Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Ornamental Displacement Syndrome

    Ornamental Displacement Syndrome

    My wife came home exhausted from a field trip—teachers, middle schoolers, the whole traveling circus—and she asked me to stash her suitcase in the garage. I slid it into the cabinet beside its scuffed, veteran companions and felt the familiar itch: wouldn’t it be nice to replace this tired lineup with a set of glossy, overqualified luggage, the kind that looks like it has opinions about first class? I love the look of expensive luggage—the clean lines, the quiet arrogance. The only problem is that I hate traveling. I admire the gear for a life I avoid like a delayed flight.

    The same contradiction sits on my wrist. I’m drawn to beautiful watches—polished steel, disciplined dials, the small theater of timekeeping—but I live like a polite hermit, rarely entering the arenas where such wrist presence might register. I want the props without the stage, the costume without the performance.

    It dawned on me, as I closed the cabinet on my battle-worn luggage, that I suffer from Ornamental Displacement Syndrome: a condition in which one’s appetite for beauty and refinement is outsourced to objects that require a public stage, even as one retreats from that stage, leaving the objects to perform in private, a one-man show with no audience and impeccable production values.

  • The Sacred Thud and the Beachside Alibi

    The Sacred Thud and the Beachside Alibi

    Last night I dreamed I visited a man who lived in an apartment not with furniture, but with his fleet of Lexus sedans, each one folded into suitcase-sized cardboard boxes like obscene luxury origami. When he carried them outside, they bloomed into full-sized cars—sleek, silent, and faintly smug. One in particular arrested me. It was labeled “brown,” a word that should have condemned it to mediocrity, but this was no pedestrian brown. It shimmered with a platinum undertone, a molten, aristocratic hue that made every other color feel like a clerical error.

    But the color was only the prelude. The real seduction was auditory. The man insisted I open and close the door. I obliged. The door shut with a dense, ceremonial thud—the kind of sound that suggests not merely engineering, but finality. It was the closing argument of a life well lived. I felt it in my chest, in my bones. At that moment, I understood with humiliating clarity that I would never feel complete until I owned this exact car in this exact shade and could summon that sacred thud on command. This, apparently, was my apotheosis.

    Once the demonstration concluded, he ushered me into his living room, where a large television glowed like an altar. It was tuned to CNN. On the screen: live coverage of his wife undergoing surgery for a rare and aggressive cancer. The procedure was experimental, a medical moonshot that, if successful, would not only save her life but advance the entire field. Her body lay open to the future; her survival would be a headline.

    The man watched with a peculiar intensity, not the anxious devotion of a husband, but the focused anticipation of someone waiting for a green light. He explained, almost casually, that once she was cured, he intended to meet his mistress at the beach. A public affair, he admitted, would be considered “unethical,” but surely—he reasoned—if his wife survived, the moral calculus would soften. One good outcome would offset the other. Balance restored.

    I stood there, staring at the screen. The broadcast cut between the operating table and a glowing chart tracking her biomarkers in real time—green lines twitching, rising, negotiating with fate. He leaned forward, eager, almost buoyant, rooting for her survival so he could proceed, unburdened, to his afternoon of betrayal.

    The room was quiet except for the hum of the television and, somewhere in the distance of my mind, the echo of that perfect car door closing—clean, decisive, final.

  • The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    If we care about the state of our souls, we have to ask a difficult question: How do we treat time as a sacred, limited gift—something to be used with urgency, yet protected by stillness? In other words, how do we move with purpose without surrendering to the chaos of perpetual hurry?

    My problem—one I can’t dodge—is how easily I waste time while convincing myself I’m doing something worthwhile. I wake up intending to write, but drift into “research”: consumer products I don’t need, fitness principles I already know, or whatever flickers across my screen and triggers FOMO. The drain is subtle but relentless. A morning that should belong to reading and writing dissolves into trivial pursuits. I justify it with a familiar lie: I am a nobody with nothing to say. What difference does it make if I squander a few hours? Why not entertain myself instead?

    These rationalizations amount to treating my life with reckless disregard. They expose something uglier beneath the surface—a low sense of self-worth and a quiet flirtation with nihilism, the belief that nothing really matters.

    Of course, talk is cheap. I can articulate all of this with precision and still change nothing. I tell myself my habits should align with my beliefs, echoing Arthur Brooks from The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. But knowledge without discipline is decoration. When I waste time online, it doesn’t just distract me—it diminishes me. It acts like kryptonite. I become a lesser version of myself.

    I know the alternative. When I guard my attention, I compose longer, more ambitious piano pieces. When I don’t, I squeeze creativity into leftover scraps of time and produce reheated versions of my past work—safe, derivative, forgettable.

    It is astonishing how easily we waste time and then defend the waste, even when the defense collapses under minimal scrutiny. I remember falling into this pattern around the year 2000, when the internet first began its quiet takeover. Looking back, I think of Jim Harrison’s line: “It’s so easy to piss away your life on nonsense.” The accuracy is almost cruel.

    This realization struck me again this morning. I had “nothing” to write about, yet decided to open John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Within two pages, the emptiness I claimed dissolved into a torrent of thoughts—about chaos, distraction, sacred versus profane time, and the psychology of hurry itself.

    Comer has reason to feel overwhelmed. As a pastor delivering six teachings every Sunday to accommodate a growing congregation, burnout is almost inevitable. My situation is the inverse. I am a college writing instructor with an abundance of free time, and with retirement a year away, that abundance is about to expand into something even larger—and potentially more dangerous.

    Comer imagines his future: a successful pastor, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker. By every external metric, he wins. But internally, he sees something else—hollowness, irritability, exhaustion, and a life that feels “emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow.” He barely recognizes himself.

    So he steps away. After a decade of acceleration, he takes a sabbatical. He sees a therapist. Stripped of his role as a megachurch pastor—the centerpiece of his identity—he feels disoriented, describing himself as “a drug addict coming off meth.” He has time now, but no clarity about who he is without the machinery of constant activity.

    He frames his book simply: imagine meeting him for coffee in Portland, talking about how not to drown in the “hypermodern” world. His approach is explicitly Christian, rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, and aimed at answering a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to rest? And more importantly, how does one rest in a culture that equates value with speed?

    I approach this with skepticism. I’ve been a Christian-obsessed agnostic since I was seventeen, and I have little patience for spiritual platitudes. Still, Comer has earned his authority through suffering, not abstraction. He anticipates my resistance and addresses it directly: “If you want a quick fix or a three-step formula in an easy acronym, this book isn’t for you either. There’s no silver bullet for life. No life hack for the soul. Life is extraordinarily complex. Change is even more so. Anybody who says differently is selling you something.”

    That alone earns my attention.

    So I’ll take the invitation. I’ll sit down for coffee and listen to what he has to say in his so-called “anti-hurry manifesto.”

  • Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    In “Our Longing for Inconvenience,” Hanif Abdurraqib diagnoses a modern sacrilege: we have streamlined the sacred. Love, once a slow collision of timing, nerve, and chance, has been repackaged as a swipe—faces flicked past like clearance items in a digital aisle. Courtship now resembles an online shopping spree, complete with filters, wish lists, and the quiet suspicion that you’re not choosing so much as being A/B tested. It raises an unflattering question: are we still falling in love, or have we become compliant participants in a well-designed experiment? Convenience has done what convenience always does—it removed the friction and took some of the humanity with it. What remains is efficient, scalable, and faintly hollow.

    The backlash has a name—call it frictionmaxxing. People, starved for something earned, are reintroducing resistance on purpose: analog rituals, delayed gratification, tasks that refuse to collapse into a tap. There’s nostalgia for the Before Convenience Times, when the self felt hammered into shape rather than 3D-printed from preference settings. The mythology is simple: meaning requires effort; effort requires inconvenience.

    I’m not moved by the usual props—turntables, VCRs, the museum of obsolete plastic. That feels like cosplay. But I do recognize the pull in two places of my own life that refuse to fake it: my acoustic Yamaha upright piano that answers only to touch and time, and my kettlebells that don’t care about my feelings or my notifications. Both demand presence. Both punish distraction. They’re small, stubborn antidotes to the screen’s narcotic ease.

    Abdurraqib’s warning is less about gadgets than about posture. Convenience doesn’t just lubricate life; it reclines it. We become passive, distractible, pleasantly numb—a polite version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man, optimized for comfort and allergic to striving. The tragedy isn’t that we have tools; it’s that the tools quietly train us to avoid anything that resists us.

    Here’s the confession that ruins the tidy narrative: I don’t need to blame screens for my preference for ease. I came that way. Given the choice between puttanesca and a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, I will choose the path that requires fewer verbs. I love puttanesca in theory—the garlic, the brine, the argument it makes on the tongue. I do not love it enough to perform the liturgy required to summon it. Convenience didn’t corrupt me; it recognized me.

    The same instinct flared when at forty-eight I became a father–twins, no less. The prospect of nights broken into fragments, of diapers and pacing and the long choreography of care, filled me with a very modern dread: the dread of interruption. I complained. My cousin Garrett, who has the inconvenient habit of being right, told me that the friction is the bond—that the lost sleep and the repetition are not bugs but features, the forge where attachment is made. I believed him. Belief, however, did not improve my mood at three in the morning.

    None of this is going away. Convenience will continue to refine itself into invisibility, and our hunger for something earned will continue to nag at us like a conscience we can’t quite uninstall. The only workable response is not purity but partition: carve out blocks of time that refuse assistance, that insist on effort, that return you to the body and the task. Live, briefly, off the grid of your own habits.

    The irony, of course, is waiting for us with a smile. Give it six months and there will be a frictionmaxxing app to schedule your inconvenience, optimize your resistance, and remind you to be authentic at 4:30 p.m. You’ll tap “confirm,” and somewhere a server will congratulate you for choosing friction the convenient way.

  • My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    Last night I dreamed I was back in a college dorm, the kind that confuses scarcity with philosophy. The place ran on grievance and empty shelves. The communal kitchen looked like it had been looted by graduate students—half a bottle of soy sauce, a fossilized lime, and the lingering odor of arguments. The factions were loud, doctrinaire, and permanently aggrieved; the refrigerator was quiet and permanently bare. I kept my mouth shut. Hunger is easier to manage than other people’s ideologies.

    A short walk away—dream geography is generous like that—sat my mother’s second husband, Baron, who has been dead since 2018 and therefore was very much alive. He wore a white football jersey and the expression of a man auditing eternity. He’d set up on a patio with a notebook and a stack of my YouTube videos, which he was mining for a college project. The topic: my life, the false stories I’ve told about it, the false stories about those false stories, and the small industry I’ve built turning all of it into myth. He watched, paused, rewound, took notes with clerical devotion. It was flattering in the way a tax audit is flattering.

    Part of me admired the rigor. Another part of me bristled at the freeloading. There he was, piggybacking on my past like it was a group project I didn’t sign up for. Still, the man was thorough. He unearthed old footage, journals, drawings—artifacts I’d misfiled in the archive of things I no longer had the energy to remember. If diligence were destiny, he was on his way to a summa.

    I wished him luck and went back to the kitchen, where luck goes to die. As I left, Baron called out that he’d put a beige bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the top shelf of the fridge. Help yourself. The promise of protein felt like a minor miracle. I elbowed through the crowd—everyone arguing, no one eating—opened the door, and there it was: the beige bowl, perfectly placed, impeccably empty. The eggs had been converted into theory.

    So I stood there, starving, while somewhere behind me my life was being reduced to footnotes. In the dream, as in the waking world, the analysis was abundant. The food was not.

  • The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    To have a hobby is to cultivate an identity. The longer you grow in the hobby, the more you learn about yourself, your likes, dislikes, and inclinations. If you’re a watch collector, as I am, you gravitate to certain types of watches and retreat from others. You cannot explain your inclinations. When fellow watch collectors notice you share a proclivity for a type of watch, there is both a bond and a fellowship. When the fellow watch collectors notice your tastes clash with theirs, disappointment and even hurt feelings can ensue. Within the larger watch hobby, there are subcategories, where collectors branch off and form tight alliances, tribes, and deeply-forged bonds. A sense of loyalty ensues. We call this Taste Tribalism: the formation of tight-knit subgroups within a hobby, bound not by logic but by shared aesthetic instincts. These tribes generate loyalty, belonging, and, when challenged, a surprising capacity for disappointment.

    Woe, however, to the watch collector who, for reasons he can’t explain, departs from what was once his favorite watch type and ventures into fresh waters. Such a transition can bring disorientation and confusion. To abandon one watch category and embrace another creates what is called Horological Identity Drift: the slow, almost imperceptible shift in a collector’s taste in which objects once central to identity begin to feel like artifacts from a previous self. The watches haven’t changed; the wearer has. What once signaled meaning now feels like a costume left over from a role no longer being played.

    While this new adventure from “watch drift” gives fresh blood to his hobby, it leaves his fellow collectors feeling betrayed and abandoned. What offends them is their sense of Aesthetic Apostasy: the moment a collector abandons a once-defining preference—crossing from one horological faith to another—provoking confusion, quiet resentment, and the sense that something sacred has been violated.

    In my case, the “drift” occurred two months ago when I started wearing G-Shocks at the exclusion of my Seiko divers. I did all I could do to return to my mechanicals, including the act of putting steel bracelets on them, in the hope that giving them a luxury look would make them more appealing, but this measure failed. The Seiko divers remain in the box, largely unworn. As a result, I am a watch drifter. 

    What does this “drifting” collector do? Retreat to his old watch type and return to his fellow collectors? What folly. He would simply be betraying himself to please others. Such an act would be a violation of a hobby that brought him joy and authenticity. He must therefore let his true tastes govern his watch journey and the desire to please others take a back seat. Otherwise, his hobby will be a superficial affair, a desperate act to belong while his authentic self withers on the vine. 

  • Confessions of a Reluctant G-Shock Convert

    Confessions of a Reluctant G-Shock Convert

    Yesterday I put bracelets back on four of my Seiko divers, restoring them to their native steel—links clicking into place with the confidence of expensive machinery. They looked the part. Between one and three thousand dollars’ worth of brushed surfaces and tight tolerances, the watches radiated competence. On the wrist, though, the spell broke. The weight announced itself immediately, a small, insistent gravity that felt less like substance and more like obligation. I admired them the way you admire a well-made chair in someone else’s house: respect without attachment.

    I had hoped the bracelets would add some pizzazz—some latent charisma waiting to be unlocked by the right configuration. Instead, they exposed a mismatch. The watches belonged to a former version of me, a man who equated heft with meaning and steel with seriousness, a man I barely recognize. That man, it turns out, has been quietly replaced.

    In his place stands a convert to G-Shock—not the entire circus, but a very specific order of monks: the Frogman, the Mudman, the Rescue. Resin instead of steel. Solar instead of ritual. Atomic time instead of romance. These watches don’t ask for admiration; they deliver accuracy and get out of the way. After them, the Seikos feel like cufflinks with pretentiousness.

    I’m aware this confession offends the faithful. Mechanical devotion runs deep, and there’s a certain etiquette to pretending you still feel it. I don’t. The G-Shocks have recalibrated my wrist. They’ve made lightness feel honest and precision feel sufficient. The Seikos now read as formalwear—appropriate, occasionally necessary, but fundamentally performative. I’ll wear them when a formal event demands it, the way one wears a jacket in an expensive restaurant to satisfy a dress code no one quite believes in anymore.

    Call it heresy if you like. I call it clarity. In my head I’m a collector; on my wrist, I’m a G-Shock guy.

  • The Clean Split: Seiko Romance vs. G-Shock Precision

    The Clean Split: Seiko Romance vs. G-Shock Precision

    For more than two decades, I lived inside the cathedral of Seiko divers—mechanical, muscular, faintly mythic. Then, without warning, I developed a taste for G-Shock. Not the entire sprawling catalog—just a narrow, almost doctrinal subset: Tough Solar, Multiband-6, digital display. Precision without ceremony. Time as a solved problem.

    Strangely, this new fixation didn’t dethrone the old one. If anything, it refused to engage it. My Seikos–SLA051, SLA023, SLA055, SBDC203, the Tuna SBBN049–continue their analog romance, ticking away with artisanal stubbornness. The G-Shocks, by contrast, operate with cold, atomic certainty. They don’t drift; they don’t charm; they don’t ask for admiration. They simply tell the truth. I find myself wearing them more often, yet the two categories never compete. They inhabit parallel realities, each complete unto itself.

    What used to be a single, coherent hobby has split into two clean domains. Not a conflict–more like a continental drift. The G-Shocks don’t diminish the Seikos, and the Seikos don’t dignify the G-Shocks. They coexist without conversation. The complication, if it can be called that, has the feel of an upgrade: a second language acquired late in life, one that doesn’t replace the first but sharpens your sense of what each can do.

    And once you see the line, you want to ink it in.

    I’ve started returning my Seikos to their bracelets, restoring them to their native uniform—steel on steel, no ambiguity. Only the Seiko SLA051 gets a pass; it belongs on a waffle strap the way certain truths belong in plain speech. The rest will click back into their bracelets like soldiers resuming formation. The goal isn’t function; it’s taxonomy. I want the collection to declare itself in two voices, not one muddled chorus.

    This is the quiet compulsion at work: the need to clarify, to separate, to keep categories from bleeding into one another. Call it Horological Bifurcation Syndrome–the clean split of a once-unified obsession into two ecosystems with incompatible logics and equal appeal. On one side, mechanical romance: weight, history, the seduction of imperfection. On the other, digital precision: light-powered, atom-synced, immune to drift. They don’t compete. They refuse to integrate. And the more I indulge them, the more I prefer it that way.

  • The House at the Edge of the Woods

    The House at the Edge of the Woods

    I dreamed last night that I was lost along the California–Oregon border, swallowed by those lush, overconfident woods that seem to grow not just trees but disorientation itself. Out of that green excess, I stumbled onto a large house. It was too warm, too lit, too certain of its place in the world. Inside were people I hadn’t seen in decades: my old high school acquaintances. They had aged on paper–engineers, doctors, the usual résumé parade–but at the dinner table they wore their adolescent selves like a second skin. The same faces, the same postures, as if time had added credentials but declined to age them physically.

    They kept arriving from side rooms, as if the house were a memory with too many doors. Soon there were a dozen of them seated at a long table, the surface crowded with platters, tureens, and bowls exhaling fragrant steam like a benevolent fog. They welcomed me with an ease that felt rehearsed by kindness itself. Dishes appeared, were passed, insisted upon. They asked what had become of me. The question was polite on its face, but they implicitly felt sorry for me. 

    For a while I occupied the heady seat of attention. Then, as naturally as a tide recedes, their focus shifted back to one another–the practical side of their lives: projects, patients, schedules, mortgages. I felt the small withdrawal and, in that petty reflex one hates to recognize, tried to reclaim the floor. I blurted out a macabre fact about how some ordinary food, under the right conditions, could turn lethal. I pitched it as a funny tidbit, but it landed like a dropped utensil. They didn’t rebuke me; they simply continued, the conversation closing over my interruption as water splashes over a stone.

    Ignored but not injured, I watched them. What struck me wasn’t their success; it was their wholesomeness and innocence. No guile, no ambient spite, none of the low-grade cynicism that passes for sophistication. Their intelligence didn’t sour into cleverness; it steadied into clarity. They had chosen this life—steady, decent, bounded—not because they were naive, but because they had measured the alternatives and declined them. That was the unsettling part: their goodness was not accidental. It was willed.

    I felt a quiet melancholy then, a recognition as clean as it was unwelcome. Between us stood an invisible partition—no hostility, just difference. They were the children of light. I was the man who had wandered out of the woods and discovered, too late, that I was still lost.

  • The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The gym in the 1970s was my holy temple. Not the antiseptic, glass-and-chrome shrines of today, but something closer to a workshop for men trying to hammer themselves into existence. The places I trained were rough, honest, and gloriously indifferent to appearances. No mood lighting. No eucalyptus towels. Just iron, sweat, and a shared work ethic.

    There were relics, of course, absurd contraptions left over from the Eisenhower years. Chief among them: the fat-jiggling machine. You strapped a belt around your waist or backside, flipped a switch, and the machine vibrated you like a malfunctioning appliance. The promise was surgical fat loss. The reality was public humiliation. No one touched it. To be seen using that thing was social suicide, a one-way ticket to pariah status. Even as teenagers, we understood that dignity had weight, and that machine stripped it from you ounce by ounce.

    Everything else, though, was perfect. The equipment did its job. The atmosphere did more. You could spend three hours there and feel cheated when you had to leave.

    Then came the 80s and 90s, and the gym got a facelift and a personality disorder. Out went grit; in came gloss. Chrome multiplied. Music was no longer background; it was an assault. Televisions blinked from every angle like slot machines. Smoothie bars appeared, as if protein needed to be accessorized. Personal trainers hovered, predatory, unctuous, and overfamiliar, radiating a kind of rehearsed enthusiasm that made you want to check your wallet.

    I tolerated the spectacle because I had no alternative. I didn’t have a garage full of equipment. The gym, vulgar as it had become, still held a monopoly on my routine. I assumed I’d be there until my dying breath.

    Then, in 2005, at an LA Fitness in Torrance, the illusion cracked. I noticed I was getting sick constantly—four, five colds a year. The common denominator wasn’t mysterious. It was the sauna, that damp Petri dish where strangers exhaled their pathogens in communal harmony. Add to that the blaring music, the social butterflies mistaking gossip for training, and the creeping sense that the place had become a theater of distraction rather than discipline—and I was done. The gym hadn’t betrayed me. It had simply revealed what it had become.

    So I left.

    In my early forties, I had no interest in bulking up. Call it instinct, call it desperation. Whatever it was, it pushed me toward power yoga DVDs. Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee became unlikely guides. I loved the sessions: the control, the focus, the quiet authority of breath over chaos. But yoga had a ceiling. Four to five hundred calories an hour wasn’t enough to outrun my appetite. If I lived on lentils, tofu, moong beans, and restraint, maybe. I didn’t.

    So by 2007, I pivoted to kettlebells.

    That wasn’t a compromise. It was a revelation.

    Kettlebells gave me intensity—eight hundred calories an hour—and something else the gym had quietly drained from me: engagement. Swings, squats, farmer’s carries were simple movements with endless variation. Enough complexity to keep boredom at bay, enough brutality to keep me honest. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still at it.

    And here’s the part no one advertises: I stopped getting sick. The revolving door of colds vanished. The gym, it turns out, had been taxing me in ways I hadn’t fully accounted for. Walking away from it wasn’t just a change in venue; it was a correction.

    Training at home became more than convenience. It became control. No membership fees. No commute. No background noise of other people’s trivialities. Just the work, stripped down to its essentials. I had removed friction where it didn’t belong and kept it where it mattered.

    That’s the difference between a real life hack and a counterfeit one.

    A real life hack replaces the original with something equal or superior. A counterfeit gives you convenience at the cost of substance, then flatters you into believing nothing was lost. My kettlebell training didn’t dilute the gym experience; it surpassed it. It demanded more precision, more coordination, more accountability. No machines to guide you. No rails to hide behind. Just you, the weight, and gravity’s indifference.

    This morning, I found myself studying kettlebell variations on YouTube—stop-start swings, double front squats—scribbling notes with the enthusiasm of a kid circling toys in a catalog. The same pulse I get when I spot a new Seiko Monster or Casio G-Shock release: anticipation, possibility, a little irrational excitement.

    Today is supposed to be an Airdyne day. An hour on the Schwinn, steady and predictable. But the kettlebells are calling. I know better than to give in. Experience has taught me the discipline of alternating days and sparing my joints, but the urge is there, insistent, almost childish.

    That’s how I know I’ve done something right.

    When your “discipline” starts to feel like anticipation, that’s not a workaround.

    That’s a life recalibrated.