Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Soy-Boy Rising: Confessions of a Reluctant Carnivore

    Soy-Boy Rising: Confessions of a Reluctant Carnivore

    I’m not a vegan, though I flirt with the lifestyle like someone dabbling in theater—call it vegan cosplay. I still eat fish a few times a week. My wife’s turkey meatballs make regular cameos. And every now and then, Mongolian beef seduces me with its glossy, MSG-laced siren song. That said, I’ve slashed my meat intake by 75%, which, by American standards, practically makes me a Buddhist monk.

    These days, I spend an inordinate amount of time pressing water out of high-protein tofu bricks like they’ve wronged me. I cube them, toss them in olive oil, and dust them with whatever spices are within reach—barbecue rub, smoked paprika, Italian herbs, chili flakes. While they sizzle, I assemble my daily temple of penance: a salad of arugula, balsamic vinegar, nutritional yeast, and a squirt of spicy mustard. Add in some herbs, and it’s a flavor riot with zero cholesterol.

    Surprisingly, it satisfies me. The texture, the tang, the crunch—I’m not suffering. I’m thriving. But I can already hear the Bro-sphere grunting with disapproval. To them, my tofu devotion is nothing short of culinary treason. The True Path, they say, is paved in ribeyes and romaine. Soy is heresy. My masculinity, they warn, is at risk of withering into oblivion if I don’t start eating liver by the pound.

    Let them growl. I don’t evangelize. If carnivore life gives them six-pack abs and existential clarity, more power to them. But my reasons for sidestepping meat are complicated. One: I find raw meat disgusting. I’ve never acclimated. Slabs of pink muscle leaking juice in my hands? No thanks. Sure, I’ll eat a well-prepared dish if someone sets it in front of me, but I don’t like the psychic gymnastics it takes to pretend nothing had to die for it.

    So yes, sometimes I give in. But most mornings, you’ll find me standing over a bowl of buckwheat groats, quietly thrilled not to be cooking a corpse. The older I get, the more that matters. Not for moral purity. Just peace of mind—and digestion.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • Fast-Flow Kettlebell Training

    Fast-Flow Kettlebell Training

    Since I no longer need to pack on muscle like a linebacker or risk a hernia proving I still can, I’ve officially abandoned the classic kettlebell approach: go heavy, rest like royalty, and worship at the altar of hypertrophy. That style had its season. It built the frame. But now? I’ve halved the weight, tripled the reps, and slashed the rest time down to barely enough to curse under my breath. The result? My sweat output now requires a mid-workout wardrobe change. Honestly, I live for it.

    At sixty-four, I’ve traded High-Volume Kettlebell for what I now call Fast-Flow Kettlebell. It’s not about brute force anymore—it’s about metabolic chaos and graceful suffering. I should probably slap a ™ on that phrase, start a YouTube channel, and sell it to my fellow sexagenarians like it’s a classified military protocol for reclaiming youth through righteous burn.

    Train like a special ops fighter, minus the risk of blowing out your spine. Stay lean, keep the blood pumping, and switch shirts like you’re in a glam-rock concert. That’s my fountain of youth.

  • ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    In Matteo Wong’s sharp little dispatch, “The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta,” he argues that AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t quite ready for daily life. Not unless your definition of “ready” includes faucets that sometimes dispense boiling water instead of cold or cars that occasionally floor the gas when you hit the brakes. It’s an apt metaphor: we’re being sold precision, but what we’re getting is unpredictability in a shiny interface.

    I was reminded of this just yesterday when ChatGPT gave me the wrong title for a Meghan Daum essay collection—an essay I had just read. I didn’t argue. You don’t correct a toaster when it burns your toast; you just sigh and start over. ChatGPT isn’t thinking. It’s a stochastic parrot with a spellchecker. Its genius is statistical, not epistemological.

    And yet people keep treating it like a digital oracle. One of my students recently declared—thanks to ChatGPT—that Lacie Pound, the protagonist of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive,” dies a “tragic death.” She doesn’t. She ends the episode in a prison cell, laughing—liberated, not lifeless. But the essay had already been turned in, the damage done, the grade in limbo.

    This sort of glitch isn’t rare. It’s not even surprising. And yet this technology is now embedded into classrooms, military systems, intelligence agencies, healthcare diagnostics—fields where hallucinations are not charming eccentricities, but potential disasters. We’re handing the scalpel to a robot that sometimes thinks the liver is in the leg.

    Why? Because we’re impatient. We crave novelty. We’re addicted to convenience. It’s the same impulse that led OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush to ignore engineers, cut corners on sub design, and plunge five people—including himself—into a carbon-fiber tomb. Rush wanted to revolutionize deep-sea tourism before the tech was seaworthy. Now he’s a cautionary tale with his own documentary.

    The stakes with AI may not involve crushing depths, but they do involve crushing volumes of misinformation. The question isn’t Can ChatGPT produce something useful? It clearly can. The real question is: Can it be trusted to do so reliably, and at scale?

    And if not, why aren’t we demanding better? Why haven’t tech companies built in rigorous self-vetting systems—a kind of epistemological fail-safe? If an AI can generate pages of text in seconds, can’t it also cross-reference a fact before confidently inventing a fictional death? Shouldn’t we be layering safety nets? Or have we already accepted the lie that speed is better than accuracy, that beta is good enough?

    Are we building tools that enhance our thinking, or are we building dependencies that quietly dismantle it?

  • The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    Last night, I dreamed I lived in heaven—and like most people blessed beyond comprehension, I had absolutely no idea.

    The dream began in a hectic classroom, as these things often do. I was teaching at a strange college campus. The students were more postgrad in their maturity and engagement than freshman—mature, sharp, and fully caffeinated on the joy of learning.

    We were deep in discussion, when I glanced out the window and saw rain falling in soft sheets. I drifted, just for a second, and in that brief lapse, the class was commandeered—gracefully—by one of my more opinionated students, Tim Miller, moonlighting as a podcaster and self-appointed co-professor.

    Tim, without missing a beat, told everyone to take out the assigned blue textbook. The expensive one. The one I myself had never read. I looked at the book with the guilt of a host who’s never tasted his own hors d’oeuvres. Trying to recover, I asked what they thought. They said it was “okay”—the academic kiss of death. I nodded solemnly and was mercifully saved by the end of class.

    I looked at the exit and saw a nearsighted colleague half my age pushing a fleet of book carts. I offered to help. He kindly accepted my offer—but by the time I reached the carts, he had finished everything himself. He waved goodbye, like a benevolent young professor who didn’t need me after all.

    As I walked through the corridor, I spotted something. A green coffee mug I’d abandoned earlier on a table, shimmering like a forgotten relic. I scooped it up and raced across campus in the rain, placing it delicately on the windowsill of the library. Two librarians emerged, eyes wide with wonder, as if I’d returned the Ark of the Covenant. They smiled as if I’d done something sacred.

    Onward. The rain kept falling, warm and tropical, more blessing than burden. I reached for my phone–the same emerald green as the coffee mug–now coated in fine beach sand. I frantically wiped it clean, restoring it to its gleaming perfection.

    I wasn’t driving. I never did. I preferred walking the five miles home, savoring the trek. In the distance, my residence came into view: three mountain-sized pyramids rising into the mist, woven from purple and gold stone, arranged in a mesmerizing zigzag pattern. I’d always loved purple—no surprise there—but for the first time, I saw the gold properly. I normally detest gold. Too garish. But this gold? This gold was alive. Deep, radiant, humming with mystery.

    I realized, with a kind of thudding wonder, that I lived there. Among the pyramids. In the mist. In heaven. And somehow, until that moment, I’d never truly seen it.

    Then I woke up, soaked not in rain but contrition, and wondered: How much of my real life do I miss by failing to see what’s already shimmering around me? What marvels have I demoted to the mundane? What if heaven isn’t a destination but a perception we keep forgetting to use?

  • Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    In her essay “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Meghan Daum compares her life in 1997 to her life in 2017 and reaches a deflating, oddly liberating conclusion: nothing has changed. At 47 and freshly divorced, she’s more or less the same person she was at 27. Still single. Still chasing deadlines. Still drinking coffee, poking at takeout sushi, and trying to keep multiple Word docs open on her MacBook while ignoring the siren song of Twitter and low-stakes Amazon purchases.

    There is one glaring difference: her rent has skyrocketed and her cognitive bandwidth has shriveled. She estimates she’s lost 70% of her brainpower to the Digital Distraction Era. So yes—same life, dumber brain, higher rent. It’s a Nabokovian joke with a Billy Collins twist: Picnic, Lightning, but with Seamless orders and browser tabs.

    Like her earlier essay “The Broken-In World,” Daum doesn’t frame divorce as failure but as an act of radical return. Not regression—recognition. The performance is over. She’s stopped cosplaying as someone else’s version of a wife. The single life isn’t a punishment or a holding pattern—it’s her set point. The gravitational center she was orbiting all along.

    Coordinating a calendar with another adult, she admits, feels like a hostage negotiation. She loves living alone. She loves eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without anyone asking if they should defrost chicken. She can travel at the drop of a hat without shoving someone else’s life off balance. She’s not anti-love. She just refuses to bulldoze her rhythms for the sake of joint Costco runs.

    Post-divorce, she’s dated—kind, smart, well-meaning men—but none of them stood a chance against the one lover she can’t quit: solitude. She rarely goes on second dates. She doesn’t need romantic sabotage. She’s got peace and a dog. Who needs more?

    And let’s be clear: this position wasn’t won in a raffle. She fought for it. Marriage, divorce, reinvention. She earned this life through blood, paperwork, and self-inventory. She’s not about to crawl back into the foxhole of emotional compromise.

    Reading Daum, I’m reminded of a perfectly-cut line from Rodney Dangerfield: “You’re born a certain way and that’s it. You don’t change.” I think about that more than I should. At 63, I’m not all that different than I was at six. Moody, brooding one day. Goofy and loud the next. There’s a streak of isolato in me too. My family tolerates it. They let me take naps and skip amusement park trips that sound like air-conditioned nightmares.

    I’m probably not a perfect husband. But we make it work—me and this life. Me and my Daum-ian disposition. The marriage lasts, not because I’ve changed, but because we’ve all made our peace with who I am. And who I’ve always been.

  • Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.

    She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.

    Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.

    Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.

    As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.

    Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.

    Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.

    She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.

  • Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    In the early ’90s, I had a student whose entire identity was shackled to the number on a stadiometer. I don’t recall the exact figure, but he was somewhere south of five-foot-five—a detail that tormented him like a Greek curse. What I do remember is that he was a strikingly handsome kid. Slender, well-proportioned, with the kind of face you’d expect to see in a Calvin Klein ad, not in a therapy session about height insecurity. But none of that mattered. He couldn’t see past the measuring tape in his head.

    It was during one of our writing lab sessions—those clattering dens of early-’90s Macintoshes, all beige and humming, where I played roving editor and motivational coach—that he confided in me. Class was winding down, students trickling out like post-cardio gym rats, and this nineteen-year-old lingered behind with something heavy to unload.

    He told me that being short felt like a life sentence. But the real damage, he confessed, came not from his height—but from the manic overcompensation it inspired. When talking in groups, he’d find the highest available perch to stand on—benches, stairs, anything to give him the illusion of height. He wore shoe lifts, which he kept hidden in his closet like a box of shame. But worst of all? He trained himself to walk perpetually on his tiptoes.

    Yes, tiptoes. Every day, every step. As if sneaking through life as a burglar of inches.

    Eventually, his spine cried uncle. The tiptoe act wrecked his back, forced him into surgery, and—here’s the gut punch—cost him an entire inch. In his effort to stretch himself, he ended up shorter. He admitted he hated himself for it, and I believed him.

    Looking at him—this good-looking, intelligent kid—it struck me just how dangerous our internal narratives can be. We live so much in our heads that our perception becomes more powerful than reality. A stray comment in middle school morphs into a life-defining trauma. A mirror becomes a courtroom. And the verdict? Never good enough.

    His story is a tragic little parable of body dysmorphia: how the seeds of insecurity, if left unchecked, sprout into weeds that choke reason, and in our desperate attempts to “fix” ourselves, we often end up disfiguring what was never broken.

    Our bodies are our canvases. And oh, how savagely the world critiques them. Some of us starve. Some inject ourselves with synthetic youth. Some spend fortunes on surgeries that leave us looking like Botoxed sphinx cats. And some, like my student, ruin their spines to gain half an inch that no one but they ever noticed.

    We’re all vulnerable to the feedback loop. When I’m lean and muscular on YouTube, the algorithm sings. I get compliments. DMs. Admiring questions about my training and my “age-defying” lifestyle. When I’m twenty pounds heavier? Crickets. I become one more bloated has-been talking into the void.

    Yes, our bodies are our canvas. But if we’re not careful, our efforts to “improve” that canvas can become self-mutilation masquerading as self-love.

  • Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem

    Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem

    In fourth grade at Anderson Elementary in San Jose, our teacher cracked open Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and unleashed a literary sugar bomb on the classroom. The characters didn’t just leap off the page—they kicked down the door of our imaginations and set up shop. The book hijacked our brains. Good luck checking it out from the library—there was a waiting list that stretched into eternity.

    A year later, the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory hit theaters, but my parents, apparently operating under some moral suspicion of Hollywood whimsy, refused to take me. I wouldn’t see it until the VHS era, when cultural consensus finally upgraded it to “beloved classic” status. That’s when I met Gene Wilder’s Wonka—equal parts sorcerer, satirist, and deranged uncle.

    The best moment? Easy. He hobbles out, leaning on a cane like a relic of Victorian fragility—then suddenly drops the act, executes a flawless somersault, and stands up with a gleam that says, I know exactly what game I’m playing, and so should you. That glint in his eye, equal parts wonder and judgment, has haunted me for decades. His entire persona is a velvet-gloved slap to the smug, the spoiled, and the blissfully ignorant. He isn’t just testing children—he’s taking society’s moral pulse and finding a weak, sugary beat.

    That gleam stayed with me. So much so that I wrote a piano piece inspired by Wilder’s performance. I called it Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem. The first movement was a nightmare—rewritten more times than I care to admit. Oddly, the second and third movements came first, composed together in the aftermath of my mother’s passing on October 1, 2020. Nearly five years later, I finally completed the first movement, like some strange reverse birth.

    The result? A tribute in three acts to the sly grin, the righteous mischief, and the bittersweet brilliance of Gene Wilder—a man who, like the best artists, never let kindness become cowardice or magic become a mask for mediocrity.

  • The Mink Coat Martyrdom of Buenos Aires

    The Mink Coat Martyrdom of Buenos Aires

    In the early ’90s, one of my college students recounted his time living in Buenos Aires, where his father was posted for business. Every weekend, the family would wander through the local bazaar—a sweaty sprawl of hawkers, fortune tellers, and the pungent scent of grilled meats. But amidst the chaos strutted an apparition so grotesque she seemed plucked from a Dickens novel and dipped in perfume: an elderly slumlord in a full-length mink coat, parading her status like a war medal in 100-degree heat.

    Her face was pinched into a permanent scowl, her thick lipstick applied like a dare, and her aura radiated pure disdain. She was, by all accounts, a miserly tyrant in pearls, known for gouging her tenants while she tottered through the market wrapped in dead animal fur, visibly wilting but too vain to admit defeat. It wasn’t just the cruelty or the heatstroke-defying couture that made her infamous—it was the sheer, pathological obliviousness.

    She believed she was admired. She thought people stared in awe of her opulence. In reality, they watched in disbelief, hoping—perhaps unfairly—for a dramatic collapse on the cobblestones, a heat-induced pratfall to crown her legacy of greed.

    Her story has no redemptive arc, no second-act revelation. She didn’t sell her coats or donate to charity or die in a puddle of repentance. Most likely, she keeled over in that same mink—roasted like a Christmas goose—and was buried without eulogy. No one attended her funeral, and certainly not her wedding, which I assume never occurred unless it was to money itself. Her legacy? Not fortune, not family. Just a place in folklore next to King Midas, Leona Helmsley, and every other tragic figure who mistook fear for respect.