A torn rotator cuff turned me into a petulant adolescent in a sixty-four-year-old body. I stomped around the house muttering, “I don’t want to be sixty-four. I want to be sixteen.” My mind went backwards, desperate for the simpler theology of youth. I remembered the golden afternoon my father drove me to San Francisco to see the 1977 premiere of Pumping Iron. Arnold Schwarzenegger was more than a bodybuilder; he was a secular god of eternal optimism and immortal sinew, a bronze statue come alive to assure troubled boys like me that discipline and a protein shake could conquer the universe.
I inhaled that movie like scripture. Mike Mentzer became my Saint Paul; Arnold was my Messiah. I tanned religiously at the beach, layering banana-coconut oil on my chest like a fragrant magical elixir. After a workout, my pecs and biceps ballooned into two radiant promises of self-confidence. I would come home euphoric, still buzzing from the iron. My mother, who had only known me as a brooding kid with a permanent rain cloud, once looked at me and asked, “Did you fall in love? You look so happy.”
I had fallen in love—with iron. Pumping iron was my El Dorado, my personal Fountain of Youth. I borrowed my motto from a forgotten champion in Strength & Health: “As long as God gives me the power to breathe, I will work out to my dying days.”
But what happens when God stops lending you the breath you need? What happens when the garage—my sanctuary, my temple of kettlebells and dumbbells—becomes forbidden terrain? A torn rotator cuff is an eviction notice from paradise. Suddenly, I wasn’t a mystic of muscle—I was a sixty-four-year-old with a crippled shoulder. I pitied myself like a toddler denied candy.
The nostalgia was seductive. I wanted to crawl back through time to the late seventies and wrap myself in the cinematic glow of Pumping Iron. But nostalgia is the Devil’s lure. Lot’s Wife looked back once, and the universe crystallized her into a shaker of driveway salt. If I kept staring at the past I’d become the same: frozen, brittle, lifeless. Moving forward was no longer inspirational—it was survival.
Phil Stutz, in his book Lessons for Living, makes the same argument without biblical theatrics. To be fully alive, he says, you must move forward. His chapter “Just an Illusion” is a scalpel to the throat of consumer culture: reality is struggle, pain, and constant work. But the culture we live in insists that happiness is an on-demand product—a smoothie of ease, dopamine, and perpetual comfort. If you don’t have it, the problem is you.
This illusion is comically persistent. We spend our lives chasing it like gamblers who “almost won last time.” We train harder, earn more, buy more, upgrade constantly—believing that one more paycheck, one more gadget, one more dollar will finally transport us to the utopia of optimized living. It never arrives. We try again. The illusion endures.
The media parades its demigods to keep the fantasy alive. They are beautiful, wealthy, self-assured, and cosmically adored. Their bodies are perfect; their futures are certain; their Instagram bios glow like prophecy. They live outside Stutz’s five brutal facts of reality, and so they are not human—they are hallucinations.
And here I was, injured and marinating in the opposite myth: I am not the optimized self. My shoulder is a wreck. Therefore, I am a loser. The recovery will be incomplete. It will be permanent. I will never be whole again. Therefore, why go on?
This is the psychological trap of real injury. It does not simply hurt the body—it hacks the mind. It whispers doom so convincingly that you start to believe your life is a long prologue to defeat. My rotator cuff isn’t just testing the limits of my shoulder; it’s testing the limits of my mental durability. And some days, I fear I am failing the exam.
Cinemorphosis 
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