Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • The Futility of Resisting Chronological Drift Syndrome

    The Futility of Resisting Chronological Drift Syndrome

    Eight years ago, at a funeral—an appropriate venue for truth disguised as humor—my cousin, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator, told me his greatest challenge in retirement was finding enough time to spend his money. It landed as a joke with a faint echo of confession. Back then, he was still visible—still a man whose time, opinions, and presence registered on the social radar.

    Now, in his mid-seventies, the joke has curdled. He tells me the most striking feature of aging is not pain, not decline, but disappearance. People look past him as if he were a smudge on the lens he once spent a career perfecting. He has entered Graylight Erasure: still present in the room, but no longer illuminated by attention, interest, or acknowledgment. The body remains; the spotlight moves on.

    I’ve tried to account for this vanishing act, and the first culprit is economic. Consumer culture is a young man’s game—desire, impulse, upgrade, repeat. When you fall out of that loop, you don’t just lose purchasing power; you lose narrative value. You become a spectator in a drama that no longer requires your participation. This is Market Exit Obsolescence: the quiet demotion that occurs when you age out of the demographic worth seducing. The ads stop speaking to you, and soon enough, so do people.

    The second cause is more primitive: denial. Aging is bad for morale. It interrupts the fantasy that time is generous and endings are negotiable. Youth is a fever dream in which mortality is a rumor; old age is the nutrition label you avoided reading—the one that ruins the snack. An older person carries inconvenient data: limits, deadlines, the unadvertised fine print of being alive. And no one likes a walking disclosure statement.

    So the culture develops a reflex. Call it the Mortality Contagion Effect—the quiet recoil from those who remind us, without trying, that the clock is not decorative. As if proximity might transmit the condition. As if attention were a kind of exposure.

    My cousin didn’t lose his competence, his intelligence, or his history. He lost his audience. And in a culture that equates attention with existence, that loss feels less like aging and more like erasure.

    Watching my cousin—healthy, financially well-off, and increasingly ignored—I see what aging really delivers: Chronological Drift Syndrome. It’s the moment you realize the culture has shifted into a higher gear while you’re still driving the same well-maintained car. The rhythms change, the references mutate, the priorities rebrand overnight, and suddenly you’re not wrong—you’re just out of sync. You haven’t stopped moving; the world has simply sped past you and called it progress.

    As you age, you may attempt to resist this growing misalignment with youth culture. You may try to make yourself youthful with potions, makeovers, and pharmaceuticals, but these measures will soon backfire. You will find that fighting Chronological Drift Syndrome is a bit like sprinting on a moving walkway that’s headed the other way—you burn calories, attract attention, and end up exactly where you started, only louder and slightly winded. The harder you try to keep up—deploying borrowed slang, auditioning for trends, nodding along to references you Googled ten minutes earlier—the more you resemble a man trying to crash a party he once hosted. 

    Desperation has a smell, and it pairs poorly with youth culture, which detects inauthenticity the way a smoke alarm detects toast. The irony is brutal: the effort to remain relevant is what renders you ridiculous. The more elegant move is to step off the conveyor, plant your feet, and accept the drift with a straight back and a sense of humor. Dignity, unlike trends, ages well.

  • The Appetite Recursion Loop

    The Appetite Recursion Loop

    Looking back, I can trace a clean, ugly line connecting my love of watches and my love of food: appetite, indulgence, anger, shame. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s a loop. I want more than I should, I give in, I punish myself for giving in, and then I reset the machine and start again. Call it the Appetite Recursion Loop—a closed system where desire feeds indulgence, indulgence feeds shame, and shame reloads desire with fresh ammunition. It feels inevitable because, most days, it is.

    Appetite and chaos are my factory settings. In the early ’90s, when I lived in a bachelor pad that smelled like basil and ambition, my Navy SEAL friend Mike would call and say, “McMahon, I can hear you chewing through the phone. Every time I call, you’re eating. What is it now, Fat Face?”

    “Angel hair pasta with pesto.”

    “Sounds dangerous. I’m coming over.”

    And he would—arriving just in time to annihilate whatever I’d cooked. His metabolism ran on military drills and Pacific swells; mine ran on fantasy and carbohydrates. He burned calories like a wildfire. I cultivated them.

    He once called with an offer: Santa Barbara, surfing, and a setup with a friend of his girlfriend’s. “Now can you surf?” he asked.

    That’s how I found myself on excursions that had nothing to do with waves and everything to do with spectacle.

    Mike lived with his father, Bob—a former Marine with a foghorn voice and a temper that could peel paint. Their daily routine was a ritualized war: shouting about lawns, garages, groceries—two men chesting up like rival roosters while spit flew. Five minutes later, ceasefire. We’d pile into Mike’s Toyota for Mongolian beef with Social Distortion rattling the doors. Back home, John Wayne on the TV, Bob opening his gun safe “in case the Duke needs backup.” To me, this wasn’t dysfunction. It was familiar. It was home.

    I was raised in a house where anger was the native language. Fathers barked, belts translated. When rage is your baseline, it’s like living with your brain tuned permanently to a Death Metal station. Eventually, you stop hearing it. You call it normal. It isn’t.

    I know that now because I married a woman fourteen years younger than me, and we have twin teenage daughters who have no interest in Death Metal Dad. They want something closer to Smooth Jazz—Bach, Earth, Wind & Fire—anything that doesn’t rattle the drywall. They’re right. Rage isn’t masculinity. It’s intoxication. A sloppy, corrosive one.

    My version of sobriety isn’t about alcohol. It’s about anger. That means tracking triggers like a customs agent. One of the biggest? New watches. Shiny objects flip a switch. The Death Metal station hums back to life. Desire spikes, anxiety follows, and then comes the familiar hangover: self-reproach with a side of irritability. I become a joyless man—Grandma Sour Pants in sneakers. My family doesn’t want to be around me. Frankly, neither do I.

    Money isn’t the problem. I can afford the watches. What I can’t afford is the noise. I own eight pieces worth about fifteen grand, and even that feels like mental bookkeeping—rotations, rationalizations, inventory control for a hobby that was supposed to be fun. If I owned twelve, I’d need a project manager and a therapist. My watch friends say, “Life is short. Buy what you want.” That’s not wisdom. That’s indulgence wearing a tie. A man-child with a credit card is still a man-child—and no man-child is happy. He buys to outrun loneliness, and the purchases lose every race.

    Ninety-five percent of my buys were impulsive. Which means ninety-five percent were evidence—exhibits entered into the case against my maturity. I sold most of them at a loss, not because I needed the cash, but because I needed to feel like I wasn’t owned by my own impulses.

    I’m a product of the Me-Generation—California, ’70s, self as deity. Stories I Only Tell My Friends captures it perfectly: the Counterculture as the Worship of the Self—whatever the Self wants, the Self gets. No brakes, no compass. Malibu as a sunlit laboratory for beautiful people making terrible decisions. When desire becomes sacred, reality becomes optional—and the bill comes due.

    When I see a watch I love, my brain lights up like I’ve just taken a hit of something illegal. Desire surges. Then anger—because the loss of control is the real offense. I don’t want rehab for watches. I want a hobby that fits inside reality instead of dragging me out of it. Pleasure without compulsion. Enjoyment without obsession. A life without permanent FOMO.

    And here’s the final punchline: even writing this makes me nostalgic for being sixteen in Santa Monica and Malibu in 1976. I start looking backward like Lot’s wife, feel the salt forming, the Death Metal station warming up again. That’s my cue. Change the channel.

    Which is why I wonder if the shift to the G-Shock Frogman was an attempt at self-surgery—a clean cauterization of the need for more. A reset. My G-Shock friends laugh. The Frogman isn’t the cure, they say. It’s Act One of a new addiction.

    If they’re right, then “I Am the Frogman” isn’t transformation.

    It’s mythology.

    And I’m the one who wrote it.

  • Cognitive Lag Drift Meets the Frogman’s Calm

    Cognitive Lag Drift Meets the Frogman’s Calm

    Camp Flog Gnaw sounds like the name of an enormous toothy cartoon monster, but it was a weekend-long bacchanal of sound and sweat for my wife and our twin daughters, two days of music and mayhem baked under the unforgiving Los Angeles sun. My wife braved the trip on Friday and came home looking like a survivor of a maritime disaster, muttering that leaving Dodger Stadium traffic was like trying to escape a collapsing pyramid. She begged me to handle Sunday drop-off and assured me they would Uber home like civilized people. Armed with a “Fast Pass” for the 110 North, I engaged Google Maps, which promptly betrayed me and sent me barreling into downtown—an urban obstacle course specifically engineered to destroy men my age. Pedestrians sprang into the street like feral pigeons, daring me to earn a manslaughter charge. Driverless Waymo cars drifted past me with pastel-lit antennae, cheerful like clown hearses guiding me into the underworld. The lanes themselves seemed painted by committee: solid, dashed, turning, not turning, red, green, “maybe stop,” “maybe don’t”—a psychedelic optical exam administered at 20 mph.

    I began to notice a quiet but unsettling shift in my driving. Two hazards arrived at the same time, like conspirators who had compared notes. First, the road itself had changed. It no longer presented information—it assaulted me with it. Screens glowed, dashboards pulsed, alerts chimed, and every passing car seemed to flash some new digital signature. The highway had become a carnival of LEDs.

    Second—and less forgiving—was what was happening inside my own head. My processing speed had slowed just enough to matter. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just enough to turn split-second decisions into small negotiations. And driving is no place for negotiation. The convergence of these two developments created Cognitive Lag Drift: the subtle but consequential slowing of mental processing speed that impairs real-time decision-making in high-stakes environments like driving, where milliseconds matter.

    The result was a kind of sensory overload paired with cognitive lag—a bad marriage. What used to feel like a calm, controlled glide now felt like I was trying to play a video game while someone flicked the lights on and off in rapid succession. The margin for error hadn’t changed. I had.

    Driving was no longer serene. It was a test I hadn’t agreed to take.

    And yet—strangely—on my wrist sat a counterargument. My Casio G-Shock Frogman did not flash, negotiate, or editorialize. It did not offer lane suggestions, heart rate, moral encouragement, or existential commentary. It simply displayed the time in large, unapologetic numerals, like a monk who has taken a vow of clarity. No animations. No alerts. No betrayal. In a world where every screen demands interpretation, the Frogman delivers a verdict: 5:42. That’s it. No subtext, no narrative arc, no committee-painted ambiguity. The road may have turned into a casino of stimuli and my brain into a cautious bureaucrat, but the watch remains a quiet tyrant of precision. I glance down and feel, for a fleeting second, that order is still possible—that somewhere in this strobe-lit madness, truth can be reduced to a number that does not argue back.

    When I finally dropped off my wife and daughters, I whispered a confession to my wife: “I’m done with this. I think I’m giving my Accord to you, and the other car to the girls. I’m retiring from the driving game.” They didn’t laugh; they’ve seen cracks in the armor. I’m a high-strung man, and at sixty-four, the neurons don’t fire like they used to. I can still handle a five-mile radius around my house—my personal demilitarized zone—but pull me into the wilds of Los Angeles traffic and I’m ready to hang up my driver’s jersey. Downtown LA isn’t a city. It’s a gladiatorial arena where the young come to dominate, and I say to myself, “This is no country for old men.”

  • “I Am the Frogman”: The Last Shout Before the Door Seals

    “I Am the Frogman”: The Last Shout Before the Door Seals

    I’ve spent more than a decade documenting my watch obsession on YouTube—a pursuit that begins as hobby and ends, if you’re not careful, as behavioral conditioning. You think you’re making videos. You’re actually being trained. The algorithm dispenses rewards and punishments with clinical indifference: views, comments, silence. You adapt. Of course you adapt. That’s the job now.

    The trouble is that the algorithm has no interest in truth, balance, or restraint. It prefers spectacle. It rewards the emotional range of a teenager who’s just discovered caffeine: hyperbole, dread, euphoria, FOMO, regret—delivered with the urgency of a man announcing the end of civilization via bezel insert. You wake up one morning and discover you’ve succumbed to Algorithmic Persona Drift—a slow mutation in which your public self becomes a louder, shinier, more hysterical version engineered for attention rather than accuracy.

    Feed it, and it feeds you back. The cycle tightens. Every video must be more decisive, more apocalyptic, more “this changes everything.” You produce manifestos. You narrate epiphanies. You analyze your own obsession with the intensity of a man dissecting his own heartbeat. The result is predictable: you become a caricature of yourself—recognizable, marketable, and faintly absurd.

    If you can tolerate that, the system will reward you. The numbers rise. The revenue trickles, then flows. You build a small empire out of controlled exaggeration. But there comes a moment—quiet, unwelcome—when you no longer recognize the man delivering the lines. The performance has outgrown the person. At that point, the decision presents itself with unpleasant clarity: keep feeding the machine and let it finish the job, or step away and salvage what remains of your voice.

    That’s one exit.

    The other is less dignified. You don’t leave; you are expelled. The causes are familiar—burnout, self-disgust, ennui, health—but the most decisive is also the least negotiable: age. You wake up one day and realize the tempo has changed. The rhythms that once animated you now sound distant, like music leaking from another room. The new release, the hyped drop, the celebrity of the week—none of it lands with the old voltage. Mortality has entered the conversation and lowered the volume.

    You try to resist. You tell yourself enthusiasm is a choice. But the gap widens anyway. You find yourself oddly relieved that you no longer care about bracelet articulation or dial gradients or the fever dream that the “perfect collection” is one purchase away. The brotherhood reveals itself for what it always was: half fellowship, half support group. You no longer feel the urge to compare scars from impulse buys, to laugh at the madness, to whisper—half-serious, half-hopeful—that this watch will finally cure you.

    For me, the separation was unmistakable. Twenty years dissolved into a blur of rotating bezels and contingency divers. Then, at sixty-three, something tapped my shoulder. Not a crisis. A correction. The obsession didn’t die; it simply lost its authority. Desire dimmed, replaced by a quiet recognition that watches are exquisitely engineered ways of losing to time.

    The feeling calls to mind a scene from Battlestar Galactica: a traitor sealed behind glass, the airlock hissing, the crew watching with solemn finality. Not melodrama—procedure. That’s aging. Not tragic, not cruel—inevitable. At some point, those still inside the illusion of endless tomorrows begin to edge away from those who have seen the horizon contract.

    A pane descends. It isn’t hostile. It’s accurate.

    You tap the glass, wave, try to rejoin the cockpit of youthful urgency. You even lift your wrist—your hulking G-Shock Frogman—and make your case. “Look,” you want to say, “I’m still in it.” But the seal has set. Reentry is not part of the design.

    What remains is less dramatic and more demanding: dignity. Accept the season you’re in. Build meaning instead of inventory. Offer something useful to those still racing ahead, even if they don’t yet see why it matters. They will. Everyone does, eventually.

    The algorithm fades. The noise recedes.

    And you are left, at last, with a quieter, harder question: not what you want next—but who you intend to be without the applause.

  • The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    My junior year of high school was my “Deacon Blues” year. I wore it like a religious creed. The song played, and I nodded along as if I’d been admitted to some nocturnal order of the misunderstood. Only decades later did I realize the joke was on me. The narrator isn’t a tragic hero; he’s a suburban man with a good stereo and a better imagination, building a flattering alternate reality to anesthetize his boredom. What I mistook for transcendence was mood lighting. I wasn’t ascending; I was dimming the room.

    Satire thrives on mockery because it exposes the soft spots we’d rather not touch. But self-mockery can metastasize. It can turn your life into a punchline so comprehensive that nothing is left standing—not even the truth that your choices matter. High stakes persist whether you acknowledge them or not. We are, to put it plainly, creatures who want more than a clever story about ourselves. We want something that holds when the music stops.

    For that, I have to go back a year. I was a sophomore who encountered “Zoom,” written by Lionel Richie and Ronald LaPread of The Commodores. The song arrived like a quiet command. You can hear the Gospel in its bones—the upward pull, the refusal to collapse into self. The voice in “Zoom” isn’t asking for a better seat at the table; it’s asking for the table to be remade so everyone can eat. It’s not self-improvement. It’s a prayer for shared elevation.

    I remember where I was when it came on—KSFX, KSOL—the speakers on my Realistic Radio Shack clock radio doing their best, the world suddenly holding its breath. I stopped. Not figuratively. I stopped. The song spoke to my heart: Be better. Not for your reputation, not for your résumé—for people. That’s a different order of demand.

    That same year, “Voyage to Atlantis” by The Isley Brothers performed a similar operation. It promised return—home not as geography but as fidelity, as a place you carry and keep. Between those two songs was a paradox I could feel even if I couldn’t name it: you root yourself in a clean intention, and from that grounding you rise. No theatrics required. No persona. Just alignment.

    Listening to them felt like church without the building. Something gathered. Something clarified. You left with less noise and more direction.

    What is music, after all, if not the part of life that refuses translation and still manages to tell the truth?

    Which brings me to an embarrassment I’ll risk anyway: in watch circles, we talk about a “grail” watch that will “sing” on the wrist. It’s a ridiculous phrase—until it isn’t. Because this hulking slab of resin I’m wearing—the G-Shock Frogman—does something adjacent to that metaphor. It doesn’t produce music. It points to it. It behaves like a reference, a small, stubborn reminder that there is a cleaner version of me available if I’d like to stop auditioning and start choosing.

    The Frogman is not an upgrade. It’s an accusation shaped like a tool. It suggests a man with a steadier pulse, a man less interested in narrating his life and more interested in living it. A man who could hear “Zoom” and “Voyage to Atlantis” and respond the way that sophomore did—by stopping, by listening, by letting the moment ask something of him.

    I don’t need to recover youth. I need to recover that pause—the willingness to be addressed by something better and not immediately turn it into a story about myself.

    The songs didn’t change. I did.

    The question is whether I can change back.

  • The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman is my aspirational self. He is courageous and disciplined. I am not. I am a coward. My self-recrimination is based on the fact that I allow fear to compromise my morals. For example, I am revolted by the way livestock is abused for our animal consumption so that philosophically I should not eat meat, eggs, or dairy, but I fear that a plant-based diet will not give me optimal nutrition. Nor will it quell my rapacious appetite, so I compromise my morals and “force myself” to eat steak, chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt. The Frogman is a man of conviction. He looks at a moral problem square in the face and behaves appropriately. Gluttony is not part of his lifestyle. My soul is tormented by my awareness of the Avatar Conscience Gap: the distance between one’s idealized self—disciplined, principled, unflinching—and one’s actual behavior under pressure. The wider the gap, the louder the internal indictment, as the imagined avatar (in my case, the Frogman) functions as a constant moral comparator. My Frogman sits on my wrist, silent, resin-clad, a metronome of judgment. I measure myself against him and come up short in ways that feel precise, almost clinical. 

    Which brings us to actual clinical measurements.

    My doctor wants bloodwork—the full audit: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin. A bureaucratic harvest of numbers designed to convert my bloodstream into a spreadsheet. I concede the PSA. The rest feels like theater. At 230 pounds—twenty over my preferred fiction—my numbers will behave, mostly. LDL will be slightly elevated, the biochemical equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Twenty extra pounds leaves fingerprints. It always does.

    At 210, those fingerprints disappear. At 210, my labs don’t just improve—they absolve. At 210, I become the Frogman, at least on paper. A man whose blood tells a cleaner story.

    But I don’t need a blood test to tell me what to do. I need to lose twenty pounds. And I will be told this, formally, in a tone of gentle inevitability. A “plan of action,” as if the problem were logistical rather than existential.

    I cannot promise compliance.

    I eat well. Whole foods. High protein. I abstain from alcohol. I perform all the rituals of discipline. And yet my appetite behaves like an unlicensed contractor—loud, insistent, unconcerned with permits or plans.

    Last night, after dinner, I swore the kitchen closed at six. A solemn vow, made with the confidence of a man who has not yet opened a lunch bag.

    Then I found it: an uneaten turkey and cheese sandwich in my daughter’s bag. Soft bread. Mild cheese. The faint scent of opportunity.

    There was no debate. No internal summit. I ate it immediately, gratefully, with the kind of focus normally reserved for religious experience. It was, without exaggeration, the best moment of my day.

    This is Sandwich Serendipity—the ecstatic discovery of unclaimed food, experienced not as leftovers but as providence. The afflicted man does not assess freshness, provenance, or caloric cost. He does not negotiate with tomorrow’s intentions. He receives the sandwich as a gift from the universe and responds with immediate devotion.

    You can moralize this if you like. I won’t. The joy is too pure.

    But it does raise an inconvenient question: how does a man like this—susceptible to ambush by deli meat and porridge bread—promise a physician that he will lose twenty pounds? On what authority? On which version of himself?

    Because the Frogman would not have eaten that sandwich.

    The Frogman would have zipped the bag, closed the kitchen, and gone to bed with the calm of a man aligned with his values. The Frogman does not forage. He does not improvise. He does not surrender.

    I put the watch on anyway.

    It sits on my wrist like a massive, indestructible accusation—resin, digital, exact. It broadcasts courage. It implies discipline. It suggests a man who has made his decisions and is living inside them.

    And beneath it, quietly, is the truth:

    I am not that man.

    Not yet.

  • The Horological Substitution Effect

    The Horological Substitution Effect

    I’ve long suspected that my late-night commiseration with other men about watches was not fellowship but camouflage. We called it passion—dial textures, lume performance, the moral superiority of mechanical over quartz—but beneath the jargon was something quieter and more embarrassing: loneliness.

    Lately, a more unsettling thought has taken hold. My transformation into the Frogman—the resin-clad apostle of atomic time—may not be about horology at all. It may be an attempt to imagine myself as a man who exudes the kind of charisma that draws an abundance of real friendships. Not forum acquaintances. Not usernames. Real people who might, inexplicably, choose to spend time with me.

    I have a name for this pathology: the Horological Substitution Effect. It’s the quiet exchange a man makes when real connection feels too risky—he trades the messy, unpredictable labor of friendship for the controlled ritual of online hobby talk. The watch becomes a proxy for intimacy. The forum becomes a stage where vulnerability is replaced with specifications. It looks like connection. It feels like connection. It isn’t.

    My suspicions hardened into something closer to fact when my wife began sending me short videos of comedy skits about a subject that has no business being funny: the epidemic of friendless adult men. The jokes land with the precision of an indictment. Get off your ass. Build a life that includes other human beings. Not for amusement. For survival. For the family.

    The problem is I don’t know how.

    My friendships didn’t end dramatically. They dissolved. Quietly. Gradually. Like hair circling a drain until there’s nothing left to catch. I haven’t met a friend for a movie and a meal in over a decade. Solitude didn’t arrive as a crisis; it moved in, rearranged the furniture, and declared itself permanent. Worse, it feels justified. I operate under a private assumption so efficient it barely needs words: no one would choose this. Why would they? Friendship is an investment, and I’ve already decided I’m a bad bet. Rejection is neatly avoided by never extending the invitation. It’s surrender, dressed up as self-respect.

    If I trace the origin, I land somewhere around 2005. Dinner with my cousin in downtown Los Angeles. Afterward, he wanted me to follow him to Silver Lake for coffee and more conversation. It wasn’t the original plan, just a spontaneous thought. I felt the anxiety spike, sharp and immediate. Dinner had been the contract; anything beyond it felt like a breach. I went along, but badly. He noticed. He never asked again. He went on to build a life dense with friendships, a calendar that requires pruning. I refined a different skill: leaving early. It’s part of my neurosis and a condition called Extension Anxiety Reflex: the immediate surge of discomfort triggered when a social encounter exceeds its original scope, prompting withdrawal, compliance-with-resistance, or emotional shutdown. The reflex prioritizes escape over connection, often at the exact moment intimacy might begin.

    I inherited the inclination to not maintain friendships. My parents spent the last decades of their lives without friends. My father outsourced social contact through his second wife but never rebuilt what he’d lost. My mother claimed acquaintances the way a diner claims rapport with a waiter—polite, transactional, ultimately imaginary. Loneliness wasn’t diagnosed in our house; it was modeled. It wore the mask of normalcy. I didn’t choose to avoid friendships so much as follow a script. 

    My parents weren’t bad people. They were self-involved, chemically dependent, emotionally unavailable. My father once told me, with the bluntness of a man who had stopped editing himself, that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t have children. People recoil at that. I didn’t. It sounded like a sentence I’d already been living. My mother oscillated between warmth and collapse, her depressions so severe she vanished into hospitals while I vanished into my grandparents’ home. Childhood became less a place to grow than a place to endure.

    So I adapted. I became self-sufficient. I entertained myself. I removed the need for others before they could remove themselves from me. Isolation wasn’t a failure; it was a system—efficient, predictable, safe.

    In my twenties, desire disrupted the system. I wanted relationships, so I built a version of myself that could secure them. Talkative. Confident. Funny. A man with timing. It worked. Women believed in the performance. So did I. But the performance had no depth. It couldn’t support anything real. Relationships collapsed under the combined weight of my anxiety and self-absorption. I could attract; I could not attach. I had charisma without the anchor: the ability to generate attraction through confidence, humor, and social fluency while lacking the emotional grounding required to sustain a relationship. I could initiate connection but could not stabilize it, resulting in repeated relational collapse.

    That hasn’t entirely changed. I can still be charming in controlled doses. Colleagues enjoy me in passing. I generate conversation the way a barista generates foam—pleasant, temporary, decorative. But conversation is not friendship. Friendship requires escalation. Risk. The unthinkable act of asking someone to step outside the script and spend time with you. That’s where the system fails. I assume the answer will be no, so I never ask the question. It’s a perfect loop: I avoid rejection by guaranteeing isolation.

    This morning, sitting in my car waiting to take my daughters to school, I nearly performed another ritual. I reached for my watch, ready to photograph it for Instagram—a small sacrifice to the gods of trivial validation. For a moment, I considered it. Then the idea turned on me. The absurdity was too clean to ignore. As if a watch photo could compensate for a hollow social life. As if attention could masquerade as connection. It felt like eating sugar to cure hunger and calling the crash nourishment.

    So I sat there instead.

    I thought about those videos my wife keeps sending. They’re funny the way a diagnosis is funny—because it’s accurate. She’s worried. She should be.

    The truth is not complicated. It’s just unflattering. I have built a life optimized to avoid risk, and in doing so, I have optimized it to avoid connection. And here’s the irony that would be funny if it weren’t so exact: as the self-appointed Frogman—the man of action, the avatar of decisiveness—I am acutely aware of the contradiction. The Frogman is not a watch; it is an aspiration. Like Steely Dan’s suburbanite Deacon, dreaming of escape through saxophone and whiskey, I imagine a version of myself that moves, acts, engages—a man who shows up, who serves, who answers the call.

    A man who doesn’t leave early.

  • The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    No one pulls you aside and says it plainly, so you discover it the hard way: approaching your mid-sixties is not a dignified procession but a slow-motion loss of fluency. Not in language—you still speak English—but in the dialect of the present. You drop references like breadcrumbs—Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, All in the Family—and watch them land with the soft thud of irrelevance. Blank faces greet you like unresponsive kiosks. You begin to understand that your cultural currency has been quietly demonetized.

    The misalignment spreads. You assume appliances are built with the stubborn dignity of the past, only to discover they’re engineered like disposable cutlery. You touch them wrong and they sulk; you look at them sternly and they fracture. Somewhere along the way, durability became a nostalgic rumor.

    Then the body joins the conspiracy. You can ingest oceans of omega-3s, lecture yourself about triglycerides, and still your short-term memory leaks like a cracked vessel. You misplace socks—on the couch. You forget the final episode of the crime series you were definitely going to finish. You overlook the Costco-sized battalion of trash bags stationed in the garage. You grind tomorrow’s coffee beans and wake up convinced you didn’t. Each lapse is trivial; together they assemble a quiet indictment. The evidence accumulates like unopened mail—thick, accusatory, impossible to ignore.

    At some point you recognize the composite image: a man slightly out of phase with the world, blinking as if the lighting has changed without notice. You flash your senior discount at the box office with a strange mix of pride and disbelief, like a badge you didn’t apply for but now must wear.

    Of course, you resist. You lift. You count protein with monastic zeal—two hundred grams a day, as if amino acids can negotiate with time. You clang kettlebells in the garage and polish your physique into a version that might pass for forty-four under forgiving conditions. It’s a valiant performance—convincing in daylight, flattering in mirrors.

    Then night driving happens.

    Depth perception turns traitor. Headlights arrive as surgical instruments. Streetlamps slice into your retinas with the precision of interrogation. The illusion collapses in a single commute. Biology, unimpressed by your discipline, resumes control of the narrative.

    And so you become, whether you like it or not, a public artifact of time passing—a walking reminder to the young that the clock is not theoretical. To them, you are the human equivalent of a neighbor’s dog barking at six in the morning: persistent, a little unnerving, impossible to mute. You do not mean to be instructive, but you are.

    Faced with this, I did what any reasonable man would do: I recruited a muse. The narrator of “Deacon Blues”—that suburban alchemist who turns disappointment into velvet—became my companion. I gave him a name, because a man like that demands one: Deacon. Each night he reinvents himself as a nocturnal artist, steeped in jazz and whiskey, sustained by the elegance of his own delusions.

    I don’t drink. I don’t haunt smoky rooms. My vice is different, and it is, in its own way, just as theatrical. I cosplay.

    My chosen persona is Action Man—the British cousin of G.I. Joe, the hero of my childhood in Nairobi, where toy stores stocked imperial variations of American fantasies. In those days, I directed epics in the backyard. I rigged a clothes hanger to a fishing line strung between trees and sent my plastic hero ziplining into danger, rescuing hostages from villains who existed only because I needed them to. The yard teemed with chameleons and carpenter bees; it might as well have been a jungle. I was the director, the stunt coordinator, the audience. Action Man never hesitated. Action Man did not forget where he put his socks.

    Now I find myself wondering whether my recent conversion to the G-Shock Frogman is less a purchase than a recall notice from that earlier life. A resin watch, oversized and unapologetic, arrives like a toy that learned how to tell time with atomic authority. Five hundred dollars for a device that looks like it escaped a childhood—but feels, on the wrist, like a command.

    The timing is suspicious. Irrelevance looms. Retirement whispers. The culture shrugs. And my unconscious, unimpressed by all of it, reaches backward and drags something forward. I did not want to dim. I wanted ignition. I wanted to be in my prime, or at least in the vicinity of it. I wanted, absurdly and sincerely, to be a man of action.

    So here I am, somewhere between Deacon’s barstool and a backyard zipline, imagining a descent into danger, hostages to save, a purpose that announces itself clearly and requires no explanation. The ravine is imaginary. The urgency is not.

  • From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    For decades I carried a tidy prejudice: digital time was vulgar—soulless, phone-adjacent, a betrayal of my analog faith. I was a man of brushed steel and sweeping seconds, a parishioner in the Church of the Diver. Quartz was for commuters. Resin was for children.

    Then I strapped on the G‑Shock Frogman and looked down.

    The numbers were unapologetic—big, bright, exact. No squinting, no interpretive dance with minute hands. Just time, delivered with atomic certainty. It wasn’t charming. It was correct. And I found myself loving it in the way you love a tool that does not negotiate.

    The comparison arrived uninvited: the muscle cars of my youth—Mustangs, Barracudas—beautiful, yes, but also squeaking relics with climate control that felt like a rumor. You don’t drive them so much as you endure them. Then you slide into a modern car and the world seals itself around you—quiet, precise, obedient. That’s what the Frogman felt like. I hadn’t upgraded my watch; I had defected to a better century.

    Here’s the heresy: I now resent my analog watches. I resent the squint, the guesswork, the artisanal inaccuracy sold at luxury prices. Why, exactly, is it acceptable that a watch costing thousands loses minutes while this rubberized amphibian syncs itself with the sky?

    I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I no longer pretend to be in charge of it. What I do know is this: the Frogman isn’t leaving my wrist.

    Colleagues of the watch faith, witness a Tribal Migration Event: the moment a collector crosses a border he swore was permanent—mechanical to quartz, analog to digital—and discovers he prefers the other side. It begins as a fling, a novelty purchase, a “let’s see.” It ends as a relocation. The shock is not the watch; it’s the realization that your identity was a costume with good lighting.

    The casualties are lined up in a box. My high-end Seiko divers—polished, dignified, expensively nostalgic—sit like former lovers who’ve been ghosted without explanation.

    “How could you?” they seem to ask.

    “You’re dead to me,” I reply, with a briskness that surprises us all.

    At this point the relationship is no longer metaphorical. It has crossed into the psychological, possibly the spiritual. There may be paperwork.

    Let me concede the obvious: on a man my age, the Frogman is not flattering. It doesn’t whisper style; it shouts evidence. It looks like something a concerned relative might mention to a professional. And yet—there it remains, immovable.

    Because something happened.

    Not a gentle drift. Not a tasteful adjustment.

    A break.

    I felt it first in small betrayals of habit. My appetite tightened its belt. Three meals, no raids. No twilight foraging expeditions in the kitchen under the pretense of “just checking.” Focus sharpened. Discipline, that elusive houseguest, unpacked its bags.

    Then the house itself changed.

    No announcements were made, but the atmosphere shifted. The eye-rolling ceased. The quiet demotion—from patriarch to eccentric roommate—reversed itself without ceremony. I had, somehow, acquired gravity. Decisions began to look like decisions rather than impulses in costume.

    And then—this is the part that refuses explanation—my nightmares stopped.

    Not improved. Not reduced.

    Stopped.

    For years they ran nightly, a private cinema of dread with excellent attendance. Then the Frogman arrived and the theater closed. Lights out. Eviction. Now I sleep. I dream in color. I jog through fields of berries and, in a voice suspiciously like John Lennon, I sing, “I am the Frogman.”

    Explain that.

    A resin watch—battery, rubber strap, digital readout—accomplished what therapy, discipline, and time politely declined to do. Part of me wants to accept the miracle without inquiry. When something rescues you from overeating, ridicule, and nocturnal terror, you don’t interrogate it. You nod. You say thank you. You keep the artifact close and your questions at a respectful distance.

    If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
    If you don’t understand the blessing, don’t analyze it.

    Unfortunately, I’m not built for reverence without curiosity. I want mechanisms. I want causes. I want a diagram that explains how a mass-produced object rewired my habits, upgraded my household rank, and shut down my night terrors like a switch.

    That investigation is what lies ahead—the study of what I can only call the Frogman Elixir Effect: a transformation so complete the purchaser no longer quite exists.

    I am not wearing the watch.

    The watch is wearing me. I am the Frogman.

    The migration is complete.

  • The Frogman Conversion: When Lightning Strikes

    The Frogman Conversion: When Lightning Strikes

    One of the great American confessions disguised as a groove, “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan, is not really about jazz or whiskey or late-night dignity. It’s about a suburban man who has quietly accepted his own smallness and now anesthetizes himself with a cinematic fantasy: he is, in his mind, an outlaw artist—unbought, ungoverned, beautifully doomed. In reality, he’s a man in a cul-de-sac rehearsing rebellion between errands.

    The song doesn’t mock him; it does something crueler and more elegant—it turns his self-deception into something hauntingly beautiful, a melody so smooth you almost miss the fact that it’s scoring a life half-lived. That’s why it lingers. It flatters the listener even as it exposes him.

    The song’s narrator is what we might call a Pinot Noir Outlaw: a man who performs a life of danger and artistic defiance through carefully curated indulgences—jazz, late-night drinks, vague melancholy—while remaining safely embedded in routine and privilege.

    And I’m not exempt. I recognize the man immediately because I am another citizen pacing the enclosure of my own habits, staging elaborate internal revolutions that never quite breach the walls. I don’t crave improvement; improvement is bureaucratic. I crave demolition. I want the current version of myself revoked, replaced, struck by lightning and rewritten. Spare me the incremental victories—slightly better blood pressure, a more respectable triglyceride count, LDL nudged into compliance. That’s not transformation; that’s paperwork.

    What I want is upheaval. I want to molt like something ancient and impatient. I want to peel off the familiar skin—cowardice, inertia, the soft compromises I’ve negotiated with mediocrity—and step out of it raw and newly assembled. Someone decisive. Someone difficult to bargain with. A man who doesn’t soften at the edges when it matters. A man who doesn’t flinch.

    But because that kind of transformation rarely arrives—no lightning bolt, no divine summons—we improvise. We cosplay. We assemble identities the way children assemble Halloween costumes: a prop here, a posture there, a new narrative stitched together from objects that flatter us. We don’t become new men; we accessorize the old one and call it progress.

    If you’re a watch collector, the illusion is particularly seductive. For twenty years, I lived inside a very specific mythology: polished steel, mechanical divers, the ritual of winding and setting, the quiet romance of gears and springs. I told myself I belonged to a certain tribe—men of discernment, men of patience, men who appreciated craft. It was a pleasing fiction.

    Then, in February of 2026, at sixty-four—an age when one is expected to consolidate, not detonate—I betrayed my own aesthetic. I bought the watch I had resisted for over a decade: the G-Shock Frogman. I had dismissed it for years as a resin aberration, a digital eyesore, a violation of everything I claimed to value. And yet, in a moment that felt less like a decision and more like possession, I ordered it from Sakura Watches in Japan.

    The acquisition was not elegant. It was a bureaucratic gauntlet. Emails. Texts. Tracking updates that read like dispatches from a stalled expedition. A sudden hostage situation in a Long Beach DHL facility until I paid a $100 ransom dressed up as an import fee. By the time the box arrived, I assumed the experience had poisoned the well. Surely the watch would arrive tainted by annoyance.

    It didn’t.

    I strapped it on, and something immediate and irrational occurred. Not admiration—bonding. A click deeper than preference. It triggered a memory I hadn’t summoned in years: the 1970s TV show Shazam!, where a boy named Billy Batson speaks a word—Shazam!—and a bolt of lightning splits the sky, transforming him into Captain Marvel. Child becomes hero. Hesitation becomes action.

    The Frogman was my word. Not spoken, but worn.

    And here is the part that resists tidy explanation: I did not feel like a man who had purchased a watch. I felt like a man who had crossed a threshold. As if some internal lever had been pulled without my consent. The old aesthetic, the old loyalties—they didn’t argue; they receded. Something else advanced.

    Call it delusion if you want. Call it consumer theater. But the experience had a force to it, a momentum that mocked the idea of careful, rational choice. It felt like being drafted by a version of myself I hadn’t authorized.

    I don’t know what comes next. I only know this: the change did not ask permission, and I did not resist it.