Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    After watching a documentary on microplastics—the kind that makes you feel like you’ve been chewing on a credit card your entire adult life—I purged my kitchen of polymer cutting boards with the zeal of a man burning cursed artifacts. In their place, I installed three bamboo boards: handsome, virtuous, and morally superior. They gleamed with the smugness of objects that require hand-washing. No dishwasher. No shortcuts. You don’t clean them; you tend to them. I accepted this as the price of purity.

    A month later, domestic reality intervened. We needed a larger board. Naturally, I upgraded—not to another bamboo slab, but to a teak charcuterie board thick enough to stop a bullet and elegant enough to host a minor European summit. When I opened the box, however, I discovered that teak is less a cutting surface and more a lifestyle commitment. It must be moisturized. Neglect it, and it dries, cracks, and becomes a microbial timeshare. The bamboo boards, I learned, share this delicate temperament. So much for rugged simplicity.

    Now, once a month, I conduct what can only be described as a ritual. I anoint each board—front and back—with a tablespoon of mineral oil, as if preparing it for a minor sacrament. They sit overnight, absorbing their glossy absolution while I contemplate the path that brought me here.

    The plot thickened when I discovered that plain mineral oil, while admirable, is apparently the beginner’s drug. The connoisseur graduates to a blend of mineral oil and beeswax—a two-in-one elixir promising water resistance, durability, and, one suspects, moral clarity. Another twenty dollars vanished. The boards, I was assured, would now repel moisture with aristocratic disdain.

    I like to think of myself as a man who values simplicity. Reality suggests otherwise. Without meaning to, I slid down the polished banister of the healthy lifestyle rabbit hole. It begins with a reasonable fear—microplastics—and ends with a cabinet of oils, waxes, and maintenance schedules that would make a museum curator nod in approval. There’s a name for obsessive food purity—orthorexia nervosa—but this feels broader, more ambitious. This is what I would call Total Purity Syndrome: the quiet transformation of daily habits into sacred rites, where deviation carries the faint odor of moral failure.

    To be clear, I haven’t sealed myself in a sterile dome, subsisting on filtered air and ethically sourced chia seeds. I’m not auditing my oxygen intake. I’ve simply spent about a hundred dollars on cutting boards and would prefer they not crack, warp, or harbor microscopic civilizations. That’s not pathology. That’s stewardship.

    Still, there is something revealing in the arc: a man who set out to eliminate plastic and ended up with a monthly oiling ceremony. Progress, it seems, has a way of recruiting you into its maintenance plan.

  • The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    My YouTube channel, now more than a decade old, has gathered over 11,000 subscribers and delivers anywhere from a polite 700 views to a respectable 5,000, depending on how shameless I’m willing to be. The high performers are predictable: watch reviews and those ceremonial “State of the Collection” videos—rituals of conspicuous enthusiasm that the algorithm devours like a starving dog. These are the videos where I feel myself performing, angling, posturing. I can practically see the hook in the water. I am not expressing myself; I am fishing. And the bait is always the same: dopamine, desire, envy, and that most reliable narcotic of all—FOMO. These are not just videos; they are small moral compromises dressed as content. They feed what the famous therapist Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel.”

    Then there are the other videos—the ones where I sit back and become a kind of rambling talk show host, reflecting on the week, my thoughts, my minor existential skirmishes. I sprinkle in a bit of watch talk as a courtesy to the faithful, but the real subject is the human condition, or at least my version of it. These videos are closer to the truth. Naturally, they struggle to crack a thousand views. Authenticity, it turns out, is not algorithm-friendly.

    This creates a tidy little crisis. Do I continue manufacturing these glossy, attention-seeking performances—feed the beast, play the game, become a caricature of myself? Or do I choose integrity and accept the role of a man speaking into an increasingly empty room? If the audience shrinks in proportion to my honesty, why not go all the way—abandon video altogether and disappear into a novel no one will read?

    The problem is, I’m not built for that kind of monastic focus. Eighty thousand words on a single idea feels less like a creative challenge and more like a prison sentence. I prefer miscellany. I like to ricochet between obsessions: watches, my adolescent bodybuilding fantasies, the enduring mystery of my own arrested development. I am, by any reasonable definition, a man-child with a specialty in distraction.

    Take food. Not just eating—how I eat. I am obsessed with meals that can be held in one hand: tacos, burritos, sandwiches, wraps—portable architecture. The ideal scenario involves standing over the kitchen sink, dispensing with plates, silverware, and any trace of ceremony. It is efficiency elevated to philosophy. Why sit down when you can hover? Why clean dishes when you can bypass them entirely? This is my idea of innovation: reducing life to its lowest possible friction. Call it optimization if you’re feeling generous. Call it laziness if you’re not.

    And yet, paradoxically, I am disciplined—ferociously so—when it comes to exercise. Olympic lifting in my youth, kettlebells and power yoga now. But even here, discipline is the wrong word. This is compulsion. I don’t train because I choose to; I train because I need to. The workout is less a virtue than a medication, a daily dose of relief for a mind that resists stillness.

    My days split cleanly in two. Morning brings optimism: coffee, steel-cut oats with protein powder, the illusion of infinite possibility. I feel like a serious person, a thinker, someone on the verge of producing meaningful work. By night, the illusion collapses. Fatigue sets in, mood darkens, and I retreat into a fog of lethargy and low-grade dread. The same man who greeted the day with ambition now negotiates with anxiety before sleep, wondering what small catastrophe might arrive in the dark. Will the dream render me so helpless I have a heart attack? Will I even wake up from this dream or succumb to eternal slumber? 

    Hovering over all of this is a private mythology, one I’ve borrowed—perhaps stolen—from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” I cast myself as the misunderstood artist, the outsider, the man quietly suffering for his craft. It’s a flattering fiction. In reality, I’m less tortured genius and more well-fed procrastinator—an enthusiast of shortcuts, a collector of appetites, a man who stands over the sink eating a breakfast burrito while postponing his lab work. The cholesterol test can wait. The scale will sort itself out. The fantasy persists.

    And that, I suppose, is the truth: I oscillate between aspiration and avoidance, between the higher and lower channels, between the man I imagine myself to be and the one holding a sandwich over the sink.

  • Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse, congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to leave at sixty-five, after four decades of teaching. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.

  • I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    I’ll Take the Full House: A Life Without the Yahtzee

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes with my favorite podcasters and YouTubers and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. I’ve taught college writing for nearly forty years, but I don’t feel compelled to sermonize about it online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. Faced with the spectacle of success, I drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody.

    Two modest ideas interrupt that spiral. The first is a phrase my daughter and I use over a game of Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a full house, a small straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions land between 650 and 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 425 calories in forty-four minutes and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does.

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Moving forward, I will continue to write a miscellany of things on my blog, which is a sort of proxy for therapy–as is my piano and exercise–and I will stop trying to be a YouTube star and tell my stories on my small piano channel because that’s where my heart is at and I don’t feel I have anything deeper to offer the fusion of my piano compositions and the fable-like stories that spawned them.

  • Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    I drank my first protein shake in 1975, at thirteen—an age when you’ll ingest anything if it promises muscle. It was milk and two heroic scoops of Bob Hoffman’s “Super Hi-Proteen,” a granular blend of soy, brown sugar, and the kind of mystery ingredients that seemed to come with a warning label in spirit if not in ink. I swallowed it like a pledge of allegiance. Years later, I realized I’d been spooning down hog slop with a marketing budget.

    Protein powders, of course, grew up. Whey replaced soy, monk fruit and stevia replaced sugar, and the flavor profile advanced from “punishment” to “tolerable.” I returned, cautiously, folding a scoop into my oatmeal or stirring it into yogurt. A lifetime lifter develops a habit I’ll call protein insurance—the quiet reassurance that your muscles won’t starve because you forgot to eat like a grown man.

    And so the shake became a fixture—less a meal than a policy.

    Bodybuilders and civilians alike now drink these things by the gallon, not just for insurance but for convenience. Which raises a question that refuses to stay polite: assuming we’re not slowly marinating ourselves in trace metals such as lead and cadmium, are we doing something more subtle—something that damages the soul? Rachel Sugar poses a version of this in her Atlantic essay “Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent,” where the modern ideal appears in a hoodie: a tech bro so devoted to efficiency that he outsources eating to a beige slurry. Why cook, why chew, why pause, when a bottle can reduce nourishment to a task you can complete between emails?

    Enter Soylent, the Willy Wonka chewing gum of Silicon Valley—a full meal compressed into a swallow, a dinner table dissolved into a transaction. At best, it tastes like competent baby food. At worst, it tastes like ambition without appetite.

    Soylent had its moment and then receded, but the protein shake did not. It adapted, multiplied, rebranded. Giants like The Coca-Cola Company now print money selling pre-made bottles fortified with protein, “adaptogens,” and antioxidant halos. The label reads like a résumé; the experience reads like chalk. A nation too busy to cook, trained to snack, and newly anxious about muscle retention—thanks to the rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists—is primed to accept frictionless nutrition. Open. Sip. Be optimized.

    None of this is accidental. The arithmetic of food is unforgiving: real food spoils and yields modest margins; ultra-processed food endures and pays dividends. The industry didn’t just produce these powders—it educated us to desire them, dressed them in the language of health, beauty, and time savings, and invited us to trade ritual for efficiency.

    Last week, I tried a thought experiment on my writing students. They’re working on an argument about whether ultra-processed foods are villains to both body and soul.

    “Imagine,” I said, “three protein wafers a day. They regulate appetite, deliver perfect nutrition, sculpt you into an Instagram after photo, and carry you past a hundred. No cooking. No dishes. No decisions.”

    I let that sit for a moment.

    “Now imagine what disappears. The dinners that run long. The laughter that spills over the table. The argument that turns into a story. The quiet, ordinary pleasure of chewing.”

    In this optimized life, your insurer applauds and your followers multiply. But you become something flatter—efficient, photogenic, and faintly ghostlike. Not dead, exactly. Just thinned out where life used to be.

    I asked for a show of hands. Who would choose the wafers?

    Not one hand rose.

    For all our flirtation with powders and promises, the verdict was clear: they want to be healthy, yes—but not at the cost of becoming efficient shadows of themselves. Real food, with all its inconvenience and noise, remains the center. The shake can stay as insurance. It just can’t be the policy that replaces the warmth of home.

  • Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Five days ago, an hour before my afternoon class, I performed my sacred office ritual: a Barbell’s Salty Peanut protein bar followed by a red apple. The pairing is non-negotiable. The bar coats my teeth in a fudge-like film; the apple arrives like a janitor, scrubbing the residue with righteous crunch. It’s dental choreography. It works—until it doesn’t.

    Mid-bar, I bit down and hit something that did not belong in the human diet. A crack, a jolt, a flash of pain in my upper left molar that suggested litigation. I spit out the offending bite and there it was: a small, defiant piece of gravel. Not metaphorical gravel. Geological. I briefly entertained the idea of a calcified peanut shell, but no—this was the kind of object that builds driveways, not snacks.

    I discarded the rock, finished the bar like a man negotiating with fate, and approached the apple with the caution of a bomb technician, chewing exclusively on my right side. The tooth protested—sharp when I bit down, sensitive when I dared sip cold sparkling water. I called my dentist. He agreed to see me Monday while my daughters are in for their cleaning, a kind of dental drive-by.

    I told him, only half joking, that if this turns into a root canal, I’ll be leaving the country under an assumed name. My claustrophobia is not a charming quirk; it’s a governing principle. The rubber wedge they use to keep your mouth open transforms my throat into a closed border. When I can’t swallow on command, panic doesn’t knock—it kicks the door in. I am praying for a humble composite fix, something modest and merciful. A root canal would turn me into a beachside exile, scanning the horizon for dental extradition.

    As if one anxiety weren’t enough, two days later my college’s learning system—Canvas—collapsed under a ransomware attack that apparently took down thousands of schools. An hour before class, I discovered my lecture had vanished into the digital abyss. I called my engineering friend Pedro to deliver a live report of my unraveling. I told him I’d have to improvise, which in teaching is another word for “pray for coherence.”

    Then a thought arrived like a small miracle: my lectures are linked to Google Slides. If I could log into my Google account, I could resurrect the class. I told Pedro I’d head to the room early and test the login before the students arrived. I looked down at my desk—keys, empty protein bar wrapper, the usual debris of academic life—but no phone.

    “Where the hell is my phone?” I said.

    “You’re talking to me on it,” Pedro replied.

    We laughed the way men laugh when reality briefly exposes its wiring. For twelve years, Pedro has been my unofficial tech support, but informing me that the phone I was using was in my hand may be his finest work.

    Between the compromised tooth and the compromised Canvas infrastructure, I felt like a man auditioning for a nervous breakdown. Instead, I walked into class and, perversely, had one of the best sessions of the semester. We discussed ultra-processed foods—their design, their addictiveness, the way they quietly rig the game of weight management. Then I offered a heretical counterargument: homemade food can be just as seductive, just as dangerous to restraint.

    To prove the point, I pulled up a photograph from the Los Angeles Times: a $38 basturma brisket sandwich from Yerord Mas, built from Australian wagyu and dusted with cumin, garlic, and chiles. The image did not educate so much as seduce. Within seconds, my students had located the menu and confirmed the price with the forensic zeal of the hungry.

    “We should Uber to Glendale,” I said, “and call it field research.”

    At that point I added, “Some of you are going to complain to the Dean that you enrolled in a critical thinking class and all I do is talk about food.”

    They laughed—real laughter, not the polite classroom version. The room had a charged, fizzy quality, as if the collapse of Canvas had granted us permission to loosen the tie a notch. Chaos had stripped the day down to its essentials: conversation, curiosity, a shared joke.

    I needed that laugh more than I care to admit.

    Now I’m waiting. Will the dentist deliver a quick, civilized repair, or will I be pricing one-way tickets and practicing aliases on a beach somewhere in Mexico, scanning the horizon for a man carrying a drill?

    In the meantime, I chew carefully, avoid gravel, and consider the possibility that the most dangerous part of my day is not the curriculum, but the snack.

  • The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    I teach college writing, which means I’ve spent the last four years staring at the AI question the way a man stares at a fire he suspects might jump the fence. When ChatGPT arrived, it didn’t knock politely. It crashed into the room like a UFO and rearranged the furniture. Since then, I’ve read what feels like a small library’s worth of essays—predictions, warnings, elegies for the essay itself—and contributed a few of my own, because that’s what we do: we metabolize disruption by writing about it.

    But there comes a point when the analysis stops clarifying and starts echoing.

    I’ve reached that point. My brain has filed a quiet injunction: no more. Not just a break from AI, but a break from reading about how exhausted everyone else is by AI. The discourse has become a hall of mirrors—each reflection slightly more fatigued than the last.

    I’ve been here before. In 2010, I had newborn twins, which is another way of saying I was living inside a low-grade emergency. The market offered guidance—books, podcasts, earnest experts—but I wanted none of it. I was already doing the job. Additional commentary felt like a second shift. Experience was loud enough; analysis was just noise layered on top.

    Both episodes point to the same condition: Applied Reality Rejection—the refusal to consume secondary discourse when you’re already neck-deep in the primary experience. When you’re in it, more talk about it doesn’t help. It dilutes.

    And here’s the part the essays rarely admit: reading about AI doesn’t soothe AI anxiety. It compounds it. Each think piece arrives like a fresh weather report announcing the same storm in slightly different prose.

    So I’m choosing friction of a better kind. I play the piano until my attention steadies. I pick up kettlebells and let gravity argue with me for a while. I walk the beach and let the horizon do what no article can—put scale back into the day. The analog world doesn’t theorize; it recalibrates.

    That was the remedy with the twins, too. Not another podcast on sleep training, but a walk, a dumb TV binge, a sweaty hour in the garage. Relief came from stepping out of the commentary loop, not diving deeper into it.

    Which is why, when I see another AI essay queued up from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I feel a familiar tightening—and then I close the tab. Not out of contempt, but out of preservation.

    I’ve heard enough echoes. It’s time to drive two miles to Catalina Avenue and take a walk at the beach.

  • The Man Who Refunded His Generosity

    The Man Who Refunded His Generosity

    There is a certain type of man who treats generosity like a minor injury—something to be iced, medicated, and quickly undone. When social protocol forces him to buy a gift for someone else, he doesn’t experience the faint glow of goodwill. He winces. The purchase lands like a deduction from a sacred account, and the only way to steady himself is to restore the balance immediately—by buying something for himself.

    This is not coincidence. It’s policy.

    He operates under a private accounting system I’d call Gift Offset Compulsion: every act of giving must be counterweighted by an equal or greater act of self-reward. The outward gesture is merely the opening move; the real transaction is internal. He hands over a wrapped token with one hand while quietly preparing a compensatory indulgence with the other.

    In his mind, this isn’t selfishness—it’s equilibrium. A world in which he gives without reclaiming would feel distorted, even unjust. So he corrects it. Every birthday present, every holiday obligation, every ceremonial nod to generosity is followed by a personal rebate. He doesn’t give; he circulates assets. He doesn’t sacrifice; he settles accounts.

    And once the books are balanced, he feels whole again—restored, reimbursed, and ready, if necessary, to give once more… provided he can be paid back promptly.

    So my challenge to all my watch-obsessive friends is this: Look deep inside and ask yourself if you’ve ever purchased a watch under this type of psychological distress.