Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Geography of Friendship

    The Geography of Friendship

    I spoke today with a colleague I’ll call E, a man I’ve known for nearly three decades. In passing, I asked about D, our retired colleague, who’d always seemed to be E’s closest companion on campus. E didn’t hesitate: “Haven’t seen him since he retired four years ago.” I was floored. For thirty years I’d watched them laugh in hallways, share office gossip, and linger in each other’s doorways. To me, they were inseparable. To E, apparently, they were work buddies on a time clock. Now? His friends are his neighbors. Brutal clarity, no sentimentality.

    I didn’t judge him, though I did wince. I had mistaken their daily collisions for lifelong intimacy. What E reminded me of—casually, almost cheerfully—is the old truth: out of sight, out of mind. My ego resists this; I prefer to imagine I leave such an indelible mark that absence alone couldn’t erase me. But who am I kidding? Friendship is built on repetition and proximity, not myth. Remove the daily face-to-face, and even the warmest ties cool into background noise.

    Romantic love, of course, cheats this law. Passion bends molecules. Couples endure years of distance with letters, FaceTime, and masochistic longing. But friendship? Friendship doesn’t migrate well. It doesn’t live in the bloodstream. It lives in the cafeteria, the break room, the neighbor’s driveway. In other words, friendship needs geography. Love can survive exile; friendship needs a shared zip code.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock. 

  • Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    In the span of five minutes yesterday, I managed to destroy not one but two Samsung QLED smart TVs, each a 55-inch, three-year-old, $700 reminder of my own idiocy.

    Samsung Number One had been sulking in the bedroom, untouched for a week. I had banished it there after splurging on a $1,500 LG OLED for the living room. Last night I flicked it on and found half the screen swallowed in black vertical lines, like a funeral shroud. The culprit? Most likely my own heroic attempt to hoist it solo onto a dresser—an Olympic clean-and-jerk without the chalk or the applause. The impact probably jarred the LCD panel, cracking delicate circuits invisible to the eye but fatal to the image. Maybe a ribbon cable came loose from the T-Con board, which can sometimes be reseated if you’re the kind of person who enjoys performing surgery with tweezers and a magnifying glass. I am not. That Samsung was escorted to my office, where it joined the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a sort of graveyard for gadgets that lost their duel with me.

    Undeterred, I marched into my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—the TV I’d lent her after moving things around the previous week. She was at Knott’s Berry Farm with her friends, which seemed like a merciful stroke of timing. My plan: reclaim the Samsung, and let her inherit the old 43-inch LG, a relic from 11 years ago that weighs twice as much as the newer, bigger Samsungs.

    But hubris is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser, and I went at it like a gorilla in a hurry. I spread my arms wide to span its edges, but my right thumb betrayed me—it dug into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a feat of magical thinking, I told myself, “The panel probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines stood exactly where my Hulk thumb had pressed, like a signed confession of my clumsiness.

    Two lessons were carved into my soul in those catastrophic five minutes. First, modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second, I am unspeakably stupid.

    Now I must cram two cadaverous Samsungs into my car for their last ride to the eWaste center and figure out how to replace my bedroom screen. My daughter, surprisingly pliant, agreed to keep the old LG. As for my bedroom, I’m buying cheap: a $259 Roku 50-incher with deliberately low expectations. And from now on, I will follow the Prime Directive of Television Handling: any set larger than 40 inches must be carried upright by two people, no exceptions. This is not a powerlifting meet. There is no medal stand. A modern TV is a wafer-thin, brittle-screened diva.

    So: velvet gloves. And no grunting.

  • My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    There is much to admire about centering our lives on convenience. We save time and resources, avoid wasted effort, and maximize efficiency in the name of what is too often called “optimization.” A life built around convenience often becomes a quest for “life hacks.” But if our behavior is less inventive, we don’t call it a hack at all—just a preference.

    For example, I refuse to go to the gym. It’s inconvenient, time-consuming, costly, and exposes me to airborne illnesses. I prefer to work out in the garage. That’s not a life hack—it’s just easier. The same goes for meals: having a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder and soy milk instead of lunch or dinner isn’t clever or innovative. It’s simply what I do when my family is out and I’m eating alone. Spending more than five minutes on a meal under those circumstances feels unnecessary. Calling a bowl of steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats a “life hack” would be grandiose.

    During the pandemic, three-fourths of my classes moved online through Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS). Hard copies disappeared. Graded documents were uploaded to the platform, which was remarkably efficient. I didn’t have to drive to campus. The college saved on electricity. That was five years ago, and my classes remain online. I now drive less than 3,000 miles a year. Online classes have made me very efficient. Once you taste efficiency, it’s nearly impossible to go back to inefficiency.

    I admit I’m a less than admirable parent. I don’t like driving my teen daughters to their social functions—birthday parties, football games, dance practices, amusement parks. I find it all inconvenient. That’s my choice. If I were truly devoted to convenience, I wouldn’t have become a parent at all. And certainly not a cat owner. Kitty litter, flea control, vet visits, and travel arrangements are an affront to any serious commitment to convenience.

    As desirable as convenience is, some personalities—mine included—turn it into a pathology. We center our lives around it, and any violation of our convenience policies breeds resentment. Many of these resentments are unreasonable. I resent old age and death, primarily because they are inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals interfere with my routine.

    Convenience culture also makes us adore routine. I suspect routine is the groom to the bride of convenience.

    Even my worldview is infected by this impulse. I am an agnostic, which I despise, because it is inconvenient. Agnosticism demands reading and constant reflection. I’ve consumed books by agnostics, atheists, universalists, infernalists, and the post-mortem-salvation curious. While Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of scripture has many compelling points, her notion of morality as nothing more than evolution feels inadequate. Paul’s vision of humanity as fallen and divided is more persuasive and mirrors my own psychology. I wish I could settle happily into Anderson’s worldview. It would be so convenient.

    Speaking of religion, Jesus preached a gospel of inconvenience. His willingness to sacrifice his life in such a manner stands as the very opposite of convenience. For devotees of the gospel of ease, following Jesus is nearly unthinkable—a path that demands nothing less than a Damascus-level upheaval like Paul’s.

    When I think of convenience, I’m reminded of Chris Grossman, a wine salesman I worked with in the 1980s. He was brilliant and affable but had no close relationships. He admitted he didn’t care much for life. He had tried having a girlfriend once and said it was awful—not because of her, but because it was too inconvenient. By his late thirties, he was a bachelor. He ate the same foods every day for simplicity’s sake and once a year drove his Triumph to a car show in Carmel. I loved him for it, because I knew we were both soulmates in convenience culture.

    Some of us are more diseased by this devotion to convenience than others, and it often lowers our standards. I am appalled by factory farming and would like to be vegan. Perhaps if I lived alone, I could do it. But in a family of omnivores, that move would not go over well. I could prepare plant-based meals for myself, but I don’t—partly because of the inconvenience. Vegans I’ve spoken to say the hardest part isn’t the food but the social ostracism.

    I’m already the black sheep in my family—the anti-social shut-in whose quirks are laughed at on good days and resented on bad ones. If I imposed a vegan diet, I fear it would alienate me further, and I’d have to grovel my way back into some semblance of connection.

    As a lifelong neurotic who already alienates people more than I’d like, I know that repairing frayed relationships is an excruciating, arduous task. And it’s so inconvenient.

  • Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators argues that the television series To Catch a Predator (2004–2007) trafficked in a sensational form of “rage bait”: staged ambushes, blurred safety protocols, and police tactics sacrificed to the show’s appetite for ratings. The program framed itself as public service, but its producers often prioritized spectacle over procedure, converting criminal justice into prime-time theater. Osit links this practice to a broader media phenomenon—rage bait—that rewards outrage, erodes critical thinking, and normalizes vigilantism and voyeurism. The same dynamics, we could argue, animate conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones (see The Truth vs. Alex Jones): both convert moral panic into entertainment and profit, with corrosive effects on civic life.

    In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, evaluate the claim that treating criminality and conspiracy as spectacle—whether through To Catch a Predator or Alex Jones’s media operations—cultivates our worst impulses rather than our better angels. Using specific examples from both Predators and The Truth vs. Alex Jones and other reliable sources, analyze the ethical and civic consequences of rage bait in an attention economy

    Three sample thesis statements (with mapping components)

    Thesis 1 — Ethical-civic critique (best for moral analysis)
     Thesis: By converting crime and conspiracy into spectacle, both To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones manufacture moral panic and reward voyeuristic retribution; rather than fostering accountability, they degrade due process, incentivize unsafe policing practices, and train audiences to prefer outrage over inquiry.
    Map: (1) define “rage bait” and show how each case uses spectacle; (2) document procedural and ethical harms (policing compromises, doxxing, false beliefs); (3) analyze effects on civic habits (decline of deliberation, rise of vigilantism); (4) propose remedies (media ethics standards, platform governance, public media literacy).

    Thesis 2 — Psychological-manipulation frame (best for evidence-driven argument)
     Thesis: Rage-bait media—exemplified by To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones—exploits cognitive biases (moral outrage, availability heuristic, social proof) to increase engagement, and that manipulation converts viewers into amateur prosecutors and conspiracy enforcers, producing measurable social harms like harassment, miscarriages of public trust, and political polarization.
    Map: (1) summarize psychological mechanisms; (2) show how production choices trigger those biases in the two cases; (3) cite empirical consequences (harassment, wrongful accusations, erosion of trust); (4) recommend policy and audience-level interventions.

    Thesis 3 — Comparative-intent frame (best for nuanced balance)
     Thesis: While To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones both monetize outrage, they differ in intentionality and practical outcomes—one trafficked in staged public shaming with ambiguous law-enforcement complicity; the other peddles wholesale distrust—yet both converge in the same social result: normalizing spectacle as a substitute for justice and public reasoning.
    Map: (1) compare production intent and methods; (2) detail convergent harms despite different aims; (3) argue why intent does not absolve societal damage; (4) close with corrective measures that address both content creation and platform incentives.

    Three likely counterarguments and tight rebuttals

    Counterargument 1 — “They serve the public good: exposing predators / exposing lies.”
     Claim: Defenders argue To Catch a Predator and figures like Jones uncover dangerous people and warn the public—both perform watchdog functions that mainstream institutions neglect.
    Rebuttal: Exposure can be legitimate, but methods matter. When producers stage confrontations or flout safety protocols, they risk false positives, entrapment claims, and endangering both suspects and vigilante viewers. Similarly, Jones’s “exposés” often rely on unverified claims that harm innocents and erode trust in verified institutions; exposing wrongdoing while abandoning standards of verification is not accountability but sensationalism. Evidence-based journalism follows verification and respects due process; rage-bait substitutes spectacle for those constraints.

    Counterargument 2 — “Audience agency: viewers choose to watch—blame the audience for wanting spectacle.”
     Claim: Some say demand creates supply: if people didn’t tune in to outrage, producers wouldn’t supply it. Viewers are responsible for their choices.
    Rebuttal: Demand is shaped by supply. Media design and platform algorithms amplify outrage, reinforce confirmation bias, and make the extreme more visible. Moreover, many viewers do not have the media-literacy tools to parse staged setups or conspiratorial rhetoric. Responsibility therefore rests both with producers and with platforms that monetize attention; blaming passive viewers ignores the structural incentives that manufacture and magnify the spectacle.

    Counterargument 3 — “Different aims—public safety vs. entertainment—so comparison is unfair.”
     Claim: Critics argue the comparison collapses distinct categories: a sting operation aimed at child safety is not morally equivalent to a conspiracy show that pushes falsehoods.
    Rebuttal: Distinguishing aims matters, but consequences and methods matter more for public judgment. When public-safety rhetoric is deployed to justify theatrics—compromising police protocols for ratings—the boundary between service and spectacle disappears. Both enterprises monetize outrage, and both can cultivate a culture of punishment without procedure. Comparing them is not moral leveling so much as showing how different rationales can converge on the same harmful social model.

  • The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    Yesterday I watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones and came away unsettled and discouraged. The film lays out, with testimony and footage, how a powerful falsehood about the Sandy Hook massacre metastasized into a lived reality for many—how ordinary people came to believe grieving parents were actors in some sinister plot. The human cost is plain: families harassed, reputations shredded, lives made worse by a rumor that would not die. The documentary also cites polling that suggests this belief is far from fringe, which is precisely what made me sit up and take notice.

    Alan Jacobs, in How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, gave me a frame for that discomfort. Jacobs argues that critical thinking is not merely a set of intellectual tools; it is a moral posture. It requires humility—the readiness to admit you might be wrong—intellectual rigor, and a willingness to engage, civilly, with rival views. In a public sphere where grievance entrepreneurs monetize confusion and cruelty, Jacobs’s point feels less like scholastic nicety and more like civic equipment. To believe in the conspiracy about Sandy Hook is less of an intellectual deficiency and more of a moral one. Willful ignorance is born of belligerence.

    There are historical moments when falsehoods gain unusual traction and the public square warps into a theater of lies. Watching the documentary, I thought about those moments not as distant epochs but as warnings: when social media rewards certainty over care, and when spectacle drowns out verification, civic habits fray. On the evening he announced his retirement, anchor Brian Williams put it bluntly when he spoke of “evil winds” in our national weather—less a prophecy than an observation that the job of keeping the truth in view has grown harder.

    That’s where I am: uneasy, but oddly steadied by the thought that civic muscles can be strengthened with small, repeated acts. Viktor Frankl reminded us that life’s circumstances often determine the work we must do; perhaps one task for this hour is to preserve the habits that let a shared reality exist in the first place.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

    One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

    Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

    My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

    That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

    Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

    Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

  • False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    I’m about a third of the way through the Audible of Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate, in which Nicholi argues that the single largest life decision — whether to accept or reject belief in God — carries the heaviest consequences. He paints Lewis as modest, serene, and living in a state of grace (the fruits of the spirit, if you like), while he casts Freud as intoxicated with his own genius, dismissing God as a childish projection.

    I have several objections. First, Nicholi leans on a rhetorical pose I find disingenuous: “I’m not trying to persuade anyone — just look at the facts.” He presents himself as a neutral referee while quietly aligning with Lewis. The result is a parade of straw-man treatments that caricature Freud and flatten the debate into tidy contrasts the evidence doesn’t support.

    Second, Nicholi’s central frame is an either/or fallacy: you either believe in God or you don’t. That binary elides the vast internal variety within religious traditions. One person’s God can be another person’s devil — and not across religions but within the same text. Christianity alone supplies wildly different conceptions: the Calvinist God versus a Universalist God; a God who offers post-mortem purgatorial salvation versus one who does not. Even accounts of the Crucifixion diverge: some Christians see it as substitutionary atonement, others categorically reject that reading. As Jerry Walls notes, the God who plans substitutionary atonement is not the God who doesn’t.

    Nicholi also ignores how different beliefs about God imply different beliefs about human nature. Are we, as Paul suggests in Romans, depraved and helpless? Or, as Hyam Maccoby argues from a Jewish perspective, did God create us with the capacity to meet Him halfway? The kind of God you endorse carries with it a theory of human wiring — and Nicholi refuses to engage that complexity.

    Those omissions aren’t accidental; they’re convenient. Reducing belief to a binary choice lets Nicholi render one side salutary and the other contemptible without wrestling with the theological and anthropological thickets that make the question genuinely hard.

    The tone of the book compounds the problem. A Harvard psychiatrist writing in a creamy, intellectual register, posing as an impartial guide through this existential choice, slides easily into what feels like a polished little tract. The surface civility—measured analysis, calm diction—camouflages rhetorical sleights of hand that, to my mind, undermine the work’s seriousness.

    I want to be fair. I’m trying. But once you notice the frauds and fallacies — the imposture of neutrality, the forced binary, the flattened portrayals — they don’t unsee themselves. So I’m forcing my way through the remaining two-thirds of the book, partly out of duty and partly to see whether Nicholi can salvage his argument when he has to meet the harder questions he’s been avoiding.