with that, the title of the play makes sense: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Well, Martha and her father—representative of society and patriarchal structures—are. Virginia Woolf represents the truth and power in telling one’s story. George’s attempt to tell his story in a way that would inevitably free him made him a permanent prisoner in his career and relationship. (Come on, you see it, too, right?)
Martha’s resentment of George hinges on this moment—the moment that ruined his chances of success and began to destroy the foundation on which the so-called “arrangement” was built—and it bears similarity to the situation Swift and Alwyn may have found themselves in. What started as a mutually beneficial arrangement that would help both parties—Swift in shedding her reputation as a woman who could not hold a long-term relationship and could only sing of breakups, Alwyn in achieving a successful acting career—ended in mutual disdain and resentment, each person wishing a different life for themself while remaining in the unhappy relationship out of love for the other person. It is difficult not to see Alwyn as George and Swift as Martha with this understanding, and I believe Swift sees herself in this depiction of a couple and that is why she has evoked the film for Tortured Poets.
At the end of the film, after the illusion has been shattered and George and Martha prepare to take on the harsh light of morning together, George attempts to make Martha laugh. “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” he sings softly. “I am, George. I am,” Martha says softly. The two will now be forced to live in the light—in the reality of their lives—without the safety and cover of the lies they covered their insecurities and unhappiness with.
Whether Swift and Alwyn were romantically partnered, in a business partnership that was paraded as a romantic relationship, or, as I personally believe, somewhere in the tortured middle, I find it difficult not to see the parallels to the narrative that’s been woven of their lives and relationship, almost as a parallel to Swift’s Midnights.
The film takes place over the span of a long, long night with two people charading a nonexistent child and life for the sake of appearances. The ruse ends—George’s doing, not Martha’s—but Martha egged him on, provoking him by speaking of the unspeakable, willing George to leave her. George pulled the trigger even though he knew it would crush Martha, but he chose to stay and face the morning regardless and not run. So who’s to blame? Well, neither of them. George wanted a successful career and married Martha to reach that point, only to thwart his success by attempting to tell his truth. Martha wanted a child and thought she married a man her father approved of, but she found that she could not and that her father’s approval was conditional, and so she was resigned to a life as a childless housewife, stuck living under her father’s shadow and the weight of her resentment of the life she ended up with not being the life she imagined at all.

“Is this play about us?”

There is an incredible moment at the end of the film where I realized that we, the audience, may very well be the young couple in the film: Nick and Honey go along for the ride with George and Martha, captive to the stories (and lies) they tell, watching their fights, and hearing different sides of the same story. They are inundated with emotions, stories, and information coming from all angles, unable to tell the difference between fact, fiction, and embellishment.
Nick and Honey drift apart over the course of the evening, and in doing so, hold a mirror to the two ends of the spectrum of Swift’s circus—er, fanbase. Honey has fully committed to George’s lie about the telegram, joining in and confirming to Martha that the lie is true, that their fictional son is dead, despite never seeing the person who allegedly delivered it. It’s not clear whether Honey is so drunk and overwhelmed that she truly believes the lie and can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. Honey represents those of Swift’s fans who not only believe the spoon-fed narrative, but double down, defend, and embellish the narrative to fill in the gaps for Swift. On the other hand, Nick represents the other end of the spectrum, an audience that pays attention and sees what’s happening in a way that nearly makes him sick. As Nick realizes the evening has been nothing more than a performance, he desperately tries to escape. Martha and George become unified again, convincing Nick that he’s part of the performance, jeering at him to believe the lies.
“Hell, I don’t know when you people are lying,” Nick says, seemingly having gone mad as he realizes what he’s been subjected to all evening. “You’re damned right,” Martha says. George adds, “You’re not supposed to.”

Swift is a master narrator, but an unreliable one

Swift’s control of her public and private narratives makes her an incredibly smart businesswoman, but it also becomes a fragile line to walk with her fanbase of people who by and large believe they know Swift on a personal level. What Swift says as fact becomes biblical, and to accuse her of lying or manipulating the truth insinuates she has committed the ultimate betrayal.
The narrative around Swift’s relationship with Joe Alwyn is shifting quickly in the public sphere. This year in particular, the timeline of Swift and Alwyn’s relationship has come into question as TikTok detectives plot out each photo appearance against new information. Swift knowingly drops “Easter eggs” with much plausible deniability. Fans quickly put the pieces together, looking for similarities and themes in the songs, weaving an entire tapestry that the press immediately picks up on and publishes as clickbait. These articles never assert that the fans are correct, of course—only that one plus one might equal three for those willing to see it.
Let’s take an example from Swift’s acoustic sets. When Swift was in Melbourne, she sang three songs during her acoustic set (Getaway Car, august, and The Other Side of the Door), all of which conveniently feature love triangles and infidelity the same week Swift’s ex-boyfriend is being accused of cheating on Swift with a costar. Fans find that the same costar posted a photo of Joe Alwyn on April 19th, the same date Swift will release her next album. Swift has somehow said everything and nothing all at once.
Juxtapose that with the fact that a few months earlier, however, Swift had released Midnights, her tenth studio album. Joe Alwyn was a cowriter on that very album via his convenient songwriting pseudonym, William Bowery. Swift released the song “Lavender Haze” with an accompanying Instagram Reel telling us the song is about protecting your relationship from “weird rumors.” As the tour started, Swift released “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” a song she attributed to her seventh studio album, Lover, signaling to the public that her relationship was alive and well. Of course, until it wasn’t, when Swift changed a song on her setlist just a few weeks into the tour from a song about the glorious happenstance of falling in love (“invisible string”) to one lamenting the demise of a once-promising relationship (“the 1”). Later, Jack Antonoff would reveal that he and Swift created “You’re Losing Me”—a depressing song lamenting the slow death of a relationship—long before The Eras Tour even began.
Just one more from the tour: Swift broadcast her love for The 1975 frontman Matty Healy from the stage of her tour. She mouthed: “This one’s for you. You know who you are. I love you.” Healy had mouthed the same thing at one of his band’s earlier shows. The rumor mill was swirling that these two were together, and we caught photos in the wild of the two holding hands and out to eat. We later learned that Swift and Healy were forced to scrap a duet on Swift’s then-upcoming rerelease of 1989 with a feature on the then-planned single, “Slut!” Personally, I find it more believable that two artists chose to pretend to be in a relationship that bred a romantic duet about a rumored love from the same time period as Swift’s original album to promote the album itself and boost the song. I refuse to believe, however, that a brilliant 34-year-old woman fell in and out of love with three men in the span of six months, something that would have surely had her berated in the court of public opinion for it if not for a storybook love affair that turned two mega celebrities in their mid-thirties into a romantic comedy overnight.
Before the tour, we can take Swift’s album folklore as another prime example. Swift self-describes the album as a blend of reality and fiction, something that she wrote in the solitude of quarantine that saved her and served as a lifeline during a time of deep isolation. Despite that, fans (like Honey in Who’s Afraid…?) believed and parroted exactly what she told them. The press barely batted an eye or wrote a single thinkpiece insinuating Swift and Alwyn were on the rocks. (They co-wrote “champagne problems” for crying out loud!) It was a feat of her songwriting to be able to write from a non-autobiographical place—a new career high that was rewarded with Album of the Year at the Grammys. Now, fans hear Swift speak of her loneliness at the time of writing the album and hear the words she’s been saying for almost four years now: That she was alone during the pandemic, at home with her cats in quarantine writing sad, sad songs with an alleged long-term partner who was nowhere to be found.
The paradoxes can go on forever, and they all beg the question: Which narrative is the real one? Was Swift “telling the truth” then, or is she doing so now? Is her plausible deniability the human cover of not wanting to reveal that her relationship was on the rocks, or is it possible—nay, probable—that every bait and switch is indeed a work of art?
Some say Swift doesn’t need good PR. Swift is at the top of her game; what could an American football player possibly offer her that she doesn’t already have? I’ll tell you.
Swift’s next album was always going to be a breakup album. Has anyone been paying attention? For Swift to put out a breakup album without this cover would make her seem depressed and obsessed, but worse, it would make Joe Alwyn look like the man who broke Taylor Swift’s heart, refusing to marry her and leaving her alone. Swift with Travis Kelce, however, is doing better than ever. She shows up at Coachella, shotguns beers on the jumbotron at the game, and wears her baseball cap backwards. Swift’s relationship gives her the excuse to be publicly happy and thriving when the public narrative around this time would be one focused on her trauma and sadness. Swift needed to act fast, and she did. And it’s working out for her just fine.
But that’s all it is: Fodder. Deliberately misleading. A sleight of hand. Swift says, “Listen to what I’m telling you,” then says, “Now look at these holes I’ve poked.” Swift weaves the web of her folklorian history and present with such a disconnect: One of these narratives must be disingenuous. Is it the music, or is it the way she is portraying her life in the public eye?
In this way, Swift manipulates the timelines of her personal life through her music. Swift is a deeply private person who believes love can only flourish in private but also parades about publicly with her latest love interest at breakneck speed. A relationship she once said was fiercely protected by privacy is now described as one that kept her “locked up” for years. (“He can be my jailer,” indeed.)

And you! love! the game!

I never planned to watch Who’s Afraid…? and draw these conclusions. Swift led me here, I followed, and what ensued was utter chaos. As someone who had never read or seen the play or film, I thought the allusion to Virginia Woolf would surely lead me to queer analyses on Woolf’s own life and works.
For me, this is the very beauty of Swift’s work and the incredibly active role she plays in curating the experience of her alleged life story for her fans. Swift points you in one direction, and you almost always stumble upon something new. Swift makes the chaoticness of the metaphorical evening you spend with her intriguing, thought-provoking, and above all else, fun.
There’s just one more layer to this one that we haven’t explored. Swift hasn’t merely subbed herself into the narrative of George & Martha instead of Virginia Woolf or what she symbolizes in the play. The name is derived from a Disney song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Of course, this song is sung by the famously naive, unsuspecting, and ill-prepared Three Little Pigs, taunting the wolf and ignoring every townsperson warning them of the dangers that lie ahead. In asking the audience “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Swift subs herself in for the terrifying and treacherous wolf, parading herself innocently as “little old me” as if the wolf doesn’t have the power to destroy everything in front of her... Do with that what you will.
So, Taylor Swift is an unreliable narrator. Then again, isn’t everyone when it comes to their own lives and experiences? From a artistic perspective, these are the exact rabbit holes I expect to be led down once Tortured Poets is released.
Stay tortured out there.

葉隠入門 Hagakure Nyūmon The Old Man Epilogue: Japan

^{January 1999, Chiyoda, Tokyo}
“When I was twenty years old Japan was less than the shell of a nation, it is more accurate to say it was less than the shell of a clam. Now I am seventy-five and Japan is the finest nation on earth; a leader in bioscience and technology, with a robust economy and a deep respect for human rights. Now at last I feel I can rest easy, alongside the Emeritus Emperor, and let a new generation lead us into the 21st century. Thank you Japan, thank you all the people of Japan. Now I can proudly announce I am stepping down from the Office of Prime Minister and leaving the Diet.” Prime Minister Mishima Yukio, Resignation Speech
Theme Music: 1980's Japanese City Pop Playlist
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Contents

1. The Old Man: Mishima Yukio's Resignation
2. Kuril Islands Dispute, 1964
3. Computing Technology, 1970
4. Defence Rearmament, 1976
5. Emperor Akihito Abdication, 1983
6. The Economy Collapses, 1993
7. Post-Cold War, 1999 onwards: Inluding, Bharat, South Korea, Anime, HSR, Latin America

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The Old Man

Mishima Yukio had been young when the bomb had brought hell on earth to Hiroshima and Nagaski. He was not young any more. He had held his father's seat, the Tokyo 3rd District, since the early 80’s, the same year as his father’s passing. He knew at nearly seventy-five he could no longer keep ruling Japan, he had been her Prime Minister for nearly twelve years. There was a time and place for all men, and it was his time to step down. The opening of the new Imperial Museum of Japan had been the perfect opportunity. Now in front of a class of eager eyed under graduates from the Emperor’s College Gakushuin, he was being asked to reflect on his years.
He stood at the podium, Minister for Foreign Affairs Koike Yuriko and new Prime Minister Koizumi Ichiro sitting in the crowd before him. Mishima’s determined eyes looked at the young graduates behind his friends. He had never been a shy man, he had demanded obedience from all those who worked for him. Now he commanded the room just by standing at a podium, even as a retired old man he had this power. It started when he was Prosecutor-General, staring down Yakuza leaders like Omori Shogen and his Black Dragon society in the wake of the failure in the Korean War. It continued when he was the deputy for Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, The Shogun, and the liaison between Nakasone and Reagan.
Prime Minister Mishima had been a hard man, with hard eyes, but now he was also an old man, with old eyes. Once he had seen people his own age, now he saw a new generation sprouting through the ground, and ready to take their place in the sun.
His hands gripped the podium in front of the old Tokyo Station. It was a beautiful building, black scallop-tile roof, crimson brick facade, and white detailing on the columns, and accents. It served the city well as the Marunouchi-side train station. It had seen just about everything from post-war recovery, to mid-year boom. The Government had elected to make it a museum, and open a new station directly opposite. It was a trillion yen project, but it would ensure smooth operation of the train lines beneath Tokyo for decades to come. It was the site of his resignation.
Mishima cleared his throat and returned to the great lecture hall of Gakushuin. Koike started the applause, she had been the youngest Foreign Minister in Japanese history, and first woman. Prime Minister Koizumi joined her, his silver mane of hair catching the light and reminding Japan why he was called Lionheart. The applause caught on like a gust of wind and Mishima raised his hand to thank them and quiet the room down. He smiled and tapped the mic.
“Thank you, it has been some time since my resignation, and I am surprised that anyone cares what I have to say. Thank you to Gakushuin, thank you to the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and thank you to all the freshmen of the class of 2008 who are just starting their university degrees. Today I am proud to give my special lecture on the History of Japan. As many of you know, I have been involved with the Government since the early 50s, and today will be a highlight reel of sorts. I encourage you to be critical, to view my moments with an analytical mind and a poetic heart. I am an old man with an old man’s memories and fondness.”
He smiled and pressed the clicker in his hand, the slide behind him flicking off the title screen and onto his first moment.

Kuril Islands, 1964

Yoshida looked down at the islands from aboard the Prime Ministerial plane, smoke billowing from several areas of the city even as the plane began to descend.
“Is this a good idea?”
He turned to his advisor.
“It is not an idea, it is a plan.”
He replied coolly.
The local population had risen up in riots against the Soviet forces, a dozen Soviet soldiers were dead, many more had fled the four islands that Japan had once called its own. Self governance had been the objective of the rioters, Japan had been forced to respond, the Soviet Union had massed a police force in response. Yoshida had called on the Self Defence Force mobilised in Hokkaido. Escalation after escalation was occurring, a spiral of chaos Japan and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war.
The plan landed with a jarring thud and Yoshida re-read through his speech once again. It made no reference to the referendum that Japan had stoked on the islands. It made no mention of the census Japan had conducted with the support of the coast guard. It was silent on the old treaties which referenced the islands.
Yoshida’s mouth was a thin line, they were playing a dangerous game. Behind him Omori Shogen, the Architect, sat with his high collared black suit, his mouth a smirk.
Hours later Omori sniffed and breathed out a blast of frosty air, his smirk turned into a smile. The trap had been laid, set, and then sprung perfectly. The Black Dragon Society had weaved Japanese flags through the crowd gathered to hear the Prime Minister speak.
The critical line of the speech had sent the crowd into a roar of support - The Kurils are Japan, Japan is the Kurils, and Japan will not leave her sons and daughters of the north alone any more.
The Soviet call had come not an hour later, the police force had withdrawn, and an American aircraft carrier force had sailed through the straits.
Omori had moved his pieces, entraping the Soviets and the Americans. Japan would gain the Kurils back, America beholden to the San Francisco Treaty, and the Soviets forced to back down else risk American involvement in North-Asian Atlantic affairs. History would record this day as the day that Prime Minister Yoshida started the path of Japan back to full territorial integrity.

Computing, 1970

As the Japanese economy surged in the 1960s and 70s, it leapt ahead in technological advancement on the back of Sony's groundbreaking development of transistors. If Sony was the leading goose, then Hitachi, NEC, and Sharp were closely following. Together the four companies competed against one another and their US competitors. The result was the formation of the eight-bit gosanke personal computers. They were the formation of the Japanese second wave technological revolution, and the mass transition away from old style business and by the late 70’s Japan was on the cutting edge of global innovation. The widespread adoption of Sony computers, particularly by the elite in India and Latin America, not only strengthened Japan's economic ties with these regions but also positioned the nation as a technological powerhouse with a profound impact on global markets.
The personal computer uptake in Japan was miraculous and in large part led by the forge-ahead doctrine of the Sato Administration. Sato with his fascination for all things technologically advanced pushed all government agencies, at great cost, to transition off paper based reporting and onto modern computers. Computing power became the overriding objective of the newly formed Ministry of Technology which was headed up by Ohga Norio. Computer programming was added into the national curriculum, and computer engineers were brought in from the United States and Europe to deliver university courses. Technology literacy across the country soared and with it a demand for computer based mass entertainment. Enter the video game. Nintendo and Sony entered the home entertainment market with colour TV connected consoles in the late 1970s and kicked off the great console wars. By early 1980 the NES had taken over as the dominant video game console, and by mid 1980 Sony had released their Playstation to roaring success.
The age of the computer had arrived and for Japan there was no going back. As home computing took primacy for most Japanese, the Soviet Union and America took to the stars and the Space race of the 1970s kicked off properly. Not to be left behind, Japan was the fourth country to put a satellite into orbit, and with American help the third nationality into space. As the Americans put the space race front of mind, their minds reaching for a lunar landing ahead of the soviets, Japan turned to more earthly affairs and the pursuit of smaller more powerful computing. A dream was born in Japan amongst this surge in technological innovation, a series of interconnected computers, a web of sorts between the universities of the country, to share research and academic papers.

Defence, 1976

Admiral Uruhara stood on the deck of the JSDN Fuji, the first aircraft carrier to be put to sea by the country since the early 1940’s. In front of him sat the heads of state from a collection of nations calling themselves ASEAN. The American Ambassador had joined them, along with Australia, India, and a handful of South American partners. Japanese ship building was back at full capacity after a decade of rebuilding, the Kure Naval Arsenal leading the way for construction of ship building facilities from Sapporo down to Chishima Rettou. Japan was now the largest ship builder in the world, her naval self defence force rebuilding the hights of the Japanese navy.
The Americans had been forced to accede to rearmament demands following Chinese nuclear tests in 1964. The Kuril Islands affair spurred Soviet Support for North Korea’s and Communist China’s development risk taking.
Admiral Uruhara in his maiden speech declared that Japan would support all free and independent south east Asian countries to construct complementary navies. ASEAN would be free, fair, and independent. Japanese naval capacity would ensure that the region never felt the pressure of the Communists. Japanese manufacturing would elevate Indonesian, Thai, and Singaporean manufacturing through complementary programs, to new heights. Japan as the leading goose would ensure South Korea was supported in its struggle against the dangerous north, and the Republic of China would forever resist the cross-strait tension.
Japan in rearmament would ensure East Asian and Southeast Asian security from the forces best upon them. Japan in rearmament would be the single most important partner for the United States in weighing the scales of world peace in democratic favour.
The media afterwards had been dramatic, the Soviet Union and China had lodged a protest in the UN. The Admiral was called to speak before the Security Council, and the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations had been called on to explain Japanese civilian control to a body of democratic nations styling themselves as the Democracy-10. The frost had formed and the world had held its breath while the JSDF had recovered its strength. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nishikawa Motors, and others came online, Japanese manufacturing roared to life.
Across the Pacific Australia under the fear of communism embraced this new Japan, and a free trade agreement set the stage for a North-South channel of trade in raw materials from the southern continent. Democratic ASEAN with the same fear embraced the supply of easy to manufacture parts in exchange for economic uplift. As the US and Japan turned their engines towards the high end, ASEAN took up the slack in cheap and easy manufacturing, and the motorcycle entered Southeast Asia. The Pacific under the fear of Chinese military potential, and Soviet expansion of the Pacific Fleet coalesced into an economic machine. Fears of a renewed Japanese military were eclipsed by economic growth through the early 80’s and into the 90’s. Japan surged upwards into the highest echelons of GDP growth, democratic ASEAN empowered by the US Washington consensus followed suit.
Years later the Admiral would reflect that perhaps his speech went too far, that he had forced a wedge wider which had been opened by the Chinese. But he had been unapologetic, the crisis spawned from that day were the result of chain events no reasonable man would have foreseen. His tomb bears the phrase “From the Kurils to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Canberra, Japan will ensure peace across the sea.”

Emperor Akihito, 1983

The Emperor was not all that old, but he wasn’t young, he had three sons who he loved, and a country he had seen returned to prosperity from destitution. He had seen the world, studied at Harvard, and Cambridge, visited more countries than any Japanese monarch before him. He had delivered speeches in Wellington, Sydney, Washington, Paris, and Delhi. Akihito had become affectionately called The Boy. He had guided a half dozen Prime Ministers through their challenges, and befriended world monarchs from Brunei to England. He had a particular affection for Elizabeth II. They were not that different in age, and royals had a tendency to find comfort with one another.
Akihito sat and listened to the Imperial Household doctor, a man he had graduated from college with. The diagnosis was bleak, not dangerous, but bleak, the cancer was spreading.
Beside and around him sat more than two dozen advisors and half his close family. His wife, and his lover looked at one another. The shadowy back rooms of the Imperial Palace had reconciled the Emperor’s sexuality long ago. The Empress had managed the daily affairs for months ahead of this diagnosis. The Imperial Lawyer was the official title, but in truth the handsome man had been close to the Emperor well before then. The Empress has ascended only on ground that she be given control of the affairs of the children.
The decisions had been considered and then decided after that meeting. Akihito would, like his father, abdicate for his son. Ahead of the word of his cancer, and his lover spread into the public, because no secret could hold forever in the age of modern communications.
The abdication was announced on 1 April 1983, the 35th anniversary of Akihito’s ascent, it would take effect on 1 April 1988 the 40th anniversary. It would preserve the dignity of the Imperial office, the Emperor would take up his late father’s title Emperor Emeritus. Akihito would then retreat to a life out of sight of the public on the Izu Peninsula and the so-called Blue Palace where the last Korean King had lived out his days. Empress Yume would take to life behind her son, the incoming Emperor Naruhito, as an expert advisor on media matters, and women’s affairs. There she would ensure continuity of the Imperial line in the search for a wife of suitable stature.
In his retirement Akihito was visited by many former friends, the closest of which, the Kennedys and Kissingers came more than once. He published more than two dozen journal articles on medical research in his retirement. He is most famous for his pioneering new ideas in mental health for Japanese businessmen including paternity leave, and yearly mandatory cancer tests for men over forty. At the time of his death in the mid nineties Akihito held the highest approval rating of any leader in Japan, save his wife. His scandals had leaked of course; his male lover, his escapades at Harvard, and these had hurt his image, but in the end it was hard to hate a man who stepped in at the right time, and stepped out before his welcome had expired.
The Emperor had an autobiography published under the moniker Momotaro. In it he covered geopolitical struggles, Imperial Household operations, his time abroad, and his hopes for the future including same-sex marriage. It was published after his death, and public sentiment on his scandals turned around soon afterwards. The second print was retitled to his name, and a forward was added by his wife expressing her deep love of him, and his love for the new Japan that was coming into its own.

The Economy, 1993

The early 1990s brought an unprecedented milestone for Japan's economy when, for a brief period, it surpassed the United States as the world's largest economy. This moment of economic triumph, however, proved ephemeral as Japan witnessed the burst of its economic bubble. The subsequent three-year recession tested the resilience of the Japanese economy, ultimately leading to a return to limited growth. The Japanese miracle of annual 10% growth through the 70’s and 80’s was floated on the back of speculation, anti-competitive mergers, outrageous land valuations and unregulated banking practices. So hilariously out of touch had Japanese firms become before the burst that at one stage the land valuation of just the Imperial Palace in Tokyo alone was more than that of the entirety of California. The Emperor of Japan was the richest man in the world for all of 3 minutes before the markets corrected.
The bubble burst was spectacular. It started with a failed bank in Hokkaido, over leveraged to high risk ventures in Northern Pacific tuna, Hokkaido dairy, and grain. A drought crippled the entire northern agricultural market, and warmed sea water halved the amount of tuna caught in a single season. The bank collapsed overnight, and under the weight of its debts brought a dozen large firms with it. The market was spooked, and across Japan people went to withdraw their yen. A bank run formed, markets reevaluated their debt, and realised the entire structure was over leveraged both domestically and internationally.
In 1993 at the height of the economic period Japan had some 300+ banks, by 1994 it was 230, at the end of 1995 it had shrunk to just 70. The recession was severe, and a total contraction of 20% forced many of Japan’s best and brightest out of work. International reputation was their only saving grace and across the Pacific Japanese talent found new employment. Into Southeast Asia, Bharat, Australia, and the Pacific they went. What precious little work remained in the Home Islands was swallowed up quickly. Major firms consolidated and a return to Zaibatsu was on the cards, the Government stepped in to force large banks to keep companies separate, selling instead to preferred international firms. The Japanese market was at last broken open and with Microsoft, JP Morgan, Shell, and the European majors came English and French language skills. Despite the setback, Japan retained its position as the second-largest economy globally, solidifying its reputation as an economic powerhouse if also a warning sign of hubris and unregulated behaviour.
English became the second most spoken language in the country, with over 50% of Japanese citizens speaking limited English and 30% speaking confident conversational English. The French took a romantic third place. On account of the high school language programs set up in schools the Japanese English accent is heavily skewed to Australian English. Japanese-English as it came to be known follows British spelling traditions much to the chagrin of the American companies who entered the country. By the turn of the 20th century almost all university courses had made English a compulsory language for completion.

Post-Cold War, 1999 onwards

In 1999, Japan celebrated its 20th anniversary as a key development partner for ASEAN, marking two decades of collaborative efforts and shared growth. As the leading force in the region, Japan's commitment to ASEAN strengthened diplomatic ties and positioned the nation as a vital contributor to the bloc's economic and strategic development. Beyond ASEAN, Japan's role as a moderating voice within Western alliances' strategic thinking against the Soviet Union garnered international recognition, establishing the nation as a pivotal player in global diplomacy.

Latin America

Japanese relations with South America were a tumultuous affair. Privately, Washington had warned Japan against further investments on the continent. These warnings were countered by the free trade bloc Japan had formed at the start of the cold war. What South America gained in access to Japanese markets though, was tempered by Japanese revulsion for Latin Socialism. As the continent went through cyclical embraces of left wing socialism, Japan went through cyclical distance making. This included refusal to allow defence contracts to empower the regimes that came and went. The South Americans once again started looking north for their economic future. All except Peru that is, and today the largest proportion of overseas Japanese live and work in the country.

Bharat

The subcontinent became to Japan the closest of possible friends, it was Bharat who moved the UN to allow Japan entry. A geopolitical melting pot of issues, Bharat faced concerns both neighbourly and trans-oceanic that it could not tackle alone. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and International Cooperation Agency put Bharat in the highest of engagement echelons. From Mumbai and Delhi to Gujarat and Sri Lanka, Japanese firms found cheap land, and labour to mass produce for the booming population. Across Bharat Yamaha, Suzuki, and Toyota sold their cars and motorcycles. Along with this came the great road network, and the engineering power of Japanese rail.
Indians with all their creativity, and culture were the first group to be given longer term VISA status in Japan. Ethnic tensions followed, Japanese xenophobia was a constant complaint, but it did not stop the migration. Shibuya 3rd ward became India town, and like the China towns found across the world in the 80s and 90s, Japan helped Bharat export this cultural phenomena. In time Japan embarrassed certain elements of the sub continental culture, Japanese Golden Curry foremost amongst this, but so too fashion, and art. Across Japan desi-culture found its niche, and colour exploded through women's fashion in a vibrancy not seen ever before.

The High Speed Rail

Japanese development through the Cold War was miraculous, but infrastructure was where things made the developed world stop and take note. The Japanese rail network from Tokyo north to Sendai and onto Hokkaido, and south to Osaka and then down to Shimonoseki was the envy of the world by the late 1970’s. The establishment of a unified rail gauge worked miracles in streamlining development costs and planning. The crowning jewel was truly the Type-0 shinkansen, the fastest train in the world when it launched in 1963, travelling from Tokyo to Osaka at 220km/h. Built specifically for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics the shinkansen took the rail world by storm.
As Japan electrified its rail network during the rebuild of the 1950s so did it progress the expansion of it. If the Pacific coast was the original rebuild and the planned construction path of the shinkansen, the Sea of Japan coast was the luxury line. The so-called Blue trains and their sleeper cars took on new meaning and the eponymous ‘blue’ name came to reflect the floor to ceiling views of the Sea of Japan possible on the carriages.
These trains through the 1990s were taken up by developed countries, first in Australia, and then Canada. It was on the back of rail technology that Japan escaped her economic conundrum, and the export of this technology saved manufacturing and industry jobs in the millions. Eventually Japan came to fully dominate the high speed rail network until France entered the foray and then China afterwards. By the time of the early 2000s while she was head and shoulders above the competition, competitors had commenced the catch up in Europe and Eurasia.

Anime

In the late 1980s Japanese animation took a leap forward that launched it from a local domestic production of Mega-man and Sailor moon, to global prominence. Dragon Ball burst onto the TV scene in 1986 and captured the hearts and minds of a generation of young men across Japan and the English version across America, UK and Australia. Its sequel series Dragon Ball Z in 1992 was a cultural touchstone and translated into some 38 different languages for broadcast around the globe. This success though was just the precursor, these were Japanese manga transformed into tv cartoons for children. April 1 1997 changed the world forever when across Japan, the United States, Europe and Australia a new anime captured such a vast swath of children it sparked security concerns inside the CIA and MI5, it was called Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon.
In the original airing wake came the portable handheld gaming device explosion, the Gameboy and the headline games, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. Catch ‘em All Fever consumed children across the planet, Nintendo was forced to front Senate hearings and submit technical specifications of the Gameboy to security agencies. Perhaps one of the most ludicrous moments of the late 90’s though was during the 1998 election in Australia where Mr John Howard dressed up as the character Pikachu. It was an effort to sell his vision of new investments in children’s programming, early childhood education, and regional relations. Unfortunately technical issues with his suit caused a power malfunction, and he was electrocuted to death. Kim Beazley went on to win the election, Paulin Hanson’s One Nation Party stealing away for the first time the balance of power in the federal House of Representatives. Until she too was felled by a pokemon scandal, an illegal trading card ring smuggling drugs in so called “booster packs”.

South Korea

The peninsula and the failure of the Korean War haunted Japan well after the cessation of hostilities. It bubbled away problematically between South and North for 50 years, the South moving its capital to Busan, a bastion of Japanese culture in the new nation. From military dictatorship to democracy, the Miracle of the Floating Port, and the formation of chaebols by the late 2000’s South Korea was well ahead of its languishing partner in the North. Japan’s role was the signature and leading trade partner, the older brother, and until the exposure of Japanese interventions in the Korean war, the former colonial master.
Tensions were never resolved between the two, but Mishima’s overtures and compensation to comfort women, and the ethnic Koreans who had called Japan home helped. The death spiral of post Cold-War Peace was on the peninsula though, a series of miscalculations, miscommunications, and accidents leading to the resumption of hostilities between South and North; Japan was quick to send aid, the Japan Self Defence Force learning the lessons of the First Korean War, joining only second behind the United States.

The Beating Heart of Asia

By the turn of the century Japan had retained its position as the second largest economy, become the central trade hub for Asia, and occupied a pivotal position in regional affairs. Following the bust of the mid 90’s the economy buckled but it did not break. France, Germany, and most impressively China were all on the surge towards Japan’s lofty second place. Storm clouds on the horizon though in the US debt market and Russia’s view on Georgia threatened the global economy though. Action on the Korean peninsula had put nerves to just about every major market across the globe. The Nikkei however was in recovery mode as the countdown ticked over to the year 2000 and in classic Japanese fashion, there was no issue to talk about, until the house was on fire.
Regionally Japan was the lead development partner for ASEAN and partnered with New Zealand and Australia for the Pacific. The US had retreated inward during the term of President Weinstein, made in America had brought manufacturing back to the mid-west. The cost had been ASEAN cooperation with the regional power to start up their own manufacturing and progression towards advanced production lines. The durability of these programs was unclear but incoming President Jobs had made strong commitments to return to free market economics. ASEAN, and the Pacific, looked to Japan to negotiate new deals.
The trading giants of PO-TEPCO, Nippon Yusen, and Port Authority Terminal set the standard for Asian trade. Together they controlled more than 60% of all incoming shipping containers in Japan, and a combined 15% of all global shipping trade. The ports of South Korea, China, Taiwan, and southeast Asia all adhered to Japanese monopolistic demands. Japan had once again become the beating heart of Asia.

What is the best model pre 2010 that is the most reliable and most comfortable, the models in my area are;
XJ: Executive Premium Autobiography Portfolio Luxury TDVi XJ6 XJ50 XJ8 V8
Mark 2
S Type: SE V6 DV6
XE: D180 D200 Dynamic GTDi Landmark MHEV Prestige Reims
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XJR
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[UPDATE: Hopefully the lack of any comments with corrections means I was in the clear and it was OK to go ahead and drop the episode, because I just did: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6u1RUWNONClUGfaZSaslot?si=Oos4uRB6Q7yaZC5o9ELhdQ ]
I host a radio-DJ-style podcast called, you guessed it, Songs of the Years. Last fall I started doing monthly episodes doing deep dives on my favorite recording artists, starting with the Beatles, then Dylan, the Stones, etc. On each of these episodes I play ten songs from the artist or group in question, and in between tracks I talk about their biography.
With a month to work on each one, I was able to take my time and be careful with meticulously fact-checking each one. But then a few weeks ago, Spotify announced that they were ending their "experiment" with the Music + Talk format in June. Well, that's the foundation of my whole deal! If I can't play tracks from the album I'm talking about, it becomes just talking about music, but taking away the music part. Which, to slightly repurpose the possibly apocryphal Martin Mull quote, is like dancing about architecture.
But I still had dozens of artists and groups I wanted to cover in these deep dives, so I started cranking up the pace, releasing multiple episodes per week. Unfortunately, this inevitably meant sacrificing some of that rigor when it came to fact-checking, and the result was that a few days ago I heard from someone on the Fleetwood Mac sub that I had gotten some important facts wrong about that band's early days.
I felt sick about this, since I can't go back and change the pod once it's released. So I resolved that going forward, I'm going to post my podcast scripts to Reddit once they are finished, and ask the people best situated to know this history inside out to help crowdsource the error checking.
Now, I can't pay anybody anything for this, as I don't get paid myself. No ads, no Patreon. Just a labor of love. But if you spot a goof and give me a citation from a solid source showing the correct information, I can (if you wish) credit you on the show for "research assistance provided by ________", using your Reddit handle or your real name, as you prefer. And you'll have the satisfaction of knowing the episode dedicated to Bruce will not spread false info like the Fleetwood Mac episode unfortunately has. (Spotify has said that although once June comes we can no longer create Music + Talk episodes, they will keep the ones already created up indefinitely, so this may well be the last podcast of this type, including full music tracks, you'll ever see dedicated to the Boss.)
Thanks in advance for your help. Below you'll find the full script. It's okay if you share portions of it with others, as long as you credit me, Alan Thomas, as the writer:
Bruce Springsteen, "The Boss," isn't just a musical icon: he is a blue-collar poet laureate, a voice for the working class. His music was born from the gritty streets of New Jersey and the vast expanse of the American dream. With a raspy voice, soaring melodies, and lyrics that pulsated with both hope and despair, he paints vivid portraits of everyday heroes, forgotten towns, and the struggle for something better.
His music isn't background noise; it is a freight train barreling down the tracks, carrying the hopes, heartbreaks, and resilience of the American working class. He chronicles factory closures and dead-end streets, but also the flicker of defiance and the yearning for a brighter horizon. Springsteen isn't just a singer; he is a bard of the blue-collar world, a champion for the forgotten, offering a flicker of hope in the face of hardship.
Bruce emerged from a hardscrabble Jersey town, the shadow of the American Dream flickering at its edges. Born into a blue-collar world with Dutch, Irish, and Italian blood flowing through his veins, his mother was the family's mainstay while his father was haunted by demons. His was a Catholic childhood, where rebellion against the nuns simmered even as something bigger whispered on the radio – Elvis, Sinatra, a raw power crackling with promise. His cheap rented guitar became a beacon, a pathway into the neon heart of the Jersey Shore. He haunted those boardwalk towns, absorbing characters and stories as the specter of Vietnam loomed. Then, in a stroke of luck, or maybe fate, a motorcycle accident kept him grounded while others went to fight.
The Beatles exploded onto the scene, upending everything, sparking that first ragged chord. His mom saw a flicker of something special, a fire worth feeding--the Kent guitar was a benediction, a baptism into rock'n'roll. From there, it was smoky Elks Lodges, beach bars, guys like Vinnie Roslin by his side – the apprenticeship years of the Jersey Shore. Names like Steel Mill and Dr. Zoom weren't just bands, they were battle scars. That raw Jersey sound, born on the Stone Pony's stage, rippled outwards. A San Francisco critic, Philip Elwood, caught the fire, proclaiming Springsteen a poet and composer with a blazing future. He wasn't wrong: the Boss was a fuse burning short.
His parents sought a new start out West, but the young rebel stayed behind. The restlessness wouldn't quit, though. The words flooded out, rough and urgent, attracting hustlers like Mike Appel, hungry for that spark. It was enough to get him in front of John Hammond, the legendary talent scout--the same man who unearthed Dylan years earlier. That audition was it: the last brick laid before the explosion.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was a calling card, a bolt of raw, unfiltered energy. Springsteen, restless and prolific, recorded most of the album at a shoestring studio, backed by his band of hungry Jersey misfits: the sax wail of Clarence Clemons, the relentless thump of Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez's drums. It was a whirlwind of youthful hopes and hard-luck stories, blending boardwalk bravado and poetic ambition.
Columbia Records boss Clive Davis saw potential but wanted a hit. Springsteen, with his rhyming dictionary and inexhaustible drive, obligingly whipped up "Blinded By the Light":
["Blinded By the Light" plays]
That tune's a kind of Dylanesque word salad: madmen drummers, teenage diplomats, summertime car chases. It defies easy explanation, but the energy was undeniable. There was something special in the air, even if its initial release barely registered.
Critics took notice, hearing echoes of Dylan, but also a voice all Springsteen's own. Words tumbled out, a torrent of vivid imagery set against rockabilly rhythms and Clarence Clemons' soaring sax breaks. Even with its grand ambition, it never lost that Jersey Shore grit. Maybe the world wasn't fully ready in 1973.
Manfred Mann's Earth Band later covered the song, scoring a massive hit and forever altering the popular understanding of the lyrics. Legacy? It's complicated. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is a time capsule, a portrait of an artist on the verge. "Blinded by the Light" remains its most famous--or infamous--track, proof that the journey from rough-hewn gem to pop phenomenon can be as unpredictable as the boardwalk scene Springsteen once chronicled.
In these lean years, the nameless group of musicians that would become the E Street Band took shape. Springsteen, handling the band's finances and forever ready for a Monopoly game, earned the nickname "The Boss"--a title that became synonymous with his leadership and their shared ambition.
They were back at 914 Sound Studios, the same cramped room where they'd cut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. But this time felt different. The E Street Band, though still unnamed, had gelled during those lean months. They were Springsteen's partners, not just sidemen. The music reflected this: it was bolder, the street corner poetry set ablaze by Clemons's saxophone and Danny Federici's organ swells. The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle was a testament to ambition, to dreaming big even with empty pockets.
The embodiment of that spirit was a seven-minute-long whirlwind of teenage yearning called "Rosalita":
["Rosalita" plays]
That is Springsteen at his most joyous and unrestrained. The lyrics, a playful tangle of boardwalk bravado and doomed romance, are pure Jersey, but the band brought a touch of epic grandeur, a sonic wall of sound that begged to be played at maximum volume. It was as if Springsteen was daring the world to ignore them this time.
No wonder it became a staple of those legendary multi-hour shows.
FM radio latched onto "Rosalita" even without an official single release, a testament to Springsteen's slow-burning breakthrough. Critics adored its energy and lyrical depth, understanding that beneath the raucous surface was a heart yearning for escape, for something greater. It wasn't a chart-topper in '73, but with time, its legend has only grown. "Rosalita" isn't just a song, it's the embodiment of youthful rebellion, a promise that the best nights, the best adventures, are always just down the road.
Springsteen's raw, unfiltered energy was undeniable, but fame remained elusive. Then came the Harvard Square Theater, that sweatbox of a venue where destinies change. Jon Landau, the critic with the power to make or break careers, was in the crowd. And that night, he saw more than just a skinny kid with a guitar and a heart full of dreams. "I saw rock and roll's future," he wrote, "and its name is Bruce Springsteen." It was more than praise; it was prophecy, a proclamation that the world was about to catch up to the fire that burned so brightly on those Jersey backstreets.
Born to Run wasn't just willed into existence – it was forged in the fires of frustration. Springsteen was coming off the modest success of his first two albums, but he knew he had something bigger inside him. The sessions were grueling, the pressure intense. Springsteen wrote and discarded songs relentlessly, demanding perfection from himself and the E Street Band. Stories abound of battles fought in the studio over the relentless wall-of-sound production, Springsteen's vision clashing with the band's desire for a rawer vibe.
From this struggle emerged what are, in my and many other people's estimation, Springsteen's best songs. I've managed to narrow the list down to three selections to share with you today. Let's start with the evocative harmonica and piano that open "Thunder Road":
["Thunder Road" plays]
"Thunder Road" went through countless iterations, Springsteen endlessly tweaking the lyrics and melody. But at its core, it always held that yearning for something more, that plea for escape that resonated deeply with his own restlessness. It wasn't just his story; it was a universal feeling painted in vivid detail. The band matched that intensity, crafting a musical landscape that felt like it could burst at any moment.
Next up is another beast entirely, a sprawling, ten-minute epic that showcases Springsteen's ambition and lyrical prowess in equal measure. This time we're opening again with piano, but with a sweet string accompaniment, as we listen to a tale of a barefoot girl sittin' on the hood of a Dodge, drinkin' warm beer in the soft summer rain, down in..."Jungleland":
["Jungleland" plays]
With "Jungleland", the Boss traded the open road of "Thunder Road" for the gritty underbelly of city life. Clemons recalled marathon sessions focused solely on that now-iconic sax solo, Springsteen demanding a performance that transcended notes on a page, something that cut to the emotional core of the song.
And of course we can't leave this album behind without spinning the iconic, anthemic, title track! This is "Born to Run":
["Born to Run" plays]
"Born to Run" came late in the recording process, and seemed to encapsulate the album's themes. It was a declaration of independence, the soundtrack for any kid who dreamt of escaping their small-town life to chase a better future. The recording was a testament to obsession: six months were reportedly spent perfecting that single track alone. Yet, even when the mix was finished, Springsteen's struggle wasn't over. Dissatisfied, he tossed the initial version into a hotel pool, nearly scrapping the entire album. It took the persuasive powers of Jon Landau to bring him back to the project, ultimately approving a final mix amidst the chaos of touring.
Commercially, the album was a breakthrough, peaking at number 3 on the Billboard charts and eventually achieving multi-platinum status. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece, with Rolling Stone later placing it at number 18 on its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. They praised its scope and raw emotion, calling it "a furious, romantic statement of youthful hopes". Born to Run remains an iconic work, the album that catapulted Springsteen into the upper echelon of rock stardom and proved that desperate dreams, fought tooth and nail for, sometimes really do come true.
August 1975 marked a turning point. The Bottom Line shows were proof that the hype was real, Springsteen playing with a raw, hungry energy that transcended the small stage. The press went wild, Newsweek and Time placing him front and center. It was the breakthrough he'd craved, but fame had a bite. Critics started circling, questioning the authenticity of this blue-collar poet turned rock star. Springsteen felt the sting, a flash of doubt amidst the whirlwind. The E Street Band was his anchor, the road his refuge. But the legal battle with Appel raged on, a creative prison when he was bursting with songs. The struggle was real, and it would shape the darkness that lay ahead.
Darkness on the Edge of Town wasn't a victory lap – it was a hard right turn. The legal battles may have stalled his recording career, but Springsteen's creative wellspring overflowed with frustration and a newfound maturity. Gone was the wide-eyed optimism of Born to Run; Darkness was a meditation on blue-collar ennui, the American Dream seen through a cracked windshield.
One track stands out as a stark centerpiece. It's "Factory":
["Factory" plays]
The opening lines paint a picture wearied by familiarity: "Early in the morning factory whistle blows / Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes." It's a scene dripping with resignation, a script handed down through generations. The factory isn't a symbol of progress; it's a relentless machine, stealing more than sweat – "takes his hearing," Springsteen sings, "gives him life." That dark bargain hangs heavy in the air.
This isn't a romanticized vision of the working class. Springsteen doesn't shy away from the grime and desperation. When he sings of "mansions of fear / through the mansions of pain," the anger feels like a physical force. You hear the echoes of his father's struggle, the frustration of a life spent chasing a dream that keeps receding into the distance.
Critics hailed Darkness on the Edge of Town as a masterpiece, a stark portrait of the working class grappling with a tarnished American Dream. "Factory" is a microcosm of that struggle – a song that burrows deep, leaving behind a gritty truth and the lingering sense that the relentless grind of factory life leaves scars that etch themselves onto the soul.
The late Seventies saw Springsteen's influence spread, a testament to his songwriting prowess. Patti Smith took the bones of his unreleased "Because the Night" and transformed it into a dark, desperate anthem that shot up the charts. The Pointer Sisters found similar success with his fiery "Fire." He fueled the Asbury Jukes' rise, penning hits like "The Fever" and collaborating with his E Street lieutenant Stevie Van Zandt.
Then came the No Nukes concerts, where Springsteen and the band unleashed their legendary live energy on a wider stage. It was his first foray into political activism, but the live album and later documentary gave audiences who had only heard the records a taste of his electric, sweat-soaked shows. These weren't just side projects; they were sparks from a creative engine that refused to slow down, a reminder that even as he grappled with his own demons, Springsteen had plenty of fuel left in the tank.
The River was a product of ambition and restlessness. Released in 1980, it was Springsteen's attempt to reconcile the exuberance of his previous work with the darker themes of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The double-album format allowed him to indulge his creative appetite for contrasting narratives and sonic experimentation, but it also presented a challenge.
The album's title track emerged from a batch of songs Bruce had been working on intermittently, initially written as a stark, acoustic ballad. Here's "The River":
["The River" plays]
The story of the unnamed protagonist and his girl Mary, with its themes of lost innocence and unfulfilled dreams, resonated deeply with Springsteen's own grappling with the conflicting desires for freedom and stability. As the recording sessions progressed, the song grew in scope. Roy Bittan's piano became a key element, adding a layer of melancholy. The band's arrangement straddles the line between rock energy and poignant introspective balladry, a testament to Springsteen's expanding musical palette.
Commercially, The River was a blockbuster, reaching number one on the Billboard album chart and eventually going multi-platinum. Though the title track wasn't a major hit, critical acclaim was overwhelming. Rolling Stone later placed the album at number 250 on its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. The title track became a Springsteen signature, its themes of yearning and regret amplified by the energy of his marathon shows. It remains a potent reminder of the transformative power of music, its ability to capture the complexities of the human experience.
The 1982 album Nebraska was born from a creative detour. Inspired by a book about the Starkweather murders, Springsteen began crafting a series of bleak acoustic demos. There was a raw intimacy to these recordings, a sense that he was tapping into a new and unsettling source. The decision to release the demos in their stark form was a bold one, defying conventional record label wisdom. He kept the E Street Band at arm's length, instead capturing the songs alone, using a four track cassette recorder. He even carried the cassette around in his pocket for a while, not even in a protective case, before he realized this wasn't just a demo, it was basically the master for the actual album!
The title track evolved from its initial form as a chilling portrait of a killer into a meditation on American violence and desperation. Springsteen recorded multiple takes, searching for that chillingly understated vocal delivery, a counterpoint to the brutality of the lyrics. Take a listen, this is "Nebraska":
["Nebraska" plays]
Bruce's guitar is sparse, almost skeletal, mirroring the empty highways and isolated towns his characters inhabit, accompanied by that mournful harmonica. That line about how "me and her, we had some fun" gives me chills.
I've got one more cut from this brilliant album to play for you today. It's a song that also began as a stark acoustic sketch. But as Springsteen honed the lyrics, the arrangement grew in subtlety. Hear for yourself, it's "Atlantic City":
["Atlantic City" plays]
The jangly guitar and shuffling rhythm create a false sense of hope, only adding to the pathos of the narrator's doomed gamble, somewhat reminiscent of the desperate scenario laid out in the earlier composition "Meeting Across the River", on Born to Run. The contrast between the upbeat sound and the bleak lyrics is disarming, a testament to Springsteen's increasing sophistication as a songwriter.
Critics hailed Nebraska as a stark, uncompromising masterpiece. It landed at number 224 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. The record's stripped-down sound and relentless gaze into the darkest corners of human experience were an artistic risk, but one that paid off. Commercially, the album was a modest success, but its impact extended far beyond sales figures.
Nebraska is a testament to Springsteen's ability to inhabit characters far removed from his own life, to use music as a means to examine difficult truths about American society. These aren't feel-good songs; they're songs that force you to confront the bleak corners of the American Dream, a reminder that sometimes the most powerful journeys are those we take into the shadows.
Born in the U.S.A. arrived in 1984 with the force of a sonic hurricane. More than just another album, it was a cultural phenomenon, catapulting Springsteen into the realm of stadium-rocking superstar. Its anthems of blue-collar struggle wrapped in a flag-waving package resonated with a nation hungry for a new kind of patriotism. But beneath the arena-ready choruses and radio-friendly hits lay a restless heart, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that hinted at the darkness of Springsteen's previous work. This tension--between populist anthems and a critical examination of the American Dream--created a fascinating and often overlooked subtext to the album, as exemplified by the titular track "Born in the U.S.A.", whose message of struggle and disillusionment was often misinterpreted by those swept up in jingoistic fervor.
I don't love this album like I do his earlier releases, but my favorite track on it harkens back to his older records with a slightly updated sound, standing as a stark contrast to the record's fist-pumping anthems. It's a haunting ballad, propelled by a repetitive minimalist synth riff and throbbing drumbeat reminiscent of a heartbeat. Here's "I'm On Fire":
["I'm On Fire" plays]
Bruce Springsteen originally wrote that song for Roy Orbison, but it resonates uniquely with his own voice--a tense, almost whispered confession of forbidden desire. The lyrics are a study in frustrated yearning, all unspoken longing and suppressed heat. The narrator is consumed by a desire he can't contain, the imagery crackling with sensual tension: "Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby / edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley / through the middle of my soul."
The song's production enhances its simmering intensity. Springsteen and his team experimented with synth sounds amidst the otherwise sparse arrangement, as the E Street Band provided a subtle pulse, creating a sonic backdrop that's both disquieting and strangely alluring.
The Born in the USA album was a commercial juggernaut, spawning seven Top-10 singles and going multi-platinum. Critics were largely swept up in the fervor, praising Springsteen's undeniable talent for crafting anthems that tapped into the American psyche. However, a more nuanced reading of the album reveals a streak of social commentary beneath the anthems, a critical eye turned towards the American experience. "I'm On Fire," with its hushed intensity and dark undertones, exemplifies this complexity. Though not one of the record's hit singles, the song remains a testament to Springsteen's ability to tap into universal emotions that lie beneath the surface of his larger-than-life tales.
In 1985, Bruce found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with pop royalty for "We Are the World." The charity single was a world away from gritty Jersey bars, the studio filled with stars at the height of their fame. Still, amidst the glitz, his raspy plea cut through with raw urgency. He may have later called it a "corny" song, but Bruce understood its power: even a simple song, sung by a chorus of voices, could spark a global movement. After all, it wasn't every day The Boss himself got to belt out a harmony with Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, not to mention being able to hang out with Huey Lewis and Cyndi Lauper. That kind of camaraderie, for a cause like this, transcended any reservations about the music itself.
Bruce Springsteen wrestled with fame's burdens during the late Eighties. The downbeat Tunnel of Love album found him probing love's rough edges, and as Berlin Wall fissures began appearing, his 1988 East Berlin show helped pry it open, proving that rock 'n' roll could be a force for liberation. But the E Street Band had to go in '89.
He cut "Human Touch" and "Lucky Town" in LA in 1992, risking accusations of going soft, and indeed these records didn't stick the landing like prior classics. Even a brave unplugged set did little to quiet growing dissent within Springsteen's ever-loyal fanbase.
Still, Hollywood came knocking: Springsteen snagged an Oscar in '94 for "Streets of Philadelphia". A brief E Street reunion led to a sprawling greatest hits collection. Then, inspired by Steinbeck, Springsteen hit the road with just an acoustic guitar for '95's "The Ghost of Tom Joad", a stark homage to the American downtrodden. But by decade's end, even he was confessing the Nineties had been a musical wasteland for him.
But the Boss came roaring back in 1999, reuniting with the E Street Band for a triumphant tour. 2002's The Rising was a gut-punch reaction to 9/11, reaffirming his gift for capturing the nation's pulse through rock. That led to stints on high-profile benefit tours and even an appearance honoring Joe Strummer.
A stark solo turn came with 2005's Devils & Dust, tackling America's growing anxieties. Then, Bruce dug into Pete Seeger's songbook in 2006, leading a giant folk ensemble on a tour many hailed as a creative rebirth. 2007's Magic was another E Street revival; then in 2008, Springsteen threw his weight behind Barack Obama's history-making campaign. He serenaded the crowd on Obama's inauguration night, his music the soundtrack to that dawn of a new era. Sure, his Super Bowl halftime show in 2009 was a nod to the mainstream, but the marathon sets on the 'Working on a Dream' tour, plus a Kennedy Center Honor, proved the Boss was more than a nostalgia act.
After 2012's fiery Wrecking Ball, Bruce found a new gear. No longer just a stadium hero, he got intimate with his autobiography, then even hit Broadway in a stark one-man show. He wasn't above campaigning for Obama or a Super Bowl romp, but that Springsteen on Broadway special? It was a reminder that he wasn't merely fueled by anthems: the Boss was a storyteller at his core.
But even when he dug into Americana on Western Stars or revisited old demos with High Hopes, Bruce refused to get nostalgic. He was too damn restless. So, covers albums felt inevitable, Springsteen putting his spin on the soul classics that shaped him on Only the Strong Survive.
And then came 2020: Springsteen's intimate Letter to You, a gut-level reflection during a bleak year, felt like a lifeline tossed from rock's elder statesman. It hinted that his hunger for connection hadn't faded at all. He even popped up on podcasts, bantering with Barack like old times. Proof that the Jersey bard still had a few tricks up his denim sleeve.
Sure, there have been pauses for health scares, and the decision to cash out his catalogue struck some as the final act. But Bruce kicked off an E Street Band mega-tour in 2023, proving he's far from the retirement home stage of rock 'n' roll. Hell, he's even promising more outtakes and soul covers on the way. The man who once raged against the dying light is now finding a thousand different ways to keep burning.
Few artists have captured the American spirit quite like Bruce Springsteen. For over five decades, he's been a tireless chronicler of its complexities: the grit, the glory, the shadows, and the unwavering hope. From anthemic stadium singalongs to introspective confessions whispered on Broadway, his music resonates across generations. He's a storyteller who paints vivid portraits of ordinary lives, reminding us of our shared humanity. He's a social conscience, unafraid to grapple with injustice and inequality.
More than just a rock star, Bruce Springsteen embodies a fundamental American mythology: the promise of hard work, the pursuit of freedom, the aching beauty of ordinary lives. His songs, belted out in sweat-soaked stadium concerts, evoke both a nostalgic longing for a simpler past and a fierce belief in the future. With his mix of gritty realism, yearning romanticism, and a profound faith in the human spirit, Springsteen's music is a soundtrack to both the American dream and the struggle to make it real.

2017 Range Rover autobiography, 107k kms Just came back with a suspension fault. Dealer is quoting $11k to fix ace lines, DRS Lines, and everything with it. Ace lines are currently leaking into the suspension system. I’m not a mechanic and don’t have all of the technical language. Dealer currently has one for sale with the same specs for $47k. Would you fix it and take a chance that more issues won’t pop up or take a trade for $25k and get into something newer? Also needs a brake job front and back, summer rubber, eventually a windshield, sos battery replacement and main battery recharge. Love the car and not really ready to be switching into something else.
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