Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes with my favorite podcasters and YouTubers and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. I’ve taught college writing for nearly forty years, but I don’t feel compelled to sermonize about it online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. Faced with the spectacle of success, I drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody.

    Two modest ideas interrupt that spiral. The first is a phrase my daughter and I use over a game of Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a full house, a small straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions land between 650 and 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 425 calories in forty-four minutes and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does.

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Moving forward, I will continue to write a miscellany of things on my blog, which is a sort of proxy for therapy–as is my piano and exercise–and I will stop trying to be a YouTube star and tell my stories on my small piano channel because that’s where my heart is at and I don’t feel I have anything deeper to offer the fusion of my piano compositions and the fable-like stories that spawned them.

  • Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    When I watched Send Help two nights ago, I kept waiting for the horror to announce itself with a straight face. It never did. The film opens in a fluorescent office where Bradley Preston—an heir in a blazer, a man-child in executive drag—struts through a company he inherited the way one inherits a bad habit. His confidence is all surface tension: glossy, brittle, and one sharp object away from collapse. From the first scene, it plays less like a fright fest and more like a comedy that knows its punchlines will land harder if they’re soaked in blood.

    The supporting cast speaks fluent “bro,” a dialect of buzzwords and chest-thumping that echoes the bleak satire of In the Company of Men—only here the jokes move faster and the air is less suffocating. Early on, the movie tips its hand with a small, perfect humiliation: Linda Liddle, a socially awkward office worker with Survivor dreams, approaches Bradley with a chunk of tuna clinging stubbornly to her cheek. He can’t hear a word she says. The camera betrays him—cuts to a close-up of his eye, deranged and hypnotized by that fleck of fish like it’s a moral crisis. The gag is surgical. It reduces Bradley to appetite and Linda to spectacle in a single, merciless beat.

    The degradation doesn’t stop there. Bradley and his phalanx of bros revel in their own language, a lexicon designed to inflate mediocrity into swagger. Then the film detonates its premise: a flight to Thailand, a thunderstorm, a crash, an island. Suddenly the hierarchy flips. Bradley’s confidence evaporates in the salt air, and Linda—quietly competent, long dismissed—becomes indispensable. Her survival skills, once a punchline, turn into the only currency that matters. The movie sharpens into what it always wanted to be: a comedy of reversal, where a cocky lightweight is schooled by the person he spent years underestimating.

    Yes, there’s horror here—gore, shocks, the occasional indulgence in spectacle—but it all feels enlisted in the service of the joke. The violence doesn’t deepen the dread; it punctuates the satire. The film moves briskly, with clever turns that keep it buoyant where LaBute’s film sinks into a kind of moral tar. And yet the two works feel like distant relatives: both obsessed with cruelty, both fascinated by the theater of male arrogance, both willing to strip their characters bare. The difference is that Send Help has the decency to laugh while it does the stripping—and in that laughter, it finds its edge.

  • The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Roland Beavers, a thirty-year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Roland was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Roland paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Roland would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday Roland met a new blonde, somehow more beautiful than the previous one. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach’s imported sand.

    On one such afternoon, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Roland in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Roland’s methods. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Roland give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Roland began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Roland’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Roland was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Roland died on the spot.

    I was never the same after that incident. I obsessed over Roland’s demise, I suffered nightmares about it, and I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. 

    About six months after the incident, a peculiar daydream began visiting me with unnerving regularity. In it, I did not watch Roland die from a distance; I inhabited his final moments, seeing the world through his eyes. As his body failed, his mind seemed to step into an alternate life—a gentler, unperformed existence. He was no longer the peacock on the grassy knoll but a husband, walking along the shoreline with his wife, four children orbiting them in laughter, and two rescue dogs bounding through the surf. The air carried a soft, almost cinematic music. The sky was a pale, forgiving blue. Sunlight fell not harshly, but tenderly, as if it had chosen to console rather than expose.

    In that imagined reprieve, Roland turned toward something higher—toward God—and spoke with a clarity he had never shown in life. He promised to abandon the theater of conquest, to relinquish the hollow rituals of charm and pursuit, to grow into the man he had postponed becoming. It was as if the world had paused to offer him a final rehearsal for redemption. The horizon opened. A stillness settled over everything. And within that stillness, he seemed to experience, perhaps for the first time, a quiet and unadorned peace—a beauty that required no performance and asked nothing in return.

     And just as the possibility of redemption flickered into being—it was extinguished. His body failed. The bee won. His life ended mid-sentence.

    I carried that ending with me to the piano, where I tried to make sense of Roland’s death the only way I knew how. For two years I worked on “The Ballad of Roland Beavers,” a piece that refused to resolve cleanly because the life it memorialized never did. Nearly fifty years later, I still play it. The notes haven’t dulled. Neither has the lesson. Some performances end not with a bow, but with a collapse—too little, too late, and no encore.

  • Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and Ari Aster’s Eddington, characters pursue power with a confidence that borders on delusion. What begins as bold ambition gradually mutates into hubris, and ultimately into a distorted relationship with power itself. In Kipling’s story, this transformation is dramatic and mythic, culminating in a literal fall from godhood. In Eddington, the transformation is more diffuse and contemporary, shaped by media ecosystems, ideological certainty, and the intoxicating feedback loops of modern influence.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare how both works portray the dangers of unrestrained ambition and the intoxication of power. In your analysis, consider how each work defines “power,” how characters justify their rise, and how their environments either reinforce or challenge their sense of authority. You should also examine how hubris manifests differently in each work—whether as overt self-deification or as a quieter, more insidious certainty—and how these differences shape each narrative’s resolution.

    In developing your argument, you may consider the following questions: Does power corrupt in the same way across different historical and cultural contexts, or does it simply adapt to new environments? Is the downfall in each work caused by external forces, internal flaws, or a combination of both? To what extent are the characters victims of their circumstances versus architects of their own collapse? Support your claims with specific evidence from both texts, and be sure to include a counterargument that challenges your interpretation before offering a rebuttal.

  • Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    I drank my first protein shake in 1975, at thirteen—an age when you’ll ingest anything if it promises muscle. It was milk and two heroic scoops of Bob Hoffman’s “Super Hi-Proteen,” a granular blend of soy, brown sugar, and the kind of mystery ingredients that seemed to come with a warning label in spirit if not in ink. I swallowed it like a pledge of allegiance. Years later, I realized I’d been spooning down hog slop with a marketing budget.

    Protein powders, of course, grew up. Whey replaced soy, monk fruit and stevia replaced sugar, and the flavor profile advanced from “punishment” to “tolerable.” I returned, cautiously, folding a scoop into my oatmeal or stirring it into yogurt. A lifetime lifter develops a habit I’ll call protein insurance—the quiet reassurance that your muscles won’t starve because you forgot to eat like a grown man.

    And so the shake became a fixture—less a meal than a policy.

    Bodybuilders and civilians alike now drink these things by the gallon, not just for insurance but for convenience. Which raises a question that refuses to stay polite: assuming we’re not slowly marinating ourselves in trace metals such as lead and cadmium, are we doing something more subtle—something that damages the soul? Rachel Sugar poses a version of this in her Atlantic essay “Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent,” where the modern ideal appears in a hoodie: a tech bro so devoted to efficiency that he outsources eating to a beige slurry. Why cook, why chew, why pause, when a bottle can reduce nourishment to a task you can complete between emails?

    Enter Soylent, the Willy Wonka chewing gum of Silicon Valley—a full meal compressed into a swallow, a dinner table dissolved into a transaction. At best, it tastes like competent baby food. At worst, it tastes like ambition without appetite.

    Soylent had its moment and then receded, but the protein shake did not. It adapted, multiplied, rebranded. Giants like The Coca-Cola Company now print money selling pre-made bottles fortified with protein, “adaptogens,” and antioxidant halos. The label reads like a résumé; the experience reads like chalk. A nation too busy to cook, trained to snack, and newly anxious about muscle retention—thanks to the rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists—is primed to accept frictionless nutrition. Open. Sip. Be optimized.

    None of this is accidental. The arithmetic of food is unforgiving: real food spoils and yields modest margins; ultra-processed food endures and pays dividends. The industry didn’t just produce these powders—it educated us to desire them, dressed them in the language of health, beauty, and time savings, and invited us to trade ritual for efficiency.

    Last week, I tried a thought experiment on my writing students. They’re working on an argument about whether ultra-processed foods are villains to both body and soul.

    “Imagine,” I said, “three protein wafers a day. They regulate appetite, deliver perfect nutrition, sculpt you into an Instagram after photo, and carry you past a hundred. No cooking. No dishes. No decisions.”

    I let that sit for a moment.

    “Now imagine what disappears. The dinners that run long. The laughter that spills over the table. The argument that turns into a story. The quiet, ordinary pleasure of chewing.”

    In this optimized life, your insurer applauds and your followers multiply. But you become something flatter—efficient, photogenic, and faintly ghostlike. Not dead, exactly. Just thinned out where life used to be.

    I asked for a show of hands. Who would choose the wafers?

    Not one hand rose.

    For all our flirtation with powders and promises, the verdict was clear: they want to be healthy, yes—but not at the cost of becoming efficient shadows of themselves. Real food, with all its inconvenience and noise, remains the center. The shake can stay as insurance. It just can’t be the policy that replaces the warmth of home.

  • Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Five days ago, an hour before my afternoon class, I performed my sacred office ritual: a Barbell’s Salty Peanut protein bar followed by a red apple. The pairing is non-negotiable. The bar coats my teeth in a fudge-like film; the apple arrives like a janitor, scrubbing the residue with righteous crunch. It’s dental choreography. It works—until it doesn’t.

    Mid-bar, I bit down and hit something that did not belong in the human diet. A crack, a jolt, a flash of pain in my upper left molar that suggested litigation. I spit out the offending bite and there it was: a small, defiant piece of gravel. Not metaphorical gravel. Geological. I briefly entertained the idea of a calcified peanut shell, but no—this was the kind of object that builds driveways, not snacks.

    I discarded the rock, finished the bar like a man negotiating with fate, and approached the apple with the caution of a bomb technician, chewing exclusively on my right side. The tooth protested—sharp when I bit down, sensitive when I dared sip cold sparkling water. I called my dentist. He agreed to see me Monday while my daughters are in for their cleaning, a kind of dental drive-by.

    I told him, only half joking, that if this turns into a root canal, I’ll be leaving the country under an assumed name. My claustrophobia is not a charming quirk; it’s a governing principle. The rubber wedge they use to keep your mouth open transforms my throat into a closed border. When I can’t swallow on command, panic doesn’t knock—it kicks the door in. I am praying for a humble composite fix, something modest and merciful. A root canal would turn me into a beachside exile, scanning the horizon for dental extradition.

    As if one anxiety weren’t enough, two days later my college’s learning system—Canvas—collapsed under a ransomware attack that apparently took down thousands of schools. An hour before class, I discovered my lecture had vanished into the digital abyss. I called my engineering friend Pedro to deliver a live report of my unraveling. I told him I’d have to improvise, which in teaching is another word for “pray for coherence.”

    Then a thought arrived like a small miracle: my lectures are linked to Google Slides. If I could log into my Google account, I could resurrect the class. I told Pedro I’d head to the room early and test the login before the students arrived. I looked down at my desk—keys, empty protein bar wrapper, the usual debris of academic life—but no phone.

    “Where the hell is my phone?” I said.

    “You’re talking to me on it,” Pedro replied.

    We laughed the way men laugh when reality briefly exposes its wiring. For twelve years, Pedro has been my unofficial tech support, but informing me that the phone I was using was in my hand may be his finest work.

    Between the compromised tooth and the compromised Canvas infrastructure, I felt like a man auditioning for a nervous breakdown. Instead, I walked into class and, perversely, had one of the best sessions of the semester. We discussed ultra-processed foods—their design, their addictiveness, the way they quietly rig the game of weight management. Then I offered a heretical counterargument: homemade food can be just as seductive, just as dangerous to restraint.

    To prove the point, I pulled up a photograph from the Los Angeles Times: a $38 basturma brisket sandwich from Yerord Mas, built from Australian wagyu and dusted with cumin, garlic, and chiles. The image did not educate so much as seduce. Within seconds, my students had located the menu and confirmed the price with the forensic zeal of the hungry.

    “We should Uber to Glendale,” I said, “and call it field research.”

    At that point I added, “Some of you are going to complain to the Dean that you enrolled in a critical thinking class and all I do is talk about food.”

    They laughed—real laughter, not the polite classroom version. The room had a charged, fizzy quality, as if the collapse of Canvas had granted us permission to loosen the tie a notch. Chaos had stripped the day down to its essentials: conversation, curiosity, a shared joke.

    I needed that laugh more than I care to admit.

    Now I’m waiting. Will the dentist deliver a quick, civilized repair, or will I be pricing one-way tickets and practicing aliases on a beach somewhere in Mexico, scanning the horizon for a man carrying a drill?

    In the meantime, I chew carefully, avoid gravel, and consider the possibility that the most dangerous part of my day is not the curriculum, but the snack.

  • The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    I teach college writing, which means I’ve spent the last four years staring at the AI question the way a man stares at a fire he suspects might jump the fence. When ChatGPT arrived, it didn’t knock politely. It crashed into the room like a UFO and rearranged the furniture. Since then, I’ve read what feels like a small library’s worth of essays—predictions, warnings, elegies for the essay itself—and contributed a few of my own, because that’s what we do: we metabolize disruption by writing about it.

    But there comes a point when the analysis stops clarifying and starts echoing.

    I’ve reached that point. My brain has filed a quiet injunction: no more. Not just a break from AI, but a break from reading about how exhausted everyone else is by AI. The discourse has become a hall of mirrors—each reflection slightly more fatigued than the last.

    I’ve been here before. In 2010, I had newborn twins, which is another way of saying I was living inside a low-grade emergency. The market offered guidance—books, podcasts, earnest experts—but I wanted none of it. I was already doing the job. Additional commentary felt like a second shift. Experience was loud enough; analysis was just noise layered on top.

    Both episodes point to the same condition: Applied Reality Rejection—the refusal to consume secondary discourse when you’re already neck-deep in the primary experience. When you’re in it, more talk about it doesn’t help. It dilutes.

    And here’s the part the essays rarely admit: reading about AI doesn’t soothe AI anxiety. It compounds it. Each think piece arrives like a fresh weather report announcing the same storm in slightly different prose.

    So I’m choosing friction of a better kind. I play the piano until my attention steadies. I pick up kettlebells and let gravity argue with me for a while. I walk the beach and let the horizon do what no article can—put scale back into the day. The analog world doesn’t theorize; it recalibrates.

    That was the remedy with the twins, too. Not another podcast on sleep training, but a walk, a dumb TV binge, a sweaty hour in the garage. Relief came from stepping out of the commentary loop, not diving deeper into it.

    Which is why, when I see another AI essay queued up from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I feel a familiar tightening—and then I close the tab. Not out of contempt, but out of preservation.

    I’ve heard enough echoes. It’s time to drive two miles to Catalina Avenue and take a walk at the beach.

  • The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I fell under the spell of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as did millions of young men who believed that iron could redeem them. Arnold didn’t just build muscle; he built permission. You didn’t have to slink into the gym like a social outcast. You could walk in like a man with a project—your body—and treat the work as something worthy, even noble.

    But here’s the part we forget when we romanticize that era: the fantasy always had a counterweight. You could admire the glossy magazine spreads, sure, but the minute you stepped into the gym, reality took over. The barbell didn’t care about your aspirations. It demanded blood, sweat, repetition, and a tolerance for humiliation. The dream had friction. It had consequences. It had gravity.

    Today, the dream has been fitted with wheels.

    We spend hours online absorbing lifestyles that arrive pre-edited, pre-filtered, and pre-approved by algorithms that understand our weaknesses better than we do. The counterweight—reality—hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been shoved to the margins, like an inconvenient footnote to a seductive headline. What replaces it is a fever dream: a curated existence that feels authoritative simply because it’s repeated often enough.

    Call this Frictionless Fantasy Drift—the condition in which ambition detaches from effort and begins to float, unmoored, in a frictionless digital sky. The struggle is edited out. The consequences are invisible. What remains is a mirage that invites you to step in and live there.

    I was reminded of this while reading Hanna Rosin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Tradwife.” Rosin contrasts the influencers of today with her own pre-internet lodestar, Martha Stewart—a figure she aptly describes as “a tycoon masquerading as a domestic goddess.” Stewart was many things—ruthless, exacting, extraordinarily competent—but she was real. Her brand, however polished, was anchored in actual skill and labor.

    Today, that grounded figure has been replaced by something far more synthetic: the algorithmic mountebank, the tradwife influencer who sells a pastoral fantasy with the confidence of a late-night infomercial host. She bakes bread from scratch, produces hearty meals with theatrical serenity, and presides over a small army of children as if domestic chaos were a lifestyle accessory. Her kitchen gleams. Her apron is spotless. Her smile suggests a fulfillment so complete it borders on evangelism.

    And then there’s the final flourish: submission. She assures her audience that handing over the steering wheel to her husband has unlocked a level of contentment previously unknown to modern women. Obedience, rebranded as liberation.

    In an era defined by Frictionless Fantasy Drift—where loneliness and dislocation leave people hungry for meaning—this performance finds an audience. Millions of them. The algorithm delivers it, refines it, amplifies it, until it begins to feel less like content and more like truth.

    Enter Caro Claire Burke, who looked at this spectacle and did what any rational observer might do: she pushed back. First on TikTok, then in her novel Yesteryear, which imagines a tradwife influencer waking up in 1855. The premise is simple. The result is devastating.

    Because when the fantasy is forced to pay rent—when it has to operate under the conditions it claims to celebrate—it collapses. The cozy illusion of domestic bliss is replaced by a brutal, unforgiving reality. Labor is constant. Comfort is scarce. And the husband, far from being a benevolent co-pilot, often resembles something closer to an owner. The cosplay dissolves, and what remains is history—raw, unvarnished, and deeply unpleasant.

    Reading about Burke’s setup, I couldn’t help but think of an old cartoon from my childhood: Tooter Turtle. Tooter is a lonely, perpetually dissatisfied turtle who dreams of becoming anything but himself—lumberjack, astronaut, baseball star, you name it. His friend, Mr. Wizard the Lizard, obliges by transporting him into these fantasies.

    And every time, without fail, the dream turns on him.

    The lumberjack nearly gets crushed. The astronaut faces disaster. The hero becomes the victim. Tooter, overwhelmed and panicked, begs to be rescued and returned to his ordinary life. The moral lands with blunt clarity: the fantasy is seductive, but it is also ignorant. It doesn’t account for reality because it doesn’t know it.

    Tooter is a child—permanently so—because he confuses the image of a life with the experience of living it.

    That’s the unsettling part. The gap between Tooter and a large segment of today’s online population is not as wide as we’d like to believe. We sit in front of our screens, absorbing curated lives, and imagine ourselves stepping into them as if they were costumes waiting to be worn. With enough imitation, enough belief, we assume the transformation will stick.

    It won’t.

    That’s why Burke’s novel has struck a nerve. It doesn’t just critique the fantasy; it subjects it to reality. It forces the dream to answer for itself. And when it does, the result is not liberation, but a sharp, corrective blow—a reminder that a life without friction may be easy to admire, but it is impossible to live.

    As for me, I’m looking forward to reading it.

  • The Visitor from the Abyss

    The Visitor from the Abyss

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    After several long seconds, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    Evil is not just an idea we debate in classrooms or confine to novels. It has a way of presenting itself—not always dramatically, not always visibly, but with enough force to alter how you move through the world. Once you’ve felt it, even briefly, it leaves a residue. A knowledge that doesn’t argue its case. It simply waits, somewhere just beyond the edge of explanation.

  • The Man Who Refunded His Generosity

    The Man Who Refunded His Generosity

    There is a certain type of man who treats generosity like a minor injury—something to be iced, medicated, and quickly undone. When social protocol forces him to buy a gift for someone else, he doesn’t experience the faint glow of goodwill. He winces. The purchase lands like a deduction from a sacred account, and the only way to steady himself is to restore the balance immediately—by buying something for himself.

    This is not coincidence. It’s policy.

    He operates under a private accounting system I’d call Gift Offset Compulsion: every act of giving must be counterweighted by an equal or greater act of self-reward. The outward gesture is merely the opening move; the real transaction is internal. He hands over a wrapped token with one hand while quietly preparing a compensatory indulgence with the other.

    In his mind, this isn’t selfishness—it’s equilibrium. A world in which he gives without reclaiming would feel distorted, even unjust. So he corrects it. Every birthday present, every holiday obligation, every ceremonial nod to generosity is followed by a personal rebate. He doesn’t give; he circulates assets. He doesn’t sacrifice; he settles accounts.

    And once the books are balanced, he feels whole again—restored, reimbursed, and ready, if necessary, to give once more… provided he can be paid back promptly.

    So my challenge to all my watch-obsessive friends is this: Look deep inside and ask yourself if you’ve ever purchased a watch under this type of psychological distress.