Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Return to the Womb

    Return to the Womb

    I’m three months shy of turning sixty-four, which means I’m old enough to know better and still young enough to entertain delusions. This is a warning to the under-sixties: prepare yourselves. At some point in your late fifties, strange desires start slithering into your psyche like vines through the cracks of a neglected greenhouse. With every new creak of the knees and fresh batch of funeral notices, a part of you will yearn for what I call the Return to the Womb.

    No, not literally—though if you could slide back into a warm amniotic bath and unplug the Wi-Fi, you just might. I’m talking about a psychological regression: the desperate, half-sane longing to be swaddled in tropical heat, to dissolve into mango-scented breezes, and to vanish into a seaside stupor under a drizzle that feels vaguely divine. The dream? To marinate in comfort, far from the cacophony of deadlines and dental appointments, in a climate designed by God for the perpetually tired.

    I was born in Gainesville, Florida in 1961, and to this day I remember the fetid perfume of alligator swamps—a heady, sulfuric funk that now strikes me as oddly comforting. Like Vicks VapoRub for the soul. Is it any surprise that I scroll Zillow listings for barrier islands in South Carolina, Georgian marshlands, and steamy Floridian enclaves? I’m not looking for a home. I’m looking for a feeling—a fetal, lizard-brained feeling that I’ve convinced myself might still be hiding in the heat.

    But here’s the rub: I don’t trust this impulse. This Return to the Womb isn’t a noble call to simplicity. It’s a siren song, crooned by the dark twin of the Life Force—the same demon that tells you to skip your workout, order DoorDash, and stream ten hours of King of the Hill in a comfort-food trance. It whispers of paradise, but it’s peddling paralysis. It’s not vitality. It’s a prelude to decay, dressed in Tommy Bahama and sipping a piña colada.

    Writers like Steven Pressfield and Phil Stutz have been wise to this force for years. Pressfield calls it the Resistance. Stutz names it Part X. Adam Smith, bless his powdered wig, simply called it the need for “self-command”—the daily decision to wrest meaning from entropy, to choose virtue over sloth, action over inertia.

    During the pandemic lockdown, I got a taste of this regression. Sitting masked in my accountant’s office in February 2021, she asked if I was thinking of retirement. Was I thinking of it? Lady, I was living it—in pajamas, in slow motion, surfing real estate listings for stilt houses on Key Biscayne while sipping overpriced Nespresso and pretending buckwheat groats were the secret to immortality. My body had synchronized with the rhythm of a hot tub. I wanted nothing more than to stay submerged.

    Four years later, I still want it. I still want the warm drizzle, the midnight ocean swims, the faint smell of coconuts mingled with chlorine and sea rot. And yet—I know. I know. I know that the moment I submit to this dream of endless hammock-lounging is the moment the soul begins to curdle.

    Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living, writes about Father Time as a pitiless, judgmental figure—not the kindly old man of greeting cards, but a stern cosmic accountant. He doesn’t care how many steps you walked or how clean your macros were. He wants to know: Did you spend your time on Earth doing something that mattered?

    As someone who’s worshipped at the altar of diver watches for two decades, who has pondered the geometry of bezels and the metaphysics of lume, I took this personally. Time is not just money. Time is judgment. Time is an indictment.

    And the Return to the Womb? It’s a slow lobotomy in paradise. It’s “brain rot” dressed as a beach vacation. It’s the comforting lie that you’ve earned an escape from purpose. But the truth is, the older I get, the stronger this impulse grows. And that, frankly, terrifies me.

    Still—and here’s the kicker—as I type this, I want it. I want the coconuts. I want the warm rain. I want the mangoes. I want the beach walks at twilight where nothing hurts and no one needs anything from me.

    We are mad creatures, aren’t we? Our intellect sees the trap. Our soul feels the pull. And some part of us, no matter how wise or weathered, still wants to disappear into the dream.

  • Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    In his essay “In Defense of the Traditional Review,” New Yorker critic Richard Brody goes to battle against The New York Times’ editorial decision to shift arts criticism—from the long-form written review to short-form videos designed for a digital audience. It’s a cultural downgrade, Brody argues, a move from substance to performance, from sustained reflection to algorithm-choked ephemera. The move may be pitched as modernization, but Brody sees it for what it is: intellectual compromise dressed up as digital innovation.

    Brody’s stance isn’t anti-technology. He concedes we can chew gum and walk at the same time—that written essays and short videos can coexist. But his core concern is that the center of criticism is the written word. Shift the balance too far toward video, and you risk gutting that center entirely. Worse, video reviews tend to drift toward celebrity interviews and promotional puffery. The fear isn’t hypothetical. When given the choice between a serious review and a clip featuring a celebrity making faces in a car, algorithms will reward the latter. And so criticism is flattened into entertainment, and standards dissolve beneath a rising tide of digital applause.

    Brody’s alarm resonates with me, because I’ve spent the last four decades teaching college writing and watching the same cultural drift. Long books are gone. In many cases, books are gone altogether. We assign short essays because that’s what students can handle. And yet, paradoxically, I’ve never seen such sharp classroom discussions, never written better prompts, never witnessed better argumentation than I do today. The intellectual work isn’t dead—it’s just found new vessels. Brody is right to warn against cultural decay, but the answer isn’t clinging to vanished ideals. It’s adaptation with integrity. If we don’t evolve, we lose our audience. But if we adapt wisely, we might still reach them—and even challenge them—where they are.

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère draws a sly, subversive line between Les Revenants—a moody French zombie drama—and the early days of Christianity, when Paul’s disciples waited breathlessly for the world to end and the dead to rise. They were the original doomsday cult: spiritual outcasts and apocalyptic misfits, not unlike the “true believers” Eric Hoffer famously described in The True Believer. What bound them together wasn’t political ideology or economic despair—it was a single cosmic rupture: the Resurrection. One dead man, allegedly not dead anymore, changed the course of Western civilization. It’s not hard to see the resemblance to Les Revenants—a town full of dead people quietly returning, not as ghouls, but as eerily normal people who nonetheless shatter reality.

    Carrère, never content with simple metaphors, brings this comparison to a dinner conversation with his urbane, rationalist friends. One of them, Patrick, accidentally blurts out something true and uncomfortably sharp: millions of otherwise intelligent, educated, and mentally stable people believe in something as outlandish as Christian theology—and no one bats an eye. If someone today claimed Zeus turned into a swan to seduce their cousin, or said they kissed a frog that turned into a prince, we’d laugh or lock them up. But tell a roomful of professionals that a crucified Jewish preacher, born of a virgin, rose from the dead and will someday return to judge the living and the dead—and you’ll be offered wine and a seat at the gala. As Patrick notes, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

    Carrère is not the first to dwell on this strangeness. Nietzsche, he reminds us, was equally dumbfounded that people who believed in rationality, science, and history could also believe in what is essentially a fairy tale with incense and stained glass. And yet, the tale persists. Presidents still bow to bishops. Cathedrals still echo with sacred music. Maybe it’s not belief that sustains Christianity, but aesthetic inertia—what Carrère calls “pious sentiment.” It’s not that people believe Jesus walked on water. It’s that the stories—and the cultural power they evoke—feel too grand to abandon. You may not believe in Santa Claus, but you still get misty-eyed when the lights go up and the music swells.

    So Carrère offers us a taxonomy of belief: There are the literalists, who treat doctrine as GPS coordinates for their soul. And then there are the sentimentalists—the lukewarm faithful—who love the rituals, the candles, the elevated language, but leave the miracles in quotation marks. For them, religion has become spiritual décor. They still crave spiritual ritual but instead of going to church, they attend yoga classes. The creative power that once summoned cathedrals and crusades now hums gently in the background, just another playlist in the cultural mix. Belief, in this world, doesn’t have to be true—it just has to be beautiful enough to preserve.

  • Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

    Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

    Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

    Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.

  • Not Just the Way You Are: The Untold Grit of Billy Joel

    Not Just the Way You Are: The Untold Grit of Billy Joel

    In high school, I was a sap for Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are”—a sentimental earworm that lodged itself in my adolescent chest like a slow-burning ember of longing. But it was “The Stranger,” with its eerie whistle intro, that truly haunted me. That mournful melody had the same desolate magic as “The Lonely Man Theme” from The Incredible Hulk—the tune that played whenever Bruce Banner had to hitchhike into oblivion with nothing but his duffel bag and repressed rage.

    Aside from that one album, though, I had little use for Billy Joel. His music struck me as sonic white bread—palatable, inoffensive, nutritionally empty. I still recall a vicious takedown in The San Francisco Chronicle where a critic dismissed Joel as a budget-bin Beatles knockoff. That assessment dovetailed nicely with my own smug teenage sneer. When a cousin of mine announced in the early ’80s that he was driving to L.A. to see Joel live, I smiled politely and thought, Enjoy your night of mediocrity, friend.

    Then the decades rolled by, as they do. Billy Joel fell off my radar completely. Not a note, not a thought, not a twitch of nostalgia. The man might as well have joined Jimmy Hoffa in the cultural vault. But recently, a few podcasters I trust raved about a five-hour documentary—Billy Joel: And So It Goes—streaming on HBO Max. Out of curiosity (and procrastination), I pressed play.

    And damn if it didn’t pull me in.

    Joel’s life story is a full-blown psychodrama with the pacing of a prestige miniseries. He falls in love with his bandmate’s girlfriend, gets punched in the face when the betrayal surfaces, spirals into suicidal depression, checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, emerges emotionally bruised but determined, and—naturally—marries the very same woman. She becomes his manager. They hit the road. That alone is a screenplay waiting to happen.

    The documentary then charts his wreckage-strewn romantic path: four marriages, battles with booze, perfectionism bordering on pathology, and the slow, soul-bruising realization that having half a billion dollars doesn’t guarantee someone to watch movies with on a Sunday night.

    Much of Joel’s pain seems to flow from a frigid relationship with his father—a classical pianist who fled Nazi Germany only to land in the capitalist circus of America, which he promptly came to despise. He left for Vienna and left Billy with an emotional black hole for a torso. Joel wrote songs, not for fame, but to fill that void—to wring something warm from cold keys.

    His mother didn’t help. She was likely bipolar, and Joel suspects he inherited some version of it—his life a pendulum swing between euphoric crescendos and basement-floor depressions. This emotional volatility didn’t soften him. If anything, Joel is grittier than I ever gave him credit for: a pugnacious Long Islander with a boxer’s jaw and the soul of a saloon poet.

    That famously mushy ballad “Just the Way You Are”? He hated it. Thought it was soggy sentimentalism unworthy of an album slot. Only when the band added a Bossa Nova beat did he reluctantly agree to let it stay. And that song, of course, became his most iconic.

    I came away from And So It Goes with a new view of Billy Joel—not as a sentimental hack or a Beatles Xerox machine, but as a bruised, brilliant craftsman. He’s not just a hitmaker. He’s a man on fire, trying to warm himself with melodies pulled from the wreckage of his life.

  • Chunky: The Candy Bar That Gaslit My Taste Buds

    Chunky: The Candy Bar That Gaslit My Taste Buds

    Of all the confections that have ever graced my palm, none haunts my imagination quite like the Chunky bar. It’s not a candy bar so much as a relic—an absurd, silver-foiled ingot you’d expect to pry loose from a cursed dwarven mine, guarded by balrogs and bureaucracy.

    Let’s start with the shape. The Chunky is a squat, lumpy pyramid—a candy bar built like it wants to be a paperweight. Peanuts and raisins form the bulk of its crude alchemy, though earlier iterations flaunted Brazil nuts and cashews, adding to its ancient mystique.

    The taste? Off. Not bad exactly, but certainly not seductive. Its faintly bitter, vaguely disappointing flavor has a curious effect: you start to convince yourself that this underwhelming mouthful must be good for you. A health food in disguise. A sweet for contrarians. Like chewing on moral fiber.

    Then there’s the weight. The Chunky carries mass. It sits in your hand with the cold confidence of a Seiko diver watch on a stainless-steel bracelet. There’s a heft to it—an aura of seriousness. No one double-fists a Chunky on a whim. You eat one as an act of personal philosophy.

    To deepen its enigma, the Chunky has become scarce. Since the ’90s, it’s been largely exiled from gas station shelves, spotted only in the digital wilds of the Internet. It’s no longer a candy bar—it’s a rumor. A memory. A grail. And even when you do track one down and unwrap it in a moment of nostalgic triumph, you’re struck with the bitter realization: you’re not reliving a taste. You’re chasing a ghost.

    The truth is, you’re more in love with the idea of the Chunky bar than the thing itself. Its greatest ingredient is projection. It is candy-as-concept. The chunky grail.

    And so, like a certain kind of watch obsessive—those who hunt for the mythical One Perfect Timepiece, the Holy Grail Diver that will satisfy all wrist cravings—you may find that what you’re after is not an object, but an ideal. The Chunky isn’t a candy bar. It’s a mirror. A reminder that the real addiction lies not in sugar or steel, but in fantasy.

  • Welcome to Kayfabe Nation: A Field Guide for Curious Aliens

    Welcome to Kayfabe Nation: A Field Guide for Curious Aliens

    This morning, somewhere between my second cup of coffee and the fourth grim scroll through the news, I found myself pondering a hypothetical: If a space alien—curious, polite, perhaps with a clipboard—landed in my front yard and asked me, a nearly 64-year-old American, “What’s it like living in your country right now?,” I wouldn’t start with the Constitution or the national parks. I’d hand them a copy of James B. Twitchell’s Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America, a book I read back in 1992 when I was thirty and still believed things might get better.

    Twitchell’s argument was that television had ushered in a golden age of vulgarity—mainstreaming spectacle, flattening culture, and celebrating the lowest common denominator. What was once fringe now strutted center stage. That was 1992. It feels almost quaint now.

    This week, I’ve been soaking in evidence that Twitchell was merely outlining the overture.

    This morning, I read Tyler Foggatt’s New Yorker piece, “‘South Park’ Skewers a Satire-Proof President,” which examines how Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still hacking away at American grotesquery with their chainsaw of satire. 

    After watching Season 27, Episode 1, I found myself genuinely wondering how they haven’t yet been exiled to some kind of digital gulag. The episode’s venom is so precise, so nihilistically cheerful, it left me staring at the screen with a mixture of admiration and dread. How do you parody a culture that’s already parodying itself?

    That same night, my wife and I watched Shiny, Happy People: A Teenage Holy War—Season 2, Amazon Prime. Enter Ron Luce, a religious demagogue who recruits teenagers into his personal holy war by dressing them in camo and screaming at them through bullhorns as they crawl through canals full of hissing cockroaches. I turned to my wife and said what I now believe is the most accurate possible take: “Ron Luce is the Vince McMahon of religion.”

    Because here’s the thing: Vince McMahon isn’t just a wrestling promoter. He’s the high priest of American kayfabe—the architect of performative outrage, cosplay masculinity, and spectacle-for-spectacle’s-sake. He’s built an empire on screaming, sweating, soap opera buffoonery, and somehow, that aesthetic now defines everything: politics, YouTube, fringe churches, presidential rallies, TikTok evangelists. 

    McMahon didn’t just influence culture—he became it. If aliens really want a crash course in America, forget Mount Rushmore. Start with Mr. McMahon, the Netflix docuseries. Then draw a direct line to our histrionic politics, our teen-traumatizing spiritual boot camps, our screaming demagogues who mistake performative frenzy for moral clarity.

    The real problem with cosplay—whether it’s in the ring, the pulpit, or the Senate—is that eventually, the performers forget they’re performing. They fall into kayfabe coma. They live the lie so long they forget how to take off the mask, and eventually, they become the mask. What starts as theater curdles into delusion.

    I used to mock the NPR crowd—those genteel sippers of Bordeaux and tote-bagged reason—but I’ve come around. The quiet, the moderate, the civil? They may be our last tether to sanity. Watching Parker and Stone slap their thighs in manic glee may give us a few much-needed laughs, but it’s not curing anything. It’s not even slowing the spiral. It’s gallows humor on a tilt-a-whirl.

    If the aliens ask me what America’s like, I’ll tell them: It’s a deeply unserious country drunk on its own cosplay, where the line between performance and reality has vanished, and where kayfabe is our national religion.

    And then I’ll offer them a donut and a copy of Carnival Culture.

  • Watch What Implodes: Andy Cohen’s Domestic Cinematic Universe

    Watch What Implodes: Andy Cohen’s Domestic Cinematic Universe

    As Stephen Colbert’s tenure winds down on CBS—another headstone in the graveyard of “Late Night”—one might conclude that the talk show format, with its recycled monologues and tepid celebrity banter, is quietly expiring in a corner somewhere, clutching its blue cards and mug. But while traditional television gasps for relevance, the Andy Cohen Empire on Bravo is not merely surviving—it’s reproducing. Rapidly. Like reality TV kudzu.

    Welcome to the Bravo Matrix, where the camera never blinks and no martini goes unslurped. This isn’t scripted television, not officially. But let’s not be naïve—these shows are engineered with the precision of a Swiss watch, albeit one dipped in rosé and glitter. The “reality” may be cooked, but it’s a soufflé audiences devour by the season.

    Each cast member, whether they’re a Botoxed real estate maven, a Charleston trust-fund Casanova, or a spiritual advisor with a skincare line, is cast not for depth but for maximum combustion. These people may or may not be exceptional, but they do one thing very well: live out their personal chaos on camera while clawing for love, status, clarity, and closet space. We watch, transfixed, as they spiral, rebound, or occasionally evolve—all in HD.

    And let’s not forget the ambiance. These shows are drenched in lifestyle pornography: rooftop bars, poolside lounges, candlelit dinners served with sizzling gossip and artisanal side-eye. If television is the new hearth, Bravo is the scented candle flickering at its center—equal parts relaxing and mildly toxic.

    The producers, ever mindful of narrative drag, inject chaos agents—new cast members with just enough lip filler and latent sociopathy to blow up the group chat. This keeps the plot moving and the blood-pressure elevated. If a character becomes too boring or too stable, they’re exiled with the same indifference one might apply to expired yogurt.

    But for the chosen few—those rare personalities who deliver madness with consistency—tenure is real. A Bravo veteran can live a decade on screen, morphing from wide-eyed ingenue to meme-fodder matriarch, all while cultivating their social media following like a side hustle with God-complex benefits. We watch them grow, or don’t. We root for them, or we don’t. Either way, we’re still watching.

    And then there’s Watch What Happens Live, where Cohen himself presides like a smirking Zeus on a pleather throne, guiding reunion specials, feuds, and audience thirst with a cocktail in hand. What started with The Real Housewives of Orange County in 2006 has mushroomed into 75 interwoven shows, with spin-offs, reunion shows, and cameos that make the Marvel Universe look like a provincial theater company.

    In the end, what Vince McMahon did for wrestling—turning it into a steroidal psychodrama of spectacle and tribal allegiance—Andy Cohen has done for domestic warfare. And if the ratings are any clue, Cohen’s steel-clad battalion of brunch brawlers and dinner-party divas is winning.

  • Finding Loopholes in Caloric Responsibility

    Finding Loopholes in Caloric Responsibility

    You remembered how Julian French and Charlene Janson were practically fused at the hip, two early-90s lovebirds marinating in chlorinated water and dietary delusion. They spent more time poolside than anywhere else, suckling from the sacred teat of the nonfat craze like it was divine revelation. If it had “nonfat” stamped on the box, it became part of their holy sacrament. SnackWell’s Chocolate Crème Sandwich Cookies, Devil’s Food Cakes, Entenmann’s nonfat fudge—every bite a loophole in caloric responsibility. And when they weren’t sprawled in the jacuzzi, they were waddling over to Penguin’s Frozen Yogurt, their temple of guilt-free indulgence.

    Julian, bless his misguided heart, believed himself a hero. You watched him parade across the pool deck in elastic-waisted shorts, clutching two towers of frozen yogurt like he’d just retrieved them from Mount Olympus. The froyo swirled skyward in absurd spirals of nonfat vanilla, trembling with anticipation. Then came the toppings—an avalanche of crushed Oreos, cookie dough boulders, syrupy strawberries, and sauces that flowed like molten sin. Fudge dripped in dark rivulets, caramel oozed like golden tar, and whipped cream sat proudly on top, crowned with rainbow sprinkles, the garnish of the damned.

    They cackled with every bite, believing they’d hacked the matrix—dessert without consequence, joy without cost. But consequences don’t wear warning labels. You watched the pounds creep up like a slow betrayal. One day, Julian hauled himself out of the hot tub, his belly sloshing like an overfilled water balloon, and just as he reached for his towel, he clutched his chest and folded like a cheap lawn chair.

    The doctor’s message was blunt: drop fifty pounds or drop dead.

    Charlene took the news as a divine calling. She transformed overnight into a wellness dictator, dragging Julian from snack god to penitential health monk. Veganism became the law of the land. Dinners were now grim platefuls of raw broccoli, quinoa, and tofu cubes that looked—and tasted—like packing foam. Julian, a former king of indulgence, was reduced to sneaking cheeseburgers in gas station parking lots. But Charlene could smell deception like a narcotics dog. The scent of trans fat sweat gave him away.

    Her response? More treadmill. More SlimFast. Less mercy.

    Their days of poolside romance were replaced by hikes, boot camps, and overpriced health retreats where fun went to die. Charlene found her calling in this tyranny of self-improvement. When you spotted them months later at Woody’s, the transformation was stunning. Charlene glowed like a fitness influencer on a juice cleanse, sipping Perrier with the smug serenity of a cult leader. Julian looked like a prisoner of war in gym clothes—gaunt, glassy-eyed, and blinking out Morse code from behind his herbal tea.

    His lips said, “I’m fine,” but his eyes whispered, “Save me.”

  • “This Is the Other Place”: Twilight Zone Parenting and the Parking App of Doom

    “This Is the Other Place”: Twilight Zone Parenting and the Parking App of Doom

    Of all the Twilight Zone episodes that have taken up residence in my psyche, none clings more tenaciously than “A Nice Place to Visit.” A petty crook named Rocky Valentine gets gunned down during a botched robbery and wakes up in what appears to be paradise. He’s greeted by Pip, a genial, rotund guide played by Sebastian Cabot, who grants him everything his larcenous heart ever wanted: money, women, luck, luxury. No struggle, no stress. Every desire fulfilled on command.

    At first, Rocky revels in this frictionless dreamscape. It’s Vegas without losing streaks, heaven without requirements. But gradually, pleasure without purpose curdles into a thick, syrupy dread. He realizes that gratification without resistance is just another form of punishment. Bored out of his mind and desperate for meaning, Rocky pleads with Pip to send him “to the other place.”

    Pip laughs and delivers the gut punch: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea that you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!” And then, with glee, Pip cackles like the well-fed devil he is.

    Which brings me to paid parking.

    There is a hell, and it lives in the infrastructure of modern urban parking. It’s a realm of QR codes, license plate entries, and apps that want your soul—or at least your email and billing zip code. Some kiosks accept coins, others demand smartphone apps, two-step verification, and an MFA code just to stand still without being ticketed. My wife, tech-literate and cool-headed, usually handles this logistical hellscape while I loiter nearby, pretending to study the map of downtown like it’s a sacred text.

    But this week she’s out of town at a teaching convention, and I’m taking our twin daughters to Laguna Beach. This means I have to drive, find a parking structure, and—here’s the true horror—navigate the digital rigmarole of paid parking without her guidance. The thought of it has me sweating harder than Rocky in his silk suit.

    The absurd part? It’s not the traffic, the tides, or the teenagers that unnerve me. It’s the parking meter. The existential shame of standing in front of a digital payment kiosk, poking at it like a confused ape while my daughters wait patiently (or impatiently) beside me. I don’t fear the unknown. I fear looking like an idiot in front of my kids.

    But here’s the deeper, darker realization: this is just a symptom. My wife, through years of effort and mental load, has become the de facto logistics commander of our household. She knows which airport lines move faster. She’s the one strangers approach at terminals, sensing her Jedi-level calm. Meanwhile, I shuffle behind her like an NPC in a bad video game—directionless, frictionless, practically translucent.

    Frictionless living has a cost. It breeds detachment. It robs you of engagement, resilience, and presence. And like Rocky Valentine, I’ve grown too used to being served instead of showing up.

    Ironically, I’m obsessed with watches—those exquisite tools designed to remind you where you are in time. And yet, I’ve spent years drifting, distracted, floating outside the dial. It takes a solo day trip with my daughters—an hour drive, some shopping, a good lunch, and possibly a tantrum or two—to pull me back into the present.

    When my wife heard about my plan, she said, “You don’t know how happy this makes me.” And I believed her. She wasn’t just relieved that I was giving her a break. She was glad to see me step into the friction. To stop spectating and start parenting in real time.

    No, I don’t want to be Rocky. I don’t want a life where every parking spot is perfect, every line is short, and every meal arrives on time. I want the chaos. I want the curveballs. I want the real thing.

    Even if it means downloading the stupid parking app.