Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    At nearly sixty-four, I still work out like a man who thinks death is watching from the corner of the garage, arms crossed, waiting to pounce the moment I skip a kettlebell swing. I train with the same primal urgency I felt at thirteen—when muscle equaled safety, and soreness meant I still mattered. I think about workouts. I talk about them. I bore people to death with unsolicited fitness manifestos. My obsessions are a carousel of age, mortality, exercise, oatmeal breakfasts, French-press coffee, and a pathological resistance to anything resembling leisure, especially vacations.

    Which brings me to now: it’s Sunday, and in a few hours my wife’s friend will drive us to LAX so we can board a United flight to Oahu. I should be thrilled. I’m not. I feel like a hostage in my own well-appointed life. I’m going only because family life requires the occasional sacrifice—and this is mine. A three-night stay at the Embassy Suites in Waikiki Beach. Palm trees. Breezes. Ocean sunsets. All of it unnerves me. I want to be helpful, gracious, even grateful—but I am a neurotic, OCD-addled man-child in a do-rag who agonizes every morning over which chunky diver watch to wear, like I’m prepping for surgery on the space-time continuum.

    I do not want to be the dead weight on this trip.

    Still, I try to prepare. My comfort rituals are in full swing. We’re packing two memory foam pillows because hotel pillows have the spinal integrity of a wet napkin. I created a “Travel Checklist” yesterday with over 30 items. My wife flagged two of them—Clorox gel and a scrub brush—and asked why I intended to pack janitorial supplies. “To disinfect the hotel shower,” I said. She told me I’m crazy. Scratch that from the list.

    We’ll land around eleven tonight, pick up the rental car, check in, visit ABC Store #38—because no Hawaii trip is complete without wandering into an ABC Store to buy bottled water, toothpaste, and the spiritual reassurance that you haven’t forgotten something vital. Then we’ll sync our devices to the hotel WiFi, maybe sit on the bed and stare blankly at the TV for twenty minutes before collapsing into our pancake pillows (if the foam ones failed to survive the suitcase crush). By the time I feel vaguely human, it will be midnight.

    And just like that, the countdown begins.

    We fly back Wednesday. Back to LAX. Back to my routine. By Thursday morning, I’ll be at Trader Joe’s shopping for groceries, then in the garage doing kettlebell swings to reassert my identity as a disciplined, slightly unhinged older man who treats a three-day vacation like a stint in exile.

    My wife’s friends raised their eyebrows when they heard how short the trip is. “That’s all my husband can take,” she told them. I felt seen and exposed all at once. It hit me while writing this: it really is a short trip. I feel guilty for being the reason we trimmed it down to a long weekend. And yet—I’m also relieved. Too much freedom, too much unstructured joy, and I begin to unravel. I need my routines. I need the Mothership. Without them, I drift.

    I’m reminded of a memoir I read nine years ago and plan to reread after this trip: An Abbreviated Life by Ariel Leve. It’s about surviving childhood under the tyranny of a narcissistic, chaotic mother. Leve writes with scalpel precision about how chronic trauma rewires the brain, how the child adapts with emotional detachment and hypervigilance, and how adulthood becomes a performance of normalcy built on damaged circuitry. Her memoir is unsentimental, razor-sharp, and achingly honest. I admire her. In some cracked mirror, I recognize myself.

    When I return from Oahu, I’ll dig up my old copy of her book. It’ll be the perfect homecoming gift—a reminder that healing is a long-haul flight, often with delays, turbulence, and very bad pillows.

  • Return to the Womb

    Return to the Womb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère recounts the strange, fevered period of his life when he became a practicing Catholic—a conversion that lasted three years and hovered somewhere between epiphany and breakdown. During that time, he rose each morning to take meticulous notes on the Gospel of John, scribbling like a man possessed. He now looks back at that period in the early 1990s with bewilderment, even embarrassment. What surprises him most isn’t that he converted—it’s that, years later, while immersed in researching the origins of Christianity, he failed at first to connect that research to his own religious episode. When he finally does, the realization is so jarring he feels compelled to dig out the old notebooks. And yet the thought of reading them fills him with dread.

    The last time he looked at them, in 2005, he was deep in depression and under the care of a psychiatrist. At the height of his religious zeal, Carrère had been suicidal. He was prescribed antidepressants—ones whose warning labels included the possibility of “erroneous beliefs,” a caveat that made him laugh darkly at his own conversion. He’s careful not to reduce religious yearning to a single cause, but it’s hard to miss the pattern: a man desperate to avoid self-destruction turning toward a story of rebirth, redemption, and divine rescue. Perhaps, instead of ending his life, he baptized it into another.

    As he flips through the old pages, he’s confronted by a younger self who no longer believed in free will or personal resolve as meaningful paths to goodness. He saw human beings as hopelessly frail and himself as incapable of rescuing his own life. At the time, he clung to God and marriage with equal desperation, hoping both would serve as anchors to prevent him from drifting into the abyss. But the notebooks also reveal a darker truth: his marriage to Helene was deeply unhappy. They loved each other, but they drank too much, blamed each other for their suffering, and fed each other’s neuroses. His writing—once the purpose of his life—had stalled completely. He hadn’t written anything in three years. He was a man sinking.

    Carrère eventually crawled out of that pit, but not through faith. What saved him wasn’t a god, but a set of daily disciplines: yoga, martial arts.

    A spiritual system that promised absolutes had failed him. A life that combined a focus on mind and body resulting in relaxation and clarity of thoughts, helped empty his anxieties and depression. With a strong mind and body, he was able to be productive as a writer. He eventually made lots of money from his craft, and he became the least likely to become religious: He became the rich man for who is about as ripe for salvation as the camel walking through the eye of a needle. 

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

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

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

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

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

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

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

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

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

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

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

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

    Welcome to Kayfabe Nation: A Field Guide for Curious Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.

    His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.

    Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”

    That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.

    And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.

    But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.

    And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.

    We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.

    We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.

    Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.

    We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.

    If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.

  • The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man
    by Jeff McMahon

    Jeff McMahon was supposed to be a titan—or so he believed. His father, a man so dominant he once stole McMahon’s future mother from none other than General John Shalikashvili with the cold-blooded finesse of a Komodo dragon, radiated command like a halogen lamp. In the long shadow of that military bearing, McMahon sought to carve out his own myth—one barbell at a time.

    As a competitive Olympic weightlifter and golden-era bodybuilder in the 1970s, McMahon sculpted not just muscle, but identity. He was a Greek statue in motion, a walking promise of masculine potential. But while others were flexing in the mirror, he was gasping for air in a high school locker room, undone not by physical strain, but by panic attacks, a Nabokov fixation, and a Kafkaesque obsession with grammar. This was not ascension to Mount Olympus. This was implosion.

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man is a semiautobiographical novel in two acts. The first unfolds in the sun-drenched, protein-soaked Bay Area of the 1970s, where McMahon trained alongside a tribe of emotionally stunted muscleheads. The second takes place decades later, when he emerges as a reluctant intellectual—still jacked, still haunted—teaching college writing in a desert town where ambition goes to die and office politics are played with knives.

    Told in the second person, the novel is both an interrogation and a darkly comic trial of McMahon’s younger self—a character he observes with a mix of horror, sympathy, and disbelief. This is not a story of triumph, but the brutally funny autopsy of one. With merciless wit and an eye for the absurd, McMahon dismantles the treacherous myth of transformation and the masculine delusion that biceps can shield one from existential despair.

    For Gen X and Boomer men raised on Schwarzenegger and Bukowski, now softening into middle age and Googling blood pressure medication, Sweaty Young Man punctures the performance-driven culture of the gym, the classroom, and the self-help aisle. What begins as a memoir of obsession and physicality ends as a meditation on identity, shame, nostalgia, and the slow, bewildering shift from symbol to person.

    This is McMahon’s offering to the younger man he once was—the sweaty, striving, half-mad lifter who believed that heroism could be bench-pressed. He was wrong. But he was trying.

    And that’s where the story begins.

  • The Confessions of a Hot Tub Messiah

    The Confessions of a Hot Tub Messiah

    You were twenty-six in the hot August month of 1998 and for a shimmering chlorinated hour at a friend’s pool party at a lavish apartment complex in Livermore, California, you became the mythical, magical Hot Tub Stud. Your girlfriend wasn’t there. It was August, and she had already packed her bags to start her fall semester at Scripps College in Claremont California. It was ridiculous that you and your girlfriend Pamela would attempt a long-term relationship. You were each other’s first romance. You both were surely naive. Neither of you knew how doomed and unhealthy your relationship was. There were things about you–your neediness and lack of spontaneity to name two–that Pamela hated about you. Deep down, you knew she hated you, but you were too needy to acknowledge how repulsed she was by your neediness. You were also too needy to acknowledge that you weren’t so hot about her either. Sure, the chemistry was great. You guys desired each other every second, but it was impossible for you to truly love someone who recoiled at your broken, immature self. Deep down, you wanted to be admired and adored, and you knew Pamela would never be that person.

    Around 3 p.m., in the steamy, chlorine-scented haze of suburban hedonism, she appeared: Rachel, a petite brunette with long, flowing hair, skin like burnished chestnut, and dark, soulful eyes that suggested she’d read Anna Karenina and wept at the right parts. She wore a green bikini. She had depth. She had presence. And she was—unbelievably—into you.

    And not just into your pecs and biceps. She was drawn to your languid ease, your temporary state of post-Pamela serenity, that rare moment when you weren’t apologizing for your existence or scanning the horizon for emotional threats. You exuded something you rarely possessed: confidence. You didn’t try to be charming. You just were.

    You talked. She was an Ashkenazi Jew, like you—except fully, whereas you were only half, your dad a gruff Irish Catholic whose idea of spiritual intimacy was yelling at the TV. You told her it was a miracle you weren’t in therapy. She laughed. The real kind. She told you about growing up in a Jewish enclave in Dallas, her econ degree from San Francisco State, and the Marina District apartment she shared with roommates and dreams.

    In the swirling warmth of the hot tub, you slowly cradled her as she floated on her back, spinning gently in your arms like a sun-drunk naiad. You gazed into each other’s eyes like characters in a perfume commercial—if the perfume were melancholy, the top note regret.

    And in that moment, Pamela ceased to exist. You were ready to let Pamela become a dot receding into the horizon, propose to Rachel, adopt a rescue dog, and buy Rachel a two-bedroom Marina District condo with French doors and jasmine on the balcony. Your soul whispered scripture: “And the two shall become one flesh.”

    But just as you leaned into that soon-to-be-legendary kiss, your guilt, or maybe your emotional cowardice, threw a wrench into fate. You stood her upright and mumbled something about having a girlfriend.

    The look on Rachel’s face—that soft, diplomatic devastation—has haunted you ever since. She gave you a gentle out: “You’re probably confused.” And then she disappeared into the changing room like Eurydice stepping into the underworld, and you never saw her again.

    Years passed. Decades. And when life feels like a cruel joke told by someone with bad timing—when you’re depressed, flabby, or existentially irrelevant—you return to that hot tub. You imagine yourself sweeping Rachel off her feet, performing impromptu piano recitals, meeting her doting parents, and becoming the man you wanted to be in that moment: the Hot Tub Stud who followed through.

    But you didn’t. You blinked. You let Eden slip through your fingers, and like all paradise stories, it ended with exile.

    Still, for one hour, you were perfect. You were desired. You were whole.

    And you’ve been chasing that hour ever since.