Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • Discretionary Use Principle

    Discretionary Use Principle

    The Discretionary Use Principle begins with a simple but demanding claim: tools are not inherently good or bad, but they become harmful when used without judgment, proportion, or purpose. Whether we are talking about food, technology, or media, the decisive factor is not purity but discretion—our ability to choose deliberately rather than reflexively. The principle rejects both absolutism and indulgence. It argues instead for a calibrated life, one that privileges nourishment over stimulation, depth over convenience, while still recognizing that modern life occasionally requires shortcuts. This framework is especially useful when thinking about analog versus digital living, where moralized categories often replace careful thinking.

    It is wise to carve out a large, non-negotiable block of each day in which machines are politely but firmly excluded—no screens glowing like anxious faces, no notifications tugging at your sleeve, no algorithm whispering what to want next. Go hike where the trail refuses to optimize itself. Lift weights in a garage with nothing but an AM radio crackling like a distant campfire. Write dreams and grievances by hand in a clothbound notebook while Bach or Coltrane keeps time. This is the analog world, and it feeds parts of the nervous system that silicon cannot reach. In this sense, analog living resembles whole foods: salmon that still tastes like water and muscle, almonds that require chewing, blueberries that stain your fingers. The more time you spend here, the less bloated your spirit becomes. Digital life, by contrast, often behaves like ultra-processed food: frictionless, hyper-palatable, engineered for compulsive return, and strangely unsatisfying no matter how much you consume.

    That analogy works—until it doesn’t. Not all analog living is virtuous, just as not all “whole foods” are benign when eaten without restraint. A steady diet of eggs, clotted cream, or beef heart can quietly undo you. Likewise, not all digital experience is junk. There are serious conversations on social platforms, lucid Substack essays, and educational YouTube channels that sharpen rather than dull attention. The mistake comes when we moralize categories instead of exercising judgment. Ultra-processed food is not a single moral villain; “processed” names a method, not a fate. Steel-cut oats, frozen berries, tofu, canned beans, and whole-grain bread are processed and still nutritionally intact. Even within the ultra-processed aisle, a minimally sweetened protein bar is not the same organism as a fluorescent snack cake designed to bypass satiety. The real danger is not processing itself but the familiar cartel of refined starches, added sugars, industrial fats, flavor engineering, and low nutritional payoff.

    Seen through the Discretionary Use Principle, the lesson is neither to flee the digital world nor to surrender to it. Eat whole foods most of the time. Live analog for long, uninterrupted stretches. But do not shun all processed foods or digital tools out of misplaced virtue. Use them when discretion, efficiency, and purpose demand it. Health—nutritional or psychological—is not preserved by purity tests. It is preserved by attentiveness, proportion, and the ongoing discipline of choosing nourishment over convenience, again and again, without pretending that the choice will ever be automatic.

  • Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Today is my last day of class before I’m loosed into a two-month intermission—a stretch of time that must be handled like a late-arrival character in a film. This visitor has a history with me, knows my flaws, and demands that I greet him with something better than the usual slouch and shrug.

    Naturally, I’ll rehab the shoulder, write, and play the piano. Exercise will take care of itself; addiction is nothing if not reliable. Food, however, is the saboteur lurking in my blind spot. My emotional attachments to breakfast grains would make a Freudian blush: buckwheat groats, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, vanilla protein powder, cinnamon, berries, nuts. The whole wholesome choir. Trouble is, those virtuous bowls can turn caloric faster than a Hallmark plot twist.

    These cereals, if I’m honest, are less about hunger and more about the psychic umbilical cord. They point back to Mother, the Womb, or—in Phil Stutz’s terms—the Comfort Zone, the Warm Bath. Linger too long in that morning porridge spa, and the scale begins to stage an intervention. Add in my peculiar habit of finding solace in true-crime documentaries—an activity best described as athletic only in its couch commitment—and the trajectory is clear: weight gain, sloth, entropy.

    Fortunately, I do maintain countermeasures. Kettlebells and the Schwinn Airdyne stand ready like loyal foot soldiers. Reading, writing, and piano practice also help stave off the creeping rot. And yes, I’ll continue shaving, if only to avoid becoming the bearded oracle wandering the streets muttering about glycemic index.

    This two-month hiatus is really a dress rehearsal for retirement, which is now only eighteen months and three semesters away. It would be dishonest to pretend the prospect doesn’t rattle me. Maintaining purpose without the scaffolding of a teaching schedule is its own moral test. I’m fortunate to have reached this threshold, but fortune alone won’t keep me from misusing it. All I can do is stay awake, practice discipline, and ask my Maker for the humility to spend the limited time left with intention rather than drift.

  • The Cruel Irony in Tatiana Schlossberg’s Fight to Live

    The Cruel Irony in Tatiana Schlossberg’s Fight to Live

    A few nights ago, I was tired of screens from setting up my Mac Mini desktop all day, so in bed, I put my laptop aside, reached for a print copy of The New Yorker, and read Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay “A Battle with My Blood.” On May 25, 2024, she gave birth to her daughter; on that same day she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, complicated by an especially cruel mutation called Inversion 3. She had to take in her newborn and her mortality in the same breath. Since then she has endured chemo, transfusions, and CAR-T-cell therapy—the same therapy that saved my brother from Burkitt lymphoma—while living under a prognosis that predicts she has a single year left at age thirty-four. The essay lodged itself in me, and I can’t let it go.

    Before reading her piece, I knew nothing about Schlossberg, except now I know she is the cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services. It would be high satire if it weren’t real: she fights for her life while her cousin, a former heroin addict and tireless distributor of vaccine misinformation, dismantles the very funding streams that support leukemia research. Her mother even wrote to the Senate to block his confirmation, pointing out that he has never worked in medicine, public health, or government. It didn’t matter. He was confirmed anyway, as if spite were a qualification.

    Schlossberg wants to live long enough for her children to remember her. Her cousin’s policies seem engineered to ensure the opposite—not just for her, but for countless patients who depend on the research he’s busy defunding. Her fight is intimate; his carelessness is national. And it’s impossible not to feel the cruelty of that collision.

  • The Torn Rotator Cuff, Watch Regrets, and Gollumification

    The Torn Rotator Cuff, Watch Regrets, and Gollumification

    I’m three months into shoulder rehab for a torn rotator cuff, and I’m finally getting close to making another video for my YouTube channel. I’m not buying or selling watches, and I don’t have much left to say about my collection that I haven’t already said. But the slow, tedious obsession of coaxing my left shoulder back to life has given me a strange gift: distance. That distance from the watch addiction has created a few insights I didn’t have before. A video essay forces me to confront those insights, not just type them into the void. Writing the essay is like benching 200 pounds for eight reps—respectable, tidy. Filming the video is 300 pounds for fifteen: heavy, ridiculous, and somehow spiritually necessary. I’m a lifelong weightlifter who invents dubious personal metrics to quantify “quality of life.” It’s pathological, but it’s mine.

    As the shoulder rehab dragged on, a realization hit me with the subtlety of a kettlebell to the teeth: my watch hobby was never just an addiction to watches—it was an addiction to regret. The thrill wasn’t owning a new diver; it was selling the old one, instantly regretting it, and staging an internal soap opera about what could have been. I bought watches that were too big, too dainty, too dressy, too gaudy—each one its own personalized regret grenade. Letting the collection creep past seven watches was another fiasco. Anything over that line triggered what I call “Watch-Rotation Anxiety,” a condition where choosing a wristwatch felt like negotiating the release of hostages.

    When the regret swelled, I tried to smother it with another purchase. New watch, fresh dopamine, quick emotional triage. The relief never arrived. The cycle darkened and tightened, and I entered a phase I call Gollumification. Gollum didn’t collapse in a single catastrophic moment—his soul thinned over centuries. The Ring promised specialness, superiority, shortcuts to power. He murdered, then lied to himself about why. Clinging to the Ring as the last scrap of identity, he withered: body shrinking, language breaking, morality dissolving into compulsive self-justification. That’s why Gollumification resonates today—it’s the slow-motion collapse. You don’t need a cursed artifact to become Gollum. Just isolate yourself, feed an obsession, and treat your desires as the only truth that matters. Eventually, the human being disappears. Only the craving remains.

    For four months, I’ve lived without that watch-ring around my neck. I feel relief. The Gollumification, at least in that realm, has paused.

    Unfortunately, demons don’t retire; they migrate. The regret addiction simply found another host. I spent three months researching a desktop to replace my seven-year-old Windows laptop, bouncing endlessly between a Lenovo business tower and a Mac Mini. I finally chose the small form factor and efficient M4 chip, then immediately began interrogating myself. Why abandon eight comfortable years of Windows just to move into the cramped hotel of Mac OS, where the mattress is lumpy and the concierge shrugs?

    After days of melodrama, I realized that in a week I’ll be acclimated to the Mac Mini. Besides, if I had bought the Lenovo, I’d be regretting not getting the Mac. Regret is a snake with two fangs: it bites whether you go left or right.

    Here’s the truth I’ve been avoiding: I am addicted to regret. It makes me second-guess everything. It freezes me in the past, clouds the present, and sabotages the future. That is the heart of Gollumification—not the obsession itself, but the paralysis of compulsive doubt.

    So I’m using this rehab period to hunt the addiction at its source. I’m trying to see it clearly, resist it, and move forward without pandering to the demon that wants me to rewind every decision.

    Because if my YouTube content simply replays my “greatest hits,” then I’m not a creator—I’m Muzak in a grocery store. The kind that whispers, “You may have woken from a coma, but please return to it.” I can do better than that. If I can’t, if I’m nothing but a jukebox endlessly replaying my own past, then I should retire, crack open a beer, devour apple pie, and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns with my spiritual sponsor, Gollum. He and I can cradle our Seiko divers, lament the third-gen Monster that slipped through our fingers, and harmonize to Gilbert O’Sullivan like two addicts in a karaoke bar built out of broken dreams.

  • Diary of a Shoulder That Tried to Kill Me

    Diary of a Shoulder That Tried to Kill Me

    I posted a YouTube video confessing that my torn rotator cuff cured me of my watch addiction. I braced for scolding: “How dare you upload non-watch content?” I imagined angry horology fanatics clutching diver bracelets and pearl-clutching over my betrayal. Instead, the algorithm delivered mercy. The view count was business as usual. The comments, however, were a grim roll call of the maimed.

    They arrived like pilgrims to a shrine of damaged shoulders. Chronic pain veterans, many of them familiar names from the watch trenches, sent dispatches: stalled healing timelines, depression so thick it sits on your chest, isometric training as penance, and farewell notes to heavy lifting. A few newcomers drifted in, summoned by the wretched deltoid-algorithms that sort humanity into suffering tribes.

    Every story hit the same grim notes: rage, dread, self-pity, and nihilism. There it was again, that quiet void whispering, “Nothing matters anymore.” Nihilism is simply the rotator cuff of the soul—an internal tear that immobilizes you far longer than the physical one.

    I haven’t officially become a miserablist. Not yet. I still haunt my garage gym like a stubborn ghost. Goblet squats, double-hand swings, straight-leg deadlifts. Russian twists. A triceps exercise called Skull-crushers—named because the kettlebell would slam into your forehead if you lose focus for half a second. I use a twenty-pounder. I’m vain, not suicidal. My push-ups are a sort of prayer: on my knees, arms tucked like a sphinx, rising slowly as if coaxing life back into my triceps.

    This morning I feel a good soreness in my triceps, the soreness that whispers, “You’re still in the game.”

    Yesterday, mid-workout, two revelations hit me like kettlebells to the temple. First, the smoking gun: the injury didn’t come from ordinary training. It came from that medieval torture move known as the “lawnmower row.” You lean over and yank the kettlebell skyward like you’re trying to start a balky Briggs & Stratton. I blocked that memory for weeks—like someone trying to forget a bad romance.

    Second, I realized the injury was gentler in its early days. I know this because I still did “around-the-worlds”: passing a 70-pound kettlebell around my body in clockwise and counterclockwise orbits like a makeshift solar system. Yesterday, with a much lighter bell, I could barely scrape a half-circle before my left shoulder screamed mutiny. I didn’t just injure myself—I worsened it with the zeal of a true believer.

    So this December  of 2025 becomes a tightrope: train enough to fend off atrophy and rigidity, but not so much that the rotator cuff tears in half like wet parchment. This is the gospel of injury: moderation, humility, and the patience of a monk.

    If I were naïve enough to trust the publishing industry, I might dream of spinning this into a 70,000-word memoir. A blockbuster chronicling not only the physical agony but the psychological descent into pain-induced existentialism. The masses would see themselves in it. I might become rich. I might become famous. And yet, between two futures—a healthy shoulder and obscurity, or torn rotator cuff and celebrity cripple memoirist—I’d take the intact tendon every time. I’d rather be an anonymous man in a quiet garage than a limping prophet of pain and book deals.

  • A Torn Rotator Cuff Is an Eviction from Paradise

    A Torn Rotator Cuff Is an Eviction from Paradise

    A torn rotator cuff turned me into a petulant adolescent in a sixty-four-year-old body. I stomped around the house muttering, “I don’t want to be sixty-four. I want to be sixteen.” My mind went backwards, desperate for the simpler theology of youth. I remembered the golden afternoon my father drove me to San Francisco to see the 1977 premiere of Pumping Iron. Arnold Schwarzenegger was more than a bodybuilder; he was a secular god of eternal optimism and immortal sinew, a bronze statue come alive to assure troubled boys like me that discipline and a protein shake could conquer the universe.

    I inhaled that movie like scripture. Mike Mentzer became my Saint Paul; Arnold was my Messiah. I tanned religiously at the beach, layering banana-coconut oil on my chest like a fragrant magical elixir. After a workout, my pecs and biceps ballooned into two radiant promises of self-confidence. I would come home euphoric, still buzzing from the iron. My mother, who had only known me as a brooding kid with a permanent rain cloud, once looked at me and asked, “Did you fall in love? You look so happy.”

    I had fallen in love—with iron. Pumping iron was my El Dorado, my personal Fountain of Youth. I borrowed my motto from a forgotten champion in Strength & Health: “As long as God gives me the power to breathe, I will work out to my dying days.”

    But what happens when God stops lending you the breath you need? What happens when the garage—my sanctuary, my temple of kettlebells and dumbbells—becomes forbidden terrain? A torn rotator cuff is an eviction notice from paradise. Suddenly, I wasn’t a mystic of muscle—I was a sixty-four-year-old with a crippled shoulder. I pitied myself like a toddler denied candy.

    The nostalgia was seductive. I wanted to crawl back through time to the late seventies and wrap myself in the cinematic glow of Pumping Iron. But nostalgia is the Devil’s lure. Lot’s Wife looked back once, and the universe crystallized her into a shaker of driveway salt. If I kept staring at the past I’d become the same: frozen, brittle, lifeless. Moving forward was no longer inspirational—it was survival.

    Phil Stutz, in his book Lessons for Living, makes the same argument without biblical theatrics. To be fully alive, he says, you must move forward. His chapter “Just an Illusion” is a scalpel to the throat of consumer culture: reality is struggle, pain, and constant work. But the culture we live in insists that happiness is an on-demand product—a smoothie of ease, dopamine, and perpetual comfort. If you don’t have it, the problem is you.

    This illusion is comically persistent. We spend our lives chasing it like gamblers who “almost won last time.” We train harder, earn more, buy more, upgrade constantly—believing that one more paycheck, one more gadget, one more dollar will finally transport us to the utopia of optimized living. It never arrives. We try again. The illusion endures.

    The media parades its demigods to keep the fantasy alive. They are beautiful, wealthy, self-assured, and cosmically adored. Their bodies are perfect; their futures are certain; their Instagram bios glow like prophecy. They live outside Stutz’s five brutal facts of reality, and so they are not human—they are hallucinations.

    And here I was, injured and marinating in the opposite myth: I am not the optimized self. My shoulder is a wreck. Therefore, I am a loser. The recovery will be incomplete. It will be permanent. I will never be whole again. Therefore, why go on?

    This is the psychological trap of real injury. It does not simply hurt the body—it hacks the mind. It whispers doom so convincingly that you start to believe your life is a long prologue to defeat. My rotator cuff isn’t just testing the limits of my shoulder; it’s testing the limits of my mental durability. And some days, I fear I am failing the exam.

  • Misaligned with the Modern World

    Misaligned with the Modern World

    My torn rotator cuff was a warning of something I should have seen coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? With a torn rotator cuff in my right shoulder, I stupidly did a solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The pain in my left shoulder was minimal. However, the impact probably fractured the TVs internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. My torn rotator cuff reminds me that I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    A rotator cuff injury is an affront to the human desire for control. You follow instructions and protocols to avoid injury and get stronger, but the pain reminds you that you can’t control the trajectory of recovery. Complete rest could be its own disaster. You’re choosing between two bad options.

    Not only do you lose control of your body in ways you never imagined—you can’t optimize.

    If you’re an exercise buff who struggles with weight and is waiting for affordable versions of GLP-1 drugs, as I am, the compromises forced by a shoulder injury are disconcerting.

    My workout on November 29, with kettlebells integrated with shoulder rehab exercises, was not encouraging. My shoulder felt worse afterward. When the Motrin wore off and I woke up at two in the morning, I could tell the training had aggravated it. I began thinking about giving up the Farmer’s Walk with a 45-pound kettlebell in each hand. Perhaps that was too much. My entire training life has been a process of eliminating one exercise after another.

    With my shoulder still aggravated from the workout, on November 30 I decided to try my Schwinn Airdyne again, but this time I wouldn’t use my left arm to row the lever. I would rest my hand on it and rely mostly on my legs. The problem was psychological. Using my arms fully, I had burned 600 calories in about 50 minutes—probably more, since the calorie monitor doesn’t calculate body weight, and several forums claim that an hour on an air bike burns around 1,000 calories. Not using my arms would reduce my output, which, in a gamified world, is demoralizing. Still, even without using my arms, the calorie burn would exceed that of walking the neighborhood for an hour while worrying about stray dogs and car fumes.

    Exactly a week before—on the day my Airdyne workout was followed by nerve pain shooting down my left arm—I burned 600 calories in 52 minutes, which comes to 11.54 calories per minute. A week later, three days after seeing the doctor, I tried the Airdyne again with a significant disadvantage: I couldn’t row with my left hand. During the session, I protected my shoulder with three strategies. I rested my hand on the lever with no pushing or pulling; I gripped my towel with the left hand while my right arm did the rowing; or I grabbed the towel draped over my neck with both hands. Not surprisingly, I didn’t burn as many calories as the week before. I burned 601 in 57 minutes, which was 10.54 calories per minute. My calorie-burn efficiency was down 9.5 percent.

    Despite the significant drop in efficiency, the experiment was half successful: I still reached my goal of 600 calories.

    The real test remained: an hour after the workout, how would my shoulder feel?

    I showered, ate lunch, did some mild isometrics for my shoulder, and did not experience the shooting nerve pain I had a week earlier, so perhaps I was in the clear with the Airdyne provided I don’t row with my injured side.

    I would take this minor victory. The last three months I felt insulted by the difficulty in wrapping a towel around my waist, taking off a sweat-soaked tank top, putting on a belt, closing the driver-side car door, reaching for something in the back of the fridge, and using my left hand to soap my right armpit. Being able to burn 600 calories on the Airdyne was a sweet morsel of consolation. 

    In this war with a rotator cuff injury, I was willing to take whatever tiny victories I could get. 

    A small expression of gratitude might help my morose disposition and the self-pity that I had indulged in over the last three months. If I ever were to write and publish a book on my ordeal, I would probably title it Shoulder, Interrupted: How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me. 

  • Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    For three months I slogged through shoulder pain armed with nothing but a self-diagnosis and stubborn pride. I refused to see a doctor. Why submit myself to some exhausted clinician who’d never lifted a kettlebell in his life and would prescribe the usual pablum—ice, rest, and advice I could have gotten from the comments section of Wikipedia?

    Then something happened that forced a reckoning. To compensate for the kettlebell exile, I doubled down on the Schwinn Airdyne—hour-long sessions of fan-bike misery that combine pedaling with lever rowing. I felt no pain… until a week before Thanksgiving. After a brutally satisfying session, a nerve fired down my arm like a live wire. The message was unmistakable: I had graduated from “irritation” to “we’re-squeezing-your-spinal-cord-for-fun.” Something was pinched, something was furious, and it was no longer optional.

    I made a YouTube video to announce the cosmic irony: my watch addiction was cured, but the cure was a torn rotator cuff. The floodgates opened. Dozens of comments poured in from people who had endured surgeries, magnets, injections, cortisone cocktails, or endless physical therapy. One old friend emailed: ten years of chronic pain, zero recovery, restricted motion for life. The road, it turns out, is paved with hope and ends in a ditch.

    It was clear: I didn’t need more voices, I needed data. I called Kaiser and booked an appointment. Someone would see me the day before Thanksgiving.

    That afternoon I met Dr. Cherukuri, a woman in her late thirties with the energy of someone who actually likes her profession. She examined my shoulder, commented that the bulge was visible even through my T-shirt, pressed around the joint, put me through a series of movements, and diagnosed left rotator cuff syndrome with left biceps tendinopathy. She ordered X-rays and an ultrasound and, pending results, believed three months of rehab could put me back together.

    She put me on Motrin three times a day for two weeks to bring the inflammation down—enough to make rehab possible. She also agreed I should continue kettlebell work for muscle maintenance. A doctor who understands the importance of preserving muscle mass? I nearly wept. The catch was predictable: no chest or shoulder presses, no biceps curls. My hypertrophy would be confined to legs, glutes, traps—maybe some trickle-down gains from rehab exercises if the gods were kind.

    She handed me a list of movements, which I combined with ones I learned from YouTube: cow-cat yoga pose, broomstick flexion, wall push-ups, wall flexion, forearm planks, plank shoulder taps, narrow-position knee push-ups, light dumbbell rotations, and more. Anything that required me to lift my arms overhead or behind me felt like sticking my shoulder into a hornet nest.

    The mandate was fifteen minutes of rehab every day. On kettlebell days, I’d slip the movements between lifts three days a week. The other four days were rehabilitation only—an entire week built around mending the wounded joint.

    Psychologically, the appointment was a relief. First, the diagnosis proved I wasn’t a lunatic or some melodramatic malingerer. Second, I needed structure. I needed a plan, a weapon—something to push against instead of drifting through pain, anxiety, and the unknowable. When I’m saddled with a problem, I don’t need platitudes; I need targets and artillery. Seeing the doctor was the moment I picked up a rifle instead of a white flag.

    But I was still blind. I had no idea how severe the tear was, whether rehab would work, whether I could heal without surgery, or how to navigate the distress of shoulder pain so sharp that turning my steering wheel wrong or sliding a backpack strap across my arm sent shockwaves that lingered for minutes.

    Going to a doctor was a necessary first step. But I still knew nothing. All I understood was how much I still needed to know if I hoped to climb out of this hole. The thirst for clarity, for diagnostic certainty, became my new obsession—one that bulldozed my watch addiction.

    My YouTube followers were devastated.
    “We need you back, bro. We need you to commiserate with us about the watch madness.”

    God bless them. They needed me to get better—not only for me, but for them, so we could suffer together in peace.

  • A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    Be careful what you wish for. I spent twenty years begging the universe to cure my watch obsession, one that caused me to blow several thousand dollars a year on diver watches I’d unbox for my YouTube followers, flip, rebuy, and then sell again—a watch-obsessive’s fever dream. For twenty years, I tried to get off the hamster wheel of crazy, but the powers of social media and diver-watch eye candy kept pulling me back in.

    I finally got my cure: a torn rotator cuff. In late August of 2025, I remember lying on my back and doing single-arm, 50-pound kettlebell presses. I didn’t feel anything severe, just a tightness in my left shoulder.

    The next day, my left shoulder felt like a disgruntled rental car—everything squeaked, nothing moved smoothly, and I dreaded putting my arm through a sleeve.

    I knew what a torn rotator cuff felt like. I’d had them in both shoulders three times in my life. The first was when I was a thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter. On a rainy day in PE, the teacher, Mr. Bishop, had us play “volleyball” with a giant 72-inch Earth Ball, and when I tried to hit it with my right arm, the arm went backward and I was out of weightlifting for nine months.

    In the mid-nineties and early two-thousands, it happened twice more during heavy bench presses. Both occurrences took about nine months to heal.

    So I knew what I was dealing with. Usually, I’d need nine months.

    Of course, I had to modify my workouts into physical therapy sessions where I stare at resistance bands as if they’re punishment devices from a Stalin-era prison camp.

    The pain seemed to be more intense after workouts. I thought of ditching them altogether, but I read that no activity could lead to muscular atrophy and render the shoulder frozen and immobile. I wasn’t sure, though. How big and deep was the tear? Was my age—now 64—a factor working against me? Why did the rehab exercises performed by medical doctors on YouTube make my shoulder feel worse?

    These questions took up all my mental bandwidth, rendering my watch obsession nil. Wanting a healthy shoulder, I would gladly trade every diver, every limited edition, every bracelet and waffle strap for a shoulder that didn’t scream like a violin in a garbage disposal. So yes—my addiction was cured. Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the disease.