Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Caveman Meets Garage App

    Caveman Meets Garage App

    In March 2005, at 43, I was besotted with my Classic iPod and its holy clickwheel. It took a minute to learn how to tether it to desktop iTunes and wrangle my playlists (mostly podcasts), but I did it without pestering my wife, and I was proud. A newer iPod arrived soon after; I refused to learn its tricks. Once I master a gadget, it becomes my comfort zone—I’d rather live there than relocate.

    I listened to podcasts all night and during post-workout naps. My life felt archived in that iPod, which—ridiculously, wonderfully—made me feel plugged into the modern world.
    My wife, less sentimental, declared it obsolete. The future was smartphones. I recoiled. They looked like bricks of chaos—apps, updates, notifications—houseplants with demands, only worse because I had to squint at ant-sized text.

    By 2014, I still clung to the iPod. It wasn’t cheap loyalty: the headphone jack snapped about once a year, and I’d pay $70 at the local shop to resurrect it. Then September 2014 arrived, our twin daughters started preschool, and my wife insisted I get a smartphone—for school runs, doctor visits, playdates. Texting was essential; parenthood demanded it.

    So I pried my fingers off the fossil and bought a Galaxy S4 at Costco. To my surprise, downloading podcasts was blissfully easy. As a podcast machine, the phone was a star. Everything else? Lame. I hated watching tiny videos, reading tiny text, and spelunking for apps. The phone became a super-iPod; the rest of its features were just extra chaos. Texting was torture—my fat fingers whacked the wrong letters, and I backspaced my way through tedium. I barely used the thing except for podcasts. My wife envied my perpetually 90% battery; to console her, I’d brag that after an all-night podcast binge I dropped to a shocking 80%.

    Yes, smartphones are addiction machines that track, nudge, and strip privacy. True. But I only use a sliver of their powers because the tactile experience annoys me.

    Part of me resents the smartphone for killing the rotary landline. That dial’s ratcheting click felt like reciting a secret code to open a cave. Beige, avocado, mint green, custard—those phones had heft that implied quality, with long, flexible cords that snaked across the room. Conversations were events; an ear would grow tender and force the ritual mid-call ear swap. Now the landline is dead—and so, largely, are conversations, replaced by texts and emojis. Speed and convenience exacted their toll: degraded communication, which means degraded friendships.

    Cory Doctorow gave us enshittification—how tech optimizes itself into garbage. I’d love to say that’s why I resist. But that’s too pat. I’m simply slow to adapt. Incompetent with new tools. My memory refuses the steps; I have to re-teach myself, again and again.

    Recently, my wife synced my phone to our garage door. A week later, I tapped the app and watched the door rise, gawking like a caveman who just discovered fire and is already imagining a barbecued brontosaurus rack. It’s a good trick. I still keep Genie remotes in the house and car as backups, but the phone option is lovely. This isn’t enshittification; it’s the opposite—unsuckification. Some things that used to suck don’t have to anymore.

    In fact, I’m eager for toilet + AI matrimony: a throne that reads biomarkers, prescribes medication, screens like a colonoscopy, and spares me the waiting room. I’m also rooting for a custom GLP-1 patch that recalibrates appetite so a morning bowl of porridge with protein powder—and another in the late afternoon—actually sates me. Easy weight management, better markers, minimal dishes.

    All of this is part of the unsuckification project.

    I’ll admit it: I’m older, I resist change, and new tech gives me a headache. But if modern tech can spare me a colonoscopy, open heart surgery, and the indignities of being twenty pounds overweight, then sign me up. 

  • Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    The mother of misery is comparison. In fourth grade I plunged into despair because I couldn’t draw like Joseph Schidelman, the illustrator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About the same time, baseball humbled me: my bat speed wasn’t in the same galaxy as Willie Mays, Dick Allen, or Henry Aaron. In my teenage bodybuilding years, I had muscles, but nothing like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Frank Zane; I wisely retired the fantasy of becoming Mr. Universe and managing a gym in the Bahamas. In college, as an aspiring intellectual, I flogged myself for lacking Vladimir Nabokov’s wit and velocity. My chances of becoming a famous novelist were equal to my odds of winning Mr. Olympia. Later, when I flirted with composing and singing, I heard Jeff Buckley’s soul pour through the speakers and realized my voice would mainly trigger a neighborhood dog-barking contest and a chorus of angry neighbors. Decades passed. My classroom persona faced a generation handcuffed to smartphones and ChatGPT. I scrambled for “edutainment” tricks to dodge irrelevance, but the gap widened no matter how I danced.

    The sting doubled when I watched Earthquake (Nathaniel Stroman) flatten an audience with a preacher’s cadence and bulletproof wisdom. His special Joke Telling Business left me muttering, “If I had Earthquake’s power, I could resuscitate my teaching career and stroll into old age with a shred of dignity.”

    Meanwhile, fresh incompetencies arrived like junk mail. I broke two Samsung TVs in one day. I failed to sync my new garage door opener to my phone. My wife had to rescue me from my own maladroit tech spiral. The result was predictable: I was condemned to the Shame Dungeon.

    Down in the basement of depression, I noticed another casualty: my YouTube channel. I usually post once a week and have for over a decade—mostly about my obsession with diver watches. But as sanity demanded I stop flipping watches, I ran out of new divers to discuss. I tried pivoting—open with a little watch talk, then segue to a wry misadventure with a morsel of human insight. If I nailed the landing, I’d get a few thousand views and enough comment energy to believe the enterprise mattered.

    But with my sixty-fourth birthday closing in, the doubts got loud. I don’t want to do “watch talk,” and I’m too mortified to perform a perky, self-deprecating monologue about my misalignment with the universe.

    I keep hearing Mike Birbiglia in my head: you must process your material before you present it; the set has to be a gift, not your live catharsis. The healing happens before you step onstage. You speak from the far shore, not mid-drowning. Otherwise, you’re asking the audience to be your therapist.

    So I’m stuck at a fork: Will this current fear and anxiety about age and disconnection pass through the refinery of my psyche and emerge as something worthy? Or will I remain in the Shame Dungeon, comparing myself to Earthquake, and decide that with talent like his prowling the earth, my best move is to hide under a rock?

    Here’s the dilemma plain: Hiding isn’t viable; it starves the soul. But serving the world a plate of unprocessed mediocrity is just as unforgivable. If I’m going to tell a story about breaking two TVs and my garage-opener meltdown, I have to deliver it with Earthquake’s power and confidence. Otherwise I’ll stay home, mope on the couch, and binge crime documentaries—losing myself in bigger, cleaner tragedies than my own.

  • Ankle Tax at Trader Joe’s

    Ankle Tax at Trader Joe’s

    This morning at Trader Joe’s, I stood at the register while the ever-friendly cashier confessed his unhealthy vaping habit and his plan to someday go raw vegan, and a helper slid my groceries into bags with assembly-line grace. That’s when a woman in her early fifties barrel-rolled a full shopping cart into my flank, the metal edge skinning my bare ankle. She tossed out an apology through a forced smile, then bolted—out the doors, groceries into her Lexus, and gone. I was less offended by the scuff than by the performance: self-centered phoniness wrapped in a grin.

    I hadn’t had an ankle scraped on a grocery run in at least a decade, back when I still braved the Torrance Costco, a gladiator pit where “shoppers” behaved like extras from The Hunger Games. I migrated to Trader Joe’s for its cozier, laid-back vibe. But this morning offered a nudge from reality: the place isn’t a bucolic paradise—it’s still frenzied commerce, and sometimes the receipt includes a mark on your ankle.

    So yes, Trader Joe’s is friendlier—just budget for the occasional Ankle Tax at checkout, payable in skin, not cash.

  • Eternal Embarrassment

    Eternal Embarrassment

    Nietzsche imagined hell as reliving your life on loop—eternal recurrence. A demon forces you to endure every joy and misery again. Let’s revise the experiment: not your whole life, just the embarrassing parts on repeat. Eternal embarrassment. If that isn’t the full biography, it’s certainly old age. You no longer fit the world. Your butt shrinks; belts stop doing their job. Cheeks sag. Your neck goes a little fleshy. Your interior vocal editor—never stellar—finally quits, so you talk more than anyone asked for, mostly about how cold you are and how the TV volume is too low. You’ve slowed down, and the world—amped on Red Bull—won’t wait.

    In two weeks, I broke two Samsung TVs, failed to sync my phone with the new garage-door opener, threw an infantile tantrum, and my wife had to bail me out. She could have gone full prosecution; instead, her annoyance was tempered by pity. She saw me trying—earnest home-improvement flailing—and, when I stumbled, she picked up the pieces. I was left embarrassed and nursing a small crisis of confidence.

    So I went hunting for redemption. My family had been grumbling about dinners. Thursday’s Caesar-with-chicken-skewers had overstayed its welcome; they wanted better lunch ingredients—better bread, meats, cheese, and more interesting condiments. As the designated Saturday Trader Joe’s runner, I sat at my computer, family gathered around, actually listened, and updated the list like I was drafting a treaty.

    Next morning—Saturday—I launched my ritual at Hawthorne and Del Amo, a tradition I’ve upheld with the zeal of a cultist for twenty-two years. Grocery shopping isn’t a chore; it’s a military operation. My $350 haul is executed with Navy SEAL precision. Delays, obstacles, small talk? Enemies of efficiency. Armed with the evolving list, I dart through aisles like I’m on Supermarket Sweep, a stopwatch ticking in my skull. 

    That morning, I stepped out of my gunmetal gray Honda, I caught a reflection in the store window—an angle so unforgiving it announced, We’ve had one too many second helpings. I looked away. Denial is cheaper than therapy. In my mind I’m a sleek, youthful me—190 pounds of toned potential, not the spectacle of a 225-pound man auditioning for the Dad-Bod Calendar.

    Inside, my confidence was restored. The staff knows me; they greet me with the friendly heckling reserved for clockwork regulars. If I show up off-schedule, they act like I’ve survived a plane crash. One cheeky clerk calls me the “Larry Csonka of Trader Joe’s.” I play along: “There’s been a Larry Csonka sighting in aisle five.” The rapport was golden—until The Incident. The shelf was barren of unsweetened soy milk—the only plant milk with actual protein. I spotted Mary, the assistant manager, stocking canned goods. I asked, politely, if there was soy milk in the back. She said she’d check, then resumed stacking cans like bullion. Assuming she’d forgotten, I quietly asked another employee to check. Fatal misstep.

    By the time I looped back with bread and pastries, Mary had stocked the soy milk—and wore a look that said I’d insulted her canned-goods ethics. In that instant, I crossed the border from beloved regular to pushy customer. Two decades of goodwill, spilled across the linoleum for a stupid carton of soy. If I could time-travel, I’d go home and order a case of Edensoy on Amazon. Once, I entered like Larry Csonka at a Super Bowl parade; now I skulked, head low, list clutched like a last shred of dignity.

    Trader Joe’s was supposed to be my safe space, but I botched it—just like the “simple” garage-door purchase. Simple things kept flowering into fiascos. I was busy processing shame and embarrassment when Nietzsche drifted back in: eternal recurrence. Except my condition was worse. Who needs to replay old humiliations when fresh ones keep arriving on the conveyor belt?

  • The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    Most people paddle along. We don’t have all the answers, but we keep the canoe upright. If you’re like me—diagnosed with low-grade depression, dysthymia—you brave forward and maintain emotional homeostasis by doing your duty to yourself, your friends, and your family. You exercise. You eat right. You post milestones on social media and affirm the tribe’s values, harvesting likes like daylight vitamins. You save for a rainy day.

    That’s what I did. So when the garage door opener finally died after twenty-five years, I called the repair company that had been nursing it for a decade and paid a thousand dollars for a replacement. The tech arrived—mid-thirties, dark blue baseball cap, beard, sunglasses—affable and chatty. We covered carne asada tacos, the garage door racket, and daily protein quotas. In under an hour he had the new Genie humming. And yet: the in-house wall button turned into a ghost button (opens nothing, closes nothing); he issued only one new remote, leaving my wife remote-less; and he didn’t sync the unit to the Genie app. “Easy,” he said, packing up. “Just follow the directions.” Then he vaporized.

    For the next two hours, I tried to enter the unit ID and sync via Bluetooth. Problem: the buttons weren’t labeled, the manual’s diagrams didn’t match my unit, and the app’s pictures didn’t match either. I called my neighbor Joe. He said the same company had given him two remotes—minimum. “Did you already pay?” he asked. “Yes.” “You blew it. He should’ve synced your phone before he left. You’ll never see him again.” I protested that he seemed nice. “He’s gone, dude.” Then, after a long pause: “Call and demand they come back—and threaten a bad Yelp review.” I phoned the tech; he said he’d try to fit me in “tomorrow,” which I translated as never. The company promptly sent me a link to post a Google review. I wrote a calm, three-star warning: skilled install, but details ignored; don’t pay until the phone is synced and both remotes are in hand. I pasted the same on Yelp. Not spiteful—just a PSA. And then the shame arrived like a stomach punch. I felt as if I’d betrayed him—though he’d arguably betrayed me. Why was I ashamed? Because I felt stupid for failing at the sync.

    ChatGPT didn’t rescue me, and the failed DIY made me feel worse—ashamed and anxious. Getting the garage fully functional had become a talisman for my emotional homeostasis. Without it, I began to tilt into the abyss. My wife came home from her middle school job; I explained the mess. She said she’d help later—first, a mountain of paperwork. I tried to stay quiet but kept circling back to the tech’s “betrayal.” My posture turned desperate and wounded; the tension thickened. She retreated to the bedroom to grade and watch TV. She wanted nothing to do with me. I don’t blame her. I’d become an emotional siren labeled The Garage Door Incident.

    The next day the tech never called. My wife, apparently an engineer in a former life, pulled off the white plastic cover on the unit, found the Bluetooth button, and synced our phones. She also programmed the second remote I’d bought on Amazon. She fixed everything the tech didn’t. I thanked her. She answered—kindly, but surgical—that I’m like her sixth-graders: no patience; I want the world to stop until my problem is solved. When I spin out like that, she needs distance. I nodded. Fair.

    That was three days ago. Since then, something has shifted. I’ll call it a Balrog Moment: Gandalf and the demon in Moria, the bridge cracking, both plunging into darkness. My shame—for incompetence, impatience, and those two negative reviews—shook my homeostasis. I dropped into a shaft of depression, self-doubt, and nihilism. My paddling rituals—coffee, workouts, piano, posting pungent morsels on social media, even drafting my biting book Speedos at Sunset: How Not to Age Gracefully in Public—suddenly felt flimsy, even ridiculous.

    This morning, staring into that abyss, I decided not to look away. The loss of homeostasis—the Balrog Moment—is the marrow of the book. The pain is vast; it drowns, it devours, it cross-examines everything I am. I’ve been sucked into a vortex of nihilism and self-doubt, and yet here I am, hunting for tools to claw back dignity, rebuild self-confidence, and find alignment in a world that keeps knocking me off center.

  • Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Last night I dreamed my dresser had a secret tier for magical pants—trousers that could rewind age, inject vitality, and reboot my identity on command. I slipped into a pair of pumpkin-orange linen specials and, poof, a mastiff materialized: a melancholy titan who brightened under my hand and wilted the moment I stopped petting him, like a living barometer for attention.

    I conjured my brother to act as the dog’s surrogate owner—someone to manage the mastiff’s emotional weather—then set off on a quest for the nectar of the gods. My route was wonderfully bureaucratic: I walked into a museum, stepped into a glass case of Roman centurions, and revived one. Together we climbed Mount Olympus and stole the gods’ food—a heist movie scored by thunder. The soldier, alabaster white and eternally pleased with himself, proved cocky, selfish, and deeply agenda-driven.

    We returned from Olympus, bounty in tow, and stopped by a beach picnic where my friends were sprawled across blankets. That’s when the centurion confessed he’d hidden the nectar, claiming it was reserved for “the people God had planned,” which apparently did not include my friends. We argued—he with smug fatalism, me with wounded entitlement. If anyone had earned a sip of immortality, surely the guy in magic pants who resurrected marble and burgled Olympus had.

    My plan was simple: share the nectar, dazzle my friends, and be canonized as the man with enchanted trousers, a mystical mastiff, and a knack for raising statues from the dead before shopping the divine pantry. It was less generosity than PR. But my uncooperative companion killed the campaign. By hoarding the nectar, he blocked my ascent in the friend-group hierarchy and forced an unflattering verdict: no elevation for me—just a man in orange linen, standing next to a sulking dog and an even sulkier demigod.

  • What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    I’ve kept in touch with one of my former colleagues who retired from the college where she taught French for thirty years. She is close to eighty now. She told me she was already starting to feel a lack of engagement in her classroom at the end of her teaching days in 2016. Even though phones had to be turned to silent and be stowed away during class, she felt that the kids were just waiting until class was over to get back to their phones and social media. Their brains had changed, their attention spans had been truncated, and they needed to be constantly entertained.

    “Edutainment” was already influencing the way we teach, but the situation grew worse. Now, the addiction to screens has sucked the students into a black hole. Without their phones, they are detached, disengaged, and sullen. 

    It is a cliche that old people are annoying as hell because they are prone to reminisce about a golden age while lecturing the modern world for its recently acquired pathologies. They wax nostalgic for some mythical past that was full of grotesque prejudices, ignorance, and chicanery. To be a scold telling the world that you came from a better place is to be a pompous ass and a bore. I will concede all of that. But objectively speaking as someone who has taught over five decades, I can say there was a Before Times when life in the analog world wasn’t in competition with the digital world. Objectively speaking, something gets lost when we vacillate between the analog and the digital worlds. Public intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Jaron Lanier have made it clear that the digital landscape has become about commerce, addiction, loss of privacy, surveillance, fragmentation, and outrage. In other words, the Internet has had dehumanizing effects on us. 

    Parents who saw their children lying in bed scrolling over TikTok videos during the pandemic can tell you their children have been damaged, and that nothing makes them happier than to see their children hanging out with other kids–without their phones–and hanging out at the park, playing sports, taking walks at the beach, and finding respite from their screen existence. Parents wept with relief. 

    I enjoyed my youth without screens and curating my life on social media. Every summer between 1975 and 1979 when I was a high school teen, my family and ten other families and friends made the sojourn to Pt. Reyes Beach where the Johnson’s Oyster farm provided us with what seemed like bottomless truck beds of oysters. From noon to sunset, hundreds of us ate an infinite amount of barbecued oysters served with garlic butter and Tabasco sauce, thousands of loaves of garlic bread, and colossal slices of moist chocolate cake. Ignoring warnings of nearby great white shark sightings, we’d punctuate our feasting with forays into the waves before emerging from the ocean. Our muscular pecs shiny with rivulets of salt water, we returned to the picnic tables and had another serving of barbecued oysters. In the summer of 78, I opted to have my parents drive home without me. I got a ride home in the back of a truck with a bunch of random people I had met that day. Full from a day of feasting and feeling like King Neptune, we stared into the stars with our glazed lizard eyes and entertained each other with crazy stories. We had a healthy disregard for chronicling our experiences on social media, for monitoring the enormous food we consumed, and for time itself. Those were happy days indeed and pointed to an era gone and lost forever. 

    I would not have had that memory had I lived such a life with a smartphone. My memories would have been filtered through a prism of digital curation and a rewired brain that needs to filter my experience in such a way. We don’t grasp the depth of our brain’s rewiring because, like fish, we don’t know we are wet when all we know is the ocean around us. We have been rewired for this new oceanic environment.

    The screen has rewired the brains of young people. They don’t read. Many college instructors don’t assign books, or if they do, the books are on the short side. In the place of books, instructors assign short essays. When it comes to writing assignments, some high schools and colleges don’t assign essays anymore. They have the students hand-write paragraphs in class. 

    Of course, as you get older, you don’t want to be a bore and lecture the world on the way things were during Before Times. At the same time, if you taught in the 1980s to the 2020s and have seen the way technology has affected the human brain, self-esteem, addiction, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills, you may have a lot to offer by contrasting the Screen Brain with the Pre-Screen Brain. You can can write academic books about this subject full of graphs and statistics, or you can give anecdotal narrative accounts, or some combination of the two, but it would be absurd to keep your mouth shut because you feared being reduced to the grumpy old person on the lawn arms akimbo screaming that the world is going to hell. Better to risk sounding like a crank than to watch silently as an entire generation scroll itself into oblivion.

  • Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    During the Fall Semester of 2024, the English Department had one of those “brown bag” sessions—an optional gathering where instructors actually show up because the topic is like a flashing red light on the education highway. This particular crisis-in-the-making? AI. Would writing tools that millions were embracing at exponential speed render our job obsolete? The room was packed with nervous, coffee-chugging professors, myself included, all bracing for a Pandora’s box of AI-fueled dilemmas. They tossed scenario after scenario at us, and the existential angst was palpable.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated pablum. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    Our dean, ever the Zen master in a room full of jittery academics, calmly suggested that maybe—just maybe—we should incorporate personal reflection into our assignments. His idea? By having students spill a bit of their authentic thoughts onto the page, we could then compare those raw musings to their more polished, suspect, possibly ChatGPT-assisted essays. A clever idea. It’s harder to fake authenticity than to parrot a thesis on The Great Gatsby.

    I nodded thoughtfully, though with a rising sense of dread. How exactly was I supposed to integrate “personal reflections” into a syllabus built around the holy trinity of argumentation, counterarguments, and research? I teach composition and critical thinking, not a creative writing seminar for tortured souls. My job isn’t to sift through essays about existential crises or romantic disasters disguised as epiphanies. It’s to teach students how to build a coherent argument and take down a counterpoint without resorting to tired platitudes. Reflection has its place—but preferably somewhere far from my grading pile.

    Still, I had to admit the dean was on to something. If I didn’t get ahead of this, I’d end up buried under an avalanche of soul-searching essays that somehow all lead to a revelation about “balance in life.” I needed time to mull this over, to figure out how personal writing could serve my course objectives without turning it into group therapy on paper.

    But before I could even start strategizing, the Brown Bag session was over. I gathered my notes, bracing myself for the inevitable flood of “personal growth narratives” waiting for me next semester. 

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home later that day, in a fit of efficiency, I stuffed my car with a mountain of e-waste—ancient laptops, decrepit tablets, and cell phones that could double as paperweights—and headed to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive. The line of cars stretched for what seemed like miles, all of us dutifully purging our electronic skeletons to make room for the latest AI-compatible toys. As I waited, I tuned into a podcast with Mark Cuban chatting with Bill Maher, and Cuban was adamant: AI will never be regulated because it’s America’s golden goose for global dominance. And there I was, sitting in a snaking line of vehicles, all of us unwitting soldiers in the tech wars, dumping our outdated gadgets like a 21st-century arms race.

    As I edged closer to the dumpster, I imagined ripping open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem beneath, fully embracing the ridiculousness of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was a revolution. And if I was going to lead it, I’d need to be like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, armed with the Tablets of AI Laws. Without these laws, I’d be as helpless as a fish flopping on a dry riverbank. To face the coming storm unprepared wasn’t just unwise; it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on it.

    I thought I had outsmarted AI, like some literary Rambo armed with signal phrases, textual analysis, and in-text citations as my guerrilla tactics. ChatGPT couldn’t handle that level of academic sophistication, right? Wrong. One month later, the machine rolled up offering full signal phrase service like some overachieving valet at the Essay Ritz. That defense crumbled faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

    Okay, I thought, I’ll outmaneuver it with source currency. ChatGPT didn’t do recent articles—perfect! I’d make my students cite cutting-edge research. Surely, that would stump the AI. Nope. Faster than you can say “breaking news,” ChatGPT was pulling up the latest articles like a know-it-all librarian with Wi-Fi in their brain.

    Every time I tried to pin it down, the AI just flexed and swelled, like some mutant Hulk fed on electricity and hubris. I was the noble natural bodybuilder, forged by sweat, discipline, and oceans of egg whites. ChatGPT? It was the juiced-up monster, marinated in digital steroids and algorithmic growth hormones. I’d strain to add ten pounds to my academic bench press; ChatGPT would casually slap on 500 and knock out reps while checking its reflection. I was a relic frozen on the dais, oil-slicked and flexing, while the AI steamrolled past me in the race for writing dominance.

    That’s when the obvious landed like a kettlebell on my chest: I wasn’t going to beat ChatGPT. It wasn’t a bug to patch or a fad to outlast—it was an evolutionary leap, a quantum steroid shot to the act of writing itself. So I stopped swinging at it. Instead, I strapped a saddle on the beast and started steering, learning to use its brute force as my tool instead of my rival.

    It reminded me of a childhood cartoon about Paul Bunyan, the original muscle god with an axe the size of a telephone pole. Then came the chainsaw. There was a contest: man versus machine. Paul roared and hacked, but the chainsaw shredded the forest into submission. The crowd went home knowing the age of the axe was dead. Likewise, the sprawling forest of language has a new lumberjack—and I look pathetic trying to keep up, like a guy standing on Hawthorne Boulevard with a toothbrush, vowing to scrub clean every city block from Lawndale to Palos Verdes.

  • David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    In one fell swoop, David Letterman killed disco. Not just the music, but the entire polyester empire of rhinestone smarm and sweat-drenched earnestness. Letterman wasn’t seduced by mirror balls. He walked on stage with his arctic deadpan, and with irony as his weapon, executed disco in front of a live studio audience.

    I was just starting college then—a lifelong bodybuilder and Olympic weightlifter who could hoist a barbell but couldn’t hoist a personality. Muscles, yes. Presence, no.

    I didn’t just want to be David Letterman. I wanted to graft his sardonic detachment onto the icy brilliance of Vladimir Nabokov—a cocktail of late-night sarcasm and literary menace. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, exactly, only that it had to involve confidence, storytelling, performance—something that allowed me to “give a presentation.”

    By accident, I stumbled into teaching. In 1987, the chancellor of Humanities at Merritt College launched a pilot program to deliver classes at Skyline High School in Oakland, and none of the full-time faculty wanted the job. My neighbor, Felix Elizalde, whose kids went to school with me, threw me a lifeline. One gig snowballed into another, and soon I was a full-time college writing instructor.

    That was thirty-eight years ago. For most of them, I would have told you the hardest part of the job was grading essays—an endless swamp of half-baked theses and misplaced commas. But now, in 2025, grading essays is only the second hardest task. The first? Something educators and administrators alike love to call “student engagement.”

    I don’t know if it’s the black hole of smartphones or the simple math of age—I’m nearly forty-five years older than my students. Probably both. Either way, I can no longer stand in front of a classroom, channel my inner Letterman, and spin stories until the room vibrates with attention. Instead, I stand beside a giant screen plastered with Google Slides. My students are “visual learners,” raised on swipes and emojis.

    I could go back to the Letterman Method, earn some laughs, maybe even spike engagement for a few minutes. But at what cost? The Google Slides aren’t as funny as my comedy routine, but they do hit the sacred “core concepts” and “Student Learning Outcomes.”

    I’ve become a ghost haunting the pedagogy manuals. Occasionally I slip, crack a joke, earn some chuckles, channel my younger self—but then I reel myself back in, because the templates for counterarguments and rebuttals won’t teach themselves.

    The students aren’t fooled. A few of the candid ones smirk: “Don’t worry, McMahon, ChatGPT will do it for us.”

    And so, as I enter my mid-sixties, I keep trying to stay aligned with the modern world. Yet every step forward feels like five steps backward, as if I’m not teaching writing anymore but rehearsing my own obsolescence.

  • The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Old-Age Desperation

    The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Old-Age Desperation

    In July of 2025, I had dinner at The Kebab Shop with an old friend—a former boxing champion turned engineer, the kind of guy who looks like he could build a bridge in the morning and break your nose that afternoon, all while discussing Tolstoy.

    He is a former student, thirty years younger than I am, and at a completely different phase in his life. As we at our kebabs, he told me he had broken up with his girlfriend and confessed something strange and honest:

    “I feel like I’m chasing the sad,” he said. “Just so I’ll feel better about myself.”

    I told him not to worry—sadness would find him, bite him in the ass, and tell him to die. It was just a matter of time. . Sometimes pain is too large to register. Like being so exhausted you can’t fall asleep, or so depleted you can’t even feel tired.
    He nodded, then casually dropped the bomb: he just bought a Lexus. I assumed an SUV—some respectable adult-mobile with storage. Nope. He turned his phone toward me and grinned. It was an obsidian black Lexus RC350 coupe, a low-slung, 311-horsepower statement of rebellion against mediocrity and middle age. Price tag? A cool $70,000.

    Why? Because he gets bored. Easily. He’s cursed with a mind that needs friction. His current job is too easy, and when things get too easy, life feels mechanical. He’s planning to move on—to another job, another city, more challenge, more money, more meaning.
    He told me staying home to watch TV feels like soul rot. So instead, he journals (in a real book, with prompts—who knew that was a thing?), plays soccer on weekends, and takes private dance lessons. Yes, dance. This man has better time management than most monasteries.

    I told him I admire him. I mean it. He’s not surrendering to entropy; he’s interrogating it with pen, ball, and motion. He’s writing his way out of the void. I might need to follow his lead when I retire in two years. No matter our age, we either rage our fists at mortality or we start sinking into the upholstery.

    I then told my friend that I nearly bought a $2,000 recliner last week. A magnificent beast of engineered comfort. But the moment I imagined myself melting into it, day after day, I envisioned not rest—but early burial. A leather sarcophagus with cupholders. I backed away like it was a cursed object.

    I was inspired by my friend’s hunger for adventure, so the next morning I punished myself with a new exercise: the Farmer’s Carry–two kettlebells, one in each hand, pacing in circles across my front lawn like a rogue warlord in gym shorts. Neighbors peeked through their blinds to watch this 63-year-old Larry Csonka doppelgänger lumbering across the grass like I was either training for something… or losing a very public battle with aging.

    I get the sense that my neighbors pity me. Here is a man who can’t let go of his bodybuilding years. He is so desperate he is going to kill himself. I imagine their fingers are poised over their phones, ready to dial 911. 

    The exercise nearly broke me. I’ll keep it in rotation, but with moderation. I train to feel alive, not to hemorrhage my last remaining Life Force into the turf of suburban California.

    And now, I wait for my friend to pull up and take me for a ride in his Lexus. He’s earned it. The man’s been driving the same Corolla for thirteen years. Now it’s his turn to live a little. And me? I’ll tag along, a passenger for a while, enjoying the ride through this strange, accelerating cycle of life.