Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The House at the Edge of the Woods

    The House at the Edge of the Woods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So I left.

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

    So by 2007, I pivoted to kettlebells.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That’s a life recalibrated.

  • The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    I remember the Landline Era with a kind of reverence that borders on disbelief. Back then, I inhabited a different self. Those heavy rotary phones were not appliances; they were portals. You dialed into a world where connection had weight, where conversations stretched for hours until your ear burned raw against the receiver. When the phone rang, it didn’t interrupt life—it elevated it. The call carried you from ordinary time into something charged and consequential. Someone wanted you. Someone chose you. That alone conferred meaning.

    Even the timing of a call had its own grammar. A phone ringing before dawn meant dread. I was eleven on December 31, 1972, when my best friend Marc Warren called early to deliver news that felt too large for our age: Our beloved baseball hero Roberto Clemente had died in a plane crash while bringing aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The call itself became part of the tragedy—a ritual of shared shock, proof that grief demanded a witness.

    In my late twenties, after I moved from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first full-time teaching job, the phone remained a lifeline. Friends scattered across Denver, Eureka, and back home would call, or I would call them, and we would talk—really talk—for two hours or more. We told stories not just to report events but to interpret them, to make sense of who we were becoming. The underlying message was never spoken, yet it saturated everything: you matter enough for this kind of time. Your life deserves this level of attention. I never questioned my worth because it was constantly affirmed in the currency of sustained conversation.

    By the early 2000s, the erosion had begun. Calls shrank to thirty minutes, sometimes less. You could feel the shift before you could name it. Texting arrived first, then the slow takeover of online life—relationships diluted into fragments, attention splintered across endless digital surfaces. The word “engagement” was repurposed into something thin and transactional. It came to mean clicks, likes, metrics—fleeting signals that mimicked connection without ever achieving it. No surge of digital attention could rival the steady gravity of a two-hour conversation in which your existence was never in doubt.

    In what I think of as the Parasocial Era, self-worth became unstable, tied to numbers that refreshed by the second. Real relationships receded as people adapted to simulations of connection. You watched others contort themselves to stay visible—posting constantly, performing outrage, dispensing optimism like a drug, chasing relevance as if it were oxygen. It was easy to recognize the pathology in others and harder to admit its presence in yourself. That recognition, uncomfortable as it was, pushed me to step back from social media, though not entirely free of its pull.

    Around 2006, I started a blog about my obsession with radios. It wasn’t really about radios. It was about reaching out, about recreating some version of the connection I had lost. When I joined social media a few years later, I found myself tracking engagement numbers with a vigilance that bordered on compulsion. Each fluctuation felt like a verdict. For the first time, I didn’t take my self-worth for granted; I monitored it, measured it, doubted it.

    Meanwhile, the practical demands of life closed in. Raising twin daughters, managing time, keeping everything afloat—these became the organizing principles of my days. Friendships didn’t end so much as they withered. Meeting someone in person required planning, travel, coordination—all the friction that digital life had taught me to avoid. Plans were made and then canceled. Illness intervened. Weeks turned into years. Absence became normal.

    I understand now that these simulated connections cannot supply what they promise. They offer stimulation, not sustenance. They mimic affirmation but cannot anchor it. I wish I had protected a handful of friendships with more stubbornness, more intention. Not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity—for myself, and for the people closest to me. A man with real friendships is a steadier presence at home. Deprive him of those, and something essential erodes.

    I don’t pretend there’s a way back to the Landline Era. I don’t see myself as a casualty either. I made choices. I accepted the bargain of convenience and efficiency, believing I could preserve deep connection while embracing frictionless substitutes. I believed I could have my cake and eat it too. That belief was naïve. The system was designed to flatter that illusion.

    Still, I return to that Sunday morning in 1972. A tragedy had occurred, and my friend needed to tell me—not broadcast it, not post it, not signal it to a crowd, but tell me. Because I mattered. The call was the message.

  • Grazing My Way to Nowhere—and Learning to Stop

    Grazing My Way to Nowhere—and Learning to Stop

    At sixty-four, I’m attempting a late-life renovation project: replace a few durable bad habits with better ones before they fossilize into personality. Chief among them is my relationship with hunger, which I’ve treated for decades as a medical emergency requiring immediate intervention—preferably in the form of a calorie-dense snack. I was raised to believe that hunger is unnecessary suffering, a small indignity that can be smothered with a tasty morsel or two. If I feel it, I fix it. If I might feel it later, I preempt it. I’ve spent years grazing my way out of imaginary famines, topping off the tank before the harrowing ordeal of being without food for four hours. I call this Preemptive Feeding Syndrome: the habitual practice of eating in anticipation of future hunger, based on an exaggerated fear of discomfort, resulting in chronic overconsumption and stalled weight management.

    This approach has produced a familiar cycle. I’ve lost weight half a dozen times—descending heroically from 245 to 200—only to regain it with equal conviction. The pattern is almost admirable in its symmetry. The problem wasn’t the diet. The problem was that the moment hunger appeared, I panicked. I treated every pang like a fire alarm. And when you live that way, fat loss becomes a series of interruptions, each one justified, each one fatal to the larger goal.

    At 231 pounds as I write this, with a modest but persistent halo of fat around my midsection and joints that file quiet complaints during exercises like the Farmer’s Walk, I’ve reached a conclusion that is both obvious and inconvenient: the decisive factor in my weight loss is not willpower. It is interpretation. Specifically, how I interpret hunger.

    For most of my life, I’ve read hunger as danger. Something is wrong. Fix it now. But I’m beginning to suspect that hunger is not a malfunction; it’s a message. Often, it’s the message that the system is finally doing what I’ve asked it to do—burn stored energy. The problem isn’t the signal. It’s my reaction to it.

    So I’m attempting a small but radical shift: treat hunger as information, not alarm.

    A brief pang is not a crisis. It’s a wave. It rises, it lingers, it passes—especially if I don’t chase it down with peanut butter and honey. When I leave it alone, something surprising happens: it weakens. When I don’t treat it as a threat, it stops behaving like one. In that shift—from emergency to data point—I gain leverage. Meals taste better because I arrive at them honestly hungry, not pre-satiated by a trail of defensive snacking. My appetite becomes cleaner, less frantic. What once felt urgent now feels negotiable.

    None of this came naturally. It had to be learned, which is to say, unlearned first. Each time I resist the reflex to patch over a pang with calories, I loosen the old wiring and lay down a better circuit. It’s slow work. It’s also effective. My threshold for discomfort has widened. I’m less reactive, more deliberate. My body will follow, but my mind has to lead.

    Frank Zane understood this decades ago. He treated hunger not as an enemy but as evidence—proof that his diet was doing its job. He didn’t try to abolish hunger; he put it in its place. Years later, he still eats with restraint, having trained himself to live comfortably inside that signal. That’s the model: not a life without hunger, but a life in which hunger has been demoted from tyrant to messenger.

    If I can complete this renovation—if I can rewire my response to hunger—I solve the central problem. If I don’t, no amount of planning, tracking, or good intentions will save me from another well-executed relapse.

  • G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    I’m reluctant to make a video about my G-Shock saga and how atomic time cured me of my restless quest for timekeeping.

    That’s not a boast. It’s a problem.

    In a hobby that runs on dissatisfaction—the faint itch that your mechanical watch is almost right but not quite—content thrives on unrest. There’s always another model to chase, another micro-adjustment to obsess over, another reason to believe the next acquisition will finally close the gap. Discontent is the engine. It powers the reviews, the comparisons, the late-night rationalizations dressed up as research.

    And then along comes atomic time, which does something unforgivable: it removes the gap.

    My G-Shocks are correct. Not “close enough,” not “within spec,” but correct in a way that leaves nothing to argue about. The second hand doesn’t drift. The numbers don’t wander. The watch does its job with a kind of quiet authority that makes further discussion feel like talking to fill the silence.

    That silence is the problem.

    Because what, exactly, am I supposed to say now? I can’t keep making variations of the same video—“I’m still happy,” “Still accurate,” “Nothing has changed except my continued satisfaction.” That’s not content. That’s a man reporting, week after week, that the sun rose on schedule.

    Making such a video would amount to a confession: the story has reached its logical conclusion. The quest for perfect timekeeping—the narrative arc that justified the channel—has ended, not with a triumphant crescendo, but with a polite, digital beep.

    And endings are bad for business.

    The only way forward would be to pivot—to talk about something other than watches. But let’s be honest: people didn’t subscribe for my thoughts on life, philosophy, or the alarming moral implications of oatmeal. They came for watches. Leave the watches behind, and you risk discovering that the audience was never there for you—only for the object you orbited.

    So yes, making such a video is terrifying.

    Not because it’s difficult to make, but because it points, with uncomfortable clarity, to my limitations. It suggests that I’ve solved the very problem that made me interesting to watch. It hints—quietly but persistently—that the channel may have been a story with a natural endpoint all along.

    And I’m not sure I’m ready to film that ending.

  • Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Last night I dreamed I lived in a place so stripped of imagination it had the confidence to call itself Desert, Arizona—as if the planners had looked at a map, shrugged, and said, “Why embellish? We’re in the desert. That’s our name.”

    In Desert, I was a bodybuilder. Not one of the marble statues you see in magazines, but a working stiff with a barbell and delusions of parity. My friends—my friends, I thought—were Serge Nubret and Robbie Robinson in their prime. Thirty years old, luminous, carved out of some superior mineral. We spent our afternoons at a man-made lake, discussing training splits, protein intake, and the eternal question of carbs—as if the fate of civilization hinged on oatmeal versus steak.

    For a while, I forgot who they were. That was the charm. They were just Serge and Robbie—men with opinions, not monuments with lats.

    Then I made the mistake that ruins most good things: I noticed the hierarchy. They were far beyond me in achievement. 

    One afternoon, the thought hit me with the force of a missed squat: I told them I didn’t belong. These were titans. I was a reasonably assembled civilian. I said as much—praised their greatness, confessed my inadequacy, pledged to work ten times harder to catch up.

    And just like that, the air changed.

    They didn’t argue. They didn’t correct me. They simply withdrew, as if I had violated an unspoken clause in the friendship agreement: Do not turn us into symbols. The moment I stopped seeing them as people and started seeing them as achievements, the spell broke. They eased me out of the circle with the quiet efficiency of men accustomed to dropping dead weight.

    A replacement arrived with the punctuality of a cautionary tale: a young Englishman in his early twenties, newly employed as a high school teacher, brimming with the kind of metabolic optimism that borders on arrogance. He made gains at a rate that suggested divine favoritism. Within weeks, he surpassed me. Within days of that, he lost interest in me. He graduated upward—into the company of Serge and Robbie—leaving me where all the surpassed are left: behind, holding yesterday’s program.

    That’s when I knew I had to leave Desert.

    My in-laws were waiting to drive me to Prescott Valley, a destination that sounded like a compromise. Before the journey, we stopped at an overnight smoothie station—an oasis for the nutritionally anxious. Imagine a row of blenders stretching into the horizon, bins of organic ingredients arranged like offerings, and travelers preparing their liquid penance before braving the heat.

    I approached the blender with the confidence of a man who has learned nothing.

    I added fruit. Then vegetables. Then protein powder. Then more of everything, because moderation is for people who have already succeeded. The machine whirred, strained, and then produced something biblical: a green, algae-like tendril that rose from the blender and clawed at the ceiling, as if trying to escape my dietary philosophy.

    The proprietor—a matronly woman in an apron who had seen too many men confuse excess with virtue—fixed me with a look that could curdle whey. “You overloaded it,” she said, with the calm authority of someone accustomed to cleaning up after ambition.

    Nearby, bodybuilder and YouTuber Greg Doucette produced a perfect smoothie with surgical precision and regarded me the way a pilot regards turbulence: an inconvenience best ignored. His competence was an indictment.

    We got in the car.

    As we drove away from Desert, the realization settled in: this wasn’t a relocation. It was a retreat. I had committed the small, accumulating sins of a man who wants the result without fully respecting the method. I ate buckwheat groats when I should have eaten steak and eggs. I entertained carbs with a softness bordering on affection. I mistook enthusiasm for discipline and variety for virtue.

    But the deeper failure wasn’t nutritional. It was philosophical. I had tried to stand among the great by admiring them as great, which is the surest way to exile yourself. I had reduced people to their achievements, and in doing so, reduced myself to a spectator.

    In Desert, that’s a disqualifying offense.

    And so I left, not because I was banished, but because I finally understood the terms of my own eviction: in a city that rewards precision, I had been imprecise—in diet, in discipline, and worst of all, in how I saw other people.

  • Why My G-Shock Saga Refuses to Become a YouTube Video

    Why My G-Shock Saga Refuses to Become a YouTube Video

    What follows is the essay that will serve as the basis for my YouTube video explaining why no such video can, in fact, be made from it.

    Six weeks ago, I received my G-Shock Frogman and promptly lost my mind. Not gradually. Not with dignified hesitation. I went down hard. The more I studied its lopsided, industrial architecture, the more I found myself staring at it the way one stares at brutalist buildings—confused at first, then strangely moved. Black resin, thick as a tire wall, sat on my wrist with the quiet confidence of a machine that does not care if you approve of it. No one told me industrial black resin could look so beautiful. 

    This startled me. I had long filed resin under “gym timer” and “Office Space despair”—the sort of material worn by men who have stopped expecting things from life. What kind of man sidelines a stable of expensive mechanical divers—curated, polished, lovingly rationalized—for a slab of molded polymer that costs a fraction of the least expensive piece in the box? The answer, apparently, is me. Something shifted. I can’t explain it. It may take years, or therapy, or both.

    Naturally, I doubled down.

    Intoxicated by the Frogman, I added the GW-7900 Rescue, a watch that costs about one-fifth as much and delivers five times the daily utility. It is padded, legible, and indifferent to my previous standards. Its numerals are large enough to read without squinting, which, at this stage of life, qualifies as a luxury feature. It became my daily wearer within a week, displacing watches that once required white gloves and a sense of occasion.

    Still unsatisfied, I escalated. The Mudman GW-9500 arrived next, with numerals that resemble municipal signage. If the Rescue was readable, the Mudman is unavoidable. Together, the three form what I have come to call—without irony—the Hero Triad.

    All three are Multiband-6 with Tough Solar, which means they spend their nights quietly consulting the atomic clock in Fort Collins and correcting themselves with a level of discipline I have never achieved in any area of my life. The Frogman and Mudman prefer to be placed carefully—on a desk, or hanging from my T-bar like well-behaved instruments. The Rescue, by contrast, syncs wherever it pleases. It has the personality of a straight-A student who does not need supervision.

    These three watches now consume over ninety percent of my wrist time. My mechanical divers sit in their box like retired generals, decorated but irrelevant. When I told my wife this, she paused and asked, “Wrist time? Who uses that term?”

    I do. We do. We count wrist time the way bodybuilders count macros—with vigilance, denial, and occasional self-deception. And lately, my wrist time has been taken over by G-Shock.

    I’ve written about this infatuation on my blog, but my YouTube audience has made something clear: words are no longer enough. We live in an age where ideas must be performed, not merely stated. If I want to be understood, I must produce a video.

    And yet, I cannot make this video.

    First, the landscape is saturated. There are already hundreds of G-Shock videos—reviews, tutorials, warnings about imminent discontinuations delivered with the urgency of a public safety alert. To add my voice would be to echo the chorus, and I have no desire to hear myself harmonizing with better singers.

    Second, I refuse to become an evangelist. I am not here to declare a holy war against Seiko, Tudor, or Omega. This is not a zero-sum game. I have not betrayed mechanical watches with a Judas Iscariot kiss and fled into the desert with a resin accomplice. I still believe in their beauty. I simply no longer rely on them for giving me accurate time. That distinction is subtle, and subtlety does not perform well on YouTube.

    Third, I lack a coherent explanation for my conversion. I cannot tell you whether this shift is driven by age, by proximity to retirement, or by a growing intolerance for approximation in a world already saturated with it. Perhaps I simply escaped Seikotraz—the self-imposed prison of mechanical devotion—and ran toward the first open door. Whatever the cause, I am not yet qualified to narrate it.

    Fourth, my story is not unique. Millions discovered G-Shock long before I arrived, breathless and late, to report that it works. To stand before an audience and announce this would reduce me to a background character—another man discovering electricity and insisting on a press conference.

    Fifth—and most damning—this narrative reads like a watch downgrade. The story people want is ascent: the climb, the conquest, the triumphant pose at the summit. I have done the opposite. I have descended, calmly, into black resin. I have traded filet mignon for a protein bar and now stand before you insisting it is not only sufficient, but superior. This is not a heroic arc. It is a dietary confession. And possibly a sign of a pathology. 

    So no, I cannot make this video. 

    My escape from Seikotraz may or may not be complete. What I can promise is this: when the next chapter reveals itself—and it will—I’ll report back, possibly with less confusion, but no guarantees. Aren’t you glad I didn’t make this video? 

  • Dental Work Without Anesthesia (and With Delusions of Bravery)

    Dental Work Without Anesthesia (and With Delusions of Bravery)

    This afternoon my dentist of twenty-two years—practically a family archivist of my molars—announced, with the calm authority of a man who has seen too much enamel decay, “Let’s handle this now before your roots start making public appearances.” Moments later, he was layering composite over two bottom teeth that had clearly lived a full and reckless life.

    No anesthesia. Apparently this was to be a character-building exercise.

    The procedure itself was a test of endurance disguised as routine maintenance. A styrofoam block was wedged into my mouth, prying it open to a degree that felt less medical and more architectural, as if my jaw were being renovated from the inside. Swallowing became a distant memory. Breathing required strategy. Time slowed to a crawl. For a Grade-3 claustrophobe, it was less a dental visit and more a hostage situation with excellent lighting.

    Was I brave? Hardly. Internally, I was negotiating terms of surrender.

    But outwardly—this is important—I looked composed. Even heroic. On my wrist sat my G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000, a hulking instrument of indifference to human weakness, radiating the sort of rugged competence I was very much not feeling. If courage is partly theater, then I delivered a convincing performance.

  • The Vegan Diet That Actually Behaves

    The Vegan Diet That Actually Behaves

    Most vegan diets chase variety. This one chases something else: predictability. I wanted a plan that supports gut health, delivers about 150 grams of protein, and stays around 2,300 calories—without turning every meal into a digestive gamble. The result is not a celebration of abundance. It’s a system that behaves.

    The guiding idea is simple. Every meal is built from three parts: a stable starch, a low-residue protein, and a measured dose of fiber. The aim is not to flood the gut with “healthy” inputs, but to give it clear, consistent instructions.

    Breakfast is structured but quiet. I start with well-cooked buckwheat groats—soft enough to digest without resistance. Into that goes a scoop of pea-and-rice protein powder, half a banana, a teaspoon of psyllium husk, and a small pour of unsweetened soy milk. It’s not exciting, but it is dependable. The psyllium adds just enough cohesion, the banana binds, and the protein arrives without the usual legume side effects.

    Lunch simplifies things even further. Oatmeal becomes the base—again, in a controlled portion. I add another scoop of protein powder, then rotate between half a banana and a small serving of applesauce. A modest amount of soy milk smooths it out. That’s it. No stacking of proteins, no fiber fireworks. Lunch is designed to send a single, clear signal to the body: digest, don’t negotiate.

    Dinner does the heavy lifting. This is the anchor meal, the one that determines how the next morning unfolds. A plate of white rice and red potatoes forms the foundation—arguably the most reliable pairing for digestive stability. On top of that, I add about six ounces of extra-firm tofu and a side of sautéed zucchini or carrots. Everything is cooked soft. Everything is deliberate. A tablespoon of olive oil finishes the plate, not for indulgence, but for smooth passage.

    If I need something at night, I keep it controlled: half a banana, a tablespoon of peanut butter, and a small glass of soy milk. Enough to take the edge off, not enough to start a second digestive act.

    Across the day, the numbers line up: roughly 2,300 calories, about 150 grams of protein, and a moderate fiber intake that stays in the zone where things hold together instead of falling apart. The real achievement, though, isn’t the macros—it’s the consistency. Meals repeat. Ingredients overlap. The system stabilizes.

    There are rules. Beans and lentils are out as daily staples—not because they’re unhealthy, but because they introduce too much variability. Raw vegetables are unnecessary friction. Fiber is measured, not celebrated. Variety is limited on purpose. This is a diet built on the belief that clarity beats complexity.

    Is it boring? Often. But boredom, in this context, is a kind of luxury. It means nothing is going wrong. It means your body is no longer improvising. It means the system is working.

    Can I sustain my health and muscle on a plant-based diet? What if I feel weak? To be honest, I have two contingency plans: I may have to add a scoop of Greek yogurt a day, and replace the vegan protein powder with whey protein powder. That will be the tentative part of the journey.