ASHLAND, VA — At approximately 9:53 AM Saturday morning, Alden Macklin, 38, a certified public accountant and four-year brown belt at Glenshire Jiu-Jitsu, opened his bedroom closet and entered a forty-seven-minute standoff with the four nearly identical black gis hanging inside. Macklin was not training. Macklin was not competing. Macklin was driving his seven-year-old daughter Hazel to her 10:15 kids class, which he intended to watch from the bleachers in his capacity as a father, a husband, a taxpayer, and a brown belt with multiple stripes.
The four gis were, by any reasonable definition, the same gi. All black. All regulation cut. All sourced from brands with samurai-adjacent names. But Macklin, standing shirtless in his bedroom holding a cup of lukewarm coffee, had come to understand that each gi broadcast a subtly different message to anyone who happened to look up from their phone in the Glenshire bleachers and wonder what kind of man was watching a children’s jiu-jitsu class in full kimono.
“This one is from when I won double-gold at the Mid-Atlantic Spring Open in 2019,” Macklin narrated to no one, fingering the pearl-weave lapel. “So the energy is ‘I have accomplished things.’ But the accomplishment was at a local open. So maybe the energy is ‘I was once briefly relevant at a regional level.’” He returned the gi to the closet, then removed it again.
The second candidate, a 550-gram heavy gi gifted to him by Professor Roy Vance after Macklin received his first brown-belt stripe in January of 2023, presented what Macklin privately called legacy energy. It was, however, a size too large after Macklin’s winter cut, and the sleeves now hung in a way that he felt made him look emotionally available. The third gi — ceremonial, cream trim, never worn — carried “this man believes in something” energy, which Macklin worried was the wrong energy for the bleachers of a Saturday kids class, where every other parent was wearing Patagonia and drinking a cold brew out of a mason jar. The fourth gi, a faded training kimono from his blue belt days, had been darned twice at the collar and smelled faintly of his own labor. This, he admitted to himself as he lifted it to his face, was the only gi that actually felt like him. Which he understood to be the problem.
At 10:02 AM, Macklin photographed all four gis on their hangers in natural window light and uploaded the images to a group chat he had created in the summer of 2022 called “Second Degree Decisions.” The chat had six members — all brown or black belts from the Glenshire affiliation — and had not produced a single reply since August 14th, when a member named Kenji sent a link to a blog post about inside heel hooks and then apparently left the sport. Macklin wrote “thoughts??” into the chat and watched the screen for eleven seconds. Nobody was typing. Nobody had been typing in eight months. Kenji’s name was still in the chat.
From downstairs, Meredith Macklin, 36, a hospital systems administrator who had not asked to be part of any of this, called up and inquired whether her husband was coming down to breakfast. He was not. He was cross-referencing the pearl weave against the coach’s gi in what he described to himself as a systems audit.
By minute thirty-one, Macklin had removed all four gis from the closet and laid them across the guest bed in the formation of a compass rose, orienting each lapel toward a cardinal direction. He climbed onto a stepstool and photographed the arrangement from above, attempting to determine, from a bird’s-eye perspective, which gi was speaking to him the loudest. None of them were speaking to him. They were four black kimonos lying on a bed in a spare bedroom that still had an IKEA tag taped to the underside of the frame. Macklin briefly understood this, then stopped understanding it.
By minute thirty-nine he had invented a new framework called “patch tax,” which weighted each gi by the total volume of institutional signage currently stitched to its shoulders. The coach’s gi scored a 2 — “simple, disciplined, no patch noise.” The pearl weave scored a 9, which Macklin described aloud as “says I won something, but which something? Does the bleacher know?” He was now speaking to the empty room in complete sentences. Meredith had stopped calling up the stairs.
At minute forty-four, Macklin made a horrifying discovery. The ceremonial gi — cream-trimmed, never worn, reserved by him, privately, for an unspecified future ceremony he had not yet been invited to — bore a faint brown crescent on the inner collar, approximately the size and shape of a thumbprint. Coffee. He had, at some point, in some moment his memory refused to produce, spilled coffee on a gi he had never once worn. He sat down on the edge of the bed and did not move for three minutes.
At minute forty-seven, Alden Macklin, brown belt, CPA, father of Hazel, husband of Meredith, four-time medalist in divisions of fewer than four people, looked at the four black gis arranged in a compass rose on his guest bed and arrived at the following conclusion: wearing any gi at all to watch a children’s jiu-jitsu class from a set of bleachers was, upon reflection, insane.
He arrived at Glenshire Jiu-Jitsu at 10:42 AM wearing a gray zip-up hoodie and a pair of track pants he had never trained in. Hazel’s class had started at 10:15. She did not notice that he was late. She did not notice that he was there. She was learning how to perform a single-leg takedown on a boy named Preston whose gi did not fit him properly, and it was the best thing her father had ever seen.
On the drive home, Hazel asked from the backseat if he was going to stay for the adults class at 11:30. Professor Vance taught on Saturdays. The room would be full. Several people would look up from their warm-ups to see what Alden Macklin, brown belt, four-year stripe, was wearing.
“No,” he said.
He did not bring a gi.