Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Gospel According to the Donkey Calf Raise

    The Gospel According to the Donkey Calf Raise

    Though both are skeptics of institutional religion, public intellectuals Sam Harris and Alain de Botton arrive at the same uncomfortable conclusion: secular life suffers from a poverty of ritual and community. Religion, for all its theological disputes, excels at gathering people together and giving shape to life’s milestones. The secular world has become remarkably proficient at dismantling these institutions, but far less capable of replacing them. The result is a culture populated by isolated individuals wandering through private existential crises, each convinced that loneliness is a personal defect rather than a social condition.

    Human beings require more than ideas.

    They require liturgies.

    Which brings me to the Donkey Calf Raise.

    The Donkey Calf Raise is bodybuilding’s enduring proof that lifters will gladly sacrifice dignity upon the altar of hypertrophy. Popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger—who sometimes performed the exercise with one or two training partners literally sitting on his lower back—it required the lifter to bend forward at the waist while rising onto his toes under load, resembling less a Greek god than a hardworking mule carrying humanity’s collective insecurities. To the uninitiated, it looked like an elaborate fraternity prank. To serious bodybuilders, however, it was sacred doctrine. There existed an unshakable belief that any exercise capable of making you look completely ridiculous was almost certainly producing extraordinary results.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, I encountered the Donkey Calf Raise long before I ever attempted one. It appeared in magazine after magazine beside Arnold and the era’s other legends. Performing it was more than an exercise. It was a catechism.

    It announced your membership in the tribe.

    Mention the Donkey Calf Raise to a poseur and he would blink at you with the vacant expression of someone who had wandered into the wrong religion. The authentic bodybuilder, by contrast, knew exactly what you meant. He had suffered through it himself. Shared absurdity had become shared identity.

    That is how rituals work.

    Their power lies not in their efficiency but in their ability to bind strangers into a community through shared sacrifice. The Donkey Calf Raise built more than calves. It built belonging.

    I remember those rituals with genuine affection, though I harbor no illusions about what followed.

    The Donkeys eventually disappeared.

    The needles arrived.

    Performance-enhancing drugs gradually replaced eccentric exercises as the primary badge of authenticity. The gym atmosphere changed with them. What had once resembled a fraternity of disciplined eccentrics increasingly resembled an arms race conducted by chemically inflated men stalking the weight room in genie pants, glaring suspiciously at one another, each convinced that everyone else was simultaneously inferior and somehow cheating. The laughter diminished. The paranoia increased. That was when I quietly exited the bodybuilding world.

    Religious rituals, by contrast, possess remarkable staying power.

    Church picnics. Bingo nights. Food drives. Car washes. Bowling leagues. Litter cleanups. Potlucks where every casserole has a family history longer than some civilizations. The specific theology may evolve, but the rituals endure because they satisfy permanent human needs: fellowship, continuity, service, and shared purpose.

    The Donkey Calf Raise enjoyed no such immortality.

    Spot a group of lifters performing Donkeys in a commercial gym today and your first instinct would not be admiration. You would assume someone was filming a comedy sketch. The ritual has become unintelligible because the culture that gave it meaning has vanished.

    That realization reminds me that when I say I loved bodybuilding, I am speaking of a particular moment in its history, not the entire enterprise. The 1970s were its Golden Age—a peculiar blend of discipline, camaraderie, eccentricity, and optimism. Later decades often replaced those virtues with pharmacology, narcissism, and escalating displays of reckless bravado.

    Since 2005 I have trained alone in my garage, accompanied by talk radio, podcasts, and audiobooks. I enjoy the solitude. It allows me to think.

    But I have no romantic delusion that solitary exercise is equivalent to belonging.

    A garage gym can strengthen the body.

    It cannot replace the tribe.

    That is why Harris and de Botton are right. Human flourishing requires more than correct ideas or optimized routines. We long for rituals that make us feel part of something larger than ourselves. The Donkey Calf Raise, absurd as it looked, accomplished precisely that. It was a sacrament disguised as an exercise, a ridiculous little liturgy through which a generation of young men found fellowship, identity, and, if only for a moment, the comforting illusion that they were carrying one another’s burdens instead of merely someone sitting on their backs.

  • The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    In Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère recounts seeking treatment from the celebrated psychoanalyst François Roustang. Roustang refused to take him as a patient. His reason was devastating in its simplicity: Carrère, he believed, was not interested in getting better. He was interested in tripping up the therapist.

    Imagine arriving at the office of a renowned psychoanalyst desperate for relief from some nameless psychic misery, only to be told that your real ambition is to make your therapist look like a fool.

    It is a remarkable diagnosis.

    Carrère’s impulse, Roustang concluded, was not to surrender to therapy but to convert it into a duel. Every session would become an opportunity to expose the therapist’s blind spots, frustrate his methods, and demonstrate that no one—not even a celebrated analyst—could penetrate his defenses. The goal was not healing but victory.

    On the surface, this sounds clever.

    In reality, it is the psychology of a frightened child.

    The patient who must always outwit the therapist is not displaying superior intelligence. He is displaying superior evasiveness. His greatest fear is not failure but surrender. If he can reduce the therapist to exasperation, then he never has to confront the far more terrifying possibility that someone might actually understand him.

    For that reason, Roustang’s refusal seems puzzling.

    Surely this was exactly the patient he ought to have accepted.

    Instead, he sent him away.

    One imagines that Carrère experienced a brief flash of triumph. The contest had ended before it began, and somehow he had won. Another therapist defeated. Another authority figure frustrated. Another confirmation that no one could reach him.

    What exquisite misery.

    But Roustang had anticipated the move.

    His refusal was not surrender. It was strategy.

    He later told Carrère that if he was so determined to remain miserable, he had only two honest options: end his life or begin living.

    With that brutal simplicity, Roustang shattered the entire game.

    There was no argument to refute, no interpretation to ridicule, no therapeutic jargon to dismantle. There remained only a stark moral choice. Continue worshiping misery or abandon it.

    Suddenly Carrère’s obstinacy no longer looked rebellious.

    It looked juvenile.

    The performance he had mistaken for intellectual sophistication was revealed as the defensive posture of an anxious ego terrified of vulnerability. His endless resistance ceased to resemble strength. It resembled Gollum clutching the Ring while congratulating himself on his independence.

    Roustang’s words proved bracing rather than cruel. Carrère gradually emerged from his depression and eventually found the strength to write My Life as a Russian Novel, the book that, in his words, pulled him “from the abyss.”

    His story clarifies a distinction our culture often blurs: the difference between being childish and being childlike.

    The childish person is governed by wounded pride. He is obstinate, theatrical, self-absorbed, forever digging trenches around his private kingdom of resentment. He mistakes defiance for courage and isolation for authenticity. Like Gollum, he clings to the very thing that is poisoning him while insisting it is his greatest treasure.

    The childlike person possesses the opposite spirit. He is open rather than defensive, curious rather than suspicious, grateful rather than entitled. He greets the world with wonder instead of grievance. He resembles Adam before the first bite of the apple, when innocence had not yet curdled into self-justification.

    Perhaps that is the hidden kinship between therapy and religion.

    Neither exists merely to make us feel better.

    Both seek to expose the childish ego that mistakes stubbornness for strength and self-protection for freedom. Both ask us to relinquish the exhausting performance of being unconquerable. Both invite us to recover something we once possessed before fear, vanity, and self-deception took root.

    The task, in the end, is not to become more sophisticated.

    It is to become less like Gollum.

  • My First Apocalypse

    My First Apocalypse

    Struggling with a persistent and indefinable mental malaise, Emmanuel Carrère eventually found relief when his psychiatrist prescribed an antipsychotic medication advertised as a treatment for “erroneous beliefs.” The phrase amused him. It sounded less like a pharmaceutical claim than a diagnosis of the human condition. If his life had been governed by erroneous beliefs, perhaps the drug was aimed less at his brain than at his philosophy.

    As a hormone-soaked adolescent, I suffered from my own spectacular assortment of erroneous beliefs.

    One of the most consequential arrived courtesy of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb. The book convinced me that civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Humanity would soon drown beneath its own numbers. Famine, drought, and social chaos were not distant possibilities but tomorrow’s weather forecast.

    Under those circumstances, dating struck me as a curious misuse of time.

    Why cultivate romance when the planet was preparing for its own obituary?

    Why ask a girl to the movies when we would soon be rationing freeze-dried food aboard lunar colonies, assuming we survived long enough to board the shuttle?

    My imagination raced well beyond Ehrlich’s predictions. In my private apocalypse there would be no health clubs, no squat racks, no barbells, and, worst of all, no gravity worthy of serious resistance training. Without a gym and a steady supply of protein, my hard-earned physique would evaporate. I pictured myself shrinking into the shape of a tomato balanced precariously atop four toothpicks. The image horrified me with an intensity wildly disproportionate to the fate of civilization itself.

    Most teenagers worry about acne.

    I worried about post-apocalyptic muscle atrophy.

    Love became a luxury for people foolish enough to believe there would still be a future. Courtship seemed almost irresponsible. Civilization was ending, and I had more pressing concerns than holding hands at the mall.

    Looking back, I marvel not at how mistaken I was but at how eagerly the adolescent mind embraces catastrophe. Young people are naturally drawn to grand narratives. Some expect salvation. Others anticipate doom. Both stories offer the same seductive promise: that ordinary life is about to be interrupted by something world-altering.

    In my case, the world never ended.

    The apocalypse quietly expired.

    My erroneous beliefs, however, proved far more resilient than Paul Ehrlich’s predictions.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

    I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.

    Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.

    Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.

    The process bordered on liturgical.

    KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

    I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

    The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

    On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.

    One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.

    My mother walked into the office.

    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

    “My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

    I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes himself as a former Christian and now an agnostic who remains irresistibly drawn to the mystery of belief. He wants to know what committed Christians actually experience from the inside. Not what they claim in theological treatises or apologetics, but what they believe in the marrow of their bones. To satisfy that curiosity, he considers joining a Catholic cruise that retraces the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.

    Then he recoils.

    He realizes that he would be boarding the ship under false pretenses. He would not be a pilgrim but an observer, a skeptical journalist pretending to be a fellow traveler. Worse, he fears he would begin treating believers as specimens in a religious safari, peering at them through the bars of an intellectual zoo.

    He cannot bring himself to do it.

    The reason is revealing. Carrère respects Christianity too much. More importantly, he recognizes too much of himself in the people he hopes to observe. He has not escaped the longing that once made him a fervent believer. Somewhere inside him survives a hunger for Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, for the intoxicating certainty that dissolves ambiguity and ends the exhausting labor of perpetual self-interrogation.

    That is the danger of writing about conversion.

    The temptation is to reduce the convert to a caricature—a fanatic, a zealot, a punch line. Once that happens, the writer has stopped investigating and started congratulating himself.

    Carrère refuses that temptation.

    One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that he approaches even the forms of faith that unsettle him with remarkable humility. He writes without condescension, without superiority, and without the lazy satisfaction of explaining away religious passion as psychological pathology. His tone is one of curiosity, sympathy, self-reproach, and, perhaps most surprisingly, envy. He cannot help wondering whether absolute conviction, however irrational, might be preferable to a lifetime spent wandering the fog of uncertainty.

    He cancels the cruise.

    He calls doing so “a bad deed.”

    That confession stopped me in my tracks because it exposed the weakness in my own writing.

    Over the years I have written roughly a dozen shabby, half-baked novels about my teenage years as a bodybuilder. I always blamed the structure, the pacing, the dialogue, or the plot.

    Now I think I know the real reason they failed.

    I was the man boarding the bodybuilding cruise.

    I looked back at my younger self and my gym companions the way a tourist looks at a curious tribe. They were amusing. They were excessive. They spoke in absurd dialects about protein, carb loading, and biceps pumps with the solemnity of medieval theologians debating the nature of grace.

    I was clever.

    I was also a hack.

    Mockery is the refuge of writers who fear understanding.

    I never asked the questions that mattered. What terror drove boys to devote themselves so completely to muscle? What loneliness hid beneath the bravado? What private wounds demanded redemption through iron? What aching sense of inadequacy transformed barbells into sacraments?

    The bodybuilding was never the story.

    The hunger was.

    If I ever return to that world, I hope to do so as Carrère approached Christianity: not with detached amusement but with humility, caution, and the uncomfortable recognition that the fanatic I wish to understand is not someone else.

    It is a former version of myself.

  • The Death of Salience

    The Death of Salience

    One of the saddest discoveries on social media requires less than thirty seconds. You scroll past short videos posted by people you vaguely know, and a realization settles over you: nothing matters because everything is presented as if it matters equally. Salience disappears. In its place is detritus.

    The mind becomes a bulldozer, endlessly scooping up gravel, dust, broken fragments, and digital debris, then consuming it without reflection. In this endless procession, urgent news loses its urgency, genuine insight is buried beneath trivia, and the ability to distinguish the significant from the insignificant begins to erode.

    Social media’s final achievement is not simply distraction but entropy. It levels every hierarchy of importance until the spirit is flattened, meaning dissolves into noise, and chaos masquerades as reality.

  • Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes a television series he once helped develop. The premise is quietly unsettling. In a small rural town, the dead return to life. There are no zombies, no horror tropes, no supernatural spectacle. The dead simply resume their ordinary lives. Your husband comes home from work. Your daughter asks what’s for dinner. Your father sits in his favorite chair. None of them remembers dying. The burden falls not on the resurrected but on the living, who must reconcile themselves to the impossible.

    Carrère uses this premise as a metaphor for religious conversion.

    A genuine conversion does not merely alter a person’s opinions. It kills one self and replaces it with another. The converted person still wears the same face, but something essential has vanished. The old personality has become a ghost.

    Carrère knows this from experience. For three years in the early 1990s he was consumed by Christian faith. Looking back, he regards that intensely devout version of himself almost as one regards a deceased relative: familiar, unforgettable, and yet strangely unrecognizable.

    The same paradox appears in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul the persecutor would have despised Paul the apostle. Paul the apostle would have regarded Saul as spiritually blind. They occupy the same body while inhabiting entirely different moral universes.

    Carrère calls Christianity’s astonishing expansion the Great Mutation. Within a few centuries, roughly a quarter of the known world accepted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, miracles, eternal life, and the conviction that earthly existence was merely the waiting room for a greater kingdom. Whether one believes those claims is almost beside the point. The historical achievement is staggering. Few ideas have ever transformed so many human beings so thoroughly.

    Reading Carrère made me realize that religious conversion is only one species of a much larger phenomenon.

    Human beings are conversion machines.

    A politically indifferent commuter begins listening to Rush Limbaugh during long drives to work. Months later he is no longer merely listening; he is quoting, arguing, and eventually thinking in Limbaugh’s cadences. The broadcaster has not simply gained an audience. He has acquired disciples.

    Sometimes I amused myself by imagining an absurd sequel.

    Suppose Rush Limbaugh had awakened one morning as a granola-eating vegan who had embraced Buddhism, practiced yoga at sunrise, and urged his listeners to forgive their political enemies because resentment disrupts the universe’s healing vibrations.

    His audience would have experienced something close to theological collapse.

    The prophet had abandoned the faith.

    Followers who had built their identities around his certainties would suddenly find themselves spiritually homeless. Many would scramble toward new authorities with the desperation of refugees. Some might discover John Bradshaw and begin healing their Inner Child. Others would embrace Deepak Chopra and begin assuring bewildered relatives that “the universe has no fixed agenda,” thereby ensuring they would never again be invited to host Thanksgiving dinner.

    The point is that conversion is not confined to religion.

    As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, people burdened by inadequacy rarely seek modest improvement. They crave wholesale transformation. If religion fails to satisfy that hunger, they will seek redemption elsewhere—in politics, psychology, nutrition, fitness, investing, or hobbies.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t merely admire Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    We wanted to become Arnold.

    Protein shakes were our communion wine. Carb loading was liturgy. The biceps pump bordered on mystical experience. We weren’t building muscle nearly as much as we were pursuing salvation.

    This morning I stumbled across a Reddit post from a G-Shock enthusiast celebrating his GW-6900. According to him, the watch had changed his life. He no longer wanted another watch. He had conquered watch addiction. He was cured.

    I smiled because I recognized the language immediately.

    He wasn’t describing a purchase.

    He was describing a conversion.

    His watch had become Damascus on the wrist.

    Carrère observes that most of us live comfortably in two parallel worlds. One contains our practical routines: paying bills, driving to work, buying groceries. The other houses our transcendent convictions, the stories that persuade us our lives are moving toward redemption rather than mere survival.

    That second world is never empty for long.

    If we lose one faith, another waits patiently around the corner. It may arrive dressed as a political movement, a diet, a fitness program, a philosopher, or even a watch. We flatter ourselves that we are rational creatures who occasionally become believers.

    The evidence suggests the opposite.

    We are believers searching for the next conversion.

  • The X-Ray Bully Principle

    The X-Ray Bully Principle

    I have often imagined writing a novel about a boy tormented by a sixth-grade bully. At first glance, the story seems painfully familiar. One child possesses power; another lacks it. One humiliates; the other endures. There are already enough novels about that.

    The interesting story begins decades later.

    The bully is drawn to the boy’s visible sadness the way sharks are drawn to blood. Whether that instinct originates in the bully’s own wounds is impossible to know. Perhaps his father’s death from a heart attack in his thirties left him carrying around an anger too large for a child to bear. Perhaps he simply needed somewhere to dump his rage, and the melancholy boy looked like an accommodating landfill.

    Or perhaps that explanation is sentimental nonsense.

    Perhaps the bully required no tragedy to become cruel. Some people seem to arrive in the world with an uncanny instinct for locating weakness and pressing on it until it bruises.

    Whatever the explanation, the bully needed only to glimpse the boy’s face.

    That face was enough.

    The sadness irritated him. The fear provoked him. The quietness felt like an accusation. Around everyone else he was merely disagreeable. Around this particular boy he became incandescent with contempt. The sight of vulnerability transformed him into an artist of humiliation.

    That, however, is not the novel.

    Bullies are common.

    What fascinates me is what happens inside the victim.

    At first the boy hates his tormentor in the ordinary way. He dreams of revenge. He imagines vindication. He rehearses speeches he will never deliver.

    Then something disturbing happens.

    He grows older.

    He begins examining himself with ruthless honesty. He sees his cowardice, vanity, evasions, self-pity, and moral compromises. Gradually, almost against his own will, he starts to wonder whether the bully had been right all along.

    Not right about the cruelty.

    Right about him.

    The bully becomes, in memory, the only person who had truly seen through the performance. Everyone else had mistaken shyness for humility, sensitivity for virtue, sadness for depth. The bully had looked beneath the surface and detected something darker.

    Weakness.

    Duplicity.

    Self-deception.

    The victim begins to believe that the insults were less acts of cruelty than acts of diagnosis.

    He embraces what I call the X-Ray Bully Principle: the belief that a tormentor’s cruelty was justified because he uniquely perceived one’s hidden moral defects and therefore functioned, however unwillingly, as a truth-teller rather than merely an aggressor.

    This inversion changes everything.

    The bully is no longer remembered as a playground tyrant.

    He becomes a prophet.

    His taunts acquire the authority of Scripture. His ridicule is transformed into revelation. His contempt begins to resemble religious flagellation—a painful but necessary discipline administered to expose hidden corruption.

    The victim quietly canonizes his persecutor.

    That is the real tragedy.

    The bully’s greatest victory was never the humiliation he inflicted on a frightened twelve-year-old. It was persuading that boy, decades later, that the humiliation had been deserved.

    The novel, then, is not about bullying.

    It is about the terrifying human capacity to mistake condemnation for insight and abuse for truth. It asks whether our harshest critics possess privileged access to our secret selves or whether shame simply grants them an authority they never earned.

    That question has haunted me far longer than any playground insult ever could.

  • From Sean Connery Chic to G-Shock Optimization

    From Sean Connery Chic to G-Shock Optimization

    About fifteen years ago, my watch hobby settled into what I assumed would be its final form. I became captivated by Seiko mechanical dive watches. Five years later, the obsession grew more specific. I wanted faithful recreations of Seiko’s 1960s divers mounted on vintage-inspired Waffle and Tropic straps. My collection had quietly become an altar to the Sixties.

    Only recently did I realize what was really happening.

    I wasn’t merely wearing watches.

    I had unknowingly enlisted in a historical reenactment society.

    Some people spend weekends dressed as Viking warriors, Roman legionaries, or Revolutionary War soldiers. My costume was different. Every morning I buckled on a diver’s watch and imagined myself inhabiting the glamorous mythology of 1960s adventure. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, Sean Connery had never stopped speeding across Caribbean waters with Honey Ryder in Dr. No. I wasn’t collecting timepieces. I was practicing what I now call Sean Connery Chic.

    For years I believed that was the inevitable destination of my hobby.

    It wasn’t.

    My mechanical divers excelled at one thing above all others: charisma.

    Imagine owning a pristine 1963 Corvette. Park it anywhere, and people gather around it with reverence. They admire its curves. They photograph it. They dream about it.

    Then they ask the owner what it’s like to drive every day.

    That’s when the romance collides with reality.

    The vintage Corvette leaks fluids with aristocratic indifference. It rattles. It drinks gasoline like a sailor on shore leave. Its electrical system views reliability as an optional feature. The air conditioning, if present at all, merely stirs warm air with admirable optimism. Safety equipment consists largely of hope. The seats regard lumbar support as a dangerous modern innovation. Every outing is equal parts transportation and mechanical negotiation.

    My mechanical divers occupied much the same territory.

    On the Charisma Scale, they scored a perfect ten.

    On the Reliability, Accuracy, Comfort, and Practicality Scale, they were lucky to earn a two.

    That realization forced me to rethink my collection.

    A man can admire vintage Corvettes.

    He probably shouldn’t own only vintage Corvettes.

    I needed a second car garage.

    One garage would house nostalgia.

    The other would embrace optimization.

    I realized this about six months ago when I opened the box containing a G-Shock Frogman, the GWF-1000, and knew within seconds that I had experienced what every collector hopes for but rarely enjoys.

    It was a No-Doubter.

    If you’re unfamiliar with watch addiction, a No-Doubter is the rare purchase that requires no rationalization. You don’t inspect it for flaws. You don’t reassure yourself that you’ll grow into it. You simply know.

    Its evil twin is the Flop-Sweater.

    That’s the watch that disappoints you before you’ve even peeled the plastic from the crystal. During the unboxing video, your smile grows increasingly artificial while your palms begin to perspire. Halfway through the presentation, you’re already calculating how much money you’ll lose when you sell it.

    Fortunately, the Frogman inspired none of that.

    Instead, it introduced me to a dangerous new pleasure: atomic timekeeping.

    Its Multi-Band 6 receiver synchronizes nightly with the atomic clock transmitter in Fort Collins, Colorado. Once you’ve experienced waking each morning to a watch that is essentially perfect to the second, ordinary accuracy begins to feel strangely primitive. Precision is addictive. Let me repeat that. Just as a watch enthusiast can become addicted to watches, that same enthusiast can become addicted to precision. Once your standards rise, they refuse to descend. I think that might be the central lesson of this essay. 

    Then came comfort.

    Despite their imposing dimensions, G-Shocks are astonishingly light. Their bulky resin cases look as though they should feel like cinder blocks, yet they practically disappear on the wrist.

    Then came engineering.

    G-Shocks delight the inner nerd because they are gloriously overbuilt. Owning one feels like driving a supercar at the speed limit. You know you’ll never exploit its full capabilities, but the mere knowledge that they’re available is oddly satisfying.

    Finally, I confronted the matter of identity.

    My Seiko divers whispered, “Sean Connery.”

    My G-Shocks announced something entirely different.

    They belonged to the world of search-and-rescue teams, police sergeants, firefighters, football coaches, military instructors, and engineers who trust equipment more than appearances.

    This wasn’t Sean Connery Chic.

    It was Action Hero Chic.

    To my surprise, I liked the role.

    The Frogman was quickly joined by three other atomic G-Shocks: the King with its gloriously legible positive display, the Mudman GW-9500 with its billboard-sized numerals, and the dependable Rescue GW-7900.

    Then there is my lone non-atomic outlier, the Mudman G-9300.

    Ironically, it has become my hotel watch.

    Hotels are surprisingly adept at blocking the radio signal that keeps my atomic watches synchronized, so the G-9300, which gains only about ten seconds per month, has earned a permanent place in my travel rotation.

    People sometimes ask whether my mechanical divers and G-Shocks compete with one another.

    They don’t.

    To compare them is to commit a category error.

    One collection points backward toward romance, mythology, and nostalgia.

    The other points forward toward precision, engineering, and optimization.

    Both satisfy something genuine within me.

    Jay Leno doesn’t own one garage because one kind of automobile cannot express every facet of his enthusiasm.

    Why, then, should I expect one watch box to tell the whole story of mine?

    About fifteen years ago, my watch hobby evolved in a way that my interests became focused on Seiko mechanical divers. Then about five years ago, the interest intensified so that I wanted the 1960s recreation Seiko divers on vintage straps, such as Waffle or Tropic designs. It would seem that my watch hobby pointed to the romantic nostalgia of the 60s. My childhood of watching Sean Connery wearing Submariners had apparently gotten into my unconscious mind. So I was no longer just wearing a watch. I was unwittingly part of a historical re-enactment society. I wasn’t doing Viking, World War II, or Roman soldier cosplay. I was living out the fantasy of being my childhood movie icon Sean Connery speeding on a motorboat with Honey Ryder in Dr. No. As far as my watch hobby goes, I thought this is it. I’m locked into Sean Connery Chic. Those three words capture the essence of my hobby. 

    My hobby was largely characterized by a specific style. As far as the watch goes, nostalgia was the primary priority. Accuracy was not the priority. My watches are the equivalent of owning a 1963 Corvette. They score a 10 on the Charisma Scale. But for reliability, comfort, safety, and function, they score a 2. 

    As soon as I saw my mechanical divers as having a vintage Corvette, I knew I needed to branch out. I wanted one car garage to have my vintage cars for nostalgia purposes. But I needed another car garage that connected me to the modern world of function and optimization. 

    I realized this six months ago when I bought a G-Shock Frogman. When I opened it out of the box and beheld the industrial beauty of its resin material, I knew instantly that it was a No-Doubter. For those of you who are new to the watch hobby, a No-Doubter is when you immediately know you got a winner. The opposite is called Flop-Sweater, when you know the watch sucks and you’re going to have to flip it for a loss. You’re literally perspiring on the YouTube video during your unboxing. 

    So the Frogman in question, the GWF-1000, is Multiband-6, which means it syncs every night with the atomic tower in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Once I got a taste of atomic accuracy, it was hard to go back. Having the precise time will spoil you and establish a standard that you don’t want to deviate from. 

    There’s also the comfort. These G-Shocks have monster-sized girth, but they are light on the wrist. I barely feel them. So now I’ve got accuracy and comfort. 

    Then there’s the pleasure of knowing these G-Shocks are over-engineered. You’re getting more technology than you’ll ever need, a fact that tickles your Inner Nerd. You’re like the guy who drives the speed limit, but you know you could go 200 miles an hour if you wanted to. 

    Finally, there’s the matter of style. With G-Shock, I had to give up Sean Connery Chic because my G-Shocks are another kind of persona altogether. They are Action Hero Chic, Law Enforcement Sergeant, and Football Coach Authority watches, and I’m totally cool with that. 

    So in addition to the Frogman, I got three other Multiband-6 G-Shocks, the King with positive display; the Mudman GW-9500 with its oversized numerals; and the Rescue GW-7900. 

    I also have one non-atomic G-Shock, the Mudman G-9300. It’s only gaining about 10 seconds a month. It is good to bring on vacations where you’ll be staying at a hotel because hotels are notorious for having the kind of structures and radio interference that will block your atomic sync. So I have found a purpose for my GW-7900. 

    I don’t see my mechanical divers as competing with my G-Shocks. To compare them would be to make a category error. One category points to the nostalgia of the past; the other category points to the optimization of the future. 

    Just as Jay Leno has more than one car garage, I can have more than one watch box. 

  • The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.

    The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.

    He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.

    To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.

    Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.

    So we lifted.

    Not casually. Fanatically.

    Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.

    He preached through barbells rather than sermons.

    Discipline.

    Precision.

    Toughness.

    Master yourself before the world masters you.

    Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.

    Henry Mancini.

    Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.

    We trained with style.

    Some of us trained with obsession.

    I belonged to the second category.

    Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.

    Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.

    I became “Squats.”

    At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.

    Only years later would I understand what was really happening.

    I wasn’t simply building legs.

    I was constructing an identity.

    The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.

    And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.