Can’t be sure if the President was shot or the Space Shuttle exploded, but I do remember the room in receiving the announcement. The room with one of those eighties AV club style projectors on wheels under the clock on the wall that was never plugged in like the ones used to watch animals fucking in biology class or car crashes in drivers ed a few years later. I remember the room because it was junior high and junior high was traumatic for all kinds of reasons unrelated to Presidents or exploding Space Shuttles. The same room that felt like a prison I would later be expelled over after throwing jars of paint out the window in art class to watch them splatter on the sidewalk below like bombs and wind up being shipped off to a storied tennis academy in Florida for a time before it was famous or had to follow any pussy SafeSport rules of the Lord of the Flies prevention variety because my parents didn’t know what else to do with me. And then there was the morning I spent watching both planes crash into the Twin Towers on a cheap TV in my shoe box of an efficiency apartment on the Upper West Side only to smell the burning jet fuel mixed with steel and human remains hours and for days later while playing tennis to make rent just north of the reservoir in Central Park. So, yes, shit happens, we soldier on secure in understanding the earth will collapse soon enough ending life as we know it if robots don’t kill us all first, but nothing could have prepared me for this. This moment I am putting fingers to phone to document right here in real time for all time by writing it down, making it real, as they say. So here goes.

Just stepped out of an hour in the onsen at the Le Grand Karuizawa Hotel & Resort that is empty because it is a Tuesday night during the slow season that is winter here and all the roads in and out of town are closed due to a storm so we have this magical private mountain retreat all to ourselves when what should arrive while we are relaxing in the cozy little lounge filled with the sound of jazz and a stunning view near the onsen on the second floor not far from our room but the first in a series of selfies U.S. Ambassador-Designate Guilfoyle just messaged me of she having what appears to be the time of her diplomatic life playing pickleball on the deck of a Celebrity cruise ship docked in Santorini with the note “Call me Athena!!!” headlining them. It is here, let me repeat, Karuizawa, Japan, that the pictures arrived on the same phone I tap into now after deleting any trace of them as fast as possible. The only other thing I’m going to say about this now besides putting down a marker of time and place is the Ambassador-Designate and I hit it off years ago at a charity Pro Am event in Sonoma before she became the trampire she is today and was still just a filthy wine glass full of laughs, but, despite staying in touch, I have thankfully never met Don Jr. Okay, and maybe one other thing. This cozy little lounge near the onsen not far from our room in the empty Le Grand filled with the sound of jazz and a stunning view I fear has entered the ranks of customer tennis to the smell of bodies burning in Central Park and paint falling from the room where the President was shot or the Space Shuttle exploded no matter how fast I wiped the Athena message off my phone. At least the water was warm enough to lose all track of time bathing naked in the snow before the night was lost while wishing the road home remain closed forever.