Cinemorphosis

Category: fiction

  • What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my college writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    In that moment of terror, the dumbest thought came over me: What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s visited by an evil entity at 2 a.m.?

    After several long seconds of thinking about my rhetorical question, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    This was not my first encounter with that particular demon. Ever since the age of five, I had carried a pathological terror of The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr with such unnerving desperation that the performance ceased to feel theatrical and crossed into something infernal. Every year when the movie aired on television, I experienced the same ritual dread: excitement curdled into panic. I wanted to watch the film because everyone watched it, because it was supposedly magical and wholesome and woven into the fabric of American childhood. But I could not look directly at the Lion’s face. Not for even a second.

    There was something about the grotesque architecture of that mask—the swollen cheeks, the creased forehead, the frantic eyes flickering through the narrow slits—that convinced me I was not looking at a costume but at a leak from another realm. To glimpse him was to receive unauthorized intelligence about what demons in hell actually looked like. Other children saw a lovable neurotic feline. I saw a panic-stricken emissary from the abyss.

    The Cowardly Lion colonized my dreams for years. I would wake in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, my heart jackhammering against my ribs. But waking up offered no relief. The nightmare did not end when consciousness returned; it merely changed venues. I could still feel the Lion in the room with me. Sometimes I sensed him sitting on the edge of my bed in the darkness while an icy current climbed my spine vertebra by vertebra. My chest tightened. My breathing became shallow and frantic. I was certain I would either suffocate, faint, or be dragged bodily into some spiritual sewer beyond childhood comprehension.

    Eventually I buried these terrors beneath the sediment of ordinary life. Or so I thought.

    Then came the summer of 1984. I was twenty-two years old and asleep one morning when I dreamed I was sprinting across a vast field toward a circle of flames. Beyond the fire stood an oasis shimmering with impossible beauty, a place radiating peace, love, and release from whatever unnamed anguish had dogged me since childhood. I knew with absolute certainty that if I could pass through the flames, I would arrive somewhere transformed.

    But just as I approached the burning circle, the Cowardly Lion stepped directly into my path.

    The effect was instantaneous. My body failed. Terror seized me with such total authority that I could no longer run. Worse, I could not scream. My mouth opened, but only muffled animal noises emerged while my lungs constricted so violently I thought I would suffocate inside the dream itself.

    Then came the truly impossible part.

    I awoke.

    At least I believed I awoke.

    I was lying flat on my back in bed, fully conscious, staring into the dim morning light of my room when I began to rise. Slowly. Smoothly. Silently. About a foot above the mattress.

    There was no drama to it. No spinning. No celestial music. Just the hideous calm of impossible physics.

    For what felt like ten seconds, perhaps longer, I floated there suspended above the bed in absolute terror before descending gradually back onto the mattress.

    I lay frozen afterward, unable to decide which possibility frightened me more: that I had actually levitated or that my mind had finally snapped under the pressure of its own private mythology.

    Naturally, I told no one.

    Who admits such things? Madmen? Cult leaders? Future occupants of padded rooms?

    So the experience became another sealed chamber inside me, another secret shoved into psychic storage beside the Lion himself.

    Then, years later, when I was thirty-seven, one of my nursing students casually described being visited in dreams by a grotesque rat-man figure. The moment she spoke, the old terror returned in full force. The Lion-Man rose from the graveyard of memory and stood before me again, and with him came the sickening recollection of floating above my bed in the summer of 1984 like some frightened counterfeit saint in a low-budget religious hallucination.

    Peeling back these memories feels less like reflection and more like excavating radioactive material. What occurs to me now is that humanity divides itself into two broad species. First are the literalists, the hard-material people who believe the physical world is the entire inventory of existence. What can be measured, photographed, weighed, biopsied, and touched is real. Everything else is sentimental fog generated by weak nerves and overheated imaginations. For these people, reality is a Home Depot aisle of concrete objects. No mystery. No metaphysical leakage. No shadows moving beneath the floorboards of ordinary life. What you see is what you get.

    I used to train with one of these specimens back in my teenage bodybuilding days, a granite-headed materialist named Falco Labroni. One evening we attended a church youth spaghetti dinner where a sweating youth pastor was passionately explaining salvation, heaven, hell, and eternal judgment between bites of garlic bread. Falco listened with the same skeptical expression he reserved for mail-order ab machines. Finally, he interrupted the sermon to announce that he would refuse to believe in heaven or hell unless Jacques Cousteau personally explored both places in a submarine and returned with film footage.

    Falco was what I now call a Film-in-Hand Absolutist.

    No footage, no faith.

    If Satan could not be captured on 16mm color film while smoking a cigar beside a lava pit, Falco wasn’t buying it. To him, metaphysics without documentation was merely indigestion wearing a choir robe.

    Then there is the other category of person—the unfortunate tribe to which I belong. These are the people cursed with imaginations porous enough to let other realities seep through. We sense shadows where others see empty rooms. We suspect hidden dimensions pressing faintly against ordinary life like faces against frosted glass. We dream vividly, feel presences, glimpse symbolic patterns, and occasionally become convinced the universe is leaking messages through nightmares, coincidences, music, illness, or memory. These people do not require film because the experience itself brands them from the inside.

    For us, life is never merely literal.

    It is layered.

    Ambiguous.

    Haunted.

    The world arrives wrapped in penumbra. Every object casts not just a shadow but the suggestion of another kingdom attached to it. A hallway at night is never just a hallway. A face can become an omen. A dream can feel more historically significant than an actual afternoon.

    Unfortunately, once you belong to this category, you never fully return to the clean reassuring geometry of materialism. You can pretend. You can teach freshman composition, pay your taxes, discuss cholesterol numbers, and shop for sensible shoes at Costco. But somewhere in the back chambers of your mind, the Lion-Man still breathes softly in the dark, waiting for the lights to go out.

    Looking back now, I see 1998 as my Lion-Man Year, the year the shadow world stopped politely knocking and simply let itself inside. My nerves were frayed, my concentration was dissolving, and my mind drifted through ordinary life as though half of it were trapped in some invisible underworld. Inevitably, this absentmindedness led me to commit one of academia’s unforgivable sins: I lost my university key.

    This catastrophe required me to report to a college administrator whose emotional warmth suggested she had once been rejected by both the priesthood and the prison system for being excessively severe. The moment I explained my predicament, her face hardened into a mask of institutional disgust.

    “The one thing,” she said slowly, as though speaking to a parole violator, “that a college instructor does not do is lose his key.”

    She looked me up and down not as a fellow employee but as a suspicious transient who had wandered onto campus carrying a forged faculty ID and a duffel bag full of stolen microscopes. Her lips curled with contempt as she informed me I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops and pay cash for a replacement.

    Cash only.

    Naturally.

    Because nothing says “modern institution of higher learning” quite like a disciplinary pilgrimage to a bureaucratic wasteland requiring physical currency, shame, and emotional self-flagellation.

    Mortified, I drove eastward away from campus civilization. At first the road was paved, lined with ordinary buildings and signs of human order. But gradually the asphalt surrendered to dirt, potholes, rubble, and terrain better suited for Cold War tank exercises. My car bucked and lurched violently as though objecting to the mission itself.

    The landscape became increasingly apocalyptic.

    Tumbleweeds rolled across the path. Cow skulls appeared beside the road like decorations from a satanic rodeo. Buzzards circled lazily overhead, apparently alerted that some weakened academic had wandered too far from the faculty lounge and was nearing collapse.

    I no longer felt as though I were in Southern California.

    I felt I had crossed into a parallel dimension where failed instructors, cursed livestock, and bureaucratic shame went to die. The air itself seemed infected with rumors of evil.

    Then came the smell.

    As I approached Plant-Ops, a chemical stench engulfed the car—a nauseating cocktail of glue, industrial paint, mildew, overheated machinery, and cow manure baking beneath the sun. The odor struck me with such force that I became dizzy. My skin grew clammy. Sweat collected beneath my collar. I was convinced I either had a fever or had accidentally driven into the outer perimeter of hell’s maintenance department.

    Part of me wanted to turn the car around immediately, flee home, collapse into bed, and abandon the entire miserable enterprise. But I was too close now. The replacement key had become more than a key. It was absolution. Redemption stamped in metal.

    So I sat there gripping the steering wheel, breathing through waves of nausea, wiping sweat from my forehead like a condemned man approaching the gallows. Then I took a deep breath and drove forward into the wasteland.

    After driving for what felt like several geological eras, I finally saw Plant-Ops emerge from the heat shimmer like a hallucination summoned by exhaustion and institutional shame. The structure sat alone on a wasteland of gravel and dust, a dilapidated hangar that looked less like a university maintenance facility and more like the final headquarters of a collapsing dictatorship.

    The oversized shack had been assembled from enormous sheets of tin and aluminum that appeared to be barely holding together through a desperate alliance of rusted screws, crooked nails, and divine neglect. Every gust of wind threatened to peel the building apart and scatter it across the desert like the world’s saddest deck of cards. The metal walls were coated in a grotesque patina of stains, corrosion, and industrial runoff that resembled toxic sludge bubbling up from the underworld itself. It looked as though Satan’s HVAC department had subcontracted the job to the lowest bidder.

    The entire structure radiated bureaucratic doom.

    This was not a place where things were repaired. This was where broken things came to surrender.

    Reluctantly, I stepped out of my car and began trudging across the gravel toward the hangar. Each footstep felt ceremonial, as though I were approaching some punitive tribunal reserved for the absentminded and spiritually unwell. The smell intensified with every yard I crossed—a nauseating fusion of chemicals, mildew, scorched metal, industrial glue, wet dirt, and something faintly organic, as though livestock had died nearby and been left to ferment beneath the sun. My stomach pitched violently. I fought the urge to vomit, faint, or simply curl into the fetal position beside a tumbleweed and surrender to my fate.

    Inside, I encountered the caretaker of this infernal outpost.

    He was a short, hostile little man with thick glasses, a bushy gray mustache, and black wisps of hair clinging desperately to his bald scalp like spiders trapped in tar. He wore a grease-splattered work apron that looked as though it had absorbed forty years of mechanical despair. Standing over a scarred wooden workbench, he glared at me with bulging amphibian eyes while eating cold SpaghettiOs directly from the can. The fluorescent light above him cast a morgue-like glow across his cadaverous face. He looked less like a maintenance worker and more like a cemetery groundskeeper who moonlighted as an interrogator.

    I explained that I had lost my university key.

    Without sympathy or ceremony, he demanded twenty dollars in cash upfront. Then he grunted toward the key machine.

    “Don’t ever lose your key again,” he muttered.

    He paused, then gave a dry laugh.

    “And if you think dealing with me is bad, wait till the guy replacing me next week. He makes me look like a picnic at the beach.”

    The remark amused him enormously. He opened his mouth wide enough for me to glimpse rotten teeth stained the color of nicotine and despair. It was the laugh of a man whose personality had been slowly pickled in bitterness, isolation, and fluorescent lighting.

    Then his expression changed.

    He studied me more carefully now, concern pushing aside suspicion.

    “You don’t look so good,” he said.

    “The smell,” I blurted weakly.

    That made him laugh again.

    “I’m used to it,” he said. “But you better lie down. Cot’s over there.”

    He pointed toward a filthy army cot near the workbench with an index finger sporting a blackened fingernail thick as tortoise shell.

    I thanked him with the dazed politeness of a fever patient entering surgery and stumbled toward the cot. The canvas sagged beneath me as I collapsed onto it, drenched in clammy sweat, and watched him begin making my replacement key.

    The key-cutting machine crouched in the corner like a dormant execution device awaiting orders from the state. It was enormous, greasy, and coated with decades of metallic filth baked into its surface like industrial scar tissue. Iron filings glittered in the grime like black snow. Above it hung a single exposed bulb flickering weakly, as though even electricity struggled to survive inside Plant-Ops.

    The old man fed the blank key into the machine and yanked the lever.

    Instantly the contraption erupted awake.

    The sound was catastrophic.

    A metallic shriek tore through the hangar with such violence it felt capable of stripping paint from bone. The grinding wheel screamed against the brass with the tortured howl of some living creature being dissected alive. Sparks burst outward into the darkness while gears rattled and chattered with arthritic fury. The machine did not sound manufactured. It sounded enraged. Ancient. Biological.

    The noise penetrated my feverish skull until I no longer believed a key was being cut. It felt as though judgment itself was being engraved into metal.

    And then it happened.

    In the middle of that infernal screeching, my body began to rise.

    Slowly.

    Smoothly.

    I lifted a foot—perhaps two feet—above the cot.

    Terror detonated inside me. I tried to scream, but paralysis sealed my throat shut. I could neither move nor cry out. I floated there helplessly while the machine screamed like an industrial banshee beside me.

    In my terrified state, I mumbled, “What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s levitating in some demon’s lair?”

    The old handyman glanced over casually.

    “Almost done,” he said.

    There was no shock in his voice. No alarm whatsoever. He regarded my levitation with the mild indifference of a mechanic watching a customer’s tire pressure fluctuate. It was as though hovering terrified college instructors were simply another routine inconvenience at Plant-Ops.

    “There,” he announced a moment later. “Finished.”

    At those words, my body slowly descended back onto the cot.

    The smell no longer bothered me. In fact, I suddenly felt calm—eerily calm—as though some fever had broken or some invisible tribunal had decided to spare me.

    The handyman handed me the new key.

    I thanked him, staggered back outside, and escaped the haunted hangar with the gratitude of a prisoner released from a penal colony.

    From there I drove directly to a hardware store and bought the most indestructible keychain apparatus I could find: Kevlar tether, reinforced reel, industrial belt loop, military-grade nylon. I clipped the thing to my belt like survival equipment for a man preparing to cross hostile terrain.

    Because by then the keychain no longer represented mere organization.

    It was a tether to reality itself.

    A safety line.

    A guarantee that I would remain anchored to the ordinary world and not drift loose again into those shadow realms waiting patiently beyond the edges of consciousness.

    What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if at any moment he can become untethered to faraway places from which he can never return? 

  • The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    I have been writing short stories for decades, which is another way of saying I have spent a large portion of my life producing evidence that enthusiasm and achievement are not the same thing. The cruel part is that I have improved. The older I get, the better I write, and the better I write, the more my earlier work begins to look like juvenilia wearing a fake mustache.

    Recently, I wrote a ghost story and morality tale called “The Ghost of Sid Briggs,” and to my surprise, it pleases me. That is rare. It made me think of the writers I revere most, especially John Cheever and Haruki Murakami, masters of the strange domestic wound, the moral haunting, the ordinary world with a trapdoor under it.

    So I became hopeful that I could add my ghost story to my long list of stories I’ve written over the years. I thought: Maybe I have a dozen stories buried in my archives. Maybe I can exhume them, clean them off, tighten the sentences, give them a new spine, and assemble a collection worthy of my literary heroes.

    Then I looked at the list. The verdict was swift and merciless. I did not have a dozen stories. I had only one that was the result of several rewrites over the last decade. I finally reached the point that it feels fully formed. I titled it “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.” It is a coming-of-age ghost story about a charismatic young bodybuilder and pathological liar whose life ends absurdly and tragically from a bee sting at a California lakeside beach. Narrated by a fellow young man who is both fascinated and repelled by Sid’s relentless self-mythologizing, the story explores male vanity, performance, fraudulence, and the seductive narcotic of reinvention. After Sid’s death, the narrator becomes haunted by recurring dreams in which Sid walks across a twilight lake to confess that, in his dying moments, he saw the life he might have lived had he abandoned narcissism and embraced love, family, humility, and spiritual truth. The ghostly visitation transforms Sid from beach peacock into cautionary prophet, warning the narrator against wasting life on performance and illusion. Decades later, the narrator continues to wrestle with Sid’s lesson through music, memory, and storytelling, realizing that some men are destroyed not by evil ambitions, but by the desperate need to become a dazzling fiction in the eyes of others.

    This is the one story that meets my current standards. The rest are not dead, exactly, but they are certainly not fit for public life. They would require major reconstruction, literary surgery, perhaps a full identity transplant. Otherwise, back to the dustbin they go, where they can continue their quiet service as compost for better work.

    The clarity over my literary work is sobering. My imagined collection collapsed into a single respectable survivor standing amid the wreckage, blinking in the light. I am not sitting on a hidden treasury of finished stories. I am sitting on a storage unit full of drafts, impulses, false starts, and prose-shaped weather systems. But at least I know the truth. Better that than the narcotic delusion of believing I possess a polished body of work when what I really have is a small literary junkyard with one decent house still standing.

    My literary challenges made me think this morning about my piano compositions. All my best songs point toward some buried autobiographical story. They are not merely melodies; they are emotional crime scenes. Each one seems to contain a memory, a wound, a comic humiliation, a ghost with unfinished business. Perhaps that is the spine I have been missing. Perhaps the stories should grow out of the songs.

    “The Ghost of Sid Briggs” began that way. It was first a piano piece, one I spent months composing, and the story emerged from it after many failed versions, false entrances, and narrative detours. The music held the emotional truth before the prose knew what to do with it.

    I am reminded of the old saying: Life is short, and art is long. At sixty-four, after writing short stories since 1981, I have only one story worthy of a collection. One. If I work hard and avoid wasting too much time congratulating myself for my own seriousness, perhaps I will have three or four before I reach my expiration date.

    This should depress me, and in some ways it does. But it also steadies me. I would rather possess one story that meets my standards than two dozen half-baked literary casseroles masquerading as finished work. A real story has architecture, pressure, mystery, and necessity. A failed story is often just a journal entry wearing a dinner jacket.

    So yes, I am humbled by my limitations. But I am also oddly buoyed by the clarity. The standard is no longer vague. I can see it now. And if most of my work fails to meet it, good. At least I know where the mountain is.

  • The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Sid Briggs, a thirty-five year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Sid was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Sid paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Sid would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday, Sid arrived at the man-made beach with a new blonde draped at his side, each one somehow more dazzling and surgically assembled than the last, as if he were upgrading girlfriends through a mail-order catalog of California delusions. They’d toss a Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the imported sand, laughing too loudly, performing youth and leisure for anyone within eyesight. Sid treated the entire shoreline like a stage set built exclusively for his mythology.

    That was when the lies began breeding like bacteria in warm water.

    He inflated his real estate career into the legend of a ruthless young mogul when in reality he was little more than a glorified rent collector for his father’s properties. He claimed to hold a business degree, though everyone knew he’d been booted out of community college after throwing a volcanic tantrum over not getting the campus radio disc jockey position. In Sid’s version of events, he wasn’t a failed student; he was a misunderstood prince denied his throne.

    Then came the aristocratic nonsense. According to Sid, his bloodline could be traced back to Belgian nobility. Somewhere, apparently, stood a family estate complete with a coat of arms, ancestral portraits, and a sacred genealogy book displayed in a special foyer like the Dead Sea Scrolls of mediocre white privilege. The more he lied, the more intoxicated he became by the sound of his own inventions. You could watch it happen in real time. One fabrication fed the next until he drifted into a narcotic haze of self-creation, trapped inside a fantasy version of himself that felt more pleasurable than reality ever could.

    By that point, the women were almost incidental. The true seduction was the performance. Sid didn’t lie to get the conquest. The lies were the conquest.

    I was eager to hear Sid’s lies because, if I’m being honest, I possessed a small talent for self-mythologizing myself. Watching Sid perform his fabrications was like studying my own bad habits through a carnival mirror. I wanted to observe what happened when a man fed himself a steady diet of invented grandeur and then mistook the swelling for genuine substance.

    My greatest obstacle to catching every word was the bees.

    The grassy knoll above the beach was infested with tiny white flowers, and the flowers, in turn, were infested with bees drunk on pollen and purpose. Their buzzing rose and fell in thick waves, sometimes louder than Sid himself. I’d lean forward in my beach chair, squinting through the sunlight, straining to catch the choicest portions of his nonsense as if I were listening to bootleg radio transmissions from a collapsing dictatorship. One moment I’d hear fragments about Belgian aristocracy or shadowy business deals, and the next moment the bees would surge into a collective electric hum, swallowing entire sections of his fantasy whole.

    Oddly enough, the interruptions improved the stories. The missing pieces forced my imagination to collaborate with Sid’s dishonesty. His fabrications became serialized entertainment, half confession and half hallucination, drifting across the hot afternoon air with the smell of Coppertone, cut grass, and imported saltwater.

    ***

    To be called “Bridge and Tunnel” in 1970s San Francisco was not a description; it was a diagnosis. It marked you as a provincial organism, a life-form that had migrated from the East Bay—Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley—regions the city regarded as a kind of cultural quarantine zone. By San Francisco standards, we didn’t simply live elsewhere; we existed at a lower altitude of refinement.

    My teenage bodybuilding friends and I would cross the Bay Bridge like contaminants slipping past a border checkpoint, only to be received with the sort of polished contempt reserved for the uninvited. The girls—urban aristocrats of posture and irony—would glance at us, lips tightening into a surgical line, and murmur “Bridge and Tunnel” as if naming a disease. The implication was clear: we had not arrived so much as oozed in, crawling through some damp civic artery to stain their carefully curated world.

    We did little to disprove their assessment. We spent our afternoons at the lake, marinating our skin in tropical bronzing oil with the reckless confidence of men who believed melanoma was a rumor. Between sets of posing and flexing, we argued with prosecutorial intensity over the great philosophical question of our time: Ginger or Mary Ann. This was not idle chatter. This was a loyalty test. Imagine a bare bulb swinging in a concrete cell, a man with broken teeth asking you to choose. Your answer wasn’t right or wrong—it was a measure of your authenticity.

    In truth, there was one answer: Mary Ann. Ginger was spectacle—too lacquered, too deliberate. Mary Ann had gravity. Especially in cut-offs. She was the apex until Daisy Duke arrived and raised the stakes, turning denim cut-offs into doctrine and ushering in a new era of televised exhibitionism.

    Bull, however, took these matters beyond reason. We didn’t realize the depth of his devotion to Gilligan’s Island until KTVU quietly removed it from the schedule. He responded as one might to a death in the family. He kicked his mother’s Sony Trinitron while wearing combat boots—an act of passion undermined by poor planning. The television survived. His shin did not. We spent the afternoon at Eden Medical Center watching him bleed through a makeshift bandage.

    We offered no sympathy.
    “You made us miss Pec Day,” Falco said.

    “And forget donkey calf raises,” I added. “You’re benched for a month. Congratulations.”

    Bull slumped in his chair, a chastened creature with curly hair and wounded pride. “Mary Ann’s gone,” he muttered, staring into middle distance as if mourning a lost lover.

    “At least there’s Jeannie,” I said.
    “Barbara Eden never lets you down,” he replied.
    “And Charlie’s Angels,” I added.

    Bull kept a poster of Farrah Fawcett in his room. Once a week, he arranged protein pills on a velvet pillow beneath it, as if offering tribute to a benevolent deity of blonde perfection.

    Reality intruded. His mother, unimpressed with his theatrical grief, demanded repayment for the damaged television. He had already failed a security job test at Gemco. He was supposed to run up a staircase while holding a fire extinguisher in fewer than fifteen seconds. He gave up midway, keeling over and trying to catch his breath.

    “What does it profit a man to have bulging muscles if he is not functional?” I asked.

    “Shut up, loser,” Bull snapped.

    He had rank—he and Falco were seniors; I was a sophomore with a loose mouth and poor instincts for hierarchy.

    Now, with a bandaged leg, he faced a new problem: no job, no training, no progress. Falco, ever the strategist, offered his usual solutions in single-word fragments.

    “Refrigeration.”
    “I failed that test three times.”
    “Take it again. Cold air builds muscle.”

    Bull shook his head. “Fifty bucks a test.”

    As always, we retreated into fantasy. We would win international bodybuilding titles, open a gym in the Bahamas, and spend our days in Speedos while sunlit goddesses delivered protein drinks in coconut shells and validated our existence. Bull embellished the vision with architectural details and swimsuit specifications. He looked almost peaceful.

    Which is why I had to ruin it.

    “And maybe,” I said, “while you’re selling memberships, you’ll run into Mary Ann.”

    “Shut up, loser,” he said again, clutching his leg.

    The pain had sharpened. Not just the injury—the realization. One impulsive kick had cost him weeks of training, a job opportunity, and delayed the imaginary migration to a tropical paradise where everything made sense and nothing required discipline.

    For the first time, Bull looked less like a future champion and more like what he was: a kid being forced to accept the fact that the Bahamas were postponed indefinitely. Accountability had arrived early. 

    Our concern for Bull evaporated the moment Sid Briggs burst through the ER turnstile, a spectacle wrapped in gauze and self-regard. His right hand was bandaged into a blunt white cudgel, as if he’d lost a fight with a plaster cast. The rest of him, however, was in peak exhibition form: cut-offs surgically trimmed, a white tank top clinging to a torso that glistened with oil. Whether he’d applied it before or after entering the ER was unclear, but the principle was not—Sid Briggs did not enter public space without proper lubrication. His neck carried enough gold chain and oversized pukka shells to suggest he had just taken first place in a luau dance-off, and he wore the prize with priestly seriousness.

    Sid’s hair was sun-bleached into submission, his mustache aggressively bushy, and his cheeks sucked inward, as if he were practicing for a portrait no one had commissioned. He looked pleased with himself in the way only a man can who has mistaken persistence for success.

    He recognized us and approached with theatrical urgency, holding up his bandaged hand like a prop. “Nasty bee sting,” he said, as if recounting a battlefield injury. He’d been tanning at Lake Don Castro when the incident occurred. The doctor, he reported, had warned him about a possible allergy: future stings could escalate, even turn life-threatening. 

    “The lake is a bee magnet,” I said.

    Briggs rolled his eyes at me with the practiced contempt of a man who has never allowed facts to interrupt his narrative.

    “As if I’m going to stop tanning at Don Castro,” he said. “That is my home, bro.”

    We laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was airtight. Sid Briggs without Don Castro would be like a peacock without a parking lot—technically possible, but existentially absurd. He lived there in spirit: beside the snack bar, beside his Playmate cooler, white Frisbee at the ready, launching pickup lines with the confidence of a man who believed rejection was a clerical error. Even now, the word “disco” conjures him for me—bronzed in Speedos, snapping his fingers to KC and the Sunshine Band as if rhythm itself were part of his personal brand.

    As he spoke, he sucked in his cheeks and scanned the room, locking onto a blonde nurse with the focus of a guided missile. “Well, amigos,” he said, adjusting his posture to maximum visibility, “I need to get back to the beach. The ladies are waiting.”

    He patted Bull on the shoulder—carefully, as if blessing a lesser mortal—wished him a speedy recovery, and strode back into the sunlight, a man convinced that even a bee sting was just another opportunity to be seen.

    ***

    About a month later, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Sid in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Sid’s methods among the drone of buzzing bees. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Sid give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Sid began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Sid’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Sid was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Sid died on the spot.

    I was never the same after Sid died. The whole thing lodged inside me like a splinter beneath the skin. I obsessed over the details of his death with the unhealthy devotion usually reserved for unsolved murders and failed romances. I had nightmares. I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. The grassy knoll, the imported sand, the Frisbees arcing against the sky—all of it felt contaminated now, like the set of a sitcom where somebody had quietly died backstage.

    About six months after Sid’s death, a peculiar dream began visiting me with unnerving regularity.

    In the dream, my friends and I gathered at the lake at twilight for a wake. We sat around a bonfire drinking cheap beer while the last ribbons of orange light dissolved across the water. Then someone would fall silent and point toward the horizon.

    There was Sid.

    Far out on the lake, he appeared as a small silhouette walking across the water toward us with calm, impossible strides. No thunder cracked. No heavenly choir sang. He simply kept approaching, closer and closer, until he reached the shore, brushed lakewater from his pant legs, and sat beside the fire as casually as a man returning late to a barbecue.

    That was when he told us about his final moments.

    The paramedics were working frantically over his body, he explained, when suddenly he looked upward and saw the counterfactual version of his life—the life he might have lived had he not spent decades performing for strangers like a peacock drunk on its own feathers. In that vision he was no longer prowling the beach with pickup lines and fraudulent pedigrees. He was a husband. A father. He walked peacefully along the shoreline beside a woman who genuinely loved him. Four children orbited around them in bursts of laughter while two rescue dogs exploded through the surf in ecstatic loops.

    Everything glowed with an unbearable softness.

    The sky was pale blue, not dramatic enough for cinema but beautiful in the way honest things often are. Sunlight fell gently across the water as though the world itself had abandoned judgment. Somewhere in the distance there was music—not literal music, but the emotional equivalent of it, the kind that arrives when your nervous system finally unclenches after years of pretending.

    And in that impossible stillness, Sid turned toward God.

    Not toward status. Not toward women. Not toward applause. Toward God.

    He begged for another chance. He promised he would abandon the counterfeit life and live honestly at last. It was as if existence itself had paused to offer him one final rehearsal for redemption. For the first time in his life, he experienced something that required no performance whatsoever: peace stripped of vanity. Beauty without spectators.

    Then the bee venom reached his heart.

    That was the cruelty of it.

    Just as he believed grace had opened a door for him, his body failed. The bee won. Sid Briggs—master raconteur, counterfeit aristocrat, beach peacock, human smoke machine—died mid-negotiation with eternity.

    Around the bonfire, dream-Sid spoke to us without swagger, without embellishment, without the narcotic glaze of self-invention. He told us he was not a man to imitate but a cautionary tale with suntan oil on it. A fraud. An impostor. A man who had spent so much time manufacturing an image that he neglected the architecture of an actual soul.

    He made us swear we would not waste our lives chasing the same hollow performance.

    And once we promised him—once he was convinced we understood—he rose quietly from the fire, walked back across the water toward the horizon, and disappeared into the dark.

    A few years later, when I took music theory in college, I carried that dream with me to the piano. I tried to process Sid’s death the only way I knew how: by turning grief into melody. For nearly two years I worked obsessively on a composition called “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.”

    Almost fifty years later, I still play it.

    The notes have never dulled. Neither has the warning hidden inside them.

    Some performances do not end with applause or redemption. Some end with collapse. Too little truth. Too much theater. And no encore.

  • The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I fell under the spell of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as did millions of young men who believed that iron could redeem them. Arnold didn’t just build muscle; he built permission. You didn’t have to slink into the gym like a social outcast. You could walk in like a man with a project—your body—and treat the work as something worthy, even noble.

    But here’s the part we forget when we romanticize that era: the fantasy always had a counterweight. You could admire the glossy magazine spreads, sure, but the minute you stepped into the gym, reality took over. The barbell didn’t care about your aspirations. It demanded blood, sweat, repetition, and a tolerance for humiliation. The dream had friction. It had consequences. It had gravity.

    Today, the dream has been fitted with wheels.

    We spend hours online absorbing lifestyles that arrive pre-edited, pre-filtered, and pre-approved by algorithms that understand our weaknesses better than we do. The counterweight—reality—hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been shoved to the margins, like an inconvenient footnote to a seductive headline. What replaces it is a fever dream: a curated existence that feels authoritative simply because it’s repeated often enough.

    Call this Frictionless Fantasy Drift—the condition in which ambition detaches from effort and begins to float, unmoored, in a frictionless digital sky. The struggle is edited out. The consequences are invisible. What remains is a mirage that invites you to step in and live there.

    I was reminded of this while reading Hanna Rosin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Tradwife.” Rosin contrasts the influencers of today with her own pre-internet lodestar, Martha Stewart—a figure she aptly describes as “a tycoon masquerading as a domestic goddess.” Stewart was many things—ruthless, exacting, extraordinarily competent—but she was real. Her brand, however polished, was anchored in actual skill and labor.

    Today, that grounded figure has been replaced by something far more synthetic: the algorithmic mountebank, the tradwife influencer who sells a pastoral fantasy with the confidence of a late-night infomercial host. She bakes bread from scratch, produces hearty meals with theatrical serenity, and presides over a small army of children as if domestic chaos were a lifestyle accessory. Her kitchen gleams. Her apron is spotless. Her smile suggests a fulfillment so complete it borders on evangelism.

    And then there’s the final flourish: submission. She assures her audience that handing over the steering wheel to her husband has unlocked a level of contentment previously unknown to modern women. Obedience, rebranded as liberation.

    In an era defined by Frictionless Fantasy Drift—where loneliness and dislocation leave people hungry for meaning—this performance finds an audience. Millions of them. The algorithm delivers it, refines it, amplifies it, until it begins to feel less like content and more like truth.

    Enter Caro Claire Burke, who looked at this spectacle and did what any rational observer might do: she pushed back. First on TikTok, then in her novel Yesteryear, which imagines a tradwife influencer waking up in 1855. The premise is simple. The result is devastating.

    Because when the fantasy is forced to pay rent—when it has to operate under the conditions it claims to celebrate—it collapses. The cozy illusion of domestic bliss is replaced by a brutal, unforgiving reality. Labor is constant. Comfort is scarce. And the husband, far from being a benevolent co-pilot, often resembles something closer to an owner. The cosplay dissolves, and what remains is history—raw, unvarnished, and deeply unpleasant.

    Reading about Burke’s setup, I couldn’t help but think of an old cartoon from my childhood: Tooter Turtle. Tooter is a lonely, perpetually dissatisfied turtle who dreams of becoming anything but himself—lumberjack, astronaut, baseball star, you name it. His friend, Mr. Wizard the Lizard, obliges by transporting him into these fantasies.

    And every time, without fail, the dream turns on him.

    The lumberjack nearly gets crushed. The astronaut faces disaster. The hero becomes the victim. Tooter, overwhelmed and panicked, begs to be rescued and returned to his ordinary life. The moral lands with blunt clarity: the fantasy is seductive, but it is also ignorant. It doesn’t account for reality because it doesn’t know it.

    Tooter is a child—permanently so—because he confuses the image of a life with the experience of living it.

    That’s the unsettling part. The gap between Tooter and a large segment of today’s online population is not as wide as we’d like to believe. We sit in front of our screens, absorbing curated lives, and imagine ourselves stepping into them as if they were costumes waiting to be worn. With enough imitation, enough belief, we assume the transformation will stick.

    It won’t.

    That’s why Burke’s novel has struck a nerve. It doesn’t just critique the fantasy; it subjects it to reality. It forces the dream to answer for itself. And when it does, the result is not liberation, but a sharp, corrective blow—a reminder that a life without friction may be easy to admire, but it is impossible to live.

    As for me, I’m looking forward to reading it.

  • Tragedy Laundering in the Age of Vibes

    Tragedy Laundering in the Age of Vibes

    Shirley Li takes aim at what she calls the CliffNotes treatment of classic films—works shaved down, sweetened up, and repackaged for audiences who want the aura of culture without the burden of confronting it. Shakespeare, once a blood-soaked anatomist of ambition and ruin, now gets rinsed through the aesthetic of Taylor Swift. In this new register, tragedy doesn’t end in death; it stalls just long enough for a handsome savior to materialize on cue. Consider “The Fate of Ophelia,” where despair is airbrushed into rescue, and consequence dissolves into a soft-focus finale. The title lingered with me because I’d joked to my students a month earlier that I’d heard the song on Coffee House and found it embarrassingly overwrought—an avalanche of sentiment masquerading as profundity.

    Hollywood, never one to miss a profitable dilution, has joined the exercise. Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reworking of Bride of Frankenstein into The Bride! arrive pre-softened, their rough edges filed down to avoid drawing blood. The originals demanded something of the audience—patience, discomfort, moral stamina. The remakes offer a tour: quick, glossy, and politely unchallenging.

    Li names the trend with surgical accuracy: “the rise of CliffNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place.” That sentence does the autopsy. What’s left after the procedure is a body that looks intact from a distance but has been emptied of organs.

    Should we be alarmed? Yes, because the sweetness isn’t accidental; it’s diagnostic. These remakes signal a culture inching toward infantilization—hungry for reassurance, allergic to ambiguity, and convinced that gravity can be outsourced to wardrobe. Give the audience a fairy tale that flatters its appetites, but dress it in canonical clothing so it can pretend it just attended a seminar. Call this Tragedy Laundering: the conversion of moral difficulty into marketable comfort, where death becomes a scheduling inconvenience and ambiguity a branding problem.

    A culture marinated in TikTok loops, cute-animal dopamine, and the immaculate emotional arcs of Taylor Swift’s pop maximalism will predictably resist the adult weather systems of the classics. It wants its cod liver oil chased with honey—and increasingly, it wants the honey first, the oil omitted. The result is a literature of safety: all vibe, no verdict; all sheen, no sting.

  • The Man Who Moved to G-Shock Avenue

    The Man Who Moved to G-Shock Avenue

    Paul McCartney once admitted that after the Beatles broke up, he couldn’t bring himself to play their songs. Too much history. Too much emotion packed into every chord. The music wasn’t just music—it was a former life. That’s how you feel about your mechanical divers. They now sit in what you’ve come to call the Box of the Abandoned Past—not discarded, not unloved, but too heavy with memory to wear without reopening old chapters.

    Then the G-Shock Frogman arrived, and with it came a revelation: you hadn’t just bought a new watch—you had moved cities. For more than twenty years, you’d been living in Mechanical Town, polishing bezels and monitoring seconds like a municipal duty. Suddenly you realized you belonged somewhere else entirely. You packed your emotional bags and relocated to G-Shock Avenue. First the Frogman. Then the Rangeman. Then the high-end Square. No ceremony. No farewell speech. Just a quiet change of address.

    Years passed. Occasionally, you tried to revisit the old neighborhood. You’d take out a mechanical diver, strap it on, and see if the feeling returned. But like McCartney staring at a piano and deciding “Yesterday” could stay in the past, you always drifted back to the Frogman. It was lighter. Simpler. Emotionally frictionless. The past had craftsmanship. The present had peace.

    Still, you refuse to sell the mechanicals. They’re not watches anymore; they’re chapters. Expensive bookmarks in the autobiography of your former self. Once a year, you conduct the ritual. You open the Box of the Abandoned Past. You shine a small, theatrical light across the rows. You offer a quiet apology while Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert” plays in the background, the soundtrack of dignified transition.

    Your wife and daughters evacuate the premises during this ceremony, treating it with the same enthusiasm reserved for releasing an aerosol flea bomb in the living room.

    But alone in the room, you sing along, close the box, strap on the Frogman, and step back into the present—no longer a resident of the mechanical past, but a citizen, fully and permanently, of G-Shock City.

    You have entered painful terrain for the watch enthusiast: Emotional Migration. It is the moment a watch enthusiast changes allegiance not by selling a collection, but by quietly moving his identity to a new territory. The old watches may still sit in the box, polished and respectable, but the emotional address has changed. What once felt essential now feels historical; what once felt like an experiment now feels like home. There is no announcement, no dramatic purge—just the slow realization that your wrist no longer reaches for the past. Emotional Migration isn’t about acquiring something new. It’s about discovering that your center of gravity has relocated, and the watches you once loved now live where you used to live.

  • The Watch Ninja and The Great Deepening

    The Watch Ninja and The Great Deepening

    If you stay in the watch hobby long enough, you must accept a hard truth: your identity will betray you.

    One morning you wake up and the mechanical divers—the watches that once defined your taste, your discipline, your personality—feel distant. Cold. Decorative. In their place sits a small, efficient triumvirate of atomic, solar G-Shocks that refuse to leave your wrist.

    You feel guilty. Disloyal. Untethered. Who are you if the romance of gears and springs no longer moves you? What kind of man replaces craftsmanship with digital certainty?

    This is not a question for forums.

    This requires the Watch Ninja.

    The fee is $1,000. Nonrefundable. Trusted members of the community blindfold you and load you into an unmarked van, because enlightenment, like limited editions, requires exclusivity.

    When the blindfold comes off, you find yourself in the stone-walled basement of a respectable hotel. Above you, restaurant workers clatter through the dinner rush. Below, time slows.

    The Watch Ninja sits on a high stool.

    He wears a white chef’s jacket, a wide-brimmed cavalry Stetson pulled low, dark aviators, and a G-Shock Frogman. The hat’s high crown gives him the posture of authority; the brim throws his eyes into shadow. He does not occupy the room. He commands it.

    Then the realization lands.

    He looks exactly like Robert Duvall as Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now—a man who would order helicopters for the sound alone.

    You confess your crisis. The abandonment of mechanical divers. The seduction of atomic precision. The creeping sense that you have betrayed your former self.

    He listens, stroking his chin like a man evaluating air support.

    Then he speaks.

    “There is no such thing as a single conversion,” he says. “There are only conversions within conversions. Your life as a watch obsessive is not defined by loving watches. It is defined by the subconversions that follow.”

    He leans forward.

    “A man builds a collection of mechanical divers. He exhausts their enchantment. Then he pivots—to G-Shocks, to atomic time, to solar autonomy. This is not betrayal. This is the Great Deepening.”

    He lets the words settle.

    “You did not lose your passion. You accelerated it. When one category is worn out, the serious enthusiast expands. You are not unstable. You are evolving.”

    He pauses.

    “Do not mourn the divers. Become the Expanding Man.”

    You leave the basement changed. Lighter. Forgiven. Your G-Shocks no longer feel like a betrayal. They feel like destiny.

    The Watch Ninja has taught you the central doctrine of serious collecting: The Great Deepening.

    This is the phase when the easy pleasure of broad collecting gives way to excavation. “I like dive watches” becomes metallurgy analysis, bezel resistance debates, production-year archaeology, and solemn arguments about whether the 2018 lume possessed greater emotional warmth than the 2020 revision.

    And somewhere in that tunnel, many collectors encounter an unexpected chamber: G-Shocks.

    What once looked crude now reveals its own austere beauty—atomic accuracy, solar independence, tool-first design, the moral clarity of a watch that does its job without pretending to be art.

    To outsiders, the Great Deepening looks like fixation.

    To the enthusiast, it feels like refinement.

    In truth, it is the hobby’s survival instinct.

    When breadth stops thrilling, depth takes over. When one identity fades, another emerges. And if the process works as intended, there is always one more layer to study, one more doctrine to adopt, and one more watch that finally—this time—feels exactly right.

  • I Am the Frogman

    I Am the Frogman

    I used to tell people I didn’t like the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    It’s oversized. It’s digital. It looks like something the wardrobe department would strap onto a second-tier superhero—Aquaman’s anxious cousin, assigned to guard the aquarium gift shop. On a 64-year-old man, it doesn’t whisper confidence. It screams midlife distress—the horological equivalent of jet-black hair dye and a motorcycle you’re afraid to start.

    And yet, for the past six months, it hasn’t left my wrist.

    My mechanical divers—polished steel, sapphire crystals, analog dignity—sit untouched, lined up in their box like former lovers trying to understand what went wrong.

    “How could you do this to us?” they seem to ask.

    “You are dead to me,” I reply.

    At this point, the relationship between my wrist and the Frogman is no longer metaphorical. It is psychological. Possibly spiritual. There may be paperwork involved.

    Let me be clear: this attachment is not based on taste. On a man my age, the Frogman doesn’t look stylish. It looks like evidence being quietly assembled by concerned family members.

    But it is not coming off.

    Because something happened.

    Not gradually. Not subtly.

    Change.

    When I started wearing the Frogman, I felt different—sharper, more contained, more adult. My appetite shrank. My focus tightened. I developed the kind of self-control normally associated with retired Marines and monks who eat lentils without complaint.

    Three meals a day. No snacks. No “kitchen reconnaissance missions.”

    Then something even stranger happened.

    My wife and daughters didn’t say a word, but their behavior shifted. The eye-rolling stopped. The subtle household demotion—from “head of family” to “eccentric roommate”—quietly reversed.

    Somehow, I had acquired gravity.

    I was no longer the suburban performance artist of half-finished plans and questionable purchases. I had become a man whose decisions suggested forethought rather than impulse.

    A man who appeared, alarmingly, to be in charge.

    But the real change was this:

    My nightmares stopped.

    Not reduced. Not improved.

    Stopped.

    For decades I lived with them—night after night, a private theater of dread that never closed. Then the Frogman arrived, and the nightmares scattered into darkness like silverfish when the lights come on.

    Now my dreams are peaceful. I run through fields of berries. In the voice of John Lennon, I sing, “I am the Frogman.”

    Explain that.

    A resin watch—battery, rubber strap, digital display—accomplished what therapy, discipline, and time could not.

    Part of me wants to leave the miracle alone. When something rescues you from overeating, ridicule, and nocturnal terror, you don’t interrogate it. You say thank you and keep your mouth shut.

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

    Unfortunately, I am a curious man.

    I want mechanisms. Theories. Experts. I want to understand how a mass-produced object rewired my habits, my household_toggle status, and my sleep cycle.

    That investigation is the project ahead—the study of what I can only call the Frogman Elixir Effect: a transformation so complete that the man who bought the watch no longer quite exists.

    I am no longer the wearer.

    I am the Frogman.

    Before we go further, I should correct something.

    Earlier, I said I thought the Frogman was ugly.

    That was a lie.

    Why I lied is a matter for future therapy—some mixture of denial, self-protection, and the fear of becoming the man who falls in love with industrial resin.

    The truth is this:

    The moment I saw it, I loved it.

    Not liked. Loved.

    It was, and remains, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

    Now that the truth is out, we can proceed honestly.

    At work, my colleague Dave noticed the change. One afternoon he suggested I attend a support group in the basement of a nearby church—men, he said, who believed they had also become Frogmen.

    Out of curiosity, I went.

    There were two dozen of us. Same age. Same watch.

    When the meeting began, we introduced ourselves the only way that felt accurate:

    “I am the Frogman.”

    Our counselor, Terry, immediately informed us that this was impossible. Only one of us could be the Frogman.

    Complicating matters, Terry was wearing the same model. There were rumors he believed he was the authentic Frogman and was using the group to establish theological authority. None of us trusted him.

    Still, we met every Wednesday.

    And something was undeniable.

    We had all changed.

    Better habits. Better focus. Better discipline. The same quiet upgrade in self-command. It was like taking creatine for the psyche. A testosterone booster for decision-making. Samson’s weapon—though one member insisted Samson actually used a donkey’s jawbone and demonstrated this point by raising his Frogman like a sacred artifact.

    The group is going well.

    Because the journey is no longer about wearing a watch.

    It is about fusion.

    What Terry eventually helped us name was Horological Identity Fusion—the state in which the boundary between wearer and object dissolves. The watch is no longer an accessory. It is a psychological extension. Removing it would feel less like changing gear and more like abandoning a role.

    Or losing a limb.

    And once that fusion occurs, something strange happens.

    You don’t wear the tool.

    You become the person the tool assumes you are.

  • The Man Who Broke Time: A Watch Obsession Goes Viral

    The Man Who Broke Time: A Watch Obsession Goes Viral

    Because I am known around The New Yorker offices as someone whose interest in watches occasionally elicits polite concern and the kind of side-eye usually reserved for men who won’t stop explaining cable management, it was perhaps inevitable that I would be assigned the Jeff McMahon story. When word spread that a 64-year-old writing instructor at Prospect College in Redondo Beach had triggered a watch-related disturbance of almost mythic proportions—drawing hundreds, then thousands of people into a crusade to “fix” his collection—I was dispatched to investigate how a private obsession metastasized into a civic emergency.

    I visited McMahon during winter break. His wife, a middle-school teacher, and his twin daughters, high-school sophomores, were safely elsewhere, leaving him alone with his thoughts, his watches, and whatever demons had learned to tell time. He answered the door wearing black travel pants with zippered pockets and a black T-shirt. Nearly six feet tall, close to 230 pounds, bald, square-jawed, with the squint of a man perpetually assessing lug-to-lug ratios, McMahon resembled a retired linebacker who had traded blitz packages for forum debates.

    Naturally, I clocked the watch immediately: a third-generation Seiko MM300 with a blue dial on a waffle strap.

    “It looks right on you,” I said, gesturing toward his forearm. “Especially given your build.”

    He shrugged. “It’s too late for me. I’m past swag. And honestly, the watch makes me miserable. I can’t decide if it belongs on a strap or a bracelet. I’ve switched so many times I no longer trust my own judgment. The only thing consistent about me is my inconsistency.”

    He led me into a bright, tile-heavy kitchen flooded with Southern California light. On the windowsill sat several shortwave radios, arranged among scattered lemons like some improvised altar.

    “Not just watches,” I observed. “Radios too.”

    He nodded, as if admitting to a second addiction was no longer worth defending.

    We sat at the kitchen table eating garlic hummus and rye crackers, drinking dark-roast coffee with soy milk and molasses.

    “Welcome,” he said with a tired smile, “to the House of Seiko. My man cave of madness.”

    I asked him why an entire community had mobilized to help solve his watch problem.

    “I have no idea,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. There are causes that matter. This doesn’t. I’m useless, over the hill, and fully Gollumified.”

    The saga began, he explained, at monthly meetups at Mimo’s Jewelry and Watches in Long Beach—friendly gatherings that escalated when he confessed the hobby no longer brought him joy. He wasn’t short on money; he was paralyzed by decision. Every choice felt wrong. The cognitive load became unbearable. He went to bed thinking about watches. He woke up thinking about watches.

    “Why not walk away?” I asked.

    “Because obsession doesn’t issue exit visas,” he said. “Once you’re in, the riddle feels existential. Solving it felt as urgent as founding a religion. I wanted to crack the code and then preach the gospel of happiness.”

    The intervention only made things worse. Camps formed. Seiko purists. Swiss loyalists. Minimalists. Maximalists. Arguments erupted. Then fights. A friend named Manny filmed the altercations. The videos went viral. Suddenly McMahon was a cause célèbre.

    “That’s when the watches started arriving in the mail,” he said.

    Luxury pieces worth more than his cars. None of them helped. He sold them and donated the money to charity. This, too, became content. More watches arrived. Then robberies. Burglaries. A P.O. box. A manager to process donations and deflect thieves.

    Millions eventually went to good causes. The silver lining, as they say.

    McMahon stared into his coffee. “I wish I felt redeemed. Mostly I feel disturbed—not just by my obsession, but by how easily the internet turned it into a farce. Sometimes I wonder if it had been anything else—stamps, guitars, fountain pens—would it have played out the same? Or is there something uniquely deranged about watches? Time itself? Father Time? Somehow my fixation feels disrespectful to him.”

    He paused, then added, “I have a friend who sold all his luxury watches. He wears a twenty-dollar Casio. Every day he thanks it for keeping him humble. He’s sane. That makes him my hero.”

    “You could follow his example,” I suggested. “Salvation is just a Casio away.”

    “And sell my divers?” he said flatly. “Not happening.”

    “You’d rather be miserable with expensive watches than happy with a cheap one.”

    “Exactly. Happiness is irrelevant now.”

    I studied him. “I don’t buy it,” I said. “This misery feels performative. A kind of cosplay.”

    He nodded slowly. “You’re right. But if I stop playing the miserable man, I have no idea who I’m supposed to be next. And that scares me more than any watch ever could.”