Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Pea Protein Plague

    The Pea Protein Plague

    For three days, I flirted with the fantasy of going vegan in the protein department. Out went my dependable whey; in came Orgain’s peanut butter-flavored vegan powder ($32), built on the gritty backbone of pea protein. Waiting in the wings was OWYN Pro Elite in dark chocolate ($47), still sealed, still smug.

    But curiosity didn’t last. It curdled into resolve — the kind of resolve born from three days of gut-twisting cramps so vicious they stole my ability to work out. Imagine the irony: my protein obsession, meant to fuel training, knocked me out of the gym entirely. Not just any protein, but vegan protein, embraced in part to end my petty larceny of cow’s milk from calves. My humanitarian mission dissolved in a haze of bloating and despair.

    So I texted my neighbor Holly, handed over $80 of organic powders, and felt as if I were banishing demons. She was delighted. Her family loves vegan protein powder for their smoothies. I was both exorcised and relieved. Good riddance to powders that turned my insides into a war zone.

    Looking forward, I’ll still be a thief — but only a petty one. A scoop of whey stirred into my morning buckwheat groats. Two modest helpings of plain Greek yogurt with honey at lunch and after my nap. A splash of stolen milk here and there. I hope the calves understand: my theft is not egregious, just survivable.

    Still, my diet is 90 percent plants, enough to keep my conscience propped up. My protein intake will slide from 180 grams to about 140, and so be it. I’ll trade hypertrophy for digestive peace.

    Because let me say it clearly: some of us must never touch pea protein again. It expands inside us like an alien organism, leaving us to wish for death’s consoling embrace. Never again.

  • When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) are searing indictments as much as they are testaments to survival. They tell the story of a singular city—New Orleans, a cultural jewel—betrayed and abandoned by its own nation.

    Told through the voices of those who endured the storm in 2005, these films lay bare a fourfold sin against the people of New Orleans.

    First sin: red-lining. Decades of discriminatory housing policies corralled Black families into neighborhoods below sea level—neighborhoods left exposed to catastrophe—while white families secured higher, safer ground. Yet out of this coerced geography bloomed community, kinship, jazz, art, and a way of life so distinctive that New Orleans became not just a city but a state of mind.

    Second sin: neglect. The protective marshlands were carved away, the levees shoddily built, the safeguards ignored. What should have been natural resilience was dismantled piece by piece, until a storm became a man-made massacre.

    Third sin: abandonment. When the waters rose, thousands of citizens waited for rescue that never came. They suffered hunger, thirst, illness, despair. Bureaucracies paralyzed by incompetence and poisoned by political rivalry left them stranded—leaders too intent on humiliating one another to save lives.

    Fourth sin: defamation. Media outlets, infected with racism, painted Black survivors as looters and criminals while white survivors were depicted as resourceful and brave. Rumors of sniper fire and marauding gangs turned aid missions into militarized standoffs, with the National Guard pointing rifles at the very people they were sent to save. These lies fueled white vigilantes who hunted Black residents as if the collapse of law gave them license to kill.

    This fourfold betrayal is almost unbearable to watch, yet threaded through the grief is a resilient beauty: the music, the food, the language, the humor, the love of place that make New Orleans irreducible. Katrina remains one of America’s most shameful chapters—but also a reminder that the soul of New Orleans is larger than its wounds.

  • The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    Last night, I slipped into a dream where I was less man and more detective cliché: trench coat, team at my side, the whole noir package. We prowled the tiled underworld of a health club, where women lay dead in the shower stalls. The air carried a rank perfume—pungent, briny, unmistakable. It was the signature of our quarry, The Alligator Man, a serial killer who apparently marinated in fish guts before slaughter.

    Our trap was absurd but effective. We laced another health club’s showers with his own scent, as if baiting him with eau de swamp monster. Sure enough, the predator slithered into the stall, and I lunged. But instead of the hulking brute I expected, I clutched a young, handsome man, small enough to vanish in a crowd. His boyish face said innocent; his stench said otherwise. I locked eyes with him and announced, with grim satisfaction, that he was evil—and that evil was about to rot in a cell forever.

    Then, with dream logic’s usual whiplash, I found myself at a holiday party with my family. My wife had crafted me a lobster costume: claws for hands, a scarlet exoskeleton, and a hat shaped like a boiled crustacean’s head. I looked like a seafood platter at a masquerade ball. I ate cake while dodging feline landmines—the hosts’ cats had redecorated the house with cat mess. The carpet was stained with these “accidents.” With cake fork in hand, I declared this exhibit A for my lifelong “no pets policy.”

    The party oozed past midnight into the pale gray of morning. Bored stiff and craving endorphins, I trudged home. Still zipped inside my lobster suit, I cranked up a kettlebell workout in the living room. My claws clacked as I swung iron, the sweat pooling beneath my polyester shellfish skin.

    Headlights swept across the window. My wife and twin daughters walked in. I assumed they, too, had abandoned the litter-box bacchanal. She spotted me mid-squat, lobster claws snapping, and didn’t so much as flinch. I worried she’d rage over my soaking her handmade costume in salt and sweat. Instead, she simply yawned, brushed past my lobster theatrics, and announced she was going to bed. Evil had been vanquished, cats had soiled carpets, and the lobster workout was apparently just another Tuesday in her world.

  • From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    I’m nearing sixty-four, and you’d think the resume of my life would say it all: married man, father of twin teenage daughters, lifelong weightlifter, and full-time college writing instructor pushing four decades in the trenches. Yet none of those titles define me quite like the pathology that has consumed my last twenty years: an obsession with diver watches.

    The disease began in 2005, when I bought my first “Hero Watch,” a Citizen Ecozilla. I was a suburbanite with all the aquatic daring of a backyard kiddie pool, but strapping that hulk of steel on my wrist turned me into a fantasy adventurer. The Ecozilla was my passport into adventurist cosplay, proof that even if my only dive was into Costco’s frozen food aisle, I could still play Jacques Cousteau in my imagination.

    For nearly two decades, I clung to bracelets and dismissed rubber. Rubber straps were sticky, sweaty, and cheap—the footwear of wristwear. But then, in 2024, a fellow enthusiast on Instagram whispered the gospel of Minotaur, a boutique strap company out of Houston. Their FKM rubber was no ordinary rubber—it was luxury-grade, accordion-style, fat spring bar holes, the kind of strap that doesn’t just hold a watch but weds it. Think craft brewery meets haute horology.

    When I slipped a Minotaur onto my Seiko diver, it was a conversion experience. Think Paul in Damascus. The strap was supple yet firm, sleek yet rugged. It was the hand-in-glove perfection every watch collector secretly craves.

    Suddenly, my seven Seiko divers weren’t just watches—they were sacraments. I no longer needed to fuss with bracelet links or endure the daily annoyance of micro-adjustments. The Minotaur straps brought equilibrium to my collection, and by extension, to my life.

    I became the town crier of Minotaur. Instagram posts, YouTube videos, flowery effusions of praise—my strap evangelism knew no bounds.

    I even struck up a friendship with Ron Minitrie, the Minotaur founder himself, who sent me models to showcase. For a while, I was living the influencer’s dream: watch bliss, strap perfection, hobby fulfillment so complete I worried it might be dangerous.

    But what happens when you reach nirvana? Do you close the YouTube channel, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after? Of course not. That’s when the gods get bored and send you a curse.

    The curse arrived in the form of a comment from a viewer named Infiniti-88. He linked to a Notre Dame study that accused FKM rubber straps of being Trojan horses of doom. According to the study, FKM bled PFAS “forever chemicals” into the bloodstream, potentially wrecking organs, scrambling hormones, and sowing cancer. Because watch straps are worn all day—sweat, heat, friction, even while sleeping—the risk was presented as constant exposure.

    Infiniti-88’s question was simple: “What are you going to do?”

    Cue the descent into madness. I read the study, panicked, and stripped all my Minotaur straps, replacing them with silicone and vulcanized rubber. Immediately, my watches felt diminished, like Ferraris stuck on snow tires. They lost their soul.

    I made a YouTube confessional and discussed the finer points of the Notre Dame Study. Half the viewers thanked me for raising the alarm; the other half mocked me for peddling paranoia. They insisted FKM risk was bottom-tier, a blip in the PFAS risk hierarchy. My response? Oscillation. I switched from Minotaur to silicone and back again—sometimes eight times in a single day. I was a man possessed, toggling straps like a lab rat on amphetamines.

    Desperate for clarity, I appealed to the digital oracles: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. Their verdict was unanimous: the study was flawed. The researchers had tortured the straps—soaked them in solvents, scorched them with heat, abraded them into pulp. In short, conditions no wristwatch strap would ever endure on a human arm. The Minotaur straps, they said, were stable, inert, safe.

    I breathed relief. For about three minutes. Then paranoia struck again. Were the AI platforms telling me the truth, or, as the dutiful sycophants they are, just feeding me the reassurance I craved? Was I clinging to wishful thinking dressed up as “analysis”?

    Meanwhile, fellow watch obsessives chimed in from YouTube and Instagram, their chorus split evenly between “Don’t worry” and “Panic with me.” Their voices joined the cacophony in my head. Certainty dissolved. Once you’ve pictured poison seeping into your wrist, you can’t unsee it.

    I began to hate the hobby itself. Hate the straps, hate the watches, hate the endless cycle of worry. It wasn’t about horology anymore—it was about risk management as a form of neurosis. I even considered selling everything and defecting to Tudor, whose bracelets come with the T-fit clasp–a miracle of quick adjustment that eliminates the fuss of links and tools. No chemicals, no rubber, no paranoia. Just a slide-and-click mechanism that promises freedom from my madness.

    When I think of my complicated relationship with Minotaur straps, the potentially-flawed Notre Dame Study, the fear of forever chemicals, and thoughts of a T-fit clasp, an image comes to mind that defines the insanity of my current situation:

    I’m thinking of the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

    In Moria, Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. They fall together into the abyss, and after an epic battle that spans mountains and caverns, Gandalf is mortally spent. It’s not a literal tail piercing—Tolkien describes Gandalf being dragged down by the Balrog’s whip after he breaks the bridge. The trauma of the battle kills him in his “Gandalf the Grey” form, but he is later sent back, transfigured, as Gandalf the White.

    Gandalf is never the same again, not because of the wound, but because his role changes: he comes back more powerful, more detached from the mortal world, and closer to a messenger of the divine.

    If I’m to survive my Minotaur strap crisis, I must follow the trajectory of Gandalf : I have to let the old self fall into the abyss. Like Gandalf, I must die to the madness and come back reborn, detached, stronger, armed with perspective. Because at this point, it’s not just about straps. It’s about what kind of man I am when the watch box stares back at me.

  • Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    In 2006, I wandered into the Wild West of self-publishing and signed up with Typepad. Back then, blogs felt like a revolution: you could pour your obsessions straight into the digital void without begging gatekeepers for approval. I created three: Herculodge, where I indulged my radio fixation; The Breakthrough Writer, course content for my freshman comp class; and The Critical Thinker, the companion for my critical thinking students. Typepad cost me about $150 a year—a fair price for a soapbox in the dawn of the Blog Era.

    But by April 2025, my soapbox had turned into a rickety stool. Typepad was wheezing like a geriatric dinosaur stumbling into an unfamiliar world: constant downtime, glacial load times, the unmistakable stink of neglect. Research confirmed my suspicion—it had been sold, stripped for parts, and left to rot. I canceled my subscription. Out of nostalgia, I kept Herculodge in basic mode, mainly because its archive of radio reviews was still linked to Thomas Witherspoon’s venerable SWLing Post, a site that embodies everything good about radio: community, continuity, and voices across the airwaves.

    But in truth, Herculodge had gone dormant long ago. After the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, I went on a spree, bought a dozen radios, reviewed them all, and then, slowly, stopped. The flame flickered, and I moved on.

    Yesterday the official death notice arrived: “We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025.” Translation: pull the plug, bury the dinosaur.

    This little obituary for Typepad drags me back to the Blog Era, when voices as sharp as Andrew Sullivan’s rose to the level of public intellectuals, while hobbyists like me tinkered in the shadows of niche obsessions, broadcasting to niche audiences. Blogs felt cozy, almost literary: you in a robe, cat on your lap, coffee steaming, ruminating about Virginia Woolf before hitting “publish.” Compare that to today’s Hot Take Era: dopamine-charged combatants spewing rage, preening for likes, and mistaking tribal points for thought.

    The end of Typepad is the end of that quieter world.

    I’ve since migrated to WordPress, which works better, loads faster, and hasn’t collapsed into irrelevance. I have mixed feelings about AI image generators: sometimes they hit the mark, but mostly they’re garish clip art pretending to be art. Still, I pay two hundred bucks a year to carve out a little order from the chaos, and it’s worth every cent. Cheaper than therapy, and with fewer platitudes.

    Typepad’s death isn’t tragic—it’s just the final shovel of dirt on an era already gone.

  • The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    Like many people, I want to believe that a plant-based diet can deliver optimal nutrition for everyone—from casual gym-goers to powerlifters and elite athletes. It’s a hopeful vision: strong bodies built on beans and lentils instead of beef. But a memory from 2019 lingers in my mind and keeps me cautious.

    That year I had a nursing student in my class. She was sharp, disciplined, a straight-A student who also worked as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym. On top of all that, she was a powerlifter. Under the guidance of an experienced coach, she decided to go vegan. For the first several months, everything looked fine. But after about nine months, the cracks showed. Her skin grew pale, her training stalled, she felt weak and lightheaded, and worst of all—her hair began to fall out in clumps. When she abandoned the vegan diet, her health rebounded.

    At the time, I didn’t know what I know now. Maybe she was missing key amino acids like lysine or leucine. Maybe she wasn’t using vegan protein powders that could have filled the gap. Maybe she didn’t know that a vegan diet contains no creatine at all, and a simple 5-gram daily supplement might have made the difference. The truth is, neither of us will ever know.

    This is what haunts me: a vegan diet can be excellent for cardiovascular health and a powerful humanitarian stand against factory farming, but only if it’s done with knowledge and precision. Done carelessly, it can lead to exactly what my student experienced—decline, weakness, and disillusionment.

    I can’t know for certain whether a few smart adjustments would have allowed her to thrive. But I can’t shake the suspicion that with the right tools—a quality vegan protein blend, a steady supply of B12, an algal omega-3 supplement, and a scoop of creatine—her story could have ended very differently. Instead of decline and disillusionment, she might have been proof that a plant-based diet, done right, can power even the most demanding athletic lives.

  • The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Guilty as charged. Case in point: my tortured relationship with FKM Divecore straps.

    The Notre Dame study had me spiraling—researchers tortured the material with solvents, heat, and abrasion until they squeezed out PFAS “forever chemicals” and then warned these might leach into human skin. Ever since, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning metronome, on whether to keep wearing the straps I love more than any other rubber I’ve tried in two decades of watch collecting.

    Of course, no one wants to think of their wristwear as a poison delivery system. But context matters. First, FKM is highly stable under real-world conditions; the lab tests were more horror show than practical scenario. Second, it’s the manufacturing process that endangers workers, not the end-user. Third, if we’re ranking PFAS risks, drinking unfiltered water, eating from PFAS-coated packaging, or cooking on scratched Teflon are solid tens on the risk scale, while wearing an FKM strap is a lonely little one. That’s the Fallacy of False Priorities: panic over the trivial while ignoring the obvious.

    Even so, the issue isn’t a Nothing Burger. Divecore’s own Paul admits handling FKM worries him, and he’s working on alternative materials—silicone, vulcanized silicone, HNBR—to protect his workers and reassure consumers. That’s just smart business.

    Meanwhile, I’m not without options. My strap drawer holds factory Seiko silicones and urethanes, plus top-tier Tropic straps made of vulcanized rubber. They’re fine, but none hold a candle to the sleek perfection of Divecore FKM. I tried swapping them in, but they feel like consolation prizes—serviceable, never glorious.

    So I made a deal with myself: enjoy my pristine FKMs for now, and when the new HNBR or silicone Divecore straps arrive, I’ll switch. Sounds reasonable. Except once you’ve let the idea of PFAS seeping into your skin lodge in your brain, it refuses to leave. I’ve written about it on Instagram, made a YouTube video, and now I’m stuck in an obsessive loop, second-guessing every strap change as though I were rewriting my will.

    Which brings me back to my original point: the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And right now, that man is staring at seven watches, toggling between glory and paranoia, wishing he could strap on peace of mind.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.

  • The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    Last night I dreamed I had once written a masterpiece—a semi-autobiographical novel that would have crowned my life’s work—only to lose it for decades in the chaos of distractions. Out of nowhere, it was unearthed not by me, but by Bernard Lackey, a famous YouTuber with the kind of smug, slightly spoiled face that screams, “My inheritance bought me this jawline.”

    A global literary society—the self-appointed guardians of human genius—summoned me to Bernard’s lair to reclaim the book. His home was a McMansion with pretensions, and I descended a spiral staircase into his basement, where shelves groaned with knickknacks, toys, and tchotchkes. There, seated like a smirking gatekeeper of culture, Bernard admired my novel, which hovered inside a glowing, enchanted box on the table.

    The tribunal announced that Bernard was a fraud: he had no right to my work, and he was to hand it over immediately. Bernard, ever the brat, feigned obedience with a sly grin. Then, with some petty sorcery, he scrambled the manuscript—pages twisted, words mangled, paragraphs reduced to gibberish. My once-coherent novel became a ruined artifact, obliterated beyond repair.

    It was obvious he resented being forced to surrender the book. If he couldn’t keep it, he would vandalize it so no one else could glory in its brilliance. It was the sabotage of a small, envious man who would rather destroy beauty than admit his own mediocrity.

    And yet, instead of rage, I felt only pity. Bernard was less a villain than a case study in insecurity, a man hollowed out by his own poverty of imagination. My manuscript was gone forever, but what remained was the consolation of clarity: masterpieces can vanish, but pettiness never dies.

  • Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    I’m starting a series I’m calling The Classroom Playback, where I revisit conversations from class discussions and reflect on how they challenged my assumptions. More often than not, I’ve found it isn’t the instructor who does the teaching—it’s the students. This is my first installment.

    I teach a college writing class to the athletic department—an eclectic mix of football bruisers, soccer strikers, volleyball hitters, and water polo warriors. Two days ago, in the context of an essay that addresses a generation of young men who don’t work or study but play computer games in their bedrooms, I introduced the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the cruel little loop in which humans adapt to pleasure until the buzz wears off and they need to crank the dial higher, faster, and louder, until finally the machine spits them out, exhausted and miserable.

    To make the point vivid, I shared a story from a former student. His older brother had dropped out of college, moved back in with mom, and made a religion out of lying in bed. His life consisted of Netflix marathons on a laptop, constant texts to his girlfriend, and a bong glued to his lips. A self-sedated sloth with Wi-Fi.

    So I asked my athletes, “Does this guy sound happy to you?”

    One of the football players, a psychology major with a grin as wide as the end zone, shot up his hand and said, absolutely—this guy was living the dream. No responsibilities, no alarms, no essays. Everyone, he insisted, would be content to live such a life.

    My jaw dropped. A psychology major dazzled by the ecstasy of permanent adolescence? I reminded him—gently but with a sharp edge—that life demands connection, structure, and purpose if humans are to flourish. Without it, the brain rots. He smiled, nodded, and conceded my point. But the nod was polite, the smile indulgent. I wasn’t sure I had actually shaken his conviction that the guy with the bong had cracked the code.

    After the football player declared his envy for the bong-hugging bed-dweller texting his girlfriend, I scanned the room and realized my grand metaphor had belly-flopped. My hedonic treadmill example didn’t land, to use modern parlance. What I intended as a cautionary tale of mental rot registered instead as a spa brochure: Netflix, weed, and endless texting looked less like disintegration and more like a vacation package.

    With fifteen weeks left in the semester, I’ve had to remind myself of two things. First: I can’t demolish their fantasies in one lesson. The hedonic treadmill requires repeat assaults, examples from all angles, until they feel—not just know—the despair of a life without meaning. Clearly, Bong Boy failed to deliver the emotional punch.

    Second: these kids belong to the “I’ll Never Buy a House” Generation. Their skepticism is hardwired. To them, the fantasy of collapsing in bed with Netflix and THC isn’t just laziness; it’s an antidote to the endless hustle culture they know they’ll never escape.

    Therefore, my football player presented me with a lesson: As an instructor, I can’t be myopic and teach ideas such as the hedonic treadmill from a limited point of view. I have to see things through my students’ eyes. 

    I’m close to sixty-four. My students are nineteen. If I want to reach them, I need to remember the golden rule of teaching—or sales, or persuasion of any kind: know your audience, speak to their anxieties, and try to see life through their eyes. Otherwise, you’re not a communicator—you’re just an old, out-of-touch crank with a lecture.

    I want to thank my football player for opening my eyes and reminding me that the classroom is instructional for both instructors and students alike.