Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Safe at Home with Tofu: We Need George Carlin Now More Than Ever

    Safe at Home with Tofu: We Need George Carlin Now More Than Ever

    George Carlin once built a whole comedy bit around the contrast between football and baseball. Football, he said, is war—full of blitzes, bombs, and sudden death. Baseball, by contrast, is a pastoral game, a gentle journey home. Safe at home. He could’ve done an equally scathing bit on carnivores versus vegans.

    A carnivore is a Viking. He doesn’t eat dinner; he conquers it. He roasts slabs of meat over open flame, wears elk pelts in July, and believes the phrase “nose to tail” is less a philosophy than a moral imperative. He eats liver because it’s what his ancestors did, despite the fact that his ancestors also died at 38 from dysentery and wolf bites.

    The vegan? A minimalist monk who speaks in the tone one reserves for therapy dogs and endangered turtles. His kitchen smells like soaked lentils and moral superiority. He eats “greens,” plural, as though a vague handful of chlorophyll could power a biped. His hero is the neighborhood spider, which he refuses to squash. Instead, he names it Rumi, places it gently on a compostable bamboo plate, and ushers it into the wild with a whispered prayer and a single tear.

    The carnivore doesn’t own plates. He eats standing up. The vegan has three sets of reusable dishware, made from renewable bamboo and guilt. The carnivore fills his “power bowl” with yolks, red meat, and testosterone. The vegan fills his with quinoa, miso, and the sense that one day we’ll all live on floating gardens of kale, fueled by gratitude and biotin.

    The carnivore laughs when lightning strikes. The vegan winces when the microwave beeps.

    And yet—here’s the kicker—both think they’re saving the world. One by returning to primal wisdom, the other by transcending it. One believes in survival of the fittest; the other believes in surviving without harming a single sentient thing. They are, in essence, two sides of the same self-mythologizing coin: the ancient warrior and the futuristic monk, each clinging to their menu like it’s a worldview. And perhaps that’s what diet is now—a belief system, a theology served with a side of macro tracking. Eat, pray, posture.

  • The Watch Potency Principle and the Man Who Couldn’t Count to Eight

    The Watch Potency Principle and the Man Who Couldn’t Count to Eight

    Chapter 2 from The Timepiece Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    The Watch Master accepted my Venmo transfer—five grand, no questions asked. He nodded like a monk receiving an offering, commending me for “putting my money where my mouth is,” as if throwing cash at the problem proved I was spiritually ready to shed my horological demons. Then he sent me home with a single directive: return the next night with all seven of my watches arranged in one box for evaluation.

    At precisely 10 p.m., under a bloated moon that cast an eerie glow across the red roof tiles of his dilapidated Redondo Beach bungalow, I stood in his living room. The Master’s pale, angular face looked freshly excavated from a tomb. He gestured for the box.

    He opened it. Seven divers—six Seikos and a lonely Citizen—gleamed under the yellowed light of a hanging stained-glass lamp.

    “Good,” he said, scanning the collection with the intensity of a mortician identifying a corpse. “All divers. That shows thematic restraint. You’re not a complete degenerate.”

    He picked up each Seiko, held it to his eye like a jeweler, then scoffed. “You baby these. When’s the last time you actually swam? Clinton administration?”

    He chuckled at his own joke, which I pretended not to hear.

    His bony fingers closed around the Citizen. “Hmm. Titanium case and bracelet. The others are all on straps. This inconsistency must be clawing at your OCD like a raccoon under drywall.”

    I nodded.

    “Sell it,” he said flatly. “It’s feeding your misery.”

    “But what about the Seiko Astron I’ve been eyeing? That one has a titanium bracelet too.”

    “Yes. And that’s not the least of your problems.” He sipped his black coffee—no cream, no joy. “You’re teetering on the edge of a collecting abyss. The Citizen’s already rotting your center. Add one more watch, and your soul will be lost to cluttered mediocrity.”

    “But the Astron—it’s beautiful,” I protested.

    “Of course it is,” he said, shrugging. “So is opium. Doesn’t mean you should buy a kilo.”

    I tried to recover. “It’s the Watch Potency Principle, right? The more watches you own, the more you dilute the power of each one.”

    He looked up sharply. “So you have read my work. Then why can’t you live by it? You recite the commandments, but break them before sunrise. Your brain and behavior are locked in bitter divorce.”

    “I just need a plan,” I said. “What do I do?”

    “Purge,” he said, as if uttering a sacred mantra.

    “Purge?”

    “Start with the titanium Citizen. Shed that one, then we’ll talk next steps.”

    “Our next move?”

    He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re exhausting. Come back tomorrow at ten sharp. And for God’s sake, don’t buy anything in the meantime.”

  • Training to Failure: A Love Letter to My Broken Sixty-Year-Old Body

    Training to Failure: A Love Letter to My Broken Sixty-Year-Old Body

    I just inhaled 80 grams of braised tofu on a bed of arugula—an herbivore’s banquet—because I didn’t want any leftovers skulking in the fridge while my family disappears for a weeklong trip. The trip also means six missed workouts, which my inner gym rat is already mourning with the solemnity of a funeral dirge.

    In my infinite wisdom—or perhaps masochistic delusion—I stacked seven consecutive kettlebell workouts into my week like some demented CrossFit monk chasing transcendence through joint pain. Predictably, I torched myself. Yesterday, I hit the wall. Even after a nap, I was cooked—bone tired, foggy, the kind of fatigue that whispers pre-flu doom into your ears while your muscles quietly plan a mutiny.

    Today was my supposed “last hurrah” before vacation. I skipped the kettlebells and mounted the Schwinn Airdyne, knowing full well I was running on fumes. Usually, I scorch 700–800 calories in an hour. Today I limped to 600. Eighty percent effort. That’s what the data says. My pride says otherwise.

    This might be my new reality: controlled, measured workouts instead of cinematic Rocky montages. The problem? I came of age in the 1970s golden era of bodybuilding, when Arnold preached the Gospel of Training to Failure and warned us about becoming “paper tigers.” I took that to heart. Too much heart. The kind that skips beats when your prefrontal cortex is begging you to lie down and your inner bro yells, “One more set!”

    But now, every time I push too hard—whether it’s with kettlebells or a fevered sprint on the Airdyne—I spiral into what I’ve dubbed RAA: Rundown Anxiety Affliction. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s a curse. You feel like you’re on the verge of the flu, haunted by a twitchy dread that your immune system has thrown in the towel. And for what? To impress the ghost of Mike Mentzer?

    I’m not exercising and eating tofu like a reformed monk to become a sickly, anxious husk of a man. That’s not fitness. That’s martyrdom.

    Today I danced at the edge of RAA. I throttled back. Took my 600 calories, thanked the fitness gods for the mercy, and called it. I’ll nap. I’ll pack. I’ll go on this trip, eat as decently as possible, and try not to treat my return like a penitential Ironman.

    Because no one needs to come back from vacation needing a vacation from their vacation—especially if it starts with RAA and ends with a doctor saying, “You need to calm the hell down.”

  • No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    Chapter 1 of the Timepiece Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    Late one night, I found myself piloting my car through the hushed streets of Redondo Beach, past manicured lawns and hedges trimmed with neurosis, until I arrived at the blight in paradise: a hulking, lichen-tinged Victorian heap that looked like it had been shipped in from Transylvania on a dare. This was the home of the Watch Master—a reclusive oracle to the chronometrically cursed, a man whispered about in collector circles the way children whisper about the Boogeyman.

    The Master was once a studio guitarist in the ’70s, back when coke was a food group and solos could last nine minutes. He’d since traded fretboards for bezels, amassing a fortune in wrist candy—most of it gifted by rock gods in states of manic gratitude. Yet despite his vault of horological riches, he wore only a battered G-Shock Square with a scratched acrylic face that looked like it had survived a tour in Fallujah. He wore it like a monk wears a hair shirt.

    He answered the door barefoot, his jeans collapsing around his ankles like they’d given up. A Led Zeppelin shirt sagged off his wiry frame, and his hair, silver and stubborn, was pulled back from a gleaming bald crown. His beard was a frizzled thicket, somewhere between Rasputin and an abandoned Brillo pad.

    “What’s your problem?” he asked, voice rough as gravel and just as warm.

    I didn’t flinch. “I own seven watches. That’s my limit. Any more and I spiral. Emotional collapse, obsessive thoughts, buyer’s remorse, the whole circus. But I saw a Seiko Astron—the blue-dial SSJ013J1—and now I need it. Crave it. Is there any way to prepare my psyche for an eighth watch without descending into madness?”

    He stared at me like I’d just asked if I could take up recreational black tar heroin “responsibly.”

    “You’re asking how to rationalize a relapse,” he said. “That’s like asking if there’s a polite way to punch yourself in the throat.”

    And with that, he opened the door wider and let me in.

    The Watch Master squinted at me through the porch light haze, as if sizing up a man who’d brought his own shackles and wanted help tightening them. He scratched his beard, winced like my  question had given him tinnitus, and finally spoke:

    “So let me get this straight. You’ve reached your personal watch ceiling—seven tickers, your magic number, your horological emotional support grid. And now you want to blow a hole in the hull with a satellite-synced Seiko spaceship that tells time in Tokyo, Toledo, and the twelfth ring of Saturn. And you’re asking me how to prepare your psyche for this?”

    He stepped back into the house and waved me in. “Come inside, pilgrim. I need a drink before I answer that.”

    Once in the dark-paneled den, surrounded by velvet paintings of Hendrix and a lava lamp that looked clinically depressed, he continued:

    “You don’t need an eighth watch. You need a spiritual bypass. The Seiko Astron isn’t a timepiece. It’s a cry for help dressed in sapphire crystal. You’re not telling time—you’re telling yourself a story: that the right watch will rescue you from restlessness. You’re like a man trying to fix a leaky roof with a diamond-encrusted hammer. Beautiful tool, wrong job.”

    He leaned in. “So if you must buy it, do this first: Write a eulogy for the peace of mind you once had at seven watches. Light a candle. Say goodbye to balance. Then hit ‘add to cart.’ And remember: when the remorse creeps in—and it will—just whisper to yourself what we all know in this house of horological horrors: No one gets out of here alive.”

    I repeated the Watch Master’s words, “No one gets out of here alive.” Then I said, “I was told you could help me with my problem. All I’m asking is that you help prepare my psyche for an eighth watch. I want you to help me prepare for this Seiko Astron as an Exit Watch. I heard you could do this for me. I had assurances. I gave you five hundred dollars. I was expecting more than a scolding.”

    The Watch Master squinted at me through a cloud of sandalwood incense, scratched his sun-damaged scalp, and said:

    “Five hundred dollars gets you a scolding. A thousand gets you a metaphor. If you want catharsis, enlightenment, and a stable seven-watch rotation, you’re looking at premium pricing. And as for an Exit Watch?” —he let out a low chuckle— “That’s like asking a bourbon addict for one last glass to sober up.”

    He leaned closer, the scratched G-Shock catching a glint of porch light. “You don’t want an Exit Watch. You want absolution. And I don’t do sacraments—I do timekeeping.”

    “So you want more money.”

    “Of course. The five hundred was for the privilege to just see me. If you want an Exit Watch, that will cost you.”

    “The Astron is close to two grand.”

    “Peanuts. If you want to close this deal, pay me five grand, and I’ll make your troubles go away.”

    I was desperate. “Venmo or Paypal,” I said.

    “Now we’re talking.”

  • The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    Last night I dreamed I was a mid-level drone in a sleek, glassy corporate tower, the kind where the espresso is artisanal but the moral rot is industrial grade. My friend John, a man of questionable appetites, had conducted an ill-advised workplace affair with a pale, mole-flecked woman who looked like Tina Louise if she’d been exhumed from a Victorian tomb. The office scorned her, and by association, John had become persona non grata. Worse, the affair had left him with a gastrointestinal affliction—proof, apparently, of both his guilt and poor judgment.

    My boss, a mustached bureaucrat whose entire personality could be summed up as “nonstick,” summoned me to his office. With the casual menace of a man ordering a sandwich, he instructed me to write up John. Not for the affair, mind you—that would be too human—but for the stomach condition. It was, he explained, an external manifestation of moral decay. HR, he added blandly, would now monitor John’s “future movements.” Orwell would’ve blushed.

    Instead of complying, I wandered over to the mole-riddled femme fatale. As we spoke, her moles seemed to multiply like a corrupted Photoshop clone stamp tool—deepening, darkening, replicating. I felt a twinge of pity, but mostly revulsion, and an impending fear that I’d soon be ordered to file a medical report on her as the first step in her “quiet dismissal.”

    I excused myself and found John, whose flat affect suggested either Zen detachment or full-blown delusion. He shrugged off the HR inquisition and announced, with the conviction of a man four bourbons deep, that the boss would soon be fired and that he would lead the company into a new era. He was the messiah of office reform, apparently, and his gastrointestinal bug was just a minor martyrdom.

    Then I woke up. I padded to the kitchen, made my usual overnight buckwheat groats, and watched in disgust as the microwave turned into a groats splatter crime scene. I was done. No more splatter. It was time for a change. A prophet had spoken—probably me—and I obeyed by ordering a $145 Staub cast iron cocotte. Sure, it’s wildly expensive for boiling breakfast grains, but I now had divine justification: a dream packed with plague, prophecy, and intestinal punishment.

    Sometimes, self-delusion makes the best retail therapy.

  • Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Last night, my wife asked me to handle a sacred domestic rite of passage: haul a trunk-load of obsolete electronics to the Gaffey S.A.F.E. Recycle Collection Center in San Pedro. “They open at 9 a.m.,” she said, which is code for: Don’t sleep in.

    So I dutifully loaded my Honda Accord with a hall of shame—old radios, half-dead fans, ghosted iPads, prehistoric laptops, orphaned computer speakers, a humidifier that wheezed its last breath in 2018, and enough acid-leaking batteries to qualify as a small environmental disaster.

    By morning, I punched the address into my phone, merged onto the 110 South, and exited Pacific Avenue, driving through an industrial no-man’s-land of rusting warehouses, improvised shelters, and overgrown brush—a Stephen King set piece waiting to happen. After bouncing over railroad tracks and veering onto a gravel path flanked by nothing but dirt and faint regret, I arrived at 8:50.

    The “facility” was a glorified tarp tent squatting in front of a cinder-block warehouse. A small line of cars idled ahead of me like penitents outside a confessional. Signs warned against dumping poisons, spoiled crops, medical waste, firearms, and, refreshingly, detonation materials of any kind. A second sign warned against exiting your vehicle, eating, or drinking—because apparently the mere whiff of your lukewarm coffee might trigger a chemical reaction that could incinerate the South Bay.

    At one point, a confused driver from Washington state cut in front, realized he was in the wrong dystopian checkpoint, U-turned, and peeled off down the gravel road, leaving a dust plume that coated our windshields like nuclear ash.

    By nine o’clock, two dozen cars were idling behind me in what now resembled the opening act of an eco-thriller. A cheerful woman in an orange vest began making her rounds, clipboard in hand. She asked what I was dropping off, and I gave her the rundown—my sad parade of malfunctioning tech. I suspect her job was twofold: confirm I wasn’t smuggling Chernobyl-grade waste, and quietly profile whether I looked like the kind of guy who dumps bodies with his broken humidifiers. Somewhere nearby, I imagined, there was a man with a headset and a sidearm watching from a repurposed FEMA trailer.

    Finally, I popped the trunk. Uniformed workers retrieved my gadgets with grim efficiency. I thanked them. They returned my gratitude like seasoned pallbearers—calm, practiced, unfazed.

    Unburdened, I pulled away from the hazmat drive-thru, feeling 50 pounds lighter and slightly radioactive. I had fulfilled my civic duty to both my marriage and the planet.

  • The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    Last night I dreamed I was helping my daughter with her homework in the middle of a public square. A chaotic, bustling arena. Think Roman forum meets tech dystopia. We had two laptops perched on a white concrete ledge high above a stadium of descending steps, as if we were doing calculus on the lip of a coliseum.

    The computers were a mess—two laptops yoked together like resentful twins, their settings morphing by the second. Screens flashed blue, then white, then black. Sometimes yellow cartoon ducks floated lazily across the bottom like deranged pop-up ads from a children’s game. I wasn’t so much solving her homework as performing tech triage on possessed machines.

    I wasn’t panicked because I couldn’t help her. I was panicked because someone might see that I couldn’t help her. Vanity, thy name is Dad.

    People walked past, utterly unfazed. Apparently, homework over a stadium chasm with dueling laptops and malfunctioning duck animations was standard urban behavior.

    Then a young man—a peripheral character from some former life—told me there was a “tech lord” nearby. Not tech support. A tech lord. Naturally, I followed.

    The tech lord’s lair was a dim room centered around a massive table, cathedral-like in tone and purpose. He was listening to the Bible—read aloud by the famous comedian George Carlin. Not a solemn voice or trained narrator, but someone best known for punchlines and pratfalls. And the tech lord was rapt. He cradled a thick, black Bible like a sacred talisman, proclaiming that this was the finest biblical performance art ever conceived.

    I tried to get in a word about my tech problem, but he interrupted me and asked me what my favorite book in the Bible was. I said the Book of Job, of course. He seemed satisfied with my response and allowed me to continue with my inquiry. 

    When I mentioned the malfunctioning laptops, he waved it off like someone refusing to answer a question about taxes. “You’ll need to get rid of both machines,” he intoned, “and buy a new one.”

    Naturally, I flirted with the idea of going full Apple—titanium chic, smug perfection—but quickly sobered up. Apple or Windows, it’s the same headache in a different tuxedo. I settled for a sleek black Windows laptop, and with a sudden, magical poof, there it was in my hands. The new device of promise. The Messiah machine.

    I returned to my daughter, still huddled over her rebellious duo. I tried to shut them down, ceremonially, like a general dismissing insubordinate troops. They refused. The screens flared defiantly. They would not go quietly into obsolescence. They had become conscious, bitter, undead.

    And then I woke up.

    The kicker? Just before bed, my wife gave me a task: drive 30 minutes to San Pedro with a car full of broken electronics and deliver them to an e-waste center. My subconscious, clearly, had feelings about this and delivered me this dream as a prelude to my task.

    One final note about the dream: the pairing of George Carlin and the Bible triggered a memory of a dream I had in the early ’90s. In that dream, the Messiah wasn’t a robed figure of spiritual gravity—he was Buddy Hackett, the goofy-faced, gravel-voiced comic best known for squinting through punchlines. There he was, standing atop a Hollywood hotel, delivering what I could only assume was divine revelation—or maybe just the world’s strangest stand-up set. I couldn’t tell if he was inspired, intoxicated, or both.

    Now, three decades later, George Carlin shows up in a dream to read Scripture aloud with messianic intensity, joining Hackett in a growing pantheon of prophetic clowns. It makes a strange kind of sense. Both comedians and prophets stand at the edge of civilization, pointing fingers at the absurdities we refuse to question. They use hyperbole, irony, and parable to slice through the world’s lazy thinking. The difference? Prophets get canonized. Comedians get heckled.

    But maybe, just maybe, it’s the same job with a different mic.s a prelude to my task.

  • The Forgiveness Trap: When Healing Becomes a Performance

    The Forgiveness Trap: When Healing Becomes a Performance

    I remember listening to Terry Gross interview Frank McCourt in 1997, right as Angela’s Ashes was climbing every bestseller list like a starving Irish ghost with a publishing deal. At one point, Gross asked the inevitable soft-serve question: had he ever forgiven his drunken, absentee father for drinking away the family’s money and abandoning his wife and children to starvation and shame?

    McCourt didn’t flinch. He dismissed forgiveness as “pompous” and “irrelevant”—as if someone had asked him if he’d made peace with bubonic plague. He wasn’t being cruel; he was being precise. Forgiveness, he seemed to argue, is often a performance—a neat, moral bow tied onto a box of horror that refuses to stay shut.

    I thought of McCourt again this morning while reading Christina Caron’s New York Times piece, “Sometimes, Forgiveness Is Overrated.” It profiles adults who survived childhoods ruled by sadists, addicts, psychopaths, and the emotionally vacant. These were not flawed parents; they were ethical sinkholes, incapable of even the most basic decency. And yet, the self-help gospel continues to hand these survivors a soft-focus script: Forgive, and you will be free.

    Enter Amanda Gregory, therapist and author of You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Gregory’s argument is refreshingly grounded: forgiveness is not a virtue badge, not a finish line, and certainly not a moral obligation. It’s a slow, private emotional process—if you choose to pursue it. You do not owe a resolution. You do not need to sculpt your rage into affection.

    Gregory’s thesis echoes Sharon Lamb’s earlier work from 2002, which cautioned that pressuring victims to forgive can cause more damage than healing. It’s not just naive—it’s cruel. There are wounds that never close, and forcing someone to say, “It’s okay now,” when it’s absolutely not okay is a kind of spiritual gaslighting. It shifts the burden of transformation onto the person who’s already been broken.

    And what about the offenders? If they’re remorseful, truly remorseful, perhaps forgiveness enters the room. But what if they’re not? What if they’re still rewriting history or refusing to acknowledge it? Then forgiveness becomes a farce—just another round of victim-blaming wrapped in therapeutic jargon.

    In many cases, forgiveness isn’t even the right frame. With time and growth, some of us develop a different emotional posture—not forgiveness, but pity. We see our abusers not as villains to be vanquished or souls to be redeemed, but as feeble, morally bankrupt husks who couldn’t rise above their own dysfunction. We stop hating them because we no longer need to—but let’s not confuse that with forgiveness. That’s not healing; it’s emotional Darwinism.

    Forgiveness has its place, but only when it rests on shared truth and genuine contrition. Otherwise, it’s a forced ritual, a bad-faith moral contract, and a way to sell books or fill up therapy time. The therapeutic industry’s insistence that forgiveness is always the holy grail? Honestly, it’s unforgivable.

  • Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    The story of Lot’s wife is usually trotted out as a biblical “gotcha”—a cautionary tale about disobedience, attachment, and the fatal cost of looking back. But really, it’s much darker, much richer. It’s about the soul-crushing gravity of nostalgia, the seductive pull of the past, and how the refusal to fully commit to forward motion—spiritually, morally, existentially—can leave us frozen, calcified, halfway between escape and surrender.

    Lot’s wife is never named in the Genesis account. She’s just “Lot’s wife,” a narrative afterthought, a supporting character reduced to a cautionary statue. And yet her fate is more memorable than her husband’s, etched into the landscape as a monument to hesitation.

    Fortunately, Midrashic literature gives her a name—Ado, or more memorably to my ear, Edith. Maybe it’s the residue of All in the Family, but Edith conjures a kind of moral warmth: a woman who feels deeply, who wants to do right, but is also tragically susceptible to emotion and memory. I prefer Edith to “Lot’s wife” not for historical accuracy, but for dignity. Edith feels human, conflicted, real.

    I don’t think Edith turned around because she was vain or shallow. I think she turned because she was haunted. She turned because the past was more than rubble—it was love, memories, people. Her heart was a complex web of longing, and it snagged her. The salt wasn’t a punishment. It was a crystallization of what happens when our nostalgia outweighs our conviction.

    And let’s be honest: Who among us doesn’t have some briny lump of regret weighing us down? Some internal salt pillar we’ve built in the shape of a younger self we can’t stop worshiping?

    Our culture is Edith’s playground. Social media, advertising, and even the algorithms know exactly how to pander to the Edith within. I can’t scroll without being invited into some “Golden Age of Bodybuilding” time warp: vintage photos of Arnold, Zane, Platz, Mentzer; protein powder reboots; playlists that reek of adolescent testosterone and gym chalk. Jefferson Starship and Sergio Oliva, side by side. It’s like being invited to embalm my past and celebrate its eternal youth. I can join message boards and talk shop with other proud monuments to vanished glory, all of us reenacting the same ritual: remembering what life used to feel like. Not what it is.

    This, I suspect, is what it means to turn to salt. Not just to long for the past, but to despise the present. To dig our heels into a world that no longer fits and spit at progress as if it betrayed us. To canonize a version of ourselves that no longer exists, then try to live in its shadow.

    But maybe Edith’s not just a warning. Maybe she’s a mirror. A deeply flawed, deeply human figure who reminds us that the instinct to look back isn’t evil—it’s inevitable. And maybe we don’t conquer that instinct so much as we recognize it, name it, and learn when to say: Enough. That life was real, and it was mine. But I’m walking forward now.

    Or at least trying to.

  • Cling to Your Lead and You’ll Lose: A Midlife Playbook

    Cling to Your Lead and You’ll Lose: A Midlife Playbook

    I don’t take the Life Force lightly. It’s the mysterious voltage that animates us, that flicks the switch from sloth to spark. One minute you’re groggy and half-dreaming, the next you’re lacing up your sneakers, firing up the espresso machine, and attacking your kettlebell workout like you’re in a Rocky montage scored by Miles Davis. The Life Force says: Get up. Get after it. Drink, eat, laugh, lift, love, live—before the curtain drops.

    Even when we’re slumped in a funk, sulking like a teenager who just discovered Camus, the Life Force doesn’t vanish. It simply retreats, muffled beneath layers of melancholy and cheap self-pity, waiting for the clouds to lift so it can slip back in with a jolt.

    I’ve been thinking about this lately as I inch toward sixty-four. The aging brain doesn’t hide its compromises. The body offers new aches like parting gifts from yesterday’s workout. And I keep reading about public figures—my age or younger—dropping dead from heart attacks and cancer, as if the universe is whispering, “You’re next.”

    The awareness of mortality, while useful in the Stoic-philosopher sense, has a dark gravitational pull. It makes you want to swaddle yourself in self-pity, curl up with grim hypotheticals, and mentally prewrite your own eulogy. I’m no sage, but I’ve noticed: the older you get, the easier it is to start thinking about death instead of living your life.

    And that’s where the football metaphor barges in—uninvited, but apt. Picture a team nursing a small lead. Instead of playing their usual game, they start playing not to lose. They abandon boldness, creativity, and flow. They tighten up. They stall. They cling. And then they lose.

    That’s what obsessing over death becomes: Playing Not to Lose Syndrome. You stop being you. You start tiptoeing through your own damn life, hands over your eyes, praying not to fall. But life’s not won through timid pacing. You win by doing what got you here in the first place—living like hell, moving the ball down the field, trusting your strength, and swinging the kettlebell with fury and joy.

    Yes, I’ll admit it: the fearful doppelgänger lives in me too. He bites his nails and speaks in doomsday whispers. But so does the joyful lifer, the one who’s still in love with breakfast, jazz, hard workouts, and writing rants like this one. Maybe being fully human means acknowledging both—the brave and the cowardly—and choosing, as often as possible, to side with the one who gets up and dances anyway.

    Life doesn’t reward those who cling. It rewards those who play to win—until the final whistle.