Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.
I underwent my own conversion in 1976.
I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.
Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.
Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.
The process bordered on liturgical.
KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.
What I sought was not merely a better pump.
I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.
It was absurd.
It was also glorious.
The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.
The conversion had other liturgical requirements.
On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.
One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.
My mother walked into the office.
“Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.
“Why are you so happy?”
I reached down and squeezed my calf.
“My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”
She looked puzzled.
“Why does that make you happy?”
I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.
In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes himself as a former Christian and now an agnostic who remains irresistibly drawn to the mystery of belief. He wants to know what committed Christians actually experience from the inside. Not what they claim in theological treatises or apologetics, but what they believe in the marrow of their bones. To satisfy that curiosity, he considers joining a Catholic cruise that retraces the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.
Then he recoils.
He realizes that he would be boarding the ship under false pretenses. He would not be a pilgrim but an observer, a skeptical journalist pretending to be a fellow traveler. Worse, he fears he would begin treating believers as specimens in a religious safari, peering at them through the bars of an intellectual zoo.
He cannot bring himself to do it.
The reason is revealing. Carrère respects Christianity too much. More importantly, he recognizes too much of himself in the people he hopes to observe. He has not escaped the longing that once made him a fervent believer. Somewhere inside him survives a hunger for Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, for the intoxicating certainty that dissolves ambiguity and ends the exhausting labor of perpetual self-interrogation.
That is the danger of writing about conversion.
The temptation is to reduce the convert to a caricature—a fanatic, a zealot, a punch line. Once that happens, the writer has stopped investigating and started congratulating himself.
Carrère refuses that temptation.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that he approaches even the forms of faith that unsettle him with remarkable humility. He writes without condescension, without superiority, and without the lazy satisfaction of explaining away religious passion as psychological pathology. His tone is one of curiosity, sympathy, self-reproach, and, perhaps most surprisingly, envy. He cannot help wondering whether absolute conviction, however irrational, might be preferable to a lifetime spent wandering the fog of uncertainty.
He cancels the cruise.
He calls doing so “a bad deed.”
That confession stopped me in my tracks because it exposed the weakness in my own writing.
Over the years I have written roughly a dozen shabby, half-baked novels about my teenage years as a bodybuilder. I always blamed the structure, the pacing, the dialogue, or the plot.
Now I think I know the real reason they failed.
I was the man boarding the bodybuilding cruise.
I looked back at my younger self and my gym companions the way a tourist looks at a curious tribe. They were amusing. They were excessive. They spoke in absurd dialects about protein, carb loading, and biceps pumps with the solemnity of medieval theologians debating the nature of grace.
I was clever.
I was also a hack.
Mockery is the refuge of writers who fear understanding.
I never asked the questions that mattered. What terror drove boys to devote themselves so completely to muscle? What loneliness hid beneath the bravado? What private wounds demanded redemption through iron? What aching sense of inadequacy transformed barbells into sacraments?
The bodybuilding was never the story.
The hunger was.
If I ever return to that world, I hope to do so as Carrère approached Christianity: not with detached amusement but with humility, caution, and the uncomfortable recognition that the fanatic I wish to understand is not someone else.
In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes a television series he once helped develop. The premise is quietly unsettling. In a small rural town, the dead return to life. There are no zombies, no horror tropes, no supernatural spectacle. The dead simply resume their ordinary lives. Your husband comes home from work. Your daughter asks what’s for dinner. Your father sits in his favorite chair. None of them remembers dying. The burden falls not on the resurrected but on the living, who must reconcile themselves to the impossible.
Carrère uses this premise as a metaphor for religious conversion.
A genuine conversion does not merely alter a person’s opinions. It kills one self and replaces it with another. The converted person still wears the same face, but something essential has vanished. The old personality has become a ghost.
Carrère knows this from experience. For three years in the early 1990s he was consumed by Christian faith. Looking back, he regards that intensely devout version of himself almost as one regards a deceased relative: familiar, unforgettable, and yet strangely unrecognizable.
The same paradox appears in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul the persecutor would have despised Paul the apostle. Paul the apostle would have regarded Saul as spiritually blind. They occupy the same body while inhabiting entirely different moral universes.
Carrère calls Christianity’s astonishing expansion the Great Mutation. Within a few centuries, roughly a quarter of the known world accepted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, miracles, eternal life, and the conviction that earthly existence was merely the waiting room for a greater kingdom. Whether one believes those claims is almost beside the point. The historical achievement is staggering. Few ideas have ever transformed so many human beings so thoroughly.
Reading Carrère made me realize that religious conversion is only one species of a much larger phenomenon.
Human beings are conversion machines.
A politically indifferent commuter begins listening to Rush Limbaugh during long drives to work. Months later he is no longer merely listening; he is quoting, arguing, and eventually thinking in Limbaugh’s cadences. The broadcaster has not simply gained an audience. He has acquired disciples.
Sometimes I amused myself by imagining an absurd sequel.
Suppose Rush Limbaugh had awakened one morning as a granola-eating vegan who had embraced Buddhism, practiced yoga at sunrise, and urged his listeners to forgive their political enemies because resentment disrupts the universe’s healing vibrations.
His audience would have experienced something close to theological collapse.
The prophet had abandoned the faith.
Followers who had built their identities around his certainties would suddenly find themselves spiritually homeless. Many would scramble toward new authorities with the desperation of refugees. Some might discover John Bradshaw and begin healing their Inner Child. Others would embrace Deepak Chopra and begin assuring bewildered relatives that “the universe has no fixed agenda,” thereby ensuring they would never again be invited to host Thanksgiving dinner.
The point is that conversion is not confined to religion.
As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, people burdened by inadequacy rarely seek modest improvement. They crave wholesale transformation. If religion fails to satisfy that hunger, they will seek redemption elsewhere—in politics, psychology, nutrition, fitness, investing, or hobbies.
As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t merely admire Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We wanted to become Arnold.
Protein shakes were our communion wine. Carb loading was liturgy. The biceps pump bordered on mystical experience. We weren’t building muscle nearly as much as we were pursuing salvation.
This morning I stumbled across a Reddit post from a G-Shock enthusiast celebrating his GW-6900. According to him, the watch had changed his life. He no longer wanted another watch. He had conquered watch addiction. He was cured.
I smiled because I recognized the language immediately.
He wasn’t describing a purchase.
He was describing a conversion.
His watch had become Damascus on the wrist.
Carrère observes that most of us live comfortably in two parallel worlds. One contains our practical routines: paying bills, driving to work, buying groceries. The other houses our transcendent convictions, the stories that persuade us our lives are moving toward redemption rather than mere survival.
That second world is never empty for long.
If we lose one faith, another waits patiently around the corner. It may arrive dressed as a political movement, a diet, a fitness program, a philosopher, or even a watch. We flatter ourselves that we are rational creatures who occasionally become believers.
The evidence suggests the opposite.
We are believers searching for the next conversion.
About fifteen years ago, my watch hobby settled into what I assumed would be its final form. I became captivated by Seiko mechanical dive watches. Five years later, the obsession grew more specific. I wanted faithful recreations of Seiko’s 1960s divers mounted on vintage-inspired Waffle and Tropic straps. My collection had quietly become an altar to the Sixties.
Only recently did I realize what was really happening.
I wasn’t merely wearing watches.
I had unknowingly enlisted in a historical reenactment society.
Some people spend weekends dressed as Viking warriors, Roman legionaries, or Revolutionary War soldiers. My costume was different. Every morning I buckled on a diver’s watch and imagined myself inhabiting the glamorous mythology of 1960s adventure. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, Sean Connery had never stopped speeding across Caribbean waters with Honey Ryder in Dr. No. I wasn’t collecting timepieces. I was practicing what I now call Sean Connery Chic.
For years I believed that was the inevitable destination of my hobby.
It wasn’t.
My mechanical divers excelled at one thing above all others: charisma.
Imagine owning a pristine 1963 Corvette. Park it anywhere, and people gather around it with reverence. They admire its curves. They photograph it. They dream about it.
Then they ask the owner what it’s like to drive every day.
That’s when the romance collides with reality.
The vintage Corvette leaks fluids with aristocratic indifference. It rattles. It drinks gasoline like a sailor on shore leave. Its electrical system views reliability as an optional feature. The air conditioning, if present at all, merely stirs warm air with admirable optimism. Safety equipment consists largely of hope. The seats regard lumbar support as a dangerous modern innovation. Every outing is equal parts transportation and mechanical negotiation.
My mechanical divers occupied much the same territory.
On the Charisma Scale, they scored a perfect ten.
On the Reliability, Accuracy, Comfort, and Practicality Scale, they were lucky to earn a two.
That realization forced me to rethink my collection.
A man can admire vintage Corvettes.
He probably shouldn’t own only vintage Corvettes.
I needed a second car garage.
One garage would house nostalgia.
The other would embrace optimization.
I realized this about six months ago when I opened the box containing a G-Shock Frogman, the GWF-1000, and knew within seconds that I had experienced what every collector hopes for but rarely enjoys.
It was a No-Doubter.
If you’re unfamiliar with watch addiction, a No-Doubter is the rare purchase that requires no rationalization. You don’t inspect it for flaws. You don’t reassure yourself that you’ll grow into it. You simply know.
Its evil twin is the Flop-Sweater.
That’s the watch that disappoints you before you’ve even peeled the plastic from the crystal. During the unboxing video, your smile grows increasingly artificial while your palms begin to perspire. Halfway through the presentation, you’re already calculating how much money you’ll lose when you sell it.
Fortunately, the Frogman inspired none of that.
Instead, it introduced me to a dangerous new pleasure: atomic timekeeping.
Its Multi-Band 6 receiver synchronizes nightly with the atomic clock transmitter in Fort Collins, Colorado. Once you’ve experienced waking each morning to a watch that is essentially perfect to the second, ordinary accuracy begins to feel strangely primitive. Precision is addictive. Let me repeat that. Just as a watch enthusiast can become addicted to watches, that same enthusiast can become addicted to precision. Once your standards rise, they refuse to descend. I think that might be the central lesson of this essay.
Then came comfort.
Despite their imposing dimensions, G-Shocks are astonishingly light. Their bulky resin cases look as though they should feel like cinder blocks, yet they practically disappear on the wrist.
Then came engineering.
G-Shocks delight the inner nerd because they are gloriously overbuilt. Owning one feels like driving a supercar at the speed limit. You know you’ll never exploit its full capabilities, but the mere knowledge that they’re available is oddly satisfying.
Finally, I confronted the matter of identity.
My Seiko divers whispered, “Sean Connery.”
My G-Shocks announced something entirely different.
They belonged to the world of search-and-rescue teams, police sergeants, firefighters, football coaches, military instructors, and engineers who trust equipment more than appearances.
This wasn’t Sean Connery Chic.
It was Action Hero Chic.
To my surprise, I liked the role.
The Frogman was quickly joined by three other atomic G-Shocks: the King with its gloriously legible positive display, the Mudman GW-9500 with its billboard-sized numerals, and the dependable Rescue GW-7900.
Then there is my lone non-atomic outlier, the Mudman G-9300.
Ironically, it has become my hotel watch.
Hotels are surprisingly adept at blocking the radio signal that keeps my atomic watches synchronized, so the G-9300, which gains only about ten seconds per month, has earned a permanent place in my travel rotation.
People sometimes ask whether my mechanical divers and G-Shocks compete with one another.
They don’t.
To compare them is to commit a category error.
One collection points backward toward romance, mythology, and nostalgia.
The other points forward toward precision, engineering, and optimization.
Both satisfy something genuine within me.
Jay Leno doesn’t own one garage because one kind of automobile cannot express every facet of his enthusiasm.
Why, then, should I expect one watch box to tell the whole story of mine?
About fifteen years ago, my watch hobby evolved in a way that my interests became focused on Seiko mechanical divers. Then about five years ago, the interest intensified so that I wanted the 1960s recreation Seiko divers on vintage straps, such as Waffle or Tropic designs. It would seem that my watch hobby pointed to the romantic nostalgia of the 60s. My childhood of watching Sean Connery wearing Submariners had apparently gotten into my unconscious mind. So I was no longer just wearing a watch. I was unwittingly part of a historical re-enactment society. I wasn’t doing Viking, World War II, or Roman soldier cosplay. I was living out the fantasy of being my childhood movie icon Sean Connery speeding on a motorboat with Honey Ryder in Dr. No. As far as my watch hobby goes, I thought this is it. I’m locked into Sean Connery Chic. Those three words capture the essence of my hobby.
My hobby was largely characterized by a specific style. As far as the watch goes, nostalgia was the primary priority. Accuracy was not the priority. My watches are the equivalent of owning a 1963 Corvette. They score a 10 on the Charisma Scale. But for reliability, comfort, safety, and function, they score a 2.
As soon as I saw my mechanical divers as having a vintage Corvette, I knew I needed to branch out. I wanted one car garage to have my vintage cars for nostalgia purposes. But I needed another car garage that connected me to the modern world of function and optimization.
I realized this six months ago when I bought a G-Shock Frogman. When I opened it out of the box and beheld the industrial beauty of its resin material, I knew instantly that it was a No-Doubter. For those of you who are new to the watch hobby, a No-Doubter is when you immediately know you got a winner. The opposite is called Flop-Sweater, when you know the watch sucks and you’re going to have to flip it for a loss. You’re literally perspiring on the YouTube video during your unboxing.
So the Frogman in question, the GWF-1000, is Multiband-6, which means it syncs every night with the atomic tower in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Once I got a taste of atomic accuracy, it was hard to go back. Having the precise time will spoil you and establish a standard that you don’t want to deviate from.
There’s also the comfort. These G-Shocks have monster-sized girth, but they are light on the wrist. I barely feel them. So now I’ve got accuracy and comfort.
Then there’s the pleasure of knowing these G-Shocks are over-engineered. You’re getting more technology than you’ll ever need, a fact that tickles your Inner Nerd. You’re like the guy who drives the speed limit, but you know you could go 200 miles an hour if you wanted to.
Finally, there’s the matter of style. With G-Shock, I had to give up Sean Connery Chic because my G-Shocks are another kind of persona altogether. They are Action Hero Chic, Law Enforcement Sergeant, and Football Coach Authority watches, and I’m totally cool with that.
So in addition to the Frogman, I got three other Multiband-6 G-Shocks, the King with positive display; the Mudman GW-9500 with its oversized numerals; and the Rescue GW-7900.
I also have one non-atomic G-Shock, the Mudman G-9300. It’s only gaining about 10 seconds a month. It is good to bring on vacations where you’ll be staying at a hotel because hotels are notorious for having the kind of structures and radio interference that will block your atomic sync. So I have found a purpose for my GW-7900.
I don’t see my mechanical divers as competing with my G-Shocks. To compare them would be to make a category error. One category points to the nostalgia of the past; the other category points to the optimization of the future.
Just as Jay Leno has more than one car garage, I can have more than one watch box.
My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.
The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.
He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.
To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.
Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.
So we lifted.
Not casually. Fanatically.
Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.
He preached through barbells rather than sermons.
Discipline.
Precision.
Toughness.
Master yourself before the world masters you.
Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.
Henry Mancini.
Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.
We trained with style.
Some of us trained with obsession.
I belonged to the second category.
Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.
Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.
I became “Squats.”
At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.
Only years later would I understand what was really happening.
I wasn’t simply building legs.
I was constructing an identity.
The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.
And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.
Emmanuel Carrère has become my literary patron saint because he asks the questions I cannot stop asking myself. Of all his books, TheKingdom has lodged itself deepest inside me because it dramatizes the same conflict that has haunted my life: the impossible task of separating myself from Christianity without ever quite escaping its gravitational pull.
In TheKingdom, Carrère intertwines autobiography with the story of Luke, imagining the evangelist as a writer following the missionary adventures of his hero, Paul. Luke becomes more than a biblical figure. He becomes Carrère’s alter ego, a fellow writer trying to make sense of extraordinary events while simultaneously making sense of himself.
That double inquiry is what captivates me.
Carrère interrogates not merely Christianity but his own soul.
One of the most striking subjects of that interrogation is success.
By any worldly standard, Carrère has won the lottery. He is one of France’s most celebrated writers. His opinions carry cultural weight. He serves on prestigious literary juries. Filmmakers seek his advice. Publishers court him. His books travel farther than most people ever will. He stays in elegant hotels, dines with influential people, and inhabits the rarefied atmosphere reserved for intellectual celebrities.
Yet success has not quieted him.
If anything, it has sharpened his discomfort.
Part of him believes that his accomplishments have carried him farther from Jesus than closer to him. Although he long ago emerged from what he calls his “Christian period,” the desire to follow Jesus never entirely disappeared. It lingers like an old melody that refuses to leave his mind.
That desire creates an almost unbearable tension because Jesus demands a way of life that appears to mock nearly every modern definition of success.
Love your enemies.
Bless those who persecute you.
Do not exalt yourself.
Sell your possessions.
Take up your cross.
Act as though this world is passing away.
Measured against that standard, literary fame begins to resemble an embarrassing distraction.
Carrère is fascinated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radicalism. The Gospel asks us to hold our earthly attachments lightly. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Love itself is transformed. Instead of reserving our deepest affection for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus seems to demand an indiscriminate love that embraces everyone equally.
Carrère pauses here.
Can love that is equally distributed still be called love?
Or has it become something so abstract that it evaporates into an ideal rather than a human experience?
He contrasts this vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness unfolds not by fleeing the world but by inhabiting it fully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in family, longevity, generosity, and community. Earth itself becomes the stage upon which covenant is lived.
Christianity, by contrast, often seems suspicious of precisely those satisfactions. Earthly success is fleeting. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Riches become spiritual liabilities. This life is preparation for another kingdom.
Carrère never completely chooses between these competing visions.
My sense is that he is temperamentally drawn toward the Jewish embrace of earthly life. Yet he cannot stop returning to Jesus.
Because no one ever spoke like Jesus.
For Carrère, the singularity of Christ lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in a body of literature—he suggests that Jesus himself is a kind of hapax: an unrepeatable event in human speech.
He recalls the temple guards in John’s Gospel who return empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus.
Their explanation is breathtakingly simple:
“No one ever spoke like this man.”
Carrère believes that even if one stripped away the miracle stories, even if one doubted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers.
Something unprecedented happened in those words.
The New Testament captivates him for another reason as well.
Some scenes possess the awkward unpredictability of eyewitness memory.
Who invents the young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after slipping out of his linen cloth? Carrère suspects the embarrassed youth may even have been Mark himself, accidentally preserving his own humiliation in the Gospel.
Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into a crowded room before Jesus.
These episodes feel too strange, too specific, too gloriously unnecessary to be manufactured.
By contrast, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other overtly miraculous episodes leave Carrère unconvinced. They strike him as theological architecture erected after the fact.
Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.
Quite the opposite.
Carrère remains mesmerized by what he calls “the Great Mutation.”
Within only a few generations, an obscure Jewish movement transformed the imagination of the Western world. Millions—and eventually billions—came to believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, eternal life, and the astonishing claim that God had entered history as a poor Jewish carpenter.
When I encounter Carrère’s phrase, “the Great Mutation,” my own imagination travels somewhere entirely different.
It returns to Saturday evenings in 1978.
I am alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.
Dr. David Banner is gentle, decent, almost saintly. He suffers injustice with Job-like patience until one humiliation too many unleashes something volcanic inside him. Suddenly the transformation begins. Muscles swell. Clothes tear. Humanity gives way to myth.
The catharsis overwhelms me.
I begin to cry.
I don’t merely want to become stronger.
I want to mutate.
I want my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that every weakness, every humiliation, every fear disappears forever.
Then the rage subsides.
The green giant vanishes.
David Banner returns.
And finally comes the sequence that broke my heart every single week.
Banner walks alone down a lonely highway while Joe Harnell’s mournful piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” drifts over the closing credits.
That was the image I carried inside myself.
Not the Hulk.
David Banner.
The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.
As a child, I mistook that identification for purity.
What I could not yet see was the narcissism quietly hiding inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not merely misunderstood but uniquely chosen, destined for some dramatic transformation that would finally justify my existence.
Looking back, I realize I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.
Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for a Great Mutation.
In my imagined novel Lifter, I borrow a page from Emmanuel Carrère and turn the investigation inward. The subject is not merely my lifelong devotion to weight training but the psychic hunger that made it feel less like a hobby than a form of emergency intervention. Why did I begin lifting weights at twelve? What wound was I trying to cauterize? What fear was I trying to overpower? Looking back, I suspect I wasn’t chasing health so much as prescribing therapy for a spirit burdened by cowardice, insecurity, and an almost inexhaustible sense of inadequacy.
The story begins before I ever touched a barbell.
As a boy, I was consumed by baseball. I imagined myself as a fearsome slugger, not because I dreamed of leading the league in home runs, but because I wanted opponents to recoil at the sight of me before I ever stepped into the batter’s box. My heroes were not graceful athletes. They were broad-shouldered giants: Willie McCovey, Harmon Killebrew, Dick Allen, Greg Luzinski, and Reggie Jackson. But towering above them all stood the legendary Ted Kluszewski, whose biceps were so enormous that, in my child’s imagination, they simply burst through the sleeves of his uniform like the Incredible Hulk erupting from Bruce Banner’s skin.
Only now do I recognize what fascinated me.
It wasn’t baseball.
It was metamorphosis.
I wasn’t captivated by batting averages or slugging percentages. I was captivated by spectacle. I wanted the crowd to gasp before I ever swung the bat. I wanted my body to announce my arrival before my performance had the chance to disappoint. I longed to become less an athlete than a mythical creature who wandered accidentally onto a baseball diamond.
In that fantasy, my muscles eclipsed the game itself.
The home run was secondary. The physique was the event.
Even as a child, I wasn’t pursuing athletic excellence so much as theatrical transformation. I wanted to become someone so physically overwhelming that ordinary rules no longer applied. If my body could become extraordinary enough, perhaps it could silence the ordinary boy trapped inside it.
That dream would outlive baseball.
It would follow me into bodybuilding, weightlifting, teaching, writing, and nearly every other pursuit I embraced. The details changed, but the longing remained stubbornly intact. Again and again, I sought transformation through achievement, hoping that each new accomplishment would finally extinguish the old feeling of insufficiency.
It never did.
The weights built stronger shoulders and thicker arms, but they proved remarkably ineffective at strengthening self-worth. Every reinvention promised belonging. Every reinvention postponed it.
Perhaps that has been the real story all along.
The barbell was never merely a piece of exercise equipment. It was my first attempt to lift something far heavier than iron. I wasn’t trying to transform my body so much as reinvent my soul. In the end, however, the Theology of Biceps proved incapable of saving me.
In terms of reading endurance, I am another casualty of the internet.
In my early twenties, I devoured two books a week with the discipline of a bodybuilder consuming protein to build muscle. Reading was not a hobby. It was nourishment. My brain felt perpetually hungry, and books were the only food that satisfied it. I read because I was curious. I read because I wanted to flee stupidity. Most of all, I read because life felt incomplete unless I had one foot planted in a parallel literary universe. To be deprived of that universe was to feel vaguely cheated by existence itself.
Then the internet arrived.
It did not destroy my appetite for ideas. It fragmented it.
My attention was gradually colonized by factoids, clickbait, social media surveillance, and articles designed less to illuminate than to be skimmed and forgotten. None of these distractions seemed particularly dangerous on their own. Together, however, they accomplished what no enemy of books had managed before: they quietly atrophied my reading muscle.
I still read, but my reading is now compromised. In the morning, I work through essays with a cup of coffee, forcing myself to stay engaged by taking notes and writing brief summaries or critiques. At night, I can usually manage another thirty minutes of essays or short fiction before my concentration begins to fray.
That is a far cry from the reader I once was.
Yet my longing for that parallel literary universe never disappeared.
It merely changed mediums.
Today I spend at least two hours a day listening to audiobooks. I listen before dawn, during workouts, while driving, and sometimes while drifting into an afternoon nap. My library ranges from early Christian history to sports biographies, novels, philosophical polemics, memoirs, and books on health and fitness.
Although I mourn the loss of my youthful reading stamina, I have discovered an unexpected compensation.
In many cases, I understand books more deeply by listening to them than by reading them.
Take Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. I have read the novel obsessively four separate times. Yet hearing it performed through Audible has transformed the experience. I am no longer merely reading about Paul and Luke as they wrestle with believers and skeptics across Greece, Syria, and Israel. I feel as though I am accompanying them. Scenes unfold with cinematic immediacy. Conversations breathe. Sentences I somehow overlooked through four careful readings suddenly reveal themselves with startling clarity. Listening has not diminished the book. It has enlarged it.
Part of this pleasure may lie deep within our evolutionary inheritance. Human beings spent thousands of years listening to storytellers, poets, prophets, and orators before most people ever encountered literature on a printed page. Perhaps the spoken voice still reaches something ancient within us.
Another explanation is what I call the Auditory Immersion Principle: the paradox in which a listener comprehends and emotionally inhabits a book more fully through sustained listening than through silent reading because the uninterrupted flow of the narrator’s voice prevents skimming, distraction, and premature judgment. A skilled narrator refuses to let my restless internet brain dart ahead or wander elsewhere. I surrender to the current of the story instead of constantly trying to steer it.
That discovery has filled me with renewed excitement for books I have postponed for years.
Near the top of my Audible wish list is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a novel Emmanuel Carrère has said transformed his life as a child. I have no doubt that listening to it will transport me into one of literature’s great enchanted worlds. I expect to emerge from it not merely informed but changed.
The anticipation is almost intoxicating. It feels as though pleasures this profound ought to be reserved for another realm, not made available through a pair of headphones during a morning walk.
Perhaps that sounds like hyperbole.
Then again, perhaps that is simply the enduring power of great literature.
The internet may have weakened my capacity to sit for hours turning pages, but it has not extinguished my desire to inhabit extraordinary books. If anything, audiobooks have reminded me that literature has always been larger than ink on paper. Long before stories were read in silence, they were spoken aloud, carried by the human voice from one soul to another.
In an age that fragments our attention into thousands of disposable moments, that ancient experience may be more necessary than ever.
Three nights ago I dreamed I was alone in a hotel room. Spread across the bed were towering stacks of books and magazines about Christianity. They represented nearly fifty years of reading, questioning, underlining, highlighting, and hoping. I stood over them with the terrible realization that they had brought me no closer to certainty than when I began.
The dream carried me back to the age of seventeen, when Christianity first overturned my life. What seized me was not the promise of heaven but the terror of hell. I found myself unable to escape the thought that the universe might be governed by a God who had already consigned billions of people to eternal punishment. I never reconciled myself to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that divine wrath could be satisfied only through the sacrificial death of God’s Son. Yet I was irresistibly drawn to Jesus himself. I wanted to imitate his humility, his freedom from ego, and his radical love for others.
For most Christians, the phrase “the Good News” evokes joy. For me, it always carried a shadow.
If the good news was that some of us could escape hell, then the corollary was that most of humanity would not.
That realization settled over me like a permanent winter.
I remember working at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits in Berkeley during college. One afternoon a familiar customer, a French immigrant, entered the store with his young son. The boy accidentally dropped a box of puzzle pieces near the register. His father patiently knelt beside him, gathered every piece, smiled gently, and placed them back into the box.
I watched them and felt an almost unbearable sadness.
Is this kind father destined for hell? Is his little boy? Is this really the central drama of existence—to rescue people from eternal punishment before it is too late?
I slipped into the walk-in beer cooler and stocked shelves because I needed somewhere to hide from my thoughts.
The strangest part of that season was the reaction of my Christian friends. They congratulated me on my conversion. They shook my hand and welcomed me into the family of God.
One afternoon my high school friend Kevin looked at my face after congratulating me.
“Aren’t you happy?” he asked.
I lied.
“Yes,” I said.
The truth was exactly the opposite. Even if I somehow managed to be saved, how could I rejoice while imagining that countless others—including decent, loving people like the French father and his son—were marching toward eternal torment? Salvation, as I understood it then, seemed to require emotional compartmentalization of a kind I simply could not achieve.
I hoped that somewhere, hidden among thousands of pages, certainty awaited me.
It never arrived.
That is what the dream exposed.
I stood beside the hotel bed and realized those books represented an entire lifetime spent chasing certainty without catching it. My reading suddenly appeared fruitless, almost absurd.
Then I picked up one magazine.
Across the cover were the words:
The Good News.
I felt rage.
Those words mocked me.
The phrase marked the moment my childhood intuition of God as the source of boundless love gave way to a theological universe in which humanity stood beneath an infinite sentence, offered mercy only because divine justice demanded the execution of an innocent substitute.
And yet another voice interrupts my protest.
What if I have misunderstood the struggle?
What if my resistance has less to do with theology than with myself?
Perhaps I resist Jesus not because his demands are too cruel but because they are too demanding. Perhaps I prefer comfort to sacrifice, autonomy to obedience, self-interest to discipleship.
Jesus offers no comfortable religion. He tells his followers to surrender wealth, deny themselves, carry their cross, and lose their lives in order to find them.
His words continue to accuse me.
Many are called; few are chosen.
The gate is narrow.
Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say?
I want to answer him.
You told us your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Yet the doctrine of hell has never felt easy or light. It has filled me with sorrow. If my life’s mission is to save as many people as possible from eternal punishment, then existence itself becomes unbearably heavy.
And yet I cannot imagine a life entirely without you.
A purely secular existence devoted to comfort, consumption, and personal fulfillment strikes me as equally impoverished. Nietzsche’s Last Man, blinking contentedly amid endless entertainment and consumer pleasures, offers no compelling vision of human flourishing.
So I remain suspended between two worlds.
I cannot wholly embrace the traditional theology that first converted me.
Neither can I embrace a secular life emptied of transcendence.
Perhaps that is why my favorite biblical image has never been David slaying Goliath or Moses parting the Red Sea.
It is Jacob wrestling through the night with the mysterious stranger.
Jacob survives, but he limps for the rest of his life.
That limp has become the defining metaphor of my own existence.
For nearly fifty years I have wrestled with God.
The pain in my hip is the pain of never quite letting go.
When I uploaded my first YouTube video fifteen years ago, I approached the medium with all the technical sophistication of America’s Funniest Home Videos circa 1990. I had recently fallen under the spell of Seiko and Citizen watches and possessed exactly enough knowledge to be dangerous. I wasn’t a curator. I was a caveman who had just discovered fire. My videos consisted largely of me staring in astonishment at a titanium Citizen Promaster, hoping viewers might catch the same contagious wonder. My outfits were not professional. I was wearing a bathrobe with Cheerios clinging to the lapel and a milk mustache under my nose.
The set looked as though a laundromat had exploded behind me. Laundry baskets overflowed with unfolded clothes. The lighting was so dreadful that viewers could never be entirely certain whether I was filming from my office or haunting a Medieval dungeon. As for focus, let us simply say that sharp images were treated as an optional feature rather than a design requirement.
Eventually I purchased a better camera and developed a passing acquaintance with lighting and autofocus. But while I was taking baby steps, YouTube entered the Space Age. Channels began deploying drones over great white sharks, robotic camera rigs that glided through African safaris, helicopters circling erupting volcanoes, and editing suites that looked as though they had been borrowed from Christopher Nolan.
I, meanwhile, was Fred Flintstone pedaling my Stoneage vehicle into a Tesla convention.
Curiously, as YouTube marched into the future, I wandered in the opposite direction.
I rarely make traditional watch videos anymore. Partly that’s because my collection has stabilized. I no longer acquire enough watches to justify another breathless “State of the Collection” update, a genre that now feels about as fresh and exciting as Hootie & the Blowfish.
But something deeper also changed.
I became uncomfortable participating in what I now recognize as the economics of envy. Every glossy close-up, every dramatic wrist roll, every thumbnail promising the next grail watch risks manufacturing dissatisfaction in viewers who were perfectly happy with their collections until five minutes earlier. I know because I spent years falling into exactly that trap myself.
Instead of filming watches, I began interrogating the psychology behind collecting them.
The channel gradually evolved into something resembling a podcast with occasional wrist shots. I developed a lexicon describing the peculiar madness of watch collecting and eventually self-published a book containing more than one hundred entries. Among them is what I call The Watch Potency Principle: as a collection expands, each individual watch loses a little of its emotional power. Eventually the collector experiences a crisis, sells everything in pursuit of liberation, discovers that liberation is strangely unsatisfying, and begins buying watches all over again. Repeat until death. Tolkien called this Gollum. I called it the process of Gollumification.
Having spent years dissecting the disease, I find myself with surprisingly little left to diagnose.
That leaves my YouTube channel in an awkward adolescence.
I don’t want to retire it because I genuinely enjoy making video essays. But I no longer possess the manic enthusiasm that algorithms adore. I am still a watch collector, just no longer in my Peak Addiction Period. Unfortunately, emotional equilibrium is terrible for audience engagement. YouTube rewards obsession far more enthusiastically than contentment.
The truth is, I am also an extraordinarily boring man.
I live in suburban Torrance. There is precious little cinematic drama in watching me search for a parking space at Costco, call a plumber when the shower backs up, or negotiate a family summit over the proper method for removing a daddy longlegs from my daughter’s bedroom wall. The algorithm craves spectacle. I offer plumbing invoices.
People sometimes ask why I don’t pivot into politics.
The answer is simple. Modern politics has become professional wrestling with legislation attached. Policy increasingly serves as the pretext for performance. Every public figure must become either the Hero or the Villain. Every disagreement requires apocalyptic language. Every debate ends with someone declaring civilization itself to be on the brink of collapse.
I have no talent for that performance because I can see the stage directions.
If my channel survives, it has to survive because I mean what I say, not because I have mastered the latest choreography of outrage.
So here I am.
I am sixty-four years old. I have spent forty years teaching writing, fifty years lifting weights and obsessing over nutrition, and twenty-five years collecting watches. By any reasonable measure, I should know exactly who I am.
Instead, I find myself confronting an unexpected truth.
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
Perhaps that uncertainty is no longer something to hide.
Moving forward with the uncertainty is the story.
If my YouTube channel has a future, I suspect it won’t be about watches at all. It will be about what happens after the obsessions cool, after the algorithms lose interest, and after a man discovers that the hardest collection to curate is not the one in his watch box, but the unfinished life still ticking quietly inside himself.
