When I was in high school, I watched four of my friends lose their minds over a single missed opportunity—a sunburned Greek tragedy in cutoffs and tube socks. Their decline began on a blistering afternoon in 1979, somewhere along the Grapevine—the steep, snaking pass that connects Northern and Southern California, or, in their case, paradise and perdition.
The boys were headed south from the Bay Area to see the Dodgers in the playoffs, crammed in a sun-faded Chevy with the naïve optimism only teenage men possess. As they crested the Grapevine, they saw it: an orange, rust-flaked Volkswagen van steaming on the shoulder like a dying dragon. Around it stood four women—tanned, sweat-slick, and shimmering with mischief—Grateful Dead followers on their pilgrimage from chaos to Santa Barbara.
The women waved tie-dye bikini tops like tribal flags and laughed with the wild, lawless energy of people who had never read a syllabus. My friends, being equal parts chivalrous and hormonally desperate, pulled over to help. They poured water into the boiling radiator, wiped their hands on their jeans, and were rewarded with radiant gratitude.
“Come to the Summer Solstice Festival in Santa Barbara,” one of the Deadheads said, her voice a siren’s hum. “We’ll dance all night.”
But my friends were men of purpose—or so they claimed. They had Dodgers tickets. Commitments. Civic duty. They politely declined, waved farewell, and continued toward Los Angeles, confident they’d made the adult decision.
By the time they returned north, they were inconsolable.
For the rest of high school, they fought bitterly over who had ruined their collective destiny. One blamed the driver for not turning around. Another accused the navigator of cowardice. They’d get drunk and rant about the “Lost Women of the Grapevine,” pounding tables and recounting their tragedy like war veterans mourning the platoon they never joined.
One night, two of them came to blows at a house party, fists flying over the ghosts of imaginary Deadheads. I stepped in to break it up, only to catch a stray right hook to the temple.
That night, nursing my swelling head with a washcloth, I turned to Master Po for enlightenment.
“Master,” I asked, “how can one brief encounter with beautiful women destroy the minds of four men?”
“Ah,” he said, “let this be your lesson, Grasshopper. The past is a seductive liar. When you cling to it, you feed it power it does not deserve. You transform an ordinary disappointment into a mythological Eden from which you’ve been exiled. And soon, you worship the loss itself.”
He stroked his beard and added, “Living in the past is the mother of depression. Living in the future is the mother of anxiety. Living in the present, Grasshopper, is the mother of peace.”
“But Master,” I said, “what if the past is more exciting than the present? And what if I enjoy being miserable?”
“That is two questions,” he said.
“Sorry, Master.”
He nodded. “The past only seems exciting because you edit it like a movie trailer. You cut out the boredom, the sweat, the traffic, and the bad sandwiches. What remains is illusion—a highlight reel of what never truly was.”
I pressed on. “But why do I sometimes poke at my pain—like pressing a sore tooth—just to feel alive?”
“You are impoverished,” said Po.
“I feel empty.”
“Then you are filled,” he replied. “The Way does not strive, yet it overcomes. You are striving too hard, Grasshopper. Let go of the Grapevine.”
I tried, but some part of me still saw my four friends stranded forever on that California pass, staring down the road where the van once shimmered in the heat—a mirage of desire that would haunt them long after their teenage tan lines had faded.
Cinemorphosis 
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