Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • How I Tricked Myself Into Reading Dostoevsky

    How I Tricked Myself Into Reading Dostoevsky

    The irony gnaws at me: I’ve been a college writing instructor for forty years, yet thanks to what I’ll politely call “Internet poisoning,” I can barely read anymore. In the ’80s, I devoured Nabokov the way bodybuilders slam protein shakes—voraciously, obsessively, as if prose itself were anabolic fuel. Now? Most books I start end up abandoned halfway through, like gym memberships in February.

    It’s not just the degraded Internet brain. There’s a physical component, too. Try cracking open a hard copy of Dostoevsky—his books are printed in fonts so microscopic they might as well be Morse code. But last night, I pulled a stunt: Crime and Punishment on my Kindle app, magnified in glorious large print across my 16-inch laptop. And I thought, “Hey, this isn’t half bad.” Almost breezy. Practically Dean Koontz with Russian orthodoxy.

    Sure, it’s lugubrious. A brooding, handsome nihilist—today we’d label him an Incel—is plotting a crime that amounts to little more than a cry for a hug. Why did Dostoevsky obsess over this guy? What subterranean morbidity haunted the man?

    So I play my mind a trick. I whisper: “This isn’t Russian gloom. This is metaphysical pop fiction. Dean Koontz with samovars.” That little spoonful of honey lets me swallow the medicine.

    Maybe next I’ll tackle Demons. Then The Brothers Karamazov. Then The Idiot. And who knows? I may one day become a Dostoevsky scholar—simply by convincing myself I’m binging airport thrillers.

  • Safari Hats and Leviathan Eyes

    Safari Hats and Leviathan Eyes

    Last night I dreamed my wife and I were walking along a South African beach at twilight, the sky streaked with salmon and violet, the horizon shimmering as if we had stumbled into a myth rather than a place on any map.

    The coastline was no ordinary shore. Instead, a massive conveyor belt rattled along the sand, carrying an endless parade of women from every corner of the globe. Each time one of them reached my wife, the belt shuddered to a halt. The woman—frumpy, froggy, apologetic, swaddled in baggy safari khakis and hats that looked like they had been flattened in a suitcase—would plead for my wife’s opinion on her outfit.

    With gentle authority, my wife made her adjustments—a tuck here, a trim there—and declared the woman presentable. At once, the supplicant would bow effusively, glowing with gratitude, before the conveyor belt whisked her off into the twilight. This was my wife’s destiny, her sacred vocation, and she bore it with effortless grace.

    Behind us, the ocean brooded. From the waves, leviathan shapes drifted in the gloom, colossal witnesses to this human pageant of absurdity. Their eyes glowed with the cold contempt of ancient gods, as if to say: This is what civilization amounts to—hats and hemlines, endlessly corrected.

    The dream inspired me to write a song this morning, “The Sadness of Summer Fashion”:

  • Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    In a recent conversation with Mike Moynihan on The Moynihan Report, media analyst Doug Rushkoff described social media life as a kind of self-inflicted madness: we willingly lobotomize ourselves into shrill binaries, flattening nuance until the “other side” is little more than a demon enemy. His words echoed Jaron Lanier’s decade-long dirge about how the online hive mind debases us into cheap caricatures.

    After fifteen years inside this funhouse, I can vouch for Rushkoff. Chasing likes and subs is a direct pipeline to despair. The algorithm isn’t designed for truth or connection — it’s a slot machine that spits out dopamine crumbs in exchange for outrage and hype. And yet, podcasters like Rushkoff and Moynihan point to a counterargument: in the right hands, social media can host intelligent conversations. But it’s a fragile victory, like surviving on a vegan diet — possible, but you’ll work twice as hard and swallow twice as much chalk.

    Socially, though, the medium is barren. Scroll long enough and the promise of “connection” curdles into loneliness.

    This hits me harder as retirement creeps closer — twenty-one months and counting. I’ve spent forty years teaching face-to-face, and I’ll miss it desperately. This semester I have student-athletes: sharp, disciplined, driven, engaging. Those classroom connections have been the marrow of my career, and they won’t be replicated by a Facebook feed.

    I’ll still have a family. I’ll still have two best friends in Torrance. But unlike my wife, who maintains a weekly social circuit of concerts, trips, dinners, and parties, my friendships are skeletal. Months-long “friendship fasts” punctuated by rare meetups. Husbands, as the cliché goes, lean too heavily on their wives for connection — a weight she may already feel pressed under. An isolated husband becomes a burden.

    You reap what you sow. Neglect friendships for decades, and you retire into isolation, wondering if you can still course-correct. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe habit calcifies into solitude.

    Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a friendship renaissance waiting out there: gray-haired amateur philosophers huddled at gritty diners, pickleball warriors at dawn, retirees solving the world over coffee. Maybe the beach yoga crowd will embrace me.

    Or maybe that’s just wishcasting. We’ll see.

  • The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    Last night, I dreamed I retired too early, lost my tenure, and found myself cobbling together two humiliating jobs to survive. By day I was a part-time writing instructor, hustling between second-rate colleges. By night I was reduced to a takeout delivery boy for the sandwich shop where my wife cheerfully worked.

    If there was a silver lining, it was this: while waiting for her to assign me deliveries, I could pedal furiously on a stable of exercise bikes provided by the restaurant. Because, naturally, this wasn’t just a sandwich joint — it was part health club, part tourist mecca. At one point, a gaggle of Danish tourists descended, cackling in a booth for hours, treating the sandwich shop as though it were the Eiffel Tower of their itinerary.

    My wife flourished. She collaborated with the shop’s original owners, a warm couple from Hong Kong, brainstorming new sandwiches and ambitious upgrades, while I sweated like a condemned man on the bikes. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon: a dark brown leather jacket with supernatural properties. Each time I donned it before a delivery, every bead of sweat, every impurity, vanished as though I’d been baptized anew.

    But there was more. To scrape together a living, I also moonlighted in a third job — mysterious manual labor in a basement with a nameless partner. To reach this purgatory, I rode a bus into the “forbidden city,” a nightmare realm painted in muted oranges, where the architecture sulked in jagged, miserable shapes and its citizens were shackled to endless toil. It was a geometry lesson in despair.

    I was heartsick, regretting my decision to retire early. Only when the bus carried me back to the sandwich shop did relief arrive. There, I could mingle with long-lost friends and international tourists, ride the exercise bikes, and cling to the reassuring thought that my leather jacket would always purge me of sweat and shame.

  • The Pea Protein Plague

    The Pea Protein Plague

    For three days, I flirted with the fantasy of going vegan in the protein department. Out went my dependable whey; in came Orgain’s peanut butter-flavored vegan powder ($32), built on the gritty backbone of pea protein. Waiting in the wings was OWYN Pro Elite in dark chocolate ($47), still sealed, still smug.

    But curiosity didn’t last. It curdled into resolve — the kind of resolve born from three days of gut-twisting cramps so vicious they stole my ability to work out. Imagine the irony: my protein obsession, meant to fuel training, knocked me out of the gym entirely. Not just any protein, but vegan protein, embraced in part to end my petty larceny of cow’s milk from calves. My humanitarian mission dissolved in a haze of bloating and despair.

    So I texted my neighbor Holly, handed over $80 of organic powders, and felt as if I were banishing demons. She was delighted. Her family loves vegan protein powder for their smoothies. I was both exorcised and relieved. Good riddance to powders that turned my insides into a war zone.

    Looking forward, I’ll still be a thief — but only a petty one. A scoop of whey stirred into my morning buckwheat groats. Two modest helpings of plain Greek yogurt with honey at lunch and after my nap. A splash of stolen milk here and there. I hope the calves understand: my theft is not egregious, just survivable.

    Still, my diet is 90 percent plants, enough to keep my conscience propped up. My protein intake will slide from 180 grams to about 140, and so be it. I’ll trade hypertrophy for digestive peace.

    Because let me say it clearly: some of us must never touch pea protein again. It expands inside us like an alien organism, leaving us to wish for death’s consoling embrace. Never again.

  • The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    Last night, I slipped into a dream where I was less man and more detective cliché: trench coat, team at my side, the whole noir package. We prowled the tiled underworld of a health club, where women lay dead in the shower stalls. The air carried a rank perfume—pungent, briny, unmistakable. It was the signature of our quarry, The Alligator Man, a serial killer who apparently marinated in fish guts before slaughter.

    Our trap was absurd but effective. We laced another health club’s showers with his own scent, as if baiting him with eau de swamp monster. Sure enough, the predator slithered into the stall, and I lunged. But instead of the hulking brute I expected, I clutched a young, handsome man, small enough to vanish in a crowd. His boyish face said innocent; his stench said otherwise. I locked eyes with him and announced, with grim satisfaction, that he was evil—and that evil was about to rot in a cell forever.

    Then, with dream logic’s usual whiplash, I found myself at a holiday party with my family. My wife had crafted me a lobster costume: claws for hands, a scarlet exoskeleton, and a hat shaped like a boiled crustacean’s head. I looked like a seafood platter at a masquerade ball. I ate cake while dodging feline landmines—the hosts’ cats had redecorated the house with cat mess. The carpet was stained with these “accidents.” With cake fork in hand, I declared this exhibit A for my lifelong “no pets policy.”

    The party oozed past midnight into the pale gray of morning. Bored stiff and craving endorphins, I trudged home. Still zipped inside my lobster suit, I cranked up a kettlebell workout in the living room. My claws clacked as I swung iron, the sweat pooling beneath my polyester shellfish skin.

    Headlights swept across the window. My wife and twin daughters walked in. I assumed they, too, had abandoned the litter-box bacchanal. She spotted me mid-squat, lobster claws snapping, and didn’t so much as flinch. I worried she’d rage over my soaking her handmade costume in salt and sweat. Instead, she simply yawned, brushed past my lobster theatrics, and announced she was going to bed. Evil had been vanquished, cats had soiled carpets, and the lobster workout was apparently just another Tuesday in her world.

  • From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    I’m nearing sixty-four, and you’d think the resume of my life would say it all: married man, father of twin teenage daughters, lifelong weightlifter, and full-time college writing instructor pushing four decades in the trenches. Yet none of those titles define me quite like the pathology that has consumed my last twenty years: an obsession with diver watches.

    The disease began in 2005, when I bought my first “Hero Watch,” a Citizen Ecozilla. I was a suburbanite with all the aquatic daring of a backyard kiddie pool, but strapping that hulk of steel on my wrist turned me into a fantasy adventurer. The Ecozilla was my passport into adventurist cosplay, proof that even if my only dive was into Costco’s frozen food aisle, I could still play Jacques Cousteau in my imagination.

    For nearly two decades, I clung to bracelets and dismissed rubber. Rubber straps were sticky, sweaty, and cheap—the footwear of wristwear. But then, in 2024, a fellow enthusiast on Instagram whispered the gospel of Minotaur, a boutique strap company out of Houston. Their FKM rubber was no ordinary rubber—it was luxury-grade, accordion-style, fat spring bar holes, the kind of strap that doesn’t just hold a watch but weds it. Think craft brewery meets haute horology.

    When I slipped a Minotaur onto my Seiko diver, it was a conversion experience. Think Paul in Damascus. The strap was supple yet firm, sleek yet rugged. It was the hand-in-glove perfection every watch collector secretly craves.

    Suddenly, my seven Seiko divers weren’t just watches—they were sacraments. I no longer needed to fuss with bracelet links or endure the daily annoyance of micro-adjustments. The Minotaur straps brought equilibrium to my collection, and by extension, to my life.

    I became the town crier of Minotaur. Instagram posts, YouTube videos, flowery effusions of praise—my strap evangelism knew no bounds.

    I even struck up a friendship with Ron Minitrie, the Minotaur founder himself, who sent me models to showcase. For a while, I was living the influencer’s dream: watch bliss, strap perfection, hobby fulfillment so complete I worried it might be dangerous.

    But what happens when you reach nirvana? Do you close the YouTube channel, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after? Of course not. That’s when the gods get bored and send you a curse.

    The curse arrived in the form of a comment from a viewer named Infiniti-88. He linked to a Notre Dame study that accused FKM rubber straps of being Trojan horses of doom. According to the study, FKM bled PFAS “forever chemicals” into the bloodstream, potentially wrecking organs, scrambling hormones, and sowing cancer. Because watch straps are worn all day—sweat, heat, friction, even while sleeping—the risk was presented as constant exposure.

    Infiniti-88’s question was simple: “What are you going to do?”

    Cue the descent into madness. I read the study, panicked, and stripped all my Minotaur straps, replacing them with silicone and vulcanized rubber. Immediately, my watches felt diminished, like Ferraris stuck on snow tires. They lost their soul.

    I made a YouTube confessional and discussed the finer points of the Notre Dame Study. Half the viewers thanked me for raising the alarm; the other half mocked me for peddling paranoia. They insisted FKM risk was bottom-tier, a blip in the PFAS risk hierarchy. My response? Oscillation. I switched from Minotaur to silicone and back again—sometimes eight times in a single day. I was a man possessed, toggling straps like a lab rat on amphetamines.

    Desperate for clarity, I appealed to the digital oracles: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. Their verdict was unanimous: the study was flawed. The researchers had tortured the straps—soaked them in solvents, scorched them with heat, abraded them into pulp. In short, conditions no wristwatch strap would ever endure on a human arm. The Minotaur straps, they said, were stable, inert, safe.

    I breathed relief. For about three minutes. Then paranoia struck again. Were the AI platforms telling me the truth, or, as the dutiful sycophants they are, just feeding me the reassurance I craved? Was I clinging to wishful thinking dressed up as “analysis”?

    Meanwhile, fellow watch obsessives chimed in from YouTube and Instagram, their chorus split evenly between “Don’t worry” and “Panic with me.” Their voices joined the cacophony in my head. Certainty dissolved. Once you’ve pictured poison seeping into your wrist, you can’t unsee it.

    I began to hate the hobby itself. Hate the straps, hate the watches, hate the endless cycle of worry. It wasn’t about horology anymore—it was about risk management as a form of neurosis. I even considered selling everything and defecting to Tudor, whose bracelets come with the T-fit clasp–a miracle of quick adjustment that eliminates the fuss of links and tools. No chemicals, no rubber, no paranoia. Just a slide-and-click mechanism that promises freedom from my madness.

    When I think of my complicated relationship with Minotaur straps, the potentially-flawed Notre Dame Study, the fear of forever chemicals, and thoughts of a T-fit clasp, an image comes to mind that defines the insanity of my current situation:

    I’m thinking of the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

    In Moria, Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. They fall together into the abyss, and after an epic battle that spans mountains and caverns, Gandalf is mortally spent. It’s not a literal tail piercing—Tolkien describes Gandalf being dragged down by the Balrog’s whip after he breaks the bridge. The trauma of the battle kills him in his “Gandalf the Grey” form, but he is later sent back, transfigured, as Gandalf the White.

    Gandalf is never the same again, not because of the wound, but because his role changes: he comes back more powerful, more detached from the mortal world, and closer to a messenger of the divine.

    If I’m to survive my Minotaur strap crisis, I must follow the trajectory of Gandalf : I have to let the old self fall into the abyss. Like Gandalf, I must die to the madness and come back reborn, detached, stronger, armed with perspective. Because at this point, it’s not just about straps. It’s about what kind of man I am when the watch box stares back at me.

  • The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    Like many people, I want to believe that a plant-based diet can deliver optimal nutrition for everyone—from casual gym-goers to powerlifters and elite athletes. It’s a hopeful vision: strong bodies built on beans and lentils instead of beef. But a memory from 2019 lingers in my mind and keeps me cautious.

    That year I had a nursing student in my class. She was sharp, disciplined, a straight-A student who also worked as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym. On top of all that, she was a powerlifter. Under the guidance of an experienced coach, she decided to go vegan. For the first several months, everything looked fine. But after about nine months, the cracks showed. Her skin grew pale, her training stalled, she felt weak and lightheaded, and worst of all—her hair began to fall out in clumps. When she abandoned the vegan diet, her health rebounded.

    At the time, I didn’t know what I know now. Maybe she was missing key amino acids like lysine or leucine. Maybe she wasn’t using vegan protein powders that could have filled the gap. Maybe she didn’t know that a vegan diet contains no creatine at all, and a simple 5-gram daily supplement might have made the difference. The truth is, neither of us will ever know.

    This is what haunts me: a vegan diet can be excellent for cardiovascular health and a powerful humanitarian stand against factory farming, but only if it’s done with knowledge and precision. Done carelessly, it can lead to exactly what my student experienced—decline, weakness, and disillusionment.

    I can’t know for certain whether a few smart adjustments would have allowed her to thrive. But I can’t shake the suspicion that with the right tools—a quality vegan protein blend, a steady supply of B12, an algal omega-3 supplement, and a scoop of creatine—her story could have ended very differently. Instead of decline and disillusionment, she might have been proof that a plant-based diet, done right, can power even the most demanding athletic lives.

  • The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Guilty as charged. Case in point: my tortured relationship with FKM Divecore straps.

    The Notre Dame study had me spiraling—researchers tortured the material with solvents, heat, and abrasion until they squeezed out PFAS “forever chemicals” and then warned these might leach into human skin. Ever since, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning metronome, on whether to keep wearing the straps I love more than any other rubber I’ve tried in two decades of watch collecting.

    Of course, no one wants to think of their wristwear as a poison delivery system. But context matters. First, FKM is highly stable under real-world conditions; the lab tests were more horror show than practical scenario. Second, it’s the manufacturing process that endangers workers, not the end-user. Third, if we’re ranking PFAS risks, drinking unfiltered water, eating from PFAS-coated packaging, or cooking on scratched Teflon are solid tens on the risk scale, while wearing an FKM strap is a lonely little one. That’s the Fallacy of False Priorities: panic over the trivial while ignoring the obvious.

    Even so, the issue isn’t a Nothing Burger. Divecore’s own Paul admits handling FKM worries him, and he’s working on alternative materials—silicone, vulcanized silicone, HNBR—to protect his workers and reassure consumers. That’s just smart business.

    Meanwhile, I’m not without options. My strap drawer holds factory Seiko silicones and urethanes, plus top-tier Tropic straps made of vulcanized rubber. They’re fine, but none hold a candle to the sleek perfection of Divecore FKM. I tried swapping them in, but they feel like consolation prizes—serviceable, never glorious.

    So I made a deal with myself: enjoy my pristine FKMs for now, and when the new HNBR or silicone Divecore straps arrive, I’ll switch. Sounds reasonable. Except once you’ve let the idea of PFAS seeping into your skin lodge in your brain, it refuses to leave. I’ve written about it on Instagram, made a YouTube video, and now I’m stuck in an obsessive loop, second-guessing every strap change as though I were rewriting my will.

    Which brings me back to my original point: the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And right now, that man is staring at seven watches, toggling between glory and paranoia, wishing he could strap on peace of mind.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.