Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Soul Foreclosure

    Soul Foreclosure

    I recently dreamed that I committed an act of generosity so spectacularly foolish that it could only occur in a dream.

    A stranger down on his luck needed a car.

    I rented him mine.

    Not for an afternoon.

    For a week.

    When the week ended, the car was supposed to return.

    It didn’t.

    The rental agency proved as reachable as Atlantis. Every phone call dissolved into voicemail. Every inquiry disappeared beneath geological layers of paperwork. Somewhere inside an administrative labyrinth, my car had ceased being an automobile and become a bureaucratic rumor.

    At first I searched.

    Then I inquired.

    Eventually I surrendered.

    I began the strange process of constructing a life around the absence of something I had once considered indispensable.

    That was when the letters started arriving.

    Apparently my missing car had been abandoned in some restricted location, and because it remained there, I was responsible for an endless procession of fines. Whose property it occupied could not be determined. Every answer generated three new forms. Every digital trail branched into ten more dead ends. Bureaucracy reproduced like mold in a damp basement.

    No one could tell me where my car was.

    Everyone could tell me I owed more money.

    The dream became increasingly surreal.

    The car was gone.

    Yet it continued ruining my life.

    I woke with the uneasy conviction that the car had never been a car.

    It was something far more important.

    The dream reminded me of Thomas Dolby’s haunting 1982 song “One of Our Submarines,” in which loss lingers like an unanswered transmission from beneath dark water. Something precious has vanished. The silence becomes its own form of communication.

    That is exactly how the dream felt.

    Looking back, I think it illustrates what I call Soul Foreclosure: the unsettling conviction that something essential to one’s identity has quietly slipped beyond one’s reach, leaving behind an acute sense of incompleteness whose object cannot be clearly named.

    The dream never directly told me what had been lost.

    It merely allowed me to experience the loss.

    The missing car became the perfect symbol because a car is more than transportation. It carries us through the world. It grants direction, mobility, and agency. To lose it is to lose not merely a possession but the very instrument by which one moves toward the future.

    The bureaucratic nightmare only deepened the metaphor.

    The missing soul could not be recovered through diligence.

    Forms multiplied.

    Digital records contradicted one another.

    Every attempt at resolution produced another layer of confusion.

    The system itself had become the villain, a paper-pushing Minotaur guarding a labyrinth whose prize no one could locate.

    Perhaps that is why I woke with such melancholy.

    I wasn’t grieving a car.

    I was grieving the suspicion that somewhere along the journey through adulthood, paperwork, obligations, and the thousand administrative distractions of modern life, I had mislaid some vital part of myself.

    The truly unsettling part was not that I couldn’t find it.

    It was that life kept sending me invoices for its absence.

  • Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    I often think about something Samuel Wilson Fussell wrote in his memoir Muscle. At the height of his bodybuilding obsession, he resented the hours between one workout and the next. Training made life bearable. Everything else was simply waiting.

    I understand that feeling better than I wish I did.

    Every workout is Christmas morning.

    The days between workouts are spent writing exercise programs the way children write Christmas lists. Should I begin with kettlebell swings? Goblet squats? Romanian deadlifts? Reverse lunges? The anticipation becomes its own form of pleasure. I don’t merely look forward to training. I ache for it.

    I’m almost sixty-five, and my one-hour kettlebell sessions in the garage have become my transcendental escape. They feel less like exercise than boarding a flight to a Norwegian sweat lodge hidden deep within a pine forest. There, steam rises through the trees like incense. The air is clean. My mind finally grows quiet. For an hour, I take a vacation from my own neuroses.

    Age, however, imposes its own theology.

    Injury is now the unforgivable sin.

    At twenty-five, I could bully my body into submission. At sixty-five, my body is the senior partner in the relationship. It insists on negotiation. I have to lift lighter, move smarter, recover longer, yet still wander close enough to my physical limits that my muscles receive the message without my tendons filing a formal complaint. Fifty years under the barbell have taught me where that narrow path lies. The art is approaching the cliff without tumbling over it.

    I cannot exaggerate how much I treasure those three weekly workouts.

    Three.

    No more.

    My body has cast its vote.

    The remaining days belong to the Schwinn Airdyne.

    Calling it “cardio” feels charitable. The Airdyne is less Norwegian sweat lodge than medieval torture device, a machine apparently designed by monks who believed salvation was achieved only through prolonged respiratory distress. If I could replace every Airdyne session with kettlebells, I would do it tomorrow. Unfortunately, my joints have become more persuasive than my enthusiasm.

    Training, however, is only half the bargain.

    Then comes eating.

    Or, more precisely, eating the right amount.

    People often say, “Just eat healthy.”

    That’s charming.

    I can eat salmon, berries, oatmeal, Greek yogurt, beans, and vegetables until I resemble a prosperous bear preparing for hibernation. My problem has never been distinguishing broccoli from doughnuts. My problem is that my default setting is abundance.

    Real nutrition isn’t merely choosing healthy foods.

    It’s choosing enough healthy foods—and then stopping.

    That is where the real battle begins.

    Like most people, I live with a steady stream of food noise humming in the background of my consciousness. Portion control doesn’t silence that noise. It merely lowers the volume enough that I can hear myself think.

    Yesterday was a perfect example.

    Breakfast was oatmeal, protein powder, soy milk, and berries. Lunch was a shrimp-and-tuna salad. After my afternoon nap came plain Greek yogurt with mango. Dinner was salmon over a salad with white rice and garbanzo beans, followed by an apple.

    Roughly 2,400 calories.

    Objectively, I ate well.

    Subjectively, I was hungry for most of the day.

    Not Hungry with a capital H.

    Not the desperate hunger of starvation.

    Just small-h hunger.

    And over the years I have learned something the fitness influencers rarely advertise between shirtless selfies and discount codes:

    Successful weight management is usually hungrier than unsuccessful weight management.

    If you’re never a little hungry, there’s a good chance you’re eating enough to maintain exactly the body you already have.

    That isn’t a tragedy.

    It’s simply arithmetic.

    If I want the leaner, stronger body my kettlebell training is trying to build, then I must accept small-h hunger as the price of admission.

    So I make peace with it.

    Because somewhere in the distance, beyond another measured meal and another day of anticipation, I can already see that Norwegian sweat lodge rising from the forest. Steam drifts through the evergreens like a veil. The kettlebells are waiting.

    And, like Christmas morning, it will be worth every hour I spent waiting.

  • The Bad Apple Principle

    The Bad Apple Principle

    This morning, while swinging kettlebells in my garage, I listened to Larry Mantle’s AirTalk. The topic was dogs in restaurants, or more precisely, the small but talented minority of dog owners determined to convince the rest of us that civilization has been overrated.

    The complaints were familiar. Dogs licked strangers’ hands. Seemingly placid dogs lunged at smaller ones. Playful dogs darted under servers carrying trays of hot food. Then came the owners of “service dogs” who informed restaurant staff that the rules were for lesser mortals. Their pets, like minor royalty, possessed diplomatic immunity.

    I suspect more than ninety percent of dog owners are perfectly considerate. They keep their dogs under control, respect boundaries, and would never dream of turning a restaurant into an off-leash park.

    They are also irrelevant.

    Restaurants don’t write policies for them.

    They write policies for the other ten percent.

    That observation led me to a melancholy truth about institutions. Bureaucracies are not designed around our best behavior or even our typical behavior. They are designed around our worst behavior. They must assume that somewhere, someone will abuse every privilege, exploit every loophole, and confuse entitlement with freedom.

    That is The Bad Apple Principle: the misconduct of a small minority determines the restrictions imposed upon the responsible majority.

    The principle explains far more than dogs in restaurants. It explains airport security, locked toothpaste at CVS, liability waivers, plagiarism software, surveillance cameras, password requirements, and a thousand other bureaucratic irritations. Every rule we grumble about has a backstory, and that backstory almost always begins with someone who behaved just badly enough to make the rule inevitable.

    The idea reminded me of a book I devoured when I was ten: Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle. Ever since, I’ve had a weakness for elegant ideas distilled into memorable names.

    Naturally, I immediately imagined writing my own bestseller:

    The Bad Apple Principle: Why Good People Live by Bad People’s Rules.

    Then reality intruded.

    The entire thesis fits comfortably inside a single paragraph.

    Knowing the publishing industry, however, I’m sure a seasoned nonfiction writer could stretch it into fifteen brisk chapters, three airport interviews, a TED Talk, and a podcast tour. My contribution would simply be to wave wistfully from the sidelines, muttering, “Yes, but the title was mine.”

  • Waiting for My Redemptive Metamorphosis

    Waiting for My Redemptive Metamorphosis

    Perhaps every human being spends part of life waiting for a Great Mutation.

    Mine arrived on Saturday evenings in 1978.

    I sat alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.

    Dr. David Banner was gentle, decent, almost saintly. He endured humiliation with the patience of Job until one indignity too many awakened something volcanic inside him. Then came the transformation. Muscles swelled. Clothes exploded into ribbons. The ordinary man disappeared, replaced by a mythical giant who seemed immune to every weakness that had tormented him only moments before.

    The scenes overwhelmed me.

    I cried.

    Not because they frightened me.

    Because I wanted them to happen to me.

    I didn’t merely want to become stronger.

    I wanted to mutate.

    I wanted my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that weakness, humiliation, fear, and self-consciousness would vanish forever.

    Then the rage would subside.

    The green giant would disappear.

    David Banner would return.

    And every week came the scene that broke my heart.

    Banner walked alone down a deserted highway while Joe Harnell’s haunting piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” floated over the closing credits.

    That was the person I recognized.

    Not the Hulk.

    David Banner.

    The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.

    As a child, I mistook that longing for innocence.

    Only much later did I recognize the quiet narcissism hidden inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not simply misunderstood but somehow destined for an extraordinary transformation that would finally justify my existence. I wasn’t content to become a better version of myself. I wanted to become another kind of being altogether.

    Looking back, I can see that I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.

    Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for salvation.

    Lou Ferrigno represented one path.

    Jesus represented another.

    Both promised transformation.

    Both seemed capable of replacing the frightened, inadequate boy with someone purified, powerful, and whole.

    The muscles were never the destination.

    They were the sacrament.

    What I truly longed for was what I now call Redemptive Metamorphosis: the hope that one overwhelming transformation—physical, spiritual, artistic, or psychological—could permanently redeem a life by replacing the flawed self with a new and purified identity.

    For years I believed that transformation might begin with a barbell.

    Only later did I realize I had been searching for something far heavier to lift than iron.

  • The Words That Wouldn’t Stay on the Page

    The Words That Wouldn’t Stay on the Page

    No one ever spoke like Jesus.

    For Emmanuel Carrère, Christ’s uniqueness lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in an entire body of literature—he suggests that Jesus is a kind of human hapax: an unrepeatable event in the history of speech.

    Carrère returns to a brief scene in John’s Gospel. Temple guards are sent to arrest Jesus, yet they return empty-handed. Asked why they failed, they offer no legal argument or strategic excuse. They simply say:

    “No one ever spoke like this man.”

    For Carrère, those few words explain more than volumes of theology.

    Even if one discarded the miracle stories, doubted the Virgin Birth, questioned the Resurrection, and rejected every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers. Something unprecedented happened in the way Jesus spoke. His words possess what I would call Verbal Singularity: the condition in which a person’s manner of speaking is so original, arresting, and irreducible that it cannot be understood as merely another variation on earlier traditions.

    The New Testament captivates Carrère for another reason as well.

    Certain episodes possess the awkward texture of genuine memory.

    Who invents the anonymous young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after escaping from his linen garment? Carrère suspects the humiliated youth may even have been Mark himself, quietly preserving his own embarrassing cameo in the Gospel.

    Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into an overcrowded room before Jesus.

    These moments feel almost too peculiar to be fictional. They are oddly specific, narratively unnecessary, and gloriously resistant to polish. Their very strangeness gives them the texture of remembered experience rather than literary invention.

    The overt miracles leave Carrère far less persuaded.

    The Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other supernatural claims strike him as theological architecture constructed after the fact. They belong to the realm of belief, and Carrère cannot honestly persuade himself to believe them.

    Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

    Quite the opposite.

    He remains captivated by the singular force of Jesus’ language and by those small, seemingly incidental details that often feel more historically persuasive than the miracles themselves. The sayings continue to haunt him long after the doctrines have ceased to convince him.

    As a novelist, Carrère cannot help but marvel at the achievement.

    Every fiction writer dreams of creating a character who feels alive.

    Jesus does something far more astonishing.

    He steps off the page and into history, inspiring the largest and most enduring movement the world has ever known.

  • When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    Carrère is captivated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radical demands. The Gospel asks us to loosen our grip on the very things most people consider life’s greatest blessings. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Even love is transformed. Rather than reserving our deepest affections for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus appears to call us to a love that embraces every person without distinction.

    Here Carrère hesitates.

    Can love that is distributed equally still be called love?

    Or does it become so universal that it loses the very qualities that make it recognizably human?

    Perhaps love can become so perfect in theory that it dissolves in practice. I would call this Affection Dilution: the condition in which extending equal love to all people weakens the depth, intimacy, and preferential character that give love its meaning within families and close friendships. A love that refuses to distinguish between one’s child and a stranger risks becoming less an experience than an abstraction.

    Carrère contrasts this Christian vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness is not achieved by retreating from the world but by inhabiting it faithfully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in generosity, hospitality, longevity, and community. The covenant is lived not apart from earthly existence but within it. Family and flourishing are not distractions from God; they are among the ways God is honored.

    Christianity, by contrast, often appears suspicious of those very satisfactions. Earthly success fades. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Wealth becomes a spiritual hazard. This world is not the destination but the waiting room for another kingdom.

    Carrère never fully resolves the tension between these two visions of the good life.

    My sense is that his temperament inclines him toward the Jewish embrace of earthly flourishing. He admires Christianity’s uncompromising moral vision, but he cannot surrender the conviction that family, friendship, beauty, and the ordinary joys of this world are not obstacles to a meaningful life. They are, in many ways, the very substance of it.

  • Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    With fewer than one hundred pages remaining in The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère confesses that he has postponed writing about the apostle John. Of all the apostles, John is the one who unsettles him most.

    Luke is easy to love. He is congenial, eager to please, and recognizably human in his longing to belong. Paul can be abrasive, impulsive, and argumentative, yet he repeatedly exposes his own deepest flaws. His confessions make him accessible. We may not always like Paul, but we know him.

    John is another matter entirely.

    Carrère calls him “the most elusive, the most multifaceted.” He is the mysterious author behind the Fourth Gospel, the John who must be carefully distinguished from the many other Johns who populate the New Testament. This is John, the son of Zebedee.

    His story hardly begins with saintliness.

    Jesus nicknames him and his brother James Boanerges—”sons of thunder”—because both possess volcanic tempers. Luke recounts an episode in which John rebukes a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name simply because the man does not belong to their circle. His miracles, John believes, lack the proper credentials. Jesus immediately rebukes him: “Whoever is not against you is for you.”

    Later, after a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, James and John ask permission to call down fire from heaven upon its inhabitants. Once again Jesus rejects their thirst for vengeance. Mark and Luke also portray the brothers as transparently ambitious, maneuvering for the highest positions beside Christ’s throne. Pride and wrath seem to flow through them as naturally as blood.

    Yet by the time we reach the Fourth Gospel, something astonishing has happened.

    John has become “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

    As Jesus hangs dying upon the cross, it is John—not Peter, not James—whom he entrusts with the care of his mother.

    How does such a transformation occur?

    Carrère remains skeptical that the rough, impulsive fisherman could later have written the dazzling and feverish visions of Revelation. He imagines instead that decades of experience reshaped John into someone almost unrecognizable. The hotheaded youth slowly hardened into one of Christianity’s towering patriarchs.

    “The agitated youth has become a grand old man,” Carrère writes.

    Old age, however, did not soften his life.

    According to Tertullian, John survived torture and even a vat of boiling oil before eventually settling in Ephesus. Throughout those years he faithfully cared for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

    It is in Ephesus that Carrère notices the profound difference between Paul and John.

    Paul, despite his notorious moods, remained approachable. You could seek him out, argue with him, receive instruction from him, even challenge him. His authority emerged through conversation.

    John’s authority emerged through absence.

    Carrère imagines him as remote, solemn, and almost forbidding.

    “When you saw him,” he writes, “you bowed as if he were a supreme pontiff: intimidating, inaccessible, floating on a cloud of incense.”

    John rarely appeared in public. He and Mary lived almost entirely in seclusion. People spoke of them in lowered voices. Their home acquired the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Everything surrounding them seemed wrapped in silence, reverence, and mystery.

    John embodies what might be called Mystical Distance: the condition in which a person’s rarity, silence, and withdrawal from ordinary life increase rather than diminish his perceived authority, causing others to experience him less as a companion than as a sacred mystery.

    This aura leaves Carrère uneasy.

    John’s lofty remoteness creates distance rather than intimacy.

    Peter does exactly the opposite.

    Carrère feels instinctively at home with Peter because Peter is gloriously, painfully human. He boasts that he will never abandon Jesus. When the moment of testing arrives, he collapses almost immediately. Jesus predicts the betrayal in advance, yet Peter insists with magnificent confidence, “Never, Lord.”

    Then he denies him.

    Again.

    And again.

    Carrère recognizes himself in that pattern.

    Indeed, he recognizes all of us.

    We spend our lives making solemn promises to our highest ideals only to betray them when comfort, fear, vanity, or self-preservation begins whispering in our ears. Whether we call ourselves believers or skeptics, we reenact Peter’s failure thousands of times. Every day presents another opportunity to remain faithful, and every day we discover fresh ways to compromise.

    Oddly enough, this realization comforts Carrère.

    Christianity does not pretend that Peter’s failures never happened. It remembers every denial in painful detail. Yet it also refuses to let those betrayals become Peter’s final identity. The disciple who failed most publicly becomes the disciple entrusted with the Church.

    For Carrère, this reveals something extraordinary about Christianity.

    Its deepest appeal is not its miracles.

    Nor its theology.

    Nor even its promises of salvation.

    Its deepest appeal is its startling willingness to embrace people who repeatedly fail their own highest convictions.

    Carrère remains an agnostic.

    Yet this vision of grace continues to haunt him.

    He cannot entirely believe.

    But neither can he entirely leave.

    Perhaps that lingering attachment is itself evidence of what he calls Christianity’s “pure goodness”—a goodness powerful enough to bind even those who cannot confidently call themselves believers.

  • Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    My first memory of stepping onto a scale came in September of 1973. I was eleven years old, living in Nairobi, Kenya, recovering from the flu. I had barely eaten in several days and wondered whether I still weighed one hundred pounds. Curious, I wandered into my parents’ bathroom, climbed onto the scale, and watched the needle settle at ninety-seven.

    It seemed like a trivial moment.

    It wasn’t.

    Six months later my family returned to California, and I joined the Junior Olympic Weightlifting team at Earl Warren Junior High. From then on, weigh-ins became as routine as brushing my teeth. The scale was no longer a bathroom fixture. It became a judge.

    Within a year I was competing in the 148-pound class and, for a brief, glorious moment, ranked number one in the nation. Then I watched Pumping Iron.

    Like countless teenage boys before and after me, I fell under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spell. His charisma was so overwhelming that Olympic weightlifting suddenly seemed like yesterday’s religion. I converted to bodybuilding.

    From that point forward, every weigh-in became an attempt to measure myself against Arnold. He stood six-foot-two and weighed about 230 pounds. I was five-foot-eleven, so simple arithmetic convinced me that 220 pounds would make me his earthly cousin.

    By sixteen I weighed 195 pounds, naturally lean and deeply tanned. A classmate named Kay McQuade told me I looked perfect.

    Poor Kay.

    She didn’t realize she was competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Compliments bounced harmlessly off my ego because perfection had already been assigned another number.

    By eighteen I weighed 210 pounds and could bench press four hundred pounds. I assumed 220 was inevitable.

    It wasn’t.

    At nineteen I competed in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest and finished runner-up. Contest dieting stripped away fat—and a good deal of muscle—until I weighed a shredded 180 pounds. I had never taken steroids. I wasn’t enormous, but I looked the way I had imagined a bodybuilder should look.

    Soon afterward I retired from competition.

    I continued lifting because it steadied my mind as much as it strengthened my body, and I settled comfortably around 205 pounds.

    That became my dating weight.

    Then, at thirty-two, something quietly went wrong.

    My weight climbed to 235 pounds with astonishing speed. The muscles remained underneath, but they now seemed trapped beneath an expanding layer of softness. I no longer looked powerful. I looked inflated.

    I became obsessed.

    Calories.

    Body fat.

    Scales.

    Mirrors.

    Thinking about my weight occupied so much mental real estate that you would have assumed all that rumination would produce results.

    It didn’t.

    When I began dating the woman who would become my wife, romance arrived carrying a dessert menu. We celebrated by eating at restaurants, lingering over dinners, and ordering sweets with cheerful abandon. Love and indulgence turned out to be enthusiastic dinner companions.

    By 2003, one year into our marriage, I weighed 257 pounds.

    There is photographic evidence.

    Somewhere on my wife’s Mac sits an image of me sprawled across our living-room couch with a bowl of popcorn studded with chocolate kisses. Melted chocolate decorates my face like war paint from a battle I had decisively lost.

    My daughters love that photograph.

    They laugh every time they find it.

    I don’t.

    When I look at that man, I don’t merely see obesity. I see someone whose appetites have staged a successful coup. He looks less like a husband than a failed republic.

    The next two decades became an exhausting cycle of resurrection and relapse.

    In 2004 I embraced a reduced-carbohydrate diet and returned to a respectable 205 pounds.

    Mission accomplished.

    Then came complacency.

    Back to 235.

    Years later I repeated the feat.

    Back to 205.

    Back to 235.

    In 2017 I met a remarkably fit celebrity chef whose daughters attended school with mine. His example inspired me to cut calories again. By August of 2018 I weighed a lean 200 pounds.

    Victory.

    Temporary victory.

    The weight quietly returned, as faithful to me as an old friend who never forgets my address.

    The last photograph of myself that I genuinely admire was taken in Yosemite in 2019.

    My daughters and I are standing beneath El Capitan. I’m wearing a black T-shirt and a Seiko Monster with its coral-blue dial mounted on a hulking Super Engineer bracelet. My arms are muscular. My face is lean. My expression carries a quiet confidence that only hindsight fully appreciates.

    Now I look at that photograph the way one studies an old passport.

    Proof that I once lived there.

    Then came COVID.

    For eighteen months I shuffled around the house in pajamas, taught college classes online, and discovered that home workouts were no match for comfort eating. My weight drifted back toward 240.

    As I write this in August 2026, I weigh 230 pounds.

    It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen the 220s since 2019.

    Seven years.

    Seven years hovering above 230, occasionally visiting 240 whenever vacation invited me to overstay my welcome at the buffet.

    Last week my family returned from Carlsbad.

    I came home weighing 236.

    Three disciplined days later I was back to 230.

    I now eat roughly 2,400 calories and about 140 grams of protein each day. Three times a week I spend sixty-five minutes in my garage swinging kettlebells. Twice a week I climb aboard my Schwinn Airdyne and pedal as if someone were chasing me with bad bloodwork.

    I have little doubt that I will soon break below 230.

    The problem is that I have already celebrated this victory several times before.

    I suffer from what I call Resurrection Fatigue: the exhaustion that arises from repeatedly rebuilding oneself after failure while knowing that every previous resurrection eventually gave way to another collapse. Each new beginning carries not only hope but memory.

    Memory can be a cruel training partner.

    It whispers:

    “You’ve been here before.”

    On difficult days I hear another voice.

    “What’s the point? You’ll gain it back anyway. You’re almost sixty-five. Eat the pizza. Order the carrot cake. You’ve had a good run.”

    Ironically, many of my eighteen-year-old students agree with that sentiment.

    Recently I asked them whether they would rather live to sixty-five eating whatever they pleased or live to one hundred on an austere diet.

    Every single one chose sixty-five.

    I understood their answer.

    At eighteen, death is an abstraction.

    At sixty-five, it has a calendar.

    You no longer think in terms of someday.

    You think in terms of seasons remaining.

    You become strangely willing to fight for another episode.

    No one wants his television series cancelled.

    So I’m still fighting.

    I know every trap.

    I know every rationalization.

    I know exactly how easily discipline dissolves into complacency.

    But I also know what waits on the other side of twenty lost pounds.

    Less sleep apnea.

    Healthier cholesterol.

    Less pain in my ankles.

    More years with my wife.

    More years watching my daughters become the women they are meant to be.

    Getting down to 210 is no longer about vanity.

    It is about longevity.

    It is about mental health.

    It is about refusing to surrender while the fight is still mine to wage.

    The older I become, the less interested I am in looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    I would settle for looking like a man who refused to quit.

  • Why I Can’t Let Go of G-Shock’s Chromatic Certainty

    Why I Can’t Let Go of G-Shock’s Chromatic Certainty

    Before the technical specifications, before the discussion of movements, and before the endless debates about quartz versus mechanical watches, something unexpected happened inside my head.

    Six months ago I underwent what now strikes me as a genuine conversion. I almost stopped wearing analog mechanical watches and entered the world of G-Shock Multiband-6 digital watches. To my surprise, a number of my YouTube subscribers later described the very same journey. They had once adored mechanical watches, only to discover that after living with atomically synchronized digital time, they could never comfortably return.

    At first glance, the conversion makes little sense.

    A quality mechanical watch running five seconds fast per day is an astonishing feat of engineering. For every practical purpose, it tells the correct time. It gets you to appointments. It catches flights. It reminds you when class begins. Its error is so small that it almost never matters.

    And yet it no longer feels right.

    That is the mystery.

    Objectively, nothing important has changed. Subjectively, everything has.

    What changes is not the watch but the standard by which the watch is judged.

    Before owning a Multiband-6 G-Shock, my standard was simple: close enough.

    After Multiband-6, my standard became: exactly right.

    Every night my watch quietly synchronizes with the atomic clock. Every morning I wake knowing—not hoping, not estimating, not approximating—that the time on my wrist is identical to the world’s official standard. Five seconds fast, once a badge of mechanical excellence, now feels oddly imprecise.

    I call this Chronometric Certainty: the psychological satisfaction that arises from knowing one’s timepiece is synchronized with an external objective standard, eliminating even trivial uncertainty about its accuracy.

    The difference is not practical.

    It is psychological.

    An analog watch always feels like an interpretation of time. The hands point. They suggest. They approximate.

    A digital display does something altogether different.

    It declares.

    When my G-Shock reads 12:37:42, there is no interpretation. It does not hint at the time. It announces it with unapologetic authority. One of my favorite G-Shocks, the enormous King, reinforces this feeling. Its giant television-shaped display gives me the uncanny impression that I am not wearing a watch at all. It feels like I have strapped a broadcast monitor to my wrist, one that receives the world’s official time directly from reality itself.

    The mechanical watch, by contrast, quietly asks for my participation.

    I know it gains a few seconds.

    I occasionally reset it.

    I mentally compensate.

    None of this requires much effort, but each act reminds me that the watch is only approximating reality.

    The G-Shock abolishes those tiny negotiations.

    It simply tells the truth.

    This realization has convinced me that my conversion was never really about watches.

    It was about certainty.

  • The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    I’m almost sixty-five, yet some stubborn part of me remains a man-child, forever scanning the horizon for the next shiny object. There is always another watch to admire, another gadget to research, another purchase that whispers the ancient promise: This one will finally complete you.

    It never does.

    Still, I’m not without hope.

    Lurking beneath my acquisitive instincts is another impulse—one that longs for restraint, clean lines, quiet competence, and the elegant marriage of form and function. I have begun to suspect that growing up is not the abandonment of desire but its refinement.

    The first clue arrived six months ago when it came time to buy a personal desktop computer.

    The younger version of me might have ogled a hulking gaming tower glowing like a radioactive Christmas tree, festooned with RGB lights and fans loud enough to suggest an imminent liftoff. Instead, I bought a Mac Mini with Apple’s M4 chip and 32 gigabytes of RAM. It sits on my desk in near silence, doing exactly what I ask of it without begging for applause. It is the technological equivalent of a competent butler: always present, never theatrical.

    The pattern continued.

    When I think about replacing my car, I don’t fantasize about a German sports sedan or some aggressively sculpted SUV that looks eager to challenge strangers at stoplights. I picture a white or silver Honda Accord Hybrid EX-L.

    It’s boring.

    That is precisely the point.

    It is vanilla and Zen fused into one magnificent state of automotive enlightenment.

    Call it Zen-illa.

    The same instinct explains why I keep gravitating toward a ThinkPad T14 Gen 7. There is nothing glamorous about it. It resembles a laptop designed by accountants who moonlight as structural engineers. It doesn’t seduce you. It reassures you. It quietly announces, “I was built to work, not to pose.”

    Then there is the watch.

    If I buy another G-Shock, it will almost certainly be the GW-5000U—not because it is flashy, but because it isn’t. It is, in many ways, the highest expression of the original Square: understated, overengineered, supremely comfortable, and utterly indifferent to fashion. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be worn.

    These objects all embody what I call Instrumental Nobility: the quality of an object whose excellence derives from uncompromising function, durability, and thoughtful engineering rather than luxury, prestige, or visual spectacle.

    Increasingly, that is the beauty I find myself pursuing.

    Perhaps this is what maturity looks like.

    Not losing the desire to acquire, but acquiring things that quietly disappear into your life because they perform their task so faithfully that they free your attention for higher pursuits.

    I still have traces of the man-child in me. Every now and then he wakes up and points excitedly at some gleaming bauble, convinced that salvation is only one purchase away.

    The adult has learned to smile politely, pat him on the head, and say, “No. We have a manuscript to finish.”

    If all goes well, by the time I turn seventy, the adult may finally win.