My junior year of high school was my “Deacon Blues” year. I wore it like a religious creed. The song played, and I nodded along as if I’d been admitted to some nocturnal order of the misunderstood. Only decades later did I realize the joke was on me. The narrator isn’t a tragic hero; he’s a suburban man with a good stereo and a better imagination, building a flattering alternate reality to anesthetize his boredom. What I mistook for transcendence was mood lighting. I wasn’t ascending; I was dimming the room.
Satire thrives on mockery because it exposes the soft spots we’d rather not touch. But self-mockery can metastasize. It can turn your life into a punchline so comprehensive that nothing is left standing—not even the truth that your choices matter. High stakes persist whether you acknowledge them or not. We are, to put it plainly, creatures who want more than a clever story about ourselves. We want something that holds when the music stops.
For that, I have to go back a year. I was a sophomore who encountered “Zoom,” written by Lionel Richie and Ronald LaPread of The Commodores. The song arrived like a quiet command. You can hear the Gospel in its bones—the upward pull, the refusal to collapse into self. The voice in “Zoom” isn’t asking for a better seat at the table; it’s asking for the table to be remade so everyone can eat. It’s not self-improvement. It’s a prayer for shared elevation.
I remember where I was when it came on—KSFX, KSOL—the speakers on my Realistic Radio Shack clock radio doing their best, the world suddenly holding its breath. I stopped. Not figuratively. I stopped. The song spoke to my heart: Be better. Not for your reputation, not for your résumé—for people. That’s a different order of demand.
That same year, “Voyage to Atlantis” by The Isley Brothers performed a similar operation. It promised return—home not as geography but as fidelity, as a place you carry and keep. Between those two songs was a paradox I could feel even if I couldn’t name it: you root yourself in a clean intention, and from that grounding you rise. No theatrics required. No persona. Just alignment.
Listening to them felt like church without the building. Something gathered. Something clarified. You left with less noise and more direction.
What is music, after all, if not the part of life that refuses translation and still manages to tell the truth?
Which brings me to an embarrassment I’ll risk anyway: in watch circles, we talk about a “grail” watch that will “sing” on the wrist. It’s a ridiculous phrase—until it isn’t. Because this hulking slab of resin I’m wearing—the G-Shock Frogman—does something adjacent to that metaphor. It doesn’t produce music. It points to it. It behaves like a reference, a small, stubborn reminder that there is a cleaner version of me available if I’d like to stop auditioning and start choosing.
The Frogman is not an upgrade. It’s an accusation shaped like a tool. It suggests a man with a steadier pulse, a man less interested in narrating his life and more interested in living it. A man who could hear “Zoom” and “Voyage to Atlantis” and respond the way that sophomore did—by stopping, by listening, by letting the moment ask something of him.
I don’t need to recover youth. I need to recover that pause—the willingness to be addressed by something better and not immediately turn it into a story about myself.
The songs didn’t change. I did.
The question is whether I can change back.
Cinemorphosis 
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