Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    I’m fewer than four semesters away from retirement—June 2027, the final curtain—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. For nearly forty years I’ve worn the armor of a college classroom persona: bigger, bolder, more disciplined than the fragile, fumbling man who hides inside. Teaching gave me a stage and a referee’s whistle. Without it, who am I? Just the broken man-child without a supervisor, left to his own devices.

    During the pandemic, when colleagues were clawing to get out, I puffed out my chest and declared I was born ready for retirement. I pictured myself a disciplined Renaissance man: mornings at the piano, afternoons writing, evenings lifting kettlebells in the garage, book in hand before bed. A gilded schedule, as though I were independently wealthy. Now those boasts feel like hot air. Structure is one thing. The man animating that structure is another. In the classroom, the stakes were high: thirty pairs of eyes asking, Are you boring? Do you know what you’re talking about? The pressure kept me sharp, funny, and, occasionally, wise. No one lets you coast when you’re trapped under fluorescent lights for two hours with judgmental twenty-year-olds.

    Bitter irony: I’m leaving just as I finally got it right. It took me decades to balance theater with approachability, to drop the drill-sergeant persona that once scared students into silence, to actually build a classroom where people learned and laughed. Now I can scaffold essays like an architect and coax timid students into crafting arguments brick by brick. And just as the machinery is humming, I’m stepping offstage. Melancholy doesn’t begin to cover it.

    And then retirement makes you pay with loads of endless paperwork. Work forms that warn you that you cannot rescind your decision. Medicare forms with their cryptic alphabet soup (A, B, C, D), switching to my wife’s insurance, navigating private plans that read like IKEA instructions translated from Martian. I’ve joked I’d rather do faculty assessment reports than wrestle with retirement forms, and I meant it.

    Meanwhile, time itself heckles me. I’ll be sixty-four in six weeks. At my cousin’s seventy-fifth birthday, the guests—all seventysomethings—mingled like ghosts of futures to come. One cousin, seventy-eight, told me that old age makes you invisible. You still occupy space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture. Old age is rude like that: the world resents you for hogging resources after your best years are spent. You should apologize for existing. Step aside, old man.

    So here I am, staring down a three-headed monster: paperwork, invisibility, and the slow evaporation of the job that kept me sane. What’s the plan? At six years old, I invented a companion—James, my imaginary friend. I’d knock on the apartment wall and tell my parents James wanted to play. They laughed, which only confirmed that James and I were onto something.

    Now, on the cusp of retirement, I feel his absence. Because when I think of retirement, I think of loneliness, and when I think of loneliness, I think of Gollum—squatting in the cave, muttering “precious” as he caresses the ring. Only for me, the ring isn’t a piece of jewelry. It’s youth. Precious, lost youth. I stroke it with nostalgia and curse it with bitterness. How dare people treat me like I’m invisible, when old age has taught me more than their Google searches ever will? And yet—I know this bitterness is the opposite of wisdom.

    So maybe I do need James back. But not the sweet, knock-on-the-wall James of childhood. I need James 2.0: a drill-sergeant life coach who will slap me across the face and bark: Stop whining. You’ve got love. You’ve got lights on in the house. You’re walking into retirement with more than most people ever dream of. Be grateful. And don’t you dare let this next chapter kick your ass.

  • The Backyard Beast No One Wanted

    The Backyard Beast No One Wanted

    About eight years ago, my wife dragged home a secondhand monstrosity: a deluxe, double-tarp trampoline large enough to launch a small circus. It came with netted partitions to keep bouncing children from achieving low-Earth orbit, a backyard NASA program disguised as “fun.”

    Fast forward to now: my daughters, fifteen and far too sophisticated for backyard astronaut training, want the beast gone. They imagine chic barbecues, fairy lights, friends lounging with kombucha spritzers—scenes that don’t exactly pair with a faded, sagging trampoline hulking like a rusted Saturn V in the middle of the yard. Dutifully, we tried to offload it. We canvassed neighbors, begged on Facebook’s “free stuff” group, even flirted with Craigslist. The universal response? Crickets. No one wants this backyard dinosaur. And frankly, who could blame them? It’s not a toy—it’s a liability. Let a kid hop on it and you’ll be hosting a neighborhood ER shuttle service, complete with broken limbs and dislocated shoulders.

    Denial is over. I’ve stared long enough at its faded tarps, its sun-bleached frame, the sad gaps in its safety net where the gardener hacked through to trim a tree. Whatever curb appeal it once flaunted has been roasted away by the California sun, leaving something closer to a giant lawn ulcer.

    So the verdict is clear: I will dismantle it. Piece by reluctant piece, I’ll scatter its remains into trash bins, an unceremonious Viking funeral for the backyard beast no one wanted.

  • When the Levees Broke, Love Held: Kinship and Trust as Survival Codes (A College Essay Prompt)

    When the Levees Broke, Love Held: Kinship and Trust as Survival Codes (A College Essay Prompt)

    Essay Prompt

    When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, it wasn’t only a natural disaster; it was a test of the nation’s moral infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) lay bare a grim truth: while government agencies stumbled, delayed, or failed outright, it was ordinary people—families, neighbors, church groups, and communities—who often became the real lifelines of survival.

    This paradox deserves attention. Katrina exposed systemic abandonment: broken levees, collapsed evacuation plans, and botched relief efforts. Yet amid this neglect, stories emerged of neighbors carrying the elderly through floodwaters, families sharing scarce food, and communities improvising codes of loyalty and solidarity to keep one another alive. These grassroots responses were not bureaucratic; they were visceral, rooted in bonds of kinship, shared suffering, and a deep sense of responsibility to one another.

    The films reveal a cultural alchemy unique to New Orleans—where music, food, faith, and kinship traditions already wove people together. During Katrina, those traditions became lifeboats, not metaphorically but literally. In the absence of functioning institutions, families and neighbors reinvented survival itself, showing that human dignity doesn’t only exist in comfort or prosperity but can be forged in the crucible of catastrophe.

    Your Task: Write a 1,700-word essay analyzing how bonds of kinship and community loyalty functioned as lifeboats of survival in post-Katrina New Orleans.

    Address the following questions in your essay:

    • How did family love and neighborhood trust create improvised survival systems when formal institutions failed?
    • In what ways did communities create a code of resilience, a shared moral contract, during the disaster?
    • What lessons can be drawn from this improvisational solidarity about human dignity, loyalty, and the meaning of community in times of collapse?

    Your essay should balance analysis of the documentaries with close attention to human stories of resilience. Use specific examples and consider how these lessons apply beyond Katrina: What do they teach us about disaster, community, and the fragile but essential bonds that keep us human?

    Sample 9-Paragraph Outline

    Introduction (1 paragraph)

    • Hook: Paint the scene—abandoned streets, flooded houses, helicopters circling, and yet neighbors wading through water with makeshift rafts.
    • Context: Briefly note government failures highlighted in both documentaries (FEMA delays, stranded citizens, broken levees).
    • Thesis: Argue that when institutions collapse, kinship and neighborhood bonds become codes of resilience—informal but powerful lifeboats—that preserve human dignity, improvise survival, and reveal enduring truths about community loyalty in catastrophe.

    Body Paragraph 1: Government Collapse vs. Community Response

    • Detail FEMA delays, local government paralysis, and the abandonment felt by residents.
    • Contrast with ordinary people organizing rescues, distributing food, and opening their homes.
    • Set up the theme: resilience grows where systems fail.

    Body Paragraph 2: Families as First Responders

    • Show how families stayed together, sharing resources, protecting elders and children.
    • Examples from the films: families wading together through water, refusing to abandon one another.
    • Argue that love in the family unit became the most reliable “infrastructure” of survival.

    Body Paragraph 3: Neighbors as Kin

    • Explore how neighbors expanded the definition of family.
    • Community members who had never spoken before suddenly acted as protectors and caregivers.
    • This shows the elasticity of kinship: disaster stretches the definition of who counts as “family.”

    Body Paragraph 4: The Code of Resilience

    • Define the unwritten rules that emerged: share what you have, protect the vulnerable, don’t abandon your people.
    • These codes operated faster and more effectively than bureaucratic policies.
    • Examples: strangers pooling resources, neighborhood patrols against looters, churches as shelters.

    Body Paragraph 5: Improvisation as Survival Strategy

    • Show how ordinary people became engineers, medics, and rescuers.
    • Example: makeshift boats, rafts, and supply lines.
    • Connect to the broader point: resilience is not planned in a manual; it is improvised under pressure.

    Body Paragraph 6: Dignity Amid Despair

    • Explore how solidarity preserved dignity in dehumanizing conditions (Superdome chaos, flooded homes).
    • Argue that dignity comes not from institutions but from mutual recognition—neighbors affirming each other’s worth when society seems to have abandoned them.

    Body Paragraph 7: Lessons Beyond Katrina

    • Broaden the lens: how does this apply to future disasters (pandemics, climate change, social unrest)?
    • Argue that resilience depends less on bureaucracies than on the cultural strength of communities.
    • Point: family and community loyalty may be the last firewall against collapse.

    Body Paragraph 8: Counterargument & Rebuttal

    • Acknowledge critics: some argue neighbor-to-neighbor efforts were insufficient or uneven, that only systemic reform can prevent tragedy.
    • Rebuttal: While systemic change is essential, Katrina shows that human dignity cannot wait for bureaucratic rescue—it depends on immediate solidarity.

    Conclusion (1 paragraph)

    • Restate thesis: Katrina revealed abandonment but also exposed the cultural wealth of kinship and loyalty as lifeboats of survival.
    • End with a powerful image: in the floodwaters, where the state faltered, the human heart did not.
    • Call to action: value, protect, and invest in community bonds before the next disaster arrives.
  • Muscle Man: A Novel of Rants in Disguise

    Muscle Man: A Novel of Rants in Disguise

    Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man is a strange beast: less a conventional novel than a stack of scathing essays stitched together with the thread of a character named Harold, an English professor obsessed with bodybuilding. Harold isn’t so much flesh and blood as a delivery system for polemics. He rants against bureaucratic absurdities, the avalanche of pointless emails, academia’s desperate clawing for relevance, and the smug Groupthink masquerading as intellectual superiority. He rails at the hypocrisy of universities that wave the flag of social justice while exploiting adjuncts, athletes, and students, and he sneers at the notion of campus as sanctuary when his inbox is clogged with alerts about robberies and assaults.

    Where the novel shines is precisely in these acidic rants. Castro’s Harold is less character than conduit, channeling fury and despair at a culture unraveling into nihilism. The ironies abound: Harold, who clings to bodybuilding as a refuge, is ironically less muscle than mouthpiece—an abstraction desperate for mass. And that is both the strength and weakness of Muscle Man. The pleasure lies in the essays-in-disguise, the delicious insights, the spectacle of academia and American culture descending into entropy. What you won’t find is narrative immersion, the joy of getting lost in a world that feels lived-in.

    That doesn’t make Castro’s experiment invalid. Novels aren’t bound by rules; if a writer wants to build a stage for ideas instead of characters, so be it. But a novel that thrives on abstractions will only light up some of the reader’s neurons, not all. If you want a narrative that delivers both scabrous cultural critique and the visceral, personal journey of a bodybuilder spiraling into madness, reach for Samuel Wilson Fussell’s Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. That book flexes.

  • True Crime Shows Us the Demon That Hides Behind the Diagnosis

    True Crime Shows Us the Demon That Hides Behind the Diagnosis

    I still gag a little when I think of tabloid TV from the ’80s and ’90s—A Current Affair, Hard Copy, Inside Edition. The formula was simple: snarl into the camera, crank up the drama, and serve audiences their daily ration of moral panic wrapped in neon graphics. Having swallowed enough of that sludge in my twenties, I swore off the “true crime” genre, suspecting most modern entries were little more than tabloid reruns with higher production values.

    Then my wife and daughters talked me into it. In the last week I watched Love Con Revenge, a six-episode saga of con artists devouring their marks and detectives chasing them down like bloodhounds, and Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, the tale of a grotesque mother harassing her own daughter and boyfriend with a relentless barrage of obscene texts. Both were polished, chilling, and—for my sins—utterly absorbing.

    No shock, then, that Netflix, Hulu, and every other platform groan under the weight of hundreds of these fraudster chronicles. They mirror our times: technology weaponized into psychological napalm, the digital swamp rising up to engulf ordinary people. The stories console us by drawing a line between the “real world” of decent citizens and the fever swamp where predators feed—though that line, as these shows prove, is faint and fragile.

    What gnaws at me are the faces of these fraudsters: unrepentant, smug, cannibalizing innocence with the appetite of vultures while spinning narratives in which they—God help us—are the real victims. Watching Unknown Number, I thought of Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, a book that haunted my twenties. The book explores the unsettling terrain where mental illness and evil blur into one another, arguing that certain destructive patterns of thought and behavior cannot be neatly filed under psychiatric diagnosis alone. Peck suggests that some people hide behind the language of neurosis or dysfunction when what they are really exhibiting is a willful commitment to deceit, denial, and cruelty—a kind of “malignant self-righteousness” that psychiatry struggles to name. In his case studies, ordinary families cloak acts of profound betrayal and abuse in banality, showing how evil masquerades as normality. The book’s disturbing thesis is that evil is not always the exotic monster of horror stories but can manifest in the evasions, manipulations, and rationalizations of those who choose to deform their humanity, collapsing the categories of illness and moral corruption into one corrosive force.

    And here’s the ugly echo: the fraudster’s toolbox of deceit, self-victimization, and gaslighting isn’t confined to con men or deranged mothers. It has migrated, wholesale, into the attention economy. TikTok influencers now weaponize the same tactics, performing ailments and afflictions as if auditioning for sainthood, diagnosing themselves in real time while amassing legions of followers. This is fraud with a ring light: branding through pathology, monetized self-deception packaged as authenticity. It is the same theater of manipulation, dressed up in pastel filters instead of burner phones. And maybe that’s why these true-crime tales fascinate us: they remind us that manipulation, gaslighting, and deception have found their ultimate playground online. We watch to reassure ourselves that we’re still anchored to reality, but what we see instead is how terrifyingly porous the line is between mental illness and pure, corrosive evil.

    When we slap a psychiatric label on every grotesque act, we risk letting the guilty off the hook. To call fraud, cruelty, or sadism merely a “condition” is to dodge the darker truth—that people are capable of choosing evil. Peck was right to warn that deceit and malignant self-righteousness are not just quirks of the psyche but deliberate acts of corruption. If we keep misnaming evil as illness, we blind ourselves to the reality that a demon can take root inside ordinary people, feeding on their rationalizations until it grows strong enough to wreak chaos and devastation in the world around them.

  • How Soon Is Theft?

    How Soon Is Theft?

    In 1990, I was in my late twenties, a newly minted college writing instructor drifting through life with the ethereal soundtrack of The Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, The Trash Can Sinatras, and The Sundays rattling in my head. One afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard with my girlfriend, I did what any self-respecting young melancholic would do: I bought Smiths T-shirts and posters like sacred relics. The crown jewel was my “How Soon Is Now” poster, a portrait of an angst-drenched youth in a gray cable-knit sweater, gazing downward as if staring into the abyss. I taped it proudly to my office door, a shrine to my tribe. Within a week, it was gone—stolen.

    The theft still smolders decades later. It wasn’t just the insult of having something ripped from my door; it was the betrayal of the faith I placed in The Smiths’ congregation. Their music was heartbreak bottled into beauty, sadness transmuted into community. To love The Smiths, I believed, was to be incapable of theft. Fans were supposed to be fellow pilgrims on the same road to melancholy salvation. You don’t rob your brother of his relics. You light a candle with him and hum “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

    But there it was: my poster ripped away not by a barbarian from the outside, but by a fellow initiate. The irony was unbearable. If The Smiths could not protect us from base impulses, if their music could not ennoble even their most ardent listeners, then what was art worth? Wasn’t it supposed to make us better, kinder, less brutish? The theft of that poster wasn’t just petty larceny. It was the murder of a principle.

    To this day, I remember the empty rectangle of tape marks left on my office door, staring back at me like a smirk from the abyss. The thief didn’t just pocket a poster; they handed me a lesson in nihilism, gift-wrapped in Morrissey’s sorrowful croon. And I’ve been suspicious of beauty ever since, knowing it can inspire devotion and betrayal in the same breath.

  • The University as Hospice, the Gym as Cathedral

    The University as Hospice, the Gym as Cathedral

    In Jordan Castro’s scabrous novel Muscle Man, the protagonist, English professor Harold, concludes that the American university is dead. It’s only alive in a creepy, sad sort of way–zombification–manifest in online posts for events that no one goes to. These events are announced in emails as “exciting,” “excited,” and “please join.” No one joins. Other emails announce “calls to action,” and no one acts. They just remain lizard-eyed and stolid. These events are exercises in soul-crushing banality. Rather than a place to nurture young minds, the American university is so encumbered by bureaucratic speak and irrelevant, esoteric academic theories, it is an impotent institution and a graveyard where people go to die. 

    Perhaps Harold just needs a hug. Or perhaps he has cracked the code. He sees in the constant flood of college email announcements a desperate plea to be heard and to be irrelevant while being buried by its own fecklessness.

    The state of the college, especially the humanities, seems especially imperiled and moribund in the A.I. Age where students outsource writing, creativity, and “critical thinking” to machines and instructors are too feeble to stop the tsunami of these disrupting, revolutionary information and language tools.  

    As higher education looks more and more like a forlorn dinosaur and clings to stale identitarian platitudes and “progressive pedagogies” to cling to relevance, Harold surely must fret his own irrelevance and seek sanctuary in his bodybuilding dreams–curling iron as the cathedral of meaning and protein shakes as sacrament. In a world where the humanities have become the walking dead, at least the pump feels alive.

  • Bench Pressing the Bureaucracy

    Bench Pressing the Bureaucracy

    By the time we get to Chapter 3 in Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, we get the sense that its protagonist English professor and aspiring bodybuilder Harold is having a sort of mental breakdown. His disconnection from colleagues and students alike has caused him to retreat into his self-created bodybuilding ecosystem where he soothes himself with fitness apps, macros, and hypertrophic training phases. In this regard, Harold is following the footsteps of Samuel Wilson Fussell’s descent into madness, acute anxiety, and misanthropic paranoia, which was chronicled in Fussell’s 1991 memoir Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.  

    In Harold’s case, department meetings are particularly odious and affect him like kryptonite. After a meeting, his gym workouts are like purgations of the silly meeting indoctrination and in his best workouts he exorcises the academia demons from his system and enjoys temporary relief before returning to the academic hellscape. 

    Part of the hellscape is the constant flow of campus emails informing him of “investigations” and “alerts” for a myriad of on-campus crimes. Violence, theft, random deaths, and perversion is chronicled in these emails so that the campus is less of an academic institution and more of an abandoned bus stop in the Land of Nowhere.

    To add to the absurdity, Harold receives follow-up emails about violent crimes on campus that use the violence as an opportunity to explore systemic causes of violence and “to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand one another.” 

    The students’ illiterate emails add to the hellscape. The students never ask for ways to improve their work. Rather, they demand higher grades in typo-laden emails that contain no punctuation or coherent sentence structure.

    Harold is inundated with a flood of thousands of emails that overwhelm him and expose the fact there is no such thing as free time, but a life imprisoned to bureaucratic thought manifest in a deluge of meaningless and absurd emails that demand attention and guarantee that your life will be squandered and rendered into nihilism. 

    The campus is less an educational sanctuary and more of a manifestation of comedian George Carlin’s famous observation that when you’re born, you get a free front-row ticket to the freak show. 

    For Harold, that freak show has all the bruising force of a compound fracture. His only painkiller is the gym: the curling bar as Percocet, the glute bridge as Prozac. Without the dumbbell’s cold salvation, Harold would drown in the bureaucratic sewage of his academic nightmare.

  • The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    In Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, paranoia has a name: Harold, a disgruntled English professor who stalks the halls of Shepherd College convinced his masculinity is shriveling under fluorescent lights and academic jargon. The place is no sanctuary of learning but a mausoleum of joyless theory—an institution where semiotics and power structures reign supreme, while Harold dreams of biceps, protein macros, and shredded abs. To him, the Priests of the Intellect are laughable scarecrows, their bodies soft as tomatoes skewered on toothpicks, their credibility dissolving with every Oreo they dunk between papers on Derrida.

    Banished to a basement classroom without sunlight, Harold becomes a musclebound Gollum snarling at his colleagues above, who bask in daylight and collegial belonging. Faculty meetings are his personal hell: an ordeal as odious as wisdom-teeth extractions performed by a dentist with no anesthetic and no soul. While his peers pontificate about “backward design” and “cohorts,” Harold visualizes his metabolism torching fat, each fiber of muscle flexing like a Renaissance sculpture coming alive.

    What makes Harold truly unhinged is Shepherd College itself—a cult in mortar and brick, built on the deranged philosophy of the late R.K. Mort, who declared that architecture should “infect” and “haunt” its inhabitants. Mort’s disciples fawn over his absurdities as if he were an academic messiah, turning the college into a dehumanizing theme park of theory. It’s Severance with faculty ID cards.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder trapped in academia myself, I relate to Harold’s plight more than I’d like to admit. Yet I nearly hurled the book across the room when Harold showed up to his interminable meeting without food. A man obsessed with protein who forgets to pack a meal? Unforgivable. In my forty years of teaching, I never once forgot to bring my Tupperware of chicken breast or Greek yogurt to the institutional trenches. I wanted to shout at the page: “Get in the game, Harold! Respect the gains!” Still, his misfit rage and comic pathos hook me. Harold may be a wreck, but he’s my kind of wreck.

    I’m only two chapters in but eager to consume the entirety of this delicious satire.

  • How I Bribed My Students Into Talking on Canvas Discussion Boards

    How I Bribed My Students Into Talking on Canvas Discussion Boards

    Yesterday’s meeting featured the usual bureaucratic chestnut: making sure our online writing classes don’t devolve into glorified correspondence courses. The mandate was clear—students must get quick feedback from us, know how to contact us, have a tech-support lifeline, understand what materials to buy (not a $3,000 MacBook Pro?), and, above all, know the bare minimum of interaction they’ll have with their online peers.

    That interaction lives on the Canvas Discussion Board, which we’re told is the beating heart of digital education. From hard experience, I know this: if I don’t attach points, those boards become ghost towns. Students treat “attendance only” discussions like spam mail. The secret motivator is points—no matter how meager. Even the stingiest point values light up student survival instincts. They’d rather wrestle with a tedious prompt than lose three points.

    So here’s my new math for online classes:

    • Three 1,700-word essays: 220 points each.
    • Six building blocks (a.k.a. formative assignments): 50 points each.
    • Eight Discussion Board prompts: 5 points each.

    That’s the full enchilada: 1,000 points. Students stay engaged, the boards don’t wither, and I can claim my class is more than digital pen pals swapping files in the void.han digital pen pals swapping files in the void.