Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    Growing old and planning your retirement provide a cruel education in the merciless nature of bureaucracy. You spend forty years imagining retirement as an escape from work, only to discover that before you’re permitted to stop working, you must complete an enormous amount of additional work.

    Most of it involves paperwork.

    Except we don’t call it paperwork anymore because there is no paper. Paper would be too easy. Paper sits obediently on a table. You can hold it in your hands, read it, scribble notes in the margins, and return to page one whenever you get confused. Modern bureaucracy has improved upon this primitive system by replacing paper with websites, portals, passwords, security questions, verification codes, drop-down menus, disappearing screens, and online forms that occasionally erase everything you’ve entered because you spent too long looking for your Social Security number.

    This technological revolution arrives at precisely the right moment in your life: when your eyes are tired, your patience is gone, and your facility with navigating government websites is approaching that of a manatee attempting to operate an ATM.

    No matter. The gauntlet begins.

    First, Medicare.

    You arrive at the Medicare website expecting to encounter something resembling a large button that says START HERE.

    Instead, you are greeted by photographs of radiant senior citizens experiencing levels of happiness rarely observed outside pharmaceutical advertisements. Silver-haired couples stroll along beaches. Healthy retirees embrace grandchildren. Everyone appears recently moisturized. Nobody is squinting at a computer monitor wondering whether he needs to fill out Form B.

    Meanwhile, the website offers you an enormous quantity of information. There are links explaining insurance packages. Links answering frequently asked questions. Links explaining other links. You can learn almost anything you want about Medicare except the answer to the one primitive question pounding inside your skull:

    Where the hell do I start?

    You become a rat in a digital maze.

    Perhaps you need Form B. Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you need it eventually but not now. Perhaps filling it out now will create a problem later. Make sure you have all your information handy, although you’re not entirely sure what “all your information” means until the website requests a number you’ve never heard of that apparently governs your destiny.

    There is no benevolent angel sitting beside you saying, “You’re doing fine. Click that button.”

    There is just you, growing visibly older in the blue light of your monitor while a seventy-two-year-old stock-photo model smiles at you from a sailboat.

    I call this Portal Despair: the distinctive psychological state produced by staring at a beautifully designed institutional website containing enormous quantities of information but no obvious answer to the question, Where do I start?

    The happier the people on the website appear, the worse Portal Despair becomes.

    Once Medicare has softened you up, you move on to CalPERS and CalSTRS.

    Years ago, before our Human Resources coordinator retired during COVID, she warned me that there was some peculiar rule governing the timing of retirement when CalPERS and CalSTRS are involved. The dates have to align correctly. There is a sequence. Something has to happen before something else happens.

    I don’t remember the details.

    I only remember receiving the distinct impression that if I retire on the wrong Tuesday, my pension will turn into a pumpkin.

    So now I must contact the new HR person and ask her to reconstruct this ancient knowledge. My goal is to get CalPERS and CalSTRS working together in perfect harmony so that my retirement proceeds like a smooth stone skipping across a still lake.

    I fully expect instead to discover that one agency requires a document from the other agency, which cannot produce that document until the first agency verifies that I have requested it.

    Then comes health insurance.

    Because I’m leaving my employer’s health plan and moving onto my wife’s, her employer requires official documentation showing that she has “lost coverage.”

    Lost coverage.

    The phrase sounds apocalyptic. It suggests that our family has been cast onto the American healthcare tundra wearing burlap sacks and searching the horizon for a free clinic.

    We haven’t lost anything. We’re changing insurance.

    But the bureaucracy has declared this a loss, and therefore someone must produce an official document certifying the loss. My wife will then present this sacred parchment to her employer, which will presumably inspect the seal, consult the oracle, and permit us to purchase health insurance through her job.

    Then we have to investigate dental and vision coverage. My wife reports that the dental insurance offered through her employer sucks, a technical assessment I trust completely. Perhaps we should continue purchasing dental and vision coverage through my former employer. Perhaps not.

    And although her job will keep us with Kaiser, we don’t yet know exactly what version of Kaiser we’re getting. Perhaps it will be essentially the same. Perhaps it will be Kaiser Lite, with higher copays and subtle degradations that reveal themselves only after you’re sitting in an examination room wearing a paper gown.

    You won’t know until you’re inside the belly of the beast.

    Good luck.

    Then there’s the pension.

    A CalSTRS representative tells you the amount you’ll receive every month, and for approximately eleven seconds you feel rich.

    Do not enjoy those eleven seconds.

    That number is gross income.

    Taxes still exist.

    The government, having spent decades taxing your salary, does not shake your hand at retirement and say, “You’ve done enough. Keep the rest.”

    So when the pension representative gives you that beautiful monthly number, mentally shrink it immediately. Do not start pricing Viking cruises. Do not buy a Porsche. Do not inform your children that Daddy has entered the leisure class.

    You’re not rich.

    You’re simply receiving taxable income while wearing sweatpants.

    By this point you begin to believe you’re making progress. You’ve completed several forms. You’ve spoken to HR. You’ve created accounts. You’ve written down passwords. Somewhere in the distance, you think you can see light.

    You are delusional.

    There are more forms.

    Forms beget forms.

    One form requires an attachment. The attachment requires certification. The certification requires proof. The proof must come from another institution, which requires you to complete another form before it will provide the proof required by the first form.

    Eventually there are subforms attached to larger forms and subforms attached to the subforms. You begin with the innocent objective of changing your health insurance and find yourself three weeks later downloading a PDF called “Verification of Qualifying Event Supporting Documentation Supplemental Certification.”

    Chefs have an expression for reaching this condition:

    You’re in the weeds.

    I prefer Form Metastasis: the tendency of one bureaucratic form to generate additional forms, certifications, attachments, proofs, and follow-up requests. Form A requires Form B. Form B requires verification from Institution C. Institution C cannot provide verification until Institution D processes Form E.

    Nobody designed the entire system.

    That’s what makes it terrifying.

    I could have retired three years ago.

    I didn’t.

    You want to know one reason?

    I hate paperwork.

    I hate paperwork with such intensity that I would rather get dressed in the morning, drive to work, attend tedious meetings, answer emails, listen to administrators explain exciting new initiatives, and grade thousands of student assignments every year than confront the administrative machinery required to stop doing those things.

    Work, at least, I understand.

    Retirement requires training.

    But I’ve finally made the decision. I’ll be sixty-five in a couple of months. I’m retiring.

    Except “retiring” now strikes me as a fraudulent description of what is happening.

    I’m not retiring.

    I’ve changed jobs.

    I used to be a college instructor. Now I am an unpaid administrative assistant assigned exclusively to the Jeffrey McMahon account.

    My responsibilities include Medicare enrollment, pension coordination, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, document retrieval, password management, deadline compliance, and maintaining good standing with an assortment of institutions that possess the power to interfere with my money or healthcare.

    There will be no salary.

    There will be no vacation.

    There will be no administrative assistant because I am the administrative assistant.

    This is Bureaucratic Retirement Capture: the process by which institutions ostensibly designed to facilitate your retirement instead colonize your time and attention. You leave your employer expecting liberation from schedules and administrative obligations, only to discover that Medicare, pension systems, insurance companies, tax agencies, and benefits departments have inherited you.

    Which brings me to the cruelest discovery of all.

    The Retirement Paradox.

    Leaving the workforce requires taking on another job: the administration of leaving the workforce.

    Instead of meetings and grading, you get Medicare enrollment, CalSTRS, CalPERS, HR documentation, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, deadlines, passwords, portals, forms, subforms, supplemental forms, and forms verifying that you have completed other forms.

    For decades, I imagined retirement as a great exhalation. I would finish my final semester, turn in my grades, clean out my office, drive home, and feel the enormous machinery of employment finally release me.

    Instead, the machinery has merely transferred me to another department.

    How stupid am I?

    Why didn’t I just keep working?

    It would have been so much easier.

  • The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    Six months ago, I bought a G-Shock GW-6900 and quickly convinced myself that it wasn’t for me. I already owned two G-Shocks—the Frogman and the Rescue—and two, I decided, were enough. I had achieved that mythical state every watch collector claims to desire and almost none can tolerate: contentment.

    There was also the 6900 strap. It was just a little too short. Once I buckled the watch around my wrist, I had only two holes remaining. The watch fit perfectly well, but in the fevered jurisprudence of watch collecting, two unused holes constituted evidence for the prosecution.

    So I put the 6900 back in its box, requested a return from Amazon, drove to my local UPS Store, and rid myself of the offending object within ten minutes. I felt enormous relief. Order had been restored. I owned exactly two G-Shocks. The collection was disciplined, coherent, complete.

    Naturally, I then bought three more.

    Over the ensuing months, the Mudman GW-9500 arrived, followed by the Mudman G-9300 and the King GXW-56. My austere two-watch collection had swollen to five, and I happily rotated among them while apparently forgetting the solemn principles of restraint that had compelled me to return the 6900.

    Then, about a month ago, the 6900 began haunting me.

    I started looking at photographs. I read discussions. I watched videos. I studied that strange face with its three circular indicators staring back at me like the instrument panel of a tiny Cold War submarine. Enthusiasts call the GW-6900 “The Three-Eyed Monster,” which is a perfectly good nickname. I prefer my own: the Triclops.

    Soon the Triclops was everywhere. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The watch I had dispatched to UPS with the efficiency of a man returning a defective toaster had somehow acquired an aura in its absence.

    So I bought it again.

    It is now in transit and should arrive in a few days.

    I don’t remember whether the first GW-6900 I owned was the older version with the greenish electroluminescent backlight. I do know that the incoming watch is the newer GW-6900U-1, with its bright white LED. More important, I am strangely confident that this time I am going to connect with it.

    I’ve experienced this phenomenon before: a watch leaves me cold the first time and captivates me later, even though the watch itself has barely changed. Other collectors have experienced it too. It’s tempting to dismiss the whole business as fickleness. We buy something, reject it, romanticize it, and buy it again. From the outside, this resembles the behavior of someone who should have his credit card frozen inside a block of ice.

    But I think something more interesting is going on.

    Collectors like to imagine that our reactions reside entirely in the objects themselves. A watch either speaks to us or it doesn’t. The dimensions are right or wrong. The dial works or it doesn’t. The strap fits or it doesn’t. We behave as if we were laboratory instruments registering objective measurements.

    We’re not.

    Timing matters. Mood matters. The condition of the existing collection matters. Most of all, our willingness to admit another object into that collection matters. Sometimes we encounter the right watch at the wrong time.

    This is what I call the Acquisition Readiness Principle: the psychological state in which a collector becomes genuinely receptive to incorporating a new object into an established collection.

    The first time the GW-6900 arrived, I was defending the sufficiency of my Frogman and Rescue. I wanted a small collection. I was guarding my wrist rotation like a suburban homeowner defending his property line. The 6900 wasn’t merely another watch; it was an intruder. Its slightly short strap gave me the excuse I needed to evict it.

    Six months later, the watch is essentially the same. I am not.

    Now there is a vacancy waiting for the Triclops.

    This raises an obvious question: How can anyone possibly be “not ready” for a wristwatch?

    The question itself exposes the magnificent lunacy of the hobby. We don’t merely buy watches. We audition them. We assign them roles. We decide whether they overlap with existing members of the collection. We worry about whether they will receive enough wrist time. We speak of watches “connecting” with us, as though a 50-millimeter lump of resin containing a quartz module were an emotionally complicated rescue dog.

    A new watch therefore requires a certain receiving mode. We have to lower the drawbridge. We have to stop protecting the existing collection long enough to imagine another member belonging there. The object has not changed. The collector has.

    Does this sound nuts?

    Of course it does.

    The most honest watch enthusiasts have long since abandoned the pretense that this is an entirely rational hobby. But perhaps the watches aren’t making us crazy. We’re doing that perfectly well ourselves. We take harmless little machines designed to tell us the time and burden them with identity, nostalgia, status, memory, personality, tribal affiliation, and elaborate theories of Acquisition Readiness.

    Then we give the hobby a bad name.

    It’s one of the things we’re most proud of.

  • How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    In 1984, when I was in college, I was knocked sideways by A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s great comic novel about the picaresque adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a bloated, know-it-all misanthrope who regards nearly every human being he encounters as evidence of civilization’s decline. The title comes from Jonathan Swift: “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

    I never considered myself a genius, but the second half of Swift’s proposition appealed to me enormously. Perhaps the world really was a confederacy of dolts. Some of my favorite comedians seemed to agree. George Carlin surveyed humanity and found an inexhaustible supply of idiots. David Letterman arrived on television with the weary expression of a man who had already heard your story and regretted it. His grumpy deadpan seemed perfectly suited to the beginning of a new decade. Disco was departing. Good riddance. Disco was for dunces. Deadpan irony was for people who understood things.

    At least that was how I saw it.

    Misanthropy struck me as a form of intellectual street cred. If you were disgusted with humanity, presumably you had seen through it. Optimists were rubes; cynics had X-ray vision. I imagined becoming a comic novelist with a misanthropic edge, skewering the fools who wandered into my field of vision.

    Unfortunately, contempt is a lousy substitute for insight.

    My fictional characters tended to be flat and two-dimensional because I had already convicted them before they entered the story. They existed to be mocked, not understood. The expression “punching down” wasn’t part of the cultural vocabulary of the 1980s, but I would have benefited enormously from understanding the concept. Satire without empathy can quickly deteriorate into a bully standing over his victims and congratulating himself on his wit.

    Then, through a sequence of accidents that hardly resembled career planning, I stumbled into teaching college writing at twenty-four. In 1987, a friend’s father needed instructors for a Merritt College bridge program at Skyline High School and couldn’t find enough people to teach the classes. I agreed to help.

    That temporary job lasted thirty-nine years.

    I taught for two years in the Bay Area, seven in Bakersfield, and thirty in Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way, nearly 10,000 students passed through my classrooms.

    They ruined my misanthropy.

    It is difficult to maintain a sweeping contempt for humanity when humanity keeps arriving in your classroom every semester with names, families, jokes, ambitions, insecurities, talents, disasters, and complicated histories. My students were too intelligent, contradictory, funny, wounded, resilient, exasperating, and generous to fit inside the crude categories of my younger imagination. The closer I looked at people, the less useful my caricatures became.

    Perhaps I am biased. An absurdly high percentage of my students treated me with kindness. They forgave me when I arrived with mediocre material and rewarded me extravagantly when I brought something worthwhile. On good days, the room crackled. Students argued, laughed, challenged me, and occasionally produced that rare classroom electricity when everyone seemed to understand that something interesting was happening.

    They also discovered that my tortured soul was an excellent source of entertainment.

    The more lugubrious I became, the funnier they found me. I could enter class burdened by some private catastrophe, convinced that existence was a bleak corridor leading toward oblivion, and within minutes twenty-five students would be laughing at me. I found this strangely therapeutic. If my despair could become somebody else’s comedy, perhaps despair wasn’t quite as formidable as I imagined. My students taught me, among other things, not to take my suffering entirely at face value.

    My empathy deepened again in 2010 when I became the father of twins. Parenthood rearranged my vision. Suddenly, when a student struggled, I could imagine one of my daughters sitting in that chair. The exhausted student, the confused student, the student who had fallen behind and was embarrassed to ask for help—each became somebody’s child in a way I had understood intellectually but not viscerally.

    I wish I had possessed that parent-vision when I began teaching. It would have made me a better instructor from the first day. I undoubtedly mistook confusion for laziness, immaturity for indifference, and struggle for lack of character more often than I would like to remember. I cannot travel backward and repair those failures. I can only recognize them.

    Now I am retiring.

    I will miss my students—all 10,000 of them, give or take a few hundred victims of my arithmetic. The overwhelming majority were kind, intelligent, curious, and hungry for the same things human beings have always wanted: connection, dignity, purpose, and some reasonable measure of happiness.

    I ask their forgiveness for the days when my selfish, surly self commandeered the classroom. And I thank them for the laughter, generosity, and encouragement they gave me on the days when my better self managed to show up.

    One thing I know after nearly forty years: sustained contact with actual human beings makes serious misanthropy difficult. You can despise “people” in the abstract. It becomes harder when people acquire faces.

    I still love A Confederacy of Dunces. I still love Ignatius J. Reilly. But after spending four decades in classrooms, I suspect I understand something that Ignatius never did. The confederacy of dunces is largely an illusion produced by distance. Get close enough to the supposed dunces, listen to their stories, watch them struggle, and allow them to laugh at you for a few decades, and the confederacy begins to dissolve.

    Had Ignatius J. Reilly been sentenced to forty years of teaching college writing, even he might have been cured.

    Although I suspect his student evaluations would have been spectacular.

  • My Thoughts and Grading Policy Regarding Students Using Generative AI

    My Thoughts and Grading Policy Regarding Students Using Generative AI

    I know too many professionals and academics—including myself—who use generative AI as a writing and thinking tool for me to tell students that AI is somehow forbidden in my class. Apart from being virtually impossible to enforce, such a prohibition would be the apotheosis of hypocrisy.

    Instead, I want to distinguish between effective and ineffective uses of generative AI and explain how I grade assignments that amount to AI slop: an effluvium of smooth, competent-sounding prose that says remarkably little, relies on hackneyed AI expressions, and substitutes verbal polish for actual analysis.

    I think of generative AI as a performance-enhancing drug and the AI user as a bodybuilder. A natural bodybuilder has difficulty competing against athletes using PEDs because the drugs provide enormous advantages in size, strength, muscularity, and recovery. Generative AI creates a similar imbalance. A student or professional who completely goes off the AI grid may struggle to match the speed, volume, and polish of someone who knows how to use these tools effectively.

    But here’s the rub: the bodybuilder still has to get in his reps. He has to drag himself into the gym, lift the weights, eat properly, consume enough protein, and hit his macros. The drugs cannot perform the workout for him.

    Imagine instead someone sprawled on the couch all day watching Netflix, surviving on Hot Pockets, Doritos, and chocolate pudding, while taking PEDs. He will not magically wake up looking like Mr. Olympia. He will remain a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it.

    Writers are no different. They have to get in their reps and hit their intellectual macros. That means doing the heavy lifting: reading carefully, thinking deeply, developing arguments, gathering evidence, writing drafts, confronting counterarguments, and rewriting weak passages. Once that work has been done, generative AI can become an extraordinarily useful tool for questioning ideas, identifying weaknesses, improving clarity, reorganizing material, editing prose, and assisting with revision.

    The problem begins when the student skips the intellectual workout and treats AI like a genie in a bottle: type in a prompt, rub the lamp, and watch a finished essay materialize.

    When I encounter an assignment like this, I am not interested in playing detective and arguing with a student about whether a particular sentence was generated by AI. I can simply grade the work in front of me. If the essay consists of generic observations, canned transitions, predictable arguments, inflated language, and smooth paragraphs without substantive analysis, then it fails to demonstrate the Student Learning Outcomes. It may be grammatically pristine and rhetorically lifeless at the same time.

    So my policy is simple: use generative AI, but do not outsource your education to it.

    Do the reading. Do the thinking. Develop the argument. Wrestle with the evidence. Write and rewrite. Then use AI where it can genuinely help you—as an editor, critic, brainstorming partner, and revision tool.

    AI can enhance the work. It cannot replace the work.

  • How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    As my writing students and I explore McKay Coppins’s “Sucker: My Years as a Degenerate Gambler,” I realize that sports betting does not lead to a single research question. It opens the door to at least four distinct arguments:

    1. Is sports betting designed to function as a harmless hobby, or does its business model depend on cultivating addictive behavior?
    2. Will the growing alliance between professional sports and gambling eventually produce enough corruption and suspicion to destroy fan trust—and, with it, the sports business model?
    3. Is sports betting so structurally tilted toward the house that a rational understanding of the system should compel us to avoid it altogether?
    4. What does the astonishing normalization of sports betting teach us about the dangers of the Overton Window?

    The fourth question interests me most. Sports betting was once associated with bookies, organized crime, ruined families, fixed games, and moral decay. Now the same basic enterprise arrives on a glowing smartphone, endorsed by Hall of Fame athletes, promoted during broadcasts, and wrapped in the cheerful language of bonus bets, profit boosts, and enhanced fan engagement. A platform capable of exploiting addiction, encouraging corruption, and monetizing human weakness has been repackaged as wholesome mainstream entertainment.

    That transformation may be the most disturbing lesson of the entire unit. The Overton Window shows us that social pathology does not have to defeat our moral resistance in a frontal assault. It can simply change its clothes. Give vice enough celebrity endorsements, corporate partnerships, technological convenience, and relentless exposure, and eventually we may stop seeing vice at all. If my students and I can watch that transformation occur without becoming deeply unsettled by it, then perhaps the normalization is already doing its work.

  • The Price of Admission

    The Price of Admission

    Walking to my office this morning on the first day of the semester, I came upon a sight I had never seen before. A line of students curled around the library lawn, hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the morning sun. I estimated more than four hundred.

    I stopped and asked one of the students what everyone was waiting for.

    “Laptop loaners,” he said.

    The answer caught me off guard. These weren’t students lining up for concert tickets, free food, or some first-week campus giveaway. They were waiting to borrow the basic piece of equipment required to function as a college student in 2026.

    I looked at the line again, and it suddenly appeared different. I had to assume that many of these students simply couldn’t afford to spend even $300 on a Chromebook. They needed a computer to write papers, access Canvas, conduct research, communicate with professors, and complete the daily machinery of college life, yet purchasing one was beyond what their budgets could absorb.

    The sight humbled me because I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about computers. I research processors, RAM, displays, keyboards, battery life, and the microscopic differences between one generation of hardware and the next. I can become genuinely excited about a new chip or convince myself that some incremental specification represents a meaningful technological event. Meanwhile, four hundred students were wrapped around the library lawn waiting to borrow a machine that could run a browser and open a word processor.

    Standing there, I also confronted the enormous difference between the economic world in which I attended college and the one my students inhabit. My generation had its struggles, and nostalgia can easily airbrush them away. But college was cheaper. Housing consumed a smaller portion of ordinary incomes. The job market was more forgiving of young people trying to find their footing. The financial penalties for making a few wrong turns were not always so severe.

    My students have entered adulthood in a different economy. Tuition, rent, food, transportation, and nearly every other necessity compete for money many of them simply don’t have. Even the laptop that college now quietly assumes every student owns can become a luxury.

    I continued walking toward my office, carrying an uncomfortable awareness of the distance between my college experience and theirs. I had always known that distance existed. But abstract knowledge is bloodless. It is one thing to read about economic inequality and another to see it materialize in front of you as four hundred young people standing in a line, waiting for a computer.

  • The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    At certain crosswalks, you press the button and wait for the light to change while a Martian voice begins issuing a command:

    Wait.

    A few seconds pass.

    Wait.

    Then again.

    Wait.

    I assume this auditory feature exists for visually impaired pedestrians who need a clear signal before crossing the street, an entirely sensible and necessary function. But apparently nobody designing these systems has discovered a way to make the human voice both audible and pleasant. The crosswalk voice doesn’t merely enter the ear. It arrives through the skull. Each Wait lands less like a word than the neurological thunderbolt that shoots through your body when your bare toe collides with the leg of a dresser.

    A couple of weeks ago, my family and I encountered these talking crosswalks while walking around downtown Carlsbad. At first, I merely disliked the voice. Then it began drilling into my brain. After sufficient exposure, something peculiar happened: my mind decided that the only way to survive the sound was to absorb it.

    I became a victim of Auditory Possession: the involuntary internalization of an irritating sound until you begin reproducing the very noise you desperately want to escape. The crosswalk doesn’t merely assault you with Wait. It enters the nervous system, establishes residency, and eventually begins broadcasting through your mouth. You haven’t imitated the machine. The machine has acquired a human speaker.

    So I began walking around downtown Carlsbad saying Wait in precisely the same robotic voice.

    Wait.

    My family asked me to stop.

    Wait.

    They asked again.

    Wait.

    At this point, they were presumably reconsidering the wisdom of bringing me on vacation. Perhaps I should have remained safely in Torrance, where I could work out, watch true-crime documentaries, and pose no threat to pedestrians.

    Instead, I wandered around a pleasant seaside town sounding like a malfunctioning piece of municipal infrastructure.

    By the end of our walks through Carlsbad, the only true crime anyone had actually witnessed was a grown man roaming the streets repeatedly barking Wait at strangers while his mortified family maintained a safe distance behind him.

  • Sovereignty Erosion

    Sovereignty Erosion

    Last night I dreamed I had houseguests when a group of strangers, apparently Russian, simply entered my home. They didn’t knock, sneak in, or offer an explanation. They arrived with the serene entitlement of people checking into an Airbnb for which I had somehow misplaced the reservation.

    Within minutes they had colonized the place. They used the kitchen. They occupied the bathroom. They took showers. One man wandered around completely naked, his body covered with tattoos, apparently having concluded that sufficient quantities of ink constituted clothing.

    I ordered them to leave.

    They regarded this request as mildly inconvenient.

    I had to tell them several times before they finally gathered themselves and departed. Even then, there was no embarrassment, apology, or acknowledgment that commandeering a stranger’s house might represent a minor breach of etiquette. They walked out with the composure of airline passengers who had accidentally taken the wrong seats and moved only after I produced the boarding passes.

    A few hours later, they came back.

    Apparently my eviction had been interpreted not as a permanent revocation of access but as a temporary scheduling conflict. Once again, I had to order them out. Once again, they eventually complied with the weary patience of people humoring an unreasonable homeowner.

    Then another stranger appeared: a woman in her fifties making watch videos in my atrium. She had apparently identified my home as an excellent location for horological content creation. I told her to leave. She ignored me. I told her again. Nothing. By the fifth command, I was yelling. She finally departed reluctantly, as though I were the lunatic disrupting her production schedule.

    At this point, my houseguests told me to call the police.

    I retreated into a dark room and tried to dial the number. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I pressed the wrong numbers. I tried again. Wrong again. The simple act of operating a telephone had become an advanced neurological procedure. I knew exactly what I needed to do, yet the message from my brain seemed to lose voltage somewhere on its journey to my hands.

    My body felt like an electric car limping along with one percent battery: the machinery intact, the destination known, the accelerator pressed, but almost no current left to move the thing.

    Then my hands stopped working altogether.

    That was when irritation gave way to helplessness and finally despair. The strangers were almost beside the point. The true nightmare was discovering that ownership itself had become meaningless. The house was mine. The doors were mine. The rooms were mine. I possessed every legitimate claim to decide who entered and who left, yet my authority seemed to exist only insofar as other people voluntarily recognized it.

    I had entered a state of Sovereignty Erosion: the nightmare sensation of watching authority over one’s own territory gradually dissolve. You own the house. You issue the commands. You possess every legal and moral claim to the space. Yet strangers stroll through your kitchen, shower in your bathroom, film watch videos in your atrium, and behave as though your sovereignty were merely a suggestion awaiting their approval.

    The most frightening intruders, apparently, don’t break down the door.

    They walk through it and wonder why you’re making such a fuss.

  • What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    I’ve been examining the effects of generative AI on my college writing students’ compositions over the last four years, and the best analogy I can come up with to get a handle on generative AI is to compare it to the way athletes use PEDs. 

    Athletes want an advantage, they want an edge, and they don’t want their opponents to have a better arsenal at their disposal, so they feel compelled to take PEDs. Same with college students who want the AI advantage. PEDs give athletes confidence that becomes a crutch. As AI does for students. 

    PEDs can give athletes a false sense of power, making them feel like superheroes. These PEDs give dope up their bodies until they don’t want to revert to the natural version of themselves. So does AI for busy students. Students with abysmal reading and writing skills can launder their writing through the AI machine and get a product that looks polished and articulate. This gives them a sense of cognitive doping. They become dependent on its sense of power. 

    Over time, PEDs make the body go flat because it acclimates to greater and greater doses. In this regard, AI makes the brain go flat after its users default to outsourcing their half-baked thoughts and letting AI generate full-blown, overwritten compositions. The disconnection between the writer and the output is soul-deadening. 

    Just as PEDs will never leave sports, AI will never leave writing or academia. Unless the data centers become too expensive to be sustained, the tool is here to stay. 

    The best thing I can do as a college writing instructor is craft assignments that defy AI use, such as field research, interviews, and personal reflections. I know full well that students will try to cheat the system and that I may have to have some blue book compositions to get a better handle on their writing, but we live in a high-performance world where often dangerous tools have to be harnessed. Otherwise, they will destroy us. 

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.