Category: Confessions

How I Tried to Shrink Time to Survive

In mid-December of 1967, when I was six years old, my mother had a severe bipolar episode, attempted to take her own life, and was hospitalized for a year. My brother was eighteen months old. My father was overwhelmed. The decision was made that I would live with my grandparents in Long Beach while my mother disappeared behind hospital walls and locked doors.

I was enrolled in a new elementary school where I had no friends and made no effort to find any. I was distant and guarded, already practiced in withdrawal. I was preoccupied with my mother’s absence and with the unanswered question that haunted me daily: what version of her, if any, would come back. My grandparents were loving, steady, and kind, but Long Beach felt foreign and provisional, like a place you wait in, not a place you live. All I talked about was going home to San Jose.

One afternoon, my grandmother tried to help me endure the waiting. She gave me a calendar and a red pen. She told me I would be going home on June 15, 1968. “Every day,” she said, “you can circle the date, and you’ll know you’re one day closer.” I flipped through the pages and felt something tighten in my chest. The calendar reminded me of movies where prisoners lie on cots in damp cells, carving days into stone, counting time as if it were a sentence rather than a passage.

After about a week of dutiful circling, patience failed me. I circled every remaining day at once, all the way to June 15, as if the red pen were not just a marker but a lever, something that could force time to lurch forward. When my grandmother saw what I had done, she didn’t scold me. She smiled, but there was sadness in it. “You thought the pen could move time itself,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

That instinct—to accelerate the calendar, to force arrival—never left me. It hardened into a temperament. When I feel overwhelmed, I reach for control. I measure, schedule, ritualize. I distrust spontaneity. I cling to routines and clocks and daily structures as if they were railings on a narrow bridge. In many ways, I am still that six-year-old boy, circling days, believing that orderly time might tame a chaotic universe and keep me from falling apart.

The cost of this way of living is distance from life itself. I’m reminded of Ariel Leve’s memoir An Abbreviated Life, which I’ve read twice. Leve describes growing up with a psychologically volatile mother and coping by shrinking the world—by narrowing experience, limiting exposure, contracting life until it feels survivable. That’s what I was doing with the calendar. I wasn’t counting days so much as trying to reduce terror to something measurable.

I think I’ll listen to Leve’s book again, this time on Audible. Some stories need to be revisited, not because they change, but because you finally recognize yourself inside them.

January 22, 2026
Chuck Klosterman, Joe Montana, and the Shape of Greatness

I’ve been reading—and now listening to—Chuck Klosterman on music and culture for over a decade. He’s a rare specimen: a true hipster precisely because he has no interest in being cool and too much interest in ideas to waste time polishing his image. His new essay collection, Football, keeps that streak alive. I’m consuming it on Audible while trying to erase myself on the Schwinn Airdyne, pedaling hard enough to regret my life choices. Every so often, Klosterman drops a line that forces me to slow the bike, release the upper-body levers, and frantically thumb notes into Google Docs like a deranged monk copying scripture mid-martyrdom.

Today’s line stopped me cold: “Greatness is about the creation of archetypes.” He was talking about the Beatles. Not record sales. Not chart dominance. Greatness, he argued, is the act of filling an archetypal mold so completely that everyone who follows can only approximate it. They may be talented, even brilliant, but they’re echoes, not origins. The mold has already been cast.

That idea made me think of Klosterman as a fourth grader, devastated when the Cowboys lost the 1982 NFC Championship to the 49ers on Joe Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark. I was living in the Bay Area then, and Montana instantly became something more than a quarterback. He wasn’t a flamethrower like Elway or a mythic warhorse like Staubach. He was smaller, calmer, unnervingly steady. He slew the Goliath that had humiliated the Niners for years. Montana wasn’t just great—he was David with a slingshot. That archetype mattered more than his stat line, and for a time it made him the greatest quarterback alive.

I’m not a Beatles devotee, but I understand why people place them on that pedestal. Archetypes don’t require personal devotion; they require recognition. You can see the mold even if you don’t want to live inside it.

Earlier in the book Klosterman expressed his genuine, hard-earned contempt for Creed—contempt earned the old-fashioned way, through actually listening—and my mind wandered to the opposite of greatness: a strange kind of cultural infamy where a band becomes a symbol rather than a sound. That’s when I realized I’d mixed up Creed with Nickelback, which led me down a brief but intense psychological spiral when I couldn’t find the documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback on Netflix. That film makes it painfully clear that Nickelback’s “crime” is not incompetence or fraud. They’re talented, professional, and wildly successful at pleasing their audience. Their real achievement is unwanted: they became the most socially acceptable band to hate.

Nickelback’s loathing isn’t sincere. It’s ritualized. Once social media weaponized contempt for them, sneering became a form of virtue signaling—a low-effort way to broadcast cultural superiority without doing the work of listening. Most of the haters probably couldn’t name three songs. The scorn isn’t about music; it’s about belonging.

Which is why I’d love to talk this through with Klosterman. He’s the right mind for it. Also, he might help me straighten out my chronic band confusion. This isn’t new. When I was five, I used to confuse the Monkees with the Beatles. Apparently, my brain has always had trouble keeping its mop-tops and punchlines in their proper bins.

January 21, 2026
Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

My wife has never been one to traffic in lazy generalizations about men and women, but a few years ago she offered one observation so sharp it lodged itself in my brain. Men, she said, have a peculiar itch that women conspicuously lack: the need to write a manifesto. Not a gentle essay about waking up early to tend tomatoes and eggplant while discovering the joys of fiber and self-care. No. A manifesto is something else entirely—a doctrinal collision, an absolutist thunderclap so brimming with rectitude, so certain of its own world-historical importance, that its author feels morally obligated to broadcast it to the four corners of the earth. Silence would be selfish. Restraint would be unethical.

A manifesto, of course, cannot emerge from a vacuum. It requires a conversion story—preferably violent. The man was once lost, deformed, wandering in a fog of ignorance. Then something happened. The cosmos intervened. He was singled out. Enlightened. Charged with a mission. His truth, having been hard-won and privately revealed, must now be universalized. To keep it to himself would be a crime against humanity. Thus the manifesto is born: part gospel, part grievance, part personal branding exercise.

My wife was not complimenting men. She was diagnosing a particular strain of virulent egotism—one that disguises itself as sincerity and moral urgency while quietly pursuing something else: control. To impose a worldview is to dominate. To dominate is to feel powerful. Strip away the rhetoric and you find that many manifestos are not about helping others live better lives but about arranging the world so it finally stops resisting the author’s will.

Because many men will inevitably produce many manifestos, conflict follows. Doctrines metastasize. Defenses harden. Footnotes sprout like fortifications. Converts gather. Commentaries appear. Some commentaries become so influential they eclipse the original manifesto and establish themselves as superior, corrected versions. The ecosystem expands, competitive and self-referential, like an intellectual CrossFit gym where everyone is chasing the same leaderboard.

What my wife was really saying, I think, is that men don’t create philosophies primarily to serve others. They create them the way athletes build muscle: to compete. A manifesto is intellectual athletics—grandstanding, bluster, and chest-thumping in paragraph form. It’s less a tool for understanding the world than a way to announce dominance within it.

Here is my confession, one I may or may not share when my wife gets home tonight: I, too, feel the pull of the manifesto. The fantasy of a grand conversion, followed by the construction of a flawless, infallible system that explains everything, is intoxicating. But if I’m honest, what draws me to that fantasy isn’t egotism so much as fear. The world is a roiling swamp of ambiguity and uncertainty. A manifesto promises certainty on a silver platter, a pacifier for the anxious adult who wants the noise to stop.

Perhaps my wife is right. Egotism may just be fear in a tuxedo. Men, for whatever reason—biology, culture, testosterone, self-loathing—seem especially adept at projecting their inner chaos onto the world and then mistrusting it for the mess they recognize in themselves. The manifesto becomes a coping mechanism, a way to simulate control in a reality that stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

Women don’t write manifestos because a manifesto lectures. It talks down. It closes the case. Women talk instead. Life, as they seem to understand it, is an open court—conversation, improvisation, shared meaning, surprise, trust. Men, by contrast, barricade themselves inside doctrine, shout it through a megaphone, and grow indignant when no one salutes.

When my wife gets home, I think I’ll abandon the manifesto project. I’ll try something riskier. I’ll start a conversation. I’ll listen.

January 20, 2026
Captain Cancel and the Rise of Domestic Hermit Drift

The other day my wife went to lunch with a longtime friend—call her A—and, as women do with admirable efficiency, they covered marriage in a single sitting. A complained that her husband had been drinking more, growing possessive, increasingly controlling. During the meal, he called her three times. By the third interruption, my wife said, the phone might as well have been sitting at the table demanding a chair. When she told me the story later, I said it reminded me of the Tears for Fears song “Woman in Chains.” She didn’t hesitate. “That’s her life exactly,” she said.

After a pause, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to me. “I told A you don’t drink,” my wife said. “You’re not jealous or possessive. But you won’t leave the house. You’re a shut-in.”
“Doesn’t he go to the gym?” A asked.
“Not for twenty years,” my wife replied. “He does yoga and kettlebells at home. He’s been trapped in the man cave ever since. And what scares me,” she added, “is that he’s happy.”

I’m not entirely sure I am happy. I just know my tolerance for annoyance is perilously low, and it drops another notch with each passing birthday. I also know that my friends from my formative college years now live scattered across the country, like artifacts from a previous civilization. We’ve grown apart without drama, which is to say, efficiently. Locally, I have two friends. Tom, a wrestling coach, is either teaching or in Santa Barbara with his girlfriend. I see him about once a year, usually when he drives me to Home Depot so I can transport oversized items back to my cave. My other friend, Pedro, is an engineer who is thirty years younger than I am. The generational differences are… pronounced. We have lunch about four times a year. Add it up and yes—half a dozen social encounters annually qualifies me as a shut-in. Which makes me, by default, an authority on a condition many men my age quietly acquire: Domestic Hermit Drift.

Domestic Hermit Drift is the gradual, mostly unintentional retreat of a married man from friendships and public life into the managed comfort of home, where routine, hobbies, and solitude replace the effort and risk of maintaining relationships. It isn’t fueled by hostility or misanthropy but by convenience, irritability, fatigue, and the slow atrophy of social muscles. As his world contracts, his wife’s often expands, creating an asymmetry in which she carries the invisible labor of social connection, public presence, and emotional buffering. The genius of the drift is its stealth. No announcement is made. No door slams. The man simply mistakes peace for fulfillment and stability for sufficiency.

As an expert in Hermit Drift, allow me to identify the warning signs.

First, your sleepwear, gym clothes, and home clothes become indistinguishable. You sleep in gym shorts and a workout shirt, wear them around the house, exercise in them, shower, and rotate in a freshly washed identical set. You call this efficiency. You experience genuine pleasure in this loungewear optimization and feel morally superior to the sheeple who change outfits multiple times a day. Minimalism, you insist, is a virtue.

Second, while your wife and her friends design custom T-shirts and handmade signs for rock concerts in the desert, you remain home on a Saturday night swapping straps on your diver watches. You build watch-rotation calendars. You track wrist time. You rank your collection by annual usage. The fact that you know you wore your Seiko Marine Master for exactly 863 hours last year strikes you as reasonable, even impressive. Others find it alarming.

Third, because your tolerance for irritation is low, you shop only at dawn, when grocery stores are nearly empty and the few people present are still half-asleep—docile, unthreatening, manageable. You take pride in shopping before the rat race wakes up. This dovetails nicely with your time-management philosophy: bed at nine, up at five. By the time the world stirs, you’ve had your coffee, your steel-cut oats, your kettlebell workout, and your canvas grocery bags—your weekly macros—put neatly away. You are, in your own mind, winning.

The rest of the day unfolds under a regime your wife has named Captain Cancel. Every proposed outing meets a veto. You can’t attend a concert because it might rain, despite cloudless skies. You can’t go to a restaurant because parking is inadequate, and when your wife reminds you of the new parking structure, you explain that it’s widely known to be contaminated with asbestos. A comedian you once loved is playing in Hermosa Beach, but you inform her he hasn’t been funny since the Reagan administration. A trip to Maui is ill-advised due to avian flu, especially dangerous during air travel. A beach picnic is canceled because of a sewage spill that, you explain, has compromised not just the water but the atmosphere. You agree to Taco Tuesday at the local brewery, but it’s too loud. You stuff toilet paper in your ears, announce you’re unwell, and Uber home. You are never invited again. This makes you smile as you drift into a deeply satisfying sleep.

If you recognize any of these traits, congratulations. You are anti-social. You are Captain Cancel. You have chosen your isolation, locked yourself in your cage, and—most importantly—convinced yourself it was the sensible thing to do.

January 19, 2026
Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

As the clock keeps punching holes in the calendar and I drift into the middle distance of my sixties, I’m stalked by the uneasy sense that I am not the man I’m supposed to be. I carry thirty extra pounds like unpaid emotional invoices. I cave to food temptations with embarrassing regularity. I indulge in narcissistic spirals of self-pity. My body bears the archaeological record of a lifetime of weightlifting injuries. Something has to give. The question isn’t whether I’m a complex human being—of course I am—but which single image can give me dignity, courage, and self-possession as I face my obligations, stay engaged with this lunatic world, and fend off entropy. The image that keeps returning, uninvited but insistent, is this: I am the Skinny Yoga Guy.

The Skinny Yoga Guy eats vegan, clean, and whole, not as a performance but as a quiet discipline. He hits his protein macros with buckwheat, pumpkin seeds, peas, soy, garbanzos, and nutritional yeast, without sulking or negotiating. He cooks plant-based meals anchored in Thai, Mexican, and Indian traditions, not sad beige bowls marketed as “fuel.” He doesn’t snack like a raccoon in a pantry; he sips cucumber water and green tea and moves on with his day.

He practices yoga six days a week, a full hour each time, sweating without complaint. The body lengthens. The spine straightens. He appears taller, calmer, less compressed by life. There’s a faint health glow—less “Instagram guru,” more “someone whose joints don’t hate him.” The discipline reshapes his temperament. The short fuse and indulgent sulks fade. In their place emerges a man who notices other people, attends to their needs without sermonizing, and discovers—almost accidentally—that service makes him sturdier, not smaller.

In this revised operating system, the watch obsession quietly dies. No more chunky diver watches as heroic cosplay. No rotation. No drama. Just one watch: the G-Shock GW-5000. The purest G-Shock because it refuses theater. Shockproof, accurate, solar-powered, atomically synced. No Bluetooth, no notifications, no begging for attention. It does one thing relentlessly well: it tells the truth about time. It is reliability without narcissism.

If the GW-5000 is indestructibility stripped of spectacle, then my assignment is clear: I must become its carbon-based counterpart. Less bloat. Fewer features. More uptime. Yoga becomes joint maintenance. Vegan food becomes corrosion control. No supplements that blink. No gadgets that chirp. No dietary Bluetooth pairing with guilt. Just a lean system designed to absorb impact, recover quickly, and remain accurate. GW-5000 firmware, now awkwardly attempting to run on two legs.

The longing is real. I want to be the Skinny Yoga Guy—disciplined, light, healthy—wearing a single $300 G-Shock as a quiet marker of having stepped off the status treadmill. I no longer want validation from a $7,000 luxury watch. Wanting this man is easy. Becoming him is not. That requires character, not aspiration.

My hunch is that I need to write my way into him. A novel titled The Skinny Yoga Guy. Not a parody, not a self-help tract, but a chronicle of real-time change rendered with mordant humor and unsparing honesty. The book isn’t the point. Transformation is. The novel would simply be the witness.

So here I am, a larval creature trapped in my cocoon. I must emerge as a new creature. The challenge is issued. Whether the world is waiting for my metamorphosis is irrelevant. I am. And that, for once, feels like enough.

January 18, 2026
The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

I got my shingles vaccine yesterday at noon and felt absolutely nothing afterward—so nothing, in fact, that I woke up the next morning feeling smugly invincible. I went to Trader Joe’s, bantered with the employees about the collective psychosis surrounding their limited-edition mini tote bags, came home, unloaded the groceries, and mentally penciled in a righteous kettlebell session in the garage. Then, right around 10 a.m., my immune system cleared its throat. A slow, heavy wave of fatigue rolled in, the kind that doesn’t ask permission. I took what I told myself was a “precautionary” nap. I made a deal with my body: if I felt fine in an hour, the kettlebells were back on. By 11, the aches had arrived, lethargy had unpacked its bags, and the deal was quietly voided. The iron would have to wait.

Now, 28 hours post-shot, I’m more tired than I was this morning, which feels like a violation of some unspoken contract. In what I can only describe as a low-grade vaccine fever fugue, I apparently decided this was the perfect moment to perform strap surgery on my watch collection. The Seiko SLA051, 055, and 023 all lost their OEM waffle straps and emerged reborn on Divecore FKM. Yes, I’m aware that FKM is rumored to whisper chemical lullabies into the bloodstream. No, I’m not persuaded that wearing these watches a few hours a week is going to tip me into a Superfund site.

In any case, I’m already planning to swap the FKMs for Divecore’s hydrogenated waffle straps in a few months. If there’s any exposure happening, it’s brief, intermittent, and vastly overshadowed by whatever biochemical fireworks the shingles vaccine is currently setting off inside me. For now, I’ll rest, hydrate, and let my immune system do its thing—apparently with a side hobby in horological rearrangement.

January 17, 2026
Learning About Rejection on a Flight to Miami

In the summer of 1972, when I was ten years old and convinced my destiny was to become a musclebound baseball god in the image of Reggie Jackson, I found myself on a flight from LAX to Miami, pressed against the window and staring out at adulthood like it was another continent. In the middle seat sat a blonde bombshell in her mid-twenties wearing pink hot pants with psychedelic purple-and-white stripes and legs so aggressively tanned they could have powered a citrus-processing plant. She wasn’t just attractive; she was a mood. She radiated the entire seventies—optimism, excess, invitation. I wasn’t merely drawn to her. I was drawn to the future she seemed to promise.

On the aisle sat her conversational counterpart: a pencil-necked, dark-haired man of similar age with impeccable manners, minimal charisma, and the quiet dignity of a man who alphabetizes his spice rack. He was an accountant. She was in dental hygiene school. For five uninterrupted hours, the two of them performed their biographies live, with me as the captive audience. Mostly she spoke. He nodded, gasped on cue, and occasionally supplied a sentence fragment to prove he was still alive. She talked about school, snacks, weather, philosophy—everything. It felt like watching a reality show pilot that forgot to end. But I didn’t mind. She was animated. She was confident. She was hope in hot pants.

At one point she announced that her ears needed to pop and offered both of us Dentyne gum, explaining that it helped with altitude. I briefly wondered if she thought we were participating in some sort of triathlon of inner-ear resilience. The accountant accepted the gum solemnly, like a man taking medical advice from destiny.

When the plane finally shuddered to a stop at the gate, the accountant—buoyed by five hours of uninterrupted conversation and the survival glow of having endured it—asked her out on a date. She declined with practiced kindness, the sort of smile perfected by women who have said no thousands of times without ever raising their voice. He accepted the rejection gracefully, even apologetically, as if her disinterest were an inconvenience he had caused.

My ten-year-old brain short-circuited. I felt like I’d witnessed something indecent. Rejection, I believed, was supposed to be private. Public rejection multiplied the shame. I flashed back to junior high dances where I’d cross the cafeteria, ask a popular girl to dance, watch her recoil as if I’d mistaken bravery for stupidity, then retreat to my friends’ laughter. Now I was seeing the adult version. How could this accountant—handsome, polite, numerically gifted—be rejected after such an extended airborne courtship? I sat there, my romantic assumptions collapsing like cheap sci-fi scenery. Maybe he was too bland. Maybe she had a chaotic love life waiting in Miami. Or maybe—this was the real lesson—she’d simply enjoyed a conversation to pass the time on a long flight. Whatever the reason, I absorbed his rejection as if it were my own. I remain convinced that somewhere in the universe’s permanent records, my name appears next to a small but enduring note: rejected by attractive woman. And yes, it still stings.

January 17, 2026
Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

I was born in America in 1961, and if I had to explain this country to a foreigner in one image, I wouldn’t reach for the flag or the Statue of Liberty. I’d point to flying first class. Not the policy of it, not the logistics—just the concept. First class is America in an airline cabin. It grabs you by the collar and says, This is how we do hierarchy. We don’t hide it. We parade it down the aisle.

Yes, we have our obnoxious luxury cars and coastal dream houses, but nowhere is class difference so intimate as on an airplane. You’re breathing the same recycled air as the people sipping champagne up front. You share the same narrow aisle, the same claustrophobic bathrooms, the same airborne flu incubator.

The difference is ceremonial. The first-class passenger is already settled—wrapped in a sherpa blanket, nibbling brie, greeted by flight attendants who address them the way courtiers addressed minor royalty.

Then comes the procession: coach passengers filing past, stealing glances, marching toward the back where crying babies, bare feet with ambitious toenails, and circulation-threatening seat pitch await. This is the real luxury—not the champagne, but the ceremony and the choreography. The pleasure is sharpened by contrast. As a first-classer, you’re not cruel. You don’t wish misery on anyone. But your comfort glows brighter because someone else is uncomfortable ten feet away.

And that glow whispers. Not “you’re lucky.” Not “you’re comfortable.” It whispers the more dangerous phrase: you’re special. That’s the real drug of first class—not legroom, but psychological elevation. The sense that you cracked some hidden code of life, that you’ve unlocked a cheat mode where ordinary frustrations can’t touch you.

I once heard a comedian joke that in a plane crash, first-class passengers would survive while the rest of us perished. It’s absurd. And yet… it sounds exactly like something we want to believe.

This is America. You don’t just earn money here. You earn the right to hear that whisper.

I’ll confess something anticlimactic: I flew first class once, in 1994, thanks to my father, who sent me to his condo in Maui. I remember almost nothing about it. No ecstasy. No glow. Maybe I suffer from flight anhedonia—the inability to experience joy at 30,000 feet.

But I have felt the first-class sensation elsewhere. A friend once let me borrow his Omega Planet Ocean. I wore it to Trader Joe’s and found myself standing in line with organic arugula and the faint, ridiculous thrill of superiority. A luxury watch did what a luxury airline seat never could.

I could afford such a watch. I owned a Tudor Black Bay once. I sold it quickly, like someone who realized halfway through a costume party that he’d come dressed as the wrong person.

Now I’m sixty-four, and the urge to gloat has evaporated. I don’t want status anymore. I want clarity. I want restraint. I want a temperament that doesn’t need applause from inanimate objects. Wearing an expensive watch I don’t need feels less like success and more like cosplay—me auditioning for the role of a man who’s made it. The problem is, I know the actor too well. Under the costume is not a titan of confidence but an anxious, fractured soul with the spiritual DNA of Franz Kafka and the comedic timing of Richard Lewis. No amount of Swiss engineering is going to fix that. And pretending otherwise would only make me feel like a fool in very fine clothes.

January 16, 2026
How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

I lost my love for movies sometime in the last decade, when Hollywood began to feel less like a dream factory and more like an actuarial office with better lighting. Everything started to look like a boardroom decision in costume. I can count on one hand the films I bothered to see in theaters over fifteen years: Avatar, World War Z, Black Panther, Get Out. A few streamed titles shook me awake—Uncut Gems and Good Time from the Safdies, Paul Giamatti’s bruised soul in Private Life and The Holdovers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sunburned nostalgia in Licorice Pizza, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. But 2025 hit differently. Four films—Eddington, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, and Weapons—did something rare: they stared directly into the national nervous breakdown. These weren’t escapist fantasies. They were dispatches from a culture unraveling—where institutions inspire no faith, conspiracies feel more plausible than facts, politics has become cosplay, and we live in sealed-off realities that collide without ever conversing.

Eddington blindsided me. Joaquin Phoenix plays a bitter, alienated, anti-mask sheriff in a New Mexico town during the pandemic, and he’s so fully possessed by the role that I didn’t recognize him for several minutes. I went in braced to hate the film—expecting a grim slog through our worst collective memories. Instead, I got something braver: a devastating portrait of a society that has slipped its moorings and drifted into a lonely fever swamp. The film doesn’t mug for satire or cheap laughs. It trusts the material. Every scene tightens the vise on your attention. It’s the kind of movie nine hundred ninety-nine directors would have drowned in. Ari Aster somehow swims.

One Battle After Another turns political polarization into tragic pageantry. Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—a grotesque ICE-agent archetype—faces off against Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rocket Man, who might as well be an Antifa folk demon. But the movie’s real target isn’t left or right; it’s the theater of identity itself. We’ve become a nation of people in costumes, fighting playground wars with adult consequences. Once your political tribe becomes your personality, nuance feels like betrayal. The film suggests a hard truth: a country run by permanent adolescents doesn’t collapse in flames—it collapses in tantrums. Penn has built a career on operatic excess, but Lockjaw may be his most disturbingly perfect creation yet.

Bugonia is stranger still. Jesse Plemons—leaner, sharper, and channeling a high-IQ Dale Gribble—plays Teddy, a man-child whose conspiracy obsessions keep him tuned to late-night AM radio and convinced that a tech CEO, played by Emma Stone, is an alien in need of kidnapping and repatriation. Once tied up in his house, she attempts to weaponize corporate confidence as an escape strategy, and her faith in managerial language becomes its own punchline. Plemons is reliably excellent, but Emma Stone has crossed into something rarer: the kind of presence Daniel Day-Lewis had in the nineties, where the screen bends around her. The film’s bizarre logic and eerie beauty sent me straight into the arms of Yorgos Lanthimos’ odd, seductive universe.

Weapons brings the nightmare home—literally. Set in the suburbs, it tells the story of a witch who makes a classroom of children vanish. The teacher is blamed. The principal responds with bureaucratic platitudes. The town spirals. Beneath the horror scaffolding is a sharp allegory about addiction and institutional cowardice: when a society loses its ability to think clearly, every crisis metastasizes. The adults talk in slogans. The children disappear.

Taken together, these films diagnose the same disease. Chaos becomes pandemonium when a culture retreats into fantasy and calls it identity. We dress up our impulses as ideologies. We curate personas instead of building character. The center doesn’t hold—not because of some invading barbarian, but because we’ve all invited the barbarian inside and handed him the keys. The good news, if there is any, is that there are still filmmakers brave enough to tell the truth about the mess we’re in. In 2025, cinema finally stopped trying to soothe me—and started telling me what I already knew but didn’t want to admit.

January 16, 2026
Colonel Lockjaw and the Cosplay Watches of the Soul

If I had to confess to one of my worst flaws, it would be this: I’m a virtuoso at diagnosing other people’s defects and a coward when it comes to inspecting my own. I can spot hypocrisy at fifty paces, write a character analysis of your blind spots, and deliver a withering critique of your moral laziness—while remaining blissfully obtuse about the same diseases raging in me. It’s not insight. It’s evasion. Instead of interrogating my own failures, I distract myself by putting others on trial.

The hypocrisy deepens because I despise people who refuse self-interrogation. Over the years I’ve kept my distance from plenty of them—friends, colleagues, acquaintances—because their lack of self-awareness felt repellent. I judged them for their blindness without noticing I was practicing the same sin with better vocabulary. My watch hobby was an early case study in this delusion. I spent years buying grotesquely oversized timepieces—wrist-mounted monuments to masculine cosplay. In my private fantasy, I was Sean Penn starring as Colonel Lockjaw. In reality, I was a middle-aged man dodging a mirror. Why confront a crisis of purpose when you can drop five hundred dollars on a costume watch and call it identity?

Eventually I sobered up—sold the ridiculous pieces, learned what real watches are, and cleared out my collection the way a dieter purges Doritos and Twinkies. But the damage was done: I’d wasted three years of a hobby because I refused to ask what my compensation phase said about me. I demanded self-interrogation from everyone else. I granted myself a permanent exemption. Do as I say, not as I do—the oldest creed of the unexamined life.

That failure has been haunting me lately, triggered by a memory from thirty-five years ago: an English Department meeting that turned into a circus. I was a young instructor, terrified of tenure committees and power hierarchies, sitting quietly while the veterans argued about whether personal narratives belonged in college writing. One professor—let’s call him Foghorn Leghorn—was a legendary drunk who showed up to meetings in a black leather bomber jacket and a cloud of whiskey fumes. With disheveled silver hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, he declared that personal narratives were “sissy” assignments and that students needed “real-life” skills like argument and analysis. Susan, a colleague with more backbone than the rest of us combined, said that autobiographical writing gave students something called “personal enrichment.” Foghorn exploded. “What the hell does that mean?” he barked. “Personal enrichment? What the hell does that mean?” Susan backed down—not because she was wrong, but because there’s no winning an argument with a belligerent man auditioning for his own demolition.

Back then, I kept my mouth shut. I was young. I was a lecturer on a non-tenure track. I was scared. But in the decades since, I’ve had time to think about Susan’s phrase. Personal enrichment. What does it mean—and should I, as a writing teacher, care? The answer is yes, and yes again. Personal enrichment is the cultivation of skills no standardized test can measure: moral clarity, self-honesty, the courage to look at yourself without flinching. In other words, self-interrogation.

I learned that lesson early in my career without knowing what to call it. Around the same time Foghorn was grandstanding, I assigned a definition essay on passive-aggressive behavior. Students had to begin with a brutal thesis—passive aggression as cowardly hostility—then unpack its traits and finish with a personal narrative. I wanted them to stop admiring dysfunction as cleverness. The best essay came from a nineteen-year-old whose beauty could’ve launched a sitcom. She wrote about her boyfriend, a man who looked like life had given up on him. He was unemployed, proudly unwashed, and permanently horizontal—camped in her parents’ living room like a hostile occupier. He drank her father’s beer, ate his food, parked himself in his chair, and stank up the furniture with equal enthusiasm. Her parents hated him. Especially her father. And that was the point.

She resented her father’s authority, so she punished him the only way she knew how—by sabotaging herself. Romantic self-destruction as revenge. When we discussed the essay, she told me something I’ve never forgotten: writing it forced her to see her behavior with unbearable clarity. She kicked the boyfriend out. Then, clumsily but honestly, she confronted her father. A personal narrative—mocked by my alcoholic colleague—did what no grading rubric ever could. It changed a life.

Fifteen years later, I assigned another narrative, this one inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I asked students to write about a moment when tragedy forced them to choose between self-pity and courage. The finest essay came from a young mother who’d been abandoned by her own mother at two years old. She grew up with a hole in her heart, then gave birth to a daughter and decided she would be the mother she never had. In loving her child, she learned to love herself. I’ve taught for nearly forty years. Her story has moved me more than anyone’s.

That’s why I assign personal narratives more than ever. Not just because they resist AI shortcuts, but because they demand moral inventory. And here’s the final irony: Foghorn Leghorn—the loudest critic of self-examination—was the man who needed it most. Last I heard, he’d burned down his kitchen while making dinner, lost his family, and was holed up in a cheap hotel drinking himself toward oblivion. The mansplainer who sneered at Susan ended up a tragic footnote in his own cautionary tale. I hope he found sobriety. If he did, it began where it always does—with honest self-interrogation.

As for me, I’ll keep assigning personal narratives. I’ll keep asking students to look inward with courage. And I’ll keep reminding myself that the hardest essays to write are not on the syllabus. They’re the ones you compose silently, about your own life, when no one is grading you.

January 15, 2026