Mogwai. Officially.

What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet..." — William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

July 10, 2026

I struggle to add anything that hasn't already been succinctly captured by the newspaper announcement above, so let me, instead, tell you about Mogwai.

A long time ago, on the cusp of my teens, I found (or purchased, I do not remember) a book titled "GREMLINS". It looked exactly like this:

I never saw the actual Spielberg movie, but I did become obsessed with this book. Specifically, I became obsessed with the mogwai.

It was close to Christmas. There was a father (a traveling salesman, I think), who was fretting over getting his boy the perfect gift. He felt terrible for being away all the time, you see, and wanted to distill that contriteness into a gift so remarkable his son would be reminded that his old man loved him.

So he walked into a Chinese curio shop and saw a mogwai named Gizmo.

The mogwai named Gizmo. Look at his face! This was peak merch back in the day.

Ugh, just the perfect gift. The father pleaded with the owner, who refused to sell the mogwai. Too dangerous, or whatever.

Anyway, the owner's grandson discreetly sold the mogwai to the salesman, and warned him that there are three critical rules for handling a mogwai.

The rules:

Never feed them after midnight (which I thought was funny, because no matter what time it is, it is always past midnight),
Do not expose them to sunlight, and
Do not let water touch their bodies.

Naturally (for the sake of the plot), Billy broke all three rules. The first rule (not to feed a mogwai past midnight) was the worst one to break, and it happened further into the story.

The following chapter in this novel was one page long, and it had the words: "Billy forgot". That was the entirety of the chapter — to capture the gravitas of what Billy had done. He'd forgotten to tell someone not to feed a mogwai past midnight, which meant... the mogwai turned into the infamous GREMLIN.

This book stuck with me. I must have read it a thousand times. Let me attempt to explain why, retroactively creating compelling logic my younger mind could not have contrived:

Gizmo the mogwai was the reified form of an apology (from father to son). It was also, as you may agree, a stand-in for the father, as in: "I will continue to be away, son, but Gizmo—cute, cuddly Gizmo—is my avatar, a reminder that I am always here".

Since then, Mogwai has probably played the role of an abstraction for me. In times when I needed the wisdom and perspective of a parent-like entity, I would recast myself as a mogwai (barely competent at the role of self-management, but nevertheless better than nothing). This made me attain independence early (age fifteen, by my count), and also made me increasingly less afraid to navigate reality.

It would be years before I learned this was a well-known psych model, referred to as IFS, or "Internal Family Systems Model".

I am merely making official what was always true: Mogwai was, and is, my father.

So what happens to Justin Ikhide Irabor?

"He's dead."
— J.I.M