Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    In 1972, on the dust-choked battlefield otherwise known as the Independent Elementary playground, Miguel Torres and I were locked in a holy war over an alleged clipping penalty. Gary Kauffman—self-appointed referee, rules committee, and prophet of doom—had flagged me during tag football, a call that would hand my team the loss. Words got hot. “Cheater” ricocheted between us like a stray bullet. Then Miguel’s fists did the talking—left, right, a percussion solo on my jaw.

    I cried—not because I stood there like a department-store mannequin while his knuckles composed a sonata on my face, but because I was blind. I hadn’t read the storm system building in my friend—barometric pressure falling, hostility rising—and I was stunned that my protest could yank that much fury out of someone who’d traded Twinkies with me at lunch.

    The recess bell shrieked. We jogged back to class, me sniffling, my face a throbbing geography lesson. Mrs. Eckhart opened My Side of the Mountain, but I heard only the drumbeat in my skull and the soft crush of my pride underfoot. I retreated inward to the place my imagination had been furnishing for months: a quiet stone courtyard outside the Shaolin Temple, the same one that glowed from our black-and-white TV. The river whispered nearby. Incense drifted like daydreams. And there stood my spiritual guide, Master Po—blind as justice, sharp as a scalpel.

    “Master Po,” I said, still tasting the copper of humiliation, “you once taught me that weakness prevails over strength and gentleness conquers. Yet my team lost, my friend rearranged my face, and I stood there helpless. Where was gentleness then?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you mistake stubbornness for virtue. You are the rigid branch that neither sees the distant hills nor hears the cooling wind—and so you snap. Begin by seeing. Begin by listening.”

    “What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing?”

    He tilted his head. “For one, you did not hear the expletives cannoning from your mouth—shrapnel of spit landing on your friend’s cheeks. For two, you did not see your own finger spearing his chest, drilling his solar plexus as if mining for a confession.”

    “So I was ticking off Miguel without even knowing it?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You cherry-pick facts to star in your favorite film—You, the Noble Victim—while everyone else auditions for Villain. Myth-making is a miraculous tool for preserving self-esteem. It is also the shortest road away from The Way.”

    “I don’t myth-make.”

    He raised an eyebrow in the patient way only the blind can. “When you were six, you slept at your aunt and uncle’s and wet the bed. Instead of accepting the weather report from your own bladder, you blamed…the Pee Fairy.”

    I winced. “I remember. It was quick thinking.”

    “What else do you remember?”

    “That I repeated the lie until it became embroidered truth. I argued anyone who doubted me into silence. The Pee Fairy did it. Obviously.”

    “Exactly,” he said. “When you muddle truth long enough, you lose your own outline. You become your costume.”

    “How do I follow The Way?”

    “Do not costume yourself. Do not curate a personality for the world like outfits for the first day of school. Let time carve you. Emerge by erosion, not construction.”

    “I’m eleven,” I said. “Time carves slowly. Also, if I don’t finish my social-studies questions by sixth period, I’ll be carving them in detention.”

    He smiled. “By doing nothing, everything is done.”

    “Try that on Mrs. Eckhart.”

    “You have much to learn, Grasshopper.”

    Back in the fluorescent glare of fifth grade, Mrs. Eckhart’s voice returned, turning pages into wind through trees. I pressed a cool palm to my cheekbone, felt the ache, and wondered if wisdom always arrived late—long after the bell, after the punch, after you realize you were yelling at a friend and mistook your echo for righteousness. Maybe gentleness isn’t an instant shield; maybe it’s a habit you grow, a small current under the noise, the kind that keeps a rigid branch from snapping when the playground becomes a courtroom and you’ve already sentenced yourself to innocence.

  • My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    Last night I dreamed that a baby had been abandoned in the flower garden outside my San Francisco apartment. His thin wail rose above the city hum, but no one seemed to hear it but me. The world went on—cars passing, neighbors coming and going—while I alone stood transfixed by that cry. I lifted the baby from the dirt, his skin warm and impossibly soft, and held him against my chest. Standing at the threshold of the apartment I rented with my wife and our stray orange cat, I prayed for holiness and wept, as though the infant had been dropped from heaven for me alone to fail or redeem.

    Inside, the apartment felt like an expensive tomb—luxurious, dim, deliberately shadowed, as if light itself were rationed. I fed the child and watched him feed, marveled at the smallness of his breaths. When his parents arrived, both scientists, I confronted them. They were calm, rational, and convinced me of their legitimacy with clinical precision. Their excuse was airtight, their affect detached, and in the end, I surrendered the baby, though my faith in their explanation felt paper-thin.

    Then the parents and the baby were gone. At this point, my role inside the apartment was clear: My wife and I were educators using the apartment to host seminars on DNA and algorithms for college students. The air smelled faintly of coffee and ozone. During one of these sessions, the true apartment owner appeared: my thirty-year-old doppelgänger, tall, lean, dressed in the sleek anonymity of wealth—dark designer sweats, minimalist sneakers. He admired the apartment I had borrowed as though validating his own taste: the kitchen gadgets gleamed like relics, the food neatly arranged, the DVDs alphabetized. His presence was eerie—a reflection of my own mind rendered in a sharper resolution. We talked about the future buyer of the apartment, another iteration of us—older, familiar, running on the same mysterious algorithm encoded in our shared DNA.

    When the lecture ended, my wife and I returned the keys to my younger self and walked hand in hand along the apartment’s tennis courts. The sky had the bruised hue of evening. I told her that everything—the baby, the double, the science lectures—had overwhelmed me. I broke down, crying again for the purity I had felt when I prayed over the abandoned child. That moment at the doorstep remained the still point of the dream: holiness in the act of holding something utterly helpless, something untouched by algorithm or ownership.

  • Flexing My Wrist Presence Against the Dying of the Light

    Flexing My Wrist Presence Against the Dying of the Light

    In my early forties, I was drunk on “wrist presence.” I wanted watches so large they could double as signal mirrors for rescue helicopters. The bigger the case, the smaller my self-esteem. These oversized monstrosities weren’t badges of taste; they were distress flares of insecurity and a middle-aged identity crisis. Even as my horological palate matured, the vanity remained. I wasn’t trying to tell time—I was trying to tell the world I mattered.

    Yet my vanity was oddly selective. I didn’t care if my car was plain as Melba toast or if my wardrobe screamed “laundry day.” All I wanted was a clean Honda Accord, a passable body, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a watch that did the heavy lifting of my entire identity. For two decades, that formula felt like equilibrium—a minimalist shell hiding a maximalist ego.

    Then, late in my sixty-third year, the vibe shifted. The thrill curdled. My so-called “signature watch” no longer filled me with adrenaline and dopamine. 

    I still love my divers, but wearing them now feels less like conquest and more like quiet companionship. The fire has cooled. No amount of flexing on Instagram or brooding on YouTube can resurrect that manic gleam. The truth is brutally simple: every tick of the watch is a memento mori. I’ve aged out of the performance. Time, the final minimalist, has stripped me down and humbled me in the face of my mortality. 

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    When I was five, I watched The Monkees episode “I Was a 99-Pound Weakling.” Micky Dolenz, tired of sand in the face, starts lifting to steal back his dream girl from beach tyrant Dave Draper—Bulk himself. He returns a walking bicep, ready for triumph, and finds the blonde beauty arm hooked through a new idol: a skinny intellectual reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Micky’s expression does the math—pecs don’t beat paperbacks—and the lesson welded itself to my skull. Many years later, I’d write a piano composition, “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz.” What follows is an excerpt from that longer work. 


  • In Defense of Watching True Crime

    In Defense of Watching True Crime

     A couple of weeks ago my wife DMed me an Instagram reel: one reviewer, dozens of true-crime docuseries. I pressed play and fell down the shaft. I binged everything—some episodes like gravel in the throat, others slick as a thriller—and realized I was hooked the way novels used to hook me: late nights, one more chapter, living on cliffhangers and bad coffee.

    A year ago I would’ve dismissed the whole genre as tabloid embalming fluid: pain turned into programming. That was the lazy take, the one you reach for when you haven’t looked long enough. The better work in this space isn’t cheap; it’s meticulous. At its best, it has social value.

    Watch the detectives. The strong series showcase minds like scalpels—profilers knitting together motive and method, investigators reconstructing a life from fibers and timestamps. The good ones don’t myth-make; they interrogate reality. Their craft can outstrip a screenwriter because the stakes aren’t applause—they’re truth and, sometimes, prison.

    Credit the pursuit, too. The suspect is slippery, the evidence thin, and still the chase continues—phone records, shoe tread, the geography of a lie. You can see how the work rewires them. They read a face like a ledger. They separate panic from performance. They carry that calibration into ordinary life, for better and worse.

    But the badge isn’t a halo. Some episodes show coercive interrogations, tunnel vision, a theory clung to past its sell-by date while exculpatory facts stack up in the corner. Those missteps belong in the record. A genre that can praise tenacity should also indict certainty when it curdles.

    What keeps me watching, beyond craft and cautionary tales, is the way communities assemble under pressure—search parties in neon vests, casseroles and candles, volunteers mapping creek beds while the cameras spin. These stories remind you how much ordinary goodness survives the worst day a town can have.

    Then there are the perpetrators, often undone by their own theater. The vanity is operatic: cryptic boasts, trophies kept, shoplifting while on the run because entitlement feels bulletproof. Not all are violent; some are artists of fraud whose lies cascade through bank accounts, marriages, and nervous systems. The harm is quieter, not smaller.

    The hardest stretch is the parents—the permanent gray in the eyes, the architecture of a life collapsed on one missing pillar. They stay decent, they organize scholarships and vigils, they become advocates—but you can see the subtraction. A part of them is gone, and the camera can’t restore it.

    I do feel the moral splinter: I’m consuming narratives built from someone else’s worst night. There’s a voice that hisses, How dare you. And a voice that answers: Then look harder. Don’t watch for spectacle; watch to learn—about procedure, about predation, about how to be a better neighbor and a sharper juror. The difference between voyeur and witness is attention and intent.

    So here I am, converted, with reservations. The good series map the borderlands between justice and error, courage and vanity, community and collapse. They don’t restore innocence; they invoice it. If I keep watching, it’s because the genre—at its best—insists on seeing clearly, and because clarity, though it stings, is a civic skill worth practicing.

  • Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Last night I dreamed that my mother and her family—gone twenty years and counting—came back to life as if they’d only stepped outside for air. No trumpet blast, no spectral fog. Just my aunt’s kitchen in Los Angeles: sunlight on the vinyl, the smell of coffee and waffles, forks tapping plates like tiny hammers. My mother kissed my cheek the way she used to, a quick press and a pat—quality control for the living.

    Between bites of waffles and scrambled eggs my grandfather announced, in the same voice he used for weekend errands, that we were driving to a mansion in Alaska. He said “mansion” as if it were around the corner, not at the end of the continent and a climate shift away. Heads nodded. Coats appeared. Dream logistics are ruthless: one cut and we were already rolling, my grandfather at the wheel of a weary sedan, a caravan of relatives stacking up behind us like punctuation.

    The city dissolved. Los Angeles flattened into a silver slab, then a bright white riddle. Snow stitched itself across the windshield; the tires made that soft, murderous hush you hear on ice. My grandfather drove with cheerful indifference to physics, tapping the wheel to music only he could hear. I watched the road bloom and vanish and thought: so this is how resurrection handles transportation—no chariot of fire, just black ice and a bench seat.

    We crested a hill and there it was: a palace poured in espresso and cream, a latte-colored sprawl with too many windows and the kind of confidence money wears when it doesn’t expect to be told no. Someone in the back called it “Politburo chic,” and the phrase snapped into place—midcentury power with an indoor fur policy. The façade implied heated floors and quiet compromises. The roofline looked like it had read every memo and approved half of them.

    What struck me wasn’t that my family had returned; it was how casual I felt about it. My mother was alive. My grandfather was alive. Aunts and uncles murmured behind me, inventorying snacks, debating rooms. And I sat there with the calm of a man who receives an impossible package on his porch and signs without reading the label. Maybe grief is software and last night the update finally took.

    We idled at the circular drive while the house regarded us with its many eyes. I tried to imagine the foyer: the smell of wax and cold marble, a staircase that curves with the arrogance of a purebred. My brain kept blurring the picture like a censor’s bar. I could sense chandeliers, a staff of refined butlers. 

    But I woke up before entering the mansion. Now more than anything, I feel tantalized by what was inside that mansion. Now I’ll never know. 

  • The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    Every semester, I pull out my Engagement Meter and see what topics make my students’ neurons fire. This term, in freshman composition (C1000), the essays on “bro influencers manipulating young men” and “fast fashion manipulating young women” barely twitched the needle—a flat 3 on the Engagement Scale. Things improved when we compared Frederick Douglass’s memoir with the “Sunken Place” in Get Out, which jumped to a 7.

    In my critical thinking class (C1001), we hit an 8 when students explored how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs prove that self-control is no longer a moral virtue but a technical setting. They saw that biology and convenience have replaced grit and willpower.

    But the assignment that detonated the Engagement Meter—a clean, seismic 10—was the essay on AI. Students wrote about how AI tools make life easier while quietly siphoning their agency, originality, and voice. They confessed that “helpful” algorithms were making them sound polished but hollow, frictionless but forgettable.

    I call these scaffolded assignments “building blocks.” After seven years of teaching them, I’ve never seen such intensity. The AI essays weren’t just reflections; they were confessions—students realizing that technology isn’t merely reshaping their writing but their sense of self.

    The irony? The more they wrote about AI replacing them, the more human they sounded.

  • State of the Misalignment Situation

    State of the Misalignment Situation

    I had hoped my blog, Cinemorphosis, would feed my video essays—serve as a compost heap of half-baked thoughts that could later bloom into something cinematic and worthy of making video essays. Instead, the blog has swallowed the energy that once went into my videos. What was meant to be a support system has become a rival ecosystem. The crossover I imagined—the blog fueling the videos and the videos enriching the blog—never happened. It turns out writing and filming come from different parts of the brain, and those parts refuse to share the same neural conference room.

    Friends say, “Don’t sweat it, McMahon. Just lean into the blog and let the videos go.” Easy advice for people who aren’t haunted by the specter of irrelevance. I can’t shake the feeling that the video essays keep me sharper—more visible, more alive. The blog satisfies my mind; the camera keeps me from turning into dust.

    Sam Harris once said he can spend five years writing a book, agonizing over edits and the publishing gauntlet, only to reach a few thousand readers—if he’s lucky. Meanwhile, a one-hour podcast can reach millions overnight, and snippets of it go viral before the author’s espresso cools. That line haunts me. The medium matters. The way we reach people has become part of the message.

    I see the same logic in my own small way. A blog post I’m proud of might earn a few dozen engagements. A decent video essay? Thousands of views, maybe more. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real draw is the vitality the videos demand—something performative, almost athletic. When I’m on camera, I feel like I’m “getting my reps in,” keeping mentally limber. The blog is therapy; the videos are training.

    Still, there’s a fine line between vitality and vanity. Part of me believes the videos keep me youthful, engaged, even relevant. Another part suspects it’s all just a resistance workout against mortality. Staying fit is one thing; refusing to age gracefully is another. Desperation doesn’t wear well on men over sixty, even under good lighting.

    So maybe writing suits me better now. Maybe the written word is the right pace for a man learning to accept that his eyesight, patience, and tech literacy are all in slow retreat. Maybe I should only return to video when I have something worth saying—something that isn’t just a performance of endurance.

    Which brings me to the real question: what do I still have to contribute?

    For over a decade, my YouTube channel orbited around my watch obsession. That obsession gradually narrowed until it became monastic—just diver watches, all on straps. I convinced myself that a collection larger than seven would doom me to spiritual ruin. I also stopped flipping watches like a Wall Street day trader, deciding it was bad for my mental health. That slowdown siphoned the manic energy that used to fuel my videos. The creative rush didn’t vanish—it simply rerouted into blog posts about my newest fixation: alignment. Or more precisely, misalignment.

    Because if I’m honest, I feel increasingly out of sync with the modern world. I adapt to new technology at the pace of continental drift. TikTok bewilders me. Smartphones offend my thumbs. Driving at night now feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. My relevance, visibility, and patience are fading in a culture that worships youth and touchscreens.

    My anxieties about self-worth and mortality are now on the front burner, while watch collecting—the “Watch Potency Principle,” the “wrist-rotation anxiety”—has been moved to the back burner where it is simmering to a lukewarm stew.

    To illustrate my current state: two weeks ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV, which was fine—until I broke two Samsungs in one day trying to move them. I manhandled the first 55-inch like it was a kettlebell, frying half its pixels in a single jerk. Then I jammed my thumb straight through the second screen while relocating it from my daughter’s room. My wife, the household adult, had to carry the new Roku replacement into our bedroom as I stood there looking like a Neanderthal who’d just discovered electricity—and promptly electrocuted himself.

    My war with technology didn’t end there. The new garage door opener came with instructions written in a dialect of cruel mockery. The installer vanished without explaining how to sync it with my phone, so my wife once again had to step in and figure it out. Now I open the garage door through an app, and every time I hear the alert that the door is moving, I step back in awe—half-terrified, half-mesmerized—like a caveman who’s just invented fire.

    I feel both too old for this world and too infantile to function in it. A man-baby marveling at his gadgets, bewildered by his own house. Think about that. My house has become a museum for technology of the future while I wander through it like a mesmerized tourist. My mouth is agape and my daughters say to me, “Relax, Dad, this is our house.” I respond by saying, “No it’s not. It’s a museum of strange and wonderful things that I don’t know how to use.” 

    These are the moments that give me content for my blog Cinemorphosis. I post almost daily, while it takes me weeks to metabolize these experiences into something coherent enough for a video essay. Writing helps me think; filming helps me pretend I’m still current.

    So that’s my current state of affairs. This channel used to be State of the Watch Collection. Now it’s more like State of the Man Who Can’t Sync His Garage Door Opener.

  • Why I’m Breaking Up with the YouTube Feed

    Why I’m Breaking Up with the YouTube Feed

    When I open YouTube, my homepage looks like a digital gladiator pit. Comedians, podcasters, and fitness influencers are constantly “dunking on,” “roasting,” or “destroying” one another. The algorithm assumes I crave conflict like a Roman spectator—hungry for outrage, giddy for blood. It’s pathetic, really. My only objection today is a simple one: stop turning my comedians into content. They’ve long been the high priests of outrage, transmuting it into gold through timing, irony, and a killer punchline. Outrage used to be an art form, not a business model.

    But comedy has competition now. For the past decade, social media has been strip-mining outrage for clicks. Unlike comedians, who craft original points of view and occasionally elevate our spirits, the algorithm slaps together cheap dopamine with a glue gun—strawman fallacies, emotional bait, polarization, and tribal garbage—all to keep us doom-scrolling through the sludge.

    Comedians once showed us our shared absurdity. Algorithms show us our mutual contempt. That’s not progress; that’s spiritual rot. I fear that as AI devours art and originality, comedians may go the way of Paul Bunyan—felled not by fatigue but by the chainsaw of automation.

    Maybe I should reprogram my feed with videos of pandas hugging ducklings. But swapping venom for saccharine isn’t redemption; it’s sedation. Better to log off entirely, read a book, or at least choose what I watch. For now, YouTube feels like poison—delivered daily, in high definition.