Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    Five mornings a week, I work out in my garage—kettlebells clanging, yoga mat unrolled, joints negotiating a ceasefire. The soundtrack is Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3 FM, broadcasting from Pasadena. This matters because Torrance is not Pasadena, and 89.3 is a notoriously fragile signal here. It fades, ghosts, sulks. Catching it cleanly is less a matter of tuning than of faith.

    Then there’s the noise. Torrance mornings are an industrial symphony: garbage trucks reversing, leaf blowers screaming like jet engines, lawnmowers revving, cars tearing past as if late for something existential. Any garage radio that can’t project authority is immediately demoted to paperweight.

    I briefly considered going big—dropping $300 on a Tecsun S-8800 field radio, a machine that looks like it should come with a government-issued lanyard. But after cycling a parade of smaller radios through the garage, I landed—almost sheepishly—on the Qodosen DX-286. And it has been an ambush.

    On FM, the Qodosen is a brute. It grabs 89.3 at full strength and refuses to let go. Its 3-watt speaker is loud without being cruel, present without being shrill. Placed in just the right corner of the garage, away from interference, it becomes a small, defiant monument to good engineering. Unfettered, it sings.

    The most embarrassing part is that I once returned it.

    I didn’t trust it. An $80 radio performing this well felt like a trick. Too good to be true. I convinced myself it was a short-lived overachiever—high performance, early death. So I sent it back and went crawling to my more expensive radios: the Tecsun PL-660, the PL-680. Fine machines. Respectable. And yet, one by one, they lost the FM battle and the speaker war.

    The absence of the Qodosen grew louder than the radios I owned.

    Eight months ago, I rebought it, tail between my legs. It has been my garage companion ever since. Morning after morning, it cuts through the din and delivers Larry Mantle like clockwork. Kettlebells swing. Downward dogs are held. The signal holds.

    Sometimes the best gear isn’t the one with the most gravitas or the highest price tag. Sometimes it’s the small, stubborn box you didn’t believe in—until it refused to be ignored.

  • How a Toilet Seat Ruined My Workout

    How a Toilet Seat Ruined My Workout

    Eighteen months ago, when I tore my rotator cuff, I made the first of several reluctant concessions to age and anatomy. My one-hour kettlebell workouts dropped from five days a week to three. In their place, I resurrected the Schwinn Airdyne—a machine I trust because it does not care about my feelings. I rode it for 50 to 60 minutes, three or four days a week, and in the early going I had to work hard to burn 600 calories in 54 minutes. Progress came slowly, then grudgingly, then reliably. Soon it took only 48 minutes to hit 600. In the last month, I was regularly landing around 700 calories in 56 minutes.

    Then came yesterday.

    I burned 825 calories in 61 minutes. Nearly 800 calories per hour. That’s not training; that’s an episode. That’s one of those rare days when the body cooperates, the mind goes feral, and the machine quietly accepts its role as accomplice.

    But we need to talk about today.

    Today, I slogged. I crawled. I negotiated with myself minute by minute. I finished with a humiliating 500 calories in 56 minutes—a meager 535 calories per hour. That’s roughly a third less output than yesterday. As someone who motivates himself through numbers, benchmarks, and internal scorekeeping, this wasn’t just disappointing. It was existential.

    Gamification cuts both ways.

    There were, however, mitigating factors. Last night I spent three hours locked in mortal combat with an old toilet seat, sweating through three T-shirts while attempting to remove plastic wing nuts that had apparently fused with time itself. During this campaign, I punched myself in the face with a pair of pliers, opening a respectable gash across my nose. I woke up sore in places no exercise program claims credit for.

    I suspected today’s ride would be compromised. I just didn’t anticipate how compromised. Working out this morning after last night’s ordeal felt like an NFL linebacker playing Monday Night Football and then being asked to suit up again on Thursday night. The schedule was punitive. What I needed was rest—another full day of it.

    To console myself, I did what any reasonable person would do: I cooked the books. Surely that three-hour ordeal burned at least 400 calories. Add that to today’s 500 on the Airdyne and—there it is—900 calories. A full 200 calories over my goal.

    Victory.

    The ledger balances. My bragging rights are being processed. All that remains is a warm bathtub and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that even on an off day, I still managed to win the argument with myself.

  • I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    This morning, as I brushed my teeth and my daughters gathered their backpacks for the drive to school, I stared into the mirror and took inventory. There it was: a respectable gash carved into the crown of my nose. A souvenir. A reminder of last night’s three-hour descent into domestic warfare.

    The catalyst was banal. For reasons known only to entropy, the American Standard elongated toilet seat in my daughters’ bathroom had cracked. I bought a replacement immediately. Then I let it sit in my office for two weeks, radiating quiet menace. I told myself the job would be simple. My instincts told me it would be biblical.

    My instincts were correct.

    The hinge bolts on top were buried beneath a geological formation of rust. The plastic wing nuts underneath were no better—coated in a crusty patina that suggested they had been forged during the Eisenhower administration. First, I scraped and cleaned. Then I sprayed. Then I tried to loosen. Nothing moved. The bolts might as well have been welded to the bowl.

    So I escalated. Tools came out. Space disappeared. The cabinet loomed. There was no leverage, no angle, no dignity. I hammered. I wedged a flathead screwdriver against the bolt and struck it like I was trying to extract a confession. I attacked the wing nut with a wrench. Forty-five minutes passed. Sweat pooled. Hope thinned.

    I called my best friend’s son, a preternaturally calm handyman with three young children screaming in the background. We FaceTimed. He studied the situation and said, serenely, “You’re going to twist the bottom bolt back and forth like a paperclip. Eventually it’ll snap.”

    I thanked him and wedged myself beneath the toilet, contorting my body into a shape last attempted during Cold War espionage. I twisted. I rocked. At one point, my locking pliers slipped and I punched myself in the face, opening up my nose like a badly sealed envelope. Blood. Rage. Progress: none.

    An hour had passed. I had mutilated one plastic wing nut into modern art. While I was assessing my wound in the mirror, my wife calmly removed the right wing nut. Half the job was done.

    The left side, however, had ideas.

    Two more hours vanished. Every tool failed. The space was tighter. My left shoulder—home to a torn rotator cuff—began to flare. Each push sent a warning shot of inflammation through my arm. I was exhausted. I was furious. I was within a centimeter of victory and flirting with surrender.

    And then the thought arrived, dark and unforgivable: Call a plumber.

    He would charge $150. He would finish in three minutes. He would charge $150 even if I stood there and wept. The fact that I had already invested two hours, blood, and cartilage made calling him impossible. Layered on top of that was wounded masculinity. Sixty-four years old. Fit. A lifetime of lifting. I could not—would not—summon a professional to do a man’s job while I watched.

    Fueled by pride and spite, I ripped the toilet seat free, gaining better access but no relief. Then, in a moment of clarity bordering on madness, I reached for the wire-cutting pliers. I attacked the plastic wing nut with savage intent. Shards flew. The nut began to yield. This was not finesse. This was attrition.

    Three hours in, shoulder inflamed, nose split, I finished the job.

    What will I do next time? I will spend $99 on a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and end the ordeal in five minutes. That’s what I’ll do. When it comes to home repairs, knowledge is power—and ignorance is a slow bleed across your own bathroom floor. If I had known about the Dremel beforehand, it would have been worth every penny.

  • Why Good Salsa Matters

    Why Good Salsa Matters

    In 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California. This was my first encounter with fast food as spectacle—and with teenagers as a category of human being. They stood behind the registers in a loose formation, and every one of them appeared to be afflicted with the same alarming facial condition. Spots everywhere. An outbreak.

    I was five. I did the math available to me. Had a disease swept through the workforce? Did Taco Bell exposure cause lesions? Were the refried beans radioactive?

    I asked my father what was wrong with their faces.

    “They’re pimples,” he said. Then, without hesitation, he added, “According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to teach them humility.”

    I knew immediately this was untrue. Not because I had read Aristotle—I hadn’t—but because I knew my father. This was him doing what he loved most: inventing authority on the spot. He also harbored a low-grade contempt for teenagers, whom he regarded as overconfident and undercooked. Acne, in his view, was divine pushback. Cosmic slapstick.

    The pimples unsettled me, but they did not interfere with my appetite. I ate my tacos and frijoles under the Taco Bell canopy, admiring the beige stone “Mexican” architecture—the aesthetic equivalent of a sombrero on a filing cabinet. The food itself was a novelty. We didn’t eat Mexican food, and Taco Bell certainly wasn’t Mexican food, but it was a portal. A gateway drug.

    Within a few years, my mother was making tacos, burritos, and enchiladas at home. Our Mexican-American neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa from ingredients grown in our own backyards. The salsa lived on the coffee table in a volcanic tureen, like something sacred and faintly dangerous. You could smell it the moment you walked into the living room—chilies, onions, garlic, alive and unapologetic.

    The color stopped you. A deep ruby red. Not restaurant red. Not industrial red. Real red. I have eaten excellent salsa over the decades, but nothing has ever matched the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, if a Mexican restaurant brings out a pre-meal salsa that approaches that standard—even halfway—I take it as a sign of moral seriousness.

    Felice Orozco’s salsa wasn’t just delicious. It was philosophical. It carried an unspoken argument about what survives and what matters. When families pass down food traditions, they’re saying something quietly radical: some knowledge deserves care, repetition, and fidelity. This isn’t about novelty or performance. It’s not about artisanal swagger or bragging rights. It’s about love made practical. Wisdom with onions.

    So what was Taco Bell to me as a child? A desecration of Mexican food? No. It was a signpost. A crude outpost with a faint aroma of the real thing. It pointed toward a richer city beyond itself—a place where food meant connection, where flavors carried memory and generosity.

    The sign didn’t point south.
    It pointed to Felice Orozco’s house.

  • The Potato Diet and the Gospel According to Mel Brooks

    The Potato Diet and the Gospel According to Mel Brooks

    Recently, I fell down a nutritional rabbit hole and emerged clutching a potato. Not just any potato, but the cooked-then-cooled kind—Idaho and sweet potatoes transformed into resistant starch, that miraculous category of food that sounds like it should be protesting something. Resistant starch, I learned, behaves like a probiotic: it feeds the gut microbiome, supports immunity, improves metabolic health, lowers cholesterol, and may reduce colorectal cancer risk. It even helps regulate appetite hormones, which is a polite way of saying it tells your brain to stop behaving like a feral raccoon.

    There’s a whole taxonomy of resistant-starch foods, but I’m a simple man. I’m focusing on potatoes. I eat them cold from the fridge or gently reheated. Lunch and dinner get a potato. Snacks get a yam blended into yogurt like some deranged Thanksgiving parfait. If it’s an Idaho potato, I dress it up with plain Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and a reckless amount of herbs and spices. This is what refinement looks like in 2026.

    So far, the results have been suspiciously positive. I feel energized. My gut feels calm and cooperative. I enjoy the strange pleasure of eating potatoes at all hours of the day. The real stars, though, are the yams and sweet potatoes—especially the purple Japanese sweet potatoes, which look like food designed by a medieval alchemist with a sense of humor.

    Then came today.

    On the Schwinn Airdyne, I felt… powerful. Not delusional powerful. Not “I should enter a CrossFit competition” powerful. Just quietly, inexorably strong. I burned 825 calories in 62 minutes. The last time I broke 800 calories on that bike was three years ago, back when my joints were younger and my expectations were less realistic.

    Do I attribute this personal record to my potato regimen? I don’t know. The potatoes could be a placebo. I could be committing the cardinal sin of confusing correlation with causation. More likely, I just had one of those rare days when physiology, psychology, and stubbornness line up like planets.

    I don’t expect to hit 800 calories regularly. Seven hundred is already serious business. Eight hundred requires intent. Eight hundred is a flex. It’s bragging rights territory—the kind of obsessive pursuit Howard Ratner brings to the giant black opal in Uncut Gems, except with less jewelry and more sweat pooling under a stationary bike.

    There was another factor, too. Today’s ride was a response to yesterday.

    My daughters were at Knott’s Berry Farm. My wife was out seeing Leslie Jones. I usually enjoy solitude, but yesterday it curdled. The headlines were bleak. My creative energy flatlined. The world felt slightly out of phase, like a record spinning at the wrong speed. When things get that dark, my internal soundtrack defaults to King Crimson’s “Epitaph”—a song that sounds like it was written for someone weeping against a stone wall at the end of history.

    I got through the night with two documentaries: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and Secret Mall Apartment. One was joyous defiance. The other was a reminder that some people respond to modern despair by secretly building illegal sanctuaries inside dead shopping centers.

    Mel Brooks said something that landed with force. Life is hard. We suffer loss. But piling misery on top of misery—indulging self-pity—only deepens the wound.

    I took that personally. I suspect the 825-calorie burn was my way of replying: I hear you, Mel. I love you. I’m choosing motion over rumination.

    And so I did.

  • Why Sitting Still Is Killing Your Writing

    Why Sitting Still Is Killing Your Writing

    You can’t write all day and expect to produce anything alive. You can sit hunched in your creative cocoon for hours, but don’t be surprised when your prose comes out pale and airless. You’ve ignored your body, your need for oxygen and circulation, your need for what can only be called Otherness—a physical and spiritual encounter with the world that does not occur while you’re marinating in your own chair. I’ve always known this in my bones. Recently, Bonnie Tsui gave it language in her essay “The Writer’s Secret Weapon.” For Tsui, creativity peaks not at the desk but in the water. Swimming becomes a form of mobile meditation, a way of clearing internal static. A body in motion reroutes the brain. Kinetic energy pries open doors that inertia bolts shut. When she swims, she doesn’t skim her subjects; she descends into them.

    Tsui also makes a bracing point writers love to resist: you can’t write about something while you’re still drenched in it. When she was working on a book about swimming, she couldn’t write fresh from the pool, water still in her ears. The experience had to ferment. The mind needs distance, a change of context, a step into Otherness to metabolize meaning. This is why even writers who log eight-hour days at their desks punctuate them with long walks. You must toggle between worlds. Living in only one—especially the interior one—is claustrophobic, coercive, and hostile to genuine creativity.

    When I think of a writer who never leaves the room, I think of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. Akaky Akakievich copies documents all day, takes his copying home at night, and copies some more. Eventually, copying is all he can do. He no longer registers the world: not mockery, not humiliation, not even a horse sneezing on him. He produces mountains of text and nothing of consequence. He has become a Non Player Character. Only when winter cold seeps into his bones does he wake from his stupor, lured by a demonic tailor into an overcoat that violently reconnects him to the world. The shock is too much. His mind, underdeveloped by isolation, cannot withstand reality’s ambitions and fever dreams. He breaks. Gogol understood something essential: the writer’s task is not to hide from the physical world but to be altered by it. That radical shift in perception—the moment when the world intrudes and rearranges you—is not a distraction from writing. It is the point.

  • Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

    Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

    As the clock keeps punching holes in the calendar and I drift into the middle distance of my sixties, I’m stalked by the uneasy sense that I am not the man I’m supposed to be. I carry thirty extra pounds like unpaid emotional invoices. I cave to food temptations with embarrassing regularity. I indulge in narcissistic spirals of self-pity. My body bears the archaeological record of a lifetime of weightlifting injuries. Something has to give. The question isn’t whether I’m a complex human being—of course I am—but which single image can give me dignity, courage, and self-possession as I face my obligations, stay engaged with this lunatic world, and fend off entropy. The image that keeps returning, uninvited but insistent, is this: I am the Skinny Yoga Guy.

    The Skinny Yoga Guy eats vegan, clean, and whole, not as a performance but as a quiet discipline. He hits his protein macros with buckwheat, pumpkin seeds, peas, soy, garbanzos, and nutritional yeast, without sulking or negotiating. He cooks plant-based meals anchored in Thai, Mexican, and Indian traditions, not sad beige bowls marketed as “fuel.” He doesn’t snack like a raccoon in a pantry; he sips cucumber water and green tea and moves on with his day.

    He practices yoga six days a week, a full hour each time, sweating without complaint. The body lengthens. The spine straightens. He appears taller, calmer, less compressed by life. There’s a faint health glow—less “Instagram guru,” more “someone whose joints don’t hate him.” The discipline reshapes his temperament. The short fuse and indulgent sulks fade. In their place emerges a man who notices other people, attends to their needs without sermonizing, and discovers—almost accidentally—that service makes him sturdier, not smaller.

    In this revised operating system, the watch obsession quietly dies. No more chunky diver watches as heroic cosplay. No rotation. No drama. Just one watch: the G-Shock GW-5000. The purest G-Shock because it refuses theater. Shockproof, accurate, solar-powered, atomically synced. No Bluetooth, no notifications, no begging for attention. It does one thing relentlessly well: it tells the truth about time. It is reliability without narcissism.

    If the GW-5000 is indestructibility stripped of spectacle, then my assignment is clear: I must become its carbon-based counterpart. Less bloat. Fewer features. More uptime. Yoga becomes joint maintenance. Vegan food becomes corrosion control. No supplements that blink. No gadgets that chirp. No dietary Bluetooth pairing with guilt. Just a lean system designed to absorb impact, recover quickly, and remain accurate. GW-5000 firmware, now awkwardly attempting to run on two legs.

    The longing is real. I want to be the Skinny Yoga Guy—disciplined, light, healthy—wearing a single $300 G-Shock as a quiet marker of having stepped off the status treadmill. I no longer want validation from a $7,000 luxury watch. Wanting this man is easy. Becoming him is not. That requires character, not aspiration.

    My hunch is that I need to write my way into him. A novel titled The Skinny Yoga Guy. Not a parody, not a self-help tract, but a chronicle of real-time change rendered with mordant humor and unsparing honesty. The book isn’t the point. Transformation is. The novel would simply be the witness.

    So here I am, a larval creature trapped in my cocoon. I must emerge as a new creature. The challenge is issued. Whether the world is waiting for my metamorphosis is irrelevant. I am. And that, for once, feels like enough.

  • The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    I got my shingles vaccine yesterday at noon and felt absolutely nothing afterward—so nothing, in fact, that I woke up the next morning feeling smugly invincible. I went to Trader Joe’s, bantered with the employees about the collective psychosis surrounding their limited-edition mini tote bags, came home, unloaded the groceries, and mentally penciled in a righteous kettlebell session in the garage. Then, right around 10 a.m., my immune system cleared its throat. A slow, heavy wave of fatigue rolled in, the kind that doesn’t ask permission. I took what I told myself was a “precautionary” nap. I made a deal with my body: if I felt fine in an hour, the kettlebells were back on. By 11, the aches had arrived, lethargy had unpacked its bags, and the deal was quietly voided. The iron would have to wait.

    Now, 28 hours post-shot, I’m more tired than I was this morning, which feels like a violation of some unspoken contract. In what I can only describe as a low-grade vaccine fever fugue, I apparently decided this was the perfect moment to perform strap surgery on my watch collection. The Seiko SLA051, 055, and 023 all lost their OEM waffle straps and emerged reborn on Divecore FKM. Yes, I’m aware that FKM is rumored to whisper chemical lullabies into the bloodstream. No, I’m not persuaded that wearing these watches a few hours a week is going to tip me into a Superfund site.

    In any case, I’m already planning to swap the FKMs for Divecore’s hydrogenated waffle straps in a few months. If there’s any exposure happening, it’s brief, intermittent, and vastly overshadowed by whatever biochemical fireworks the shingles vaccine is currently setting off inside me. For now, I’ll rest, hydrate, and let my immune system do its thing—apparently with a side hobby in horological rearrangement.

  • Retirement Isn’t the Problem—Entropy Is

    Retirement Isn’t the Problem—Entropy Is

    A month ago I had my first physical therapy appointment with Ken, a young man who radiated competence and emotional distance in equal measure. He handed me a list of exercises, told me to perform them three times a day, informed me that surgery was unlikely, and ushered me out like a man closing a file. Efficient. Impersonal. I assumed that was just his professional style.

    Yesterday I saw him again, and the man had apparently been replaced by his more human twin. He was warm, chatty, and openly exhausted—in the specific way that only new fathers can be. Suddenly his earlier aloofness made sense. That first session wasn’t clinical detachment; it was sleep deprivation in a polo shirt. This time he walked me through a new routine using resistance bands anchored to my bedroom door—pec flys, side laterals, posterior delts, the whole greatest-hits album of shoulder rehab. Best of all, the new program comes with mercy: once a day, four days a week. A civilized schedule for a man who has already paid his dues.

    Then came the good news. Ken tested my mobility and announced I had gained fifty percent in a month. That sentence deserves a parade. He followed it with an even sweeter story: one of his clients suffered a full “100 percent” rotator cuff tear and healed without surgery over fourteen months. I told him that sounded like gospel music to me. Hope, when you’re injured, is a performance-enhancing drug.

    While typing up my report, Ken casually asked how I felt about retiring from teaching in eighteen months. I didn’t bother with bravado. I told him the truth: I’m scared. When you spend forty years building a work persona—something that animates your days, sharpens your thinking, and gives your life narrative tension—and then you remove yourself from the stage, you don’t just lose a job. You risk losing your gravity. People love to say they’ll “stay busy” in retirement. But human beings don’t thrive on busyness. We thrive on stakes. Without them, we drift. Not into disaster—into comfort. Into pleasure. Into slow-motion decay fueled by snacks and streaming services.

    I’ve tested the volunteer fantasy already. Years ago, after adopting a rescue dog, I thought volunteering with the organization would be meaningful. Instead, I found myself sitting in front of a pet store in Redondo Beach on a Saturday, surrounded by wonderful people and feeling absolutely unnecessary. They were kind. They were earnest. I was bored out of my soul. The group’s founder, Cathy Rubin—a therapist with X-ray vision—took one look at me and said, kindly and accurately, “Jeff, this isn’t for you.” She was right. I kept donating. I never went back to volunteer. Not everyone is wired for sainthood.

    So yes, I’m scared of retirement. I’m scared of my own antisocial tendencies, my talent for isolation, my ability to rationalize entropy as “well-earned rest.” I’ll keep writing. I’ll make the occasional YouTube video. I’ll perform small acts of public presence. But I know the truth: I’m going to have to fight like hell to stay alive in the deep sense—not breathing, but burning. Because entropy doesn’t kill you in one blow. It kills you in installments.

  • Searching for Gold’s Gym While Life Sends Me to Radiology

    Searching for Gold’s Gym While Life Sends Me to Radiology

    Last night I dreamed I lost everything that usually pretends to be me. I woke up on the grass of a high school football field wearing only gray gym shorts and an empty wallet—no phone, no keys, no biography. From there I drifted into a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood and became a kind of genteel vagrant, squatting in rich people’s basements and back cottages in exchange for handyman work. I had no idea how I knew what I was doing, but in the dream I somehow inherited the skills of an Italian drywall contractor I once knew as a teenager. My one obsession was finding Gold’s Gym, which in this fevered geography had become a holy site—Oz, Mecca, and Lourdes rolled into one. The belief was simple and insane: if I could just work out there, I would be saved.

    I never reached the gym. Instead, I wandered through mansions, luxury malls, and restaurants dripping with spectacle—giant half-naked fashion models leering from every surface like pagan idols of commerce. The excess depressed me. All that gloss, all that money, and not a shred of peace. I didn’t want the riches. I didn’t want the scenery. I just wanted enough handyman gigs to scrape together the cash to hire a guide—some benevolent Virgil—to lead me to the sacred weight room. In the dream’s logic, salvation required a spotter for the bench press and the squat rack.

    Then I woke up and reality delivered its own sermon. My left shoulder—the one recently diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff—was throbbing like a bad memory. I shuffled through the morning ritual: steel-cut oats, coffee, three ibuprofen, email. There it was—my doctor recommending an MRI and a steroid shot. So I did what every rational modern patient does: I watched YouTube videos of people being fed into MRI machines like cautious astronauts. The claustrophobia hit immediately. That narrow tube might as well have been a coffin with better lighting. I thought, there is absolutely no way I’m volunteering for this kind of psychological hostage situation. Surgery isn’t even on the table—so why stage a horror movie? I’ll pass on the MRI. I’ll take the steroid shot. I’ll stick with the practical mercy of pain relief.