Category: music

Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

I should have known at thirteen that seventeen would be brutal. At thirteen, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was already circulating through the house like a prophecy. I liked the song well enough, but my mother loved it. It was her time machine back to high school—loneliness, rejection, the ache of not measuring up. More than once I watched her eyes fill as the song drifted out of our Panasonic portable radio. That was her loneliness anthem. I needed my own. Mine was “Watching and Waiting” by the Moody Blues—a song for someone alone in the dark who senses there is something greater beyond himself and aches to make contact with it. Less teenage rejection, more metaphysical hunger.

By seventeen, starting college, I was profoundly lonely. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage defined by intimacy versus isolation, and I was losing badly. I felt it in my bones as a socially maladroit bodybuilder shuffling through classes by day and working nights as a bouncer at a teen disco called Maverick’s in San Ramon. Picture it: me at the door, arms crossed, watching a parade of thrill-seekers gyrate, flirt, and dissolve into noise. The job didn’t cure my loneliness; it distilled it. I was close enough to touch the crowd and miles away from belonging to it.

One morning after a late shift, I dreamed I was living in the Stone Age. I was alone in a cave, wrapped in animal skins, stepping out into a gray, indifferent sky. I raised my arms toward the clouds, reaching for something—anything—that might answer me. In the background, “Watching and Waiting” played like a prayer I hadn’t yet learned how to pray. The dream was sad and beautiful, which felt like progress. As Kierkegaard noted, despair’s worst form is not knowing you’re in it. At least I knew. And as the Psalmist understood long before therapy existed, grace tends to follow sorrow once the sorrow has been fully felt.

People hate being alone. They’ll sit through ads on YouTube rather than listen ad-free on Spotify because YouTube lets them comment, scroll, argue, agree—experience the song with others. Solitude may be cleaner, but communion is warmer. Which brings me to watches. What is the watch hobby in isolation? Nothing. A watch on a deserted island is just a lump of steel keeping time for no one. The hobby exists only because a community animates it—supports it, debates it, sometimes overfeeds it. A watch on your wrist is a semiotic flare. It says something. Others read it. You read them back. That exchange is the point.

This is what I mean by Horological Communion: the quiet fellowship formed when watches are not hoarded as private trophies but offered as shared symbols. Meaning emerges only when the object is seen, recognized, and answered—at meetups, in forums, in comment sections, across a knowing glance from one wrist to another. Without that communion, the watch is mute. It ticks, faithfully, but it says nothing at all.

February 1, 2026
The Greatest Flex Is Self-Denial

In case anyone has missed it, Bruce Springsteen is seventy-five years old and still looks like he could outrun most men half his age while singing at full volume. He has the same chiseled body that powered “Born to Run” during my junior year—the song that injected an entire generation with adolescent adrenaline and the belief that escape was always one chorus away. The mystery is not that Springsteen is still performing. The mystery is how he’s performing while appearing carved out of disciplined granite.

The answer, it turns out, is brutal in its simplicity. Springsteen eats one meal a day. That’s it. No grazing. No late-night negotiations with the pantry. His self-control has apparently spread, too. Chris Martin of Coldplay—another famous man who could afford to eat like a Roman emperor—has sworn off dinner entirely. I find all of this deeply unsettling, not because it’s unhealthy or extreme, but because it’s practiced by people who could easily afford indulgence as a full-time lifestyle.

That’s the real flex. Not yachts. Not villas. Not decadent excess. The most impressive display of power available to the wealthy is self-denial. These men don’t lack access. They lack excuses. Their discipline quietly points an accusatory finger at the rest of us, and unfortunately, that finger lands squarely on my plate.

If I’m being honest—and honesty is the whole problem here—I’m indulgent when it comes to food. Portions creep. Snacks multiply. I carry about twenty pounds that no amount of kettlebells or Schwinn Airdyne heroics can fully offset. Springsteen himself has said that fitness is ninety percent diet, and I resent him for being right. You can’t out-train a refrigerator you keep reopening out of habit.

So tonight, instead of reaching for another snack, I may watch the latest Bruce Springsteen documentary for moral reinforcement. The man who once soundtracked youthful restlessness may now be offering something rarer: a model of restraint with dignity intact. Cheers to Bruce Springsteen—patron saint of senior citizens who refuse to let dinner win.

February 1, 2026
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Wounded Male Ego

I resisted watching Frankenstein. I assumed it would be a lavish, overcooked gothic reheating of Frankenstein—all velvet drapes, thunderclaps, and prestige posturing. I was wrong. It is polished and operatic, yes, but beneath the lacquer there’s an unexpectedly tender heart beating, unevenly, like something newly stitched together and afraid it might be noticed.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein as a man permanently damaged by a tyrannical, grandiose father. This Victor doesn’t merely want to conquer death; he wants to correct his own humiliation. Science becomes his altar, godhood his compensation. In trying to escape the cruelty that shaped him, he replicates it with terrifying fidelity. The film is unsparing on this point: the wounded male ego, when armed with intellect and ambition, is a demolition device.

The monster—created from hanged bodies and unholy obsession—is played by Jacob Elordi with startling delicacy. Six-foot-five and impossibly graceful, Elordi gives us not a brute but a melancholic waif, a creature whose sadness feels tuned to a minor key. There’s something unmistakably early-’80s indie about him—an echo of Julian Cope or the funereal romance of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure. He looks like he could step up to a microphone and confess his alienation in verse. Elordi doesn’t lean into that fantasy, but he doesn’t need to. His restraint is what breaks you.

That this film avoids camp, self-indulgence, and parody is no small feat. At over two and a half hours, with a plot that is essentially elemental, the pacing remains assured. Del Toro trusts atmosphere, performance, and thematic coherence. The conviction is clear: a man tries to elevate himself into a god and leaves a trail of devastation, while the being he creates is condemned to a far crueler fate—immortality without belonging.

When the credits rolled, I could almost hear Ian McCulloch singing “The Disease.” The association felt right. Elordi’s monster carries that same expression: beautiful, doomed, and painfully aware that he will outlive his wounds without ever outgrowing them.

January 31, 2026
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.

January 25, 2026
Living in the Bottle: A Life Spent Building Cozy Universes

My parents like to remind me that I grew up poor in a cockroach-infested assisted-living situation in Gainesville, Florida. The place was called Flavet Villages—Flavet, if you lived there, which everyone did because there was nowhere else to go. These were not “villages” in any meaningful sense. They were World War II–era Camp Blanding army barracks, uprooted from Jacksonville and dropped into North Florida like surplus history.

What I love, even now, is the audacity of the name. Flavet Villages. It’s a master class in rebranding: take a barracks crawling with roaches and give it a pastoral plural noun. It’s the real-estate equivalent of dabbing Vicks VapoRub on your neck and calling it Menthol d’Après-Minuit.

Flavet sat near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest that felt mythic to me, even then. A Mynah bird lived there—always on the same branch, like a sentry or an oracle—and before bedtime my father and I would walk to the edge of the woods and talk to it. At dusk, the tide dropped, and the swamp revealed itself. Alligator dung, fully expressed. The smell was feral and unmistakable. While most people would recoil, I found it oddly soothing—bracing, even. As if the universe were saying, You’re here. This is real.

As a native Floridian, I sometimes wonder—with a perverse sense of pride—whether my early exposure to fecal alligator swamps permanently rewired my sensory thresholds in ways outsiders could never understand.

One evening, as my father and I stood at the forest’s edge, we heard a distant radio playing Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. The song is about an island paradise that seems achingly close yet forever unreachable, and it’s meant to induce longing and melancholy. But I felt none of that. Paradise was already present. I was standing in an enchanted forest with my storytelling father, a talking bird, mythical alligators nearby, and music drifting in like a siren call. This was not longing; this was habitation. I lived in a fairy tale and had no interest in leaving it.

That same ache—for a magical enclosure—returned when I was five and living in the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose. The grounds were landscaped with sunflowers and volcanic rock, and as I walked to the playground I would stare at the flower beds and wish I could shrink myself down to Lilliputian size and live inside them forever. That was my first lesson in coziness: the idea that a small, bounded world could feel safer, richer, and more alive than the vast one surrounding it.

Then came I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden’s blonde goddess lived inside a genie bottle—a jewel-lined cocoon with a purple circular sofa and pink satin pillows glowing like some erotic reliquary. More than anything, I wanted to live in that bottle with her. The impossibility of that wish crushed me with the same quiet sadness as “Bali Ha’i.” That the bottle was, in reality, a painted Jim Beam decanter only deepened the metaphor. I was intoxicated by fantasy long before I understood the word.

Flavet Village, the swamp forest, the Royal Lanai flower beds, Jeannie’s bottle—these were all variations on the same theme: cozy ecosystems that stood apart from the real world while quietly shaping how I understood it. Without those parallel universes, reality would have been flatter, harsher, less survivable.

Now, in my sixties, I’ve built a new ecosystem: my watch world. A watch box holding seven watches that I tend like a mother hen, fretting over straps and bracelets, endlessly optimizing the rotation to extract maximum pleasure from time itself. It’s a controlled universe, one I can enter when the outside world becomes too loud or incoherent. I always come back—but I’m aware of the danger. The pull can be strong. Swapping a Tropic strap for a Waffle may calm me in the moment, but eventually I have to step out of the bottle, leave the forest, and reenter a world that demands attention, judgment, and responsibility.

The fantasy sustains me. It just can’t replace the world.

January 25, 2026
Chuck Klosterman, Joe Montana, and the Shape of Greatness

I’ve been reading—and now listening to—Chuck Klosterman on music and culture for over a decade. He’s a rare specimen: a true hipster precisely because he has no interest in being cool and too much interest in ideas to waste time polishing his image. His new essay collection, Football, keeps that streak alive. I’m consuming it on Audible while trying to erase myself on the Schwinn Airdyne, pedaling hard enough to regret my life choices. Every so often, Klosterman drops a line that forces me to slow the bike, release the upper-body levers, and frantically thumb notes into Google Docs like a deranged monk copying scripture mid-martyrdom.

Today’s line stopped me cold: “Greatness is about the creation of archetypes.” He was talking about the Beatles. Not record sales. Not chart dominance. Greatness, he argued, is the act of filling an archetypal mold so completely that everyone who follows can only approximate it. They may be talented, even brilliant, but they’re echoes, not origins. The mold has already been cast.

That idea made me think of Klosterman as a fourth grader, devastated when the Cowboys lost the 1982 NFC Championship to the 49ers on Joe Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark. I was living in the Bay Area then, and Montana instantly became something more than a quarterback. He wasn’t a flamethrower like Elway or a mythic warhorse like Staubach. He was smaller, calmer, unnervingly steady. He slew the Goliath that had humiliated the Niners for years. Montana wasn’t just great—he was David with a slingshot. That archetype mattered more than his stat line, and for a time it made him the greatest quarterback alive.

I’m not a Beatles devotee, but I understand why people place them on that pedestal. Archetypes don’t require personal devotion; they require recognition. You can see the mold even if you don’t want to live inside it.

Earlier in the book Klosterman expressed his genuine, hard-earned contempt for Creed—contempt earned the old-fashioned way, through actually listening—and my mind wandered to the opposite of greatness: a strange kind of cultural infamy where a band becomes a symbol rather than a sound. That’s when I realized I’d mixed up Creed with Nickelback, which led me down a brief but intense psychological spiral when I couldn’t find the documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback on Netflix. That film makes it painfully clear that Nickelback’s “crime” is not incompetence or fraud. They’re talented, professional, and wildly successful at pleasing their audience. Their real achievement is unwanted: they became the most socially acceptable band to hate.

Nickelback’s loathing isn’t sincere. It’s ritualized. Once social media weaponized contempt for them, sneering became a form of virtue signaling—a low-effort way to broadcast cultural superiority without doing the work of listening. Most of the haters probably couldn’t name three songs. The scorn isn’t about music; it’s about belonging.

Which is why I’d love to talk this through with Klosterman. He’s the right mind for it. Also, he might help me straighten out my chronic band confusion. This isn’t new. When I was five, I used to confuse the Monkees with the Beatles. Apparently, my brain has always had trouble keeping its mop-tops and punchlines in their proper bins.

January 21, 2026
“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” and the Art of Being Nine

When I was nine, in the summer of ’71, my family and three others camped on a tiny island near Mount Shasta—an experiment in frontier optimism that involved water skiing, fishing, and waging daily war against yellow jackets. We built traps from jars and funnels, which is what passes for science when you’re a child and the enemy has wings. Whenever the social noise became too loud, I retreated into a tent with Archie comics and a portable radio, my private bunker of paper jokes and AM static. Outside, the sun blazed and my friends howled with laughter. Inside, I lay on my stomach, flipping pages, while two songs drifted through the thin canvas walls—“Riders on the Storm” and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” They were gorgeous. They were devastating. Their beauty did nothing to soften their sadness. They didn’t cheer me up; they baptized me into melancholy.

I survived that summer gloom by clinging to the holy trinity of comic-book escapism: X-ray vision glasses, Sea Monkeys, and Charles Atlas promising to turn scrawny boys into beach legends. But I had known a better kind of sadness before that—eighteen months earlier, in fourth grade, when B.J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” became the soundtrack to a winter of biblical rain in San Jose. That rain didn’t feel like inconvenience; it felt like permission. We walked in it. We built forts in it. We sang in it. Wet sneakers were badges of honor. Mud was a small price to pay for enchantment.

After school, we took the longest possible route home, not because we were lost, but because we didn’t want the day to end. I think children are natural pantheists. We don’t worry about tracking dirt through the house; we worry about missing the miracle. One afternoon, in a downpour that looked like it had been personally arranged by the weather gods, I saw two middle school girls walking arm in arm, kicking their legs and singing like they were auditioning for joy itself. They weren’t performing happiness. They were inhabited by it. I don’t think I’ve seen human beings that unselfconsciously alive since.

We eventually reached the edge of Anderson Elementary, where a park spilled into trees and bushes and, hidden like contraband, our cardboard fort waited. I crawled underneath it, stared through a gap in the walls at the rain-swollen sky, and sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” to no one in particular. I remember feeling drunk on the depth of that sky, stunned by the sheer extravagance of being alive. I wasn’t happy because something good had happened. I was happy because everything had happened—and I was inside it. For a moment, I felt infinite. And, at nine, infinite felt the same as immortal.

January 7, 2026
Flashback to Tony Banks’ “Afterglow”

The podcast conversation between Andrew Sullivan and George Packer left me with a kind of Boomer melancholia: the sense that the world is shifting beneath our feet while we stand rooted in place. The young don’t believe in our institutions, our democracy, or our economic promises. We no longer share a common reality; instead, we inhabit digital bunkers curated by conspiracy brokers who can elevate grifters to national power. Boomers—myself included—feel sidelined, stunned, and a little ghostlike as a new world rises and shrugs us off. I carry that heaviness alongside the throb of my torn rotator cuff, which still jerks me awake at two in the morning. My shoulder and my generation feel similarly compromised: stiff, unreliable, and unable to perform the way they once did.

These thoughts ambushed me this afternoon as I walked into my bedroom to grab my things before picking up my daughters from high school. Out of nowhere, a song from my teens surfaced—Genesis’s “Afterglow,” written by Tony Banks. It appears on A Trick of the Tail, but the definitive version is Phil Collins’s live performance on Seconds Out, where the ache in his voice makes the song feel like a confession. The narrator wakes from a spiritual coma to realize the world he trusted is gone and he’s broken along with it. In that ruin, he yearns to surrender himself to something higher—love, purpose, the purifying clarity of devotion. It reminded me of Nick Cave’s conversation on Josh Szeps’s Uncomfortable Conversations, where Cave describes his own devotional temperament and his hunger for transformation. “Afterglow” feels like the soundtrack to that kind of awakening.

But not everyone hungers for that kind of epiphany. I’m not sure my heroes Larry David, George Carlin, or Fran Lebowitz would ever have an Afterglow Moment, and I don’t think they should be judged for it. Some people thrive without chasing transcendence. I know that I, like Nick Cave, feel broken in a broken world and remain open to whatever cleansing revelation might come. But I don’t mistake that for a universal template. If I ever had an Afterglow Moment and found myself at dinner with Fran Lebowitz, I’d keep the whole thing to myself. There’s no reason to evangelize the converted—or the happily unconcerned.

December 8, 2025
Thanksgiving Heart Attack

Thanksgiving Day, 2025. My wife and twin daughters were applying their final cosmetic and sartorial flourishes before we drove to Los Alamitos for the obligatory family pageant, and I had a half-hour window of solitude. I sat at my Yamaha piano, eager to play a song I’d written years ago—“The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”—a melancholic tribute to a Monkees episode that shattered my five-year-old psyche. In it, Micky pumps iron to steal a blonde beach goddess from a sun-bleached bodybuilder, only to discover she has evolved into a Proust-reading aesthete and now prefers intellectuals who collect first editions. It was my first lesson in the absurdity of desire: you can train, sweat, and transform yourself into a bronze Adonis only to watch beauty run away with a man who hides behind Remembrance of Things Past. That moment was my first crack in the façade of childhood—when I faintly understood life might be crueler and more ambiguous than birthday cake and Saturday morning cartoons.

Halfway through the song, I felt a stabbing pressure in my left chest—an alarm bell that whispered, “heart attack.” It was the kind of pain you ignore for twenty seconds until the fear gets loud. Maybe it was simple anxiety: I am sixty-four, three semesters from retirement, and just endured Sam Harris complimenting Christian fundamentalist Doug Wilson for possessing the courage of his biblical barbarities. As an agnostic torn between admiration and nausea, I crave certainty the way addicts crave relapse—but God gives me ambiguity, Paul gives me guilt, and the afterlife gives me indigestion.

Ethics don’t spare me, either. I eat yogurt and whey protein while pretending I don’t hear the screams behind factory-farmed supply chains. My “plant-leaning” diet is a moral performance piece—vegan cosplay with a dairy chaser. Every spoonful tastes like cognitive dissonance.

The day before, a sports doctor diagnosed my left shoulder with rotator cuff syndrome and biceps tendinopathy. She promised I might avoid surgery if I did her rehab exercises. She printed out eleven medieval torture movements, most of which lit my shoulder up like a Roman candle. Should I push through the pain, I wondered, or was I already guilty of kettlebell blasphemy—retracting the tendon until I doomed myself to the orthopedic gulag?

So I sat there, convinced the pain in my chest was an omen. But when my wife stepped into the living room and asked me—without ceremony—whether her boots matched her dress, the pain evaporated. The piano, the Monkees, Sam Harris, Paul, vegan sins, and torn tendons all vanished. Her question grounded me. It was the kind of mundane interruption that reminds you the world is still here, indifferent to your melodramas. My imaginary heart attack surrendered to domestic reality.

November 27, 2025
Thou Shalt Remember: Swagger Fades, But Authenticity Endures

In the summer of 1977, my church was Cull Canyon Lake, and tanning oil was the sacrament. Every Saturday, I’d anoint myself in Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil—zero SPF, 100 percent hubris. It smelled of coconuts and artificial paradise. When I think back to the hormonal heat haze of youth, I can still smell it: the scent of lust, vanity, and skin damage baking in the California sun.

That’s when I first saw him—the apostle of artificial cool. I didn’t know his name, so I christened him Camaro Frankenpimp. Late twenties, brown wavy hair, gold chain, Speedo so tight it threatened constitutional rights. His black ’76 Camaro—with its white racing stripes and glassy arrogance—glimmered in the parking lot like a totem of misplaced masculinity.

Camaro Frankenpimp strutted across the grass in his blue briefs, boombox blaring, white Frisbee spinning in hand, Playboy cooler close behind. He had perfected his entrance and rehearsed his lines. Every Saturday, I’d hear the same monologue:

He’d paid five hundred bucks for that custom paint job. His dad owned a chain of clothing stores in the Bay Area. He’d managed them since high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio about a small part in a martial arts movie. And, the pièce de résistance, he owned a home in Parsons Estates. He dropped that name like a holy incantation, as though suburban real estate were the path to transcendence.

I later realized he’d memorized his script from Eric Weber’s How to Pick Up Girls!—the ur-text of sleaze, which instructed men to approach women like sales prospects: persistence over decency, bravado over authenticity. I’d seen the book passed around my high school locker room like contraband scripture. Camaro had apparently underlined every commandment.

He was successful, at least by his own shabby standards. Each Saturday, he had new blondes—interchangeable apostles in bikinis—tossing his Frisbee back like he was the messiah of mediocrity.

Then came the reckoning.

One afternoon, I watched from my towel as Camaro held court on his grassy knoll, his tanned body gleaming under the sun, boasting to two bikini-clad disciples. Suddenly, he howled like a wounded wolf.

“You stepped on a bee!” one girl cried.

The bee twitched in the grass, mission accomplished. Within seconds, Camaro was sweating, limping, and insisting he was fine. His skin shone like varnish; his foot ballooned to the size of a Christmas ham.

“I’m fine,” he kept saying, though panic had already claimed his eyes.

Moments later, he collapsed, chest heaving, mouth foaming. His body convulsed, the boombox still playing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” in surreal counterpoint. By the time the ambulance arrived, Camaro Frankenpimp—the self-anointed prophet of Parsons Estates—was gone.

I went home shaken. My hero, the sun god of Cull Canyon, slain by a bee. That night, I sought counsel from Master Po.

“Why, Master,” I asked, “did such a magnificent man die so suddenly?”

“Choose your heroes wisely, Grasshopper,” said Po. “The man was no hero. He was a hollow idol, built of vanity and insecurity. He was all surface and no soul, all pose and no power. His death was not tragic—it was poetic. For it is written: he who cannot conquer himself will be conquered by the smallest of creatures.”

October 24, 2025