Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.

  • The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    Last night, I dreamed I worked at a surreal hybrid of a college campus and an amusement park—the kind of place where tenured professors could file paperwork in one building and ride a log flume in another. Picture syllabus deadlines and cotton candy coexisting. Naturally, I was late for both.

    Meanwhile, several miles away in my old neighborhood, Marcus, a childhood friend, decided he’d had enough of modern civilization. His exit wasn’t dramatic—no manifesto, no angry blog post—just a quiet pilgrimage beginning in front of my house. The weather was unreasonably perfect. Sunlight filtered through air that smelled like rose petals and eternal spring. Think Garden of Eden meets Orange County real estate brochure.

    So why would Marcus leave paradise? We didn’t know. But my neighbors and I were offended by the sheer moral audacity of it. His journey felt like a judgment—like he’d stared into the hollow eyes of our HOA and whispered, “You people are dead inside.” Naturally, we chased him. Not to stop him, but to prove we were decent people too. We jogged after him, waving metaphysical CVs and shouting, “We recycle! We make our own salad dressing!”

    But Marcus was too far ahead. By the time I arrived at the college-amusement park, he was gone. I retreated to my professor’s office to catch up on what dreams insist professors do: paperwork. That’s when Mike arrived—a former student, Navy SEAL, and time-traveling spirit guide from the 1990s. He led me to a house in Buena Park, once his father’s, now transfigured by dream logic into a mansion of staggering beauty, where I apparently lived a life of joy and ease in another dimension. It was, quite simply, the life I never knew I had but now mourned like a phantom limb. I was flooded with regret. Why did I leave that parallel mansion where I was whole, radiant, and probably never had to grade a single freshman essay?

    Then the sun set, and—as dreams do—I stopped being a professor and morphed into some kind of blue-collar rig worker, one of four men hauling cargo across the freeways of this theme park universe. At breakneck speed, we clung to the roof of a truck, flying over the 5 freeway like a band of deluded daredevils. I alone had the courage (or sanity) to question this arrangement. “You know,” I said, wind slapping my face, “we don’t have to die tonight. There’s an interior cabin. With seats.”

    At first, they mocked me—because apparently, dreamland logic still includes workplace hazing—but eventually, they gave in. We climbed down into the safety of the rig, like cowards, or people who enjoy not being flung across asphalt.

    As I relaxed, I thought once more about that mansion in Buena Park, that shadow life where I wasn’t trying to prove my worth or cling to cargo. A life of belonging, not striving. Then I woke up, ate a bowl of buckwheat groats, drank my Sumatra coffee, and wondered what it all meant.

  • Nostalgia, Nihilism, and the Need for a North Star

    Nostalgia, Nihilism, and the Need for a North Star

    We live in a state of perpetual performance. Not just for others, but for ourselves. It’s cosplay with consequences—playful on the surface, deadly serious underneath. We obsess over how our performance lands. We evaluate our worth by the reactions we elicit. At stake is not just our reputation, but our very sense of moral character.

    This obsession isn’t new. The philosopher Blaise Pascal put it bluntly: we’d rather appear virtuous than actually be virtuous. It’s easier to sculpt the image than to develop the core. In this way, we’ve become artisans of curation, not content—architects of persona, not people.

    We live, as Shakespeare warned, on a stage. But our thirst for applause is bottomless. The more we receive, the more we crave. We become validation addicts, forever chasing the next fix of approval. And when applause falters or vanishes, anxiety rushes in. To soothe this anxiety, we self-medicate. Not just with likes and follows—but with food, consumption, workouts, and delusion.

    Some of us drown that dread in comfort food. Others sprint in the opposite direction—discipline, clean eating, high-performance regimens. But often, that stoicism is just cosplay too: hunger in a different mask. When that fails, we drift into nostalgia. We reimagine the past—not as it was, but as it flatters us to believe it was. We cast ourselves as the hero, the lover, the misunderstood genius. The story becomes so good, we forget it isn’t true. We live in the fiction and lose our grip on reality.

    This disconnect—between who we pretend to be and who we are—makes us brittle. Maladapted. And so the cycle deepens: more consumption, more self-distraction, more illusion. Consumerism becomes therapy. Hedonism becomes self-care. Nihilism becomes a badge of honor. All of it is cosplay. And all of it is corrosive.

    Philosophy, religion, and therapy exist to confront this masquerade. They offer a language for our delusions, a history of our dysfunction, and a spiritual direction out of the maze. They remind us that cosplay is not identity, and performance is not presence.

    I don’t pretend to have it figured out. But I’ve found insight in thinkers like Phil Stutz, who warns against the seductive ease of instant gratification, and Steven Pressfield, who speaks of resisting the lure of comfort in favor of a purposeful life. I’ve also been challenged—and strangely comforted—by Paul’s doctrine of kenosis: the radical idea that we’re not here to inflate ourselves but to empty ourselves in service of others. In a world obsessed with power and “respect,” that message lands like a thunderclap.

    What unsettles me most is not our ignorance—it’s our awareness. Many of us know the truth. We even live it for a while. But we drift. We relapse. We trade the hard-earned clarity for the cheap thrill of our old scripts. That’s what demoralizes me: not just the fall, but the speed and ease with which it happens.

    Yet I still believe in the power of a North Star. Call it purpose, vision, a calling—whatever name it takes, it’s the gravitational pull that keeps us from floating off into the void of our appetites. I think of Ann Kim, the Korean immigrant told to stay in her lane. She didn’t. She found her voice, expressed it through food, and became a James Beard Award-winning chef.

    The path to a good life, I suspect, doesn’t begin with fear of failure. It begins with a compelling vision of who we are meant to be. And the discipline to never look away from it.

  • Why the Watch Enthusiast Is Fated to a Life of Eternal Agony

    Why the Watch Enthusiast Is Fated to a Life of Eternal Agony

    The Watch Potency Principle states that as a watch enthusiast adds watches to his collection, the potency of his pleasure and satisfaction derived from his watches dissipates and is replaced with anxiety, displeasure, disappointment, and resentment, and that the opposite is also true: As his collection winnows down to a few–usually between three and six–the potency of pleasure and satisfaction he derives from his watches increases to the point that the potency affirms the hard-fought choices he had to make to arrive at his small albeit potent collection. 

    But the story of the watch enthusiast looking for watch potency is complicated by the fact that his Inner Watch Minimalist is at war with his Inner Watch Adventurer, the part of him that has an undying curiosity for new watches and new experiences with watches, including the different effects diverse watches have on his wrist, and his curiosity leads to accumulating more watches than he can wear. This results in Watch Devitalization, the weakening of the watch’s power, so to speak. In the case of Watch Devitalization, the enthusiast will sell a perfectly excellent watch, one he has arduously saved up for many years, sell the watch and then realize when the fever of Watch Devitalization has passed, that he has made a grave mistake. 

    As we can see, the eternal battle between the Inner Watch Minimalist and the Inner Watch Adventurer guarantees that the watch enthusiast lives a life of perpetual agony. 

  • Cereal, Barbara Eden, and the Dreaded Faculty Review

    Cereal, Barbara Eden, and the Dreaded Faculty Review

    Last night, my subconscious staged a bureaucratic opera. I was seated at an absurdly long table in a drab college conference room, the kind with flickering fluorescents and air that smells like paper cuts. My colleagues flanked me on all sides, each with a mountainous stack of paperwork—my tri-annual performance review, apparently—but the documents weren’t about my teaching. No, this was no assessment of curriculum or student engagement. This was a surreal interrogation of my entire psychological file.

    There were questions—thousands of them—spread across hundreds of pages. Why did I once hoard boxes of Cap’n Crunch? What did Barbara Eden mean to me in 1972? How had my crush on Bo Derek evolved into a phase of antisocial lumberjack-shirt brooding during college? These weren’t performance metrics; they were personality archeology. Everyone present wore the tight-lipped smile of professional decorum, but their glances hinted at unease, as if one wrong answer might trigger an existential audit. I kept staring at the wall clock, its massive hands dragging toward freedom. I just wanted to escape this Kafkaesque tribunal and get home to do something real—like kettlebell swings.

    Finally, the dean rose with the smug benevolence of a man who knows you’re trapped either way. “That concludes your review,” he said. No verdict. No score. Just a round of polite handshakes, the hollow kind people give when they’re pretending you’re not on probation. I left the room feeling like Schrödinger’s professor—both validated and damned. Then I woke up. One sip of hot, black coffee sent a dopamine jolt through my system, like jumper cables to the soul. The dream, I told myself, was nothing but psychological runoff—my neurotic inner life expelling its administrative waste.

  • Neddy Merrill Disease: Lifting Weights to Outrun the Abyss

    Neddy Merrill Disease: Lifting Weights to Outrun the Abyss

    I take no glory in training through my 60s. At nearly 64, with a lifting life that began in 1974 amid the clang of Olympic barbells and testosterone-choked gyms, I no longer chase records or applause. These days, I chase mobility. I chase not falling apart. A nagging flare of golfer’s elbow—inner right, thank you very much—has made its uninvited return, forcing me to swap kettlebell rows for gentler “lawnmower” pulls and abandon my beloved open-palm curls in favor of reverse curls, the orthopedic equivalent of safe sex.

    There was a time, of course, when I confused self-worth with showing off. I strutted under heavy weights in the ‘70s through the ‘90s like a tragic extra from Pumping Iron, nursing shredded rotator cuffs and wrecked lumbar discs in my quest to impress… well, no one, really. The mirror? My dad? Arnold? These days I tiptoe a tightrope between intensity and injury, trying to silence the reckless ghost of my twenty-year-old self who still believes he’s indestructible.

    This tug-of-war with time reminds me of Neddy Merrill, the doomed protagonist in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” who tries to recapture youth by swimming across his neighbors’ pools like a suburban Odysseus, only to arrive at his own foreclosed house—empty, echoing, and final. I see flashes of my own Neddy Merrill alter ego every time I glimpse my neighbor, a sturdy cop in his early 40s, shepherding his twin teenage sons off to jiu-jitsu. I envy them—their youth, their purpose, their untouched joints. But I remind myself that comparison is the mother of misery. I don’t train for glory anymore. I train because the alternative is to surrender to frailty, to collapse into a slow-motion horror film of decay. I train because being strong is still cheaper than therapy, and it’s the only middle finger I can raise at time’s relentless advance.

  • Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Fan’s Liturgy in Sweat, Hair, and Feedback

    Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Fan’s Liturgy in Sweat, Hair, and Feedback

    In the Bay Area of the 1970s, nothing was more quintessentially American than Led Zeppelin. Not apple pie, not hot dogs, not even fireworks detonating under the banner of freedom on the Fourth of July. No, Led Zeppelin was the national anthem of hormonal turbulence, a sonic passport to lust, rebellion, and ecstatic doom. At the center of this swirling pagan mass stood Robert Plant—shirtless, golden-maned, howling with the tortured elegance of a fallen angel whose job was to make teenagers believe that transcendence came through hips, heartbreak, and hair-whipping.

    Plant wasn’t just the house prophet of sexual revolution-era America; he was its prisoner. His voice didn’t just seduce—it ached. It howled. It bled. It was priapism as opera, libido turned operatic suffering. Meanwhile, Hugh Hefner—the so-called high priest of sexual liberation—was a fraud with a bubble pipe. With his crusty cardigan and smug, soft-core smirk, Hefner sold a sterilized fantasy built for TV sitcoms. Robert Plant, by contrast, sounded like he’d clawed his way out of the underworld in leather pants, carrying every orgasm and every regret with him.

    In Bernard MacMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin, we encounter Plant as the elder beast—still leonine, still mythic. He reclines in a richly shadowed room worthy of Masterpiece Theatre, his face now a craggy relief map of rock’s excesses. The documentary doesn’t dwell on the groupies, trashed hotel rooms, or aquatic legends of infamy. Instead, it gives us the roots: Plant’s soulful debt to Little Richard, Page and Jones’ studio stint with Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”—that thunderclap of a song that still sounds like someone hurling a piano at the moon. Watching that scene took me straight back to 1973 Nairobi, where my father and I first heard Bassey belt that monster in a theater so loud it felt like the walls were peeling.

    There’s archival footage of Zeppelin playing to a crowd that looks less like Woodstock and more like a family reunion gone sideways. Grandmothers clutching their pearls. Children plugging their ears. No one knew what had hit them. This wasn’t just music—it was a mass exorcism.

    So no, Becoming Led Zeppelin won’t give you the tabloid filth. It won’t dive into the daisy chain of destruction that came with their rise. But it offers something more interesting: a portrait of a band that didn’t just soundtrack my youth—they were my youth. And Robert Plant, in all his howling, tormented glory, was its golden god of doom.

  • His Royal Hairdresser: A Dream in Kettlebells and Class Anxiety

    His Royal Hairdresser: A Dream in Kettlebells and Class Anxiety

    Last night, my subconscious staged an outdoor fitness class without my consent.

    I found myself in a park in Redondo Beach, the sun blinding, the grass impossibly green—an Instagram-filtered fantasy of Southern California wellness. I was mid-kettlebell swing, drenched in purpose and a light sheen of dream-sweat, when I realized I was surrounded. Dozens of adult learners had appeared from nowhere, kettlebells in hand, eager and expectant. Apparently, I was their instructor. No one had hired me. No one had asked. But the dream had spoken, and I complied.

    Midway through a set of Turkish get-ups, a British emissary arrived. She looked like a character from a post-Brexit spy novel: stern, sun-dried, calves like cannonballs, dressed in a starched khaki uniform that screamed military cosplay and mid-level bureaucrat. She informed me—in clipped tones—that she worked for Prince Charles and that, regrettably, I lacked the proper haircut to instruct kettlebell technique. Apparently, the heir to the throne had strong feelings about grooming standards in recreational fitness.

    I explained, gently but firmly, that I was bald. Smooth as an egg. No haircut necessary. She did not care. My objections were irrelevant. Orders were orders.

    We marched off to a nearby luxury hotel, the kind with carpeting so plush it slows your gait. Prince Charles was there, sitting cross-legged on a massive hotel bed surrounded by two open laptops, deep in what I can only assume was royal doom-scrolling. When he saw me, he snapped both laptops shut with the speed of a man hiding state secrets or Wordle stats.

    He gestured toward a massive, throne-adjacent salon chair, upholstered in padded leather and colonial guilt. “You need your hair parted down the middle,” he declared.

    Again, I protested—I was bald. But His Royal Highness was undeterred. He placed a comb on my scalp, and as if conjured by the Crown itself, hair appeared. Thick, black, center-parted. The haircut was bestowed.

    Feeling both knighted and absurd, I reached into my wallet and tipped him two twenties. He accepted the bills with the contempt of a man too wealthy for paper currency. It was as though I had handed him used Kleenex. He nodded, purely out of ritual, and turned back to his laptops, already erasing the memory of me from his mind.

    I returned to the park, my hair neatly parted, my purpose restored. I resumed leading my eager students in kettlebell swings, disappearing into the warm fog of belonging, convinced—for at least this dream—that I was a vital member of my sun-drenched community.

  • My Midyear Top 5 Music Obsessions of 2025 (So Far)

    My Midyear Top 5 Music Obsessions of 2025 (So Far)

    Let’s call this what it is: a midyear soundtrack to my emotional needs, taste refinement, and irrational belief that a great song can still restore one’s faith in the universe. Below are five songs from 2025 that didn’t just catch my ear—they staged a full occupation of my psyche.

    1. Billie Eilish – “Wildflower”

    Boomers love to chant, “They don’t make music like this anymore,” usually while polishing their vinyl copies of Rumours and sipping overpriced Malbec. To which I say: Have you heard “Wildflower”? Billie Eilish wrote a melody so hauntingly beautiful and emotionally precise it might just slap Stevie Nicks across the astral plane. “Wildflower” isn’t nostalgic—it’s timeless, and it makes the whole “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” argument sound like a radio station that’s lost its signal.

    2. Miley Cyrus – “Flowers” (Demo Version)

    Forget the radio-polished, empowerment-anthem version designed for spin class playlists and morning talk shows. The demo is the real deal. Stripped down and raw, it sounds like Miley walked into the studio, ripped her ribcage open, and hit record. It’s not just about self-love—it’s a reckoning. A breakup song without the mascara, just bone-deep clarity and vocal grit. If the original was a brand campaign, the demo is the heartbreak behind it.

    3. Lana Del Rey & Father John Misty – “Let the Light In”

    This track is so beautiful it feels like eavesdropping on two fallen angels trying to talk each other back into heaven. I’m humbled, elated, and borderline offended by how good it is. If I’d played this song for Anthony Bourdain who once told KCRW’s Evan Kleinman that during his Applebee’s-induced existential spiral he lost faith in the human soul. I wish I could have played him “Let the Light In.” Perhaps he would have reconsidered the cosmic bleakness of mediocre mozzarella sticks. Lana and Misty have composed a shimmering argument for the existence of the human soul. It should be piped into the waiting room between this world and the next.

    4. Strawberry Guy – “As We Bloom”

    Strawberry Guy continues his gentle tyranny over my playlists. “As We Bloom” is another heart-melting, dew-soaked track that could have been transmitted from the dream-state of a lonely Victorian poet. He has the rare talent of making everything feel sacred and a little tragic, like a faded birthday card found in a drawer during a move. In vibe and texture, he’s a spiritual cousin to The Innocence Mission, and I say that with reverence.

    5. Olivia Dean – “Touching Toes”

    This song made me forget my age, my responsibilities, and that I’m not, in fact, swaying in slow motion through a desert cantina in the 1970s. “Touching Toes” is sultry, jazzy, and unselfconsciously whimsical—pure auditory flirtation. It gives me the same odd, disorienting confidence that Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis” once offered: a delusion of magnetism and a sudden desire to wear silk and speak in metaphors. Olivia Dean makes me feel like maybe I am the moment.